Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh Fermor —

Years ago, I read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, his account of his walking tour as a young man from Holland to Istanbul, and fell in love with his prose. His two books about Greece, Mani and Roumeli, which I’m also bringing, are just about as good. In Mani, he travels to a remote and desolate peninsular at the Southern end of the Peloponnese famous for its fierce, independent denizens who resisted Ottoman rule from their stone towers. Leigh Fermor had a truly enviable life. During the war, he was Special Operations Executive commando on Nazi-occupied Crete, where he planned and executed a daring kidnap of a German general. He then went on to become probably the best travel writer of all time. Mani’s not quite the same location where I’m going but the picture on the cover shows Leigh Fermor on Ithaca, where I’ll likely go.

The Ionian Mission by Patrick O’Brian —

Another Anglo-Irish Patrick. My whole family are big fans of the Aubrey-Maturin maritime novels that take place during the Napoleonic wars. I’ve only read Master and Commander, the first novel in the series,, but I’ve watched the film adaptation with Russel Crowe many times. This one takes place in the Ionian islands so I had to bring it along. Kirkus Reviews writes, “[the heroes] sail to the Greek islands to tinker with the balance of power at the fringes of the Turkish empire. Splendid adventures at a stately pace.” Sounds fun.

Byron: The Last Journey April 1823-April 1824 by Harold Nicolson —

In 1823, Lord Byron sailed from Genoa to the Ionian sea with his friend the Italian nobleman Pietro Gamba. His plan was to assist the Greek rebels against the Ottomans with money and arms. It was to be his last voyage; he would die of an illness in Missolonghi. Harold Nicolson was a career diplomat in His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service and the husband of the more famous writer Vita Sackville-West, as well as being an author in his own right. Here’s how a review of the book in the Atlantic Monthly from 1924 begins:

Few and gifted are the biographers whose works vindicate their belief that the best good turn they can do a great man is to be sincere about him. Mr. Nicolson’s place in this small class is high. His Tennyson was a beautifully' sincere essay in salvage. So is his Byron. He sees Byron’s life not as ‘ a series of wasted opportunities’ but as ‘a catalogue of false positions,’ none falser than the last, at Missolonghi, where Byron went, foreseeing that he should be detected, exposed, as soon as events forced him to act like a man of action — the most ill-fitting of the many parts for which he had cast himself. Mr. Nicolson is of opinion that ‘Byron accomplished nothing at Missolonghi except his own suicide,’ and also, that by' that single act of heroism he secured the liberation of Greece.’ By sticking to his false position he achieved after his death more than his most extravagant well-wishers had expected of his journey.

A Narrative of Lord Byron’s Last Journey to Greece by Pietro Gamba —

For a less critical account, I’m also going to read Pietro Gamba’s journals on Byron’s last trip. Count Gamba was the brother of Byron’s lover Teresa Guiccioli. The aristocratic family had married off the 21 year-old Teresa to a much older man for political reasons, and, feeling guilty about it, they took an indulgent view of her affair with the poet, seeing it as a way to make it up to the young woman. Pietro became an adoring fan of Byron and his right-hand man for his last journey, but was apparently incompetent and unlucky, much to the exasperation of Byron. He got himself captured by a Turkish frigate with most of their supplies and weapons; Byron himself escaped narrowly. Here’s Byron writing of another mishap of his Italian friend: "Gamba—who is anything but lucky—had something to do with it—and as usual—the moment he had—matters went wrong.” I hope for better luck!

See you in a few weeks.—

Yesterday, July 20 2026, the State Department released a report entitled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism; on Twitter, the Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced, “For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States. The State Department is exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country. The American people deserve to know." This comes just days after the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” hosted by Rubio, which featured representatives from over 60 nations and speeches from Scott Bessent, Kash Patel, and Stephen Miller, who lent his Nazi rhetorical stylings to the event, saying

"This is a fatal cancer to civilization. And the greatest risk that we have is that our institutions have grown too soft and too cowardly to be able to defend themselves against a mortal threat. If your civilization is your home, you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives.

The report specifically targets DSA as a “particularly potent illustration” of these supposed Cuban influence operations—although it has to admit that the group "was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government" and has "organic ideological commitments," but insists this does not mean the group is free of ties to the Cuban influence network — it cites delegation to Cuba as evidence. This, along with Miller’s dismissal of the left’s “completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties, Rubio’s vow that terrorist designations would come for left-wing groups “soon,” and the report’s own invocation of “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions,” has many on the left justifiably anxious about both domestic political repression and a pretext for military action against Cuba. I don’t want to dismiss these concerns, but there’s a more recent precedent than the Second Red Scare worth considering—the “Little Red Scare” of the Reagan era.

Shortly after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, on April 24, 1981, the newly formed Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism convened its first hearing on “Origins, Direction, and Support of Terrorism.” The “SST,” or “the Denton Subcommittee,” after its chairman, freshman senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, was formed by Judiciary chair Strom Thurmond as an attempt to restore the functons of the old Senate Internal Security Subcommittee—the upper chamber's counterpart to HUAC, the McCarran-Eastland operation that had run the Senate's side of the postwar red hunts— which reform-minded post-Church Committee Senate had finally abolished in 1977, along with the House's internal security committee two years earlier. The subcommittee would consist of Denton, John P. East of North Carolina, and Orrin Hatch of Utah in the majority, with the minority represented by Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Joseph R. Biden of Delaware in the minority; chief counsel was former FBI man Joel S. Lisker.

To the New Right, this abolition was unilateral disarmament in the still-frosty Cold War—and it removed a valuable cudgel against the domestic left. The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership transition plan called to “revive the committees"“ and to rebuild of the internal security apparatus to battle domestic subversion, warning that clergymen, students, businessmen, entertainers, labor officials, journalists and government workers may engage in subversive activity "without being fully aware of the extent, purpose or control of their activities," and that individual liberties are "secondary to the requirement of national security and internal civil order.” The author of this section was one Samuel T. Francis, who would go on to be a staffer for John East.

“Third Worldism” was already a big fixation back for the Denton Committee and its staff in 1981. In a review of Claire Sterling’s Reader’s Digest press book The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism, Francis wrote:

It is highly doubtful that the Soviets seriously think that terrorist groups can bring about a revolution in the advanced economies; that is not their purpose. Rather, the front line lies in the “national liberation movements” of the Third World, on which the “imperialist economies” are dependent. By supporting terrorism in western Europe and North America, the Soviets intend merely to develop a cadre of politically cooperating elements that, in both their violent and non-violent activities, express solidarity with the national liberation struggles and destabilize the “imperial states.” The struggle against imperialism is a constant theme of terrorist propaganda, and it is crucial to understand that the primary target of terrorism is not the regime of the “imperial state” itself but its economic and political relationship with the “colonized areas” in revolt

The first witnesses to the committee were Sterling, former Director of Central Intelligence William Colby, Michael Ledeen—remember him?—and a Belgian journalist and spy novelist named Arnaud de Borchgrave. He was actually Count Arnaud de Borchgrave. He ran away at fifteen to join the British Royal Navy, then spent three decades as Newsweek’s glamour correspondent: Paris bureau chief at twenty-one, eventually chief foreign correspondent, covering by his own count seventeen or eighteen wars and interviewing seemingly every head of state on earth. His physical appearance was famous and a little absurd—permanently bronzed, immaculately tailored, a man built for hotel bars in Beirut and audiences with Sadat—the press corps aristocrat as a type that no longer exists. Newsweek pushed him out in 1980 after thirty years. Borchgrave concluded, apparently sincerely, that his defenestration was itself evidence of the thing he’d been warning about — Soviet penetration of Western media reaching into his own newsroom. In 1980, he published a roman à clef with Robert Moss called The Spike, which outlined his belief that what passed for news in the US was the product of KGB psychological warfare operations. Senator Denton took this novel as the blueprint for the Subcommittee’s work. “Denton believes The Spike”. He has concluded that the press is advertently and inadvertently in league with the Communists. He believes the United States news media gets disinformation, and he's going to 'hold hearings and investigate ' how the American press has been duped by Communist propaganda,” a Democratic senator at the time told the Boston Globe.

