Full Transcript for Unraveling Christopher Lasch's Minimal Self with Elijah Emery

00:08:07.911 because because I have because when I read his late stuff he emphasizes different things but he doesn't actually retract anything he said earlier on. 00:08:07.911 --> 00:08:36.570 I can't find where he said like I was wrong and I do think, for example, his critique of herringtonism and the social democratic left is that it basically learned all the opportunism and like overly simple materialism from the populist movement but didn't learn any of the virtues, and also was kind of. 00:08:36.990 --> 00:09:11.380 He seems to imply in the late work now and I again I don't remember him stating this outright and I feel like I have to read these books every couple years now but that that the accusations of racism and whatnot in it are both true but also kind of a bad faith accusation, like people are trying to bury not just what's good in the populist, but also perhaps that people have some of the worst traits that were in the populist themselves and they're like the. 00:09:11.380 --> 00:09:27.724 The accusation of racism while true distances them from it, whereas you know you could accuse almost any movement from the 19th century of being. 00:09:27.724 --> 00:09:31.258 I mean the progress is, for example, super. 00:09:31.258 --> 00:09:55.019 I mean in many ways more racist, definitely out and out eugenicists, and yet that's not something that, yeah, i mean left historians know about it and talk about it, but in general it is not brought up in the general ire the same way say populist racism is yeah, i mean, i think that that one thing it's. 00:09:56.603 --> 00:10:04.423 He says that that racism, for example, is present, both in his writing in 1969 and in his writing in 1991. 00:10:04.423 --> 00:10:08.916 But what changes is the context within which that's enmeshed? 00:10:08.916 --> 00:10:20.652 and so he sees it as proof of a lack of ideological rigidity in his first writings about it and then in his second writings about it. 00:10:20.652 --> 00:10:28.288 What he sees it as proof of instead, is the fact that racism can be grafted on to the existing ideology of populism. 00:10:28.288 --> 00:10:52.216 It's just like a totally separate thing, which to me is a pretty unsatisfying way of going about it, and it's why I think that the true and only heaven, while it's like almost, it's one of like the more beautiful of his works in terms of its internal organization and the breadth of its, you know, its study, it's really leaving a lot out, clearly on purpose. 00:10:53.641 --> 00:11:28.818 For, as you've talked about, this myth-making effort of having like a unified history of populism, in the same way that what he was trying to do in 1969 was have a unified history of the American left, and I think actually that's the biggest difference is that previously he says like he's basically rehabilitating populism by associating it with the new left and with the number of the positive aspects of American socialism as he sees it, which is like more decentralized, more focused on on freedom than you know, communism in the Soviet Union or whatever. 00:11:28.818 --> 00:12:11.151 And then he has this really strange section in true and only heaven where he's like yelling at other historians who talk about, who talk about like the fact that populism can only be rehabilitated through its association with socialism, and tries to just like cut this rigid divorce in between the things that he had said were part of a similar historical tradition 20 years earlier and make it seem as if it's a completely separate historical tradition later. 00:12:11.434 --> 00:12:32.666 So it's a completely different framing of class conflict in American life, basically, or not class conflict, but political conflict in American life so, reading the turn only heaven, which in one sense does give lashes own self mythology, where he finally goes down and explains the trajectory of his political career. 00:12:33.509 --> 00:13:11.522 When I say it's a pathology, i don't mean to mean it's false, but it's it's augmented by time yeah, it's augmented by time and by reflection and can't be totally trusted because there's some things in there when I was reading it that I was like I'm not sure I can totally square this with what is in what is implied by the early pre-40 in trilogy, the, the agony of the American left, the world of nations and radicalism in America. 00:13:11.562 --> 00:13:59.932 Yeah, what I find also interesting is, while lash is critical of, say, the black power movement for being too nebulous and the post-60s civil rights movement, the idea that he was a heron folk socialist, mostly associated with white people, really strikes me as strange, because one of the things he tries to do is take the kind of soft Christian populist socialism and Martin Luther King and recast it as a model of viable populism that understands human limitations and the tragic nature of human life. 00:14:02.257 --> 00:14:46.860 What I've gathered is his turn against socialism isn't even so much an ideological one are like he feels like Marx is wrong or anything like that, is that he feels like socialists by the 1980s hate their subject, and I have gone back and reread a lot of socialist material from that time period, particularly, you know, his goodbye to the left essay, and I read all the essays around it too, including the, the Trotskyist one, but just a little in Ruben one, and what I found interesting about that is I'm like they really were at that time period like basically going well, the working class has false consciousness. 00:14:46.860 --> 00:14:48.413 That's why they're voting for Reagan. 00:14:48.413 --> 00:15:02.392 They took the narrow that the working class was voting for Reagan so generous, which I think is interesting, why I think I think it is so generous to. 00:15:03.394 --> 00:15:09.576 I mean he he thinks that a lot of the working class voted for Reagan, but he doesn't think they voted. 00:15:09.917 --> 00:15:33.640 He

thinks they voted for Reagan because they hated liberalism, which is a little bit different because he's not saying that they're like irredeemably, you know, racist or have been won over, because he rejects the white backlash thesis actually, which is one of the weirdest and, i think, worst elements of history in the true me have. 00:15:33.680 --> 00:15:38.480 And it's just like he takes a paragraph, he's like this is fake and then he doesn't go into it anymore. 00:15:38.480 --> 00:15:50.737 But his, his, his answer is basically that, like you know, the element of populism associated with love of place, you know, love of country, etc. 00:15:50.737 --> 00:16:10.884 Was kind of swept out from under the Democrats feet and taken up by the Republicans and because they didn't trust the Democrats to deliver the goods anyway, people could say well, you know, these two are basically the same, but this one is culturally, you know, more welcoming of me or whatever. 00:16:10.884 --> 00:16:13.891 Yeah, and that's actually his big. 00:16:13.891 --> 00:16:39.070 His big qualm with Barbara Ernreich is that he uses her as the best example of left intellectual writing about the new class and he thinks that she doesn't recognize some difference between the bottom and the top, on the basis of support on the part of working class voters for Reagan right. 00:16:39.090 --> 00:16:52.639 I think people also need to remember that the PMC thesis answers originally implicated was the PMC as a political subject, which is something that lash was always just not super big on. 00:16:52.639 --> 00:17:05.142 He wrote a whole lot about the confusion, like the new left obsession with students in the 60s in the early books so he actually goes against a lot of his reasoning in the turn. 00:17:05.162 --> 00:17:30.519 Only heaven in revolt of the elites to clarify it, kind of from the left honestly, and de-emphasize culture, and so you wind up kind of not knowing why he thinks people switched from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans and it's just because he doesn't take any account of mid-century political economy. 00:17:30.519 --> 00:17:48.781 He does start like picking it up again in the late 80s and early 90s, but by that time the suburbanization effects defensive, you know, housing values tied up in that it's all, it's all happened and it's completely changed the social base of American politics. 00:17:49.263 --> 00:17:51.615 So you just don't have a good answer for it yeah shelling. 00:17:51.634 --> 00:18:31.182 Then Tyne and I, who you know, shelling, and I argue about this a lot, where I accused lash of he's a Marxist, esque, yeah, and shallon accused me of being dogmatic, but I was like no, i mean, he believes in dialectics and he takes culture seriously and that was his both attraction to and repulsion from, like, the Frankfurt school, yeah, but he in many ways is a workerist and that he does not see anything beyond that, particularly after the advent of the atom bomb, revolution. 00:18:31.182 --> 00:18:36.700 For him, the great, you know, the great unanswered question in World of Nations is revolution obsolete? 00:18:36.700 --> 00:18:46.102 and the answer that he gives seems to be not really, but I don't know what it is and you don't either, and most of what you're saying is a metaphor that makes it meaningless. 00:18:46.102 --> 00:18:54.452 But you could read him at the end of that is saying no like at the end of all, is revolution obsolete? 00:18:54.692 --> 00:19:06.677 yeah, it's not obsolete, no, that that it is obsolete, that, like revolution, is because you can read it as I'm saying no, it's not obsolete, but it's so obscured now that we can barely talk about it. 00:19:06.677 --> 00:19:11.759 Or you could read that as saying just yes, it's obsolete, no, we can't do it anymore. 00:19:11.759 --> 00:19:16.058 There is no revolution on the horizon and everything you're doing is just a metaphor as a cope for that. 00:19:16.058 --> 00:19:20.838 And it's actually having read that essay now about five times. 00:19:20.838 --> 00:19:21.701 It's ambiguous. 00:19:21.701 --> 00:19:24.455 It's like he doesn't know what he thinks about that. 00:19:24.455 --> 00:19:26.079 I think real question. 00:19:26.600 --> 00:19:50.166 I think I found myself revisiting a lot of these like end sections of the most important essays and the most important books in order to kind of understand the minimal self and then also understand the apparent turn towards Christianity, which is for me like the big thing that I can't quite figure out how real it is. 00:19:50.889 --> 00:20:03.067 And what he seems to like do is, you know and this is tied up with the whole narcissism thesis that it's it's a form of regression and to get around it. 00:20:03.408 --> 00:20:27.891 In his revolution obsolete, he talks about how any new revolutionary culture will need to pick up things from the past, basically, and oppose the anti-culture with, like the preservation of the past and the preservation of the continued reality of the material world in the form of, like, stopping climate change, basically. 00:20:27.891 --> 00:20:48.540 And then he has a very similar point about what the use is of reverting to like Judeo-Christian morality which is his term, not mine, which is is that it gets around the contradictions of the present by requiring one to grapple with an entirely different set of tensions. 00:20:48.540 --> 00:20:57.894 That leaves one able to more effectively develop the self-discipline and the independence necessary to adapt to the change circumstances of the present. 00:20:57.894 --> 00:21:01.731 And so I think the answer to is revolution. 00:21:01.731 --> 00:21:25.941 Obsolete is, yes, but we can still kind of go backwards in a way, but like only mentally to a time when it wasn't obsolete, which is one of the weirdest answers possible, and it's why it's so hard to thread the needle between like is he criticizing nostalgia or is he doing

nostalgia? 00:21:27.412 --> 00:22:21.003 it seems to be having it both ways a lot of the time, and this has been something that I've settled out with you and I are both kind of defenders of lash as not a reactionary, which I stand by, but I think why he's so useful for both the right and the left actually, and depending on well, except for certain parts of the left, he's not useful for a certain kind of feminism, but the reason why it's so useful everybody else is that his social psychoanalysis and his idea that, like, personality is replicated from material conditions into culture and thus a feedback loop on individual personality itself. 00:22:21.064 --> 00:22:39.843 So, yes, he does think that there's individual temperaments and you know that people have have differences beyond their cold from a you is not a full Foucaultie and even though sometimes he seems to flirt with it, he also seems to sincerely think that. 00:22:39.843 --> 00:23:20.990 You know, what I find most conflicting about him is exactly that point you got into, and it even shows up in his critique of the populist, because while he talks about, like well, populism, particularly in the early books, degenerating into paranoia because it had a very, it had a very cynical view of class relations, that that was given to conspiracy theories, because it didn't have a view of culture or put are of like systemic political economy was very much like they are out to get you political economy, which he seems to critique it for a lot of the time. 00:23:21.070 --> 00:23:41.240 But I've read Blake Smith, who is a writer on Earnhardt and tablet yeah, not, not a guy that I think I share politics with, but he's pointed out some pretty, some pretty accurate contradictions in like this writing. 00:23:42.061 --> 00:23:46.263 I think I think I've Smith is I talked about. 00:23:46.263 --> 00:24:03.397 I have like a section at the end of the thesis which I just sent in and like my advisors are like this way too long, but anyway, where I talk about different interpretations of lash in contemporary politics and Smith is the right wing. 00:24:03.397 --> 00:24:26.399 I put him with the right, the right wing reader of lash, who I think is probably the most eloquent, purely because he doesn't do what most of the right does, which is fixate on just the true and only heaven and revolted the elites and that one essay about communitarians that lash like when he argues with Lily and Ruben. 00:24:27.062 --> 00:24:42.982 Yeah, and and Smith has this really nice reading of the use of the minimal self in particular, and what I disagree with him about is that he says that there is this really big contradiction between lashes, psychoanalysis and his populism. 00:24:42.982 --> 00:25:03.252 But I think that what he does pick up on is that lash is too uncritical, as you say, in a lot of ways of especially late in life populism's relationship to politics as a whole and it's in corporation into the Democratic Party doesn't

