2024 Book List

Welcome to year four of Mike Reads Books Now.  Not sure I will top last year's record of 42 books (or that I even want to), but try we shall.

1. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World - Naomi Klein (link)

As a compelling combination of theory, research, and memoir, Doppelganger is in many ways Klein's most interesting work.  What sounds like a thin premise (examining the life of a right-wing crank you share a name with) becomes a supremely honest reflection on the state of things, forgoing the melodrama and focusing on the real.  As usual, Klein's work suffers slightly when it gets prescriptive, with a final chapter of vaguely anti-capitalist sentiment that ultimately lacks teeth.  Which is too bad, because the preceding chapter (a detailed account of her own involvement with Palestinian advocacy) would have made a powerful and logical conclusion to her argument.

There are two specific areas where Klein's analysis shines.  The first is the fraught subject of "conspiracies."  While she rightfully considers QAnon and the like a scourge on society, she emphatically refuses to throw out the microchipped baby with the adrenochrome-tinged bathwater.  This is partly because, in her concept of the "Mirror World," she understands that even the most deranged crackpot still lives in the same reality, and thus shares the same fundamental fears and anxieties.  But even more importantly, she is able to discern how blanket condemnations of "conspiracies" undermines an honest search for the truth:

"When radical and anti-establishment writers and scholars attempt to analyze the underlying systems that built and uphold power in our world, including the proven existence of covert operations to eliminate threats to those systems, it is common for them to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. In truth, it is one of the most battle-worn tactics used to bury and marginalize ideas that are inconvenient to those who wield economic and political power, or who feel personally attacked by anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, or anti-racist analyses because the critiques implicate them. Every serious left-wing analyst of power has faced this smear, from Marx onward. 

In their effort to counter spiraling Covid misinformation, many establishment institutions fell back on this tactic. For example, the European Commission published a guide that defined a conspiracy theory as "the belief that certain events or situations are secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces with negative intent." Okay, but that leaves out the most important factor: whether the theory in question is false or at least unproven. Because plenty of events and situations—financial crises, energy shortages, wars—are indeed "manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces" and the effects of those manipulations on everyday people are intensely negative. Believing that does not make you a conspiracy theorist; it makes you a serious observer of politics and history." 

Klein takes great care to situate this theorizing appropriately, citing similar observations from everyone from Adam Smith to Mark Fisher, and analogizing to similar periods from throughout history.  The most obvious of these comparisons is to Nazi Germany, specifically in how Hitler's concept of "Jewish capitalism" provided cover for atrocities by directing real economic grievances at a convenient scapegoat. She then describes how a similar misdirection happens now, where capitalism inverts the meaning of the institutions that make up our society (housing is an investment, education indebts you, news is about driving clicks, etc...).  This augmented reality serves to "breed mistrust and paranoia" to such a degree that even the most deranged conspiracist reveals a glimmer of truth:

"...conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else's profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extractions, the feeling that important truths are being hidden.  the word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one every taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it's easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.  As Gilroy-Ware puts it, "Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.""

Klein's other critical insight concerns the "mirroring" present in the titular phenomenon—specifically how the Manichean nature of this psychology has come to dominate the discourse:

"Rather than being defined by consistently applied principles—about the right to a democratically controlled public square, say, and to trustworthy information and privacy—we have two warring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time. [...] Once an issue is touched by "them," it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else.  And what mainstream liberals ignore and neglect, this emerging alliance lavished with attention." 

This "alliance" that forms the doppelganger to Klein's own politics is referred to as "diagonalism," a fundamentally right-wing orientation that has incorporated certain tendencies (ie. health and wellness) that were previously not necessarily compatible with right-wing aesthetics.  This is where Naomi Wolf, a self-proclaimed feminist and former (?) liberal, enters the picture.  But Klein's analysis is not limited to her doppelganger; instead, she finds this binary thinking everywhere.  She sees this, most relevantly, in the pandemic response ("Stuck in the binary of lock down versus open up, we failed to consider so many options during the first years that we live with the virus, and there were so many debates we didn't have."), but also more generally in critiques of power and capitalism ("...our critiques of oligarchic rule are being fully absorbed by the hard right and turned into...discombobulated conspiracies that somehow frame deregulated capitalism and communism in disguise.").  She comments on how the concept of "ecofascism" has twisted genuine concern for the environment into a reactionary tendency that has usurped the very language we use to fight the forces of fossil capital.  And she spares no sympathy for the centrist leaders and their lesser but no less real sins, admonishing them for "using words as intended, yet with no intention of acting on them."  In short, a politics based on opposing an other, whether real or imagined, is not a sustainable proposition.  Rather, a productive and meaningful political project must feature a positive vision that exists outside of the "Mirror World."

2. Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control - Daniel Pick (link)

Not precisely what I was expecting, but still moderately interesting.  What I expected was a more detailed history and examination of the idea of explicit "brainwashing," perhaps along the lines of this, which portrays the idea as a Cold War-era projection of both the insecurities and sins of American empire upon its enemies.  While there is some discussion of that, Pick's narrative is more concerned with the psychological implications of the phenomenon, which takes us to places far afield of what one would typically consider to be "brainwashing" (though to be fair, the originally squishy definition of the term lends itself to abuse, which the author makes note of when relevant).  Additionally, this examination primarily takes the form of a literature review, which is not inherently a problem but is inadequate here because of the lack of an incisive perspective from the author.  This is not to say there is not a perspective at all; just that it's so watered down as to be useless.  Take this section regarding corporate control of the internet:

"If we are to step off the ladder, envision a different social architecture, choose an unknown future, rather than the continuation of a governing past, we need to consider both the structural features that entrap us and our existential choices.  We need, indeed, to take seriously the convergence of surveillance, the cyber-based economy, the manipulation of politics, and all the rest; and keep alive the prospects of protest and major reform, of change to how reality is orchestrated, including online, by those corporations who, over the years since its creation have shaped and monetarized the internet."

While nothing here is wrong or even misguided, there's a noticeable absence of any sort of political analysis or any indication who "We" is in this instance.  He does eventually close this gap somewhat, but in a similarly broad manner:

"Politics must mean more than formal parties, stage-managed conference, law-making chambers, with all the rest of the process reduced to shrill shouting matches on social media.  Politics should not just be a means to an end; it is a value in itself. [...] A central implication of the material present in this book is, indeed, that we need to attend to how a society creates or hampers conditions for politics in that sense; and I'd add more specifically, democratic politics; how it enables or disables a population from having the means to think and to choose, as equals, deliberatively, wisely, when it most matters."

Pick comes closest to genuine insight in the closing pages, invoking "struggle" and "collective action" and the like, but he can't quite bring himself to consider any radical solutions, much less even suggest that any of the problems he identifies are inherent to liberal democracy (emphasis mine):

"Liberal democracy in its current incarnations is not best regarded, I assume, as some satisfactory political end point, but rather the foundation for a struggle towards more democracy and a deeper realisation of human freedom. We need to consider what the institutions are that we already have that can support this never-ending struggle, and to ask, what kinds of social conditions and modes of 'containment' are needed to reduce unbearable anxiety, manage passions and conflicts, sustain debate, foster thinking and enable measured and decisive collective actions? 

[...]

For those who value liberal democracy or agree at least that it provides the necessary platform for a more egalitarian future, it is important to consider why it has proved so difficult to renew structures of social care and creaking old electoral processes, to counter the influence of big money, to resist cynical strategies of gerrymandering and voter suppression and to avoid grotesque online disinformation wars."

What is useful about Pick's narrative in this regard is that you can use his argument to partially diagnose the etiology of this ideology (beyond the obvious and reductive "he's an old British liberal").  Take his lengthy discussion of Cold War writer Czesław Miłosz. On one hand, Pick appears to provide an even-handed and comprehensive summary of Miłosz' critique of both Russian and Western culture, going so far to note that "the art of brainwashing had reached a kind of perfection" in the West due to its hidden nature.  On the other hand, this same discussion is littered with some incredibly blinkered and reductive understandings of the Cold War that directly contradict what Miłosz wrote.  After briefly describing the Red Scare, Pick opines that "...some spaces for spoken, written and artistic principled opposition remained in the post-war United States, unlike in China or the Soviet Union at that time" and notes that dissident authors like Arthur Miller weren't "sent to labour camps."  Leaving aside the comical exaggeration of the spectre of the Gulag (and the incredibly low bar for American "freedom"), Pick's analysis here fails to listen to heed the very words of Miłosz' about the equally corrosive nature of American censorship.  Which is doubly ironic, given that Miłosz himself is an example of the American propaganda machine, as his star-making turn in American exile was part of the CIA's project to court and promote the "compatible left."  In this way, Pick's perspective is a perfect example Western bias in how it reduces Communism to a foreign stereotype while eliding the deep history that helped establish durable Western hegemony.

Pick's ideological blinders are not just a matter of incomplete historical understanding—they also point to an orientation towards the liberal ideals of individual self-determination and agency above all else.  This echoes some of the critiques I had of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, where similar invocations to an unnamed "we" ultimately call for liberation of the individual.  This similarity becomes most obvious when Pick cites Arendt liberally, sometimes with literally the same exact passages as Zuboff.  Take the following dissection of a "totalitarian" society; while the analysis is not necessarily wrong, a critical read of Pick's argument reveals the invocation of so-called "totalitarian" states to be naked projection when you apply these same analyses to the West.  It's impossible for me to read the following and then read Pick's subsequent chapters on corporate control of American society and not apply this analysis directly to us.  Perhaps Pick meant for the reader to peek between the lines, but there's no real indication he's being that clever.  Rather I will take his seemingly accidental coherence as a happy accident and move on.

"Ultimately the system required a vast and terrifying security state, even if it paid lip service to plebiscites or parliament. The latter, if still there, was just for rubber stamping decisions. Such states used new technological means to repress, and to disseminate their own core messages, including many lies great and small; they subjected their populations daily to centrally controlled 'news', or disinformation, and kept up a constant barrage of symbols, exhortations and denunciations, via radio, film, newspapers, magazines, as well as slogans, songs, pamphlets, pageants, marches, parades, rallies, popular dramas, etc. Perhaps people believed the political messages, or maybe they just gave up on believing, merely seeking to survive by paying the necessary dues. A totalitarian political system, those writers also explained, strips away entirely the protection of 'suspect' minorities, snuffs out freedom of the press and destroys all other liberal and democratic bulwarks."

3. Drug War Capitalism - Dawn Paley (link)

"Seen in this light, it becomes easier to understand how the drug war facilitates the continuation of a capitalistic economic model predicated on security, in part by creating a public discourse that allows increased state militarization on the pretext of implementing security measures to protect civilians in the face of heinous acts carried out by criminal groups."

A straightforward book that is essentially a compelling opening summary of her thesis (which ends with the sentence above) followed by several chapters of alternating personal anecdotes and incredibly dry material that directly reinforce the central thesis. Which makes for a slightly punishing yet certainly useful read.  In fact, this repetitive nature helps to drive home a few truths about the titular phenomenon in a way that a straight summary couldn't.  First, a good deal of the sourcing of historical record comes directly from the Times, the Post, and other mainstream outlets.  This helps demonstrate that the purpose for and the violence of the War on Drugs are anything but hidden, and what's missing is an emphasis and/or synthesis of this information that this book helps provide.  Second, the specific details of criminal syndicates in Latin America help show how American policy doesn't necessary create them, but certainly does create the economic and social conditions that allow them to flourish.  Third, the way that governments and media frame the violence that stems from The War on Drugs as "apolitical" reinforces the central narrative of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist that there is a fundamental and critical relationship between politicians and criminals that both sides seek to obfuscate.  And finally, the way the "rule of law" is repeatedly invoked by American politicians as the impetus behind interventions in Central America betrays just how much of a stalking horse for capitalist hegemony that phrase is in practice.  All of this incomplete understanding and purposeful misdirection serves to create a "plausible deniability" that almost paradoxically makes American rule over Latin America stronger and more durable than when we used a heavier hand:

"The 2009 coup is different from previous coups in Honduran history, which were generally either carried out under pressure from the United States, or carried out by the army for its own sake. This time an important section of the Honduran elite; specifically the transnational elite as represented by people like Camilo Atala and Jorge Canahuati and the Facussé family, as well as organizations like ANDI, AHM, and COHEP, encouraged the army (some might say manipulated the army) in removing Zelaya from his private residence. Even though it was clear to observers from all points on the political spectrum that the Honduran armed forces violated the constitution when they removed Zelaya to Costa Rica, Honduran business elites and the Honduran army, along with some members of the judiciary, Congress, and the Catholic Church insisted that the coup did not represent an interruption in the country's democracy. This again contrasts with previous coups in Honduras, which were blatant military operations whose leaders did not attempt to mobilize the civilian population so as to appear to be fulfilling a democratic mandate."

4. Dirtbag: Essays - Amber A'Lee Frost (link)

Part memoir, part political analysis*, Dirtbag is most useful as a reminder that I am not crazy; that there is both reason for both hope and pessimism and that life is about determining how to balance the two so you don't go crazy.  This frankness leads Frost's prose to read like a, ahem, dirtbag version of left thinkers who came before, which I think is a necessary exercise to, at the very least, keep the spirit alive.  "Optimism is for suckers, but pessimism is for pussies" is a perfect Gramscian formulation for a vulgar age.  The critique of Occupy Wall Street's consensus model updates Jo Freeman's analysis for the modern era.  And her excoriation of Corbyn's apologetic response to the "mob that didn't actually care about, or really even believe, their own accusations" and reinforces every useful critique of his reign as British Labour leader.  But most of all, her final words on modern progressive activism read like a stark echo of the Sedgwick essay I love to come back to again and again: 

"And there's the real rub: back in the 1940s and 1960s you needed the police or the CIA to interrupt meetings; now we did a much better job of just sabotaging ourselves, without even knowing it, and for free.

Maybe some of these people were cops, but would it really matter if they were? When a group's strategies and tactics are indistinguishable from an "op," aren't cops and activists a distinction without a difference?

"With comrades like these, who needs capitalists?""

*I said this formula would have made Freddy deBoer's book better, and the relative quality of this book only reinforces that

5. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression - Kelly Oliver (link)

"This task, the task of acknowledging the unrecognizable singularity of each individual, a singularity beyond individual rights or the law, is what gives meaning to our lives and to our relationships with others. We do not know or understand ourselves. We do not know or understand others, perhaps most especially those closest to us. Once we fall under the illusion that we do, that we understand ourselves and others, then we lose the possibility of communication, of communion, of love, of the forgiveness that makes it possible to continue to be beings who mean. Acknowledging that we don't understand or know, and moreover that we can never fully understand or know, provides the impulse for interpretation. Because we cannot know, we interpret. Because we cannot know, we mean. Because we cannot know, we are beings who mean. And through endless interpretation, our lives become meaning full."

