The Idea of "Extremism"

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein's new book about the dysfunctional state of American government, It's Even Worse Than It Looks, has been getting a lot of press lately.  I haven't read it yet, but I have been struck by a word in the book's subtitle -- "How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism" -- that, based on reviews and Mann and Ornstein's own summaries of their argument, plays an important role in their diagnosis.

As the subtitle suggests, "extremism" is very much the villain in Mann and Ornstein's story about American politics.  Mann and Ornstein use "extremism" to describe today's Republican Party.*  They write that the contemporary GOP is "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

Though I agree with much of Mann and Ornstein's argument about the failure of our constitutional system, the analytical category of "extremism" seems very problematic to me.




"Extremism" is an old hot-button word in American politics.  It is almost entirely a pejorative.  And it has two related, often blurred meanings: it can be a description of an ideology, but it can also be a description of political tactics.  Indeed, it very often implies both while fudging the distinction between the two.  I don't know how Mann and Ornstein finesse the relationship between ideology and political tactics in the book-length version of their argument. In their summaries of it, the two are treated as almost entirely the same thing. The authors use "extremism" explicitly to describe the GOP's ideology, but that ideology essentially entails a set of political tactics, which are, in a sense, the real focus of Mann and Ornstein's concern.

The word "extremism" is, of course, a spatial metaphor. Ideologically speaking a view is "extremist" based on its distance from some (purported) ideological center.  Tactically, a political behavior is "extremist" if it doesn't conform with some sense of moderation.  By the beginning of the Cold War, the notion that real political answers were to be found in the vital center had become a key component of U.S. liberalism.  Opponents to both the left and the right could be labeled "extremist," a term that suggested that the accused was dangerously close to the truly far right or far left, fascism or communism.

When critics labelled Barry Goldwater an extremist in 1964, the newly crowned GOP candidate, to the great surprise of the media, became one of the few modern U.S. political actors to embrace the term:

Goldwater's declaration about "extremism in the defense of liberty" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice" became the most famous line from his convention address.**  Clearly Goldwater was embracing the notion of extremism in tactics.  Indeed, the speech attempts to connect the idea of extremism to two things that are conventionally seen as core aspects of the dominant U.S. ideology: liberty and justice.  But despite its fame, Goldwater's attempt to domesticate the rhetoric of extremism failed miserably.  While many elements of Goldwater's campaign survived his spectacular defeat and became key elements of much more successful conservative campaigns in the future, the word "extremism" remained a pejorative in mainstream politics (though some activists on the right would occasionally lay claim to it in Goldwater fashion).  This year's presumptive Republican nominee accuses the President of "environmental extremism"; he never embraces the term as a description of himself.

The largely pejorative nature of "extremism" and the slippery relationship between its ideological and tactical referents are two reasons that I am suspicious of it as an analytic term.  But there's a more specific reason that I am bothered by Mann and Ornstein's usage of it. To the extent that "extremism" has an objective meaning, it is relational: an extremist view is far from the center, outside the mainstream.

Whatever else you can say about today's Republican Party, it is, for better or for worse, not outside of the mainstream.  It remains very competitive in national elections.  It won the 2010 midterms pretty resoundingly.  Though a slender majority of the public views the Republican Party unfavorably, a very substantial minority--forty percent--have a favorable view of it.  I have a hard time calling a view held by forty percent of the public far from the mainstream.  And, indeed, when it comes to policy positions on many major issues, the distance between the two parties is not nearly so great as the level of partisan hostility would suggest.

So "extremism" seems to me to be an imprecise and lazy way to describe the problem about which Mann and Ornstein are writing (a problem the existence of which I absolutely acknowledge). Not only does it not accurately describe the relationship of the current Republican Party to the current mainstream of American politics, but it also at least implicitly rests on the notion that the answers to our political problems can always be found in the political center.  Without in any way embracing the substance of Barry Goldwater's political vision, I would have to agree with him that extremism is not always a political vice (though I'd like to think that I'd have the good sense not to say as much on the stump).
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* One of the authors' main points is that we need to move beyond the journalistic tendency to want to present the two major parties as essentially similar, mirror images of each other.   Although as I note above I have some problems with the way they characterize the Republican Party, I am entirely in sympathy with the view that the conventional desire to see the two parties as similar to each other is deeply wrongheaded and interferes with understanding American politics.

** They are said to have been penned by Harry Jaffa, one of Leo Strauss's first students and a consultant to the Goldwater campaign, though they certainly do not represent a particularly Straussian sentiment.

From Rome with Love

[Post #2 from Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. -TL]

As Woody Allen's new movie, "To Rome with Love," opens here only in dubbed form and to mixed reviews, I am happy many Americans will see new Rome footage. Since I have a strong preference for a synchronization of lips and words, I haven't yet seen the movie. But the idea of seeing Woody Allen mouthing one set of words while hearing a masculine Italian voice providing another may prove a set piece of ventriloquistic humor impossible to resist. I just caught a few minutes of "Cheaper by the Dozen" on Italian t.v. and Steve Martin's interior monologue, funny enough in English no doubt, reached the level of true hilarity. The thought that this quintessentially American actor, playing a bumbling and quintessentially American father on a quintessentially American family vacation, turns to Italian when thinking to himself is so far-fetched that it makes me laugh even now.

