He’d given me a book—more accurately, three volumes shrinkwrapped in a tan, cardboard slipcase—and said something about it being amazing. I probably said thanks and stuck it with all the rest of his gifts: zines of obscure communist theory, Italian modernist poetry, assorted Dalkey Archive paperbacks. Our lives were in many ways at cross-purposes—he a vegan straightedge animal rights activist with a penchant for literature, me an uneducated anarcho-primitivist crustpunk turned vegetable farmer—but we bonded over books.

I don’t know what eventually drew me to pull it from the tottering stack of milk crates we used for shelves. Maybe the daunting size of the thing, or the elaborate patterns on each of the spines, or the mysterious title the collection bore: “2666,” a number evoking both Satan and the future. I must have started it in winter—when the harvest was over, the canning was complete, and the only real task was to tend the hearth against the wet Kentucky cold and read—and continued between planting in the spring. I really can’t remember; and as I reach into my memory for details, the complete separation between the details of the book and my life as I read it gives me pause.

I lived in Bolaño’s world for months. I fell into the darkness with his litterateurs; I watched with Amalfitano as his geometry text withered on the line in the Mexican heat; I prowled about Santa Teresa with Oscar Fate, horrified yet resolute; I sat cooking in the sun at every crime scene, grew mad with Lalo Cura, stared too long into the eyes of Haase; and I wandered broken across the ruins of Europe with Archimboldi, lost in a dream of a world undone. When I closed the final volume and returned to normal life, I’d found the real world I lived in changed forever.

It’s an elementary observation, of course—the stuff of college application essays and youthful romanticism. But I’d never written such an essay—the local state university required only GPA and a valid bank account—and I was in fact a youthful romantic. (Now I’m an old one.) And despite my relatively cosmopolitan form of life at the time—riding freight trains around America, talking with people from all walks of life, learning something about the ways of the world—I knew very little about anything. A handful of novels I’d read extracurricular, some half-remembered facts about American reconstruction and postbellum industrial expansion, a distaste for boredom and fluorescent lighting—these were the fruits of my 12 years of schooling. I’d been everywhere and back again, but I still lived in the confines of my ignorance. Bolaño changed that.

Thinking about it now, the first two sections of the novel—The Part About the Critics, The Part About Amalfitano—must have been the first intimate visions afforded to me into the life of academics. To this day, I still have never read a “campus novel” (unless one counts Ravelstein, which I read last year in Chicago); I only ever tasted “the college experience” through a few young women I briefly and confusedly courted; none of the movies I ever watched about university life seemed to leave any impression on my soul. Academia was terra incognita; Bolaño’s must have been the first map I found.

I’m talking from a studio where the chaos is just a mask or the faint stink of anesthesia. I’m talking from a studio with the lights out, where the sinew of the will detaches itself from the rest of the body the way the snake tongue detaches itself from the body and slithers away, self-mutilated, amid the rubbish. I’m talking from the perspective of the simple things in life. You teach philosophy? said the voice. You teach Wittgenstein? said the voice. And have you asked yourself whether your hand is a hand? said the voice. I’ve asked myself, said Amalfitano. But now you have more important things to ask yourself, am I right? said the voice. No, said Amalfitano.

The mind of a monarchical subject is as inaccessible to me as that of a horseshoe crab or slime mold. I’m a republican through and through—a “low-Anglo tyrannophobe” in the diction of one notable high-bred WASP legal scholar—for whom politicians are objects of scorn or possibly begrudging support, but never outright veneration. So when the Queen of England died last week at an impressive 96 years of age, I felt a vague, distant prick of melancholy like one might feel when an old store I never really visited goes out of business, or when a B-list alt rock band from the 90s finally calls it quits (hadn’t they a decade ago?)—but seeing the fawning adoration bestowed upon her and her station by real existing monarchists in the United Kingdom and play-acting celebrity-obsessed Americans was like watching a ritual dance of a tribe of Amazonian cannibals. Of ethnographic interest, certainly, as it’s clearly meaningful to their form of life, and forms of life are always interesting—but my interiority contains no correlate.

If the American revolution meant anything for the commoner, it granted freedom from caring about kings. The constitution promised each citizen enjoyment of their place beneath the sun free of any Alexander to disturb them. My kindness shall be extended to a fellow man or woman because they are my fellow; if the president himself knocked on my door I might invite him in for a drink, but only because he is a stranger like any other. The Queen, too, would be deserving of such hospitality. And likewise, if she is to be revered or her life to be emulated, it is for the same reason that any commoner’s might be: on account of her virtue, the nature of which, like health, is the same in any man or woman.