A sweeping analysis of the effects of oppression on both personal and social psychology that stretches from Freud to Fanon to feminist literature and beyond.  I would quibble that Oliver spends a disproportionate amount of time on some subjects and parts of her theorizing is a bit banal, but the result of her synthesis is nonetheless fascinating.  A crude summary of the basis of her logic is that an individual's psychic condition stems not from some wholly distinct wellspring within themselves, but rather from a combination of inputs determined by one's social position.  She then feeds this fundamental assumption through various psychic theories to reveal what is useful and what is not, and more importantly, to synthesize them into something new that accounts for the material reality of the subject.  Oliver's theorizing leads to the idea of the "intimate revolt" of an individual as the basis for larger social revolts, as well as the idea that forgiveness is what makes us truly human in that it "makes it possible to transcend alienation, if always only temporarily, through creative sublimation in language or signification."  Put another way, this is a different approach and a different path to the same fundamental conclusions that Sedgwick reaches in the same essay that I share all the time.  And lest you think all the psychology and/or feminism portends conclusions that are not sufficiently material or "radical," such a worry is largely if not completely incorrect:

"If we can imagine bodies authorized to act without having or possessing particular properties that legitimate them, then we can begin to live without reducing our bodies and actions to commodities with or without exchange value on the market within the global economy of property. This may seem a utopian goal, but the necessity of psychic revolt gives hope that the authority of the economy of property contains the seeds of its own transformation and that imagining the past differently can open up the possibility of alternative futures. This hope is based on the notion that the economy of property is itself fundamentally dependent on another logic, a time outside time, a past that cannot be contained within lineage, the unconscious. To realize this hope, we need to rethink our relation to time, history, and the past. And to do that, we need to conceive of bodies without properties, agency without sovereignty, and investment without ownership."

6. The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance - Peter Gowan (link)

"...the external policies of the Atlantic powers are not transparent, and...their operational goals are rarely captured by their public presentation. [...] If a democratic public opinion is to be able to exercise its responsibility to try to influence the behavior of the states in which we are living, then we must try to understand how the powers of those states are being wielded and for what purposes; and this requires that we don't take policy on trust.  It also usually requires delving into the detail and engaging in 'backward mapping': reading back from actual policy outputs to hypotheses about policy goals.

...the statecraft of the great powers in the modern world, though often blundering and inept when viewed within a longer historical perspective, is sophisticated, arcane and complex in its tactics and detail.  Of special importance here is the fact that contemporary statecraft encompasses policy instruments that go well beyond the traditional coercive coinage of diplomacy, and include a range of tools of economic statecraft, market management and information management. 

[...]

This campaign should not be seen as being driven by a single compulsion, such as the search for cheap labour or the search for markets.  It is better viewed as an exploitation of power over the international political economy by the US and the EU in order to extract every possible useful advantage through re-engineering societies outside the core; or, to put matters the other way around, to expel as many problems as can be expelled outwards from the core societies."

Both a useful summary of the transition from Bretton Woods to our current system and a fun time capsule of post-Cold War prognostication (this was written in the late nineties). The first half is well summarized by the passages above, but goes into great detail about why Washington progressed as it did (in a word, power).  The second half is more mixed, but when it hits, it hits.  There's a useful passage on why Russia wasn't brought into the NATO fold (essentially, it was necessary for the US to back Yeltsin's coalition against the Communists, but said coalition was too committed to maintaining control of its domestic resources to submit to American hegemony), but nothing is as preternaturally accurate as this analysis of Ukraine:

"Particularly dangerous will be the onset of intense American-Russian rivalry within Ukraine.  Russia has powerful levers for pursuing this struggle, not least its economic leverage over the Ukrainian economy, its links within Ukraine's political elites and the crisis of Ukraine's armed forces and state administration (not to speak of its appalling general economic crisis).  At the same time, American hopes that it has a strong base of political support in Ukraine may prove unfounded and a deep internal crisis within that country could ensue."

7. The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR - Jules Archer (link)

Less a detailed investigation of the Business Plot and more a biography of Smedley Butler, The Plot to Seize the White House works nonetheless because of just how compelling Butler's story is.  His role as the primary whistleblower who helped stop the coup is fascinating in and of itself, but it acquires much more meaning when placed within the context of his All-American life.  His decades-long experience as a Marine convinced him that "war is a racket," going so far as to say "it would probably be a good thing for our nation if we were to get a trimming sometime" to help us learn that "there is more in this world than unnecessarily fat bank accounts."  In spite of this, he was still American though and through, saying that this "new Tory class" could and should be opposed by "the great mass of the American people who still believe in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States."  The unresolved contradictions present in this worldview also revealed themself in his near-singular focus on opposing the war machine, where his aversion to American involvement in the leadup to World War II as the Nazi threat became more and more real led to some unfortunate rhetorical overlap with overtly fascist undercurrents.  Regardless, his fundamental understanding that "defense" should mean defense is both commendable and sadly, still relevant:

"We ought to agree on a definition of the word "national."  If it means defense by our Army and Navy of every dollar and American person anywhere they may happen to be on the surface of the Earth, then, just as sure as I'm standing here, we'll be fighting in a foreign war."

Returning to the titular event, one of my most notable (and surprisingly hopeful) takeaways was the fundamental infeasibility of the plot itself.  Yes, there were powerful moneyed interests behind the plot that were never punished and have since found new and unique ways to rule the world.  But their inability to execute an explicitly fascist takeover reveals a fundamental contradiction.  Take this passage from Butler's testimony about the pitch these business interests made to him:

"The Morgan interests say that you cannot be trusted, that you will be too radical, and so forth, that you are too much on the side of the little fellow; you cannot be trusted.  They do not want you.  But our group tells them that you are the only fellow in America who can get the soldiers together.  They say, 'Yes but he will get them together and go in the wrong way.'  That is what they say if you take charge of them."

And also this analysis from reporter John L. Spivak:

"The takeover plot failed because though those involved had astonishing talents for making breathtaking millions of dollars, they lacked an elementary understanding of people and the moral forces that activate them.  In a money-standard civilizations such as ours, the universal regard for anyone who is rich tends to persuade some millionaires that they are knowledgeable in fields other than the making of money.  The conspirators went about the plot as if they were hiring an office manager; all they needed was to send a messenger to the man they had selected."

Neither of these assertions on their own feel 100% accurate to me, but taken together they reveal the larger truth that a durable fascist takeover requires a conscientious leader but also a conscientious leader would never actually agree to do such a thing!  This doesn't mean fascism is not real or is not a threat; just that there is likely something too ingrained in Americans' otherwise perverted sense of "freedom" to allow for such tyranny to truly take hold.  Knock on wood.  

8. The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America - Margaret O'Mara (link)

"Although too young for the counterculture, [Steve] Jobs confessed that the tumult of the 1960s had been personally transformative. "A lot of ideas that came out of that time really focused on thinking for yourself, seeing the world through your own eyes and not being trapped by the ways you were taught to see things by other people." And what Jobs found, as he told his rapt listeners, was that the way to change the world was through business, not politics. "I think business is probably the best-kept secret in the world," he offered, "It really is a wonderful thing. It's like a razor's edge."

A useful high-level view of the development and subsequent preeminence of Silicon Valley in American life.  I am reminded of my critique of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (near the bottom of this), where I found the content of the book similarly useful, but found that her muddled ideology (one that prejudiced a distinctly American concept individual liberty above all else) detracted from her message.  The difference here is that there's almost no ideology on display, to the point that O'Mara's attempts to synthesize her material come across as incredibly banal.  Take this from the intro, which is of course "true," but at the same time so vague and obvious as to be meaningless:

"To declare that Silicon Valley owes its existence to government, however, is as much of a false binary as declaring that it is the purest expression of free markets in action. It is neither a big-government story nor a free-market one: it's both."

This lack of incisiveness is frustrating because, among other things, the inclusion of the quote up top and her podcast appearances indicate that she has more to say than what's in the book.  But still, the aforementioned usefulness of this tome stems from the sheer volume of facts that allow the reader to sculpt such a narrative themselves.  The description of the "techno-utopians" whose vision shaped the reality of modern Silicon Valley is depicted as fundamentally conservative, at least slightly disingenuous in its rhetoric, and most of all, views technological innovation as not a means to an end but an end in and of itself.  Even liberal advocates like Al Gore conceive of technology as "not just a policy, [but as] a solution to all sorts of other kinds of policy problems."  The various boom-and-bust cycles endemic to the industry are also shown to be the product of larger economic forces.  The push and pull of defense spending encouraged development during war-hungry eras and forced entrepreneurs to go in different directions during downturns.  And novel compensation models like stock options created semi-perverse incentives around both recruitment practices and tax avoidance (can't be taxed on compensation that's not real!).  Finally, the initial Valley spirit of "thinking small" gave way to large corporations flexing their power and dictating the market (especially once the dreaded eighties rolled around), which helps to explain the modern feeling of technological stagnation. 

9. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World - Antony Loewenstein (link)

"If India is buying a fleet of fighter planes from, say, France, it knows that lynching and a little mass murder will, at most, get a delicate finger-wag.  A big market is excellent insurance against moral censure."

-Arundhati Roy

"Israel is a pariah state.  When people ask us for something, we cannot afford to ask questions about ideology.  The only type of regime Israel would not aid would be one that is anti-American.  Also, if we can aid a country that it may be inconvenient for the US to help, we would be cutting off our nose to spite our face not to."

-Former Knesset MP Yohanah Ramati

Much like my impression of Asa Winstanley's book from last year, The Palestine Laboratory is a useful and true book that is undermined a bit by the author's righteous fury.  Somewhat poor writing aside, Loewenstein still manages to compile a good deal of info and context around Israeli foreign relations throughout its history.  That the initial investment in the Israeli security industry came from German repartitions is a bitter irony that only fuels the rest of the narrative.  From the analysis that suggests that anti-migrant sentiment in the EU stems in part from Israeli influence (both ideological and material) to the detailed description of Israel's relationship with the former apartheid government of South Africa (where according to a former Israeli ambassador "we gave the know-how and they gave the money"), there's plenty here to digest and incorporate into even the most firmly established anti-colonial worldview.

10. The End of Imagination - Arundhati Roy (link)

"I am prepared to grovel.  To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible.  So those of you who are willing: let's pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes, and speak our secondhand lines in this sad secondhand play.  But let's not forget that the stakes we're playing for are huge.  Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us.  The end of our children and our children's children.  Of everything we love.  We have to reach in ourselves and find the strength to think.  To fight."

A pleasant book of essays and speeches that pulls the nifty move of rarely if ever addressing the title specifically (even in the titular article!) while still somehow managing to impart that idea throughout.  Her analysis ranges from razor sharp to treacly and banal, but I'm willing to overlook the latter as speeches by their very nature (given to a specific, knowing audience at a specific time) will often read as such in retrospect, even when they're really good.  Most notably, her theme of a populace unable to dream of a better world avoids the shallow and the obvious, and is buttressed by a firm understanding of how the economics of capitalism encourage an unthinking body politic.  Her analysis calls out essentially every faulty understanding of our society: the concept of a "bumbling" government doing it's best to fix difficult issues (instead of being the cause of said issues), the Manichean conception of "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists," and the idea of American foreign aid as generous benevolence instead of what it is (a desire to control the world and profit off of the administration).  It's this last item that really ties together the idea of American empire across decades, from John McNaughton's proposal for "rebuilding" a Vietnam that we destroyed to our current war on UNRWA in Palestine, all of which has the rather obvious goal of supplanting local/international support structures with something controlled by America.  And Roy understands that this neocolonial mindset is above all else very practical: not only is it easier to use economic levers to manage things from afar, but the very structure of this management (think NGOs) serves as an inherent bulwark against political resistance by absorbing and neutering/redirecting protest.

But even though Roy is sufficiently materialist in (most of) her analysis, it's the ideas behind communication, language, and other basics of human existence that shine through the brightest.  Her contrast of her own concept of language as "the skin on my thought" with how American empire's dogma of plausible deniability requires that "the whole purpose of [their] language is to mask intent."  Her idea of empire as the "greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them" reframes an often academic concern as something more tangible and real.  She interprets America's desire to manage public opinion as something fundamentally insecure, a "persistent and valid worry that if people were to discover and fully comprehend the real nature of the things that are done in their name, they might act upon that knowledge."  Because of all of this, she concludes that "the corporate media doesn't just support thew neoliberal project.  It is the neoliberal project."

Finally, as Roy is Indian, a good deal of her discussion is about political developments in India.  Specifically, she invest a good deal of time describing how the overwhelming number of dam projects are used to further the interests of global capital at the expense of rural people.  What's most interesting about this for me, an American, is just how much the political landscape surrounding this that she depicts (ie. the rise of Modi amidst feckless opposition from the Congress Party) almost exactly mirrors our situation here.  Like, it's wild how much this just sounds like a plea to the Democrats of the Subcontinent:

"If the Congress Party wishes to be taken seriously as an alternative to the destructive right-wing religious fundamentalists who have brought us to the threshold of ruin, it will have to do more than condemn communalism and participate in empty nationalist rhetoric.  It will have to do some real work and some real listening to the people it claims to represent."

11. Fire on the Mountain - Terry Bisson (link)

The tagline that appears on the cover of my copy reads "What if John Brown had won at Harper's Ferry? The classic SF novel of a Black utopia in the American South."  The dreaded u-word gave me pause but I did not need to fear because not only is the book great, but any misconceptions the reader may have are addressed directly in the text.  And sure, the story features flying cars, trips to Mars, magical shoes, and other developments typically meant to convey a world free from toil.  But it's clear that Bisson sees the fundamental result of his alternate history as a much deeper and more meaningful liberation.  In letters from the protagonist's ancestor (who describes his experience in the 1859 uprising many years later), we come to understand the real meaning of Nova Africa, the new state built out of the wreckage of slavery:

"My real dream...was to go far away, beyond the mountains, away from the black folks as well as the white, away from Virginia, from America: and I imagined somewhere over the rainbow there was a land where people lived in peace and harmony, didn't spit in the corners for boys to mop up; talked sweet to children; read books; didn't fight; didn't smell like wood smoke and horse shit.  I now know it was Lebanon, a dream imparted to me along with reading by my homesick friend, the Arab—his idealized childhood Lebanon, mixed with every child's original dream of socialism, that genetic (I insist!) utopia without which there would be no actual socialism, with all its warts, for soul-hungering man.  Some but not all of this sweetness I was to find in Nova Africa, some in Cuba, some in Ireland; but all that was still a lifetime away."

