Back on the Horse
As some readers may have noticed, I have barely posted for several months. As for what I've written, yes indeed I have a whole set of half-finished drafts, and even a few 98% finished essays that I’ve been holding back. Today I’m writing to to say something on the public record: I’ve resolved to get back on the horse!
The reasons for my pause have have been good, bad, and mixed. Part of it is simply sloth, and I apologize for that. There are some partial good excuses I won’t get into. As for “mixed,” at no point have I ever aspired to fight in a war of all against all for clicks, nor to create a "normal Substack type” blog (even without hustling for clicks) scheduled regularly whether or not I have anything worthwhile to add. I'm wary of wasting time, whether yours or mine, simply on hot takes or saying "me too." So I keep getting confused. What do I want to accomplish in this space? But I like organizing my thoughts this way and sometimes the results seem worth sharing and/or archiving. So, I keep deciding to muddle along and see what comes of it.
Quite a few of the pieces I've been half-finishing lately are about the mixed blessings of left-wing discourse on so-called Christian Nationalism, and/or the traumas of ICE invading my old home ground of Minneapolis and shooting protestors in cold blood, and/or something we learned in the last election: that Trump won because about half of the populace thought he was a lesser evil compared to left-liberals. Even though discontent with Trump seems to be rising, this latter problem shows little sign of going away. And most of these people aren’t insincere sleazy liars like Trump. How shall we understand their sense of priorities and/or their receptivity to his cons? Are there things to do within the power of the left that can change this perception and turn certain tides in our culture? What can we say that doesn’t make things worse in practice, as punditry about “Christian Nationalism” often does? I've also been following how emergent components of the Republican coalition are evolving in the Trump era, with special attention to how religion fits into this. On this front I might have certain advantages compared to your average Substack pundit based my research and teaching.
Related to the all-too-strong perception in swing states—such as Wisconsin where I just spent my summer—that MAGA is somehow less evil than "the left," I recently read this piece in Jacobin by Paul Heideman on the Democratic Socialists of America. (It’s a companion to Heideman’s helpful Rogue Elephant on the structural evolution of Republicans toward the shitshow they are today). He analyzes trade-offs among various paths that DSA could pursue from place to place: sometimes with plausible paths to power (as with the Sanders and Mamdani campaigns) but sometimes with strong outsider/minority sensibilities (as in Tennessee). In this context Heideman discusses what he calls “rhetorical maximalism” [slogans like “ABOLISH THE POLICE!”] which can be understood largely as performative and presupposing “political minimalism," but which also lead us back toward strategies in a war of all against all for attention. Often such performances include complacent virtue-signaling by educated people, which overlaps with currents in academia that I know well. And of course the right-wing media excels at trumpeting examples of this with maximally unflattering framing, with or without basic truth-telling.
Think for a minute about rhetorical maximalism on the right, such as from people profiled in Laura Field’s fine Furious Mind to which I will return. Think, for example, how certain MAGA religious folks framed Kamala Harris as a literal demon-worshipping witch who (on supposed Biblical authority) should be eaten by dogs.
Let’s have a show of hands. Did such attacks on Harris help persuade anyone reading here that she was a greater evil compared to Trump—despite the undoubted evil of her complicity in the Gaza genocide? No, it just pissed you off and deepened ruts that Naomi Klein diagnosed as “mirroring” in her superb Doppelgänger book. You probably felt outrageously misrepresented and disgusted when instructed that all Democrats are on board with her imagined depravity, and it might have fomented white-hot rage against “the right” (all of it?) as your own greater evil. Maybe your rage swamped more nuanced perspective and you treated this episode as paradigmatic behavior by Pentecostals, whom you wrongly assumed to be overwhelmingly white, or even as paradigmatic “Christianity” which you wrongly assumed to lean decisively toward MAGA.
My point is that some left-wing rhetorical maximalism, full of unnuanced hate directed at the right, functioned in similar way to rally MAGA. If so, it was the opposite of constructive persuasion, conducive to winning—at least in some major contexts. With all due respect for rallying troops, it could function more like rocket fuel for a MAGA narrative about whom to hate more or mistrust less.
I hope to circle back through some of these issues, among other matters, over the next few weeks. Probably this is the antithesis of a good strategy to hustle for clicks, but so it goes. Anyway, this is enough for today. Mainly I just wanted to acknowledge that I had gone missing, briefly reconnect, and mention a couple of teasers.
To kick off my “get back on the horse” resolution, I’m not solely posting this little essay today. I’ll also shortly click "post" on a poem that turned out pretty OK. It isn’t about heavy cultural-political issues, although I suppose they are in the background. Mainly it is just musing about memory, aging, and what we do with the time we have.
