Book Review: “American Character”

Colin Woodard, per my expectations, is still an amazing historical author suffering from a lack of political imagination. Woodard’s book “American Character” picks up where “American Nations” left off, outlining the coalitions of the nations and the essential conflict they can never resolve: the balance between the primacy of the individual and the state. He does some analysis of current problems, refers back to his definitions in “Nations” and generally does the breezy, good pop-ideological work that is out of the ordinary in the United States nowadays.

That said, I have a major set of two critiques. I was very disappointed, because his last book has provided much to chew on in the past two years, new heuristics and sorting mechanisms that lend intelligibility to a world that is rapidly becoming unintelligible. In this case, it was merely an application of the heuristic he developed in “Nations” to a set of current issues. The new bit in the Woodard canon is his synthetic concept of “national liberalism”–his attempt to create the synthesis from the thesis/antithesis of the individual rights/social and civil rights divide.

National liberalism is an interesting concept, and perhaps one worthy of further analysis, but in the context of this review, all that needs to be said about it is that it is the demonstration of Woodard’s lack of imagination, incarnate. It supposes no grand revolutionary break with the past, no attempt to steer the ship of civilization away from the (rapidly melting) icebergs ahead. No, instead it proposes rhetorical changes to the ways that issues are presented to Americans, assuming that narrative and rhetoric are the supreme political values like all good liberals do.

The disturbing conclusion that a hardcore environmental leftist gets to by the end of the book is that perhaps the post-Westphalian nation state is insufficient for dealing with the enormity of climate change, that even a national ethic based in Yankeedom working toward the goal of mitigating climate change might be insufficient. You start to realize that the problems of climate and capitalism are so large, systemic, and universal that no single nation can even make a dent. And that’s a really unhealthy rabbithole to go down as a leftist, to be honest.

So, aside from the fact that Woodard is a liberal who would be an aspirational leftist if the US school system didn’t intentionally omit leftism, and that–as a result–he lacks the political imagination to either imagine the ultimate solution or ultimate dissolution, the book is a breezy thinker. While I’d obviously recommend “American Nations” more, there is actionable and useful stuff in “Character” and that is a credit to Woodard. After all, it’s hard to put pretty lipstick on the dying liberal pig.

It’s been a while

Yes, holy shit yes it has. Basically I’m just gonna post what’s in my drafts folder, regardless of how together they are.

Some of them are weirdly prophetic, others are… well, Trump won. We’re all fucked on prediction track records as of recent. But it appears as though I had my fingers on the pulse(s?) of a couple of trends that have borne out.

American SYRIZA: a Gameplan

What’s stopping the formation of an American Syriza?

Rather, why aren’t we, as Leftists, working toward such a goal yet?

This piece will answer neither of those fairly large and important questions, and will instead assume that they’ve been settled in the hopes that a rough schematic for creating a Left coalition party–one that can make legitimate challenges in electoral politics–can be envisioned.

That said, I’ve just started reading “Crowds and Party” by Jodi Dean and and it causes me to wonder: what’s stopping us?

I chose to purchase the book after hearing an interview with her on the Majority Report. In the discussion, a left-ish liberal in the form of Sam Seder questions Dean about the existence of an American Left. Seder doesn’t necessarily buy that there is one, but Dean does. Further, she believes that this Left doesn’t know it’s own strength and size. I really, really want to agree with her, but I’m not certain that she’s totally right on that count. Seder on the other hand is patently incorrect that the Left is non-existent and that a Sanders campaign is one of the first steps in building one. My observation and analysis fall in between these two: there is a Left, but it needs to take seriously the tasks of outreach and coalition-building. And that is why this analysis feels scizophrenic to me at times: the Left is there but seems to deny itself, but seems to demonstrate no meaningful willingness to cross Cold War-holdover sectarian lines.

What’s Stopping Us?

Now that that’s out of the way, I posit the following question: why can’t DSA, SPUSA, Socialist Alternative, the Greens, and the other smaller parties (even those RCP psychos) set aside their comparatively small philosophical differences and start organizing at a local level?

Syriza only develops in a unique historical context: austerity bombed-out the Social Democratic consensus of PASOK and required that the most Left members of that party find a new home. Parallel to this, fringe parties, dozens of which were so irrelevant that they stood no realistic chance at electing a Member of Parliament, began to open lines of communication.

What Unites Us?

Anticapitalism. Duh.

The unique qualities of climate change for the provide a uniquely modern reason to make an anticapitalist appeal to the general public. Anticapitalism nowadays is not solely desirable merely as an end in itself because capitalism is evil and yucky, but also because global capitalist economic organization–if left unaltered–will suffocate and drown us. And it will do so in my lifetime. (list party interests in anticap)

What Is To Be Done?

The most important thing in creating a working coalition in the realm of electoral politics is a concrete, discrete demand. One of the central problems with the Occupy movement was an inability to lay out a set of demands due to the horizontal leadership structure and the absolute (and anarcho-liberalism-inspired) deference to the agency of the individual. The Sanders moment and associated movements would do well to remember those two lessons. The diagnosis for what is to be done, then, comes in the form of direct response to those two criticisms.

1) A Congress of Left Parties must be called with the intent of creating a plan for maximizing ballot access, funding, and membership to elect as many Left Alternative candidates as possible, AND

2) This Congress of Left Parties must then adopt a universal economic platform.

Thinking about the circular firing squad qualities of the Left, those two imperatives may seem insane. They are, however, much less contentious and difficult than they appear. Referring to imperative one, the plan to maximize resources is one that, necessarily, will create political equivalents of non-compete clauses (after all, why run a Green and a SPUSA candidate in the same congressional district) that will free up further resources. Those resources can then be used to plant seeds of Left parties outside of the safe blue states where they tend to proliferate; take, as a rough example, SPUSA funds in Nebraska being redirected to the Green party because the prior efforts by BOLD Nebraska suggest that they would be more amenable to social democracy framed as conservationism than the frame that SPUSA uses.

Keeping in mind that the uniting, galvanizing truth of the coalition of the Left Alternative is anticapitalism, the explicitly socialist parties must be willing to accept a more moderate, environmentalism-based avenue simply because the ends are united in purpose.

 

“In that same vein, I wonder if maybe the Democrats stand as much of a chance of having a party breakup as the Republicans? Everyone is talking about the distance between the GOP base and elites, but the distance in the Democratic party isn’t insignificant. I personally hope that both collapse, and that the remaining two parties are a Left Labor party versus a party of Capital made up of the remnants of the establishment GOP and the DLC Clintonite Dems. I can dream.”
“I feel bad this morning, sure, but the exit polling regarding the youth is still the most encouraging thing to me. For the first time, I’m now torn between whether agitating outside of the Democratic party is the best route, or whether the demographics of the “Bernie Coalition” suggest that–with some hard, hard work–the Democratic party has already started the shift to a social democratic party.

For now, though, the Democratic party is a sclerotic party of capital. They’ve not done anything to earn my vote–save that they’re NOT Republicans. Vote for Hillary in the general if you live in a swing state, sure. But you’d better fucking vote in the off year, and if you really wanted to make a change, you should run for local office. I think it’s high time that the JeffCo school board or the Golden City Council here in CO had a Socialist Board Member, don’t you guys?”

Bruenighazi–My Unnecessary Analysis

About one month ago, Matt Bruenig was fired from Demos for tweeting (relatively) benign barbs at Neera Tanden. It wasn’t the “what” of what he was tweeting, so much as the “who.” And, while Twitter isn’t real life, Matt was an expectant father-to-be, and losing a job in that situation is sub-optimal. Now that the dust has mostly settled and the factions are clear, some lessons can be gleaned from what should have been a tiff confined to the decidedly-not-IRL stakes of Twitter. In fact, Bruenighazi can be used as a lens to understand a few new and novel things about this election:

While the ideological distance between us is less, Liberals are the true enemy of the Left in the United States, not the rapidly dwindling white nationalists that make up the GOP.