So yes, God save the Queen—but God save the rest of us too, “for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”

“What movement even exists anymore?”

“There’s plenty out there. It never ended. You just—“

Say it. I left. I bowed out.

“—you just haven’t been around it in a while.”

We both know what you mean and it’s not this. And you’re right: refusing to drown in a sinking ship, I swam to the shore. I denied myself a noble death—drinking myself to death in a woodland cabin hunched over my vials of herbs, or blowing my brains out in the basement of some former squat now abandoned to bleakness and ruin, or being gradually ground to dust by generation after generation of thumotic young activists who loathe my presence and deny the relevance of my knowledge—and chose instead to chase after this elusive thing called “truth.”

Maybe, though, this was always my real movement—and it’s the other one that, in the end, left me.

I’m listening to this episode of the Honestly podcast, on a dispute between Oberlin College and a local bakery: https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/e765b3b3/oberlin-accused-the-gibsons-of-racism-now-it-owes-them-dollar36-million

It’s a maddening conflict, reminiscent of a similar incident from last year at Smith College in which administrators railroaded a janitor, a campus security officer, and a lupus-afflicted cafeteria worker after a student accused them of racism. But they are both instructive episodes, inasmuch as they allow a glimpse into a few of the central purposes of progressive liberal arts colleges (PLACs) in the current age:

1. To train an increasingly diverse collection of upwardly-mobile, bourgeois private school graduates to be semi-educated activists, while
2. relying upon the cheap labor of townies of average talent who could never be admitted according to the schools’ increasingly onerous admissions policies, and
3. hoarding enormous endowments and building real estate empires in the towns where they’re located, establishing an increasingly tyrannical “gown over town” relationship.

In this respect, PLACs like Oberlin and Smith are just another kind of anarchotyrannical power broker—like big business, organized crime, etc.—seeking to establish the conditions of their own flourishing and win riches for themselves to the detriment of the social fabric around them. Townies be damned: the wheel of progress turns only through the effort of enlightened institutions, so the students are right to terrorize them for being regressive, ignorant schmucks. Better to run them out of town, or at least make them live permanently in fear of speaking their minds.

I spent a few days at Oberlin College in 2009, after being bailed out of Richland County Jail in Mansfield where I’d been held a weekend for “trespassing on railroad property” (pulled off a freight train). A friend had a friend there; I slept under a staircase for three days and made cheesecake from a recipe given to me by a fellow inmate. Up to that point I’d had extremely limited experience with “small liberal arts colleges”: the only one I’d ever stepped foot on before was Shepherd University in West Virginia, where I’d found a brief love interest and was subjected to a few soon-to-be-vogue “privilege walks” at a number of “anti-oppression workshops.” My very limited experience of higher education (that summer prowling around Shepherd, a brief stint at Marshall University in Huntington, the occasional trip to WVU with an ex-girlfriend, and some friends who attended West Virginia State in the town of Institute) suggested that most people who attended colleges and universities came from the surrounding areas. At Oberlin, though, I was surprised to find that students came from everywhere, nobody seemed to be studying anything, and everyone wanted to be an artist, an activist, or (in most cases) both. Mostly, though, they wanted to do drugs and sleep with each other. All things considered, this wasn’t much different from the Richland County Jail.

Liberal arts colleges need to be told that they cannot be tyrants—that they need to be friendly contributors to the life of their host cities, rather than seeking to establish themselves as robber barons in a factory town. Part of how this gets done is, as the Gibsons’ lawyer puts it beautifully in the podcast, is to remind administrators—forcefully, if necessary—that “what they are running is not a nursery school, it’s a college. And in that regard it’s their responsibility not to merely appease students—and when students rush to judgment or rush off in one direction, their responsibility isn’t just to support them and applaud their efforts…[but] to be the adult in the room.” The last few decades have shown us just how compatible student activism is with the neoliberalization of higher education: make students into footsoldiers of special esoteric ideologies and they’ll happily test out “changing the world” on random people and institutions that inconvenience them, opening up real estate investment opportunities and demanding the creation of endless new academic initiatives and committees along the way. There’s far less power and money to be won by helping them become responsible moral and political agents.

