Weekly Grounding #4

News, links, writing

Weekly Groundings are published on Fridays to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I found during the past week. I hope they help ground your thinking in the midst of media overload. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.

Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:

• “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?”

  • This review of a forthcoming book by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira provides some important insights about the electoral failures of the contemporary Democratic Party. The book is especially significant because “Back in 2002, the pair [Judis and Teixeira] published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a work that basically created the ‘demographics is destiny’ concept. A lot of people took the idea as a fait accompli — but clearly hadn’t read the book, which actually held that a growing Democratic coalition of younger people, urban professionals, minorities and single working women could only be a winning base if Democrats could also keep working class whites under the same banner. That didn’t work out as hoped.”

• “‘People Rot From the Inside Out’: Lethal Xylazine Deepens the US Drug Crisis”

  • This reporting at The Financial Times describes the horrific effects of xylazine, or “tranq,” a “synthetic opioid, 50 times stronger than heroin, [which] was linked to more than two-thirds of the record 109,680 overdose deaths in the US last year — the equivalent of one fatality every five minutes.” While this crisis in Philadelphia and other American cities has recently garnered more media attention, it is still not getting anywhere near the political attention it deserves. It’s unclear how the Biden administration’s recent designation of “fentanyl adulterated with xylazine as an ‘emerging threat’ to the US” will shape policy going forward. The administration certainly won’t be able to address the social rot that is at the root of America’s drug crisis.

• “Elon Musk Tears Up the Decoupling Script in China”

  • This Asia Times article demonstrates that US-China “decoupling” may not be as clear-cut of a phenomenon as most analysis (from the left and the right) would suggest: “Beijing is putting out a huge welcome mat for foreign chieftains – from Musk to JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon – to signal that China really is open for business again…Musk is also giving Xi and Li a big public relations win in another way. At his meeting Tuesday with Foreign Minister Qin Gang, Musk gave the thumbs down to Washington’s decoupling from China strategy. Musk said, effectively, that the relationship between the two biggest economies is too symbiotic to fail.” This is a topic I have addressed before here on Handful of Earth, and it will continue to be of utmost importance in the coming months and years.

• “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History”

  • The New York Times has finally decided to discuss the troubling use of Nazi symbolism in the Ukrainian military, noting that “Units like the Da Vinci Wolves, the better-known Azov regiment and others that began with far-right members have been folded into the Ukrainian military, and have been instrumental in defending Ukraine from Russian troops. The Azov regiment was celebrated after holding out during the siege of the southern city of Mariupol last year. After the commander of the Da Vinci Wolves was killed in March, he received a hero’s funeral, which Mr. Zelensky attended.”

• “The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia: Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback”

  • Philosopher Gabriel Rockhill’s in-depth essay in Monthly Review provides a polemical critique of the “perverse inversion” of the relationship between May 68 and the French intelligentsia. This is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand the global role of French theory: “The so-called structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers associated with French theory have come to be identified with the ’68 movement by a muddled historical amalgamation that serves very clear political ends…[W]ithin the larger Anglophone world, it is a matter of promoting a radical image of a group of thinkers by establishing a vague but persistent analogy between alleged intellectual rebels and actual political militants. The only thing that remains of the historical event itself is its symbolic value, which is detached from material practice in order to function as a free-floating signifier that can be used to promote—or denigrate—a product of the global theory industry.”

• “How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party”

  • New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos provides a captivating long-form exploration of the rise of private concerts for the super-rich: “At bottom, the boom in private gigs reflects two contrasting trends. One has to do with the music industry. For more than a century after sound was first captured on wax cylinders, in the eighteen-eighties, the money came mostly from selling recordings. But that business peaked in 1999, and, as CDs vanished, revenue sank by more than fifty per cent. It has recovered on digital subscriptions, but the new giants—Spotify, Apple, YouTube—pay artists only a fraction of what physical sales once delivered. The other trend is the birth of a new aristocracy, which since 2000 has tripled the number of American billionaires and produced legions of the merely very rich. As musicians have faced an increasingly uncertain market, another slice of humanity has prospered: the limited partners and angel investors and ciphers of senior management who used to splurge on front-row seats at an arena show.” I’d recommend reading this piece in tandem with a Wall Street Journal article from last month, entitled “Persian Gulf States Boom With ​​Billionaires, Beyoncé and Bling,” to understand the broader geopolitical and economic transformations underlying this trend.

What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments!