“A week is a long time in politics,” Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson is reputed to have said, supplying us with one of the great political clichés. If a week was a long time in the middle of the 1960s, it’s a positive eternity today. Politics, mediated through the internet, appears as a wild froth of frenetic activity. Public outrage and hysteria can seize millions in a matter of hours and then be promptly forgotten. We feel that at any moment, society itself may dissolve, with online fantasy giving way to violent realization. And yet, though we teeter on the edge, the final lurch into the abyss never seems to arrive. Waves of distemper sometimes burst onto the street, but ebb away just as rapidly. There’s a sense of stasis, stuckness, and futility. Cycles of public outrage burn out before turning into a general conflagration. It feels like a time of great social change, but our politics moves in fits and starts. As Kierkegaard wrote of the present age, the public “flies into enthusiasm for a moment only to decline back into indolence.”

It’s to this sense of simultaneous frenzied activity and passive nullity that Anton Jäger’s book Hyperpolitics addresses itself. Jäger is an intellectual historian, a lecturer at Oxford, and a prolific contributor to the magazines of the Anglophone left—New Left Review, Jacobin, The Point, Damage. Hyperpolitics is stitched together from magazine articles submitted to these publications. The acknowledgments are disarmingly candid about its origins: The project began with what Jäger calls a “furtive tweet.” “Most of the chapters were commissioned by friends,” Jäger writes, before adding that his editor Thomas Meaney “insisted that the pieces in question did, in fact, add up to a book.” Perhaps.

The thesis feels plausible and even convincing. Jäger proposes a four-stage periodization of modern politics: mass politics (1914–1989), characterised by high mobilization within dense institutional structures — parties, unions, churches, pillarised civil societies; postpolitics (1989–2008), the privatized quietude of the long 1990s, in which citizens retreated from public life and technocrats governed by neoliberal consensus; antipolitics (the 2010s), when the financial crisis shattered postpolitical complacency and populist movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and Syriza erupted from the rubble; and finally hyperpolitics, the condition of the present, in which “everything is political” but nothing is institutionally anchored. Jäger writes, Hyperpolitics is “low-commitment, low-cost, and all too often, low-value.”

Hyperpolitics might be handily characterized as politics with ADHD: hyper activity, low sustained focus. It is not “the strong and slow boring of hard boards” as Max Weber characterized the vocation of politics at the dawn of the mass political era. This diffusion of political energy throughout the system has a material basis if you follow Jäger’s historical sequence: deindustrialization leads to the decline of mass parties and associational life, then comes the demobilization and depoliticization of the post-politics era, then political agitation returns with the 2008 crisis, but the old institutions that could turn those political programs and desires into tangible gains no longer exist. Instead of a robust civil society, there is the internet, atomized, fragmentary and labile.

Trying to sum up an era with a single abstraction is immensely difficult at great historical remove, never mind from within the heat of events. The concept of hyperpolitics is certainly describing a real phenomenon. But the question is whether it is the phenomenon: the overriding pattern of modern politics. Jäger shies away from staking out that kind of claim for his concept. “Hyperpolitics denotes a tendency rather than a totalizing style. Nevertheless, this book argues that it constitutes a gravitational pole in the force field of twenty-first-century politics,” he writes. Fair enough!

The question is how strong that gravitational pull really is. A look at a few empirical episodes provides mixed results. The explosion after the murder of George Floyd seems to confirm Jäger’s thesis most clearly. Enormous protests followed, but few lasting mass organizations emerged, and the political impulses that they generated were defeated. But what of more recent events? Jäger admits that the right might have an edge in renewing or sustaining civic life. Still, he does not closely examine organizations like Turning Point USA or the Faith and Freedom Coalition. The latter group, chaired by a veteran of conservative causes, Ralph Reed, claims in 2024 it made 78 million voter contacts, conducted 10 million home visits, engaged 13,000 churches, and distributed millions of voter guides. Even if we discount some of this as exaggeration, Faith & Freedom can’t be dismissed as a mere inflated mailing list. During the 2024 election, the Washington Post described it as spending tens of millions of dollars on evangelical voter mobilization and reported a national field plan involving thousands of paid canvassers and volunteers. This is not a holdover from the 20th century: this is a post-2008 group.

This all points to a major blind spot in Jäger’s analysis of American civil society: the church. The word “evangelical” only appears once in the (frankly somewhat hackneyed) invocation of “megachurches.” In both 2016 and 2020, Trump picked up about 80% of the white evangelical vote. In general, Trump won over white Americans who regularly attend worship services, 59% to 40%. Civil society decline might be a broader context for understanding American politics, but Trump’s constituency is not mainly drawn from the atomized and lonely crowd, but from people who are well integrated into the remaining structures of American communal life. One 2021 paper showed that Trump did best in 2020 in areas that had a combination of remaining high social capital and economic decline. The image of Trump as Napoleon III, the chief of the atomized peasantry as a “sack of potatoes” that Jäger is fond of invoking, is clever but not quite right.

Before Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, TPUSA was already a substantial organization, not merely a social-media or radio audience. It claimed ot have reached more than 2,300 high-school and college campuses. The organization had a national field structure, formal chapter charters, field representatives, campus tours, conferences, and a large media operation. In 2024, its campus tour hit more than 30 schools, with reported crowds of 2,000+ at Oklahoma State, 2,250+ at Florida State, and 5,250+ at Texas A&M.

Post-assassination, we get a mixed picture that confirms but also complicates a hyperpolitical interpretation. On the one hand, the hue and cry, the possibility of mass mobilization, the threatening “Reichstag fire” moment, dissipated quickly. Notch one for hyperpolitics. But there were some apparently durable effects: TPUSA did grow its organization. By September 2026, Reuters reported more than 3,500 high-school chapters and 1,500 college chapters, albeit amid a broader collapse of Trump among young voters. And the vaunted “vibe shift,” the putative cultural shift that America went through, was the example par excellence: evanescent and ephemeral, it put the “hype” in hyperpolitics. But on the balance, here is a case where the churn dissipates, and some organizational density does remain; Not exactly what a hyperpolitical perspective would predict.

On the left, there are real signs of non-hyperpolitical developments as well. Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral campaign built a durable citywide canvassing apparatus that DSA subsequently reused in other races—and this was on top of DSA’s existing infrastructure. The Palestine movement wasn’t without consequences, either: public opinion in the US has shifted radically on the question of Israel-Palestine with real electoral results. Is that just the horrific images on the news and social media, or is that the work of the activists? Hard to say at this point, but it does not fit the hyperpolitical pattern of much ado and then nothing. And, finally, in Minneapolis in 2026, resistance to the federal immigration crackdown drew on unions, churches, immigrant organizations, teachers, and community groups capable of coordinating action well beyond the lifespan of any single viral campaign. The point is that media hype might not reveal—or might even conceal—some durable organizational activity.

There are a few ways to approach these empirical mismatches. One thought is that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and we are already exiting the “hyperpolitical era.” Less charitably, hyperpolitics might be picking up on and over-theorizing an epiphenomenon rather than an essential relation of social forces. It could be that’s the way the world appears to the terminally online—a succession of hysterias, micro-scandals, and fads—but it misses what’s underlying all the political decomposition and recomposition. It gives us a phenomenology of contemporary politics, but not a logic. A book that did that couldn’t be so short or so sexy: it would have to look in great detail at why there is this uneven and combined development of civil society.

I have to say, also, that I get next to nothing from the discussions of Wolfgang Tillmans and Michel Houellebecq. Those parts seemed more an effort to situate the book on an avant-garde cultural terrain than anything enlightening. To briefly judge a book by its cover, the photo and design give it the consumption character of a hip objet d’art for the urban pad. This points to another major weakness, which is that of tone, aesthetics, and judgment: there is a frisson of a sour and sneering nihilism at work. Hyperpolitics comes out of the Baudrillardian tradition, if you can call it that, where politics mainly appears as spectacle, simulacrum, and gesture. The danger is that this can mistake style and sensibility for explanation. From this perspective, everything starts to be poisoned by irony, exhaustion, and presumed bad faith. All militancy is just make-believe; all enthusiasms, Schwärmerei; all commitment, mere posturing. Political disappointment confirms in advance that nothing much could have happened anyway. The critic acquires the enviable position of being too disabused to ever be really surprised. Nothing ever happens, as the meme goes.

This can be a poor standpoint from which to understand political development. The fact of the matter is politics is full of failure, ugliness, naivety, vulgarity, and compromise. “From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step,” as one who knew politics very well once said. A pose of aesthetic acuity can become political stupidity when its main concern is avoiding embarrassment. The sneer provides a comforting retrospective superiority because the participants are always more credulous than the observer. An affected remove can provide less a sense of disinterest than that of hauteur and betrays a sentimentality of its own. Jäger’s cultivated irony toward the present, as welcome and witty as it sometimes can be, comes from an attachment to the past. “Hyperpolitics” appears trivial because it is measured against an idealized image of mass politics that hard historical research may show never really existed. It may be less a conceptualization than a series of nostalgic snapshots. At its best, I do believe the concept of hyperpolitics can help us to get our bearings and separate what’s essential from the accidental in contemporary politics and society. The book does contain moments of real, valuable intellectual labor towards understanding the world. But at its worst, Hyperpolitics might just make you feel cool for knowing it all comes out to nothing anyway.

