I'm convinced that Freddie DeBoer mentally lives in those scenes from The Omega Man where Charlton Heston has to talk to mannequins because all the people are dead. Except all the people aren't dead, and DeBoer just spends all his time yelling at his mannequins rather than having conversations with them. He has named them all for journalists who are practically speaking to his left. "You careerist piece of SHIT," he yells. "I'm a COMMUNIST," he yells.
I subscribed to DeBoer's substack for a few months and then dropped it this week. My subscription was still active the day he posted the post about Ganz's reflections on Jan 6, and it was a pure distillation of everything that became tedious and disappointing about DeBoer's pieces.
First of all, it was just a very bad reading. There was nothing "panicked" or "hysterical" about your original piece, John Ganz. If there was an affect, it struck me as depressive––and who on the left can fail to be depressed by what has indisputably become a "political win" for Trump in the wake of that spasm of directed political violence? The fact that Biden went on to take office is hardly the issue. The election has proven that whole areas of US society––civil society, the courts, public sphere reflection––are too weak to hold someone like Trump in check, because a large portion of the electorate have contempt for those institutions. (Then when liberals and leftists describe why and how that is bad, we are cast as annoying pearl-clutchers or kids who run to the teacher to whine.)
Second, even more blatantly than usual, DoBoer was clearly projecting in his own post what he claims to hate on the left––policing other people for the wrong kind of political feelings. There was very little to his argument beyond "sure, the riot was really bad, but what enrages me is not this ominous political violence and all it portends, but the fact that sucky liberals are too worked up about it––because they suck."
It was illuminating to read and occasionally write something in the comments section. I've never gotten that kind of misogynist responses on any other substack. It appears that 90% of those readers are there for the contempt DeBoer sprays on liberals. Then when, every 6 weeks or so, he writes (in an aside) that he supports the dignity of trans people or affirmative action, the commenters don't really seem to believe him.
It was extremely telling that when FdB wrote a pretty tame "hey, actually trans people should be allowed to exist without being bullied or discriminated against" piece, his comment section lost their minds.
I've liked a lot of Freddie's writing but had to stop reading him, he just writes the same piece about media beefs he has from a decade ago over and over again. You could probably write them with AI at this point, it just makes for incredibly tedious reading.
You report De Boer as writing: "The lament of the early Trump years was not that democracy had yielded destructive results, as it sometimes/often/usually does, but that the delicate sense of order in the universe held by front-of-class kids had been unnaturally broken. Oh well." -
I am one of those presumably "delicate-sensed" Left/Democrats. Neither I, nor any of my many like-minded friends, are worried about a delicate sense of order in the universe (a very murky notion) disappearing, but about something concrete: the compromising or breakage of the US Constitution, its laws and associated customs. It is that which Trump has been breaking or compromising--often in full daylight (as in the taped phone conversation with a Georgian election official in which Trump engaged in an unlawful attempt at election interference--and this is just one such example). These are real, down-to-earth transgressions which, I would think, any responsible US citizen would contest in every lawful way they could. The attempt by various commentators to frame all criticisms of Trump and MAGA-ism as some sort of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" by pearl-clutchers is just another example of normalizing the abnormal. And if that abnormal does become normal, I wonder how De Boer will consider that.
In the meantime, it seems to me that over in MAGA-world and among Republican fellow-travelers of that world, there is a lot of sense that some sort of order has been destroyed--and a lot more than delicate-sensed disapproval of that presumed loss. I have been reading Right-wing social media, especially during the 2020 election period, which was rife with calls to take out the rifles and nooses. Nothing delicate there (not to mention Jan 6). I don't know if you can call the people who adhere to this "Front-of-Class-Kids" or "Back-of-Class-Kids" but wherever they are, I think it is they who merit the censorious attention that De Boer is dishing out.
I’ve given up on Freddie deBoer, and his piece on you is why. At the end of it, he dismisses your concern about the liberal order, the rule of law, etc. by saying it doesn’t exist and never did (I deleted his post so I don’t have his exact words). Politics to him is just a clash of rich vs poor, of mob vs mob, and the whole point of political discourse is to position yourself in the right mob. It’s the same sort of cynicism I’ve found in a lot of academic-humanities leftists and their camp followers on social media. It’s the leftist equivalent of Rothbard’s mob politics. And as a leftist, I’m fed up with it. There is more to politics than the clash of mobs, and liberalism has to affirm that in the face of Trumpian authoritarianism. Thank you for your work.