This re-contextualization of history is not only useful for helping to envision these realistic utopias, but also helping one re-examine their view of even the most well-trodden history.  The most clever example of this is a work of alternate history within the book that appears to depict something like our actual reality (given to the protagonist by a "kindly" old racist lady, no less).  In this narrative, the stakes of the war are less slavery (which was "about finished anyway") and instead nationhood.  Seen in this light, Lincoln becomes not a great emancipator but a devious one: "He emancipates the whites from having to give up any of the land they stole. From having to join the human race."

12. Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War - Kyle Burke (link)

"But the Freedom Corps project was an expensive charade. Only a handful of volunteers ever made it to Southeast Asia and most of them just visited Taiwan. By 1968, it was finished. Marvin Liebman regretted his participation. "Despite our great hopes and rhetoric, I considered it fruitless," he later wrote. Recalling the disaster of the World Anti-Communist Congress for Liberation and Freedom in 1958, Liebman did not want to be "involved in building another facade, especially one that could be exposed as such." Ironically, the failure of the Freedom Corps affirmed Liebman's "sneaking admiration" for those young men and women who opposed the war in Vietnam. Filled with "frustration and rage, they took to the streets and campuses to fight for something they believed with all their hearts." He could "never find that passion in the activities of the conservative youth.""

A fun read that seeks to situate the desire by right-wing groups to form an "anti-communist international" during the Cold War not as purely an outgrowth of CIA machinations, but rather as a parallel development.  These "similar networks of concerned citizens and NGOs" were their own beast, drawing their manpower from the military and intelligence spheres while seeking support and money from the business world at large.  While the surface-level tenor of these organizations often read like bog-standard Cold War anti-communism, frequent displeasure with liberal governance suggested something even more sinister.  Sure, only some of these organizations made this explicit, such as the Ukrainian-led ABN whose desire to "create ethno-nationalist states" behooved a vision best described as "national socialist, stressing the equality for the nation rather than the working class."  South American guerrillas sounded a similar tone, labeling as "subversive" a broad swath of society that included "rock musicians, young people, journalists, teachers, and anyone who advocated for social justice."  But it's striking how even the more anodyne organizations, including ones that ended up being nothing more than paper tigers, had the shared view that the checks and balances and democratic oversight of liberal governance was at direct odds with their goals. 

Despite of all the useful facts and adept historicizing, perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is there there's a lot of psychology going on here.  Burke explicitly makes note of the macho nature of the warrior subculture and how all of this fundamentally aligns with the individualistic, free-market ethos that undergirded it, but that just scratches the surface of the many layers of this pathology.  The most notable overarching characteristic of these layers is how everything these people/groups said can be read as pure projection.  The Soviet Union was seen as "the only empire in existence" which inspired "anticolonial discourses" among the right, who considered third-world conflict to be "well planned skirmishes...being directed from the communist control tower in the Kremlin."  Iran-Contra participant John Singlaub had a little more awareness, recognizing the "inequalities created by centuries of oligarchic rule," but nonetheless considered third-world insurgencies "as little more than proxy warriors for outside communist forces bent on establishing footholds close to the United States."  But perhaps no one was more addled by such ideological confusion than Ronald Reagan himself, who wrote in a letter to Singlaub:

"The struggle between freedom and communism is, in its essence, not an economic conflict but a spiritual one.  It is a struggle in which those who love God, county, family and freedom are pitted against those possessed by ideological zeal who seek absolute power."

The ultimate irony of this was that the fall of the Soviet Union signaled the end of the effort to create an international alliance of the far right.  As one would expect of a fundamentally capitalist project, the motive was less about heartfelt advocacy than it was "winning the hearts and minds of Americans, particularly wealthy conservatives who could donate to their cause."  And seeing that there was no longer a grand communist threat, the impetus behind such an effort vanished, in large part because "it was based upon a mutual sense of what its members were against, not what they were for."  A useful political analysis that works as a lesson for basically anyone!

Ultimately, Burke's narrative is perhaps most useful as a very full and detailed explanation of how Iran-Contra came to be, in part because of how it was far from anomalous.  Several decades of crimes and other indiscretions performed in the name of anti-communism helped to shape the political space in which this sort of thing could happen more and more.  And even though CIA covert ops were curtailed in the 1970s (supposedly) and the Reagan-led effort to support right-wing paramilitaries ended with his presidency (supposedly), this does not mean global capital has stopped using illicit means to further its aims.  What the closing pages make clear is yet another example of neoliberalism absorbing its own critiques to make it more powerful.  Private military firms that have arisen since the nineties (think Blackwater) may not have the free reign of the 1950s CIA, the sheer firepower of the US military, or the sheer desperation of the random American commandos depicted in this book.  But they are still enforcing the rule of global capital all the same, perhaps with more blood-curdling efficiency and purpose:

"PMFs promised two major advantages over traditional militaries.  First, they enhanced the abilities of governments, including the United States, to pursue geopolitical interests without deploying their own armies, thereby removing war-making from the realm of popular debate and citizen sacrifice.  Second, by shielding their operations from public scrutiny, PMFs have offered new ways for states to clandestinely support unpopular or undemocratic regimes with horrendous human rights records."

13. Revolution's End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA - Brad Schreiber (link)

"We really thought groups like the SLA were nuts and horrible, and yet we felt some responsibility.  We could recognize that level of craziness, and that someone needed to get a hold of them and say 'Just Chill.'"

-Rick Ayers

A perfectly fine read that I don't have much to say about, other than it's fascinating to see the contradictions that arise in acts of counterinsurgency.  The SLA was inauthentic and bad, as one would expect from a creation of the forces that seek to crush the left, but it also aired real grievances and successfully agitated to appropriate a small amount of wealth in order to feed people.  That the SLA "failed" and did not appear to have any meaningful legacy* is noteworthy, but if you squint you can still see a blueprint for how capitalism's subversion of revolutionary ideology could one day lead to its downfall.

*other than helping to make it really easy to sniff out fake revolutionaries

14. Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War - Volodymyr Ishchenko (link)

"The Western elites are trying to save the fraying international order; the Russian elite is trying to revise it to get a better place in the new one. However, neither can clearly explain how exactly the rest of humanity wins from either outcome. This is what 'multipolarity' may look like—the multiplication of national and civilizational identities, defined in opposition to each other but lacking any universal potential."

A sobering collection of essays on the realities of present-day Ukraine.  Ishchenko's description of how the crisis of post-Soviet hegemony helped birth leaderless "revolutions" whose result was more a rearranging of deck chairs than any true social revolution echoes similar research from Vincent Bevins.  Speaking as a leftist, he describes the political terrain of Ukraine as not entirely dissimilar from here, specifically in how dissidents are treated (spurious accusations of "Russian propaganda," serious scholarship being treated solely as "political activism," etc...).  And while I wish there was more material here regarding the 2013 economic showdown between the West and Russia or some of the deep history of the region, there is still enough critical content to help paint the larger picture.  Most notably, his understanding of the larger conflict as one between competing class interests is a useful lens:

"...taking the phenomenon of political capitalism into account, we can see the class conflict behind Western expansion, and why Western integration of Russia without the latter's fundamental transformation could never have worked.  There was no way to integrate post-Soviet political capitalists into Western-led institutions that explicitly sought to eliminate them as a class by depriving them of their main competitive advantage: selective benefits bestowed by the post-Soviet states. The so-called 'anti-corruption' agenda has been a vital, if not the most important, part of the Western institutions' vision for the post-Soviet space, widely shared by the pro-Western middle class in the region. For political capitalists, the success of that agenda would mean their political and economic end."

Of course, the reality of a sclerotic ruling class in post-Soviet states does not make the Americans (nor the West more broadly) some great shining white knight.  The alterative to a Putin-esque "stability without development" is not necessarily any better, especially when you consider Ukraine as a whole.  Ishchenko mentions foreign debt to Western nations as a sort of sword hanging over not just Ukraine but the whole region.  Forgiveness of this debt, long a demand of the Ukrainian left, would be the most meaningful step towards real self-determination, but it's made clear that this has been a dead letter across several presidential administrations.  Additionally, there were many steps America could have taken to better support Ukraine and minimize the chance of war, but they didn't for...reasons:

"One strategy would have been to start serious negotiations with Putin, to agree that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO, because they never had any desire to invite it to join — nor do they have any desire to fight for it, as we see now. Another, opposite strategy would have been to send a massive supply of weapons to Ukraine before the war started, which was sufficient to change the calculations on Putin's side. But they didn't do either of those things — and that looks sort of strange, and of course very tragic for Ukraine."

15. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb - Gar Alperovitz (link)

"I told him that my own opinion was that the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and let our actions speak for words.  The Russians will understand them better than anything else.  It is a case where we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way.  They have rather taken it away from us because we have talked too much and have been too lavish with our beneficences to them.  I told him this was a place where we really held all the cards.  I called it a royal straight flush and we mustn't be a fool about the way we play it.  They can't get along without our help and industries and we have coming into action a weapon which will be unique.  Now the thing is not to get into unnecessary quarrels by talking too much and not to indicate any weakness by talking too much; let our actions speak for themselves."

"Byrnes—what we must do now is not make the world safe for democracy, but make the world safe for the U.S.A."

-Harry S. Truman

A detailed account of everything you would ever want to know about the titular subject, which effectively serves as a backdoor treatise on how knowledge is created in American politics.  The combination of secret/missing information from the weeks leading up to August 6th and the way false justifications were laundered after the fact both combined to garner a popular understanding of the bomb (it was needed to end the war) that is not at all supported by the historical record.  Even though Alperovitz is cautious about drawing firm conclusions about the precise reasons the bomb was dropped, I feel that his work provides more than enough support towards my theory that the bomb was the first shot of the Cold War.  Hell, just look at those quotes from Truman above.

As Alperovitz tells it, the decision itself was sort of a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis.  Instead of Kennedy and a few others talking down his advisers that were pushing for war, the decision to drop the bomb appears to have come from Truman and his Secretary of State James Byrnes in opposition to most others in and around the government.  The evidence he presents is both striking and convincing.  For one, nothing really indicated the US was going down this specific path until Truman took office.  Per the book, "it is quite clear that a very different strategic understanding steadily began to influence political-military thinking at this time. Eerily, it occurred at almost the precise moment Harry Truman took over the Oval Office on Roosevelt's death."  What's more is that the cast of characters in opposition to dropping the bomb is a veritable who's who of future Cold Warriors.  Lewis Strauss, Douglas MacArthur, and Curtis "bombs away" LeMay all voiced opposition.  John Foster Dulles joined his fellow religious leaders to urge restraint immediately after Hiroshima.  And conservative Catholic priest James M. Gillis basically turned into Kwame Ture for a minute:

"I would call it a crime were it not that the word "crime" implies sin and sin requires consciousness of guilt....The action taken by the United States Government was in defiance of every sentiment and every conviction upon which our civilizations is based." 

Concerns about the USSR taking power in Europe after the war clearly played into American decision making.  Alperovitz is especially candid about why this obvious fact slips past most people:

"Worries about this prospect (increased Soviet power) began to impact calculations concerning the forms of power the United States could use to influence Soviet behavior in Europe.  And this began to bring the potential role the atomic bomb might play into much sharper focus.

Americans tend to be naive about "power." As we look back on much-admired figures in earlier periods of history (like Truman), we like to think that American diplomacy might somehow been above such questions. In some part of our awareness, of course, most of us know this is unlikely. Still, we need to be reminded that leaders of all nations think and reason about their real-world capacity to achieve their ends."

In this way, the bomb itself became its own diplomatic force, leading us down paths we might not have otherwise taken.  Lt. Groves, overseer of the Manhattan Project, envisioned the post-war order as an "American-administered Pax-Atomica" based on not just technological superiority but also a presumptive monopoly on the raw materials needed for the bomb, such as uranium.  Truman used the leverage gained from knowledge of the bomb to pursue more aggressive negotiations during Potsdam, challenging Stalin on the Balkans, in direct opposition to the previous approach under FDR and Stimson.  This newfound "confidence" of Truman's even extended to Germany, where the specter of the bomb lessened the need to collaborate with Russia to extract industrial reparations from the defeated Nazi government.  This approach served to birth the Cold War not only by institutionalizing a particular brand of American hubris, but also by "making it impossible ever to enlist Russian cooperation in the set-up of future international controls over this new power."

The last third of the book concerns everything that happened after the bombs were dropped.  This section is pretty predictable if you know anything about Cold War history (newspapers publish Stimson's whitewashing uncritically, Henry Luce is involved, McGeorge Bundy even shows up as a ghostwriter of sorts), but it's just as critical to the story Alperovitz is telling.  And just like any other event from the period, the slow roll of declassifications and revelations (not to mention the fact there's still classified info) is both maddening and fundamentally undemocratic.  All this detail and analysis concerning one of the seminal events in the creation of our modern polity serves to make The Decision a great introduction to the rot at the heart of America, if you're not already inclined to such thinking.

16. Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America - Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (link)

"How can I be a fascist? I don't control the railways or the flow of commerce..."

-Barbie

I have rarely waded into the "fascism debate" for many reasons.  For one, I think it's slightly too academic for my tastes, which I said in this post:

"Ever since Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, there's been an ongoing debate about whether or not all this is fascism.  Personally, I have no dog in that fight, as I find it to be more about semantics than substance.  The modern American right and its anti-trans/abortion/etc program is both fascist in one sense (it's a far-right political project bent on domination) and not fascist in another (we have our own bespoke and long-standing tradition of oppression).  This doesn't mean I think this discussion is necessarily foolish, but instead that there are limits to its practical use in the face of a very real threat."

The rest of that post details the other reason I avoid the debate—that is, it is often very myopic, not just to history, but to the very concept of the world outside of America.  Because we once joined with others to defeat fascism, there's a tacit assumption that all subsequent enemies are also fascist, and that ongoing American hegemony is the primary thing keeping fascism at bay.  The thing is that this is not true, and is perhaps so untrue as to be the literal opposite of reality.  As such, the popular conception of "fascism" in America is more of a non-specific concept that can be applied liberally in different contexts.  Or perhaps put more succinctly, it's just vibes.

In this context, I picked up this collection of essays that has managed to both summarize this debate and reignite the animosity between the different camps.  While few of the individual essays approach the brilliance of true revelation on their own, the collection as it's presented here is greater than the sum of its parts.  There is a push and a pull to the reiteration of similar themes throughout the essays that builds and reinforces a thesis that the real "answer" to the fascism question is somewhere in between the binary poles of "Yes" and "No," which not even the most fervent interlocutor inhabits anyway.

