Sam Harris

I do not pay attention to Sam Harris but hazily thought of him as a relatively-less-terrible exemplar of the Legion Of Famous Bonehead White Guy Intellectuals With Bad Priors. (Understand that I use the term “intellectual” here as descriptive of a position in the social process and a psychological type rather than as validation of his insight. Joe Rogan, f’rinstance, is a true intellectual in the sense that he loves ideas and really does think for himself … while being such an asshole and knucklehead that he is attracted to terrible ideas.) I took Harris as discernibly smarter than someone like Rogan, though hung up on a distinct Stubborn Asshole Atheism which made him a sucker for Islamophobia. But that praise through less-vigorous damnation comes to a close, because I just learned that a few years back, he said this:

As bad luck would have it, but as you’d absolutely predict on the basis of just sheer biology, different populations of people, different racial groups, different ethnicities, different groups of people who have been historically isolated from one another geographically, test differently in terms of their average on this measure of cognitive function. So if you’re gonna give the Japanese and the Ashkenazi Jews, and African Americans, and Hawaiians … you’re gonna take populations who differ genetically — and we know they differed genetically, that’s not debatable — and you give them IQ tests, it would be a miracle if every single population had the same mean IQ. And African Americans come out about a standard deviation lower than white Americans. A standard deviation for IQ is about 15 points. So, if it’s normed to the general population, predominantly white population for an average of 100, the average in the African American community has been around 85.

I recognize that song; it is thoroughly debunked bad faith racist far right The Bell Curve horseshit. Once again I should have recognized that these guys are all swimming in the same Intellectual Dim Web stew of bigotry.

Social media shitstorms

Drawing on a Twitter thread of mine about the need for an ethos for social media shitstorms (significantly refined in Jan 2024):

I believe in the liberal-as-in-liberal-democracy approach to the Paradox Of Tolerance, which says that we need all six of these principles working together.

1. Honesty — always speak in good faith, telling the truth as well as one knows it, especially about oneʼs own ideas and intentions
2. Generosity — start from a presumption that everyone speaks & acts in good faith
3. Vigilance — always watch carefully for bad actors
4. Skepticism — demand strong evidence before accepting that someone is a bad actor
5. Transparency — publicly document evidence of bad actors
6. Safety — ruthlessly exclude demonstrated bad actors

Shitstorms create incentives against those principles. One must work hard to preserve them.

Pursue clarity

Shitstorms sow confusion. Resist this. Everything one says every time one engages must pursue clarity — especially about what actually happened. Return as much as possible to the known specifics of what people said and did. Push back against the telephone game effect.

Every comment will necessarily summarize complex issues and events. Respect how tricky this is. Respect the effort it involves.

Remember how summaries can easily imply something different from what happened, even when technically accurate, out of clumsiness or malice. Understate your case and steelman positions you disagree with, to counter your own biases.

Expect honest mistakes

Never assert that facts or conclusions are “obvious”. Counsel patience and thoroughness, even when you feel confident that you know the truth.

When a shitstorm gets thick, some people acting in good faith will still share misleading or simply false commentaries. Document the errors as specifically as you can, tell anyone you see sharing those errors, and spread warnings about misinformation afoot. Since such errors are inevitable, do not take them as discrediting all criticisms; even reprehensible actors will face false accusations, so do not exonerate the subject of a shitstorm based on a single disproven accusation.

Register the ideological biases of commentators but do not dismiss all commentators on one side for their ideology, even if most of them share an ideology you oppose.

Respect & support newbies

Shitstorms get harder to understand the longer they proceed. Remember that anything you say may become someoneʼs introduction to the issue.

Recognize the tension between this need for diligence and the need to respect the time & energy of people caught in the shitstorm. Neither demand that that any particular individual catch you up nor fault people for asking for an explanation of the shitstorm.

Expect bad early responses

Shitstorms are disorienting and upsetting. They bring out the worst in anyone. Never indict the subject of a shitstorm based on their initial response; those will always have failings.

That does not mean to refrain from criticism. Share thoughtful criticism. Help people think. Clearly name the problems you see in commentaries. Resist the temptation to dismiss commentaries as “nitpicking”. Resist the temptation to dismiss something or someone over one clumsy point.

Dawdle to judgment

Respect and praise people who were attentive to the issue early, who talked about it publicly before the shitstorm. But do not covet that position. Do not try to be right early. Do not take pride in drawing a conclusion with less evidence than others.

If you were among those watching the subject for a long time, explain why, describe your conclusions, and share information about what happened and how you knew. Point to where people talked about the issue before the shitstorm.

Never brag about having “called it” early. Never fault people who did not already know about those sources. A shitstorm demonstrates that information you thought was “everywhere” was not.

Be kind

Shitstorms inspire ruthlessness. Counter that.

In the heat of a shitstorm, you will misread people. Check your understanding. Expect to make mistakes anyway. Apologize readily.

In the heat of a shitstorm, people will misread you. Assume good faith. Correct misreadings clearly but patiently. Forgive readily when people admit an error.

In the heat of a shitstorm, be generous, honest, transparent, and skeptical, even if you fear that bad actors will benefit. You can undo being too gentle but not being too harsh. Turning out to be right in the end does justifies neither cruetly nor misrepresentations. Kindness extended to even the worst actors during a shitstorm benefits the entire community.

In the heat of a shitstorm, return again and again to what facts are known, what are not, and what sources ground that knowledge. You may not have the capacity to respond to every request for particulars & sources, but never take those requests as insults.

Hate the shitstorm dynamic

Shitstorms are inherently traumatizing.

They hurt every participant. They often hurt innocents the most. All too often, they even hurt the guilty more than they deserve.

Never say the trauma was “justified”, however necessary it was to confront the issue. At best a shitstorm is a necessary evil, when other remedies have failed. They are never a positive good.

Related

I have posts about how I handle sealions and discussions in my space.

Laura Jedeed has a useful post COINTELPRO-Style Behavior: What It Is, How To Recognize It, What To Do When You See It which offers similar counsel.

Here are some COINTELPRO-style tactics we should all watch out for:

1. Accusations of impropriety, espcially in the days following a successful event. Bonus points if the accusers:
   1. Say they have strong evidence but never provide it, or demand you believe them without evidence.
   2. Use the incident to disproportionally paint a person or group as irredeemably tainted.
   3. Pivot, when you ask reasonable questions about the accusations, to accusing you of being complicit in the crime. This behavior takes advantage of your desire to be a good person and invokes fear that you’ll be cast out in a time when we need community more than ever.
   4. “But Laura, are you saying we should never listen to people who accuse groups or leaders of impropriety?!!” Absolutely not! Serious accusations must be taken seriously. Also, ask for evidence. Opt for dialogue and conflict resolution over ostracism and denunciation when possible.
2. Broad statements about a faction within a wider organization. Some paraphrased examples I’ve seen recently:
   1. “the left is always attacking liberals, they hate us and can’t be trusted”
   2. “Establishment libs organizing protests are deliberately pacifying the populace”
   3. “Where are Black people in the Palestinian solidarity movement?”
   4. “These protests are unserious, useless, performative garbage. Typical white people behavior.”
3. Constant drama. People are going to get into fights and have personal beef, but if someone is ALWAYS having personal beef, and ALWAYS litigating that beef in public within activist circles, that person is disrupting the movement whether they mean to or not. This is a known COINTELPRO tactic.
4. People who openly call for violence, property destruction, or other illegal behavior. There is literally NEVER a reason to do this. If violence and/or property destruction become necessary, why would you put it in writing?! We KNOW the Trump regime is going after people for domestic terrorism. Encouraging people to advocate for violence or property destruction online is a great way to take someone out of the fight for absolutely no gain.

Again: the people doing these things are PROBABLY NOT FEDERAL AGENTS. They probably are doing these things because they understand how high the stakes are and desperately want things to succeed. It doesn’t matter. These types of actions destroy solidarity, and we have to shut them down immediately

If you encounter these ideas online, some things you can do (from least to most aggressive):

1. Calmly point out that the statement seems counterproductive and explain why
2. Ask for evidence of serious accusations
3. Call them out. Establish a norm of not putting up with that shit
4. Block them

Product management menagerie

Dean Peters has a smart and fun taxonomy of (bad) product management patterns with fun animal names, starting from familiar classics like HiPPO and the seagull.

• HiPPO — Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
• RHiNO — Really High-value, New Opportunity
• ZEbRA — Zero Evidence, but Really Arrogant
• WoLF — Works on Latest Fire
• Seagull — Swoops in, makes noise, craps everywhere, leaves a mess
• YAK — Yet Another KPI
• CoBRA — Cognitive Bias-Related Assertions
• PUMA — Promotes Unusually Meaningless Assumption
• GOOSE — Guesstimating Overly Optimistic Scheduling Estimates
• PUFFIN — Plans Unending Feature Factory INitiatives

Varn

Round one

I wonder who really wants to experience a few hours of me talking with an old internet frenemy who has smart, strange radical politics I deeply disagree with. But if you do? Here it is:

You can find my precipitating essay what, if not liberal democracy? right here on this here blog. I never really got an answer out of Varn to its questions; the discussion meandered. I did have fun, though.

