The crisis of male loneliness is very much in the news right now, for good reason; masculinity is certainly, to say the least, In Crisis. This is worthy of serious attention, but not from me. I’m going to focus instead on something that I think is kind of overlooked right now – what’s going on, exactly, with normie women? Women are a core demographic of the MAHA woo-woo right, many of them having abandoned long careers as Democratic voters to become fruit snack crusaders, vaccine skeptics, and general social menaces. There was a piece last month that a lot of people sent me, knowing where my interests in this stuff lie: “How New Age Women Turned Right,” by Sarah Jones. I was expecting some kind of explanation of how New Age women “turned” right, but with all due respect, the piece didn’t really deliver on that or much of anything else. It’s not exactly a book review, but most of the content summarizes one book about one very infamous New Age lady: Burning Eye Sees All, by Leah Sottile, about the late (excuse me, ascended) Amy Carlson a.k.a. Mother God and her cult, Love Has Won. Most of the insights in the piece are sourced from Sottile’s book; the one that was particularly interesting to me was Sottile’s contention that mysticism has historically been an avenue for women to transcend (heh) their restricted social status. (Including the 1970s-1980s New Age movement – Sottile points out that during these decades, women were still blocked from more mainstream spiritual authority.) Jones writes of Carlson: “she wanted authority, and a version of motherhood on her own terms, and it consumed her.” I think this is mostly right, and while the piece doesn’t explore this satisfactorily, I am going to excavate it like a commercial crystal mine for further insights.
Last month, around when the piece came out, I was also reading through most of Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. His ignominious later career notwithstanding, I was really impressed by it (it came out in 1933, for Christ’s sake!), and felt like it illuminates something crucial about the MAHA moment that other analyses continue to miss (our well of collective intellectual resource getting shallower, I fear, amid the contentization and podcastification of thinking). Reich carefully synthesizes social-economic and political data about Weimar and post-Weimar Germany to make inferences about the “average personality structure” of German people at the time, the average personality structure that, he contends, made them ready and even eager to receive the contradictory rhetoric, false promises, violent fantasies, and emotional appeals of fascism. Though Reich was a psychologist, the book is not principally “idealist.” A great deal of work is devoted to demonstrating how the average personality structure is contingent on what leftists like to call “material reality,” economic conditions of work and life, social conditions at the particular historical moment, distribution of life chances, prospects for fulfillment of basic and spiritual needs, and so on. Reich focuses on sex and sexuality (feels Freudian to me, idk), contending that the industrial organization of life creates sexual frustration, in fact exploits and diverts sexual energy to make people to things like work in factories for most of their waking hours and live in nuclear families. I think this can easily be generalized to what we might call life energy, creativity, spirit, or whatever, without losing Reich’s drift. Fascism, in Reich’s analysis, is an outgrowth of this diversion and exploitation; fascism as “organized mysticism,” as he calls it (mysticism of, for example, the family, the mother within the family) offers people a sort of substitute emotional release for all their pent up and frustrated aspirations and vital energy.
In this way, the average personality structure acts like a lurking variable that serves to explain political outcomes that are otherwise contradictory at, for example, the level of balance-sheet material determination that we’re so comfortable talking in. Why do people vote against their own interests – poor people for rich people’s interests? Why do people “fall for” deceptive rhetoric and false promises? Because, according to Reich, the organized mysticism of fascist ideology offers a way to process the unbearable contradictions of social and sexual life that occur and are felt at the level of the individual psyche. German fascism affirmed, on an emotional and mystical level, the very “authoritarian family structure” (Reich’s term) that had been shredded by Weimar economic crisis. The particulars are, of course, different for us today, but I think the psychological aspect is similar. Social repression and exploitation and mystification/exaltation of the mother within an authoritarian family structure… where have I heard this before?
