Beer in Columbus 4.0

With the craft beer industry well into its maturity phase, I figured it is time to update my ranking of local breweries that I last attempted in 2020.  Since then a lot of new breweries have opened, many existing breweries have expanded or otherwise changed, and more than a few have closed.

As usual, there are a couple caveats to this exercise.  I haven't had every beer ever made by each brewery, so please don't consider these rankings precise or exact.  I don't include breweries that aren't based here, so that excludes Saucy, Forbidden Root, Brewdog and the like.  I have de-listed the breweries that have closed since I last did this, so please pour one out for Smokehouse, Random Precision, Somewhere in Particular, Lineage, and Pretentious (and please pour two out for Sideswipe).  I haven't included a couple small breweries in the region, because I don't feel like going to everything just for the sake of completeness.  Furthermore, there are some places that I haven't visited since 2020 that I don't feel particularly compelled to go back to because they haven't given me much of a reason to do so (I have largely copied over my 2020 blurbs for these, which are noted as such).  Finally, the order of this list is based almost entirely on the quality of the brewery's own output.  A lot of places have nice patios/food/guest taps which I will often mention, but very little of that will play into the rankings.

#50 - Knotty Pine Brewing (2020 blurb)

Less of a brewery and more of a bar that brews a couple of mediocre beers, Knotty Pine is nonetheless a pleasant place to go on a weekday afternoon and have a beer on an empty patio overlooking residential Grandview.

#49 - Eastside Brewing Co

Someone has to be second-to-last, so why not make it a place without anything particularly noteworthy beer-wise?  I visited on a lovely October day, which might have been the last day of the year to properly enjoy their spacious outdoor surroundings.  And while there was nothing egregious in my flight, the highlight was probably a fine but forgettable cream ale.  At this point in the rankings, having a #1 option is a key differentiator, even if it's very modest.  That Eastside couldn't quite muster that gets them put here.

#48 - Elevator Brewing Company (2020 blurb)

One of the old guard brewers in Columbus that hasn't really kept up with the times.  You could probably sell what they currently are as a working-class type ethos if their accompanying restaurant wasn't a mildly expensive place located in the middle of downtown.  Oh and they don't make their most interesting beer (Mogabi) anymore (2026 NOTE: they started making this again recently, which bumps them up precisely one spot).

#47 - Old Dog Alehouse & Brewery (2020 blurb)

The newest of Delaware's three breweries is also its least essential.  The one time I went the draft list was pretty basic.  I had their IPA (Jetta's Flying Snot) and it was fine.  There is a bakery (?) on the premises which is kinda cool I guess.

#46 - Grizzlybird Brewing Company

My original low ranking of Grizzlybird was based on a visit to Johnstown back when the brewery was called Galena Brewing.  I finally made my way up to the "new" location last year, and was not particularly swayed by their updated beer lineup (though I did like that the space resembled a bar taken directly out of 1995).  I will say that their West Coast IPA (The Dude) at least has a bit of personality to it, which is a useful contrast with the places below this.

#45 - Endeavor Brewing Company

I skyrocketed Endeavor up the 2020 list based on its near-perfect banana-hefe-hazy creation, Hammock.  Unfortunately, it does not appear they have brewed the beer since then, so I am left to rely more heavily on the truly atrocious flight I had from them in 2018.  The fading memory of the optimal patio beer is the only thing keeping these guys from going lower.

#44 - Grove City Brewing Company (2020 blurb)

These guys are actually in the city they share a name with, so that automatically places them higher than Galena (2026 NOTE: they also make slightly better beer, which is they still place ahead of the newer iteration).  Most of what I've had there has been forgettable, though I did have a nice pale ale with kviek yeast on my last visit.  At the very least, they always have double-digit taps going so there's a little more variety than some of the other smaller places.

#43 - Three Tigers Brewing Company

I have visited Three Tigers a few times; once when it was a small bar tucked into a tight space, once when it was a small restaurant that seemed focused on weekend brunch (pictured above), and once when it took its current form as Granville's hottest Vietnamese place with expansive patio space and bar seating.  Throughout all that, the beer has never been amazing but has always been good.  Perhaps the best example in the region of beer as a vehicle for other going concerns.

#42 - Nostalgia Brewing Company

Last year, I finally made it back to the place that took over the old Pigskin spot in Gahanna.  What transpired was a flight of beer that is perhaps most representative of what one should expect from a reasonably good brewery.  There was a one-off beer that was awful, and wasn't on Untappd so I don't even remember it (which is good I guess lol).  There were a couple of fine but forgettable IPAs.  There was a lager with maple syrup that either worked or didn't work depending on the sip.  And there was a truly beautiful cream ale infused with coffee (Whole Latte Love) that was smooth as hell.

#41 - Spires Social Brewing Co.

Easily the most chaotic of the newer breweries, so much so apparently that they briefly lost their liquor license a few months back.  When they are able to sell beer to their patrons, they produce a fascinating mix.  Bucking the trend I've observed with breweries that don't specialize in hazies, their hazy (Country Time) was far superior to their more classic IPA (PS: I'm Hoppy).  I also had a thin but fine gose and a reasonably good imperial stout infused with cookies and cream.  Their batting average does not appear to be high enough and most of their hard-hit balls are merely well-placed doubles, but their effort gets them a place here on the list.  Which makes them the Adam Rosales of Central Ohio breweries?

#40 - Buck's Brewing Co (2020 blurb)

There is something very pure about Buck's.  The taproom opened in 2018 after years of its founder's homebrews making their way into local bars.  It's located in a former pool shop on the north side of Newark.  Most of the beers are unnamed and everything I had was perfectly cromulent (I had the milk stout and NEIPA).  Just a small, nice place, and nothing more...nothing wrong with that.

#39 - Trek Brewing Company (2020 blurb)

Newark's other perfectly fine place for beer is located in a former Damon's.  Much like Buck's it is perfectly fine (one of the small joys of the beer world at this point is that a small town like Newark can have multiple places with a competent lineup).  I recommend the Trail Magik stout.

#38 - Temperance Row Brewing Company (2020 blurb)

A deli that makes beer in a town (Westerville) known as the former home of the temperance movement.  This description makes it sound like an old-fashioned place and you would not be wrong.  Which necessarily means that their maltier stuff is solid (Scofflaw is great, but last time I had their English Pale Ale (Hatchetation) which was also quite lovely) and their IPAs are subpar.

#37 - Olentangy River Brewing Company

In my prior write-up, I noted that the coffee stout was the only thing they had going for them, so it's very funny that I primarily go here for coffee now (I have spent multiple work mornings on their large, well-shaded patio after dropping the kids off at zoo camp).  Despite the awesomeness of the space, there's just a lot of other places to get better hazies (and a lot of other places to get beer, period).  And not for nothing, the food truck (Mordisco) sounds really good but is not.

#36 - Bridge's End Brewing Co.

The taproom has a weird vibe (too fancy) and there wasn't anything particularly memorable the time I went, but the overall competence on display and the willingness to try some weird things (can I interest you in a cucumber-basil kolsch?) makes it impossible for me to place them any lower.  And I do appreciate when a brewery that does not appear to have any interest in hops just leaves IPAs off the menu altogether (there were a couple IPLs, which were fine).

#35 - Loose Rail Brewing (2020 blurb)

Located in a barn-like building in the middle of Canal Winchester, Loose Rail executes a number of styles admirably well.  Nothing sticks out in either direction, which is fine.  The most average brewery in the Columbus area.