De Borchgrave gave Cuba a very important role in this disinformation ecosystem, writing in response to critics of his book who pressed for evidence of Soviet control that “Much of this work is done through proxy services, such as the Cuban DGI intelligence.” In his testimony to the Subcommittee, he stated, “the basic decision to support international terrorist groups was taken at the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana in 1966.” His source was unnamed “Western intelligence groups,” and he left it at that. (Sure enough, the new Rubio report also cites the “Tri-Continental Conference.”) As Adam Hoschhild wrote in the New York Times in 1981:

Among other things, [De Bourchgrave] claimed, citing unidentified sources, that at a secret meeting in Nicaragua in July 1980, Yasir Arafat, Fidel Castro, and ''other Marxist chiefs from Central America'' planned ''major destabilization of our inner cities through their racial assets in this country.'' The same forecast was made in London in The Daily Telegraph'' a year ago, in an article by Robert Moss (who with Mr. de Borchgrave co-authored ''The Spike,'' a novel) titled ''Castro Is Planning U.S. Race Riots.'' If one or the other keeps making this prediction each year, sooner or later, if there ever are major uprisings here, they'll be able to say: ''See? We told you so!''

The Rubio Cuba report recycles this whole thing with attempts to connect Black Lives Matter to Cuban Intelligence.

The Denton Committee had something the new Red Scare-dy cats don’t have anymore: the menace of the Soviet Union. Now they have to try to pin the whole thing on tiny, little Cuba. But even in 1981, the one person who knew what he was talking about, former DCI William Colby, poured cold water on the more outlandish conspiracies proposed by the committee’s other witnesses. While confirming there had been Soviet and satellite support for terrorist organizations, he testified that “the Soviets are not directly directing the orchestra today.” He recalled the efforts of the Johnson administration to find a foreign hand behind the antiwar movement and said that “The agencies reported back to them, ‘No, there is not. This is an indigenous phenomenon, this is something that is happening here, and it cannot be explained that way.’” He also cast doubt on the strength of the Cold War adversary, testifying, “I think that the historical developments have demonstrated that Marxism-Leninism, which was such a heady wine at one point, is now ideologically dead,” pointing out the widespread dysfunction and cynicism in the Eastern Bloc.

This did not prevent the Denton Committee from engaging in political mythmaking, which, of course, was the real intent. Denton considered subpoenaing the leaders of a protest against US involvement in El Salvador. The committee also disseminated audio tapes of an interview with De Borchgrave, where he named The Village Voice, Mother Jones, SoHo News, and The Progressive as targets of KGB media manipulation campaigns, to 290 radio stations nationwide. Ronald Reagan himself claimed that the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign was the product of foreign intel direction, telling a press conference in 1982, “In the organization of some of the big demonstrations, the one in New York, and so forth, there is no question about foreign agents that were sent to help instigate and help create and keep such a movement going."

Fearsome-sounding stuff, but ultimately a flop. The Little Red Scare didn’t come to much. The SST never became the new SISS: there were no security files, no blacklists, no prosecutions for membership in anything. The freeze resolution passed the House over the president’s objection. The FBI contradicted Reagan in the pages of the Times within five months: “F.B.I. Rules Out Russian Control of Freeze Drive.” CIA Director William Casey couldn’t even make his own analysts sign off on Claire Sterling’s thesis. The principals faded away: John East dead by his own hand in June 1986, Denton beaten that November, the subcommittee quietly never reconstituted once Biden—the ranking member at that first hearing—took the gavel.

Sam Francis’s takeaway from the flop of the Third Red Scare was that the idea of foreign control was neither good analysis nor a good animating myth; He shifted from Cold Warrior to critic of globalist, liberal managerial elites: the real enemy was here at home. It’s that theory that you can see at work in today’s New Right with its war on the managerial elite, the deep state, the universities, the administrative apparatus, etc. But this cultural war seems also to be failing, which leaves the right returning to comforting Cold War bromides. On the one hand, sure, it’s scary; on the other, it’s a sign of a movement that’s intellectually braindead. If Cuban puppetmasters didn’t sound plausible in 1981, can it possibly sound more plausible today? First time as farce, second time as more farcical farce? I don’t know.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

The email address I gave last week as the LaRouche book “tip line” was incorrect—the correct address is johnganz@proton.me. Note that this address is specifically for that project; if you want to engage with something I write here, please use the comment section.

I’ll be on vacation starting next week and will likely be gone at least two weeks. I may try to give a travel dispatch from abroad, but I will not have my laptop, so it might be a little difficult. I’ll be sailing around the Ionian Sea, appropriately enough.—

The whole country has Odyssey fever, it seems, and although I haven’t seen the new movie yet—I’m very skeptical about Hollywood adaptations of classics, but people do seem to love it—I’ve been doing some reading related to Homer’s epic. The reception makes clear that three thousand years after its composition, Homer’s epic remains a foundational text of our culture; its interpretations and reinterpretations are controversial. The online right, led by the cretinous Elon Musk, has been having a total meltdown over Nolan’s Odyssey, mostly because Helen of Troy is played by a black woman, and predicted that this “woke” Odyssey would fail at the box office. It’s impossible, therefore, not to feel a little schadenfreude as it breaks records worldwide. Watching this all unfold, I was reflecting on how differently left and right culture warriors respond to things they don’t like: “the woke” response to something is usually that the regressive attitudes within the cultural product are regrettably dominant; it’s a crisis, the sign of a backsliding culture that the offending material appears, and the fear is that the artwork in question will spread the social infection of racism, sexism, or whatever other -ism. On the right, they assume that the public at large actually shares their opinions, and that the Hollywood elites—you can put three parentheses on both sides of that—are foisting leftist propaganda on the masses, which will spontaneously and organically reject it. If you think about it, their positions are actually identical on some level: the public is a mob of drooling racists and films can whip them into a frothing rage—the right-wingers just happen to think that’s a good thing. It always turns out that for the most part normal people respond with a lot more good sense and proportion than the ideologues—it is, after all, only a movie. But, of course, the ideologues are right, too: these myths are still alive, they still structure our thoughts, so how they are represented matters a great deal.

Check out Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Nolan’s film in the New York Review of Books:

Whatever its flaws, Nolan’s work indicated that he might indeed be the right person to take on Odysseus, another multifaceted hero characterized at once by admirable cleverness and dark behaviors, and the Odyssey, a text characterized by temporal disjuncts and narrative playfulness. The result, a $250 million, three-hour-long behemoth, the first movie to be shot entirely in the IMAX format, is, like Batman Begins, a darkly psychologizing updating of a classic; like Memento, it toys with themes of memory and forgetting while, like Oppenheimer, it twists a profusion of narrative and temporal arcs. And like the sack of unruly winds that Aeolus, the divine custodian of the winds, entrusts to Odysseus in book 10—only to have it opened by the hero’s suspicious crewmen, with disastrous results—it is in the end a mixed bag: at once a vehicle for the director’s virtues and, as with The Return, a case study of the weaknesses inherent in attempting to modernize a work many of whose values remain, for all its timelessness, stubbornly archaic.

The problem seems to be that he gave Odysseus a bit too much of an inner life—a gnawing conscience where Homer saw none. And he may not have even known the feeling, as our next reading makes clear.

In college, I found Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature at the Dawn Treader bookstore in Ann Arbor; I had never heard of the book or Auerbach before, but I would buy anything that looked interesting. It turned out to be marvelous: Auerbach traces the entire history of Western literature, from The Odyssey to Mrs. Dalloway, and reconstructs the worldviews of the authors and their epochs. It begins with the essay “Odysseus’ Scar,” where Auerbach compares the style of the Odyssey to that of the Hebrew Bible:

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Today is Bastille Day, commemorating the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris and the beginning of the French Revolution. I suppose The Revolution could be dated to the 5th of May, when the Estates-General convened, but that’s less exciting.

Henry Kissinger once asked Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution, to which Zhou responded, “Too Early to Tell.” Unfortunately, this sublime reply was based on a misunderstanding: Zhou thought Kissinger was asking about the recent 1968 student rebellions in France. It’s one of those “too good to check” moments where the apocryphon is better than the reality, because it’s true: the effects of the French Revolution are still unfolding, and the question remains open whether humanity is to be free or enslaved.

It was evident to observers at the time—especially those abroad—that the stakes of the Revolution were far greater than the question of which regime would prevail in France. Since my recent return to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, I’ve been reading her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, where she quotes Kant’s remarks on the French Revolution in his The Conflict of the Faculties:

The revolution of a gifted people which we have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry; it may be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a sensible man, were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time, would never resolve to make the experiment at such cost-this revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race.