Erickson strongest observation is that these forces don’t need to be coordinated to reinforce one another: one supplies money, institutions, intellectual justification, and cadres, while the other supplies subculture, militancy, and a mass political language. But Erickson is unable to identify the correct causal mechanism for this breakdown, attributing it to the corrupting “infection” of the ideas of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and ultimately to Satan himself. That may be convenient rhetorically, but it is intellectually remiss. It performs the right wing’s favorite diagnosis: the healthy body infected by an outside agent; it exhibits no curiosity or understanding of why or how the right is susceptible to this “takeover.” As Cassius said to his co-conspirator, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Erickson is structurally unable to recognize the process, because he’s part of it. He suffers from the selective blindness of conservative intellectuals—I’m using that term very generously.

Erickson wasn’t blind to what Trump represented from the beginning. In 2015, he disinvited Trump from the RedState Gathering over his remarks about Megyn Kelly and publicly argued that there were lines of decency a conservative movement ought to enforce. In 2016, he refused to vote for Trump and described him in stark moral terms. Yet by 2019, after three years in which the alt-right, Charlottesville, Steve Bannon’s White House role, and the general transformation of the Republican coalition had made the nature of Trumpism much harder to misunderstand, Erickson reversed himself. He announced that Trump and Pence had “earned my vote,” explaining that while his concerns about Trump’s character remained, the administration’s policies were worth supporting; shortly afterward, he told the Trump White House that he was “happy to help them” and met with Vice President Pence.

That sequence matters because it shows that the problem was never simply total ignorance. Erickson recognized the rupture, recoiled from it, and then accommodated himself to it once the new regime proved capable of delivering substantive conservative victories. He was hardly alone—look at the names The National Review Trump issue cover for just one example. That process of accommodation is precisely how a movement changes without ever quite admitting that it has changed: yesterday’s disqualifying tendencies become today’s regrettable excesses, provided the coalition still delivers judges, tax policy, abortion restrictions, or whatever other victory over the left. The boundary of respectability moves after the political movement has already moved it.

The same pattern repeats after January 6. Erickson wrote that conservatives had allowed QAnon and election conspiracies to “seep” into the movement, that some conservative media figures had actively harnessed the anger, and that the right needed an internal accounting. He conceded that the phenomenon was “far more pervasive than I thought.” But even this language is revealing. Once again, radicalization appears as something that has seeped into conservatism, rather than as something actors within conservatism had repeatedly tolerated, instrumentalized, and normalized. So, even when Erickson recognizes the political consequences, he reaches instinctively for the metaphor of contamination.

His own earlier career supplies an even clearer version of the contradiction. During the Tea Party period, Erickson explicitly argued that conservatives had to purge birthers, truthers, and other “crazy” fringe elements lest they discredit the movement. In other words, he understood very well that the relationship between respectable conservatism and its fringe was an internal political problem requiring boundary maintenance. What he has difficulty recognizing is that boundary maintenance can fail not because some foreign doctrine suddenly crosses the walls, but because actors inside the walls repeatedly decide that policing the boundary is less important than preserving the coalition.

That is why Carl Schmitt and Satan are such convenient explanatory agents: They externalize the cause. If Schmittian ideas infected the right, then the respectable conservative—like the United States itself—remains fundamentally the victim of an alien intellectual pathogen. But Erickson’s own history points toward a less comforting explanation: the transformation proceeded through choices made by conservatives who saw enough of what was happening to object, yet repeatedly concluded that accommodation was politically preferable to rupture. The process did not require them to become fascists themselves. It required only that they redraw the line of acceptable association each time the movement crossed the old one.

The striking thing, then, is not that Erickson failed to predict the far right’s advance. He recognized major elements of it very early. The failure lies in his inability to incorporate his own accommodation into the causal story he now tells. He can see the radicals, and he can see the ideas, but he cannot quite see the respectable conservatives who kept making room for them—because at crucial moments he was one of them.

He and others must do this because, like Brutus and Cassius, they are underlings: Conservative intellectuals are not in the driver’s seat. The knowledge- and discourse-producing class on the right doesn’t have an organic function within their movement: they do not help organize the forces they work with; they have to react to them. Their role is retrospective: justifying, rationalizing, excusing. They are what Robert F. Carley has called “conjunctural intellectuals”; they appear at a particular point of political rupture, ride its waves opportunistically, provide it with arguments and rhetorical firepower, but cannot command its development. Erickson himself is a product of an earlier radicalization of the Republican Party. He emerged nationally during the Tea Party revolt, as one of the intellectuals and media entrepreneurs urging conservatives to use insurgent energies to capture the GOP from within. What he has difficulty recognizing now is that the process did not stop at the political boundary he preferred.

The double move of accommodation and repudiation practiced by Erickson and so many other conservative intellectuals is structurally determined by their position within the movement. This is an old, old story. William F. Buckley is remembered in conservative mythology as the intellectual sovereign who drew a bright line between respectable conservatism and the lunatic fringe, most famously by expelling the John Birch Society. But as historians like David Austin Walsh and Nicole Hemmer have shown, the line was never so bright. The modern conservative movement itself emerged from a much wider right-wing popular front in which respectable anti-New Deal politics mingled with conspiracy theories, racism, antisemitism and outright fascism. Buckley’s relations with this world were intimate and prolonged, and his acts of exclusion tended to come only when particular allies became liabilities to the larger project. The supposed gatekeeper was therefore less the sovereign author of the movement’s boundaries than their manager: compelled to keep contact with radical energies while periodically sacrificing their most embarrassing representatives in the interest of respectability.

The pattern persisted after Buckley became an emeritus figure. In 1991, National Review subjected Pat Buchanan to a lengthy inquiry into whether he was an antisemite; only months later, as Buchanan’s primary campaign against George H. W. Bush gained momentum, the magazine recommended that discontented conservatives cast a tactical vote for him. In the political world I examined in When the Clock Broke, marginal figures such as Murray Rothbard and Sam Francis were already attempting to construct a new right out of nationalism, racial and cultural resentment, economic dislocation and hatred of established elites. They didn’t yet have a social basis to make that possible. The respectable conservative intelligentsia did not create these forces and could not finally suppress them. It alternately condemned, appropriated and rationalized them.

The Tea Party produced another generation of the same type. Erick Erickson rose to national prominence as an intellectual and media entrepreneur of that insurgency, urging conservatives to use popular revolt to discipline and capture the Republican Party while continuing to police its most disreputable fringes. Trump and the alt-right demonstrated the limits of that position. Erickson initially recognized the break and repudiated Trump; once Trump became the effective leader of the Republican coalition and began delivering conservative policy victories, Erickson accommodated himself to him. Now, another turn of the wheel later, he discovers Haywood, the Groypers and Christian-nationalist institutions with renewed horror.

The content of the insurgency might change, but what remains remarkably stable is the role of the conservative intellectual. He does not command the movement from above or organically organize it from within. He occupies the unstable space between a respectable institutional world and popular forces he can neither afford to embrace completely nor safely abandon. He therefore oscillates between legitimation and excommunication. Buckley did it with the Birchers; National Review did it with Buchanan; Erickson did it with Trump. The point is not that these men secretly wanted every development they later condemned. It is that their political function continually placed them in a relationship of dependence on movements whose direction they did not control.

The irony here is that Erickson misses what is actually instructive about the Carl Schmitt story. Schmitt is less useful as an example of an evil thinker whose ideas somehow infected a political movement than as an example of the conjunctural intellectual. Schmitt did not create National Socialism. Much of his major theoretical work preceded Hitler’s rise, and he was not originally a Nazi partisan—he was even an opponent of Nazism who suggested using the state against them. But after Hitler took power, Schmitt opportunistically accommodated himself to the victorious movement, translated his existing intellectual apparatus into its political vocabulary, supplied legal rationalizations for its violence and exclusions, and briefly became its most celebrated jurist. The regime did not emerge from Schmitt’s books; the regime created the conjuncture in which Schmitt could become “the crown jurist of the Third Reich”—before they cast him off. They had little need for intellectuals at that point.

In that respect, Schmitt is much closer to Erickson than Erickson realizes. Both are intellectuals produced by political conjunctures whose movements repeatedly outrun them. The difference is that Schmitt accommodated himself catastrophically far more completely to the victorious force. But the structural temptation is recognizable: the intellectual discovers that the political movement has moved somewhere he did not anticipate, adjusts his concepts to remain relevant to it, and later narrates the movement as though ideas rather than political forces had been doing the moving.

I’m sure many younger people on the right who aspired to intellectual roles didn’t envision themselves as legitimators of these energies at the start of their careers, but the need for career opportunities made it a necessary accommodation—if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

J.D. Vance, the ultimate opportunist, has his read on the present conjuncture and therefore will not attack the far right. When Nick Fuentes correctly observes that Vance "panders to the far right but simply doesn't want the baggage of associating with the far right,” he’s noting that Vance is a politician who needs a coalition and cannot jettison potential allies willy-nilly if he hopes to advance. What he recognizes, like Francis and Rothbard before him, is that the far right—the racist right—is an organic part of American conservatism—it is not some infection that comes from without.

