Reading, Watching 08.04.24
Weird is as Weird Does
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
First off, a little news related to When the Clock Broke, which is still available for purchase wherever good books are sold. This morning my book launch discussion with Michelle Goldberg will finally air on C-SPAN2 at 9:05 AM ET. If you can’t catch it then, it airs again at 12:05 PM and will be available to stream on c-span.org.
I also wanted to draw your attention to a couple of interesting recent reviews. The first, from the left, is by David Klion in The Nation. The second, from the hard right, is by Christopher Caldwell in The Lamp. Caldwell is the reviewer most sympathetic so far to the right-wing tradition I describe in the book, so his perspective is interesting for me to read. I also like that he begins with this reference:
Almost half a century ago, the historian of China Ray Huang wrote a profound, eccentric book called 1587: A Year of No Significance. Studying the emperor and half a dozen of his top administrators as they went about their routine duties, Huang made vivid a Ming dynasty being drawn into terminal decline by problems too small and a process too gradual for contemporaries to take note of: budget shortfalls, the corruption of the court by eunuchs, poorly managed trade relations with Portugal, occasional Japanese piracy, and so on. Two generations later, in the 1640s, the dynasty would meet its end in plague and insurrection.
The journalist John Ganz is attempting something similar. When the Clock Broke describes a few months in the administration of George H. W. Bush, roughly from November 1991, when the libertine ex-governor of Louisiana Edwin Edwards returned to the gubernatorial fray to drub the former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, until August 1992, when Pat Buchanan declared at the Republican National Convention in Houston that a “religious and cultural war” had broken out between two political factions—two Americas, even. Whatever was going subtly wrong then, maybe it will help explain what is going dramatically wrong now.
This is more astute than Caldwell could possibly know. I was assigned that book in my high school AP World History class with my great teacher
and I wrote a paper on the decline of the Ming dynasty. Although I wasn’t consciously thinking of Huang’s book, but I still own it and I realize now that it must have been somewhere in the background.The Democrats have decided to paint the Republicans as “weird.” What to make of this strategy? My buddy Jay Caspian Kang has a great column in The New Yorker about it:
Who is normal and who is weird? When it comes to those of us in the American media, it’s obvious that we are all weird and way too online. Yet part of our job is to gauge, and sometimes even inhabit, the mind of the normie voter. There’s a bit of theatre to this process, in which a cast of supposedly regular people—cabdrivers, people in diners, truck drivers, elementary-school teachers—is paraded upon a stage so that each can deliver a soliloquy about the candidates and the state of the nation. We in the media, the producers of this little play, adjust the lighting and hit the Applause button.
I also would add that, as contributors to the struggle for hegemony, it is also our job to form common sense, to label things weird and normal, to set boundaries. Although usually the right should be the upholders of existing normative standards, they are the conservatives after all, but since they’ve decided to frame themselves—at least on the intellectual level—as a kind of dissenting movement or even counter-revolutionary force, they’ve practically decided they are the weird party. Groups that tout their subcultural and subversive bonafides may keep a certain internal coherence and provide a sense of belonging, but are not competing to become the dominant consensus in society. They are too weird. A hegemonic strategy is more “become the new normal.” For all the New Right invocations of Gramsci, they aren’t very good at applying his theories. Perhaps because they just read the wikipedia page and leave it at that. As Gramsci noted, modern civil society is a highly complicated system that does not easily fall to frontal assaults, but must be gradually taken over:
1n the most advanced States civil society has become a very complex structure. one which is resistant to tile catastrophic irruptions caused by immediate economic factors (crises, depressions) etc.). The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a dogged artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy's whole defensive system~ whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment or their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective.