Dear subscribers,

I want to thank everyone who has supported this newsletter over the last year. It’s been an adventure to craft a newsletter and podcast as quirky as this one. I’ll always be grateful to Substack for this opportunity, which has helped me grow as a writer and introduced me to many fascinating voices, both among those I interviewed for the podcast and in the comments and emails I’ve received. Working with editor Emily M. Keeler and podcast producer Julia Elinore Peterson made the Substack feel like not just a platform but also a real home. Substack is a wonderfully flexible platform and I’d encourage all creators interested in finding a platform for their work to give it a try.

As much as I’ve enjoyed the last year, it’s time to move on. The Nation, where I’ve worked before, has lured me back as a writer. I will be doing two columns a week and a podcast for them (plus special bonus work). I’ll maintain a newsletter which will provide weekly updates of my work. I'll keep sending you weekly emails from my new newsletter, now hosted by The Nation, but you can opt-out here if you don't want to hear from me anymore. I will add that one reason. I’ll add that one reason not to unsubscribe is that I’ll be posting extra material that will only go to newsletter subscribers.

For those who are paid subscribers, I’ll be sending out a special notice shortly. I’ll suspend the payments on the Substack and be giving you a free one year subscription to The Nation (with the option to unsubscribe). I’ll explain all the detail in the special notice.

Again, I want to thank everyone who read and listened to me here and hope you continue to follow me at The Nation.

In the meantime, here are some recent pieces from The Nation: a podcast where I talk to Linda Hirschman about the history of abolition and its relevance to the current debate over abortion, a podcast with Eoin Higgins about Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald, and a column about Great Replacement Theory and the GOP.

I hop you continue to read my pieces and listen to the podcast.

On April 14, union organizer Chris Smalls went on the Tucker Carlson show to talk about the first successful organizing effort at an Amazon plant in the United States. Although Smalls acquitted himself superbly, his appearance was much criticized in some liberal quarters.

Andrew Lawrence of Media Matters tweeted:

Tucker Carlson is a hateful bigot and he uses his program every night to spread his hateful bigotry. Someone like Smalls appearing on his show only gives Tucker credibility he doesn’t deserve.

For example, earlier in the same show tucker ran a whole segment defending a twitter account directing harassment towards the lgbt community…I think it’s a mistake to appear on that same show minutes later.

Furthermore, spare me the whole “get the message out” bullshit…on his best nights tucker has 1% of the population tuning in…I’d imagine it’s the least likely to be swayed 1% of the population in America.

There are more effective, less harmful ways to get the message out Tucker Carlson is your enemy and if you don’t understand that you have no idea what we’re actually up against.

This debate raises some tricky issues. Does appearing on Carlson’s show legitimize him? Or is it important to go on right-wing media and offer up spirited progressive and left wing arguments to a large audience that doesn’t often here them?

To sort out these issues, I turned to the prolific podcaster Katie Halper, who has never been one to run away from a fight and who has appeared on Fox. It’s a fun exchange that untangles a real dilemma.

Share

In the summer of 1999 I reviewed Russell Smith’s debut short shorty collection Young Men. To make sure I did the job right, I read his earlier works, two novels. I also read some of Smith’s journalism and interviews with the writer. In those interviews he often cited Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. So I read some books by both writers. Altogether I read about a dozen books and wrote a 3,000 word essay about the story collection and where it stood in relation to Smith’s emerging body of work, as well as his place in the tradition of the comic social novel. 

My editor, John Metcalf of Canadian Notes and Queries, liked the piece so much he insisted on doubling our agreed upon fee. Instead of $25, I was getting $50. It was perhaps the least remunerative work I’ve ever done (aside from some book reviewing for publications that ended up paying me nothing). But it was oddly satisfying. I felt I was doing something that needed doing, where I learned a lot and could share my new understanding with readers.

Book reviewing has never been the road to riches. Economically, it’s usually a marginal activity on the fringe of culture. But it’s also an activity that is essential for the health of reading culture. 

In the current issue of Maisonneuve, Emily M. Keeler surveyed the state of book reviewing in Canada, riffing off an essay in n+1 that offered a bleak view of the USA scene. The Canadian situation is even worse than the one in the United States. Emily is well-versed on these topics. She’s a former book review editor at the National Post, has written about books for a variety of publications, and is at work on her first novel. She’s also the editor of this newsletter.

In talking about book reviews, we also take up some recent books about social media, including Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts, Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This  and Vivek Shraya's The Subtweet.

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share

If you want to share this post:

Share

On Thursday, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand gave a fiery speech on the impending end of Roe v. Wade. She emphasized the dishonesty of the justices who, based on a leaked draft, are ready to extinguish the constitutional right to abortion: 

It is an outrage that we have five justices on the Supreme Court who lied, lied in their confirmation hearings in order to be confirmed. It is an outrage that in America today, that our judicial system is so corrupted and so politicized and no longer representative of the will of the people.Five justices said they respect precedent, five said that Roe v. Wade was established precedent, five said they would never undermine established precedent. It is unconscionable what this decision will do to the American people.

Gillibrand is right to emphasize the element of deception. Time and again, judicial nominees who had every intent to spike Roe insisted it was settled law. But the deception is not over. There’s a new prevarication afoot: the claim that ending Roe is a one-off, that other human rights are safe. 

The Wall Street Journal editorialized along this line, lamenting the “ parade of horribles that Democrat and the media are trying to sell Americans”— a “parade of horribles” about future decisions squashing other rights. 

The editorial is adamant that concerns about other major decisions being overturned are essentially hysteric, and insists that the justices, although critical of many these other decisions, would preserve them. Once again, the promise is that settled law will be protected. 

Writing for CNN, the historian Nicole Hemmer debunks this line of argument:

Though Alito assures readers that overturning Roe will not threaten other basic rights (just as Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch assured Americans they considered Roe to be settled law), there is no reason to believe that is the case. The legal justifications underpinning the right to an abortion are foundational to other key decisions as well: Griswold v. Connecticut, which ruled states could not outlaw contraception; Loving v. Virginia, which ruled states could not outlaw interracial marriage; Lawrence v. Texas, which ruled that states could not outlaw sodomy; and Obergefell v. Hodges, which ruled states could not outlaw same-sex marriage. If you're comforting yourself with the fantasy they wouldn't go that far, think again: Republicans are already eyeing Obergefell.

To understand why rescinding Roe will not be a stand alone affair, it’s important to understand the nature of the opposition to Roe. It’s never been strictly about the law; the Christian right mobilized against Roe not because they care about the law, but because they are extremely opposed to women’s liberation and the social revolution that spearheaded enshrining women’s reproductive rights into law. Opposition to abortion, as sociologist Kristin Luker demonstrated in her classic 1984 book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, is rarely an isolated sentiment but exists withina network of traditionalist sentiment about gender roles.

In pursuit of the goal of extinguishing Roe, the Christian right led a fifty-year campaign that upturned American politics, and changed the shape of both major parties. They became the driving force of the Republican Party, pushing it to prioritize the courts above all else. When Republican-nominated justices disappointed them, the Christian right founded a privately held ideological organization (The Federalist Society) to vet nominees for political purity. The amazing discipline of the Christian right can be seen in the whole sequence of events starting with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death: making sure the GOP stonewalled the Merrick Garland nomination, rallying behind Trump, securing the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, and pushing ahead with securely right-wing nominees like Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. 

Is it possible to imagine that so resolute and determined a movement will just fold up and retire once Roe has been vanquished? Isn’t it more likely that, energized by victory, the Christian right will push ahead with the rest of their agenda. After all, getting rid of Roe won’t end abortion—it will only allow very conservative states to ban abortions. But there will still be ways for women to get birth control that the Christian right (falsely) sees as abortifacients. There will be a push to secure state borders to make sure birth control doesn’t get in, and that women seekingabortions will  face hurdles getting out.

Already, leading anti-choice figures like Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, are talking about the need for a federal ban. 

One possibility is that the courts could (as justice Sam Alito hints at in his draft decision) recognize fetal personhood. If that happens, then there will be a national abortion ban. 

Since the impulses behind the Christian right were never just about the legal objections to Roe but rather a wider opposition to social and sexual liberalism, it’s likely that the movement will continue to push for a return to anti-sodomy laws (even if that requires overturning Lawrence), a reversal of the right to birth control, and an overturning of marriage equality.

All of these are “settled law.” But the court is proving that settled law means nothing. 

(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe:

If you enjoyed this post, please share:

Share

When I had Linda Hirshman on the podcast last December, I referred to her as “the Cassandra of the American left.” I was thinking about her warnings, going back many decades, that reproductive rights in the United States, as codified in Roe v. Wade, were under threat. But going beyond that warning, Linda has been prescient in predicting that the anti-choice movement won’t stop with overturning Roe but will push for further rollbacks to personal autonomy via the concept of fetal personhood, extend abortion bans nationally, and reverse legislation enshrining the right to buy birth control. 

With the leak of a draft of a majority opinion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, we see that Cassandra has once again been proven right. In the draft, Alito strongly hints at support for fetal personhood. He also speaks slightingly of the rights to birth-control and same sex marriage as well as the reversal of anti-sodomy laws (although equivocates on whether these decisions can be retracted). 

In light of the pending demise of Roe and the dark future in the United States for reproductive freedom and sexual liberty, I wanted to talk to Linda again. We take up the implications of Alito’s decision, the likely political consequences and also the need for a strong feminist movement that places the issue of equal citizenship at the forefront of the political. 

Previous Posts in Anticipation of the Fall of  Roe v. Wade

Notes for the World after Roe: A short syllabus of articles on abortion and bodily autonomy.

The End of Roe and the Rise of Vigilantes: An essay on how the Texas Abortion ban and the threats to Roe v. Wade are not about nostalgic returns but rather intended to usher in a dark future.

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and subscribe:

If you liked this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

Last June I argued that Critical Race Theory (CRT) functioned largely as a bogeyman for the right. My contention was that few on the right understood or cared about the actual body of ideas behind CRT. Rather, CRT serves as a convenient label for an amorphous cultural change involving the popularizing of anti-racist ideas, only some of which are involved with actual CRT. By this analysis, paying attention to real CRT is besides the point and a waste of time, since that’s not the real stake in the argument.

My friend John Ganz, proprietor of the excellent Unpopular Front newsletter, has a different take. He feels that some the hostility right-wing thinkers have towards CRT is a clue about a larger set of attitudes, a reflection of a real agenda not just to stir up a bogeyman but to roll back the civil rights movement. Since I always learn from John, I was eager to talk about our differences. 

I feel our conversation is rich and rewarding. One warning: the audio is glitchy. My podcast producer Julia Elinore Peterson made a valiant effort to clean it up with only partial success. But I thought the contents of conversation has enough merit that it deserved posting. So if you’re willing to put up with some glitches, I encourage a listen.

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler; podcast produced by Julia Elinore Peterson)

Share and Subscribe

If you enjoyed this post, please share:

Share

Or Subsribe:

Subscribe now

As memory of Hitchens the man inevitably recede, the question of his literary reputation inevitably comes to the fore. Writing in the Toronto Star, my friend the philosopher Andy Lamey argues that Hitchens is enjoying a deserved revival:

Recent books by or about Hitchens recall this period of his career, before he became an apologist for the Iraq War, one who bore a disturbing resemblance to the warmongers he once opposed. Appearing ten years after Hitchens’s death, these titles suggest that Hitchens is on his way to joining the pantheon of journalists, such as H.L. Mencken and Joan Didion, who churned out copy on deadline that remains of interest decades later.

It’s undeniable that we’re seeing a plethora of Hitchens reprints as well as collections of previously fugitive pieces—such as the newly published (and regrettably titled) A Hitch in Time. Further evidence of Hitchens’s renewed relevance comes from the fact that an unauthorized biography is in the works, in addition to appraisals like Ben Burgis’s recently published Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters (which Doug Bell and I discussed on this podcast).

So Andy’s clearly on to something when he suggests that Hitchens is a renewed subject of discussion. Andy’s own eloquent account of Hitchens as an admirable contrarian speaks to that, and he’s also right on target in pointing out the superiority of Hitchens’s work before 9/11. 

But, having spent some time revisiting Hitchens work, I want to register some quibbles. There’s a limit to how much of his work can be revived even, if we leave aside essays that are clearly wrong-headed (not just the pro-war essays but the notorious Vanity Fair piece contending women aren’t funny as men). In his writing, there’s an issue that goes beyond the inevitably dated nature of his journalism. 

The comparisons with Mencken and Didion highlight the problem. In the case of Mencken, we see how bad politics can cast a pall. Hitchens himself wrote well about this in 1994 when apprising a Mencken biography and noting a fatal blindness about fascism:

Reviewing Mein Kampf for the American Mercury, [Mencken] was so even-handed as to draw a pained howl from [publisher Alfred A. Knopf] himself. About the rise of fascism in general, Mencken was sanguine: more sanguine, let us say, than he was about FDR. That might be condemnation enough. Yet it is not. Think of the incredible literary failure that is involved in Mencken’s refusal to write a serious polemic against Hitler. Here aside from the grotesque embodiment of all hatred and superstition, was the quack, charlatan, and crank to end all quacks, charlatans, and cranks. Such a target! And from the pen that had flayed and punctured the ‘booboisie’, there came little or nothing.