The most useful of these themes are twofold.  The first is the near-constant invocation of already existing American fascisms that render certain aspects of the debate toothless.  Between the "long-standing institutional pathologies of a national security state that generates insecurity by design," the refusal of those same institutions to "attempt to tie individual [white nationalist] crimes to a broader movement," and the "dissolution of the masses" that predicated and created the demand for the atomization of the social media age, there are so many distinctly American pathologies to be concerned with that projecting Weimar Germany onto our current situation becomes quaint and, in a perverse way, almost comforting.  And of course, focusing only on modern developments belies that they have roots in the Klan and other proto-fascist movements that pre-date the rise of European fascism.

The second useful theme is that the etymology of current uses of "fascism" do actually arise in part from "vibes," and that is actually just fine (to a degree).  An essay by Peter E. Gordon synthesizes this idea best, relying on Wittgenstein to say that "terms to not require exhaustive definitions; we compare events not by applying rules but by recognizing family resemblances across a wide variety of distinctive phenomena."  The idea that analogies to Nazism and the like require perfect one-to-one mapping is on it's face a ludicrous proposition.  And while few if any would actually argue that, it does appear to be an overriding assumption of at least some arguing against the comparisons.  Indeed, the elevation of capital-f Fascism "into a timeless signifier of absolute evil has had the effect of making it not only incomparable but, in a more troubling sense, unknowable."  If we instead allow ourselves to understand that the term can simultaneously mean "both a historically distinctive ideology and a general style," this allows for a "more expansive appeal to the political past."  Viewing "fascism" as "a common name for a style of institutionalized cruelty and authoritarian rule that recurs with remarkable frequency, albeit in different guises" allows us to incorporate the lessons of history without becoming slaves to them.

It was also interesting to see a critique of Bowling Alone here.  I voiced my own misgivings when I read the book in 2021, but Anton Jäger's analysis is much more incisive and in-depth.  His analysis of what was missing from Putnam's narrative (ie. the replacement of mass-membership organization with NGOs driven by the interest of large donors) is very useful, but his invocation of the third-rail that Putnam wouldn't allow himself to touch is key:

"...a Marxist interpretation [for the economic restructuring of neoliberalism] proved a useful supplement to the Putnamite view: individualization was an imperative for capital, and collective life had to be diminished in order for the market to find new avenues for accumulation."

17. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 - Kathryn S. Olmsted (link)

"[In Watergate, the people were asked to believe] their President had been a bad person.  In this situation they are asked much more; they are asked to believe that their country has been evil.  And nobody wants to believe that."

-Otis G. Pike, following his investigation into CIA wrongdoing

A disappointing history that strides right up to the line of being truly incisive before stepping back.  I had hoped this would be something along the lines of Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, which wrestled with the nature of "truth" associated with even the most ridiculous conspiracy theories.  Instead, Olmsted's analysis deals largely in banal observations and nutpicking.  Which is too bad, because the narrative itself is a breezy read that suggests high-level themes such as the Schmitt-adjacent idea of conspiracism as naming your enemy (never more clear than when Hoover declared all of communism a conspiracy).  She notes Seymour Hersh and Gary Webb in her acknowledgments section, and even has a pretty sympathetic description of the latter's whole ordeal.  And her final words (before the sloppy Trump addendum) would be a perfectly good conclusion to a better book:

"If antigovernment conspiracy theorists get details wrong—and they often do—they get the basic issue right; it is the secret actions of the government that are the real enemies of democracy."

18. The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them - Aziz Rana (link)

"The Constitution...is what living men and women think it is, recognize as such, carry into action, and obey. It is just that."

-Charles Beard

"Fifty years ago, American capitalism seemed to be what Marx predicted it would be and what all muckrakers said it was—the inhumane offspring of greed and irresponsibility....But American capitalism today is actually nothing of the kind. There has occurred a great transformation, of which the world as a whole is as yet unaware....There has been a vast dispersion of ownership and initiative, so that the capitalist system has become intimately bound in with the political system and takes nourishment from its democratic roots."

-Fortune magazine, 1951

"On the face of it, these are disparate ideas and ends—basic creedal nationalism, civil libertarian values, market capitalism, constrained representative government, American primacy—which need not go together and may well be in profound tension. But thanks in part to the story of the country that politicians and commentators have built around the Constitution, these ends have been combined into a unified and driving nationalist faith."

-Rana, in the introduction to this book

A detailed narrative of a hundred years of American history (1887-1987) that simultaneously shows how the structure of the Constitution favors the elite at every point while demonstrating how the elite managed to consolidate power using those exact means.  While Rana's narrative is focused on the ideological currents that shaped this journey, it is still firmly grounded in the material concerns that drove this change.  The necessity of strong Constitutional rule arose in part from the closing of the frontier, as there was no longer the "safety valve" of free land to resolve class antagonism.  Simultaneously, industrialization and the consolidation of capital that accompanied it necessitated a shift from state to federal government.  And the birth of American empire, the World Wars, and the Cold War all required re-interpretation of the Constitution to justify seemingly un-American actions.

Rana's review of the ideological journey that has led us here is wide-ranging and complete, covering the whole spectrum of debate and thought.  On the "bad" side, elite justification for minority rule is, not shockingly, relatively consistent throughout the ages.  I would summarize the overall ethos of the powerful as preferring a hollow sense of "stability" that enhances the flow of capital at the expense of durable positive rights and/or true individual liberty.  This effort included familiar-sounding tactics, such as promoting indoctrination-like educational programs, pushing a "Judeo-Christian" form of nationalism, and promoting a misanthropic view of human nature to justify counter-majoritarian policies (per Arthur Schlesinger: "consistent pessimism about man, far from promoting authoritarianism, alone can inoculate the democratic faith against it").  Some of this shift came from the same Cold War madness I've detailed elsewhere, where a semi-irrational paranoia around "totalitarianism" was used to depict the same Bill of Rights that gave us things like Buck v Bell as the only bulwark against fascism.  But the ongoing throughline of, per sociologist Edward Shils, an "antipolitical tradition" is a useful way to connect seemingly disparate strands of this slow, right-ward journey.  Per another sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, the Constitution "defused politics, insulated market capitalism from counterproductive attacks, and constrained democratic excess through extensive veto points and rights guarantees."  All of this served to not only empower the ruling class, but to flatten and, in some cases, erase history.  To sum this up, here's our old friend Richard Hofstader:

"Hofstader wrote that unlike Europe, the United States, "having no feudal traditions," also had "no socialist traditions" nor "deeply rooted and ardent class conflicts." And this American class exceptionalism helped to explain the ubiquitous love, from the founding, of "legalism" and the Constitution."

Of course there is actually a rich tradition of socialism and class conflict in America which had a very different set of feelings about the supposed promise of the Constitution.  Socialists tended to see the very idea of rights as arising from mass action, and not the judicial process that often served to instead restrict those rights.  This did not mean that organizations like the IWW fully rejected nationalism or patriotism, but rather sought to build a new one derived from the concrete experience of everyday work.  This "emancipatory project of creating a cooperative commonwealth" owed very little to the existing Constitution, which invoked "we the people" in service of institutions that facilitated class rule.  Instead, the Declaration of Independence was seen as the more aspirational text, "highlighting a distinctive American working-class history of rejecting oppressive authority."  This struggle to redefine Constitutional rule was at times very broad and mainstream, ranging from FDR's conception of a "Second Bill of Rights," to the Black Panthers' Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention, to the Lolomi Plan, a version of "Indian Communism" that sought to adapt indigenous traditions in a modern context.  Throughout the decades, the consistent ideological conflict within the left was whether to define this project as a restoration of the promise and potential of the founders, or instead, as a break from a fundamentally flawed and un-democratic governing arrangement.  While the left's push to change the Constitutional order was ultimately defeated by powerful forces acting with purpose (Rana cites Black Against Empire, Hammer and Hoe, and other such things I have read), this fundamental intransigency of the left was certainly a factor in the project's demise.

And finally, here's yet another example of something I'm reading directly reflecting current events.  I have seen numerous comparison of the current student protests to 1968 (which is useful and illuminating to be clear), but if you want to be a real hipster about it can I interest you in some World War I protests:

"At universities, professors who took anti-war stances or who were viewed as otherwise ideologically suspect found themselves without employment.  At Columbia, university president Nicholas Murray Butler, an outspoken pro-Constitution voice, stated that there would be "no place" on campus for people who countenanced "treason."  Butler oversaw the firing of numerous academics, eventually leading the historian Charles Beard himself to resign in protest."

19. Vineland - Thomas Pynchon (link)

"And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began—some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia—Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath."

Another banger from the foremost poet of American decay, which I can best summarize as "1984 but real".  Falling in between the tight story of The Crying of Lot 49 and the sprawl of Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's narrative is equal parts charming and frustrating, but it gets the job done.  The same analytic strengths as all his other works are on display here, but the character of Brock Vond is perhaps his finest insight into the mind of those that champion the American security state.  To wit:

"His idea was to make enough money available to set them all fighting over who'd get it. It would also, as Brock pitched it, have value as a scale model, to find out how much bringing down a whole country might cost."

"Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desire for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep—if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching—need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning."

20. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History - Michel-Rolph Trouillot (link)

"We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence. Naivete is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naivete is always a mistake. [...] History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots."

A succinct and powerful epistemological analysis of History that is reasonably well summarized by the quote above.  Still, it is worth reading this book to see how Trouillot applies this analysis to histories close to his heart, such as the Haitian Revolution.  Throughout, his dialectic between the "false dilemmas of positivist empiricism and extreme formalism" help chart a middle ground, revealing the fundamental truth that "historical production is itself historical."  And while some parts of this analysis are banal and obvious (the titular "silences" are deemed inherent to the historical process because "something is always left out while something is recorded"), those parts are often revealed to be the building blocks of a complete and useful analysis (the previous parenthetical supports the eventual assertion that you can produce "a "better" history simply by an enlargement of the empirical base").  And hey look, another fun application of the "knowledge does" ethos:

"What is scary about tourist attractions representing slavery in the United States is not so much that the tourists would learn the wrong facts, but rather, that touristic representations of the facts would induce among them the wrong reaction."

21. White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States - Louise Michele Newman (link)

"Western liberal feminism has perpetuated a cultural ethnocentrism that the Western speaker rarely intends and often cannot acknowledge. It's not simply that crosscultural forms of sisterhood are difficult to enact because of misunderstandings that stem from cultural differences. Rather, the history of Western liberal feminism has produced theoretical claims that position Western societies as superior to non-Western ones in terms of women's freedom from oppression, defined in terms of "individuality" and "choice.""

A fascinating exploration of the debates and contradictions present in the struggle for women's rights around the turn of the twentieth century.  The most notable of these contradictions in Newman's narrative is how most of the white women leading the movement viewed themselves as "racial conservators," which precluded meaningful solidarity with women of other races.  This feminine sense of conservatorship not only helped make America's budding imperial interests more palatable for the masses, but it also spoke to a fundamental fear (held by white men and women alike) of losing control of racial reproduction.  Indeed, feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman justified empowering women for this precise purpose: 

"So long as (white) women remained economically dependent upon (white) men, (white) men would maintain control over sexual selection. And because white men chose to reproduce with women whom they found attractive for superficial reasons—the future development of the white race would remain in jeopardy...Gilman held that the solution to the problem of "race suicide" was to make (white) women economically independent of men so that (white) women could once again resume control over sexual selection."

Newman's narrative makes it clear that, as you might suspect, there was a lot of psychology going on here.  Most of the feminists described in the book seemed to have a fundamental aversion to patriarchal domesticity that drove their work.  Nearly all of these women had peculiar life stories for their time, ranging from poor upbringings to unconventional partnerships.  In this light, a lot of these thinkers' output reads as a projection of their own personal insecurities through the (racist) parlance of the time.  Take this line from Alice Fletcher in response to the Dawes Act:

"The Indian may now become a free man; free from the thralldom of the tribe; free from the domination of the reservation system; free to enter into the body of our citizens."

Of course the Dawes Act was an atrocity, breaking up tribal lands and enforcing the precepts of private property on a people that, by and large, had no use for the concept.  That such an act could be read as promoting "freedom" by a group of people reflects not just the centrality of such a concept to capitalist ideology, but also the specific pathology of this peculiar class of activist.

While I don't doubt Newman's overall thesis w/r/t racism, and find her scholarship here to be generally quite good, there are moments where the citations she includes in her text leave some room for doubt.  Her claim that "abolitionists had their own forms of racism, reflected in arguments that supported universal rights while still upholding white superiority" is supported by this excerpt from Lydia Maria Child:

"The present degraded condition of that unfortunate race is produced by artificial causes, not by the laws of nature...As a class, I am aware that the negroes, with many honorable exceptions, are ignorant...but this ceases to be the case just in proportion as they are free. The fault is in their unnatural situation, not in themselves...And even if the negroes were, beyond all doubt, our inferiors in intellect, this would form no excuse for oppression or contempt."

While it's certainly possible that Child was racist or otherwise misguided, it's unclear how this passage demonstrates that.  My assumption seeing the word "ignorant" in this context (a person arguing for black liberation in 1836) is not that it's being used to disparage or judge, but to describe the literal material condition of not being allowed to read or write.  If that assumption is indeed incorrect, Newman doesn't provide enough direct evidence to counter it.

Alternatively, see this passage on Margaret Mead:

"Mead had believed that the United States was superior to the primitive societies she studied, not because of sexual differences, but because only it had the potential—due to a presumably greater complexity and sophistication—to maintain a larger range of gendered behaviors from among which individuals could pick and choose. Challenging the United States to eliminate its rigid and "artificial" sex-typing, Mead ended Coming of Age with this injunction: "Samoa knows but one way of life and teaches it to her children. Will we, who have the knowledge of many ways, leave our children free to choose among them?""

This example is different from the last, as it comes at the end of a large discussion of Mead.  But even with that added depth, I don't feel that there's enough there to support the moral interpretation of Mead's work that Newman is making here.  And once again, the quote she provides in direct support can (and perhaps should) be read not as an implicit judgment against Samoans but as a call to action to a bourgeois American audience in that specific context.

In the end, this book describes a Western feminist tradition made up of well-meaning liberals doomed in part by their apparent inability to apply a formal Marxist lens to their analysis.  Indeed, a lot of the racism seems to stem from a simple confusion of base and superstructure.  But Newman herself seems to fall victim to the same problem in her meta-analysis by being a little too willing to ascribe racist motives to things that read as insufficiently articulated material analyses.  There is discussion of class in the book to be sure (ie. activists sought to "professionalize" motherhood, inherently creating new class divisions), but a narrative that explicitly depicts how feminists' racism filled the void of a nonexistent (and perhaps impossible) class analysis would be more useful, and perhaps more honest.

22. Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health - Micha Frazer-Carroll (link)

A breezy read that makes a strong case for the communal control of our own well-being.  As Frazer-Carroll implies when discussing the fraught topic of diagnosis and then says directly in the conclusion, "If we believe that communities should have control over production, then it follows that we should have control over our healthcare and healing too."  The specific arguments she makes are sometimes over-generalized and often avoid the messiest conflicts (ie. how do we balance individual autonomy against the legitimate communal concerns), but part of this approach stems from a fundamental ethos of open-mindedness that I find useful and thought-provoking.  Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the chapter on "knowing" mental health:

"Questioning the way we 'know' mental health doesn't involve rejecting all current knowledge, or resisting the pursuit of knowledge in the first place. Rather, it is about finding new ways to orient ourselves towards knowledge. This involves scrutinizing and disrupting how power and capital shape our understanding of 'truth.' But it also means relinquishing the possibility of a final truth.  We should resist the urge to authoritatively declare what mental health is and how we must know it. [...] The activist Jonah Bossewitch has argued that...we need to move towards an 'epistemological' approach. By this, he means that we should not battle one another over how we must know mental health, but instead, embrace the infinite ways that we might know it."

I will say that Frazer-Carroll's section on abolition is a bit muddled.  She defines the concept fairly extremely ("it necessitates an end to carceral logics and all forms of imprisonment.") but then prescribes a more moderate solution ("safe, well-resourced and accountable community spaces").  She then holds up Trieste, Italy as something of a model for mental health care, which even more directly contradicts her most definitive statements (but does match more closely with my understanding of the vision of abolitionists):

"Within services, there are also difficult situations, and on rare occasions people are detained for very brief periods of time.  However, Passante tells me that boundaries in the system are defined 'dialectically', through long periods of negotiation and sometimes compromise. This approach is a slow one, it requires relationships characterized by trust and collaboration, rather than domination and control."

23. The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World - Linsey McGoey (link)

Interesting to read this a couple of weeks after Silencing the Past.  Whereas Trouillot spends a good deal of time describing the inevitability of "silences" and the mechanisms that made events like the Haitian Revolution "unthinkable," McGoey never digs quite as deep in her analysis of functional ignorance.  Sure, she incorporates a lot of I would like to see in making such a case (material analysis, Charles Mills, how much Steven Pinker sucks), but the comically simple prose leads to minimally incisive arguments.  She does acknowledge how ignorance is inherent to humanity, but her prescription of what that "good" ignorance actually means is lacking.  In the closing pages she echoes Audre Lorde: "the power of human unknowing is unlimitable and will break even the strongest oppression."  But the preceding 300+ pages are almost entirely about how the powerful are able to use this condition to oppress.  As such, the book reads far more pessimistic than I believe the author intended it to be.

Regardless of my high-level misgivings, there are still a few fun nuggets.  The aforementioned Pinker is proffered as an example of the "futility thesis" (ie. things can never get better so be happy with what you got), which is an angle on his terribleness I never fully considered before.  Her commentary on other historical thinkers (Hayek's market dogmatism makes him perhaps the most prominent "unkknower," Arendt's opposition to "ideologies" reveals her to be fundamentally anti-political) is fairly deft as well.  McGoey gets closest to developing a truly insightful throughline in her occasional commentary on how capitalist ignorance has shaped the practice of science—the unfalsifiable nature of neoclassical economics helps to explain its persistence, the ability to compartmentalize RCTs makes them more amenable to profit-seeking which is part of why they are considered the "gold standard" in drug research, etc etc.  And even though the author never once cites Marx, she does get really close to aping him throughout—the most fun example of this being a quote from Keynes: "remoteness between ownership and operation is an evil in the relations between men."

24. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory - David Graeber (link)

"As Karl Marx once pointed out: prior to the industrial revolution, it never seems to have occurred to anyone to write a book asking what conditions would create the most overall wealth. Many, however, wrote books about what conditions would create the best people—that is, how should society be best arranged to produce the sort of human beings one would like to have around, as friends, lovers, neighbors, relatives, or fellow citizens? This is the kind of question that concerned Aristotle, Confucius, and Ibn Khaldun, and in the final analysis it's still the only really important one. Human life is a process by which we, as humans, create one another; even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows; and "the economy" is ultimately just the way we provide ourselves with the necessary material provisions with which to do so. 

If so, talking about "values"—which are valuable because they can't be reduced to numbers—is the way that we have traditionally talked about the process of mutual creation and caring."

A fun, breezy read that had me nodding my head up and down, sometimes vigorously.  Like the other Graeber books I've read, the value here is less in its rigid, formal analysis (of which there is little) and more in its unique brand of synthesis, which relies on his near-unflinching open-mindedness.  This trait is especially useful when examining just how strange seemingly ordinary concepts like "selling one's labor" are when viewed through a historical prism.  There are exceptions to this of course; for example, Graeber's anarchist leanings make him a little overeager to critique Marx, to the point where he says "capitalism is not a single totalizing system that shapes and embraces every aspect of our existence." This statement is certainly true in terms of formal analysis, but that's not the terms Graeber is speaking in here, which makes such ideas run counter not only to this text but his whole oeuvre (ie. Debt can be read as a history of how the titular subject has rendered the rule of capital totalitizing).  Nonetheless, I felt something approaching goosebumps (you can't actually get goosebumps from a book, sorry R.L. Stine) when the closing pages brought everything together in exactly the way I wanted it to:

"If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have? 

This is a powerful argument for human freedom. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, even claim that it's the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for, but we don't think a lot about what being free or practicing freedom might actually mean. The main point of this book was not to propose concrete policy prescriptions, but to start us thinking and arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like."

Ultimately, a book based largely on a compendium of semi-anonymous internet respondents can't be the basis for a complete analysis of what ales us.  And a policy proposal from a self-declared anarchist isn't generally going to excite me personally.  But Graeber's explicit denunciation of either of those interpretations in the closing pages confirms what I felt as I was reading the book; that is, a sense of hope and wonder about just what we could make out of this world if we chose to.

25. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s - George Lipsitz (link)

"In their support for the no-strike pledge, their zeal to punish wildcat strikers, and their projections of labor peace in the postwar world, Communists in labor could not have been more poorly prepared for the post-war strike wave. When the party ultimately changed its positions, it did so not out of any serious self-criticism of its disastrous wartime practices but because of pressure from Stalin, who correctly recognized that corporate-liberal postwar policies could succeed only at the expense of the Soviet Union. Refusing to admit their past mistakes and reluctant to identify themselves directly with Soviet foreign policy, U.S. Communists attributed their rediscovery of the class struggle after the war to the fiction that Truman's policies constituted a decisive break with the New Deal past. This posture prevented the party and its adherents from seeing the organic link between government policies and the maintenance of wartime production levels, causing them instead to speak of a conspiracy of powerful forces pushing the nation toward fascism. Communists correctly identified the totalitarian implications of the corporate-liberal state (especially when it directed its repression at them), but they wrongly identified them as a betrayal of New Deal liberalism—rather than its fulfillment. 

[...]

Trade unions play a dual role under capitalism. Important in winning material advances, unions also represent the institutional expression of all the shared experiences that bind workers together in everyday life. They provide an important frame of reference for their members as a legitimate forum for the expression of work-related concerns. On the other hand, unions also take on an institutional life of their own. To survive they must protect the competitive position of the employer, guarantee stability at the workplace, and legitimate the capitalist division of labor through job classifications and unequal rewards. Both roles co-exist uneasily within the same institution, constantly vying with each other for supremacy. In the forties, Communists cast their lot more with the institutional form and viewed the unpredictable class consciousness of everyday life with suspicion, fearing that it might lead to syndicalism or anarchism. Thus they aligned themselves with bureaucracy, trusting the ends to which they wanted to apply their power to overcome the limits of the form. But in the subjective experience of workers, the form itself had a political content. A Communist bureaucrat was still a bureaucrat, and if they were no worse than other union leaders, they were also no better."

A holistic view of the labor struggles of the 1940s that explicitly frames its analysis as a blueprint for the future by detailing both what was useful and what wasn't during the formation of the post-war liberal order.  The above passages regarding Communists' failed strategy is perhaps the most useful such analysis, even if the background that precedes this conclusion (about how all of this was done with a justifiable single-minded focus on defeating the Nazis) is somewhat fatalistic.  Besides these key points, Lipsitz's narrative reinforces a lot of other key lessons as well.  The inability to progress past the wartime mindset helped to reinforce the idea of the American war effort (and thus industry at large) as fundamentally protecting American enterprise, which was ultimately self-defeating to anyone envisioning something different.  Spontaneous actions led by the rank and file were useful in galvanizing large slices of the public but, as we saw in If We Burn and elsewhere, often failed to translate into concrete and meaningful results.  And not than anyone reading this should need any reminder, but the ethos of "conservatism" is, as always, revealed to be a thin smokescreen for the desires of capital:

"Why did competitive-sector conservatives lobby for and support a bill (Taft-Hartley) that conflicted with so many of their basic political beliefs?  For some of them , conservatism simply masked self-interest and greed. [...] Others—with a more principled commitment—found that Taft-Hartley offered a way to explain and perhaps reverse their increasing powerlessness without having to question even more basic concepts about the capitalist system.  Supporting the bill meant endorsing its tacit assumptions, especially the ideas that workers joined unions because of government regulations rather than their own wishes, that demagogic labor leaders provoked strikes against the will of contented workers, and that pressures on smaller businesses originated from actions by government and labor, rather than from the expanding power of monopoly corporations."

While the title should have keyed me into this more, I was still surprised by how much of the narrative is about the diffusion of working-class concerns into the broader culture of the time.  It's a testament to Lipsitz that he applies the same level of rigor to infuse these sections with almost as much meaning as the more concrete analysis of labor power.  The best example of this is how his analysis of the limits of film noir speaks to a broader limit to didacticism in art that I hadn't fully considered before:

"As Frederic Jameson argues...successful commercial films often open up wounds and air out social tensions in order to contain them. But they always run the risk that the problems exposed will have more meaning to audiences than they way in which the film 'resolves' them. Polan points out that the range of subject positions presented in films allows viewers to experiment with many different points of view, that the preferred ideological resolutions inscribed in film texts must always make us aware that other choices are possible." 

When we apply this to the ostensible "lessons" of film noir, summarized by Lipsitz as "translat[ing] justified resentments against a corporatist culture of conformity into atomized individualistic self-pity," we can also understand how such an artistic approach can lend itself to the undoing of the underlying ideology.  Indeed, the modern tendency towards digging into characters' backstories, while not always as conducive to great art, can at least be read as an unspoken desire to push back against this atomization.  And when such an approach transcends its medium (looking at you Andor), perhaps art can be as useful as anything at showing us the path out of our troubles.

26. The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism - Trevor Aaronson (link)

"The essence of what occurred here is that a government, understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism, came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own.  It created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true...I suspect that real terrorists would not have bothered themselves with a person who was so utterly inept."

- US District Judge Colleen McMahon

A concise treatise on the "terrorism is mostly fake" thesis that builds on and refines the author's groundbreaking 2011 article.  Not only does Aaronson's narrative demonstrate the futility of waging war on an idea, but it also shows the extremely banal ways that such a campaign is kept alive in spite of itself (unreasonable demands from FBI superiors, a network of grifters who will do anything for cash, people willing to go along with others our of politeness, etc..).  There is little theorizing outside of the relatively obvious conclusions that he draws directly from his research/reporting, which renders his conclusions fairly basic (ie. "This is a bureaucratic phenomenon more than anything").  But this is not a problem for two main reasons.  First, even the most "faultless" explanation for our domestic war on terror is an indictment of our system.  Second, there's enough meat here to let the reader theorize about additional causes.  The description of intense paranoia within the bureau, the way FBI terrorist data was used to craft Trump's "Muslim Ban," the weird coincidence of how informant's recording equipment always seems to fail at the right time, and the direct effect of FBI activities creating a culture of suspicion within Muslim communities throughout the country...it's all more than enough to support the idea that our elites have purposefully engineered a broader strategy of tension to further their ends.

27. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States - Daniel Immerwahr (link)

If you want a full cataloguing of the expanse of American empire, this is not the book for that.  Immerwahr's narrative is large in scope, but it overlooks some key aspects of how America demonstrates its power (ie. how US dollars are the world's reserve currency).  Instead, this book focuses more on concrete matters of land and people.  What's more is that it specifically orients itself towards facts and stories that an informed (?) reader like myself might be less familiar with.  This approach not only serves to teach basically anyone who reads the book a thing or two, but also forces the reader to wrestle with the very idea of empire and what it means in a modern era.

This is not to say that the focus on things like the Guano Islands or standardized measurements of screwheads ignores the push and pull of economics in the development of empire.  But instead of getting buried in the weeds, Immerwahr uses a deft touch to guide the reader towards a high-level understanding, which is probably a better approach than constantly screaming "it's all about money, stupid."  For example, the author quotes multiple colonial leaders desiring "stable" governments in post-colonial states.  While this sounds reasonable enough, it's soon revealed that the idea of stability is just a smokescreen: "And what was a stable government? One in which "money can be borrowed at a reasonable rate of interest" and "capital is willing to invest" was [Leonard] Wood's definition. He wrote to McKinley: "When people ask me what I mean by stable government, I tell them 'money at six percent'"."  More broadly, Immerwahr describes how "empire-killing technologies" made "tech-enabled globalization" the logical choice of modern empire:

"It may help to look at the decline of colonialism from a different angle, focusing not just on supply but on demand as well. The worldwide anti-imperialist revolt drove the cost of colonies up. Yet at the same time., new technologies gave powerful countries ways to enjoy the benefits of empire without claiming populated territories. In doing so, they drove the demand for colonies down."

The end result of this fundamental shift was a renewed focus on "small pockets of control" that America uses to enforce what Immerwahr calls the "Pointillist Empire." This idea echoes the concept of "smart totalitarianism" from Conspiracy Theory in America, but instead of high-profile assassinations and other crimes against democracy, Immerwahr is focused on more material ends, whether it be our hundreds of overseas military bases or the nature of international labor relations.  In doing so, he is able to tie his seemingly unrelated mini-narratives to the larger picture almost effortlessly:

"...as the US population has aged, requiring more health care, and as the Philippine economy has faltered, more and more nurses from the Philippines have left to work in the United States.  Today, a massive pipeline carries tens of thousands of Filipino nurses to jobs in US health centers.

