Reading, Watching 03.31.24
Easter Rising
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little about what I’ve recently been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
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On Friday, I was on the Ezra Klein Show, where we discussed David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Trump and right-wing populism in general. If that sounds interesting to you, please check it out!
On the New Yorker website, Andrew Marantz has a piece on a new book that purports to be a compendium of the fascism debate where he gives a very fair and considered break down of the whole controversy. I highly recommend you read the whole thing, but this is probably my favorite part:
A forthcoming book about conservatism in the early nineties, John Ganz’s lively and kaleidoscopic “When the Clock Broke,” also presents fascist sympathies as quintessentially American. (In a chapter on Sam Francis, a proponent of “respectable racism” and an influential Washington Times columnist, Francis is quoted, in the late eighties, referring to himself as “ ‘a fascist,’ pronounced the Italian way.”)
Marantz’s piece has launched another round of the debate, with principal figures claiming that it vindicates their interpretation and others descending into a temper tantrum. I will have more to say about the piece and collection in question in the coming week.
In the London Review of Books, Stephen Holmes has a review of Samuel Moyn’s Cold War liberalism book:
But the strangest aspect of Moyn’s account is the openly contradictory way he treats his own thesis. After insisting on the fatal fissure in the continuity of liberal theory caused by the Cold War, he ends up confessing that in fact this imagined rupture between good and bad liberalism never actually occurred. The conceit that Cold War liberals betrayed a morally inspiring prelapsarian liberalism is central to his argument. That earlier liberalism is said to have been ‘emancipatory and futuristic before the Cold War, committed most of all to free and equal self-creation, accepting of democracy and welfare’. It’s only by making a sharp distinction between earlier and later liberalisms that Moyn is able to argue that ‘Cold War liberalism was a betrayal of liberalism itself’ and that it ‘broke with the liberalism it inherited’.
Yet this pivotal chronological distinction dissolves in his own hands. Long before the Cold War, he informs us, ‘19th-century liberalism opened the gates of the liberal citadel to conservatism.’ Similarly, ‘before the Cold War, liberalism largely served as an apologia for laissez-faire economic policy and was entangled in imperialist expansion and racist hierarchy around the world.’ By emphasising the continuity between Cold War liberalism as he has described it and the liberalism that preceded it, Moyn is recanting the premise on which his entire book is based. Passages such as these, stressing liberal continuity over liberal rupture, belie Moyn’s claim that Cold War liberalism was ‘an entirely new version’ of liberalism. They also eliminate any hope of recovering a worthy form of liberalism from the past. At the very beginning of the book, Moyn quietly inserts what we can only call a pre-emptive retraction, explicitly denying that ‘there exists some pre-Cold War form of liberalism to revive.’ With no liberating tradition to rehabilitate, Moyn ends up ‘reaching back to before the Cold War creed ... for the sake of an entirely new version’.