I have decided to start a new solo blog entitled That Blog You Like Is Going to Come Back in Style. My first post is an attempt to set an appropriate tone.

My reason for doing this is a sense that I need a change. It may be permanent or it may fizzle out. In either case, this site and its archives will remain available, and it will be open for new posts from any of my co-bloggers (i.e., Marika).

Existing email subscribers to this blog have been subscribed to the new one. I apologize for any inconvenience and annoyance. Feel free to unsubscribe without judgment or offense. But by the same token, I’d love to continue the conversation with any past blog fans.

Yesterday, a friend I’d not seen in person in a while asked me how my back pain was doing. He asked because he follows me on Facebook, which I use as a personal diary, and I had mentioned back problems there frequently for the last several week. The odd thing about that is that I had one discrete episode of back pain, with a clear etiology related to an injury that I aggravated by exercising too soon, and I fully recovered from it weeks ago. He thought my back was still a problem because I was writing frequently about my fear that it might happen again and my extreme caution about exercising when I feel even the slightest crick in my neck.

I assured my friend that I was fine, but I was a little embarrassed to realize that I had been projecting these fears so frequently. And reflecting back on the last several months, I realized that a similar pattern kept happening. A series of minor health setbacks — bad allergies, a sinus infection, a short bout of covid, and then the back pain — had a disproportionate emotional impact on me. Even aside from the drain on my physical energy, when suffering from these ailments I felt unable to go about my everyday activities. Thankfully most of this happened during summer vacation, so there were few mandatory daily activities — but the collective impact is that I spent a lot of my summer bored and depressed. The back pain was worst of all, because its impact on my exercise routine sent me down a spiral where my entire life would have to change. I rewatch Star Trek on the rowing machine, for instance, so I would never watch Star Trek again and stop writing my blog on the topic. In fact, maybe I’d just stop writing anything, because who cares?

One might note a certain illogic to these reactions, and the more I think about it, the more I feel like I am having reverse-psychosomatic reactions to the political situation. I am carrying around a lot of anxiety about the actions of the Trump administration — including, most recently, uncertainty about whether the US military will invade the city where I live. More and more of the structure of our lives depends on the whims of the most selfish, stupid, and impulsive man alive, and I am 100% convinced that nothing durably good can happen politically in the US until he and his movement are out of power.

And yet, good things continue to happen to me. I was finally promoted. I had the opportunity to apply for a sabbatical. I’ve been exploring a variety of writing projects. I had a successful reading group this summer and plan to join a reading group this fall. I literally just responded to a session devoted to my work, at an interdisciplinary international conference. I have unique, fulfilling teaching. I live with a wonderful partner in a beautiful apartment. I have money in the bank and a credit score that could move mountains. Everything’s coming up Kotsko, except for the part where the world is ending.

Ironically, one of those things that’s coming up Kotsko is precisely my health. At my most recent annual physical, I got a clean bill of health except for one of the standard afflictions of middle age: high blood pressure, which I am now controlling with a side-effect free medication. The doctor even said to “keep up the good work”! But the anxiety has to land somewhere, and my body gave it occasion to land on fleeting ailments that my mind chose to interpret as signs of more widespread collapse.

Even the timing seems meaningful in retrospect. My allergies and sinus infection came as the first wave of tariff disruptions were happening, filling me with the fear that we might be in for a repeat of the Global Financial Crisis — and suddenly, when faced with the same allergy symptoms that I have had literally my entire adult life, I felt that I couldn’t keep going, that my body was attacking itself, that I could barely get up in the morning. My covid infection came after we returned from Mexico City, our first trip abroad post-Inauguration. We worried that we might face trouble at the border, but it was the easiest trip through Customs we’ve ever had. When I got the positive diagnosis a few days later, I felt bizarrely angry, and even kicked and dented our garbage can. It’s as though all the aggressive energy I’d been storing up to fight my way back into the country had to find its way back out.

Now that I’ve had this revelation, will I experience greater peace of mind? Probably not! Trump is still out there doing his thing, day after day after day! Important infrastructure of modern life is being torn out, likely never to be replaced. Trying to build my little life in the midst of all of that still feels simultaneously impossible and meaningless. How can I settle in and enjoy the privileges of a more stable academic career when there might not even be universities in any recognizable form by the time Trump finishes with them? How can I seek to interpret human politics and culture when both are being degraded beyond recognition?

But at the same time, how can I do anything else? What use is it for me to steal my life from myself, on Trump’s behalf? What else can I do in the face of apocalypse but build my avowedly useless little shelter?

No matter how well-matched a couple is, every relationship brings with it some kind of compromise. In our household, one such compromise has resulted in me being a near scholar of the survival reality show Alone. I’ve hated camping for as long as I can remember and, in general, share Socrates’s preference for the city over the countryside. My Esteemed Partner is not the opposite by any means, but she would probably like to do more outdoor activities than we actually wind up doing. When we discovered Alone during the pandemic, that created an important release valve. She gets to indulge her fantasies of roughing it in the wilderness, while I get to apply my “always-on” analytical mind to a show that is in fact almost a parody of neoliberal individualism.

The premise is simple and cruel, taking the “skills-based” reality show paradigm to its logical limits. Contestants are dropped off in the remote wilderness, in the same region but far distant from each other. The winner is the one who is able to endure the isolation and deprivation the longest. All the contestants are in some sense survival experts, in many cases either living off the grid, providing instruction in survival, or both. Hence they have many skills that can help them extract some kind of living from the land. But few have the experience of extended periods of complete social isolation — perhaps we see here why the show became a hit during the pandemic? — and all of them are tormented by a complete lack of knowledge as to how many other contestants are still going and how long they may have to hold out.

Winning does not require holding out against death. Contestants receive periodic medical checks and can be extracted if their condition has dangerously deteriorated. (To my knowledge, no contestant has actually died, but part of me wonders if someone has and they just never showed the footage or acknowledged their existence.) Instead, they are holding out against the temptation to give up — an ever-present option. They are equipped with a satellite phone that allows them to “officially tap out,” the term of art for giving up. Within the space of an hour, a team shows up to film them sharing the vital life lessons they have learned from the experience and then to clean up their hard-won shelter so that it is as though they were never there.

The post-“tap out” filming is an exceptional moment — up until then, the contestants must film themselves. We occasionally get a glimpse of the quite imposing suitcase full of camera equipment they have to lug around in addition to their survival gear. Sometimes this gives them an advantage, for instance using the camera’s light for other purposes or setting up motion-detecting cameras to track animal habits. I assume that they have enough downtime that the work of setting up the shots, etc., doesn’t become excessively burdensome. But I suspect the act of filming is a double-edged sword. It gives them an imaginary friend to talk to (one contestant this year constantly addresses the camera as “you guys,” by which I assume she means the home audience), but sometimes the irony of constantly performing for an absent interlocutor seems to promote the inevitable spiral into abject loneliness.

I’m sure there is a lot to say about the subcultures that have grown up around the show, its effect on survivalist circles, the almost uncanny recurrence of the theme of a man leaving his very pregnant wife behind to be on the show, etc. I don’t know anything about that — I just know what I see on screen. And what I see is so perfectly, sublimely ideological that I almost suspect that Adorno is an executive producer. The surface-level content of the show is radically individualistic. Each of the contestants is completely isolated and forced to rely on their wits, their knowledge, and the limited kit of survival items they have cultivated. The contest appears to be a pure meritocracy, judged not by a fallible human being but by nature itself.

Yet seldom has there been a less “natural” setting. They are undertaking a task no human being has attempted or even would attempt. The places they are forced to survive in have, as far as I can tell, never been permanently inhabited by humans. Had they chosen to live there, they would not have done so in radical isolation, but in a group. There are no indigenous lifeways that involve shivering alone in a makeshift shelter north of the Arctic Circle or hunkering down under a tarp in the middle of a freak rainstorm in the South African desert. The scenario is, in short, completely contrived — it would only “really” come up as a result of a highly technologically-mediated event like a plane crash.

And their existence is itself highly technologically mediated. Their “tap out” phones depend on a network of satellites connected to the GPS system. They have an elite medical team on call at a moment’s notice. And the reason we can even see what they are doing is that they have a wide range of camera equipment — including extremely durable batteries and advanced solar cell technology — to capture them as they essentially generate endless video “content.” The material they are filming will be distributed on cable and streaming networks, but what they are doing is not essentially different from a TikTok influencer. In fact, many of them already are influencers — the “getting to know you” segments often include YouTube clips of their survival feats — and as the show has gone on, awareness of the past episodes and the surrounding social media discussion has deeply shaped how more recent contestants prepare. After the first few seasons, it became common for current contestants to name-drop past stars of the show, both as models and cautionary tales. The most radically individual experience is thus profoundly socially mediated.

The show is not without its pleasures. There is amusement in seeing an arrogant contestant brought low by his failure to catch any fish day after day. There is morbid fascination in getting a window into the minds of these certified weirdos (who else would even attempt such a thing?). And there can be moments of profound empathy when a bedraggled contestant drops out, unaware that they are one of the last two remaining and that their opponent is also hanging on by a thread.

As when watching obscure sports on the Olympics, one becomes an insta-expert, confidently judging the contestants’ choices. (My go-to commentary: Hunting big game? Always a mistake, absolute hubris. Fishing, only fishing!) But having seen almost all extant episodes, I cannot accept the notion that this is a contest of skill or merit. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. One rule of thumb, for instance, is that the person who builds the most effective shelter will always tap out shortly thereafter. As I have said, the contestants who get their food situation permanently “locked down” (by killing a big game animal and drying all the meat) wind up with an albatross around their neck — their sole task becomes to protect their horde from the various rodents and scavengers. And in the end, no one ever has “enough” food for the long haul. Winter comes, nature closes up shop, and the show becomes a “starvation contest” — a phenomenon that has itself entered the contestants’ patter. Along the way, competitors are more likely to be eliminated by sheer happenstance — as when an otherwise highly skilled Australian competitor’s boot came unglued shortly after he landed — than by any discrete mistake.

In the end, it is an emotional game, and few of us have the emotional resources to stand up to the boredom, deprivation, and isolation of this competition. Those who do seem to be either vaguely insane or — I don’t know how else to put it — a little bit stupid. A recent winner fit the latter description, letting every disappointment and setback roll over him, only once losing his temper (upon finding that the persistent marten he had nicknamed “Sassy” had yet again stolen his food cache), mostly passing the time by reciting self-help slogans and other banalities. He was not just the last man standing, he was the Last Man.

And yet one did not begrudge him. Indeed, we were rooting for him to prevail against the last holdouts. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing the person that the system has selected for. I have no doubt he would be an exemplary middle manager, an unflappable customer service rep. But at the end of the day, we were rooting for Sassy, the true winner — who received a life-changing jackpot from this man who had been forced to generate social media content at the outer reaches of the GPS network.

I hate generative AI. I hate how it’s destroying writing pedagogy and giving students even more excuses not to read (because they can just read a “summary”). I hate how whiny and defensive AI users are about the pathetic little ways they’ve integrated it into their lives. If I could push a button and permanently delete it from existence, I would. If I could go back in time and prevent it from being invented, I would.

The reason I hate it is not just that its output is mediocre bullshit. It’s that it is an active attack on everything I value — literacy, analysis, thought. I find the thought that I would use ChatGPT actively degrading and humiliating. I have never touched it, not even as a joke, not even to prove it sucks, not even — as Beatrice has been doing — to see what it’s showing my students. I admit that this is somewhat irresponsible of me, to indulge my revulsion in this way. This technology — which is unimaginably expensive and resource-intensive and which has not developed anything approaching a plausible profit model — is of course inevitable, “here to stay.” Nothing could interrupt the progress of a technology that requires hundreds of billions of dollars to be shovelled into the furnace year after year after year without returning anything. (Can you tell I’m angry? Can you tell I’m sick of hearing these thoughtless clichés?)

But one must eventually face it. One must eventually give it some thought. Beatrice has been helping, in her Substack posts and in our continual chat thread. She also pointed me to the work of Jan Mullen on AI as externalized attention, which takes the kind of insanely overambitious long view of AI that I find appealling as an aficionado of political theology-style genealogies. Mullen compares the rise of AI to the rise of literacy and notes that the latter was, for most of its history, primarily a tool of state control. In a wide-ranging interview, Mullen wonders aloud whether the form of control AI is creating will line up with our idea of “the state” — but is absolutely clear that the purpose of generative AI is to manipulate and control us, to take away our power and agency, the power and agency that humanity somehow managed to wring out of the technologies of literacy.

I was particularly interested in a moment where Mullen postulates that the new model of control “will be distinctly post-literate — and, as a result, post-legal.” This triggered my political theology instincts and I immediately asked: does that mean it will also be post-monotheistic? Long-time readers know I love Jan Assmann’s theory of monotheism. For Assmann, what monotheism does is not primarily or most importantly to reduce the number of gods, but to introduce a new kind of god — an exclusive God, one in relation to whom all other gods are false. A crucial technology for stabilizing the claims of this exclusive God is of course the written scriptural text, which remains a durable deposit even as day-to-day religious practice inevitably drifts away from the strict demands of the original revelation. The monotheistic God, in contrast to previous pantheons with their loosey-goosey translatability and porosity and their ever-shifting body of mythical tales, is a God of the letter because he is a God of law.

So if ChatGPT destroys literacy and law, then ChatGPT is going to kill God. By this I don’t mean that the bearded guy in the sky is going to be found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest, but that monotheistic religion as we have traditionally understood it will not be able to function in a post-literacy regime.

Note that I am not claiming that ChatGPT will take away people’s ability to read in the sense of deciphering letters — obviously its functioning depends on that. But it is killing the notion of a stable, permanent, authoritative text and undercutting the skills needed to engage with that kind of text. Note also that I am well aware that the vast majority of monotheistic believers throughout history were illiterate (in either the “can’t decipher letters” or “can’t make sense of a complex text” sense). But the elite leaders definitely were fully literate, and in fact that was the source of their authority. One cannot say the same of the type of religious leaders who are most thriving in the meme-ified, Trumpified bastard child of Christianity that sets the tone for American religious practice today. Compared to even a generation ago, literal knowledge of what the Bible says at all has been radically set aside. Some combination of personal charisma and “vibes” — above all, opposition to what they imagine progressivism to be — are the source of authority, leading to obvious absurdities like the rejection of compassion as a Christian virtue.

I am a harsh critic of the dumbed down “seeker-sensitive” model of Christianity I was raised in. But in comparison with what passes for Christian teaching today, it is intellectually sophisticated and morally demanding. This is not to say it was simply “better” (after all, it paved the way for what’s happening now) or that the answer is to get back to the Bible. It’s just to mark how far we’ve fallen. What seemed like a vacuous, popified version of Christianity at the time now seems like a robust theological ethos. The haphazard methods of “Bible study” now seem fit for a graduate seminar.

Speaking of the evangelical milieu, I’ve always resisted Luhrmann’s thesis (in When God Talks Back) that evangelicals cultivate an internal voice that they identify with God. When I was growing up, I didn’t know what people meant when they said that Jesus was their best friend or that God was telling them to do something — and I assumed they didn’t know either, that it was just a weird kind of in-group signalling. For my part, Jesus was not my best friend and God didn’t tell me even one single thing. I was all alone up there in my head, always, and I assumed that everyone else was, too. The thought that everyone I grew up around was suffering from a low-grade self-induced psychosis is difficult to cope with.

Now that people are turning to ChatGPT for spiritual insight, though, I wonder if I finally have to admit it. Obviously here again we are dealing with what seems like a quantitative change — people are using the machine to shuffle religious clichés, where previously they just half-consciously did it themselves. But the qualitative difference is that the insights of “Buddy Christ” could always be corrected against the unchanging text of Scripture. When there is no longer an external anchor like that, when the divine revelation is “customized” for each and every reader, something has changed. Again, this is not to say that what happens to be in the Bible is necessarily “better” than any given ChatGPT transcript — presumbly it’s often worse. But a point of leverage has been lost. Counterargument is no longer possible in the same way. And insofar as that point of leverage, that external source of authority, was how “God” functioned in traditional monotheism, that means God is dead.

The new regime appears to be broadly polytheistic. There is of course always the god of the uncriticizable self, who behaves with the same irritable intolerance as the monotheistic God in the face of even the faintest suggestion that one might consider behaving or thinking differently. But there are many other sites of veneration, an overlapping consensus of podcast hosts and memesters and conspiracists that each believer can mix and match to drive themselves insane in the most relevant and appealing way. Joe Rogan belongs to this pantheon, along with Jordan Peterson and any number of other luminaries whose endlessly prattling voices people love more than their own families. Donald Trump is of course a very powerful god in this polytheistic milieu, but as the boos to his vaccine advocacy and the pushback to his Epstein caginess show, he is not all-powerful, his word is not quite law. And the fact that Trump’s words lack all self-consistency means that there are many Trumps as well, that Trump can be whatever his follower imagines him to be.

I cannot see what the believers see when they look at Trump. All I can see is the most degenerate loser ever to live, the most despicable piece of shit imaginable. Maybe this is of a piece with my revulsion at ChatGPT — and indeed, my failure to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m too hung up on facts and reality and meaning and consistency. I’m too literal. That’s why I am unsuited to the emerging world, why I reject it more forcefully than it would ever even bother to reject me. I’m just too literal.

[This paper was presented at the European Academy of Religion conference in Vienna on July 11, 2025, in a session entitled “Agamben’s Theological-Political Horizons: Reimaging Judaism, Christianity, and Messianic Potentiality,” organized by Libera Pisano, Federico Dal Bo, and Carlo Salzani. The topic of my paper drifted a bit from my original proposal, which was going to be an overview of Agamben’s approach to Christianity guided by the question of whether he embraced a “fall narrative.” (Spoiler alert: no.) Hence the title doesn’t quite fit what I presented, but here we are.]

Surely one of the strangest moments in Agamben’s career is that captured in the short book The Church and the Kingdom. Here, in contrast to the academic audience presupposed by virtually all of his other works, Agamben is addressing the bishop of Paris and other clerics, in person, in Notre Dame Cathedral in 2009. In this august and presumably somewhat intimidating setting, he lays out a thorough-going critique of the Church’s betrayal of its Pauline legacy. The Church, he claims, has lost sight of the unique experience of time implied by Paul’s concept of messianism and has thereby ceased to be a community of sojourners in this world and instead become but one worldly institution among others.

For most readers of Agamben’s work up to this point, especially The Time That Remains, this diagnosis is predictable. Those who had moved on to The Kingdom and the Glory would find some of the claims he makes about the result of the Church’s loss of its messianic calling similarly familiar—though with the twist that here he proclaims a “theological genealogy” for the structure of law and exception rather than that of economy:

The crises—the states of permanent exception and emergency—that the governments of the world continually proclaim are in reality a secularized parody of the Church’s incessant deferral of the Last Judgment. With the eclipse of the messianic experience of the culmination of the law and of time comes an unprecedented hypertrophy of law—one that, under the guise of legislating everything, betrays its legitimacy through legalistic excess. I say the following with words carefully weighed: nowhere on earth is a legitimate power to be found; even the powerful are convinced of their own illegitimacy. (CK 40)

Perhaps surprisingly, though, this bleak yet strangely envigorating declaration is paired with an invocation of the possibility that the Church could nonetheless come to play a redemptive role in the world. Though the expected answer to his closing rhetorical question—“Will the Church finally grasp the historical occasion and recover its messianic vocation?” (CK 41)—is surely no, the very fact that he asks implies that the Church might regain the Pauline experience of time and thus presumably serve as a positive model for other institutions.

The possible redemptive role of the Church is unexpected not only because it is about the Church, but because it is so concrete. Instead of pointing to the legal studies of a retired warhorse or the possibility of a world full of Pulcinellas, here he has in mind the reform of an institution that actually exists today in the world. A few short years later, in another short work on church affairs—The Mystery of Evil, based on lectures given in 2012 and 2013—Agamben claims that at least one church official, namely Benedict XVI, had embraced the kind of reform he hopes for, paradoxically through abdicating. While he thereby gave up any direct role in shaping church policy, Agamben believes that his abdication “forcefully calls attention to the distinction between two essential principals of our ethico-political tradition, of which our societies seem to have lost all awareness: legitimacy and legality” (ME 2). By acknowledging he was no longer up to the task and stepping aside—even though he was legally entitled to serve as pope for life—Benedict shows a rare awareness of the importance of legitimacy.

This gesture is first of all a rebuke to the worldliness of the Church, but as in The Church and the Kingdom, Agamben claims that both church and world are both facing a fundamentally identical problem: “The hypertrophy of law, which presumes to legislate over everything, on the contrary betrays, through an excess of formal legality, the loss of all substantial legitimacy” (ME 3). And while the example of abdication may initially seem to point toward the familiar invocation of bringing the Western machine to a halt, here Agamben adopts a different tone, declaring that “legitimacy and legality are the two parts of one single political machine, which not only must never be flattened out into one another, but must also remain in some way operative so that the machine can function” (ME 4).

In this paper, I want to talk about what the unexpectedly concrete and even reformist positions Agamben stakes out in his writings on the Church can tell us about the development of his intellectual project. To do this, I will need to make a perhaps counterintuitive case—namely that the extensive engagement with Christianity in the Homo Sacer project was an unexpected development that he even initially resisted. Though he arguably struggled to fully digest the implications of his theological genealogies, I will show that they helped him clarify both what he finds so objectionable about the “Western machine” and what is actually at stakes in his messianic critique. After tracing this development, I will briefly address the question of Agamben’s “consistency” across time and offer an assessment of the mature position that resulted from his fresh engagement with theology in the midst of his research for the Homo Sacer project.

1. Resisting the Theological

It may seem strage for me to claim that Agamben began engaging with theology at some discrete point. Obviously Agamben has dealt with theological themes and texts and thinkers throughout his career. From that perspective, the greater focus on theology beginning in the 2000s represents a quantitative rather than qualitative shift. Yet only with the beginning of the Homo Sacer project did Agamben feel constrained to account for his approach to theology explicitly. And he did so initially by leaving theology decisively aside. The figure of the homo sacer is never analogized to Christ, nor is Schmitt’s analogy between the sovereign decision-maker and the monotheistic God ever analyzed. Indeed, he bends over backwards to disprove any Christian genealogy for the concepts he is investigating, devoting multiple pages in both Homo Sacer and State of Exception to debunking Kantorowicz’s famous thesis on the Christian roots of medieval power structures in The King’s Two Bodies and asserting that royal death rituals had solely Greco-Roman roots (HS 92-94, SE 83). Shorn of Kantorowicz’s comforting narrative, we are forced to confront “a darker and more  uncertain zone …  in which the political body of the king seemed to approximate—and even to become indistinguishable from—the body of homo sacer” (HS 94).

This line of inquiry, so strongly emphasized in the early stages of the Homo Sacer project, will be abandoned entirely in the part-volumes that followed. In its place, Agamben would develop another conceptuality—namely, that of the interrelation of auctoritas and potestas, authority and power. In State of Exception, Agamben memorably connects this dynamic to the paradigm of sovereignty when he declares:

As long as [auctoritas and potestas] remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct (as in republican Rome’s contrast between the Senate and the people, or in medieval Europe’s contrast between spiritual and temporal powers) their dialectic—though founded on a fiction—can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine. (SE 86)

The state of exception, then, is a failure state of the dialectic between power and authority, what happens when that dialectic collapses. Yet aside from this point of contact, the two paradigms represent two parallel tracks in State of Exception, which lends the book its exceptionally disjointed character. Indeed, the reader may well wonder why we spend so much time on power and authority, since Agamben appears to view their collapse into the state of exception as more or less inevitable.

Yet the invocation of “medieval Europe’s contrast between spiritual and temporal powers” calls this fatalism into question, since that situation persisted in some form for centuries. Why pass over that long period of dormancy in a short parenthetical clause? It’s not for lack of knowledge. We know that Agamben is exceptionally well-informed about medieval theology and, through Dante, medieval political theory. We also know that it’s not any kind of prejudice against theology, since Agamben gave the seminar on Paul that became The Time That Remains during the same years that he was writing State of Exception (i.e., during his one significant period in America). Rather, I would propose that Agamben is avoiding the medieval Christian counterexample for the same reason that he wants to discredit Kantorowicz’s theory of the Christological roots of medieval sovereignty—they are difficult to square with his most extreme claims about the ineluctable destructiveness of the Western political machine.

2. The Theological Turn in the Homo Sacer Project

I have a lot that I could say about Agamben’s engagement with theology in the early 2000s, but for present purposes, the most important thing is the end result: namely, the massive tome The Kingdom and the Glory, which vastly expanded the conceptual scope of the Homo Sacer project and also promised a more complex structure for the series. Where most readers likely expected that the next installment would be the final volume on “form-of-life”—and presumably comparable in length to the existing volumes—The Kingdom and the Glory, though lengthier than the rest of the series combined, was designated as only a subsection of volume 2. The awkwardness of its place in the architectonic, which actually changed as the series was finalized, matches the awkwardness of its relation to the conceptuality that governed the first three books in the series. In the first chapter, he declares that there are actually two paradigms of governance: “political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God, and economic theology, which replaces this transcendence with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent ordering—domestic and not political in a strict sence—of both divine and human life” (1). This distinction never returns in subsequent volumes and arguably is not even maintained consistently in The Kingdom and the Glory. Indeed, by the end of the book, it seems as though “political theology” and “economic theology,” glory and economy, form part of a single paradigm analogous to the duality of auctoritas and potestas.

What are we to make, then, of the initial gesture of separation between political theology—the paradigm that had informed the Homo Sacer series up to this point—and the newly introduced economic theology? I believe that he wants to assert that the two are separate because, to put it bluntly, he finds economic thinking repellant. Indeed, he concludes his analysis of the theological genealogy of economy with the assertion that the only place the divine economy will remain eternally active is in hell—which means that our global paradigm, based on the eternal providential governance by the invisible hand of the market, is a kind of hell on earth. This rejection of economy is surprising on a first read, because the presentation of economic theology as an alternative to political theology, as well as its association with freedom and democracy, might lead the naïve reader to assume Agamben views it positively. What the association with hell helps to clarify is that, for Agamben, the promises of the economy are all false: it never lets us rest, never ceases to manipulate us, never stops undercutting our freedom in service of its providential plan. His analysis of office in Opus Dei reinforces this impression. The ethics of office are depersonalizing, desubjectivizing, turning all of life into a meaningless ritual performed for its own sake.

Taken together, as the preface to Opus Dei suggests, economy and office represent a kind of nihilistic mechanism, working for the sheer sake of working, world without end. And just as the paradigm of the economy, extended to all eternity, becomes hellish, so too does the ethics of office ultimately devolve, in Kant and Kelsen, into an open-ended demand for punishment and suffering. In contrast to the early volumes of Homo Sacer, which extrapolated from the most extreme possible situations to make generalizations about the normal operations of power, Agamben’s investigations of economy and office penetrate into the most mundane spheres of everyday life—our need to make a living and our identification with social and professional roles—to ground a diagnosis that is arguably even more bleak for being less easily dismissed.

3. The Search for Minority Traditions

The association of economy with hell is not the only unexpected reversal in The Kingdom and the Glory. In the second half of the book, the initial association of glory with fascism may seem to indicate that glory is somehow destructive or oppressive. Yet Agamben asserts that glory, if read against the grain, reveals the inoperativity at the root of all power structures. The idle king who reigns but does not govern, the God who basks eternally in his own glorification—both testify to the ultimately pointlessness of our institutional machinery, which Agamben traces back to Aristotle’s speculation that humanity might be “without work,” without some inherent pre-given task. Where the sovereign suspension of the law actually renders the law’s application more brutal and inescapable, the messianic suspension is a revelation of the ultimate groundlessness of all human works.

When can we see this messianic suspension in action, or rather in inaction? Agamben repeatedly asserts that his investigations into the inner workings of Western institutions succeed in rendering them inoperative. This seems to mean that simply understanding and contemplating the machine is already messianic, to the extent that it reveals the nihilism at its heart. For those seeking more concrete and embodied messianism, Agamben holds up the example of Franciscanism, which inducted its members into a status to which the fundamental category of law—that of possession or ownership—was simply inapplicable, freeing them to live the Gospel rather than follow or obey it as some external rule or law. Ultimately the machine found a way to absorb even the radical messianic claim of the Franciscans back into the legal apparatus by establishing the legal fiction that the pope owned their property on their behalf—and Agamben’s detailed readings of the debates that led to that outcome show that the Franciscan theorists were increasingly cornered into adopting the system’s own terms even as they sought to resist it.

We could say something similar for the briefer genealogies that Agamben lays out in The Time That Remains, which seemed to lay so much of the intellectual groundwork for the theological genealogies in the Homo Sacer project. Again and again, the messianic insights of Paul get reabsorbed and redirected by the Western machine. The messianic experience of time collapses into a mythological narrative, the messianic calling of Paul is perverted into the Weber’s idea of professional vocation—essentially every aspect of Paul’s thought has been repurposed to reinforce the machine.

One is tempted to ask whether these messianic interventions ever turn out to be effective, whether they ever establish anything durable. But in Agamben’s terms, these questions repeat the mistake of the Franciscan theorists of thinking on the machine’s terms. Indeed, I would suggest that even the notion that the machine could be permanently abolished—so often invoked by Agamben at crucial moments of his argument—would represent one last triumph of machine logic if taken literally as a prescription for a durable state of affairs. We can never fully abolish the economy in favor of glory, potestas in favor of auctoritas, the law in favor of the messianic. But by the same token, the machine cannot ever fully achieve the collapse in the opposite direction, at least not without destroying the life on which its existence depends. All we can do is keep the tension alive by finding ever-new ways to live in a way that suspends the machine’s claims to ultimacy and self-evidence.

4. Conclusion and Assessment

In conclusion, I will address two questions. First, is there really any change or development on Agamben’s part here? Second, and more importantly, what are we to make of this view of politics?

To the first question, I can only answer: yes, obviously. The fact that the quotations from The Church and the Kingdom and The Mystery of Evil sound so jarring to the reader more familiar with Homo Sacer and State of Exception is certainly prima facie evidence that a change has taken place. Agamben did not start out his career as a political theorist and his theory of politics did not emerge fully formed on his first try. He took on difficult questions, he remained open to new ideas and new areas of inquiry, and he often struggled to incorporate new materials and problems while remaining faithful to his deepest insights. To me, this more dynamic and open view of Agamben is more productive and interesting than the more typical reading in terms of “consistency”—and that is something I try to prove at greater length in Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, available wherever fine books are sold.