#34 - Buckeye Lake Brewery (2020 blurb)

Is Buckeye Lake actually better than the last couple entries in this list?  Probably not.  But every time I venture to Central Ohio's weak facsimile of a resort town to visit this place, it feels at least a little bit like a tiny vacation.  And lately, the beer even matches that perception with the Peaches and Cream ale being an optimal beer to enjoy outdoors on their deck.

#33 - Ill Mannered Brewing Company (2020 blurb)

I've been less impressed by the recent beers I've had here, but this is still a solid spot with good variety if you're ever in Powell.  The expanded taproom certainly helps matters as the old location was cute but extreeeemely small.  My favorite beer of theirs remains the DIPA Palate Fatigue, a good old-fashioned Simcoe bomb.

#32 - Thunderwing Brewing

Look, I will always miss Sideswipe, but at least the space was able to live on with a disciple of its founder.  Is the new place as good as Sideswipe?  No, but that's a high bar for any place to clear for me personally.  Ultimately, a biscuity mild (Far Shores) and a workmanlike IPA (Arise) is a really good place to start, even if not everything else is quite as good as those.

#31 - Zaftig Brewing Company

I've gone to Zaftig a shocking number of times for something this low on the list.  I think the promise of continuous iteration on high-gravity beers is too tempting of a premise for me to abandon completely.  And lucky for me, this eternal optimism has paid off on the last two visits with a couple of reasonably-good DIPAs (Hop Swapper and Sauvin & 7).  Now, is it true that both of those use Idaho 7, the cheat code of hops?  Yes, but having the vision to go to the well multiple times with your strongest fighter is a sign of wisdom all its own.

#30 - Combustion Brewery & Taproom

The first time I went to the original Pickerington location a decade or so ago, the IPA was solid and the Imperial Breakfast Stout was a true standout.  These beers showed more than enough promise to place Combustion fairly high on the list.  Nothing I have had since then has lived up to that initial promise, which is too bad because I had high hopes when they took over the old Lineage spot.  My most recent visit featured a Czech lager without much personality and a Barleywine that didn't justify the booziness.

#29 - Campfire Brewing

I find myself wildly mixed on Campfire because on one hand, their flagship IPA actually made me respect smoked beers a bit, and their conceit of releasing a bunch of "test batches" of new beers at least keeps you on your toes.  On the other hand, I have yet to have something truly memorable from them.  That this combination of things places them above a bunch of more established breweries is probably more indicative of my eternal optimism than anything else, so I will need to go back soon to test this evaluation.

#28 - Honest Friend Brewing

You can take a lot of what I just wrote about Campfire and repeat it here.  I will not do that because that is boring.  I will say that as an aging dadbod-haver, I appreciate Honest Friend's concept of only making low-ABV beers.  That said, I need a little more clarity of purpose beyond that to truly fall in love with the place.  Their reasonably well-executed if dainty little French saison (Louche) is probably the best thing I've had from them, which says it all, really.

#27 - Double Edge Brewing Company

If you must absolutely go all the way out to Lancaster for whatever reason, at least they have a pretty good brewery there.  I have somehow been here five (!) times now, and have had everything from a pungent sour (Axl Razz) to a very nice coffee stout with extra coffee.  As is often true with breweries that don't specialize in haze bombs, the traditional IPAs (The Lateral, Seven Seas) are significantly better than the hazies.  Nothing wrong with that.

#26 - Edison Brewing Company

Possibly the most solid brewery on this list.  A bunch of various European-type offerings and a few IPAs, all of it good, none of it otherworldly.  I like the view of downtown from their location on the near-east side, but the patio is possibly the most exposed placed on Earth if you're trying to enjoy a drink on a summer afternoon.  Luckily they allow you to sit inside.

#25 - Outerbelt Brewing
#24 - Homestead Beer Company

With Homestead losing their old place and then losing their new place, they are now really nothing more than a pop-up within Outerbelt's behemoth taproom.  Homestead wins the in-building competition with some of their old recipes (ie. Snake Oil) still going.  And there's still the memory of the wonderful bourbon barrel-aged stout (Bison) I had in 2020.  That said, I had a couple of their newer (?) brews on my latest visit and was less impressed.  Because I don't know quite what Homestead is as a going concern, they go here for now.  

Outerbelt's history is less accomplished than it's brewery-mate (hence the lower ranking), but I did have a fantastic one-two punch on a recent visit, with a throwback DIPA (Double Parked) and an incredibly clean and deep red lager (Camino Amberino).  Perhaps now that the initial promise of their fine (but ultimately lesser) hazies has died down, they can occupy a lane that allows them more room to shine. 

#23 - Standardized Brewing

You wouldn't necessarily think a combo coffee place-brewery in one of those new-fangled developments way up north would have particularly good beer, but it does!  Specifically, they do hazies reasonably well, with both a standard Citra bomb (Evans Farm) and a nice little coconutty guy (From the Heart Vol 5).  Fun bonus: when I visited last summer, I was able to watch Wimbledon on the patio until a storm blew in.  Then, when another patron's dog ran away because of the thunder, a group of tweens (there presumably because it's not just a brewery) helped chase it down.  The suburbs: not completely terrible when they have good breweries.

#22 - Henmick Farm & Brewery

A giant barn in the country with a huge outdoor space that makes a little bit of everything and makes it well is the most down-the-middle value proposition one can imagine for a brewery.  That the dunkel was truly extraordinary, with the syrupy-ness of the malt contrasting with the creamy texture from the side-pull, puts it a step above other similarly cromulent breweries.

#21 - Gemüt Biergarten

Gemüt seems a little too inclined to make crowd-pleasers to be a truly great lager-based brewery, but there's nothing inherently wrong with pleasing the crowd.  That said, when they do choose to go big and bold with the malt (Rubezahl Schwarzbier), they achieve something a little more special.  General competence with (mostly) untapped potential gets you ranked here.

#20 - Barley's Brewing Company (2020 blurb)

An oldie but a goody.  Their imperial stout is great.  Blurry Bike is light and airy with a bite.  Blood Thirst Wheat is a beautiful use of fruit.  Barley's rarely tries to reinvent itself, but that's fine because they're just really good at making beer.

#19 - Restoration Brew Worx (2020 blurb, mostly)

I've been up to Delaware thrice four times, but have somehow never had any of Restoration's high-ABV stouts.  As such, this is remains an incomplete grade.  That said, I've had so many successful variations on their hoppy beers, that I feel confident in saying that they are skilled at what they do.

#18 - Antiques on High

#17 - The Getaway Brewing Co

I resisted Seventh Son's conceptual offshoots for long enough, as it turns out to my detriment.  Antiques on High's initial offerings were admittedly mixed, but the lineup of sours I had recently were all perfectly good.  Like I said in my write up of Portland, you don't necessarily need to re-write the book on sours to be worthwhile, especially in an era that pays short shrift to the more classical versions of the style.

The Getaway is a comparatively sparser concept (lagers and such), but one of the beers I had (the Italian pils Italo Disco) was such an exemplar of the style, with all the silkiness and stankiness you want in equal measure that I couldn't help but stand up and applaud (not literally).  I would like to see more than four beers from them (most of their taps are occupied by their sister breweries), but for now they go here.

#16 - Hoster Brewing Company

The idea of revitalizing a century-old brand is kind of hokey, but Hoster pulls it off.  They do this because the old recipe (Gold Top), while fine, is easily overshadowed by everything else.  I can't decide if the Czech dark lager (Eagle Dark) or the altbier they brewed for their anniversary is my favorite thing I've had from them.  Also I appreciate that the only IPA I've had from them (German IPA) is brewed with rye.  We need more rye IPAs dammit.