Hitchens ended with a devastating judgement: “With Mencken, the face grew to fit the mask, and the playful Prejudices became the drone of authentic prejudice. Those who flirt with race theory should learn to beware their own dominant gene.” (Hitchens’ review can be found in his book Unacknowledged Legislation). 

As with Mencken, the harshest thing you can do with Hitchens is note how he failed his own talent: isn’t it amazing that the deadly polemicist who so skillfully skewered Mother Theresa, Bill Clinton, and Henry Kissinger failed to use his rapier wit against equally worthy targets like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. In fact, Hitchens spent the better part of his last decade spinning sophistry on behalf of a reckless imperial adventure. 

The names Mencken and Didion bring up the issue of style. Both writers were highly original prose stylists: Mencken’s rococo mixture of mudslinging slang and lecture room mock-orotundity still managing after many decades to surprise and delight. Didion’s highly personal voice, her spooky diffidence and bracing skepticism, was an even greater achievement. Like Mencken, Didion is much imitated but no one ever comes close.

Hitchens was a less original figure. He was a superior example of a type, an Oxbridge wit. You can hear echoes in his charming drawing room irony of many other writers in this mode: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell. It’s an enviable style, but not an particularly original one. Hitchens’s best work was as a literary critic, but that Oxbridge inheritance also marked him in this realm—his best writing is about 20th century British writers who emerged from and belong to his milieu. He could be marvellous writing about P.G. Wodehouse or Anthony Powell, but the further he got away from home base, the less sure his criticism became.

Hitchens had a very specific gestalt: debate club boorishness, soixante-huitard romanticism, the masculine comedy of the clubby English social novel. Even when Hitchens was alive this gestalt evoked an earlier world, one that is becoming ever more remote. I’m having a hard time imagining circumstances where they become salient again. Like Waugh and Powell, Hitchens offers the niche pleasure of nostalgic fantasy. There will always be readers attracted to it, but more as a way to escape the world rather than to understand it.

Share and Subscribe

If you enjoyed this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

The last time I saw Steven Heighton, which I had no reason to think would be our final encounter, my back was aching from carrying around a knapsack full of his books. It was 2017, and I'd been invited to deliver a lecture at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario; Steven was a Queen's alumni and still lived in Kingston, a small city with a peculiar social composition. I figured I’d make the most of the trip and arranged to meet up with Steven with the idea that I'd get some signed books.

Kingston is a university town, but it also houses a prison and military base. As Heighton wrote in a 2003 autobiographical essay for the anthology Writers Talking (edited by John Metcalf and Clare Wilkshire), Kingston was:

[A]n inexpensive harbour city with plenty of writers, bookstores, pubs, live music, and weird turreted Victorian houses, along with a volatile mix of population groups: the inbred local gentry, ex-prisoners, the profs and upper-middle-class professionals of the downtown, soldiers from the base, Royal Military College cadets, factory workers, bike gangs, the largely affluent student body, young artists, thousands of retirees.

As both a person and a writer, Heighton was Conradically mobile, roving the world to bring stories that could as easily be set in Japan or Greece or the Artic circle as suburban Toronto. But Kingston’s strange stew of Upper Canadian stuffiness and underworld grit spoke to him and provided the basis for some of his best fiction. 

My plan was to go out to dinner with Steven as well as the academics who had invited me and then to get Steven to sign all of my books (I had all his poetry, essay and story collections as well novels). As it happened the dinner was too successful for me to pull off my autograph plot. Steven was such a lively and open talker, so good at getting down to the brass tacks of candid self-disclosure that bringing out the books seemed like it would introduce an element of fannish disruption. I assumed, wrongly, there would other future occasions for book signing. 

Like many of his friends and his admirers, I was shocked by Steven’s death on Tuesday. He was only 60, struck down by a sudden, aggressive bout of cancer. His partner Ginger Pharand described it “a forest fire of an illness.”

Heighton was never a best-seller, but he achieved enough mid-level success to support himself and his family;his work had a modest but measurable international audience, and he relied on what he called his “deranged frugality”  and the odd teaching job. Among the community of writers, he was loved for both his work and his person. He was committed to the life of writing, always refining his work and broadening his range. His early prose and poetry tended towards the romantically florid, lush outgrowths of verbiage that he would learn to prune over the course of his 17 books. His writing became ever more muscular, focused, effective. His commitment to literature was on constant display in his relationship with other writers. He was always ready to provide a probing reading and apt, encouraging criticism. 

Of his many works, I’m particularly fond of the story collection The Dead Are More Visible and the novel Afterlands.

Here, I want to single out two examples of his writing. One is “Missing Fact,” which the poet Jason Guriel has called “the best essay on half-rhyme I've ever read—in the form of one of the best sonnets I've ever read.”

Missing Fact

Noli me tangere, for Caesars I ame;

And wylde for to hold, thought I seeme tame.

 – Thomas Wyatt, c. 1535

Sometimes time turns perfect rhyme to slant,
as in Wyatt’s famous sonnet - how the couplet
no longer chimes, his “ame” turned “am,” now coupled
more by pattern, form. So everything gets bent
and tuned by time’s tectonic slippage. You and
I, for instance, no longer click or chord
the sharp way we did, when secretly wired
two decades back (not fifty - but then human
prosody shifts faster); and surely that’s best –
half-rhyme better suits the human, and consonance,
not a flawless fit, is mostly what counts
over years. But, still, this urge (from the past?
our genes?) to shirk all, for one more perfect-
coupling rhyme: for two again as one pure fact.

It’s hard to know what to praise more, the mediation on the shifting of language or the implicit linkage of coupling with couplets. 

The other passage I want to call attention to is from the short story “Fireman’s Carry,” found in The Dead are More Visible, in which a firefighter narrates putting out a flame:

A rooming house is about the worst place for a fire, short of a chemical factory. Narrow hallways, the wiring below code, a dozen rooms or more, each warehoused with the kind of fodder that fires dote on—aged mattresses, bales of newspapers and Reader’s Digest, paperbacks, LPs, dry-rotted furniture. This place was sensationally decrepit. Shredded Insulbrick over century- old clapboard. Packed with flammables and going up in a whoosh. We had four trucks out front, ladders deployed, crews fighting to dent the firestorm that had already blown out the lower windows, seeking more oxygen, more space to expand. The crews were spraying from all angles, triangulating the fire’s heart, trying to buy us a few minutes upstairs. In the south alley, another hose was drenching the side-door stairwell where we’d entered and where we hoped to exit, soon. For now the lower flight of stairs was a foaming, terraced cascade, like a salmon weir.