The family structure in the US is under tremendous strain from economic conditions, social conditions, the commodification and brutalization of sexuality and emotional life, the bite of neoliberal social and welfare policy coming into millenial maturity, even women’s putative “liberation” with the freeing of markets – now you’re free to work a shift for your boss and then a shift, unpaid, for your husband and kids! Now you’re free to subjugate yourself to the market to survive! Is this not what Reich would call “sexual misery,” the frustration and wastage of women’s life force and ambitions on a population scale? But just you try to point this out, as Chappell Roan recently did when she mentioned on a podcast episode that the moms she knows are miserable. Those miserable moms will be the first to lash out at you; in addition to the bulk of unpaid social and private labor, women also, through social media, take on the work of mystifying themselves and their lives. (I just saw a TikTok video of a woman asking her husband to take their kids to a birthday party because she was tired, they both laughed as the husband hedged and said he didn’t know if he “had it in him.” Fucking embarrassing.)
Sizzling with Drizzle, in this economy?
Long time, no talk. I’ll spare you the usual excuses and apologies and skip right to it.
As I’m currently working with a friend on Something about data and datafication, I wanted to bang out a couple of quick thoughts here that aren’t totally germane to the main thrust of our thing. As an entry point, smooth as an ocean liner, I want to draw your attention to this amazing Financial Times Alphaville feature. This is not the “Lunch with the FT” feature where Roula Khalaf interviews the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over pasta in his Napa home. Rather, this is the blog feature accompaniment to that piece, where someone named Bryce Elder (Bryce, if you’re reading this, I love you) reads Altman for absolute filth. To wit: Altman actually cooks with the “Drizzle” offering from the trendy Graza (gra-tha, if you’re insufferable like that, which I am) olive oil brand. You should never heat a finishing oil! The bottle Altman cooks with, Elder notes with appropriate outrage, is actually one of two open bottles in his kitchen. It’s perverse, unbelievably indulgent, like paneling the exterior of your Subaru beater in solid mahogany. Sam Altman also has an expensive espresso machine that functions poorly and is widely panned online, complete with an expensive and pointless add-on doohickey perched atop it. This doohickey is called, in all solemnity, a “puck sucker.” Altman wields a knife to prepare the lunch that vexes Elder to no end. It looks expensive, but it could be cheap; he wonders about where the center of gravity in the handle is – more towards the tip, as with a Japanese knife, or more towards the center, for the kinds of vegetable-chopping more common to European techniques? Impossible to say. The blade is curved, making it, I agree, a puzzling choice to use to chop garlic. (He made them pasta aglio e olio? Give me a fucking break!)
We care about Sam Altman because, as I said, he is the CEO of OpenAI. OpenAI is in, to put it mildly, trouble. Ed Zitron has called the company “a systemic risk to the tech industry” and it’s hard to see how he’s wrong. OpenAI is currently wrangling with Microsoft, its biggest corporate supporter, over the terms of a restructuring deal whose parameters I don’t quite understand but which I’m sure is certain to pointlessly burn even more money than the company has already wantonly torched. But I didn’t come here to eulogize the most money-losing company in the history of capitalism. I came here to talk about the basis of the AI, which is to say the tech industry, which is to say the stock market’s value, which is data.
Back when I was most recently on Bluesky again (ugh), I got into an argument with somebody about how even the newest AI models don’t work – they are, in the words of Ed Zitron again, increasingly expensive and unsustainable “lossy bullshit.” (In machine learning jargon, “loss” is another word for “error.”) To support my original claim I maintained, correctly, that these models cannot really tell you what 2+2 is. My Bluesky interlocutor countered that the newer models are actually much improved over their older relatives, such that they can give answers to queries, queries like “what is 2 + 2,” to 99.999+% accuracy. Can I have a side of aglio e olio with that? You know what can give me the answer to “what is 2+2” with 100% accuracy, every time? A handheld calculator. And it doesn’t have to burn ten acres of rainforest to do it. “What is 2+2” is a simple question with a closed-form (shout out to me for the unexpectedly witty chosen name for my newsletter) arithmetic solution. If you perform the simple arithmetic operation known to initiates into the mathematical mysteries as “addition,” and perform it correctly, you will get the right answer, guaranteed. AI models like ChatGPT don’t work this way, though. An AI model answers a question like “what is 2+2” probabilistically, which means that it uses a bunch of unstructured data – let’s say, the text of every mathematics textbook it has pirated from JSTOR or wherever – to estimate the posterior probability distribution of the possible responses present in that training data set of mathematics textbooks (and whatever else, including the AI-generated slop that is beginning to creep over the face of the internet like kudzu – but this is a separate concern for now) to the question “what is 2+2.” To do this, it requires what we euphemistically call “computing power” – an awful lot of electricity and water. A very stupid and computationally intensive answer, one that is not even guaranteed to be right, to a very simple question.
