This piece is damned good. Beautifully assembled narrative. I think you put your finger on our anomie quite well. What I wouldn't give to feel the bonds of physical community again, to owe and be owed and have both debts paid, fulfilling shared purpose.
This is an excellent piece, Leighton. It's ironic that the New Right gets so much traction in the US, which is, as you point out, a country that is not well suited to the solutions it offers because of our unique history. There's something fundamentally anti-nationalist for Americans to be looking to the models of Europe to build our conception of national identity.
Also, the left used to be concerned precisely with the question of what it means to be an American. James Baldwin's incredible essay "The Discovery of What it Means to be American" comes to mind.
A year ago it looked like this was exactly where the right was headed. Now the tech bros have really scrambled things. How do you square the nostalgia of Bronze Age Pervert with the transhumanism of Elon Musk? I'd love to hear your shot at it. Mars is now the frontier, and . . . um . . .
"To Richard Spencer and his ilk, racial solidarity was the most elemental form of human connection." His ideological "ilk" is the democratic party as they are 2 sides of the same coin. Richard Spencer is a nothingburger with 15,000 twitter followers and 25,000 followers on his personal account. He can rant to himself and his few fellow travelers all he wants but I'm going to state he will have zero impact on the rest of us outside his bubble, unlike the racist democratic party. As US citizens we not only share geography, but we also share being raised and educated to understand the historical significance of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Then there are the legal immigrants who choose to come here and live under those incredible documents. It's the dems who have been trashing the Constitution that binds us and working overtime to foment racial division. "We have turned to the old mythologies: ethnicity, heritage, historical ancestry." Other than the nothingburgers of the Spencer type, just who, on the right, is turning to ethnicity and historical ancestry? Our heritage is our founding documents and applies equally to Mayflower descendants and legal immigrants. There will always be sneetches here and there who obsess over skin pigment, cartilage shape, height, whatever. But they are the outliers, except for the democratic party where racism and misogyny have become their creed.
You are correct that what holds us together, if anything, is the constitution. The federal bureaucracy has emerged as the primary binding agent of citizens to the constitution that Leighton I think rightly acknowledges. As a result, we squabble over a Frankenstein creation of politics, agendas, budgets and opposing ideological convictions of right and wrong.
It has served the purpose of separating us from the god given rights and self empowerment that the constitution meant to codify as a means of leveling the playing field. The arc of that narrative has been net positive for those initially left behind (with certainty inequality persists). And it continues to be a beacon to eager people from all over the world who strive for the opportunity to write their own future.
Yet as a country we are sedentary and devoted followers of the spectacle and circus of the federal bureaucracy. We claim allegiance to parties or figure heads. In our increased stratification and isolation we have more security and yet have never been further from ourselves and our autonomy to live free and by our own will. That is ultimately what the appeal of MAGA or whatever we want to call it is. However it’s fraught with similar cultish tendencies as what the democrats put forth. It’s not an antidote. It’s another expression of the same malaise.
The arena of people cheering executive order after executive order was a tragic example. The perversion of executive orders has been long in the making and is firmly bipartisan. Seeing it play out with such high production value made me think we’d come full circle to worship of the king. That in the effort to grasp for what might save us we are reaching so far back as to become what we abandoned.
"Yet as a country we are sedentary and devoted followers of the spectacle and circus of the federal bureaucracy. We claim allegiance to parties or figure heads. In our increased stratification and isolation we have more security and yet have never been further from ourselves and our autonomy to live free and by our own will. That is ultimately what the appeal of MAGA or whatever we want to call it is. However it’s fraught with similar cultish tendencies as what the democrats put forth. It’s not an antidote. It’s another expression of the same malaise."
I think the problem with defining what an American is is that actors on the new right are very keen to define "American" as whatever exclusionary concept that predates the expansion/extension of the definition that was created during the Civil Rights era - it is often taken for a granted that mass movements like contemporary women's rights, American Indian, LGBT, Chicano/Latino, the modern environmental justice movement, and Americans with Disabilities, flow outward from the 1950s/1960s civil rights movement, and thus for the new right's project to succeed, it is necessary to return to the definitions of Americans that predate the mass mobilization of civil rights. That is the goal as described by some New Right figures; their admission that civil rights = DEI and the decision to issue an EO to repeal Johnson's executive order from the peak of the rights expansion era is instructive.