That Woody Allen's new flick has a role for Rome is exciting to me because, as farfetched as it still seems three months into my stay, with only six weeks remaining, I am actually here in Rome. Thus, the film's locations are sure to include some of my current stomping grounds. As Fulbright Lecturer in American Intellectual History at the University of Rome III (Roma Tre), Rome is miraculously my home away from home for the semester. Like the invitation to join the USIH blogging community, this Fulbright is a great surprise and honor. Nothing in my past ever seemed to indicate to me I would one day be here (no path I was on ever seemed destined to lead to Rome, that is, unless you meant Rome, New York). Now I am walking on cobblestones well trodden upon, not only by vast numbers of Romans over the ages, and visitors from all over the globe with varying motives and degrees of welcome, but more recently, by our distinguished colleagues and friends, mainstays of USIH and all things intellectual in this country, Casey Blake and Wilfred McClay. The names of other previous holders of this teaching and research fellowship might also be familiar to intellectual history aficionados: Alex Bloom, author of Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, for one, whom it was my joy to meet here this March.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think we are not paying enough attention to Italy. Anyone at all moved by its rich heritage and contribution would say the same. But I am not talking here solely about the "we" of my fellow countrymen and women in general. For the tourists among them, at least, Italy is in the forefront of their minds, a charm many hope to add to their little bracelets, along with the other wonders of the world. (For a little more on the littleness of some touristic tendencies, see my Longing For The Real post "Tourism or Narcissism?") And Americans deeply interested in everything from art and archeology to cuisine and classical antiquity have always had their attention riveted on Italy.

Here, in my first regular Sunday installment on the USIH blog, I am thinking instead of how little attention many of us, scholars of American history, have been paying of late to Italian things or, for that matter, German--and the list goes on. Within the discipline of history, as we are well aware, the post-1960s period saw fields such as Diplomatic History and Intellectual History eclipsed by the New Social History and specializations such as African American History and Women's History. American and European history increasingly found themselves sharing shrinking resources with the (misleadingly) so-called non-Western fields, sometimes for reasons that were more political than intellectual. At the same time, the Humanities have been eclipsed by an invidious occupationalism whereby many view liberal study and utilitarian programs of professional certification as mutually exclusive. As a result the purposes of the University itself have been altered almost beyond recognition.

All of this, on top of our already considerable, even legendary self-centeredness, forms quite a dead-weight.

But to understand causes for historical developments is not the same as accepting the results. This is the genius of innovations like USIH and other like-spirited efforts. Remarkably, they have risen at precisely a time of the utmost precarity for our field and all of the related fields and institutions that are ordinarily its vital supports. (For two excellent meditations on precarity in our profession and beyond, see the posts by my fellow Longing For The Real bloggers, my doctoral student colleagues Erik Hmiel (also my advisee at Syracuse University) and the University of Rochester's Michael Fisher. (Pace Michael, my thanks go to Erik for summoning the word, which far better than the bland solidity of precariousness captures the feeling of teetering on the brink of the abyss.) At a time when we cannot pretend there will be academic jobs in intellectual history to allow all of the deserving scholars in the field to make a living with their true talents, it is truly astounding, and heartening, that endeavors like this should emerge.

So why not go all the way? There is great work going on here too in American intellectual history, as in many other countries, and much never gets translated. We are missing out! "Foreign" films may be subtitled in English instead of dubbed, but works of scholarship are neither. Italians interested in this field are also no strangers to the precarity of an area of inquiry they hold dear. A student in one of my graduate seminars here, whose English is impressive but whose vocabulary does not have the free range of a native speaker's, surprised me during our last class by dubbing the situation facing the field of intellectual history here one precisely of...pracarity.

The most famous line of Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee" is surely "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Separating ourselves from traditions and current practices so entwined with our own is asking for the kind of inner emptiness she rendered so poignant and poignantly.

The song presents the predicament of freedom so central to the experience of being American, and of being human, for that matter. The tension between independence and the yearning for rootedness and lasting connection is embodied in this story of two people who experience true yet fleeting communion hitch-hiking one rainy night aboard an eighteen-wheeler, "window wipers slapping time," singing every song they knew. While this song is ostensibly all about not getting attached, not being tied down, it simultaneously lingers longingly and lovingly over specific people and places. Particular cities are mentioned (Baton Rouge, New Orleans) and we learn there is such a thing as home after all: "I let him slip away./He's looking for that home and I hope he finds it." The sweet languor of the song's opening gives way by the end to unbridled movement forward and the frantic cry of passion and loss. Early references to the blues foreshadow the painful cataclysm of the line, "I would trade all of my tomorrows for just one yesterday." With precarity like this in the best of times, who needs anything worse?

Precarity in personal and professional life can run hauntingly parallel for each of us at any time. We have surely chosen a vocation in which they not only intersect, but often become one inseparable line. Always there is the possibility of letting what is really important slip away. (Oops, I lost Bobby McGee. Oh, well.) But then again, we might prefer not to--when we can help it.

For the remainder of my Roman stay, I hope to put in words, if I can, some of what I have seen here in Italy that interests me and might be of interest to USIH readers. And I just might comment on an interior monologue or two of Woody Allen's. As we all know, he conducts them solely in Italian.

George Nash: Intellectual Autobiography

Dear Readers: What follows is an excerpt from George Nash's comments on an OAH Panel on conservative intellectuals. He graciously agreed to my request that these comments be published here.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin April 19, 2012

George H. Nash

One of the organizers of this panel has urged me to be autobiographical in my remarks, as a way, perhaps, of providing a context for our discussion, and so, for a few minutes, I will oblige. As most of you know, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 originated as a doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. What you probably do not know is that this was not the original subject of my dissertation. Casting about for a topic while living on a politically polarized university campus in 1969 and 1970, I became fascinated by the phenomenon of intellectuals in American politics and began to look for a “case study” to focus upon. For a time I considered writing a dissertation about the muckrakers or the Progressives. Moving closer toward the present, I examined leftwing student protest movements in the 1930s. Finally, after several months of searching, I selected my dissertation subject: a history of Americans for Democratic Action (the ADA).