I.G.Y.
This one is a bit of a meander (first as shower thought, then as free-write, and finally as free newsletter post, the great ouroboros of intellectual work in 2025) but I haven’t written anything for awhile and so I figured – what the hell, let’s lose some subscribers today. There are a few reasons I haven’t written anything for public consumption in a minute, though the private scribblings continue at their typically feverish pace, don’t you worry. For one, I have been working on an article for an actual publication which should be out soon; I’ll let you know when it is. Mostly, though, it’s a constellation of related reasons, spelling out “DESPAIR” in astrological glyphs. The state of the world is absolutely terrifying right now, and neither I nor anyone else has much of value to say about it; public-facing writing about it all feels, in its current iteration, broken as it has been by the perverse incentives of publishing, all rather bad-faith and inauthentic.
But here I go anyway, powered by the jitters, palpitations, and false courage attendant to downing a couple of cold brew coffee smoothies. (These, my latest obsession, are further eroding my ability to produce any writing for anyone to read, since the embrace caffeine as my One Last Vice is fucking up my sleep quality.) I started piecing together the thoughts I’m going to attempt to tessellate today in the shower (where else), listening to my friend Tim’s excellent appearance on the Chapo Trap House podcast for an episode about Medicaid and the imminent attacks on it. Tim has two qualities, rarely co-present in the same person – an understanding of the arcana of health policy and an empathetic facility with human suffering – that I quite honestly envy. It’s a good discussion of the problems with US health care and the sheer cruelty of it, and I agree tremendously with the parts of the discussion pointing out how much human potential is wasted so that rents can be extracted from the rationing of care. I also agree tremendously with the ominous sense that the particular structure of health care contributes to general, population-scale increases in sickness, in stress, in mental illness, and in continued fraying of social cohesion. I share Tim’s and the hosts’ foreboding about the violence that is built in to the health care system working its way out as more, lateral violence, as people lashing the fuck out at themselves and each other because they just can’t fucking take the bullshit anymore.
All of this is absolutely convincing on its face. I do think there is another, underappreciated dimension to it, though. It’s easy to believe that this stuff is all just an adjunct to the singular profit motive programmed into US health care, and for a long time, that was a reasonably sufficient belief. I think we also need to be really, especially scared about the synthesis of this routinely evil stuff with the strand of techno-fascist accelerationism that now has the entire country in a chokehold. (For a great reading of the two apparently contradictory strains in the contemporary right wing, may I recommend Erik Davis’s newsletter.) That stuff, the Musk and Thiel stuff, the proliferation of lossy, expensive, destructive “AI tools” that are being shoved into every aspect of human existence, is predicated on a basic belief about the expendability and uselessness of human beings in general. In this sense, the squelching of human potential, the extreme inefficiencies in health care “markets,” the increases in social suffering and social volatility are not only convincing arguments for abandoning this system and creating a new one – they are, in the technofascist program, extremely intended outcomes. They want to create a world where we have nothing to live for, and where we’re tearing each other apart from the stress and difficulty of it all, because they’re betting that this will create the conditions to further consolidate their power. They’re not wrecking the government in spite of the suffering and chaos it will cause, but rather because of that; it’s their gamble – a dangerous one, but the one they’re making – that smashing the state and precipitating general societal breakdown creates opportunities for them.
