This week at Compact
I must admit I’ve rolled my eyes at recent warnings from Elon Musk that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election” (ostensibly because Democrats will flood the country with immigrants and give them citizenship, thus guaranteeing a permanent majority). It struck me as MAGA’s own version of the tiresome “democracy is on the ballot” rhetoric coming from the other side.
So I found Compact editor-at-large Greg Conti’s latest column refreshingly provocative. Whatever we make of the billionaire shitposter’s hyperbole, the idea that immigration “[affects] the integrity of democracy,” Conti says, “cannot be lightly dismissed.” Citizens of many locales and nations experience their lack of input on immigration policy as a loss of political control, and Conti suggests they are onto something. Setting immigration policy, he argues, belongs to a class of “decisions that fundamentally alter the nature of sovereignty” —decisions that are often determined by popular referendum. In “the normative democratic direction of authorization,” he explains, “the people, which is sovereign, selects its government, rather than the government selecting its people.”
The Biden administration’s lax border policies, a drastic reversal from the Trump years, have fed popular discontent and worsened the Democrats’ electoral prospects this year. On another signature Trump issue, trade, Biden and co. took the opposite approach, continuing and in some cases expanding and refining what Trump started. Perhaps aware that mere willingness to impose tariffs no longer sets him apart, the latter has lately articulated an even more aggressive trade agenda than he did in prior election cycles, proposing a tariff on all imported goods, the revenue from which he claims can replace the income tax. In response, Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher provide a clarifying account of what Trump got right, but also why a revenue-replacing approach to tariffs distracts from other, more relevant objectives.
In other political coverage, Ryan Zickgraf offers a wry dispatch from Pennsylvania, “the battlegroundiest of battleground states.” Contrary to expectations, he finds most people are less fired up than fed up. It’s a continuation of Zickgraf’s ongoing account of the “politics of nothing” that, even if you wouldn’t know it from all the online sound and fury, has overtaken America. Meanwhile, the Peking University economist Yang Yao reports on how the US election looks from China, and finds that Trump, the man who started a trade war and railed against the “China virus,” is nonetheless the clear favorite of average Chinese. Read the full essay to find out why.
Meanwhile, Erika Bachiochi and Chris Rufo both offer critiques of identitarian tendencies on the political right, in the realms of gender and race, respectively. In different ways, both argue for the need to turn away from the divisive frames that have become prevalent. And Glenn Elmers turns to two seemingly opposed thinkers—Michel Foucault and Leo Strauss—to make sense of a paradox of the contemporary intellectual scene: the “the left’s ostentatious defense of ‘science’ and its simultaneous embrace of quasi-religious superstitions.” “What appears to be a contradiction,” Elmers argues, “is the predictable result of science’s transformation into an ideology.”
Finally, for our Friday long read, Brad Littlejohn recounts his time volunteering in a part of North Carolina recently devastated by Hurricane Helene. The disaster, he says, “revealed wells of hidden strength and solidarity within a deeply divided nation,” and yet “it also laid bare a vacuum of political leadership and a dangerous decline of state capacity.” He found both “a triumphant story of Tocquevillian ‘little platoons’ spontaneously self-organizing to aid one another in time of crisis” and “a story of a failing state.”
What I’m reading
I recently finished Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation, which Trevor Merrill reviewed for Compact. Like Merrill, I found it a surprising, at times surprisingly moving, and overall uneven effort. One thing that struck me: It’s a novel partly about what the late political James C. Scott called “seeing like a state.” Houellebecq’s protagonist is Paul Raison, a high-level government functionary, as was his father before retirement—attached to the General Directorate for Internal Security, the French FBI. It isn’t just public safety but reality itself that is threatened by a terrorist campaign involving sophisticated deepfake videos. Alongside all that, the novel also an intimate portrait of the Raison family’s struggle to avoid unraveling amid illness, infidelity, divorce, sibling conflict, suicide, and the social and political crises tearing France apart.
At stake in these private and public dramas is the fate of the modern state’s project of ordering human existence according to the imperatives of reason. (Houellebecq isn’t exactly subtle on this point, given the surname of his leading family). The terrorist campaign to “annihilate the modern world,” whose motives Raison and his colleagues attempt to decipher without much success, is both a campaign of violence and a media onslaught; through it, the power of the state to determine the basic contours of reality is called into question; at the same time, on a more meta-literary level, so is the imaginative power of the sort of fiction Houellebecq practices. It isn’t accidental here, I suspect, that the rise of the realist novel was historically linked to that of the nation state. The fate of the novel in the age of deepfakes, Houellebecq hints, is inseparable from that of state power.
In the nonfiction realm, I’ve lately begun The Years of Theory, a transcript of Fredric Jameson’s seminar on French literary theory; Jameson, whose legacy we discussed on the Compact podcast, was the greatest Marxist literary critic until his recent death. A detail that stood out to me early on in The Years of Theory: Jameson credits his discovery of modern French philosophy to none other than René Girard, an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr in the early 1950s when Jameson was an undergraduate at nearby Haverford. Girard’s role in bringing “French theory” to the United States is widely acknowledged, but his influence on Jameson is as far as I know unexplored. I expect I will have more to say about The Years of Theory in future installments.