like. 00:25:03.493 --> 00:25:05.240 Yeah, i've done a show on this with Rob from the right. 00:25:05.240 --> 00:25:06.011 We both discussed. 00:25:06.011 --> 00:25:20.601 We both discussed how William James Bryant ended up in the Democratic Party before you could even justify it by the FDR Alliance, when it is still primarily a conservative Dixie Crab party yeah, and he. 00:25:20.682 --> 00:25:22.813 I mean he was the nominee, four times like that's. 00:25:24.137 --> 00:25:42.913 He was the standard bearer, he was the party and in many ways he begins the popular, like the image of the popular front that is solidified by the end of third periodism, prompting the CPU SA to actually play ball with the Democrats during the FDR regime, and that literally being manifested during the war. 00:25:42.913 --> 00:25:55.711 The thing is I've always wanted to say that's like a moment of original sin because I'm a Marxist and I'm concerned with Marxist stuff. 00:25:55.711 --> 00:26:07.375 But when I look at like the, how did the populist left get absorbed by the Democrats who are at this time? 00:26:07.375 --> 00:26:20.928 I mean, there's still neo-Confederates in the impromptu position in the party when Bryant comes in and And Bryant was not a racist I mean one of the things that people forget about. 00:26:20.928 --> 00:26:35.250 The scopes monkey trial is like one of the reasons why he rejects evolution is like having a fight with H L Minkin, and all that is because he thinks that Darwinianism, as he understands it, necessitates racism. 00:26:35.893 --> 00:26:37.210 Yeah, he's, he's against. 00:26:37.210 --> 00:26:45.634 He's like if Darwinism is real and survival, if the fittest, is real, then the people who don't survive are going to be tossed away by society. 00:26:45.634 --> 00:26:48.011 So for him it's like it's a moral issue. 00:26:48.011 --> 00:26:54.112 And it's a moral issue, i mean he, he got in like a lot of trouble. 00:26:54.112 --> 00:27:07.493 It was a big issue at the 1896 convention in particular, he wanted secretly to include an anti lynching platform and then was talked out of it, because then, you know, the South would have just completely left the Democratic Party. 00:27:10.239 --> 00:27:24.452 Right And so so the original, like if the original sin of the popular front actually for me as much as I want to be a narcissistic Marxist and say it was our fault actually really does go back to William J Leaning Bryant. 00:27:24.452 --> 00:27:43.897 But the other question I have about that, elijah, that I want your pick on is when I was talking to Rob from the right podcast about this not about Lash, but just about this in particular I kept on going like why isn't anyone talking about how the sharecroppers went away? 00:27:43.897 --> 00:27:47.134 Because that's the base of that party. 00:27:47.134 --> 00:27:58.371 And after that you either become a paranoid weirdo after the 1890s, after Bryant and also or you become a socialist. 00:27:58.371 --> 00:28:07.041 And then I'm like but let's also look at the trends of land ownership Sharecroppings, now limited to a rump part of the South and like the lower Midwest, and that's it. 00:28:07.041 --> 00:28:09.088 Yeah, it's going away. 00:28:09.952 --> 00:28:14.145 Yeah, i mean, the social base of populism just was completely eviscerated, and it was. 00:28:14.145 --> 00:28:20.450 It was linked to what Brian was running on in 1896, the first time, which is free silver. 00:28:20.450 --> 00:28:34.352 And you know it was these rolling debt cycles that basically eviscerated the economy of the South and the West and caused a lot of people to just flee to the cities, where they became integrated into these urban machines. 00:28:34.352 --> 00:29:06.700 And so by the time that FDR comes in, basically from not exactly from the urban wing of the party, but from a much more urban wing of the party you know he's based in New York then either Woodrow Wilson or Brian, a lot of these former sharecroppers or their descendants, were now part of the New York or the Illinois delegation rather than being from the Nebraska delegation or the Alabama delegation or whatever. 00:29:06.700 --> 00:29:11.436 So a lot of these, these voters are kind of reallocated. 00:29:11.436 --> 00:29:25.564 But the just peculiarly populist politics really is destroyed by the debt crises of the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century is my understanding of it. 00:29:25.564 --> 00:29:29.741 So that's kind of my take too. 00:29:32.792 --> 00:30:00.144 But one of the things I find so interesting about WASH's cultural histories of the left is that he does kind of see that in the 80s, the late 80s, with the, with the shift in suburbanization, really you know, the stuff that began in the 50s really taking hold, and he does kind of see it with fortism I mean, that's the brilliance of cultural narcissism as it takes, you know, social fortianism and pairs it with actual political economic analysis. 00:30:00.144 --> 00:30:13.057 And yet one of the things I find so fascinating about the true only heaven because I used to say that the most reactionary book is there were both of the elites, but you've actually convinced me to read it again- It's very weird. 00:30:15.154 --> 00:30:17.105 I mean, it's like just it really is politically implacable. 00:30:17.105 --> 00:30:18.845 But anyway, finish what you were saying. 00:30:20.610 --> 00:30:21.011 No, yeah, but. 00:30:21.011 --> 00:30:21.252 But. 00:30:21.252 --> 00:30:22.596 But the true and only heaven. 00:30:22.596 --> 00:30:29.224 Not just in its rejection of progress, because WASH's rejection of progress in the book is actually more limited than people think. 00:30:29.224 --> 00:30:32.664 It's not like the generic postmodern like oh all progress is bullshit. 00:30:32.664 --> 00:30:40.234 It's more that, like, moral progress is is decoupled from material progress Is decoupled from material progress. 00:30:40.304 --> 00:30:43.575 We can't

really say like to assume we're making political progress because of material progress. 00:30:43.575 --> 00:30:48.177 It's just not wise. 00:30:48.177 --> 00:30:57.186 So it really is a specific reading against Wigish history, which even most progressives now accept Basically. 00:30:57.186 --> 00:31:00.865 Yeah, i mean, the weird thing about progressives now is they both accept it. 00:31:00.865 --> 00:31:34.865 They both accept the critique of Wigish history and the in the end, of progress, but also can't drop their moral frameworks that assume it at all Like and I'm going to sound like a luster McIntyre or another person who everybody thinks is a critic McIntyre, or another person who everybody thinks is a communitarian who wasn't, at least from his perspective That there really isn't, in light of modern stuff, anything like guiding what would even be meant by moral progress. 00:31:34.865 --> 00:31:44.865 It's not like we assume that people become kinder, nicer and better with political and technological development. 00:31:44.865 --> 00:31:54.845 Now we seem to talk about like the right side of history, but by right side of history what we really mean is we think more people think like us than not. 00:31:56.465 --> 00:32:28.352 Yeah, well, this is the, this is the appeal of the on the so called universal class which is what lash associates with the PMC in the true and only have it, but not in revolt to the elites, which is this class united by a culture of critical discourse and the assumption that everyone can be integrated into, into its class, but that that runs up against the material constraints of industrialization. 00:32:28.352 --> 00:32:38.381 And then now, in the 80s or the 90s, the shrinking of the middle class and the growing, once again, of the ranks of the poor. 00:32:38.381 --> 00:32:51.038 So, basically, you know, it is exactly as you say, it's a, it's a limited rejection of progress based on the fact that it's economically unfeasible. 00:32:51.399 --> 00:33:14.716 Basically, right Basically like okay, if you assume moral progress is is based off this, and you're going to have some big problems because the economy that this is based off is, in last year's mind, is already dead And and we are just living in its ashes, which is always like my big joke about the culture of narcissism. 00:33:14.716 --> 00:33:16.898 I mean, i was making jokes about it down Twitter. 00:33:16.898 --> 00:33:30.539 I was singing Yeah, i thought they were funny, carly Simon But but I was also told someone knows, narcissism isn't the category for lash of which neoliberal man or woman or human would exist. 00:33:30.539 --> 00:33:32.446 It's for this manner. 00:33:32.446 --> 00:33:36.894 Yeah, that's for this, and what we would actually be is something like total psychic devastation. 00:33:37.233 --> 00:33:41.740 Yeah, i'm actually I actually sort of agree and sort of disagree. 00:33:41.740 --> 00:33:52.739 I think that basically, the conclusion I've come to in comparing the true and not the true and we haven't excuse me culture of narcissism with the minimal self, is that the strategy? 00:33:52.739 --> 00:33:56.332 I got to let my cat and give me one second. 00:33:56.865 --> 00:33:57.024 Yeah. 00:33:57.705 --> 00:34:22.242 I'm sorry about that. 00:34:22.945 --> 00:34:36.480 Anyway, the you know it's and this is the big argument against the culture of narcissism from a lot of psycho analytic thinkers was that it neglected primary narcissism in favor of secondary narcissism. 00:34:38.184 --> 00:35:03.278 And I think that the distinction is that secondary narcissism continues to be more and more untenable because it requires this equalization of the self to the institution in a way which isn't possible in an era where large institutions, bureaucracy, strong unions, the company caring for you your whole life, basically because of the Fortis model, where none of that is sustainable anymore. 00:35:04.085 --> 00:36:06.586 But the kind of more frightening thing in the minimal self is that lash starts to equate the separation anxiety that he associates with narcissism, or that he says narcissism is a survival strategy from with consumer capitalism itself and that this act of simultaneous desire and addressing of the desire which you get from engaging in in the market basically by you know you hand over this money, you get the thing without seeing obviously all the work that went into it enables this deeper primary narcissism to continue even more in a prior era when a lot of people did work in factories, or new people who worked in factories, and so that there were restrictions on this total equalization of the self to the market, and so you're right that it is this form of total The year market world. 00:36:08.829 --> 00:36:26.548 But it also in some ways would be flipping from secondary narcissism to primary narcissism, where the yeah, where the attachment, like the attachment disorder, being manifested socially, is like exactly. 00:36:26.548 --> 00:36:33.394 Right, yeah, like I mean, ironically, what am I? 00:36:33.394 --> 00:36:34.254 what am I? 00:36:34.254 --> 00:36:35.475 what am I? 00:36:35.475 --> 00:36:46.745 more provocative thesis is I'm working with on turning into an essay in the book with shallon is the idea that minimal self might actually be the most Marxist of lashes books. 00:36:47.865 --> 00:37:02.161 Oh it is an it section where he is talking about this And I went back and read it again I was like, oh my God, he's saying that capitalism is our mother. 00:37:02.161 --> 00:37:05.865 You know, like this is his big, his big realization. 00:37:05.865 --> 00:37:26.085 And yet it's so wrapped up in so many of the later themes like he's playing with myth in this really explicit way by saying that there's, you know, humanity is in mashed with two brothers, narcissus and Prometheus, and they're both taking us down paths that seem divided or are really the same, and we've already gone much too far

down in them. 00:37:26.085 --> 00:37:34.995 And then, in the same book, he's like we need to restore a Judeo Christian way of thinking about selfhood, and so what it is is. 00:37:34.995 --> 00:37:55.401 It's kind of like this perfect mesh of all of the things which are so confusing about him, And if you can get through the minimal self, i think you really understand a lot of the rest of his project, with maybe the exception of the revolt of the elites, which is so weird as a book. 00:37:55.885 --> 00:38:02.250 That book is much stranger Because on a superficial reading it reads like a Steve Bannon rant. 00:38:02.250 --> 00:38:08.896 on a deeper reading and I say this as a person who's now read it, i think, three times, four times. 00:38:08.896 --> 00:38:24.326 I'm about to embark on time number four or five, i would you find it to be at the end like this is. 00:38:24.326 --> 00:38:27.189 This is for almost disassociated from itself. 00:38:27.869 --> 00:38:31.972 Yeah, it kind of it's it's operating on so many levels. 00:38:32.193 --> 00:38:46.268 it's like on the one hand, like a more explicit political pamphlet, then like a lot of his other stuff, but then like you dig down into it and there's like in, in, i think it is either the second to last or the last essay. 00:38:46.889 --> 00:38:57.338 There's this section where he's talking about the conception of modernity and the conclusion seems to be that there is no such thing as modernity, that like that's the big conclusion he's come come up with. 00:38:57.338 --> 00:39:17.789 that modernity is is superficial, because it assumes a distance from the past that doesn't exist, and that there's no difference between now and the past that is meaningful at all in terms of altering human consciousness, and like that's how he kind of like rejects in the same essay. 00:39:17.789 --> 00:39:32.890 he's like psychoanalysis doesn't really do much like basically, which is such an insane thing to say from his perspective, and it's why I don't really ever know what to do with revolt, the elites. 00:39:32.890 --> 00:39:43.021 I'm probably going to be with you reading, reading it for my third time sometime in the next couple of months, just to try to figure it out again, because it's just so strange. 00:39:43.925 --> 00:39:54.617 Yeah, i think the Alpha for a mega periods are actually the liberals in the Russian Revolution, which is a book that no one told me was important And then I read it. 00:39:54.617 --> 00:39:56.679 I'm like No, i think this is important. 00:39:56.679 --> 00:40:14.075 I think, for example, his his calling of John Dewey's utter incoherence shows up throughout his work, including his stances in the war, which I want to point out. 00:40:14.075 --> 00:40:25.363 his stances on the war were pro war war one, but opposed to war war two, and yet he's a progressive. 00:40:25.965 --> 00:40:38.798 Yeah, john Dewey is like a character who lash gives a lot of eye or two And I've seen like some writing which I can't totally remember being like it's only because Dewey was such a great influence on lash which I totally like. 00:40:38.798 --> 00:40:41.762 I was just kind of weirded out by it doesn't seem like that. 00:40:41.762 --> 00:41:02.567 But Dewey speaks to like what lash sees as the heart of the worst elements, i think, of the liberal project, which is the self assured social engineering that neglects to recognize how incoherent it really is And you know, and tries to like cordon things off. 00:41:02.567 --> 00:42:14.234 It's almost, it's very similar Actually, i think like Weber or something like that, like this analysis of the process of rationalization and how lash thinks about Dewey, where his critique of Dewey and the war, which shows up again in the new radicalism in America, talks about how, like the conception of the war, like Dewey's conception of the schools, assumes that it can be cordoned off into the sphere that were this, you know, this little box which doesn't affect the remainder of society, and that that's completely false, that society is ultimately interconnected And that, as a result, you can't just pretend that your actions in one area of life, whether it's conducting a war or building a school system are not going to deeply penetrate into the remainder of the culture and speak to how that whole culture is constructed And you know it more broadly, how the economics of that culture and the organization of that polity is constructed. 00:42:17.617 --> 00:42:26.961 Yeah, i've been called a lot of stuff about what I do and make lectures about war with Dewey, like just there are many times where academics will go to me. 00:42:26.961 --> 00:42:37.077 Well, it's because of this influence And I'm like, i'm sorry, the plain language of the text, and in this case the plain language of the text in all periods of this man's writing, is anti-Dewey. 00:42:37.995 --> 00:42:38.698 Is Dewey imp. 00:42:38.698 --> 00:42:50.510 It shows the compartmentalizing of American culture and political economy in such a way that it leads to total political incoherence and weird opportunism. 00:42:50.510 --> 00:42:52.538 that doesn't even make that much sense. 00:42:52.538 --> 00:42:53.702 Yeah, like. 00:42:54.914 --> 00:42:58.456 And then, on the other hand, you have like the opposite effect, i think. 00:42:58.456 --> 00:43:34.527 Like I see, kind of like if you want to expand this, to like Lash's work more broadly, this difference between Dewey, who's like seen as by some people a significant influence, and Foucault, who's basically ignored, even though a lot of his stuff seems to come up very heavily in both the world of nations and even in a heartless world actually, where Lash is very taken with this process of classification and discipline, and he has this line in his essay on the asylum in the world of nations. 00:43:34.626 --> 00:43:37.580 Oh yeah, just straight up lifted from history man. 00:43:37.580 --> 00:43:42.844 It's like Yeah, and at