At this point, not only are Filipino nurses training in preparation for emigration, but Filipino doctors are retraining as nurses so they too can find work abroad. 

Medical expertise flows out of the country, money flows in. It's had a mixed effect. But the point here is that the easy flow, which has made the Philippines the United States' top supplier of foreign nurses since the 1960s, is not the consequence of markets alone. The Philippines has a competitive advantage because of the generations of nurses who learned their craft precisely to US standards."

28. The Eclipse of the Demos: The Cold War and the Crisis of Democracy before Neoliberalism - Kyong-Min Son (link)

"Postwar democratic theorists' readiness to skip an investigation into the cogency of [their] assumptions stands in sharp contrast to the exacting manner in which they deconstructed the concepts of popular sovereignty and the common good. The outsize benefit of the doubt they gave to the pluralist conception of democracy is hard to understand except for the fact that the image of political equilibrium appealed to a broad array of motifs that permeated postwar political thought: the valorization of individual autonomy, the aversion to the idea of collective standards transcending the individual, the promotion of ideological flexibility and compromise, and the emphasis on the stability of existing democratic institutions."

-The Author

"Servility, ignorance, craftiness and obsequiousness are not innate qualities, but are the fruits of a system which forces men into subservience. Evil institutions bear bitter fruit, and this bitter fruit is then used to justify the institutions which produced it."

-John Dewey

A reasonably coherent look at how the idea of the demos (ie. the polity produced when "private wills undergo transformation to become a public will that does not exist before citizens' mutual engagement") was sacrificed by Cold War democratic theorists first to help entrench existing democratic institutions in the wake of "authoritarianism," and later to submit to the will of the markets.  Progressing through this book, it's remarkable to see how these thinkers (especially Hayek and Arendt) had reasonably strong critiques of classical liberalism, but were limited in their prescriptions by a fundamental aversion to and/or distrust of "the masses."  Son's narrative makes this interpretation reasonably clear, but his overwhelming focus on showing how this line of thought set the stage for neoliberalism (rather than being a wholly separate phenomenon) renders his prose slightly less incisive than it could be.  Which is kind of remarkable given how often he forcefully and directly refutes the logic of Cold War liberal thinkers.  In this way, he falls victim (if only slightly) to the same limitations of those he critiques.

The focus on instrumental democracy does pull Son's narrative in a few interesting directions.  The search for democratic stability through technocratic concepts such as systems theory and cybernetics led to some surprisingly honest admissions from theorists.  Herbert Simon in particular pulls no punches on his elitist notions of the purpose of reinforcing the structures of liberal democracy: 

"Simon's crucial point is not simply that people do make rational choices despite their limited capabilities and less-than-optimal conditions, but that because of those deficiencies, they cannot make rational choices unless they are placed in a carefully curated environment. As he puts it, "a higher degree of integration and rationality can...be achieved, because the environment of choice itself can be chosen and deliberately modified.""

The other interesting throughline concerns one of my favorite topics, knowledge.  The aforementioned concepts of cybernetics and the like forced thinkers who employed such concepts to define the fundamental unit of democracy when making such an analogy.  For David Easton that fundamental unit was knowledge: "he envisioned democracy not simply as competition between political elites or between salient interest groups but as an information-processing system in which political signals are generated more diffusely and flow more freely thought a complex web of channels."  While this definition certainly has merit, there are a few large problems with it.  Perhaps most obviously, if you're trying to actually make such an ethos concrete through the production of real quantifiable data, it can (and does) mask the subjectivity of such a process.  Such an affect stems from more than just "bad data" mucking up the results, but instead from the creation of a system where the relationship of the data to the will of the people becomes inverted (when describing how a metric-oriented focus contributed to atrocities in Vietnam, Son opines "In the process of data collection, the data had become an end unto itself").  The culmination of this problem can be seen in the fundamental pessimism of Hayek, whose assertion that to utilize "knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality," we must rely on the markets and the markets alone.  The result of such thinking was then a purposeful creation of institutions that encouraged constrained and "rational" decision-making from its subjects in order to serve, per Herbert Simon, a "more omnipresent centralized power."

In revisiting Hayek for this, I was struck by how nakedly contradictory some of his logic was.  Yes, knowledge can never be known in its totality by an individual, duh, that's not a particularly unique insight.  But pairing that with the stubborn insistence that, nonetheless, each individual must be able to "decide the purpose and the mode of using the bits of knowledge in her possession" is odd.  Sure, Hayek's formulations forsake the classical liberal ideal of the intrinsic value of the individual, but in this very peculiar way where the ability of an individual to act on their specific knowledge is key to the whole program.  Son's summary of this contradiction is as revelatory as anything else he writes, and makes me wish he had narrowed his focus further:

"In Hayek's neoliberalism, liberty appears not as a state or capability of the individual, but as a feature of a particular social order, namely, the market order. The relation between a social order and its members, then, is reversed. A society does not exist to support its members' exercise of liberty; the members help maintain the capitalist civilization by engaging in social interaction as dictated by it, and may receive liberty in return for their conformity."

29. American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis - Adam Hochschild (link)

"That this ruthless, relatively small party [the Bolsheviks] has seized power in such a vast country reignited an ancient American fear of secret conspiracies, something always stronger in unsettled times, when people fear that their own positions in life are threatened or eroding and need someone to blame."

-The Author

"Truth and Falsehood are arbitrary terms...There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other...The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false."

-Arthur Bullard

A captivating history of American tumult from 1917-1921 that tows the standard left-liberal line of being unflinchingly critical of the past without always cutting to the core of the matter.  Yes, Hochschild spares no red ink on his treatment of unsympathetic figures like Woodrow Wilson.  And he often understands and communicates that worker power is the locus of the struggle he depicts (for example, he cites Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois' analysis that the race riots in Phillips County, Arkansas were a reaction to black sharecroppers attempting to unionize).  But he's always just a little too timid to fully indict America and/or capitalism as the root cause.  In the closing paragraph, one of his demands is "a more equitable distribution of wealth, so that there will not be tens of millions of people economically losing ground and looking for scapegoats to blame."  Which sounds good and is even partially true, but neglects the implications of the power behind the wealth.  

Regardless there's a lot of useful stuff here.  Hochschild's narrative establishes just how World War I formalized the concept of American counter-intelligence that was originally birthed in the war in the Philippines.  He describes how the Espionage Act straddled the line of implicitly censoring the press without explicitly doing so (at least most of the time), and also depicts the self-censorship that resulted from brutal crackdowns on free expression.  Little nuggets about the extreme right-wing proclivities of folks like Reverend George Simons and Captain John B. Trevor (who worked with Military Intelligence to provide data from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to a Senate committee!) provide a preview of similar leanings from more recent figures like Timothy McVeigh.  And as always, there are numerous examples of newspapers doing the bidding of the powerful, whether it be parroting falsehoods planted by J. Edgar Hoover or echoing current-day false claims against Palestine:

"...the New York Tribune reported that in the Union of Russian Workers office "detectives and agents of the Department of Justice discovered a secret chamber in which were concealed explosives, chemicals, and death-dealing devices." Oddly, raiders had not noticed this when they ransacked the building from top to bottom several weeks earlier."

Of course, the first Red Scare did eventually end.  In his analysis of this, Hochschild is careful to strike a balance between optimism and pessimism.  The reasons for pessimism are obvious: J. Edgar Hoover became an entrenched malevolent force in our polity and the anti-immigrant fever carried over enough to effectively ban Asian/Jewish/other immigration for decades.  Indeed, the scars of this period still rest on the face of our country to this day.  But still, the optimism is there if you look for it.  The best example is how he depicts the political current that helped to break the Red Scare as being relatively straightforward.  A concern for economic issues like inflation and the desire to punish war profiteers not only led us out of the crisis but helped build eventual support for the New Deal and its abundant reforms.  Perhaps this lesson of keeping it simple and (correctly) naming your enemy can be a lesson to us today.

30. what if? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions - Randall Munroe (link)

I finally read the second book in this series (always my favorite part of the XKCD-verse) and enjoyed it just as much as the first.  Not gonna force any sort of "analysis" onto a comedy book, but I will say that Munroe's approach here is probably as good of a way to get someone started thinking like a scientist as anything else.

31. Cuba: An American History - Ada Ferrer (link)

"Ultimately, then, (Jose) Marti believed that Cuban independence, if truly successful, would do two things for the world. First, it would serve as a brake on US expansion. Second, it would be an example to the world of a new kind of republic—one that stood opposed to the racial and ethnic violence then so readily on display in the United States. As a paragon of racial justice, as a check on US empire, the Cuban Revolution would be a revolution for the world."

Cuba serves as a very complete history of its titular nation, and is a worthy compendium for its attention to detail alone.  What makes it more than just an encyclopedia is how it frames its narrative as a perpetual struggle between a nation seeking self-determination in the shadow of the growing empire to its north.  This push and pull is illustrative throughout, as development in Cuba is shown to be not just a function of the desires of its people, but also American willingness to establish and/or concede power over Cuba based on the the particulars of its position on the matter over time.  This is made most clear during the time of American occupation post-independence.  Similar to its dominion over the Philippines, America used the concern of "self-government" to justify its presence until a sufficient pliant government was established (summarized by Ferrer with the pithy "independence should never be hurried").  The US used various methods to try to build the new nation in its image (the section on the broad failure of America-centric education was fascinating), but ultimately it was a focus on economic policy that enabled six, largely unbroken, decades of American dominion.  Broadly speaking, the private property rights established in Order 62 enabled American capital to squash existing communal landholders, which in turn. helped to set the stage for its eventual undoing in the 1959 revolution.  Narratives like these serve to show that the spirit of the Cuban people, a seeming underdog versus a great power, has nonetheless served as a useful counterbalance to the whims of American capital.

A few other narrative threads also serve to reflect our present condition back on us, and perhaps even to provide a few lessons for us. The 1933 revolution empowered liberal reformers whose focus on establishing procedural norms largely ignored demands from the left to seek "economic independence."  This conflict set the stage for Batista, waiting in the wings while undoing liberal reforms with military actions, to seize power only a few years later.  This fecklessness of leadership is buoyed by the role the people served during the far more successful 1959 revolution.  There, a growing vanguard of people not only had a direct stake in the revolution, but were able to direct the state towards the economic reforms that were sorely needed decades earlier:

"How had so much happened so quickly? How had a multiclass revolution with goals squarely in the mold of long-standing progressive demands in Cuban politics produced something so seemingly unexpected? The answer to that question lies not in any single moment, but rather in the frenzied day-to-day accumulation of events over the first two years of revolution. For all the uncertainty of that period, some patterns became obvious in the maelstrom. Most apparent was a potent radicalization that transformed progressive social and economic goals into something much more far-reaching. In this first phase of the revolution, powerful people lost property and prerogative. But m the process, many more gained land, literacy, and wage increases; masses of people developed a profound stake in the revolution. As radicalization won adherents among a majority, that majority then helped further consolidate and propel that leftward turn. Popular support was thus both cause and effect of the revolution's growing radicalism." 

One other thing that separates Cuba from other American histories of radicals is the time it spends on ideology.  A common complaint I've had about other such works (say, the Fitzpatrick short histories of the USSR) is that they gloss over this, which to some degree paints the radical subject as inherently otherized.  Ferrer does not make this mistake, which serves to reinforce what I already know about Castro (among others), while adding enough to make the reading worth it:

"As a young man, Castro loved reading about the Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar. Now he devoured epic histories of the French and Russian revolutions. As he read them, he pondered questions about what made revolutions succeed or fail or even happen at all. Was it the particular man who led them? The specific moment or circumstances in which they occurred? Or the underlying structural conditions? [...] Fidel also liked to consider the logic inherent to all revolutions. And his readings led him to the conclusion that the climax of every revolution was the "moment the radicals carried the flag.""

32. Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town - Brian Alexander (link)

It took a while to adjust to Alexander's style (very journalistic in nature versus the academic tone of almost everything else I read), but I was still able to reinforce a lot of what I know about the world in this story of communal decay wrought by the often invisible forces of capital.  Whereas a tome like The Constitutional Bind communicated the consistent advantage our institutions grant towards the powerful through a detailed analysis of history, Alexander demonstrates this same idea more passively through his narrative.  The details of VC firms making deals to extracts profits out of successful companies, the bankruptcy process that seems to exist primarily to enrich lawyers, and the inherently predatory nature of the payday lenders that "bail out" our protagonists all convey the same lesson in a different yet necessary manner.  This persistent thumb on the scale also reinforces this blog's unofficial watchword of "complexity" while incorporating a critique of the media at the same time:

"Trying to explain that the roots of Lancaster's problematic changes were deep and old was a futile exercise. A few people who were executives at Anchor at the time remembered Icahn, but nobody else did. Almost nobody knew the true story of the Newell takeover and of the shady dealings of Newell's felonious financier, Gary Driggs. Cerberus had come and gone so quickly that the episode blurred. The vast majority of Lancastrians couldn't name Monomoy, to say nothing of Barington Capital, Wexford Management, or the Clinton Group. They didn't follow the intricacies of carried interest, the decline of union power, Wall Street lobbying, or the political contributions made by the predatory-lending industry. It that they were rubes, as so many big-city liberals took comfort in believing. It was that they had lives to lead and work to do. Both the national and the local press, which might have once briefed them on how The System had been turned on its head, were themselves eviscerated by digital culture, by their own insular preoccupation with themselves, and by the drumbeat message from cable news and Internet propaganda to never trust "the media.""

We also see how such conditions reinforce themselves on an individual level, by depriving people of the ability to imagine a better world:

"Mark wished his life had more substance, thought he wasn't sure what he meant by that. Maybe "fulfillment" would be a better word, but he wasn't sure about that either. When he tried to think of a form fulfillment might take, aside from drugs, he couldn't conjure an image in his mind. He knew that people sometimes claimed to be fulfilled, or said their lives were imbued with passion, but he was unable to step into the shoes of such people. They existed in a fantasy world. He could see them through the glass screens of his smartphone, his compute, his television. They were all far more glamorous and altogether happier than anybody he'd ever known. Mark's world was Lancaster, and America as seen from Lancaster—ad in them, with the exception of his own family, there was nothing deserving of his faith."

Finally, it's interesting to note that the most obvious path out of this is simply what made Lancaster great in the first place. Glass builders were drawn to the area by "cheap, plentiful, publicly owned gas."  The resulting polity featured class distinctions that were "present, but fuzzy" where neighborhoods were reasonably well integrated and children went to the same schools.  How novel!