Round two

After that first discussion, Varn & I agreed that we had succumbed to being a little too genial to grasp the nettle of the original question … and had to confront the accelaration of MAGA fascism in the US. So we did an even longer call:

Black Mirror

If you are squarely in the target audience for Black Mirror, you have already watched it. If you have not yet jumped in, I have a few resources here which may help decide whether it is right for you, including a skip guide if you want to just pick up a few of the best episdodes for your tastes.

The “black mirror” of the title references both the computer screen and, of course, the show’s intention to reflect back to us the way computers and related technologies affect our society today. Most episodes take the form of a sort of design-science-fiction: stories which explore the implications of imaginary technologies. The tone generally relies heavily on morbid humor and tragic ironic twists in the style of Richard Matheson. (Even if you do not recognize Matheson’s name you probably recognize the Matheson Twist from countless imitations and screen adaptations, including more than a dozen episodes of the original Twilight Zone series.)Black Mirror also invites comparison to The Twilight Zone in having an anthology format, each episode an independent story.

I recommend these episodes most highly, starting with an important word of advice:

• S01E01 “The National Anthem” — One of the gutsiest satires ever put on film. But even if you plan to watch the whole series, do not watch this first episode first. If you take to the show, you can go back for this episode later. But the tone of it is so deadpan — and the moves it makes so mortifying — that it can easily throw one out of the show entirely.
• S03E04 “San Junipero” — A break from the show’s usual tone, poignant and ultimately optimistic ... plus some of the best evocation of clothing from the 1980s ever put on film. I recommend it as your One Episode if you feel sure you will not care for the show in general. And pick it up as a parting dessert if you find yourself losing interest.
• S03E01 “Nosedive” — Both one of the best meditations on the show’s themes and one of its best-executed stories. The ending is cathartic. If you only watch one episode to get what the show is about, I recommend this one or ...
• S01E02 “Fifteen Million Merits” — My favorite episode. It squeezes in half a dozen turns where it becomes about something different, and intelligently satirizes several particular things plus a big thing which is hard to name.
• S04E01 “USS Callister” — Famous for its witty evocation of Star Trek, though one should expect the middle part of the story to go seriously dark places.
• S04E05 “Metalhead” — Though it has a topical theme, this episode is an almost pure, lean action thriller rather than a satire with something to say.
• S02E03 “The Waldo Moment” — A political satire which felt a bit too broad and fantastical when it was released in 2013 ... and now feels frighteningly prescient.
• S05E02 “Smithereens” — A complex satire which covers a lot of ground. I think it falls a little short of its thematic ambitions, but still impressive because it aims high.
• S04E04 “Hang the DJ” — Though not as strong as “San Junipero”, it also has a twist more like more sentimental O. Henry than cutting Richard Matheson.

Content warnings

Black Mirror presents the tricky bind that many episodes have cause for content warnings ... which constitute significan spoilers. If you have trauma triggers, ask someone who has seen the show about whether yours mean you should skip an episode; if you lack such a friend, I invite you to drop me a line.

I do have a quick word about two key episodes:

• S04E06 “Black Museum” delivers its own mini-anthology of stories. Despite my strong stomach, the segment about the doctor squicked me right out. Know that it will Go There hard.
• S03E02 “Playtest” is a straight-up monster horror story. It delivers effective shocks but disappointingly hollow storytelling, not just in having nothing to say but also in the execution of its horror conceit. Teenage Me probably would have dug it, but adult me thinks even folks who take to the show might want to give it a pass.

What, if not liberal democracy?

I have long kept intellectual and personal company with radical leftists, and in the last several years I have radicalized enough that I no longer count as a progressive — I am a leftist now, too.

But I have a long-standing impasse in talking with many of my leftist comrades, because I also I have a deep commitment to liberal democracy: universal human rights, rule of law, democratically accountable institutions, et cetera. Many leftists see embracing both socialism and liberal democracy as hopelessly confused. I have some questions for them.

First, though, a little clarity about what I mean.

Liberal democracy

I grant how the history of liberal democracy suggests something fundamentally wrong with it. Many of the Enlightenment thinkers who originally shaped the body of libdem ideas and institutions named private property ownership as a primary human right on a par with free speech and freedom of religion. The emergence of libdem governments from that was entangled with the grave injustices of colonialism, slavery, genocide, and the birth of capitalism. Plus, of course, realworld liberal democracies today are capitalist societies exhibiting countless social injustices. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

But libdem principle and left ideals are woven together in my heart and mind.

Where history shows libdem principle & institutions delivering injustices in practice, it also suggests that libdemming harder helps. More commitment to rights & democracy makes societies more just.

The Civil Rights Movement provides a familiar example. I am not a fool who thinks that the CRM fixed racist injustice in these United States by improving rights protections and access to the the ballot box for Black people. Obviously racist injustices remain. But it would be both dismal and absurd to deny that the CRM corrected injustices at all. And though we must understand power politics to understand how the CRM forced institutional changes, that offers an incomplete understanding. The CRM used not just power politics; it also stood heavily on an insistence on libdem principles, to drive institutions not only to better serve Black people but to become more consistent with those libdem principles. Grounding political claims in libdem ideas about universal rights stood literally at the center of the name of the Civil Rights Movement.

Not that we can rely on Libdemming Harder as our sole instrument to bring justice. Injustices persisting in the wake of the CRM exemplify how history demonstrates a need for adjuncts and counterweights for the limitations of libdem principles & institutions. And I believe that we have plenty of headroom for very different liberal democracies which are much more liberally democratic and deliver much better justice than we have now.

Liberal socialism

The draw of libdemming harder includes me finding socialism not just compatible with libdem principle but implied in it … or at least in the democratic half. Surely capitalism’s private ownership of the means of production is un-democratic? Surely we can at least conceive of a body of libdem principle which does not count private property among our basic rights but does find a right to the material necessities for a dignified life? I am hardly the only person to suggest this.

Matthew McManus’ book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism [manifesto • review • interview] demonstrates how there is in fact a robust intellectual & political tradition marrying liberalism with socialism.

Paul Crider’s Socialist-Liberal Nexus makes the case another way, and his manifesto Inheritance of Equals: A Case for Liberal Socialism makes a case for a liberal socialist vision:

Liberalism defines itself in terms of freedom, and liberal socialism is no different. But the freedom of liberal socialism is ambitious and expansive, mingling and interpenetrating with equality like a yin and yang. We will see that equality is necessary for and constitutive of freedom, and vice versa.

Those works are recent, but the position is not at all new. McManus provides the history — and when I originally wrote this post, before he published, I registered how Point 10 in the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program justifies its socialist claims with nothing other than a direct quote of the statement of libdem principle from the top of the United States’ Declaration of Independence.

We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security

My hope is that entwining libdem and socialist principle addresses the worrisome history of the socialist project. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao do not prove anti-leftists’ claim that socialism inevitably leads to horror, but they should inspire some wariness. That all three rejected libdem principle suggests that we should think twice before doing the same.

If we believe that socialism holds more promise than history has yet proved, I think we must at least respect having that same hope for better liberal democracy.

My questions

I ask leftists who reject any marriage of leftist ideals with liberal democracy:

• If you hold that “liberal democracy” by definition includes capitalism, how should I name a socialist society with governance grounded in liberal principles of universal rights, democratically accountable institutions, rule of law, and all that other libdem jazz? You need not accept this as a good idea or even plausible to attempt; I just ask what I should call it to avoid confusion.
• If you hold that “liberal democracy” by definition includes the Westphalian nation-state, how should I name a social or political order other than the state which supports liberal principles like universal rights, democratically accountable institutions, and rule of law? Again, I do not ask you to accept this as a good idea or even plausible to attempt; I just ask what I should call it to avoid confusion.
• If you reject libdem universal rights, democratically accountable institutions, rule of law, et cetera as cursed to inevitably produce injustice, what governance principles & forms do you propose instead? I do not demand every detail, but I need at least as much clarity as the 200-odd words in the Declaration of Independence the Black Panthers quoted.

More

Liberal Currents

A publication which embodies the spirit I am talking about. I enjoy their podcast series with the witty name Neonliberalism.

Liberal Currents offers discussion, elucidation, and defense of liberal principles and institutions. These principles—however qualified—are freedom, individualism, universalism, and pluralism, grounded in a respect for the dignity of ordinary people living ordinary lives. These principles are embedded and protected within liberal institutions: the rule of law, due process, democratic politics, private property, markets, and institutions of free inquiry and expression.

While the authors may at times disagree about the various forms liberalism may take as these values are contextualized in lived experience, the unified editorial voice believes liberalism is alive and more critical than ever. As popular faith and confidence in liberal principles and institutions ebb, Liberal Currents commits to their rejuvenation and vigorous defense.

“Radical liberalism”

A Bluesky thread by Aaron Ross Powell:

What is “radical liberalism?” I get asked this occasionally, as it appears in my bio here and in the tagline for my ReImaginingLiberty.com podcast, which is about “the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic liberalism.” So here’s a 🧵 setting it out.

“Liberalism” is a contested term, but the family resemblance among its varieties is ultimately about a shared set of values. Liberalism values dignity, autonomy, freedom, and the capacity of each of us to choose and craft the course of our own lives. It thus opposes hierarchy and dominance.

I am a “radical” liberal because I don’t just center those values in my political and social thought, but view them as the whole ballgame, and recognize the degree to which taking them seriously means throwing off a lot of the mechanisms of control many people are perfectly comfortable with.

Put simply, unless you are actually harming others, you should be able to live as you see fit, and you should afford everyone else the same freedom. It is wrong to compel other people to live the way you'd prefer, and it is especially wrong to use state violence to do so. You don't get to tell the rest of the world how to be. But you do get to choose how you want to be. That means you can't force your social preferences on others and you can’t tell them what they're allowed to exchange with others. Nor, if you hold to liberal values, should you want to. 5/

That “nor should you want to” is where liberalism is seen as not just a set of policy or institutional guidelines, but as a system of values. A virtuous person doesn’t say, “I shouldn’t murder people, even though I want to.” A virtuous person would never have the desire in the first place.

The same is true of the liberal person. A liberal person doesn’t say, “I’d really like to stop LGBT people from openly living their lives, but I can’t.” A liberal person wants LGBT people to be able to live how they choose to live, and sees a world where they can’t as bad for everyone.

Liberalism is an ethic about how we ought to view ourselves in relation to others, and how we ought to view others in relation to ourselves. It is applying the basic virtues of respect for others and joy in their ability to flourish to politics. This means illiberalism is necessarily unvirtuous.

Radical liberalism, then, doesn’t just oppose state control, but it also must oppose social conservatism, which is an unvirtuous desire to compel society (which means to compel people other than ourselves) to live in accord with our personal preferences.

It is perfectly liberal to be personally conservative: “I want my life to conform to a set of relatively stable preferences and behaviors.” It is illiberal to be socially conservative: “I want everyone else’s life to conform to that same set of relatively stable preferences and behaviors.”

To be liberal — and, remember, virtue requires liberalism — you cannot believe that everyone else must do as you approve. That’s not your choice to make, it’s theirs. And because people are individuals, the world will be diverse. Because people are changing, the world will be dynamic. Radical liberalism, then, is a deep commitment to, and love for, a diverse and dynamic world, and the myriad ways people pursue (and hopefully find) their bliss within it. And it is an unwavering rejection of the urge to control, whether that be in the social, political, or economic spheres.

Paul Crider adds:

It’s interesting that Aaron doesn’t directly touch on state economic policy, or really statism at all. As written, I pretty much agree with it. I cringe at the liberal perfectionism (pluralism is a value that must be affirmed), not because it’s wrong, but because the real tension is so bare.

I used to use “radical liberal," but I’ve moved away from it, I guess because I think liberalism comprises multiple values that are sort of always in balance or negotiation with each other, and “radical" often implies reducing to single essence.

Still radical in the ninja turtle way though.

I’m very fond of Black radical liberalism, but that’s, you know, a bit awkward for me to self-apply.

Occupy Liberalism!

A paper in which Charles W. Mills argues that “the foundational values of liberalism have a radical potential that has not historically been realized”.

It includes an academic but very useful short comment about the range of things that liberalism contains and could contain, starting from a quote from British Political theorist John Gray’s book Liberalism:

Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctively modern in character, of man and society [⋯] It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms; and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements. It is this conception of man and society which gives liberalism a definite identity which transcends its vast internal variety and complexity.

What generate the different varieties of liberalism are different concepts of individualism, different claims about how egalitarianism should be construed or realized, more or less inclusionary readings of universalism (Gray’s characterization sanitizes liberalism’s actual sexist and racist history), different views of what count as desirable improvements, conflicting normative balancings of liberal values (freedom, equality) and competing theoretical prognoses about how best they can be realized in the light of (contested) socio-historical facts. The huge potential for disagreement about all of these explains how a common liberal core can produce such a wide range of variants. Moreover, we need to take into account not merely the spectrum of actual liberalisms but also hypothetical liberalisms that could be generated through novel framings of some or all of the above.

The subtitle “Or, Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism (And Why They’re All Wrong)” names the paper addressing these concerns:

1. Liberalism Has an Asocial, Atomic Individualist Ontology
2. Liberalism Cannot Recognize Groups and Group Oppression in Its Ontology—I (Macro)
3. Liberalism Cannot Recognize Groups and Group Oppression in Its Ontology—II (Micro)
4. Liberalism’s Values (Independently of the Ontology Question) Are Themselves Problematic
5. Liberalism’s Enlightenment Origins Commit It to Seeing Moral Suasion and Rational Discourse as the Societal Prime Movers
6. Liberalism Is Naïve in Assuming the Neutrality of the State and the Juridical System
7. Liberalism Is Necessarily Anti-Socialist, so How “Radical” Could It Be?
8. The Discourse of Liberal Rights Cannot Accommodate Radical Redistribution and Structural Change
9. American Liberalism in Particular Has Been so Shaped in Its Development by Race that Any Emancipatory Possibilities Have Been Foreclosed

If those points trouble you, check it out.

The Trial Of The Chicago 7

I thoroughly enjoyed Aaron Sorkin’s film and was dazzled by some of the performances. And I hated the politics of the way it presented the history.

To understand my frustrations, mild spoilers below.

On bare facts the film is okay. It takes a large number of small liberties with historical details, and a handful of understandable big liberties. One of the big revisions is that the treatment of Bobby Seale in the courtroom, which feels like imaginary movie theatrics, is actually dramatically toned down from what really happened. So it goes with historical dramas, in the name of telling the story. I gather that Slate’s list running down the particulars is pretty good, if you want them.

But on the texture, it is much more frustrating. There are some high points — “we see a cop do something you don’t ever wanna see a cop do” is a shattering line in context of the film and the world we have now — but it is fundamentally a misrepresentation of the meaning of the story, who the Seven were, and what they stood for.

The heart of the problem is the treatment of Abbie Hoffman. Sasha Baron Cohen is breathtaking in the role and Aaron Sorkin’s knack for writing smart characters who feel like they talk like real smart people talk communicates how Hoffman, for all his deliberate clowning, was very very smart and very very purposeful. And vigor of that portrayal makes the problem with it all the more galling as a demonstration of the general problem of the movie.

Much of the film concerns friction between Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden. At the start of Act III the movie gives us a Sorkin-tastic moment in which they have The Conversation in which they reveal that they Truly Respect One Another. I admire Sorkin’s mastery of dialogue and story structure and the scene is, as craft, terrific. As is often the case with Sorkin’s writing, while I was watching I fell under his spell and found it moving in the way I was supposed to.

But in that scene Movie Hoffman says a thing about his aims which would have repulsed Real Hoffman. Sorkin does not understand the left, thinks he does, and thinks he can bend left voices to speak for his undercooked mushy liberalism. Abbie Hoffman wanted a transformative leftist revolution. He was working for one. He believed that he and his movement would achieve it. He wanted to save the lives of American soldiers, yes, but he understood that the moral urgency was in saving the lives of Vietnamese people.

If you understand that, you will see what is wrong with The Conversation, the climax, and the whole film.

After you have seen the movie, I recommend checking out some critical commentaries:

• Jeet Heer at The Nation
• Charlotte Rosen at The Nation
• Joshua First at the Jewish Daily Forward

Three big economic policies

There are three broad rival frameworks for economic policy under contemporary capitalism (which also are relevant under most socialist proposals): monetarist policy, demand-side fiscal policy, and supply-side fiscal policy. In practice all three are pretty much always in play, but different policy programs generally emphasize one over the others.

All three claim to be the best way to manage the economy in two ways:

1. Moderating the impacts of the boom & bust cycles which emerge in markets
2. Ensuring that industry has the capacity to provide valuable goods & services

In service of these things, they try to juggle some tendencies which tend to conflict:

• ensuring that industry provisions enough goods & services that people enjoy prosperity
• keeping people prudent so they do not bid up the prices of things which are in fixed or nearly-fixed supply (like land or raw materials)
• ensuring that industry invests in new capacity (like factories and technological R&D).

Monetarist policy says that the best way to do this is through controlling how much money is in the economy, generally by controlling interest rates charged by a central bank (in the US, the Federal Reserve) to private banks when they need to borrow money. If the central bank’s interest rates are high, then the private banks will be cautious about lending money, leading people in the economy to be cautious and prudent in their decisions; low interest rates make people more free-spending. So policy tries to set interest rates at a level which keeps the economy moving without encouraging mistakes. It tries to push against the booms and busts, raising interest rates during the boom (to curtail a tendency toward bidding up prices and investing in dumb things) while cutting them during the bust (to make money available to keep things moving when times are lean).

Both forms of fiscal policy try to do something similar not through banks but through choices in government taxation & spending, taxing more & spending less during the boom while taxing less & spending more during the bust.

The difference between the two forms of fiscal policy is where in the economy they focus their attention.

Demand-side fiscal policy looks at shaping consumer spending. How much money do ordinary people have in their pockets? If you make sure they have the right amount, then they will buy useful products & services and industry will invest in capacity to provide them. So it favors policies which put money in most people’s pockets.

Supply-side fiscal policy looks at shaping investor’s choices. If you make sure that they have the right amount of resources, then they build the capacity to deliver useful goods & services and hire people to do the necessary work. So it favors policies which put money in the pockets of the rich people who shape investment.

Demand-side fiscal policy dominated the US in the middle of the 20^th century. The movement conservatism which dominated the Republican Party from 1980-2016 favored supply-side fiscal policy ... and the general consensus came to emphasize monetary policy more than it had in the past.

Movement conservatives argued for supply-side policy by saying things like, “Capital gains taxes are dumb and counterproductive. If you own something like a factory and it gains in value, that is because it makes something useful. We should not discourage that by taxing the owners for some of the increase in value! It is good to make factories which make useful things! Yes, cutting the capital gains tax makes rich people who own things like factories richer, which may sound unfair, but it is okay because ordinary people get jobs working in those factories and they make useful stuff, so the wealth ‘trickles down’ to everybody. Indeed, since you are making more stuff, the country is wealthier, so a lower tax rate does not reduce the tax revenue the government gets, since the economy is more productive: a smaller portion of a bigger pie comes out to the same amount for government to spend.”

Supply-side economic policy thus can sound plausible. But the experiment we have conducted thanks to movement conservatives demonstrates conclusively that it is entirely wrong. It just concentrates wealth. Since supply-side policy does not mitigate unemployment during busts in the boom-and-bust cycle, workers fear losing their jobs and do not have the power to force employers to pay them more, even when productivity increases. It is a rationalization for enriching the already-rich who own capital under capitalism. So despite this now well-demonstrated failure, it is still around and still the driving theory for Republican Party policy, since the rich will always find ways to support and reward people who argue for policy which makes them richer.

Hallelujah

People:

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is a Jewish song about fucking, doubt, longing, being Jewish, kinky fucking, lust, melancholy, agapē, magic, and Jewish fucking.

The song is well-known because Jeff Buckley did a cover in which he says, “yes, really, this song is totally about fucking”:

It is not a Christmas song and it is not an Easter song. It is an extremely Jewish song about Jewish fucking.

Christians: do not tempt Reb Cohen’s shade to rise out of Sheol to explain this.

There are three acceptable versions — Cohen’s, Buckley’s, and this guy’s in Yiddish:

I was inspired by verses from Life’s Not Fair You See …

I’ve heard there was some words in verse
Where Cohen wrote of sex and worse
But goys don’t really listen to it, do ya
It starts with lust, it ends with death
It’s fully yid in every breath
I just don't think you grok the “Hallelujah”

… to add a few of my own …

When Cohen names the holy dove
He doesn’t mean romantic love
It’s obvious the meaning really threw ya
It’s not quite G-d, and sure ain’t Christ
The highest Good, but isn’t nice
It’s a cold and it’s a broken הַלְלוּ יָהּ

(And you can find a silly riff of mine among a delightful collection of them.)

More commentaries

My friend @ETori says:

I know my people like to make fun of Xtians fascination with Hallelujah. I mean, they hear it really differently than most Jews do. At the same time, there is such a pervasive sense of grief in it. It’s not just sex, it’s mourning, it’s anger, it’s love, it’s breathtaking.

I mean … it’s in the tradition of the Song of Solomon, which Jewish educators tried to convince me was really about the Torah.

Or Hafez poems, where Muslim clergy try to tell you that the wine is a metaphor for Gd.

Sammy Aurora underlines the point:

Hallelujah isn’t just a sex song, it’s a song by a very Jewish man that references his very Jewish (and very negative) perspective on God and religion. Please stop trying to make it a church song, thank you.

To ever one saying: “wait, it’s a sex song?”:

“It had references to the Bible in it, although these references became more and more remote as the song went from the beginning to the end”

Rolling Stone | How Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ Brilliantly Mingled Sex, Religion

Also to clarify, “negative” is the wrong word for the portrayal of God and religion in Cohen’s work, but what I meant was that it’s something other than uncomplicated praise and worship and often has a dark undertone. Which makes it weird to use as a Christian hymn.

Babadybbuk snarks:

Me: how about a remake of Boorman’s Excalibur but make it KING DAVID and essentially one long ass music video for Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and it’s SO H•RNY that it has gentiles vomiting in the aisles during screenings 🤔

Question asked while making the film fest rounds: what compelled you to make this highly controversial film???

Me: The Christian gentiles had to be taught a lesson. For too long they’ve been making Cohen’s Hallelujah about Jesus when all this time it’s been a h•rny Jewish song.

Jacob Brogan snarks:

New rule: If you’re going to do something (figure skating, scoring an emotional scene in an animated comedy, etc.) accompanied by any version of “Hallelujah,” you have to first write a short essay explaining what you think the lyrics mean.

I would like to also use this space to rescue a linkrotted commentary I like:

I wrote this a while ago for FB after someone asked “wait, what is the song really about, I thought it was about an abusive relationship?” Thought I would share here.

This is your obligatory PSA that Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen is a DEEPLY and undeniably Jewish song.

Cohen was born, lived, and died as an Orthodox Jew — he also embraced elements of Buddhism, but contrary to what people may assume, that doesn’t mean he stopped being a religious Jew. He himself said so in interviews — that he was content with his religion and identified as Jewish.

A lot of his music is informed by his Judaism and by the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. For example, Abraham’s famous line of “hineni” or “here I am” being used as the refrain in “You Want it Darker.” Cohen’s “Who By Fire” is a pretty literal interpretation of the Unatoneh Tokef prayer from the Yom Kippur liturgy, about inescapable morality. His work is often very literally and directly informed by his Judaism.

Hallelujah is perhaps the ULTIMATE example of Judaism in Cohen’s work. It uses two famous stories from the Tanakh — the imagry of “bathing on the roof” comes from King David (of secret chords and psalmistry) and his adulterous lust for Batsheva. The lyric about tied down and having ones hair cut is an allusion to Delilah cutting Shimshon/Samson’s hair, betraying him and stealing his strength.

Hallelujah itself is a Hebrew word — “Hallel” means praise, the “u” ending makes it a vocative command, and “Jah” represents the Divine, the object of praise. It means “you should/let us praise the Divine.”

Cohen wrote DOZENS of verses for the song, and most people covering the song use the ones selected by Jeff Buckley for his cover. However, if you look at the original verses Cohen sang, you’ll find even MORE Jewish sentiment.

“They say I took the name in vain, but I don’t even know the name.” Blasphemy or taking G-d’s name in vain has a very different meaning in Judaism — we can’t use G-d’s sacred Name unless we are directly addressing G-d, and even then, only the high priest can use it, and only in the most sacred place in the Temple at the most sacred time of the year. But because the Romans destroyed the Temple and exiled us, the high priest line was broken, the Temple doesn’t exist, and the Name is believed to have been passed down secretly in Babylonia until as late as 600ce, when it vanished entirely.

In a real sense, the original way that we communicated with G-d in Judaism has been destroyed by outsiders, and we’ve had to adapt. Judaism moved on, now a religion of text instead of Temple, but there’s still a GREAT sense of loss and displacement around that issue.

“There’s a blaze of light in every word, it doesn’t matter what you heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah” — not to get too deep into it, but, this is a reflection of Kabbalah, Jewish ontological mysticism. One explanation of creation is that G-d, the Eternal, withdrew in order to make space for the universe to be born. As G-d collapsed inwards, everything in the universe emanated out from G-d’s person like shafts of light. Everything that exists came from one of these 10 eminations of divinity or the 22 letters of the Hebrew language. There’s a blaze of light in every word — a spark that reflects how G-d used light and words to create everything.

This gets very very interesting when you get to the idea of “the holy or the broken.” Kabbalah conceives of those eminations as vessels that hold the divine light of G-d, but that the reason evil exists in the world is that long ago, the vesseks cracked and the sparks all fell out. Now, each positive aspect like love, strength, harmony, has a negative aspect, like death, sadness, corruption. Tikkun olam, or repairing the world, is the job of doing more and more good deeds in the earthly realm so that we can gather up all that light and positivity and repair what’s been broken in the world, on a personal level but also a cosmological one. So, while there’s a holy hallelujah — joy, thanksgiving, gratitude, praise — there’s also brokenness, sorrow, despair. But even that is part of the world, an empty shadow of the good aspects of existence, and you have to take the bad with the good and just try to make the world better.

“And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song, With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.” In Judaism, we don’t need an external source for salvation. You do the best you can, you apologize when you do wrong and try to do better, and if you still suck, you go to the equivalent of purgatory for 11 months max. Thats it. No hell, and no Jesus required.. Many Jewish people don’t believe in an afterlife at all, or believe in other options like reincarnation. But anyone who does believe in a positive afterlife (analogous to heaven or paradise) believes it’s available to anyone who simply tries to be a good person.