Birmingham, AL. I’m 13 or 14 years old, standing awkwardly in a crowd of hipsters at a hardcore show with my brother’s band on the bill. I’m fat, sweaty, and tired, head spinning from 4 idle hours of travel from Memphis, and I’m feeling the first dull pangs of video game withdrawal (nothing is fun, everything is annoying, get me out of here). A band is playing: they’re all wearing blazers; the singer has a bouquet of flowers; they’re flailing around earnestly; the whole thing feels desperate and pathetic. The singer jumps off the stage and flowers fly into the air, scatter on the linoleum floor. I walk out of the room. Some years later I learn the band’s name: mewithoutYou. (Why so stylized?)

Huntington, WV. I’m 17 years old and a friend is demanding over AIM that I download a song. They’re playing in town next week, she says—their new record just came out, it’s incredible, you’re gonna love it. “January 1979” by mewithoutYou—I balk, recalling the suits and the bouquet and the linoleum years before. No no, she says, this one’s different—give it a chance. Soulseek delivers, and less than a minute in I feel my stubborn teenage defenses melt away. It’s good. At the show I stand dumbstruck in the face of a performance unlike anything I could imagine, a demonstration of total vulnerability set to poetry and post-hardcore. Watching the singer turn himself inside out on stage made me, in turn, realized how totally exposed my own insides are to the blinding light of [something]. Wandered the halls of my high school speechless for a week, knowing something had changed but not sure what. The album I stubbornly downloaded becomes the soundtrack of the next decade of my life.

It’ll take us the rest of our lives to figure out what mewithoutYou meant. Let’s get started.

George Will’s new column at The Washington Post is a very sympathetic read of my recent essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education. His is here, mine here.

I’m grateful for the attention to my piece—and even moreso for his enthusiastic recommendation of Mark Sinnett’s masterful St. John’s College commencement address, which deserves to be seen by everyone on the planet with a grasp of English and a sound and functioning soul. But in trying to improve on my argument, he mischaracterizes my claim: far from advocating “technological determinism,” my point was that social media functions as a playground for academics made anxious by the political economy of neoliberal higher education. Twitter is a place for anxious academics to lose themselves in the Gereden of the day and forget whatever wisdom they’ve gleaned from their years of study. The technology is catalyst, not cause—it facilitates professorial sophistry, but the original impulse comes from elsewhere.

I would welcome George’s thoughts on how this problem might be fixed. I’m largely unfamiliar with his writing and thought, but I have a suspicion that we’d find ourselves in some opposition on the details: my criticism of academic insanity comes from a bone-deep love of thinking and learning, and a conviction that the modern research university is falling far short of its promise of providing anything we can call “an education” to a vast majority of people it serves (not to mention those it doesn’t). I want a de-frivolizing of the academic humanities because I love the humanities, and I want it to be possible for anyone with an earnest desire to engage in study of them. Consider how many broad-minded and deep-souled scholars of literature, philosophy, and the classics were working-class kids who enrolled at Brooklyn College in the middle of the 20th Century. Now imagine this—or something like it—in as many American cities as possible. This is, roughly speaking, my ideal future.

There are many barriers to this kind of future, and most of them come from within the structure of the university: social media silliness is utterly secondary to the very serious problems facing the liberal arts. But it’s certainly not making anything better, and curious people who feel a pull toward the study of philosophy, history, literature, or the liberal arts more broadly would not be foolish to be dissuaded after witnessing the antics of professorial discourse-mongers. There are already so many incentives pulling learners (especially young ones) toward computer science, engineering, or sociology. The importance of liberal arts education has always been best demonstrated in the demeanor of those who regard them as important—so if there’s no money in it anyway, who in their right mind would choose to associate themselves with clowns?

I initially wrote this for submission to a journal in the summer of 2020, but it wasn’t quite up to snuff for publication. I post it here as a record of my thinking from that summer and on: the thoughts being worked out here, and the attitude they imply, have only deepened in the years since.

---

The first time I ever joined a protest was in 2003, shortly after the United States military bombed and invaded Iraq. I was a high school sophomore in West Virginia, almost entirely oblivious about the nuts and bolts of politics but wielding a red hot indignation for what seemed to be an immoral and unstrategic aggression against a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack two years prior. When I watched the night vision video of bombs falling on Baghdad, I knew—viscerally, unreflectively, and deep in my gut—that what was happening was wrong. Driven by this sense, I got together with my sister and a good friend one day after school and joined the few dozen anti-war demonstrators holding signs across from the Cabell County Courthouse.