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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 the Los Angeles Reviews of Books, Mathias Fuelling has a review of Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics:

ANTON JÄGER’S Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences (2026) is a strange book: too short to offend, too long to be pithy or aphoristic. The effect is to make it flat. Jäger is explosively erudite, yet this erudition leads to banal ends, loud bangs that come to small talk. He is a superstar on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and the book captures Jäger’s charisma within a particular online socialist milieu—the wide-ranging references, close attunement to political events in Europe, and a gift for the incisive turn of phrase. Jäger’s insights are often provocative and penetrating, drawing on a wealth of comparative knowledge and a willingness to take intellectual risks, but they are left undeveloped, discarded as soon as they are expressed.

In the preface, he compares the current Democratic Party to an “inverted Peronist developmental bloc.” Further in, he tells us that “the KKK and other [American] white-supremacist groups might well count among the first properly fascist organizations in history.” Near the end, he notes of the culture wars during the Trump era that “OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries found themselves engulfed in a kind of permanent Dreyfus Affair, one that extended to family gatherings, circles of friends, and workplace cliques,” and that “the average Western European today is more likely to interact with geriatric nurses than workplace union reps.” Quips and analogies such as these can be found on almost every page, but what do they add up to?

Hyperpolitics can be seen as a hip remix of Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” for the early 21st century, with Trump in the role of Louis, though at its heart, it is less of an argument than a heuristic model. In the absence of efficacious class struggle over the now decades-long nadir of socialism, according to Jäger, we have ended up in an ersatz version of history in Europe and the United States, characterized by four succeeding waves of macropolitical orientations. A mass politics defined a period from the 19th century to the end of the Cold War, which marked the height of movements organized along social bases such as class. The triumphant globalization of the 1990s saw the rise of postpolitics, “in which citizens retreat from collective life into the private sphere.” An antipolitics emerged in response to the 2008 financial crisis, with people returning to politics but in a landscape “marked by the erosion—or even accelerated disintegration—of social bonds.” Since the initial election of Donald Trump, a hyperpolitics has taken hold, with people ever more politicized, but in a fractured environment inadequate for the mobilization of this political energy.

I was working on my own review of Hyperpolitics, but it was taking me so long that the magazine I was doing it for didn’t want it anymore, so I may just post it on here soon.

For my piece this past week on techne and phronesis, I revisited Hannah Arendt’s essay “The Crisis in Culture.” There are so many great passages and lines it’s difficult to pull just one:

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In Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between the two types of “intellectual virtue” or mental powers that deal with doing and making: techne and phronesis. Techne is often translated as “art,” but for our purposes its sense is better preserved in its derivatives like “technique,” “technical,” and “technology”; in essence, it refers to a set of procedures or fixed rules that can be followed in order to produce things. Phronesis is translated either as “practical wisdom” or “prudence”; it deals with knowing the right thing to do in a particular situation. It’s close to what we might call good sense, judgment, or even insight. Aristotle says that while the young might be talented in mathematics or geometry, they can’t possess practical wisdom because it requires not knowing just general notions but with many particulars, familiarity with which can only come through long experience. Phronesis is involved in deliberation and is the virtue proper to politics and statesmanship.

AI might possess techne, or really it is reified techne, but it can’t really possess phronesis, and therefore it can’t deliberate and know how to accomplish any human goods. It can’t really act as such; it can only behave, or be “agentic” in the ugly terminology of Silicon Valley. The tech world is aware of this on some level, as well. Although many tasks of programming can now be automated, the primary talent leaders in technology now talk about is “taste.” As 20th century philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer have elucidated, taste is phronetic: it judges particulars but without a determinate rule that can be given in advance. There are rules of thumb, general notions, but none of these can really be called concepts. For instance, elegance and simplicity are often thought of as hallmarks of good taste. But obviously the application of simplicity alone cannot generate elegance. It can just as easily make something barren, boring, and bland, like a lot of contemporary design. The tendency to apply these aesthetic ideas as if they were simple procedures that can be followed by anybody is why there is so much of what Emily Segal has cleverly called “tasteslop", which I think is something like the idea of good taste reduced to algorithmic regularity.

My friend Jay Caspian Kang is writing a series on the concept of shame and how it has declined in our culture for The New Yorker. The first example of shamelessness is how NBA teams “tank” in order to receive more favorable draft picks. The second installment looks at how AI might further degrade our collective sense of shame. He points out that the AI boosters have a very different process of moral reasoning than our usual assessment of what is praiseworthy or blameworthy: they apply some kind of clearly delineated, abstract, mathematical rule. In both cases, the types of goods internal to the practice—being as excellent as possible at basketball and being a good person—are subjected to a technical process in order to accomplish an abstractly and quantitatively defined outcome. As Gadamer put it, this is part of a modern tendency that “degrades practical reason to technical control.”

What unites the entire “culture” of Silicon Valley is that type of degradation: the reduction of everything to an algorithmic sequence of steps.

What is ironic or maybe merely unfortunate of the contemporary situation is that precisely when robots might be able to take over the merely technical or deductive parts of thinking is that the importance of judgment should become even clearer. We could enter a golden age of the study and contemplation of human accomplishments. Instead, we seem to be mulching it with all the rest. One thing I’ve noticed with young people is that they seem to know—and want to know fewer—particular things: far fewer names of famous politicians, events, artists, athletes, or works of art that are remembered for their excellent qualities. The memory and preservation of those things is not a small thing; It is culture itself.

Democratic, publicly debated decisions on how and when to apply and develop artificial intelligence are important because they preserve our judgment of what’s proper to do. This is exactly what communities should deliberate and decide together. And the simple reason “it’s creating ugly things” is not as thin or meager as it might seem; it’s pretty much all we have if we want to remain in a human world.

I guess we were trying to prepare ourselves for what might happen. This seemed like the movies becoming real—there had been a spate of late 90s and early 2000s films showing the destruction of New York, even of the towers themselves—so it made sense to return to the movies. The image of America and its place in the world was created by Hollywood. When my parents finally picked me up, and we made our way back to our apartment in Manhattan, I assured them that Osama bin Laden would be assassinated that very night. I was thinking of movies like Patriot Games or Air Force One that depict fantastically competent covert commando raids to capture or kill terrorists. I wonder if the decision to eventually carry out one of these raids rather than use a bomb or a drone strike to kill bin Laden was at least in part to conform to this cinematic convention.

Of course, that didn’t happen that night. But George W. Bush seemed like a movie president, like Bill Pullman in Independence Day or Harrison Ford. He was playing the role perfectly and it was comforting. Gradually, it dawned on us that there wasn’t much there and he was out of depth, controlled by insane and evil advisors. He also wasn’t prepared for a vulnerable country: He was a baby boomer from the most secure and privileged caste in American society. People say that World War II ended the WASP ascendancy, but perhaps it was really 9/11. The big institutions of the Second World War and Cold War, like the CIA, failed. The old diplomatic consensus fell apart. Bush was already a patrician aping a cowboy, but after that different forms of right wing populism prevailed. People like to forget that the wars were very popular at first. Even the neocons were a kind of crude attempt to reassert the Pax Americana through force alone. The War on Terror was supposed to be WWII 2.0 rather than WWIII. A lot has been made of their Jewishness, but the neocons really were trying to provide the successor ideology for WASP hegemony—the Ralph Lauren (né Ralph Lifschitz) of the ruling class. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, the whole gang were shrewd political operators underwritten by a naive and sentimental patriotism, which is what made them so dangerous.

Once the plans for the Iraq War became clear, whatever illusions I had about the Bush administration were over. I think it helped I was still so young, so I was impervious to the “sensible” liberal voices that were joining in. It was obviously idiotic and a lie: Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. The WMDs were a pretext if they even existed. They did not in the end. But it was disconcerting that the country at large was so ignorant that it could be convinced otherwise. After that, I never had much faith in institutions. And neither did anybody else. The second blow was the financial crisis in 2008. Everyone in charge seemed either corrupt or incompetent. Then the door was wide open. A brief promise of American restoration with Obama. One cannot entirely discount the possibility that somewhere in the white liberal unconscious he benefited from a character type Denzel Washington had spent the previous decade perfecting: the decent, commanding, preternaturally competent Black man who turns out to be the stoutest defender of American institutions—like in Crimson Tide (1995) and, yes, The Siege. Then Trump, always on the alert for deals, knows a depressed property when he sees one.

You have to give Bush credit for one thing: when the attacks happened, he went on TV and said not to blame Muslims in general. That seemed like commonsense civics at the time, the sort of thing the president is supposed to say, but now hatred is openly preached by American politicians. They don’t even pay lip service to unity. Polls say the level of Islamophobia is higher now than it was directly after 9/11. The scenario in The Siege, with martial law and people being grabbed off the streets by heavily armed men, seems less farfetched today. Obviously the towers were an iconic representation of American power, which made them a target. But they specifically were the World Trade Center, a symbol of openness to (and domination of) the rest of the world. Since then, we seem to be falling in ourselves. We have been gradually closing ourselves off from the world as if under siege. But like in the movie its a siege we have imposed on ourselves. Who knows if we will ever see it lifted.

The private healthcare and social assistance (+9.5 percent) major industry sector is projected to add the most jobs of any sector, over 2.2 million over the projections period, and is projected to be the second fastest growing major industry sector. This strong growth is expected to account for about 37.0 percent of all new jobs projected to be added through 2035. Strong employment growth is expected to stem from both the aging population and the increasing prevalence of chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.