Turning to the second question, I find it more difficult to answer, because Agamben’s prescription seems vague and elusive but also obvious and even boring. Our institutions would work better, he seems to be saying, if everyone would approach them in good faith and follow the spirit of the law rather than weaponizing its letter. That seems hard to disagree with. But especially as an American living under the Trump regime, which has combined ramptant lawlessness with the weaponization of every available law and technicality, the notion that the solution is to hold law somehow more loosely can be hard to accept. But it is precisely fealty to the law for its own sake that allowed Trump to take power—above all by taking literally the rule that allowed him to “win” the 2016 election despite losing by millions of votes. More than that, attachment to the law has made it very difficult for opposition forces to find ways to straightforwardly oppose him, even in rhetorical terms. This is true above all of his claim to be aggressively enforcing immigration laws that previous administrations had ignored—all prominent leaders concede that “the law’s the law” and cannot be set ignored, much less changed.  In this context, one version of a messianic intervention might be for an important political leader to say, “I don’t care what the Constitution or the law says—we can’t treat people like this!” It is a telling sign of our predicament that such an obviously necessary gesture on the part of any major political leader seems roughly as likely as the coming of the messianic age.

Friends of the blog will definitely be interested to read this article by long-time contributor (and now independent blogger) Beatrice Marovich, drawing on interviews with an astonishingly wide range of contemporary theologians reflecting on the possible death of their field.

This summer, I’m trying to get a reading group on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics going. I chose this book for a few reasons. Adorno has been a continuous presence for me, but I’ve never really dug into his work systematically. More broadly, I am interested in dialectical thought and am especially seeking to recapture the magic of the reading group on Hegel’s Science of Logic I participated in during the pandemic — so this seems like the other main “big book” of dialectics. Even more broadly, I think that having a serious, extended discussion seminar with my intellectual peers would be refreshing to me, so to that extent, the specific text we choose may not be super-important.

And part of me wonders whether we will wind up switching texts, because Negative Dialectics is, in a sense, not fully available in English. The official published translation by A.B. Ashton is sloppy at best, to the point that Ashton was panned by Jameson in his book on Adorno as being “innocent of the philosophical tradition.” A widely circulated alternate translation by Dennis Redmond is significantly better, but still sloppy — as a translator myself, I’m shocked to see so many definite article errors, for instance. Finally, Christian Thorne and Matthius Menda have produced a positively good translation — of the first 43 pages of this 400-page book. Even in the Ashton, one gets the broad strokes, but it’s disappointing not to be able to do the kind of close reading that makes a discussion seminar really sing.

Hence I have turned to the German, which, to be fair to the translators, is genuinely very idiosyncratic and difficult — much harder than Agamben’s prose, for instance, and my translations of his work do unfortunately include some errors despite the greater accessibility of his texts. Adorno leans heavily on the case and gender endings in German to create densely woven prose. It can be very satisfying to read, but also makes unique demands on the reader. Normally in my German reading I can mostly handwave gender and case, which is treated as a somewhat vestigial structure by most authors I’ve read. Adorno is forcing me to finally whip myself into shape and master it, much like reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit forced me to master roots and prefixes. Thorne and Menda show that Adorno’s near self-dialect of German can be rendered into stylish English prose, but it’s hard.

It’s also hard for me simply to read. I have dipped into many languages for reading knowledge over the years, including Qur’anic Arabic, and somehow German is the one that most resists my advances. Through consistent work over the last couple years, I’ve gotten to the point where I can sit down and read standard scholarly German without getting overly bogged down in the dictionary — a skill I will need since my next major research project is on Goethe’s Faust — but to feel like I’m really understanding Adorno, I need to study every word, every pronoun, every ending, every particle. The result is that, in a typical session of an hour or so, I wind up getting through a page and a half. There is no way I can get through the German text quickly enough to keep up with any reasonable pace for a reading group. In fact, at this pace, I’ll be lucky to get through the introduction by the time next semester rolls around.

This observation raises the question of why I am even bothering. The only immediate use of this exercise is to assess the translations, but even there my ranking corresponds to what anyone would suspect after simply reading the translations in English with no reference to the German. For the broader purpose of sharpening my skill in German, Adorno may also be overboard — after all, I have managed to work my way through Part 1 of Faust in the original without undue difficulty. For the latter, I had the alibi of planning a research project and, more immediately, regularly teaching a course centered on the text, but even there my level of study was excessive. My scholarship would focus on the broad themes and influence of the Faust legend, not the nitty-gritty of the text, and in the context a student-centered discussion class, injecting my German tidbits is more likely to be distracting than helpful for students who are often struggling to get their minds around reading a great literary work in English.

One could say the same for other language projects. All of them have some kind of tangential justification, some relationship to my teaching and research. I do often teach the Bible, so gaining a familiarity with biblical Hebrew makes sense. The Qur’an, which I also often teach, is often regarded as both untranslatable into any other language and incomparably beautiful in its original Arabic, so making some effort to check that out for myself makes sense. Similar arguments could be lodged in favor of my attempts (less recent, sadly) to keep my Latin and Greek fresh — I am a professor in a Great Books program, after all! And yet, and yet…

There is a devotional quality to my language routine. Of course it’s not lost on me that many of the texts I’ve studied have been scriptural or devotional works (e.g., Augustine’s Confessions, 1 and 2 Samuel, the Qur’an). I can even trace my attention to linguistic detail back to my efforts to memorize long chunks of the New Testament for the sake of Bible quizzing — efforts that usually petered out, but that forced me to be attentive to every nuance of the (translated) text. What a stange passage I came across that day as I tried to memorize the opening verses of 1 Corinthians:

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24, quoted in the New International Version that I studied for quizzing)

That second “Christ,” seemingly redundant and definitely syntactically awkward, becomes a stumbling block within the text itself. I remember struggling with it, asking myself — maybe for the first time ever — whether there could be a misprint or a mistake in the Bible. I’ve studied the passage in the original Greek; it doesn’t help. It’s irreducibly weird, just like so many of the things Paul struggles to express. If I had passively listened to the passage read out before a sermon or even read through it at a more normal pace, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. But to this day I can remember puzzling over that phrase, remember the texture of the pages, the weight of the print, the church van I was riding in (my memorization efforts usually began immediately after completely bombing out at the regional Bible quizzing level in late spring), even the faint nausea I experienced from reading in the car. I was physically uncomfortable and my efforts were motivated by frustration (how could I blow away the competition at the district level but be destroyed at the regional level?!), but it is a happy memory — perhaps my first memory of pure intellectual contemplation.

Similarly, if I reflect on my experience of reading Adorno each morning, or my experience of getting into a regular reading routine with many other texts over the years, I can only report that I find the work uniquely satisfying. A good morning foreign-language session makes me feel energized, in a way I now recognize as parallel to my feeling when I get done with a session on the rowing machine. I love entering that intellectual flow state, and I love seeing the structure and nuances of the other language. I love pondering what resists translation. And above all, I love encountering the thing itself, the original text, dwelling in it, meditating on it — simply for its own sake.

For many years, I have been using my Amazon Wish List as a vast “to-read” list — including recommendations, books of which I’ve read interesting reviews, books I want to remember for my research, etc., etc. (I very rarely actually buy the book from Amazon; instead, I’m free-riding on their easily accessible database of virtually every book ever published.). Over time, the list became so unwieldy as to be useless, and this year I resolved to attack the problem from two directions. First, I would go through the list and be honest with myself about whether I would actually read certain titles (or groups of titles on topics I have lost interest in). Second, and more interestingly, since I am between research projects, I wanted to use my ample commute time to actually read a good chunk of them by fully leveraging my access to interlibrary loan.

The result has been an enjoyable semester of miscellaneous reading that is often pegged to certain times of my life or certain friends. It was so nice to get off the treadmill of work-oriented reading that I even resisted writing up a blog post, because it would potentially make it “feel like work.” But as an aid to my own memory, I present the list here:

• Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture — this was a good way to consolidate memories of my trip to Rome, overlaying what I had seen with its broader historical significance.
• Shabbir Akhtar, The New Testament in Muslim Eyes: Paul’s Letter to the Galatians — this is related to a long-planned article on Paul and the Qur’an; I found it to be extremely strange and borderline unreadable, to be honest.
• Robert O. McDonald, Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life — I already blogged about this one.
• Jiwei Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism — I’ve read a lot on Soviet Communism but comparatively little on China, and a review article on Ci’s work in NLR made this seem like a good starting point. It was pretty bracing, presenting Mao’s career as marked by magical thinking and a weird secular eschatology.
• John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System — an effortlessly authoritative overview of science fiction studies, through the lens of the ways that commercial culture transforms the meaning and function of “genre” compared to classical models.
• Seth Benardete, Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero — this was recommended to me way back when I was first prepping Shimer’s senior capstone sequence. I probably should have read it back then!
• Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey — This wasn’t a “recommendation,” but I figured I enjoyed Achilles and Homer so much I would check this one out. It gave me a lot to think about for particular details of the Odyssey, but I’m not sure I understand the overarching argument about how Homer is somehow Platonic in approach (such as it is discernible in his almost Gillian Rose-like severe style).
• Zdravko Planinc, Plato through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues — This was a recommendation from my summer seminar on Plato and Homer; it similarly gave me a lot of insights for future teaching.
• Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners — my friend Bruce Rosenstock, who passed away in 2023, recommended this to me way back when I was working on Awkwardness. Since I didn’t have reliable library access at the time and wasn’t planning on making it a scholarly book, I left the recommendation aside — but picking it up semi-at-random now, I enjoyed the morbidly fascinating tidbits of medieval manners, as well as the introduction in which he uses his own sociological method to account for why the sociology of his time sucked.
• Erving Goffman, Stigma: The Management of Spoiled Identity — another Bruce recommendation from the Awkwardness days. This is remarkable for the author’s matter-of-factness about the negative valence of certain traits in the context of mandatory “normality.” I was also struck by how his discussion of affinity groups, complete with publications, for most stigmatized identities anticipates the explosion of similar groups in online settings.

For the summer, I’m going to need to shift gears back toward class prep and research for most of my reading, so this is where I leave this particular project. I think I’m going to make an effort to do something similar every few years, though. Undirected reading is really important for keeping one’s mind fresh and nimble.

There’s something about Trump that draws comparisons with Communism. The one I’ve heard most is the Cultural Revolution, where Chairman Mao incited a rebellion against the state he ostensibly led, with the Great Leap Forward (rapid economic transformation through absurd magical thinking) as a close second. Mao does not exhaust the field, however. There is a rich vein of ironic parallels to be found in the career of Mikhail Gorbachev. Here I am drawing on Vladislav M. Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, which I discussed at greater length here.

There are any number of parallels that immediately leap to mind — such as their strange trust in their country’s historical enemies (Reagan for Gorbachev, Putin for Trump), their tendency to indulge in personal projects instead of governing (writing Marxist theory for Gorbachev, golfing for Trump) or even the fact that both have a bizarre visual feature on their head (the birthmark and the combover, respectively).

More informative, though, are the parallel dynamics of their careers. The first is that both shocked the political establishment with their radicalism. In both cases, establishment figures assumed they would be a fresh outsider face (Trump as a political novice, Gorbachev as the first Soviet leader born after the Russian Revolution) who could be controlled. In fact, in the case of Gorbachev it was likely that the need to control him didn’t even occur to most of the relevant power brokers, since he had previously been such a “go along to get along” kind of guy. But both Gorbachev and Trump 2.0 moved much faster and made much bigger changes than anyone was anticipating. In Gorbachev’s case, the establishment was too blindsided to do much of anything prior to the abortive coup attempt (famous for the Soviet TV station’s decision to play Swan Lake on repeat for the duration rather than report on events), and this time around it doesn’t seem like much of anyone with institutional power is making serious plans to counter Trump.

The nature of those rapid changes also bears comparison. Perhaps most notably, Gorbachev’s decision to simply leave the Eastern Bloc countries to their own devices was as shocking to Soviet insiders as Trump’s omni-trade war has been to their American counterparts. This decision is representative of a broader trend — their rapid changes tended to be strangely self-undermining. Gorbachev seems to have believed he would gain some moral authority and shed an economic burden by abandoning the Warsaw Pact, just as Trump claims to be righting a major wrong in the world trade system by fighting back against our allies’ supposed parasitism. In practice, though, both moves seriously undercut the sources of the respective superpower’s sway on global events.

The same was true domestically. Gorbachev styled himself as a new Lenin, instituting a renewed revolution to fully actualize socialism in its ideal form — including an eventual transition to democracy. Ironically, though, he ruled more purely dictatorially than most post-Stalin Soviet leaders, even as he continually undercut the sources of his own power. Key to his plan to democratize the Soviet Union was the ambition of reenvigorating the individual republics and their local “soviets” — moves that wound up stoking nationalistic fervor that had mostly lain dormant, which (shockingly!) proved to be counter to Gorbachev’s socialist goals. And though this analogy is admittedly a bit strained, both also made changes to the “official” history of their countries that hurt their legitimacy — Gorbachev by belatedly admitting the truth that the Baltic states had been annexed by force (morally good, tactically stupid) and Trump by hamfistedly imposing a white supremacist narrative to counter the scourge of “woke” (morally evil, also tactically stupid).

Similarly, the attempted reform of the Soviet economy took on a DOGE-like “move fast and break things” tone, as the few people who still had some idea how the planning system worked were sidelined and the functioning systems were gummed up. The attempt to make the constituent republics “real” again also had the effect of severely disrupting supply chains, similar to Trump’s antics. Contrary to the hagiography by which Gorbachev wisely oversaw the inevitable dissolution of the Soviet Union, the events of his rule were chaotic and unpredictable to almost everyone involved, due to the unique combination of naivety and recklessness he brought to the table.

In summary, both were aspiring revolutionary dictators, aiming to revive an idealized heroic national past, and both relentlessly destroyed the state capacity necessary to carry out their stated goals. Both responded to economic discontent by heedlessly making things even worse. Both abandoned allies and cozied up to long-time enemies who did not actually have their nation’s interests at heart.

Where the parallel begins to break down is that Gorbachev’s intentional stoking of intra-Union nationalism wound up creating independent power centers that ultimately dissolved his country out from under him. A few months into the Trump administration, we don’t seem to be very far down that road — though arbitrarily witholding federal funding to “blue” states could do for state-level identification what Trump’s abominable threats have done to Canadian nationalism. Maybe Gavin Newsom will turn out to be America’s Boris Yeltsin, withdrawing the single biggest constituent unit from a tottering federal structure (though of course California is proportionally nowhere near as dominant as the Russian “Republic” was within the USSR).

And of course, for most Western readers, the parallel rankles because Trump is bad and Gorbachev was good. Personally, I’m not so sure that dissolving a major world power, permanently racheting down the life prospects of everyone in the successor nations, and abandoning a major region of the world to what amounts to mafia rule was an unalloyed good. If the choice were between the continued existence of the USSR and the constituent republics becoming nice, normal, prosperous liberal democracies, obviously the latter outcome holds considerable appeal — but it is not remotely what happened, nor is there really any reason to imagine that option was on the table. Meanwhile, judging from the early days of Trump’s second term, the world may well regard the dissolution of the United States with relief by the time he’s done.

If that sounds impossible to you, well, the dissolution of the Soviet Union would have sounded impossible to everyone in the early 80s — from Gorbachev and Reagan all the way on down. A superpower doesn’t just destroy itself! That would be crazy! But sometimes crazy things happen. We unfortunately seem to be living through one example — hence the value of thinking through a previous case.

