Links 42.2024

On a Personal Note

It’s late again, and once more, I’m writing this newsletter on the road, from a hotel room—this time in Łódź, Poland, where I attended this year’s Freedom Games. I gave a little talk on (you guessed it!) the future of liberalism. My main takeaway: more people should read this newsletter (#iykyk is real)

Anyway, speaking of self-indulgence, here is this week's meme:

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BTW Episode 07 of Weltanschauung just dropped. This week, Philipp and I are disclosing (and discussing) our portfolios // only available in German

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Steve Bannon Has Called His “Army” to Do Battle—No Matter Who Wins in November

Long-time readers of this newsletter will recall the days when this outlet turned into some sort of unofficial ‘Steve Bannon tracker’—at least for some time. Thankfully (and for the sake of my own sanity), things have calmed down around Bannon. But, from time to time, pieces like this still pop up. As you’ll notice right away from the first excerpts, the article hits all the right themes of the usual Bannon stuff; but ultimately fails to provide a deeper understanding of his project and worldview.

I suspect the journalists here got lost in trying to capture what the anti-globalist movement actually is about. But maybe that’s precisely the point—and also the reason why I’m linking it. Because this confusion unintentionally reflects the ideological chaos of our times. They just don’t seem to be able to grasp what this fundamental (i.e ontologically) illiberal sentiment is all about. For example, more often than not the authors retract back to a political or material level of analysis. They don’t see the anti-modern tenants in this Weltanschauung. Anyways and in short, you can’t make sense of the current political realignment without factoring in Bannon, Dugin, and—yes, weirdly enough—Julius Evola. And while this isn’t really breaking news to the esteemed readers of this newsletter, it’s clearly something the authors of this article still need to catch up on. Interesting nevertheless. Here are some of the Bannon paragraphs:

The best outsider’s portrait of Bannon is a book by the ethnographer Benjamin Teitelbaum, called War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers. Teitelbaum spent years interviewing Bannon and his like-minded allies and associates, from the late Brazilian “far-right guru” Olavo de Carvalho, as The New York Times described him, to Aleksandr Dugin, the philosopher who was, in the years before Russia launched its shadow takeover of Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine, one of Russia’s most prominent public intellectuals, in posh hotel rooms and under-the-radar gatherings. He got unparalleled access to Bannon, and he was able to do so in part because he came to him not as a political reporter but as a scholar interested in an obscure school of thought known as Traditionalism.

Capital-T Traditionalism is a mystical philosophy developed by a Frenchman named René Guénon, who converted to Islam and died in Cairo in 1951. His syncretic view held that modern ideologies like liberalism and communism had perverted the natural, sacred, timeless true order of human life. Many inheritors adapted and expanded Guénon’s philosophy, most notably the Italian Julius Evola, for whom the natural order of things meant men ruled over women, and whites and Aryans were above Black, Jewish, and Arab people. Evola used his theories to elaborate a meta-narrative of why nations and empires rise and fall—a small addition to a library of esoteric historiography that now makes for popular fodder in conservative circles. “Traditionalists aspire to be everything modernity is not,” Teitelbaum wrote. “To commune with what they believe are timeless, transcendent truths and lifestyles rather than to pursue ‘progress.’ ”

[…]

Bannon first encountered Traditionalism in his 20s, when he secretly practiced meditation and frequented mystical bookstores while serving on the Navy destroyer USS Paul F. Foster. Teitelbaum does not try to pin Bannon as a devotee, although some people on today’s far right certainly are. The word that best describes Bannon, in quite a few senses, is restless. He’s a compulsive reader, with an ideology that owes more to his own experience, and sense of loyalty to “legacy Americans,” as one Bannon employee put it to me, than to any one philosophy. But as he followed a path into the American elite—from a working-class kid who grew his hair long and lived in a tent while attending Virginia Tech to founding his own Beverly Hills investment firm—Bannon kept up his mystical studies and developed an outlook that shared much with a small-t traditionalist backlash against the financialized and tech-dominated world that was emerging. He saw the “aristocrats” around him as a deadened people, hopelessly disconnected from the blood and sweat and deep sense of shared, spiritual purpose that had made America into a great nation. When he arrived at Goldman Sachs to work in mergers and acquisitions, he discovered he was the only member of his cohort of hires who’d come from a blue-collar background or had served in the military. “The aristos don’t fight!” he told Teitelbaum. “They strictly don’t.”

