Weekly Grounding #34
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“Ron DeSantis and the Failure of Pseudo-Trumpism”
At Unherd, Michael Lind evaluates the ideological and policy divisions on display within the Republican primary. He argues that “DeSantis’s Pseudo-Trumpism and Nikki Haley’s Pre-Trumpism are attempts to build bridges between…raucous MAGA newcomers and the remnants of the older Bush Republican party — at least those who had not already quit the party out of disgust with the populist parvenus who have crashed the country club.”
Lind continues: “[H]owever incoherent Trump may sometimes be, he has tapped into a worldview with certain coherent public policy positions, whether they be on government entitlements, immigration or forever wars. Members of the declining Republican establishment who hope that they can revive their old Bush-era programme of benefits cuts and foreign adventures, while pacifying national populist voters with performative denunciations of wokeness, will be disappointed by DeSantis’s failure. If there’s a conclusion to be drawn from his rise and fall, it’s that Trump voters want the real thing, not a placebo.”
“Could Immigration Hand the 2024 Election to Trump?”
On the issue of immigration, Lind’s “national populist voters” seem to be a clear majority going into this year’s election.
reports at : “Between Trump and Biden, who are voters most likely to think is close to their views on immigration? It’s Trump by a country mile: 44 percent of voters say Trump is close to their position, compared to a mere 25 percent who say Biden is close to their position. Even Hispanic voters are more likely to say Trump is close to their views on immigration than to say Biden is!” He continues: “Frankly, it’s a bit late in the day to finally be moving on this issue and only under duress from the Republicans. The border debacle has been unfolding throughout Biden’s term and the political damage has been accumulating. A big part of the problem is that there are a lot of Democrats who didn’t—and don’t—really want to do much about border security.”Stay tuned for a forthcoming essay on Handful of Earth about the broader implications of the immigration debate in the United States.
“U.S. Planning to Establish New Drone Bases in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Benin”
Jeremy Kuzmarov investigates American plans to expand military operations in Africa for Covert Action Magazine. He subjects Wall Street Journal reporting on the issue to scrutiny, reporting which had “made it seem like the U.S. was seeking to establish new drone bases outside of Niger because of an altruistic commitment to combating Islamic terrorism.” In contrast to this explanation, Kuzmarov draws on the commentary of Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, who stated that “the major issues fueling conflict in Niger and the Sahel are not military in nature—they stem from people’s frustration with poverty, the legacy of colonialism, elite corruption, and political and ethnic tensions and injustices. Yet rather than address these issues, the U.S. government has prioritized sending weapons and funding and training the region’s militaries to wage their own wars on terror….One of the hugely negative consequences has been to empower the region’s security forces at the expense of other government institutions, and this is surely one factor in the slate of coups we’ve seen in Niger, Burkina Faso, and elsewhere in recent years.”
“The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives”
In characteristically lucid fashion,
of argues that “the rising influence in America of a wider group of what should properly be called Right-Wing Progressives, provides a great example of how our whole left-right conception of politics has degenerated into a state of deep confusion and uselessness – and how this is leading to some very muddled thinking about who is what and what should be done about the raging dumpster fire of our present modernity.”Lyons makes this argument through a reading of tech venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which attempts to “weld together the techno-progress cult of Silicon Valley, the boundless liberationism of free-market individualist liberalism, the Nietzschean vitalism of the neo-pagan and ‘neo-reactionary’ corners of the online right, and the anti-Woke, anti-communist, anti-bureaucratic bonafides of American conservativism.” Lyons demonstrates that this ideological mishmash is philosophically incoherent but that Andreessen and his ilk can be coherently understood as “Right-Wing Progressives” (RWPs), a concept which Lyons devotes the remainder of the essay to exploring.
“Bill Ackman Is a Brilliant Fictional Character”
In a surprisingly entertaining piece at The Atlantic, Kurt Andersen offers commentary on Bill Ackman’s social media posts: “Taken together, these recent posts of Ackman’s are like a novella, an exquisite piece of satirical fiction in digital epistolary form. They have the voice of an absurdly self-regarding unreliable narrator, a hot-headed, self-righteous, born-rich billionaire investor who considers himself intelligent and virtuous, persecuted by villains as he fights for justice and the honor of his defenseless goddess wife—and reveals his foolishness and awfulness and possible derangement in the course of a week-long public tantrum.”
“The Thing That Is Silence”
reflects on the writings of philosopher Max Picard at . Specifically, he discusses Picard’s conception of silence. For Picard, silence is “an autonomous reality, it is something of itself and not merely a negation, and, critically, that it is part of the nature of silence to be a vital, renewing force from whose absence we suffer more than we know.” Sacasas elucidates the stakes of this argument, stating that “the human-built world is already unaligned to human values and well-being because it operates at a scale and according to a logic that elude our comprehension and confound our agency. And this is so largely because it exists beyond the reach of ordinary language. The realm of speech, specifically its public and thus political quarters, increasingly becomes the realm of exasperating and maddening futility. And we may all be forgiven for feeling as if we are the idiots whose words, however full of sound and fury, finally signify nothing, and, more to the point, effect no change in the world.”What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.