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Start writing today. Use the button below to create your Substack and connect your publication with
Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
Start a Substack
FOCUS: WTF?!:
Strange things leak into my feed, usually as people I trust tell me I must take so-and-so
seriouslya€’’not their ideas, but their token-sequences as thermometers for guaging socal
temperatures.
And yet, usually, I have a hard time reacting soberly. Thus I look at the European intellectual
far-leftist nostalgia for really-existing socialisma€”or maybe it is the European
intellectual far-rightist nostalgia for fascism, it is really hard to tella€”and go a€oeWTF?!?!a€D
This, for example: Anton JAPger warning us how a€oeEuropean industry and
security policy [is now] subordinate to American geopolitical imperativesa€D.
The a€oeAmerican geopolitical imperativesa€D to which a€oeEuropean industry and security policy [is
now] subordinatea€D is that a cruel and authoritarian Muscovite
rAOgime not conquer and once again dominate Eastern Europe.
This is an American goal, yes.
But one would think it is a European goal as well. Indeed, one would think that it would be a much
higher priority goal for non-Ukrainian Europeans whose close cousins are right
now being stalked by killer robots.
And those who do not share in this a€oeAmerican geopolitical imperative^ □? I gotta say: to me they
look either (1) deranged, or (2) puppets of today a€™ s kleptocratic Kremlin.
Anton J Anger: The American experiment has just begun: As Baudrillard warned, US politics is coming
for Europe'. a€~The result of Putina€™ s war has
been a full-blown a€oereturn of the kinga€D, with European industry and security policy subordinate
to American geopolitical imperativesa€!. It feels as
if the EU is effectively run from Langleya€!. Energy costs are destabilising the German export
model. Dollar supremacy is stronger than ever. The biggest
army in human history is now trying to reshore its industry. Liquid gas supplies find their way to
Stuttgarta€!. Late imperial Rome with a stock exchange
and nuclear weapons, and the same spectacle of public acclamations that accompanied the crepuscules
of the pagan worlda€! a vertiginously unbalanced
form of hegemonya€!.
The politics of other developed nations are also Americanising, witha€! regular BLM rallies and
trans controversies a recurrent featurea€!. The hollow
universality of American culture induces both despair and comforta€!. From Silicon Valley to
evangelicalism to Trump to polyamory to the military
industrial complexa€!. Anti-Americanism might be a moral imperative for Europeans. It certainly is
satisfying. But a disinterest in the US is hard to justify
politically, let alone strategically expedients!
Again: WTF?!?!
Constructing an enemy: SceAmericaSD. (What has America ever done for us? One can see how Belgian
Nazis and Stalinists might have a beef; but with others it is not so clear.)
Claiming that while anti-Americanism is a moral imperative one must be a€oestrategica€D and a€oenot
disinteresteda€O in it. And then racing immediately into the embrace of a
kleptocratic authoritarian in the Kremlin.
What kind of politics is this? And is it better classified as leftist, rightist, or simply stupid?
Let me quote some paragraphs from my Slouching Towards Utopia here:
Have I committed an error by not lumping fascists in with really-existing socialists? After all,
how much light really shines between the fascist and the
really-existing socialist?
A distressing number of people, starting with Mussolini him- self, seem to have transited from one
to the other directly. That suggests not a left-right
political spectrum but rather a horseshoe, or even a color wheel. Red and blue are as far apart in
terms of visual wavelengths as colors can be. Yet if you
take magenta paint and add a little bit of cyan you get blue; if you take magenta and add a little
bit of yellow you get red. George Orwell famously asked,
a€oeBut arena€™ t we all socialists?a€D19 He was in Barcelona, it was 1937, and the
Stalinist-backed socialists were exterminating the Spanish Marxist
faction that he had joined when he arrived in the city (the Worker sa€™ Party of Marxist
Unification). All the while, Francoa€™ s fascists waited outside
the city.
There were important policy differences.
As Hermann Rauschning claimed Hitler had said to him, a€oeWhy need we trouble to socialize banks
and factories? We socialize human beings!a€D That
is to say, really-existing socialism focuses first on control over institutions and commodity flows
and only secondarily on control over what people think,
say, and doa€”but we focus first on what people think, say, and do.
How profound a difference was this really? And while status inequality was important to
really-existing socialists, material inequality and ruling-class
luxury was ... embarrassing. By contrast, for fascists, if material inequality and ruling-class
luxury bothered you, it only demonstrated that you were not
really with the program.
But do these constitute a difference in species, or just variation within a species properly called
a€cetotalitariana€d?