As the world turns to shit, life grinds on, and I’ve been reading a little bit of the structural Marxist Nicos Poulantzas on the state. Frustrated as I am by asinine mutual aid discourse as, for example, the public infrastructure that sustains my one-time profession is being imploded (look a few paragraphs ahead for the Great Gutting of the CDC Show), I have been thinking that it’s seriously time for the left – any left worth being a part of right now – to reengage the role of the state. Much as it’s understandable to want to retreat from it, the state does structure the contours of popular power and political possibility. I am not going to try to summarize the little bit of State, Power, Socialism that I’ve read, except to pluck out one little line in his section on what he calls “authoritarian statism.” Authoritarian statism involves, among many other things, the “establishment of an entire institutional structure serving to prevent a rise in popular struggles.” What is interesting to me at this moment is how much this institutional structure is constituted as a negative space, through the destruction and hollowing out of already-embattled institutions of so-called civil society. On what passes for the American left, long dominated by NGO philanthropy, we’re dealing with the fallout of a sudden and total shift in “cost-benefit” calculus for the stupid little nonprofits that sustain the actual work. Poulantzas continues: “Probably for the first time in the history of democratic States, the present form not only contains scattered elements of totalitarianism, but crystallizes their organic disposition in a permanent structure running parallel to the official State.”
What I said at March for Science 2017
Lightly edited for clarity and relevance. The March for Science was organized here in Pittsburgh through the Pitt graduate student union organizing committee I was a member of, which explains a) why I spoke at it at all and b) the general bent of my remarks. (It’s also a bit more earnest than 2025-me feels super comfortable sharing, but whatever.) If I can get it together I am going to publish a more detailed critique of tomorrow’s action(s) tomorrow. In any case, enjoy.
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Today I want to use a common thing I hear when canvassing STEM grads as a starting point for a broader discussion about the moral responsibility of scientists. This goes something as follows: “well, I believe in what you all are doing, but I don’t want to pick a side, I just want to focus on my work.”
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book called Cat’s Cradle that was published in 1963. In it, a brilliant but aloof scientist develops a technology called ice-nine, a seed crystal that freezes any water it comes into contact with. This fictional scientist, who developed the atom bomb and played cat’s cradle with a length of string as it was dropped on Hiroshima, developed ice-nine to help American soldiers avoid dealing with mud. His children sell the bits of ice-nine in their possession after his death and end up freezing all the water on earth, precipitating a global catastrophe and the extinction of all human life. That’s one example of divorcing your work from its context. Frankenstein is another. Frankenstein, as Vonnegut reminds us, is the name of the scientist.
(Not) seeing like a state
The polycrisis grinds along. It’s my least favorite time of year, less so even than the pit of winter. We love it when it’s 60 degrees one day and 30 the next, my sinuses love it, my mood loves it, the hypersensitized nerve endings in my brain, barely recovered from last week’s Airborne Toxic Event, absolutely fucking love it. The constant howling wind isn’t driving us to a kind of quaint sepia-toned 19th-century madness at all. One more thing to be grimly and stiffly borne, although eventually this transitional period will resolve definitively into spring. The polycrisis will also resolve, but those futures are less clear and more terrifying.
I want to try to touch on a few recent developments to make a few kind of crackpot points that may, nevertheless, resonate, as if struck with a wooden spoon. The first is the indefinite shuttering of the PRAMS (Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System). I was, and remain (spiritually if not in practice) a perinatal epidemiologist, so this one is obviously near and dear to my heart. Quite obviously, this is Bad, another evil omen on a horizon crowded with them lately. Reading about this where most people get their news – privately-owned social media platforms – that’s probably all you’ve heard about it. It’s shut down inevitably. It’s Bad. And thus it gets sort of buffed out in the white noise of the polycrisis.
