Home News Interlude
What I've been writing elsewhere
This past week two very pieces of mine, each of which I’m quite fond of, came out in two very different venues.
The first, which appeared in The New York Times last Thursday, was a piece about the impossibility of institutionalizing populism, of the Trumpist or any other variety. It’s an expansion or elaboration on some ideas I sketched out in this Substack post back in June. Populism, I argue, isn’t just prone to demagoguery and corruption, it actually depends on them in fundamental ways, because its essential critique is anti-institutional, and without recourse to institutions as a source of authority populism necessarily must rely on personal authority instead. Rather than summarize further, I encourage you to read the whole thing.
I do want to respond to one way of reading me which I don’t think is quite right. David French kindly links to me in his recent essay, also in The New York Times, arguing that Trump must be defeated to end the MAGA threat, and, further, that defeating Trump will likely cause MAGA to deflate and ultimately retreat, allowing a healthier GOP to reemerge. The first contention may well be true, but I don’t think the latter one is. Trump has proven exceptionally adept at capitalizing on burgeoning anti-institutional feeling that was roiling American life, but it was roiling American life before Trump, and it busted out in a variety of other ways as well.
On the Right before Trump, there was the Tea Party, the Gingrich, Santorum and Cain candidacies, and the rise of cranks like Alex Jones. On the Left there was also a rising opposition to elite governance, starting with Occupy Wall Street, then with Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and the Great Awokening, all of which were fundamentally revolts against existing institutions, and of course there was the Sanders campaign. Somewhat more unclassifiable politically-speaking, you had the anti-vaccine movement and phenomena like Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. If the last category has become functionally Right-coded, that’s part of a larger crank realignment that Trump has unquestionably facilitated, but that’s kind of my point: this kind of rejection of elites, of experts, of norms and consensus has been rising for some time. Trump has managed to build a movement out of it that he can ride to power, and he’s certainly made bad trends worse. But if you decapitated MAGA by defeating Trump that wouldn’t eliminate the forces that allowed him to grow in the first place, and while Trump is sui generis in many ways, he’s not the only would-be demagogue in America. Tucker Carlson got 34 million viewers for his interview with a Nazi apologist, after all; if Trump is defeated, those viewers aren’t all going to just melt away.
Populism is a symptom of an underlying disease. You do have to treat symptoms—fevers can kill you—but you also have to treat the disease, and that’s something we really haven’t gotten a clear handle on yet.
The other recent piece of mine is about Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning film, The Zone of Interest, and appeared in Modern Age, where I am the film and theater critic. I will confess, I don’t tend to think of myself as a critic exactly—I don’t like writing thumbs-up and thumbs-down pieces. I think of myself as engaging in criticism in the sense of trying to understand what a work of art is doing, how it’s doing it, and what larger significance it might have.
My piece on The Zone of Interest was strongly shaped by two events that were extrinsic to the movie itself: first, Hamas’s attack on October 7th, 2023, which happened only days before I saw the film, and the second, Glazer’s own Oscar acceptance speech where he tied his film’s purpose to events in Israel and Palestine. As my readers may know, I have complex views about the relationship between an author and the work, as well as between the larger culture and the work. I can’t go along with either the New Criticism’s view that the work exists in splendid isolation, nor with the New Historicism’s tendency to reduce all work to cultural forces, but neither do I want to go back to 19th-century-style biographical criticism. So I wind up being eclectic in my approach; I’m interested in what the work is doing, what it did to me, what the creator may have intended it to do, and how it’s likely to read in a particular cultural and historical context.
All of those are especially obviously at play in this particular piece because of those two extrinsic events and their effect on me as well as on the larger world. I flatter myself that, in this case, my eclecticism and personalism helped me get at things that other treatments of the film may not have gotten. In any event, it’s a bit long, but I do hope you’ll read the whole thing.