[Editor’s note: While preparing for my frequent course “Deals With the Devil,” which centers on the Faust theme, I discovered that one of my favorite filmmakers, Éric Rohmer, wrote a doctoral dissertation on F.W. Murnau’s silent film Faust. To force myself to read it, I put it on my syllabus, hoping that it would set up an exercise where my students could build connections between the Faust theme and a major work not obviously based upon it, in this case, My Night at Maud’s. As you will see, it turned out that much of the material in the book was not directly relevant to the course, but Rohmer does have some good stray observations about Murnau’s reworking of the Faust theme and his relationship to Goethe in particular. I share the text of the handout I will be distributing to my class in case anyone might find it interesting or useful. My translated excerpts below are drawn from Éric Rohmer, L’organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977). Page numbers refer to this edition.]

Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) was a French filmmaker associated with the New Wave movement pioneered by directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Like Godard and Truffaut, Rohmer actually started out as a film critic and scholar, and he did his doctoral dissertation on Murnau’s silent film adaptation of Faust (1926). As a film critic and aspiring filmmaker himself, Rohmer is much less interested in the plot of the film than in Murnau’s cinematic technique. In fact, he believes that the familiarity of the plot was what allowed Murnau to be so innovative in the way he presented it—all his attention was focused on technique rather than narrative. Nevertheless, Rohmer does make some very insightful remarks about how the film functions as an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust. Here I will provide an overview of Rohmer’s work and a translation of those passages. My hope is that this will help us to make connections between the Faust theme and Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s (1969).

Rohmer opens the book with the claim that “Of all filmmakers, F.W. Murnau is perhaps the one who knew how to organize the space of his films in the most rigorous and inventive way” (9). He defines three different kinds of space that a film can create. The first is the pictorial space, which talks about the way that individual shots or frames are composed. The second is architectural space, which refers to the way a film creates the illusion of a “real world” that the characters are moving through. The third is filmic space, which refers to the way that the film creates a sensation of movement.

The main chapters of the book go through these versions of space one by one. In the first chapter, on pictorial space, Rohmer claims that most filmmakers of Murnau’s time were inspired by photography, but Murnau preferred to use painting as a model. Rohmer goes through many individual painters he believes inspired Murnau’s broad style, including Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer. He also mentions several specific paintings that he sees as models for particular scenes and refers, in broader terms, to the way that illustrations of Goethe’s Faust may have influenced him as well. This chapter basically does not discuss the plot at all and hence does not include any substantial passages relevant to our class discussion.

In the second chapter, on architectural space, Rohmer does a detailed study of the layout and décor of the various spaces that appear in the film. This chapter includes some analysis that is so detailed that it may border on the insane—for instance, at one point he provides a chart listing and categorizing every single object that appears on screen (80-82). He also includes sketches where he tries to reconstruct the layout of Faust’s study (67), Gretchen’s house (71), and Martha’s house (72). More relevant to our discussion is his inventory of the scenes from Goethe that Murnau excluded or modified, which leads to an analysis of Mephistopheles as a character:

Now let us precisely determine, while examining each scene in detail, the places that are in Goethe and those that have been modified. Auerbach’s tavern disappears, but it is in a tavern that we see Mephistopheles provoke Valentine and engage in a feat of sorcery, here more terrifying than burlesque: the flame shooting out of the wine. If the character of Mephistopheles retains all the comic force of his literary model (without going beyond it, except perhaps in Martha’s house), Murnau wanted, however, to preserve the seriousness of the wonders he shows us, whereas Goethe tinged the legacy of the Volksbuch [a term for the original Faust legend] with derision. The demon is not presented to us, as in the play, in the form of a poodle; it is Faust himself who evokes him, just as in the legend; and the sinister monk who emerges, though sarcastic, cannot provoke in us the slightest chuckle. Murnau will equally avoid showing us the gallery of animals that is the witch’s kitchen (Hexenküche); it is in his study that Faust’s rejuvination is carried out. Walpurgis Night, which inspired painters and musicians, has also disappeared, but I do not see how a cinematographic translation of that satiric-philosophical interlude could be given, except in a spirit of Goya-esque masquerade, which is quite far from Murnau. (60-61)

Rohmer then takes a step back to think about Murnau’s relationship to Goethe more broadly:

If Murnau and Kyser [the writer of the screenplay] ultimately remain so faithful to Goethe, despite their apparent desire to distance themselves from him and return to the sources of the myth (“an old German legend,” as the credits say), it is perhaps also the case that the play carried the seed of its cinematographic transcription. It is true that the settings of the scenes, in this philosophical drama that was made above all to be read, even if they do not play a truly active role, assert their presence more forcefully than in many works better conceived for staging: that of Shakespeare, for example, or the Greek tragedies. The “tragedy” of Faust is indeed more cinematographic than theatrical, in its first and second parts. We never find in it a banal waiting room, an anonymous place, but always a well-defined place, which makes up an integral part of the old myth and of what Goethe himself forged, in the same way as the names of characters or the epoch when the story unfolds—which no one would dare change. (61)

Later in the chapter, after his reconstruction of the various sets and his listing of all the objects, Rohmer reflects further on the idea that everything in the film has a very defined purpose:

In Murnau, the same thing holds for clothing as for objects: it is never a means, a tool, a weapon for getting what one wants or seducing someone. We are in a world made of relationships of force, not of persuasion. Not of a lover’s courtship: the woman does not play the flirt, the man does not play the rake. In this universe of pure desire, there is room only for predator and prey: whether he uses the fascination of his looks or pure violence, it is all the same. Each being is for the other a vampire or a victim. Each knows what he is after from his counterpart, or what he fears. Deception is impossible. There is no need to strut about: one passes immediately to action, which is to say to assault or its simulation. The love scenes are conceived as battles where now the man, now the woman is attacking or attacked, pursuing or pursued. Thus, for example, the scene in Martha’s garden… (86).

This concreteness holds especially for costumes:

To a change in clothing there almost always corresponds a profound transformation of one’s being, and Faust, with its theme of rejuvenation, puts out in the open a theme that is elsewhere latent [in Murnau’s other films]. Moreover, the transition is not forcefully abrupt. It would be more fair to speak sometimes of blossoming or blooming. In the famous scene with the jewelry, reduced by the filmmaker to a simple necklace, or in the one where Valentin offers a shawl to his sister, the two faces of Gretchen are revealed, today a reserved young girl, tomorrow a woman and a lover. The fact of wearing such and such clothes is not for Murnau a social act, but a natural phenomenon of evolution, of growth or decline. (87-88)

In the third and final chapter, Murnau analyzes the idea of filmic space or the creation of motion. Here he emphasizes Murnau’s use of sudden appearances, which leads to another massive table listing and categorizing every example (96ff.). This chapter also includes a long section where he provides multiple abstract sketches of different scenes to trace the direction of the main movements (125ff.). He discusses the overall pattern of motion in the film as a kind of strategy, which is sometimes apparently violated by the actors. In this context, he talks about individual performances, particularly those of Emil Jannings (Mephistopheles), Yvette Guilbert (Martha), and Camilla Horn (Gretchen):

Certainly one can say that Emil Jannings and Yvette Guilbert “go too far.” It is certain that the gestures of these two actors, especially in the scene where they meet, appear indifferent to the general dynamic of the film’s strategy. They are gestures that bear a significance without reference to the global conception of the mise en scène. Their direction owes nothing to their inscription in the space of the film… But one must not confuse the direction of the film and what is proper to each filmed element…. This mode of expression is the responsibility of the characters…. It is not Yvette Guilbert, nor Jannings who “goes too far,” but Martha and Mephistopheles…. This comic verve, though due in part to the personal rapport of the actors and though apparently foreign to the general spirit of the mise en scène, is ultimately integrated successfully into the film’s modelling and its motor scheme….

By opposite means, Murnau obtains with an unknown, Camilla Horn, in the role of Gretchen, the same result…. Did he lead his actress to find some of these poses and gestures herself, or did he suggest them right from the start? It is of little importance whether he uses one or the other method. The fact is that he succeeded there as well in perfectly marrying what came from him and what he owed to the actress, giving us the impression of cutting her to the quick, of forging a new being who would be, from birth, “Murnauian”… This second nature which she is granted renders her always absolutely “natural.” (108-110)

In the footnotes to this chapter, Rohmer also returns to the notion that the Faust legend is more intrinsically cinematic than theatrical. Here he quotes Goethe’s version of the wager, where Faust defies Mephistopheles to give him happiness so great that he will declare, “Beautiful moment, please do not pass away”:

It is an idea more cinematographic than theatrical, because tragic theater, whether Greek or Shakespearean, puts the accent on the impossibility of innocence, not of happiness, having in view action rather than contemplation. The feeling of the incompleteness of the moment, associated with that of is fullness, we find in a vague way in almost all films, in the guise, most often, of a “sentimental” optimism, in search of one of those “suspensions”… that the screen is well suited to achieve by its magic and that of the soundtrack. In this sense, the “happy ending” of Murnau’s Faust appears to be more in line with the typical mythology of the cinema than with the ambiguous conclusions of the first and second parts of Goethe’s Faust. (123)

There are a number of candidates for “the book that predicted Trump,” from Octavia Butler’s eerily prescient near-future dystopia that purported to “Make America Great Again” to Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. I have occasionally quipped that Creepiness is the book that truly deserves the title. There is a moment of truth there — I do argue that the creepiness trend was in large part about the breakdown of white masculinity — but it was mostly just a joke about the almost overwhelming creepiness of Trump himself. More recently, though, it has dawned on me that another book in the series may deserve some prophetic credit, namely Why We Love Sociopaths. Or rather, it seems to have initially dawned on Aaron Bady, who tweeted about it a few times, and that prompted me to realize that Trump fits my cultural diagnosis in that book in a way that is, dare I say it, almost creepy.

My argument in Why We Love Sociopaths is that the remarkable prevelance of sociopathic characters in 2000s television was a symptom of a broken cultural contract. With the decline of the Fordist order and the rise of neoliberalism, one long-standing narrative about social mobility and merit had been discarded without being replaced by a plausible alternative. This situation gave rise to a growing sense that the only reliable means to get ahead in the system is to cheat. Certainly we can read Trump 2.0, and especially the seeming public indifference to his flagrant violation of laws and constitutional structures, as an extreme outgrowth of that basic tendency.

I organized my account around three types of sociopaths, all of which seem in retrospect to capture the Trump phenomenon in some way. The first category was the Schemer, which I mainly associated with cartoon shows where the characters are attempting to get away with mischief for its own sake. My key example was Eric Cartman from South Park, the strangely charismatic and resourceful child who periodically comes close to taking over the United States and even the world. Though Trump obviously lacks Cartman’s discipline and focus, there is something of the childish schemer in Trump — though that element is less prevalent in the embittered end-state we are now witnessing.

The second was the Climber, who stops at nothing to climb the social ladder. My key examples here was Don Draper from Mad Men. Here the connection to Trump is admittedly more distant, since my analysis was focused on meritocrats of the Obama type, who I argue should not be counted on to challenge the basic terms of the system that enabled their rise. Yet I do start out with an analysis of reality television, which I present as a “dumbed-down” version of the same basic worldview we see in prestige dramas like Mad Men and The Wire, and so I want to claim partial credit due to Trump’s association with reality TV.

The final sociopathic archetype was the Enforcer, the lawman who breaks the law in order to save it. My key example here was Jack Bauer of 24, who murders and tortures his way to stopping terrorist attacks that only see seems to have the insight to predict. Trump himself has identified unambiguously with this category, in his infamous quote (attributed to Napoleon) claiming that it is impossible to violate the law in service of your country. Clearly he is counting on his fellow citizens to decide that it doesn’t matter if he follows the legal niceties as long as he gets things done — nor is there any way to deny that the system as constituted on January 19, 2024, was basically incapable of delivering any meaningful results in a way that would be legible to the public.

Not only does Trump fit, in some way, into all of these categories, but his appeal depends on his ability to pivot among them. His status as a Cartman-esque provocateur gives people license to dismiss his scarier or more nonsensical declarations as mere bluster; his reputation as a (sort of) self-made businessman is key to his appeal; and his promise to “get things done” by any means necessary both emboldens his supporters and cows his enemies into submission. You can’t hold all three of these images together simultaneously, but they often combine in a kind of one-two punch. Cartman Trump seems most useful for such strategies. For instance, the existence of Climber Trump allows people to use the Cartman Trump to dismiss his destructive economic plans as bluster, while the frightening ambitions of Jack Bauer Trump can be rendered more palatable by reference to Cartman Trump. But on the less jovial side, it is precisely the Climber Trump that renders him plausible to many as a Jack Bauer figure who won’t be beholden to political restraints.

While in my conclusion I do offer up the feeble hope that, in a broken system, we might all benefit from being more sociopathic — a counterintuitive soundbite that was for a time picked up by Slavoj Žižek in his public lectures — my overall assessment of this trend is negative. It does offer a diagnostic of our broken system, sometimes even (in the case of The Wire in particular) a remarkably insightful one, and I admit up front that I enjoyed many of these shows (including South Park and some reality TV).

But its dominance of the entertainment field was, I believed, socially corrosive, and I think events have proven me correct. Trump 2.0 is not just politics as entertainment, which is bad enough, but it’s politics as 2000s entertainment, it’s politics as designed by people who watched way too much South Park, 24, and reality TV. I’m not making this up. Literal Republicans say as much, about themselves. Ross Douthat wrote a famous column on the rise of “South Park Republicans,” motivated primarily by a brash anti-PC attitude rather than any positive ideology. Supreme Court Justice Scalia — supposedly “the smart one” — literally cited 24 in an opinion, and the current conservative supermajority are all intellectual heirs of Scalia. As for the influence of reality TV, Trump’s trajectory speaks for itself, and clearly neither J.D. Vance nor any of Trump 2.0’s luminaries are “here to make friends.”

Obviously sociopath TV is not the only cause of Trump — nor am I saying as much. I’m saying the trend itself arose as a symptom of social breakdown, which it then helped to exacerbate. The one thing my diagnosis excludes is social media, for which I can perhaps be forgiven since I was writing in 2012 (and the book was after all about TV). But I think that many of the attitudes inculcated by South Park, reality TV, and 24 — the reflexive anti-PC “provocativeness,” the endless zero-sum competition for “clout,” and the ambient menace of violent fantasies — have shaped the social media field as well.

I’m not sure how much credit I really deserve for this prediction, since the fact of having written the book didn’t help me to predict either Trump’s success in the primaries nor his Electoral College technicality. But then, like most sane people, I had not up till that point given Donald Trump — who was little more than a vapid media phenomenon — much thought. If I had, perhaps I would have seen how well the cultural trends I diagnosed in Sociopaths converged in him. The cost, though, is that I would have squandered some of those precious remaining years and months before I was forced to spend so much of my time and energy thinking about one of the most worthless human beings ever to live. I stand behind that trade-off, even if I had no way of knowing I was making it. And if it turns out that my little book about TV trends, properly contextualized, could have prevented Trump’s rise — all I can do is apologize.

On our flight home from Rome, we hit some turbulence — the borderline scary kind that turns your stomach and elicits the occasional gasp. I am a pretty seasoned traveller, so it would take much more than that to make me really fear for my safety. But my mind did wander: what if this was the end? And I thought about my improbably good life: a wonderful partner, a job that lets me genuinely contribute to society while challenging myself intellectually, a beautiful highrise apartment in a city we love, a lifestyle that accomodates frequent international travel…. It would be a shame not to get as much of this life as we could, but if a freak accident cuts it short, we have at least been living the life we want. My Esteemed Partner, happily engrossed in her movie, was apparently even less affected by the turbulence than me, but I imagined that if it really was a serious situation and she really was scared and upset, sharing thoughts along these lines with her might bring some comfort — maybe even some peace.

