Just finished listening. I am not an intellectual or an academic. I'm a self-employed agency owner that went to design school, and I wish this conversation would have gone on for another two hours.
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.
> Chris Maisano: 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...
Good stuff. This is nitpicky but I do think it's useful to distinguish Burnham from Francis -- and also maybe attend to some shifts in Burnham's thinking. The Burnham of The Managerial Revolution was a post-Marxist but just barely ( think he wrote the book only a year of two after he left the Trotskyist movement. So it is still a theory of class and of modes of production. The new managerial class took it's position because private family capitalism was no longer up to the technical demands of the modern world and the emerging super-states. With the Machiavellians might seem like a reversion to pre-class thinking -- and certainly has a flavor of cyclical history, Burnham really continued to maintain all his life that the managerial class was a real distinct class, with its own class consciousness & interests, and the only possible class for a modern industrial nation. Burnham himself was in someways a product of that class, a child of the high bourgeois who became a technician of power (as consultant to OSS and CIA). Burnham never thought he could or should overthrow the managerial class. The only option was to try to sway it (in a Machivellian circulation of elite fashion) by creating counterpoints of power, National Review and the right-wing of the GOP. Notably, his hope in 1960s was in what he saw as good managers, not Goldwater or Reagan but Nelson Rockefeller and Robert McNamara (who he defended against left and right attacks). Conversely Francis was never that upscale, saw himself as voice of dispossessed midland gentry (not so much the deep south as the borderland, Kentucky and North Carolina). As such he had hopes that his people could challenge managerial control and return to power. It's a bit less theoretically satisfying than Burnham because what is the change in mode of production that would allow such a return to happen? As it developed, what happened was mid-century managerialism had to make room fro a return to buccaneer capitalism in form of Silicon Valley new money, types that felt confined by managerial rules and hence were willing to ally with Francis' Middle American radicals. But Francis never saw that coming, that was the ruse of history surprising us all.
Burnham was very different from Francis was very different from Rothbard—plus there were many different Burnhams, depending on when, where he was at the time, who his audience then was, and what he was trying to accomplish.
And I do not know nearly as much about all the successive and very different Burnhams as I should, given that I am supposed to be a Highly Trained Professional at this.
And I really do not know as much about them as I should, given that the gravitational intellectual influence of the superstar that is composed of Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi, and Evans <https://henryfarrell.net/large-ai-models-are-cultural-and-social-technologies/> <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/shoggoths-amongst-us> (plus Fourcade, plus Healy, plus Davies). They are rapidly convincing me that if I am to be actually useful—if I am to have any insight into human society in the rapidly approaching Attention Info-Bio Tech Age mode of production—I need much better insight into Burnham.
Why Burnham?
Because he is the starting point for serious thinking about bureaucracies, ideologies, and democracies alongside markets and "other social technologies" as powerful organizational technologies. Those profoundly alter the shape and functioning of the East African Plains Ape Anthology Intelligence in which each of us is enmeshed, and that determines the possibilities and scope for our lives.
So what should I read about Burnham, other than Orwell, and the scattered Twitter observations of Jeet Heer?
> Jeet Heer: 'Good stuff. This is nitpicky but I do think it's useful to distinguish Burnham from Francis -- and also maybe attend to some shifts in Burnham's thinking. The Burnham of The Managerial Revolution was a post-Marxist but just barely ( think he wrote the book only a year of two after he left the Trotskyist movement. So it is still a theory of class and of modes of production.
> The new managerial class took its position because private family capitalism was no longer up to the technical demands of the modern world and the emerging super-states. While the Machiavellians might seem like a reversion to pre-class thinking -- and certainly has a flavor of cyclical history, Burnham really continued to maintain all his life that the managerial class was a real distinct class, with its own class consciousness & interests, and the only possible class for a modern industrial nation. Burnham himself was in someways a product of that class, a child of the high bourgeois who became a technician of power (as consultant to OSS and CIA). Burnham never thought he could or should overthrow the managerial class. The only option was to try to sway it (in a Machivellian circulation of elite fashion) by creating counterpoints of power, National Review and the right-wing of the GOP.
> Notably, his hope in 1960s was in what he saw as good managers, not Goldwater or Reagan but Nelson Rockefeller and Robert McNamara (who he defended against left and right attacks).
> Conversely Francis was never that upscale, saw himself as voice of dispossessed midland gentry (not so much the deep south as the borderland, Kentucky and North Carolina). As such he had hopes that his people could challenge managerial control and return to power. It's a bit less theoretically satisfying than Burnham because what is the change in mode of production that would allow such a return to happen? As it developed, what happened was mid-century managerialism had to make room fro a return to buccaneer capitalism in form of Silicon Valley new money, types that felt confined by managerial rules and hence were willing to ally with Francis' Middle American radicals. But Francis never saw that coming, that was the ruse of history surprising us all...
Good question. Burnham is very important (not just for history of the right but also the left and Cold War liberalism) and hasn't gotten quite the top notch scholarly attention that a figure of his stature deserves. One problem is that to understand him you have to understand Trotskyism and also the America -- you have some who understand one or the other but rarely both. I actually think you, Dylan & John should do a podcast series going through the books and biography. But in terms of what exists, John Patrick Diggins' Up From Commnunism is very good on Burnham and also the other early National Review types who started as communists and ended up on far right). It's actually quite well written as well. John Judis has a good discussion of Burnham in a chapter of a book called Grand Illusions. There is a biography by Daniel Kelly done by a Buckleyite press (ISI) which can best be described as dutiful. It gives the basic facts but lacks analytical heft.Worth checking out two Burnham National Review pieces -- his 1960s profile of Robert McNamara (an interesting defense of the administrative revolution in pentagon) and his review of Alfred Chandler's Visible Hand (from, I think, 1977).
> [James] Burnham is very important... and hasn't gotten quite the top notch scholarly attention that a[n intellectual] figure of his stature deserves.... To understand him you have to understand Trotskyism and also America.... You, Dylan [Riley] & John {Ganz] should do a podcast series...
I have a better idea: next episode of "Inflection Point": Dylan Riley, Jeet Heer, John Ganz, and Brad DeLong discussing "James Burnham & the Schachtmanites: From 'The Prophet Armed' to 'Francisco Franco Is Still Dead'"
I seem to remember it was more interesting for what it said about Francis than what it said about Burnham. I mean a bear-bone analysis of Burnham, rightly emphasizing The Machiavellians but not many great analytical insights other than that Burnham was a modernist (or, as we would say, a "reactionary modernist."
Your comments beginning at 44:26 on the utility of fascism analogy does an immense service in clarifying the political economic order we are in the midst of.
Loved the convo! My ears perked up in particular during the conversation drawing connections with Napoleon III - I've heard you make this comparison in a few places now, and wondered if you'd be willing to drop a reading list of works you've found helpful for learning more about the failure of the Second Republic/rise of the Second Empire. I tried reading Christopher Clark's Revolutionary Spring (2023) last year, and while I respect what he's trying to do, I think the project was just too big to successfully hang together. I found Jonathan Beecher's Writers and Revolution (2021), which focuses just on France, to be a much better read, and am hungry for more recs.
To entice others to pick up Beecher's book, I'll leave you with some choice quotes that are included about about Adolphe Thiers. May we live our lives in such a way as to avoid having some of the greatest thinkers and writers of our century come to unanimous conclusions about how much we suck.
"A mischievious abortion." - Karl Marx
"Can anyone find a more triumphant imbecile, a more abject old scab, a more turdlike bourgeois?" - Gustave Flaubert
"Turdlike is just the word to characterize this shit-shaped vegetable, this clown without an idea." - George Sand
On a point towards the end of the discussion on a crisis of representation, I had finished listening to Ezra and Derek Thompson doing their book schtick on a podcast before listening to this, but I think there's a distinct lack of acknowledgement from them and their proposition with how they fail to address the representation issue.
The YIMBY crowd have (rightfully IMO) made a point of the undemocratic nature of the current town hall structure, they've pointed to how infeasible it is to represent future residents rather than the folks in the room at the microphone. But the solution seems to be hoping that mobilizing the folks who can't afford to move or achieve their goals is enough to overwhelm this entrenchment, which I'm a bit skeptical of. The New Deal synthesis of promising great things in exchange for participation in the coalition basically isn't there in the synthesis.
Additionally, on the point of HW Bush absorbing the prior Reaganites and Ford wing, the Abundance discussions basically take for granted that there's been perpetual liberalism on display since Reagan! In what amounts to an apology tour for decades of management by people they view as fellow travellers, they're doing their own absorption of past Republican governance into the miasma of liberalism. Agreed very much that your book being a legible, and less fast-paced preview of our current times has been a huge help. I think folks would look wistfully at Ross Perot's digital townhalls and administrative reform promise.
Always enjoy listening to you Ganz. Not least because you talk like a human being. But the 2 Inflection Point hosts need some help. One sounds like an 80s era idea of our future robot overlords. The other like an insecure academic pontificating to bored undergrads. Perhaps they need more time in close study of regular conversing human beings, so they might imitate them more faithfully?