The Liberal establishment is scared. They will knock down the best (albeit most inflammatory) avatar of Millenial Leftism they can manage, but they still ignore the content of his critiques in doing so (and completely ignore young women and PoC–the start of the spat that ended in Bruenig losing his job in the first place).

For the Left to succeed in this time of flux and realignment, a clear, moral argument must be made against the limitations of Liberal representation politics.

The Matt Bruenig affair, while decidedly shitty for Matt and his new family, and slightly less shitty for those of us who enjoyed his online presence, has resulted in another corner of the velvet drapery covering the rotting flesh of liberalism falling off, revealing the degredation beneath.

Nationalize Twitter

Take for granted for a moment the assertion that Twitter is, on balance, good and worth having. Admittedly, this is a stretch. But, having accepted that proposition for the sake of argument, I must ask: are you worried about Twitter? If you listen to the Wall St. mavens, perhaps you should be. Like many companies of the Tech Boom 2.0 that it was born near (chronologically and geographically), insane public valuations created expectations and budgets that become hanging albatrosses around their baby necks. So, if Twitter is good and useful (remember, that’s the granted portion), what is to be done?

Nationalize Twitter, of course.

There are two interplaying prongs to the argument as to why we should nationalize Twitter, from my vantage point. The first is an issue of simply viability in the present and near future, and the second is an extension of a philosophy that can hopefully be applied to many forms of unpaid (but enriching) labor.

To Save Twitter, We Must Seize Twitter
The first argument is blunt: Twitter, if it wants to continue existing, needs to be nationalized. Their business model isn’t panning out in terms of advertising revenue. Twitter, despite being incredibly useful in acting as–essentially–an AP wire service with racist trolls, is proving to not be a profitable enterprise from a free-market capitalist point of view.  (Twitter corp health). It may well be the case that the market in social media is moving away from Twitter and its death is inevitable.

So Twitter may well end up becoming one of many future failures in the looming tech bubble, because–simply put–Twitter isn’t can’t turn a profit. Just like fire departments, digital infrastructure, and many other varieties of public programs. The point of this comparison is to demonstrate that the government, if acting in accordance with a society that has deemed a certain good or service necessary, will sometimes subsidize that good or service. Whether roads, schools, or (in more civilized nations, at least) healthcare, governments will provide goods and services at a “loss” simply on the principle that they are worthwhile things for us all to have.

We may be reaching a point in the lifespan of Twitter where it will become necessary to nationalize it if we want it to continue existing (admittedly, an open question, considering that Twitter is an open sewer grate). While it may seem counter-intuitive at first, the infrastructural equivalents of roads and telephone wires in the digital future may indeed be services that disseminate information quickly and efficiently–like Twitter.

Do You Own Your Twete, On Line? Or Are You Owned, On Line?

How much time do you think you’ve spent trying to craft a pefect tweet, shaving characters and finding ever more creative shorthands to cram your complex thought into the 140 character limit? If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent too much time doing this, perhaps even agonized daily over the incomplete manner in which you’ve just presented a thought or argument (Jesus Christ, I seriously hope that you’re not anything like me).

And I don’t even have more than 200 Twitter followers.

My point is that for folks who legitimately use Twitter as a publicity tool–or even those who attempt to advance a career through tweeting–must expend a great deal of time and effort on theirs, owing to the fact that their livelihood is tied into tweets, at least in some small fashion.

Hmm, I just used “time” and “effort” up there in reference to the act of Tweeting. And it’s easy to explain why: tweeting is mental labor. If tweeting is mental labor, tweets are the product of that mental labor; if tweets are the product that Twitter is selling to advertisers, then we are performing uncompensated labor for Twitter Inc. It’s a fairly simple concept, perhaps so rudimentary that drawing attention to it only draws quizzical stares and questions of efficacy.

“What, do you get .2 cents for every tweet view that leads to a link clickthrough? Do you get a stock dividend from Twitter based off of your percentage of the total amount of followers? How should this labor be compensated?”

My assertion would be that the labor should remain uncompensated, perhaps–but that the labor certainly should not be alienated from the unwashed tweeters, existing solely as corporate profit for Twitter Inc. Tying the disparate threads of this argument together, Twitter is a situation where nationalization would be the solution to the dual tracks presented: a government bailout and guarantee of continued existence for the public good in addition to an end to the essentially alienated, uncompensated labor that we perform, ostensibly for our own enjoyment but materially for Twitter Inc.’s profit.

 

While there is extenuating information, such as the relatively low clickthrough ratio for links posted on Twitter versus comparable services, it can reasonably be assumed by the fact that so many people use it thusly that Twitter is fast becoming both a necessary tool in media employment and a venue for entertainment itself.

A Wild Western Weekend and a Terrified Newsmedia

This’ll most likely be a short post, because media criticism doesn’t really take up the space that real political criticism does.

Yesterday (3/26/2016), the Sanders campaign won 3/3 states and won by margins totaling (at the very least) twenty percentage points. That is self-evidently newsworthy. Earlier this week, he also won Utah and Idaho by similarly impressive margins. To be honest, in a two-person race, any plus-fifteen percentage point win is worthy of analysis, in my opinion.

Up until this week, the media seemed to agree. When Sanders won YUGE in NH and VT, the extra analysis came quick: Sanders does well in his home state and the neighbor. Even if you find the “neighbor state” narrative faulty, there’s some (bad) analysis there. When Clinton made it to the south, her huge margin victories led to the analysis that Sanders can’t turn out minority votes (again, I’m not here to take issue with the way that the news media has analyzed these events, even if their analysis is just absolute dogshit).

Then we turned West. Utah, Idaho, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii have spoken, and if they’re not actively on fire, they’re certainly feeling some Bern. The margins, like the aforementioned early contests, were YUGE.

And yet, when I turned on MSNBC shortly before giving up on Hawaii returns last night, I was not greeted by shouting brick of cheese, Chris Matthews. Nor was Rachel Maddow’s typical wry excitement over all of the election day wonkery present. Not even their weekend B team.

No, MSNBC was in Lockup, running a scroll with the day’s caucus results across the bottom of the screen. I flipped to CNN, and they were talking to some GOP talking heads about the #TedCruzSexScandal. I turn to Fox News and they’re showing me a commercial about self-lubricating catheters. (I didn’t stick around Fox News. The catheter commercial was inordinately long.)

This morning, with all of the fighting over whether Bernie can win minorities (despite having just won the only state to never have a white majority), and with all the redbaiting emanating from “good liberals,” I just wanted to get in to an ideological scuffle with some depressed liberals. Instead, I’m forced to take a Poynter Panel perspective on what MSNBC, CNN, and (lol, nah) Fox News were doing last night and why it matters.

The extent to which the media shapes and restricts the public ideology has already been analyzed and dissected at length in Leftist circles. If this concept sounds foreign and you want to know, read you some Frankfurt school and some Chomsky. I can’t explain it better than they did.

But mass media, in the age of the internet at least, is beginning to show its age. Literally: the target demos for every cable news network are in their 60’s while the youth largely receive their news through the internet (and experience the epistemically-troubling echo chamber effect therein). This is, perhaps, a bit of specificity that can help to explain the insane splits between Sanders and Clinton when it comes to the age of supporters.

So if you’re reading this, DON’T WORRY! You’re already on the internet. In fact, you may well have said to yourself, “why didn’t you just search “#HICaucus” on Twitter if you wanted to know what was going on?” And I did! I am, however, a glutton for punishment and I love seeing what the clueless liberal commentariat is saying.