I sat with this line of thought for a few moments, savoring my sense of calm and equanimity. And then I thought: “Am I okay?” Is it normal for a person in the prime of life to be so comfortable with the thought of premature death? Is this a sign of wisdom and maturity, or of despair? Reflecting on this experience several times over the past few months, I have not been able to settle on an answer to that question. But what has become clear is that it was not about death as such, or at least not entirely: it was about Trump, the one force on earth that seems somehow even more inescapable than death.

Part of why I could imagine that flight home as the end is that we had joked, and maybe more than joked, about that trip being our last for the foreseeable future. The fears that motivated that speculation seemed distant and outlandish at the time — maybe My Esteeemed Partner, whose passport expires in a couple years, would not be able to renew it for some reason; maybe we would come to understand that we wouldn’t be guaranteed reentry if we left the country.

Now those fears seem somehow more realistic, not because of anything concrete that has happened in connection to the Trump administration’s policy on travel, but simply because everything feels like it’s up for grabs. I know that there’s always someone willing to claim they were the one voice in the wilderness that no one would listen to, but surely no one could have predicted how arbitrary and far-reaching the damage would be. Did Trump campaign on, for instance, suspending all medical research grants indefinitely? Did anyone really understand that he was going to hand the keys to Musk and completely ignore the Congressional appropriations process? Did anyone think the president would be openly musing about picking and choosing which government debts he regarded as binding?

And yet I still live my life, basically unaffected so far except for some mild anxiety about whether I will actually receive my tax refund. In fact, things are going well. I’ve been promoted, at long last, to associate professor, and though the Shimer faculty was not given the opportunity to gain tenure status, we have at least achieved some formal job security after many years of uncertainty. I’m enjoying my teaching this year — which is a good mix of familiar courses and challenging new material — and I’m happy to be serving my colleagues as chair of a major standing committee within faculty governance. My book Late Star Trek is coming out in a few short weeks, and I’m working toward establishing my scholarly expertise in the Qur’an.

In short, everything is coming together — but I’m not 100% sure there will even be college next year. Most are interpreting the assaults on federal research funding as attacks on higher ed more broadly, and the entire sector is deeply, deeply dependent on federal funding. Would they get rid of Pell Grants? That would be fatal for many institutions. Getting rid of federal student loans would be fatal for nearly all. I find myself in the bargaining stage as to whether North Central is likely to be affected by each step. I can even imagine scenarios, albeit highly improbable ones, where the loss of student loans is somehow survivable. But such speculation requires at least some stable background, some comprehensible context — and I will admit that I cannot process what a total repudiation of higher ed by the federal government does to the enterprise of higher ed, much less one particular school.

More radical thoughts present themselves as I go through the bargaining stage. What if I lose my job? I have savings that can last me a good long while, even leaving aside My Esteemed Partner’s income. And even if we both find ourselves out of work, we could probably survive for many years at a tolerable level of comfort. But that presupposes things like the continued viability of banks, or the continued value of money, or the stability of the power grid, or the safety of the water. John Quiggin introduced some nightmare fuel over at Crooked Timber: what if Trump announces the convertibility of US dollars with cryptocurrency? As recently as five weeks ago, I would have laughed off the idea. I’m not laughing now.

And it’s like this for everything. Will there be a flu shot next year? Will there be a Post Office next year? Will air travel remain viable? Will we be bogged down in a counterinsurgency in Canada? Will we join the Russian Federation? I threw the last one in there to test whether there’s a limit of what seems possible, and I find that I can’t dismiss even that — not after Trump’s insane lies about Zelinskyy and the origins of the war in Ukraine!

For a long time, I have been encouraging people to consider whether George W. Bush was even worse than Trump, but in a few short weeks Trump has demolished my case. Bush was an evil president using the power of the state to do evil things. Trump has effectively abolished the state. We do not have laws. We do not have a government. We certainly don’t have a Congress and we barely have courts. But in an important sense, we also don’t have a president. We have the irritable whims of two billionaires, handling domestic and foreign policy, respectively, and we have a bunch of psychos in charge of more detailed policy portfolios. The goal is not to change public policy, but to render public policy impossible. The goal is not to transform American society, but to destroy it completely, to destroy everything that makes it possible to call this great and terrible nation a human society.

Everything is up for grabs, because there is no limit to how capricious and spiteful and short-sighted the people ostensibly “in charge” will allow themselves to be. There is no possibility of any positive outcome until they are removed from office and replaced by literally anybody else — even J.D. Vance, who at least lacks Trump’s demonic charisma and who certainly does not inspire the same kind of fear and pathetic self-abasement and hence might get some pushback from someone.

Yet we all live our lives, day to day, as though we still live in a society, as though promises mean something, as though it’s possible to tell the future more than a week in advance, as though there’s anything we can be sure they won’t take from us. And as I think about that, I can sometimes even work myself into a state of calm resignation where I can contemplate the possibility of my life becoming much different and worse due to circumstances beyond my control and conclude that I will survive and find ways to affect the world positively and maybe even still experience moments of satisfaction and joy. But there are other times where I read the latest headline and spontaneously think: I don’t want to live in this world anymore.

When I’m in that mood, sometimes I think back to that turbulence. The strange thing about being in a plane crash, at least to my mind, is that you are going to be falling — for the rest of your life. The sick roller coaster sensation — at least this is how I imagine it, though it’s presumably much worse — is what you are going to be experiencing for the rest of your life. With one major exception, of course! But maybe one is accepting of that outcome in a different way in an endless moment of perpetual falling than in a moment of abstract contemplation. Food for thought, certainly!

Am I okay? I don’t even know what that would mean under these circumstances. And I — a white, straight, monogamously partnered, property-owning male with a savings account — am certainly the least of anyone’s worries. All due respect to those who are being more directly victimized! But what I’m sure we can all agree on, regardless of privilege level, is: This can’t go on forever. It can’t even go on for four years. And yet it might go on for four years and maybe even longer. For some people, it will last — perhaps already has lasted — the whole rest of their lives.

Agamben is best known for his critique of sovereign emergency powers and their tendency to reduce all legal subjects to a homo sacer-like state of absolute exposure to violence. But in more recent years, he has written more often about a seemingly opposite, but actually deeply correlative problem: the attempt to legislate every area of life. On the political level, this means collapsing legitimacy (our sense of what the law should be and do) into legality. Whatever the law is, must be legitimate, simply because it is the law — meaning that the idea of legitimacy as a critical standpoint over against the law is lost. One can see this on the level of constitutional law in the United States, where establishing the Founder’s intent, or simply repeating the way the existing institutions function, often suffices to establish the legitimacy of a particular outcome, at least in the minds of many liberals.

The same dynamic holds at an interpersonal level. On the one hand, we have increasingly lost any sense of the distinction between the legal and the ethical. I think here of the frequently given advice that after a car accident, one should not apologize, because it would mean admitting fault and could put you at a legal disadvantage. In a sane society, though, a person who believes themselves to have caused serious harm to another should apologize — and the person receiving the apology should not seize on that natural human reaction to maximize their legal advantage. On the other hand, people increasingly seem to believe that their interpersonal relationships can and indeed must be structured according to strict contractual terms. This comes up especially in sexual contexts, where one might expect legal niceties to be out of place. I look at the vogue for polyamory, for instance, and wonder at people’s apparent belief that anyone can “promise” that their feelings won’t be hurt. We could say something similar for people’s love of inscribing themselves into ever more precise identity categories that come complete with their own list of demands — or for other’s apparent belief that merely being asked to acknowledge the existence of unfamiliar gender or sexual identities is an unjust imposition to which they did not consent.

For me, the distinction between legality and legitimacy — or, more vividly, between law and justice — is pretty foundational. This is, blessedly, not because of Schmitt’s book by that title, but because it was foundational for Ted Jennings’ teaching when I was in grad school. This was when he was working on his two career-capping works on Paul, Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul and Outlaw Justice. As is well known, Paul’s mission in life was to vindicate the full inclusion of non-Jewish or Gentile believers in the Jesus movement — without requiring them to fulfill the Jewish law. And he argues for this position theologically by taking a fairly extreme position: “works of the law” cannot be necessary to save the Gentiles, because they have never actually saved anyone. What is salvific is actually faith or trust in God, apart from any external work. Although he would probably resist this description, in both books Jennings “secularizes” Paul’s argument by claiming that he is pointing to a universal dynamic in the relationship between law and justice. Law always points beyond itself, toward the principle of justice, and that principle means that law can always be called into question. When law claims to be fully self-sufficient, it betrays itself and becomes a tool of injustice.

In those days, there were many clear examples of what happens when law is separated from justice. George W. Bush was president, having taken office with a minority vote after a deeply questionable Supreme Court decision. No one had won the Electoral College without winning the popular vote in over a century, and the Supreme Court had never intervened in an election case in such an overtly partisan way. But the Electoral College was technically the law, and the Supreme Court is the last court of appeal, so he took office. After 9/11 — somewhat contrary to Agamben’s analysis — Bush did not claim sweeping emergency powers so much as fashion himself “legal tools” to wage his War on Terror. New legal categories were invented (“enemy combatant”), loopholes relating to territoriality were exploited (Guantanamo and CIA black sites), and the use of military force was authoritized even if war was not declared (in either Afghanistan or Iraq). Most chillingly, the White House set teams of lawyers to work elaborating a legal basis for the use of torture.

Basically all of this is still on the books. The Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda and its allies is still the law of the land. Obama took advantage of Bush-era laws and norms to run a drone strike program that even claimed the right to execute American citizens without due process. Bush’s torture memos, even if never used by later administrations, were never tested in court, and certainly none of the architects of the torture regime were ever prosecuted. And the normalization of the Electoral College technicality gave us Trump in 2016 — and almost provided him with a perfectly legal means to seize a second term against the popular will in 2020.

Meanwhile, Republicans have been weaponizing laws and rules in many other ways. The anti-abortion movement has routinely passed state laws that were known to be unconstitutional, for the express purpose of giving them a route to the Supreme Court in the hopes of chipping away at and eventually overturning Roe v. Wade. In Congress, they have exploited every rule and loophole — from the abuse of the fillibuster to McConnell’s refusal to even consider Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee. Less discussed have been their efforts to ratchet the balance of power in the House permanently to the right. By means of the Hastert Rule (named after a convicted child molestor, by the way), which mandates that no legislation can come to the floor unless it has a support of the majority of Republicans, laws that would have enjoyed majority support have been obstructed even more efficiently than with the Senate fillibuster.

Meanwhile, professing the sanctity of laws and norms, Democrats refuse to change the rules to take away Republicans’ illegitimate advantage — because they have no conceptual basis for calling it illegitimate. The rules are the rules, and changing them would be cheating. That goes even for a stolen Supreme Court, whose Democratic members insist must be respected even as it undoes all their priorities with a gleeful disdain for precedent or even normal legal procedure — many of the biggest recent decisions should have been dismissed because the plaintiff lacked standing. But again, the rules are the rules, and all Democrats can do is grin and bear it.

We may be seeming to enter a new phase with the total brazen lawlessness of Trump 2.0. But I think it is, instead, the natural next step in the dialectic. Law shorn of legitimacy is already a kind of force, an inert brute fact — and so it should not surprise us that it eventually gives way to overt force. When law that has become nothing but a tissue of arbitrary technicalities, is it surprising that someone would eventually treat the concept of law itself as one huge annoying technicality? Meanwhile it is hard to imagine popular passions being inflamed by the call to vindicate the claims of Congress, which has systematically rendered itself incapable of passing routine legislation with majority support, or of the Courts, which have increasingly revealed themselves to be the servants of presidential power in any case. Nor is it any wonder that low-information normies approve of Trump’s actions, because the dysfunction of the system has created pent-up demand for someone to finally do something — without all the infighting and excuses.

The fact that what is being done is purely destructive, that we are losing things we may never get back, has not yet become clear. And when it does, we will need leaders who can speak to the level of justice and legitimacy rather than law and norm and procedure — leaders who can say, straightforwardly, that Trump shouldn’t do what he’s doing because it’s pointlessly cruel and that Trump doesn’t have a mandate to do what he’s doing because he’s a liar. When that moment comes, though, I fear that we will instead get the same mealy-mouthed losers who could do nothing but mumble about a “democracy” that means you can only vote for one party for the rest of your life and you should never actually expect to get anything out of it. We should want a return to law, a return to procedures and norms recognized by all political actors — but only on just and legitimate terms. Perhaps that can occur within the boundaries of the existing constitution, but a return to the status quo ante of 2024 is not and cannot be the answer. Until people of good will come to understand this, there will never be hope.

As I have been writing my posts on the relationship between Trump and neoliberalism, a feeling of futility has sometimes set in. Who cares about this abstract question amid all the wreckage he has already created? My first response to such a demand for practicality is to insist that it is always better to understand than not to understand. To the extent that my analysis is accurate, it’s important because it’s true. And that truth may lead to a strategic gain, insofar as viewing Trump as a big dumb continuation of neoliberalism might reduce the leftist temptation to think “maybe we can use this” or, worse, “maybe he has a point.”

On a personal level, though, part of the reason I am focusing on such large-scale questions is simply that I have done a poor job as a day-to-day commentator or prognosticator. I wrote shortly after the election that it seemed fanciful that Trump would attempt to cancel future elections. Now it turns out that his opening gambits were to attempt to invalidate the Fourteenth Amendment and the separation of powers, which makes extreme outcomes like that much more imaginable. At the same time, however, the Democratic refrain that democracy is in peril seems to remain unconvincing to the general population. Trump’s approval ratings are favorable, seemingly precisely because of the actions he is taking. He won the election, he seems to be taking bold action to fulfill his promises, and most people like it — where’s the threat to democracy?

The problem, as ever, is the lack of clarity about what democracy is and why it’s valuable. And part of the confusion comes from the tendency to conflate “democracy” with “the US Constitutional system,” which was avowedly set up in order to tame and even frustrate democratic ambitions to the extent possible. To the extent that Democrats are simply calling for a return to the conventional constitutional order, I would certainly prefer that to the current situation. But that order is sclerotic and unsustainable. Indeed, many of the kinds of actions that Trump is doing now are ones that I would have liked to see Obama or Biden do — strong-arming the Senate instead of deferring to their stupid anti-democratic customs, or simply ignoring things like the debt ceiling. I’m even on record as saying that Obama should have refused to acknowledge Trump’s Electoral College technicality and begun the transition with Hillary.

What’s frustrating about this situation is that this final presidential push was bound to happen. The current system does not fulfill popular demands, by design, and there’s no reason to expect a society to tolerate that indefinitely. And unfortunately, the presidency is the only institution other than Congress with anything like a democratic mandate, and it is definitely the only institution that can directly do stuff. The shame is that it didn’t happen under a president who wanted to do good, instead of a president who wants to do nothing but harm. And that stems in part from our old friend neoliberalism, whose “best practices” do not include bold state initiatives. But it also stems from the older generation of Democrats’ pathetic Boomer reverence for the Constitution that never evolved past childish Cold War truisms. And now that it’s tumbling down, we’re all being asked to hope that the system that frustrated popular demands for a generation and gave us Trump will somehow stop Trump.