You can see it already: In the latest jobs report, for August 2026, healthcare employment was still rising. It added about 13,000 jobs that month, with home health care services alone adding 11,000. Healthcare averaged about 32,000 new jobs per month over the previous 12 months.

Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, wrote that capital was producing its own gravediggers; in point of fact, it’s producing its own nurses.

How should we then account for the hostility of Trumpian ideology towards the principal characteristics of care workers? They are frequently people of color, immigrants, and women. On the level of culture and ideology, this is a disavowal: society depends increasingly on feminized, racialized, migrant care labor, while politically insisting on the restoration of the patriarchal family, native-born sovereignty, and masculine productive labor. This is the fantasy world of an aging population that wants to imagine itself still virile and master in its own house.

Of course, the devaluation of such work and its workers has real benefits on the level of political economy as well: Immigration restriction, precarious legal status, gender hierarchy, and the privatization of care can all help produce a labor force that is cheaper, more dependent, less free, and therefore easier to discipline. It’s an attempt to reverse the dependency of care work: rather than acknowledge its dependence on workers, care workers would depend on the protection and largesse of employers or husbands.

This is where things become truly contradictory rather than merely ironic: Trumpism is attacking those sectors of labor that the actually existing capitalist economy cannot do without. If you make immigrant care workers too precarious, you can suppress wages—but you may also create labor shortages. If you push care back onto women in households, you can reduce public costs—but you may also reduce labor-force participation elsewhere. If you stigmatize feminized care work, you may politically subordinate it—but then have difficulty recruiting enough workers. Not to mention that the Trump economy is producing exactly those kinds of workers that are least politically invested in MAGA: female, credentialed workers.

Trump himself is a dotard, in the immortal phrase of Kim Jong Un, and increasingly under the watchful care of a younger aide. She personifies a kind of filial devotion while his own children, like those in King Lear, have ambitions and dynastic projects of their own. But she is not his Cordelia; she’s an employee. Feudal dependency has not returned. Even in Trump’s attempt to construct a personal regime—a “sultanate,” as the historian Ervand Abrahamian recently called it—he cannot escape wages. The sovereign patriarch ends, like everyone else, dependent on the paid labor of another.

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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.

I highly recommend the new interview with the historian Ervand Abrahamian in the New Left Review:

…Weber would be surprised to find that the United States, which was supposedly a modern state with an institutionalized bureaucracy, has become a sultanate, where the sultan makes decisions on his own, taking advice from household slaves or servants. That is one thing that strikes me reading the American press, especially the New York Times, which has actually been quite informative about the decisions made in Washington. It’s more like a Marx Brothers movie, the chaos there. The Iranian regime is very different. Despite being led by medieval theocrats, it is highly institutionalized. So even the decapitation of the leadership did not result in the collapse of the regime. I think that’s what the Israelis expected. Three or four days of bombing, they assured Trump, and it would fall. There would be regime change or – and I suspect this is what the Israelis really thought – the country would collapse into civil war. But that did not happen. The institutions survived, and they seem to be quite robust. I’m sure there’s a great deal of personal and political rivalry among the leadership, but they are still invested in preserving their republic.

Since the beginning, it’s been remarkable how the representatives of the Islamic Republic appear—on TV at least—to be totally rational, and all the surrogates and officials of the US government appear to be the raving lunatics. This is what Trump and his people could not understand, partially because they are racist and partially because they are simply unimaginative and stupid: Iran is not a personalistic regime where assassinating a few key figures would make all the difference; it’s a consolidated system staffed with people invested in its existence.

I’d long thought of doing an extended critique of Noam Chomsky, but “Chomsky After Epstein” by Alex Gendler in Strange Matters does a far better job than I ever could:

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I believe that as a society we are now experiencing a variation of this that I call “the incelization of the lifeworld.” This is the introduction of the concepts and categories from the subcultural world of the incels into mainstream culture. I don’t think this means all young men will become homicidal misogynists or that we will stop having sex—although many think the latter is really happening. No, it’s something more subtle and insidious: the gradual sterilization of all erotic life, and its replacement with a competitive, objectifying, quasi-economic conception of intimate life.

I first learned the term “mogging”—from AMOG, alpha male of the group—from young right-wing men about a decade ago who used it more or less ironically. It originally came from the manosphere, but these were fairly normal and well-socialized people; they developed an unfortunate fascination with pathological online subcultures that came to dominate their worldview. Now less than a decade later, it’s everywhere. People use it jokingly—I do—but even with a heavy dose of irony, it structures the way people see the world.

The clearest example of incelization of the lifeworld is looksmaxxing, an idea that began in incel-adjacent forums with concepts such as “sexual market value,” numerical attractiveness rankings, “Chads,” “sub-5s,” facial ratios, canthal tilt, jaw shape and genetic ceilings. In the past few years, it has migrated massively onto TikTok and ordinary teenage culture. Clavicular is a major figure of pop culture. Young men are learning to regard features they had never previously noticed—the distance between their eyes, jaw dimensions, hairlines—as measurable defects affecting their “SMV.” Feminists will surely note with a certain irony that this is men simply going through the painful self-scrutiny and forced self-improvement that women have experienced since time immemorial, but it’s hardly a cause for celebration: women are rated even more harshly.

This is not just jargon and memes spreading from a subcultural avant-garde to the mainstream; the colonization of the lifeworld has objectively taken place in the world of dating. The experience of a competitive market of the dating app makes the incel “red pill” plausible. It is quite literally a system—an algorithm—taking over the customs and manners of mating.

Working out, dressing well, developing interests, earning money, becoming more confident, none of these are new aspirations. But manosphere culture reinscribes them as investments that should produce a determinate return in sexual attention. The gym body, salary, jawline, testosterone, height, clothes and social status become entries on a balance sheet. Nothing is pursued for intrinsic value. Even competition is no longer about virtue or excellence within a field. Does anybody aspire to be the best chess player or the best basketball player or an artist of genius anymore? These were once honorable pursuits, but now they are secondary to the rankable and quantifiable status an activity confers at large. The person is explicitly imagined as a commodity with a market valuation. And the living of life itself becomes an algorithm, a series of explicit, learnable steps to solve an optimization problem.

Suppose someone doesn’t want to go out with you. In the lifeworld, that’s an encounter between two particular people: perhaps there’s no chemistry, perhaps she likes somebody else, perhaps it’s inexplicable, perhaps you are not interesting in any way. You remind her of dad or, worse, you don’t remind her of her dad. In the incelized lifeworld, rejection gets translated into a system: I’m a 5, she’s an 8, women select men in the top 20 percent, my jawline reduced my market value, etc. A painful and ambiguous human experience has been converted into a theory of market position.

Women are adopting the same logic as part of a strategic sexual arms race: “high-value men,” “princess treatment,” “the bare minimum,” provider status, red flags, optimization and rules for extracting commitment. Relations between the sexes are strategic interactions between antagonists seeking to maximize value and avoid exploitation.

Surely, marriage, dating, and sexual conquest have always been acquisitive, competitive, and economic. We used to marry for a dowry or a herd. But now, as Habermas put it, “the ideological veils have been stripped,” and the explicitly economic comes into the foreground without the mediation of other institutions that make such calculations seem more human.

It’s always been remarkable that incels, who, along with women, suffer most from the system of competitive rationality that they describe, are the most intent on reinstantiating it and insisting that it is the natural order of things. They reject all attempts to ameliorate its effects as “cope.” Through their loneliness and alienation, they just experienced earlier and more intently the technological colonization of the lifeworld that has gradually reached everyone. But they still believe in the possibility of buying your way out: of a set of clear procedures that can allow you to proceed. They turn the experience of alienation into the absolute truth of the world.

The incel is a bit like the musician Rameau in Diderot’s famous dialogue Rameau’s Nephew. The titular nephew is a thoroughgoing cynic, who, because of his precarious and subaltern position, sees through the illusions of society and views everything as a game of extraction and exploitation. He says aloud what polite society conceals and is not fully wrong. For Hegel, Rameau’s nephew represents alienated or “self-estranged” consciousness: he sees that the official ideals of society—virtue, merit, culture—are contradicted by the actual circulation of wealth, prestige, and dependence. And he says to the Diderot figure, “I've done systematically, with a keen intelligence and a reasonable and true aim in mind, what most others do by instinct.” The incel’s truth also consists partly in giving systematic expression to assumptions that ordinary society prefers to leave unsaid. Everyone knows beauty, money, status, and popularity affect erotic success; the incel turns these tendencies into an iron system of ranks and laws. Like Rameau, he boasts that he has merely done consciously and systematically what everyone else does by instinct.

But the wretched Rameau is still able to enjoy life: “Drink good wine, gorge oneself on choice delicacies, roll around on beautiful women, lie on lovely soft beds. Other than that, the rest is nothing but vanity.” For the incel consciousness, everything is vanity except the exchange value. He is a miser. And therefore miserable. The enjoyment of erotic life recedes into infinity under the terms of the numerical system of its acquisition. That’s the nature of numbers: they go on and on. They are a bad infinity with no absolute value. Under this system, a lover cannot be one’s absolute because there is necessarily a better one. A career, a trade, an art, every experience, love itself; cells on a spreadsheet, into infinity.

