Alan Jacobs

Liberals should read smart conservatives not because they need to be convinced by conservative arguments — though let’s face it, sometimes they do — but rather because conservatives frame issues differently than liberals do. They describe the conditions of history, and the circumstances of our debates, in a language that’s strange to liberals. And dealing with these alternative framings can be very clarifying indeed. 

An example: in The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties Christopher Caldwell argues that the grief over the assassination of President Kennedy led to more sweeping legislation than JFK himself would have dared to pursue: “A welfare state expanded by Medicare and Medicaid, the vast mobilization of young men to fight the Vietnam War, but, above all, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts — these were all memorials to a slain ruler, resolved in haste over a few months in 1964 and 1965 by a people undergoing a delirium of national grief.” And he then claims that this set in motion a dramatic transformation of the American legal and political order — a transformation that we have inherited: 

The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible — and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out. Much of what we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in recent years is something more grave — it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation. The increasing necessity that citizens choose between these two orders, and the poisonous conflict into which it ultimately drove the country, is what this book describes.

Now, it is probably true that only someone who questions the wisdom of “the de facto constitution of 1964” would frame our recent history in this way; but it is certainly true that this framing is powerfully illuminating: it yields insight into both the nature and the intensity of our current political differences. You may not interpret or judge those differences as Caldwell does, but even so, he has presented their causes in ways that ought to earn your assent. 

Another example: Mary Harrington is not just a conservative, she is a self-described reactionary. But some of her recent work is, like that of Caldwell, extremely useful, especially her argument — in, for instance, this essay, which has many links to her earlier work — that what I have called Left Purity Culture (see the LPC tag at the bottom of this post) operates as a kind of de-personalized and even de-humanized swarm. And in certain recent controversies, especially the ones involving Twitter, that swarm is confronted by a version of what she calls Caesarism: 

The Biden administration is fond of talking about “democracy” versus “autocracy”, but it might be more accurate to talk about swarmism and Caesarism. Swarmism is a kind of post-democratic democracy: a mutant form of liberal proceduralism, characterised by collective decision-making in which no one is ever individually accountable. Instead, consequential decisions are as far as possible pushed out to supposedly neutral procedures or even machines. When NGO officials whom you can’t vote out of your political ecosystem talk about “our democracy”, they’re talking about swarmism.

Caesarism, on the other hand, looks substantially the same at lower levels. The main difference is that you get named humans in key decision-making roles — complete with human partiality, eccentricity, and occasional fallibility. Twitter was, until recently, a key vector of elite swarmism. And to swarmists, such rule by a named individual, rather than a collective and some committee-generated “guidelines”, is by definition morally wrong. This core assumption oozes, for example, from this report on the takeover, with its empathetic depiction of the anonymous, collegiate collective of sacked Trust and Safety workers sharply contrasted with the autocratic, erratic individual Elon Musk. 

This, like Caldwell’s framing of American history since the 1960s, is not just interesting but useful. It helps me to think about the structure, as it were, of the debates over Twitter. Now, I might prefer a swarm to a Caesar — and Harrington herself doesn’t see anyone to support here: "I’m not cheerleading for Musk as Caesar. Just because I dislike faceless proceduralism doesn’t mean I have much appetite to see political authority gathered into the mercurial hands of a transhumanist billionaire who wants to implant microchips in human brains.” But whether you take the swarm’s side or Caesar’s side or no side at all, this is a very helpful way of describing the conflict, and is a description that neither a a swarmist nor a Caesarist would have been likely to discern. 

Fifty or sixty years ago, one of the most common genres of nonfiction book in this country concerned advertising. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Naked Society (1964), Wilson Bryan Key’s Subliminal Seduction (1973), and the many books that addressed the effects of television generally but included advertising as an essential element of their critique: Marie Winn’s The Plug-In Drug (1977), Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), George W. S. Trow’s In the Context of No Context (1980), Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). 

This kind of book doesn’t get published any more, because writers and publishers alike know that those authors definitively lost the battle they were fighting. And the white flag of surrender was run up the flagpole when David Foster Wallace published his brilliant and still-relevant essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in 1993. 

DFW’s essay is the Kafka’s Leopards moment in the American response to television advertising. Here is Kafka’s little parable: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers. This is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”

Ezra Klein: “A town square controlled by one man isn’t a town square. It’s a storefront, an art project or possibly a game preserve.” Yep. 

Lovely choral Evensong this evening at St. Alban’s. “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Street furniture

May I never be called a rantipole.

Catastrophic tactical error by Southgate: After an Arsenal legend scored for France, he brought off his Arsenal man. Everyone knows that only Arsenal can defeat Arsenal. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇫🇷 ⚽️

NYT: “As weird as the story [Pinocchio] is, it’s been made all the stranger by the decision to turn it into a metaphor about fascism, a conceit that is as politically incoherent as it is unfortunately timed.” A movie's not “a metaphor about fascism” when it actually has fascists in it (including Mussolini himself). 

Leo Strauss and the Closed Society by Matthew Rose | Articles | First Things:

Strauss was not the only thinker who turned to questions of education in the darkest days of the war. A few months later, Jacques Maritain delivered the Terry Lectures at Yale, calling for the renewal of the modern university through a rediscovery of Christian philosophy. Maritain was joined by T. S. Eliot, Simone Weil, C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers, whose wartime reflections on education gave voice to religious ideas that would succeed in inspiring postwar democratic movements, if not postwar universities. 

Fascinating! Someone should write a book about all that. 

The Struggle To Be Human - by Ian Leslie - The Ruffian:

Whether it’s music, movies or politics, we seem to be creating a world more amenable to AI by erasing more and more of what makes us, us. Even if we think we have got the better of this deal up until now, we shouldn’t assume we always will. A little resistance is prudent. The bar for being human has just been raised; the first thing we should do is stop lowering it.

Can’t stop singing this.

The link in the previous post goes to a current Penguin edition, but I’m reading the copy I bought and read 40 years ago (but have since mostly forgotten).

In my experience — and I do have some experience with this phenomenon — when a journalistic outlet responds to criticism by saying “We stand by our story,” that always means that (a) they know they have been caught red-handed in either dishonesty or incompetence, (b) they cannot stage a proper defense of their work, but (c) they are unwilling to confess their shortcomings. 

Whaddya mean that’s not a word? It’s my gamer handle!

DHH argues that European nations should pursue digital sovereignty. I think this is right. So far the idea of a global internet has meant primarily an American internet, and I believe (a) it would be good for other nations to declare their independence from the American tech behemoths, and (b) it would be good for my country to be reminded that we cannot dictate technological and moral terms to the rest of the world. 

I like having a corkboard.