Bannon developed relationships with Traditionalist-minded critics of the global system all over the world, from former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Some of them, like the openly Traditionalist philosopher Dugin, have been deeply antagonistic to America. Bannon and Dugin are hardly allies, even if Dugin welcomes the idea that a nationalist America might rise up alongside the “Solar” Russia he dreams of, borrowing an idea from Evola. But they share an intuitive sense of “the tradition,” as Bannon said when the two met in 2018. More importantly, Bannon and populists throughout the West came to welcome the vision, now Russia’s guiding policy, of a multipolar world order that will rise in place of the American-led order, which Bannon had come to believe was ravaging Americans.

“America isn’t an idea,” he told Dugin. “It is a country, it is a people, with roots, spirit, destiny,” he said. “And what you’re talking about, the liberalism and the globalism…real American people are the victims of that. We’re talking about the backbone of American society, the people who give the country its spirit—they’re not modernists. They’re not the ones blowing trillions of dollars trying to impose democracy on places that don’t want it. They’re not the ones trying to create a world without borders. They’re getting screwed in all this by an elite that doesn’t care about them and that isn’t them.”

[…]

“We’re prepared to take it on. It’s a global revolt. It’s a zeitgeist.” To Bannon, and for pretty much everyone involved in his diffuse movement, resisting the empire is bound up in a project of preserving the spiritual character of a nation. And there was another thing he later talked to me about at great length that the left shies away from—in part because, in his view, it would mean throwing into question all hopes and dreams of building a stronger social safety net or slowing climate change.

This was the global dollar system. Worldwide use of the dollar to settle international transactions and of American bonds as a trusted means for the world’s central banks to store their currency reserves allows the American government to spend far beyond its revenues, secure in the knowledge that financial markets will act as a credit card with an almost infinite limit. This has allowed America to spend $31 trillion more than it has taken in since the end of the Cold War, because America’s military dominance and stable government serve as guarantees. This system, Bannon warned in a series of pamphlets titled “The End of the Dollar Empire” (electronically published in collaboration with his show’s main sponsor, the precious-metals broker Birch Gold), was falling apart—“not quickly, but inevitably.” If the world actually does abandon the dollar, America’s days as the world’s great military power will come to an abrupt end.

[…]

Bannon had once told me, Trump is “a fucking moderate” compared to the people who have made him into a symbol of systemic reckoning, and I had trouble imagining that they’d stand for someone like North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who by all appearances would be confused by the idea that the extent of America’s financial and military power is sapping the vitality of the nation.

I spoke to Bannon during the intra-Republican battle over who would succeed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. Bannon argued that this, too, was a fight about the dollar system and the world order. “The whole civil war on Capitol Hill right now?” he said then. “That’s a real fight about money and power, about whether you can keep laying debt on the American people.”

I had never really thought of someone like Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who comes off mostly as a MAGA culture warrior, as an anti-imperialist renegade. But to Bannon it was all linked. Even populist Democrats are “neoliberal neocons,” a phrase he loves to use to dismiss any politician who doesn’t show an interest in unknitting order. “To be serious you’ve got to be anti-imperial,” Bannon said dismissively of Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut I was then writing about, who actually shares many Traditionalist-sounding critiques of how our connected world has left a void of meaning in people’s lives. Bannon said, “He’s out there supporting a $100 billion supplemental for Israel and Ukraine that we absolutely can’t afford. Empire is the core mode of power. Unless you’re prepared to take on Wall Street and the banks,” which for Bannon would mean confronting the very basics of the financial system, “you’re never going to actually do anything. It’s all talk.”

“But people are waking up,” he’d told me. “Once you talk about how the system is financed, they are fucking furious. A working-class audience can understand something’s not right with the system, but they can’t put their finger on it.” Bannon, who calls his audience the “army of the awakened,” has made it his mission to spell it all out. “Populism is system versus anti-system, that’s the whole story. Republicans in all these super-red MAGA districts who don’t get it are gonna get attacked,” he said. “There’s going to be a revolution in this country, one way or another.”

[…]

Bannon sometimes jokes that he’s a Leninist, which may sound strange coming from someone who also says that Trump is barely right-wing enough to be on board with the project he’s advancing. But everything is scrambled these days. Maitra brought up Lenin too, and his idea that “the fundamental clash is not between capital and labor,” as Maitra put it. “It’s between national capital and international capital.” He joked that it would “ruin his career” if I ended up making him out as a Marxist. But “fundamentally Marx was right,” he said, in seeing the forces of international capital and military power as inextricably linked. “And in the US, the national capital lost,” he said, as trade deals like NAFTA and the broader world economic structure sapped the “real” productive economy that populists of both right and left today want to restore. “So it’s an economic problem.”