After following the links (as far as I could) and getting a sense of the inquiry I think you guys are on to something. If you train long and hard enough you, too, can learn how to discern threads through history.
These two scholars are pretty amazing; with bs detectors VU-metering throughout the discussion, each of you held true to critical analysis based on a vast and sometimes very deep understanding of threads in history.
Ganz you held ground admirably. While my brain was breaking you seemed to understand the gist of most all arguments put forth, and your hosts gave as good as it gets.
I know I’m probably stanning (or starving) for what is probably mere academy. But I must say that you interpreted the discourse at times in a very beneficial way (“wtf structure?”), not to say they were anything nearing pedantic, let’s chalk it up to a mild form of jargon of which I’m new to.
I know that I was thinking about Dean Acheson's book "A Democratic Looks at His Party"—the part where he talks about how the Republican Party is the party of millionaires and those who expect to some day millionaires. And I know that I was thinking about John Steinbeck "A Primer on the '30s." Esquire (June 1960), p. 85-93: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist..."
If it was about France and Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx's "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" is his anti-Napoleon III ragepost. And Niall Ferguson's excellent big Rothschilds biography has very nice quotes about the Rothschild family's reactions to the rise of Napoleon III...
> Anyone catch the book on 1848 Delong mentions about 30ish mins in?
Just finished listening. I am not an intellectual or an academic. I'm a self-employed agency owner that went to design school, and I wish this conversation would have gone on for another two hours.
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.
Nicely put:
> Chris Maisano: 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...
<https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/inflection-point-with-dylan-riley>
Good stuff. This is nitpicky but I do think it's useful to distinguish Burnham from Francis -- and also maybe attend to some shifts in Burnham's thinking. The Burnham of The Managerial Revolution was a post-Marxist but just barely ( think he wrote the book only a year of two after he left the Trotskyist movement. So it is still a theory of class and of modes of production. The new managerial class took it's position because private family capitalism was no longer up to the technical demands of the modern world and the emerging super-states. With the Machiavellians might seem like a reversion to pre-class thinking -- and certainly has a flavor of cyclical history, Burnham really continued to maintain all his life that the managerial class was a real distinct class, with its own class consciousness & interests, and the only possible class for a modern industrial nation. Burnham himself was in someways a product of that class, a child of the high bourgeois who became a technician of power (as consultant to OSS and CIA). Burnham never thought he could or should overthrow the managerial class. The only option was to try to sway it (in a Machivellian circulation of elite fashion) by creating counterpoints of power, National Review and the right-wing of the GOP. Notably, his hope in 1960s was in what he saw as good managers, not Goldwater or Reagan but Nelson Rockefeller and Robert McNamara (who he defended against left and right attacks). Conversely Francis was never that upscale, saw himself as voice of dispossessed midland gentry (not so much the deep south as the borderland, Kentucky and North Carolina). As such he had hopes that his people could challenge managerial control and return to power. It's a bit less theoretically satisfying than Burnham because what is the change in mode of production that would allow such a return to happen? As it developed, what happened was mid-century managerialism had to make room fro a return to buccaneer capitalism in form of Silicon Valley new money, types that felt confined by managerial rules and hence were willing to ally with Francis' Middle American radicals. But Francis never saw that coming, that was the ruse of history surprising us all.
No!
Not nit-picky at all.
Burnham was very different from Francis was very different from Rothbard—plus there were many different Burnhams, depending on when, where he was at the time, who his audience then was, and what he was trying to accomplish.
And I do not know nearly as much about all the successive and very different Burnhams as I should, given that I am supposed to be a Highly Trained Professional at this.
And I really do not know as much about them as I should, given that the gravitational intellectual influence of the superstar that is composed of Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi, and Evans <https://henryfarrell.net/large-ai-models-are-cultural-and-social-technologies/> <https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/shoggoths-amongst-us> (plus Fourcade, plus Healy, plus Davies). They are rapidly convincing me that if I am to be actually useful—if I am to have any insight into human society in the rapidly approaching Attention Info-Bio Tech Age mode of production—I need much better insight into Burnham.
Why Burnham?
Because he is the starting point for serious thinking about bureaucracies, ideologies, and democracies alongside markets and "other social technologies" as powerful organizational technologies. Those profoundly alter the shape and functioning of the East African Plains Ape Anthology Intelligence in which each of us is enmeshed, and that determines the possibilities and scope for our lives.
