Recent work: Two essays on the wreckage of liberalism

Plus go plant some flowers

Photo by Christina Brinza on Unsplash

Hello dear readers! You will have to forgive the long delay since my last dispatch. I am just now finding myself on the other side of an extended school break for the kiddos + Passover, which basically means I’ve been working as a short-order cook instead of offering hot (or lukewarm) takes about the outrage(s) of the day.

I have been looking for bits of calm amidst the deluge, and found a story from Leonard Woolf’s Downhill All the Way quite moving. Leonard Woolf was a British political theorist, writer, and publisher — but is perhaps unfairly most famous for being Virginia’s husband. Downhill All the Way is his autobiographical retelling of the years from 1919-1939, as Europe descended once more into barbarism:

One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler — the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers which, like the daffodils, “come before the swallow dares and takes the winds of March with beauty.” Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.

I joked a few weeks ago that the best part of being a historian is the daily reminder that things have always been terrible, but Leonard Woolf offers a different sort of consolation: that the natural world exists on a different time-scape than we do. I think about this on my walks around the 200+ year old trees in University Parks. These trees have seen it all — every outrage, every lie, every act of cruelty and stupidity. They don’t give a damn about us, so long as we don’t destroy them (which is not something we can take for granted in this age of climate crisis). Still, I am going home soon and will plan my new garden. I will plant some iris.

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In other news I have two new pieces to share. The first, for GW University’s Illiberalism Studies Project, is “Stop Calling them Libertarians: How the Tech Right Learned to Love the State,” a title which is fairly self-explanatory. Here’s a bit more:

It’s often taken for granted that tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks are libertarian warriors facing off against big government: bio-hacked knights in self-driving cars out to slash regulation, public spending, taxes. Rather than relying on the stories that tech elites spin about their political commitments, it is more instructive to look at their behavior: from the demand for a government bailout of Silicon Valley Bank to the critical role that federal funding has played in the success of Elon Musk’s companies, to the tech set’s pivot toward defense technologies in an attempt to capture lucrative military contracts. Among the lucky recipients of the latter are Anduril Industries, the defense startup whose founder achieved infamy by creating an exploding VR headset that kills the user if they die while playing a video game. As Anduril President Christian Brose stated in a recent interview, “We have relationships with the current administration – it’s not secret that our founder has given money to Trump and is very supportive of Trump and has been for a very long time.” As he added, “At the level of vibes, it’s good.”

I also suggests that while techno-feudalism is a fine alternative to the libertarian label (one I leaned into in my last book), we should not overlook the analytic utility of good old imperialism:

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt described imperialism as a process in which the owners of capital convinced politicians and citizens alike “to identify the economic interests of a relatively small group with national interests as such.” Unable to achieve their goal of endless accumulation without “the expansion of the national instruments of violence,” businessmen set out to conquer both the mechanisms of government and logic of politics. They “became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen.”

You can read the whole essay here.

Next up, for the (open access) policy journal European View, I have a new piece, “Owning the Liberal International Order,” about how hatred for liberal internationalism soothes the the internal rivalries that strain the Trump 2.0 coalition. The traditionalists and engineers each have their own reasons for despising the “rules-based international order” — but understanding their triumph requires taking stock of just how fragile that order was in the first place:

There is a famous story about the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi being asked for his views on Western civilisation. “I think it would be a good idea,” he supposedly quipped. The fact that the story is most likely apocryphal does not undermine the critical sting. Somehow the Europe of Homer, Michelangelo and Kant was also the Europe of the African slave trade, the Bengali famine and the Holocaust. This is the right note to conclude any discussion of liberal internationalism and its possible demise in the face of an emboldened Trump administration. The ease with which the president has run roughshod over the rules-based international order points to its underlying fragility, the signs of which were already evident prior to Trump’s return: a UN that has failed to restrain the militarism of its members or enforce global coordination around climate goals; leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu who flaunt their contempt for international legal institutions (while the US moves to sanction officials at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court); and financial bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which stand discredited in the eyes of many after decades of liberalisation, debt and austerity policies.

The piece goes on to outline what I see as the three pillars of foreign policy under this administration: (1) unilateralism, (2) economic warfare and (3) the personalisation of international relations.

I can’t promise either will be an enjoyable read, but hopefully useful still the same. And when you’re done, might I suggest planting something that will outlive us?