There was nothing particularly heroic about protesting the war. All of us, I think, knew in our hearts that our opposition was ultimately futile: we had already lost and the bombs had already been dropped, but it was nonetheless important to register our rejection of the state of things as publicly as possible. And in 2003, voicing such opinions was no way to win friends: the war was overwhelmingly popular, and at all points of its unfolding practically every public institution (not just the media, but also the schools and city government) had cheered its arrival with rallies, celebrations, and the distribution of tiny American flags. The country was unified around an appetite for vengeance: everyone felt it was high time for revenge, even if the victim was arbitrarily chosen.

One appearance at an anti-war protest followed another, my backpack and black hoodie steadily gathering political patches and pins like a flame gathers moths. In response to a button I sported reading “war is not the answer,” a boy in my grade scrawled the obverse in huge letters on the back of a Mossy Oak hunting jacket and invited anyone in agreement to sign: I remember watching practically everyone in my history class—including our teacher—add their name. There was something refreshing in noticing my subjective, dispositional alienation from my peers being objectified in the form of political stances: where previously I had no clue why I couldn’t easily get along with my classmates, I now had something to point to. But waging this largely solitary war against war nonetheless contributed to my preexisting teenage melancholy, driving me even further into solipsism, and as the years passed my radicalism only intensified. By senior year, while corporations were printing “Support the Troops” on everything they could and carrying out elaborate strategies to insult the French, I was neck deep in far-left theory and propaganda: Crimethinc., the Communist Manifesto, a smattering of anarcho-primitivist essays, anti-globalization and environmental documentaries. By graduation (which I of course did not attend) I was a true believer—and the first day I walked into a college classroom some months later, I knew at once that whatever it was to be done would not take place in cheap plastic chairs beneath fluorescent lights, but out in the streets. I didn’t last a semester.

The next few years of my life were spent in the activist trenches, first in a campaign to end strip mining in West Virginia, then to block highway construction in Indiana, and, briefly, to end a free trade agreement in Canada and New England.[1] None of these campaigns were popular and all eventually failed, whether crushed by the overwhelming force of capital and the state or through internal decomposition and schism. (I have since driven on stretches of the highway whose very existence I fought against.) Comrades were arrested and, at the state’s most lenient, charged astronomical bail fees; at worst, they faced numerous federal felonies which, even if dismissed, meant years of house arrest, court appearances, and countless thousands of dollars owed to lawyers. Friendships disintegrated; some transformed into vicious enmity. Even the least disheartened recognized that an approach of direct confrontation with capital and the state was bound to fail, and redirected their efforts into smaller-scale, longer-term, more constructive projects; the most broken among us drifted into quietude, seeking peace after years of hopeless, exhausting struggle. For my part, I moved to a farm in southern Kentucky, retiring from mass politics for the sake of reading, thinking, and coaxing green life from the earth—that is, until an increasingly fanatical housemate sabotaged the project because of ideological disagreements. Politics obliterated even the anti-political.

The protests and riots unfold across the country have me reflecting on my own history of participation in mass politics. When they began, I—like most Americans—was moved by the nobility of their call for justice. I was baffled and awestruck by their rapid spread across the country. And when the fires and looting started, I was horrified—and only moreso as a chorus of journalists, celebrities, and left-wing politicians engaged in a coordinated show of intellectual gymnastics to justify and excuse the destruction. This reaction didn’t immediately have a language beyond a feeling of visceral refusal, a resounding “no” roaring from the deepest reaches of my being. But with the passing of time, so too a dispersal of fog—and accordingly, some clarity of vision and thought.

The riots and the rapid transformation of culture following them have carried with them an ominous sense of familiarity. The swift alignment of public opinion, buttressed by countless public statements made on behalf of corporations, institutions, and politicians; the unequal bifurcation of American society on all levels and a universal atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust; the hostility to debate and the repetition and enforcement of sloganeering: this all smacks quite uncomfortably of the disorganization of American society at the time of the Iraq War.

Eliot Weinberger, in his gonzo-Thucydidean chronicle of 9/11 and its aftermath What Happened Here, noted that prominent left-wing intellectuals who had cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center as “a humiliating blow against the American Empire, and a just reward for the decades of American hegemony and aggression” did so as slaves to abstraction, in full ignorance of the reality of the situation: that a vast majority of the victims were poor minorities, low-ranking office drones, and rescue workers. Moreover, the destruction of the Twin Towers meant the obliteration of much of downtown Manhattan, a scenario easily weathered by the wealthiest of New Yorkers but economically devastating to the poorest. The upper classes can look on political spectacles with the rosy-colored glasses of abstraction: for them, the towers were primarily a symbol, whether of exploitative global capitalism or of American freedom and prosperity; the attack functioned first and foremost as an allegory, either of an oppressive empire receiving its just desserts or of forces of evil attempting to snuff out the light of freedom. No matter the narrative suggested to one beholding the ink-blot of reality, the concrete, on-the-ground consequences of the disaster became of secondary importance to achieving victory in a warfare of competing symbols.

