This regime is my enemy, but it is also the closest thing I have to an ally. The story of this age, for me, is not the deprivations of the right, anyone who can read a book will know that this is what they have always been, but the degradation of the left. I don't think Trump has won as much as the left has lost. And as long as every Pretti is matched by a Kirk I don't think that will change.
My life and career are still being governed by the rules put down in 2020 and it seems my choices are to remain quiet and embolden people who openly hate me, or to empower people who hate others even more.
I don't think a lot of well meaning people established in their careers realize how bad things have become, and how much worse they are still likely to get. I think this is just the start. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
It would be instructive for readers to learn who, in your estimation, have betrayed your ideal of independent thought in order to become regime propagandists. Providing context—naming names—would allow the reader to determine whether your implicit claim to represent the ideal—even as imperfect striving—is closer to fierté or orgueil.
I understand the desire, but these days I really do think it’s better to stay focused on ideas rather than on individual representatives of ideas. However much we might wish to remain high-minded, simply identifying a person by name invites a spiral of ad-hominems and real harm to both sides. I’ll make an exception for Randy Fine though.
I'll offer up Matt Taibbi as a perfect illustration of your argument. I can do so without throwing ad hominem darts. Taibbi has devolved from skilled investigative reporter to Substack independent entrepreneur through his tilted critiques but primarily through his platforming and deference to the unashamed regime apologist Walter Kirn (fact not ad hominem).
"But when he called me traitor he meant that I had joined another side. If he had read the book he would know that there are no sides for me." --Leonard Cohen
From Saul Bellow's Ravelstein: "He had a line on each of his neighbors -- the little bourgeois types dominated by secret dreads, each one a shrine of amour propre, scheming to persuade everyone else to endorse his image of himself; flat, reckoning personalities (a better term than "souls" -- you could deal with personalities but to contemplate the souls of such individuals was a horror you wanted to avoid).
"To this extent I find it gravely unfortunate that our new media technologies have effectively imposed on us an expectation of universal punditry, so that it is often simply assumed that to have a public presence at all, even if it is nothing more than a collection of a few hundred virtual friends or followers, entails, as part of the 'job', issuing regular statements on every new inflection of our rolling global polycrisis as if we were all the spokespeople of august institutions."
That is a perfection distillation and articulation of something I've felt for a long time but couldn't possibly express that clearly. Bravo. 👏
I suppose I'm happy this piece has already jumped the fence that typically confines my work to a loyal clique of readers. So thank you! (It took me 90 minutes to write.)
Seriously, this is interesting. Have a watch: https://youtu.be/zXAGCzpZFyk?si=6uqzdKUvvRc8evCu I've read about this angle (on critical minerals and defense) in a number of different places now.
I'm not a Trump fan. But I'm not an enemy of peace either.
If "strength" to you involves 10 guys shooting a man pinned to the ground in the back, or shooting a mother in her minivan, I submit that your definition of "strength" is severely deficient
It seems that as the vast majority gets to the point of framing even death in terms of legal logic, we can probably say we have become incredibly stupid. When people look at people in terms of enemy (by virtue of legal acts) and not in terms of fellow human beings (by virtue of natural law) maybe it shows that resentment has become the norm and we know resentment is the primary source of punitive moralism and the de facto enemy of morality and that's why we are now in such terrible terrible situation.
I’m not sure from where you’re deriving your ‘natural law’ framework ? Rousseau?
Humans have had tribal in-group:friend, out-group: enemy distinctions since humans were a thing. Even (especially) unto death. Homo sapiens probably genocided Neanderthals.
Perhaps then it would be more accurate to say we have reverted to incredible stupidity.
I’m not framing this under Rousseau and definetly not claiming that humans were ever non-tribal. Of course humans have always drawn enemy distinctions.
I'm saying that we got to a point where people increasingly justify exclusion, punishment, and even death through legal logic alone, evacuating any prior moral recognition of the person as a human being.
Natural law, in my view, refers to the idea that some moral claims precede legal classification. Now, as resentment appears to have become the dominant moral energy, i don't see that much of a reversion to savagery but a degeneration of moral responsibility into procedure.
I already addressed it in the thread with Patrick Goold above. It may have been a horrible mistake in a massively fraught situation brought about by your side. If you're trying to obstruct the law, don't bring a gun.
