The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote." —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Greetings from the far left coast where your oft humbled scribe is scratching his grizzled head while pondering the results from last week's election. I did not see this coming. Sometimes it is good to be wrong.
The Democrats held their technical majority in the Senate with the possibility of picking up one more seat in the Georgia runoff on December 6. As I type Republicans are closing in on a sliver of a majority in the House and screeching about who is to blame for their bitterly disappointing performance. The piece I hacked out on Friday (It Could Have Been Worse) might have been better titled "It Could Have Been Much, Much Worse."
Raphael Warnock's runoff with Herschel Walker remains consequential. A Warnock win will give the Dems a 51–49 majority and with that majority membership on Senate committees. It will also provide a slight cushion for occasions when Manchin and La Sinema go rogue.
Democrats did well for a number of reasons. Abortion was a factor. Some truly abysmal Republican candidates and the specter of the former president helped. There is something to the assertion that the election was a vote for normalcy. Elizabeth Warren credits Joe Biden's legislative achievements, the Inflation Reduction Act foremost among them. These accomplishments surely helped but maybe not as much as Warren thinks. She is laying the groundwork to push for her progressive agenda in 2024.
Amy Walter reported that of the races The Cook Political Report listed as toss-up, Democrats won 75 percent of them. Republicans did not do well in swing districts that Biden carried by a significant margin (Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on what happened in the midterms and what’s next for Congress, PBS NewsHour, November 14, 2022).
I like Elizabeth Warren. I have a soft spot for Bernie Sanders. I once thought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a promising new face in Democratic ranks. The Democratic Party needs progressive voices, albeit maybe more Pramila Jayapal, less Ocasio-Cortez. It also needs the array of impressive young Democrats not generally grouped with the progressive faction who shone during the 2022 campaign. I mentioned Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Congresswomen Elissa Slotkin (Michigan) and Abigail Spanberger (Virginia) on Friday. John Fetterman in Massachusetts is another, as are reelected Colorado governor Jared Polis and newly elected governors Wes Moore (Maryland) and Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania). They are not alone as newly prominent representatives of a party whose principles are not threatened by a diversity of perspectives and viewpoints.
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne singled out the campaigns of Whitmer and Shapiro, asserting they "defined the ground on which a broad Election Day alliance [progressive and traditional] was built." He points to a slogan Whitmer ran on in her first campaign for governor four years ago: "Fix the damn roads." This year she built on that theme with pledges to restore safe drinking water and improve health care and education.
[S]he joined Biden and Democrats elsewhere in describing a new manufacturing future involving making more electric cars, "semi-conductors and clean energy right here in Michigan," praised "movements for women’s rights and civil rights and LGBT rights" and organized labor, and spoke of the residents of her state fighting for "family, friends and community." (Forget DeSantis. Whitmer and Shapiro are defining the future, November 13, 2022).
For all the reasons to take heart, this not the time for giddiness. The election showed that at least half of the country is not bat guano crazy. Even allowing that not everyone who voted Republican is beyond the pale, that still leaves a mess of people who could use a checkup from the neck up, as former Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman put it. Plenty of election deniers won. Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, Josh "Crazy Legs" Hawley, Lindsey Graham, Marjorie T. Greene, Elise Stefanik, and Jim Jordan remain in place with a lot of clout in their respective domains.
Dionne closes his column with this advice: "don’t get too obsessed with a Trump-DeSantis rumble rooted in a tired, old cultural politics. 'Fix the damn problems' is the sound of the future speaking." Let's break away from the election for now with this note of hope.
"When Marxist critic György Lukács was arrested following the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution and was asked if he was carrying a weapon, he handed over his pen. (That anecdote is a little neat. I had to take it with a grain of salt—but I took it." (From Louis Menand's review of Richard Cohen's book Making History: Storytellers Who Shaped the Past in The New Yorker, April 18, 2022.) I'll take it too.
I came to Tony Judt through his essays in The New York Review of Books, to which he was a frequent contributor. Judt's books Postwar, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944–1956, Ill Fares the Land, and Reappraisals occupy prominent place in my bookcase. They are now joined by Thinking the Twentieth Century, a sort of intellectual memoir/history composed near the end of Judt's life in collaboration with his friend and fellow historian Timothy Snyder. The book takes the form of a long conversation between Judt and Snyder, begun in January 2009 after Judt had been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) the previous September. Despite physical deterioration due to the progression of the disease, he continued working right up to his death in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.
Judt explained how he saw himself and his life's work in his last interview, conducted via email with Peter Jukes.
I used to avoid the first person and personal memoirs like the plague. But it became clear that if I wanted to say unpopular things in large public places, I needed street cred. Being Jewish is not enough. Being an ex-Zionist is not enough. But being an ex-Zionist who wore the Israeli army uniform (and has a pic of himself complete with cutie and sub-machine gun): that helped. And in this case the end justified the means. No one can shut me up on this subject, so they are forced to resort to clichés about self-hating Jews and the like: evidence of failure.
All the same, it does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel. I see myself as first and above all a teacher of history; next a writer of European history; next a commentator on European affairs; next a public intellectual voice within the American Left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter… (Peter Jukes, Tony Judt, The Last Interview, Prospect, July 21, 2010)
Thinking the Twentieth Century, which I am almost halfway through, is a pleasure and deserves more extended treatment than I can give it here. For now I want to mention remarks by Judt that struck me as timely, and in line with my own sentiments, when I read them late last week. In the chapter "Paris, California, French Intellectual," he discusses his antipathy to the social historical writing and cultural studies that became fashionable and displaced traditional historical scholarship beginning in the 1970s. In his view, "Economics, politics and even society itself were slipping out of focus and indeed out of the field altogether." He was irritated by the use of selective social and cultural data to displace conventional contextual or political explanations of major political events.
As for cultural studies, I found them depressingly superficial: driven by the need to separate social data and experience from any economic roots or influences, the better to distinguish their claims from the discredited Marxism on which they otherwise drew shamelessly.
In the political and academic debates of earlier decades, Marxism had always been treated in the final analysis as a historical model powered by the engine of proletarian interest and actions…
What happens, after all, when the proletariat ceases to function as an engine of history? At the hands of practitioners of cultural a]nd social studies in the1970s the machine could still be made to work: you merely replaced "workers" with "women"; or students, or peasants, or blacks, or—eventually—gays, or indeed whichever group had sound reason to be dissatisfied with the present disposition of power and authority.
Thinking the Twentieth Century was published in 2012. Not so long ago. Still, it is easy to imagine that Judt's views would not go over well with today's heirs of those practitioners of cultural and social studies in the 1970s currently in the ascendance in certain academic and intellectual circles, nor in the realm of progressive politics and popular culture where their influence extends. One need think only of the movers and shakers who make programming decisions at National Public Radio, always on the lookout for stories about groups suffering from oppression at the hands of the usual suspects.
Judt also warns against the lure of utopian thinking, "dreaming of infinite futures" as the way to make a better world. "It’s a very late-Enlightenment view that says that the only way to make a better future is to believe that the future will be better. Smarter people than me used to believe very differently and I think it is time to listen to them once again" Jukes, Last Interview).
I find much in Judt that is simpatico. It would be wonderful to have him still on the scene to weigh in on the rightward turn to authoritarian nationalism in Europe and the US, Putin's Russia, and the war in Ukraine. We would not have to agree with him on all counts to benefit from his voice.
It is wrong to find pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Elon Musk's Twitter debacle presents a challenge.
New blog posts:
An Improbable Comrade, November 7, 2022. Sometimes fate messes with our heads. A player steps out from an ensemble cast onto the stage in a role no one would have anticipated. Before Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election, Liz Cheney was a standard issue Republican…read more>>
It Could Have Been Worse, November 11, 2022. The consensus is that it could have been worse. As Mona Charen put it on the morning after, "Yes, some horrible candidates won, and a few more may yet succeed. But the red wave is looking more like a small toxic spill"…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: where stuff gets done
