ego trippin’

Josh Marshall on Elon Musk:

Most of us know what it’s like to be caught up in the moment. In a moment of tense confrontation or ego injury it is natural to pull tight to those who are there to defend you. Some of this is simply human nature. But with the likes of Musk and Trump it operates on a qualitatively different and more explosive level, the consequence of an innate narcissism, an ingrained sense of grievance and entitlement and the unique dynamics of social media. Of course, their power and wealth make their meltdowns vastly more consequential than yours or mine.

Probably not a good thing that we have a social and economic system that rewards extreme narcissism and sociopathy.

Antisemitism as cartoon-ideology

John Ganz:

Antisemitism is sort of an obscene graffito scrawled on the bathroom wall of bourgeois society. But it also has something of an air of mystical hocus-pocus and the direct, graphic power of occult symbols, like say, the swastika. Like cartoons, it is also plastic: shapeable and moldable to new conditions and subject to limitless morphological variation. Fans of other simplistic renderings of society will have a tendency gravitate to the world of antisemitic vignettes as providing more vivid and pornographic kicks.

There is a reason that almost every conspiracy theory tends to migrate back to antisemitism. It is, in many respects, the ur-conspiracy of Western modernity, always ready to assert (or reassert) itself under the right conditions.

Harrison Ford’s Last Truly Great Performance

Josh Spigel on Harrison Ford in The Fugitive:

It's especially a shame to think that Ford could've gotten so much more credit for his work as Richard Kimble. Here, much more than in other recent films, you simply get to watch the lead character think a lot. Kimble has to rely on the kindness of strangers for much of the mid-section of The Fugitive, both before and after he's shaved off his beard and colored his hair to alter his appearance as much as possible. He speaks softly and infrequently here, only using as many words as he has to. Whether he's speaking with the woman renting out a room to him, to a one-armed convict he hopes is the one he tussled with on the night of his wife's murder, to a friendly colleague of his (a young Jane Lynch), to a pushy young ER doctor (a young Julianne Moore) or to Gerard himself, Kimble's introverted. It suits Ford well, as we get to watch him slowly piece together what happened to Kimble, why it happened to him, and how he can try to right this series of wrongs.

Ford really does elevate this film with a wonderfully nuanced performance that does so much to sell what is otherwise a somewhat convoluted story.

Andor is good →

Adam Serwer explains why:

When I say politics, I do not mean that Andor is a liberal or left-wing show. It can be read that way—one can see the echoes of the issues that animated the George Floyd protests in the show’s portrayal of Imperial law-enforcement agencies cracking down on dissent, or in the Imperial prison that has debt clocks in every cell. What I mean is that the series attempts to imagine an internal politics of class, culture, and ideology that motivates its principal characters and fictional institutions.

You can think of Andor as one of only a few attempts to put the political economy of Star Wars on screen and unlike previous attempts, this one really works.

"Time is forever just running out"

I have been on a bit of a Richard Hofstadter kick, and at the moment I am (slowly) rereading both The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. I was struck, in the latter, by this paragraph toward the conclusion of the title essay.

The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.

The paranoid spokesman sees the face of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, who systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out.

Although some of this is at work across the American political spectrum, it is hard to read this diagnosis and not think immediately of QAnon and the apocalyptic fantasies of the far-right and, to a great extent, the Republican Party.

Machiavelli on Renewal

I was flipping through Discourses on Livy while brainstorming a column and I was struck by this passage from Book III, Chapter I.

It is very true that all the things of this world have a limited existence, but those which go through the entire cycle of life ordained for them by heaven are generally those which do not allow their bodies to fall into disorder but maintain them in an orderly way, so that either nothing changes, or if it changes, it is to their welfare, not to their detriment. Since I am speaking of mixed bodies, such as republics and religions, let me say that changes which bring such bodies back to their beginnings are healthy.

The ones that have the best organization and the longest lives are, however, those that can renew themselves often through their own institutions, or that come to such a renewal through some circumstance outside those institutions. And it is clear than light itself that if they do not renew themselves, these bodies will not endure.

Justice and Jurisprudence

I spent roughly two hours this morning flipping through an 1889 legal treatise titled Justice and Jurisprudence, published by the Brotherhood of Liberty, a group of Baltimore-based Black lawyers committed to the fight “against denial of liberty according to race.” The book is an analysis of the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution as well as a broadside against the Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), which gutted enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment.

It’s a massive tome of nearly 600 pages and written in an ornate, and sometimes very difficult, 19th century style. But it also has some real bangers in it.

This passage, in particular, will give you a sense of the writing as well as the substance of the argument.

The complaint of the citizen of African descent is, that the decay of “natural and well-known repugnances” creating civic discrimination cannot be expected, so long as the judicial interpretation of our laws, directly encourages the supremacy of one class of citizens over another in the every-day, joint and several enjoyment of those civil rights, immunities, and privileges which the supreme law of the land shall be equal heritage of all classes in the state.

The African citizens protest and claim that a uniform, precise, and fixed regulation of the sovereign rights of all the individuals who now compose the state, in accordance with the letter and spirit of the law of the land, would put an end to the bickerings, rancor, and discord which foment race-antagonisms throughout the land. They say truly, that the vexatious litigation between the races incontestably establishes, what is too notorious for question, that the more numerous and powerful body in the state daily trample under foot the civil rights of a minority — of a sensitive, peaceful, unresisting, helpless and useful portion of the civic society; that the state now requires the repose which the amendments to the Constitution contemplate; that this anarchistic force in the state must be curbed, controlled, and counterbalanced by the law of the land; that an amphibious code of crude, contradictory textual rules, instead of repelling insolent despotism, encourages the spirit of race-antagonism to enter fresh fields, and, with new allies under its command, to commit new depredations upon all the other civil rights of these citizens; that their general civil right to engage in all departments of industry requires something more for its protection than a mere grammatical construction of the words employed in the Fourteenth Amendment, and an ambulatory parade around the amendment itself, with an army of pretentious learning — an imposing array of deceptive dialectical subtleties; that to meet the race-perils which confront the state, in the present condition of civil rights, there is an imperative need either of new legislation, or the enforcement of the existing laws by rules which will protect, on life’s common way, the lowliest child of the state’s adoption, making him feel that he is a man, majestic and free: rules of such strength and grandeur that they will inspire each member of the state with awe and reverence; so clear, uniform, stern, and unrelenting in their character, that the most profligate or powerful member of the state will not dare to evade or dispute their authority.

It’s, uh, a little hard to parse. But the message — the state cannot be blind to racial inequality and injustice — is as valid now as it was then.