Four ICE agents walk into a Mexican restaurant in Minnesota, are served a meal, and return hours later to arrest three of its workers, walking home, in front of a Lutheran church. I can’t remember where it was that I read this, but it was less than 24 hours ago, in one of those big classic histories of the ancient world, about how hospitality cultures arise in opposition to predatory and piratical practices. (One of the genuine advantages and most welcome reforms of Athens’s Delian League was the suppression of piracy.) In seafaring communities, in particular, hospitality becomes the marker of those who are potential friends as against those who are definitive enemies. With ICE, we seem to have pioneered […]
I’m not a subscriber to Liberties, the journal, so I can read only a bit of this article by Susie Linfield, “The Politics of the Hardened Left: The Left Since October 7.” I’m not complaining. Having read a fair amount of Linfield’s work over the years, I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of what she thinks. And what she’s going to think. Never many surprises there. Which is why I want to comment on this opening statement of her article: Cataclysmic world events — the fall of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, September 11, Donald Trump’s ascendancy — should cause cataclysmic, or at least fundamental, changes in thought. To be an intellectual, or a citizen, means to respond to […]
Under the headline, “There Were Good Reasons to Depose Maduro,” Bret Stephens writes: Whether failing to remove the regime is a possibly disastrous oversight or part of a yet-to-be-revealed plan, the administration will have to figure out how to get rid of it for good in favor of a legitimate, stable and democratically elected government. Now Stephens is someone who’s on record as claiming that Trump and/or his regime are fascist, authoritarian, and autocratic. Just this past year, he has compared both to North Korea, Nero’s Rome, and much else. Yet here he is, writing as if it’s a real question as to whether this very same leader and this very same regime can create “a legitimate, stable and democratically […]
If you’ve ever read Plato’s Republic, you know that one of its central features is the argument, pursued quite sincerely by Socrates, that the state should prohibit the teaching of certain texts, particularly by the poets, by which Socrates (really, Plato) means Homer. Fast forward a couple thousand years and change, and we see the state of Texas discovering what is truly the best way to teach Plato in today’s world: ban him. Back in November, the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System, which is a state body, voted to adopt the following rule: No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and […]
I’ve been working for months on a review of Sven Beckert’s new book Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a monster of a book—more than 1300 pages, with notes and the index—and I’ve had trouble writing my way into the review. When I write, I label each draft with a number. If I’m writing an article, the first draft is Article 1, the second Article 2, and so on. I put a date on each draft, too, to remind myself when I started the draft. In this review, my Article 1 has a date—October 11, 2025—and then a blank page. Which means I circled around and around the piece for months and wrote nothing that I could even keep. Then the […]
The opposition of Jewish voters to Zohran Mamdani has been, and will continue to be, a flash point of commentary and conflict over the mayor. It reminds me a bit of how Black voters were often the flash point of commentary and conflict over Bernie Sanders in 2016. In the last year, Michael Lange has emerged as the sharpest analyst of NYC electoral politics. When it comes to the unlikely campaign and career of Mamdani, hardly anyone has equalled Lange’s record of analysis and prediction. In his latest post, Lange takes on the question of Jewish voters and Mamdani. Long story short: Cuomo performed best…among wealthier and older Jewish voters, while Mamdani performed best among younger Jewish voters and those […]
Like many of you, I woke up this morning to the news that the United States government had attacked Venezuela and captured its president, spiriting him out of the country. Though this part of it got hardly got any notice, two days ago, Jumaane Williams, in his inaugural address as NYC public advocate, explicitly invoked Maurice Bishop, the leader of Grenada where Williams’s family is from, as an influence and an inspiration. Bishop, a left-wing revolutionary, came to power in Grenada in 1979. In 1983, his government began building an airport in Grenada, which made the Reagan regime nervous. As rumblings in the US grew, Bishop was toppled in a coup and executed by forces within his own government. Six […]
In addition to what I wrote earlier today, I want to make three other observations about Mamdani’s inauguration speech. First, Trump was almost completely absent from the speech. He came up, by name, only once, when Mamdani referenced the voters who cast their ballots for Trump in 2024 and then for Mamdani in 2025. He came up, by act, only once, when Mamdani made a reference to ICE raids. I don’t think anyone believes Mamdani is not aware of Trump or what Trump can do to New York. So we have to ask why he refused to make Trump a feature of his speech. It’s not because Mamdani was only interested in going positive and being hopeful; he referenced all […]
