Ajay Singh Chaudhary over at Political Research Associates:

On July 3, 2017, France experienced an unusual spectacle. With all the regal pomp that the French state and the Palace of Versailles can accord, newly elected President Emmanuel Macron addressed both houses of parliament, only the fourth such address since 1873.

Macron used his speech to lay out a program of severe transformations to the French state and society: breaking labor and enacting economic “reforms”; decreasing the number of parliamentarians; minimizing legislation and legislative oversight; and making permanent aspects of the constitutional “state of emergency” France has been under since the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. In other words, far from the image of a liberal democratic savior painted by the Anglo-American press, Macron outlined a program to maintain and consolidate minority-government rule. In terms that hovered between self-parody and pure mysticism, Macron called this an “efficient,” new “contractual republic.” From the dais of the Sun King, Macron proclaimed—several decades after the fact—that we are all human capital now.

Macron’s program is anti-democratic in everything from its rejection of civil rights and equal protection to perfected neoliberal economic “reforms.”¹ It even takes aim at the democratic institutions of the state itself. In structure and even aesthetic, “Macronism” presents a postmodern pastiche of hyper-modern technocracy and ancien regime all at once. Understanding why this program is so attractive to the political center, and to liberals more broadly, is vital in order to understand the volatile political climate on both sides of the Atlantic. As with the supposedly “boring” political situation in Germany, where the neo-fascist Alternative fur Deutschland party will now be the first Far Right party to enter its parliament since the end of WWII, Macron also represents a rightward trend: a brand of authoritarian liberalism that emboldens the Right, facilitating its political maneuvering, and allowing even small radical right-wing movements outsized influence over national policy.

And yet, Macron’s election was met with near universal acclaim among nominally left-of-center politicians and media commentators across Europe and North America. “About as exciting and theatrical as electoral politics gets,” exclaimed The New York Times.² Macron’s movement was held up as an exciting prospect, a new “revolution” from the center, a response to “Trumpism” the world over and in the United States in particular. This despite the fact that, just as in the Netherlands and Austria, the French Far Right, while not winning the election, still received higher support in the national contest than ever before.

More here.

Tobi Haslett in The New Yorker:

Seriousness, for Susan Sontag, was a flashing machete to swing at the thriving vegetation of American philistinism. The philistinism sprang from our barbarism—and our barbarism had conquered the world. “Today’s America,” she wrote in 1966, “with Ronald Reagan the new daddy of California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing.” Intellectuals, doomed to tramp through an absurd century, were to inflict their seriousness on Governor Reagan and President Johnson—and on John Wayne, spareribs, and the whole shattered, voluptuous culture. The point was to be serious about power and serious about pleasure: cherish literature, relish films, challenge domination, release yourself into the rapture of sexual need—but be thorough about it. “Seriousness is really a virtue for me,” Sontag wrote in her journal after a night at the Paris opera. She was twenty-four. Decades later, and months before she died, she mounted a stage in South Africa to declare that all writers should “love words, agonize over sentences,” “pay attention to the world,” and, crucially, “be serious.”

Only a figure of such impossible status would dare to glorify a mood. Here was a woman who had barged into the culture with valiant attempts at experimental fiction (largely unread) and experimental cinema (largely unseen) and yet whose blazing essays in Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books won her that rare combination of aesthetic and moral prestige. She was a youthful late modernist who, late in life, published two vast historical novels that turned to previous centuries for both their setting and their narrative blueprint; and a seer whose prophecies were promptly revised after every bashing encounter with mass callousness and political failure. The Vietnam War, Polish Solidarity, aids, the Bosnian genocide, and 9/11 drove her to revoke old opinions and brandish new ones with equal vigor. In retrospect, her positions are less striking than her pose—that bold faith in her power as an eminent, vigilant, properly public intellectual to chasten and to instruct. Other writers had abandoned their post. So Sontag responded to a 1997 survey “about intellectuals and their role” with a kind of regal pique:

What the word intellectual means to me today is, first of all, conferences and roundtable discussions and symposia in magazines about the role of intellectuals in which well-known intellectuals have agreed to pronounce on the inadequacy, credulity, disgrace, treason, irrelevance, obsolescence, and imminent or already perfected disappearance of the caste to which, as their participation in these events testifies, they belong.

She held a contrary creed. “I go to war,” she said a decade after witnessing the siege of Sarajevo, “because I think it’s my duty to be in as much contact with reality as I can be, and war is a tremendous reality in our world.” Behind the extravagant drama, though, was a shivering doubt. Her work rustles with the premonition that she was obsolete, that her splendor and style and ferocious brio had been demoted to a kind of sparkling irrelevance. The feeling flared up abruptly, both when she was thrilled by radical action and when she was aghast at public complacency.

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Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian:

Fifteen years ago, I published Globalisation and Its Discontents, a book that sought to explain why there was so much dissatisfaction with globalisation within the developing countries. Quite simply, many believed the system was rigged against them, and global trade agreements were singled out for being particularly unfair.

Now discontent with globalisation has fuelled a wave of populism in the US and other advanced economies, led by politicians who claim that the system is unfair to their countries. In the US, President Donald Trump insists America’s trade negotiators were snookered by those from Mexico and China.

So how could something that was supposed to benefit all, in developed and developing countries alike, now be reviled almost everywhere? How can a trade agreement be unfair to all parties?

To those in developing countries, Trump’s claims – like Trump himself – are laughable. The US basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalisation. In some of these institutions – for example, the International Monetary Fund – the US still has veto power, despite America’s diminished role in the global economy (a role which Trump seems determined to diminish still further).