To Kant, the fact that people rooted for the revolution—for the idea of justice itself—without self-interest and even against their own self-interest, demonstrated the innate, disinterested moral capacity of human beings. The revolution symbolized the possibility—the inevitability, perhaps—of progress:

Now I claim to be able to predict to the human race--even without prophetic insight-according to the aspects and omens of our day, the attainment of this goal. That is, I predict its progress toward the better which, from now on, turns out to be no longer completely reversible. For such a phenomenon in human history is not to be forgotten . .

In his Philosophy of History, Hegel called it “a glorious mental dawn. All thinking being shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men's minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.”

Putting the same sentiment in much finer style than Kant or Hegel could ever achieve, Wordsworth also wrote of the Revolution as a “dawn” in his poem “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement.”

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!—

Wordsworth's enthusiasm for the revolution would wane, as would that of his fellow poets Coleridge and Southey, much to the bitter disappointment of their former friend the critic William Hazlitt, who considered them base apostates. Hazlitt believed it was power, a “grim idol,” that stirred and seduced the imagination, not principle and right. The poets, in their different ways, sold out, according to Hazlitt, for money, for fame, or for the appearance of intellectual sophistication. As he writes of the trio in Political Essays (1819):

"And we saw three poets in a dream, walking up and down on the face of the earth, and holding in their hands a human heart, which, as they raised their eyes to heaven, they kissed and worshipped; and a mighty shout arose and shook the air, for the towers of the Bastile had fallen, and a nation had become, of slaves, freemen; and the three poets, as they heard the sound, leaped and shouted, and made merry ,and their voice was choaked with tears of joy, which they shed over the human heart, which they kissed and worshipped. And not long after, we saw the same three poets, the one with a receipt-stamp in his hand, the other with a laurel on his head, and the third with a symbol which we could make nothing of, for it was neither literal nor allegorical, following in the train of the Pope and the Inquisition and the Bourbons, and worshipping the mark of the Beast, with the emblem of the human heart thrown beneath their feet, which they trampled and spit upon!"--

This apologue is not worth finishing, nor are the people to whom it relates worth talking of. We have done with them.

Hazlitt believed, unlike them, he remained a “true Jacobin—”

A true Jacobin, then, is one who does not believe in the divine right of kings, or in any other alias for it, which implies that they reign "in contempt of the will of the people;" and he holds all such kings to be tyrants, and their subjects slaves. To be a true Jacobin, a man must be a good hater; but this is the most difficult and the least amiable of all the virtues: the most trying and the most thankless of all tasks. The love of liberty consists in the hatred of tyrants. The true Jacobin hates the enemies of liberty as they hate liberty, with all his strength and with all his might, and with all his heart and with all his soul. His memory is as long, and his will as strong as theirs, though his hands are shorter. He never forgets or forgives an injury done to the people, for tyrants never forget or forgive one done to themselves. There is no love lost between them. He does not leave them the sole benefit of their old motto, Odia in longum jaciens quae conderet auctaque promeret. He makes neither peace nor truce with them. His hatred of wrong only ceases with the wrong. The sense of it, and of the barefaced assumption of the right to inflict it, deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart with aspics' tongues deadly to venal pens. It settles in his brain--it puts him beside himself. Who will not feel all this for a girl, a toy, a turn of the dice, a word, a blow, for any thing related to himself; and will not the friend of liberty feel as much for mankind? The love of truth is a passion in his mind, as the love of power is a passion in the mind of others. Abstract reason, unassisted by passion, is no match for power and prejudice, armed with force and cunning. The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love or ourselves. The one is real; the other often but an empty dream. Hence the defection of modern apostates

On Bastille Day, make sure the Revolution is not forgotten, and be a good hater.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

In case you missed it, I announced my new book project this past week.—

I’m really encouraged by the enthusiastic response the idea has garnered already, and have been especially interested in all the offers from former members of LaRouche’s organization to talk. I’m actually a little overwhelmed by the volume of offers at the moment, but I’m starting to get things organized. To that end, I’ve set up a kind of “tip line” for this book: if you have experience with LaRouche’s group, know someone who does, or have interesting information and resources to share in general, please email me at johnganz@proton.me

The messaging app on Substack is annoying, and I avoid it: if you want to reach me about this project, email is much better.

For a recent episode of our podcast, Jamelle and I discussed Margaretha von Trotta’s 2017 film Hannah Arendt, which focuses on Arendt’s coverage for The New Yorker of the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann and the subsequent controversy. (The episode should be up on our Patreon soon.) While preparing for the recording, I read an essay by the great historian Anson Rabinbach, who died last year, called “Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy.” Originally published in the journal October in 2004, the piece is an intellectual history of the fallout from Arendt’s series of articles that gave us “the banality of evil.”

Considering the centrality of clichés in Arendt’s diagnosis of Eichmann’s mindless form of evil, it's somewhat ironic that that phrase has become a cliché in its own right. It’s worth revisiting exactly what she meant by it. The banality of evil refers to the kind of thoughtlessness that she thought Eichmann demonstrated in carrying out the Holocaust; He was unable to tell right from wrong, she said, because he had given up his capacity for thought and judgment, specifically his ability to view the world from another’s perspective. As she wrote in the postscript to the book:

Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he wasdoing. It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted. In principle he knew quite well what it was all about, and in his final statement to the court he spoke of the “revaluation of values prescribed by the [Nazi] government.” He was not stupid, It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is “banal” and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these “lofty words” should completely becloud the reality of his own death. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.

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The title (so far) is Crackpot Empire: Lyndon LaRouche and the Conquest of America and, as you can tell, it’s gonna be about Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and his strange movement. If you’re not familiar with LaRouche, he led one of the most bizarre political cults in American history. Born to Quakers in Massachusetts, he began his political life as a member of the Trotskyist Old Left, was an important member of Students for a Democratic Society and was a major player in the Columbia campus takeover before being expelled after a failed takeover attempt, after which he directed his group to violently attack other New Left groups. Then he led his followers on an odyssey that would take them from the far left to the corridors of power—the heart of the Reagan administration and the Central Intelligence Agency—and back out to the fringes again. He was a veritable Shakespeare of conspiracy theories: so many notions that originated from his mind have become part of the common culture—Obamacare death panels, Soros’s malign influence, the Frankfurt School undermining Western civilization, climate change being an “anti-human” hoax. I believe and, I hopefully will persuade you, that, beyond being a mere oddity, LaRouche’s life and thought has much to tell us about America today.

(As a perk for their support, paid subscribers will be able to read part of the book proposal beneath the paywall below.)

I wrote my last book while working on the newsletter full time, so I don’t really anticipate any interruptions. If newsletters do slow down a bit, keep the book project in mind and know you are supporting it! I may announce a little “book leave,” but I imagine that will only come at the crunch time towards the end. Again, I’m very excited to share this news with you and I’m sure I’ll be able to provide you some interesting tidbits that come from my research.

Thanks again for all your support!

“I’m as American as apple pie,” Lyndon LaRouche Jr. once declared, and he was right. The radical hypothesis of this book is that Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr, a crackpot and cult leader, has just as much to tell us about America as Lyndon B. Johnson. Like Edgar Allan Poe, whom he considered an embodiment of the Republic’s spirit, LaRouche is an essential American oddball, whose fervent imagination turned towards the macabre, morbid, and ultimately, madness. Like Captain Ahab on the Pequod, he led a small group of followers on a monomaniacal quest, a perverse microcosm of the American experiment itself. And like Ahab, he believed “all visible objects are, but as pasteboard masks,” and that beneath the apparent reality of the senses, there always lay a deeper reason.

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The essence of the Trump phenomenon is an attack on the American idea of citizenship; it’s the bright red thread that runs from “birtherism” to Barbara, it is why Trump felt the need to show up at the Court for this case, and it is why his minions now raise a great hue and cry against a decision that just a few years ago would have been regarded as common sense.

The Trump v. Barbara decision is confusing: Is it a decisive win for birthright citizenship or a bare and fragile victory that is just the opening salvo in a generations-long war on the idea of America itself? It’s too soon to tell, but I think Roe-type campaign on the 14th would be a harder battle for the right; the implied right of privacy in Roe v. Wade was more tenuous ground than the text of the 14th Amendment and all the historical documentation that supports its plain meaning.