Mind your own damn business!

Since the publication of his excellent “Liberalism As a Way of Life” (probably my personal Book of the Year), I’ve become an Alexandre Lefebvre fanboy—and so, I’m super excited to host a session with him later this month.

Now, to add to all the hype, I’m linking to Alexandre’s review of Timothy Snyder’s “On Freedom”, which will (in an almost uncanny way) check all the “Links” boxes: a bit of Rawls here, some Deneen there, a sprinkle of Isaiah Berlin, and a finishing touch of Dugin. Voilà!

I mean, just look at this paragraph—it’s exactly what I’ve been talking about all along

Read the whole thing…and buy Alexandre’s book!

Change and instability are to be expected in politics, especially in an election year. And boy, has the United States of America delivered. From the disastrous debate performances to the assassination attempts, the US presidential race has been messy, to say the least. But when it comes to the ideas underlying politics, we expect some stability. If politics is like weather – prone to sudden shifts – political ideas and ideologies are more like climate: evolving slowly over time, familiar, durable and predictable patterns. Here, however, the global right shifts in political ideas on both the left and the right have been positively volcanic, especially when it comes to the concepts of negative and positive liberty.

We all know the standard picture. Conservatives tend to emphasize negative freedom or freedom from constraint, particularly from government regulation. Progressives are more about positive freedom, namely freedom to live well, which often requires government action to address structural barriers such as poverty and discrimination.

This picture no longer matches the reality. On the one hand, the Democratic Party in the US is suddenly the great defender of negative liberty: “Mind your own damn business” is what Tim Walz’s message to the government when it comes to reproductive rights, sexuality and freedom of speech. And it’s no coincidence that Kamala Harris’s walk-on song for her rallies is Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” with its chorus of “freedom, freedom, where are you?” The answer progressives seem ready to give is: right here.

The shift on the right is even more drastic. Post-liberal scholars and pundits converge on this point: if freedom just fits into this mess – of shredded social fabric, plummeting religious belief and church attendance, the normalization of divorce, sexual liberation, drug addiction and dozens of [dystopia?] more freedoms – so be it and let’s not going to get out. Liberalism, thunders Patrick Deenen in his influential Why Liberalism Failed (2018), “aimed at achieving supreme and unprecedented goods such as liberty and equality” but has brought only war, “decline” in relationships, membership and even health. A relationship between parents and children, states James Poulos, is the necessary counterweight to liberalism’s unraveling of authority. And far from championing freedom of speech, there are many on the right who now call for limiting liberalism’s value of open discussion in the name of tradition or preventing social harm.

Snyder’s book tells a similar story. On the left and right, freedom has moved away from the individual and liberty has taken a collective turn. The subject of On Freedom is not so much liberty as its opposite: authoritarianism. The surprising feature of Snyder’s book is that he analyses liberalism and authoritarianism together as part of the same dynamic, rather than a battle between good and evil. What liberalism fails to deliver, authoritarianism promises.

[…]

But Snyder’s book does more than identify lost freedoms. He argues that contemporary illiberalism has also inverted the two major concepts of liberty, negative and positive. For most of the twentieth century, liberals fought to safeguard negative liberty – freedom from interference – while illiberals fought for positive liberty – the freedom to realize their best selves. Today, it is the reverse. On the left, freedom is mostly negative (the state and church should not interfere in my life). On the right, freedom is positive (I will use the power of the state to live a good life). The clearest example is Russian and Ukrainian illiberalism. Putinists are not interested in the negative liberty of privacy or autonomy. Quite the opposite: they see the state’s role as having a responsibility to cultivate the citizen’s moral being. This is true for Russia’s leading religious thinker, Aleksandr Dugin, just as it was for twentieth-century theologians such as Ivan Ilyin. Contemporary authoritarianism does not protect freedom from the state but uses the state to impose a new kind of order: a thick, value-laden conception of the common good, in which citizens are told what freedom is for. It’s no surprise that contemporary authoritarian populists often describe themselves as anti-liberal or even post-liberal. For these thinkers, freedom is not only an obstacle to the common good, but often the source of society’s dissolution.

Snyder’s most devastating observation concerns the key failure of liberalism. The liberalism of the twentieth century was secular and dedicated to a doctrine of progress: it was about creating the best possible future. Liberalism aspired to help people realize freedom, in part by helping them discover how they might like to use it. It allowed the freedom to choose but, crucially, without answering the question of what freedom is for. This is the emptiness that today’s authoritarian populists seek to fill.