Barely two months later, I abandoned this topic. I did so for reasons that seemed compelling to a lowly graduate student at the time. I discovered that another graduate student at another university was working on the very same subject and had a substantial head start. And I came to the conclusion from my preliminary research that the ADA—whatever one thought of its principles—was boring. Once it had defeated the “Progressive” liberals in the political civil war on the Left in 1947-48, it quickly settled down into utter predictability and ideological conformity. Its period of greatest historical importance had lasted little more than a year.

And so it came about that my dissertation adviser—himself at the time a liberal Democrat and onetime ADA member—suggested that I look at intellectuals on the other side of the political divide: the conservatives. In truth, the idea of writing about modern conservatism had occurred to me before my adviser, Donald Fleming, made his fateful recommendation, but two obstacles had deterred me up to that point. The first, which may strike you as quaint, was concern that the topic was not “historical” enough—that it was too close in time to the present to be examined in historical perspective. Would there, I also wondered, be enough archival material upon which to base such a study? The second hurdle was in a sense political: conservatism in the early 1970s was not chic among historians, and I knew this. During my undergraduate years at Amherst, one of my professors had dismissed Russell Kirk as a “broken record” and William F. Buckley Jr. as “fancy footwork.” I knew what prominent historians thought of what was frequently then labeled the “Radical Right.” Still, in 1970 I accepted my adviser’s counsel and quickly found, on the intellectual Right, a world in ferment that proved fascinating to explore.

The decision to write about an unfashionable topic, with contemporary ramifications, had an important effect on me, I now believe: it encouraged me to approach the subject as dispassionately as possible. I aspired to write a dissertation (and eventual book) that could be read with profit by people across the ideological spectrum, regardless of their opinion of the subject. In the near term (though I do not recall worrying about this unduly), it would be necessary to submit a dissertation that would pass muster with readers in my own department, none of whom, so far as I knew, was sympathetic to conservatism.

But there was more to my modus operandi than this. In his paper Professor Andrew Hartman quotes a passage from Gertrude Himmelfarb that resonates with me. “Where modernism tolerates relativism,” she says, “postmodernism celebrates it.” “Where modernism, aware of the obstacles in the way of objectivity, regards this as a challenge and makes strenuous efforts to attain as much objectivity and unbiased truth as possible, postmodernism takes the rejection of absolute truth as a deliverance from all truth and from the obligation to maintain any degree of objectivity.”

By this definition of terms, I think it fair to say that Professor [David] Hoeveler [chair of this panel] and I came into the profession at the tail end of the reign of modernism. Somewhere along the line I absorbed the conviction that the fundamental purpose of a historian must be the quest for truth about the past or (in the words of the historian John Lukacs) “the reduction of untruths” about the past. To be sure, we all have our limitations. We are all human and, as Mark Twain once remarked, “There is a little human nature in all of us.” Moreover, as historians we know that perspectives change, new methodologies appear, the world turns, new conditions arise, and new questions about the past become salient. Nevertheless, as Himmelfarb notes, the “modernist” response to these “obstacles in the way of objectivity” is to try to overcome them and reaffirm the ideal, even while knowing that we shall never totally succeed. Some of this impulse, I believe, guided my approach to my subject: I wanted and felt the need to be as nonpartisan about it as possible.

So I plunged in and thereby (without knowing it) set out on a road that has remained less traveled until recently. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had persisted with a dissertation on the ADA. The chances are that I would not be participating in this panel today.

I share these fragments of autobiography partly to emphasize the curious, contingent factors that can shape a career or a field of inquiry--and partly for another reason. Today historians and other scholars often speak about our “projects” and our research agendas. Perhaps this is a subtle reflection of the hold of postmodernism on the academic imagination: If truth is merely a construct derived from the interplay of power relationships, perhaps it must appear to some that whenever we write a book we must have some hidden, long-term purpose. In my own case, I have occasionally noticed in the literature what seem to be intimations that The Conservative Intellectual Movement in American Since 1945 was intended to establish the parameters for the field and to marginalize other approaches to the study of American conservatism. Why, for instance, did the book start with 1945? Why not 1933? Was I attempting thereby to “privilege” the Buckleyite New Right at the expense of the pre-World War II “Old Right”? And so on.

Perhaps the funniest hint that the book had some grandiose ambition was probably a case of a typographical error. In the 1980s someone in a bibliography mistakenly cited my book as The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1492!

Let me assure all present that I had no such grand design when I began. In 1970 I was a twenty-five-year-old graduate student anxious to do my best on a manageable subject that seemed worth studying and then, with my degree in hand, to enter Academia. If I had done so in the conventional manner, I have no idea what my second book would have been about.

The Baffler Round Table, Entry #4: John Summers' Reply

For hosting this roundtable, kind thanks to Tim Lacy and his fellow editors, and to Eric Brandom, Adam Parsons, and Keith Woodhouse for their able and observant summaries of the contents of this strange new publication, which is not a magazine, or a journal, or a trade paperback, but contains a little of each of these things.

As the occasional note of uncertainty and overreach in the respondents suggests, the essays in Baffler 19 are neither journalism nor scholarship, but criticism that borrows techniques and knowledge from both fields. It's not necessarily a respectable form of criticism, either, in the precincts of U.S. higher education where the three respondents are seeking their way. Since Mr. Brandom got to use the fancy word "constructivist" in his review, I'm going to call our "street corner" "interstitial." Take that, Brandom!


As for the complaints about this or that, give us a chance, will you? It's only the first issue. By late June, when Baffler 20 is due to be coughed out by the computers, we'll have marching orders issued to every history phd candidate in the country. You'd better subscribe soon!




