Mailbag No. 1
You Ask, I Answer
Hello Dear Readers,
This is the first mail bag post, which I will do monthly or so. If you’re a paid subscriber, just respond to the email or leave a comment on a post and I’ll try my best to answer your questions. Since we’re just getting started, I only have two questions this month. I’ll probably do a couple more in the future, but I guess I’ll be able to answer them with the attention they deserve.
Reader itsveryquiet asks:
I’m writing on the night of January 8, after the fascist putsch attempt in Brazil, and after Lula correctly labeled the attempt as fascist. My question: are you able to speculate as to the reasons why there is persistent resistance among my co-partisans on the left to describing the (post-)Trumpian attack on democracy here in the US as fascist?
I can think of several categories of motives: ideological (“saying they’re fascists will subordinate the left to neoliberal factions”); professional (“I have a book saying this isn’t fascism, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it”); and social (“calling it fascism is cringe af”). I am very interested in your thoughts on this question. I find it so frustrating.
Ugh, what I mean to ask is, can you speculate on why this sentiment has staying power on the left? Sorry if I’ve been unclear. It’s late and I’m upset.
No, you’ve been perfectly clear. And yes, I also find it very frustrating. I think you already identify some real motivations there, but I don’t want to discount the idea of “good faith” objections. I think it really is an open question. I’ve always looked at this as a research program: how far can we get with the “fascism frame,” how much can it reveal, does it illuminate anything? I think the answer has clearly been, “Yes”. It’s obviously not exactly like fascism as it was in the 1920s and 1930s; we live in a very different era. The philosopher of science Imre Lakatos said the criterion of a progressive research program was its ability to predict novel facts. I think you could say the “fascism thesis” has had some predictive success: people who thought it was fascism correctly imagined that something like January 6 might happen, while others thought the very idea was absurd. I also think that even if people’s motivations are conflicted, or even if they are in bad faith, a genuinely important discussion can happen. Passions much baser than pure intellectual curiosity can generate real knowledge. Other people might find this all tedious, but I think this is a genuine, interesting, and worthwhile debate. That being said, on a personal level I often find many of my interlocutors in this debate to be obtuse, supercilious, or churlish, sometimes all three, and I’m sure some feel the same way about me.
I want to add one more variation on the themes you’ve mentioned. There’s a certain sense in which calling things “fascist” is something that is just not done among serious intellectuals. That’s for cheap pamphleteers and propagandists, maybe for writers of newsletters, but not real scholars. Smart people don’t do that, they introduce nuance, they know there are all sorts of varieties. Calling something “fascist” is a bit gauche and consigns you to the middlebrow at best. The irony, of course, is that this is just a mutual signaling of thoughtfulness and intellect instead of their actual performance. I think this is clearly part of what’s going on, and why the people who argue against it never seem to take even the strongest arguments fully seriously. To a certain extent, I can’t blame them. Some of the people who call things fascism are pretty vulgar and imprecise and, in many cases, sort of borderline charlatans. It’s also a crazy and scary topic to bring into any discussion: the Nazis!? Hitler!? Surely, you must be joking!
But I think the non-fascist-callers are overly guided by the comme il faut behavior of “intellectuals” to avoid vulgarity above all else. You can see that because when they knock on you, it’s usually about how you are not smart or learned enough to see what’s so obviously the case. “One” just doesn’t do it. Heidegger called this discourse that speaks for “what one does” Das Man, often translated as “the They.” I think “the They” informs all the motivations you correctly identified: they are all more about what a certain crowd does or does not do than what’s actually going on in the world. To add another layer, I also think people just flat out don’t know very much about fascism and have a very cartoonish idea of it, but assume of course as very smart people they must know, and know better than you or I.
You know what I say? Fuck ‘em.
Brendan writes:
Hey John,
Another interesting column.
I have questions about your craft: do you recall anything which was particularly useful to your formation as a writer? Do you think of yourself as a trade writer, or more of an independent scholar? Does either conception affect how you approach form, or do you mostly operate on intuition? And do you approach your Substack work in the same manner as you would commissioned pieces?
Thanks,
Brendan
Thanks Brendan. This is a great series of questions that I’m going to kind of answer in reverse order. I do approach posts here differently than commissioned pieces. For one thing, I love that I write about whatever I want so long as my subscribers will tolerate it. I’ve been pleasantly surprised just how much of an appetite there is for the strange stuff I’m interested in. Not worrying about tailoring a pitch to what an editor thinks the public wants is very liberating. On the other hand, great editors help you improve your writing in ways that you just can’t really do on your own. If you are starting out as a writer, unless your thing is being especially gonzo and probably even then, you should work with a good editor. You will learn a ton. I miss having an editor and when I do work with one, either for magazine articles or on my book, it’s a very special type of creative collaboration that I believe every writer really needs.
I’m not sure how I conceive of myself as a writer. I guess I just tell people I’m a “writer” without specifying journalist, essayist, historian, or whatever to avoid all that. If they ask what kind I just say, “I write mostly about politics and history.” I didn’t even really set out to be a writer. I’ve always loved history, political theory, and philosophy, and thought about a PhD at one point, but I fortunately quickly realized that academia wasn’t for me. I actually got an MFA in painting, but I took some writing classes while in grad school and sort of got more out of them than my art classes. I had done some art writing before grad school and when I got out took a job writing copy for a music media company, which was meant to be a day job. Then the 2016 election happened and I started writing about politics. And here I am now.
It’s probably unavoidable, especially when you start, but I actually think a lot of self-consciousness is not helpful. With a writing assignment or newsletter, I have a job to get done and I try to find the right words. Sometimes I’m lucky and there’s a sentence or two I think is good. I care about style, but I’m not usually thinking about it when I write. I am trying to make myself as clear as possible to my reader. I do my best to keep the aesthetic pretentiousness under control while I’m actually writing. Writing is ultimately just a way to convey information and I think good writing just conveys information well. If the reader enjoys it to the point they want to keep reading, that’s good writing, if it’s vivid and clear enough that they understand and they remember what they read, that’s good writing. For me, bad writing is a slog, vague, and not memorable.
I also try to read widely: scholarly books, but also novels, the classics, essayists, the newspaper, criticism, whatever. I had to read the 90s New York Post for book research recently and was kind of blown away with how great the writing was and how good they were at accomplishing what they set out to do. It had zero pretense: “We’re a newspaper, people read us on the train, they want to be entertained, they want the essential facts fast, bam, bam, bam.” Sure, it was tacky and seedy, it’s a tabloid, but it was all just so professionally put together. Anytime I encounter a good piece of craftsmanship, I try to pay attention to how they did it.
When I read people I admire, I try to pick out their “tricks.” How do they get certain effects? Is it word choice? Is it rhythm or consonance? When I find a writer I like, I tend to collect their works and read as much of it as possible. Then I’ll move on. I also realize that I’m never gonna be James Joyce or Saul Bellow over here. I love the great geniuses, I can appreciate what they are able to do, I can try to emulate it a bit, but I’m real with myself: I write a niche politics newsletter. I spent a lot of time in art school trying to channel the geist of titanic ART or whatever and it just made me terribly unhappy. Once I dropped all that big time bullshit, my life and work became easier and a lot more fun. In sports clichés, they call this “staying within your game.” Now, I just try to stay within my game, go up there and put the ball in play. Sometimes you get a hit. Hope this helps!