There is nonetheless a deep irony here, because Trump’s rampage against the constitutional order is obviously undercutting the sources of presidential power and even of state legitimacy. One reason that the executive branch is able to do stuff is that it knows stuff — indeed, it provides the standard statistics that underwrite all other public and private economic activity and much else besides. By destroying that basic state capacity, Trump is destroying any reason for citizens to trust the government about anything, unless they happen to trust the current holder of the presidency. It becomes pretty difficult to run a society — even a paranoid police state determined to carry out the biggest forced population transfer in human history — without that baseline of trust. It also becomes pretty difficult to know whether you’ve succeeded in achieving your goals and to convince others that you have.

Low-information voters are still only seeing the broadest themes in Trump’s actions. He said he’d cut foreign aid, which most voters falsely believe to take up a huge portion of the budget, and he’s doing so. He said he’d appoint Musk to head up an effort to aggressively cut waste in the federal government, and he’s doing so. He said he’d use tariffs to strong-arm other countries, and he’s doing so. The self-undermining and nonsensical nature of many of those actions, much less their long-term consequences for the constitutional order, are seemingly not on people’s radar. But if he continues to “succeed,” many people will be rudely awakened to the fact that the government seemingly has no ability to benefit them in any way — and whether that realization hits while Trump is president or after he dies peacefully in his sleep surrounded by his friends and family, it will be a major, probably fatal blow to the legitimacy of the system.

It might even be the kind of things where particular states or regions start asking why the federal government even exists, and then the great “national divorce” so desired by conservatives might actually happen. And then we might all recall, too late, that “national divorce” is a euphemism for civil war — which, as everybody knows, is the very worst thing that can happen to a society. So now I’ve maxed out the negativity of my predictions about Trump and no longer have to worry about being made to look naive by the actual course of events.

In my last post, I awkwardly name-dropped a book to admit I hadn’t read it — namely Robert McDonald’s Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life, available wherever fine books are sold. Since then I have in fact read it and want to discuss some connections with my notion of a Trumpian “shove” as the successor to the neoliberal “nudge.” What follows is not a full account of the book — which, along with being a great critique of “nudge” rhetoric, also turns out to be an accessible primer on Lacan (with depressingly relevant examples) — but a sampling of some key concepts that I find especially applicable to Trump’s heretical neoliberalism.

McDonald’s Lacanian approach allows him to see some internal dynamics of the nudge that otherwise would not be as evident. (I will spare you the Lacan and give you the pay-off.) First, he notes that nudges never live up to their promise of seamless unconscious manipulation of behavior. Instead, they always announce themselves more or less clearly, spurring the subject to begin questioning what the nudger wants from them — and possibly rebelling against the intended outcome simply out of annoyance at the attempted manipulation. For this reason, nudges generally don’t work, and presumably the nudgers know they don’t work. Hence McDonald concludes that nudges are not actually directed at the ostensible nudgees, but are messages sent to some presumed third party. For example, the attempts to “incentivize” a return to work post-covid by removing unemployment benefits had not apparent impact on employment — but they were a powerful message that everyone should get back to work and no longer expect any mollycoddling (my term, not McDonald’s). Finally, the nudge paradigm as a whole sends a broader message of despair, signalling clearly that any deliberate collective project is impossible. This opens up a performative contradiction, because on the one hand, only the market can be trusted to deliver any social benefit, but on the other hand, the market is apparently not achieving that on its own and needs tinkering by expert state actors.

Applying these to Trump’s “shoves” — his attempts to use economic inducements to blackmail people into his desired behavior — I think we get further evidence that Trump is a heretical mutation of the neoliberal project. First of all, like a classic nudge, Trump’s “shoves” generate a lot of questions as to what he really wants, but in contrast to the neoliberal apparatchik, Trump’s desire is fundamentally unknowable — apparently even to himself. Hence investors and political commentators all assumed, up to the weekend before they were set to take effect, that Trump would call off his harsh tariffs against Canada and Mexico. And at the last minute he did, at least temporarily, after securing concessions that most observers agree were already happening (and, bizarrely, conceding to Claudia Sheinbaum’s demand that he take more action to stop the flow of guns into Mexico). Will he find another excuse to kick the can down the road in early March? Presumably, but who knows?

What is at stake here is more than simple incoherence or inconsistency — and we are certainly not dealing with some game of 11-dimensional chess where Trump is skillfully deploying Nixon’s “madman strategy.” Where the nudger ostensibly sought to influence the behavior of the nudgee for the sake of some particular end, Trump’s shoves seem to be nothing but the assertion of dominance and control for its own sake. And we can see that the same ambition was present in the original nudge paradigm, which promised a form of seamless social control without political conflict. Surely what made nudging so appealing to people like Barack Obama was not the series of piecemeal social gains they could deliver (increasing uptake of 401(k)’s by 6%!) but the very idea that “smart” policymakers could gently guide society from behind the scenes without indulging in anything so vulgar as political contestation.

In practice, many subjects were offended by the implied blackmail of the nudge — and in protest, they have helped to elect someone who took away the implication but kept the blackmail. But, importantly, they are no longer the people being nudged. Rather, the deep state wreckers and DEI elites and, above all, foreigners are finally getting a taste of their own medicine. This is why Trump and company have targetted arguably the most sympathetic and beneficial use of government money (USAID) for absolute elimination and why they began their tariff crusade by threatening to blow up relations with our closest neighbors — to send the message that they will be swayed by no moral claim, especially not a claim of loyalty. All that matters is the brute fact of economic competition, which Trump is attempting to rig so that America wins every time (instead of merely most of the time). Any other concern or priority is not merely a distraction from the important task of “winning” every economic statistic, but an active deception and a ploy.

And that brings us to the performative contradiction of Trump’s agenda. If the classic nudgers were testifying to the failure of the state to organize collective life, Trumpian shoves presuppose the failure of the economy itself — and on a global scale. In his very desperation to gain the approval embedded in the economic statistics he has chosen to target (coming out “ahead” in all trade balances), Trump implicitly invalidates all previous economic outcomes as illegitimate, tainted as they are by wokeness and meddling foreigners. And his attempt to assert American domination presupposes that America has been almost comically weak for basically the entire postwar era, allowing even Canadians to manipulate them into unfavorable trade deals.

This disconnection from reality is what makes Trump so scary, but it is also what makes him weak. Indeed, on his own terms, Trump cannot possibly succeed, because he has deprived himself of any standard of judgment other than his own irritable whim — which will never be satisfied and which, ironically, makes him extremely vulnerable to people who manipulate him by setting up incentives and fooling him into thinking their preferred outcome is his own choice.

Though I haven’t written much on neoliberalism lately, I still dip into the literature now and again. The next book in my queue, Robert McDonald’s Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life, has put me in mind of the classic neoliberal notion of the “nudge” and how it might help us think through the vexed question of Trump’s relation to neoliberalism. (This post does not directly reflect McDonald’s specific view, though, because I am not planning to start it until my train ride tomorrow — but in the true spirit of blogging, I decided to write at the moment I had the time, the idea, and the motivation rather than waiting.)

In the “Trump chapter” of Neoliberalism’s Demons, I claim that Trump is a heretical neoliberal in the proper theological sense — someone who radicalizes the premises of neoliberalism in order to purify it. Trump doubtless violates many specific neoliberal policy preferences (e.g., free trade, trust in abstract expertise and competence), but when it comes to what I identify as the moral core of neoliberalism, he is a true believer. He really sees the world as a field of zero-sum competitions whose results don’t just sort people into winners and losers, but do so in a way that reveals their true worthiness as people. His critique of actual-existing neoliberalism is that the “wrong” people and countries are winning.

Hence Trump concludes that the system must be rigged against the “right” people and countries and sets about righting that supposed wrong to make sure that the “right” people and countries start winning again. Obviously his framework for determining the “right” people and countries is deeply racist and xenophobic, but I think it’s important to highlight that he’s taking a specifically neoliberal approach to racism and xenophobia — the damage that the racial and foreign Others are doing is economic and calls for a shift in economic policy. The economy is still in principle the site for legitimation of individuals and groups, but in his view it hasn’t been allowed to operate properly. Once he “fixes” it, white people will once again be in charge of everything (instead of merely most things) and America will once again dominate the world (instead of being merely the unipolar hegemon).

Trump is pursuing this agenda even more radically in his second term. What’s striking to me, however, is how thoroughly neoliberal his tools are. So far, everything is structured as a big, dumb “nudge.” To start with the least heretical policy: he doesn’t like the trade balance with other countries, and so he threatens them economically with tariffs. Traditional neoliberals would prefer that tariffs be kept at a minimum, but there is room for protective or punitive tariffs if they aren’t following the rules of the free market, as Trump believes other countries are not. More radical, though, is his attempt to weaponize economic tools to achieve seemingly unrelated policy goals, like using tariffs in his negotiations with Colombia over deportations (apparently unsuccessfully, or at least not as successfully as Trump believes) or his threats to impose punitive tariffs on Denmark if they do not cede Greenland to him. And on the domestic side, he doesn’t like anything “woke” or DEI, so he tries to take away all their money — most dramatically through the attempted freeze on federal grants and loans, but also with the more routine threats to withold federal funding from sanctuary cities, school districts that acknowledge trans people exist, and other supposed malefactors.

In both cases, Trump also holds in reserve the punitive arm of the state — refusing to rule out a military conquest of Greenland (surely a mighty feat that will live on in song and legend) or the deployment of troops in his deportation scheme. That, too, broadly fits with the neoliberal paradigm, which tends to delegitimate any direct role for the state other than the police and military. But it is fascinating that these hamfisted economic “nudges” are what he reaches for first and most often. From the classic neoliberal perspective, the actions are much too “in your face” and forceful, rather than the seamless, almost unconscious manipulation that “nudges” were supposed to achieve. Hence we could call them “shoves” rather than “nudges.” But both are still economic in nature, and thus in continuity with a worldview in which economic incentives are the only legible motivations.

More than that, Trump conceives of the policy priorities that are not directly economic from a common sense perspective as profoundly economic. They are part of his agenda to “fix” the economic order so it starts delivering the “correct” results again. And once we see that, even some of his crazier policy preferences start to make a perverse kind of sense. The best example here is his fantasy that tariffs can somehow replace the income tax as the primary funding source for the federal government. This goal is for all intents and purposes impossible to achieve and the pursuit of it would cause untold suffering and disruption. But what makes him think it must be possible is that it is morally necessary — it would be a form of reparations from the whole world, for all the economic damage they have done to America with the many unfair deals they have imposed upon us. The same logic worked on a smaller scale with the fantasy that Mexico would pay for the wall. By supposedly “sending” so many immigrants to steal American jobs, Mexico had done profound economic harm to America, so it’s only fair that they should foot the bill for the solution.

Trump’s mutation of neoliberalism is of course delusional and simplistic — but it is, in its own way, deeply coherent. In fact, it is too coherent, which leaves it with no room to process the unexpected or even the unknown. The fact that all the people who actually know anything objectively true at all are in on the anti-American DEI conspiracy is obviously a huge weakness, and it leaves those of us on the outside of the Trump bubble with very little leverage to persuade them to change course. Yet I cannot help but notice that the reciprocal shove of everyone in the country simultaneously shouting at them that, no, they can’t arbitrarily shut down the entire federal government because some of duly legislated programs might be too “woke” did prove effective. We can also expect reality itself to shove them back if they really do attempt to replace the income tax with tariffs, because they will very quickly realize that they don’t have any money to pay all the guys with the guns.

This is obviously very far from the ideal of deliberative democracy, but it makes sense that a neoliberal heretic would not be invested in an ideal to which the orthodox believers gave half-hearted lip service at best.

This year I had the unique opportunity to visit both Athens and Rome (on separate trips). I’ve therefore seen a ton of ruins. In most of my travels, I’ve found ruins and archaeology in general less interesting than well-preserved artworks in comfortable museums. This time it was more of a mixed bag — the Acropolis, for instance, was a little underwhelming, but it felt very meaningful to me to wander about in the Agora, imagining that this was the same ground Socrates trod.

My reaction to Roman ruins was more complex. Part of the reason that I had never visited Rome before, despite having ample opportunity, was that I have an antipathy to the Roman Empire, due to my intellectual formation in liberation-oriented theology circles. To me, they are history’s Bad Guys, and there is something pathological about the way they are fetishized again and again throughout Western history. What jumped out at me on this tour — especially in the day we spent at Pompeii, the preservation of which surely counts as one of the most horrifying yet amazing things ever to happen — was just how capable they were. The design of the city of Pompeii, for instance, seemed more functional and intelligent than that of 95% of US cities. (Here I count even the biggest cities — surely the Romans would have anticipated the problem of garbage piling up on the streets in New York City and designed the city with alleyways!) The fact that the routes of Roman roads are still travelled today, that aqueducts are still functional, that the international metropolis of Rome literally still uses the sewer dug by the Romans — it’s absolutely incredible.

One of My Esteemed Partner’s favorite sites was the Pantheon. On the ground level, it’s just a moderately cluttered and tacky church, but the ceiling is an unparalleled feat of engineering — a huge dome, with no internal infrastructure or supports. Contemporary investigators literally don’t know how they achieved it. And on this trip, a retrospectively obvious thing dawned on me: for most Western Europeans for a thousand years or more, that was how it was with essentially all Roman achievements.

Often modern people look down their nose at the so-called “dark ages” as an era when people were obsessed with the past, seemingly arbitrarily. But they were physically surrounded by infrastructure and buildings erected by the ancients that they couldn’t build if they wanted to. The engineering know-how, the access to resources, the sheer ability to organize and structure a labor process — it was all gone and there was seemingly no way to recapture it.

The situation reminded me of a common trope of contemporary dystopian sci-fi. In many of these stories, there is a kind of deposit of older technology that current-day people either rely on without fully understanding or else scavenge for parts — often with unanticipated consequences. The same thing happened with Roman technologies. The Colosseum, for instance, was obviously subject to wear and tear from the weather, as well as earthquakes, but a big part of why more and more sections of it kept collapsing was that people were simply pulling out the iron rods that held the columns together and using them for something else.

We could say the same for the intellectual achievements of the ancients. Medieval people didn’t rely on them simply because they were lazy or unimaginative. They lacked the intellectual infrastructure — not just the traditions of education, but often the physical documents themselves, which had to be copied afresh every generation or so. They assumed that Galen was smarter than any contemporary doctor not only because he was such a genius but because he was in a position to know much more than any current-day investigator. You can’t just rebuild that intellectual infrastructure through sheer force of will, certainly not as an individual. The most gifted person in medieval Europe simply could not get as far as a person in the Hellenistic era would have been able to get. Medieval Europeans thought the ancients were better because they were, and it took centuries for them to get to a place where they could seriously think of themselves as surpassing their achievements.

My big worry is that we are currently experiencing a process of decay that will leave future generations living among ruins. It might seem absurd in terms of contemporary ideology to say that we will soon be living off of older technologies, but even within a single lifetime we’ve collectively lost abilities — the ability to get to the moon safely, for instance — and there are still crucial systems that are running on “outdated” code (such as COBOL for bank mainframes, etc.). More prosaically, our roads, our other infrastructure, our housing stock are all cheaper and crappier than they were a generation ago. It is impossible to imagine contemporary buildings remaining functional a century from now, as so many institutional buildings from the turn of the 20th century are. In fact, many of them aren’t functional even when they’re built!