The problem, however, are those 60 years olds in the target demographic for cable. This ties back in to the original point of the piece: what’s the danger in a media blackout? The Sanders margins are commonly presented as a story of his success with the youth, but the Yang narrative attached to that Yin story is his commensurate failure with the old.

I almost don’t need to complete the syllogism for you to get it at this point: A) cable news doesn’t cover Sanders in a legitimate way  B) the olds get their information from cable news C) olds won’t support Sanders (if they’re even aware of him in more than a holistic sense, at all).

So, yeah. There’s definitely an extent, perhaps measurable, to which the cable news discourse has depressed Sanders’ likely numbers among the olds. That really sucks. I’m pissed, but with every large margin victory by Sanders accompanied with age splits that suggest a wholesale generational shift to the Left, I can’t help but smile. After all, the new Socialist generation will exist longer than MSNBC will.

Reminder: Jonathan Chait Is Bad, and Marxism Is Good

So, I wake up this morning to a beautiful white blanket and a phone call from the boss-lady letting me know that work is cancelled.

I also wake up to another SUPERDUPER POLEMIC from the Master of Modern Liberalism, Jonathan Chait. The title, “Reminder: Liberalism Is Working, and Marxism Has Always Failed” is obvious clickbait, but Chait is never content to let his headline editor get all of the deserved criticism. Chait is, essentially, a neoliberal troll nowadays.

First of all, I almost want to slap him in order to get the name of Jacobin out of his mouth. There is an extent to which I believe that, if your thinking is revealed to be as sclerotic and backward as Chait’s, you shouldn’t even be allowed to look at a beautifully-designed and written Jacobin–let alone read one.

Moving on from that relatively harmless quibble I possess, Chait goes on to flatly state that “Marxism is terrible.” That’s fine; arguments are typically structured “Claim–>Warrant–>Conclusion” or “Point–>Evidence–>Analysis”, so this is really just the start of a takedown of Marxism. Right?

Not quite. Chait spends the next block of text talking about Bernie Sanders because Chait is the op-ed equivalent of a squirrel or raccoon–he forgets the occasion for this flawed premise (Obama’s Cuba visit) and decides to go back to his favorite whipping Social Democrat.

When he finally gets done with his linguistic onanism, he manages to make the same tired point that “every communist country in world history quickly turned into a repressive nightmare.” He also manages to conflate “rights” and “control of capital” in a truly mealy-mouthed (mealy-brained?) passage about Marxist conceptions of rights.

He then manages to get to his pet topic, talking about how Marxists will purge and repress any ideology they deem “reactionary.” Ah, ol’ Jonathan “Free Speech on College Campuses is Under Siege” Chait. This feels better–feels familiar.  He even manages to tie Marxism with political correctness, because of course he did. (Sidenote: if he’s allowed to do that, I am just gonna start telling people that the St. Louis Blues adopted the ideology of Nazi mysticism because both resulted in violent white guys in stupid uniforms).

But what Chait fails to realize in his “analysis” is that he’s ascribing a single, discrete political program to THE MARXISTS. If I’ve learned anything running one of the Jacobin Reading Groups (debatable), it’s that there’s no one way to be anticapitalist, no one single canonical interpretation of Karl Marx’s material. I’ll actually cop to wanting to repress ideologies and speech I find reactionary, myself. I am thoroughly illiberal, Mr. Chait, and I hope you fear what I want to do to your conception of your “free speech.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that any programmatic anticapitalist or Marxist government will settle on my answer as THE answer. Chait’s abiding fear seems to be that the Politburo, if it seizes the courts, the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, will *abridge his free speech rights*.

First of all, if that’s your abiding fear, look the fuck in the mirror and consider whether your perspective is, perhaps, just a tad privileged. Some people don’t have cushy media jobs that guarantee that they won’t starve.