This is not a showpiece paragraph but a typically observant one. It has Heighton’s characteristic commitment to, as he liked to say, “noun the world”: to use the naming power of language to mimetically capture reality. Anyone who has spent time in a rooming house will immediately feel a shiver of recognition. 

There will be more to say about Heighton in the future, but for now I want to end with a review I wrote in 2012, for the National Post, of The Dead Are More Visible. I stand by the enthusiasm I expressed then and hope one day to write about his larger body of work. 

Clear-eyed Physicality 

Steven Heighton is fascinated by the things couples do in bed. Which is not to say he's a voyeur or a pornographer. Rather, he is a writer who is exceptionally clear-eyed about the fact that emotions are only alive to the extent that they are incarnated in physical acts: in looking, in touching, in caressing, in cuddling, in grappling, and in all the other motions that led up to the act of lovemaking and are intensified by it. Nor do these tactile experiences disappear after consummation but rather linger in the body like still-warm embers from an exhausted fire.

The stories in Heighton's new collection The Dead Are More Visible are impressively varied, but one feature that gives the book unity is the author's recurring concern with the biological and emotional urges that bring couples together and also sometimes push them apart.

Here is an account of a long-married couple who lost a son in an auto accident: “Every night for months they lay twined without ever having sex, a strange shift from all the years when they had often made love but always slept a little apart.” Here is a Canadian who teaches English in Japan describing the postcoital routine he has with his employer and lover: “Always, after the night's last sex and cigarettes, we would turn away from each other and lie back to back, space between us, to fall asleep, but when I woke up in the small hours she would be furled into me, face on my shoulder or pressed into my nape, sleeping hard.”

Here is a husband about to divorce thinking about the lingering sexual tensions that exist between him and his soon-to-be ex, a woman whose outwardly cool exterior conceals her private passions: ”Whenever they were in each other's vicinity, a vital arc would leap the synapse between them, etching the air. And in the sweaty aftermath of sex she would act as if nothing shocking had just occurred, as if she hadn't just been far beyond herself, laughing wildly, her hard little thighs crushing his hot ears and cheeks.”

Sex is a slippery activity that notoriously resists the efforts of prose fiction to grab hold of it. There is even a sniggering annual prize given to bad sex writing. It is a testament to Heighton's authorial gifts that he not only can write about sex with exquisite delicacy, but that many of the best passages in his stories are about intimacy in the broadest sense, meaning not just carnal acts but the full spectrum of sensations that underlie all human relationships and also our very existence as selfconscious animals. Heighton is a full-bodied writer, disconcertingly candid about fleshly urges in a way that shocks us into recognizing and remembering intense experiences that we've been socialized not to talk about.

In an autobiographical essay, Heighton once asserted that “I wouldn't have to write if I could be a gifted athlete, an artist of the body – a runner, a swimmer, a boxer.” This admiration for artists of the body—those who live by doing rather than more sedentary activities—explains some of the focus on sports in this collection. One story is about boxers, another focuses on a sports doctor who once had a promising career as a runner, and a third deals with the non-athletic but still very physical job of being a fireman. All of these artists of the body are described with the same vivid and precise prose Heighton brings to describing sex. At its best, this prose manages to achieve the same miracle of incarnate expressiveness found in Joyce or Nabokov, masters whose words are so intensely textured and specific that we feel them pulsing through our body.

To say Heighton is an immensely talented writer is true enough but insufficient. Thanks to creative writing programs, Canada has many skilled writers who can carpenter together serviceable sentences to make a readable story or novel. Middling competence in fiction is now the Canadian norm and enough to win prizes and even sell a few books. Unfortunately, given the small army of writers who can jump over the bar of adequacy and win attention and some praise, it is forgotten that there is a much smaller cadre of writers who belong to a different league, who write fiction of first rank. If Joyce and Nabokov seem like too distant and foreign as points of comparison, then here is a comparison closer to home: the best stories in this book—the title tale, “Shared Room on Union” and ”Nearing the Seas, Superior”are as good as the fiction of Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant. Or to be more blunt, Heighton is as good a writer as Canada has ever produced.

Critics are paid to be querulous and to earn my keep I can find a few faults. Heighton is an ambitious writer, which means he occasionally aims further than he can shoot. In the last story, “Swallow,” the plethora of secondary characters overwhelms the central plight of the protagonist. I wish Heighton hadn't reprinted (in slightly edited form) his older story “Heart & Arrow,” which is written in a florid prose style he has since, thankfully, abandoned. But these are niggling quibbles. The best stories in this book do what only great art can do: make us feel more fiercely alive.

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you enjoyed this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

In 2017, Emmanuel Macron decisively trounced Marine Le Pen in the French presidential race, winning by a ratio of nearly two to one (Macron’s 66.1 percent as against Le Pen’s 33.9 percent). Macron and Le Pen are squaring off again on Sunday April 24. If polls are to be trusted, it will be a much closer race. Macron still leads, but with an edge in the 2 to 8 percent range. Given the possibility of polling error, Le Pen has a real shot at winning.

To suss out the election and the stakes, I talked to Arthur (Art) Goldhammer, one of the leading anglophone writers on France. An affiliate at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, Goldhammer is a novelist and the translator of more than a hundred books from French into English, including many seminal intellectual works such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital. His writings on France can be found on the Tocqueville21 newsletter.

Art and I took up not just the political careers of Macron and Le Pen, but also larger trends in French and global politics, including the withering away of the mainstream conservative and social democratic parties, the rise of media entrepreneurs as political actors, the rise of the populist left, and the recasting of the political spectrum as a battle between pro-system and anti-system politics. 

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you liked this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

When Compact magazine launched in late March, it received an unusually prominent notice in The New York Times, which ran a long feature emphasizing the novel ideological fusion the magazine was attempting. The headline for the article read “Two Religious Conservatives and a Marxist Walk Into a Journal.” The religious conservatives are Matthew Schmitz and Sohrab Ahmari. The erstwhile Marxist is Edwin Aponte. Reporter Jennifer Schuessler took pains to underscore the ideological diversity within the journal: “The masthead of columnists and contributing editors mixes Catholic anti-liberals and dissident Marxist feminists, European radicals and American populists, with prominent figures (Glenn Greenwald, Patrick Deneen) alongside those who cut their teeth on upstart blogs and podcasts.”

So what is Compact? Is it a hodge-podge? Or are there some underlying principles uniting this disparate crew? To take up the issue, I spoke with Eric Levitz, who wrote a stringent critique of Compact for New York magazine. 