33. When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s - John Ganz (link)

"In a way, the Weavers were just doing what earlier generations of Americans had done in the face of shrinking opportunities and the spiritual destitution or corruption of the settled areas: they headed west. Notions about divine election and imminent apocalypse were close to home as well, familiar from their upbringing in America's various offshoots of Calvinism. They feared social collapse, a Great Tribulation, but in a sense they were both its products and its agents. Mainstream American society had stopped providing them with a plausible story: army service was demoralizing, the churches had nothing to say to them, materialism could not fill the gap, and all around them were signs of decay. The oldest material basis of American life, the family farm, the homestead, appeared to no longer be viable. The family itself was in danger, surrounded by a seductive world of vice and corruption. The world they grew up in and took for granted no longer existed. Surely these were the signs of coming Armageddon and the doings of a malign, Satanic force."

A perfectly good Perlstein knock-off that hints at applying a Gramscian analysis of the early nineties (specifically as a crisis of hegemony) but never really commits.  That's fine though, because the erudite history we're left with is a perfect addition to the "everything is the same as it's always been" canon.  In Ganz's narrative, Ross Perot reads as a funhouse mirror version of Trump, Trump himself shows up as an uncanny foreshadowing of his future influence (ie. ranting about the Japanese during a episode of a news program that also featured David Duke), and a late-in-life Nixon, ever the realist, accurately predicts the future:

"If Yeltsin Fails, the prospects for the next 50 years will turn grim. He Russian people will not turn back to Communism. But a new, more dangerous despotism based on extremist Russian nationalism will take power...If a new despotism prevails, everything gained in the great peaceful revolution of 1991 will be lost. War could break out in the former Soviet Union as the new despots use force to restore the 'historical borders' of Russia."

What is specifically interesting about Ganz writing this sort of book is that he is very much of the Donald Trump = fascism school.  The implication that Trump is a logical continuum of what came before comes as a surprising and striking contrast.  Additionally, Ganz has no rose-colored glasses about America's past: in the closing pages of the introduction (about the only place where his opining takes the form of something longer than a well-placed quip), Ganz fully admits that American democracy is "tenuous at best" and explicitly agrees with the school that claims it "never fully existed in the first place."  Which makes me question not so much the accuracy of the fascism thesis, but its utility.  If America has always been a breeding ground for fascist impulses, what use is calling out Trump as an aberration?  To be fair, that's not really a question for this book to answer, but given what he has written here, I am curious to see how Ganz's thoughts on this matter develop over time.

34. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together - Heather McGhee (link)

Of all the DEI books to come out over the past few years, this is the one that caught my eye enough for me to grab it from the library.  The central argument was what drew me in (in short: we all suffer the effects of racism, and only through multiracial solidarity can we overcome this), and everything McGhee presents to that end is useful.  But oddly enough, it's the topics tangential to the central thesis that are both more illuminating and more confounding.

On the positive front, McGhee picks and chooses her historical nuggets well.  The closing of public pools lest they be integrated is the most striking example (enough to inspire the cover art), but the inclusion of Lee Atwater's wildly racist campaign strategy to elect George H.W. Bush is the most incisive part.  By framing his maneuvering as the inflection point in American history where racial affect became effectively divorced from explicit mentions of race, McGhee paves the way for something of an "epistemology of ignorance."  In doing so, she cites Wendell Berry's idea of a "hidden wound" and buttresses this by quoting James Baldwin: "[White Americans] are dimly aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence."  This exploration of the existential cost of racism surpasses whatever economic detriments she presents, and serves to recast the American Dream as fundamentally a (racially limited) right to forget.

On the negative front, you might expect me to rail on an insufficient critique of capital, like I do with basically every other book written by a liberal. But McGhee is better on that front than most, even if she can't fully bring herself to indict the system itself.  Instead, her problems lie more with her seeming inability to filter out what doesn't help her argument.  The most obvious of this is the snippets of interviews with notable grifters like Robin DiAngelo, but that feels like a cheap complaint.  What's more worrisome is anecdotes like the one concerning housing choices.  McGhee cites a study where whites, on average, say they want to live in a 47% white neighborhood, but then search in places that are 68% white and actually end up living in places that are 74% white.  What this section doesn't mention is that until very recently the US was roughly 70% white people, meaning it is literally impossible for the average white person to live in a 47% white neighborhood.  While not every drive-by summary of academic work can be refuted with basic demographic knowledge, examples like this do raise doubts as to McGhee's rigor in this area.

In other places, McGhee's assertions are a bit simplistic and/or contradictory.  Early in the book she echoes another's claims that the primary driver of our lack of "social solidarity" is "sharp divisions based on race."  And though she does often cites economic reasons for this divide, she makes a weird sidestep midway through the book where she diagnoses white people's concerns about "the economy" as a mere dogwhistle for maintaining white supremacy.  In short, there's plenty of reasonable theses throughout the book, but never a particularly compelling synthesis.  Until the literal closing page I didn't quite get why she was unable to square the circle, but then it hit me:

"Since this country's founding, we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower, and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts.  But it could be.  And if it were, all of us would prosper."

Until that moment, it didn't quite register just how limited the titular "Us" was in McGhee's mind.  By centering her narrative entirely upon domestic issues, she largely forgoes the white supremacy, the lack of solidarity, and the power imbalance wrought by American Empire.  This isn't to say there isn't enough material within our borders for a detailed social analysis; rather, it's that such a social analysis will be necessarily incomplete if it excludes the largest swath black and brown people affected by American racism.  I'm not sure if McGhee would have written a better book had she expanded her scope, but I would have liked to see her try.

35. The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994 - Edward W. Said (link)

I chose a less obvious option for my first Said because...honestly, I don't remember!  I often buy books months before I read them based on research and/or word of mouth that happened even longer ago.  But this collection of writings from an extended period of Said's life is actually a great introduction to the man, as it highlights his ability to communicate insight and ethics over a broad range of topics to a variety of audiences.  And like many insightful thinkers, Said's work reads as an image of the present reflected back into the past.  

Some of this thought echoes what I remember from Rashid Khalidi's work (on the uniqueness of the Palestine struggle, Said says "no movement has had to deal simultaneously with expulsion, dispossession, colonization, and a terrifying kind of international illegitimacy"), but Said's analysis stretches beyond the focused narrative of The Hundred Years War on Palestine.  He remarks on how Palestinians, through their dispersal, have been denied the ability to synthesize a common national narrative other than that of the "knowing endurance" of the refugee.  The flipside of this effective "denial of history" is that meaningful shared knowledge between Arabs and Americans does not exist, seemingly precluding any hope of a meaningful peace.  And Said shares my diagnosis of the fundamental trait of American conservatives as incurious, painting them as "uninterested in the past or present, look(ing) at the future blankly and unknowingly." 

One interesting dialectic in Said's work concerns how to ultimately resolve the Palestinian question.  On one hand, he understands that appeals to pure military might are incomplete:

"We cannot credibly and politically, with any serious or desirable result, fight each other militarily. They could slaughter us, but they're not going to get rid of every Palestinian, and they won't snuff out the flame of Palestinian nationalism. Conversely, we have no military option against the Israelis. What we do have is a vision, a way of including them in the Middle East based on respect of nationalities for each other, the right to live within secure and safe borders, and to coexist in a profitable way with other peoples, with differences."

But on the other hand, this does not mean that simple debate will solve the problem either:

"Perhaps we ought to remember that neither an artificial tranquility induced by Camp David TV appearances nor Sadatian hyperbole about 'psychological factors" can transform the real conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians into a simple misunderstanding. And this alleged misunderstanding cannot, we must hasten to add, be dissolved by "problem solving," or by getting people together in seminars where the "barriers" between them will disappear."

Perhaps the way to (partially) synthesize these competing ideas is to understand the locus of control: that is, the American Empire.  After all, Said frames his ideal state above in terms of American capitalism ("profitable") and the concept of the nation-state that undergirds it ("borders").  So what's even more curious is how his analysis leads him to conclude, in fewer words, that American Empire must fall:

"For the American intellectual, that simply means, at bottom, in a globalized environment, that there is today one superpower, and the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world, based upon profit and power, has to be altered from an imperial one to one of coexistence among human communities that can make and remake their own histories together. This seems to me to be the number-one priority—there's nothing else."

Of course, it might not be completely fair for me to pick parts of various articles, speeches, and talks given decades apart that somewhat contradict each other.  Peace in the Middle East has been a moving target, and so it's only fair that Said would have changed his approach and his rhetoric over the years. Where it becomes most clear that Said has a unified analysis is ironically in regards to a different matter altogether: the first Iraq War.  On this topic he is crystal clear in his diagnosis throughout:

"As for the United States this was another imperial intervention, inspired by oil, not principles, mainly to consolidate a faltering empire, distract from the troubles at home, acquire a military aura at the expense of a tailor-made villain whom, interestingly enough, the United States in a certain sense supported and apparently still wants to live with as a useful foreign devil. It is perfectly obvious, however, that along the way, getting Iraq out of Kuwait has accomplished next to nothing; and once again the United States and its allies show themselves to be largely devoid of ideas, values, and any appreciable sort of moral or statesmanlike courage, except bellicose declarations and saber rattling. 

This war must really be seen as an episode in a much longer and deeper contest. After fts European wars, for instance, the United States quickly came to terms with Europe; the same was true of its conflict with Japan and Indochina which even after were devastated seems to have settled into a sustained mode of doing business with the united States. Only with the Arab—Islamic world does one feel that after this particularly violent chapter the problems remain pretty much unsolved, pretty much simmering beneath the surface."

"Yet at bottom this is a personalized struggle between, on the one hand, a Third World dictator of the kind that the United States has long dealt with, whose rule it has encouraged, whose favors it has long enjoyed, and, on the other, the president of a country which has taken on the mantle of empire inherited from Britain and France and is determined to remain in the Middle East for reasons of oil and of geostrategic and political advantage."

And to bring it back around, Said understands the role Israel plays in this, suggesting a grand synthesis that, while never spoken explicitly in this text, clearly existed somewhere in Said's mind.

"It is my supposition that Iraq is being destroyed today, not because of its aggression against Kuwait, which could have been reversed patiently, regionally, economically, and politically, but because the United States wants a physical presence in the Gulf, wants to have direct leverage on oil to affect Europe and Japan, because it wishes to set the world agenda, because Iraq was perceived as a threat to Israel."

36. The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins - Stefanos Geroulanos (link)

"What motivated [archaeologist John Lubbock], was the sense that in the ground, in the deepest past, lay an explanation of society, culture, and humanity itself. And what was the first reason to study prehistory? Its value "in an empire such as ours." To know humanity was to master and own it."

-Geroulanos

"The subjugated and disorganized peoples have therefore had no choice but to accept the substitute solutions offered them or...to seek to imitate Western ways sufficiently to be able to fight them on their own ground."

Claude Levi-Strauss

There's a chapter in End of the Myth where Greg Grandin describes the repeated use of the metaphor of the frontier as a "safety valve."  Many of the chapters of this book resemble such a treatment in how they catalogue a phenomenon without necessarily going beyond that.  And yet, I found the slow progression towards a conclusion present in this approach to be far more rewarding than I expected a third of the way in.  So in short, stick with this book, it's worth it.

The most notable such reward is the feeling of completeness.  Take the two pull quotes above—the journey from imperial to anti-imperial logic (and everything in between) doesn't just communicate the totality of prehistorical thought, but also the interrelatedness of the development of that thought to the development of the world at large.  As such, The Invention of Prehistory is not just a compendium or an analysis, but a history all in itself, both of the topic at hand and of something more.  That something more could correctly be seen as "everything," but I think the more interesting aspect of the book's metanarrative its depiction of the history of ignorance.  Some of this is inherent to the scientific process; after all, the material basis of archaeology is the stuff we find in the ground, which can only be revealed over time.  But there's also an aspect of ideology to this—specifically, how one's way of seeing the world limits the way in which you're able to interpret the unknown.  Geroulanos states this explicitly at times (his closing chapter contains this: "...good, reliable science becomes harder to identify. The past loses its elasticity, its complexity, its electricity. And at a time where we are regularly plied with disinformation and lies, most theories of prehistory only add to the pile."), but the an reader can piece this together from his narrative as well.  Take this passage on how feminist-oriented archaeology explicitly rejected the unexamined biases of previous work:

"Rather than locate objects found in a dig back into a social organization where gender roles were already known, the archaeologist had to visualize over and over the place and meaning of objects that would be forever ambiguous."

And this section about the lack of imagination of anti-communist researchers:

"Primitive communism mattered, in part, because conservatives increasingly presented socialism as simply "antithetical to human nature": it was capitalism that was "natural," communism the aberrant form. So whenever it was reported that some Indigenous society shared property and the catch of the hunt, debates would erupt as to whether this mean that communism represented humanity's universal past." 

In short, this journey, present throughout the book, is a quiet plea for both genuine curiosity and patient humility.  As Geroulanos says when describing the post-War effort to reclaim the past: "No, there are no peoples without history—it's just that most people are not aware of other peoples' histories." 

37. The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice - Elizabeth F. Cohen (link)

Much like how Pitkin's The Concept of Representation depicted the philosophical metanarrative of its titular subject, this book attempts to do the same for its own.  But either I'm a more critical reader than I was when I read that, or Cohen is more blinkered in her approach, because I found some of the omissions/minimizations in her analysis to be striking.  While I understand the primary subject of this book (the idealized philosophy of liberal politics) necessitates a reductive approach to the messiness of actually existing liberal democracies, a better balance between the two would be more useful.  To take the most obvious example, it's absurd to not mention slavery until page 92 of a book that regularly discusses the thoughts of 18th-Century thinkers on relevant concepts like citizenship.  More generally, Cohen regularly describes the process of politics as it relates to durational time, but rarely attempts to marry any of this with an analysis of power imbalances.  There is a thread in the closing chapter about how the scientific nature of time measurement led to an "exercise of power modeled on economics," which in turn led to a "market logic" that is "vulnerable to exploitative arrangements."  But for the most part, these types of fairly obvious conclusions go unnoticed, and the work as a whole suffers for it.

This effective shallowness mars many of Cohen's other interesting observations.  For example, she remarks on how time is a process of cultivation of knowledge and wisdom, one which can help provide some level of security and certainty of the future.  As such, durational time becomes necessary to effective democratic processes, which is a logical conclusion even though it elides some larger truths.  The problem comes in the resulting conclusion, which reads in part "Democracy is predicated on a belief in a non-static conception of human character."  The idea that our current polity, in which most political operative are maximally cynical about the transformative potential of virtually any political effort, reflects this idea at all is ludicrous and only serves to undermine her otherwise logical argument.