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Editor's Note: Thanks to everyone for participating. This has been something of an experiment---i.e. getting intellectual historians to comment on both the present and something that's outside their historical comfort zones---but I hope it's been stimulating. Feel free to let us know your thoughts, on the round table and/or the experiment, below. - TL

New Contributor Introduction: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

[From Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, posted by TL] 

I was deeply moved by the invitation to join the USIH community and by the warm welcome by my soon to be fellow bloggers. The last line of the introduction from their introductory announcement, about seriousness and friendship, took my breath away: to hear my efforts summed up with this poetic coupling is the highest compliment I can imagine. It would have taken a lifetime of reflection for me to grasp so clearly what I am myself hoping and trying for. If we have these, it seems to me, we have everything. 

Years ago, when I first heard the word "blog," I must admit I was horrified. First there was the word, sounding the very opposite of that other, age-old, first word. And it didn't even have the fun of the pure anagram, which at least attempts giddy humor, juxtaposing the supposedly all-too-earthly canine with the divine. (If you are interested in a low growl against this stereotype, see my plug for "caninization" on our blog Longing For The Real.) Backwards, blog would only read golb, which instead has echoes of Woody Allen trying for a bank hold-up with his note, "I have a gub." Humor in this guise also has the inflection of mistakes and meaninglessness, though there is some pleasant irony, perhaps, in the proximity of golb to gold, which critics could go on to argue is its exact opposite. "Blog," to a language purist, sounded nearly profane, this latest Orwellian butchering of the English language. What has happened since then, to give the word such good connotations?

For me, USIH. And a handful of other fellow workers humbly claiming their rightful place through nothing but the intelligence, originality, and elegance of their written words in--as W.E.B. DuBois put it--"the kingdom of culture." How are they doing this, given our dire straits, with everything from a dearth of jobs and decline of the university's classical mission to today's wholesale devaluing of the written page? With courage, energy, and invention.

Yes, I have been following the Society ever since its founding long, long ago...ok, last year. That's not quite true. It wasn't born yesterday. It began with the annual conferences, and before that with the brilliant idea on the part of the courageous new scholars who decided to utter a cry in the wilderness to those of us with common interests. Just five years ago ours seemed an area of inquiry one had to engage in only in secrecy. It seemed destined for extinction. So when I heard about the conference, from one of my doctoral students at Syracuse University who delivered a paper in its inaugural year (Jonathan Wilson, whose recent USIH post gave us a detailed description of the public intellectual conference at Harvard), my interest was instant and intense. I have followed it with rapt attention ever since. More aptly, wrapped in it, enfolded, brought into a fold. 

My reasons? Hope and despair. As an inveterate idealist, my encounters with academe in the first decade and a half of teaching, had helped nudge me over the cliff into the long-feared abyss. One of those fortunate enough to secure a job at a major research university, and then to attain tenure and not one but two promotions, miraculously, I was filled with chagrin not just by the kinds of things I observed, but even more, by those I didn't see anywhere. With naïveté as my strong suit, I looked around for the intellectual community I assumed was the be-all and end-all of choosing the mind as a way of life. Visions of cafés and conversations danced in my head, essays and letters, seriousness and friendship. 

What I found instead, the particularities of my own despair and its sources, is a story of its own. Suffice it to say that I was shocked to the core at how distant from my dream--however misguided you might consider it--was from reality. In that dream, ideas really mattered. 

I became a Jacoby-ite (Jacobyn?). Less concerned with exactly who counted as one in the whole public intellectual debate later engendered by The Last Intellectuals, like others I was drawn by Russell Jacoby's clear laying-out of the historical developments that seemed to have irrevocably altered life in the late twentieth century. The decline of the milieu in which ideas were exchanged with emotional intensity, that "perfervid" atmosphere one of the four writers profiled in "Arguing the World" called it, seemed to be the story of my own professional despair. It explained a lot, if not everything. 

When I was invited to participate in an online forum on the state of American intellectual life by one of the stars now in the USIH constellation, Ray Haberski, my portrait was all shades of gray. I was surprised by the points of light George Cotkin saw, if that phrase can be used innocently and apolitically yet. The resulting chiaroscuro bemused and confused me at the time. I didn't recognize the shades of of hope. 

The great thing about idealists is that they are so smitten with the forms, they cannot escape even if they wanted to. A Houdini act gone awry, they cannot deliver themselves from the box they locked and asked the assistant to plunge recklessly into water. They haven't merely gone over to the deep end, they remain there despite many offers of rescue. As in Neil Young's "Helpless," "the chains are locked and tied across the door." Cynicism, what passes for sophistication today, is not an option. 

So, while it would be easier to lose oneself in the shadows, an idealist lives to be proven wrong. If despair can become elation, if struggle is tied to the only happiness we are to know, let no man tear them asunder. 

In the first discussions about the internet, and its possible enhancement or destruction of community, like many I imagined the worse. Tragedy is our human fate. But on the way, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs counseled, all of our tools and other creations are only as good--and as bad--as their uses. If the internet might threaten real community, or further a way of life in which it was already extinct, then the hayseed might say, in his complete simplicity and "field of dreams"-like faith, let's make it not. It seems the universal challenge, no matter what the materials, or the time or place, is to make our lives something we actually want to live, which includes, because we are social beings, making our commons a place we want to inhabit. Can we make a beautiful commons, not for more free range of disembodied surfaces but for the disciplines and stewardship of freeing inwardness, where the "feeling intellect," á la Philip Rieff, can reside? 

A new acquaintance, half British and half Italian, likes the saying "fa il vostro mondo" (make your own world). 

I joyfully cast my lot with those who, hope against hope, try to live in the world as it is as if it were the world they would like it to be. Only by doing so do these worlds come any closer together. 