Finally, some readers might be interested in a more complete catalog of my prior work. I’m ultimately going to put such a catalog on my website, but for now, here’s where you can find my prior work at:
The New York Times (2014 to present)
Modern Age (2018 to present)
The Jewish Review of Books (2017 to present)
The Week (2015 through 2022)
The American Conservative (2012 through 2017)
The elites and experts have been wrong about everything for the past thirty years. Condescension and browbeating will not earn back any trust.
Noah Millman is patiently waiting to figure out what might be driving the very dangerous forms of populism which he finds so distasteful and unfortunate. He's obviously a very smart guy so he must have *extremistically* good reasons to completely ignore how obscenely high levels of wealth and income inequality can distort the functioning of the organs of state and the institutions of civil society so that they are blindly and paralytically unresponsive to the needs of huge minorities and amorphous majorities.
I haven't read everything Mr. Millman has ever written, but imagine he MUST perceive certain disquieting parallels between now and the 1930s when popular authoritarian movements surged across the metropolitan centers of world domination leading to some quite regrettable repercussions which still inspire many to firmly intone the phrase "Never Again!" even as the US doubles down on its material support of genocide in Gaza and on the West Bank.
I hope though that Noah Millman will forgive me for further flogging my imagination to conjure up a rationale for ignoring wealth and income inequality and its impact on personal as well as institutional corruption. Perhaps he would say that wealth and income inequality have been a fundamental facet of civilized institutional structures AT LEAST since the dawn of hydraulic agriculture and monumental civilization? That would be true, but then again so have populist resentments and uprisings though the written record tends to reflect only the ideas of those capable of reading and scribing who, with the earliest exception perhaps being certain Hebrew prophets in the period leading up to the first diasporas and the destruction of Solomon's temple (along with the entire surrounding city of Jerusalem).
And, of course, Mr. Millman would correctly argue that obscene levels of wealth and income inequality cannot be the *sole* cause mass resentment, fury, resignation, alienation, hostility, scapegoating, and gullibility. Modernity, like life, politics, calculus, climate change, gender, and making friends is complicated after all. This explains (even justifies?) why it's so easy to blame the victim.
Which brings us to trauma. Those who invest trust and devotion in leaders like Hitler and Trump are surely traumatized in their own special ways. So are those who cynically cast their lots with grifting fanatics in the hopes of syphoning up some spilt gravy. Still it's easier to see why someone might ignore trauma than why they would ignore obscene levels of corrupting wealth and income inequality. After all, trauma is to humanity as water (and predators) is to the little fishies of the sea. Even people who are never tortured, bombed, or have their children stripped out from their arms are shaped, if not scarred, by trauma. It starts with birth trauma and goes on with all kinds of separations, betrayals, deprivations, disillusionments etc whether these are somehow more likely to be considered 'real" or dismissed as "imagined". Humans with our reflective (mimetic) consciousness are "imagining animals" who could probably traumatize ourselves into frenzies or paralysis if others and circumstances weren't so kind as to do it for us. And, by the way, we are not only traumatized by what happens (or could happen) to us, we are also traumatized by what we have done (or might do) to others. Did I say we are "imagining animals"? Did Bobby Dylan say "It's life and life only."?
But scrambling higher to somewhat firmer ground, maybe Mr. Millman has written elsewhere about how the social democratic response to the Great Depression and World War II did institute guard rails against too much obscene wealth and income inequality? In the US this was called the New Deal, and it was always highly resented, if not reviled, by so many. But it changed tax policies, labor policies, and financial regulations to exert profound effects on government, civil society, and culture from 1933 until at least 1965 when it instituted Medicare, Medicaid, and profoundly disruptive Civil Rights and Voting reforms that ended up giving quite a few people the dangerous ideas that being a different color or a female meant you were entitled to seek the protections of the state even as others, playing their own version of the long game, worked to whittle away New Deal reforms and regulations while depriving the state of resources so that wealth might be accumulated and controlled by a shrinking number of mega corporations. One of the skillful techniques used by these well resourced anti-populist masterminds (by the way) involved inciting divisions among the masses and stoking discontent and contempt for institutions of civil society and government.