With that being said, Kavanaugh’s narrow dissent-concurrence that splits the difference and says that Trump’s executive order was against the law but not the Constitution creates an opening for aggressive Republican legislators to test the bounds of birthright. The right doesn't need the Dobbs path because Kavanaugh built them a shorter one, and it's worth spelling out its arithmetic. If Congress amends §1401(a), Kavanaugh's ground for invalidation evaporates by his own explicit terms. The question then returns to the Court as purely constitutional, where the margin is 5–4, and the five are Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson. So, then the war on birthright citizenship, post-Barbara, requires two things: one law and one seat on the court.

Some conservative and libertarian commentators have pointed out that if read carefully, no justice’s reasoning supports the Executive Order in full. Here’s David J. Bier for the Cato Institute:

1. Despite their votes, no justice agreed with the executive order in full.

   • Justice Clarence Thomas asserts that citizenship should be based on where someone’s parent is domiciled and on their intent to remain. But the executive order is based on legal status, not residence.

   • As fellow dissenter Neil Gorsuch notes, this rule would grant citizenship to domiciled illegal immigrants, which he doesn’t rule out. In the absence of a congressional statute, it would also seemingly limit citizenship for children born to US citizens in the United States when their parents’ residence is abroad.

   • Justice Alito thinks it should be based on whether the child gets citizenship from a foreign country at birth, but he admits that this would grant citizenship to some children of illegal immigrants. Alito seems to acknowledge that this interpretation could affect the citizenship of some children of naturalized citizens as well.

   • Only Justice Kavanaugh defends the scope of the executive order itself, but then finds that it violates Congress’s statute. I think they’re all in conflict because their underlying theory has no historical, legal, or textual basis.

Ed Whelan in The National Review:

At bottom: Six justices hold that every child born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States is a citizen—five under the Citizenship Clause, one (Justice Kavanaugh) under federal immigration law. Perhaps less noticed is that two other justices (Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch) leave open the possibility that massive numbers of babies born to illegal aliens are birthright citizens, and the approach of the ninth justice (Justice Alito) means that some difficult-to-quantify (but potentially very large) number of babies born to illegal aliens also are.

This raises the question, then, of why the ruling wasn’t at least 7-2 or even 8-1.

I think, on some level, the conservative justices wanted to help the administration, and therefore their "side,” save face: they gave cover and legitimacy to absurd arguments to prevent total humiliation. By doing so they have created a gap that the right will attempt to pry open. Besides, the spirit of party that led them to this was just the habit of their profession, which is that of sophistry. I was just reading William Hazlitt’s Political Essays, and came across this from the “Illustrations in the Times Newspaper,” which seems apt:

A lawyer is a sophist by profession ; that is, a person who barters his opinion, and speaks what he knows to be false in defence of wrong, and to the prejudice of right. Not only the confirmed habit of looking at any side of a question with a view to make the worse appear the better reason, from a motive always foreign to the question itself, must make truth and falsehood sit loose upon him, and lead him to look on both indifferently, as his convenience prompts ; but the quibbles and quillets of the law give a handle to all that is petty and perverse in his understanding, and enable him to tamper with his principles with impunity….The bent of a lawyer’s mind is to pervert his talents, if he has any, and to keep down his feelings, if they are at all in his way. He lives by forging and uttering counterfeit pretexts; he says not what he believes to be true, but any thing that by any trick or sleight he can make others believe ; and the more petty, artificial, and farfetched the contrivance, the more low, contemptible, and desperate the shift, the more is he admired and cried up in his profession.

The handle that the "quibbles and quillets of the law" gave them here is the facial-challenge standard. The plaintiffs attacked the order on its face—strike it for everyone, before it operates on anyone. Under Salerno (1987), such a challenge fails unless “no set of circumstances exists” in which the order could lawfully apply. One valid application saves the whole thing. For Thomas and Gorsuch, that one application was “the birth tourist.” Their domicile theory condemns the order in the vast majority of its real uses—most children of undocumented parents are children of domiciled parents—but it permits the order to operate on children of true transients. One valid application; challenge fails; they vote to uphold the order entire, including everything their own theory forbids. Gorsuch admits it: the order is “lawful at least as applied to children of temporary visitors.” At least as applied to does all the work. Had they prevailed, the millions of children their theory calls citizens would have been left proving domicile, family by family, before the Social Security Administration. Here and throughout the case, the conservative justices were acting as Trump believes they should, as his lawyers, rather than the judges he must prove his case to.

There are many ironies surrounding Trump v. Barbara, but the greatest irony, the master irony that controls the rest, is the reversal of the position of “conservative.” Barbara preserves the fundamental law of the land that has prevailed for 160 years and was reaffirmed 130 years ago in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. But to judge by the reaction of the right-wing commentariat, the court handed down a wild innovation that breaks radically with tradition. The caterwauling of the conservatives is ridiculous but also somewhat frightening, because they are attempting a total revision of the country’s history and customs while pretending to be its custodians. This is why I’ve always thought it right to apply the labels “fascist” or even “totalitarian” to this movement: it is an attempt to alter the character of the country through the force of shrill and screeching propaganda.

The ironic reversal of conservative and revolutionary positions can be found in the opinions themselves. The majority uses the particular to derive the universal; the minority attempts to use the universal to derive the particular. Roberts is performing what the great scholar J.G.A Pocock called the “common-law mind” in his book The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: the insistence that contemporary rights had their origins in a customary order that reached back to “time out of mind.” Roberts’s opinion treats jus soli as an immemorial custom—Calvin's Case, Blackstone, Kent, an unbroken chain, with the 14th Amendment merely "declaratory" of what was always the law. Roberts presents the 14th as part of what Edmund Burke would call “the entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity.” For Roberts, the Dred Scott decision is something like the “Norman Yoke” was to the common lawyers of the 17th century—the regrettable, illegitimate interruption of ancient liberty. If this is tendentious mythmaking, it is tendentious mythmaking with a great American pedigree: it would have been familiar to the Revolutionary generation, who began by insisting on their “rights as Englishmen.”

Clarence Thomas’s arguments correspond to the other part of Pocock’s work. In the 17th century, antiquarians discovered that the “ancient” Anglo-Saxon custom was nothing of the sort: it was actually the feudal law imposed by the Normans; parliament and the courts did not derive from the concrete utopia of pre-Conquest days, but from the rule of William the Conqueror. This gave the monarchists an invaluable weapon against parliamentarians: they could debunk the “ancient right” arguments and show that the legal order derived from the King. In like manner, Thomas points to jus soli as a feudal relic, born of medieval subjection to the king—"the darkness of the Middle Ages," as he writes. Also in like manner to the King of England’s lawyers, Thomas is providing legal support for a would-be absolutist. But while Thomas is playing historian, the counter-history he develops is itself no less an act of tendentious mythmaking, carefully avoiding the documentation that would clearly refute his position. He has to completely excise ratification record: namely, the exchange in which Senator Cowan objected that the Clause would confer citizenship on the children of Chinese immigrants and Gypsies, the era's bywords for the unassimilable and the transient, and Senator Conness, speaking for the Clause, accepted the implication outright. The framers were confronted with precisely the objection Thomas raises, and enacted the Clause anyway.

Justice Jackson’s opinion situates birthright citizenship in the historical substance of the United States in a much more concrete and less mythological way than Roberts’s common-law approach. For Jackson, the 14th Amendment is the product of the “Second Founding” of Reconstruction, which has the virtue of being literally true. While Thomas attempts to construct the 14th Amendment as a narrow remedy for the formerly enslaved, Jackson quickly and easily demolishes this contention by showing the clear universalistic intent on the part of its framers. And she points to another underlying irony of the case:

…the ultimate irony is that for all the talk about the detestable Dred Scott decision, the Government and the principal dissent propose a return to its core tenet. Their bottom line is that, for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship. It is that odious conclusion that the Citizenship Clause plainly rejects, as the Court explains.

I think Jackson’s most powerful words are about the place of historical record and memory:

…[F]ading memories are not the only danger. The distortion of historical facts—retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims—may be an even greater threat. Yet here we are. The Government, the principal dissent, and a handful of revisionist commentators now vigorously promote an interpretation of the Citizenship Clause that diverges sharply not only from what the text says, but also from the historical record as interpreted by the keepers of “the call of remembrance” (trained historians). What is more, this alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing. Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people. And the Great Emancipator eventually foresaw that the only path forward that could prevent a return—in any form—to slavery and race-based subordination was to link the fates of all.