Our conversation delves into the wayward history of the crew behind Compact and earlier efforts at red-brown ideological alliances, including Murray Rothbard’s attempts to create a coalition of libertarians and Maoists in the journal Left and Right and Eugene Genovese’s Marxist Perspectives journal, which was an important stepping stone on his journey to the right.

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you enjoyed this podcast, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

Commentary magazine has been a family affair almost since its founding in 1945 by the Jewish American Committee. John Podhoretz, who has edited the magazine since 2009 is the son of Midge Decter, who joined the magazine as a secretary in 1948 and wrote for it for many years, and the son of Norman Podhoretz, who started writing for it in 1953 and served as editor from 1960 to 1995 and editor-at-large until 2009. In his autobiography, Norman Podhoretz used the metaphor of “the family” to describe the cluster of distinguished New York intellectuals who wrote for Commentary (figures like Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin and Lionel Trilling). But another, more literal, family has dominated the magazine for seven decades. Innumerable off-shoots of the Decter-Podhoretz clan have found themselves on the Commentary masthead including various children (Naomi Munson and Rachel Abrams), sons-in-law (Steven C. Munson, his other son-in-law Elliot Abrams), and grand-sons (Sam Munson).

If editing Commentary is a family business, it’s starting, like many other mom-and-pop operations, to run into succession trouble. In 2007, Commentary left the aegis of the American Jewish Committee and became a nonprofit. The writer Dan Scott has written an extensive substack post providing an analysis of its public financial statements of Commentary. He argues that the magazine is top heavy with staff salaries, running consistent losses and, most dangerously, surviving by selling off its investment capital. 

Is Commentary really in such trouble? Do the difficulties of the magazine relate to its editorial history? To take up these questions, I talked to Jacob Bacharach, who is a novelist and essayist of note as well as  an expert in non-profit funding. He brings to the discussion a rare combination of skill in both forensic accounting and intellectual history. 

Jacob and I have enormous fun running through the wild ideological shifts of Commentary history (from Cold War liberalism to radicalism to neo-conservatism). Jacob is always an energetic conversationalist. In a previous episode we talked about the Potemkin school of the University of Austin. 

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you enjoyed this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

Mounting evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine continue to emerge even as negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are underway in Turkey. As the Atlantic Council reports on Friday:

Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion has seemingly altered Russia’s war goals, creating space for diplomatic negotiations to advance. That was on display as negotiating teams from both countries huddled in Istanbul on March 29 for talks which, by all indications, were the most productive so far, and the two sides appeared closer to ending the war than before.

The evidence of war crimes, coupled with increasing calls for Russian Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian leaders to stand trial, highlights the difficulty in reconciling the tension between conflicting imperatives. The demand for justice will have to be balanced by the urgency of bringing the war to an end as quickly as possible. Ukraine and the broader coalition of countries arrayed against the Russian invasion will need to sort out their priorities. 

To discuss possible paths to peace and the larger prospects for a post-war settlement, I spoke with Stephen Wertheim, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Wertheim, who is also a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School, brought a sober, realist perspective to this discussion.

Coming Attractions

My household is currently bedevilled with Covid. Fortunately, all cases are mild so far.
In the meantime, I’ve already recorded some podcasts that will air in the coming week. Look forward to Eric Levitz talking about Compact magazine’s attempt to fuse social democracy with traditionalism, Jacob Bacharach on the financial troubles of a neo-conservative flagship journal, and John Ganz on the fear of Critical Race Theory.

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you liked this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

One of my most unpopular opinions, going back more than 40 years now, is that I think Batman should be a light hearted character who cheerfully POWs and BANGs his way through a Gotham city filled with colourful villains. In other words, I'm a fan of the 1960s Batman TV show that starred Adam West. The more recent turn towards a dark and gritty Batman, which started in the early 1970s with the comic book stories by Neal Adams and written by Dennis O'Neil, has always struck me as wrong—even though individual movies and comic books in this mode occasionally give me some pleasure. O’Neil and Adams’ noirish spin on the character was taken to a new level of somberness by Frank Miller in a series of famous graphic novels, notably The Dark Knight Returns (1986, done in collaboration with Lynn Varley and Klaus Janson) and Batman: Year One (1987, done in collaboration with David Mazzucchelli).

It was with those prejudices in mind that I went to see The Batman, a film directed by Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson as the caped crusader. This movie took the grim and gritty aesthetic to a new pitch of darkness. In fact, much of the film was barely visible. You had to strain your eyes to even figure out what is going on the screen.

The film seemed like a good occasion to talk about the evolution of Batman. I sat down with my frequent podcast guest Doug Bell to talk about both the movie and Batman as a character. We took up the 1930s emergence of Batman out of the pulp conventions of the mystery man genre, the domestication of Batman as a result of criticism in the 1940s and 50s, the camp Batman of the 1960s, and the more serious (or perhaps more ponderous) Batman that emerged out of the influence of Frank Miller. We also discussed the various iterations of Batman in movies and what distinguishes the most recent film from its predecessors.

(Post edited Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you liked this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

At age 26, Madison Cawthorn has much to be proud of: He’s the youngest member of congress (in fact the first one to be born in the 1990s), he’s a national figure whose words constantly make headlines, and he’s proven that there is, in fact, a behavioral line Republican congressional leaders cannot cross, although one that highlights their own fundamentally selfish politics. 

Over the last 18 months, Cawthorn has made a name for himself as part of a cohort of anti-establishment Republicans who pitch their appeal to the far right in ways that embarrass the party. In early March, Cawthorn  denounced Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a “thug” and the Ukrainian government as “evil.” 

That was only the most recent of Cawthorn’s habit of outré behavior. As CNN notes, 

During his short tenure, Cawthorn has racked up a remarkably long list of eye-popping controversies: he brought a congressional candidate onto the House floor, which is against the rules, and falsely told people that the candidate was a staffer; he was seen cleaning his gun in the middle of a virtual hearing on veterans' health; he got busted for driving on a suspended license; and he was hit with an ethics complaint after getting into a verbal altercation with GOP Rep. David McKinley on the House floor, to name a few.

Through all these controversies, Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader and the person best situated to punish Cawthorn, either bit his tongue or gave the mildest of wrist-slaps. McCarthy has been similarly indulgent of two other members of his caucus, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of whom attended a convention organized by white nationalists.

But now Cawthorn has finally gone too far. Appearing on a podcast earlier this month, the young congressman shared some lurid stories of “sexual perversion” and drugs on Capitol Hill:

The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington, I mean being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average is probably 60 or 70. You look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics … Then all of a sudden you get invited to, “Well hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.” What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy. Or the fact that some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you.