#15 - Parsons North Brewing Company

The most average brewery on this list (positive).  Their IPAs are well-executed versions of their eponymous styles.  Their Mexican lagers are the second-best Cinco-related beers in town (North High's Jalalima is still the best).  And their barrel-aged offerings have ranged from beautiful displays of the barrel (Dark Sour) to wonderful use of adjuncts (Toasted Coconut and Cinnamon Barrel Aged Imperial Stout).  Their refusal to name any of their beers remains a sticking point, but as long as they stubbornly continue to make all of their beers good, it's only a very minor complaint.

#14 - Land-Grant Brewing Company (2020 blurb, mostly)

While refreshing my memory for this piece I found that I have checked in 35 40 distinct beers from Land-Grant on Untappd. This is my second fourth-highest total among local places, which is only appropriate as volume is kind of their whole deal (ie. my most-recent check-in was on Ohio State's campus).  This commitment to quantity means there are some duds but there's also some really good ones, like CMYK, a really sharp and crisp DIPA.  They recently expanded their footprint to include a large outdoor space, which someone without small medium children could probably tell you gets busy on weekends in the summer.

#13 - Rockmill Brewery

This is a very incomplete grade as I haven't been since the ownership changed hands.  Rockmill was historically one of the best places in the area, executing classic styles with aplomb.  The updated menu looks to have carried over some of this, but with more than a few notable changes.  For now, a decade-plus of positive memories is enough to land them here, but I reserve the right to move them radically up or down the list whenever I get around to visiting again.

#12 - Happenstance Brewing Project

The name of this place is appropriate for my experience with it, as I happened by it on the way back from a trip.  If you find yourself in Marysville with time to kill, you can't go wrong here.  I was limited to two beers, but they were both bangers: an English IPA that was brewed perfectly to style and their flagship IPA (The Stance), which complements the aggressive amount of Nelson with a lovely touch of Mosaic.  I am excited to find an excuse to stop back here to see just how good the rest of their extensive menu is.

#11 - Nocterra Brewing Company

While I have cooled a bit on kettle sours as a concept, it's hard to deny that Nocterra is good at making them.  Since the last time I ranked all the breweries I had the Sheboygan version of their Swell Line series, which might be the only time I've had cranberry in a beer (that can't be right)?  I also had a wonderful wild ale (Notarctia Proxima) at their new location in Audubon Metro Park.  Their hazies and such remain fine but forgettable, but as long as they churn out unique and interesting things on all ends of the sour spectrum they stay here.

#10 - 2 Tones Brewing Co.

This is simply a place that is good to great at everything from your basic Citra-Mosaic bomb (About a Month) to a syrupy lager (French Toast Crumble).  Plus it's close to the VA, so you can always overhear amazing conversations between old people if you go early enough.  Win win.

#9 - Seventh Son Brewing Co.

This is still a great space with maybe the fullest lineup of flagship beers in town.  What holds them back ever so slightly is a lack of upside, best exemplified by the middling Scientist series of IPAs or the hit-or-miss nature of their high-ABV offerings.

#8 - CounterBalance Brewing Company

As the newer little brother of a place higher up on the list, I'm not quite sure what to make of CounterBalance yet.  The focus on low-ABV beers doesn't preclude big, bold tastes from sours (Neon Tides), lagers (Pizzazz), and even a 4% Citra bomb (Element of Surprise).  But I have yet to see much variance (the taplist on my two visits was small both times and nearly identical), and I've had a couple of duds as well.  I see no reason these guys can't climb the ranks, but I need to see juuust a little bit more.

#7 - Staas Brewing Company (2020 blurb)

Delaware's finest brewery runs the gamut from saisons to IPAs, but everything has a very classical feel to it.  And to be clear, all the beers are well-executed and very good.  The House English Ale is probably the star (if only because I don't think I've ever had anything quite like it), but you literally can't go wrong here which is something you might not be able to say about anywhere else on this list.

#6 - North High Brewing

I am torn on my evaluation of North High because on one hand, they still make a lot of their classics (Stardust to Stardust, Fly, Jalalima) and those are still very good.  But on the other hand, their newer locations lack the charm of the now closed namesake location.  And more importantly, the newer offerings I have had at those locations were relatively mediocre.  There's a ways to go before I drop them from their lofty spot in these rankings, but let's just say I at least started thinking about it.

#5 - Wolf's Ridge Brewing

Similar to North High, Wolf's Ridge development over time has focused on locations over beer.  Wolf's Ridge maintains the edge because 1) the newer locations are far more charming, and 2) their batting average on making great beers remains higher.  Problems with their barrel program have led to a decrease in output of their most special beers.  But what does get out is still great, and there's still the cream ales and the main Dire Wolf to fall back on.

#4 - Columbus Brewing Company

CBC's relationship to physical spaces remains an ongoing comedy, though the one remaining spot near East Market is very good.  Most importantly, they still make Bodhi.  I have admittedly not done a good enough job keeping up with all of their newest creations, but what I have had has been good enough to suggest They've Still Got It.  Specifically, I had wet-hopped beers in consecutive autumns that highlighted the specific hops (Idaho 7 in 2022, Cashmere in 2023) to such an absurd degree that I am kicking myself in retrospect for not seeking out whatever they came out with the last two years.

#3 - Derive Brewing Company

By far the best new place since I last did this exercise, Derive is something of a poor man's Triptych.  This is no insult, as I consider Triptych one of the finest breweries in the land.  What makes Derive similar is their commitment to brewing a large assortment of quality lagers, and other such "smaller" beers.  They also have a wide range of quality when it comes to IPAs ranging from truly excellent modern IPAs (Canary Diamonds) to welcome throwbacks (Rewind) to offerings that lean way too much on Cryo (this is another similarity to Triptych, and is the main drawback to both places).  They also make a fairly wide range of kettle sours, which are distinct/good enough to be worth your time.

#2 - DankHouse Brewing Company

As DankHouse has gone from its infancy to maturity, I've noticed something of a pattern to their myriad recipes.  That is, there is a certain level of sameness to the average DankHouse sour or IPA.  In this way, they are something of an antithesis to my favorite brewery in existence, whose every offering reeks of purpose.  And the wholehearted embrace of AI labels doesn't help matters (though they get something of a pass since their original artist passed away).  It would be very easy to default to this base judgment and lump them in with other "disappointing" breweries like, say, Belleflower.  However...well...you may have noticed they are #2 on this list.

First off, this baseline of thick sours and citrus-y IPAs is a pretty good baseline to have.  Sure, I am addicted to checking in new beers on Untappd, but I'm not just picking up every new offering I can get from them for funsies.  And among those pickups have been some truly special finds.  The flashy things like the cereal milk beers and the bombastic IPAs are the obvious highlights, but there's a lot more to what they do than that.  Garden Grove uses pineapple in a way that makes me actually like what I normally consider to be the most overrated adjunct.  Their German pilsner (Righteous Liquid) stacks up with the best of other similar local offerings.  And their "throwback" IPAs (ie. HumanFrequency) harkens back to the days of yore, in some ways surpassing their hazy output.  But the recent highlight comes from last year, when they produced a sour aged in Sotol barrels that was beautifully distinct and perfectly blended with strawberry and other complementary fruits.  This became what I believe to be my first 5-star rating for a local beer on Untappd.