Now, one of the biggest problems actually comes from people adapting Jeff’s version. The verse “Maybe there’s a God above” was written by Cohen, but he didn’t sing it. Jeff Buckley chose to include it in his rendition. “Maybe” theres a G-d is a VERY Jewish sentiment. We are a religion, NOT a faith. Belief in G-d is more or less optional. No one, even in Orthodox circles, will ever ask you about your personal belief in G-d. That’s none of their business, it’s quite rude, like asking about money or something. Everyone sorts out their spiritual journey on their own, and Judaism makes a LOT of space for questioning, doubt, multiple conflicting viewpoints, even downright disbelief. As a result, there are many agnostic and atheist Jews who are still deeply religious and fully observant. However, in an ire inducing brand of Christian hubris, most Christian artists choose to change this to “I know that there’s a God above,” TOTALLY stripping the Jewish context from that line because doubt is not culturally acceptable in their faith-centric system.

Unfortunately, Christians often go even farther than inserting a forced and obligatory belief in G-d — I have heard renditions of Hallelujah with the lyrics totally changed, so that it becomes an Evangelical worship song about the love of Jesus, a Christmas song about the birth of Jesus, or even (horrifyingly) a Passion narrative song for Easter about the death of Jesus. There are THOUSANDS of songs on those topics already. Stealing a Jewish song for a Christian purpose is ironically just like the story of the rich man with many sheep who stole the poor man’s only sheep. Which is a metaphor for David stealing Batsheva from Uriah. WHICH IS LITERALLY IN THE SONG. It’s the biggest religion on earth stealing something from one of the smallest. To make matters worst, juxtaposing it with the crucifixion is BEYOND tone deaf, considering one of the origins of antisemitism is the accusation that Jews killed Jesus. No one in history has mistreated, exiled, exterminated, and abused the Jewish people to the extent that Christians have - and still, they have the nerve to take a fundamentally Jewish song and appropriate it for their purposes.

Hallelujah is a beautiful song, and many people of all backgrounds relate to it. That’s because, though it is a deeply Jewish song, its fundamentally about the tension between beauty and brokenness — in love, life, humanity, the divine, and the universe. Everyone relates to that. But thats THE central and foundational message of the song, onto which other messages are applied.

To make it about Christmas, Jesus, or the crucifixion STRIPS that message and replaces it with (what Judaism essentially considers) idolatry.

To use this song at the RNC in support of the Trump campaign does the same thing. Though the lyrics were unchanged, the true message was stripped away, leaving behind an undeniable message - praise Trump. This is idolatry, this is blasphemy, this is appropriation, this is theft, this is defilement and violation and assult.

In conclusion:

Independence Day

This is a deep revision of my old Independence Day post. (And I sharpened it up here in 2023.)

On this day, arriving in a dire moment in American life, I want to celebrate how our national holiday commemorates neither a military victory nor founding an institution, but rather people signing a statement of principles: the Declaration Of Independence.

Some of the principles the Founders asserted 246 years ago are superb. Frankly, many of them are … not so much. And we have failed to live up to the best of those principles.

But celebrating the nation by pointing to its defining principles — not land or blood or history or institutions, but principles — is good. So every year I re-read the Declaration on Indpendence Day.

I offer reflections on my favorite parts.

A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them

I could do without the implicit sexism, but taking care to name your reasons for your politics is good.

We hold these truths to be self-evident

Being clear about which key points one takes as axiomatic — points where one refuses to even enter into an argument about them — is good. I recently learned that Benjamin Franklin suggested that bit, telling Jefferson that his initial draft “sacred and undeniable” was not strong enough.

that all men are created equal [⋯] with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

As Heather Cox “How The South Won The Civil War” Richardson observes …

For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous slavery by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.

… so this is good stuff.

And I love how the Declaration says “among these” rights. We have a lot of rights. We have too many rights to list. This is just a start, naming some of the key big ones. Especially delightful to me is naming “pursuit of happiness” in that top tier of rights. A frank admission that we cannot demand happiness, combined with the insistence that we are entitled to the things we need to have in order try for happiness. Again the expansive implications of not enumerating the particulars, as there are too many and the principle runs deeper any examples could encompass.

to secure these rights, governments are instituted

Our rights do not bind and limit government. Our rights do not come from government. Our rights exist prior to government. Our rights are what government is for.

governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

When people do not accept their government’s legitimacy, it renders that government inherently unjust. We have a word for this principle: “democracy”.

whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it the right of the people to alter or to abolish it

Again, government is our instrument. If it does not secure our rights, it has failed and we can fix it.

when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security

Duty.

These are instructions.

in every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury

The first step in political change is to name the problems, to open the possibility of a correction.

we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor

For political change we must act in solidarity, backed by all we are and all we possess.

Every year on Independence Day I also re-read a speech by the greatest American, Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Douglass underlines the paradox that the very people who declared these principles held other people in the bondage of slavery, as profound a betrayal of humanity and equality and rights as one could imagine, persisting among those founders’ children and grandchildren.

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States …

Though we ended the slavery of his time, I humbly submit that we continue to fail too much, too often, in too many ways. Our nation still merits Douglass’ scathing words.

When I read these two great documents, I revisit those American principles. I ask myself what my principles are and how I may fulfill my principles better. I keep returning to the same statement of my most fundamental politics, my version of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”:

all people are equal in rights, dignity, and moral claim to the fruits of this world

all people

ALL people

ALL PEOPLE

And rights are necessary but not sufficient. Our moral equality extends to our essential value, to respect, to our material needs.

I hold those truths to be self-evident

My nation was born from slavery & genocide, the greatest injustices I can imagine. It perpetuates both, and their consequences, to this very day. But our national holiday reminds us how the USA came with a manual which counters those by getting some very important things very right.

1. We start from principles
2. Those principles hold that government — the public’s instrument for explicitly shaping society — has no legitimacy if it does not ensure liberty & equality for all
3. We are not simply entitled to direct the nation to liberty & equality for all; we have an obligation to correct every failure in that purpose

The founding crimes of slavery & genocide rendered the entire system which supported them illegitimate on its own terms. So do our ongoing crimes. Every American bears an obligation to stand up for aligning our nation with its highest principles.

The important issues

For perspective, I consider these the most important issues in the world:

1. Ensuring the material sustainability of human civilization is more important than everything else put together. This includes not just climate change but also resource exhaustion, ecosystem breakdown, nuclear & biotech weapons, and so forth.
2. Global poverty is more important than the sum of everything other than the the material sustainability of human civilization. About a billion human beings will go to bed hungry tonight. About another billion are poor enough that they do not have shoes. The next billion are not doing so great, either: they suffer with easily preventable diseases, backbreaking substistance labor, and other fundamental privations.

I cannot name the ^#3 problem in the world; the next tier has several problems which are tough to rank:

• Millions live in slavery
• We have ongoing slow genocides and outbreaks of acute genocide
• Billions live under authoritarian states, and the liberal democracies all have authoritarian movements growing in strength
• Preventable diseases — easily preventable, even trivially preventable — kill millions each year, and severely disable millions more
• We have constant bloody wars

We should be working harder on the big problems.

My contribution is not necessarily special, but I really should be working harder on this stuff. Partly this is my own failure. Partly this results from living in a society in which one must kick & scratch hard to get to work on the big problems. Which is itself a big problem.

Media

I was moved to post this because I was just asked, “Do you feel that you, your interests or your community are represented in the media? Why or why not? What do you wish people knew?” That is not quite the same question, but obviously it is related. My answer to that was:

1. The climate crisis and general breakdown of the material sustainability of human civilization is not just the most important thing, it is more important than everything else put together. On the one hand, I am frustrated that this is not central to all news & political reporting; on the other hand, everything to say has been said. That this is barely reflected at all in news & political media is maddening.
2. The threat of fascism and the broader far right as a driving force in US politics — both in our political culture and in its hold on political institutions — is not just the most important political story in the US, it is more important than every other political story put together. In this instance there is a lot left to say, including that every political story needs to be informed by this ongoing issue.
3. The US is in the grip of institutional breakdown across all institutions, public and private, with decades-deep taproots. Few Americans can name this pervasive problem, and many cannot even conceive of effective institutions. This underlying problem drives both our inability to address the climate crisis and also our susceptibility to the anti-politics transformative fantasies of the far right.
4. The ongoing crises above produce and are supported by a failure of American political and policy imagination. Without the ability to imagine big changes to make things better, we cannot address their challenges. Political media — especially accessible progressive political media — need to put big ideas on the table as plausible to consider and to enact.
5. All of these connect to the issue on which I am an obsessed crank: the built environment of American life created through decades of suburbanizing housing and transit policy making the material fundamentals of living resource-intensive, expensive, soul-deadening, and corrosive of social cohesion. Most Americans cannot imagine the world with less economic and logistical pressure and stronger communities which we could have that also dramatically reduces pressures on the climate and ecosystems.

Social wisdom classics

Mostly from the internet, a bunch of good vocabulary for thinking about how people communicate and work together.