Though, maybe we could just add something to the word blog to make it a tiny bit more elegant as a name for a whole genre of writing and conversation? Perhaps we could find a graphic ornament of some kind? Develop an original inflection all our own, a new sort of pronunciation on the page, like a secret written handshake? Accessorize it with an accent, taking a page from Kierkegaard? 

Bløgging, anyone?

The Baffler Round Table, Entry #3: Keith Woodhouse

[Editor's Note: This is entry number 3 of 4 total in our round table covering The Baffler, No. 19 (March 2012). Today's piece comes from Keith Woodhouse, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California. Monday's entry came from Eric Brandom, and Tuesday's from Adam Parsons. A response to all three will follow from John Summers, The Baffler's new editor-in-chief. - TL]

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Before Occupy Wall Street, before the WTO protests in Seattle, before No Logo and Adbusters, there was The Baffler, taking on a corporate ethos slowly insinuating itself into American popular culture. The magazine first appeared in 1988 to fill what its founders viewed as an empty space in cultural criticism on the Left, a space opened up by the retreat of academics further into their particular niches and schools of thought. It ran intermittently from 1988 to 2001, and then even less frequently (fewer than one issue a year) through 2007. There was a brief revival in 2010. Now The Baffler has returned with the institutional backing of the MIT Press. The first new issue is out and is numbered 19, suggesting continuity rather than a fresh start.

Reviewing a magazine is an odd practice because while all magazines strive for coherence within articles, far fewer attempt coherence between them. The Baffler is different, as the new editor-in-chief, John Summers, makes clear in his introduction to the issue. “Our mission” Summers writes, “is to debunk the dogmas that discourage the intuitions of experience from fully forming in a critical intelligence” (p.8). In the case of issue 19 that debunking is aimed generally toward technology, the high-tech industry, and what the geographer Richard Florida likes to call “the creative class.” The notion that the twenty-first century is a time of unprecedented and accelerating technological breakthroughs is, according to Summers, a bunch of crap. Placing all those supposed breakthroughs in historical perspective, he says, leads to the sneaking suspicion that the tech industry has succeeded “mainly at producing dazzling new ways to package and distribute consumer products…that have been kicking around history for quite some time” (p.8). It is, it turns out, an era of low expectations, or of moderate expectations cheaply satisfied.

The centerpiece of the issue – the longest article, and the inspiration for the cover art – is David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” Graeber starts with a simple question: Why haven’t we gotten all the cool stuff promised to us by mid-to-late-twentieth-century depictions of the future, stuff like invisible force fields, hoverboards, interplanetary travel, and flying cars? He offers a rich and complicated answer, reaching back decades and involving a constellation of influences.

Graeber starts with a central irony: despite the serious claims of many 1960s intellectuals that fully mechanized factories would liberate human beings from menial work, it was not technology but outsourcing that freed many Europeans and North Americans from the assembly line. By the 1980s consumer products were increasingly made not at home in high-tech factories by robots but rather abroad in low-tech factories by displaced rural workers. If Marx was right that profits can be extracted only from human labor, Graeber notes, then there are powerful incentives in place to avoid at all costs the 1960s fantasy of automated production.

Market imperatives mixed with political ones determined the nature of technological innovation in the United States. The moonshot was probably largely responsible for unreasonable expectations about commercial space travel and vacationing on Mars, and for Graeber it was little more than a public relations effort to prove that capitalism could out-innovate communism. Once the United States had established its mastery of outer space, it was free to funnel the vast majority of its technological development funding into military research to insure its mastery of the planet’s surface as well. The story that the big-government scientific projects of the 1960s gave way to the entrepreneurs-in-a-garage breakthroughs of the 1980s, Graeber explains, is inaccurate. The government continued to spend many of the nation’s research dollars, but in an effort to create military and surveillance hardware that could project American power and undermine working-class politics. Government research bore our missiles aloft but left drivers on the ground.    

Still, as long as research is being done, for whatever reason, shouldn’t there be a slow parade of inventions and discoveries? Yes, probably, Graeber says, but the problem is that we have shifted from “poetic technologies” to “bureaucratic technologies”; instead of thinking freely in order to create whatever people dream about, researchers think within the confines of what can be easily proven to work and defended from criticism, and that’s only when they are not buried by paperwork. This hyper-bureaucratic state of affairs is a consequence of partnerships between government, academia, and private business, partnerships suffused with corporate thought. It is a mistake to assume, Graeber suggests, that bureaucratic inefficiency is a product of government; it is equally a product of market-based business practices that eschew free-range, curiosity-driven work in favor of immediate applicability.

On this point, Will Boisvert agrees fully with Graeber. His contribution, “Future Schlock: Creating the Crap of Tomorrow at the MIT Media Lab,” is a sharp case-study in bureaucratic technologies. The much-ballyhooed MIT Media Lab is supposed to be an incubator for innovations in consumer products, at least according to its many journalistic boosters. According to Boisvert it is in fact a junkyard of trivial and ephemeral doodads. A toothpaste that signals the temperature and weather through its taste. An alarm clock that runs away from its perch in order to force its owner out of bed. A remote-controlled teddy bear. Interactive wallpaper. Guitar Hero.

The real innovation, Boisvert tells us, is the lab’s business structure. Corporations fund the lab but cannot direct its work, and receive only non-exclusive rights to whatever eureka moments occur. That way the lab at least seems independent while it accepts private cash, although companies can fund individual graduate students, can use faculty members as “consultants,” and can place their own people on research teams. Corporations have funded specific university research for decades. But the result of the Media Lab’s generalized corporate funding is an even greater drive to demonstrate the marketability of the lab’s work, if only to build a track record. And the Media Lab is not an anomaly; similar institutions exist at several universities, including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Southern California.