#1 - Hoof Hearted Brewing

In a certain light, Hoof has some of the same "problems" as the other decade-plus-old breweries near the top of this list: issues with the second location, the same old lineup of legacy beers, and relatively less excitement over new recipes.  But everything I just said in defense of DankHouse goes the same if not more so for Hoof.  That "same old lineup" is incredible, and they've still made room for new discoveries (an oat lager collab with DISSOLVR is probably the best of those for my buck).  The place that makes Konkey Dong and Musk of the Minotaur and Slo Turbo will probably be the best of Central Ohio until whenever they decide to stop.

Why Is Everyone Mad at Me?

I try not to write posts about things I see on the internet anymore, but occasionally I can't help myself.  There has been a very silly discourse on Bluesky about how people on the left treat everybody's favorite pundit, Will Stancil.  While I obviously can't speak for everyone, the general argument on the left is that he is a unrepentant shit-stirrer who has some odious takes for someone who considers himself progressive.  The argument from centrists/liberals/what have you is that regardless of the validity of his stances or your feelings about his behavior, you should treat him well.  This side of the debate feels so strongly about this that they even published something about on their little website.  The key portion to this post, for your convenience:

"While those on the right simply hate Stancil for being a liberal, anti-Trump talker, his left-wing critics seem to believe they’re engaging in some sort of personal corrective activity by piling their abuse onto him. It’s simultaneously coldly cruel and inappropriately intimate. They do not know him, have no place to assume the depths of his character and soul, and yet they delight in mistreating him even as they claim it’s for a higher purpose. They are performing for one another and enticing each other to increasingly cruel behavior. It’s an anti-fandom in action. 

Of course, none of this is unique to Stancil. This is how many such swarmings go. People perform for one another and they engage in showy abuse of the subject of the pile-on, telling themselves a fantasy narrative to maintain the belief that what they’re doing is somehow just—or at least justifiable."

Ignoring that the author is implying, with very little evidence, a level of sophistication and purpose in leftist "harassment" that I sincerely doubt few if any people have even considered, there's something more insidious going on here.  To illustrate this most clearly, I will turn to a famed shit-stirrer of yesteryear, Jude Doyle: 

There are two specific points to be made here.  The first is that picking a fight based on a questionable reading of something and then running away by saying "we all have work to do" is wildly disingenuous.  It implicitly assumes the truth of your own assumptions and the invalidity of any arguments to the counter.  The second is that we know for a fact (link contains deadname) that they were part of an operation to spread bad faith narratives about the same exact guy for the same stupid reasons.  Even thought the infrastructure of the Hillary Clinton campaign no longer exists, why should we ever assume good faith from them on this matter?  And contrary to your advice, it sure seems like you are indeed trying to win an internet fight in 2016!

To turn this back to the original subject, this is exactly the sort of behavior performed by Stancil and his ilk.  Their attacks on their enemies are not the same as attacks against them, because they're correct, they're special.  And we should never assume bad faith or ideological poisoning of them, because how could we possibly know what is their hearts?  What they are asking of their opponents is to ignore what they know, ignore the context surrounding all of this, and to submit to their version of reality.  Not only is such an approach in service of such ineffective politics bad on its face; it's also sacrifices the very idea of politics at the altar of self-righteousness. It's not meant to convince or to build power but to browbeat the people they don't like.  What's incumbent on us is not to "harass" anyone who does this but instead to firmly and sincerely refuse to accept this approach to "politics" as valid.  How you go about doing that is up to you. 

More Than Mental Health

Multiple football players have met a similar, terrible fate over the past year.  This pattern has yielded a common appeal to caring for the mental health of yourself and those around you.  While I don't necessarily think that emphasis is a bad thing, I do think it serves to redirect one's attention away from a common theme of such cases.  To understand this pattern, let's briefly examine the reporting on these cases.

From the reporting on Marshawn Kneeland:

"On the night Dallas Cowboys defensive end Marshawn Kneeland died, the team's director of security, Cable Johnson, called law enforcement to ask for a welfare check on Kneeland and to tell police Kneeland had sent a text saying he didn't want to go to jail.

"He sent out some group texts that are concerning -- probably mental health -- but the group texts seemed to be saying goodbye -- made some statement about not able to go to prison or to jail," Johnson told Plano police dispatch, according to audio obtained by ESPN through a public records request.

Kneeland died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound last week. Police found his body in the early morning last Thursday after he had evaded officers during a pursuit and fled on foot. Police have not said what prompted the pursuit."

From the reporting on Doug Martin:

"Doug's parents were actively seeking medical assistance for him and had contacted local authorities for support," Athletes First said. "Feeling overwhelmed and disoriented, Doug fled his home during the night and entered a neighbor's residence two doors down, where he was taken into custody by police. An investigation into what transpired as he was detained is underway."

From the reporting on Kyren Lacy:

"According to Harris County authorities, police responded to a call from a female family member who said Lacy had discharged a firearm into the ground during a verbal argument late Saturday night. When they arrived on the scene, they learned that the suspect, Lacy, had fled in a vehicle.

Authorities say their pursuit of Lacy ended when he crashed. They say that when officers approached the vehicle to extract Lacy, he had died from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound." 

To be fair, the Kyren Lacy case is seemingly complicated by the fact that the state of Lousiana was looking to bring charges for negligent homicide against him.  But even so, when you spend a few minutes looking into the basis of the charges, it gets incredibly fishy.  In any case, when you consider these cases together you begin to see how the specter of our prison system and the presence of police is at the very least a contributing factor in many incidents popularly categorized as "mental health" issues.  This of course does not mean that "mental health" is not a useful lens for understanding the struggles these athletes faced.  However, if our conception of "mental health" is as atomized and depoliticized as it often appears to be, then it simply cannot be a gateway towards addressing the root causes of these deaths.  When someone is going through a crisis, it is indeed critical to, per the words of Matt Rhule in the first link, "all be there for them."  But for that presence to be a meaningful contribution to preventing the worst cast scenarios, it has to go beyond simple interpersonal niceties and instead seek to actively build of a society where people (especially young black men) are not encouraged to only see one way out of terrible situations.

2026 Book List

1. Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights - James Peck (link)

"We divide the world in two. Those countries who choose democracy, we help. In those countries which do not choose, we create conditions where they will choose it."

-Morton Halperin, US State Department, 1994

"More can be won by illusion than coercion"

-Harold Lasswell, 1927

"Does freedom of the press extend to a paper's right to support armed, externally controlled forces (the Contras) attempting to overthrow an elected government? Human rights reports rarely delved into such questions. 

In 1975, the Senate's Church Report on Cia operations against the Allende government in Chile had pointed to the funds that flowed to El Mercurio so that the paper could spread CIA-planted rumors and propaganda, showing how the CIA made Allende's censorship of the paper a centerpiece in a highly orchestrated campaign to accuse him of suppressing "freedom of the press." Did human rights groups assume such standard operation procedures of ideological intervention were myths? Irrelevant? Unworthy of investigation? They simply took no position."

-The Author

I started the new year off with an absurdly appropriate subject to dig into given *gestures around* literally everything going on right now.  Based on a painstaking documentation of decades worth of American overtures towards "human rights," Peck's main accomplishment in this book is using this history to construct a fascinating synthesis.  Per Peck's analysis, there are broadly speaking two existing conceptions of human rights: one that is focused on narrow, individualistic liberties, and another that speaks to more systemic and economic rights driven by material conditions.  The apparent fecklessness of Western human rights organizations is repeatedly shown to be symptom of adopting a laser-like focus on the former current, largely at the behest of American hegemony.  At the same time, the American government and its ilk are explicitly aware of this second current, and in fact use the concepts associated with this current in their analysis of how to keep such an ideology at bay.  This contradiction between knowledge and action is made most explicit in an analysis (from none other than the CIA) of how a growing liberal bourgeois class will serve as a natural counterweight to the very possibility of insurgency:

"Yet Washington's managers were not too worried. They judged that "the widening income and regional disputes" would not be "incompatible with a growing middle class and increasing overall wealth," a situation not inimical to American power. If their guardedly argued economic predictions held true, CIA-funded task forces foresaw a planet of 2 billion somewhat-well-off people—enough to sustain the globalization process—living amid 4.7 billion others."

