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.

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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.”

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[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.

Originally published at The Bellows—June 29, 2021. As The Bellows appears to have gone defunct, I have reposted it here.

In the summer of 1989, RAND Corporation functionary and Bush-era State Department director Francis Fukuyama declared that world history, finally, was over. “What we may be witnessing” in the softening of Soviet hostility to America and Western Europe, he argued in an essay for The National Interest, “is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” The twentieth century had been a kind of Hunger Games for political systems from the dust of which Western liberal democracy and Actually Existing Socialism emerged as the last remaining contenders, and the agonism between the two ideologies and regimes was the engine that propelled history. And in the death of Stalin, the ongoing unrest in the Eastern Bloc, the slow cessation of Soviet hostility to America, and Gorbachev’s turn toward glasnost and perestroika, Fukuyama detected a seismic shift. “It is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history,” he surmised—but this something pointed not to a stable peace between communism and liberalism or to a friendly synthesis of the two, but to “an unabashed victory of political and economic liberalism.” Months later the Berlin Wall fell and liberal revolutions overthrew communism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary; within two years of Fukuyama’s article, “the former Soviet Union” became a regular and uncontroversial turn of phrase in newspapers everywhere.

Fukuyama’s article made him both a celebrity and a rhetorical punching-bag. Criticism abounded: the argument was deemed self-evidently ridiculous, historically and socially myopic, ethnocentric to the point of sinister. (Connections were made to his former teacher Samuel P. Huntington, famous for his “Clash of Civilizations” thesis.) But for sympathizers, especially after Fukuyama’s prescience was proven, the era of liberal triumphalism had begun. With Soviet communism consigned to the dustbin of history, liberal democracy was finally left without any substantive challenges to its march across the globe. Safe from any serious competition, the erstwhile “arsenal of democracy” could lay down its arms and turn its attention to the peacetime efforts of enriching itself and devising new and ever more exciting forms of entertainment while letting human rights bloom across the globe.

Or so it seemed, until 2016. The election of Donald J. Trump to the helm of the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world and the success of Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union brought the End of History to an end. The neoliberal technocratic governance that characterized politics at the End of History had been rejected from below, by legions of disaffected citizens unhappy with the established consensus—and alongside this right-populist groundswell emerged the left-populism of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, who challenged the liberal gridlock from the other side. The people want politics, it seems, whatever the flavor. And with politics comes conflict, and with conflict the possibility of history.

This is the story told by Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe—British academics by day, hosts of the podcast Aufhebunga Bunga by night—in their new book The End of the End of History. “To grasp the notion that politics was back,” they write, “and to understand the profound sense of disorder that is a feature of our age, we need to go back to the End of History. … Only when we recall the tedium of the age—that sense that staid neoliberal democracy was all there was—can we grasp how shocking the return of politics since 2016 has been.” And only by grasping what happened between the End of History and the End of the End, they argue, can the Left—their political faction of choice—figure out how to seize the future.

The neoliberal hegemony following the End of History, they argue, ushered in an age of “post-politics,” “a form of government that tries to foreclose political contestation by emphasizing consensus, ‘eradicating’ ideology and ruling by recourse to evidence and expertise rather than interests or ideals.” Despite an abundance of paeans to “change” and “progress” by the bards of liberal democracy, the post-political era was marked by a total foreclosure of political contestation rather than a new blossoming of possibility. Governance was deemed too important to be influenced by average citizens, and decision-making—especially for economic issues—was outsourced to a cluster of bureaucracies and institutions that sprang up around Washington, DC like mushrooms after a spring rain, populated by a caste of manager-experts drawn from the top universities in the country. Protest against the new consensus became increasingly carnivalesque and desperate as it found it impossible to make any lasting political impact. Two main tendencies emerged on the Left. In the first, anarchism and the Situationists became vogue, and attention was turned away from production and distribution toward the spectacular domain of media and advertising. In the second, books like Hardt and Negri’s Empire told a story in which all the disparate movements and projects—feminism, environmentalism, student activism, anti-globalization—constituted a Lord-of-the-Rings-style alliance of all the good guys called the Multitude. The 9/11 attacks and the wave of repression that followed mostly put an end to these movements, however, and the anti-war protests that followed the invasion of Iraq carried the air of futility from the jump. “Despite millions on the street,” the authors note grimly, “it never felt like the war might be stopped. Indeed, perma-war continues to this day.”

Post-politics sought to depoliticize society; the force currently working against this neoliberal depoliticization they dub “anti-politics.” In America, this looks like Trumpian belligerence and hatred of “elites”; in the UK, Brexit; in Brazil, both anti-corruption activism and the Bolsonaro regime that won power in its wake. Anti-politics is driven by an emphasis on dissensus and refusal, and characterized by a rejection of the political establishment as such; it takes issue with the very ideas of authority and political representation, proudly declaring the bankruptcy of institutions and the nakedness of the emperor. But it can also serve as a cudgel to break the deadlock of post-politics, allow for the reemergence of the political, and bring an end to the End of History.

But what, exactly, does it mean to bring back the political? What is politics, anyway? The strangeness at the heart of the book follows from the authors’ definition of the term. “Politics at its most essential,” they write “is the demand for reordering statuses and upending hierarchies. It is a demand for equality; it is even the basic notion of contestation.” Elsewhere, they define “politicization” as “the putting of things into question or into dispute,” as if any questioning whatsoever were ultimately an issue of power and its implementation. Regardless, their commitment to this broad definition of politics conflicts with the narrowness of their perspective. For a book concerned with—and often sympathetic to—the aims of anti-neoliberal populism, the authors are conspicuously unconcerned with the actual content of populist demands.