But my more urgent concern is the intellectual infrastructure. Academics of my generation look at people like Fredric Jameson and think of that kind of erudition as simply unachievable — much less earlier polymathic figures like Auerbach. I don’t think anyone the age of 50 would claim to know as much as Jameson did when he was 50. People just don’t do that anymore. And we are witnessing a further ratcheting down, at least in the US, as the humble art of reading an entire book is increasingly lost to the younger generation. Students are graduating from high school and college knowing less and less, and able to do less and less. What happens when they’re the ones teaching the younger generation?

This is not just “kids these days” scaremongering. It’s not about them as individuals, it’s about intellectual infrastructure. My strongest students now are every bit as smart and capable as my strongest students were when I first started teaching — in fact, I’d count some of the students I’ve taught in the last couple years as the finest I’ve ever encountered. But it’s much more binary, and more seriously, the students who lack those abilities and experiences most often don’t think of it as a problem. The students who can engage at a higher level appear to be anomalies, as though they are “born with it.” And if emulating their own stronger peers does not seem like a live possibility, what about emulating the professor, much less the people who are writing or editing or translating the books they’re reading?

Once in a discussion of Aristotle’s scientific writings, a student generously suggested that Aristotle did the best he could, because he couldn’t just look things up on Wikipedia like we can. I jumped in to say: Aristotle was Wikipedia to them! Just like you look it up on Wikipedia, they looked it up in Aristotle! My improvised retort was perhaps a little glib, but especially with the rise of generative AI, it does seem like we’re going to be in a situation where more and more people are going to be forced to rely on a deposit of knowledge from prior to 2019 — one that can be remixed and perhaps commented on, but not really expanded, because the skills and resources that it takes to expand it have somehow withered away.

Some have suggested that this shift is okay, because students are gaining other kinds of competencies we lack. To me, that seems like magical thinking — much like an ancient person assuming that if the Romans left, someone else would come along to build and maintain the roads. Things don’t happen simply because the space is left open for them. Maybe on the margins the new educational regime where text is radically decentered allows other competencies to grow more than they otherwise would, though some of the claimed competencies strike me as having dubious value (like posting TikTok videos). But there is no medium as information-dense or as able to capture complexity as text. People who cannot work with text simply cannot learn as much overall, and no amount of silver linings can undo the brute fact that less is less.

Mass literacy is a kind of infrastructure, and like all forms of infrastructure in our neoliberal and now potentially post-neoliberal world, it has been allowed to crumble. Without a rapid course correction that appears to be nowhere on the horizon, we are headed down a path where many future generations are going to be gleaning from our scraps, because they have been deprived of the resources and knowledge they need to match our achievements. Who knows how long people will look back on the golden age of the Twentieth Century like medieval Europeans looked back on Roman times? As history shows us, it can be a long time.

At the AAR this past weekend, Beatrice Marovich hosted a discussion about the decline of theology. Eventually, this evolved into a discussion of the decline of theology blogging, which was where many of us had cut our teeth intellectually — and, of course, where many of us met in the first place. I have been processing this conversation over the past few days and wanted to write down some thoughts for posterity, as someone who was (if I may boast of such an august position) pretty central to the enterprise of theology blogging at its height.

The first question to ask is why theology blogging took off in the mid to late 2000s. I believe that part of the reason is simply that theology as a field has many intrinsic properties that dispose it to a relatively open-ended, undisciplined discussion like the blogosphere. Above all, theology is inherently interdisciplinary, combining conceptual analysis, literary interpretation, historical and political reflection, cultural criticism — basically everything that any humanities discipline does is done in theology. People in theology were therefore ready to be part of the widest possible range of conversations in the humanities blogosphere, and people in my immediate intellectual circle were in fact closely engaged with bloggers in literary studies, philosophy, political theory, and many other fields.

There are other factors more particular to that historical moment. To put it bluntly, it was the Bush years. This meant that religion was an unavoidable topic. That was the heyday of political theology (in the “real,” Schmittian sense, not the broader sense of “politically engaged theology”) and of the Paul and philosophy trend — meaning that other intellectuals were ready to take theologians seriously as interlocutors in a way they might not have been in the 90s. By the same token, the fact that the evangelicals seemed to be so clearly in the ascendant in the 2000s produced many opportunities for alienation and disillusionment among intellectually curious and passionate young adults, in a way that would have been less potent when evangelicals could present themselves as a threatened subculture in the 90s.

From both directions, then, it was a perfect storm. And for a few years, things were very intellectually intense and exciting. But the vibe started to shift already as I was finishing up grad school. Part of it was a degree of attrition — people got jobs and got busy, or didn’t get jobs and dropped out. The impact of the Financial Crisis was especially damaging in the latter respect, and in cutting off the pipeline of younger participants. And of course there was social media, which cannibalized the entire internet. A big part of blogging culture were the comment threads, which fell virtually silent as people decided they preferred to comment on social media rather than on the post itself. For a time, I would exhort such people to comment on the blog if they wanted to join the conversation, and they inevitably dismissed the idea — or (since they tended to be left-leaning social media users) claimed that I was somehow violating the principles of social justice by suggesting that someone should comment in a space where they felt potentially “unsafe.” My reaction to such remarks, then and now, was: “Bullshit.” And in retrospect we can see how damaging it has been to shift all public discourse onto algorithmically-driven, profit-seeking platforms — which now even actively discourage the use of links that would take one outside the corporately-curated experience.

There were also factors specific to academic and particularly theology blogging. I am thinking here of the tendency toward institutionalization. Specialist journals, centers, and even departments started putting up blogs, which competed for everyone’s free writing time even as they squelched the free-wheeling fun of the blogosphere. Even among bloggers themselves, there were attempts to create quasi-institutions in the form of group blogs (like Long Sunday or The Valve in circles adjacent to me). Obviously this is somewhat hypocritical of me to criticize, since The Weblog and An und für sich were always group blogs. But they were also very clearly my personal blog, not an impersonal institution. Since I knew that few had the same writing stamina, my strategy was to provide the audience for whenever a friend or intellectual comrade wanted to put something out there. (In retrospect, I worry that my dominance might have dissuaded some potential contributors, but that’s a different problem than impersonal institutionality.)

In the theology blogging space, there were two attempted institutionalizations that I believe were particularly damaging. The first was Syndicate Theology, which stole the idea of doing book events on major new publications in theology (a stock in trade of The Weblog and An und für sich at their height) and sucked the life out of it by overproducing them. I know that saying “stole” may come across as loaded language, but I heard reliable reports that the creators of Syndicate had our practice specifically in mind when they developed the site. They did not consult with me in any way, nor did they solicit me to participate or offer to do an event on any of my books — all of which points to a guilty conscience in my opinion. I’m happy to burn that bridge publicly now, because of course virtually no one reads the site. Just like Borders, they put their independent competitors out of business before overextending themselves.

The other problematic institutionalization was the blog attached to the journal Political Theology. Reportedly they were forced to do the blog by the corporate owner of the journal, but even within that context they proceeded in an unethical way. In the early stages, they repeatedly attempted to “poach” writers from my blog — though, again, never me. Later on, they started apparently publishing anything anyone sent them, leading to some pretty embarrassing posts. Ultimately they put out something so egregious — accusing leftists of supporting jihad — that some friends and I, concerned with how the low quality of the blog and the offensiveness of that post might reflect on the field, requested that it be taken down. The editors were so stubbornly defensive that we were forced to publish an open letter on the issue. Along the way, they had offered that we could write a rebuttal piece for the blog or even take over some of the editorial duties — both insulting offers in context. I joked at the time that I would take over as their blog editor only if I would be allowed to shut it down altogether.

Obviously I still have some bitterness on the last two points, but as I said, this was a huge part of my life — and honestly, a lot of the institutionalization attempts seemed to involve stealing my ideas or poaching young academics I had supported, while cutting me out personally. Whatever may be the case with my own personal grudges, though, what is certain is that the atmosphere became much more cynical and careerist, which again militated against the fun, free-wheeling atmosphere of blogging. Blog posts became a chore, a CV line, a way of doing a favor that one might be able to cash in later — not a forum for community-building or intellectual exploration. If Twitter and Facebook were what killed off the blogosphere, maybe what made people less resistant to the change was that blogging had already become too much like LinkedIn.

In the best spirit of the classical age of blogging, I have been open and vulnerable to you, probably to an inappropriate and self-undermining degree. Please reciprocate in the same spirit by submitting any comments, questions, reminiscences, apologies, points of rebuttal, or cease-and-desist letters in the comment form below rather than grousing on social media about it.

[The following is a conference presentation delivered at the American Academy of Religion’s annual conference in San Diego, under the auspices of the Political Theology programming unit.]

The topic of this presentation began as a joke—an exceptionally niche joke, but a joke nonetheless. For many election cycles now, I have been declaring my intention to vote for the katechōn rather than the man of lawlessness. The reference, which I hope is clear to most attendees at a political theology session, is to the New Testament book of 2 Thessalonians. There, Paul—or, more likely, a later pseudonymous author trying to tone down or “correct” Paul’s apocalyptic teaching in 1 Thessalonians—writes that, contrary to the views that some people attribute to him, the apocalypse is not near at hand but has been indefinitely delayed. The passage reads as follows:

Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day [of Judgment] will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you? And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him by the manifestation of his coming. (2 Thessalonians 2:3-8)

In contrast to 1 Thessalonians, which encouraged Paul’s readers to look forward to the apocalyptic fulfillment of the resurrection of the dead, the pseudonymous author focuses almost exclusively on the destruction that will be wrought by the “man of lawlessness” once the force or individual restraining him—namely, the katechōn—is removed. God is still going to win out in the end, but perhaps the restrainer is a better bet for the time being.

The figure of the restrainer has been the object of considerable reflection in the field of political theology. In Nomos of the Earth, Carl Schmitt argued that the katechōn was the central concept of Christian politics, allowing it to bracket its apocalyptic expectations and get to work creating political institutions in this present world, and many—including me, in The Prince of This World—have argued that the concept of the modern state is a secularized version of this figure who restrains the forces of apocalyptic destruction. Those forces of destruction are normally envisioned as coming from outside the institutional order, whether in the form of foreign enemies or domestic insurrectionaries. My joke about voting for the katechōn, presumably as a form of negative polarization against the man of lawlessness, expressed the sense that contemporary political rhetoric tends to figure the danger as coming from inside the house—that is to say, one of the two traditional parties of government is claimed to represent a mortal threat to the institutional order as such.

And now, of course, the joke is on me, because I have foolishly agreed to write a conference presentation analyzing what turned out to be a devastating election result. I do not intend to use this as a forum for punditry or prediction, genres that most of us have presumably consumed in excess in the last few weeks. Instead, I intend to carry out a political theological investigation of the apocalyptic rhetoric that has marked American political discourse in recent decades—and, it should be noted, almost equally on both sides. Just as Kamala Harris presented Donald Trump as a mortal danger to the American republic, so too did he paint her potential victory as the death of the nation. By pointing this out, I don’t mean to claim that both sides are equally justified in their use of this rhetoric, nor to discount the profound fears that Trump’s return to power have aroused—fears that I very much share. Even if this election turns out to be the time the rhetoric comes true, however, it is still worth reflecting on what it means that a nation split almost perfectly 50-50 between two institutional parties that are both more than 150 years old has developed such an apocalyptic political culture.

I will carry out my analysis in two steps. First, after briefly laying out what I understand to be the task of political theology, I will try to gain some critical distance from our desperate political situation by drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s reading of 2 Thessalonians in his short book The Mystery of Evil, where he claims that the passage is not an apocalyptic vision but instead reveals the deep structure of Western political institutions. With these concepts on the table, I will then plunge back into our domestic political hellscape, using the American situation to show the limits of Agamben’s reading of 2 Thessalonians.

I.

I should begin my analysis proper by clarifying what I mean by political theology. I do not use the term to designate a politically-engaged normative theology—for instance, one that would provide us with values and hopes that would help us to cope with our present political situation. Such work is necessary for faith communities, but I am not a member of any faith community and don’t presume to dictate their political action to them. Instead, I am a critic and scholar, and I view the task of political theology as that of exposing the theological roots of political concepts. As I define it in Neoliberalism’s Demons, “Political theology is a holistic, genealogical inquiry into the structures and sources of legitimacy in a particular historical moment. Political theology in this sense is political because it investigates institutions and practices of governance (whether they are defined as state-based or economic, public or private), and it is theological because it deals with questions of meaning and value (regardless of the form the answers take)” (128). Hence I believe that political theology is especially well suited to analyze the apocalyptic turn in American political rhetoric not solely or even primarily because that rhetoric is drawing on religious patterns of thought, but because it points toward a profound crisis of legitimacy. By the same token, Agamben’s Mystery of Evil is an especially fruitful point of reference for this analysis not only because it discusses 2 Thessalonians, but because it is fundamentally a book about crises of legitimacy—which Agamben believes to afflict all Western institutions.

The text itself consists of two short essays that heavily overlap. The first is a reflection on Benedict XVI’s abdication from the papal throne due to old age, which strikes me as uncannily timely given that the defining moment of this election cycle was Biden’s withdrawal from the race for the same stated reason. Agamben views Benedict’s decision as exemplary because it “forcefully calls attention to the distinction between two essential principles of our ethico-political tradition, of which our societies seem to have lost all awareness: legitimacy and legality” (2). By admitting that he was unable to carry out the duties of his office any longer and stepping aside in favor of a more vigorous leader, Benedict was, in Agamben’s reading, asserting the purely spiritual power of his office rather than asserting his legal prerogative to hold the position until death. More than restoring the legitimacy of the church in the public eye, however, for Agamben Benedict’s resignation serves to expose how much the church has given up all claim of legitimacy by descending into the machinations of money and politics.

To that extent, then, Benedict’s gesture was a messianic one in Agamben’s terms. This is one of the slipperiest concepts in his arsenal, not least because it seems to evoke hopes of political revolution or apocalyptic fulfillment. For Agamben, though, the messianic is ultimately a philosophical category rather than a political or theological one. The messianic is not concerned with any particular historical revelation and especially not with any arbitrary sequence of future events that is supposed to lead to the end of history. Instead, the messianic exposes the dynamics of history by providing a point of view from which the operation of the “political machine” that structures our lives is suspended so that we can actually understand it—and perhaps thereby transform it. Agamben’s reading of theological texts, especially the texts of Paul, is therefore a kind of secularization of their insights. In The Time That Remains, for instance, Agamben claims that the famous “already/not-yet” dynamic of messianic expectation is not tied to the postponed arrival of a particular messianic figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, but instead provides us tools to understand the experience of time through language. Hence it turns out that there is something fundamentally messianic about rhyming in poetry, for instance.

Agamben clears the space for this kind of reading by asserting—idiosyncratically and, in my view, falsely—that Paul is emphatically not an apocalyptic thinker and that apparently apocalyptic passages should instead be read “messianically.” In the case of 2 Thessalonians, such an assertion is especially counterintuitive, since the passage has almost universally been regarded as an apocalyptic narrative in which the katechōn is taken to represent a concrete historical individual or institution—most often the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, Agamben finds a productive minority tradition in the fourth century theologian Tyconius, who is often classified as a Donatist heretic but who had a decisive influence on Augustine (and the young Joseph Ratzinger). For Tyconius, the katechōn is not an external agency like the Roman Empire, but the Church itself, insofar as it is still mired in sin. Whereas the conventional reading positions the katechōn as good, or at least as a necessary evil, Tyconius opens up the space to see this restraining power as a negative thing—and, in one of Agamben’s characteristic interpretive tours de force, to understand what pseudo-Paul calls the anomos in a more positive valence, not as a wicked individual or force, but as something that is “outside the law” in the same sense that Paul can describe the messiah and his followers as being “outside the law.”