The way the US state organizes data collection, especially around pregnancy, labor, and delivery, is suboptimal. I have written about this before. I don’t think shutting PRAMS down is good, but I also don’t think that the state of data for pregnancy/maternal mortality was good before Elon’s goons lit the fuse on a cartoon bundle of TNT under the entire administrative state. The way the US does it actually makes some important aspects of maternal mortality very hard to see; other aspects that are more visible are still rather imprecise. In the absence of a coherent national monitoring system, we have to rely on health care encounters, billable outcomes, and what can be inferred (often rather obliquely) from death certificates or pieced together from sub-national bodies like state maternal mortality review committees. ProPublica recently published a great article, essentially an epidemiologic analysis, linking Texas’s state abortion ban to a marked increase in the rate of pregnancy-associated septic infection. According to the substantial companion “methods” document, they were able to do this by purchasing seven years of hospital discharge data. (They did a good job, but the extensive methodology is necessary because this is not a straightforward, or obviously a free, thing to do. I am considering writing a long post going through this analysis so if you are interested in that, let me know.)
PRAMS is part of this ecosystem. It is a survey (not a population registry) of live births (so no pregnancies ending in miscarriage, termination, or stillbirth are included). PRAMS collects critical information – in these times, one has to make sure to adequately genuflect before the data collection systems that do exist – but it’s more akin to one piece of an old puzzle missing a handful of tabs and blanks. This has been, understandably, rather overlooked in the breathless reporting on the chaos of Trump’s first month in office. A Talking Points Memo article from February 22 reported that PRAMS had been completely shuttered, indefinitely, accepting no new data after January 31 of this year. (The PRAMS page on the CDC website says that data collection for 2025 will begin in April, so I’m not sure what to make of that.) There was no official announcement of this, but according to the sources cited for the article, the CDC is informally telling partner institutions that the entirety of PRAMS is undergoing a new IRB (Institutional Review Board) review. In a follow-up article, the reporter (Josh Marshall) speculates that this new IRB review may be because the PRAMS questionnaire is being modified to comply with Trump’s executive orders, meaning that questions about race and racism, socieconomic status, gender and sexual orientation, and so forth (much of which was part of the entire raison d’être of PRAMS in the first place) are being axed for future versions of the questionnaire.
Bird flu series #3
This will be another post about avian flu. I’m doing something I usually don’t do, which is working on this right after waking up. (Close your eyes and imagine the first sip of morning coffee hitting your blood-brain barrier.) (Considerable hours have now elapsed since the morning I wrote that.) I’ve been sitting on this too long, partially due to the general psychological block I’ve developed around writing and partially due to that block’s particular tendency to manifest as debilitating perfectionism. This ain’t a dissertation and considering the fucking slop people churn out daily I figure – it doesn’t have to be dissertation-quality. It just needs to be out there, because unfortunately, in today’s carnivorous world, when you’re not posting your take, someone else out there is. And theirs will be worse.
I have in the past heartily recommended Mike Davis’s 2005 book about avian flu, The Monster At Our Door. I still recommend it, it’s a great and highly informative read, and of course we all love Mike Davis, because he rocks. That being said, this post will be structured around a respectful critique of some aspects of the book. Not because I want to poke holes in his argument for the sake of it, and not because I think I’m so great or whatever, but because I feel like this is an efficient way to communicate the extremely complicated content I want to impart. I’m essentially free-riding on the work Mike Davis already did to structure his book. There is one major axis along which I will critique The Monster At Our Door, which I started thinking about recently when I read an interview in The Sick Times with the great Colin Carlson. Colin cautioned against over-attributing the emergence of pandemics (or of novel pandemic-potential pathogens) to human agency. It’s important to remember (gentle reminder…) that the causal structure of something so complex is, well, complex. Humans are involved, of course, but not in straightforward ways that reduce to simple, more or less deterministic, Freakonomics-type beats. Humans are actors in a planetary ecosystem that we fundamentally do not and cannot control. As Colin says, “We all have this story in our heads of a remote community where people cut down forests and then mysteriously start getting sick.We get things wrong because of this narrative… A pandemic could just happen because we live on a biodiverse planet — we are constantly in contact with animals and pathogens.”