Of course, left-wing intellectuals were not the only ones guilty of this after 9/11: the “weapons of mass destruction” narrative turned many prominent journalists and cultural commentators from the right to the center-left into an Aeschylean chorus howling for the rapture of blood and fire. Even the most critical were swept up in the frenzy: Christopher Hitchens, enfant terrible of the left, found cause to channel his nigh-religious hatred of religion into enthusiasm for airstrikes, going so far as to personally befriend Bush’s Secretary of Defense—and the war’s chief imaginarian—Paul Wolfowitz. The war divided America into unequal sides, the bellicose constituting the lion’s share. But in a different way, it served as a force of unity: it injected the poison of abstraction into the minds of nearly everyone, afflicting America with an inability to see the world on a granular level, to recognize things and people in a completeness irreducible to pieces in a cosmic game of Go laid by the heavenly forms that serve as the true motor of all things. A family member, coworker, or erstwhile friend who disagreed didn’t simply have an opposing opinion: they were a worldly instantiation of wrongness-as-such, a footsoldier of Manichaean darkness marching on the World of Light. And darkness, unlike a friend, may receive no quarter.

Perhaps now it’s possible to see the eerie similarity between the culture of 2003 and the culture of 2020. In both cases, a powerful schismatic force drove vast numbers of cultural elites, intellectuals, and normal Americans into hostile, opposing camps built around fanatical commitments to a priori truths and dogmatic refusal to question assumptions. Fanaticism carries with it a threefold demand: first, that you flatten complexity into a battle between two sides; second, that you pick one and stay put; and third, that you allow a swarm of assumptions associated with whatever position you’ve chosen to colonize your mind entirely. In a world rent top to bottom by friend-enemy distinctions, where all truth is power, there can be no truth beyond what is true for one’s group and no understanding beyond the battle lines. And ultimately, no matter how just a mass movement’s vision may be, the force of conformity it exerts will always jeopardize the inner dignity of the participant.

This lesson was known to an entire generation of writers and thinkers living in the shadow of the ideological frenzy that launched World War II, and in their present-tense reality of the looming Soviet Union and its relentless global propaganda campaign against the “fascism” of liberal democratic Europe and America. In his 1950 theoretical polemic Man Against Mass Society, an especially deep and illuminating example of the genre, the French dramatist, philosopher, and self-described “Christian of the Left” Gabriel Marcel explains how modernity’s transformation of society from a complex, interlocking network of small institutions into an undifferentiated mass of atomized individuals occasions the development and spread of an ideological fanaticism fundamentally hostile to the honest, deep reflection necessary for the existence of philosophy. “[T]he masses are of their very essence…the stuff of which fanaticism is made,” Marcel argues; “propaganda has on them the convulsive effect of an electrical shock. It arouses them not to life, but to that appearance of life which particularly manifests in riots and revolutions.” Propaganda and fanaticism are what Marcel calls “techniques of degradation”: strategies for reducing human beings and the communities they form to their base physicality, of stripping away their dignity, of eroding the metaphysical tendencies latent in all human endeavor in order to make populations more amenable to technocratic planning. The Nazi death camps are Marcel’s example par excellence of this process of degradation, but more subtle tendencies are visible in the overall logic of the new technocratic politics of the early 20^th century: demographic- and population-thinking, consideration of human beings in masses instead of communities, total mobilization for religiously-charged political causes in place of careful, reasoned consideration of possibilities and consequences. A degraded society of degraded human beings may permit survival, but it doesn’t allow for life.

How can this process of degradation be fought? Marcel’s answer is clear: the only available weapon is philosophy. And he understands philosophy not as a process of abstract, analytical assessment of propositions, but as the fruit of reflection, of contemplating one’s situatedness, of the givenness of one’s environments, and of the pursuit of stable truth amid the flux of things. Because they are the first line of defense against this process of degradation, Marcel insists, “he first duty of the philosopher in our world today is to fight against fanaticism in whatever guise it may appear.” And propaganda, the vehicle of fanaticism, may come in many forms—newspapers, radio, television, political slogans—but all share the feature of militating against the quiet, unproductive, reflective act of thinking by demanding the habitual repetition of words. “At the root of fanaticism…lies man’s servitude to words,” observed Marcel, “and I would say that the first mission of the philosopher, in this world or in opposition to this world, is to refuse to accept that servitude.” This remains as true now as ever. No matter the content, propaganda and political slogans—whether 2003’s “support the troops” or 2020’s “black lives matter”—are cultural technologies meant to build an environment hostile to reflection, philosophy, and—perhaps most basically—honesty.

