Reading Notes, January 20th

From humble beginnings.

So far, I haven’t published anything on this Substack. Not great! To fix this, I’m putting out some (weekly, bi-weekly?) notes on what I read or listened to. The idea is blogging a sort-of-annotated bibliography that goes a little off track will eventually translate to other things getting published. We’re so back. Thanks to the 15 subscribers for sitting tight this far.

Now, back to the post.

Podcast: “The History of the History of the Right, with Kim Phillips-Fein” Know Your Enemy from Dissent, 18 Jan. 2024, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/the-history-of-the-history-of-the-right-with-kim-phillips-fein/.

I’ve enjoyed listening to Know Your Enemy podcast as a left-wing annotated bibliography on mid-century American politics. This latest episode is no exception. Their discussion of Hofstadter’s consensus history ruling out a broader intellectual story on the right is a decent surface level overview. Should American right-wing politics be known by the Birchers and Earl Warren/desegregation haters instead of eccentric CIA magazine operators born to Mexican oil money? Have histories of the American right now swung to close to the former than the latter for good reason? Personally, I’m inclined to ignore this dichotomy and begin the story when the Whigs collapsed and the GOP was born in Wisconsin by paranoid white protestant business-owners who hate taxes. But speaking of Wisconsin, I wish the hosts could’ve thought about McCarthyism further. Should McCarthyism be understood as doing the dirty work for the cold war liberal consensus Hofstadter popularized? Unfortunately, they were simultaneously too critical and not critical enough of the right to dig into that. Many such cases. Still a good listen for the sources cited.

How do you get a consensus anyways? Last time it involved kicking all of your Wallace ‘44 friends out of the State Department, but now I’m not so sure how that would work. The Biden administration will surely inform us after a few more of their State Department employees join protests against an alleged ongoing genocide being aided by the State Department. Comparing this to postwar America, Arab nationalism obviously isn’t remotely as menacing as international communism was. On the other hand, people have proper jobs to do betraying the West to Stalin at Malta ensuring our country can operate smoothly abroad. If they like hanging out with protestors against the State Department then maybe their protestor friends can get them a new gig that isn’t at the State Department? The real consensus will be the friends we make changing jobs along the way.

Column: Willick, Jason. "Opinion: On immigration, Democrats are the ones driving polarization." Washington Post, 14 Jan. 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/14/democrats-immigration-polarization-move-left/.

Jason is correct and probably didn‘t go far enough drawing out the problem for small-d democracy a lack of citizenship consensus can cause. My own amateur guess is Republicans are probably just going to cut legal immigration in the future because the public cannot agree on anything else, especially on internal enforcement. But there are still a lot of details to work out, and it really wouldn’t surprise me if Biden gets a couple million more legal asylum + illegal unauthorized immigrants into the country over a narrowly won second term.

If your opponents are clearly winning over the public, and have drawn on the immigration issue both while in and out of office (i.e., it’s popular for the GOP beyond regular thermostatic dynamics), why not throw a Hail Mary and improve a few million lives? That might partly explain what’s going on in this White House. In the meantime, policy wonks for high skill immigration might look at Senator JD Vance’s visa bond bill and get cracking on stuff that could make it into a RAISE Act version 2.0 down the road. I also expect the 2030 census could be enormously controversial due to a lack of a small-d democratic pact on this current White House’s policies sidelining Congress, and Republicans might just choose to flat out ignore the results for redistricting like they did in 1920. But who knows, that might be too pessimistic.

Book Chapter: Vought, Hans P. "Woodrow Wilson and Hyphenated Americans" The bully pulpit and the melting pot: American presidents and the immigrant, 1897-1933. Macon, Ga. : Mercer University Press, 2004. 12–18. Internet Archive. Web. 19 Jan. 2024.

Woodrow Wilson has undergone such a drastic downward revision that I’ve become more curious why he was praised by political scientists before our recent emphasis on his (many) sins. David Frum’s forthcoming Wilson essay should be a helpful read, as he hinted towards on the Hub podcast yesterday. (Also a good podcast!) Like many of our democracy in decline commentators today, Wilson was very concerned about division in America and had some hot takes. He published a bunch of books drawing together big ideas on American history for the glorious sake of unity. It seems forgotten that Wilson is who resurrected Lincoln as a truly national hero. Great stuff. But when Wilson ran for public office, he proceeded to have his complaints about immigrant urban political machines quoted back to him throughout the campaign trail. It ultimately didn’t matter and he became president as we all know.

The chapter helps illustrate that progressivism was a bipartisan phenomenon in the United States at the turn of the 20th century that often found currency with older stock WASP Americans, wary of corruption by which new urban politics was all too often ordered. It sometimes dipped into racism (Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr.’s emphasis on Anglo-Saxon blood, Wilson’s view of blacks and Asians as unable to be admitted to the republic) and sometimes didn’t (Vought’s chapter on Teddy Roosevelt includes his demands that California allow skilled Japanese migrants because Asia matters to foreign policy and he loved his Judo lessons.) For better and for worse, we do not have the bipartisan ethno-religious leaders that dominated Congress in that period. Perhaps we do still have Teddy’s WWE view of citizenship, where sufficient cartoonish interpersonal violence can make anyone an American. RETVRN?

But as David Frum noted in his book (published 2000) on the 70s, early 21st century America is not unlike early 20th century America. Ironically, this is in part through the politics of non-profits, colleges, and post-60s primary systems which earlier progressives surely desired to reduce political rackets with. So much for original intent. Perhaps Frum’s Wilson essay will go further and allow greater focus on this period beyond themes of the threat to democracy. Still, the odds are he’ll angle it more towards Ukraine and forget all the more interesting things he wrote 30 years ago. I wish I could be more optimistic, but Frum’s recent analysis on Congress was really underwhelming. It’s worth reading people’s older books so one can be both more informed and disappointed. But like Vought’s book, I’m still going to keep reading him with an open mind eager to learn more.

Essay: Møller, Jørgen. "Conservative parties and the birth of democracy: by Daniel Ziblatt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, xv+ 427 pp.,£ 26.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780521172998." (2019): 515-517.

I’m in the middle of revisiting Ziblatt’s 2017 book after putting it down for a while. The last chapter on British conservative organizing through the Primrose League and other civil society organizations was great, so I figured I’d take a look at a review by an academic who is quite familiar with the period. Møller suggests the book has a well-evidenced thesis, but scholars should take a broader look at state formation in Northwestern Europe prior to WW1 and WW2, given Danish conservatives didn’t go fash and lost a ton of elections during this period. I think Møller has more academic work to that effect, and I look forward to learning more about it.

Alongside Brazil’s military dictatorship, I’m finding this kind of stuff more and more interesting to read about. Perhaps John Ganz’s long fight for late 19th century France as a point of analysis has won me over a little. Ganz’s insurrection upon Ross Douthat’s NYT “dreampolitik” columns is a tougher sell to me, yet he’s putting up a worthwhile read on that front too. I have no idea who is going to accept the 2024 results at this rate. It’s too bad Ron DeSantis spent all his campaign money on Twitter influencers and ignored the media for half a year. Ziblatt’s book so far strangely reassures me things will be alright in the end. I will have more thoughts on this book in the future.

Old Magazine Clipping: (I’m not going to bother annotating this one, they’re all over the place on Google images and I cannot yet find an easy index for the contents and issues of the magazine.)

I’ve recently enjoyed looking at some of the political cartoons by Judge, a pro-McKinley break-off of another 19th century magazine called Puck (which I think Puck newsletter is named after?) They’re a lot of fun in their repeated digs against Grover Cleveland, who is probably the best Democratic president that business Republicans could have hoped for until Bill Clinton. Of course, 19th century Americans were significantly more favorable to white racism and accordingly the cartoons can get ugly in that regard. Another parochial feature is this was back when conservative business Republicans obsessed over the tariff and gold standard all the time, so you get Democrats selling out Americans to the British as motif in many of these. Parties and issues change over time. And that’s why you, dear reader, should stay subscribed; you simply cannot get this cutting-edge analysis anywhere else.