the time when that book wasn't well translated in America. 00:43:42.844 --> 00:43:45.762 I was actually like I had to do some Foucault scholarship. 00:43:45.762 --> 00:43:51.287 When I encountered that, i'm like wait, was there even a version of this book in English readily available? 00:43:51.287 --> 00:43:52.137 I found out. 00:43:52.137 --> 00:43:54.485 I think there was, but it was brand new. 00:43:54.485 --> 00:43:56.100 Like no one has read that yet. 00:43:56.260 --> 00:43:56.802 It was super new. 00:43:56.802 --> 00:44:09.278 But he says in the same essay he's like I have a strong suspicion that one could say that many institutions, such as the modern family, also corresponds to this process of classification and discipline. 00:44:09.278 --> 00:44:20.880 but later scholarship will have to take this up And it's like here you see the germination of Haven and a Heartless World which then contributes to everything else. 00:44:20.880 --> 00:44:36.608 So there's these just really funny connections between which people he thinks, because he is an intellectual historian, are good to run with and which people he thinks should be laughed out of the academy, basically if they weren't so dangerous. 00:44:40.501 --> 00:45:06.463 What I find fascinating about Lash is because people associate him as a fundamentally American thinker, as an American as in his figures, even going all the way back to a revitalization of people like Jonathan Edwards, who I have read more in the context of understanding evangelical history through the work of Mark A Noll which, by the way, Jonathan Edwards, is much more important than that fire and brimstone saying that we used to teach in school. 00:45:06.463 --> 00:45:17.240 We finally stopped teaching it because even the conservatives complained, apparently, But I also live in a Mormon area. 00:45:19.399 --> 00:45:26.305 The Mormon said because of culture, how, Like that's a whole different ball game. 00:45:26.305 --> 00:45:27.660 I can't explain Mormon. 00:45:27.660 --> 00:45:31.085 Well, lash has a lot of stuff on Mormons in his book actually some of which. 00:45:31.085 --> 00:45:31.937 I think is wrong. 00:45:35.575 --> 00:45:35.776 He has. 00:45:35.776 --> 00:45:39.546 Like I actually was talking about it with a couple of Mormon friends of mine. 00:45:39.546 --> 00:45:41.541 I was like well, i was just reading this. 00:45:41.541 --> 00:45:49.488 He says that the amazing thing about Mormonism is it combined polygamy with a high respect for women. 00:45:49.488 --> 00:45:51.622 He has a line to that effect. 00:45:51.622 --> 00:45:53.582 One of them was like that's complete. 00:45:53.582 --> 00:45:54.959 What are you talking about? 00:45:54.959 --> 00:45:59.084 They just completely were against the suggestion. 00:45:59.084 --> 00:46:04.666 I figured I should probably go with their analysis and didn't know any further on the Mormonism. 00:46:05.695 --> 00:46:12.748 So when I actually read that essay I was like that is a weirdly superficial take. 00:46:12.748 --> 00:46:18.820 This is somebody who's encountered Mormon history but actually doesn't know it very deeply and doesn't really know Mormon culture. 00:46:18.820 --> 00:46:32.930 There's a sacralization of women in Mormon culture, but I think that's a different thing than respect. 00:46:32.930 --> 00:46:33.854 Yeah, than respect. 00:46:33.854 --> 00:46:37.063 There's a sacralization of women in Islamic culture. 00:46:38.655 --> 00:47:00.367 I also think he talks about the sexual libertinism on the Mormons, beyond even polygamy, which is actually kind of true and died out in the 20th century, for example, sex work was legal and it felt like city until the end of the Mormon wars. 00:47:00.367 --> 00:47:16.225 Basically And again, i actually think it's interesting you can't really comment on that as progressive or regressive from a feminist perspective cleanly. 00:47:16.225 --> 00:47:39.144 I think the actual logic for it is much more complicated and much more rooted in a particular concern and also some sad realities of coming out west with a whole lot of female converts and no men and men dying and raids and wars and whatnot. 00:47:39.144 --> 00:47:53.398 But he also doesn't seem to understand Mormon racism that much either In the world of nations. 00:47:53.398 --> 00:48:09.765 That's the essay, because I just happened to live in Utah and know a whole lot about Mormonism now that I was like bro I get what you're trying to say and I think there is a kernel truth that I say There's a lot more of sharecropper. 00:48:10.055 --> 00:48:14.447 I also objected as a dogmatic Marxist to what he was calling working class. 00:48:14.447 --> 00:48:17.376 I'm like sharecroppers aren't working class, it's almost a feudal relation. 00:48:17.376 --> 00:48:28.168 And I'm like America's weird because we just never called our peasants peasants and our surfs surfs. 00:48:28.168 --> 00:48:34.274 They're either slaves or freedmen-ish, because that wasn't supposed to exist here. 00:48:34.274 --> 00:48:48.983 But we had sharecropping And we had basically indentured mining because the whole company town situation with compelled work was also pretty much it's like that's not. 00:48:48.983 --> 00:49:04.259 I remember if you read some of the radical union stuff of the 1890s and the American mine workers, we're not even proletarianized, we're basically surfs, we're on company manners. 00:49:04.259 --> 00:49:10.905 So I found that I found lash. 00:49:10.905 --> 00:49:20.688 That's the part of lash that I really struggle with because sometimes he's so good on seeing class relations that are not clear and being really specific about it. 00:49:20.688 --> 00:49:38.876 Like one of the things about the PMC talk is like he's really clear that he does not see intellectual and bureaucrats and all of that middle tier as the same thing until Trin only heaven. 00:49:38.876 --> 00:49:45.800 And he's describing this post-fortis universal class that's

trying to emerge and failing. 00:49:46.434 --> 00:49:47.698 About like 10 pages earlier. 00:49:47.698 --> 00:49:54.724 He's like the only thing that seems to unite the new class is that they are called the new class by the American right. 00:49:54.724 --> 00:49:57.617 So he's again. 00:49:57.617 --> 00:50:13.003 He's just like hedging things, i think, in terms of what you were saying about how he sees class relations, the example that gets me the most was when he's talking about the syndicalists in America in the Trin only heaven he has. 00:50:13.003 --> 00:50:26.399 That he's like the base of the syndicalists was in the mining camps in the West where people could remember only a generation earlier, the freedom being prospectors or cowboys, and I've like these were terrible jobs, like nobody is looking. 00:50:26.399 --> 00:50:33.364 It's horrible to be in a mining camp, but it's also awful to be a cowboy or a prospector. 00:50:33.364 --> 00:50:47.388 Like this is just completely at odds with the entirety of the established historical record on what these jobs actually felt like and how they actually were received by the people who worked them. 00:50:48.517 --> 00:50:52.527 Yeah, see, this is the thing that I do think is legitimate the Khrushchev Kalaishon. 00:50:52.527 --> 00:50:54.943 He has this, he's right. 00:50:54.943 --> 00:51:34.064 I will say, for example, for all the Marxist criticism at petty bourgeois virtues, and I think we're right to be critical I actually do think, and I think even most Marxists if they're being consistent well and behold, for me these days to hold any Marxist to anything consistent, ever even like the plain reading of basic text, but that the rentier relations that we associate with petty bourgeoisie now would inculcate a completely different set of values than artists in petty bourgeois in the Americas. 00:51:34.064 --> 00:51:44.541 I was reading that Amitago Bordega did not consider the American Revolution a national revolution because it didn't involve race, which I think is also funny. 00:51:44.541 --> 00:51:49.676 You consider it to the Civil War than the British Empire, but which I've pointed out that I was like. 00:51:49.676 --> 00:51:57.927 Well then, like the more the national revolutions in France and England, then they considered it also aren't national revolutions. 00:51:58.075 --> 00:52:01.885 Bordega, you sound like Lin Bao, but even less coherent. 00:52:01.885 --> 00:52:14.335 Bordega is a weird figure another day, but I was thinking about the way that I actually do think there is a real sense in which our bourgeois revolution is proto-bourgeois. 00:52:14.335 --> 00:52:16.307 It even Lash doesn't really get that. 00:52:16.852 --> 00:52:19.593 He doesn't mention it, he never mentions the American. 00:52:19.593 --> 00:52:19.875 Revolution. 00:52:20.416 --> 00:52:46.141 Yeah, it's actually this weird gaping hole when he talks about 18th and 19th and early 19th century America, because he already sees the problems developing in late 19th century America, which I do think is insightful, which is why this is why early Lash and late Lash are both interesting, because I don't think they completely contradict each other, but I do think they read history differently. 00:52:46.742 --> 00:52:50.379 Yeah, i mean, it's basically whether or not. 00:52:50.379 --> 00:53:03.716 I think the most basic difference is if you interpret, how you interpret the pivotal development of a formerly proletarian class in the United States. 00:53:03.716 --> 00:53:42.229 Do you say that it was something which substantively altered the way that political conflict between, like broadly construed, the elites and the people and I'm using that because he doesn't early on he frames it as capitalist versus workers sort of, but he doesn't do it later Or do you frame the development of this proletarian class as merely changing the battle lines between, like a union of the middle classes and the lower classes against the rich in some way? 00:53:42.229 --> 00:53:47.702 So it's basically like I don't know. 00:53:47.702 --> 00:53:53.420 I mean I would think otherwise if it didn't go against everything he ever wrote. 00:53:53.420 --> 00:53:58.719 That it's like is it natural for there to develop a proletarian class in the United States? 00:53:58.719 --> 00:54:04.788 It's basically, i think, the early Lash and the late Lash. 00:54:04.788 --> 00:54:15.774 It's a change of interpretation into whether or not they are for, like, the revolutionary subject or not in the American context. 00:54:15.834 --> 00:54:34.807 Basically, So I'm going to put on my English teacher critical mode for a second, because people forget that I'm not actually a historian, a pedagogue, and I'm trained in philosophy, anthropology, english literature Just a good reader. 00:54:34.807 --> 00:54:36.760 A good reader, you can learn a lot of things. 00:54:36.760 --> 00:54:48.457 But I noticed, actually even in the style of the essays, that after minimal self, there's a shift. 00:54:48.457 --> 00:54:50.323 And I'll tell you what I noticed in the shift. 00:54:50.323 --> 00:55:07.885 Instead of exploring conceptual arrangements of ideas of which classes are organized, so in the world of nations, you deal with essays on, like the security state, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 60s, black nationalism, the multi-diversity. 00:55:09.015 --> 00:55:12.466 When I encountered that word I'm like, oh, we were doing stupid jargon in the 50s. 00:55:12.466 --> 00:55:13.318 I just forgot. 00:55:13.318 --> 00:55:39.448 No one told me this jargon The progressive consolidation of creating progressive liberalism out of the prior progressive movement, which was mostly an intellectual and bohemian movement, with populism and elements of socialism to stabilize actually a dying Brahmin, early Papua's class. 00:55:39.448 --> 00:55:41.602 That's his reading of what FDR actually is. 00:55:41.602 --> 00:55:46.946 Why FDR didn't call himself a

progressive is because he was trying to subsume that movement. 00:55:47.755 --> 00:55:51.364 Not as much of a traitor to his class as he seems, is Josh's reading. 00:55:51.705 --> 00:56:06.606 Yeah, he's actually selling out newer capitalists to save older ones and allegiance with other elements of society by throwing them a bone ie Marxist terminology. 00:56:06.606 --> 00:56:10.604 I know this makes me unpopular, but I believed it all my life. 00:56:10.604 --> 00:56:18.205 Fdr Stalin is like all the other European guys in that he's a bone-apartist figure. 00:56:18.205 --> 00:56:23.762 He is the American form of bone-apartism. 00:56:23.762 --> 00:56:29.660 When you hear conservative scholars go after him it's like well, stalin, hitler and FDR are all the same thing. 00:56:29.660 --> 00:56:30.917 They're full of shit. 00:56:31.217 --> 00:56:33.523 But there's a rational core to part of. 00:56:33.523 --> 00:56:48.960 It is where there's a total breakdown of entrepreneurial capitalism as we traditionally understood it, a brutalization and strengthening of the state that we had not seen in human history since the end of the Ampik Empire. 00:56:48.960 --> 00:57:00.346 I don't think people really understand how the European war spreading all over the globe really solidified nations and states as things that were really really weak. 00:57:00.346 --> 00:57:11.375 Comparatively, you can even see this in the size of the state, the size of the state balloons from 1929 to 1951. 00:57:11.375 --> 00:57:13.439 It's just exponentially larger. 00:57:13.439 --> 00:57:24.488 Lash interestingly to me, lash almost hits on that stuff all the time, but he doesn't call it that. 00:57:24.488 --> 00:57:26.481 He's not interested in Marxist terminology. 00:57:26.481 --> 00:57:27.419 I never can tell. 00:57:27.419 --> 00:57:32.661 Is it that 50s Cold War thing where you're hedging your bets and not actually admitting you're a Marxist. 00:57:34.176 --> 00:57:45.939 I mean he calls for, he cites angles in the very favorably in the asylum chapter He cites angles. 00:57:46.115 --> 00:57:50.867 He's definitely, although the Frankfurt School's critical theory is interesting. 00:57:50.975 --> 00:58:31.408 I don't want to go into Gabriel Rockhill's attacks much, but I have pointed out that even the Stalinist in this time period are using the same language because nobody wants to completely own their communism, because while anti-communism is kind of at a die-down during the 40s because of the war also something missed in Rockhill's article because they're complaining about people making allegiances with a government that's literally in alliance with the USSR but that people are afraid that it can come back at any moment. 00:58:31.408 --> 00:58:39.301 For example, a lot of the early Frankfurt School texts aren't translated into English, even though they're published in America. 00:58:39.301 --> 00:58:43.401 They're kept in German so that people don't get too uppity. 00:58:43.401 -->