Five Geek Social Fallacies

1. Ostracizers are evil
2. Friends accept me as I am
3. Friendship before all
4. Friendship is transitive
5. Friends do everything together

Ring theory

• The “Ring Theory” suggests that, in a crisis, we sit at the center of a set of social rings.
• When we face a crisis, the people closest to the crisis would fit around us in the first ring, and others fill outer rings the further they are from the crisis.
• The person in the center ring, and inner rings, can complain about the crisis to those in outer rings, but those in outer rings should offer only comfort and support to those in inner rings.

Ask culture vs Guess culture

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you’re a Guess Culture person — and you obviously are — then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you’re likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you’re an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.

Ask vs Guess is a particularly vivid example of different cultural meta-communication styles in action. I recommend Deborah Tannen’s pop books about language & metacommunication not just for being good on the subject but as some of the books I most recommend, period: That’s Not What I Meant! introduces the subject in general and her book You Just Don’t Understand is very instructive on gendered communication patterns and their breakdowns, a not-evil not-sexist version of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. I have a long Twitter thread mostly about gendered breakdowns in meta-communication. I also very strongly recommend the book Black And White Styles In Conflict about communication breakdowns which emerge from different styles in Black vs white meta-communcation which is powerful but also heartbreaking if one has any engagement in anti-racist work.

The Tyranny Of Structurelessness

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness — and that is not the nature of a human group.

This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free" social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of “structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones.

The Missing Stair

Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it? Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there's a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it’s okay because we all just remember to jump over it.”

Some people are like that missing stair.

Being a systems (over)thinker

From John Cutler:

Some things I’ve learned over the years as a Systems (Over)Thinker

1. Take care of yourself. Your brain is working overtime—all the time. Practice “radical” recovery
2. You may spend a lot longer thinking about things than most people. Pace your delivery
3. If you go deep first, and then simplify…keep in mind that you don’t need to show all of your work
4. Your default description of (almost) any problem will be too threatening/overwhelming
5. Do your deepest thinking with co-conspirators (not the people you’re trying to influence)
6. Informal influence is often not formally recognized. Prepare mentally for this
7. The people you’re trying to influence spend 98% of their day overwhelmed by business as usual
8. Remember to also do the job you were hired to do (if you don’t you’ll be easier to discount)
9. Seek “quick wins”, but know that most meaningful things will take a while
10. Some things take ages to materialize. It is discontinuous, not continuous
11. Make sure to celebrate your wins. They will be few and far between, so savor the moment
12. The people who support you in private may not be able to support you in public. Accept that
13. Hack existing power structures—it’s much easier than trying to change them
14. Consider becoming a formal leader. It’s harder in many ways, but you’ll have more leverage. What’s stopping you?
15. In lieu of being a formal leader, make sure to partner with people who actually “own” the area of change
16. Watch out for imposing your worldview on people. Have you asked about what people care about?
17. You’ll need a support network. And not just a venting network. Real support
18. “Know when to fold ‘em”. Listen to Kenny Rogers The Gambler. Leave on your own terms
19. Don’t confuse being able to sense/see system dynamics, with being about to “control” them. You can’t
20. Grapple with your demons, and make sure not to wrap up too much of your identity in change

Dominionism

In understanding the US right, one must grapple with Christian Dominionism. Political Research Associates have a good overview of the state of play as of 2016, Domininism Rising, which provides a good overview if the movement is new to you.

Dominionism Defined

Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological view, means, or timetable, Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.

Analyst Chip Berlet and I have suggested that there is a dominionist spectrum running from soft to hard as a way of making some broad distinctions among dominionists without getting mired in theological minutiae.106 But we also agree that:

1. Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe that the United States once was, and should once again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy. Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.
2. Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, insofar as they believe that the Ten Commandments, or “biblical law,” should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing biblical principles.
3. Of course, Christian nationalism takes a distinct form in the United States, but dominionism in all of its variants has a vision for all nations.

NRx — Neoreaction

This post assembles resources explaining who the “neo-reactionary” aka “NRx” folks are. They are one among the far right movements comprising Team Trump.

• Journalism & commentary
• Overviews
• Curtis Yarvin
• More particulars
• Movement source texts
• Texture
• More on Yarvin
• Adjacent movements
• Gray Tribe
• Fascism

At the beginnings of the second Trump administation, they have their hand on the tiller, in the form of Elon Musk and J.D. Vance. This makes understanding them much more important than it seemed when I first started assembling this index. A long open letter (5 February 2025) underlines the threat:

Following President Trump’s Executive Order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), many have been shocked by the speed and scope of changes led by Elon Musk. While DOGE in theory aligns with longstanding conservative ambitions, the reality is that Musk has not limited government or dismantled the deep state; he has replaced it with himself. Under his radical restructuring of federal power, the White House is at risk of becoming captive to Musk’s demands. This memo outlines four alarming developments that transcend partisanship.

1. Musk-aligned operatives have seized control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), purging career civil servants and installing loyalists with ties to Musk’s private ventures.
2. DOGE has deployed unvetted hires — many under 25 years old — who now wield de facto control over sensitive government functions without security clearances. These individuals, drawn from Musk’s orbit and Silicon Valley’s neo-reactionary (NRx) network, operate without legal oversight or accountability.
3. DOGE has gained read-write access over Treasury pipes and federal payment systems, granting Musk direct influence over the financial infrastructure of the U.S. government. This unprecedented control over money flows creates a national security risk and a personal power lever for Musk.
4. The congressionally mandated divestment of TikTok has been delayed, with reported Chinese interest in Musk as a buyer. If successful, Musk would control not just X (formerly Twitter) but also the largest platform shaping youth political discourse—further concentrating his influence over public opinion.

Rather than operating as an ally of the Trump administration, Musk has hijacked its ambitions for his own purposes. His rapid takeover of federal infrastructure mirrors the broader ambitions of the neoreactionary (NRx) movement — a small group of Silicon Valley elites who reject democracy and seek to install a “CEO Monarch” to rule by technological and financial dominance. This network includes Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, David Sacks, and Curtis Yarvin, among others. Once considered fringe, purveyors of this ideology have now been embedded into the core of government operations.

Musk’s maneuvering demonstrates a long-standing strategy of this elite class: not dismantling government, but replacing its power structures with ones they control. DOGE has not reduced bureaucracy — it has privatized it. Treasury has not been made more efficient — it has been placed under a billionaire’s influence. TikTok has not been secured from foreign threats — it has been delayed so Musk can position himself as its gatekeeper. President Trump, far from asserting dominance over the administrative state, may now find himself hostage to Musk.

Journalism & commentary

Overviews

• Robert Evans (2025), a journalist covering the far right, offers a good introduction as a gloss on the letter linked above in his verbose, snarky podcast Behind The Bastards also has entries on figures like
• RationalWiki (ongoing) offers a wealth of resources including relationships and contrasts with other movements, plus nerdy snark
• TechCrunch (2013) has an early overview with explanations of some key NRx vocabulary plus a pretty big index of links to other resources
• A Guide For the Perplexed (2025) at Platfrom has an overview focusing on NRx dreams of creating pseudo-libertarian alternatives to Westphalian nation-states
• Vanity Fair (2022) has a thoughtful deep dive by David Pogue looking at the culture of NRx and its relationship with other politics
• Current Affairs (2022) has a roundtable discussion featuring Elizabeth Sandifer, whose book Neoreaction: A Basilisk (2018) is smart, witty, and suitiably unkind
• QZ (2017) connects NRx to both tech culture and other far right movements
• Mouthbreathing Machiavellis (2014) from leftist culture commentary magazine The Baffler
• Evil Nerd Theory (2024) explores the legacy of NRx and adjacent movements
• Understanding The Tech Right (2023) is an instructive commentary from elsewhere on the far right by odious white nationalist Richard Hanania
• Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets (2022) connects a lot of dots, including J.D. Vance
• The Nerd Reich (ongoing) a ongoing blog about Silicon Valley far right movements, largely NRx
• The Authoritarian Stack is a deeply-researched review of the relationships between tech-industry authoritarians engaged with and adjacent to NRx

Curtis Yarvin

Yarvin aka “Mencius Moldbug” is undoubtedly the most central and influential figure in Neoreaction, and he has become increasingly visible and personally influential at large. I have a section below reflecting on him, and he merits his own subsection in this index of treatments of the movement.