Because you maintain that Renee Good was driving 'away' rather than into the ICE enforcer, even after all the video evidence, I assume you are either 1. arguing in bad faith or 2. don't have eyes.
Either way, as I said to Goold, I no longer argue with Leftists, because the subject is never the subject; the subject is always the Revolution. I bothered to comment on his post because he described himself as a Liberal and his post was somewhat eloquent at least.
I don't know why you assume I'm a leftist, or what "my side" is supposed to be. Also, you probably don't know this as a Brit, but here in America it is perfectly legal to carry a gun with the proper permits, which Alex Pretti had. It is meant to prevent the tyranny which you so are so thoughtlessly boosting. Also, filming officers is not obstructing the law. Maybe don't talk about obstructing the law if you don't know what it is m8
I know that conceal & carry is perfectly legal in several states
I know _why_ that is & wish we had the second amendment here.
I know you're a leftist & that you are on the opposite side to me because of _everything you've written_. Describing ICE agents carrying out the law under Trump, as mandated by the majority of the people in the last election, as 'tyranny', is how I know this.
I know that Pretti wasn't just filming, he was directing traffic & came between an ICE agent and a woman who was obstructing the law. (I've seen the videos from a tedious number of different angles)
The deaths of both Good & Pretti are at the feet of people like you who dehumanize ICE agents and lead others to believe they should fight 'tyranny'.
"Rapist" and "fraudster" are terms that in the first case a civil and, in the second, a criminal court have found applicable to the current President of the United States. Does the "show of strength" you allude to actually shield us? Debatable, to say the least. Even if so, the old question arises again, how will we protect ourselves from the protectors?
These are not terms I would play with for political capital. Allegations made by politically-motivated people /groups are not the same as convictions. But neither am I claiming that Trump's a 'nice guy.' (I was inconsolable the first time he was elected; relieved beyond words second time around) That's kind of my point. But there's strength and then there's 'tyranny', 'fascism', 'Nazism', all the ludicrous claims the Left make about Trump, which are so probably false, I've stopped trying to debate them. (As Nick Freitas put it recently: the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution: https://youtu.be/M3zJF6CjvoE?si=fhiDP6lXx4_TuTbI)
My question to you is: why only now is the old question arising 'again'? Obama got ICE to deport more people than Trump has so far. And America under Biden was in the throes of destroying itself. You could see it from space. Nearly 7.3 million illegal immigrants crossed the Southwest border under President Biden: an amount greater than the population of 36 states. Even 'pro-immigrant' orgs were desperately flagging up how dangerous this was: https://cis.org/Oped/Bidens-border-policies-facilitate-shocking-modern-slavery.
Without borders, and a leader / leaders willing to defend them, who even is the 'we' trying to 'protect ourselves'? And from whom?
BTW, you were the one who introduced the terms rapists and fraudsters, apparently for rhetorical effect since no names or evidence were supplied. When I suggested they apply to the president, it was on the basis of convictions by a jury on thirty-four counts of filing false business records and by another jury of sexual assault on one E. Jean Carroll. These convictions are a matter of public record. Unlike Good or Pretti, or the nameless human beings you malign, Trump had his day in court.
To your question to me: the old question is not arising "only now". It is always alive wherever there is government. There are times when it is more pressing than others. Its importance can sneak up on one. Right now it seems particularly pressing. Have I been complacent in the past? No doubt.
If I can mix praise with criticism, I was actually a little disappointed by this piece overall. But the paragraph that led me to it is gold.
“I believe we have a duty… not to speak in slogans, not to serve as vessels for the speech of others, but instead to struggle to come up with and to share genuinely new ways of comprehending the world, whether through rational argument or creative vision.” (cont.)
When with the rise of then-candidate Trump a kind of know-nothing racism began to gain a higher profile (given a big assist by candidate Clinton and her deplorable basketing), I was really struck by the way the tastemakers tried to leverage the low-status indices of racism against "the other side," a move for which "closing the barn door after the horse has left" would be a fair description. I couldn't help but feel that the instinctive reaching for their sneer and their indignation simply showed how utterly unprepared the high-status folks were; in the end, their go-to strategies turned out to be various (attempted) forms of weaponized snobbery. That wasn't to say that there wasn't a better case to be made; but that the wherewithal to make it was so lacking, surely bespoke something. Trump went on to get elected in part via a great *inversion* of snobbery, an it's-our-turn-now-motherfuckers elevation of low-class (a brazen tackiness being the way this got displayed); inevitably, on its sodden coattails, some of the worst (i.e. "deplorable") tendencies of the American id got to quickly become accustomed to daylight. Some did, some didn't; and among those who welcomed the change of administration, some made their peace more easily than others with what the daylight revealed (and in some cases sanitized); but it was the reaction of the high-status opposition that was more telling; they thought they could just double down on their previous snobbery with its formerly-established polarity, and this would somehow work to banish all the icky stuff Back To The Darkness From Which It Came. Alas, I fear that some *still* think this is how to win, at least judging from a great deal of online discussion. What Justin says here -- that it all devolved, very quickly, into *completely empty* signalling -- hardly needs underlining, except alas for the entire generation that was raised thinking this actually was going to be effective; signalling is a social mechanism, and snobbery is a social vice. But though snobbery (of whatever polarity) can be brutal on individual targets -- hence the cancellation orgy of the late 2010's -- it doesn't really scale; and in the absence of actual access to real policy-making power, it was inevitable that frustration with the impotence of signalling was bound to eventually fester and break. The Women's March in early 2017 and the recent No-Kings performances didn't do anything, or at least, nothing that feels like anything. And thus: Minneapolis in 2020, and Minneapolis redux in 2026. Now *that's* getting stuff done! The point here is *not* that such-and-such an immigration "policy" (if that's what it is) and/or its "enforcement" is just or not, should be "resisted" or not; it's that *all* of this, "policy" and "enforcement" and "resistance", has been and remains a grotesque skit with live ammo, a bunch of cosplay in which the participants have broken into dad's poorly-secured gun cabinet. All of these paroxysms could also be read as symptoms of a collective, and uneven, transition from aesthetic to ethical modes of social "engagement" about "politics" -- I am using "aesthetic" and "ethical" here more or less as Kierkegaard does, but "engagement" and "politics" here still mean "performance". That it is performance with casualties doesn't really change the category. It is not surprising (does it even need saying that it is, for those immediately involved, catastrophic?) that people have been and are getting killed. But the wretched thing is that this is what happens when people stop being able to talk to each other, and *that* has been going on since before January 2025; even pointing out that it predates 2016 is trivial. The decade of 2015 - 2024 was simply when things came to a particularly appalling metastasis. But even now, we could still do something different. Better. It starts with getting comfortable with saying, and with hearing, "it's complicated," as a *starting place* and not as an evasion.
The part about the conservative guys seeing the London LGBT Pride and finding that the neutral public sphere had been compromised had me thinking... I see their point that it can feel like the entire public space has become hostile for them. But if you look at the calendar, the Pride probably lasts a few days. The calendar year is full of holidays and festivals, and quite a few of them are of traditional, religious origin. One day the street is full of pride flags, another day there's an Easter parade or full of Christmas lights, not to mention festivals of various faiths like Eid al-Fitr, Diwali or Hanukkah. It seems to me that the public sphere of the street is quite liberally apportioned - if you have a well-respected community that wants to celebrate something, the limiting factor is probably volunteers and organization capacity, not the wider culture judging you out. If London doesn't have Spanish- or Italian-style Easter processions, it's probably because London's Christians are not that keen on organizing them, not because they would be uniquely prevented from having them. The liberal protocol is simply that the bits that don't fly with you, you just ignore them.
On the other hand, there's a deeper tension between a neutral liberal sphere and cultures, because cultures are defined not only by what they believe or *do*, but also by what they *reject* or leave out. A social conservative doesn't just want to cultivate personal virtues and follow traditions, they also want to opt out *as a community* of things that the wider society accepts. And that's hard to keep up when you're not the majority and can no longer pretend to speak for society in general. You can try to keep taboos and restrictions within your group, and an associated sense of superiority, but you can't prevent people from hearing opposing views elsewhere, and from being influenced by the rest of society.
I don't think anyone has a real answer to this riddle. Communities have to navigate the question of just how insular they want to be, but there's an inescapable difference between being the majority culture, and just being a cultural community within a wider liberal society.
Edit: and that's where the woke trend deviated badly from the liberal protocol, it started leaning way too hard on wanting everyone to reject a whole lot of things, to the point of making that rejection a badge of inclusion. That's something a subculture can do, but if the mainstream does it, it's no longer liberal.
I really liked your whole article but I’d ask you to be careful quoting South Asians, as a South Asian myself. We use junglee as a slur because there are tribal people who live in the jungles of South Asia. And he was using a slur word for them when he said “junglee”. It’s legally punishable in India to use such language.
Sorry brother, that’s just not a claim that works on me. Write to me privately if you ever want to discuss the question as a problem in the history and epistemology of science. There are always more angles to consider when it comes to a massive topic like this, and it’s possible that a discussion would somewhat complicate the way you see the matter. I’d rather not continue this here though — if there’s one thing I hate as much as I hate universal punditry, it’s comments-section pugilistics.
For some reason or another (pedantry), I feel compelled to pick at one throwaway statement near the start re: the tearing of disconsolate calves from their mothers. I've seen this point bubbling up often lately, across many different nodes of the zeitgeist. Something has emerged of recent to make it a bit of a micro-cause du jour, and while I am not here to defend the worst among such practices, I do find it a bit odd how readily people seem to accept the apparent self-evidence of its moral atrocity.
Is it just the plaintive wailing of the animals afterwards that we anthropomorphize into so great a horror? In the grand scheme of industrialized agriculture, it strikes me as a rather trivial offense. And even prima facie, do human babies not also cry when we wean them off the teat, or remove their sippy cups from their toy cupboards? And yet we accept the necessity of this, do we not, and probably place it very low on the list of "things that would not happen in a Utopia"?
Of course I am being slightly contrarian -- I know that the factory farms perform this task in their maximally harmful way (practically by definition). But as someone who grew up around family farms with small-scale dairy production, it felt mostly harmless, and in some cases even provided some relief to the mothers, whose udders were being chewed to pulp by their ravenous young (to say nothing of the gruff, farm-life presumption of character-building being instilled into the young punks). Needless to say, it was done much later than the industry standard in these cases, but still not always without complaint from the animals.
It seems to me that we forget our role in the very creation of these domesticated ruminants. They are far removed from their wild analogues, and they have no place in the natural world, by our hand alone. Quite simply, they would not exist without our intervention. I don't find it surprising, therefore, that we must continue intervening, and in fact would argue that we are duty-bound to do so, playing a paternal role in the microcosm of their development, and that this won't always mean frolicking pleasantly alongside them in a Swiss Alpine meadow.
Every practice that takes place in the cattle matrices of the mechanized livestock industry is blatantly depraved, by virtue of its context. This is a vile abrogation, of the highest order, of that selfsame paternal duty to which I earlier spoke. But we cannot therefore assume the moral turpitude of the acts in and of themselves, in any context.
Maybe this is such a minuscule sliver of the pie as to be not worth the nuance. Yet my being situated within this sliver for most of my life makes it look not so minuscule, and leaves me little choice but to dwell on such things for perhaps longer than most.
I'm surprised you didn't take issue with what I would imagine to be an even more audacious claim -- that ears of corn, too, are creatures of God, and that it is sinful to withhold love from them! Otherwise, you're correct in intuiting my preference for comments that engage with the principal argument of a piece rather than with any one of the very many small points made or examples drawn out in passing.
I think my oblique point is that by paying attention to the other beings in the litany that includes the calf —e.g., fetuses, corn— you’ll see that my real concern doesn’t have much to do with the particular conditions of this or that animal farm.
Yes, and frankly I can also see that it actually makes your point stronger, or at least illustrates it more clearly, to choose one of industrial agriculture's lesser offenses to include in said litany.
Nonetheless, largely due to my possibly coincidental repeated encounter with this example of late, my compulsion to palaver on the topic was inescapable.
This regime is my enemy, but it is also the closest thing I have to an ally. The story of this age, for me, is not the deprivations of the right, anyone who can read a book will know that this is what they have always been, but the degradation of the left. I don't think Trump has won as much as the left has lost. And as long as every Pretti is matched by a Kirk I don't think that will change.
My life and career are still being governed by the rules put down in 2020 and it seems my choices are to remain quiet and embolden people who openly hate me, or to empower people who hate others even more.
I don't think a lot of well meaning people established in their careers realize how bad things have become, and how much worse they are still likely to get. I think this is just the start. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
It would be instructive for readers to learn who, in your estimation, have betrayed your ideal of independent thought in order to become regime propagandists. Providing context—naming names—would allow the reader to determine whether your implicit claim to represent the ideal—even as imperfect striving—is closer to fierté or orgueil.
I understand the desire, but these days I really do think it’s better to stay focused on ideas rather than on individual representatives of ideas. However much we might wish to remain high-minded, simply identifying a person by name invites a spiral of ad-hominems and real harm to both sides. I’ll make an exception for Randy Fine though.
I'll offer up Matt Taibbi as a perfect illustration of your argument. I can do so without throwing ad hominem darts. Taibbi has devolved from skilled investigative reporter to Substack independent entrepreneur through his tilted critiques but primarily through his platforming and deference to the unashamed regime apologist Walter Kirn (fact not ad hominem).
"But when he called me traitor he meant that I had joined another side. If he had read the book he would know that there are no sides for me." --Leonard Cohen
From Saul Bellow's Ravelstein: "He had a line on each of his neighbors -- the little bourgeois types dominated by secret dreads, each one a shrine of amour propre, scheming to persuade everyone else to endorse his image of himself; flat, reckoning personalities (a better term than "souls" -- you could deal with personalities but to contemplate the souls of such individuals was a horror you wanted to avoid).
I really like that novel save for the protracted seafood poisoning episode near the end.
I’m still with you, Smith.
"To this extent I find it gravely unfortunate that our new media technologies have effectively imposed on us an expectation of universal punditry, so that it is often simply assumed that to have a public presence at all, even if it is nothing more than a collection of a few hundred virtual friends or followers, entails, as part of the 'job', issuing regular statements on every new inflection of our rolling global polycrisis as if we were all the spokespeople of august institutions."
That is a perfection distillation and articulation of something I've felt for a long time but couldn't possibly express that clearly. Bravo. 👏
This must have taken you ages to write. I’m so sorry.
You are in cloud cuckoo land if, as a self-identifying western liberal, you think that this regime is your ‘enemy’. Hard times, strong men etc.
If you regard Trump as bad, you better count your blessings that his recent show of strength is shielding you from Xi, Putin & Khameini.
Peace through strength is the only realistic course (according to all of History, ever).
Trying to protect the illegal serial rapists, wife-beaters, murderers & fraudsters from ICE isn’t a good look. No matter how liberal you are.
I suppose I'm happy this piece has already jumped the fence that typically confines my work to a loyal clique of readers. So thank you! (It took me 90 minutes to write.)
Seriously, this is interesting. Have a watch: https://youtu.be/zXAGCzpZFyk?si=6uqzdKUvvRc8evCu I've read about this angle (on critical minerals and defense) in a number of different places now.
I'm not a Trump fan. But I'm not an enemy of peace either.
If "strength" to you involves 10 guys shooting a man pinned to the ground in the back, or shooting a mother in her minivan, I submit that your definition of "strength" is severely deficient
A mum trying to ram a guy with said minivan to obstruct ICE from deporting a serial rapist? Yes I’m happy with that.
It’s almost surreal that you’re not. But as i said above: weak men =bad times.
It seems that as the vast majority gets to the point of framing even death in terms of legal logic, we can probably say we have become incredibly stupid. When people look at people in terms of enemy (by virtue of legal acts) and not in terms of fellow human beings (by virtue of natural law) maybe it shows that resentment has become the norm and we know resentment is the primary source of punitive moralism and the de facto enemy of morality and that's why we are now in such terrible terrible situation.
I agree we have become incredibly stupid.
I’m not sure from where you’re deriving your ‘natural law’ framework ? Rousseau?
Humans have had tribal in-group:friend, out-group: enemy distinctions since humans were a thing. Even (especially) unto death. Homo sapiens probably genocided Neanderthals.
Perhaps then it would be more accurate to say we have reverted to incredible stupidity.
I’m not framing this under Rousseau and definetly not claiming that humans were ever non-tribal. Of course humans have always drawn enemy distinctions.
I'm saying that we got to a point where people increasingly justify exclusion, punishment, and even death through legal logic alone, evacuating any prior moral recognition of the person as a human being.
Natural law, in my view, refers to the idea that some moral claims precede legal classification. Now, as resentment appears to have become the dominant moral energy, i don't see that much of a reversion to savagery but a degeneration of moral responsibility into procedure.
Because you didn't address it, I guess we are safe to assume you find shooting people in the back to be an honorable act
Also, typically when ramming someone, you need to be moving towards rather than away from them
I already addressed it in the thread with Patrick Goold above. It may have been a horrible mistake in a massively fraught situation brought about by your side. If you're trying to obstruct the law, don't bring a gun.
Because you maintain that Renee Good was driving 'away' rather than into the ICE enforcer, even after all the video evidence, I assume you are either 1. arguing in bad faith or 2. don't have eyes.
Either way, as I said to Goold, I no longer argue with Leftists, because the subject is never the subject; the subject is always the Revolution. I bothered to comment on his post because he described himself as a Liberal and his post was somewhat eloquent at least.
I don't know why you assume I'm a leftist, or what "my side" is supposed to be. Also, you probably don't know this as a Brit, but here in America it is perfectly legal to carry a gun with the proper permits, which Alex Pretti had. It is meant to prevent the tyranny which you so are so thoughtlessly boosting. Also, filming officers is not obstructing the law. Maybe don't talk about obstructing the law if you don't know what it is m8
I'm not your mate.
I know that conceal & carry is perfectly legal in several states
I know _why_ that is & wish we had the second amendment here.
I know you're a leftist & that you are on the opposite side to me because of _everything you've written_. Describing ICE agents carrying out the law under Trump, as mandated by the majority of the people in the last election, as 'tyranny', is how I know this.
I know that Pretti wasn't just filming, he was directing traffic & came between an ICE agent and a woman who was obstructing the law. (I've seen the videos from a tedious number of different angles)
The deaths of both Good & Pretti are at the feet of people like you who dehumanize ICE agents and lead others to believe they should fight 'tyranny'.
But go ahead & feel good about yourself.
Or, as you Americans say: have a nice day!
"Rapist" and "fraudster" are terms that in the first case a civil and, in the second, a criminal court have found applicable to the current President of the United States. Does the "show of strength" you allude to actually shield us? Debatable, to say the least. Even if so, the old question arises again, how will we protect ourselves from the protectors?
These are not terms I would play with for political capital. Allegations made by politically-motivated people /groups are not the same as convictions. But neither am I claiming that Trump's a 'nice guy.' (I was inconsolable the first time he was elected; relieved beyond words second time around) That's kind of my point. But there's strength and then there's 'tyranny', 'fascism', 'Nazism', all the ludicrous claims the Left make about Trump, which are so probably false, I've stopped trying to debate them. (As Nick Freitas put it recently: the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution: https://youtu.be/M3zJF6CjvoE?si=fhiDP6lXx4_TuTbI)
My question to you is: why only now is the old question arising 'again'? Obama got ICE to deport more people than Trump has so far. And America under Biden was in the throes of destroying itself. You could see it from space. Nearly 7.3 million illegal immigrants crossed the Southwest border under President Biden: an amount greater than the population of 36 states. Even 'pro-immigrant' orgs were desperately flagging up how dangerous this was: https://cis.org/Oped/Bidens-border-policies-facilitate-shocking-modern-slavery.
Without borders, and a leader / leaders willing to defend them, who even is the 'we' trying to 'protect ourselves'? And from whom?
BTW, you were the one who introduced the terms rapists and fraudsters, apparently for rhetorical effect since no names or evidence were supplied. When I suggested they apply to the president, it was on the basis of convictions by a jury on thirty-four counts of filing false business records and by another jury of sexual assault on one E. Jean Carroll. These convictions are a matter of public record. Unlike Good or Pretti, or the nameless human beings you malign, Trump had his day in court.
I don’t have time for this shit. https://www.ice.gov/most-wanted
To your question to me: the old question is not arising "only now". It is always alive wherever there is government. There are times when it is more pressing than others. Its importance can sneak up on one. Right now it seems particularly pressing. Have I been complacent in the past? No doubt.
If I can mix praise with criticism, I was actually a little disappointed by this piece overall. But the paragraph that led me to it is gold.
“I believe we have a duty… not to speak in slogans, not to serve as vessels for the speech of others, but instead to struggle to come up with and to share genuinely new ways of comprehending the world, whether through rational argument or creative vision.” (cont.)
When with the rise of then-candidate Trump a kind of know-nothing racism began to gain a higher profile (given a big assist by candidate Clinton and her deplorable basketing), I was really struck by the way the tastemakers tried to leverage the low-status indices of racism against "the other side," a move for which "closing the barn door after the horse has left" would be a fair description. I couldn't help but feel that the instinctive reaching for their sneer and their indignation simply showed how utterly unprepared the high-status folks were; in the end, their go-to strategies turned out to be various (attempted) forms of weaponized snobbery. That wasn't to say that there wasn't a better case to be made; but that the wherewithal to make it was so lacking, surely bespoke something. Trump went on to get elected in part via a great *inversion* of snobbery, an it's-our-turn-now-motherfuckers elevation of low-class (a brazen tackiness being the way this got displayed); inevitably, on its sodden coattails, some of the worst (i.e. "deplorable") tendencies of the American id got to quickly become accustomed to daylight. Some did, some didn't; and among those who welcomed the change of administration, some made their peace more easily than others with what the daylight revealed (and in some cases sanitized); but it was the reaction of the high-status opposition that was more telling; they thought they could just double down on their previous snobbery with its formerly-established polarity, and this would somehow work to banish all the icky stuff Back To The Darkness From Which It Came. Alas, I fear that some *still* think this is how to win, at least judging from a great deal of online discussion. What Justin says here -- that it all devolved, very quickly, into *completely empty* signalling -- hardly needs underlining, except alas for the entire generation that was raised thinking this actually was going to be effective; signalling is a social mechanism, and snobbery is a social vice. But though snobbery (of whatever polarity) can be brutal on individual targets -- hence the cancellation orgy of the late 2010's -- it doesn't really scale; and in the absence of actual access to real policy-making power, it was inevitable that frustration with the impotence of signalling was bound to eventually fester and break. The Women's March in early 2017 and the recent No-Kings performances didn't do anything, or at least, nothing that feels like anything. And thus: Minneapolis in 2020, and Minneapolis redux in 2026. Now *that's* getting stuff done! The point here is *not* that such-and-such an immigration "policy" (if that's what it is) and/or its "enforcement" is just or not, should be "resisted" or not; it's that *all* of this, "policy" and "enforcement" and "resistance", has been and remains a grotesque skit with live ammo, a bunch of cosplay in which the participants have broken into dad's poorly-secured gun cabinet. All of these paroxysms could also be read as symptoms of a collective, and uneven, transition from aesthetic to ethical modes of social "engagement" about "politics" -- I am using "aesthetic" and "ethical" here more or less as Kierkegaard does, but "engagement" and "politics" here still mean "performance". That it is performance with casualties doesn't really change the category. It is not surprising (does it even need saying that it is, for those immediately involved, catastrophic?) that people have been and are getting killed. But the wretched thing is that this is what happens when people stop being able to talk to each other, and *that* has been going on since before January 2025; even pointing out that it predates 2016 is trivial. The decade of 2015 - 2024 was simply when things came to a particularly appalling metastasis. But even now, we could still do something different. Better. It starts with getting comfortable with saying, and with hearing, "it's complicated," as a *starting place* and not as an evasion.
The part about the conservative guys seeing the London LGBT Pride and finding that the neutral public sphere had been compromised had me thinking... I see their point that it can feel like the entire public space has become hostile for them. But if you look at the calendar, the Pride probably lasts a few days. The calendar year is full of holidays and festivals, and quite a few of them are of traditional, religious origin. One day the street is full of pride flags, another day there's an Easter parade or full of Christmas lights, not to mention festivals of various faiths like Eid al-Fitr, Diwali or Hanukkah. It seems to me that the public sphere of the street is quite liberally apportioned - if you have a well-respected community that wants to celebrate something, the limiting factor is probably volunteers and organization capacity, not the wider culture judging you out. If London doesn't have Spanish- or Italian-style Easter processions, it's probably because London's Christians are not that keen on organizing them, not because they would be uniquely prevented from having them. The liberal protocol is simply that the bits that don't fly with you, you just ignore them.
On the other hand, there's a deeper tension between a neutral liberal sphere and cultures, because cultures are defined not only by what they believe or *do*, but also by what they *reject* or leave out. A social conservative doesn't just want to cultivate personal virtues and follow traditions, they also want to opt out *as a community* of things that the wider society accepts. And that's hard to keep up when you're not the majority and can no longer pretend to speak for society in general. You can try to keep taboos and restrictions within your group, and an associated sense of superiority, but you can't prevent people from hearing opposing views elsewhere, and from being influenced by the rest of society.
I don't think anyone has a real answer to this riddle. Communities have to navigate the question of just how insular they want to be, but there's an inescapable difference between being the majority culture, and just being a cultural community within a wider liberal society.
Edit: and that's where the woke trend deviated badly from the liberal protocol, it started leaning way too hard on wanting everyone to reject a whole lot of things, to the point of making that rejection a badge of inclusion. That's something a subculture can do, but if the mainstream does it, it's no longer liberal.
I really liked your whole article but I’d ask you to be careful quoting South Asians, as a South Asian myself. We use junglee as a slur because there are tribal people who live in the jungles of South Asia. And he was using a slur word for them when he said “junglee”. It’s legally punishable in India to use such language.
Racism is just acknowledgement of scientific reality.
Sorry brother, that’s just not a claim that works on me. Write to me privately if you ever want to discuss the question as a problem in the history and epistemology of science. There are always more angles to consider when it comes to a massive topic like this, and it’s possible that a discussion would somewhat complicate the way you see the matter. I’d rather not continue this here though — if there’s one thing I hate as much as I hate universal punditry, it’s comments-section pugilistics.
For some reason or another (pedantry), I feel compelled to pick at one throwaway statement near the start re: the tearing of disconsolate calves from their mothers. I've seen this point bubbling up often lately, across many different nodes of the zeitgeist. Something has emerged of recent to make it a bit of a micro-cause du jour, and while I am not here to defend the worst among such practices, I do find it a bit odd how readily people seem to accept the apparent self-evidence of its moral atrocity.
Is it just the plaintive wailing of the animals afterwards that we anthropomorphize into so great a horror? In the grand scheme of industrialized agriculture, it strikes me as a rather trivial offense. And even prima facie, do human babies not also cry when we wean them off the teat, or remove their sippy cups from their toy cupboards? And yet we accept the necessity of this, do we not, and probably place it very low on the list of "things that would not happen in a Utopia"?
Of course I am being slightly contrarian -- I know that the factory farms perform this task in their maximally harmful way (practically by definition). But as someone who grew up around family farms with small-scale dairy production, it felt mostly harmless, and in some cases even provided some relief to the mothers, whose udders were being chewed to pulp by their ravenous young (to say nothing of the gruff, farm-life presumption of character-building being instilled into the young punks). Needless to say, it was done much later than the industry standard in these cases, but still not always without complaint from the animals.
It seems to me that we forget our role in the very creation of these domesticated ruminants. They are far removed from their wild analogues, and they have no place in the natural world, by our hand alone. Quite simply, they would not exist without our intervention. I don't find it surprising, therefore, that we must continue intervening, and in fact would argue that we are duty-bound to do so, playing a paternal role in the microcosm of their development, and that this won't always mean frolicking pleasantly alongside them in a Swiss Alpine meadow.
Every practice that takes place in the cattle matrices of the mechanized livestock industry is blatantly depraved, by virtue of its context. This is a vile abrogation, of the highest order, of that selfsame paternal duty to which I earlier spoke. But we cannot therefore assume the moral turpitude of the acts in and of themselves, in any context.
Maybe this is such a minuscule sliver of the pie as to be not worth the nuance. Yet my being situated within this sliver for most of my life makes it look not so minuscule, and leaves me little choice but to dwell on such things for perhaps longer than most.
I'm surprised you didn't take issue with what I would imagine to be an even more audacious claim -- that ears of corn, too, are creatures of God, and that it is sinful to withhold love from them! Otherwise, you're correct in intuiting my preference for comments that engage with the principal argument of a piece rather than with any one of the very many small points made or examples drawn out in passing.
A shame -- the best of life is found in tangency
I think my oblique point is that by paying attention to the other beings in the litany that includes the calf —e.g., fetuses, corn— you’ll see that my real concern doesn’t have much to do with the particular conditions of this or that animal farm.
Yes, and frankly I can also see that it actually makes your point stronger, or at least illustrates it more clearly, to choose one of industrial agriculture's lesser offenses to include in said litany.
Nonetheless, largely due to my possibly coincidental repeated encounter with this example of late, my compulsion to palaver on the topic was inescapable.