Take for example their assessment of Brazil, their “most crystalline example” of how anti-political disruption—particularly in the form of anti-corruption campaigns—opens the door for the victory of “right-wing authoritarian populism.” Protests against public transportation fare hikes in São Paulo in 2013 grew into a massive, nationwide revolt, making Brazil the latest in a series of countries—Iceland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, the Arab Spring countries, etc.—whose public order would disintegrate in a popular uprising against police brutality and government corruption. Not only were Brazil’s left-wing parties generally feckless and disorganized, the party that had presided over the previous two decades of corruption and repression was Lula de Silva’s Workers’ Party (PT), the largest left-wing party in Latin America. After the party was implicated in a campaign of money laundering and bribery with the state-owned oil company Petrobras—featuring extensive kickbacks reserved for Lula himself—and a wave of austerity measures were initiated by Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff following a crippling recession, PT became the object of popular scorn. The mess of sentiments bringing bodies into the streets congealed into antipetismo (anti-Workers’ Partyism): the moral authority of the PT—“until 2005 widely seen as a principled, ethical force”—had collapsed.

In the vacuum of authority that followed, after institutions, parties, and left-wing idealism had lost all credibility, the negativity of antipetismo sought a positive vision and found it in the last one available: nationalism. “My party is my country’ became a common slogan,” the authors write mournfully, “with protesters decked out in only the green and gold of the national flag.” And in the next elections of 2018, this anti-establishment, nationalistic sentiment coalesced around a seven-term law-and-order congressman from Rio de Janeiro, Jair Bolsonaro, who won an eleven-point victory over his opponent from the Workers’ Party. From this turn of events, the book’s authors take the lesson: “If politics no longer offers any hope, best to seek refuge in family and faith, to defend that which is dear—with arms if need be.”

So politics is for putting things into question—but not that! Politics is for reordering statuses and upending hierarchies—but not those! Politics is the basic notion of contestation—but only concerning those things Marxist academics care about, not normies whose understanding of politics comes from something closer to the gut, informed by nearly a century of aggressive political encroachment upon those spheres of human life that the American political tradition long accepted as standing outside the purview of state and bureaucratic power. (It is bizarre, for instance, that a book seeking explain the rise of 21^st century populism in the West would lack a single instance of the word “abortion.”) The idea that democratic politics might be about something like establishing a political community one would be proud to bequeath to their descendants is strangely outside their purview, and likely inconsistent with the notion of politics as pure contestation. Parents rearing children and people seeking the security and support of a community want the warring to end somewhere: politics in this case is an instrument, a means for achieving not just stability or peace—as the architects of post-political neoliberalism believed—but justice.

Historian John Lukacs wrote that “at the end of an age we must engage in a radical rethinking of ‘Progress,’ of history, of ‘Science,’ of the limitations of our knowledge, of our place in the universe.” And at the end of the End of History, on this cusp between what was and what will be, it is of the utmost importance that we reconsider what we think we know about politics. Hochuli, Hoare, and Cunliffe are right that the post-Cold-War neoliberal consensus tried to “overcome”—that is, suppress—politics with economics and technocracy: all questions about the character of common life irreducible to quantities in a spreadsheet were deemed irrelevant, irrational. Whatever helped melt the world into capital to be moved across the globe was deemed licit if not obligatory, no matter the damage done to people and the communities they constituted. If justice meant anything at the End of History, it was ultimately reducible to money—and most of our age’s political tendencies tended to agree. Both right-wing anti-tax crusades and the left-wing calls for a more robust welfare state are, according to the best representatives of each camp, aimed at a kind of moneyed justice: of finding ways to make a rising tide that lifts all boats. They might disagree on the specifics, but they agree on the fundamentals.

Breaking out of the post-political paradigm, then, would involve putting economism and technocracy up for question, of finding a new way to think about politics beyond the narrow parameters agreed upon by the political tendencies of our age. It would mean putting into question the very nature of politics itself—not by politicizing politics, whatever that would mean, but by philosophizing it. It would mean putting up for question the very idea of a “politics…rooted in the self-interest of producers,” to consider that the problem runs far deeper—to take seriously, for example, Jacques Camatte’s contention that the proletariat is no longer the agent of capital’s undoing, but the final agent of capital’s domination over the very nature of the human being. It would mean rejecting inherited concepts and asking again the question that lies at the very beginning of political thinking, that animates Socrates’ search for the nature of political things in Plato’s Republic: “What is justice?” Such thoughts and questions make political action difficult, of course. But what better time for entering into such a tangle than in the midst of a “low-grade dystopia” following “the defeat of left-populism and the final death of social democracy”?

The populist explosion of the last ten years has been one of the most unpredictable and confounding developments of the last several decades. Countless brilliant, highly-trained specialists failed to predict Donald Trump winning the 2016 presidential election or the success of the Brexit referendum—but nonetheless proceeded to speak and act after the fact as if their expertise remained fully intact. Professional explainers have crawled out of nearly every academic and media institution the world over, writing books and essays about how the populist insurgency proves them right about everything they already believe. Compared with others like it, The End of the End of History is a fine book: it is a reliable guide to recent political history with a breadth of perspective that puts other “history of the present” books to shame. But it would have been a much better book if the authors had taken the populist insurgency for what it truly is: a rebuke of supposed expert knowledge of the contemporary political landscape and, more radically, an opportunity to reconsider shallow presuppositions about the nature and purpose of politics.

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