Byron's Big Break Up; First Time as Farce; The Italian Angle; A Reader Question
Reading, Watching 05.10.26
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.
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.
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.
Unable to find any good examples at the antiquarian book fair, I was reading memoirs about Romantic writers online. Here’s a section from the Journal of the conversations of Lord Byron: noted during a residence with his lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822, dealing with the end of his ill-fated affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, that I like for its acerbic wit. Lady Caroline stole into Byron’s apartments when he was absent and wrote “Remember me” in one of his books. Here’s how he responded:
“ Yes! I had cause to remember her; and, in the irritability of the moment, wrote under the two words these two stanzas : —
Remember thee, remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life’s burning stream,
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!
Remember thee! Ay, doubt it not;
Thy husband too shall think of thee;
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou ***** to him, thou ***** to me!”
In most collected versions of the poem, that line with the asterisks reads "Thou false to him, thou fiend to me,” but it appears His Lordship may have used some stronger language in the heat of the moment. To be fair to the young Lady Lamb, I’m sure Byron, whom she once called “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” was no peach himself
Once again, I’ll be presenting a paper as part of “The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era: A Mini-Conference” at the University of Cambridge on June 2nd. Tickets are available online. As I’m working on the paper itself, my roundup this week may be a little shorter; most of my reading time has been consumed by economics papers and FDIC reports that I doubt the casual reader will much enjoy.
I can give a little bit of a sneak preview of the paper’s contents, though. I’m using the opportunity of being in an academic environment to make some arguments about the economy, which were implicit in When the Clock Broke, more formal and explicit. I’m also going to go into more detail about the Savings & Loan, junk bond, and leveraged buy-out manias, which I was only able to touch on in the book. Here’s the thesis so far:
The recession of 1990-91 is not generally thought of a signal event in American history. On paper, it was relatively mild compared to other contractions and crises in the 20th and early 21st centuries: the unemployment rate peaked at 7.8 percent. By official measures, it was short, lasting just 8 months. Only the 2001 downturn would be shorter and less severe, according to the traditional metrics. Although political scientists cite the recession as the primaryu reason for his defeat, it does not figure high in the conventional wisdom about George H.W. Bush’s loss in 1992. Bush’s broken “no new taxes” pledge is what is popularly remembered as the reason the incumbent failed to win reelection. Moreover, the recession is now considered to be a mere blip before the outstanding economic performance of the balance of the decade. I believe this appearance of insignificance is deceptive.
It’s the contention of this paper that the economic downturn of the early 1990s, the larger set of economic problems it bodied forth, and its peculiar set of political effects revealed deep structural issues in the political economy of the United States that were papered over during the prosperous Clinton years. This “first Neoliberal crisis,” as one might call it, demonstrated in nuce similar mechanisms that we would come to see in the social and political crises that beset the United States in the early 21st century: namely, the Greast Recession, right-wing populism, and the destabilizing and authoritarian presidencies of Donald J. Trump. First, a speculative bubble caused by deregulation the financial markets bursts, then, the crisis spreads to the real economy, and finally, there is a political reaction.
The specific form of this political reaction is important to recognize. Rather than manifesting as class struggle per se, these politics took on a populist and plebiscitary form: rage at the perceived and real intermeshing of political and economic elites, as well as the related attack on representatives and even representational government itself as hopelessly corrupt and beholden to “special interests.” In its place, the public turned towards expressions of strongman rule that purported to short-circuit the interplay of interest group politics and slow-moving bureaucracy to make direct interventions in the economy. As a former Federal financial regulator and the author of a retrospective book on the Savings & Loan collapse presciently wrote, “History repeats, said Karl Marx, discussing the rise of Louis Napoléon; the first time it’s tragedy, and the second time it’s farce. For all the damage done, this tale had a heavy leavening of farce from the beginning. Repetition—and it could happen—would be tragedy.”
Speaking of the economy, a reader reminded me that, in addition to the privatizations in the 1930s I discussed in my series on the Nazi economy, there was a prior wave of privatization in Fascist Italy. The same historian who looked at the Nazi case, Germà Bel, wrote a paper called “The First Privatization: Selling SOEs and Privatizing State Monopolies in Fascist Italy (1922-1925.)” You hear the same old thing bout the Fascists in Italy as about the Nazis: they were actually socialists. The evidence in this case appears strong on a superficial level: Mussolini did indeed begin his political career in the Socialist Party, and there was a strong anticapitalist and syndicalist tone to early fascist pronouncements. But they sure changed their tune. Bel writes:
