Jimmy Carter, Neoliberal; Lind Agonistes; Heterodox Economists; The Order
Reading, Watching 01.05.2024
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
I gotta start again with some personal news (i.e. bragging.) First, I’ll be writing a monthly column for The Nation, both online and in print. I’m very excited to join such a grand old place, where many of my heroes wrote. This won’t change Unpopular Front — the newsletter will continue as usual.
Second, Penguin/Viking has agreed to publish When the Clock Broke in the UK. The audiobook and ebook should be available soon, and the paperback will be out in June.
And third, I was thrilled to learn that the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa named When the Clock Broke as his top book of 2024 in Süddeutsche Zeitung. Here’s a translation of what he wrote:
The book that impressed me most this year is 'When the Clock Broke' by John Ganz. In the USA, the bestseller is currently being celebrated as a brilliant prequel to Donald Trump's rise, and rightly so. Ganz delves deep into American politics and society in the early 1990s and portrays an eerie milieu teeming with right-wing politicians, thinkers, police chiefs, conspiracy theorists and fraudsters. They are all united by the attempt to radicalize America. Their counter-revolution in 1992 failed miserably, but the extremist forces have now been unleashed. Ganz's thesis: Trump, as a billionaire populist, white nationalist and gangster patriarch, is today a kind of synthesis of elements that existed loosely and ineffectively side by side in the 1990s. Precise, astute and historically sound, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the history and appeal of Trumpism.
This is a particularly cool shout-out for me because Rosa was a student of Axel Honneth, whom I took a couple of seminars with at Columbia and who is a big influence on my work.
On his Substack,
has a great look back at the economic legacy of Jimmy Carter:—Nearly everything you might associate with Reaganomics was actually underway by the time Carter left office: deregulation of energy, transportation, communications and finance; higher military spending alongside reductions in support for low-income Americans; punishingly high interest rates; trade expansion; rapid deindustrialization; and accelerating de-unionization. Carter was hardly the only force behind these outcomes, but he contributed intentionally to each.
By 1984, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s top domestic policy adviser, could already describe the former president’s most important legacy as “taking the Democrats into the post-New Deal era.” This meant “supporting fiscal moderation and less government intrusion in the economy — a philosophy of government that some now describe as ‘neo-liberal.’”
It is common to separate Carter’s laudable personal qualities from his presidency, which even admirers tend to consider a failure. But his neoliberalism was bound up with his temperament and value system. Think about the different meanings of “austerity.” In political economy, the word refers to budget cuts and wage restraint. In personal life, austerity means the moralization of sparseness, the practice of sucking it up and doing without.
An op-ed from September in The Financial Times by Simon Kuper has been doing the rounds again — Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa:
So what connects these men’s southern African backgrounds with Maga today? Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “known for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude”, writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership in the company country club.” The mine’s Black migrant workers lived in work camps.
To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”. His spokesman has denied that he ever supported apartheid.
Back in April 2022, I called the tech-oligarchy ideology baasskap:
Something like a class-consciousness of the most reactionary section of the tech bourgeoisie now appears to be crystallizing and, with it, a concomitant set of political practices and ideologies. (Musk and Thiel formed PayPal together.) The ideology, stripped of all its mystifying decoration, is actually pretty simple and crude: it says “bosses on top.” This is the unifying thread that runs through Yarvin’s tedious peregrinations from radical libertarianism to monarchism: the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good. It is, to borrow a term from the history of apartheid, baasskap—boss-ism.
And speaking of Yarvin’s tedious peregrinations, on his substack he has an illiberal defense of grab-em-all immigration policy. I don’t recommend reading it per se—it’s a lot of gobbledygook, but if you’re curious, this is what Vance, Musk, Thiel, etc. think is smart stuff.