This lack of incisive critique of actually existing systems does achieve a specifically interesting purpose in one instance.  Take this passage from the chapter on the various political values of durational time:

"Durational time also often proxies for multiple things simultaneously. We can see this very clearly in the case of prison sentencing. There is widespread disagreement about the purposes of imprisonment, which include incapacitation, deterrence, retribution or expiation, and reformation. Durational time can represent each of these goals simultaneously, allowing people to agree to complicated sentencing formulae even when they are seeking very different ends. The vagueness about what is happening in a given duration of time works to evade potentially divisive disagreements."

Here you have an adherent of liberal ideology explicitly stating two things.  First, in listing acceptable goals that overlap and sometimes even directly contradict one another (hard to reform a person you're seeking retribution against), Cohen betrays the fundamental lack of concern for specific rights/values at the heart of liberalism.  Second, framing the evasion of "potentially divisive disagreements" as a feature of liberalism betrays the apolitical bias of its institutions.  Cohen is able to acknowledge these shortcomings at times ("Democracy and liberalism are in conflict with one another" she says in a later section), but is not incisive enough in totality for it to matter.

38. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 - W. E. B. Du Bois (link)

"Our fathers had been compelled to postpone the principles of their great Declaration, and wait for their full establishment until a more propitious time. That time ought to be present now. But the public mind has been educated in error for a century. How difficult in a day to unlearn it. In rebuilding, it is necessary to clear away the rotten and defective portions of the old foundations, and to sink deep and found the unrepaired edifice upon the firm foundation of eternal justice."

-Thaddeus Stevens, on the passage of the 14th Amendment

"The price of the disaster of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of ignorant laborers in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government; of overthrowing a slave economy and establishing upon it an industry primarily for the profit of the workers. It was this price which in the end America refused to pay and today suffers for that refusal"

-Du Bois, subtitling his chapter "The Price of Disaster"

Another entry in the category of "book whose central conceit is dispelling a narrative I already did not believe" that is compelling nonetheless.  Of course, "compelling" almost certainly short-sells Black Reconstruction, as Du Bois' scholarship may be the ultimate root cause of why I, a random white guy ninety years hence, already knew Dunning School myths about Reconstruction to be false.  Indeed, a work diffused into public consciousness to such a degree that it stands on its own hallowed plain as a truly timeless entity is as much a piece of history itself as it is a compendium of historical knowledge.  Black Reconstruction is nothing less than history as Truth, or as Du Bois himself puts it in the closing chapter, "the record of human action [...] set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations."

The success of Du Bois' approach rests on two primary factors.  The first of these is his unabashed, unequivocal truth-telling that sacrifices zero clarity in its pursuit of a multi-faceted, complex truth.  His analysis of the failings of Dunning School thought is equal parts detailed and cutting, and is summarized effortlessly as "designed not to seek the truth but to prove a thesis."  His narrative of Northern attitudes is fair and balanced throughout, but pulls no punches when describing the foolishness of the "American Assumption, of the possibility of labor's achieving wealth, applied with a vengeance to landless slaves under caste conditions.  The very strength of its logic was the weakness of its common sense."  And his analysis of the political development of specific states and localities is accompanies throughout by a firm understanding of why most such analysis fails.  This passage from his chapter on Louisiana is perhaps as indicative of Du Bois' oeuvre as anything else in the whole book:

"The history of Louisiana, from 1870 to 1876, reads like a Chinese puzzle to those who forget the great forces below. Beneath the witch's cauldron of political chicanery, it is difficult to remember the great dumb mass of white and black labor, the overwhelming majority of the citizens of Louisiana, groping for light, and seldom finding expression. Historians quite unanimously forget and ignore them, and chronicle only the amazing game of politicians."

The second, related factor is none other than the immortal science itself.  Du Bois' unrelenting focus on questions of land, and labor, and all other relevant economic matters demonstrate a consistent use of historical materialism to develop his conclusions.  The most obvious and unrelenting example of this in his narrative is the constant trade-off made by Reconstruction governments to allow for enfranchisement of Freedmen while rarely budging on matters of economics.  But of course, Du Bois has more to say than just this.  On the matter of the ultimate unity and dominance of the capital class, he is clear: 

"Thus the guidance and dictatorship of capital for the object of private profit were not to be questioned or overthrown; but it must maintain that ascendancy by controlling the public opinion of the laboring class. This was accomplished and, on the whole, easily accomplished by the power to give and withhold employment from people who were without capital, the power to fix wages within certain wide limits, the power to influence public opinion through the prestige of wealth, news and literature, and the power to dominate legislatures, courts, and offices of administration."

And Du Bois ties this back in to how, despite the many nominal improvements to democratic procedures during Reconstruction, this class formation fundamentally undermined and made impossible the idea of true American democracy: 

"Great corporations, through their control of new capital, began to establish a super-government. On the one hand, they crushed the robber-barons, the thieves and the grafters, and thus appeased those of the old school who demanded the old standards of personal honesty. Secondly, they made treaty with the petty bourgeoisie by guarantying them reasonable and certain income from their investments, while they gradually deprived them of real control in industry. And finally, they made treaty with labor by dealing with it as a powerful, determined unit and dividing it up into skilled union labor, with which the new industry shared profit in the shape of a higher wage and other privileges, and a great reservoir of common and foreign labor which it kept at work at low wages with the threat of starvation and with police control.

This control of super-capital and big business was being developed during the ten years of Southern Reconstruction and was dependent and consequent upon the failure of democracy in the South, just as it fattened upon the perversion of democracy in the North. And when once the control of industry by big business was certain through consolidation and manipulation that included both North and South, big business shamelessly deserted, not only the Negro, but the cause of democracy; not only in the South, but in the North."

Lest anyone assume Du Bois' analysis is "class reductionist" (which is a silly thing to accuse almost anyone of, let alone a legend like Du Bois), he repeatedly incorporates race into his class analysis, often very explicitly.  To this end, the text contains numerous examples of obvious racist rhetoric and a detailed accounting of the rise of the Klan.  But the most stark and useful findings on this front are when he directly ties economic outcomes to racial bias.  His psychoanalysis of white Fear finds the ultimate source to be the "fear of unemployment," but simultaneously, there are wages paid to whites that have nothing to do with employment, per se (emphasis added):

"It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and tides of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness."  

I do want to briefly note how Du Bois' work contributes to two of my areas of interest.  One area is the perverse way Americans think of the concept of fascism, and how it does and doesn't apply to the modern day.  A proper response (perhaps the response) to such punditry is to assert that America has always been some kind of fascist, meaning that any analysis that supposes 2016 or 2024 to be some sort of inflection point is necessarily left wanting.  To this end, Du Bois is quite useful.  He diagnoses the South with an "intolerance fatal to human culture," that poisoned the whole nation to be "ranged against liberalism."  This fundamental opposition to liberalism (the idealized version of it, at least) in turn led to the birth of American imperialism, which Du Bois describes as something not dissimilar to fascism:

"The United States was turned into a reactionary force. It became the cornerstone of that new imperialism which is subjecting the labor of yellow, brown and black peoples to the dictation of capitalism organized on a world basis [...] International and commercial imperialism began to get a vision. Within the very echo of that philanthropy which had abolished the slave trade, was beginning a new industrial slavery of black and brown and yellow workers in Africa and Asia. Arising from this, as a result of this economic foundation, came the change in the attitude toward these darker people. They were no longer "Brothers in Black"; they were inferiors. These inferiors were to be governed for their own good. They were to be raised out of sloth and laziness by being compelled to work." 

The other area Du Bois' work touches on is the epistemology of American self-mythologizing (ie. how we lie to ourselves).  There is much to draw from the chapters on the actions of the federal government; above all else, the simultaneous aspirations and shortcomings of figures like Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens (see the pull quote up top) are certainly illuminating.  The conception of the vote mattering above all else towards the creation of true American democracy is depicted as both simplistic and short-sighted throughout the narrative.  But Du Bois sums it up best in his concluding chapters, painting America's lack of moral imagination as fundamentally a product of a most reductive understanding of human nature:

"This whole phantasmagoria has been built on the most miserable of human fictions : that in addition to the manifest differences between men there is a deep, awful and ineradicable cleft which condemns most men to eternal degradation. It is a cheap inheritance of the world's infancy, unworthy of grown folk. My rise does not involve your fall. No superior has interest in inferiority. Humanity is one and its vast variety is its glory and not its condemnation. If all men make the best of themselves, if all men have the chance to meet and know each other, the result is the love born of knowledge and not the hate based on ignorance."

39. Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor's Global Anticommunist Crusade - Jeff Schuhrke (link)

"Before I left my country, I was warned by some of my co-workers that I would be 'brainwashed' in the United States. I can now answer that I am very happy to be brainwashed in the free, friendly, and comradely manner in which we are being brainwashed at [AIFLD]."

-José Delores Bautista, union leader from the Dominican Republic

A globe-spanning work on how Cold War-era labor leaders sought to counter "totalitarianism" in the international labor movement...by using their vast influence to make ensure that the totality of all such organizing fell within the bounds of American desires.  The irony doesn't stop there of course, as the focus of Meany, Reuther, and others on promoting "free" labor not only necessitated the implementation of less democratic union governance, but also directly contributed (through purges and the like) to the hollowing out of the American labor power that had helped build and maintain the New Deal order.  This fealty to the foreign policy goals of Capital (a sort of respectability politics for labor, if you will) was ultimately self-defeating, as the AFL-CIO's seat at the foreign policy table was rescinded once the unique conditions of the Cold War ceased to exist. 

Schuhrke's narrative otherwise echoes many other Cold War stories of CIA influence and intrigue in other spheres.  All parties to this collaboration both at home and overseas were strident anti-communists before working with the CIA, which serves as yet another demonstration of how covert forces within our government don't so much create reality but rather manipulate it.  Such union leaders are shown repeatedly to demonstrate these tendencies through extreme pragmatism and rank incuriosity.  Religion, especially Catholicism, was used as both a motivating force and as a cudgel, perhaps made most clear through the justifications voiced by organizer Bill Doherty Jr. (emphasis added):

"...where a Latin American country escapes a violent revolution from which only communism will benefit it will be because the campesino has been given reason to believe that at long last his voice is being heard, his identity is recognized, his dignity honored."

That this collaboration was understood to be mutually beneficial raises the obvious question, for whom?  Obviously the US government was happy with the arrangement, as similar efforts continue today through disbursements made by organizations like USAID and NED.  The labor aristocracy also benefitted, both through entrenchment and enrichment (a fantastic example of this are Chilean professional associations known as gremios, who assisted with US efforts to topple Allende.  The word gremio literally translates to both employer and worker, which "captured the AIFLD concept of labor-management solidarity more than any word in English.").  The international proletariat, however, suffered greatly.  American support for dictatorships in Brazil and elsewhere, direct financial support for offshoring programs, and interference in Third World organizing efforts all serve to show how the ideology of "industrial pluralism" not only immiserated the working class, but created an apolitical reality where meaningfully countering the whims of American Capital seems almost impossible.

40. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America - Nancy MacLean (link)

"In the view of the libertarian economist, Jesus was mistaken. Conscripting the Good Samaritan story, Buchanan made his case that "modern man had gone soft": he lacked the "strategic courage" needed to restore the market to its proper ordering. By this logic, what seemed to be the ethical thing to do—help someone in need—was not, after all, the correct thing to do, because the assistance would encourage the recipient to "exploit" the giver rather than to solve his own problems."

"Buchanan was breaking with the most basic ethical principles of the classical liberalism he claimed to revere, of the market order as a quest for mutual advantage based on mutual respect. Instead, he was mapping a social contract based on "unremitting coercive bargaining" in which individuals treated one another as instruments toward their own ends, not fellow beings of intrinsic value. He was outlining a world in which the chronic domination of the wealthiest and most powerful over all others appeared the ultimate desideratum, a state of affairs to be enabled by his understanding of the ideal constitution."

One-third a perfectly fine but ultimately shallow liberal polemic and two-thirds the story of a particularly dismal school of libertarian thought, Democracy in Chains is worthwhile primarily because the latter aspect really wrestles with the theory in question.  This alone makes the book a worthy addition to Shock Doctrine, Globalists, License to Be Bad, Eclipse of the Demos, and others in my collection that detail the intellectual traditions that have helped degrade our society.

The "libertarian" ethos of James M. Buchanan and his acolytes is tricky to pin down.  On one hand, there's the usual hypocrisy where one clamors for freedom but wishes for the power of the state to clamp down on any dissent (ie. against students protesting the Vietnam War).  But at its core, Buchanan's "public choice" theory is just the fundamental denial of society now common to right-wing thought.  Among his primary concerns was that majority rule leads to "special interests" seeking "profits" from government programs, which in turn leads to government officials feeling obligated to fulfill what is asked of them by their constituents.  On one hand, this is simply fear of basic liberal principles, but it also serves as projection.  Indeed, the patronage of rich donors which infects our polity can be much more accurately and simply described the same way.  By turning this accusation back around on the relatively powerless masses, Buchanan perverts the language and logic of liberalism far below its already perverse baseline:

"It was an old saw on the American right that the people were so dull and inert that any call for government action could come only from self-interested third parties, outside agitators—whether abolitionists, labor bosses, Communists, or politicians—seeking to make personal hay"

Even though the utter lack of both logic and morality in Buchanan's work makes for a somewhat repetitive message, there's still a lot of resonant layers to this story.  It's fascinating how Buchanan and his ilk pursue a fundamentally Leninist strategy for taking power, sounding like Bolsheviks in their rejection of "incrementalism and pragmatism" and pursuit of "changes in the whole structure of social and economic institutions" (it's a welcome surprise that a liberal like MacLean is able to discuss the right's fascination with Lenin without doing the usual "Russia bad" schtick).  It's also noteworthy how such radical goals butted up against the limits of tolerance of many existing right-wing institutions, requiring Buchanan to be tactically selective and secretive.  Like all "good" libertarians, their reliance on private property as a cudgel shines through their work (one screed imagines disciplining student protestors thusly: "Think how much differently faculty and administrators would react to student occupations of their offices if those offices were more like their own homes: if they should be required to rent, lease, or purchase office facilities from the universities. Then they might find their spines and stop paying "ransom"").  And their desires for austerity in many areas (in this case Social Security) is, while hypothetical in this case, as useful a description of the practical realities of our neoliberal hell as I've read anywhere:

"First, it would break down citizens' lived connection to the government, their habit of believing it offered them something of value in navigating their lives. Second, it would weaken the appeal of collective organization by inducing fracture among groups that had looked to the government for solutions to their common problems. But third and just as important, by putting a vast pool of money into the hands of capitalists, enriching them, it would both make them eager to lobby for further change and willing to shell out dollars to the advocacy groups leading the charge for change."