en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 11:22:35 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Friend1421234010 Mon, 28 Apr 2025 11:22:35 -0700 Review4344485849 Sun, 27 Apr 2025 14:22:28 -0700 /review/show/4344485849 Peter gave 4 stars to Under Fire (Paperback) by Henri Barbusse
bookshelves: 1910s, 1914-1945, 20th-century, broad-left, french-writers, novels, originally-in-french, srs-literature, wwi, war
]]> ReadStatus9359585818 Sun, 27 Apr 2025 14:22:19 -0700 /review/show/4292566037 Peter started reading The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
]]> ReadStatus9359584127 Sun, 27 Apr 2025 14:21:55 -0700 /review/show/4344485849 Peter finished reading Under Fire by Henri Barbusse
]]> Review7460749482 Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:33:23 -0700 /review/show/7460749482 Peter gave 5 stars to Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (Near Futures) by Quinn Slobodian
bookshelves: canadian-writers, history, global-history, intellectual-history, broad-left, conservatism, liberalism, neoliberalism, fascism, we-live-in-a-society, race, 21st-century, 2020s
I’ve been a fan of Slobodian’s work for a while, and he delivers another essential work here. This continues in the vein of his earlier monographs Globalists and Crack-Up Capitalism in historicizing the relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and the global right. I think Slobodian’s project is especially poignant for me, as I distinctly remember when it seemed that there was much more daylight between free market/libertarian ideology and white supremacy, war, and authoritarianism than there actually was. I was never sympathetic, but I thought maybe the ideology could stand on its own more than it has.

What Slobodian shows here is how, in the “End of History� era after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many free market zealots couldn’t rest easily on their laurels. Between the very real preexisting far-right commitments of many of the original neoliberals, the crises that the end of the Cold War left unresolved, and a need for a hook for further political action, a subsection of capitalist ideologues made a “new fusionism.� If post WWII American conservatism rested on a coalition of the religious, anti-government free-market proponents, and anticommunists (this was in their own telling- notice it doesn’t say “racists�), the new right-wing fusion would be between free market neoliberals and “paleos,� that is, racists, ethnonationalists, etc. Arguably, the most symbolic figure of the “new synthesis� is Murray Rothbard, the “anarcho-capitalist� ideologue. I say “arguably� because, at the end of the day, the neoliberal-paleocon synthesis, as I think Slobodian shows, advances more by the action of those who took some, but not all, of its premises, and agreed to fudge the rest to work towards the common goal of defeating anything progressive: Pat Buchanan, Charles Murray, Peter Brimelow, the hundreds of journalists and academics who smuggled their rank bigotries and sophistries into mainstream conversations, eventually the influencers and meme-lords of today, up to and including the actual current president of Argentina and, in a less direct way, the president of the United States.

Slobodian finely threads the needle between the original neoliberals around the Mont Pelerin Society and the new synthesis. They truly are Friedrich von Hayek’s bastards- not his legitimate heirs, but sharing plenty of his DNA. It’s true that Hayek turned towards “cultural explanations� for inequality towards the end of his life, and agreed that efforts to protect/advance the cultures that supposedly allowed for liberal capitalism were necessary to undertake. True to form though, he refused to quantify these cultural differences or assign them firmly to any given demographics. You could more or less tell what they meant- it was pretty consistently white people they were “defending� from “forced integration� and/or “aggression,� from the Jim Crow US South to apartheid South Africa. This, more than any other issue, is what kickstarted political libertarianism in the US. That said, Hayek, Friedman, and political epigones like Goldwater and Reagan all claimed that the free market was for everyone, foreswore bigotry as irrational, etc. That they had to deflect to “freedom of association� to fight civil rights is the hypocrisy-tax they paid to the virtue they understood broad human freedom to be. But from Rothbard on down, other libertarians who rubbed elbows at Mont Pelerin conferences were more than happy to spell the implications out, aloud, along predictable lines.

The new fusion didn’t just provide an alliance between cultural conservatism and neoliberalism, one that could outlast the disastrous neoconservative coalition when it shat the bed in the Middle East and everywhere else. It also reestablished the right in an intellectual foundation of supposedly hard realities. For all the emphasis the likes of Milton Friedman put on the “free flow� of money, goods, ideas, and sometimes people, their ideological neighbors in the new fusion preferred more solid metaphors. IQ, supposedly, is “hard-wired,� in the genes. These genes in turn supposedly run along hard lines of descent bound to racial, ethnic, and national groups. They then reinscribe these supposedly immutable differences (based on made up and arbitrary racial and national groups) to insist on the need for need hard borders, in order to keep undesirables, those not programmed by the aforementioned genes to succeed in capitalism, out. Hard money, too, in the form of gold or, eventually, the hard logic of the blockchain, would separate the strong, thoughtful, and provident from the weak suckers who think that society, in the form of government and its papers, could, would, or should care about them (they’d be the ones who could fight off the low-IQ foreign hordes, too, in their own imagining). Slobodian combs through a wonderful array of sources, from the performatively (pseudo)-intellectual world of post-war eugenics, to goldbug survivalist fora which dovetailed with the once-lively world of investment advice newsletters to a few different flavors of science fiction to show us how this new fusion formed and spread. Among other things, Hayek’s Bastards shines as an example of a growing historical literature of just how fucking weird the nineties and aughts really were.