And yet, Peck's narrative reveals yet another level of contradiction that gives his work an additional richness.  Despite the ruling class possessing a general knowledge of the ideology of their opposition, they have been bound by the shackles of their own ideology to never be able to properly synthesize their own shortcomings.  Peck begins to hint at this in the introduction with this anecdote:

"Kennan, for example, puzzled over the contradiction between the Soviets' realism and their fanaticism. "I must say I admire" the Communist leaders, he said in his lectures to the National War College in 1947, "for the realism with which they look to the essential features of power and do not allow themselves to be carried away by the more petty sorts of human vanity." And yet, inexplicably, the Kremlin held fast to an ideological prism, distorting reality to suit its own needs (the class struggle, capitalism's decline, the certainty of revolution and of the economic development of Communist society). How could these men be at once so objective and yet so ideological? This was "the key question to understanding the whole system," Kennan concluded, "and I am frank to say I don't know what the answer is." Greater self-awareness might have suggested a place to start." 

This is a wonderful example of how ideology (especially that of capitalism) often takes the form of unstated assumptions about how the world works; both in Kennan's inability to comprehend the Other, and in Peck's assertion that Soviet ideology was necessarily distorted.  Peck subsequently demonstrates how the West's dominant conception of "freedom" is a critical part of this blinkeredness.  Per the aforementioned narrow conception of "human rights," this ideal is seen less as a general humanistic freedom and more as a "freedom of capital" which "stood apart from and often against such other core values as equality, community, solidarity, and redistributive forms of justice."  How a pursuit of such freedom sustains and reinforces itself is perhaps best understood through the West's usage and deployment of media.  The commodification of images such an approach produces serves to "simplify and dramatize reality, disrupting the context of politics by focusing on an instantaneous present, and encouraging emotional reactions to events rather than reflective consideration of them."  Within the context of the book, the treatment of human rights violations as individual events devoid of context ironically makes them easier to dismiss and to forget.  And so yet again, as this blog has noted before and will continue to note ad infinitum, we can understand the American conception of freedom as fundamentally the freedom to forget.  After all, when knowledge is commodified it takes on a cost; one for which few are willing (or even able) to pay the price.

2. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut (link)

"Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people's blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed."

In the past, I've lodged mild complaints about otherwise great sci-fi novels giving short shrift to the story itself.  So let me give full credit to Vonnegut for absolutely nailing that aspect, weaving an intricate yet simple tale while sacrificing little else.  As is typical with his works, Vonnegut's wit and wisdom is worth it no matter what.  That he's able to weave these strengths into a coherent story with a clear thematic purpose makes The Sirens of Titan something special.  Rumfoord's plight (being strewn across time and space thanks to his encounter with a "chrono-synclastic infundibula") leads directly to founding his new religion on the basis of his knowledge of the future, while Constant's slower journey from profound ignorance to sublime wisdom leads to a wholly different relationship to "the truth."  What this asks us to consider is the possibility that the only real "agency" we have as individuals (or perhaps even as a species) may be the decision of how to approach our fundamental lack of any real agency on a more cosmic scale.

3. The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces - Seth Harp (link)

"One day in 2018, a pair of FBI agents showed up at Huff's warehouse in High Point, an unexpected visit that shot a bolt of fear through his heart because he had $700,000 in drug money stashed in a washing machine in plain view. But it turned out that the agents only wanted to talk to him about one of his warehouse employees, Robert Seward, a bearded black man from Fayetteville who had converted to Islam."

A useful piece of reporting on the terrifying levels of immediate blowback from the War on Islam Terror in the form of rampaging, drug-addicted special forces soldiers and veterans.  The journalistic approach doesn't lend itself to any sort of analysis beyond the obvious, but it's still useful to understand how units like Delta Force operate with a level of impunity that would (and does) make the regular Army blush.  It's also striking to observe the dialectic of these groups drawing people in with the promise of community (not just the obvious camaraderie but also in material concerns like the promise of free healthcare), and then, largely by means of the mental burden of performing their amoral mission, driving their operators to some combination of greed and ruin (ie. there's a story near the end of a military widow not receiving a life insurance benefit because her husband's overdose was deemed to be "misconduct").

4. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? - Gabriel Rockhill (link)

"If you demonstrate to someone that they've been ideologically inculcated, they may be able to overcome it. If you teach them how the system works that brainwashed them, they are given the tools necessary to liberate themselves and others because objective ideological criticism of this sort brings into relief the system that produces—and will continue to produce and reproduce—ideological subjects."

In many ways, this is the book I would write if I was so inclined to write a book.  Not only does Rockhill's work draw extensively on some of my favorite reads from the past six years (The Cultural Cold War, The Mighty Wurlitzer), but it also ties the sordid history of our three-letter agencies' exploits into a broader Marxist analysis of knowledge production.  Specifically, Rockhill looks at the "social totality, encompassing various state agencies, non-governmental organizations, and corporate soft power initiatives" to show how "socioeconomic conditions—in the macroscopic sense—are ultimately the primary driving forces, but they do not mechanically determine ideology."  Put more simply, money is the language of capital, and thus, knowledge created at its behest will inherently be influenced and shaped by that social relation.

What is specifically fascinating about this approach is how Rockhill's own method (dialectical historical materialism) is simultaneously useful towards his analytical ends, and serves as a direct contrast with the methods of the titular Western Marxists.  This is perhaps best exemplified by Rockhill's use of this blog's favorite watchword—complexity—in a constructive (and necessary) sense rather than reductive sense.  Indeed, the process of knowledge creation can only be truly understood through a thorough accounting of al of its inputs, both material and ideological, which categorically requires something more than vulgar materialism or rank ideology:

"Unlike the extremes of idealism and empiricism, materialism draws on as much concrete data as possible to account for the socio-actual totality, but it concretely abstracts from the minutia of empirical details in order to integrate and synthesize them at a higher level by establishing the most coherent explanatory framework, which in continues to test and modify based on practical trials.  It is important in this regard, and it needs to be emphasized, that DHM does not simply scrap all of the work done within the framework of bourgeois knowledge production.  On the contrary, it draws on whatever aspects of it that can make valuable contributions, but it seeks to move knowledge to a higher level of synthesis, coherence, and practical relevance by developing superior explanatory and transformative Wissenschaft of human life on planet Earth."

Subsequently, Rockhill draws on the work of Lukacs to generalize this idea.  It is not just the process of knowledge production that is irreducible to simple concepts, but indeed, knowledge itself:

"...a dialectical approach recognizes that "objective reality is fundamentally richer, more diverse and more intricate than the best developed concepts of our thinking can ever be," while at the same time it strives to improve our apprehension of the real through an ongoing process of scientific elucidation. [...] One of the strengths of the materialist approach is precisely that it dialectically situates subjects within a broader objective world and understands full well that the former cannot completely and absolutely grasp the latter."