Milo found himself on the wrong side of a MAGA feud between the anti-Israel and anti-semitic—Milo is Jewish by birth, a fact that has not prevented his open flirtation with Nazism—national socialist wing and its fascist, imperialist and ultra-Zionist wing. As Kayne West’s chief of staff, Yiannopoulos was a key was instrumental in bringing Nick Fuentes to Mar-a-Lago. His old pal Laura Loomer, a deranged Batman villain who has extended her career as alt-right clown by hitching her wagon to Israel, crowed that she had sicced ICE on Milo, who had overstayed his visa. (Milo had previously proposed ICE checkpoints at supermarkets, where anyone unable to produce proof of legal residence would be summarily deported, but it feels ingenuous to point out hypocrisy at this late date—Milo never meant white people.)

There’s at least circumstantial evidence to take Loomer’s boasts seriously. This is not the first time she has presented herself as a kind of freelance commissar for Trumpism. In April 2025, Loomer met Trump in the Oval Office and urged him to purge National Security Council staff whom she considered insufficiently loyal to MAGA. The next day, at least three senior NSC officials and several lower-level aides were fired.

Here’s where the wry smile of Schadenfreude must give way to the furrowed brow. On its social media sites, ICE publicized its deportation with a mugshot of Milo. Think about it: the security state is being used to settle factional disputes in the ruling party. And apparently at the behest of a person–have you seen this woman?—who makes the screeching Goebbels seem like a paragon of steadiness. Manifestly insane and idiotic people are running our government. They are using its tools to punish and humiliate their enemies. What country are we living in?

It’s easy to dismiss Loomer and Yiannopoulos as two particularly flamboyant and strange characters, but they are just exaggerated caricatures of a broader right wing that broadly shares their features. The state has been captured by influencers and propagandists. This is how these people fight each other: They are low, miserable bastards and bitches. You can expect an uptick in doxxing, lawfare, and the release of kompromat—remember that fun term?—as factions position themselves for the Trump succession. If this is how they treat their former friends, how will they treat their enemies?

We eventually reached a little harbor in the channel between Ithaca and Kefalonia called Port Polis, which we chose because the sailing guide to the Ionian Islands we had onboard said it had easy access to the site of Odysseus’s palace. Polis turned out to be a small, pretty cove with a beach and a quay for fishing boats. It had a little taverna, really more of a cantina, whose only denizens before lunch were cats lounging in the sun. The staff there warned us that it was too hot to climb all the way up to the archeological sites near the town of Exogi, and that we should take a cab instead. The one taxi in the village of Stavros was busy, so we decided to ignore their advice and hike it. The phone said 40 minutes—not too bad.

It wasn’t. Especially helped by a stop at the extremely tiny one-room archeological museum halfway, whose 5 euro fee felt justified for the momentary relief of air conditioning. The port was once the site of a cave, which had collapsed during an earthquake. The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of the historical Troy, identified it as the cave where Odysseus hid his Phaeacian tripods upon his return to Ithaca, before Athena disguised him as a beggar. The cave had apparently been a site of continuous religious worship from the Mycenaean period to Roman times, and the museum had fragments of Bronze Age tripods that held the sacred fires. The cult appeared to center around the nymphs, presumably nereids, who resided in the caves, but the museum’s most treasured item was a tiny fragment of a ceremonial mask from Hellenistic times that bore the inscription “ΕΥΧΗΝ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙ‘ — vow or prayer to Odysseus. The value seems to be that it conclusively linked the cave to Odysseus.

We continued climbing to the area marked with little fanfare as “archeological sites.” The great Schliemann failed to find Odysseus’s palace-city down near the village, but a site on the mountain above Stavros had been known since the 19th century as the “School of Homer.” In the 1990s and 2000s, there was a systematic excavation of the area, which revealed a much more extensive terraced complex with artifacts dating back to Mycenaean times. In 2010, archaeologist Thanasis I. Papadopoulos said “with every scientific reservation” that “we believe that we stand before the palace structure of Odysseus and Penelope.” Quite a claim. Just last year, the Greek Ministry of Culture concluded, with the discovery of tile fragments bearing the name Odysseus, that the entire area was an “Odyseion,” dedicated to the worship of the epic hero. This all suggests that the ancients also believed that the Mycenaean settlement on the site was Odysseus’s home. Good enough for me. It’s somewhat strange, but also refreshing, that it does not attract busloads upon busloads of tourists, especially after the success of Nolan’s Odyssey. That may change.

On the whole, the Ionian Islands seemed less blighted with tourists than the popular image of the Cyclades, but this perception may be because we spent so much time on our boat rather than in any of the villages or beach resorts. Ithaca in particular seemed sleepy and making only a half-hearted attempt to sell plots of land and houses to vacationers from Europe. The Ionian coast is not particularly easy to reach, at least from the United States: Athens is 4 or 5 hours away by bus and the only airport, Aktion Preveza, where I landed, takes only a few flights per week. It seems most popular with the Swiss, Austrians, and Southern Germans, for whom it is only a short flight away. Large stretches of our voyage, especially along the western coast of Zakynthos, were fairly desolate and free of human settlement. There was one popular sandy beach surrounded by cliffs with a shipwreck that attracted charter boats. And then many caves and coves, where the deep blue of the sea gave way to neon turquoise. Approaching those forbidding and impressive caves, with no other boats around, it’s not hard to imagine them inhabited by nymphs, goddesses, and monsters. Again, the inspiration for Odysseus’s voyage seemed easy to grasp. We attempted to approach one cove to anchor for a swim, but the sea nearby was rough and our skipper Max, my friend since we were about 10, deemed it too dangerous to get so close to the rocks. The place felt a little too enchanted, and I didn’t exactly feel disappointed when we started up the motor and chugged away. Encountering an angry nereid, disturbed after a slumber of thousands of years, felt entirely possible.

My immediate reaction to this was, “That sounds like some Third World shit.” A little research would bear this intuition out: this is something like a practice of developing nations. For example, Nigeria during the oil boom of the 1970s. Faced with rapid inflation and shortages of consumer goods, the military government created the Nigerian National Supply Company to import staples such as rice, sugar, milk and fish. The government reduced or eliminated duties on selected goods and imported others directly for resale at subsidized prices. A contemporary World Bank mission reported that Nigeria’s Meat and Livestock Authority was actually flying in 300 tons of chilled beef every week, while many government imports were being sold domestically “at, or below, cost.”

The Nigerian government established the National Supply Company specifically to bulk-import consumer goods—including beef—and resell them at subsidized prices as an anti-inflation measure. The government was more afraid of the political consequences of angry consumers than ticked-off domestic producers.

Another example comes from Indonesia during Suharto’s New Order regime. Suharto came to power after the chaos of the Sukarno years, which witnessed inflation and repeated rice shortages. The new regime promised stability, and it used the state logistics agency, BULOG, as a kind of valve to adjust rice prices. The regime set a floor price to support domestic producers and a ceiling to keep consumers from feeling the squeeze of inflation. This contradictory mandate worked well enough for a time: When prices fell too far, BULOG bought rice; when prices rose too far, it released stocks or imported rice. But in the early 1970s, a bad harvest coincided with a global food shortage; BULOG could not import enough rice to meet demand. The rioting that plagued the Sukarno regime returned, and the regime had to scramble to import even expensive rice to meet demand.

Needless to say, these import-licensing schemes and carve-outs create great opportunities for corruption or “political capitalism,” as Riley and Brenner have described it. Once access to a market depends on exemptions, waivers, quotas, or discretionary permits, profits increasingly flow not simply from producing more efficiently but from securing privileged access to the state. The barrier itself creates a rent; political influence determines who gets to collect it. Firms will cultivate patrons, lobby for special treatment, or position themselves as indispensable intermediaries between the executive and the market. In that sense, the apparent chaos of constant exceptions can be politically functional: it turns economic policy into a system for distributing favors, disciplining rivals, and binding business interests more tightly to the regime. BULOG’s control over imports of rice, wheat, sugar, and soybeans meant that access to scarce commodities—and to the large rents created by the difference between domestic and world prices—could be allocated politically. Under Suharto, those privileges were regularly intertwined with regime-connected firms and cronies.

Trump’s tariffs increasingly function less like uniform rules than as the opening bid in negotiations between firms and the state. For instance, Pharmaceutical companies can obtain tariff exemptions by reaching pricing and investment agreements with the administration. An even clearer example comes from the polysilicon sector: Trump imposed new Section 232 tariffs, but simultaneously authorized Commerce to approve company-specific “onshoring plans.” If Commerce approves a firm's plan, that firm can import covered products and production equipment without paying the tariff, in quantities Commerce judges commensurate with the firm's investment. Commerce can vary the benefits and later rescind them if it decides the company has not lived up to its commitments.

To sum up, the government first creates a rent by restricting market access, then acquires the power to distribute that rent through exemptions and carve-outs. Under such circumstances, cultivating political access can become as important to profits as lowering costs or developing better products. In February, Democratic senators charged that the administration had granted thousands of product exclusions through a non-public process, alleging that politically connected industries had benefited disproportionately. Senators Warren, Blumenthal, and Kim are currently investigating a Korean conglomerate, Base Group, over a $2 million payment to a Trump company while the conglomerate faced a Trump-administration trade investigation. The senators explicitly asked whether the payment was connected to an attempt to obtain favorable tariff treatment.