Again, the great irony of Barbara is that “liberals” uphold our tradition—a revolutionary tradition as both Jackson and Roberts emphasize in different ways—while the “conservatives” attempt a revolution against tradition. The curious dialectic of Enlightenment here is worth pointing out: the dissenterse dissenters take up the Enlightenment's weapons—contract theory, “the consent of the governed,” and the debunking of "feudal" superstition—and turn them against the Enlightenment's result. Consent was the principle that freed men from inherited status and gave them rights; here, it is used in an attempt to strip rights from infants. The "feudal relic" they're debunking is the actual instrument of equality. Abstract principle becomes exclusionary, while inherited custom is emancipatory. This is perhaps what it means to live in a revolutionary society: the tradition we conserve is the revolution itself. As Langston Hughes wrote, we must “Let America be America again…

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

We’re going to try to get back on our every-two-weeks schedule from now on.

Max and I talk about the Supreme Court rulings, Zuckerberg’s disappearing chain, the vibe shift that never shifted, and the shocking revelations about the Tate brothers.

I will have a more detailed analysis and commentary on Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case, later this week.

Some of the pieces we discussed:

• “What happened to Zuckerberg’s chain?” by Max Read

• “The Vibe Shift was Just a Mirage” by David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times

• “Vibes Cartel” by me

• “The Shift to Vibes” also by me

• “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse” by Heidi Blake in The New Yorker

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Slaughter overturns nearly one hundred years of precedent, beginning in Humphrey’s Executor, which prevented the president from arbitrarily removing commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission. The reasoning goes that by preventing the president from firing members of the Departments, it would threaten the “unity of the executive,” which is what they say the Founders wanted. But in Cook, the same court, the same justices, discover an exception! The president cannot remove a member of the Federal Reserve Board without establishing cause. What’s the difference? Well, the Fed is special. Again, they return to the Founding to justify this: “The United States has a long tradition of independent central banking. The Nation’s first de facto central bank, the Bank of North America, predates even our Constitution.” (I think the word they really want is “precedes,” which establishes priority in a deeper sense.)

I quote Roberts’s decision:

The protection from removal enjoyed by Governors of the Federal Reserve is consistent with the Constitution. The Founders knew from experience the calamities that could arise from even the “suspicion” of political manipulation of monetary policy. Report on a National Bank (Dec. 13, 1790), in 7 Papers of Alexander Hamilton 305, 331. So when they established the First Bank of the United States, they guaranteed its independence from Presidential control, and their successors did the same for the Second Bank. That enabled both banks to serve as the “great regulating wheel” of the early American financial system. E. Lomazoff, Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy 53. The Federal Reserve follows in this tradition, with a similar degree of independence from Presidential control. What matters is that the Federal Reserve remains consistent with the principles that underpin the First and Second Banks—namely, that monetary policy should not be subject to political interference. In the Court’s view, the Federal Reserve maintains the balance struck by the founding generation under modern circumstances.

The “Founders” didn’t even agree that such a Bank was permissible under our system. It was Alexander Hamilton’s baby, who, in this regard, turns out to be the only Founder that matters. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both believed it was a gross violation of the Constitution. Andrew Jackson militated against its return as the Second Bank. The First Bank of the United States and the Second Bank together lasted around 40 years, less than half the time that the Humphrey’s Executor precedent stood, but for some reason, it forms an inviolable “tradition.” You could just as well say the real, old American tradition is abolishing the thing.

Kavanaugh’s concurrence reveals the real reason, which is not one of constitutional law:

Even temporary uncertainty about the status of the Federal Reserve could spark political upheaval, including confusion about whether the President could immediately remove multiple Governors at will, as well as turmoil in the U. S. and world economies. I would not go down that road. I would not risk destabilizing the U. S. economy just so that we can further mull over an issue that, in various permutations, we have been thinking about for many years. As the Court’s opinion explains and the Government agrees, the Federal Reserve occupies a unique role in the U. S. Government and maintains critical responsibility for the stability and success of the U. S. and world economies.

Okay, so in other words, messing around with the money supply would throw the capitalist system into chaos. And that’s the one thing you cannot do. “Touchez pas au grisbi.” As Marx wrote in Capital, the money market — credit and banking — is where individual capitals are stripped of their particular forms and pooled into “the common capital of a whole class.” It is where they cease to confront one another as competitors and stand instead as a single concentrated mass, fronted by the bankers as what Marx calls “the representatives of social capital”—capital’s nearest approach, within capitalism, to a perverse socialism of its own. And because the apparatus exists to hold the common interest of the class above the appetite of any single capitalist, it cannot be captured by one fraction without imperiling the operation of the whole.

A little intellectual parlor game I like to play when this sort of stuff happens so explicitly is “Miliband or Poulantzas?” This refers to the great debate between the two principal Marxian state theorists: Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas. Very quickly, Miliband—father of Ed and David, if you want a piece of trivia—believed representatives of the capitalist class actually staffed the state; Poulantzas believed the state was essentially a structural function of the capitalist system, it acts as a guarantor, and its actual personnel did not matter as such. For Poulantzas, to behave as such a guarantor of capital, “a regulating factor of its global equilibrium”—a pretty close translation of exactly what Kavanaugh is calling—the state must have “relative autonomy,” that is to say, it cannot be captured by this or that capitalist, whose particular competitive needs would disrupt the overall functioning of the system.

The “corruption” of Supreme Court Justices—the friendliness with businessmen, receiving gifts from them, etc.—seems to recommend Miliband; they are part of the capitalist class writ large, but the clear referee role in these rulings, keeping the state structure intact, really looks much more Poulantzian to me. What we are seeing then is the Supreme Court decreeing how the “committee for the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” is to be constituted: it can be captured by quasi-criminal elements, manipulated by petty businessmen seeking a quick buck from fat government contracts, it can be used to line the pockets of cronies, and to practice increasingly outrageous forms of open corruption—but only up to a point. Just don’t mess with the program.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

In Phenomenal World, Tim Barker has a piece on the history of the idea of American decline, which feels timely as we approach our nation’s 250th birthday. Americans have long feared decline, but now it appears to be really upon us. The fear of decline once spurred us into furious action to stave off the reality:

In the Winter 1988–1989 issue of Foreign Affairs, political scientist Samuel Huntington attacked the question as the world stood on the precipice of the new unipolarity. Despite the impending Cold War victory, this was an anxious period for American capitalism. The malaise was summed up by Democratic presidential candidate Paul Tsongas: “The Cold War is over; Japan and Germany won.” Huntington rejected this defeatism. He deflated contemporary fears by reminding readers that similar decline panics had recurred since the 1950s in a series of waves symbolized by Sputnik, Vietnam, the energy crisis, and now, in the late 1980s, Japan.

In each instance, the foretold decline failed to materialize. In hindsight, we see their fantasies and projections for what they were. Who now remembers bestsellers like The Coming War with Japan? But Huntington, while rejecting the decline thesis, refused to condescend to the declinists—even misguided fears were worth taking seriously, he maintained. True, the US had survived countless supposedly terminal diagnoses. But even a hypochondriac might benefit from regular visits to the doctor. Would the imperial republic have endured without the recurring panics? Could a hallucinatory discourse (Khrushchev will bury us) actually produce its own reality (continued American primacy)?

This is just what Huntington concluded. American structural power had endured not despite, but because of the doomsayers. In his words, “the declinists play an indispensable role in preventing what they are predicting.” This pattern held across the waves of post-Sputnik discourse. It also gave rise to a slyly confident prediction: “The United States is unlikely to decline so long as its public is periodically convinced that it is about to decline.”

This is what Plato might have referred to as a noble lie. In order to win their backing for policies to prompt renewal, American voters needed to be persuaded of the possibility of US decline. To whom would it fall to mislead the public for their own good? In the immediate sense, the declinists would do the persuading. But behind them there had to be someone capable of consciously inflating the crisis discourse. This sounds cynical, but it is appropriate when reading Huntington, who once wistfully reminded readers that Truman “had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers”—a rare admission of the sources of political power in the American Century. A radical who wrote the same sentence would be crucified for crudeness.