Are these stories true? Maybe but maybe not. Cawthorn is a known fabulist. Called to the carpet by Kevin McCarthy, Cawthorn reportedly said his stories were exaggerations. But the conservative lobbyist and consultant Roger Stone, who knows Cawthorn and is not unfamiliar with decadent behavior among Republican elites, posted a comment on social media saying, “Congressman Madison Cawthorn just told me has NOT retracted his claims about drug fueled orgies among DC elites.”

The truth of Cawthorn’s statement is less pertinent than its provenance. As several acute observers (notably Amanda Marcotte in Salon as well as Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman in The Washington Post) have pointed out, all Cawthrorn was doing was taking the standard QAnon inspired moral panic about sexual perversion and directing it against members of his own party. Cawthron has taken the QAnon knife and turned it into a boomerang. It’s the second part, the fact that the conspiracy theory is aimed at fellow Republicans, that is the sticking point. 

As Waldman and Sargent note:

The claim that children everywhere are being “groomed” into some form of depravity has become ubiquitous on the right; as Fox News host Laura Ingraham recently asked, “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender-identity radicals?”

Various laws attacking trans people are regularly justified with claims that they are defenses against creeping deviancy. Even giving a trans teen love and support is characterized as “abuse,” a horror from which children must be protected.

Ultimately, this sort of language has become omnipresent for lawmakers such as Cawthorn, almost like the air they breathe, which is why they regularly slip into it so reflexively. But as this episode shows, these tendencies can boomerang: The lure of depicting Washington as a kind of bottomless cesspool of degeneracy — a guaranteed right-wing applause line — led Cawthorn to accidentally hit his own colleagues with friendly fire in the form of charges of “sexual perversion.”

The one place this analysis can be challenged is in the question of whether Cawthron “accidentally” hit his own colleagues. Cawthorn’s comments might have been ill-advised—the Republican establishment is now, it seems, turning against him and will support primary challengers—but they were not necessarily inadvertent. 

 As a member of the Trumpist wing of the GOP, Cawthorn is invested in an anti-establishment narrative that paints his faction as at war not just with the Democrats but with the so-called Republicans in Name Only (RINOs), who control the party. Trumpists suppose that these Rinos are in thrall to the Deep State and the corruption of Washington. 

It’s notable that Cawthorn is already running ads where he’s cast as the brave truth teller, standing up to “the radical left, the establishment, and the media”

I’m not sure whether Cawthorn’s line of argument will be enough to stave off a primary challenge, especially with Republican leaders in his state of North Carolina mustering against him. But it has to be understood that he does have a strategy of sorts and isn’t flying blind. The strategy is the very same one the right used against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden: making wild accusations of sexually illicit behavior to discredit. The Cawthorn gambit is that what can work against Democrats can also work against the leadership of his own party. 

(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you liked this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

As all the world knows, Will Smith upstaged the Academy Awards this year by slapping Chris Rock, who made a joke in very poor taste about Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair. (She has alopecia and is, of course, Smith’s wife.) Smith’s act raises all sorts of legal and ethical issues: Did Smith commit a crime? Why was there a surprising amount of sympathy for him? Was his apology, made after he won the best actor award, adequate? What remediation can be made for the this act? I take up these questions with Doug Bell, friend of the pod. 

Smith’s slap certainly distracted attention from the rest of the show, and the many deserving winners. So Doug and I also take up the awards handed out, discussing the wins and losses of Dune, The Power of the Dog, and CODA. 

Previous movie discussions

Some of the movies, not all of them nominated, discussed have been taken up in previous podcasts, including Dune, Macbeth, Passing, and The French Dispatch. 

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you liked this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

Francis Fukuyama, rarely hesitant to proffer bold predictions, has already seized on the Russian attack on Ukraine as an occasion for grand generalization, with the same confidence that led him in 1989 to use the slow dissolution of the Warsaw Pact as a pretext for proclaiming “the end of history.” 

Writing in American Purpose earlier this month, Fukuyama proposed that, 

The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings. 

In an interview for The Washington Post, Fukuyama built on this argument, contending that, “A moral clarity has been imposed on populist politics. Many of these populists, including Donald Trump, have been able to pretend they’re really tribunes of the people, that they’re channeling a democratic urge.” He added, “That’s the reason every one of them — except for Trump, evidently — has been trying to backtrack from the support they gave Putin.”

Not for the first time, Fukuyama is confusing one swallow for the whole spring. There’s an element of truth to his observation. Putin’s adventurism has in many parts of Europe strengthened centrist politicians while bringing discredit to right-wing populists who had allied themselves with Putin. Matteo Salvini’s Lega, which had been running as high as 35 percent in polls in Italy, has crashed and is now at 16 percent. 

In France, Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit turned presidential candidate, surged at the end of last year and looked like he was well positioned to be one of the two top contenders in the first round of the presidential election, alongside the incumbent Emmanuel Macron. Fredrik Segerfeldt in The UnPopulist notes: 

The war in Ukraine has changed all this, at least for now. Europe’s extreme right has traditionally maintained good relations with Russia and Putin, and Zemmour and Le Pen have been no exception. Now, they are both busy backtracking on admiring statements they’ve made about Putin in order to limit the political damage. Zemmour’s support in the polls has fallen to 11% to 12%, a six- to seven-point drop in a few weeks, and it seems likely voters will punish him at the polls in April for his Russophilia.

Yet, Segerfeldt cautions that this change might only be temporary. It’s by no means clear that the populist right is going away anytime soon. Victor Orbán, perhaps the most politically successful of right-wing authoritarians in the West, is likely to be reelected this year. He’s cagily used the crisis to mend his arguments with EU and to take on the mantle of defender of the Hungarian nation. The general spirit of nationalism and militarism that the war encourages is likely to be fertile grounds for all sorts of right wing movements. 

The populist right is adapting to the new environment. Subsequent to Fukuyama’s comments, Trump has become more critical of Putin but also turned his fury to Joe Biden, arguing that his alleged weakness created the crisis. In other sectors of the right, the earlier explicitly pro-Putin arguments have largely disappeared but a kind of anti-anti-Putinism is still strong. This is most clearly evident in the spread of conspiracy theories, like the notion of “Ukrainian bioweapons labs” which was born in the fever swamps of QAnon websites but was quickly taken up by Fox News, especially Tucker Carlson. The bioweapons lab story is particularly noteworthy because it shows how easily paranoia born of the Trump era and the pandemic can be repurposed to spread wartime disinformation. 