Graeber and Boisvert both look at the contemporary technological landscape and see a desert. It’s a desert filled with gizmos, but a desert nonetheless since so many of those gizmos are little more than distractions or novelties. Graeber has an explanation for this: defenders of capitalism are trapped between two competing impulses. On the one hand, they want to suppress the idea of any sort of liberatory technology (or, really, just differenttechnology) that could re-order the economic hierarchy, and so they want to limit the notion of technological possibility. On the other hand, they want to reinforce the belief that capitalism brings technological innovation, and so they want to encourage the understanding that innovation is happening all the time. The tricky balance between these impulses is to stir up excitement around minor products with negligible features, like phones that play video games and televisions that play two channels at once.

But despite their disdain for just about everything sold by the average electronics retailer, Graeber and Boisvert are not Luddites, and neither is The Baffler. The magazine is not criticizing technology but the ideas and systems behind the technology we find today. There is even a longing for a more heroic technology that murmurs in the background of issue 19. Graeber laments the decline of poetic technologies with ambition and substance. Capitalism cannot hold them back forever, he says. “Breakthroughs will happen; inconvenient discoveries cannot be permanently suppressed” (p.84). New, important technologies will arise despite the fact that “The greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed has spent the last decades telling its citizens they can no longer contemplate fantastic collective enterprises, even if – as the environmental crisis demands – the fate of the earth depends on it” (p.82).

The idea of massive technological enterprises as solutions to environmental crisis was once anathema to environmentalists, but the scale of global warming is so great that environmentalists may become the greatest advocates of large-scale technological change. They might, as Boisvert does, think nostalgically of a time when technology was big and bold and beneficial. “Back then,” he remembers, “we did not expect machines to be us; they were bigger and stronger and faster than us, and we revered them as they remade the world in ways we had never imagined” (p.98). Given the right motives, that remaking could be for the common good.

Or, maybe, environmentalists would agree more with G. Beato, who writes about Synthetic, L.L.C., the maker of Hipstamatic, in “Disposable Hip.” Beato likes Synthetic not only because the company is the rare tech-firm that makes a profit by selling its product rather than charming venture capitalists, but because of its newest invention, Hipstamatic D-Series. While the original Hipstamatic app imitated the pictures taken by Kodak Instamatic cameras, the D-Series will imitate the entire experience, by including only twenty-four exposures in a “camera” and preventing the camera’s users (the cameras can be shared online) from actually viewing the pictures until the roll is done. Rather than offering consumers unlimited use and total convenience, Hipstamatic D-Series will sell them the idea of limits. “What Hipstamatic D-Series makes clear is that scarcity can once again be ours,” Beato writes (p.110). It is a technology that makes a virtue of less rather than more.

One of the few articles in issue 19 of The Baffler that reads as thoroughly critical of technological fetishism of any kind is Robert S. Eshelman’s “Revolt of the Gadgets.” Eshelman takes on the popular narrative that the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests were victories for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and cell phones. That sort of lazy, class-unconscious reporting, he says, robs the people who were doing the protesting of agency and simplifies or ignores the economic and social issues behind the protests. No doubt he’s right. But while Eshelman is appropriately upset with all the attention paid to websites and telephones during the protests, I imagine he would be willing to admit that technology can play an important supporting role, at least, in social uprisings.

Eshelman might agree, in other words, with Graeber and Boisvert and Beato that the problem is less technology itself than its production and reception. He might even agree with Kim Stanley Robinson, by far the most techno-optimistic of The Baffler’s contributors. In an excerpt from his novel 2312 Robinson describes a future in which the solar system is colonized with “ terrariums” that replicate Earth’s basic environmental conditions and allow people to live on other planets. In Robinson’s imagining, colonists leave behind them not only Earth but the planet’s capitalist economy as well. The rest of the solar system becomes an opportunity to set up a non-market economy, regulated by a single computer program run on a quantum computer that determines precisely how much should be produced and where it should be distributed. A revolution on Mars helps establish the new economy system-wide, and capitalism retreats into a largely unregulated “marginal economy” that exists mainly for recreational purposes. This is as heroic and as poetic as technology gets.

The Baffler #19 is a magazine critical of the technology industry but hopeful for technology. It is also a magazine concerned with the technological present and future but oriented primarily toward the past. Despite the last line of John Summers’s introduction – “We have seen the future, and it doesn’t work” – The Baffler looks mostly over its shoulder. Some articles, like Graeber’s and Boisvert’s, are about the present but look wistfully back to a more hopeful technological era, to what Boisvert calls the “heroic Machine Age,” when flying cars were still just over the horizon. Other articles are more explicitly about recent or not-so-recent history. Rick Perlstein considers the rise of Ronald Reagan and concludes that his success was less a matter of social and economic policies than of his unrelenting optimism. Chris Lehmann reviews the early-twentieth-century work of novelist Ernest Poole, and finds that the current recession and Occupy Wall Street’s response echo Poole’s own proletarian stories. Jim Newell looks to his own past in a funny remembrance of his experience parroting monetary theory in front of Ben Bernanke in the final round of the Fed Challenge – a sort of Model U.N. for economics geeks – several years before Bernanke’s own, real-world Fed challenge.

A historical sensibility frames the whole issue. Early on there is an excerpt from a memo written by the economist James Galbraith in the summer of 2008 and sent to the Obama campaign, warning of the potential economic calamity to come. The memo went unanswered. Near the end of the issue is an excerpt from an article by James Agee depicting the lives of Alabama tenant farmers during the Great Depression – the article that would eventually become the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – sent to Fortune Magazine in 1936. The article went unprinted. The inclusion of Agee’s piece not only gestures toward the past and another example of boom-and-bust capitalism, but also portrays a much more technologically innocent – or impoverished - time. After reading about websites and iphone apps and consumer gadgets, it is all the more moving to read Agee’s spare and matter-of-fact descriptions of horse-drawn wagons, roadside picnics, and picking and storing cotton. On the weekends the three farming families that Agee follows might go by wagon to Moundville, a city of 500, where once in a long while the local school would show a movie, something few members of these families had ever witnessed.