The short term seemed to prove Huntington correct: America in the 1990s seemed more prosperous and powerful than ever—even the malaise of deindustrialization seemed to briefly lift as investment in fixed capital grew. But perhaps this led to a degree of complacency. This is sort of the argument of my own book. People often ask me why the “populist revolt”—I call it the beginnings of a crisis of authority or hegemony—of the early ’90s faded away for almost three decades and then came roaring back. My answer is usually that the balance of the decade made that moment seem like a weird blip, a moment whose fears were mere follies, and so it was largely forgotten. It seems, as far as America goes, the only thing we have to fear is the absence of fear.

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It would be grossly inaccurate to say all of Greenspan’s policies were simply downstream from Rand’s “Objectivist” doctrine. On the contrary, he was flexible on questions of dogma. For a Rand publication in 1966, he was writing in favor of the Gold Standard, which seems to be every crank’s favorite monetary idea. “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard,” he concludes. Of course, you can’t really be a gold bug at the Fed—part of your job is to ensure the liquidity the economy needs not to collapse during a crisis. So, he dropped that part of the Randian doctrine, but he never stopped advocating for laissez-faire principles. As recently wrote in the Guardian:

Greenspan pushed Clinton and Congress to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which since the Depression decade of the 1930s, had separated investment banking from commercial banking, thereby preventing banks from gambling with personal savings. He also argued vigorously against regulating derivatives – essentially, financial bets on financial bets – that proved to be weapons of mass financial destruction.

In his public advocacy for these policies, he crossed the line of being a mere technocrat and was acting as a politician. With easy money and deregulation, the ingredients of the 2008 financial meltdown were in place. When the catastrophe came, Greenspan admitted he was wrong, somewhat to his credit. “[I found] a flaw in the model that I perceived is a critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak,” he told a congressional committee. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms … I was shocked.” According to Randian ideology, self-interest should have made the markets purely rational; no one would do anything dishonest or shortsighted.

But can such a belief really be forgiven in any adult, let alone one of such high mental capacity as Greenspan seemed to possess? A moment’s thought seems to militate strongly for “No.” I’m sure everyone has witnessed moments of human folly where people are undone by their own self-seeking actions. Everyone has seen greed pull people under and competition become destructive to the competitors. Beyond common sense, there’s the evidence of history. What of the past financial crises? Don’t they all basically have the same dynamics: increasingly complex ways of producing a bank run? If you go back to Greenspan’s old writing on gold, you start to see the problem. Young Alan thought that the Great Depression was made worse and even brought on by the abandonment of the gold standard. That’s just empirically false. In fact, countries recovered in the order they abandoned gold.

While Greenspan could change his mind, and alter course, he was fundamentally attracted to ideological conceptions of the world: just so fables that exempted him from paying attention to the messy reality underneath. Surely, in his career, he must have encountered the work of Hyman Minsky, who argued that the combination of the Fed’s infusions and deregulation was creating the equivalent of a financial hydrogen bomb. But that would’ve had to involve admitting that the market could be irrational and that was the one thing central view that could not be abandoned. The other problem with Rand cult’s ideology was the essential elitism: the business elite, the 1% if you will, got there from being superior, from being more rational, they were productive and virtuous, and therefore they deserved the Fed’s help. They could be trusted with it because they would always act with their superior self-interest as their guide. When it’s broken down to its essentials, this is not a worldview that should have ever been given serious consideration, no matter the short term success its adherents might demonstrate. It’s a glib and arrogant series of bromides. Combine it with the name big-o “Objectivism,” the equivalent of calling your philosophy “The Way Things Really Are–ism,” and you’ve got an intellectual disaster on your hands. That’s what Greenspan’s legacy finally is—an intellectual disaster: America relied on the acuity of his mind for its safekeeping and he failed us.

Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Events themselves have no regularity or predictability: I intended to write today about the Iran deal, but right now it looks up in the air again, as Israel is trying to scuttle it by continuing its campaign in Lebanon. Opposition among hardliners in Iran also seems to be growing. Nevertheless, we do have something in writing: the text of the Iran deal. It’s really not a deal; it’s a “Memorandum of Understanding, “ it’s an agreement to agree. It looks like an astonishing capitulation: it gives Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, it does not deal with nuclear weapons—again it punts there—, and it gives 300 billion to the Islamic Republic for a “reconstruction” fund. This administration was talking regime change and total war at the start of the conflict, and now they are treating Iran’s government as a legitimate, reasonable partner. The Israelis are upset at Trump’s about-face, but they should have known that anything he says really doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s all bluster. There’s a legal term, “mere puffery,” which refers to statements so outrageous that a reasonable person could not be expected to take them seriously. That’s basically Trump’s every word—mere puffery. The shapelessness of the world is just because Trump’s thoughts and actions are shapeless and arbitrary.

There is actually one predictable pattern in Trump’s behavior, and that’s that he’s completely unreliable and terrible to do business with. This looks like one of his business deals: a lot of noise, brutal recriminations, hair-raising threats, grandiose plans and promises, and then he walks away, leaving behind a mess, usually a much crappier version of what he claimed he was gonna do, and, of course, leaving his partners and creditors in the lurch. This is all he is in the end: a schiesty hustler. He got tired of the war; it isn’t working the way he wanted, so he’s trying to pull out. If you ever thought Trump is capable of behaving strategically, let alone undertaking some “civilizational” plan, you are far dumber than he is. And that’s all he needs to stay in business—bigger suckers.

From the golden age to the dark ages. This brings me to that other city to our south, our so-called capital. They are preparing for another sporting event altogether. It couldn’t be farther in spirit from what New York is experiencing: a bloody, no-holds-barred fight in a cage. What a hamfisted metaphor: a cage on the grounds of the White House, the ultimate symbol of unfreedom. Fighting with bare hands: the ultimate symbol of humanity reduced to the state of nature, to the condition of bestiality. The bitter irony is heightened by this unholy event taking place one month from Bastille Day, which commemorates the glorious dawn of human freedom. They measured and prodded these modern gladiators—slaves, really, whose bodies are sacrificed for other mens’ bloodlust and greed—on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, in sight of Father Abraham’s immortal statue, under his benevolent, but still judging, gaze. What a defilement of our sacred places! It’s sacrilege in the exact Roman sense: a violation of the temple sanctum. Sacrilegus originally meant “one who steals sacred things,” and in Roman law, it combined a sense of a religious taboo with a crime against the state and the entire public good. What could more accurately represent what Trump and his cronies are up to? We ought to feel disgust and horror as old Romans would at an intrusion of the sanctuary of Vesta. That we don’t immediately react in such a way perhaps reflects that we no longer believe, and our empire is truly on the wane.

Despite impiety and profanation in the capital, the flame of democracy still burns bright here in the North. Here, at least, we have not turned infidel. Madison Square Garden is not called the Mecca for nothing: even when the Knicks aren’t good, it’s recognized as the center of the basketball world, where the masses flock to make a pilgrimage to the sport’s holiest place. Basketball is a truly American sport; it represents the balance of team cooperation and individual accomplishment and style. No nation can make a claim to fighting with fists: it is the unfortunate patrimony of all mankind. Basketball might be as commercial and vulgar as anything else in our civilization; it may involve too much money, too much glitz, too much vanity and pomp, but it is undeniably beautiful. No offense to the soccer fans who are now our guests for the World Cup, but it may be the real “beautiful game,” the one where pure human athleticism is best displayed. It’s highly physical, but sheer violence is against the rules (unless, of course, your name is Victor Wembanyama.) It’s a spectacle of strength and power becoming concentrated in a moment of grace and finesse: a basket requires fine dexterity of the fingers and discerning judgment of the right moment to strike as much as pure brawn. And like all the other great American sports, it is democratic, beloved by all races and social conditions. The democratic character of this particular team is heightened by the fact that it includes no gaudy superstar; we don’t have a LeBron, or a Jordan, or a Wemby: Brunson was never considered a franchise player in the same way those players were. He is a modest hero who took a pay cut to build a better team around him. It’s a team of spare parts that somehow came together to form a perfect engine. And while white nationalism is the governing ideology in D.C., the celebration of basketball, whose greatest athletes and whose culture is black, feels defiant. As Washington retreats into parochialism, narrowness, and hate, and falls to grappling and pummeling each other senseless on the ground, New York, not just a metropolis, but the cosmopolis, a city of immigrants and 800 languages, leaps and bounds over it. We embrace our team and each other as we have always embraced the whole world. We remain the true capital of Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” and therefore the capital of the universe, a welcoming harbor to whoever still aspires to be free and great. Let’s go Knicks.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