It’s worth noting here that this is not really protectionism per se, which can be quite regular and boring: you have some rationalized system of tariffs—a clear-cut policy—that’s supposed to end up with a specific result. This is more like something you might call a “discretionary economy, where things move at the personal discretion of the Big Boss or one of his plenipotentiaries. The developmentalist pretext, where the regime is defending domestic industry, is conveniently compatible with the needs of corruption.

Now we get to the inevitable “I told you so” section of the newsletter. Back in February 2025, I characterized Trump’s economic approach as “juggling” different needs, interests, and constituencies and that his constitutive unit of economic analysis, so to speak, is the “deal:”

Trump’s big thing is the deal, which is essentially a personally worked-out negotiation, an arrangement, a carve-out. He understands the economy as a series of exceptional situations, not as some machine or abstract system that has a regular logical progression. As a result, he is willing to grant exceptions and carve-outs to keep things going: this business will get this treatment, that guy will get this, and so and so forth.

The “juggling” aspect of Trump’s policy shifts looks an awful lot like Marx’s famous skewering of Napoleon III:

The contradictory task facing the man explains the contradictions of his government, the confused and fumbling attempts to win and then to humiliate first one class and then another, the result being to array them all in uniform opposition to him. This practical uncertainty forms a highly comic contrast to the peremptory and categorical style of the government’s decrees, a style faithfully copied from the uncle.

Industry and trade, i.e., the business affairs of the middle class, are to flourish under the strong government as in a hothouse. Hence the grant of innumerable railway concessions. But the Bonapartist lumpenproletariat is to enrich itself. Hence fraudulent manipulation of the Bourse with the railway concessions, by those already initiated. But no capital is forthcoming for the railways. Hence the Bank is obliged to make advances on the railway shares. But the Bank must simultaneously be exploited by Bonaparte, and therefore must be cajoled…

The US beef producers find themselves now “humiliated” as Trump favors the needs of consumers.

What I didn’t fully develop back then, though, is that this is a feature more than a bug, as the cliché goes. It has a clear political logic that empowers the executive as the dispenser of favor and insult. But of course, it is contradictory: you can’t make everybody happy all of them, and then, as Marx predicted, you end up making everyone mad. That’s sort of what’s happening, I think, as Trump’s numbers on the economy are cratering.

There’s another level of question here that I can’t carry out in today’s newsletter, but that recommends Brenner and Riley’s work and other attempts to synthesize the contemporary conjuncture: Trump’s idiosyncrasy aside, why at this moment are political actors in the United States behaving in this “Third World” way?

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.

In the Ideas Letter, political scientist Marlene Laruelle has a very clever comparison between two people who are apparent opposites—Alexander Dugin and Timothy Snyder:

On paper, Timothy Snyder and Alexander Dugin should have nothing to say to each other. Snyder is an American historian and a longtime history professor at Yale, now at the University of Toronto, whose authority rests on the years he spent studying the different forms of state violence that shaped Eastern Europe under both the Nazi and the Stalinist regimes. Dugin is a Russian political philosopher and self-taught esoteric thinker, more at home with occult speculations than archival footnotes. He is also a disciple of the so-called Traditionalist School of Julius Evola and René Guénon, an anti-modernist philosophy that seeks the return to a metaphysical order.

The distance between them is not only intellectual but also political. Snyder became one of Donald Trump’s most insistent critics and a vocal advocate for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s aggression, starting with the annexation of Crimea in 2014; Dugin spent the same decade as the man whom many Western journalists have called, mostly out of intellectual laziness, “Putin’s brain.”

So yes, the two should have nothing to say to each other. And yet when their claims are placed side by side, the similarities become hard to miss. Despite their opposing politics, Snyder and Dugin often rely on the same underlying way of thinking. Both offer a master concept that promises total clarity, divides politics into moral absolutes, and frames Russia as an atemporal civilizational entity.

They also write posturing in the vein of prophecy. And they cultivate a kind of apocalyptic thinking that locates the crisis abroad rather than at home. Each of their master concepts is grand enough to explain an epoch and is wielded as a decoder: Whoever has not grasped it looks, at best, naive.

You might say they both had a mythic outlook. Before my vacation, I was reading Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State (1946). Cassirer is neglected today, but along with his rival Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most important German philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. His basic idea was that man was an animal symbolicum—a symbol-making animal, a thesis he developed in his primary work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The Myth of the State is his attempt to understand the rise of the Nazis. I thought the passages on how the racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau, the French aristocrat who essentially invented race science, differed from patriotism and nationalism were very interesting and relevant since there is a constant attempt to reinject this poison into public consciousness:

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I still think A.O.C. is one of the most important politicians on the left and has a role to play beyond her district: she should aim to replace Chuck Schumer in the Senate. The first reason for this is that perhaps her strongest talent as a politician is as an inquisitor: she shines in committee, putting the feet of the corrupt and cupidinous to the fire. So, I think as a matter of service to the nation, she would do the most good there. But I also think she would serve her party and faction best by winning a Senate seat—let me explain.

We on the left, of course, disdain the Senate’s undemocratic nature, but we should assume that it’s not going anywhere anytime soon and therefore we must use it. The structure of the chamber allows for something I’ve started calling the “Senatorial redoubt.” A Senate seat combines a long six-year term, enormous individual prerogatives, statewide legitimacy, relatively weak party discipline, and—especially historically—the possibility of building an independent political organization around an individual senator. Traditionally, this has been used to defend a sectional interest that is combined with the ideological tendency and political economy native to that region. The classic example of this is John C. Calhoun, the champion of the slaveholding South. Yes, not, a good or pleasant man, but, for a time, an extremely effective wielder of power for his state and region. You can find other examples throughout the chamber’s history: William Borah for Western Republican isolationist insurgency, Robert La Follette for Upper Midwestern progressivism, and Richard Russell for the segregationist South.

The Senatorial redoubt also allows for an intraparty faction to have its own stronghold. For example, look how Senator Robert Taft kept the Old Right alive in the Senate during a period of progressive Democratic hegemony and then was instrumental in rolling back part of the New Deal. For an example of a rising rather than fading tendency, Jesse Helms turned his North Carolina seat into a springboard for the New Right that came to power in the 1980s. Today, Rand Paul serves this function for libertarianism and Bernie Sanders for social democracy or democratic socialism. But Bernie is old, and the Senate will need a new representative of his tradition. A.O.C. is the most obvious choice.

It may sound like a little bit of a defensive strategy considering the great strides D.S.A. is making, but you have to plan for adversity. Democratic socialism is still and, may yet be for a while, a minority political tendency in this country: it is one faction of one party. To use Gramsci, a Senate seat is an important part of a “war of position:” a faction that has lost the presidency, the national party apparatus, or even much of its mass constituency may nevertheless retain an institutional strongpoint from which it can defend its gains and hone counteroffensives. And perhaps more importantly to do the actual work of legislating, investigating, and “advising and consenting” to the executive. I really do not like the left-wing cant phrase “building power,” but A.O.C. in the Senate, which seems a safer bet, is a better way to build power than going for broke with a presidential run. I think as an organization D.S.A. should consider if it is developed enough nationally to support and sustain a presidential run. What it has clearly done is built a lot of infrastructure in New York that could propel a Senate candidate into office. QED: AOC.

If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model of a transitioning economy, each firm captures the full cost saving from automation but bears only a fraction of the demand loss it creates in the product market; the rest falls on rivals. This demand externality traps rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. The resulting loss harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and “better” AI amplify the excess; wage adjustments and free entry cannot eliminate it. Neither can capital income taxes, worker equity, universal basic income, upskilling, or Coasean bargaining. A Pigouvian automation tax can. The results suggest that policy should address not only the aftermath of AI labor displacement but also the competitive incentives that drive it.

The reason I get this is that it’s just Marx’s concept of coercive competition put in the language of conventional economics.

Orthodox economics generally posits that competition is always ultimately rational and virtuous: a given firm may fail, but the process of competition itself creates better social outcomes: cheaper products, more productive methods, better technology, etc. The free operation of the market will produce abundance—no comment on present discourse intended. Marx didn’t think so; he thought competition coerces capitals—firms—to do things that are completely rational from their perspective of staying afloat and accumulating profits, but which undermine the entire environment that capitalism as a whole requires to keep chugging along. The naked pursuit of self-interest does not miraculously produce a positive outcome; instead, it produces crises and contradictions for the capitalist class.

For our purposes here, competition with other firms forces each firm to adopt labor-saving AI technology. For any one firm, this seems perfectly rational: replace workers, lower costs, increase profits, and avoid being left behind by competitors. But when every firm does the same thing, they begin to undercut the economy on which they all depend by eliminating the wage income of the consumers who buy their products.

This is not quite the contradiction Marx envisioned, which involves a much more complicated story about labor, value, and profitability. Here, the problem is closer to the one John Maynard Keynes worried about. Cutting wages can look like a gain from the standpoint of an individual business: its costs go down, and its profits may temporarily rise. But wages are not only a cost to businesses; they are also incomes to workers, and workers spend that income buying things. If all the firms in the economy slash their wages at the same time, total consumer demand falls. That is a possibility here because of the distinctively adaptive and generalized nature of AI technology: it seems like almost any type of firm could benefit from it. Again, what’s rational for each company separately can therefore be disastrous when everyone does it at once.