As I’ve noted often in this newsletter, the hard right in the United States is increasingly attracted to authoritarian politics. (Trump’s formerly frequent praise of Putin was one symptom of this tendency, which has far deeper roots.)

On a podcast with Hillary Clinton, Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic offered this assessment of Tucker Carlson:

I don’t know exactly where Tucker gets his information but some of it is quite specific. He’s made specific comments about things the Ukrainians have done that someone is feeding him information about how to describe the war and giving him ideas. Then, of course, that information is very, very useful for the Putin regime to play it back on Russian TV. Tucker Carlson appears quite frequently and it’s used as evidence that ‘we have support in America’. He’s literally a useful idiot. He’s getting information from someone with ties to Russia. I don’t know who that is and I don’t want to speculate.

Applebaum is right on one level. Carlson’s position can fairly be described as anti-anti-Putin. But in countering Carlson’s conspiracy theories, Applebaum concocts some of her own. There’s no reason to think Carlson is being fed information from a Russian source. Quite the reverse. Carlson’s bioweapon lab theory had organic roots in the true homegrown kookery of QAnon. It makes sense for Carlson to gravitate towards such fantasies of secret plots. Carlson deals in anti-system politics. His whole brand is about building suspicion of liberals and Democrats. Naturally he'll gravitate towards theories that allow him to brandish his oppositional brand. 

The fact that Carlson so quickly found fanciful narratives to suit his politics is an indication that right-wing populism isn’t going to go away anytime soon. In fact, the uncertainty and chaos of wartime conditions is likely to offer even more opportunities for anyone peddling the politics of paranoia. 

(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you enjoyed this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

The news from occupied Ukraine continues to be grim and contradictory. Russian forces have laid siege to Mariupol, issuing an ultimatum demanding it surrender by 10AM Monday local time. If not, Russia’s defense ministry warned, all those who remain in the city will face a military tribunal. 

Amid these horrors, the shape of a possible peace deal is also becoming visible in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia being mediated by Turkey. Citing Turkish sources, the Financial Times reports

[T]he two countries were edging towards agreement on Kyiv declaring neutrality and abandoning its drive for Nato membership, ‘demilitarising’ Ukraine in exchange for collective security guarantees, what Russia calls ‘denazification’ and lifting restrictions on the use of Russian in Ukraine.

The paradox is that as Russian forces become more brutal, all signs point to the Russian government abandoning the core mission Putin originally outlined, which was incorporating Ukraine into Russia. There’s considerable evidence that Russian war aims have diminished in the face of Ukrainian resistance.

To gauge where the war stands now, I spoke with Anatol Lieven, visiting professor at King’s College London and senior fellow at the Quincy Institute. I’ve long admired Anatol’s books and articles about foreign policy and was grateful for the chance to talk to him. 

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you enjoyed this podcast, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

Vladimir Putin is a strongman who is drawn to strongmen: not just other autocrats but literal bodybuilders and muscle-flexing martial artists. In 2013, Putin tried to appoint the washed up action star Steven Seagal as Russia’s special emissary to the United States. Although the bid failed, it did lead the Obama administration to briefly consider responding in kind by making Arnold Schwarzenegger, former governor of California and noted action movie star, into America’s ambassador to Russia. This idea was based on Putin’s known love of action stars. Of the 22 people and institutions Putin follows on his twitter account, one is Schwarzenegger. 

This history, and the fact of Schwarzenegger’s wider popularity in Russia, explains why the star of the Terminator franchise decided to make a video addressing the Russian people. 

Schwarzenegger’s nine-minute video is the best example of public diplomacy I’ve seen in the current conflict. It threads the difficult needle of being respectful of the national pride of Russians while also clearly condemning Putin’s aggression. Schwarzenegger boldly makes use of the story of his father, a Nazi wounded in the siege of Leningrad, to make clear he’s aware of Russia’s history and also as an example of someone misled into an unjust war. 

It’s difficult to know whether this video will be able to circulate widely in Russia, but it is an exceptional use of personal testimony to cross a wartime divide. If any Western messaging can reach the Russian people, it’ll be this video.

Schwarzenegger’s video can be contrasted with the plague of cringe-inducing poetry that has come from other celebrities. AnnaLynne McCord, of 90210 fame, posted a masterclass in shamelessly awful poesy, with a video of her reading a poem she composed titled, “Dear Putin, If I Was Your Mother…”

The poem opens:

Dear President Vladimir Putin

I'm so sorry that I was not your mother

If I was your mother, you would have been so loved

Held in the arms of joyous light

Never would this story's plight

The world unfurled before our eyes

A pure demise

Of nation sitting peaceful under a night sky

If I was your mother

The world would have been warm

So much laughter and joy

And nothing would harm

I can't imagine the stain

The soul-stealing pain

That the little boy, you, 

Must have seen and believed

McCord recited the poem with a baffling confidence, as if the absurdity of her words and ideas didn’t occur to her.

Not to be outdone, Bono, lead singer of U2, sent a poem to Nancy Peolosi that was read on Thursday as part of a St. Patrick’s Day celebration. 

Bono’s poem reads

Oh, Saint Patrick he drove out the snakes

With his prayers but that’s not all it takes

For the snake symbolizes

An evil that rises

And hides in your heart

As it breaks

And the evil has risen, my friends

From the darkness that lives in some men

But in sorrow and fear

That’s when saints can appear

To drive out those old snakes once again

And they struggle for us to be free

From the psycho in this human family

Ireland’s sorrow and pain

Is now the Ukraine

And Saint Patrick’s name now Zelenksy

It’s hard to known where to begin with this doggerel. The best that can be said about it is that it reads like three half-finished limericks hastily jammed together. I will note that saying “the snake symbolizes” indicates a certain lack of faith in readers. “The psycho in this human family” is just awkward diction. And “the Ukraine” is insulting since the country defiantly rejects the definitive article, which makes it sound like a province rather than a sovereign state. The rhyme of “Ukraine” with “pain” also leaves a sour aftertaste. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger proves that celebrities can contribute to public discourse, if they take the time to craft a thoughtful message. McCord and Bono show all the can go wrong if good intentions take the place of craft and intelligence. 

(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you liked this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

On March 3, in an on-air interview with Fox News, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. He reiterated that call in a tweet:

Graham’s endorsement of murder was quickly and rightly condemned. At the very least, it’s impudent for a politician to advocate killing the leader of another nation, let alone one that has nuclear weapons. 

But while Graham’s reckless utterances are isolated incidents, his underlying logic is more widely shared. Assassination makes sense if you believe that Putin and Putin alone is the real cause of the war. I’ll confess that I’ve had similar thoughts in the run-up to the war and through the early days of conflict. In a podcast, David Klion and I talked about how a palace coup replacing Putin might be the easiest and best solution. 