We can see your points about ethnicity and heritage in practice in places like Chicago, where many Polish neighborhoods fly the flag of Poland (but not the United States); in contrast, many homes flying the flags of Mexico or Puerto Rico are also flying the flag of the United States (to wit, one of my neighbors is flying a combined U.S./Mexico flag and the Gadsden flag). But in the everyday discourse of the new right, the former flag wavers are 'American,' and the latter are fraudulent usurpers. This can give us an insight into how they define 'American' - one primarily determined not by some cross-cultural patriotic unity but as one anchored in a civic project distinct from the views of a majority of Americans.
Similar situations exist in other countries. Nigeria has over 250 ethnic groups and over 500 spoken languages, but 60 percent of the population belongs to three ethnic groups. Nevertheless, what makes one 'Nigerian' is collectively defined as anchoring to one central ethos that allows various cultural and religious integrations into the national pantheon. The American New Right would not abide by such an arrangement.
A belief in the Constitution as a unifying document reads as a bit misguided; the document in its default form is exclusionary to the vast majority of Americans as they live today, and the significant provisions that grant expansiveness to the definition of American - the amendments extending rights and privileges to the formerly enslaved and their descendants, women, 'birthright citizenship,' and even the fundamental right to vote to nonproperty owning white males (the basis for all voting rights expansion) and the direct election of senators - was granted not by some benevolent "unity authority," but because of agitation and mass mobilization to demand that the definition of American met the definition of equalitarianism outlined in the narratives and myths of the American political and cultural project itself.
Another fine essay. I hope you are collecting these for a book? What honestly makes me very proud to be an American is we're nothing like all the other ethnic nation states. It's glorious to be a citizen of a nation founded on ideas, not ethnicities.
This is very good food for thought, but I myself tend to put most of the emphasis elsewhere. You mentioned the erosion of the nuclear family as a negative, but the nuclear family is inherently unstable and traumatizing. Its predecessor, the extended family, was not only the norm throughout human history, for good reason, but the American norm little more than 100 years ago, when the federal government decided it was too conducive to communistic thinking and living. Its efforts to undermine it for that reason succeeded, and we now have little to no social infrastructure with which to protect and nurture young people, especially as our school system has become ever more soulless and dehumanizing. (Consider this: not only does school sum human beings up with a number, but a number with a decimal in it!) Not only do the family and school no longer meet our needs as we grow up but school drugs its captives and labels them learning "disabled" for the crime of not being ready to read at age five or spend hours on end trapped indoors. All children suffer from these abuses but boys suffer the most, yet we never talk about it. These boys will grow up damaged and convinced they cannot read or be smart, and therefore at a profound loss for meaning in their lives. They're sitting ducks for all the crazy alternative substitutes for meaning on offer to them, but what they crave is simple. They crave respect (as do we all), empathy for their injuries, and a way to contribute and feel good about themselves. There's certainly overlap between my analysis and yours, as well as many others', but almost no one mentions the effects on young people of what is virtually the only universal American experience anymore: 13 years in industrial schooling. This is a grave mistake, and until we address it we will fail to fully understand what ails white men, and especially young men, in the United States. That said, I appreciate your willingness to call out the self-indulgence of the left. It's the kind of balanced approach we need much more of.
Great essay. Check out The Magna Carta Manifesto by historian Peter Linebaugh. He analyzes the Charter of the Forest, a part of the Magna Carta that people have written off as irrelevant. But what he shows the critical importance of traditional right to the commons and how privatization was an important and necessary prelude to breaking mutuality and paving the way for modern capitalism in Britain.
Linebaugh's "The London Hanged " is also important. He shows how capital punishment was used to break, what some historians call the "moral economy" based on a blend of the market economy and traditional understandings about what constituted property rights. As a politically homeless ex-Democrat, I look forward to your posts and podcast.
This piece is damned good. Beautifully assembled narrative. I think you put your finger on our anomie quite well. What I wouldn't give to feel the bonds of physical community again, to owe and be owed and have both debts paid, fulfilling shared purpose.