• The Yarvin Explainer (2025) takes a deep dive into Yarvin’s thinking and lays out how it connects to the pseudo-libertarianism of Peter Theil.
• Vox (2022) covers Yarvin and links him to Steve Bannon (2017)
• Yarvin’s Case Against Democracy (2023) from the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal calls him “too elitist for fascism”
• Behind The Bastards (2024) covers a lot of ground with its usual snark
• Matt “The Dark Elf” McManus at Commonweal (2023) examines Yarvin’s peculiarities, contrasting the anti-democratic “libertarianism” that he and Thiel represent against other far right movements
• Moldbug Variations (2017) at The Baffler talks about Yarvin’s place in the far right ecosystem
• Is Curtis Yarvin influential? (2025) registers how hard it is to answer its central question
• ‘Reboot’ Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook crisply outlines Yarvin’s fantasy of how governance should work
• The Interview (2025) at The New York Times, which was many people’s first exposure to him
• Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington. (2025) at Politico centers on an interview with Yarvin at the start of the second Trump administration
• Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America (2025) at The New Yorker is a cautious profile which captures a lot of the texture of him as a figure, though …
• A statement on my ex-fiancé addresses that profile as an exemplar of the difficulties American journalism has talking about him and the broader movement: “Many of the ways she limned my ex-fiancé’s character were on target. Yet her profile of Curtis covers almost none of what I think is most important about Curtis.”
• The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel (2017) is a long discussion of the overlaps between NRx and a particular nerdy obsession with potential artificial intelligence, which Sandifer’s book linked above also addresses at length

More key reporting & commentary

• End Times Fascism (2025) is an astute read of NRx-ish influence on the Trump regime from Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor
• Peter Theil (2024) covered by Evans at the Behind The Bastards podcast
• Politico (2017) on Steve Bannon and his connection with both the “Alt Right” and NRx
• It May Not Be Brainwashing, but It’s Not Democracy, Either (2025) from Thomas B. Edsall at the NYT addresses how NRx-ish ideas have spread among tech moguls
• Mother Jones (2022) addresses Peter Thiel and Senate candidate Blake Masters (shading from NRx into Gray Tribe, see below)

Movement source texts

• The Dark Enlightenment (2013?) is an early sort-of manifesto for the movement, Meltdown (1997) is a poetic evocation of its sensibilities, and Hyper-Racism (2014) is a window into its ugly implications; if like me you are a middle-aged weirdo intellectual who remembers the cultural-theory-punk 1990s, it is helpful to situate author Nick Land as a there-but-for-the-grace cautionary demonstration of how we could have gone badly wrong
• Unqualified Reservations (2007-2014) offers the collected NRx writing of Curtis Yarvin’s writing as Mencius Moldbug, though informed people have warned that it has been scrubbed of embarrassing examples of racism et cetera, so one can benefit from checking against the Internet Archive of the original blog
• The Education of a Libertarian (2009) is where Peter Theil famously said “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”; at the time he styled himself a “libertarian” but is best understood now as NRx
• It’s Time For Truth And Reconciliation (2025) is a more unhinged later word from Theil, Nerdblog Slate Star Codex offers an overview “In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell” (2013) and an Anti-Reactionary FAQ (2013) which are useful, but I include them among sources from the movement because it turns out that the author is too sympathetic to them

The texture of the movement

I find this tweetrant (2015) by Jay Allen <@a_man_in_black> a useful elaboration of what NRx is:

NRx is Neoreaction. Racist, monarchist nerds, with varying degrees of emphasis on each. Their version of SJWs/cultural Marxists is “the Cathedral”, a liberal academic conspiracy to marginalize them. NRx is against liberal bullshit like immigration, democracy, and human rights. NRx-ers envision a racially-pure autarky with an autocratic leader. The difference between them and fascists isn’t clear to me. They like to take credit for the entire alt right but responsibility for no one, inside or outside NRx. So of course half of the NRx screeds are against intellectual cowardice. NRx is popular with the [4chan] /pol/ crowd, natch.

Fascists romanticize violence; NRx’ers don’t. Fascists don’t really care about policy; NRx’ers do. Still: too close.

Okay I lied I do know the differences between NRx and fascism. NRx doesn’t (usually) idolize the military or demonize intellectualism. They have utopian or colonial ideas about achieving racial purity. They’ll convince all the undesirables to move away or all move somewhere with no undesirables (or no settlement at all). More Zionist than Ein Volk, Ein Reich.

NRx eschews solidarity, too. They aren’t a movement or an ideology, just a vague pile of shitty ideas. Their term for themselves is often “the University”, emphasizing their “diversity of thought”, opposing the Cathedral of liberals. Paralleling Eric Scott Raymond’s writing about the Cathedral and the Bazaar, in free software. (ESR has long been a classic nerd “libertarian”; to my knowledge he has not slid to NRx.)

NRx-ers are often freethought / atheists, manosphere / MRAs, and free software types, so they have their meanings for those communities’ terms. NRx-ers “redpill” converts, for example. NRx exalts “western civilization”, which is pretty much code for whiteness.

They have a complicated relationship with religion. NRx-ers alternately love Catholicism as traditional and eschew “superstition.”

NRx has that particular fringe tactic of being so fractious that they don’t have to take responsibility for each other. Everyone else is no true NRx-er.

Aaron Bartley has a FB post (2025) about how this manifests in the alliance with the early days of the second Trump administration.

Why are they doing this? What’s motiving the techno-feudalists (Musk, Thiel, Vance, Andreessen and their minions) to wreck our country and tank the economy?

I’ve subjected myself to hours of YouTube interviews and dozens of screeds by the tech overlords and their high priests. They have made no effort to hide their motivations. This is my attempt at a basic synthesis of how they explain their shift from neo-liberals to Trumpists:

1. The techno-feudalists have billions invested in crypto and without a big push from the government and the removal of all regulations, their money will be lost. Crypto has not mainstreamed in the way they expected, both because of Biden-era regulations on speculative investments and because the public just isn't into it. They need the state to manage the transition to crypto.
2. 2. Similarly, they’re gravely concerned about the trillions they’ve invested in AI. Any amount of regulation or constraints by the state is seen as a death-knell. They know that AI has prompted a speculative bubble and they need the state to manage the bubble through subsidies and contracts. They also need the state to aggressively shield the US from Chinese AI technology.
3. Both crypto and AI are burning up the earth. The electricity demands of both AI and crypto are enormous. They need a completely deregulated energy industry and rapid shift away from any climate policy. Even the mention of climate change is a threat to their fortunes.
4. China has caught up faster than they expected in all realms of tech. They need an ultra-protectionist/nationalist regime to keep Chinese technology at bay.
5. Lastly, they resent their employees deeply for the political concerns they’ve been raising about climate change and DEI. They blame the “radicalizing” influences of elite institutions and want the government to shut these institutions down or reform them heavily.

The over-arching motivation is to make the state a profit center for themselves through privatization, subsidies and contracts, just like the post-Soviet oligarchical takeover in Russia.

To that last point, a snippet from The Twin Insurgency:

Unlike classic 20^th-century insurgents, who sought control over the state apparatus in order to implement social reforms, criminal and plutocratic insurgents do not seek to take over the state. Nor do they wish to destroy the state, since they rely parasitically on it to provide the legacy goods of social welfare: health, education, infrastructure, and so on. Rather, their aim is simpler: to carve out de facto zones of autonomy for themselves by crippling the state’s ability to constrain their freedom of (economic) action.

Curtis Yarvin

Elsewhere on this blog, I said this about Yarvin in 2021:

Yarvin is an extraordinarily terrible person. Not just extraordinary in the degree of his terribleness, but in the kind of his terribleness.

Under the name “Mencius Moldbug” he wrote the blog Unqualified Reservations, in which he made very very long and complicated arguments about culture & politics which made him one of the leading figures in a small, energetic, strange, nerdy, evil movement of political ideas known as the “Dark Enlightenment” or “Neo-Reaction” or “NRx”

Moldbug said that if one reads enough dead white reactionaries, one realizes that democracy stinks and liberalism is at war with human nature, so we would be better off if we appointed someone smart like Steve Jobs to be dictator of America. Or maybe we should clone Charles II and crown the clone king. After all, Singapore is authoritarian but a nice place to live and very economically productive. This long, tortured argument was full of repulsive asides like, “Golly, reviving slavery is probably not the best move, but while it is not a big deal to me, I have to admit that dead white reactionaries made a lot of persuasive arguments that slavery is actually a good idea, and if you think about it, Black people really are best suited to slavery, aren’t they? Not that I’m a white nationalist, though. Those guys are not as smart as I am.”

If you don’t know Moldbug, I know that sounds like a parody. It is not. That is a succinct taste of stuff the blog really said. I read a fair bit of it years ago, fascinated by its bizarre style and repulsive ideas.

Moldbug is not exactly a Nazi or a fascist; he reflects an idiosyncratic far right sensibility significantly different but equally horrible. Yarvin was not attached to a political movement which did anything real, they just said a bunch of crazy, evil stuff on the internet, but that is still quite bad enough. And though really just a blowhard, he is a dangerous, damaging blowhard. He has radicalized a bunch of nerds. Yarvin evidently had some kind of contact with the first Trump campaign though the racist, fascist advisor Steve Bannon, and in years since he has popped up more and more often in references by other figures on the right, though his actual influence is uncertain. Fascist or not, I cannot overstate how evil his ideas and influence are.

Rather than get fussy about which evil far-right nuts are According To Hoyle “fascists”, antifascists use the word “fash” as a term of art for the whole range of evil far right nuts. Moldbug is definitely fash, and I will refer to him as such here.

I only recommend reading Yarvin if one has both patience and an interest in deeply understanding far right movements. If one wants to make that attempt, he has indexed a Gentle Introduction To Unqualified Reservations which belies its name by being about a hundred thousand words long and not at all gentle. (It also edits out many of the most egregious examples of racism from the original blog.) Just a few paragraphs in:

UR is a strange blog: its goal is to cure your brain. We’ve all seen The Matrix. We know about red pills. Many claim to sell them. You can go, for example, to any bookstore, and ask the guy behind the counter for some Noam Chomsky. What you’ll get is blue pills soaked in Red ^#3.