Contemporary authoritarianism operates under the pretext that people are naturally in competition with one another, and that only a strong state can protect citizens’ well-being. In this competition, some people win and others lose. But instead of demanding liberty and equality for all, contemporary illiberals use positive freedom to justify exclusion. The strong state decides who wins, and authoritarian freedom demands that those who lose are denied their liberty.

Today’s liberalism lacks the self-assertion of twentieth-century progress. While progressives still rightly seek justice and social equality, the movement for freedom has largely been given up. “Freedom,” writes Snyder, “is something that we must fight for and maintain,” but he is unhopeful. In his final chapters, he outlines several strategies to rejuvenate liberty and defeat authoritarianism, including decoupling liberalism from unregulated capitalism and national defence. Yet Snyder doubts whether liberals are still capable of achieving this.

Snyder’s great strength is to bring back an older tradition of political thinking, in which freedom is collective, something that binds society together rather than tears it apart. But in his view, liberalism’s failure to grapple with this collective conception of freedom blinds it to the reality that authoritarians have understood all along: the question of freedom is not so much about how to get it but what to do with it.

German language body enshrines 'idiot's apostrophe'

Grammer Nazis in shock & disbelief: Language is a spontaneous order process after all!

The Council for German Orthography (RdR) caused a stir amongst grammar perfectionists on Monday when it announced that as of 2025, an apostrophe used to indicate possession will be considered correct.

[…]

In English, possession of an object is almost always implied by use of an apostrophe, as in: Henry's Bar, Bloomingdale's department store.

Not so in German, where possession is either shown by use of the genitive grammatical case, or without an apostrophe as in the case of Annes Cafe (Anne's cafe).

However, in recent decades it has become increasingly common, especially for small businesses, to use the apostrophe in German to indicate possession: Andi's Imbiss (Andi's restaurant), Kim's Kiosk.

[…]

In Der Standard, Austria's newspaper of record, the move was decried as another "normalization of Anglicisms," while also noting that the RdR has long refused to weigh in on more pressing issues like the use of gender-neutral language.

"This nonsense is by no means the end of the story" wrote Andreas Platthaus in a mocking op-ed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, putting an apostrophe in the middle of each word.

However, Platthaus questions the commonly held belief that the colloquially-titled "Deppenapostroph" or "idiot's apostrophe" is a direct result of English emerging as a global lingua franca.

Seven Ways to Love Better

This is a strange article. Its whole tone, style, and lack of analytical depth would usually lead me to dismiss it outright; yet, it makes some surprisingly insightful and rare quality observations. For instance, the final point—that a relationship doesn’t need to last to be considered a success—is simply beautiful!

Relationships involve conflicts that can lead either to intimacy or distance, to bonding or rupturing, depending on how you handle them. How you negotiate conflict may prove to be the single most important indicator of your compatibility.

[…]

Chris Huntington […] writes about a having a similar routine with his son, with the twist that every night they also share their best and worst moments of the day. One night, preoccupied with his litany of worries, Chris realizes something is missing, and says, “We forgot to do best and worst moments. What was your best moment of the day?”

“This is, Daddy,” his son says, nudging his chin into his father’s shoulder. “This is.”

Tears sprung from my eyes the first time I read that line, and I never forgot its lesson: Be in the moment. Stop thinking about the future or the past, about what may or may not happen, and put away your phone. If a child in your lap asks about the best part of your day, say, “This is.”

[…]

There is no rule that a relationship must last a certain amount of time to count as a “success,” just as one that ends hasn’t necessarily “failed.” Every relationship we have, short or long, can be good, essential, even transformative, and have lasting value.

In “The 12-Hour Goodbye,” Miriam Johnson was struggling to get over a breakup. Her boyfriend was leaving her for reasons she couldn’t understand, despite the two of them talking it through for 12 straight hours. She thought they had been so good together. Their relationship had stoked in her a passion to pursue work involving animal welfare. After their split, she stumbled into an opportunity to do so, which helped her restart her life. But she couldn’t get over her ex.

“It’s been a year since we broke up,” she says to her therapist. “I thought my dream job and exercise would heal me, but I still think about him every day. What more can I do to let go?”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” her therapist replies. “It’s not about getting over and letting go. It’s about honoring what happened. You met a person who awoke something in you. A fire ignited. The work is to be grateful. Grateful every day that someone crossed your path and left a mark on you.”

Peace,
SG