When I glanced at this paper, I immediately thought of the work of James Crotty, introduced to me by . Crotty synthesized Marx and Keynes and made a special study of the conditions of coercive or “fratricidal” competition. Crotty took Marx’s idea of coercive competition and combined it with Keynes’s view of an uncertain, unstable economy. Firms often make enormous investments not because they are confident those investments will pay off, but because they fear what will happen if their competitors make them first. A company may think a new technology is overhyped, too expensive, or even likely to produce excess capacity and lower profits for the industry as a whole. But if its rivals are spending billions on it, sitting out may be even more risky. We can see this even on an individual level: you know that AI sucks for you as a worker, doesn’t make you better per se, but to compete, to stay alive, you also realize you have to learn how to use it. Crotty called this kind of thing competitively coerced investment—again, everyone can be pushed into an investment arms race that is rational for each participant and destructive for the group.

The paper proposes a tax to get rid of the negative externality, which seems kind of milquetoast when you consider the depth of the issue it identifies. The socialist replies, “Look, you’ve shown here that competition is not rational, that produces these terrible outcomes on a systemic level; isn’t it clear that we need some kind of social coordination of investment?”

Decisions about how quickly to automate, how much productive capacity to build, and what happens to the people whose labor is displaced can’t be left entirely to firms locked in this competitive arms race. This last point is crucial: it’s not that capitalist CEOs are just evil people—well, some definitely are—no, the structural logic is coercing them to do something destructive in order to survive. They can’t help themselves. You can imagine a benevolent boss saying, “Well, I don’t wanna lay off all my workers by going out of business, so I have to do something to help stay afloat so I can keep some of my people afloat.” And they can’t just decide to stop making profits: their bankers would quickly have something to say about that.

I felt very ambivalent about the data center debate, but this helps me to think of my preferred solution: I wasn’t sure how I felt about these local moratoriums or about the tech-optimist gung-ho “let’s build” attitude. Both seemed kind of wrong to me. I think we need to be very deliberate—we need to have a robust public debate and understanding of just how and where we apply AI technology. Not “smash the machines” and not “let it rip” either. Is that likely to happen? Well, no, but that’s what should happen. One problem is that this coercive competition story is also playing out on a national scale, with different countries not wanting to “fall behind” their rivals.

Another issue, on the question of labor and politics: a lot of ink has been spilled about how D.S.A. attracts a ton of knowledge workers and professionals who are disappointed with their careers. Some of these takes are sympathetic, and some are derisive, but rarely do they capture the structural dynamic: an advanced capitalist economy produces a lot of these “general intellect” workers and then also wants to eliminate the need for them and to slash their wages, putting them in a precarious position and politically radicalizing them. Capital always wants to appropriate their skills and intellect, which is what AI allows on a mass scale. D.S.A. growth is just an expression of that contradiction.

The key Marxist idea, which I cannot emphasize enough, is that at different points in history contradictions arise between the way society produces and reproduces itself and the way that society is organized. The central contradiction of capitalism, according to Karl Marx, is that production is social—it requires the coordinated labor of millions of people—but ownership remains private. The problem is not simply that this arrangement is unfair, although it is that too. It is that private ownership can become inadequate to, and even destructive of, the enormous productive capacities that capitalism itself brings into being.

AI makes one of capitalism’s oldest contradictions especially visible. Its most advanced productive force—artificial intelligence—depends on the accumulated intelligence of society as a whole—the labor of thousands of years and millions, if not billions, of people—yet that collective intelligence still appears in the economy as the private property of capital. Having appropriated the general intellect, capital then tries to use it to dispense with the living labor on which both its own profits and the livelihoods of the population still depend. It just won’t work. And it’s not that AI is bad, per se; it’s that it actually belongs to all of us in common.

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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.

I’ll be continuing my travel diary next week.—

As you may be aware, I got an MFA in painting in a previous lifetime, and I’ve tried to keep up with it as a hobby. Recently, I’ve created an Instagram account—@800johnganz—dedicated to my paintings, which are mostly of volcanoes. Please note the ones on the grid are for sale!

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By elevating the posts of his paying supporters Musk changed the rules of Twitter; that was the whole reason he bought it. Theoretical equality was abolished. Then, he simply programmed the website to promote himself and his ideological allies.

Elon Musk obviously succeeded. By purchasing Twitter, he made himself more central to global politics and was able to engineer a right-wing shift on the site. I barely log on anymore, but I still know far more about reactionary culture than I did in 2021. I am familiar with a wide range of flavors of racism now, and I understand all kinds of racist posts at a basic grammatical level. I know what London is actually like, but I also know what libertarian “founders” in Texas think London is like. All of that is inevitable if you have any contact with x.com. Musk used Twitter to help get Trump elected and exert even more personal control over the state. The SpaceX IPO in June briefly made him a trillionaire, so it’s not like revenue problems at a microblogging site he bought with funny money matter much to his overall project.

My own assertion, itself vibes-based and therefore entirely unfalsifiable, is that the “vibe shift” was the unconscious cognitive effect of hanging out on Twitter after Musk’s acquisition. It was experienced, and only needed to be experienced, in the minds of the US American media class. One of the main skills required of contemporary journalists is the ability to detect which way the wind is blowing, to carefully trace the hidden boundaries of discourse. For those who spent too much time on his platform over the last four years, Elon made the left appear less popular (in the middle-school sense).

Bevins is describing something very much like ’s idea of “malformed publics,” a more subtle formulation than the '“misinformation” frame that suggests that the main toxicity of social media is not that can get you to believe lies or propaganda, but that it alters your notion of what’s normal and acceptable to believe or say:

The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.

This isn’t brainwashing - people don’t have to internalize this or that aspect of what social media presents to them, radically changing their beliefs and their sense of who they are. That sometimes happens, but likely far more rarely than we think. The more important change is to our beliefs about what other people think, which we perpetually update based on social observation. When what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too.

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen people change with their algorithms and it’s pretty scary and sad.

I do think one thing Bevins understates a little bit the political downsides in creating one of these hall of mirrors, which we can see clearly on display now: the people inhabiting these publics think they are broadly representative of the world at large, rather than quite subcultural. The X-ing of Twitter made the Trump administration and right-wingers more broadly think they had a mandate for their most extreme ideas because they only saw a world of chuds staring back at them. The opposition also risks becoming demoralized because they also see this world of total idiocy.

I know I do this a lot, and I’m very sorry, but I kinda predicted this a long time ago. In 2022, before the Twitter acquisition I wrote:

An outline of the institutional shape of this [reactionary tech] politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters. In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation. Just memes, nonsense, idiotic enthusiasms and fads, etc.

The shittiness of X is the point, so to speak. It’s a slag heap, a mental waste dump, a sewer. Currency exchange was the wrong metaphor; It’s some kind of industrial waste product recycling process. Instead of writers and intellectuals coming up with ideas that filter into the culture, they are totally dominated by the conditions of discourse of social media. For example, look at the recent piece by Helen Andrews in Compact—she’s doing exactly what I thought would happen, turning gutter-thoughts into something more respectable sounding. She literally takes a racist shitpost and spins an essay out of it:

The term that I prefer for the ideology we saw in 2020 is race communism. The term “gay race communism” originated with the pseudonymous X account Drukpa Kunley in 2022 and entered the public record when it appeared in print in the Wall Street Journal in 2024. It started as a jokey epithet, but, as a straightforward description, it has much to recommend it.

No it really does not, but that’s besides the point for now. Her entire essay is full of Twitter-like pseudo-ideas, like evidence-free assertions that industrial accidents have happened because the jobs diversified their hiring, which is an entire genre of racist posting. My first thought on seeing it as “Wow, they are totally out of ideas.” The posters are in charge, writers apparently just translate it all for the squares.

But it’s a little too easy to be smug and say, “Well, that happens to dumbs dumbs, but not me.” No, it happens to all of us. Social media forms a huge part of our reality, it shapes our perceptions, it is literally what we perceive for a large part of the day. It shapes our language, as Willy Staley perceptively wrote about in the Times magazine:

The incentive structure of the platforms can now produce new units of culture practically without the need for human will, or more precisely by warping our will to suit its needs. The slang term itself is but a grain of sand around which copycat posting behavior collects, until it becomes large enough to pass through to the offline world. It’s just like how slang used to work, only completely different — shaped not by the needs or wants of a particular scene, place or subculture, but by the incentives and logic of scaled digital networks.

If you haven’t become addicted to a social media platform, you may not be aware of what, exactly, goes on inside the head of someone hunched over a phone. It’s not clear that addicts are aware of it either. Jonah Weiner, a contributing writer for this magazine, wrote about this phenomenon on Substack, in a way I found alarmingly accurate. He described the experience of thinking in tweets, rather than normal thoughts, even when he was far from his phone, in this case washing the dishes and finding he was low on soap. His first thought was to water it down to make the bottle last longer. But then, everything that followed was deranged by the internet. Instead of having normal thoughts, Weiner wrote, “Thanks to Twitter, I’d think something exponentially more inane and annoying, such as, ‘The masculine urge to water down the dish soap … ’ or ‘The two genders [picture of brand-new dish soap vs. picture of old diluted dish soap].’” It goes on from there: “Men will dilute the last millimeter of dish soap rather than go to therapy”; “No but the way I just diluted the dish soap.”