First off, I have to address a small controversy.—

I apparently caused a little bit of an upset online due to my teasing comments about English food. I’d theorized that the British people actually enjoy eating bad food: that it’s in keeping with their national character to shun sumptuousness and prefer modesty, and also to show their grit by getting down what others find inedible. This is surely due to some nostalgia for the sacrificing spirit of the War. But I will also remind you that sadomasochism was once known on the Continent as “the English vice” or “the English disease.” I qualified this immediately by saying I knew that there was a lot of great food available in the UK, especially in London, and that I am aware that British cuisine is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, with talented chefs using top-shelf ingredients and putting imaginative spins on pub classics. The thing is, I actually like a lot of British food: I am one of the few Americans who enjoys a full English breakfast, beans and all. A sandwich that’s just bacon on a roll seems rational to me, if in a slightly infantile way. And, of course, there is terrific ethnic food here: I had two of the best Indian meals of my life on this trip—and not in London. I found unassuming pubs in Cambridge with gourmet menus. On Friday, at St. John Bread and Wine in the East End, I had a lunch that consisted of Welsh Rarebit, cod roe with fried potatoes, rabbit offal and lentils, crispy pig’s skin with sorrel and chicory, and finally roast lamb with vegetables in the style of a “Sunday Roast.” It was all delicious. But be that as it may, I’ve also eaten absolutely disgusting and flavorless things on my trips here. I had something called “field mushrooms on toast” at one of the most charming-looking pubs I’d ever been to in London that looked like something that came out of the Exxon Valdez disaster and tasted like it, too. I stared in astonishment at a breakfast sandwich consisting of egg, bacon, and sausage, which somehow managed to have no flavor. Usually, breakfast meats, even at their lowest quality, deliver the cheap satisfactions of salt and savory, but I’ve bitten into bits of bacon here that seemed to have been boiled at length to remove any hint of seasoning. The relationship of British cooks to salt in general is curious: it is totally absent and, then, suddenly, delivered in overpowering concentrations. So, I submit that, yes, while British food has improved a lot, and the British are generally pretty adventurous and cosmopolitan eaters, they do revert, from time to time, at least, to their old, vile comforts.

Also, for what it’s worth, my remarks were meant to be in good fun.

All of New York thrums with Knicks fever. I recommend two essays: one by Vinson Cunningham in The New Yorker on the excitement of these Knicks—

I admit it: I do feel a kind of nativist, automatic kinship with whoever’s wearing the blue and orange, something to do with my everlasting allegiance to the city-state of New York. I try (and, just ask around, often fail) in life to restrain my judgments and act fairly and think before I speak; when the Knicks are on, playing prettily or not, I am a foulmouthed partisan, pumping my fist and pacing the living room, issuing imprecations at the team’s opponents (in the privacy of my home, I speak about the Philadelphia 76ers’ center Joel Embiid in ways that should embarrass me, but don’t), or at whichever Knick is playing poorly and souring my mood. My connoisseurship plays second fiddle to my status as a member of the clan.

—and one in a more elegiac mode by Thomas Beller from several years ago in the same publication about Latrell Sprewell, troubled star of the last Knicks team to reach the Finals:

Using a word as nebulous as “tone” when assessing a basketball player is almost heretical these days. It’s the era of analytics, moneyball, and basketball conferences at M.I.T. I’m confident that the numbers would bear out my claim about Latrell’s significance, at least to a point. But what makes me love him goes beyond basketball.

There was something about Latrell that was from another time. It’s not so much that he had an old soul. It’s more that his game, and especially his game face, was Old Testament. There was something harsh and unforgiving about him. He had a face that had seen the plagues and the Red Sea part. He was leading the Knicks out of the desert.

I somehow got on the subject of Sprewell with the author Scott Spencer, who told me that he had pitched Sprewell as a subject to Jann Wenner back when Sprewell was a Knick. He said that Wenner lowered his forehead to his hand and said, “You’re the fourth middle-aged Jew who has pitched Sprewell to me this week.

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Do I think Platner is actually a Nazi? No, not really. I think he’s an adventurer type and a bit of a lost soul. Exactly the kind of person who might start in a privileged or, at least, genteel milieu and then seek out more authentic and exciting experiences, like, say, joining the military and going to war. Historically, those kinds of people often became Nazis or fascists, but they could also become any number of other things—Communists, high-flying businessmen, international aid workers, etc. I think Simone de Beauvoir nails this type in her Ethics of Ambiguity:

Hoping for no justification, he will nevertheless take delight in living. He will not turn aside from things which he does not believe in. He will seek a pretext in them for a gratuitous display of activity. Such a man is what is generally called an adventurer. He throws himself into his undertakings with zest, into exploration, conquest, war, speculation, love, politics, but he does not attach himself to the end at which he aims; only to his conquest. He likes action for its own sake. He finds joy in spreading through the world a freedom which remains indifferent to its content. Whether the taste for adventure appears to be based on nihilistic despair or whether it is born directly from the experience of the happy days of childhood, it always implies that freedom is realized as an independence in regard to the serious world and that, on the other hand, the ambiguity of existence is felt not as a lack but in its positive aspect.

In other words, the kind of guy who would like to flaunt his lack of respect for the serious world’s norms around Nazi symbols. Moreover, de Beauvoir goes on to show their political flexibility, which comes from the very spirit of adventure: “They do not take politics seriously. They thereby allow themselves to be collaborationists in ‘41 and communists in ‘45, and it is true they don’t give a hang about the interests of the French people or the proletariat.” Again, there were plenty of these types of guys on both sides in the War.

What’s more, the adventurer’s spirit also explains Platner’s attitude towards women and love—his Don Juanism, capriciousness, and recklessness. De Beauvoir: “The taste or conquest is often subtly tied up with the taste for possession. Was seduction all that Don Juan liked? Did he not also like women? Or was he not even looking for a woman capable of satisfying him?” Good questions.

Many people on the left are subcultural bohemians with similar aspirations, and find such an attitude appealing and worth emulating. They like his rejection of the hypocritical standards of taste and behavior of the Beltway dorkwads. But it’s why I feel ambivalent about Platner: I don’t think he’s a very serious person. There’s an air of buffoonery about the whole thing. I’ve met many of these private-school Don Juans in my life, and I don’t particularly like them. They are usually real sons of bitches. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: seriousness itself, the sheer givenness of society’s norms, has to be rejected if you are going to be an authentic person who thinks for yourself. But hopefully, then you ethically dedicate your life also to the freedom of others, not just your own. Does Platner give a shit about anybody except Platner? I guess I don’t buy the performance. Can an adventurer be a good guy to have on your side? Sure, at least they are not cowards. But I don’t entirely trust him. Maybe, because he’s certainly lying about the tattoo.

Attached below is the paper I wrote for “The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era: A Mini-Conference.” It is basically a more formalized and academic development of one strand of argument in When the Clock Broke, namely that the Savings & Loan crisis and the recession of the early 1990s demonstrated a lot of the same mechanisms that were visible in a much more stark and drastic way in 2008, and eventually, 2016.

I’d like to thank my commentator David Edgerton of King’s College London for his insightful remarks and Caroline Johnston of Cambridge University for running the terrific discussion. And thank you to all the attendees for your helpful questions and comments. A very special thanks again to Gary Gerstle for the invitation to Cambridge — it was really a wonderful and stimulating event — and we’re all very much looking forward to his next book.

Here’s a sample that summarizes the argument in my paper:

This “first neoliberal crisis,” as one might call it, demonstrated in nuce similar mechanisms we would come to see in the social and political crises that beset the United States in the early twenty-first century: namely, the Great Recession, right-wing populism, and the destabilizing and authoritarian presidencies of Donald J. Trump. First, a speculative bubble caused by deregulation of the financial markets bursts; then, the crisis spreads to the real economy; and finally, there is a political reaction. Rather than manifesting as class struggle per se, these politics took on a populist and plebiscitary form: rage at the perceived and real intermeshing of political and economic elites, as well as the related attack on representatives and even representational government itself as hopelessly corrupt and beholden to “special interests.” The public turned towards expressions of strongman rule that purported to short-circuit the interplay of interest group politics and slow-moving bureaucracy. A former federal financial regulator and the author of a retrospective book on the Savings & Loan collapse presciently wrote, “History repeats, said Karl Marx, discussing the rise of Louis Napoléon; the first time it’s tragedy, and the second time it’s farce. For all the damage done, this tale had a heavy leavening of farce from the beginning. Repetition — and it could happen — would be tragedy.”

