Political Romanticism; the Reciprocal Siege; "Constitutional Collapse;" Fear as a political factor; Returning to the Conformist
Reading, Watching 03.30.25
This is a weekly feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
There’s been a lot of discourse about “neo-romanticism” that I’m keen to comment on because the history of romanticism is a particular favorite of mine, but I’m going to try to give that more of an essay treatment in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I’ll re-share a piece of reading from an old one of these round-up posts:
At a used bookstore, I came across a collection containing Heinrich Heine’s “The Romantic School.” Heine was himself a Romantic lyric poet, but possessed of a famously sarcastic wit, which he let fly in his critical writing. Heine was living in exile in Paris at the time and “The Romantic School” is meant to be a corrective to Madame de Stäel’s famous book on Germany that introduced the concept of “Romanticism” to the French public. While de Stäel presented German Romanticism, the product of “the land of poets and thinkers,” as a positive ideal worth emulating, Heine was trying to demystify the artistic movement from his homeland. He preferred what he deemed to be the enlightened, progressive, and classical literature of Lessing, Schiller, Herder and Goethe and wanted to steer French readers towards that tradition and away from the Romantic School, lead by the Schlegel brothers. For Heine, German Romanticism’s turn towards Catholic traditionalism and the Middle Ages was both aesthetically and politically reactionary. The Romantics essentially served as the cultural front of the nationalist upsurge against Napoleon, with many of the principal figures also involved in anti-French intrigues and secret societies. (It must be said that Heine was particularly foresighted about the problems that might arise from the mixture German nationalism and Romanticism.)
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Heine may have been ultimately quite contemptuous of the German Romantics, but he wasn’t insensitive as to the causes of their revolt: “Perhaps it was disgust with the prevailing religion of money, a repugnance to that egoism whose hideous and distorted features glared from out all the present, that in Germany first led a few poets of the Romantic School who were sincere, to flee from refuge from the present into the past, and to seek the restoration of the middle ages.”
Also, family pride dictates that I must mention here that Heinrich Heine is my first cousin — six times removed.
This past week, there was another entry in the “fascism debate.” While some prominent scholars have revised their position and admitted there was more to the analogy than they previously admitted, some are loathe to admit defeat. I received messages from readers asking that I respond to the piece, but I’ve decided not to for a few reasons. At this point, the crisis of democracy is not hypothetical. Continued litigation of the finer points of a historical analogy seems purely academic. And, as often is the case in academic debates, the egos of the participants might be the real issue. In the face of horrifying reality, more back-and-forth seems both stale and unseemly. Although debates can be generative, they can also be parochial and alienating for a broader public. The enemy, as it were, is not other intellectuals who write for other small magazines. I’m also just tired of saying the same thing over and over again. My position is clear now: historical analogies are never perfect, but this one is instructive and provides an important context for the present. References to the history of fascism are a necessary part of the research program in the social sciences and humanities that can help us understand the political situation. As such, I’ll continue to use the analogy when it feels appropriate and enlightening. But I don’t think I want to directly engage with opponents anymore. Granted, I often quickly abandon such resolutions, but that’s my feeling at the moment. We also live under modern conditions, where authoritarian regimes have different forms and dynamics than in the middle of the 20th century, so it may be useful to turn to recent examples like Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and yes, Russia.
Related to all that, I spoke to a reporter at the Financial Times last week for an article on Trump’s culture wars. Here’s what I said: “What the Trump people have realised is that capturing the state is not enough…They also have to put pressure on the other defensive positions of liberalism, which is where its real power is — in the media and academia.” One should also add the legal profession. And I think the sense of liberalism we are talking about now is not merely the American one of “left of center,” but the more philosophical one: a broader commitment to individual rights, the rule of law, and pluralism.
This was part of a much longer disquisition on what I thought about the political strategy of the Trump administration that included a lot of ranting about Antonio Gramsci, but they can’t print that sort of stuff in a sensible newspaper. I’ve been thinking a lot about Gramsci since the election, particularly his great metaphor of civil society and the state as a vast trenchworks. In my piece right after the inauguration, I quoted this passage from The Prison Notebooks:
The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy's entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics…. A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organise with lightning speed in time and in space ; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit. Similarly, the defenders are not demoralised, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future.
My question then was just how far the Trump movement would be able to penetrate the defenses of American liberalism. Thinking of this analogy, I told the FT reporter that they’d gotten a few ditches farther than one might have supposed, but that they had not yet totally overrun the fortress. Left-wingers, myself included, often mocked the right-wing appropriation of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as crude and quasi-literate, but I have to admit that at least some of them seem to have a more sophisticated understanding of the political terrain than I had imagined. As a slight counterpoint to that, they do not seem to understand the depth or size of their opponent. As my friend Jamelle Bouie wrote in his column this past week, there is a tendency among right-wingers these days to treat the opposition as somehow fake or manufactured. This may give them a false sense of what’s going on. This could lead to overconfidence or overextension, or the belief that by destroying isolated fortifications they are destroying the enemy army. I think as the regime loses momentum, we will be leaving the “war of maneuver” phase, of spectacular rapid advances and encirclements, and entering another “war of position” phase, of a long, drawn-out attritional slog in the trenches of civil society. As Gramsci writes this is when “one passes over to siege warfare; this is concentrated, difficult, and requires exceptional qualities of patience and inventiveness. In politics, the siege is a reciprocal one, despite all appearances, and the mere fact that the ruler has to muster all his resources demonstrates how seriously he takes his adversary.”
A lot of people ask me what they should do. I am not a political strategist, but I assume the opposition will be plural: it will take many forms on many fronts. But one could do worse than to conceive of civil society as this kind of political battlefield: at the very least, it’s what many of the smarter guys on the other side are doing. Get ready for a long siege.