Every one of these joke structures is immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent a lot of time on X: What Weiner is describing is the imitative behavior that sustains and nurtures memes. But more important, he’s describing what this behavior requires, which is the hijacking of your frontal lobe by the incentives of the platform. Disappear into your phone for long enough, and your phone will disappear into you, putting you to work for the platforms even in your downtime. People have taken to calling this “brain rot,” which isn’t a bad term for it at all, not just because phone slang is stupid and annoying — though it is — but because it really does rework your gray matter.

Newspeak isn’t enforced by Big Brother, we love to speak it. It makes you feel with it or part of it.

One thing that helps me think about this is Martin Heidegger’s concept of Das Man, translated as The One or The They. Basically, it’s an inauthentic form of being according to social norms. Instead of authentically choosing to do something or be someone, we go along with “what one does.” We talk as others do, we repeat the same clichés and phrases, etc. Das Man is felt as an authority without a clear source. It’s society, man. It’s also an unavoidable part of our being human: you can’t be authentically choosing your true self all the time; we all live much of our lives in—or as—Das Man, but hopefully one can also step outside of it from time to time and say to oneself, “I’m not doing that anymore; it’s not me.” Or, “I’m sick of repeating that bullshit.” Social media just reveals this overarching existential condition of inauthenticity very starkly. AI is also kind of just Das Man embodied: it’s an aggregate of social knowledge without an author, without a character, a voice, or a self. This kind of impersonal, abstract domination seems harder to escape as it becomes the very air we breathe, but, by manifesting itself in specific technologies, perhaps we are just able to see more clearly and quickly what social existence has always entailed.

In the middle of my trip, I found myself on Hydra, a tiny island in the Saronic Gulf about an hour south of Athens by ferry. Although closer to its nation’s metropolis than many American suburbs, to land there feels like entering another time. This is no doubt because there are no cars permitted on the island—if you want to get your bags to your hotel, you need to hire a team of mules, or less romantically, a motorized wheelbarrow—and the strict local building codes keep the traditional architecture moored in the past. Most of the island’s permanent residents live in the town, known only as Hydra port, and more remote hamlets or beaches are usually reached by boat or mule. There’s also an Orthodox Monastery up in the mountains, but with 90-degree heat during the day, I decided it would be best to leave the monks alone with their contemplation. There are also apparently some nuns as well: I gave my seat at the ferry dock to a very aged sister who was helped to the port by what were evidently two very pious islanders, set apart from their fellow Hydriots working in the shops and restaurants by a more anachronistic appearance. The man had a terrific gray mustache and a button-down shirt left open to reveal tattoos with nautical and religious themes; he wore a small straw fedora, but a fez and a brace of daggers and pistols stuffed into a sash would not have looked at all strange on him. In fact, he looked strikingly similar to a print I bought and, then lost later in my trip, of a Hydriot sailor of the 19th century. As I got up, the ancient nun placed her hand on her heart and said efcharisto poli to me, a gesture I found very touching and gave me the chance to use the few Greek words I have, parakaló—both please and you're welcome.

There’s not much to do in Hydra except to get ferried to beaches, eat at tavernas, shop, and people-watch in the cafés at the port. Hydra, due to its charm and bohemian reputation, attracts many very fashionable visitors. Lots of ostentatious air kisses are exchanged in the port-side cafes where Parisians and Milanese act surprised and delighted to run to each other as if it were such a charming and unlikely coincidence that they’d both find themselves in such a place. As so happens everywhere, the merely genteel are chasing the merely fashionable who, in turn, are chasing the actual artists. Leonard Cohen and Henry Miller are the most famous examples, two creators who, whatever their own gifts and merits, have unfortunately cheesy cults surrounding them. Henry Miller wrote in his Colossus of Maroussi that Hydra “rises out of the sea like a huge loaf of petrified bread. It is the bread turned to stone which the artist receives as reward for his labour when he first catches sight of the promised land,” in a simile so bad that I now feel relieved for not having read him much. I’m more favorably inclined to his judgment that the island is “naked perfection,” as much a blessing as a curse as it becomes a can’t-miss destination of so many would-be aesthetes, myself included. For my part, I was much more excited to find out that Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote his book Mani, which I had in my backpack and just finished rereading, on the island, at the house of the painter Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, sadly destroyed in a fire. There is, however, a museum and a very interesting one. It’s called the Historical Archives Museum of Hydra, a name which conjures up dusty reams of paper and perhaps mercifully fends off the tourists.

As you walk in, you are welcomed by the business end of the deck gun taken off a torpedo boat. This warns you of the strict naval discipline that prevails in the museum’s halls: I was strongly reprimanded by a guard about photography. The museum is in large part dedicated to the island’s glorious martial and political past; Hydra’s rich merchants funded the War of Independence, its mariners crewed its warships, and you learn that this tiny place provided more than its fair share of Greece’s admirals and prime ministers, whose imposing portraits line the walls. “See the urn that contains the ACTUAL HEART of our island's hero Admiral Miaoulis!” the museum website announces. The vitrines are filled with medals, old uniforms, and weapons—Turkish scimitars and yataghans, pistols from flintlock to revolver, rifles that ranged from mother-of-pearl-inlaid muskets to bolt-action knockoffs of Mausers of local manufacture, and models of ships that ranged from sailing men-o’-war to modern torpedo boats and destroyers commemorated for meeting ill fates at the talons of unfortunately more modern Luftwaffe bombers. Adult me was charmed; had I been taken as a child, I would’ve been enraptured, and my parents would’ve had trouble removing me from the place without tears and violent protestation.

More pacifically, there are also displays dedicated to local traditional costumes, and I was very taken with the silk Zostra that provided the sash for the men’s outfits. They are often a faded oxblood, purple, or magenta and have cords and stripes woven into them, sometimes with golden thread. They were equally useful in peace and war, when they could be loaded up with an array of knives and pistols in preparation for boarding an enemy ship. You can see one put to that purpose in the painting below of the famous Bouboulina, the Hydriot woman who became a hero of the War of Independence and perhaps the first female admiral:

I’m not the first foreigner to find them comely: the famous portrait of Byron in Greek dress features him adorned with the textiles. I figured a knock-off of one would be easy to find in the port shops or one of the many tourist shops in Athens, and I could use it as a scarf, but it turns out they are very hard to find. Hunting for one led me to learn a lot more about the Greek silk industry than I’d ever thought I would. From what I can gather, they don’t really make them anymore. We expect even traditional textiles to have moved at some point over to mass production, with quality and substance lost but something of the original look preserved, but the weaving tradition and much of Greek silk production, for that matter, has died out. These magnificent objects were woven in the home, by women, for their dowries. The domestic loom and dowry weaving ended in Greece between about 1950 and the mid-1970s as rural people left the drudgery of village life. The introduction of artificial silk then destroyed most of industrial production, with the remnant centered around the city of Soufli in Thrace, the far northeast of the country.

It’s easy to sigh over the loss of the Zostra, but it also must be considered that this loss coincided with the liberation of women from aeons of drudgery at their looms; uninterrupted, monotonous labor of untold generations of wives and daughters from Penelope to the near present. Odysseus’s wife would not have woven silk, though, which was introduced only in Byzantine times, around 500 A.D., by monks working for the Emperor Justinian I, who smuggled silkworm eggs out of China. I also discovered a more drastic and grim reason for the dying out of Greek silk production: the massacre at Chios in 1822. Chios was an important center of trade and silk manufacture in the eastern Aegean. It held a secure position in the Ottoman system, which made its people reluctant to join the revolt against the Sultan’s rule. Nevertheless, a small troop of revolutionaries from neighboring Samos landed on the island and attacked the Turkish garrison. Some Chiots joined the cause, but most stayed out. When the garrison was relieved by an Ottoman fleet, the reprisal against the population, most of whom had stayed loyal to the Sultan, was to be horrific. The island was totally sacked and pillaged. Four-fifths of the population of around 120,000 were either slaughtered, enslaved, or forced to flee. A gloomy reflection is due here that the present horrors in the eastern Mediterranean have so many fell precedents in the savage wars and revolutions of the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Levant during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Naturally, the domestic manufacturers were also destroyed, the looms shattered, the warehouses looted and razed, and most crucially the chain of traditional knowledge and practices violently severed. In response, the Greek revolutionaries mounted a counter-attack that resulted in the destruction of the Ottoman flagship in the harbor of Chios by Greek fireships, skippered by Hydriots. A model of a fireship—essentially a floating incendiary bomb that is driven into an enemy ship to light it ablaze—is a proud centerpiece at the Hydra museum, where a wall text connects the tradition of the fire ship all the way back to the mysterious “Greek fire,” the secret weapon of the Byzantines.

The atrocity on Chios, dramatized most famously by the painting by Eugène Delacroix, brought a wave of European sympathy and support for the Greek cause, including the fateful expedition of Lord Byron to the Ionian Sea, my earlier destination on my trip. But I’ll leave that till next time.

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.

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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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