This is an excellent piece, Leighton. It's ironic that the New Right gets so much traction in the US, which is, as you point out, a country that is not well suited to the solutions it offers because of our unique history. There's something fundamentally anti-nationalist for Americans to be looking to the models of Europe to build our conception of national identity.
Also, the left used to be concerned precisely with the question of what it means to be an American. James Baldwin's incredible essay "The Discovery of What it Means to be American" comes to mind.
A year ago it looked like this was exactly where the right was headed. Now the tech bros have really scrambled things. How do you square the nostalgia of Bronze Age Pervert with the transhumanism of Elon Musk? I'd love to hear your shot at it. Mars is now the frontier, and . . . um . . .
"To Richard Spencer and his ilk, racial solidarity was the most elemental form of human connection." His ideological "ilk" is the democratic party as they are 2 sides of the same coin. Richard Spencer is a nothingburger with 15,000 twitter followers and 25,000 followers on his personal account. He can rant to himself and his few fellow travelers all he wants but I'm going to state he will have zero impact on the rest of us outside his bubble, unlike the racist democratic party. As US citizens we not only share geography, but we also share being raised and educated to understand the historical significance of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Then there are the legal immigrants who choose to come here and live under those incredible documents. It's the dems who have been trashing the Constitution that binds us and working overtime to foment racial division. "We have turned to the old mythologies: ethnicity, heritage, historical ancestry." Other than the nothingburgers of the Spencer type, just who, on the right, is turning to ethnicity and historical ancestry? Our heritage is our founding documents and applies equally to Mayflower descendants and legal immigrants. There will always be sneetches here and there who obsess over skin pigment, cartilage shape, height, whatever. But they are the outliers, except for the democratic party where racism and misogyny have become their creed.
You are correct that what holds us together, if anything, is the constitution. The federal bureaucracy has emerged as the primary binding agent of citizens to the constitution that Leighton I think rightly acknowledges. As a result, we squabble over a Frankenstein creation of politics, agendas, budgets and opposing ideological convictions of right and wrong.
It has served the purpose of separating us from the god given rights and self empowerment that the constitution meant to codify as a means of leveling the playing field. The arc of that narrative has been net positive for those initially left behind (with certainty inequality persists). And it continues to be a beacon to eager people from all over the world who strive for the opportunity to write their own future.
Yet as a country we are sedentary and devoted followers of the spectacle and circus of the federal bureaucracy. We claim allegiance to parties or figure heads. In our increased stratification and isolation we have more security and yet have never been further from ourselves and our autonomy to live free and by our own will. That is ultimately what the appeal of MAGA or whatever we want to call it is. However it’s fraught with similar cultish tendencies as what the democrats put forth. It’s not an antidote. It’s another expression of the same malaise.
The arena of people cheering executive order after executive order was a tragic example. The perversion of executive orders has been long in the making and is firmly bipartisan. Seeing it play out with such high production value made me think we’d come full circle to worship of the king. That in the effort to grasp for what might save us we are reaching so far back as to become what we abandoned.
"Yet as a country we are sedentary and devoted followers of the spectacle and circus of the federal bureaucracy. We claim allegiance to parties or figure heads. In our increased stratification and isolation we have more security and yet have never been further from ourselves and our autonomy to live free and by our own will. That is ultimately what the appeal of MAGA or whatever we want to call it is. However it’s fraught with similar cultish tendencies as what the democrats put forth. It’s not an antidote. It’s another expression of the same malaise."
Very well said.
Much obliged (as Bubbles would say).
I think the problem with defining what an American is is that actors on the new right are very keen to define "American" as whatever exclusionary concept that predates the expansion/extension of the definition that was created during the Civil Rights era - it is often taken for a granted that mass movements like contemporary women's rights, American Indian, LGBT, Chicano/Latino, the modern environmental justice movement, and Americans with Disabilities, flow outward from the 1950s/1960s civil rights movement, and thus for the new right's project to succeed, it is necessary to return to the definitions of Americans that predate the mass mobilization of civil rights. That is the goal as described by some New Right figures; their admission that civil rights = DEI and the decision to issue an EO to repeal Johnson's executive order from the peak of the rights expansion era is instructive.