My thinking on this went something like this: there’s little evidence of popular support for the war and even evidence of elite dissension against it. The major government-led attempt to mobilize pro-war opinion only started a week after the conflict started and was clearly a response to robust anti-war protests (which have seen more than 14,000 Russians arrested). Discomfort with the war could be seen in the criticisms made by children of the elite (Elizaveta Peskova, daughter of Putin’s press secretary, posted an anti-war message on Instagram, although it was quickly deleted) and objects raised by oligarchs like Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska (both of whom have distanced themselves from Putin). During the cusp of the invasion, Putin publicly dressed down his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, who expressed doubts about the wisdom of the aggressive policy Putin was following. 

Further evidence of the war’s unpopularity is Putin’s March 16 speech decrying “national traitors.” You don’t talk like that unless you feel you have significant opposition.

This level of dissent from a military adventure is without precedent in Putin’s rule and suggests an autocrat who launched a war on  a whim, without having any real support. To be sure, by this analysis, it’s not at all clear that most of the Russian population is (or isn’t) anti-war. Rather, the general population and the elites alike are forced to accept Putin’s rule, or join a vocal minority of protestors who risk imprisonment, torture, and in some cases death for opposing Putin. Suffice to say, even if they’re relatively quiet, they might still be unhappy with what he’s done.

With this line of thinking, it becomes clear that Putin is the problem. Remove Putin and there is no problem. Conversely, if pressure is put on the Russian public and the Russian elite, they might try to overthrow Putin or least give him enough pushback to change policy. 

And yet.

My thinking here has shifted slightly after reading a persuasive essay in the Financial Times by Anatol Lieven, a well-connected British foreign policy analyst who is a fellow at the Quincy Institute. I still suspect Putin doesn’t have buy-in from the Russian population and there is significant elite dissent. But Putin doesn’t rule by whim alone. He has a constituency behind him.

Lieven makes a useful distinction between the notorious oligarchs—the ultra-rich who benefit from plundering Russia— and the siloviki—the “hard men” of the Russian military-industrial complex (some of whom are also very rich), who specifically profit from alignment with Russian nationalism. The true era of the oligarchs was the 1990s, when they set the terms for Boris Yeltsin’s government. Putin’s own base comes from nationalist military-industrial types who were disgusted by the oligarchs and wanted to see them sidelined. To be sure, the siloviki are corrupt as the oligarchs, but their corruption has an ideological purpose. 

According to Lieven: 

The siloviki have been accurately portrayed as deeply corrupt — but their corruption has special features. Patriotism is their ideology and the self-justification for their immense wealth.…

The siloviki are naturally attached to the idea of public order, an order that guarantees their own power and property, but which they also believe is essential to prevent Russia falling back into the chaos of the 1990s and the Russian revolution and civil war. The disaster of the 1990s, in their view, embraced not just a catastrophic decline of the state and economy but socially destructive moral anarchy — and their reaction has been not unlike that of conservative American society to the 1960s or conservative German society to the 1920s. In this, Putin and the siloviki have the sympathy of very large parts of the Russian population, who remain bitterly resentful — both at the way they were betrayed and plundered in the 1990s and what they perceive as the open contempt shown towards ordinary Russians by the liberal cultural elites of Moscow and St Petersburg. 

If Lieven’s analysis is correct, then getting rid of Putin won’t solve the underlying issues. It’s possible that Putin will be removed by a palace coup. It’s also possible he’ll negotiate a peace deal with Ukraine in the coming weeks. In that scenario, Putin could still lose power (a disappointing war might make some of the siloviki turn against him). 

But in either scenario, the removal of Putin won’t end Russia’s aggressive nationalism. The problem isn’t just Putin but the political cohort he belongs to. The siloviki isn’t going away easily. The only way it can be removed is by a democratic revolution. There are signs that such a revolution might happen (the anti-war protests are themselves a harbinger). But as yet that’s still more an aspiration than a reality. 

(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you like this post, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

Michael McFaul, already distinguished as a former ambassador to Russia and professor of political science at Stanford, has achieved a new milestone by becoming a much-reviled social media personality. On March 2, he tweet out “there are no more ‘innocent’ ‘neutral’ Russians anymore.” He subsequently apologized for the tweet and deleted it.

On March 12, McFaul went on The Rachel Maddow Show and said, “One difference between Putin and Hitler is that Hitler didn’t kill ethnic Germans, German-speaking people. Putin slaughters the very people he said he has come to liberate.” When that comment was posted by Maddowblog, it drew wide criticism. McFaul apologized for the remark and The Rachel Maddow Show deleted the tweet carrying the clip and also apologized. 

But McFaul is more than an undiplomatic diplomat. As David Klion showed in a splendid 2018 profile in The Baffler, McFaul is the very incarnation of decades of failed American policy. In his profile, David writes:

McFaul had a ringside seat to all of this [the end of the Soviet Union] as a grad student in international relations and a Fulbright scholar in Moscow in 1990-1991, where he ended up volunteering for the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and conducting seminars to train Russia’s earnest young would-be democrats. He even met a young Vladimir Putin in this period. “To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of Russian history was at last bending toward justice, freedom, and democracy,” he writes. “That put the KGB on the wrong side of history. Putin’s only chance to survive was to join the democrats, or so I believed at the time.” After the Soviet Union finally collapsed, McFaul opened NDI’s Moscow office. “We were not ‘meddling’ in Russia’s internal affairs, but invited guests of the Russian government,” he reassures us.

“In the summer of 1992, I felt like a rock star,” McFaul boasts. To extend this metaphor, Russia over the next few years resembled Altamont. McFaul acknowledges his team’s failure to secure democracy, noting Yeltsin’s authoritarian strain and self-destructive personal habits, the rise of a corrupt oligarchy, and the growing appeal of far-right nationalism. But McFaul more or less shrugs off the vast scale of human suffering caused by the firesale privatization of Russia’s economy, which he reduces to a few bland sentences about inflation and deficits.

Since McFaul is in the news, I thought it would be a good time to talk to David about the career of this emblematic figure. 

At the last part of the podcast (starting at the 1:05 mark), David and I revisit his profile of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. We take up the current efforts of institutions that have received Abramovich’s largess to defend him from sanctions. We also discuss this New York Times profile of Abramovich, which leads us to a conversation about media ethics and the Times’ much-criticized habit of re-reporting stories from other outlets without due credit. Does that critique apply here? Tune in and find out. 

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

Share and Subscribe

If you enjoyed this podcast, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now