So what should I read about Burnham, other than Orwell, and the scattered Twitter observations of Jeet Heer?
> Jeet Heer: 'Good stuff. This is nitpicky but I do think it's useful to distinguish Burnham from Francis -- and also maybe attend to some shifts in Burnham's thinking. The Burnham of The Managerial Revolution was a post-Marxist but just barely ( think he wrote the book only a year of two after he left the Trotskyist movement. So it is still a theory of class and of modes of production.
> The new managerial class took its position because private family capitalism was no longer up to the technical demands of the modern world and the emerging super-states. While the Machiavellians might seem like a reversion to pre-class thinking -- and certainly has a flavor of cyclical history, Burnham really continued to maintain all his life that the managerial class was a real distinct class, with its own class consciousness & interests, and the only possible class for a modern industrial nation. Burnham himself was in someways a product of that class, a child of the high bourgeois who became a technician of power (as consultant to OSS and CIA). Burnham never thought he could or should overthrow the managerial class. The only option was to try to sway it (in a Machivellian circulation of elite fashion) by creating counterpoints of power, National Review and the right-wing of the GOP.
> Notably, his hope in 1960s was in what he saw as good managers, not Goldwater or Reagan but Nelson Rockefeller and Robert McNamara (who he defended against left and right attacks).
> Conversely Francis was never that upscale, saw himself as voice of dispossessed midland gentry (not so much the deep south as the borderland, Kentucky and North Carolina). As such he had hopes that his people could challenge managerial control and return to power. It's a bit less theoretically satisfying than Burnham because what is the change in mode of production that would allow such a return to happen? As it developed, what happened was mid-century managerialism had to make room fro a return to buccaneer capitalism in form of Silicon Valley new money, types that felt confined by managerial rules and hence were willing to ally with Francis' Middle American radicals. But Francis never saw that coming, that was the ruse of history surprising us all...
<https://inflectionpointpodcast.substack.com/p/when-the-clock-broke-starring-john>
====
P.S.: Also things I should immediately move to the top of the pile:
* **Daniel Immerwahr: **_Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society_ <<https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/daniel-immerwahr/PolanyiUS.pdf>>
* **Guido Franzinetti**: Karl Polanyi's Fascist Cousin Ödön Pór <<http://italogramma.elte.hu/wp-content/files/Guido_Franzinetti_Odon_Por.pdf>>
* **Ödön Pór**: Fascism <<https://archive.org/details/odon-por.-fascism-1923_202107>>
Good question. Burnham is very important (not just for history of the right but also the left and Cold War liberalism) and hasn't gotten quite the top notch scholarly attention that a figure of his stature deserves. One problem is that to understand him you have to understand Trotskyism and also the America -- you have some who understand one or the other but rarely both. I actually think you, Dylan & John should do a podcast series going through the books and biography. But in terms of what exists, John Patrick Diggins' Up From Commnunism is very good on Burnham and also the other early National Review types who started as communists and ended up on far right). It's actually quite well written as well. John Judis has a good discussion of Burnham in a chapter of a book called Grand Illusions. There is a biography by Daniel Kelly done by a Buckleyite press (ISI) which can best be described as dutiful. It gives the basic facts but lacks analytical heft.Worth checking out two Burnham National Review pieces -- his 1960s profile of Robert McNamara (an interesting defense of the administrative revolution in pentagon) and his review of Alfred Chandler's Visible Hand (from, I think, 1977).
Jeet Heer wrote:
> [James] Burnham is very important... and hasn't gotten quite the top notch scholarly attention that a[n intellectual] figure of his stature deserves.... To understand him you have to understand Trotskyism and also America.... You, Dylan [Riley] & John {Ganz] should do a podcast series...
I have a better idea: next episode of "Inflection Point": Dylan Riley, Jeet Heer, John Ganz, and Brad DeLong discussing "James Burnham & the Schachtmanites: From 'The Prophet Armed' to 'Francisco Franco Is Still Dead'"
<https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/inflection-point-with-dylan-riley>
What about Francis's monograph?
I seem to remember it was more interesting for what it said about Francis than what it said about Burnham. I mean a bear-bone analysis of Burnham, rightly emphasizing The Machiavellians but not many great analytical insights other than that Burnham was a modernist (or, as we would say, a "reactionary modernist."
Your comments beginning at 44:26 on the utility of fascism analogy does an immense service in clarifying the political economic order we are in the midst of.