We can see your points about ethnicity and heritage in practice in places like Chicago, where many Polish neighborhoods fly the flag of Poland (but not the United States); in contrast, many homes flying the flags of Mexico or Puerto Rico are also flying the flag of the United States (to wit, one of my neighbors is flying a combined U.S./Mexico flag and the Gadsden flag). But in the everyday discourse of the new right, the former flag wavers are 'American,' and the latter are fraudulent usurpers. This can give us an insight into how they define 'American' - one primarily determined not by some cross-cultural patriotic unity but as one anchored in a civic project distinct from the views of a majority of Americans.
Similar situations exist in other countries. Nigeria has over 250 ethnic groups and over 500 spoken languages, but 60 percent of the population belongs to three ethnic groups. Nevertheless, what makes one 'Nigerian' is collectively defined as anchoring to one central ethos that allows various cultural and religious integrations into the national pantheon. The American New Right would not abide by such an arrangement.
A belief in the Constitution as a unifying document reads as a bit misguided; the document in its default form is exclusionary to the vast majority of Americans as they live today, and the significant provisions that grant expansiveness to the definition of American - the amendments extending rights and privileges to the formerly enslaved and their descendants, women, 'birthright citizenship,' and even the fundamental right to vote to nonproperty owning white males (the basis for all voting rights expansion) and the direct election of senators - was granted not by some benevolent "unity authority," but because of agitation and mass mobilization to demand that the definition of American met the definition of equalitarianism outlined in the narratives and myths of the American political and cultural project itself.
This is the thinking and conversation we need. Thank you. Oh, to get beyond what divides us.
Another fine essay. I hope you are collecting these for a book? What honestly makes me very proud to be an American is we're nothing like all the other ethnic nation states. It's glorious to be a citizen of a nation founded on ideas, not ethnicities.
This is very good food for thought, but I myself tend to put most of the emphasis elsewhere. You mentioned the erosion of the nuclear family as a negative, but the nuclear family is inherently unstable and traumatizing. Its predecessor, the extended family, was not only the norm throughout human history, for good reason, but the American norm little more than 100 years ago, when the federal government decided it was too conducive to communistic thinking and living. Its efforts to undermine it for that reason succeeded, and we now have little to no social infrastructure with which to protect and nurture young people, especially as our school system has become ever more soulless and dehumanizing. (Consider this: not only does school sum human beings up with a number, but a number with a decimal in it!) Not only do the family and school no longer meet our needs as we grow up but school drugs its captives and labels them learning "disabled" for the crime of not being ready to read at age five or spend hours on end trapped indoors. All children suffer from these abuses but boys suffer the most, yet we never talk about it. These boys will grow up damaged and convinced they cannot read or be smart, and therefore at a profound loss for meaning in their lives. They're sitting ducks for all the crazy alternative substitutes for meaning on offer to them, but what they crave is simple. They crave respect (as do we all), empathy for their injuries, and a way to contribute and feel good about themselves. There's certainly overlap between my analysis and yours, as well as many others', but almost no one mentions the effects on young people of what is virtually the only universal American experience anymore: 13 years in industrial schooling. This is a grave mistake, and until we address it we will fail to fully understand what ails white men, and especially young men, in the United States. That said, I appreciate your willingness to call out the self-indulgence of the left. It's the kind of balanced approach we need much more of.
Great essay. Check out The Magna Carta Manifesto by historian Peter Linebaugh. He analyzes the Charter of the Forest, a part of the Magna Carta that people have written off as irrelevant. But what he shows the critical importance of traditional right to the commons and how privatization was an important and necessary prelude to breaking mutuality and paving the way for modern capitalism in Britain.
Sounds a bit like Karl Polanyi’s The Grear Transformation, one of the most eye-opening books I’ve ever read.
Linebaugh's "The London Hanged " is also important. He shows how capital punishment was used to break, what some historians call the "moral economy" based on a blend of the market economy and traditional understandings about what constituted property rights. As a politically homeless ex-Democrat, I look forward to your posts and podcast.