Translating his extrapolation from Tyconius into more political terms, Agamben claims that “the katechōn is the power—the Empire, but also the Church, like every juridically constituted authority—that opposes and conceals the lawlessness that defines messianic time and in this way slows the revelation of the ‘mystery of lawlessness.’ The unveiling of this mystery coincides with the manifestation fo the inoperativity of the law and with it the essential illegitimacy of every power in messianic time” (33-34). Agamben applies this analysis directly to our present, “when the powers of state act openly as outside the law,” so that “the anomos does not represent anything but the unveiling of the lawlessness that today defines every constituted power, within which State and terrorism form a single system” (34).

Surely this last bit is evocative of all kinds of examples in all our minds, from police violence up to the president-elect’s solicitation of stochastic terrorism. Equally evocative is Agamben’s assertion that we cannot simply rely on the workings of the law to fix this problem of pervasive illegality. Here we might think of the attempt to solve police violence through improved training and procedures or the long-cherished (and now-thwarted) hope that the law will somehow save us from Trump. From Agamben’s perspective, however, we can see that this strategy was doomed to fail, because “the hypertrophy of law, which presumes to legislate over everything, on the contrary betrays, through an excess of formal legality, the loss of all substantial legitimacy” (3). Elsewhere he associates this excess of legality with “the paradigm of the self-regulating market [that] has taken the place of that of justice and [that] pretends to be able to govern an ever more ungovernable society according to exclusively technical criteria” (17). In either case, we are dealing with a legal or regulatory system that has dispensed with the need to establish its own legitimacy and has indeed attempted to collapse legitimacy into legality without remainder—in other words, to effect a final victory of the katechōn over the man of lawlessness.

The real solution, Agamben claims, is to find a way to hold in productive tension “the two coordinated but radically heterogeneous principles—legitimacy and legality, spiritual power and temporal power, auctoritas and potestas, justice and law—that constitute the most precious patrimony of European culture” (18). Rather than hoping for some ultimate end of history to arrive, we need to participate actively in the dynamic of history, recognizing that no constituted order can escape contestation over its legitimacy and that the attempt to shut down that contestation through purely legal means leads only to the worst forms of illegality and violence.

II.

Returning to the American political scene, we can see that both parties are engaging in their own form of apocalyptic speculation, in Agamben’s derogatory sense. Both are claiming, again and again, that they represent the katechōn over against the forces of lawlessness on the other side. Obviously the rhetoric is more plausible on the Democratic side, given Trump’s straightforward criminality and obvious ignorance of and contempt for the American constitutional system. But on the Republican side, Trump is taken to represent the avatar of a kind of natural order that is menaced by the Democrats’ supposed “woke” agenda. Both equally seem to imagine a final elimination of the lawless element. Democrats hope to defeat Trump once and for all, allowing a “strong Repulican Party” to rise from the ashes and begin the hard work of bipartisan dealmaking, while Trump supporters have more lurid fantasies of purging “woke” advocates from all positions of power and authority. Perhaps less obviously, I would also say that both sides share a kind of fetishization of the law. This is again clearest on the Democratic side, as they keep hoping that laws and norms will do their political work for them. But Republicans, too, seem to indulge in a kind of magical thinking where simply passing a law, or seizing a veto point, or locking in a permanent majority through gerrymandering, will simply be the end of the matter. That’s what I choose to hear in Trump’s declaration that his supporters will never need to vote again—not that he will somehow become dictator for life (or not only that), but that he will fix the system so completely and permanently that no one will ever be able to infect it with “wokeness” ever again.

If we return to the question of why the US should have such an apocalyptic political culture, Agamben’s analysis suggests that the reason is that American institutions are fundamentally illegitimate—hence menaced by the anomos. Neither side can fully admit that the anomos is coming from inside the house, however, so they project the lawless element onto their opponents, whom they then cast as foreign bodies to the republic that can and must be eliminated. And they have been in such a frustrating stalemate for so long because what they propose to do is impossible. The katechōn cannot finally win. Legality cannot finally swallow legitimacy whole. The attempt to make that happen is at best futile, as when Democrats allow their brief opportunities to govern to be fed through the woodchipper out of respect for “norms,” and at worst horrifically destructive, as with our worst fears about what Trump may actually be able to achieve this time around.

But what of Agamben’s prescription? What would it even look like to restore awareness of legitimacy as a principle heterogeneous to law? To me, the first step would be to break the taboo against even discussing major overhaul or even replacement of our absolutely abominable Constitution—but it’s difficult for me to imagine an actual overhaul or replacement happening without an intermediate stage marked by the old ultraviolence. And on a more conceptual level, I worry that Agamben is repeating, to a second degree, the same gesture he rightly critiques among the powers and principalities of our age. That is to say, I wonder if he is setting up the dynamic between legitimacy and legality, between the anomos and the katechōn, as a kind of meta-katechōn that staves off the decadence and violence that follows from the collapse of the tension between them. In other words, I wonder if he is offering us anything more than the naïve hope that we could make our existing order work if everyone would just act more in good faith, following the spirit of the law rather than weaponizing its letter. It is a telling sign of our predicament that such a seemingly obvious and even boring outcome seems roughly as likely as the coming of the messianic age.

Kamala Harris’s closing pitch to the American people was to highlight the threat to democracy represented by Donald Trump. I share that sense of threat — lying about a stolen election and fomenting an insurrection to disrupt its certification are certainly not the marks of someone with a deep and abiding respect for democratic norms. And yet I also understand why that pitch has fallen flat, even among people who acknowledge the 2020 election result and disapprove of the January 6 attacks. After explaining why I find the mainstream liberal rhetoric on this position so unconvincing, I will discuss the more profound sense in which Trump and his movement represent a threat to the possibility of a more meaningful democratic culture emerging in the US, then conclude with some practical tips you can try at home.

1. A Critique of the “Threat to Democracy” Rhetoric

On the one hand, America has always had a tenuous grasp on democratic norms. Disputes over voting procedure and eligibility have always been part of the normal range of political contestation; gerrymandering has been “a thing” since the founding of the Republic; state and local elections are routinely scheduled strategically to decrease turnout and thus accountability; money plays such a huge role in election races that people seem to regard donation as almost more important than voting itself; the Senate is insanely malapportioned and has adopted even more anti-democratic rules on top of that; the two-party system artificially narrows the range of political options in a self-reinforcing way; the separate election of two houses of Congress and the Presidency all but guarantees divided government and thus gridlock most of the time, preventing the implementation of any coherent political program; and of course the Electoral College has allowed the loser to win twice in our young century, to the point where the popular vote has basically disappeared from public discourse. There simply is not a robust culture of democracy in the US. No rational American adult expects their vote to lead directly to any specified outcome. We vote mainly to try to prevent the worst, but there is no sense in which the people at large have a hand in setting the political agenda.

Within that context, the Democrats have done virtually nothing to create the conditions for more authentic democracy. No voting rights legislation was passed or even seriously taken up under Biden — in part because Senate Democrats can’t (or simply don’t want to) discipline their own party even on the purely procedural question of the fillibuster rule. Al Gore conceded to his virtually unprecedented 2000 Electoral College upset almost immediately and Democrats since have done nothing to call into question the institution that has effectively stolen two elections from them, both with disastrous consequences. Indeed, they seem to be “leaning in,” running narrowly focused campaigns on swing states while making no effort in Republican-leaning states. Nor was there any attempt to counteract the extremely unpopular Dobbs decision — in part because they concede in advance that the Supreme Court would simply strike it down again.

And simply at the level of rhetoric, it cannot be the case that the only way to defend authentic democracy is to vote for one and only one party forever and ever amen. It cannot be the case that voters are not allowed to register their dissatisfaction with the omnishambles of the Biden administration because the only other option the system allows is illegitimate and unacceptable — a claim that the Democrats don’t seem to even believe themselves, since Kamala Harris called to “congratulate” Trump on his victory, just as Obama cheerfully agreed to meet with him before handing over the keys and Hillary attended his inauguration.

Certainly Trump is going to be more supportive of restricting voting rights than the typical Republican, and he is going to empower and embolden others on the state level to take more repressive actions. Republicans will likely further lock down their veto points and exploit all avaliable leverage to thwart the popular will — above all on the question of abortion. He may even concoct a rationale to run for a third term and find his hand-picked Supreme Court willing to legitimize it. But the notion that he is somehow going to abolish elections or appoint himself dictator for life strains credulity. And again, if Democrats really believe that, then they should be willing to take much more radical action to prevent him from taking power than re-running Hillary’s campaign with a slightly more charismatic and likeable candidate. Either the Democrats don’t really believe Trump is a burgeoning dictator or they are cowards and fools of almost unimaginable dimensions. (Or both!)

2. A Broader Concept of Democracy Than “People Periodically Vote”

There is more to democracy than just voting. First, the people who propose to rule themselves must have some sense of shared identity, embodied in shared practices and institutions. Second, the community must be able to hold itself and its representatives accountable with reference to some kind of reality principle — some shared empirical basis for judging the success or failure of policies and projects. In the narrow sense of “people voting,” Tuesday’s absolutely disastrous and devastating election result was undeniably democratic. Yet the other two conditions are obviously lacking.

In terms of the first condition, Trump and the Republicans have set themselves up as the sole arbiters of who really “counts” as American, and they have inculcated an attitude of paranoia and distrust in their supporters through false accusations of voter fraud. More broadly, they clearly have no investment in American political institutions except insofar as they can be weaponized to give them more power, nor do they value public goods such as public schools, public libraries, public health regulations, etc., etc. And this connects up with the second condition. For example, the result of the 2020 presidential election is an undeniable, brute empirical fact — yet a strong pluarlity of our fellow citizens believe the obviously self-serving lies of a life-long scam artist over the unanimous testimony of election officials and judges from all 50 states and both parties. And that is only the most extreme instance of an attitude that rejects factual claims from experts precisely because they are made by experts.

What unites both of these two anti-democratic tendencies is their rejection of the public in favor of the private. And to that extent, Trumpian populism is a radicalization of the neoliberal ethos. In the classical era of neoliberalism, from roughly 1991 to 2016, the general consensus was that the purpose of public institutions was to set the rules of the game of market competition and to provide a range of public goods — such as basic research, official statistics, and the conditions for turning young human beings into productive human capital — that market actors had no incentive to reliably provide. Already, the value of public goods and public knowledge was implicitly called into question. They were not ends in themselves, but means to economic growth. Indeed, they were often even viewed as necessary evils, and as many such public duties were entrusted to private profit-seeking entities as possible.

In our new populist moment, by contrast, even this notion of the public as the necessary handmaiden of private accumulation has been delegitimized. Public schools don’t exist to induct students into a shared secular democratic culture, for instance, but are treated as hired hands to provide parents with babysitting services and to inculcate only those values the parents favor. Public libraries are not treated as repositories of certified knowledge, but as reflections of whatever arbitrary values or beliefs the surrounding community happens to have. And public office is increasingly treated as a private possession — above all by Trump, who jokes that he should get a “do-over” because he faced too much opposition and scrutiny to fully enjoy his first term and who muses that perhaps he should not have agreed to leave office in January 2021 after all.

This preference for private power over against public goods goes hand-in-hand with the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other oppressive views characteristic of the radical right. The unfettered exercise of private power will inevitably mean the reassertion of traditional forms of dominance in private life — the superiority of the man over his wife, the ownership of children by their parents, the various hierarchies of race, etc., etc. In reality, the neoliberal order was fully compatible with such hierarchies, which festered and worsened even as exceptional individuals from disadvantaged groups enjoyed spectacular success. But even that token representation was experienced as a humiliation by many of our fellow citizens — above all Trump himself, who first stormed onto the political scene to spread lies meant to delegitimize our first Black president and who arguably chose to run for president specifically because Obama mocked him in his remarks at the Presidential Correspondents’ Dinner.

Reaganite deregulation was ostensibly meant to unleash wealth creation. Trumpian deconstruction of the administrative state is meant to make sure that there’s no one who can tell the boss what to do — no one to give workers or customers or anyone else any leverage against the hierarchy of private domination. Something similar is going on with the destruction of any public consensus on a shared reality through algorithmic manipulation. Where before one might decry wasting money on “useless knowledge,” now the goal is to make sure no genuine learning or understanding occurs at all — by feeding everyone a customized stream of bullshit that targets their own personal weaknesses and insecurities, a tendency that LLM-generated text and images will surely only amplify.

On both these points, the Democrats are again poor messengers, because they don’t genuinely believe in public goods or the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. They remain neoliberal through and through, meaning that they can’t get past arguing that quality public schools actually help economic growth or that we need to learn stuff because it’s a knowledge economy — or whatever the fashionable corporate bullshit happens to be today. “Greening the economy will create jobs and help us compete against China!” Seriously: shut the fuck up.

3. It’s the Capitalism, Stupid!

We can fight these tendencies and create more livable conditions. People have done so in the past, to varying degrees of success. But all of these tendencies are intrinsic to capitalism. We may well be entering a new phase that will make us nostalgic for neoliberalism — a phase centered more on establishing economic autarky and zero-sum competitions between nations — but it’s still going to be capitalism, which means that it’s still going to be exploitative, racist, endlessly hungry from free reproductive labor, etc., etc. We can’t solve those problems in the long run with solutions that are fundamentally parasitical on capitalist production, such as the welfare state or universal basic income, even if they are financed through the vulgar online MMT magical thinking of “helicopter money.”

We need to figure out ways of organizing our communities and our values and our livelihoods in non-capitalist ways. That has been more or less off the table for a generation, in large part because the biggest large-scale experiment with doing that spectacularly collapsed and everyone decided that the system jerry-rigged between two world wars in a peasant society was the only possible way you could do anything other than capitalism. We need to stop letting our rejection of a society that is dead and gone (and that ever fewer people still alive even directly experienced) limit our imagination.

And we need to get the fuck off of social media as soon as possible. I know I am late to this game, having held out at Twitter way too long and then tried to make Bluesky work. The beginning of the end for me was a huge blow-up around a Financial Times column that averred that Bluesky was a liberal bubble, prompting much indignation. After I gave up actively contributing, I have occasionally taken a peek in there and — good grief, it is absolutely absurd. It’s like the liberal version of when we used to make fun of Fox News for suddenly lurching to Hillary Clinton’s ancient scandals while Trump’s trials were going on. The immense levels of cope, verging on the conspiratorial (one pollster in Iowa has figured out it’s going to be a Harris landslide), made me feel like I was on another planet.

We all need to read more — really read. We can’t keep getting our news in two-sentence bursts or trying to have serious discussions with decontextualized fragments. We need to keep some kind of intellectual culture alive, because public schools are dying and universities no longer care about such matters. We need to keep ahold of reality. Like Matthew Ellis — whose excellent post today I have had in the back of my mind as I wrote this — I would encourage you to read the financial press. I subscribe to the Financial Times currently, and find it refreshingly factual (complete with non-tendentious headlines, for my Bluesky bros!). I’ve subscribed to Bloomsburg Businessweek in the past and found it excellent. You would be unimaginably better informed if you just read one of those regularly and subscribed to the New Left Review than you will ever be from scrolling on social media.

We are in a really bad situation. I don’t know how to make it better, but I do know we need to stop making ourselves actively stupider.