This is something that has bothered me about the Covid discourse for some time, and which I touched on in the first post of this series. This sort of causal over-attribution creates tidy narratives that drive engagement on online content platforms. That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if there were literally any sources of legitimate information left. Since there aren’t – as Colin points out – this tends to circumscribe better thinking about adaptation to and mitigation of pandemics that can, do, and will arise. Careful thinking about mitigation gets washed out in the white noise of outrage and anguish. This is what I meant in that first post that you can’t just back the truck up out of capitalism and be fine (contra the Bluesky guy who got insanely mad at me for saying that the United States of America, one country on the vast blue planet, having better “regulations” would likely not have been enough to stop H5N1 – this outbreak, which is not the first – cold). This attitude, and the attendant over-comparison of Covid and H5N1, is leading, among the internat chatterati at least, to a gloomy tone of dour inevitability about a possible H5N1 pandemic that I think is extremely fucked up. H5N1 is already a concrete, present issue that must be dealt with on a planetary scale; this present reality coexists alongside another truth, which is that the nightmare scenario most have in mind, H5N1 going human-to-human, is not inevitable.
The really scary thing is that it is only partially under our control. And there are reasons to be freaked. It is a fucked up time in the US, to understate the problem, and we are not doing the kinds of flu responses that we should be. We’re not collecting the right kinds of data, studies are being suppressed, and so on. But there are farm workers in the country right now for whom H5N1 is not an abstract threat, and media studies professors on Bluesky who love to crow (eh?) about mutual aid could, in fact, be working on local organizing to get PPE to these workers instead of doomposting and engagement-mongering about it. I’ll list some things I think we can do, on an individual basis, to decrease the likelihood of a reassortment event, either at the end of this post or in a subsequent one if this post becomes too long (already looking like a possibility that it will be a separate post, after nearly 1000 words of throat-clearing here).
RFK Jr. and MAHA hegemony
RFK Jr.’s fuckups, idiocies, and crimes have been amply documented by others and still, like a catastrophe unfolding in slowed-down trauma time, we’ve watched his confirmation grind obstinately to what has seemed to be its inevitable conclusion. This feels like one more defeat in a long, long streak of losing battles for “science.” Crying foul over the offensively stupid and harmful shit he’s said and done, chronicling the troubling resonances (with, for example, 19th century eugenic race science) in his own statements and in the priorities of the broader MAHA movement, have come to nothing. Calling Senators to voice objections has proven to be the weak tea it has always tasted like. And now, the lightworkers will have their day. In a grotesque parallel to the administrative takeover of the federal payments system by 22 year old groypers, RFK Jr. is (if I had to guess) going use his authority to use the federal government to arrange a broad patronage network for supplements hawkers, reiki practitioners, illiterate homesteaders, and 5G psychos. Grim.
The framework that we’ve mostly been using to understand what has been happening here – the strange alignments that put Meister Brain Worm in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, for Christ’s sake – has been something like a “crisis of misinformation,” characterized in terms of a fragmentary information ecosystem and mounting distrust of experts through the Covid pandemic. A recent (and helpful, as far as it goes) post from popular Substack Your Local Epidemiologist says about as much. They recommend: 1) “Recogniz(ing) that top-down information doesn’t work anymore,” 2) “Meet[ing] people where they are,” and 3) “Tell[ing more stories.” I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this. I do, however, think that this analysis locates responsibility for the crisis with people we don’t understand – antivaxxers, TikTokers, lightworkers – and specifically inside their heads, somewhere in their information-processing cortex, where it’s inaccessible to political analysis. As such, I think that while the tone is appropriately serious, the post actually underestimates what is really happening here, and thus the scale of the problem we are facing. What’s really happening here, in my view, is a seismic process in the struggle to construct hegemony. I am suggesting that MAHA, and RFK Jr. as its figurehead, signal a serious and ongoing rearrangement of the power stakes of science.