While this acknowledgement of (but not surrender to) complexity is critical to dialectical thought, the defining difference between it and Western Marxism is one of the fundamentals of the discipline: class struggle.  In this light, the atomized views of Western Marxists can be read as a negation of class struggle, and indeed, thinkers like Adorno often explicitly address this in their works.  But to what end?  Let's start with Walter Rodney:

"The bourgeois class—the capitalist class—has an interest in specifically mystifying the application of scientific principles to society; because the same application of scientific principles to society would suggest that we must understand the changes—the transitions by which capitalism itself came into being, and by which the particular class in power will be removed from power."

Rockhill subsequently expands on this, and explicitly associates the two modes of thought with two separate value systems:

"These theoretical practices, one based primarily on exchange-value and the other principally on use-value, are largely incompatible.  One is a product of the intellectual sector of the bourgeois superstructure.  The other endeavors to develop a scientific apprehension of reality in order to transform it."

Where this leaves us is trying to understand how a thinker can possibly be "Marxist" while espousing (and furthermore, working to develop) an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to revolutionary praxis.  Perhaps I have spent too much time learning about conservatives (peep the next book on this blog), but so much of the output of these Western Marxists (at least in Rockhill's accounting) reads as the fundamental conservative truism of valuing what's directly in front of your face above all else:

"Sense-perception is the lowest level of socialist consciousness. It simply consists in looking at the world and comparing it to a picture in one's mind, without necessarily understanding the nature of the world or the struggles at hand. This reductive approach is characteristic of imperial—and imperious—Marxists, and their analysis of socialism usually consists in comparing a preconceived image of socialism or communism to what they perceive in the world, which is powerfully mediated by the ideological propaganda that they consume via the bourgeois media and academic world."

Why then does this ultimately matter?  On one hand it's very obvious: by borrowing from both the Marxist and the conservative traditions, these thinkers lend tacit support to the American empire while boxing in "the left" and preventing more radical thought.  In a way, I would even go so far as to say Western Marxists synthesize the two poles to "dominate and transcend" the worse excess of either inclination, for better or worse.  But given that the worse end of this distorts both the meaning and the causes of the most infamous crime of the right, I think it is clear that it represent a false and amoral equilibrium that should not be pursued by any serious Marxist:

"[The Holocaust] industry has distorted the history of the Nazi Holocaust, and fascism more generally, by promoting a cultural and exceptionalist misrepresentation of it that works to shore up imperialist interests (especially Zioimperialism), while obscuring the actual history of fascism as an anticommunist project bankrolled by the capitalist class and deeply rooted in Western colonial traditions. The Frankfurt school, for its part, caught the rising postwar wave of the Holocaust industry, under the forlorn banner of the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, while writing theory that was funded in part by investments in the corporation that produced the poison gas used at Auschwitz." 

5. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump - Corey Robin (link)

"This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer's untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father's rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth. Each in his way subscribes to this typical statement, from the nineteenth century, of the conservative creed: "To obey a real superior...is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting."

The latest in the "Mike pulls a book off the shelf he might not have previously read to completion" series is a fun collection of essays that doesn't quite live up to the "book that predicted Trump" hype.  While Robin's primary definition of conservatism (above) is indeed somewhat related to my own (an undying deference to that which is directly in front of your face), there is still plenty of material to support my simpler estimation.  Most of that material is from Michael Oakeshott, which suggests maybe I should have just read him.  Oops!  In all seriousness, beyond the highly relevant quotes from Oakeshott's work ("[conservatism] is not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition...to enjoy the present."), Robin synthesizes and builds on the work of others enough to make it a useful compendium nonetheless.  Here, for example, we see how conservative thought is not merely counter-revolutionary in spirit but in its very mode of thought, where one must forego the very possibility of dialectical synthesis in favor of unending zero-sum games:

"Take Michael Oakeshott's famous definition in his essay "On Being Conservative": "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the super-abundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." One cannot, it seems, enjoy fact and mystery, near and distant, laughter and bliss. One must choose. Far from affirming a simple hierarchy of preferences, Oakeshott's either/or signals that we are on existential ground, where the choice is not between something and its opposite but between something and its negation."

6. America, América: A New History of the New World - Greg Grandin (link)

"The Truman administration insisted that "business and private capital could easily flow more freely into countries to the south of us if obstacles which now stand in the way were removed."

Those "obstacles" were human beings. They were trade unionists, peasant activists, students, intellectuals, voters, economic nationalists, dissenting priests—they were the "democratic leftists" who were then being eliminated across the region, anyone who might scare off investment or increase a nation's loan risk [...] Politicians and businessmen who wanted to modernize their economies had to eliminate dissent, since, as George Marshall told them in Bogota, and Washington constantly reiterated, they needed to attract private capital. For that, they had to show they had matters in hand."

A wonderful journey from the terrors of conquest to the promise of pan-Americanism that harkens back to Ada Ferrer's Cuba for both its wide scope and its dual-path narrative.  This dialectical nature is especially useful in two particular sections of the book.  The first of these goes back to the start, contrasting the idealism of English colonialism with the "black legend" of the Spanish conquest.  In fact, the critique of colonialism encouraged by the inquisitive, humanist spirit of Las Casas and other Spaniards actually helped England imagine itself to be relatively benevolent.  If the chronicles of Spanish terror in Brevisima Relacion were correct, well then, they must be worse stewards of the native population than the English.  While outright denial of their own atrocities helped England (and later the United States) grow and maintain this fiction, a sleight of hand with respect to property claims helped as well.  A Locke-ian notion of labor (specifically labor as practiced by the settlers) as that which elevates the natural bounty into the realm of private property served to dispossess those who did not "activate right of possession" nor "create value."  By contrast, the constitutions of newly independent nations in Latin American spoke of the social rights that came from eschewing unlimited freedom in order to live in harmony with others.  Indeed, it is this competing normative vision of society that provides the basis of Grandin's narrative:

"Latin Americans love "everything that unites," [Francisco] Bilbao wrote, "we prefer the social over the individual, beauty over wealth, justice over power, art over calculations, duty over interest." Over the years, what has often been taken for "Anti-Americanism" in Latin America is better thought of as a competing version of Americanism."

The second notable contrast is both the focus of the pull quote above and the most common subject matter of this blog: the Cold War.  As we already know, the New Deal order that preceded the Cold War was one built on a certain level of cooperation between capital and the people.  Specifically within the context of Grandin's narrative, the "Good Neighbor" policy towards Latin America was both a boon towards those nations and benefitted businessmen who desired more liberal trade policies.  The overall goal of such an approach was not just to beat back fascism but to "support the virtuous in creating a social-democratic order in which all could eat, work, and live in health with dignity."  This positive vision of liberalism succeeded for a time in part because of this holistic approach:

"This is what a coalition rising to dominance sounds like, able to seamlessly unite domestic and foreign interests, to reconcile isolationist and internationalist impulses in a moral vision that offered citizens a new way to think about the world. Roosevelt himself made this point. The Good Neighbor Policy "has the virtue of explaining itself," he told a conference of Anglican and Episcopal clergy."

Of course, the contradictions inherent to such an arrangement couldn't hold once the specter of fascism became less immediate. The story of America's role in the weakening of Latin America's liberal democracies has been told in more detail elsewhere (so much so that Grandin simply points us to some of his other works).  But it is striking how directly and efficiently the security state the US helped build to combat Nazi influence in Latin America was immediately turned towards "not just Communists but all labor and peasant activists."  In one particularly illustrative example, Pinochet used the Pisagua penal colony in the Atacama (originally constructed to hold Germans, Japanese, and Italians during the war) to round up dissenting miners, and later, to torture, kill, and dispose in mass graves the victims of his regime.  The lesson from this is not just the simplistic (but correct) Chekhovian instinct regarding military/police/surveillance buildup, but something greater: that the domestic politics of Latin America "couldn't be stabilized until the interstate system that destabilized them was reformed."  Grandin himself isn't willing to go further, but I will: these polities can't be made permanent and durable until this same interstate system is abolished and transcended.

7. Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism - Thea Riofrancos (link)

"In so many of these places, mining wasn't an isolated threat or a discrete harm. It was yet another wound on landscapes parched by global warming, yet another injustice in a community relegated to the margins, yet another false hope for those long promised, and long denied, a share of the riches of our global economy. Put simply, each of these locales I visited felt like the wrong sport for a large-scale, intrusive mine. But this inevitably raised the question: What would be the right place?"

Early in this book, the author describes the delicate desert ecosystems of the unique places that house much of the world's lithium reserves.  It's a fascinating picture of the complexity and interdependence that exists in even the most seemingly barren corners of our planet.  Riofrancos then spends the rest of her narrative discussing the ins and outs of the political economy of the extraction of these natural resources in a manner that almost seems like a purposeful extension of the opening section.  After all, if what we're fundamentally discussing here is man's desire to dominate nature, then it only makes sense to highlight the fundamental folly and impossibility of ultimately transcending the limits that nature places on us.

To demonstrate how these natural processes are recapitulated in our politics, Riofrancos spends her time detailing the overlapping and conflicting goals of the different groups attempting to mitigate climate (which is very reminiscent of another book I recently read).  She makes it clear that, while we can't truly know the inner workings of the private companies that dominate the mining industry, those companies are both made up of and subject to a series of bureaucrats who "command an intimate, workaday knowledge of otherwise concepts."  By doggedly tracking down and speaking with these people, Riofrancos is able to piece together overarching theories about the system at hand, such as how the idea of sustainability has effectively become just another tradable commodity.  And while she appears to give green capitalism a fair hearing, everything in her narrative, from the origins of the unequal exchange of colonialism to the very real and obvious shortcomings of modern greenwashing efforts, shows how it can't overcome the unbroken power relations that inherently lead to displacement and ruin.  Riofrancos smartly avoids overdetermining her prescriptions while making it clear that the desire for "circularity" (a combination of state power and environmentalism housed within national borders for reasons of "security") is ultimately a dead end.

8. A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn (link)

"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee..."

-Helen Keller

Continuing my year-long theme of dusting off the bookshelf, here's a classic I was gifted on a lark a decade ago but never read.  Given that background, it's fun to consider what this might have done for me then versus what it does for me now.  Even though I've covered many of the themes and ideas here elsewhere with more targeted precision, it's easy to trace the root of most of the things I believe (and know) about our sordid history back to this seminal text.  Indeed, seeing everything laid out in a breezy, completist manner is informative in its own right, as it allows the reader to make connections you might not otherwise make (ie. there's a George Floyd for everything, our conquest of the Native Americans reads like Israel's current policy towards its neighbors, and the bipartisan consensus on war powers long predates the rise of American Empire).  And even if reading this tome constitutes preaching to my own choir, there is still value in seeing these self-evident truths repeated back to me in stark, often witty prose:

"The farmers had fought, been crushed by the law, their struggle diverted into voting, and the system stabilized by enlarging the class of small landowners, leaving the basic structure of rich and poor intact. It was a common sequence in American history."

"The last words heard from the platform were: "Whatever we poor men may not have, we have free speech, and no one can take it from us." Then the police charged, using their clubs."

One particularly interesting aspect of this book is Zinn's deft approach to class analysis.  In the introduction, he is clear that his approach here differs from that of the typical American historian:

"The historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations [...] If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win."

True to his word, Zinn centers much of his narrative on explicit class conflict.  Moreover, he refuses to be overly simplistic or binary in his analysis.  Throughout the book, he makes clear how the ruling class uses the "middle class" (he doesn't really use the word bourgeois for reasons that will become clear) as a "buffer between the rich and the dispossessed."  He summarizes this best near the end:

"The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority."

That the dispossessed become a literal minority appears to be a key part of his point; this middle class is not just the academics he mentions in the beginning, nor the classical definition of the bourgeois, but rather the majority of the country.  Indeed, it is these exact people to whom he implores his message in the closing pararaph of the original version:

"The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards."

9. Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right - Quinn Slobodian (link) 

There's very little here that isn't covered in spirit in Slobodian's other work, or in other similar encyclopedias of the modern right.  Regardless, there's tons of "fun" anecdotes and a deep enough dive into newer pathologies (ie. the goldbugs) to stir some new thoughts in my brain.  The first is a further development in my central thesis of conservatism as valuing only what is directly in front of your face.  In Slobodian's narrative, you can almost imagine the words of Hayek and his ilk offered in support of a humanist utopia, albeit one that is profoundly corrupted by its devotion to the value-form.  In this way, it's the blinkeredness of only focusing on the political economy directly in front of your face that limits conservative thinkers.  Take this passage for one:

"Hayek seemed to demand something elusive: a small group without the group feeling that might move in the direction of sharing, a society absent of demands for social justice, a troop with no impulse toward redistribution: communal cohesion without a sense of community."

Elsewhere, Hayek's Austrian descendants saw "society as an interpretive process which translates meaningful utterances of the human mind into socially useful knowledge."  Again, this sounds positively humanistic and correct on a surface level, but when it's twisted through the perversions of neoliberal philosophy, we see that this "knowledge problem" can only be solved through dutiful adherence to market logic.  And most notably, when these folks turn towards the topic of racial inequity, the historical record that clearly demonstrates the cause of such phenomena is at fundamental odds with the gospel they preach.  So to a man, they all eschew the very notion of history as having explanatory power for lazy and reductive appeals to "biological reality."

The constant stream of racism on display here serves an additional point; one related to the endless class vs race debate.  As much as one might want to treat racism as sui generis to the conservative project, it's instructive to see just how often these thinkers explicitly ground their racism in appeals to the economic base.  As Slobodian puts it, this "importance of the human factor and the endowments of culture in economic success" is seen everywhere.  Take Peter Bauer:

"Bauer noted that "differences in economic abilities and attitudes are especially wide between people who belongs to different cultures," seeing this as the biggest obstacle to economic development. "What holds back many poor countries," he put it bluntly, "Is the people who live there.""

More generally, pundits like Peter Brimelow opined that market logic itself may be at odds with certain cultural conditions.  Conveniently for him, advances in technology could ameliorate the need for cultural considerations:

"...you don't actually need immigration to smooth out any demographic imbalances: the greying of the baby boomers, the social security problem, as long as you have technical innovation. [...] ...what this means is that massive immigration is not necessary for economic reasons." 

Finally, Slobodian doesn't go quite this far, but it's not hard to read some sections of this and get the sense that overt political racism acts as something of a red herring (or perhaps, more accurately, red meat) in the modern landscape. In his section on the dreaded goldbugs, we get a sense of why the AfD really exists:

"Yet the original "alternative" they presented was not an alternative to nonwhite migration or "Islamification" but an alternative to the euro as a German currency." 

In summation, a political tendency whose first principle is to be subject to no one is going to find it easiest to advocate for that fundamentally unpopular principle by finding an outgroup to act as the sin-eater for all the problems capital has created.  Don't let them get away with it.

10. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America - Barbara Ehrenreich (link)

"When you enter the low-wage workplace—and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well—you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift.  The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship."