That all of this is based in junk science ala Charles Murray, junk economics, fetishism of various kinds (commodity, race, gender, violence, take your pick), doesn’t really deter anyone invested in this new fusionism or its constituent parts. These supposedly hard facts that ground them in reality are more like feelings, and the right is going to oblige all of us to care about them. Slobodian was also co-author of the paper that introduced the concept of “diagonalism� to explain the appeal of authoritarian movements � MAGA, AfD in Germany, anti-vax and transphobia everywhere � hooked in crunchy, notionally-libertarian or apolitical types in a sort of united front of “alternative facts� believers against the oppressive regime of� well, reality, and its harsh vibes. Diagonalism and the new fusionism are, at the very least, sitting at the same lunch table, if not cousins (or weird scifi clones).

The neoliberal project, from its beginnings in interwar Vienna, has always been about encasing the market as an institution from democratic pressure. More than the chaos that free marketeers supposedly thrive off of, the most important neoliberal thinkers emphasized institutions (constitutions, nations, banking authorities, courts, etc) that could act as bulwarks against the supposedly corrosive action of the masses. I would say it wasn’t just fringe kooks taking the neoliberal oriflamme from the “respectable� hands of the Hayeks of the world. Post-Cold War (and post 9/11, post-GWOT, post-2008, post-Tea Party, on and on), it was those kooks who helped give the right, as a broader project of the defense of privilege, and neoliberalism with it, new life. And Slobodian produces an uncanny effect in his writing (at least for this child of the end of history period) by displaying just how porous the line between kook and respectable always was, not just intellectually but institutionally and even socially- the connections have always been there. And he does this without the kind of reductionism you so often see in “the discourse� - “of course, they were always nazis from the word go,� etc etc, which might be handy in a social media dustup but less so for a thoroughgoing understanding of what’s going on.

All this, in a slim (under 200 pages), readable, and often highly entertaining book. Go read it! ]]> Review7399705514 Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:32:15 -0700 /review/show/7399705514 Peter gave 5 stars to Trump Sky Alpha (Paperback) by Mark Doten
bookshelves: american-writers, novels, humor, science-fiction, srs-literature, 21st-century, 2010s, we-live-in-a-society
This is a book for full-grown adults, but, because it can be plausibly classified as "dystopian," a number of notionally-grown people with the brains of little babies read it, as you can see from the reviews below. I will likely write more about this book soon but just want to "put a pin in it" as it were.
****
Supposedly, we can’t effectively satirize Trump- he’s too outrageous, our satirists too weak, look how bad SNL is, etc. As far as I’m concerned, we put too much weight on satire, and have for some time, but that’s another story. I actually think this Trump satire works. I think it works better now, in the 47 restoration period, than it did when the book was published in 2019, when he looked relatively weak. It’s only partially a Trump satire, anyway. True, it begins with Trump flying away on a runaway blimp, blowing the world up after a four-day global internet outage causes widespread chaos. But, as we follow Rachel, a former journalist in the burnt out shell of the old world, as she reluctantly finds the story of what happened at the behest of the shady post-apocalypse regime, we see that it took a lot more than the then- and future President to set the world on the path to destruction. Her initial assignment is to write about “internet humor at the end of the world,� literally what people were posting as the bombs were dropping. This brings her to darker territory as it leads to the actors who might have set the fatal internet outage in motion. Trump Sky Alpha doesn’t feel like an SNL sketch or a bit on a podcast (some of whom have ok Trump impressionists). It doesn’t feel like the sort of scifi that takes the recent past or present as inspiration. It feels like a nightmare in multiple parts � the Trump part, the waking nightmare of surviving the end of the world in some weird compound, a very real-sounding depiction of the last hours of the internet, the nightmare in the minds of those who were made by the internet and decided to unplug it � and that’s its power. Its irreality feels like what we’re living through- and, I reemphasize, it feels a lot more like now than what I remember of 2019. This was a strange thing to read just now. I’m glad I did anyway. ]]> Review7495746123 Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:17:17 -0700 /review/show/7495746123 Peter gave 5 stars to People Collide (Hardcover) by Isle McElroy
bookshelves: american-writers, 21st-century, novels, lgbtq, 2020s
]]> ReadStatus9343010781 Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:17:10 -0700 /review/show/5560275515 Peter started reading Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation by Peter Cozzens
]]> ReadStatus9343009251 Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:16:52 -0700 /review/show/7495746123 Peter finished reading People Collide by Isle McElroy
]]> ReadStatus9342560615 Wed, 23 Apr 2025 05:41:10 -0700 /review/show/7511956631 Peter marked as on-the-list The Great War and the Language of Modernism by Vincent Sherry
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