When I say the power stakes of science, I am not talking about the administrative relations and the legal rules that govern how science is carried out in the USA. (Of course, this is important, it’s just not what I’m talking about right now.) To bring in Bruno Latour (I’m so, so sorry), science is a social activity that fabricates reality itself. This does not, as vulgar “social constructionism” would suggest, mean that everything is a social construct and thereby somehow fake or not real. It is meant to be an accurate description of what science is, as a process and as an attempt to make human understanding of the world, separate from the abstract construction of Science as an arbiter of objective reality. Latour wrote a 2004 book whose English title is The Politics of Nature that treats exactly this topic. I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive summary of it here (in true Continental fashion, a concise or clear summary is all but impossible), but I am going to pick up on some key themes and ideas from it because I think they help to illustrate one way of thinking about what’s happening with MAHA.
Latour essentially uses Plato’s Cave (Lord), through a lengthy and painstaking procedure, to allegorize what he calls a “bicameral” relationship between science and society. One of the houses, science (or Science, as distinct from “the sciences” as people actually practice them), is the domicile of objects, objective reality or ontology if you’re nasty, and “facts,” which are real and bear some ultimate truth but are silent. The other is where dwell subjects, the social world, “politics,” social constructions, and the sense people make of things (epistemology) – these can speak, but their contact with ultimate reality is mediated and compromised by the meddlesome presence of messy human subjectivity. The figure of the scientist can pass between these houses, endowed with the special power to make objective reality legible to the subject-world. This is heady as fuck, I know. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of arguing for the “truth” of Latour’s metaphor or his assertions. I just want to lay out the basic template of his thinking to help us to get thinking this way.
The bifurcation of the political, shitty version
Stuart Hall writes a lot about how Thatcherism is so successful because it manages to touch the real experience of people’s lives, and articulate something of that truth in a rightward direction, or maybe more precisely to articulate something of it as rightist ideology. Hall’s accounting of “authoritarian populism” feels especially, uh, relevant right now, but there’s something to this more tangible than the construction of historical categories. There is an emotive experience of everything that is “going on,” and that necessarily happens in a personal register.
Or rather, maybe, there’s a weird double emotional register of events like what we’re living through right now. First, there’s the register of public performance. This is the register of the brave face, the sweeping statement, the performance of courage. It’s also the register of comparison and ranking. It’s where you have to rank your experience of your problem according to the miserly moral calculus of progressive discourse so often presented, dishonestly, as progressive values. I catch myself doing this all the time. I’ve caught myself doing it this week, in the middle of the abject panic about my future and my stability that is finally catching up to me. Of course my fear is nothing compared to the suffering of Gazans, or the terror inflicted on trans youth in our own country, and so on. I would never try to pretend that it is. However, it is there. It exists in the second register, the personal one, where catastrophe takes on a specific and personal shape.
In my experience it is considered a progressive virtue to conduct our affective performances of politics entirely in the first register (the register of Posting). I do think this has drawbacks in and of itself, but I think it also has a secondary effect which is insidious and which few recognize. It ensures that personal catastrophes remain personal, never crossing the threshold into politicization. This is a particular problem for scientists, who struggle to politicize their experiences in the first place. (Don DeLillo in Libra: “The purpose of history is to crawl out of your own skin.”)
I think this helps to explain some of the intense ambivalence and psychic paralysis I’m feeling lately. I am terrified for my job (the threat of losing my job is very much experienced, by me, as personal catastrophe, in ways that I can’t/won’t go into) and at the same time I can’t believe that we’re really going to the fucking barricades for NIH indirects. But of course, we’re not going to the barricades at all, which furthers my indifference. Rather than a broad-spectrum assault on civil society, rather than an illegal attack that will fuck up thousands of people’s livelihoods, for no reason, at a single keystroke, scientists are articulating their opposition to this in terms of the particular merit of their own research. To put it bluntly: a lot of research is simply not good. Universities are not good. The system of funding is not good, it’s certainly not meritocratic, it’s a source of endless frustration and wasted time and administrative burden to everyone, it’s actually a principal reason I left academia (was this smart or dumb? I don’t know).