To someone like me, who has watched trade negotiations closely for more than a quarter-century, it is clear that US trade negotiators got most of what they wanted. The problem was with what they wanted. Their agenda was set, behind closed doors, by corporations. It was an agenda written by, and for, large multinational companies, at the expense of workers and ordinary citizens everywhere.

Indeed, it often seems that workers, who have seen their wages fall and jobs disappear, are just collateral damage – innocent but unavoidable victims in the inexorable march of economic progress. But there is another interpretation of what has happened: one of the objectives of globalisation was to weaken workers’ bargaining power. What corporations wanted was cheaper labour, however they could get it.

More here.

Adam Tooze over at his website:

it was not the politics of crime that led Stephen Miller to invoke Mariel in his exchange with the Times. It was economics. Mariel has a double life. It is on the one hand an emblem of social and political crisis in Miami in the 1980s. But at the same time and in rather contradictory ways it also serves economists as a crucial field for studying the labour market impact of mass migration.

What has lured economists onto this fraught terrain is not the temptation of scoring a mention from a Trump spokesperson. What makes the Mariel Boatlift irresistible is a question of methodology. Economists don’t like complex entangled histories. It is hard to cleanly identify causation in complex social settings. So their gold standard are so-called “natural experiments” – both terms carry heavy weight – by which they mean moments when out of complex and entangled social reality emerge events or interactions that seem truly exogenous and random and thus allow the clear identification of what is cause and what is effect.

Generally in studies of labour markets and immigration such moments are not easy to find. Judging the impact of the large migrant flows from Mexico on US labour markets is difficult because those migrant flows are themselves heavily influenced by the level of unemployment in the US. By contrast, Castro’s decision in early 1980 to open the Mariel port to emigration was exogenous. We do not need to worry that our assessment of the impact of the Cuban migrants on the Miami labour market will be muddied by the fact that the Cubans chose to migrate to a labour market that was particularly well-suited to receiving them. The inflow of migrants from Cuba and Haiti raised Miami’s workforce by 7-8 percent in a matter of months over the spring and summer of 1980. Such an increase in the supply of labour ought to “show up” in increased pressure on wages, perhaps particularly at the bottom end of the labour market. The hope, of course, is that once we have cleanly identified mass migration’s impact on wages and employment in Miami in 1980 we can transfer those insights to other settings where the chain of cause and effect is more tangled.

More here.

Justin Smith on William Gass over at n+1:

WILLIAM HOWARD GASS, who died on December 6 at the age of 93, is one of the very few philosophers of the 20th century to transcend the essential boringness of that social identity. What university committees did he serve on? What was his teaching load? What was the “impact factor” of the journals he published in? Who cares. Gass, who completed his dissertation under the supervision of the analytic philosopher Max Black at Cornell University in 1954, and who worked for a short time with (to the extent that one could work with) Ludwig Wittgenstein, also wrote what is perhaps the greatest, bleakest, most rigorous, and finely calibrated American novel of his era, 1995’s The Tunnel. Impact factor: either “incalculable,” or “n/a,” depending on your view of disciplinary boundaries.

Yet his literary output must not be seen as an abandonment of his earlier trajectory. Idiosyncrasy is the integrity of genius, it is sometimes said. Gass was writing philosophy the only way he could. His principal preoccupation in philosophy was with metaphor, which you might think is a perfect point at which to bring philosophy and literature into conversation. You might think this, until you read Black on the subject, writing around the same time Gass was completing his graduate work under him: “To draw attention to a philosopher’s metaphors,” Black observes, “is to belittle him—like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting.” He concludes that while metaphors are unavoidable and might sometimes be harnessed for salutary ends, they are, in general, dangerous, “and perhaps especially in philosophy.”

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Sarah Jaffe reviews Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank in Dissent:

Yet sometime between the release of the hardcover and the paperback edition of Listen, Liberal, America elected Donald Trump, a man who seems to roll up all of the worst parts of the conservatism that Frank loves to sharpen his claws on into one administration bent on nothing but more graft and more wreckage.

Frank, in some ways, deserves credit for seeing elements of Trumpism coming, but he also misdiagnosed some of its roots. The flaw in many of Frank’s zingers is a tendency to oversimplify, to reduce things to binaries—culture versus economics, business versus government—when the reality is more complex. His oeuvre tells the story of how the politics of class became another kind of identity politics; in telling that story, he inadvertently shows how so many people miss the fact that class is a relation of power bound up in one’s income, yes, but also race and gender, sexuality, education, even geographic location. To “talk about class,” as so many have exhorted since the 2016 election, is not simply to talk about the workers at Carrier, but to understand the material conditions that determine one’s position and power in society. Sometimes Thomas Frank seems to get that; other times he doesn’t.

The culture war that produced Trump wasn’t a battle on elite college campuses or in the pages of white papers read inside the Beltway. Instead it was a war that was fundamentally economic at its core, its cultural anxieties wrapped around the reality of decline. The culture that the workers at Carrier and Rexnord mourn is one of long days but predictable schedules, grueling work but relatively high wages and benefits, the occasional strike that bound them closer together and left them with battle stories for later.

What should have been shocking about Trump, in other words, was less that he used a combination of racism, brutish attacks on his opponents, and braggadocio about his business exploits to vault to the top of a heap of Republican nominees: it was that he combined it with at least some attention to the economic concerns of workers at Carrier.

This was, looking back over the past few decades, both shocking and inevitable.

More here.