If I were to rewrite it today I’d mention in more detail some things I missed or passed over too quickly:—

• There’s a complex story about race here that I did not address. I mention that the House reforms of the 1970s that ultimately assisted in deregulation being passed bypassed the Southern populist Democrat committee chairs who once had so much power, but I did not go into the relationship between the Thrift industry and redlining. Many of the congressmen who were defended the Savings & Loan as a bulwark of community-centered finance against predatory big banks were also ardent segregationists. In addition, when the bailouts came in the early 1990s, there was notably different treatment in institutions that served black communities and white. For instance, while hundreds of banks failed in the early 90s, for some reason, Freedom National Bank of Harlem was treated relatively harshly: it’s depositors were given up to the $100,000 FDIC cap, but this was unusual as federal regulators helped customers at other banks transfer their accounts to new banks so they wouldn’t lose anthing.

• There’s an even closer connection between the mechanism of the S&L crisis and the subprime mortgage crisis than I let on. Lewis Ranieri of Salomon Brothers devised the system of packaging mortgages into bonds specifically as a product to sell to ailing Thrifts. This practice he labeled “securitization” and these were the one-day-to-be infamous Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMOs.) There was another round of deregulation in the mid 1980s that facilitated this, which overturned the rule against private banks selling mortgage-backed securities without government oversight.

• I wish I had made stronger connections between finance and the productive economy: the deregulation was partly to deal with the shortage in housing starts that the financial issues of thrifts were causing in the late 70s and early 80s and, ultimately, it resulted to a crisis of overproduction—a glut—in commercial real estate. I think you can tell a pretty orthodox Marxian story about capitalist crises there.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

—William Blake, from the preface to Milton: a Poem

I write to you from Cambridge, England, where I’m set to be a part of a conference put on by the history department on Trump and Trumpism. I arrived a few days early to catch the “The United States of America at 250” event, which was largely dedicated to discussions about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. The last panel, featuring my friend Jamelle Bouie, was entitled “Does the Declaration of Independence still matter?” I’m not sure how I would answer that, honestly. As I watch the debacle around America’s 250th Anniversary celebrations unfold in the States, the answer seems simultaneously to be “not at all” and “very much so” — no one seems to care about it anymore, but it seems urgent. Particularly that second paragraph, which begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

I’ve written in the past about this regime’s ideological assault on the Declaration, including Vance’s “Anti-Declaration” and Eric Schmitt’s National Conservatism conference speech. During the discussions, I couldn’t help but think of M.E. Bradford, the Southern Agrarian reactionary who inspired the paleoconservatives, and his take on Jefferson’s document in his 1976 Modern Age essay “The Heresy of Equality”, published the year of the nation’s bicentennial. Bradford was responding to Harry Jaffa’s essay “Equality as a Conservative Principle,” which argued for Abraham Lincoln’s interpretation of the Declaration and that equality of natural rights was the basis of government by consent of the governed. For Bradford, this was all Yankee and Puritanical nonsense, promulgated by dictatorial fiat by the “Caesar” Lincoln. I quote from my own book:

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If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

Next Tuesday, June 2nd, I will be presenting a paper as part of the The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era mini-conference at Cambridge University. My paper is entitled “How the Clock Broke: The Recession of 1990-91 and its Political Consequences.” I’ll share the whole thing after the conference, but for now, here is the final intro:

Shortly before he was first elected in 2016, Donald Trump declared, “If you remember the early ‘90s, other than, I would say, 1928, there was nothing even close. The conditions facing real estate developers in that early ‘90 period were almost as bad as the Great Depression of 1929 and far worse than the Great Recession of 2008. Not even close.” The fact-checkers fell on the statement and pronounced it another one of Trump’s doozies. Looking at the national aggregates they were correct: the peak-to-trough employment contraction in 2007–09 was several times what it had been in 1990–91, and the second downturn lasted longer. But Financial Times columnist Matthew Klein, in a piece that ran a few days later, observed that the fact-checkers had missed what Trump was saying. The period coincided with Trump’s own near-ruinous bankruptcies, and from the parochial perspective of a Manhattan real estate developer such hyperbole was understandable: New York City lost ten percent of its total employment between 1990 and 1992 and did not recover to the pre-recession level until the end of 1998. If you look at a chart of the total non-farm employment in the New York metropolitan area, the supposedly booming 1990s looks like a wide valley. Whatever happened, it was etched permanently in the brain of Donald J. Trump. And, as I will argue, the period left its traces on the nation as a whole, albeit in ways that remained imperceptible.

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Now I have to admit to being wrong. Back in December, I wrote in The Nation:

At long last, President Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP is slipping. There’s no Götterdämmerung, no dramatic denouement, no operatics in the dictator’s bunker. Trump is being dragged down by normal politics: He’s simply unpopular, dogged by a sex scandal and a lousy economy. The laws of gravity, it turns out, apply on Planet Trump. He’s a lame duck, and he’s just plain old. After dominating the news for a decade, he finds himself yesterday’s man. And like the little Nazi in Cabaret, Nick Fuentes and his army of groyper toads are croaking out “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

I’ve also commented several times that the normal “Madisonian” dynamics of the US system were asserting themselves, and ambitious politicians would want to get out from under a wobbling Trump. Not so fast, John! I hate being called a pundit, and this is part of the reason why: you always end up with egg on your face when you make predictions.

To demonstrate how strange the present situation is, let’s turn quickly to history. Usually, a low approval rating means lower presidential control of his party and a fracturing caucus and coalition. Truman, with a low 30s approval rating, could not get much of his Fair Deal pushed through despite Democratic control of both houses; LBJ’s massive coattails couldn’t save him as he sank into the quagmire of Vietnam; Democrats couldn’t get far enough from Carter, and one big one, a Kennedy no less, tried to primary him; H.W. Bush faced a strong primary challenge even after a successful war; W.’s second term agenda fell flat as his lame-duckness kicked in fast; and most recently, Biden struggled with his agenda as it became clear to his party how unpopular he was after 2022.

So, what makes Trump special? He really leads a movement more than a party; that movement is the dominant force in the GOP, and his voice still dominates the movement. “I am MAGA,” he once declared, and he’s right. That charismatic domination of his party is part of the reason people like me turned to the fascist precedent when analyzing Trump. But there’s more to the story. “37 percent” means something much different in a world with such a fragmented media environment and polarized politics. Red States and Blue States are culturally different worlds in a way that they were not for most of the 20th century. As you’ve seen, incumbents need to fear a primary from their right much more than the opposing party. You can be close to 90 percent approval in your party and have a shitty national approval because you have zero Democratic support, and all the independents abandoned you. We have something different going on here than the party systems that historians and political scientists studied and made their assumptions about.

On the one hand, Republicans are probably just cruising for a bruising: by sticking with an unpopular president, they are gonna get walloped in the midterms. People like to say blue state liberals are out of touch, but MAGA land may be in for a rude awakening as they find out much of the country really hates their guy. But there are bigger problems afoot here. The system is supposed to ultimately reward the popular will. What’s happening is that the us constitutional order is becoming less and less representative. With the gerrymandering permitted after recent Supreme Court rulings, Democrats may have to run some 4 percent ahead of Republicans for a bare majority in the House. This is undemocratic and even dangerous. We can have a party in power that doesn’t respond to public opinion and is just constantly caught up in its own propaganda and paranoia; Yet another reason to bring up the dictatorships of the past when looking at Trump and his party. For now, the penalty for disobeying Trump looks way higher than obeying—bad stuff if you are worried about Republicans doing something illegal come midterm time.

The big hope now is that the Trump dictatorship within the GOP is simply punished by the voters in November. It’s happened before: Trump has been kind of a Catch-22 for the GOP in the past, where they can’t win without him—can’t get out of a primary without MAGA—but can’t win with him—the MAGA candidate fucking sucks and loses. But if the penalty isn’t high enough, party-dictatorship may become a structural and systematic feature of our politics and the Trumpzeit will linger on, perhaps long after his death.