Transitioning from dusting off my bookshelf to dusting off my wife's, I decided to finally read this classic.  I remembered hearing a lengthy discussion of this here after Ehrenreich's passing, and I remembered there being two distinct takeaways.  The first seems obvious but isn't always: that you, by yourself, do not have much power to affect even your own working conditions, let alone that of all your co-workers.  The second I...couldn't immediately remember.  There's a few other noteworthy points made along the way (how economic theories about bullish labor market break down in reality, how societal change created new markets to offload "women's work"), but nothing that I identified or remembered as that second thing.  Luckily, as I read the closing page a slow grin came over my face as I realized this was the thing I had forgotten.  Goosebumps!

"When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The "working poor," as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, "you give and you give." 

Someday, of course—and I will make no predictions as to exactly when—they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end."

11. Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men's Tennis - Giri Nathan (link)

I always enjoy Giri's writing at Defector, so it was a no-brainer to pick up his book-length story of the 2024 men's tennis season, where two ascendent superstars took their place at the top of the sport.  It's a breezy read that my wife correctly describes as "a really good magazine article," but I did find his analysis of how Alcaraz appears to divine tennis knowledge through practice to be an interesting reflection on the idea of knowledge generation in general.  One part of this was his coach understanding that rigid orthodoxy wouldn't bring out the best in Carlos, leading him to "offer [Alcaraz] a structure to climb onto without restricting what he might grow into."  But more generally, it seems that Carlos' specialness comes from his innate understanding of this learning process as much as anything:

"It isn't incuriosity, just a case of tacit bodily wisdom winning over explicit analytical fact. To tear around the court and hit balls at the speed Alcaraz does seems to require an uncluttered mind. Getting wrapped up in the minutiae of equipment or injury could only lead to overthinking, to the gestation of doubts. Alcaraz knew as much as he needed to know and would not be weighed down by a grain of superfluous information. In that, he was like so many other intuitive high performers: It was better to feel than to know."

"As I watched Alcaraz lift the trophy [...] I was reminded again of his admission at the start of the fortnight. He'd been watching videos of himself. Why go elsewhere for knowledge? Plato once theorized that people have immortal souls, full of knowledge accrued from past lives, so learning is actually just rediscovering that forgotten knowledge buried inside. Perhaps this has only ever been true of Carlos Alcaraz. How quickly we'd arrived at the juncture where there was so little for him to learn from other people's examples, where he was writing the future of the sport by himself, expanding its possibilities with every half-volley and high-pressure triumph."

12. Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History - David McNally (link)

"A European traveler in the Gulf states in the 1830s commented on the disinterest most planters showed in personal or domestic finery. "Their pride does not consist in fine houses, fine raiment...It is their pride to have planted an additional acre of cane-brake, to have won a few feet from the river, or cleared a thousand trees from the forest; to have added a couple of slaves to their family." Journeying through Texas in the mid-1850s, Frederick Law Olmstead was dismayed by the modest dwelling of a reasonably prosperous planter, whose profits he estimated at $6,000 over two years. "What," he asked, "do people living in this style do with so much money? They buy more negroes and enlarge their plantations.""

"Plantation slavery now inhabited a market environment in which survival demanded the application of agro-industrial methods that more efficiently exploited labor, rather than the leveraging of world price differentials. The core dynamic of the second slavery was the subordination of plantation production to the imperatives of an industrial capitalism driven at its centers by wage labor. As one historian of the nineteenth-century Cuban sugar plantation noted, not only was the planter "a man of bourgeois consciousness," equally critical, "his survival and success were only possible by the constant renovation of the means of production.""

Another entry in the "correcting misperceptions Mike Bogacz never himself held" category, Slavery and Capitalism nonetheless reinforces several things quite well. The headline, that chattel slavery was capitalist in nature in large part because of the proletarian nature of the slaves, is well supported in the text, if somewhat redundant (indeed, you can tell by the pull quotes I found the descriptions of slaveowners as a particularly perverse bourgeois class to be more enlightening).  I did find McNally's thesis that "living personalities resist domination" to echo one of the main premises of Citizen Marx in an enlightening way:

"Marx is urging us not to conflate two quite different productive powers mobilized by capital—those of the material means of production and those of living labor.  Otherwise we risk losing sight of the defining properties of labor-power: the creative, purposive, and subjective capabilities of human beings. [...] And if we treat laborers as technical factors of production, we also occlude their capacity for resistance and social transformation. As much as labor-power can be exploited, it cannot be entirely appropriated and absorbed by capital—even when the laborer is chattel property. This is because a living personality always possesses will."

In other areas, the short but sweet fifth chapter starts by explaining how Marx' dialectical method addresses this blog's favorite watchword of complexity, and then starts to pick away at how reductive definitions of concepts such as "labor" and "commodity" serve to stultify one's analysis.  McNally also echoes some of Porter's theorizing in Trust in Numbers (but in a Marxian flavor) by centering quantification in his narrative, from detailing how mapping was used to support enclosure in 16th-century England to discussing how the idea of "labor in the abstract" contributed to the commodification of agricultural labor in the New World.  And finally, everyone's favorite dichotomy is once again revealed to be a false one:

"It is vital to keep both elements of this term—racial capitalism—at the fore. We are observing racial formation as an infrastructure of capitalist accumulation. As Ira Berlin astutely argued, "The stench from slavery's moral rot cannot mask the design of American captivity: the extraction of labor that allowed a small group of men to dominate all. In short, if slavery made race, its larger purpose was to make class, and the fact that the two were made simultaneously by the same process has mystified both."

13. Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life - Richard Beck (link)

"...the United States faced a whole series of problems stemming from the kinds of authoritarian political rule, endemic urban poverty, and social instability that plagues the countries where growth had failed most spectacularly. [...] Going forward, America would need to confront these problems more directly, with a decentralized, expansive, and flexible military effort that wouldn't be bound by any conventional definitions of victory or defeat. That's where the expanded war on terror came from. It might not be able to solve the problems facing a low-growth world, but it could at least tolerably insulate the United States from their effects. The war is a tool for managing the very surplus populations that the end of American-led economic prosperity helped to create, people whom the United States now finds itself unable and unwilling to help."

A wonderful reflection on the last quarter-century of life in America that ties together the militarization, the racism, the economics, and the elite impunity that have defined the era.  Beck's narrative jumps around a little too much for its own good, but that he ties it all to those four specific tentpoles helps form it into something cohesive.  While it is funny to see many of the same beats I have seen elsewhere (the author's personal disappointment in Obama as a motivating factor, imploring the reader to consider the Indigenous response as instructive, etc), it also reinforces the fact that those feelings are correct.  In support of the first point, Beck specifically goes in depth to show how show just how cowardly and anti-political Obama was in the face of the war ("Obama hoped to resolve the debate around surveillance by convincing people that there wasn't much of a debate to have in the first place").  The economic section uses the meta-history of the Arrighi book (it's on my pile) as a jumping off point to (correctly) paint America as a dying empire that feels compelled to counter naturally slowing growth with increasingly desperate measures to preserve its hegemony.  But even though those sections speak to a lot of my personal proclivities, my favorite synthesis of Beck's comes in the closing section.  In it, he sketches a theory of politics of mass surveillance where, for the majority of people, the direct effect of the program is hard to pin down.  As such, the effect of mass surveillance was much more diffuse and subtle.  The "lack of trust" communicated by the policies of Bush, Obama, and others is shown to lead to an anti-political bent where speech is inherently curtailed for fear of the unknown:

"They produced a social world founded on suspicion, one in which it is safer to be alone than to be with others, easier to go along than to object, and simpler to be quiet than to ask a question in good faith that might nevertheless attract the wrong kind of attention, whether from cops, peers, parents, or strangers."

14. Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy - Adam Tooze (link)