I went to the FDR Memorial for DC's cherry blossoms the other day, strolling amid the granite walls and reading the quotes that no longer belong to our collective discourse, and it truly felt like walking in the ruins of the dead but far more advanced civilization.
The nice thing about FDR is that, if you squint and ignore some unsavoury stuff, any prospective popular front member can see their own politics in him (e.g., I see econ-brained social democracy & procedural hardball within liberalism—the goated politics).
I'd highly recommend Krugman's substack post here (https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/more-than-you-wanted-to-know-about) talking about FDR's role in US tariff policy, and Maia Mindel's here (https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/why-did-the-great-depression-happen) talking about the great depression, and the interplay between hard money and tariffs that made it much worse. Maia’s post also highlights an interesting tension in Friedman; while all of his object-level political interventions & popular work made the world worse, he made genuine contributions to his field.
My comment is not related but - I'm reading the Anatomy of Fascism now and it's striking how, whenever Paxton is explaining why a movement wasn't fascist or adding a qualification to a historical case study, inevitably, the factors he cites (failure to craft a wide enough coalition etc) are things that MAGA successfully did and/or are more criteria for fascism that MAGA passes.
As a small c conservative and a social democrat (I don’t think this is a contradiction) I can’t believe what I’m seeing right now. One point in your favor in the fascism debate is the revolutionary nature of Trump’s actions.
It occurred to me after seeing your reference to Yarvin that in part this post is about The Myth of FDR vs. reality FDR and it made me wonder if part of The New Deal/Post-War order’s endurance had to do with the durability of that myth.
That also made me wonder if what Liberalism needs, in part, is a counter myth.
So much ink was spilled post-election about whether the left needs a “Joe Rogan” but it occurs to me (very much through reading your work) that what the Right has had much longer than a Joe Rogan is their deep bench of myth schpieling crackpots (Rothbard, Yarvin in the US, Dugin etc in Russia) that provide what Ernst Cassirer called one of “the fundamental facts of mythical experience”:
“[myth’s] coherence depends much more upon unity of feeling than upon logical rules.
This unity is one of the strongest and most profound impulses…”
I’ll be frank, I am no expert on Cassie’s work and just happen to be reading it after reading a group bio of Cassirer, Benjamin, etc. a bit ago.
All that said it did make me think of When the Clock Broke and what you have said about your plans for your next book.
In short, the conservative myth of the cowboy (Reagan, Perot, maybe way down the crazy-line, Musk on Mars) has been passed over for that of The Godfather and it all makes me wonder if the Left needs some myth, if not the crackpottery that seems to go along with it on the right.
Granted, maybe I should just take the “much more upon unity of feeling than upon logical rules” as a warning that myth is inherently a dead end on politics and maybe getting high on your own mythical supply is a great way to crash your economy into a bottomless pit. Who can say? 🤷
America cannot run trade surpluses due to dollar hegemony and what American citizens get out of their perpetual trade deficits is permanently subsidized consumption. Our political structure has substituted broad based benefits, like taking the surplus of goods and transmuting it into a national healthcare system paid for by foreign US dollar demand and allowed disproportionate benefits flow to the recipients of 40 years of tax cuts.
Now the popular front is confronting a moment where mass politics is most salient - everyone will pay more for everything - and the reaction from supposed coalition members like UAW leadership is to pursue rent-extraction for their guilds. If labor or anyone else cannot see that the leopard will also eat their face, they can be discarded from the coalition calculus.
I remember reading Rafael Patai’s ‘The Arab Mind’ (1973) back in the aughts - probably the most elaborate westsplainer of Arab essentialism ever and a favourite of Bush neocons - and one of his “insights” was that, possibly because of the orality of prayer protocols, “Arabs” (Patai doesn’t distinguish) supposedly believe that just saying something wills it into existence.
Kinda think of this whenever a Trump bobblehead talks about the world economy.
Anyway, no external force has been willing or able to impose a sufficient cost on Republicans or sectors off the corporate world for choosing Trumpism, so it’s strange to imagine the markets actually delivering the greatest blow to their domination fantasy.
Mandatory reminder: there is not a single actual problem for which the solution involves Trump in whole or in part.
He is pathologically in capable of doing bad for anyone outside a very small cohort. Everyone else is just a target for the bully to punch down.
These two things are obvious enough. Anyone who couldn’t see it, specially, but not only, post-Covid and J6 — that is, the last five years — well, they have a problem.
There is no reasonable, justifiable disputing this.
I went to the FDR Memorial for DC's cherry blossoms the other day, strolling amid the granite walls and reading the quotes that no longer belong to our collective discourse, and it truly felt like walking in the ruins of the dead but far more advanced civilization.