Speaking at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as mayor today, Imam Khalid Latif invoked the phrase “moral imagination.” Those of you historically inclined and theoretically attuned will instantly recognize the term. It was coined by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and beloved by midcentury writers like Lionel Trilling and Gertrude Himmelfarb. So we now have, in the twenty-first century, at the invocation for a Muslim political leader, a Muslim religious leader repurposing the words of two of New York’s greatest Jewish intellectuals from the twentieth century, who had repurposed the words of an Irishman from a Catholic family that had converted to Anglicanism in the eighteenth century. That’s quite a historical and political tapestry being woven here, no? If you stayed […]
I read a lot of books this year. A lot of great books, on the principle that the older I get, the less time I have for bad books. But since everyone’s time is finite, I thought I’d just list here my ten favorite books that I read this year. Favorite for different reasons. The sheer joy of reading them, page to page (Ernaux and Kempowksi and Wilson). My appreciation of the scholarship and what I learned from them (Battistoni, Reitter). The way they’ve sat with me long after I finished them (Alexievich, Butler). My appreciation of their sheer achievement (McNally, Clark). And some were all of these (Kempowski, Wilson, Reitter, Butler). And, oh, I cheated: I’ve listed eleven books. […]
On July 15, at a congressional hearing, New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik subjected CUNY’s chancellor, Félix Matos Rodríguez, to a humiliating round of questions about the alleged views of the CUNY faculty and staff. The chancellor, unfortunately, did little to defend the people at CUNY who work to make the institution what it is. Instead, he ritually intoned the need to fight antisemitism. When asked about specific people and institutions at CUNY, he deflected, feigned ignorance, or threw his employees under the bus. I particularly remember one moment of the exchange between Stefanik and the chancellor (start at 4:45). Stefanik: Are you familiar with CUNY CLEAR? This is the clinical arm of CUNY School of Law. Rodríguez: CUNY CLEAR. I’m not […]
My big decision for the coming new year: I’m getting off the electronic calendar matrix. I’ve always disliked the technology. I’ve finally decided to act upon it. Being a late adopter of the smart phone, I’ve never gotten used to looking at the electronic calendar the way I used to look to my paper planners. Before the electronic calendar, I simply kept my paper planner on my desk, next to my wallet and keys, and it was the first thing I looked at in the morning, and would take with me whenever I went out of the house, along with my wallet and keys. Then came the electronic calendar, and try as I might, I still have not developed the […]
A personal word about Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative long-time editor of Commentary, who died two days ago. As some of you many know, back in 2000 or so, I interviewed a bunch of conservatives for a magazine piece I was doing. Amazingly, I got an interview with Bill Buckley, an interview with Irving Kristol, and an interview with Norman Podhoretz. I spoke with Buckley in his Upper East Side townhouse on Park Avenue, surrounded by portraits of his wife and little dishes of cigarettes. (It was more town than house; I don’t think I’ve ever been in a personal dwelling that big.) I spoke with Kristol in an ugly office in Washington, DC; I’m guessing, though I can no longer […]
Yesterday, I was reading Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx, when I stumbled across a reference that sent me tumbling down an afternoon’s worth, or warren, of rabbit holes. In no particular order… 1. In February 1945, as Germany slowly dawned to its likely defeat in the Second World War, two of its representative intellectuals, Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, launched the strangest, even by their standards, musing of the mind. Jünger kicked it off. Responding to a condolence card from Schmitt, Jünger stoically itemizes his losses over the last two years: his father, his son (killed during the war), and his hometown. With an unruffled melancholy, he registers the death and destruction that has occurred and is […]
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll once again be working with my friend and co-author Alex Gourevitch on a new writing project: an introduction to a new edition of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. The translation will be done by the excellent Paul Reitter, who did that new translation of Capital, and will be published by NYRB Classics, which has issued so many wonderful translations since its founding. It’s hard for me to think of a more timely text than On the Jewish Question. Despite his traffic in antisemitism, Marx is trying here to get us to think about religion, identity, and politics outside the framework of culture war, which had engulfed so many intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Instead of […]
My latest pet writing peeve: the use of “a kind of” and “a sort of.” I don’t know when I began noticing this writing tic, in myself and in the larger culture, and I don’t know how long it has been around. I’m certain I’ve seen these phrases in writing from as long as a century ago, but it’s all over the place now. I associate it with a sort of—oops, I did it again!—literary affectation that one sees not only on social media but in legacy media as well. Along the lines of Lionel Trilling saying, “Goethe says somewhere…,” but in a tweet, a post, or a piece. It evokes a Jamesian spirit of the ineffable, the not quite, […]