00:58:50.330 I can think about, for example, i think Refenstahl and Grossman. 00:58:50.330 --> 00:58:54.664 both have work that has only been translated recently and they were first published in the United States. 00:58:54.664 --> 00:58:57.182 They just published in German. 00:58:57.182 --> 00:59:12.257 So there's this time period, particularly as you get into the 50s and 60s, where people are being really cagey, although they'll cite Marx positively but they don't say like I am sympathetic to Marxism because you can't do that He calls. 00:59:12.277 --> 00:59:17.059 he's like we need democratic socialism in this country at the end of the agony of the American left. 00:59:17.515 --> 00:59:22.206 Yeah, he does although he also my fairing, so a lot. 00:59:22.855 --> 00:59:38.262 I think what's funnier is that he's simultaneously saying, basically, that he sees FDR I don't think he would use the term Bonaparteist figure, i just don't know what he would think about that but he definitely sees him as a consolidation of the power of the old Brahmin elite. 00:59:38.262 --> 00:59:44.106 And then he also is like, of course, like in the beginning of the Trudonly Heaven essay. 00:59:44.106 --> 00:59:50.341 He's like well, i finally found FDR very inspiring and we're very upset when Harry Truman pursued the Cold War. 00:59:50.341 --> 01:00:06.647 So I think his opposition or support of these figures is much more oriented around foreign policy than just a willingness to pursue accommodation with the Soviet Union, than anything else. 01:00:08.434 --> 01:00:15.416 He basically sees accommodation with the Soviet Union as a human necessity and so like, and he doesn't. 01:00:15.416 --> 01:00:21.115 He also does seem to think, well, socialism isn't that bad Like. 01:00:21.115 --> 01:00:42.736 That's basically his argument, although I get the feeling that he would think that, you know, democratic socialism in America would look very different than even democratic socialism in Europe, much less what we see in the USSR at the time I mean. 01:00:42.736 --> 01:01:05.847 So I think that's why it's so hard to pin down, is because, particularly as late work there's, you know, shalon interprets it as pretty much a continuity, and I keep on reading it and there are elements of continuity there, but even in his style. 01:01:05.847 --> 01:01:07.370 So here's what I noticed it's different. 01:01:07.370 --> 01:01:15.162 Yes, the new American radicals are profiles, but true and only heaven, even though it's not a profile book. 01:01:15.162 --> 01:01:18.257 It's not a book that you would think would be written as intellectual profiles. 01:01:18.257 --> 01:01:22.803 That's what ends up being, and so there's a lot more concern. 01:01:24.297 --> 01:01:27.744 Especially, especially the politics of the civilized minority. 01:01:27.744 --> 01:01:38.622 That and the syndicalist chapter, my two least favorite in the book, because they like focus on these very narrow examples most of the time. 01:01:38.622 --> 01:01:44.472 Like you know, he's like to understand the politics of the civilized minority. 01:01:44.472 --> 01:01:59.679 I'm going to explain three social science textbooks from a 20 year period And that shows how liberals thought of politics and it's like, really like I'm not sure about that, but it's exactly what you're saying. 01:01:59.679 --> 01:02:05.300 it reverts to profiles, and it's profiles either both of people and of books. 01:02:07.418 --> 01:02:07.619 Right. 01:02:07.619 --> 01:02:17.096 Profiles of books are common in his work but like, for example, normally when he's, if you read the world of nations, about half of that is reviews of books that were turned into the chapters. 01:02:17.096 --> 01:02:31.267 but they always open up to, like, the entire social history of the topic of the book, to engage with the book on the movement of history, i mean, and that's why those books are so interesting. 01:02:31.267 --> 01:02:34.521 I also have pointed out that lash clearly wrote them. 01:02:34.521 --> 01:02:53.242 where there's arguments made not by just the S argument in the essay, but the way he's selecting essays, in what order And in the true and only heaven you have profiles of thinkers and ways of thinking, which is which is no longer trying to. 01:02:53.242 --> 01:03:03.721 I mean, yes, there's contextualization but, like when lash talks about the feminist movement in agony of the American left, he's talking, he's always contextualizing it. 01:03:03.721 --> 01:03:07.164 It's like these parts of the feminist movement are rejected. 01:03:07.164 --> 01:03:08.920 These parts are accepted. 01:03:08.920 --> 01:03:11.041 They're accepted for mostly conservative reasons. 01:03:11.041 --> 01:03:16.786 actually, the liberal rehabilitation of those conservative reasons is actually a little bit of bad faith. 01:03:16.786 --> 01:03:19.862 But here's why this happened. 01:03:19.902 --> 01:03:24.405 Here's examples This is the early 20th century feminism, yeah. 01:03:24.995 --> 01:03:27.562 And the 19th century feminism too, he's actually bigger than that, yeah. 01:03:29.195 --> 01:03:32.283 And then look at these authors, look at when this comes up. 01:03:32.283 --> 01:03:55.710 You think about right before the asylum chapter there's a chapter on a very specific, lonely female writer who's been lionized in feminism and he contextualizes what's actually going on there in her life and how these letters are like correspondences between women who have been taken out west but not given opportunity to work. 01:03:55.710 --> 01:04:00.466 but they come from a class where they're kind of stable but they're really isolated. 01:04:00.466 --> 01:04:06.008 So it would generate this discourse that can be recuperated by feminists later. 01:04:06.008 --> 01:04:12.785 I mean, that's the kind of stuff he's doing And then, in true and only heaven, I don't think he's really doing that. 01:04:12.785 --> 01:04:17.646 in the same way, He kind of

does it with the populist movement to defend the populist movement. 01:04:18.635 --> 01:04:36.564 He actually engages for his populist analysis much more in intellectual history, like in a crowd sweeping it, rather than like stuff where he's like talking about his depiction of the authoritarian personality, for example, which is much more profile based. 01:04:36.564 --> 01:04:51.485 But I think kind of like the whole book can kind of only be justified as almost a novel rather than a work of history, because otherwise it just leaves so much out. 01:04:51.485 --> 01:05:11.240 It's making this very specific argument for seeing history this way and it's marshalling a number of sources for that, but is very conspicuous in what it's choosing not to do And that's the big difference. 01:05:11.240 --> 01:05:28.028 I think, in terms of the style also, that the early works are trying to fit as much in as possible and the true and only heaven and revolt of the elites, which are seen as these really sweeping histories, especially true and only heaven, are actually very piecemeal a lot of ways. 01:05:29.097 --> 01:05:32.780 Yeah, i would agree with that And I mean all his books. 01:05:32.780 --> 01:06:07.452 But but, but Hayden in a Heartless World, cult of Nostalgia, and the Minimal Soul for basically essays, collections, well, and Russians and liberal American numbers in the Russian Revolution which are, which are not Okay, and agony of the American left may not agony American left is weird because it feels like it's essays, but it's definitely actually written as a cohesive narrative And you know the two books, the other two books that trilogy are like profiles or their World of Nations is basically. 01:06:07.452 --> 01:06:09.907 I did essays about book reviews. 01:06:09.907 --> 01:06:13.106 Let me talk about all the history that these book reviews for a while. 01:06:13.146 --> 01:06:23.746 Yeah, Well, I noticed in his nostalgia section he also just like, basically plagiarizes from a Harper's article that he wrote Oh yeah, he self plagiarizes. 01:06:23.860 --> 01:06:25.385 Yeah, that was cooler to do back in the day. 01:06:25.940 --> 01:06:49.287 Well, what's really funny is what he leaves out, which is that it's like basically the same section, except he takes out a sentence that says history cannot be twisted for present purposes or something along those lines, And he just removes that, which kind of suggests that the trunely haven't twists history for present purposes. 01:06:49.287 --> 01:06:54.128 I kind of see, I think like trunely haven't. 01:06:55.081 --> 01:06:57.088 I think of it as a deliberate counter myth. 01:06:58.522 --> 01:07:03.710 Yeah, i think that's the best way to read it And you can see it also in the figures he fixates on. 01:07:03.710 --> 01:07:06.327 There's basically I mean it's divided into two. 01:07:06.327 --> 01:07:12.667 It basically does the same thing that agony of the American left and world of nations does in reverse. 01:07:13.260 --> 01:07:17.521 It's like a palindrome where agony of the American left is like. 01:07:17.521 --> 01:07:28.345 Here is a counter history of the American left which is inactive, myth making but it's also contesting consensus history with these examples of real conflict, so it's less mythical. 01:07:28.345 --> 01:07:33.889 And then world of nations is like and here is why the liberal historiographic project is wrong. 01:07:33.889 --> 01:07:35.905 And then trunely, haven't you get to? 01:07:35.905 --> 01:07:36.240 and it's. 01:07:36.240 --> 01:07:39.782 Here is the liberal historiographic project and why it's wrong. 01:07:39.782 --> 01:07:40.865 And it's about progress. 01:07:40.865 --> 01:07:54.006 And here is me writing about George Surrell and Reinhold Niebuhr and applying their thinking to all of these disparate movements to fit them together in a counter history. 01:07:54.006 --> 01:07:58.510 And those two thinkers he writes a lot about. 01:07:58.510 --> 01:08:02.023 Like if you command death myth in there, it's big. 01:08:02.023 --> 01:08:08.588 In the Surrell and the Niebuhr sections I mean, that's one of the things I'm like. 01:08:08.780 --> 01:08:16.514 If he's become a Surrellian, then Surrell is to me the most problematic. 01:08:16.514 --> 01:08:25.207 A problematic, i mean one, what he actually did, which was I'm gonna promote socialism by spreading anti-Semitic conspiracies. 01:08:25.207 --> 01:08:26.844 That I don't even believe. 01:08:26.844 --> 01:08:33.381 I'm gonna talk about the myth of violence, which I actually think is weirdly. 01:08:33.381 --> 01:08:41.067 I don't like on violence or the book on myth, but I actually weirdly think he's correct. 01:08:41.920 --> 01:08:44.708 Well, that's the part Lash rejects also, which is funny. 01:08:44.708 --> 01:08:48.324 Yeah, i know, even though that's the part that he does. 01:08:49.500 --> 01:08:49.661 Right. 01:08:49.661 --> 01:09:01.583 I mean it feels like he got protesting too much, because you are like people who only read those two books the last two that we've been and then maybe go back and re-culture of narcissism, since it's so famous. 01:09:03.360 --> 01:09:03.701 That's the. 01:09:03.701 --> 01:09:06.289 I call it the Red Scare reading list. 01:09:06.699 --> 01:09:07.742 Right. 01:09:07.742 --> 01:09:57.585 They tend to have, like a, to think that Lash was always idolizing American artisans, that he has a very naive view of the late 17th and 18th century, although one of the things that I find interesting about that is and you can, i'm sure, all people kinds of people make hay about this that both Westward expansion is mentioned as a fact that has material problems but not as a fact that really happens to people like that involves this placement And the other two gaping holes is like the American Revolution and the Civil War are basically just almost completely absent in Lash's historiography. 01:09:58.319 --> 01:10:00.186 And I think the same thing is true of

the New Deal. 01:10:00.186 --> 01:10:06.826 honestly, as I've said before, It's there more than the American Revolution or the Civil War, but it's not there at all. 01:10:06.826 --> 01:10:21.646 And what's funny is that Lash actually does touch on the 1856 to 1860 period in revolt of the elites, because he writes about Lincoln's speeches during the time, but he doesn't talk about the Civil War. 01:10:24.500 --> 01:10:26.506 And the New Deal is interesting. 01:10:26.506 --> 01:10:38.670 I think you're right about that, because the only time he makes a lot of hay about the New Deal and not about what it does, except in the chapter on FDR and the consolidation of the. 01:10:38.689 --> 01:10:43.604 Brahmin elite, the Brahmin elite with the leftovers of the socialist movement. 01:10:43.604 --> 01:10:59.206 And the other thing I've always pointed out is like in his histories he talks a lot about the SPA and the Knights of Labor, fairly and accurately, including their flaws, but the Communist Party, even though it's like he writes about people who leave it. 01:11:00.500 --> 01:11:06.770 He puts it in agony of the American left and it's supposed to be a big, like it's in the title essay. 01:11:06.880 --> 01:11:14.463 It's like socialism, communism and black nationalism And communism is like And it's like a paragraph, it's like a paragraph. 01:11:14.704 --> 01:11:15.346 And he's just like-. 01:11:15.699 --> 01:11:22.005 And it's like a bridge between socialism and black nationalism is like well, all the black nationalists were-. 01:11:23.399 --> 01:11:24.224 Became communists. 01:11:24.559 --> 01:11:26.667 Before the well they became communists. 01:11:26.667 --> 01:11:28.246 Are they left the Communist Party? 01:11:28.246 --> 01:11:35.648 Yeah, it gets when he gets into like a hero cruise, but he just ignores it, he doesn't pay attention to it. 01:11:35.648 --> 01:11:40.742 I find that fascinating because he's quite right about some things. 01:11:40.742 --> 01:11:58.110 He says about the SPA and it's the sessas over the IWW And like when it was pivoting left and right and why And when it was, but then like doesn't mention the CPUSA at all, which was almost as big as an organization by 19,. 01:11:58.110 --> 01:12:01.208 Like by 1939. 01:12:01.820 --> 01:12:15.045 His history of the American left very conspicuously removes, i think, the two things that most of the American left would suggest are victories, which are the radical phase of the New Deal and the civil rights movement. 01:12:15.045 --> 01:12:32.087 And he says that these two things, the radical phase of the New Deal, he ignores and he focuses on FDR as opportunist, fdr as Brahmin and the stuff going on within the brain trust, not within union organizing and like on the street politics of the period. 01:12:32.087 --> 01:12:34.306 And the civil rights movement. 01:12:34.306 --> 01:12:42.229 he just like says his populist but is not a left-wing movement And he downplays the socialistic elements of the movement. 01:12:44.059 --> 01:13:04.309 Here's my thing I think we upplay the socialistic elements of the movement because the socialistic elements is like Adolf Reed points out in this stuff on Ruskin that he's been writing recently They lost like they lost in real time, and the only exceptions actually are the two big ones. 01:13:04.309 --> 01:13:34.090 But the only people who became more socialistic in out of the 60s, who didn't go into something like the Panthers or the Black Liberation Army or something like that, are actually, weirdly, malcolm X, who moves from being basically a Black here and folk nationalist to a kind of national separatist socialist, but socialism for everybody and light on that. 01:13:34.090 --> 01:13:37.930 But he's very like if you go back and look and hit. 01:13:37.930 --> 01:13:39.345 Like he hates capitals. 01:13:39.345 --> 01:13:53.244 But he hates capitals because he thinks it's one, because the rhetoric about socialism really comes in after his trip to Mecca. 01:13:53.244 --> 01:13:55.163 Like that's where it really ends up. 01:13:55.163 --> 01:14:18.286 The kid starts to think that like Sarah a bit more or less, although what he means by socialism seems something like European style social democracy that's slightly less racist than it actually was in Europe. 01:14:18.286 --> 01:14:19.590 Like that's it, that's all. 01:14:21.824 --> 01:14:26.186 But I mean, I agree with you, I but Lash doesn't say that. 01:14:27.259 --> 01:14:28.203 He just doesn't deal with that at all. 01:14:28.899 --> 01:14:29.402 Like it's not. 01:14:29.402 --> 01:14:38.072 But he doesn't give it either of these movements a fair hearing and then say why they're not fair. 01:14:38.072 --> 01:14:43.884 You know elements of success on the part of the American left And they may not be. 01:14:43.884 --> 01:14:48.265 You know there's very good reasons to say why both of them are not. 01:14:48.265 --> 01:14:49.761 But Lash doesn't. 01:14:49.761 --> 01:14:54.766 He doesn't focus on the failures And the unmitigated. 01:14:54.766 --> 01:14:55.923 I always it's not. 01:14:57.481 --> 01:14:58.980 So here's the thing why I don't. 01:14:58.980 --> 01:15:27.930 I think, if you want to explain why the radical movement of the civil rights movement and of, let's just say, the general gestalt of the new deal and its radical parts, when the, when the CIO comes up and you have industrial unionization and the TUL gives up its well, doesn't give up its Stalinism, but basically says like, okay, look like we're. 01:15:27.930 --> 01:15:31.304 We've never required someone to be a communist to be one of our unions. 01:15:31.304 --> 01:15:59.787 So, as long as you're doing industrial unionizing, we're now going to do a popular front, not just a united front from below, which means and to get into communist terminology, because even I think these terms are even far into communists now united from below is you're willing to side with people, but only who aren't formal