DeBoer's habitual assemblage of criticisms is usually most aptly directed at the writer known as "Freddie deBoer", to an almost eerie extent at times. I have both sympathy and empathy for him in this sense--he would be a better writer, a better leftist, etc. if he could be more effectively self-reflective, self-aware, and thus able to moderate and complicate his critique as well as think his way towards some politics that might actually connect him to other people who share some of his views. It's a pretty weird leftism where the person enunciating it thinks he is the necessarily and permanently solitary examplar of the left except for necessarily and permanently silent others on whose behalf FDB speaks his outrage. He sort of comes off as Harold Lauder in Stephen King's The Stand, writing incessantly in his ledger, cultivating his resentments and bitterness rather than making new connections or fellowship.
"Communally approved level of rudeness?" No offense, but you are prickly in a way that isn't everybody's cup of tea. The idea that it's some kind of pose is ridiculous.
Might be projection on his part. He envies your candor and believes it must be manufactured. Meanwhile he suffers from a constant fixation on aligning his views with the opposite of whatever he imagines the people who annoy him believe.
This is a great diss track, but personally I don’t think there’s much plausibility to the idea that Democratic politicians could have mobilized a popular movement against Trumpism. Also, the Jan 6 hearings were a genuine civic achievement of a tall order. They were not successful, but not because of bureaucracy worship or anything of the sort.
This is the a key, I think. Democrats (especially operatives) and leftists haven't responded to MAGA in optimally strategic ways. But much of the critique of Dems, from the right and left, is based on the assumption that there was some set of choices they could have made that would obviously have defeated Trumpism. Well, okay, but what would that path have been?
They usually insinuate that if people on the left had just been a little more chill, shut up about law-breaking, or performed a few more Sister Soulja moments, or something . . . . than it would have necessarily induced the right groups of people (young men, Latino folks, union members) to vote for Biden/Harris. But I don't see anything that supports that premise.
DeBoer’s an irrelevant idiot who — worse — gives self-help a bad name. (For those unfamiliar, he had problems, took time off to deal with that (good for him on that) but clearly failed (which, yes, is sad).
Society collapses but there’s no shortage of irrelevant (and worse) pundits to obfuscate, distract, etc.
DeBoer seems to hate the "well actually....." style of punditry (who doesn't). But his whole post was based on a "well actually it isn't a coup in the technical sense". Ok great who cares. It's not like the MAGA's are ever punished for not being literal in their definitions.
Appreciate this response, John. I'd read his piece in the wild. It continues to piss me off that the "if it doesn't fit this specific frame then it wasn't an insurrection" argument stays alive. (Just as I have no patience for the "if you supported the Floyd protests then you shouldn't have a problem with January 6th" thing that also won't die. Comparing very different things is a real mind virus.) We saw what we saw. People don't generally bring a bunch of zip ties to the Capitol if they were only intending to yell a little. But your assessment ultimately holds the most water. This bends the norm further to the point of breaking. It'll now take much less to cause the breakage.
FWIW I've subscribed to both Substacks, but have only renewed this one. Very unscientific proof there.
And brought knives, clubs & blackjacks, toxic bear spray, and quite a few guns--which the MSM tends to downplay simply because they weren't actually used by the insurrectionists. There are protests and there are protests, and Jan 6th was organized as a threat to frighten, intimidate and paralyze Pence and Congress from certifying the 2020 election results.
'No, he’s obsessed with the existence of some high school pecking order that he’s been excluded from. He’s obsessed with the tyrannical rule of various orders of kids: the smart kids, the cool kids, and here, “the delicate sense of order in the universe held by front-of-class kids.”'
Adam Tooze is also invoking high school archetypes in his recent work on class in America, but in a different way. Here the Democrats inhabit the role of studious prim nerds, while the Republicans are the louche yet entertaining rich kids. Whose party do you want to attend? he asks.
Well, maybe not the one where the supposedly wild-and-crazy host dances slowly alone to a forty-year-old show tune. He's also the teenager who advocates for random locker searches and modesty rules for girls. But, hey, he's always making jokes about hubcap-stealing Hispanics, so he must be wild and crazy.
Leaving aside the debate about who is actually the Cool Dude (whom, I would argue, has been embodied by Obama in our political culture), I would also argue this is the wrong way to use high school as a metaphor. What I remember from that time is mainly horizontal, not vertical. It was different groups creating their own version of self-worth, bumping into each other, getting angry, fighting, but never dominating the institution. (Which no student could have, of course. We were kids.) The promise of politics is that one group can dominate.
That felt like a real ramble, but I'm posting it anyway.
I'm convinced that Freddie DeBoer mentally lives in those scenes from The Omega Man where Charlton Heston has to talk to mannequins because all the people are dead. Except all the people aren't dead, and DeBoer just spends all his time yelling at his mannequins rather than having conversations with them. He has named them all for journalists who are practically speaking to his left. "You careerist piece of SHIT," he yells. "I'm a COMMUNIST," he yells.