I appreciated this conversation between Ahmed Moor and Peter Beinart over Beinart’s decision to speak at Tel Aviv University, in violation of BDS, and then, in the face of a lot of public and private criticism, including from people who are close to Beinart, his very public reconsideration and apology for having done so—and then the backlash to his apology. That backlash to his apology is coming from two different sides, from people who are anti-Zionist, who claim that Beinart is just doing damage control to preserve his brand, and people who are Zionist, who say he was forced to grovel before a political inquisition of the left. I have to say that Beinart does an extremely good job of […]
Last Friday, I spoke on a panel at NYU on political theorist Alyssa Battistoni’s new book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. The room was packed, somewhat unusual for an academic book of political theory. But if you’ve read Battistoni’s book, or know of her work, you’ll understand why. The book is not only a remarkable synthesis of a variety of literatures on the environment, climate change, work, Marx, feminism, and the politics of care—if you were just looking for an excellent account of the last 50 years of political theory, plus Marx and a lot of twentieth-century economics, this would be your book—but also a brilliant intervention in these debates. It has given me all sorts of […]
-
Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, The Left, The State
-
Tags Alyssa Battistoni, David Ricardo, Grotius, Karl Marx, Plato, Pufendorf, Sianne Ngai
If you were paying attention on election night, you might have heard Zohran make two claims in his victory speech that often code as conservative: Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception….We will leave mediocrity in our past. The minute I heard those words, and the talking heads’ murmuring that it was odd for a socialist to talk up excellence and talk down mediocrity (aren’t socialists supposed to care only about equality, and a leveling equality at that, which drives down the quality of everything), I remembered a passage in Marx’s Capital. In the last pages of his chapter on original accumulation, Marx discusses the earliest days of capitalism or last stages of feudalism, when farmers still […]
I’m re-reading J.G.A. Pocock for the first time in many years, and it’s surprising to me how obsessed he is with what used to be called, back in the heyday of the Cold War, “psychological man.” Pocock was a historian of early modern political and historical thought. His great subject was civic humanism, and his touchtones were Machiavelli, Savonarola, Harrington, Hume, Gibbon, and so on. His frames were virtue and rights, commerce and property. But the not-so-latent thread of his writing is anxiety, personality, hysteria, lethargy, melancholia, disintegration, and so on. On the page, he presents himself as the Anglo man of remove. But the writing betrays a midcentury, vaguely closeted Freudian who perhaps had done a stint or two, […]
Why did the Democrats cave in on the shut down? It seems clear that the main issue was not electoral backlash, since most of the senators who caved are not up for reelection, and the politics were trending in the Democrats’ favor, or at least not against them. The main issue was the filibuster. There was growing pressure from Trump on the Republicans to get rid of it, and the Democratic leadership had every reason to fear its elimination. Why? It has very little to do with preserving their power while they are in the minority; that ship has obviously sailed. The Democratic leadership doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster for the same reason the Republican leadership doesn’t […]
When I read Paul Heideman’s Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos in manuscript last year, I instantly recognized it as the most probing, and, likely to be, lasting, analysis of the rise of Donald Trump. The reason is simple. Unlike many analyses of Trump and the right, Heideman takes the political economy and history of big business seriously. Not capitalism, not the working class, though Heideman, as a good democratic socialist cares a great deal about both, but big business. Like no one else thus far, Heideman sees just how fractious are the divisions with the business class and how delicate are the threads binding these factions together, and how that […]
The Hindu, one of the larger newspapers in India, interviewed me about Zohran Mamdani. I spoke at length with Meera Srinivasan, who’s based in Sri Lanka, and was able to give some of my most extensive thoughts on the significance of Mamdani’s campaign and victory, for the left in the United States and beyond. Srinivasan and I spoke about Mamdani’s abilities to bridge the divides of class and identity, the failures of centrism and the Democratic Party, and how Mamdani builds on a legacy of immigrant socialism from the early twentieth century. Have a listen.
I just read an oped in an Ivy League undergraduate newspaper arguing that it is a matter of basic justice for the university to pay for and provide students with access to the most up-to-date AI platforms. Duke University, the oped argues, is already paying for and providing its students with this platform. If this Ivy League university not does follow the example of Duke, Duke students will have an “unfair advantage” over this university’s students. The university must make this technology available to ensure that its students are competing on a “level playing field.” This article, I should say, may be the best reason I’ve yet found for why universities should ban AI. Until you’ve been forced to sweat […]