Getting back to the material potential of the fear itself, Chait’s worry is nullified by a Jacobin passage that he quotes, in another flailing attempt to tar and feather a publication more vibrant and intellectually agile than he. “Sometimes a combative scrum — not the marketplace of ideas — is the face of democracy”, is the quote he pulled. He hates this and critiques this and holds his breath until his face gets blue and blah blah blah. Take a step back and read the passage. He quotes it in an attempt to fearmonger about loss of free speech; a combative scrum of ideas requires healthy fighters, people intellectually curious and quick enough to win a battle of ideology before being forced to fight a physical battle by the antagonists they’re attempting to defeat or beat back. Chait must know, on some level, that his pathetic neoliberalism will attract no champion to fight on its behalf in this arena of ideas that he’s envisioning. These dispatches in the past year are–in my estimation–the thinly-veiled diary of a man who made a living selling his intellect realizing that the market for his intellect won’t exist in a decade. It’s beautiful.

He may have served a purpose in a Bush-era America, where Liberals and The Left had to make tenuous alliances against Christian Conservatism and Neoconservatism–I’ll grant that. In an age when the distinctions between Leftism and Liberalism are being sharpened however, Chait is writing a portion of his own career obituary every time he thinks he can boot up the ol’ word processor and police the ambitions of The Left.

Trump and the Taboo

Complex hegemonic superpowers seldom collapse in spectacular supernovae. They slowly wither from within, public officials crossing metaphorical Rubicon after metaphorical Rubicon (or literal, in a single case). Eventually, after a series of small norms and taboos being violated here and there–generalizing a whole group as rapists or openly disparaging a veteran or physically threatening the press or straight up repeatedly lying or offering to pay legal fees of supporters as a literal militia is forming in your name, to list some random, unrelated examples–a rupture occurs and suddenly you’re in the Roman Imperium and not the Republic. Only difference here is that Trump seems to be the Gracchi, Marius, and Caesar all in one person. Hopefully we don’t let him get to Caligula.

On Chicago

I recall the moment the Trump candidacy stopped being funny to me; I was at work, idly half-listening to the local NPR affiliate in one earbud. Terry Gross was interviewing someone, and the word “Trump” was used in close proximity to “white nationalist” or “identitarian” (sidenote on “identitarian”: I’ve never seen a greater distance between people who use a word intended to paint public perception and the [correct] public perception of those people). I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but resolved to do a google search using those terms when I got home.

What I found was Evan Osnos’ increasingly (and increasingly, and increasingly) essential piece in The New Yorker: “The Fearful and the Frustrated”. Since late August, I’ve been chewing on the HUGE amount of chewable material that Osnos presented in his piece, but one topic in particular keeps getting stuck in my craw.

Upon my third or fourth attempt to explain the import of his piece, a deadening thought occurred to me: people didn’t fully understand that while some of us were witnessing the early stages of a fascist movement, others had no historical or political context for understanding–let alone confronting–fascism. They didn’t understand the stakes, they didn’t understand the antecedents, and they didn’t understand (or accept) the base, Sinclair Lewis-intoned truth: “It CAN happen here.” The final conclusion I reached from these conversations is that, without a legitimate Left, there is no recourse for confrontation of fascism.

This, admittedly, is a super-bleak thought. I cannot help myself, however. I think back to every time that a potentially or materially brutal fascism has been killed in the crib (or at least prevented from militarily developing a country to the point of becoming a worldwide threat), and the single common uniting factor is the existence of legitimate Leftist critiques to confront the fascists–rhetorically and sometimes physically. Oswald Mosely couldn’t build the working class constituency he wanted to take from Labour, the Republicans in Spain so wounded their enemy that Franco couldn’t add another continental European nation to the ranks of the Axis nations, and Golden Dawn had to deal with the black balaclava-clad anarchists who wouldn’t allow them to inflict a police riot on Athenian students opposing externally-imposed austerity. Even in the one domestic occasion before now where fascism seemed on the rise, Father Charles Coughlin and the business interests who literally sought to depose FDR had to contend with the high water mark– at least in terms of population and political influence–of the Communist Party of the USA.