communists, but only in workers organizations and only in workers organizations led by workers. 01:15:59.787 --> 01:16:03.349 Are you not in general organizations? 01:16:03.460 --> 01:16:07.670 The reason why they thought that is in America. 01:16:07.670 --> 01:16:29.309 No one can figure out how to even you'd even fucking do a united front from above or from above and below, because a united front from above requires you to make tentative deals against certain things or for certain things, but never to support a government and a parliamentary system with a bourgeois party. 01:16:29.309 --> 01:16:37.746 So you either block shit or you do help bourgeois people, do stuff that was specifically help the working class, but you don't support their government. 01:16:37.746 --> 01:16:44.768 And since we're not a parliamentary system in the United States, that is not a relevant strategy. 01:16:44.768 --> 01:17:03.890 You just can't do it here There's so, interestingly enough, the only way third parties have ever really been able to have an effect in America is by voter-based threatening, upsetting and then consolidating with a major party. 01:17:04.039 --> 01:17:17.505 And that's not just a popular front thing like that's the entire history of even the farthest right elements of the US unless one of those elements can completely suppress one of the other elements. 01:17:17.505 --> 01:17:26.340 So, for example, like the radical Republicans, suppress the progressive wigs are actually. 01:17:26.340 --> 01:17:27.985 That's really the only time it's fucking happened. 01:17:28.648 --> 01:17:28.908 Yeah. 01:17:30.101 --> 01:17:35.126 Like that's like no, it only happened during the Civil War and that's when one party completely failed. 01:17:35.126 --> 01:17:44.224 So it's, it's something to really think about, about why that happens, right? 01:17:44.224 --> 01:17:56.685 So if you're someone like Lash and isn't dealing with this and you wanna talk about why that went wrong, i think all of Lash's culture stuff and his training as a cultural historian just doesn't help him there. 01:17:57.027 --> 01:18:06.222 Yeah, i mean I, i I lament the fact that he has no, he basically I mean he has no understanding of the legal framework of the United States, among other things. 01:18:07.360 --> 01:18:08.023 Yeah, i find that. 01:18:08.143 --> 01:18:09.307 I find that wild. 01:18:09.500 --> 01:18:51.646 And the only time he hits at it is in that debate with Larry and Ruben, when he's when he quote quits the left in that first issue of Takoon, when he's a siding with the communitarians, but then he says like look, the Warren court solved a social conflict in America that was very unpopular, by naturalizing in law And I think it's not gonna go well for everybody because because it's moved law from something that's political, contested, to natural and something that it leads to And conservatives can do that too, although he doesn't really think they're going to at this point, but I'm like he does, sort of he does see that, like he talks about that And I think honestly he's right about that. 01:18:51.739 --> 01:19:16.502 Like that, the social conflict around the civil rights movement, which I don't think what it degenerated into a civil war, but could have degenerated even more than it did into a days of lead, like situation, and the naturalizing the political conflict into a legal interpretive conflict removed it from like whether or not it had to be popular and you had to run people over. 01:19:16.502 --> 01:19:30.747 But interestingly enough and I hate to say this, but this is something where reactionaries are right it leads to people not legislating or passing civil or amending the constitution anymore, like that's what immediately happens Immediately? 01:19:31.440 --> 01:19:32.002 Yeah, i mean there's. 01:19:32.002 --> 01:19:33.386 There haven't been. 01:19:33.386 --> 01:19:48.127 I think this is one of the big problems with the New Deal is that the New Deal never on, just like replacing the sitting conservatives on the Supreme Court with liberals. 01:19:48.127 --> 01:20:07.268 And this is the same strategy that Reagan attempted to do 40 years later and where we're seeing the fruits of that strategy now, but it didn't culminate in these like sweeping changes to the constitution which were still plausible at the beginning of the New Deal. 01:20:07.268 --> 01:20:20.607 But one thing I would push back on where it's very funny that people fixate so much on how the courts removed popular discussions of civil rights. 01:20:20.607 --> 01:20:29.244 The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act all come after Brown v Board, like a decade after. 01:20:29.244 --> 01:20:55.847 In fact, in many ways the intervention on the part of courts and it actually is true for busing Busing is really legislated through the courts rather than occurring through legislatures, and it has to do a lot with the peculiarities of like the way American schools are organized on a county level or on a district level. 01:20:56.279 --> 01:21:05.688 We could talk about the way everything in America is organized weirdly, because we organize it through hyper federatedness the likes of which the world has rarely known. 01:21:05.688 --> 01:21:10.505 We even do that with tax collections. 01:21:10.505 --> 01:21:11.422 So I know it. 01:21:11.422 --> 01:21:31.467 like Americans pay low taxes And I'm like actually we don't, but we pay so many different kinds of weird ass taxes to so many different levels of government that when you're only looking at the federal marginal income rate, we do and we don't pay super high VAT taxes, but like we do actually pay pretty high taxes. 01:21:31.467 --> 01:21:31.628 Yeah. 01:21:34.880 --> 01:21:49.925 I mean, right now I'm probably a part of, i'm a part of a city, but if I went, like, a little bit north, i'd be part of a village which is different from the town, which is different from the water

like collection area, which is different from the garbage. 01:21:49.925 --> 01:21:55.807 you know administration, anyway, it's exactly as you say. 01:21:55.807 --> 01:21:59.149 it's extremely, it's hyper federated in the oddest ways possible. 01:21:59.149 --> 01:22:37.621 And I think but I think basically, like what I would say is just that this put it all in the courts does happen with a lot of big cultural issues, but I actually think it happens less with civil rights than people often say it does, because this was the last major cultural issue that was answered legislatively Or maybe that's overselling it, but anyway it had tremendous legislative and popular involvement which is not true of gay rights, abortion, whatever I mean. 01:22:37.701 --> 01:22:40.626 on the state level, obviously, but in terms of national changes. 01:22:42.002 --> 01:22:44.550 What if I'm fascinating about all these separate abortion? 01:22:44.550 --> 01:22:52.707 abortion is actually the most complicated because, while it is popular now, my entire life it was about 50-50. 01:22:52.707 --> 01:23:32.884 And even now, if you break down people's opinion on what kind of abortion should be limited, and not just the yes or no, you actually have like 2020, 2020, 2020, something like that, like breakdowns, what people think is okay, and I find that to be expected actually to some degree, because I think that's an issue where it's easier to argue now that there's been decades of it existing, and I think it's important. 01:23:32.884 --> 01:23:40.340 But I also have pointed out that like kind of what the Supreme Court has done is something that Lash would probably have picked up on that. 01:23:40.340 --> 01:23:58.827 It's like, well, the Supreme Court has politicized it in a way that's actually good for everybody, because while one side can claim a victory that it couldn't claim, it can't claim it at every state, and it does actually give Democrats and non-blue states a reason to vote. 01:23:58.827 --> 01:24:01.819 So there's a cynical reason why you like what people go, like. 01:24:01.819 --> 01:24:03.207 Why do they need Democrats to do anything about it? 01:24:03.207 --> 01:24:05.072 I'm like, well, didn't they win the midterm? 01:24:05.072 --> 01:24:06.806 I mean like, well, they didn't win the midterm. 01:24:06.806 --> 01:24:16.386 So let's be honest, they just didn't lose as bad as we all historically expected them to, but they did significantly better than anybody would have predicted. 01:24:16.447 --> 01:24:25.509 Pre-row being reversed And I think Lash would be onto the cynical side of that, what I don't think he would see, particularly in late. 01:24:25.509 --> 01:24:35.962 Lash, just like I said, there's just bracketing out a political economy and manifested in economics selectively, like we've talked about. 01:24:35.962 --> 01:24:46.228 He's very good on it And when he's talking about the 70s and part 80s, He's talking about especially the relationship between foreign

affairs and domestic industrial needs. 01:24:46.689 --> 01:25:06.625 Right, but he's bad on it when he's talking about the 17th, 18th century, 19th century, and the other thing that he brackets out that I think is super interesting is exactly what you're talking about. 01:25:06.625 --> 01:25:11.623 Law is not talked about in him except in like four essays, and it's kind of cursory. 01:25:12.286 --> 01:25:12.546 Yeah. 01:25:13.139 --> 01:25:22.086 I mean, i agree with you on the, by the way, on civil rights, because it's expanded, the civil rights amendment is when that all ends and the legislative advantages stop. 01:25:22.086 --> 01:25:33.328 But what I will say is we don't have enough power, even with the legislative advantages and the civil rights movement, to really push a constitutional change of any significance. 01:25:33.328 --> 01:25:42.850 There are amendments after Brownby board, but there's not that many and they're like super superficial. 01:25:43.845 --> 01:25:47.376 Well, the amendments after Brownby board are like the entirety of the. 01:25:47.376 --> 01:25:50.759 I think you mean, are you talking about just after the civil rights act? 01:25:51.943 --> 01:25:53.248 Yeah, yeah, after the civil rights act, yeah. 01:25:55.005 --> 01:26:06.578 No, i think like the other thing is that it's not really remanded to the courts as much as it's remanded to within the bureaucracy, so like within the EOC, within state level investigative bodies. 01:26:07.240 --> 01:26:18.123 Within the judicial creation of the administrative state program, Exactly Which you know here's the thing Which he touches on, because he's talking about it in the culture of narcissism. 01:26:18.123 --> 01:26:26.630 exactly that thing the effect of the interplay between federal lawmaking and rulemaking, and corporatism in its American form. 01:26:26.630 --> 01:26:45.748 But he's not formalizing it or picking up where exactly it's emanating from or why exactly it was established beyond, like vaguely talking about, you know, to defend the power of the Brahman class and its later forms. 01:26:47.279 --> 01:26:48.565 Right, i think this is. 01:26:48.565 --> 01:27:10.929 this is actually something we need to kind of pick apart, and we'll do it another day, but I think that's an interesting observation, because I've become increasingly convinced that Marxists and this is not just lash do not take law seriously as part of the base of production. 01:27:11.679 --> 01:27:14.324 That's why I'm going to law school, for exactly that reason. 01:27:17.899 --> 01:27:56.296 Because money, contract law, a lot of the limitations of businesses, a lot of the ways we talk about Capitalism, changing from mercantile capitalism to entrepreneurial capitalism in the settler colonial period, into, I would say, mercantile proto-capitalism, into agrarian settler capitalism and then into industrial capitalism Those are developments of technology. 01:27:56.296 --> 01:28:06.759 But the later changes and I

know people are and I don't think they come this is where it gets complicated I don't think they come from the law. 01:28:06.759 --> 01:28:12.514 Neoliberalism is not a political project imposed upon people, the way someone like David Harvey says. 01:28:12.514 --> 01:28:25.140 It is a development of things that were already beginning during fortism, expanded out because the public-private partnerships have already begun all the way back to the new deal. 01:28:25.140 --> 01:28:35.743 Frankly, What has changed is workers have an informal but real seat at the table. 01:28:35.743 --> 01:28:40.782 It's not an equal one, but they are considered the wobbly leg of a three-part stool. 01:28:40.782 --> 01:28:45.074 As profits change, they're cut out. 01:28:45.074 --> 01:28:54.275 But what I've also pointed out, the more I've really seen it, this is all also reflected in changes in law and in legal interpretation. 01:28:54.710 --> 01:28:56.577 One thing about that is it lags behind. 01:28:56.577 --> 01:29:09.654 For example, the Clinton welfare bill is in the 90s right And this is what people commonly associate actually with the end of New Deal Welfareism. 01:29:09.654 --> 01:29:13.358 That is the legal end of New Deal Welfareism. 01:29:13.358 --> 01:29:22.241 It's not under Reagan, it's not under Bush, it's under Clinton And it's because the underlying structure has already been removed. 01:29:22.769 --> 01:29:22.951 Right. 01:29:23.030 --> 01:29:51.025 And so now we're just formalized it in law and a nominally left liberal party will put an impair to Arnett which, by the way, if you read Naomi Klein's book, the Shocked a book that I am on record over and over again being obsessed with hating for now 15 years I point out that the client actually shows this happening in multiple countries. 01:29:51.069 --> 01:30:21.481 This is not unique to the United States, nor is it imposed by the United States in all instances, and in some cases, like the case of Sweden or the case of, say, parts of Nicaragua's neoliberalization, the neoliberalization is achieved more easily because the public, private suspension into the state warfare was already there And there's so much state power assumed by the leftist forces that they can push it in ways that say Pinochet actually couldn't. 01:30:21.481 --> 01:30:53.506 And that and the reason why I hate that book is like making it something like it was a conspiracy of people who backed Pinochet And yes, the Chicago was were involved And yes, that's real completely cuts out the fact that, even in her own description, the legal changes are formalized under nominally left, liberal or sometimes nominally socialist regimes And so, and it's because they're reactive, in my opinion, they're not active. 01:30:54.978 --> 01:30:55.322 Well, this is. 01:30:55.322 --> 01:30:56.108 I mean, here's the thing. 01:30:56.108 --> 01:31:01.094 Why is always the most conservative element of the state Like? 01:31:01.094 --> 01:31:10.822 and by that I don't mean it is conservative in content, i mean that it exists to codify things that are already happening, or it exists to protect the status quo. 01:31:10.822 --> 01:31:14.487 Literally, that's what rule of law means is a stable status quo. 01:31:14.947 --> 01:31:24.349 Yeah, the reason why people don't like it, like the reason why you don't want rule of law to break down, is because the status quo breaks down so much that you have stasis. 01:31:24.349 --> 01:31:25.949 Use a Greek term. 01:31:25.949 --> 01:31:34.560 Stasis encourages out and out and direct political conflict, so war by other means just becomes social in civil war. 01:31:34.560 --> 01:31:42.344 But You know, that is the whole R. 01:31:42.344 --> 01:31:47.439 In the case of fear and Marxism There's a class base or some other political subject. 01:31:47.439 --> 01:31:48.282 It's a revolution. 01:31:48.282 --> 01:31:59.909 The point about that is that's like something that people I think are rightly afraid of, why they like rule of law and why we always think of law as kind of. 01:31:59.909 --> 01:32:02.828 I think a lot of liberals think of law as a progressive force. 01:32:02.828 --> 01:32:11.226 But one thing I think Lash is right about is we're drawing that opinion from a time period in American history that's actually quite rare. 01:32:11.849 --> 01:32:11.949 Yeah. 01:32:12.672 --> 01:32:19.949 And in that sense I think he might be right that the victories of the civil rights movement are not left-wing, but not in the way he sees it. 01:32:19.949 --> 01:32:29.929 They're not left-wing because they don't really interpenetrate into the social realm beyond education, and by social I also mean like social welfare. 01:32:29.929 --> 01:32:36.061 The denuding of social from its economic context is like a post 1980s phenomenon. 01:32:36.061 --> 01:32:44.819 Even in America We didn't used to say social conservative to mean like I'm socially conservative but economically liberal. 01:32:44.819 --> 01:32:48.799 That phrase would not have made sense before the late 1970s. 01:32:48.799 --> 01:32:49.540 It just wouldn't have been. 01:32:49.540 --> 01:33:01.077 It would have been a nonsense phrase, kind of like when you encounter neoliberalism in World of Nations and you realize he means something completely different than what he means by neoliberalism. 01:33:01.077 --> 01:33:11.858 In the true and only heaven which is neoliberalism, we mean it And I had to go and look stuff up and like what were people meaning by neoliberalism in 1967? 01:33:11.878 --> 01:33:14.023 Because it was not The Kennedy administration. 01:33:14.023 --> 01:33:18.198 Right, like liberalism, is back baby after the quiet Eisenhower years. 01:33:18.619 --> 01:33:18.880 Right. 01:33:18.880 --> 01:33:23.929 But it's also interesting because I'm like and he talks about the movement of the left. 01:33:23.929 --> 01:33:39.972 I mean, there is a truth in that book where he talks about like the radical left gets a lot of his