The nice thing about FDR is that, if you squint and ignore some unsavoury stuff, any prospective popular front member can see their own politics in him (e.g., I see econ-brained social democracy & procedural hardball within liberalism—the goated politics).
I'd highly recommend Krugman's substack post here (https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/more-than-you-wanted-to-know-about) talking about FDR's role in US tariff policy, and Maia Mindel's here (https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/why-did-the-great-depression-happen) talking about the great depression, and the interplay between hard money and tariffs that made it much worse. Maia’s post also highlights an interesting tension in Friedman; while all of his object-level political interventions & popular work made the world worse, he made genuine contributions to his field.
My comment is not related but - I'm reading the Anatomy of Fascism now and it's striking how, whenever Paxton is explaining why a movement wasn't fascist or adding a qualification to a historical case study, inevitably, the factors he cites (failure to craft a wide enough coalition etc) are things that MAGA successfully did and/or are more criteria for fascism that MAGA passes.
As a small c conservative and a social democrat (I don’t think this is a contradiction) I can’t believe what I’m seeing right now. One point in your favor in the fascism debate is the revolutionary nature of Trump’s actions.
Thanks as always for an insightful post, John.
It occurred to me after seeing your reference to Yarvin that in part this post is about The Myth of FDR vs. reality FDR and it made me wonder if part of The New Deal/Post-War order’s endurance had to do with the durability of that myth.
That also made me wonder if what Liberalism needs, in part, is a counter myth.
So much ink was spilled post-election about whether the left needs a “Joe Rogan” but it occurs to me (very much through reading your work) that what the Right has had much longer than a Joe Rogan is their deep bench of myth schpieling crackpots (Rothbard, Yarvin in the US, Dugin etc in Russia) that provide what Ernst Cassirer called one of “the fundamental facts of mythical experience”:
“[myth’s] coherence depends much more upon unity of feeling than upon logical rules.
This unity is one of the strongest and most profound impulses…”
I’ll be frank, I am no expert on Cassie’s work and just happen to be reading it after reading a group bio of Cassirer, Benjamin, etc. a bit ago.
All that said it did make me think of When the Clock Broke and what you have said about your plans for your next book.
In short, the conservative myth of the cowboy (Reagan, Perot, maybe way down the crazy-line, Musk on Mars) has been passed over for that of The Godfather and it all makes me wonder if the Left needs some myth, if not the crackpottery that seems to go along with it on the right.
Granted, maybe I should just take the “much more upon unity of feeling than upon logical rules” as a warning that myth is inherently a dead end on politics and maybe getting high on your own mythical supply is a great way to crash your economy into a bottomless pit. Who can say? 🤷
America cannot run trade surpluses due to dollar hegemony and what American citizens get out of their perpetual trade deficits is permanently subsidized consumption. Our political structure has substituted broad based benefits, like taking the surplus of goods and transmuting it into a national healthcare system paid for by foreign US dollar demand and allowed disproportionate benefits flow to the recipients of 40 years of tax cuts.
Now the popular front is confronting a moment where mass politics is most salient - everyone will pay more for everything - and the reaction from supposed coalition members like UAW leadership is to pursue rent-extraction for their guilds. If labor or anyone else cannot see that the leopard will also eat their face, they can be discarded from the coalition calculus.
I remember reading Rafael Patai’s ‘The Arab Mind’ (1973) back in the aughts - probably the most elaborate westsplainer of Arab essentialism ever and a favourite of Bush neocons - and one of his “insights” was that, possibly because of the orality of prayer protocols, “Arabs” (Patai doesn’t distinguish) supposedly believe that just saying something wills it into existence.
Kinda think of this whenever a Trump bobblehead talks about the world economy.
Anyway, no external force has been willing or able to impose a sufficient cost on Republicans or sectors off the corporate world for choosing Trumpism, so it’s strange to imagine the markets actually delivering the greatest blow to their domination fantasy.
“One of our country’s worst commentators on politics, Batya Ungar-Sargon, recently compared Trump to a “21st century FDR””
was a satisfying enough read that I moved on from my first look at this article a few days ago. Glad in can’t back and finished, though.
Mandatory reminder: there is not a single actual problem for which the solution involves Trump in whole or in part.
He is pathologically in capable of doing bad for anyone outside a very small cohort. Everyone else is just a target for the bully to punch down.
These two things are obvious enough. Anyone who couldn’t see it, specially, but not only, post-Covid and J6 — that is, the last five years — well, they have a problem.
There is no reasonable, justifiable disputing this.