Loved the convo! My ears perked up in particular during the conversation drawing connections with Napoleon III - I've heard you make this comparison in a few places now, and wondered if you'd be willing to drop a reading list of works you've found helpful for learning more about the failure of the Second Republic/rise of the Second Empire. I tried reading Christopher Clark's Revolutionary Spring (2023) last year, and while I respect what he's trying to do, I think the project was just too big to successfully hang together. I found Jonathan Beecher's Writers and Revolution (2021), which focuses just on France, to be a much better read, and am hungry for more recs.
To entice others to pick up Beecher's book, I'll leave you with some choice quotes that are included about about Adolphe Thiers. May we live our lives in such a way as to avoid having some of the greatest thinkers and writers of our century come to unanimous conclusions about how much we suck.
"A mischievious abortion." - Karl Marx
"Can anyone find a more triumphant imbecile, a more abject old scab, a more turdlike bourgeois?" - Gustave Flaubert
"Turdlike is just the word to characterize this shit-shaped vegetable, this clown without an idea." - George Sand
Really enjoyed this discussion!
On a point towards the end of the discussion on a crisis of representation, I had finished listening to Ezra and Derek Thompson doing their book schtick on a podcast before listening to this, but I think there's a distinct lack of acknowledgement from them and their proposition with how they fail to address the representation issue.
The YIMBY crowd have (rightfully IMO) made a point of the undemocratic nature of the current town hall structure, they've pointed to how infeasible it is to represent future residents rather than the folks in the room at the microphone. But the solution seems to be hoping that mobilizing the folks who can't afford to move or achieve their goals is enough to overwhelm this entrenchment, which I'm a bit skeptical of. The New Deal synthesis of promising great things in exchange for participation in the coalition basically isn't there in the synthesis.
Additionally, on the point of HW Bush absorbing the prior Reaganites and Ford wing, the Abundance discussions basically take for granted that there's been perpetual liberalism on display since Reagan! In what amounts to an apology tour for decades of management by people they view as fellow travellers, they're doing their own absorption of past Republican governance into the miasma of liberalism. Agreed very much that your book being a legible, and less fast-paced preview of our current times has been a huge help. I think folks would look wistfully at Ross Perot's digital townhalls and administrative reform promise.
Always enjoy listening to you Ganz. Not least because you talk like a human being. But the 2 Inflection Point hosts need some help. One sounds like an 80s era idea of our future robot overlords. The other like an insecure academic pontificating to bored undergrads. Perhaps they need more time in close study of regular conversing human beings, so they might imitate them more faithfully?
+4 insightful
After following the links (as far as I could) and getting a sense of the inquiry I think you guys are on to something. If you train long and hard enough you, too, can learn how to discern threads through history.
These two scholars are pretty amazing; with bs detectors VU-metering throughout the discussion, each of you held true to critical analysis based on a vast and sometimes very deep understanding of threads in history.
Ganz you held ground admirably. While my brain was breaking you seemed to understand the gist of most all arguments put forth, and your hosts gave as good as it gets.
I know I’m probably stanning (or starving) for what is probably mere academy. But I must say that you interpreted the discourse at times in a very beneficial way (“wtf structure?”), not to say they were anything nearing pedantic, let’s chalk it up to a mild form of jargon of which I’m new to.
I think you guys are on to something.
I really enjoyed this. I can’t find the early episodes(pre covid) online. Please re-upload them. I can’t wait for the next episode.
Earlier episodes with Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley are at:
* <https://open.substack.com/pub/inflectionpointpodcast/p/robert-brenner-and-dylan-riley>
* <https://open.substack.com/pub/inflectionpointpodcast/p/robert-brenner-and-dylan-riley-continued>
* <https://open.substack.com/pub/inflectionpointpodcast/p/robert-brenner-and-dylan-riley-concluded>
> Colby Andersu: I really enjoyed this. I can’t find the early episodes(pre covid) online. Please re-upload them. I can’t wait for the next episode.
Anyone catch the book on 1848 Delong mentions about 30ish mins in?
Do you have a timestamp?
I know that I was thinking about Dean Acheson's book "A Democratic Looks at His Party"—the part where he talks about how the Republican Party is the party of millionaires and those who expect to some day millionaires. And I know that I was thinking about John Steinbeck "A Primer on the '30s." Esquire (June 1960), p. 85-93: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist..."
If it was about France and Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx's "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" is his anti-Napoleon III ragepost. And Niall Ferguson's excellent big Rothschilds biography has very nice quotes about the Rothschild family's reactions to the rise of Napoleon III...
> Anyone catch the book on 1848 Delong mentions about 30ish mins in?
I’m assuming I’m not the only person here who thought at first glance you were talking to Tom DeLong.