energy actually not from the Soviet Union, but from this weird movement where there's stuff happening in the third world but also the Kennedy administration happens and everyone's excited about that And that thing. 01:33:39.972 --> 01:33:51.688 Those things happen together and there's somehow, even though they're kind of directly opposed, They're like, complimentary to the psyche of the student revolutionaries. 01:33:51.788 --> 01:34:06.907 Right, it's like the welding of like revolutionary revolution as metaphor from like national liberation movements is something I don't know another. 01:34:06.907 --> 01:34:07.949 I'm going to end you with this thought. 01:34:07.949 --> 01:34:12.909 Lash is often interesting in that how much of a Marxist framework he picks up. 01:34:12.909 --> 01:34:32.889 But particularly in World of Nations, he describes things that Marxist would describe like we would have the debate on whether or not the national liberation movements are socialist revolutions or bourgeois revolutions or bourgeois revolutions And like Lash sees that, but he doesn't see it in those terms. 01:34:33.532 --> 01:34:57.949 He's like, well, these regimes are going to have to be neo-developmentalists and they're going to have to be actually integrated into one of the blocks of geopolitics And so like they can't be models for revolutionaries or even radical politics in the core, because there's no way for that to happen and there's no occupation for you to overthrow. 01:34:57.949 --> 01:35:01.780 And I think Lash is even like more right than he even knows. 01:35:01.780 --> 01:35:04.949 But he doesn't frame it. 01:35:04.949 --> 01:35:10.949 Like when I explained that essay, i always explained it in Marxist terms, but then I have to go back and say that's not actually what he says. 01:35:11.171 --> 01:35:20.663 Like here's what he says I saw this poll on Twitter which was like which of the branches of Marxism is the most dead right now? 01:35:20.663 --> 01:35:24.045 It was like Frankfurt School Marxism, Gromsky and Marxism. 01:35:24.045 --> 01:35:38.014 It had a couple of others, and I often wonder how much of this is impenetrable to me because I don't have a good handle on Gromsky, who is the? 01:35:38.014 --> 01:35:41.702 you know, that's the branch of Marxism that's the most influential on Lash's thinking. 01:35:42.472 --> 01:35:49.679 Yeah, it's also the one that's hardest to understand because it's not even fully translated in a lot of like Gromsky and thinking is actually projected by later thinkers. 01:35:49.679 --> 01:35:52.828 Yeah, but go ahead, mike. 01:35:52.828 --> 01:35:56.112 Yeah, gromsky is the one that right. 01:35:56.112 --> 01:36:01.246 Gromsky is the one that all the right wingers have a boner for because they actually believe in cultural hegemony. 01:36:01.246 --> 01:36:05.958 The way that Gromsky describes it, which I have always actually seen as a strike against Gromsky. 01:36:08.016 --> 01:36:09.949 It's kind of like my problems with the, with the Frankfurt School. 01:36:09.949 --> 01:36:14.420 I'm like, yeah, reactionaries like Richard Spencer with the culture industry and got all wet about it. 01:36:14.420 --> 01:36:18.760 Like you know, i don't know what's good. 01:36:18.760 --> 01:36:19.369 In fact. 01:36:19.369 --> 01:36:38.159 My other thing is I do think, after Pollock and I don't want to slander Pollock actually think Pollock's an important thinker and Lash doesn't pay enough attention to him in his critique of the authoritarian personality, but that Frankfurt Schoolers are too anti working class. 01:36:38.159 --> 01:36:54.949 Because, as I've had other people point out, that there's another study that use the same parameters, done by American sociologists at the same time, and it actually found findings that were more consistent with Marxism than the Frankfurt School, findings that, like, no, actually working class people aren't particularly more authoritarian. 01:36:54.949 --> 01:37:09.577 It's really varied and there's no personality clearly associated with it, although it does seem to be particular, to kind of upper middle class thinking, and I find that interesting. 01:37:11.411 --> 01:38:05.360 I guess we end on a well, there are left wing elements to the end of Lash's life, but a lot of this shit's weird And it's opaque because I feel like the man was so productive, that like, and so selective that, while I get more out of him than I get out of, say, david Graber, actually have a lot of the same oh, this challenge can be so mad at me about saying this, but actually some of the same problems with Lash that I do about David Graber, that like he's motivated, particularly in his late work with like coming up with a counter narrative myth and one that isn't like, oh, i'm going to show you the problems with the left wing and take off your rose colored glasses Something that I'm you know are pink wash glasses in this case. 01:38:05.360 --> 01:38:27.792 So I'm saying I'm very sympathetic to actually I think he's mostly right in those books, honestly even about stuff like the collective actor problem with black nationalism and like stuff about like, well, you know, when you compare yourself to other nationalisms that have a nation like far away that they're supporting and they're trying to integrate as a diaspora movement. 01:38:27.792 --> 01:38:30.896 It's kind of a different thing than trying to have a nation within a nation. 01:38:30.896 --> 01:38:41.752 That's a break off of a nation but also maybe stays in it, at the same time putting on whether or not you're a cold for our political black nationalist And I think that's like that's a fair critique. 01:38:41.813 --> 01:38:43.015 It's also an obvious one. 01:38:43.015 --> 01:38:47.242 It's like you know, it's so obvious that it doesn't get made And I think people forget about it. 01:38:47.242 --> 01:38:55.543 But I find I just find the in the in stuff so, so confusing. 01:38:55.543 --> 01:38:58.913

Yeah, because I also don't. 01:38:58.913 --> 01:39:06.845 I mean, like I still think you would agree with me that you don't think lashes and out and out reactionary Definitely not, or even a conservative. 01:39:07.411 --> 01:39:08.732 No, he's like barely. 01:39:08.732 --> 01:39:16.143 the thing that would most point him in that direction is just becoming religious, and that's not even clear, right. 01:39:17.009 --> 01:39:24.081 His stuff about and what he values in the Judeo Christian cultures like a is like an integrated sense of self. 01:39:24.081 --> 01:39:25.824 A lester McIntyre. 01:39:25.949 --> 01:39:27.415 Yeah, he's like it's very demanding. 01:39:28.029 --> 01:39:30.814 Right And the demands will will. 01:39:30.814 --> 01:39:38.909 actually, you know, even if you don't become a Christian, you will have an integrated person hood because of the conflict of those of that kind of discipline on yourself. 01:39:39.411 --> 01:39:42.876 He's like you know, he has a line and revolted the elites. 01:39:42.876 --> 01:39:47.704 It's like an honest atheist is always to be preferred to a fake Christian or something like that. 01:39:49.652 --> 01:40:00.689 So it's, you know, it's a matter of honesty and and that he reminds me of, like John Gray, who's always you know when, his five types of atheist book we just like who did right suck. 01:40:01.931 --> 01:40:05.601 Who wrote one of the book covers of of revolt of the elites? 01:40:06.130 --> 01:40:18.344 Yes, I know I mean John Gray's and John Gray's and John Gray's one of my fascinations, because he's he's too cantankerous even to be a paleo conservative. 01:40:18.949 --> 01:40:19.069 I love. 01:40:19.069 --> 01:40:20.252 I love his quote. 01:40:20.252 --> 01:40:24.282 I was reading something of his from writing about the Thatcher administration. 01:40:24.282 --> 01:40:29.997 He's like I love thatcher because the thatch rights for the closest thing we had in England to Bolsheviks. 01:40:35.510 --> 01:40:38.434 I mean it's he moved. 01:40:38.434 --> 01:40:45.164 One day I need to have a symposium, because I've read most of his books and and I can tell you what dark barn is. 01:40:45.164 --> 01:40:52.903 If I give in to despair, my conservative impulse will come back and I will be John Gray. 01:40:52.903 --> 01:40:57.215 I will not even be recognized with most people as a conservative, because I will not. 01:40:57.215 --> 01:41:01.421 I will hate conservatives for being too fucking liberal and Christian. 01:41:01.421 --> 01:41:05.889 Anyway, I will not hate them. 01:41:05.889 --> 01:41:11.764 I mean, think about John Gray As a crazy note. 01:41:11.764 --> 01:41:21.501 He's a conservative socialist and I mean that, and he's extremely conservative and extremely socialistic. 01:41:21.501 --> 01:41:28.364 But he's one of the few that's not from an aristocratic background, It's from pure misanthropy. 01:41:28.364 --> 01:41:31.220 People need help. 01:41:31.220 --> 01:41:39.345 Maybe the state can do it, because maybe people are less dumb With. 01:41:39.345 --> 01:41:43.737 Their needs are met, but they're always going to be stupid and this is always going to fail. 01:41:43.737 --> 01:41:44.759 That's his attitude. 01:41:45.220 --> 01:41:48.109 Yeah, Lash gives people a lot more credit than John Gray does. 01:41:49.242 --> 01:41:50.146 Right, that's the other thing. 01:41:50.146 --> 01:41:50.862 Lash doesn't. 01:41:50.862 --> 01:41:58.127 Actually, i mean, i don't love the biography about him that's readily available, because it's clearly written from a religious conservative's perspective. 01:41:59.380 --> 01:42:00.243 But the guy? 01:42:00.243 --> 01:42:13.908 I've listened to a couple of interviews by the guy and his conclusion is like well, ideologically you just can't put Lash anywhere, which is a lot more honest than trying to slot him into the conservative project. 01:42:14.920 --> 01:42:16.985 Like Roger Campbell tries to do since Lash died. 01:42:20.182 --> 01:42:22.869 Yeah, which is completely not true. 01:42:23.739 --> 01:42:31.659 Which is also why, for the longest time, the only people who talked about Lash were conservatives. 01:42:31.659 --> 01:42:44.840 And then, unfortunately and I do play a role in this, although I'm not the person who told Angela and Ago to read it, but Angela and Ago and I we'd never actually directly talked ever. 01:42:44.840 --> 01:43:11.569 I just read her stuff, corresponded with like we both like Christopher Lash and no one remembers who he was, and then the lead up to Trump happening and like everybody, including the Red Scare people and the Claremont Institute and like everybody's all back over Christopher Lash again, and at first I'm actually kind of excited. 01:43:11.569 --> 01:43:15.425 Then I get what I'm getting, what they're reading from, and I'm like where did you get that? 01:43:18.260 --> 01:43:34.095 I mean, i just spent a while rereading or not rereading reading for the first time, like every major essay published on it in the past, like 10 years, 15 years, okay so, you might have read more, because I have actually only cracked the. 01:43:34.135 --> 01:43:35.439 I've read like 15. 01:43:35.439 --> 01:43:37.627 So there's only 15. 01:43:38.280 --> 01:43:38.761 There's not any. 01:43:38.761 --> 01:43:44.144 There's like there's so few of them And it's. 01:43:44.144 --> 01:43:45.670 I mean it's really like he's. 01:43:45.670 --> 01:43:46.773 He's got kind of. 01:43:46.773 --> 01:43:49.881 He's talked about a lot more than he's written about. 01:43:49.881 --> 01:43:53.911 But I have a strong suspicion, because I've talked to a couple of guys. 01:43:53.911 --> 01:43:56.265 I have a strong suspicion a lot of people talk about them. 01:43:56.666 --> 01:43:57.409 Don't read him. 01:43:57.409 --> 01:43:59.987 The only thing they you have the revolt of the reed. 01:43:59.987 --> 01:44:18.726 There's a bunch of blog posts about the Takun 1 exchange where he gets really mad at the right and then at the