Participation in politics can be a noble pursuit. Maintenance of our shared world requires careful negotiation with one another about the shape we wish it to take. Sometimes, of course, we are confronted with radical decisions of monumental importance that must be made quickly, that don’t admit of scrupulousness or sobriety. In these moments, it is easy to lose sight of our existential situation: that we exist in a world we depend upon, with others we depend upon, and that the dreams we have for the world we share are not as easily realizable as we want them to be. The suffocating atmosphere of fanaticism can cause us to forget that there are things—beautiful, splendid, life-giving things—that have nothing to do with the power- and prestige-games that characterize our shared political reality. Rather than sacrificing ourselves to the politics machine, of assimilating ourselves to fanaticism, it’s of the utmost importance to find space to allow our attention to settle on things untouched by politics. In tumultuous times such as ours, recall the wisdom of George Orwell, writing just months after the end of World War II: “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

---

[1] In honesty, I must admit that I had absolutely no sense for movement politics or the ins and outs of organizing work, and was likely more of a liability than a boon. But I was a body in the battle, and I was more than willing to carry boxes, dig holes, and march in the streets when called upon.

Compare:

Make no mistake: #ViktorOrban is the leader of the West now — the West that still remembers what the West is.

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 3, 2022

vis-à-vis

https://balkaninsight.com/2022/04/01/a-grudging-vote-for-fidesz-in-hungarys-poorest-regions/

In many ways, for many people in the county, more representative are the views of Istvan Lehoczky, a 76-year-old pensioner from the small town of Ujfeherto.

“Hungary is a quasi-mafia state, and everyone knows it. But if the opposition wins, we will have six more mouths to feed,” says Lehoczky, a former manager at the local industrial facilities, referring to the alliance of six disparate opposition parties seeking to defeat Orban.

One of the signs of this alleged mafia-like characteristics is the misuse of European funds, which, according to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), in Orban’s Hungary was the highest in the EU in 2015-2019. Ujfeherto alone was awarded several EU-funded projects, one of which is the construction of a cold store – a large refrigerated facility for preserving food at very low temperatures.

Since 2019, however, there has been little apparent progress in the project. The billboard informing about this 510-million-forint investment (around 1.4 million euros) stands on a vast, empty field with no signs of construction whatsoever.

BIRN asked the town’s Fidesz mayor what has been done so far and what are the next steps in order to complete the project. “The procurement procedure for the cold store was recently unsuccessful. A new procurement will be announced soon,” Mayor Jozsef Hosszu said in a written statement.

Despite being aware of all Fidesz’s misconduct, whether electoral or the misuse of funds, Lehoczky admits to a love-hate relationship with a strong charismatic leader, whom in this county is embodied by either Orban himself or Miklos Sesztak, his former minister and one the county’s influential leaders backed by a record-high 62 per cent of voters in his constituency.

“I’m not happy with many Fidesz policies,” Lehoczky says. “Yet, with COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, one has to expect the government to be able to make quick and firm decisions, something that the chaotic opposition doesn’t guarantee.”

His fatalistic pragmatism is a combination of a full awareness about Fidesz scandals and the feeling that nothing can be done to prevent them, while any change to this well-cemented dysfunctional order will end in political chaos and financial uncertainty. It reflects the unspoken contract offered to a large part of the society by Orban: political stability and some share in the distribution of fruits in exchange for restricted democracy.

Clientele politics and cronyism, but “based”: the apex of Western civilization, according to idiots.

an ongoing list

• Edward G. Ballard, long-time chair of Tulane’s philosophy department: Fairfax, VA
• John Sallis, of Vanderbilt/Boston College: somewhere in Arkansas
• Charles E. Scott, of Vanderbilt/Penn State: Wewoka, OK
• Hubert Dreyfus: Terre Haute, IN
• Don Ihde: Hope, KS
• Richard Velkley: Fort Mitchell, KY
• Graham Harman: Mount Vernon, IA

For an ambitious researcher: Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, but about rival camps of Straussian philosophy and political philosophy professors. (Lives of the Eminent Philosophy Professors?)