The point is that, in nearly all cases of fascism being confronted and defeated (or at least gravely wounded), there was a legitimate, organized, intellectually-coherent, and relatively sizable Left.

A separate, but related issue, is the lacking philosophical vocabulary of the Amerian liberal establishment when it comes to denouncing and confronting fascism. The GOP’s handling of Trump has been downright shameful, but when the so-called “progressive who gets things done” is sending out “gotta hear both sides”-level press releases the morning after we all may well have witnessed the first chink in the armor of American democracy exploited by an orange buffoon, I worry that we just don’t have the critical mass of Leftists to–as we are sometimes forced to do in America–drag our erstwhile liberal friends to the left with us.

The unique and horrifying things about the United States in this situation are twofold: 1) we have never had a political party specifically designed to represent the interests of industrial and post-industrial Labor AND 2) the Two Party system, while generally providing a failsafe for the USA against prior European styles of radicalism, can also prove to be a “dead man’s hand” style trigger if the social, economic, and political conditions are such that a normally unacceptable primary candidate manages to receive the nomination of one of the two major parties.

Each of these points will most likely be expanded in to larger pieces–after all, explaining the rise of Trump is basically a big juicy cartoon t-bone to an internet Marxist who wants to take gutshots at the Democratic party. But for now, the morning after the incident in Chicago–so many wondering “what is to be done?”–I just needed to write this down. Even if I think writing for catharsis is necessarily narcissistic, I worry that not enough people are thinking about the Trump phenomenon with the full toolbox of historical specificity, philosophical background, and analytical capacity.

The Purpose of This Here Blog aka “Mission Statement”

Skipping a great deal of boring biography, I was radicalized by my four years in the brackish hellswamp of Foggy Bottom–taken from being a near-nihilist, near-libertarian cuss of a late teenager at 18 to a full-on Trot in less than four years. To be sure, a lot of my antipathy toward Washington DC can be attributed to the mere culture shock of a Coloradan moving to a (bad) East Coast metropolis. But there is something evil about that humid taint of a city. I believe this. I am affirmed in my faith and shall not be shaken; Washington DC is the sweaty gooch of America and our capital is more or less a big marble sculpture of the Founding Fathers laughing at the foolish modern mortals who believed their forebears so infallible that, when they decided to build the NATION’S CAPITAL in a motherfucking swamp, nor was their faith shaken. A humid August day in DC is argument enough against originalism. Anyway.

Point is, I went to college with a very specific goal of doing something in the realm of politics. That lasted about three months. Unfortunately, however, I remained–as horrible beltway trollgoons like to say in tones of self-mockery that suggest more self-confidence than they possess–a political junkie. The political junkie portion of my brain is, unfortunately, hardwired in. That said, I’m not some navelgazing Nate Silver, trying to reduce reality to algorithms (even if I believe, in principle, in our capacity to do so). I just relish the rush of returns and trying to figure out who my elected officials will be from the torrent of data that pours in on election night. I get that most elections are bourgeois concerns. Sue me.

It is that side of me, mixed with the person who more or less self-radicalized in college, who needs to have this blog. This was the time to start it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a guy calling himself a Socialist is running a nationwide campaign, and he’s doing shockingly* well. This singular historical moment may have been the event that provided me with the reason to finally jump off that cliff and get a blog. I mean, if I just transcribed my own ultimately psychologically-troubling arguments with myself, I would have a great deal of content. But, before this moment (and the media’s utter inability to deal with it), I had no reason to chime in. Now, though? I’m all in. The levels of media malpractice and sophomoric analysis in the liberal intelligentsia when weighed against the particular historical import of the moment demand that people use their voices in whatever fashion they can. And I went to a fancy city-slicker school, so it’s time to put that book-learnin’ to use.

*Eventually, I’ll work up a post on just how not-shocking-at-all Sanders’ “shocking” relative success is. That was one of the burning topics that necessitated the creation of this here blog, anyway.