The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is ground zero for the American and, increasingly, the global right. We asked the spirited Argentine journalist, Juan Elman, who has followed in past years the reactionary shenanigans of Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, and Nayib Bukele, to spend four days recently at CPAC in Washington, DC and provide us his reflections.
Some may avoid using the term civil society to describe the voices of CPAC, but cultural critic Lee Siegel would protest. It is here where civil society exists, in extremis even. But does it have power? Real power? He would answer hardly so, though civil society champion Jonas Rolett, who responds to Siegel, emphatically disagrees.
CPAC habitués would appreciate the French philosophical anthropologist and hero to Peter Thiel, the revered—and reviled—René Girard. He is the subject here of one of the smartest podcasts out there: Know Your Enemy, which takes on heroic (and not-so-heroic) figures of the contemporary and historical right.
Next up, the singular historian, Barbara Jean Fields, has long been one of the keenest interpreters and critics of race discourse. In this recent lecture she asks whether race is identity, and then answers in the negative. Fields’ work has always been a tonic to promiscuous renderings of what race is, and what it is not.
Turning the spotlight on the subject of philanthropy, Amy Schiller asks necessary questions about whether philanthropy, often submerged within a neo-liberal paradigm, can be saved. Her prescriptions for its salvation will surprise—and perhaps inspire. Marshall Sahlins, the recently passed University of Chicago anthropologist, had himself long focused on the perils of neo-liberalism avant la lettre. Here, Anna della Subin dives into his final (posthumously published) work that, like his student David Graeber, takes the long view, grappling with the cultural status of so-called metapersons.
Finally, two pieces from the publication Jacobin debate the thorny question of degrowth. Some, like the Japanese Marxist phenom Kohei Saito, see Marx’s own hand in the debate. Others treat it as an enemy not only to Marx but to humans everywhere. You decide.
Our musical selection this edition is from the American South, long a playground for satire, and often satire directed inwards. Hayes Carll’s send-up is a loving and hilarious tribute to that tradition.
—Leonard Benardo, senior vice president at the Open Society Foundations
CPAC Through a Latin American Lens
Juan Elman
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Argentine journalist Juan Elman dove into the world of the U.S. far right at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. He found an ecosystem preparing for battle in November to stave off what they see as the decline of the United States in the face of migration, the “woke left” and China. It is a group that perceives Jan. 6 as a lingering open wound, one that marks a defeat in the defense of U.S. democracy. Trump is perceived as the only possible salvation in this scenario, and he generates devotion among fans. International guest stars Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Argentine President Javier Milei helped showcase the global nature of the far-right phenomenon.
“In a sense, Trump, Bukele and Milei represent three distinct variants of the far-right family in the hemisphere. Trump represents the nativist type, built on a strong religious influence that flirts with racial supremacy. Bukele, beyond his local particularity, has won regional admirers for his iron-fist policies, a punitive populism that resonates in places besieged by insecurity. Milei, on the other hand, seems to represent a new variant marked by free market radicalism, with a strong rejection of the state and its drivers: the political class. In a region marked by a crisis of representation, Milei’s battle cry also resonates.”
Civil Society’s Proper Place
Lee Siegel
The Ideas Letter
Essay
Civil society is often posited as a vital space for the preservation of a healthy democracy. “But the very idea of civil society, resorted to in this way, as some sort of sacred refuge, is a symptom of the failure of both the marketplace and the state,” according to Siegel. Civil society lacks political power, and “rarely has an influence on political decisions, whether you are bowling alone or with 20 other people,” he argues.
“A thriving civil society is precious, as much for a people searching for a space to breathe between commerce and the administrative state as for a people yearning to be free from a suffocating totalitarian universe. It is too precious to be refuge, salvation, or last resort. We need to de-sacralize civil society, as it were, and to search for opportunities to make civil society interact meaningfully with the state and economy without allowing it to be subsumed by them. Letting civil society be, without looking to it for salvation, might even have the more immediate effect of making our politics, if not functional, at least marginally endurable.”
In Response
Civil Society’s Beating Heart
Jonas Rolett
The Ideas Letter
Civil society does have an impact on politics, if you broaden the scope beyond “well-meaning NGOs,” writes Jonas Rolett in a response to Lee Siegel’s piece above, pointing to the French Revolution and the U.S. civil rights movement. “It’s more accurate to say that political decisions are constantly influenced by social actors outside of government.”
“The relationship between politicians and civic actors isn’t binary; it’s manifold, complex and reactive. If that weren’t true, societies would remain rigid and inert. That’s why countries where dictators neutralize political competitors for long periods often stagnate—until the cork flies out of the bottle. Because while one can dampen the Brownian motion that characterizes civic life for a while, the pressure that builds up in closed societies almost always bursts into the open.”
For more, Siegel and Rolett continue the conversation here.
René Girard and the Right
Know Your Enemy, with John Ganz
John Ganz
Dissent Magazine
Podcast
John Ganz discusses René Girard, “the Stanford polymath whose theory of “mimetic desire,” violence, and the meaning of secular modernity has inspired a devoted following—including Peter Thiel, Girard’s former student.” Girard has become a darling of the right—as Sam Kriss recently put it in a Harper’s essay, “Girardianism has become a secret doctrine of a strange new frontier in reactionary thought.” The interview delves into the literature professor’s insights into who we are as human beings, what we want, and the origins of violence and social order.