The historical orientation of The Baffler#19 may be in part the influence of John Summers, the new editor-in-chief, himself a historian. But I think it is something more than that, and points to one of the few shortcomings of an otherwise great issue. The Baffler hasn’t found its sweet spot: it doesn’t seem quite sure of what it is doing. It knows what is wrong: the “wreck of dogmas, bound in shallows and miseries,” in Summers’s words, that got us here, and to which we risk returning when the recovery comes. “The Market is understood not as a fallible mechanism…” Summers writes, “but as metaphysical truth incarnate” (p.6). That critique, though, is well established by now. Occupy Wall Street has furthered it, as have some labor unions. Left-leaning journals have said it repeatedly. Even the president has made vague suggestions in that direction, if only for rhetorical purposes.

The original run of The Baffler worried – rightly – that in a time of relative peace and relative prosperity the Left was easily seduced by corporate cool, and the appearance of a sleek, trouble-free post-industrial society. Because The Baffler started at a time of Left-Wing complacency it had an especially pointed critique. Corporate values had infiltrated liberal culture and The Baffler took it upon itself to point this out.

The new Baffler has a more difficult task. At a time when the Left is energized, or at least paying attention, and when everyone has a blog to stand on and shout from, it’s not clear what street corner The Baffler is laying claim to. It’s worth pointing out, for instance, the disappointment behind both Silicon Valley’s successes and the glamour of the creative class, and The Baffler does this as well as anyone. But fables of techno-utopia are not nearly as hegemonic as were the fantasies of post-industrial society in the 1990s. For every celebration of the latest dot-com there is another weary sigh that the internet, in the end, is just a massive waste of time.

All the looking back that The Baffler #19 does, then, is probably a matter of taking stock. “How did we get here?” is the question of the moment. Even Thomas Frank, one of the magazine’s founders, seems somewhat perplexed. In a piece on the unburstable bubble of Washington, D.C. consensus called “Too Smart To Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly,” Frank usefully runs down the several examples of common wisdom in the capital that proved totally wrong over the past decade and for which there was no fallout whatsoever. Surely, he suggests, this sort of fatuousness can’t go on much longer, before admitting that of course it can, and wondering “what kind of blunder it will take to shatter this city’s epic complacency, its dazzling confidence in its own stupidity” (p.16).

The next step for The Baffler is probably to get past the “How did we get here?” question to mapping the terrain of “here.” This is especially crucial at a time when liberals are wandering through a dark political woods with little sense of direction. It’s what the old Baffler did so well, and the new one undoubtedly will too. John Summers and the magazine’s staff clearly know what they’re doing – the first issue of the third time around is packed with good writing and packaged well. We’ve seen The Baffler’s future, and it works.

The Baffler Round Table, Entry #2: Adam Parsons

[Editor's Note: This is entry number 2 of 4 total in our round table covering The Baffler, No. 19 (March 2012). Today's piece comes from Adam Parsons, a Ph.D. candidate at Syracuse University. Yesterday's review was by Eric Brandom, and tomorrow's will be authored by Keith Woodhouse. A response to all three will follow from John Summers, The Baffler's new editor-in-chief. - TL]
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In his editorial introduction to the newest issue of the revived Baffler, John Summers (who will, I hope, forgive me for perhaps reading too deeply into his remarks) sounds like no one quite so much as Voltaire responding to the Lisbon earthquake. “Has the market god,” he thunders, “ever appeared so remote and mysterious as it does in the present crisis?” While the ostensible theme of the issue is technology, in many of the pieces, as in Summer’s introduction, the real question is theological: where, as Summers asks, is the god of the market? Why have its priests (who, with their “mind-cure” homiletics, read as decidedly mid-century Protestant clerics) failed so miserably to produce a brave new world with their endless ministrations?(p. 7)

Few of the authors wax so openly theological as does Summers; the exception is Barbara Ehrenreich, who examines the relationship between early human religiosity and new, mystical ideas about the curative power of animals. Nevertheless, many of the entries in this issue are devoted to attempts to answer the question of why, after all the assurances, after all the predictions, there has been no deus ex machina in the late capitalist world; of why our societies are left waiting on hilltops like so many bands of disappointed Millerites. None are more focused on this question than David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” Citing a “sense of disappointment” bred by the failure of a “generational promise” made to the children of the Cold War that technological wonderment lay in their future, he argues that even our most impressive inventions are merely Baudrillardian hyper-real simulations of objects and activities we had once dared to imagine ourselves making, as it were, flesh (p. 66).


Rather, Graeber argues, what technological advances have accrued have been either mundane or politically expedient, and often both. Information technologies have not created a “workless utopia,” but, on the contrary, have allowed for the large-scale precarization of a workforce which is at the same time driven to work longer hours and to relax the work/leisure boundary. Advances in more tangible fields like robotics - once central to the techno-utopian dream - have instead been turned to political ends. The most pressing political end, of course, is the preservation of neoliberalism, which he imagines future historians describing as a “form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones,” a system concerned with its own perpetuation rather than with its viability in any substantive sense (p. 75). However (and here we return to theodicy) it has become eminently clear that neoliberalism has failed not only to provide the kind of future which it has promised, but also to provide the basic goods - a rising middle class, intellectual and technological innovation, geopolitical stability - which it offers to justify its present stranglehold on power. To succeed this dead god, Graeber offers the promise of spontaneous creativity. This offer comes, of course, as no surprise to those familiar with his political activities.