end the Trotskist and Len and Ruben respond to them and he like freaks out and says like the left is not to sound like the Platypus affiliated society, basically said the left is dead and doesn't even know it. 01:44:18.726 --> 01:44:21.645 No, i can't really be associated with that anymore. 01:44:21.645 --> 01:44:22.608 Why So? 01:44:25.161 --> 01:44:31.546 For me, what's what's way more worrying is the people reading him behind closed doors in the right and discussing him. 01:44:32.381 --> 01:44:32.904 Yeah, I have a lot. 01:44:34.360 --> 01:44:50.391 So like I talked to somebody who's now with JD Vance's people, who was very, very into lash but he also to his credit he was like no, he's a socialist, which is very funny. 01:44:52.319 --> 01:45:34.507 I was reading the comments to Blake Smith's article on unheard And I not that I love on her, but I was like reading it and I'm like holy crap, there's like this like bunch of people reading lash on the right with like an interpretive rubric that only reads culture of narcissism, through through the revolt of the elites, doesn't know anything about the early stuff And maybe maybe they kind of skim agony of the American left because they don't think they think that's just trying to own the left, which is not trying to do, and their interpretive rubric is really weird. 01:45:34.507 --> 01:45:44.970 And I also remember that I read Julian S L A is essay about about him breaking from lash, and I remember writing him and going like where do you get this interpretation of lash? 01:45:45.680 --> 01:45:49.489 Yeah like you're breaking from an interpretation of lash that I just don't recognize. 01:45:49.489 --> 01:45:50.712 Yeah. 01:45:50.712 --> 01:46:10.766 And then I'm like, but if I was reading true and only heaven and revolt of the elites only, and I was reading it with a weird guide like the Claremont Institute or like some just some reactionary priest I know, or something, i probably could get what he got out of it. 01:46:11.439 --> 01:46:13.645 I mean, i I kind of understand it because I read. 01:46:13.645 --> 01:46:26.210 First I read true and only heaven, and then revolt of the elites in 2020, where, like, the things that were really at the forefront were identity, politics, stuff. 01:46:26.210 --> 01:46:41.592 It was like when I was reading it, basically and bridging the gap between like what, what the distinction between populism is and how it relates to, like a cultural context. 01:46:41.592 --> 01:46:48.444 And then I went back and continued reading it and now my conclusions about what all these books mean is completely different. 01:46:48.444 --> 01:46:57.425 But I think it basically comes down to that there are entirely different languages spoken between each of the four main groups. 01:46:57.425 --> 01:46:59.711 Reading lash, who I can kind of go over now. 01:47:00.280 --> 01:47:02.648 Yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's end the night on this. 01:47:02.648 --> 01:47:06.507 Who do you think are reading lash and what are their basic interpretive rubrics? 01:47:07.439 --> 01:47:09.527 So these are my groupings of it. 01:47:09.527 --> 01:47:19.929 There's the new right and the post liberal elements of the new right, and this includes most prominently Patrick Deneen. 01:47:19.929 --> 01:47:38.609 It also improves includes Blake Smith and Jeff Schellenberger, and then, on the other hand, it sort of includes people at the front porch republic and a lot of people who are like vaguely communitarian, vaguely post liberal. 01:47:39.220 --> 01:47:42.411 I've read some of the front porch stuff also that we need to be very specific. 01:47:42.411 --> 01:47:45.724 They're right wing communitarian, Like they're yeah, they are. 01:47:45.724 --> 01:47:48.002 They're not just normal commute. 01:47:48.002 --> 01:48:21.224 Because, like, yeah, because I, like, i do like pointing out that, like if you were like Charles Taylor, who's a communitarian, he's not a right winger, or our Michael Sandel, who is not a left winger, but also not a right winger, um, he really likes China, for example, Yeah, this group basically fixates on um lash as like think of lash as conception of religion. 01:48:21.564 --> 01:48:37.101 Actually it overemphasizes it, but they do expound upon it and privilege the late writings over the middle ones and then just completely ignore the early ones and fail to recognize any similarities between lashes psychoanalysis and his religious conception. 01:48:37.101 --> 01:48:48.389 And then it's also integrated into the like lashes pure populist, which is what comes up in the front porch republic And it's a vision of populism which, as you say, is very right, you know, communitarian. 01:48:48.389 --> 01:49:04.591 And then you often find that a lot of the people who are more practical I like I would put Blake Smith and Jeff Schullenberger in this they're connected to like more vibrant intellectual projects, um, kind of deemphasized lash. 01:49:04.591 --> 01:49:17.023 They say he left the left, they point to a couple of tensions within him, but they don't really go into him into as much detail as a lot of the post liberal still, because they recognize that his project is not their project. 01:49:17.023 --> 01:49:18.992 Is my suspicion Right? 01:49:18.992 --> 01:49:22.548 Um, then there's like the post left sort of. 01:49:23.621 --> 01:49:31.688 I also want to emphasize it like, interestingly, the people who leave lash and have that reading are Jewish. 01:49:35.317 --> 01:49:37.567 But Which read the? 01:49:37.567 --> 01:49:38.639 uh, the read Like. 01:49:38.659 --> 01:49:51.545 Smith, i mean like like I don't know when tablet went from being like Buzzfeed for Jews into being a conservative outlet, which seems to have happened slowly over the course of about like Nine years. 01:49:51.545 --> 01:49:56.269 Yeah, because I remember liking tablet actually at one point in my life. 01:49:56.880 --> 01:50:02.011 But I still kind of I read tablet and then

I read Jewish currents and it makes me very confused. 01:50:02.962 --> 01:50:24.583 Um yes, yes, it does Um, uh, but yeah, I, I I actually think I think I would kind of separate Smith because I think he actually, as I've said earlier, does actually have a pretty good reading of lash He doesn't go into. 01:50:24.583 --> 01:50:34.927 I think his reading contextually is wrong in terms of, like, how he can combine it with the political project he seems to be interested in. 01:50:34.927 --> 01:50:45.068 But I, you know, I don't think he's lying about anything which is different in my mind from like, especially what the French Republic does. 01:50:45.068 --> 01:51:08.907 But anyway, I think then there's also like the post left which is like, and it's probably best picked up in, just like talking about red scare and things associated with red scare, And what this does is it is it reduces lash to a critique of identity politics, Um, and focuses lash. 01:51:09.279 --> 01:51:12.788 Critique of liberalism as only identity politics to us. 01:51:12.788 --> 01:51:17.829 Exactly, they seem to reduce liberalism just to identity politics, which is weird. 01:51:18.899 --> 01:51:27.728 And it combines a reading of revolt of the elites and, uh, culture of narcissism and doesn't seem to focus on anything else, not even true. 01:51:30.826 --> 01:51:31.949 Doesn't read minimal self, yeah, yeah. 01:51:33.322 --> 01:51:41.253 Also and you know, I think that's an incorrect reading and it's frankly a pretty narcissistic reading. 01:51:41.253 --> 01:51:57.885 And the big example of this like shrinking lash and then deploying him strategically is I don't know if you know Emmett Penny um, who he wrote an article called the revolt of the green elites and compact, And I think it's a pretty good article. 01:51:57.885 --> 01:52:01.800 I don't think it misrepresents lash that much, Honestly. 01:52:01.800 --> 01:52:21.005 I've talked to him a couple of times, But I think what it does is it deploys lash within discussions of like environmentalist politics and nuclear energy, which last just didn't write about, And I think that replicates in miniature And that's Emmett Penny's like pet cause to. 01:52:21.024 --> 01:52:24.846 Yeah, it's a shtick Um nuclear barbarianism. 01:52:24.846 --> 01:52:27.145 That's his fucking hand on Twitter, exactly. 01:52:28.759 --> 01:52:42.414 And it replicates in miniature a lot of what the post left associated people do, which is they take him, they take lash, they put him in this context that he didn't really write about identity politics and then strategically deploy him on those terms. 01:52:42.915 --> 01:52:43.715 Yeah, let me do that. 01:52:43.715 --> 01:52:45.000 What marks do I mean? 01:52:45.000 --> 01:52:47.729 like the way they read Marx's relationship to the left tradition. 01:52:47.729 --> 01:52:55.206 he's like basically an argument from absence, except that there actually is evidence that Marx associated himself with the left. 01:52:55.206

--> 01:53:02.644 Like but, but their, their argument is mostly a oh, this one time Marx was really annoyed with socialists, so he didn't. 01:53:02.644 --> 01:53:03.667 He doesn't use that word here. 01:53:03.667 --> 01:53:05.144 I'm like, yeah, but he does other places. 01:53:05.606 --> 01:53:05.806 Yeah. 01:53:06.581 --> 01:53:11.922 Like, and and particularly with some of the people who are European and, like, speak the languages that stuff is written in. 01:53:11.922 --> 01:53:18.786 I'm like, and you have to know it, like, are you really reading selectively, cause you can't blame it on a translation error? 01:53:18.786 --> 01:53:26.170 You can read it in the original, like, yeah, anyway, so that's, that's their thing, basically. 01:53:26.170 --> 01:53:27.791 And then there's like me and Tut. 01:53:28.699 --> 01:53:29.844 There's well, you guys are. 01:53:29.844 --> 01:53:30.807 You guys are the last group. 01:53:30.807 --> 01:53:31.983 I have one group in between. 01:53:31.983 --> 01:53:45.572 So first I have the center, which is like the Axios article on Steve Bannon, but also earlier, the attempt to deploy Lash as like is Barack Obama a Lashian conservative? 01:53:45.572 --> 01:53:48.886 Is this like article from 2008 that Andrew Sullivan published? 01:53:49.287 --> 01:53:52.627 Yeah, yeah, weirdly there's this. 01:53:52.627 --> 01:54:06.050 I also kind of I'm going to get in trouble for this, but Kevin Matt Mateson, who is Lash's student, i see as this, but from the just the slightly more pro-Obama side, like yeah was Lash critiquing the narcissism that leads to Trump. 01:54:06.791 --> 01:54:07.252 Yeah. 01:54:07.799 --> 01:54:21.143 Like, like both this interest like the difference between them is, like that, andrew Sullivan's way more annoying and less punk, but also like one of them is a D and one of them is sometimes an R. 01:54:21.706 --> 01:54:26.490 Yeah, And I think, basically, like the centrist engagement is super limited. 01:54:26.490 --> 01:54:29.367 It doesn't seem to really delve into him as a thinker. 01:54:29.367 --> 01:54:32.748 It just is like, ah, this is the thing everybody knows about him. 01:54:32.748 --> 01:54:39.805 And here are like a couple of quotes that are, you know, split off from anything else and just exist in a vacuum. 01:54:39.805 --> 01:54:45.308 And there's this awareness that he's important, but not an awareness of why or what that means. 01:54:46.350 --> 01:54:49.385 And in the final group, i would say that maintenance about Mateson. 01:54:49.385 --> 01:54:53.549 Honestly I agree with him. 01:54:53.549 --> 01:54:57.309 So, sullivan, who else would you include in that list? 01:54:58.581 --> 01:55:01.260 So I it's very, very small, Like there's no. 01:55:01.260 --> 01:55:17.250 there was an article in the New York Times earlier this year called or in 2022 that was someone on the left turn on the label progressive, which mentioned the true and only heaven and like is progress the goal? 01:55:17.250 --> 01:55:24.528 But it was just like Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and Hillary Clinton called herself not a democratic socialist. 01:55:26.884 --> 01:55:30.090 So it like you know it's kind of it's New York Times stupid. 01:55:30.090 --> 01:55:30.851 Okay, gotcha. 01:55:31.492 --> 01:55:32.701 Yeah, And that's. 01:55:32.701 --> 01:55:34.367 that's basically how it like comes up. 01:55:34.460 --> 01:55:39.145 I think like another good example of this is whenever I'm sympathetic to the revolt of the elites is when I read the New York Times. 01:55:39.145 --> 01:55:40.409 Yeah, perfect. 01:55:43.244 --> 01:55:52.630 Or like when Eric Levitt's got into lash very briefly on Twitter, he's like this is an interesting book, and then he just like never dealt with it again, but he did mention it in like a couple of tweets. 01:55:52.630 --> 01:55:57.009 So the main point about the center is that there's not very much engagement. 01:55:57.899 --> 01:56:23.645 And then finally there's the left, which is, you know, i chose to define very broadly, so it includes between super fricking hostile and then like me and Tut and like show in Vontain and I guess Sam Adler barrel, yeah, and Chris layman, chris layman And I might I actually might move if I was. 01:56:23.645 --> 01:56:30.908 if we're defining it super broadly, i'll move Kevin Mateson, because Kevin Mateson and Chris layman are like yeah. 01:56:30.908 --> 01:56:32.732 I basically were classmates. 01:56:33.239 --> 01:56:41.921 So I see, i see it kind of like the left when it engages with lash either, is usually playing defense kind of. 01:56:41.921 --> 01:56:55.407 And this is like Chris layman's whole thing, where it's like he knows lash, he wants to point out that lash is not a conservative or a reactionary And you know it's very defensive. 01:56:55.407 --> 01:56:58.188 It doesn't really go into a lot of the ambiguities. 01:56:58.188 --> 01:57:04.287 It doesn't go into why lash can be interpreted ambiguously And it doesn't go into him as an intellectual thinker. 01:57:04.287 --> 01:57:23.930 It goes into like what political projects he was associated with during his life And I thought like probably the best example of this is the recent Jacobin article from Christian Lorenzen which is like why do we keep coming back to Christopher lash? 01:57:23.930 --> 01:57:32.710 Certainly there's plenty in lash to raid, but his lasting appeal is due, i think, to a deeper quality in his writing which just like doesn't engage with the topic at all. 01:57:32.710 --> 01:57:41.979 And it's a very nice article, it's very well written, but it doesn't talk about anything enduring or lasting about lashes, intellectual thinking or his politics. 01:57:42.440 --> 01:57:45.347 Somebody asked me to have that guy on the show and I read that. 01:57:45.347 --> 01:57:59.069 I finally got somebody give me that article And when I read it I'm like I think I might and I don't mean this insultingly, because this person is

