"Defactualization;" "Wise-Guy Arbitrage;" Melinda Cooper on the "anti-social state;" Understanding the Alien Enemies Act with Jack Goldsmith
Reading, Watching 03.23.25
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
First off, on April 8th, Dissent magazine will be holding a fundraiser featuring talks by Sara Nelson, Jamelle Bouie, and Matthew Sitman. Please consider buying a ticket to support this essential journal in this time of great political and intellectual uncertainty.
Some shameless self-promotion: Due to retail demand, When the Clock Broke will now be available in paperback in the US on May 27th. It will also be available in the UK on June 12th. The paperback edition will have a new postscript written by yours truly.
In case you missed it, sociologist Dylan Riley and economic historian Brad DeLong had me on their Inflection Points podcast to discuss my book and much more.
I thought this comment on the podcast by reader Chris Maisano was particularly helpful and astute:
Thanks for this conversation, I really appreciated it. Around the 36:00-37:00 minute mark, Prof. DeLong asks how Trump/MAGA seek to fulfill the material interests of their base, and I think a big part of the answer is their immigration policy. I think they have convinced themselves that a radical program of immigration restriction, deportations, and the like is what's needed to boost the fortunes of native-born white Americans. Housing crisis? Immigrants are moving in en masse and living ten to an apartment, driving up costs. Low wages and bad jobs? Immigrants are coming in and undercutting standards for everyone else. And so on. In that sense, I think MAGA's fundamentally anti-immigration logic has a similar role and purpose to the Jacksonian drive to exterminate and forcibly resettle indigenous populations - to increase economic opportunities for plebeian whites by expelling the foreign elements supposedly keeping them down. Like the idea of bringing back manufacturing as a source of mass employment through tariffs, it will not work, but I think this accounts for a lot of the motivation behind the program.