Let us bring in as a reference British socialist historian Eric Hobsbawma€”a card-carrying
communist from before World War II until 1956, thereafter
becoming more moderates’’who had a couple of asides in his histories that strike me as revealing:
The first comes in his 1994 book The Age of Extremes, a history of what he called the short
twentieth century, or the period from the start of World War I in
1914 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Hobsbawm, writing in his old age, still believed that
joining a SoeMoscow-aligned Communist partySD
was, for those who de- sired global revolution, Seethe only game in townSD: SoeLeninS™ s S~party of
a new typeS™ ... gave even small
organizations disproportionate effectiveness, because the party could command extraordinary
devotion and self-sacrifice from its members, more than
military discipline and cohesiveness, and a total concentration on carrying out party decisions at
all costs,SD he wrote. SceThis impressed even hostile
observers profoundly.SD
Is there a hairS™ s breadth of difference between the fascistsS™ worship of a heroic leader and
HobsbawmS™ s belief that unthinking obedience to
the dictator in MoscowS’’whoever he might beS” who had murdered nearly all of his peersS”was
praiseworthy, and profoundly impressive? To accept
that being a follower meant de- votion and self-sacrifice at all costs would absolutely have earned
MussoliniS™ s and HitlerS™ s approval. SceThis is a
fascist coupSD were perhaps the last words of StalinS™ s peer Bolshevik Gregory Zino- viev, as
StalinS™ s henchmen shot him...
And Hobsbawm could be aggressively and neoliberally rightist:
One touchstone, again, is British left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm saw the late 1970s
and the subsequent discontent with the social
democratic order as justified, writ- ing, SoeThere were good grounds for some of the disillusion
with state-managed industries and public
administration.SD He de- nounced the a€oerigidities, inefficiencies and economic wastages so often
sheltering under Golden Age government
policies .a€D And he declared that a€oethere was considerable scope for applying the neo-liberal
cleansing-agent to the encrusted hull of many a good ship
a€~Mixed Economya€™ with beneficial results.a€D He went on with the clincher, saying that
neoliberal Thatcherism had been necessary, and that there
was a near-consensus about this after the fact: a€oeEven the British Left was eventually to admit
that some of the ruthless shocks imposed on the British
economy by Mrs. Thatcher had probably been necessary.a€D
Hobsbawm was a lifelong communist. To the end of his days, he would continue to stubbornly
maintain, while drinking tea with his respectful
interviewers, that the murderous careers of Lenin and Stalin (but perhaps not Mao?) had been worth
undertaking, because they indeed might, had things
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Dispensation, where he heard and then himself preached the Lesson: the market giveth, the market
taketh away; blessed be the name of the marketa€!
Show me who I talk to say that I greatly understate the role that bribes and videos play in the
construction of the pro-Muscovite opposition to North Atlantic civilization. Perhaps.
Perhaps I am not barking up the wrong tree as a worry the question of how conceptual frameworks are
much less important than performatively assuming an oppositional stance.
Subscribe now
MUST-READS: Aze Best Things About Twitter I Have Seen Today:
I need to stop talking about this. I have already blocked a€oeElon Muska€D, a€ceMuska€D, and
a€oeElona€D from my feeds. Yet he keeps leaking through. And I do not need to
have him living rent-free in my brain.
But here are two that properly orient you:
Linette Lopez: At Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk was a jerk with a grand vision. At Twitter, he's just
a jerk: a€~The Musk playbook: Enter a field with very
little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problema€!. Raise
money from a fervent group of true believersa€! flashy,
half-baked product ideasa€!. Repeat. Twitter is the antithesis of an "Elon Musk company.a€D... At
previous stops in his career, Musk's employee
punishing, product-pushing plays worked. Customers seemed satisfied with what he gave them, and he
was able to keep around enough workers to
eventually build the cars or mount the solar panels or launch his rocketsa€! [because] they are
made to feel as if they are saving the worlda€!. Selling the
dream is what turned Tesla's stock into a superstar since it went public. People bought Tesla to
be part of Musk's mission. It didn't matter that the company
only became profitable last year, or that it had an unreliable lineup of vehicles, or that
more-established automakers were poised to catch upa€!. There is no
pivot in which Musk suddenly becomes serious and starts actinga€! normala€!. Thea€! boss from hell
you see on Twitter is the one people actually get in
Musk world. It's always been that way...
Mike Masnick: No, The FBI Is NOT a€~Paying Twitter To Censora€™ : a€~Musk is either deliberately
lying about stuff or too ignorant to understand
what hea€™ s talking about, and I dona€™ t know which is worse, though neither is a good look.
Today, his argument is that a€oethe FBI has been paying
Twitter to censor,a€D and he suggests this is a big scandal. This would be a big scandal if true.
But, ita€™ s not. Ita€™ s just flat out wrong. As with
pretty much every one of these misleading statements regarding the very Twitter that he runs,
where people (I guess maybe just former people) could
explain to him why hea€™ s wrong, it takes way more time and details to explain why hea€™ s wrong
than for him to push out these misleading lines that
will now be taken as fact. But, since at least some of us still believe in facts and truth, leta€™
s walk through thisa€!
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