probably well educated, needs very, he's a very good writer, But I'm like, what would I interview him about? 01:57:59.199 --> 01:58:16.125 I know more about the subject than he seems to know from that article He's doing in that article, a very different thing than you're doing, but I think it speaks to a broader conception of what to do with lash from the left, like, oh, he's part of our project. 01:58:16.125 --> 01:58:18.765 Why, i don't know, but his writing is very nice. 01:58:18.765 --> 01:58:36.730 Like you know, there's not a deep engagement And the only people I talked about who have deep engagement are you and Todd, basically, and Lane when he was going over it with you on pop the left. 01:58:36.730 --> 01:58:39.265 And this is just in public published works. 01:58:39.987 --> 01:58:57.865 Right, i mean Lane did one piece where he picked up on Trin only having, during his divorce And you know, started speculating about gender essentialism and got all mad that Lacanians, because they don't take Freud's gender stuff like literally. 01:58:57.865 --> 01:59:02.583 But which lash does? 01:59:02.583 --> 01:59:03.025 That's Tuts. 01:59:03.025 --> 01:59:08.666 You know, psychological complaint is like that. 01:59:08.666 --> 01:59:37.534 The symbolization of psychoanalytic thought is often quite well understood by lash, but that he reads like mother, father and all that like like, in a way, a lot of the American and British psychoanalysts did, but he reads it literally And it's which, for all that, i don't love Lacan, lacanians don't. 01:59:37.534 --> 01:59:40.324 Well, they read that all symbolically. 01:59:40.324 --> 01:59:46.324 So it's, it's. 01:59:46.324 --> 01:59:52.885 It's an interesting thing, i will say this project has gotten me between. 01:59:52.885 --> 02:00:01.009 Between this and Todd, i've actually read a couple of people who were roughly associated with lash. 02:00:01.009 --> 02:00:11.587 Not Jackabee, the client of public man, what's his name? 02:00:11.587 --> 02:00:14.067 He also wrote on public intellectuals. 02:00:14.067 --> 02:00:22.860 Oh he, because there's the, there's the jet, it's a Russell. 02:00:22.880 --> 02:00:29.431 McCoby book on public intellectuals, but there's another one, a Richard Senate. 02:00:29.431 --> 02:00:42.822 Yeah, i've read more Richard Senate now, and I've read a lot more Phil reef because I'm now realizing that like I should also write an essay about how Susan Sontag and Lash are mirrors of each other. 02:00:42.822 --> 02:00:49.074 but the feel reef is actually as explainable, as important. 02:00:49.074 --> 02:00:54.862 to lash a psychoanalytic thinking is brown probably It was a touch says more, so I'm not sure. 02:00:55.841 --> 02:00:57.366 Like what I should have learned stuff. 02:00:57.366 --> 02:00:59.545 His late stuff is all reef. 02:01:00.106 --> 02:01:03.685 Okay, um, because what I find it interesting. 02:01:03.685 --> 02:01:14.728 Well, that makes sense, because reef is like a Freudian sociologist as opposed to a Freudian psychologist, like which has one big examination of reef. 02:01:14.869 --> 02:01:33.014 in revolt, The elites right, but it seems to inform like a lot of like, because, digging into reef, i'm now like, oh, i'm getting where some of these classifications and minimal self and cultural narcissism actually came from, because for a while I was like where the hell is? 02:01:33.014 --> 02:01:34.904 this is not coming from terror management theory. 02:01:34.904 --> 02:01:48.452 This is, this is not just him having a pissing match with the Frankfurt school, like what is actually going on here, and fill reef, particularly Freud. 02:01:48.452 --> 02:01:54.509 the mind of a moralist is actually helpful in figuring that out. 02:01:54.509 --> 02:01:58.519 Um, so I'm enjoying this journey. 02:01:58.519 --> 02:02:03.250 I also had to read a whole lot of Randolph board, which I never knew I was going to do. 02:02:04.099 --> 02:02:17.911 Yeah, i know He's one of the Bohemian left intellectuals that he really respects, which I think people when people read new radicalism they miss that he does respect a Randolph born. 02:02:17.911 --> 02:02:19.805 He does respect Jane Adams. 02:02:19.805 --> 02:02:22.106 He does not seem to respect John Dewey. 02:02:23.121 --> 02:02:42.706 Um, in fact, the more you go through that book the less he seems to respect people Like yeah, his, his favorite chapter is the chapter on the war in unanalyzable feeling, where he just like complains about all of the people who he just talked about in the American liberals and the Russian revolution. 02:02:43.046 --> 02:02:43.286 Yeah. 02:02:44.179 --> 02:02:45.503 Um yeah, which which haven't. 02:02:45.503 --> 02:02:58.945 when I read the American Rivals and the Russian Revolution I was like, oh, this is where he writes about all this shit, Like, like, and you know there's whole chapters of, basically there's two chapters that I could have just entitled in that book. 02:02:58.945 --> 02:03:21.301 Why do we sucks Like although I will also say in kind of defensive, dewey, he actually doesn't deal with Dewey's frostiest adjacent period or his friendliness to Marxism in the nation or any of that Like, um. 02:03:21.301 --> 02:03:28.865 so it's selective And I'm just going to. 02:03:28.865 --> 02:03:40.324 I know that lash, when he's running about education, it's very old man, yells at cloudsy, but that's the part in his work throughout his life where I'd never disagree with him. 02:03:42.103 --> 02:03:44.087 Like you, you, education day sucks. 02:03:45.460 --> 02:03:48.527 Yeah, it's the perspective of the teacher. 02:03:48.527 --> 02:03:55.643 Right, yeah, and it's all Dewey's fault, um, which is kind of I hate to say it Kind of like. 02:03:55.643 --> 02:04:05.324 Actually, another thing about me when I moved from being a conservative to being a Marxist, which was a four or five year process, uh, when I kind of broke with conservatism but was lost. 02:04:05.324

--> 02:04:15.875 But the one thing I never dropped was a hatred of John Dewey, I think, maybe like that part of lashes lash book, just like we just really hate John Dewey. 02:04:15.875 --> 02:04:20.831 Like whenever, whenever Lash is writing about John Dewey, i'm like, yeah, fuck that guy. 02:04:20.831 --> 02:04:30.551 Like, and he's such a, if you're an education and you hate John Dewey, you are a weirdo. 02:04:30.551 --> 02:04:31.554 Why? 02:04:31.554 --> 02:04:39.563 Why, because, like, progressive constructivism is the default pedagogy. 02:04:39.563 --> 02:04:45.114 But anyway, that's for the other day. 02:04:45.114 --> 02:04:47.032 Thank you so much for coming on, elijah. 02:04:47.032 --> 02:04:58.871 We're gonna have you back on in three or four weeks, maybe when you get your mind back, because you did just finish this thesis And it is late there in Yonkers. 02:04:58.871 --> 02:05:01.090 Oh, didn't mean to. 02:05:01.924 --> 02:05:03.831 Sorry, yeah, it is late here. 02:05:03.831 --> 02:05:07.829 My AirPods just completely ran out of battery so I didn't hear anything. 02:05:07.829 --> 02:05:13.052 But anyway, thank you very much for having me on your show, because I assume you just did like a closing thing. 02:05:14.027 --> 02:05:37.154 Yeah, i just closed out and thanked you, but the other thing I said is we're gonna have you back on to talk about a particular article that somehow manages to butcher John Updike, a writer that I've write it and defended, which I know everyone's gonna go from calling me the white Sean King lookalike to like that dude really is white. 02:05:37.154 --> 02:05:54.451 He likes John Updike And Lash because one of the worst readings of both people somehow that I think I've read in a long time and we're releasing for patrons. 02:05:54.451 --> 02:06:22.835 And then maybe over the summer, when you've had some break and you finish up your thesis, we can actually go back and talk about specifically the book of Lash that almost nobody reads American Levels and the Russian Revolution, because I think that book is so important actually Yeah, I can do it anytime after February 15th, because I told myself I'd give myself, other than this podcast, a month off of Lash Thinking. 02:06:23.645 --> 02:06:24.529 I'm gonna go back to it. 02:06:25.064 --> 02:06:42.310 I find that when I do podcast after I've done research for the Lash book for a lot that I just like start sounding like I hate him, like I start breaking down every arm commit he makes and mock him unfairly and I'm like I don't even mean this. 02:06:42.310 --> 02:06:45.332 I'm just tired of fucking reading this shit. 02:06:46.054 --> 02:06:48.773 It's exactly that It's draining. 02:06:48.773 --> 02:06:56.730 It gets you really tired because it's just engaging with all the downfalls in American history, basically. 02:06:56.730 --> 02:07:07.530 But anyway, thank you very much for having me on, and I'm excited to come back soon to talk about how bad the Lash and Updike article is, and then something else later. 02:07:08.005 --> 02:07:15.131 I normally talk about how first things is a Christian magazine that does kind of have intellectual standards, but that one is so bad I can't read it. 02:07:15.152 --> 02:07:25.070 You have to read the whole thing, like the whole thing is so great because half of the articles are like the worst articles I've ever read. 02:07:25.070 --> 02:07:35.547 And this was literally I was reading this the day before I handed in my final draft of my thesis, So I was feverishly changing my conclusion to be like this is terrible, this is awful. 02:07:35.547 --> 02:07:47.791 And then a couple of the articles are just like this is you know, he was a very nice guy and so it's just like butchering his intellectual history, or like he was such a sweet fellow. 02:07:48.404 --> 02:07:57.953 So to think of that, to be fair to Lash, that is one thing that everybody, right and left, says about him is like he was a really really kind person. 02:07:59.024 --> 02:08:04.471 That's one reason I can like live with him in my head for so long, because I don't think he's like a mean guy. 02:08:04.993 --> 02:08:21.213 Yeah, don't go on a Marx quest, my friend, because Ingalls well, ingalls is kind of a bad person to me at times, but by our morals gainers but also really charitable and kind in others. 02:08:21.213 --> 02:08:29.087 But Marx, for his brilliance and he is brilliant he's an asshole. 02:08:29.087 --> 02:08:54.268 I find like whenever I'm reading Marx, i just like go on Twitter and I'm like declaring war on everybody and calling everybody Lesallians and like I'm like breaking out anachronistic insults about political tendencies that no one's thought about for 150 years, just like because it gets in my head and I'm just like God, you're all Lesallians, i hate you all. 02:08:56.447 --> 02:09:00.393 You should start doing that more formally, just calling people in the comment section Lesallians. 02:09:00.664 --> 02:09:09.912 Are you seeing me that I'm Twitter, like you're your Sally and your mom's a Lesallian and your dad's a prudunist and you're probably a precutinist yourself. 02:09:09.912 --> 02:09:13.572 How can you be a Lesallian and a precutinist? 02:09:13.572 --> 02:09:14.106 I don't know. 02:09:14.106 --> 02:09:14.831 it depends on your mood. 02:09:14.831 --> 02:09:16.250 Those are opposite deviations. 02:09:16.250 --> 02:09:20.052 but whatever, you're a bad person and I hate you and you should die. 02:09:20.052 --> 02:09:40.588 Also, you're stupid And it's like because there's a whole lot of Marx's actual political biography is like he said terrible shit about this person but then when this person died, he cried and showed up at his funeral and I was like, yeah, yeah, marx, you're one of those guys. 02:09:41.045 --> 02:09:42.893 Well, i do love all of like the stories. 02:09:42.893 --> 02:09:50.608 You're like he would just be listless for days on end and then he would work feverishly and then

he would spend the rest of his time playing with his kids. 02:09:50.608 --> 02:09:57.432 So he seems like also kind of a fun person, but definitely much more of a curmudgeon. 02:09:59.764 --> 02:10:04.134 I think being his daughters other than the abject poverty part of that was cool. 02:10:04.134 --> 02:10:18.212 And also until the breakdown of the first international, he does seem like he was a good person to work with actually when he was on. 02:10:18.212 --> 02:10:23.275 And yeah, marx complicated guy. 02:10:23.275 --> 02:10:54.914 But because I bring it up, because that's the person I read even more than Christopher Lash, is like reading every shred of Karl Marx I can get And then also reading the secondary literature and going like you guys are making this consistent when it isn't R, like yelling, i don't know how you got a PhD where you could say what the plain text of the text says doesn't say that Like just doesn't seem like what you get a PhD to do. 02:10:54.914 --> 02:10:57.990 And they're like well, that's a basic reading I'm like well, i think your reading's made up. 02:10:58.784 --> 02:10:59.747 Well, that's actually what you do. 02:10:59.747 --> 02:11:00.811 Get a PhD to do. 02:11:02.585 --> 02:11:11.149 I remember when somebody yelled at me for, like, well, you're just quoting Karl Smith, he's really fighting against the political juicing all the way back to Hobbes. 02:11:11.149 --> 02:11:13.091 And I'm like, yeah, so what? 02:11:13.091 --> 02:11:19.789 I'm just quoting what he says in the first chapter, because it's also famous, but also it's the fucking thing that defines his politics. 02:11:19.789 --> 02:11:20.949 So why don't we talk about that? 02:11:20.949 --> 02:11:26.932 Like, instead of all this weird esoteric, epistemological minutia that you want to like deal with? 02:11:27.005 --> 02:11:37.371 so you cannot deal with the fact that Karl Smith was a fucking fascist, yeah, and you'll find when you go to the first things thing, it's going to be the same way for Lash. 02:11:37.371 --> 02:11:39.108 For them, but with Gnosticism. 02:11:40.264 --> 02:11:41.349 Oh, no, no, no. 02:11:41.349 --> 02:11:44.368 Whenever first things brings up Gnosticism, it's bad Like-. 02:11:45.706 --> 02:11:47.369 There's like the intro essay is like. 02:11:47.369 --> 02:11:49.054 Lash was so brilliant. 02:11:49.054 --> 02:11:51.311 He had an essay on Gnosticism. 02:11:54.925 --> 02:11:57.012 Oh man, is that why they like? 02:11:57.012 --> 02:11:59.567 what's his face? 02:11:59.567 --> 02:12:06.357 the canon writer, um loved Ashbury. 02:12:06.357 --> 02:12:08.850 Can't remember his name now. 02:12:12.164 --> 02:12:13.449 Things cut out for a second sorry. 02:12:13.990 --> 02:12:15.546 No problem I was talking about. 02:12:15.546 --> 02:12:19.670 is that why they also like this guy in the Western Canada? 02:12:19.670 --> 02:12:20.813 Yeah, harold Bloom. 02:12:20.813 --> 02:12:23.353 They love Harold Bloom because he also Yeah, I think so, gnosticism. 02:12:23.984 --> 02:12:27.389 Yeah, they're just very, they're like Gnosticism is so dangerous. 02:12:31.324 --> 02:12:41.117 Oh man, i love it when you have people trying to apply like 15th century heresology to like modern politics. 02:12:41.117 --> 02:12:44.411 Yeah, they're like this is the G that amongst what Lash was trying to do. 02:12:44.965 --> 02:12:47.472 He was trying to deal with the repercussions of Gnosticism. 02:12:48.024 --> 02:12:49.290 That's Eric Von Kuhnlenten. 02:12:49.290 --> 02:12:54.569 That's like who really was trying to deal with it, like thought all of liberalism was really imitating the eschaton. 02:12:54.569 --> 02:13:02.338 But that's esoteric paleo conservatism. 02:13:02.338 --> 02:13:09.170 You have to be deep in it And actually by me admitting that, i know that I'm admitting how deep in I was. 02:13:09.510 --> 02:13:10.132 That's okay. 02:13:10.132 --> 02:13:11.547 That's okay, you're out now. 02:13:14.029 --> 02:13:29.670 Like we used to be like, well, you know, and actually I was secular at the time and I was like really struggling with how to deal with all these people really concerned about, like, about, like Gnostic takeovers, And I'm like eventually I was like, by Gnostic do you mean Jew? 02:13:29.670 --> 02:13:39.398 Like that doesn't make sense, Like, but anyway, have a good night, Elasha. 02:13:39.417 --> 02:13:40.519 All right, good night. 02:13:40.519 --> 02:13:42.139 Thank you so much for having me on Good night. 02:13:42.158 --> 02:13:42.663 Elasha and good night.