“It’s very interesting that this person with a theory of envy, resentment, jealousy and and mimetic desire was very close to the person who was involved in the creation of social media (Thiel), which really exacerbates everything we’re talking about to an extreme degree.”
Is Race Identity?
Barbara Jean Fields
Illinois State University
Lecture
Race is not identity for Columbia University Professor Barbara Jean Fields, who argues that “race, and identity are polar opposites,” the first being collective and the latter individual. “When you combine the two, they reach an apogee of intellectual incoherence. Race is the antithesis of identity, bearing the same relationship to an individual sense of self that a brand seared into a bull’s hide bears to the bull’s sense of themselves.”
“When the notion of racial identity infiltrates the political arena, it becomes a solvent of politics. It becomes a solvent of politics in the first place by encouraging the fallacy of a collective interest that people share purely by reason, a shared ancestry. I, for example, am not aware of any interest that I hold in common with Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, let alone any political, judicial, or religious conviction. But the siren song of collective racial identity for ears attuned to it, and minds distracted by it, tempt people to imagine a natural affinity with or allied a well-founded antipathy toward someone who quote, ‘looks like them.’ It also lends spurious credence to disparity thinking. The idea that the highest political good will have been achieved when every group, however that group is specified, suffers injustice in proportion to its percentage of the population. By that reasoning, if the percentage of unarmed Afro- or indigenous Americans killed by police matches their percentage of the total population, and the percentage of unarmed white Americans killed by the police matches their percentage of the population, then justice has been achieved. And correlatively, justice and injustice can be defined in no other terms.”
Can The Concept of “Philanthropy” Be Saved?
Amy Schiller
Current Affairs
interview
The current philanthropic paradigm is fundamentally flawed; in a neoliberal system, giving is used to fulfill critical rights the state doesn’t cover: GoFundMe as health insurance. While the neediest cases are emotionally compelling, ultimately basic needs must be fulfilled by a social democratic state. Amy Schiller takes the concept of a universal basic income wage one step further and proposes a “giving wage” that would allow everybody to decide what philanthropic projects to support. These efforts shouldn’t be targeted at basic needs, but rather special projects that enrich life, however the giver chooses to interpret that.
The current philanthropic paradigm is fundamentally flawed; in a neoliberal system, giving is used to fulfill critical rights the state doesn’t cover: GoFundMe as health insurance. While the neediest cases are emotionally compelling, ultimately basic needs must be fulfilled by a social democratic state. Amy Schiller takes the concept of a universal basic income wage one step further and proposes a “giving wage” that would allow everybody to decide what philanthropic projects to support. These efforts shouldn’t be targeted at basic needs, but rather special projects that enrich life, however the giver chooses to interpret that.
Metaperson
The enchanted worlds of Marshall Sahlins
Anna della Subin
The Nation
Essay
Marshall Sahlins’s final book, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity, challenges the 19th Century received wisdom that our beliefs in the divine are a reflection of earthly structures of oppression, by examining societies without rulers that still have complex beliefs in celestial hierarchies and metahuman authorities. His work suggests that these ideas may predate human social orders. It explores the role of metapersons—supernatural beings—in human life and suggests that understanding them could offer new insights into human political and economic systems.
“Across most cultures, Sahlins observes, human life unfolds in continuous reference to other beings—supreme gods and minor deities, ancestral spirits, demons, indwelling souls in animals and plants—who act as the intimate, everyday agents of human success or ruin, whether in agriculture, hunting, procreation, or politics. These not-quite humans, or metapersons, can be found across all landscapes, from the Chewong ‘leaf people’ in the Malay Peninsula to the Greenland Inuits, who had the idea that spirits animate each human joint and knuckle. Indigenous communities possess empirical knowledge about these spirit worlds, yet anthropologists often use the language of ‘belief’—or worse, ‘folk belief’—to describe them, an approach loaded with their own disbelief. Rejecting the obscurant category of ‘belief,’ Sahlins asks: What if we saw metapersons as worthy of a science of their own? If we examine them as a ubiquitous global presence, and attempt to tease out general theories about their role in human political and economic life, what would this new science teach us?”
Four Problems for the Degrowth Movement
Daniel Driscoll
Jacobin
Article
The degrowth movement lacks a credible theory of social and political change and provides neither empirically grounded nor actionable solutions for addressing climate change. A green growth program is necessary for decarbonizing the planet and advocates must address immediate practical problems, including financing emerging market economies; ending neoliberal austerity in richer countries; and compensating losers in the transition from fossil fuels.
“Degrowth may be an appealing idea for morally committed left academics and activists. But it is not a serious path forward for the climate.”
Further Reading
Kohei Saito’s “Start From Scratch” Degrowth Communism
Matt Huber & Leigh Phillips, Jacobin
Kohei Saito’s argument that Karl Marx was the original theorist of degrowth has found favor among the non-Marxist green left. Nonetheless, degrowth and classical Marxism are incompatible. Saito’s concepts could “lead to political disaster for both the socialist left and the environmental movement.”
“Degrowthers consistently misdiagnose the core problem of capitalism as ‘growth’ when in fact it is the lack of social control over production and investment decisions. When we attain such control, we may indeed choose to grow many socially useful forms of production (and degrow others). So long as economic growth, of either the capitalist or socialist variety, is held responsible for environmental problems, Saito’s neo-Malthusian ideology serves as a useful distraction for capitalists from the true source of the inability to adequately deal with such problems, the anarchy of the market, and the solution to such problems: socialist planning.”