A similar hope animates Kim Stanley Robinson’s excerpted novel 2312, which imagines a humanity who, having expanded to fill the solar system, have constructed for themselves an economy which is equal parts Kurzweil and Belloc. In this interplanetary Mondragon, humans occupy themselves with pastoral fantasy writ large, constructing entire private biomes in hollowed-out asteroids. Notably, Robinson alone in this issue offers a concrete and winsome view of the future. The other piece of speculative fiction, Chris N. Brown’s strange and compelling short story “Edge Lands,” imagines a more sinister possibility in which the creative impulse has canvases both larger and more alive, but is restricted to an elite class of self-referential and self-modifying socialite high artists.


Self-referentiality among the would-be cultural elite is not, however, a dystopian fantasy, suggests Maureen Tkacik. On the contrary, we can have all we want right now, in the form of so-called “Thought Leaders,” or, as Tkakic calls them, the “Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic” (p. 114). In particular, she is concerned with tracing the similarities between the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journal Encounter and the array of centrist think tanks within which Atlantic editor David Bradley seeks to position his publication. More interesting, however, is the compelling, if occasionally tacit, case she makes for the intellectual affinities between contemporary centrism and the “mind-cure faith” of Bradley’s childhood in Christian Science (119). Convinced of the societal irrelevance of productive labor, she argues, they are also prone to “level the playing field between reality and fiction” (p. 120).

A similar leveling, argues Will Boisvert, has occurred in that Vatican of technological research, the MIT Media Lab. Comically juxtaposing the lab’s inflated descriptions of new technologies (“seamless and pervasive connections between our physical environments and information resources”) with the mundane devices themselves (in this case, new ways to pick TV channels at a bar), Boisvert, like Graeber, bemoans the absence of real innovation. The devices produced by the lab are not only lacking in novelty, but also in any of the grandeur of a previous age of invention. These are not monuments of ingenuity but “feeble, feckless gadgets” who “simper and cringe at our dieting travails;” in large part, they are simply more efficient tools for the perpetuation of narcissism (p. 98). Boisvert’s indictment of the gadget is something of a shared theme. G. Beato, comparing the iPhone apps Hipstamatic and Instagram, complains of their ability to manufacture and market scarcity itself as a good: we can, their structures inform us, have unlimited information for free, but we must pay to limit that same information. The virtualization of goods which our gadgets enable now requires us to pay more for the absence of goods than for their presence. As always, capitalism provides us with the means to manage the crises it causes - but for a price.

Robert S. Eshelman’s attack on the cult of the gadget is even more pointed: talk of a Facebook revolution in Egypt is not only exaggerated, he says, but wrong, an attempt to put a technocratic mask on working-class agitation centered around trade unions. In his telling conclusion, Eshelman quotes from the memoir of Egyptian Internet activist Wael Ghonim, who is explicit about the inability of social media to connect with working-class Egyptians. According to Ghonim, the Egyptian revolution was “not an Internet revolution... In the past, revolutions happened, too” (p. 106).


If one were to judge only by the contents of the latest issue of The Baffler, in fact, one might think that revolutions and the conditions which cause them happened only in the past: either the temporal past of the earlier United States or the displaced past which Westerners so often imagine for the second and third worlds. The poor and the dispossessed are present everywhere here, and often compellingly so, but they are never our poor: never the poor of east Kentucky, or of suburban Paris, or of Washington Park in Chicago. Rather, along with old-fashioned Egyptian trade-unionists, the reader encounters the poor of Ernest Poole’s socialist novel The Harbor, of post-Communist Russia, of Depression-era Alabama, and of 1930s India. In themselves, these pieces are often impressive, but taken as part of the whole, they reveal a striking absence (or, perhaps, an absence of striking - but I digress).

Analysis of the present political situation is mostly limited to bemoaning failure. Jim Newell closes an otherwise excellent memoir of his time as a member of a championship-winning Fed Challenge team (a sport which is both nerdier and more strange than one might imagine) by moralizing about the damage a “single Randian ideologue” like Alan Greenspan can do (p. 35). Thomas Frank seems genuinely shocked that, in the years leading up to the crash, mainstream economists and pundits were so consistently wrong in ways so consistently beneficial to the wealthy. Even Rick Perlstein’s fantastic analysis of Reagan’s appeal is framed as a lamentation: in this case, for Americans' easy succumbing to the Gipper’s seductive moral imprimatur, which offered a way to escape the self-criticism which the aftermath of the Vietnam War was demanding of them.

The most serious attempt at a concrete prospectus is, to return to the metaphor of religion, atheistic. James K. Galbraith, writing in 2008, advises neither a recourse to the arcane machinations of the Federal Reserve nor the breeding of a better and more moral class of experts but, instead, a return to “collective action on the grand scale”(p. 27). This, he argues, necessarily entails the demilitarization of industrialized economies, both to allow the devotion of resources to the construction of infrastructure and to remove incentives for technological solutions which, like coal power plants, are militarily preferable but socially and environmentally disastrous.

Galbraith is so starkly different, in fact, that one is almost tempted to think that the entire issue is intentionally arranged to make Galbraith seem more attractive. However, even if that is not the case, the revived Baffler works remarkably well. The volume is skillfully edited and, even when it is absurd, not for a moment dull. Marked by a visual style that is almost nostalgically postmodern, it manages to create the same sense of disorientation which its contents so frequently criticize. Perhaps there is some irony here - after all, isn’t the freedom from endless and disorienting stimulation, a la Hipstamatic, precisely what G. Beato suggests we are paying for when we pay for curation?