Since we provide the genuine article, UR is pretty much the anti-Chomsky. (As a broad generalization, UR’s stance in any controversy will be the opposite of Chomsky’s.) Take one of our red pills — heck, split one in half — and you’ll be in a completely different world. Like DMT, except that the DMT reality is prettier than your old reality. UR’s is uglier. Also, DMT wears off.

Alas, our genuine red pill is not ready for the mass market. It is the size of a golfball, though nowhere near so smooth, and halfway down it splits in half and exposes a sodium-metal core, which will sear your throat like a live coal. There will be scarring. What can we say? That’s what you get for being an early adopter.

For the record, in that passage he was the first to appropriate that allegory for use by the far right; it would go on to be adopted primarily by an adjacent strain focused on the supposed horrors of feminism rather than Yarvin’s broader dread of the horrors of democracy & equality.

That should be more than enough of a taste of his smug nerdwit and radical opposition-to-everything for most people.

Yarvin & tech

This is deep geekery, but if you are digging into Curtis Yarvin, you may also want to know about his software infrastructure project Urbit and its implicit politics:

• Popehat (2013) has about as accessible an introduction to what the heck Urbit itself is as one could hope for
• Distributed Web Of Care (2019?) has a smart critique of why Urbit’s structure is bad and concentrates power in some bad hands
• Software, Sovereignty and the Post-Neoliberal Politics of Exit (2021) is an academic paper which “examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking [⋯] on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’ [with a] focus on Urbit”

Adjacent movements

• Steve Bannon and Elon Musk Are Battling for the Soul of Trumpism from April 2025 covers more than the title implies, providing a deep review of the many strains of hard and far right movements within the MAGA regime
• The Twin Insurgency, “plutocrats and criminals who unknowingly compound each other’s insidiousness”, is the single most clarifying analysis of What Is Going On
• The Trumpland Diary (2025) places NRx in context among the other movements shaping the second Trump administration, specifically Christian Reconstructionism and Project 2025
• TESCREAL (ongoing) names a contellation of reactionary tech utopianism obsessed with the near-future potential for artificial superintelligence within the larger constellation of weirdnerd culture which includes NRx; Jon Evans’ Extropia’s Children takes a wider look at that weirdnerd spehere
• Breeding for IQ (2024) talks about the creepy weirdnerd cult of IQ which extends beyond proper neoreactionaires: “eugenics works by naturalizing socioeconomic inequality and generating support for policies that enhance the life chances of those at the top of the social hierarchy and reducing the life chances of those at the bottom”.
• The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right (2021) at The New Republic talks about a broader far-right movement which includes NRx and more
• The Rise of the Dale Gribble Voter (2024) is an astute reading of the current iteration of the paranoid style in American politics (1964!) which falls for figures like RFK, Jr. and Joe Rogan, but wear your hazmat suit and keep your wits about you when reading it, as the author Richard Hanania is an outright white nationalist
• Where did the tech right come from? (2025) collects a bunch of Xitter threads and other sources laying out how tech leaders understand their own right turn

Gray Tribe

Eventually I need to spin off a whole post about this type: libertarian-ish nerds disgusted by both liberal and conservative politics.

• Slate Star Codex (again with a big caveat for the source) has the Grey manifesto-ish I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup (2014) which is referenced by …
• Informed commentators have identified Luigi “The Adjustor” Mangione as Gray Tribe; Emily Shugarman examines him on those terms (2024) with a pretty-good introduction to what Gray is like.
• The Rise Of The Grey Tribe (2014) is a manifesto-ish overview
• When Nerds Collide (2014) does not refer to itself as Grey Tribe but explores the sensibilities from which it emerges — “my intersectionality will have weirdoes or it will be bullshit”
• IQ With Conscience (2017) comes from an insider in the overlapping racist “IQ realism” movement
• The Californian Ideology (1995!) is a classic critique of the taproots of tech industry culture from which this springs
• No Exit Opportunities: Business Models and Political Thought in Silicon Valley (2024) explores more recent manifestations of the Californian ideology and their internal contradictions

Fascism

Many smart commentators call NRx a species of fascism. John Ganz’ The Enigma Of Peter Thiel (2024), which I recommend reading in full, makes the best case for this reading which I have seen.

In his biography of Thiel, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Max Chafkin writes, “The Thiel ideology is complicated and, in parts, self-contradictory, and will take many of the pages that follow to explore, but it combines an obsession with technological progress with nationalist politics—a politics that at times has seemingly flirted with white supremacy.” Let’s see, we’ve go some futurism, nationalism, maybe a little bit of racism here and there…hmm, what does that all add up to? What a mystery this guy is!

[⋯]

Peter Thiel believes he belongs to an elite group, often understood in implicitly or explicitly racial terms, that is entitled to set aside democratic governance in favor of pursuing a program of technological progress and national restoration. He believes the political means to accomplish this is through a charismatic leader with manipulative, populist appeals to past national glory and against parasitic immigrants and culturally decadent liberalism. For him, even the most milquetoast, reformist liberalism is “tantamount to communism.” He’s obsessed with romanticized fantasies of absolute power, domination, and control. He dreams of wielding the the national security state against enemies both foreign and domestic. He envisioned a kind of imperialist world-state controlled not through deliberative bodies like the U.N. but directly by the intelligence and secret police bureaus. He combines the ideology of white collar, petit-bourgeois intermediary class with its emphases direct management techniques and closely-held ownership with the grandiose, world-spanning designs of an industrial titan. There’s really no contradiction within Peter Thiel’s politics, they are quite consistent: he’s just realized, more clearly than his opponents often, that there’s ultimately a contradiction between the rule of capital and democracy, and the way to deal with this contradiction, as far as he’s concerned, is to do away with democracy.

Ganz’ catalogue of Thiel’s fashy sensibilities describe well why I read NRx as a cousin to fascism in the shape of its reactionary sensibilities. The two overlap in their dread of modernity as a threat (while being unmistakably modern themselves), in their rejection of democracy and universal rights, in their romanticization of the “better” culture of a poorly-specified past, and in their odd futurism threaded into reactionary fantasies. And he is right to register NRx’ers as eager to enter into an alliance with unmistakable fascists.

But I think it is important to be sophisticated about how fascism is a far right authoritarianism but not all authoritarianisms are either fascist or totalitarian. I split this hair partly to make it easier to pick up the scent of NRx’ers even when they display un-fascist characteristics. We need a sharp nose for the whole bouquet of far right movements we face. So I want to name some ways in which the two ideologies differ.

Nationalism is a defining pillar of fascism; it yearns for a “strong” nation-state which reflects the character of its True People. NRx sees the nation-state instrumentally, and is sometimes directly skeptical of it as the right political form.

Fascism is resolutely irrationalist, imploring us to Trust Our Blood, enthusiastic about gut instinct and violence as positive goods triumphing over intellectuals and technocrats. NRx is not just rationalist but romantically rationalist, enthusiastic about nerdy technocrats controlling society, and often insists that violence is unnecesary to achieve its aims.

Fascism dreams of a purge of the people who corrupt the nation — Everyone But The Volk — exemplified by the racism & antisemitism of the Nazis or the transphobia of MAGA. NRx dreams of eliminating the system of liberalism and liberal institutions which they imagine destroy our potential for greatness. The Good People are not the Volk but the IQ Elite.

Because fascism’s authoritarianism leads to strong state interventions in the economy when fascists hold power, it is common to misunderstand fascism as having an economic policy agenda just as communism and neoliberalism do, but fascism at root does not really care about policy any more than social & governance ideologies like monarchism or theocracy do. Neoreaction is not married to a specific economic policy agenda, but it sees economic policy as an essential function of governance, tending strongly toward enthusiasm for “unregulated” capitalism Unleashing The Genius Of Entrepreneurs And The Market.

This connects to different forms their authoritarianism takes. Fascism tends toward totalitarianism, the state intruding into everything, down to ensuring that art and architecture and individuals’ thoughts & feelings align with their vision. NRx loves the example of Singapore: a state unburdened by rights protections for individuals, but also hands-off in many ways, at once ruthless and minarchist.

Both yearn for “traditional” moral & social sensibilities, but come at it from opposite directions. Fascists see everything they want springing from A Strong Nation Of Virtuous People; they start from the fantasy of everyone to Living Right, assuming that quotidian policy questions of economics et cetera will just sort themselves out as a result. (I strongly recommend John Holbo’s long essay on that tendency among conservatives in general.) NRx starts from a libertarian-ish vision of Capitalism Unleashed Enabling The Best Of Us To Do Great Things, rationalizing from there that Science shows us that to achieve that we must cultivate a Smart, Industrious, Normal populace. To a lefty like me, both dreams are rationalizations of their aesthetic preferences in cultural norms, animated largely by misogyny and (usually) racist bigotry; we also see this in the turn some “libertarians” take to white nationalism. But the dynamics are different; libertarianism, fascism, and NRx are not simply equivalent.