I used to really like him too! The more fool me
lol
I subscribed to DeBoer's substack for a few months and then dropped it this week. My subscription was still active the day he posted the post about Ganz's reflections on Jan 6, and it was a pure distillation of everything that became tedious and disappointing about DeBoer's pieces.
First of all, it was just a very bad reading. There was nothing "panicked" or "hysterical" about your original piece, John Ganz. If there was an affect, it struck me as depressive––and who on the left can fail to be depressed by what has indisputably become a "political win" for Trump in the wake of that spasm of directed political violence? The fact that Biden went on to take office is hardly the issue. The election has proven that whole areas of US society––civil society, the courts, public sphere reflection––are too weak to hold someone like Trump in check, because a large portion of the electorate have contempt for those institutions. (Then when liberals and leftists describe why and how that is bad, we are cast as annoying pearl-clutchers or kids who run to the teacher to whine.)
Second, even more blatantly than usual, DoBoer was clearly projecting in his own post what he claims to hate on the left––policing other people for the wrong kind of political feelings. There was very little to his argument beyond "sure, the riot was really bad, but what enrages me is not this ominous political violence and all it portends, but the fact that sucky liberals are too worked up about it––because they suck."
It was illuminating to read and occasionally write something in the comments section. I've never gotten that kind of misogynist responses on any other substack. It appears that 90% of those readers are there for the contempt DeBoer sprays on liberals. Then when, every 6 weeks or so, he writes (in an aside) that he supports the dignity of trans people or affirmative action, the commenters don't really seem to believe him.
It was extremely telling that when FdB wrote a pretty tame "hey, actually trans people should be allowed to exist without being bullied or discriminated against" piece, his comment section lost their minds.
Bingo!
I've liked a lot of Freddie's writing but had to stop reading him, he just writes the same piece about media beefs he has from a decade ago over and over again. You could probably write them with AI at this point, it just makes for incredibly tedious reading.
Freddie let the internet turn him into an asshole and mistook that for an ideology. Not an uncommon affliction, unfortunately.
Which is ironic, because one of his main themes is that "the internet has turned young liberals and leftists into assholes."
FdB was an early pioneer (master, really) of that form. Shame he doesn’t realize it.
I feel like if someone wrote "the beer hall putsch was a success" we would understand what they meant and not immediately nitpick.
You report De Boer as writing: "The lament of the early Trump years was not that democracy had yielded destructive results, as it sometimes/often/usually does, but that the delicate sense of order in the universe held by front-of-class kids had been unnaturally broken. Oh well." -
I am one of those presumably "delicate-sensed" Left/Democrats. Neither I, nor any of my many like-minded friends, are worried about a delicate sense of order in the universe (a very murky notion) disappearing, but about something concrete: the compromising or breakage of the US Constitution, its laws and associated customs. It is that which Trump has been breaking or compromising--often in full daylight (as in the taped phone conversation with a Georgian election official in which Trump engaged in an unlawful attempt at election interference--and this is just one such example). These are real, down-to-earth transgressions which, I would think, any responsible US citizen would contest in every lawful way they could. The attempt by various commentators to frame all criticisms of Trump and MAGA-ism as some sort of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" by pearl-clutchers is just another example of normalizing the abnormal. And if that abnormal does become normal, I wonder how De Boer will consider that.
In the meantime, it seems to me that over in MAGA-world and among Republican fellow-travelers of that world, there is a lot of sense that some sort of order has been destroyed--and a lot more than delicate-sensed disapproval of that presumed loss. I have been reading Right-wing social media, especially during the 2020 election period, which was rife with calls to take out the rifles and nooses. Nothing delicate there (not to mention Jan 6). I don't know if you can call the people who adhere to this "Front-of-Class-Kids" or "Back-of-Class-Kids" but wherever they are, I think it is they who merit the censorious attention that De Boer is dishing out.
I’ve given up on Freddie deBoer, and his piece on you is why. At the end of it, he dismisses your concern about the liberal order, the rule of law, etc. by saying it doesn’t exist and never did (I deleted his post so I don’t have his exact words). Politics to him is just a clash of rich vs poor, of mob vs mob, and the whole point of political discourse is to position yourself in the right mob. It’s the same sort of cynicism I’ve found in a lot of academic-humanities leftists and their camp followers on social media. It’s the leftist equivalent of Rothbard’s mob politics. And as a leftist, I’m fed up with it. There is more to politics than the clash of mobs, and liberalism has to affirm that in the face of Trumpian authoritarianism. Thank you for your work.
