Chucking the vibes

The Week in Review: September 30, 2024

Though Compact founding editor Sohrab Ahmari declared J.D. Vance the winner of Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate, he concurred with managing editor Geoff Shullenberger on this week’s podcast episode that both candidates merit our respect for their civil treatment of each other and strict focus on policy. I wrote in last week’s newsletter that policy issues are being occluded by empty culture war-fodder and vibes-based posturing—which both Trump and Harris have only exacerbated—in public discourse. Many breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing these adults enter the room of this chaotic election season.

I find it to be increasingly difficult to engage in conversation with people with differing points of view without it devolving into moralistic virtue signaling and the chucking of ad hominems. Thus why I’m exceedingly grateful every time I encounter mature folk who know how to argue fairly. 

I was particularly struck by a challenge issued by Justin E. Giboney, founder of the &Campaign, while attending a presentation he gave. He asked the audience whether they have ever sincerely engaged with the ideas of their ideological opponents, and suggested we attempt to identify at least five strengths in their ideology. He then took it a step further, challenging us to identify at least five weaknesses within our own.

I tried this exercise recently with a group of students after reading Plato’s Symposium and learning about the Socratic Method. When they tested it out in their debates with family members and classmates, they were shocked by how much more effective it was than hurling dismissive labels or avoiding contentious discussion altogether. 

We’d all do well to learn from this V.P. debate.

This week in Compact

Harris, writes Joel Kotkin, “is no class warrior or socialist.” Rather, “she reflects the worldview of California’s ultra-rich elites…It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Harris’s successful debate performance last month was coached by a top Google attorney, who is litigating antitrust business in front of her own administration.”

Darel E. Paul highlights the uptick of Minnesotans moving to Wisconsin, motivated in part by their home state’s sharp left political turn under Tim Walz. “But standing in the glow of true-blue Minnesota, western Wisconsin sees itself as firmly red.”

On the 100th anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s birth, David N. Gibbs argues that he was America’s first neoliberal president. “Carter’s instincts on economic policy were deeply conservative…In many respects, Ronald Reagan gets too much credit for the transformation in policy that deregulated, de-unionized, and financialized the US economy.”

Ashley Frawley fears that right-wingers claiming to be subversive “deflects from the reality that the space for rebellion has collapsed. All we are doing is playing dress-up, with the right now reprising the exhausted gestures of the countercultural left as the latter tries to have it both ways, alternating between subversion and pearl-clutching moralism.”

Ross Barkan says that few Democratic politicians offer “a greater organizing philosophy. What are you for? What great and exciting things do you want to do for the citizenry?” He recommends they learn from the example of Robert Moses, “hero of New Deal-era urbanism reviled by many on the left—who offers a robust, viable model for what progressive urbanism can be in the 2020s and beyond.” Be sure to checkout out Geoff’s interview with Barkan on the podcast.

“There is no such thing as real soft power without real hard power,” asserts David Rieff. “Believing the contrary is just a failure to face the bad news…Europe’s rearmament is a fact,” he continues, one which he doesn’t “believe will soon be undone. But it is perfectly possible to look at it as the continent’s long overdue coming to its senses—or to conclude that it will lead to disaster for Europe and for the world.”

Compact’s summer intern Dylan Partner applauds Joshua Leifer’s attempt to address a crucial question in his latest book Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life: “As synagogues depopulate, community consensus fractures, and demographic prospects worsen, American Jews are increasingly asking: What, if anything, can be done?” While Leifer “criticizes American Jewish institutions for what he regards as their insufficiently critical support of Israel, he also calls on Jewish critics of Israel to keep a foot planted in these institutions.”

A quick vibe check…

Though I’ve spent the last few newsletters bashing vibes-based discourse, I feel compelled to offer a brief assessment of where the vibes have felt solid lately:

-Caffe Reggio…my favorite cafe in all of Manhattan

-listening to Bolero (old school romance ballads produced mainly in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Mexico) playlists on a loop

-Samba bars…there are some good ones in midtown and in Newark

-the diverse ethnic enclaves of Astoria, Queens

-checking social media on your laptop and not your phone–or better yet, getting a flip phone

-checking books out from the library

-reading Eastern Christian monastic literature, Sufi poetry, and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams before going to bed

-pumpkin spice lattes from anywhere but Starbucks