DeBoer's habitual assemblage of criticisms is usually most aptly directed at the writer known as "Freddie deBoer", to an almost eerie extent at times. I have both sympathy and empathy for him in this sense--he would be a better writer, a better leftist, etc. if he could be more effectively self-reflective, self-aware, and thus able to moderate and complicate his critique as well as think his way towards some politics that might actually connect him to other people who share some of his views. It's a pretty weird leftism where the person enunciating it thinks he is the necessarily and permanently solitary examplar of the left except for necessarily and permanently silent others on whose behalf FDB speaks his outrage. He sort of comes off as Harold Lauder in Stephen King's The Stand, writing incessantly in his ledger, cultivating his resentments and bitterness rather than making new connections or fellowship.
"Communally approved level of rudeness?" No offense, but you are prickly in a way that isn't everybody's cup of tea. The idea that it's some kind of pose is ridiculous.
Might be projection on his part. He envies your candor and believes it must be manufactured. Meanwhile he suffers from a constant fixation on aligning his views with the opposite of whatever he imagines the people who annoy him believe.
None taken!
That fixation will lead him to become the next Eugene Genovese.
This is a great diss track, but personally I don’t think there’s much plausibility to the idea that Democratic politicians could have mobilized a popular movement against Trumpism. Also, the Jan 6 hearings were a genuine civic achievement of a tall order. They were not successful, but not because of bureaucracy worship or anything of the sort.
This is the a key, I think. Democrats (especially operatives) and leftists haven't responded to MAGA in optimally strategic ways. But much of the critique of Dems, from the right and left, is based on the assumption that there was some set of choices they could have made that would obviously have defeated Trumpism. Well, okay, but what would that path have been?
They usually insinuate that if people on the left had just been a little more chill, shut up about law-breaking, or performed a few more Sister Soulja moments, or something . . . . than it would have necessarily induced the right groups of people (young men, Latino folks, union members) to vote for Biden/Harris. But I don't see anything that supports that premise.
"Not Like Us" sharp-tongued lefty Substacker edition.
DeBoer’s an irrelevant idiot who — worse — gives self-help a bad name. (For those unfamiliar, he had problems, took time off to deal with that (good for him on that) but clearly failed (which, yes, is sad).
Society collapses but there’s no shortage of irrelevant (and worse) pundits to obfuscate, distract, etc.
DeBoer seems to hate the "well actually....." style of punditry (who doesn't). But his whole post was based on a "well actually it isn't a coup in the technical sense". Ok great who cares. It's not like the MAGA's are ever punished for not being literal in their definitions.
This is a perfect encapsulation of the Freddie de Boer experience.
Appreciate this response, John. I'd read his piece in the wild. It continues to piss me off that the "if it doesn't fit this specific frame then it wasn't an insurrection" argument stays alive. (Just as I have no patience for the "if you supported the Floyd protests then you shouldn't have a problem with January 6th" thing that also won't die. Comparing very different things is a real mind virus.) We saw what we saw. People don't generally bring a bunch of zip ties to the Capitol if they were only intending to yell a little. But your assessment ultimately holds the most water. This bends the norm further to the point of breaking. It'll now take much less to cause the breakage.
FWIW I've subscribed to both Substacks, but have only renewed this one. Very unscientific proof there.
And brought knives, clubs & blackjacks, toxic bear spray, and quite a few guns--which the MSM tends to downplay simply because they weren't actually used by the insurrectionists. There are protests and there are protests, and Jan 6th was organized as a threat to frighten, intimidate and paralyze Pence and Congress from certifying the 2020 election results.
The
'No, he’s obsessed with the existence of some high school pecking order that he’s been excluded from. He’s obsessed with the tyrannical rule of various orders of kids: the smart kids, the cool kids, and here, “the delicate sense of order in the universe held by front-of-class kids.”'
Adam Tooze is also invoking high school archetypes in his recent work on class in America, but in a different way. Here the Democrats inhabit the role of studious prim nerds, while the Republicans are the louche yet entertaining rich kids. Whose party do you want to attend? he asks.
Well, maybe not the one where the supposedly wild-and-crazy host dances slowly alone to a forty-year-old show tune. He's also the teenager who advocates for random locker searches and modesty rules for girls. But, hey, he's always making jokes about hubcap-stealing Hispanics, so he must be wild and crazy.
Leaving aside the debate about who is actually the Cool Dude (whom, I would argue, has been embodied by Obama in our political culture), I would also argue this is the wrong way to use high school as a metaphor. What I remember from that time is mainly horizontal, not vertical. It was different groups creating their own version of self-worth, bumping into each other, getting angry, fighting, but never dominating the institution. (Which no student could have, of course. We were kids.) The promise of politics is that one group can dominate.
That felt like a real ramble, but I'm posting it anyway.
I've also used the metaphor! But it's not my only one