Weekly Grounding #52
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.
“Anatomy of a Cover-Up”
At
, documents how “Anthony Fauci, with key help from the Washington Post, turned a true story into a ‘right-wing conspiracy theory.’” The true story is Fauci’s funding of a scientific experiment in which “researchers in Tunisia placed the heads of sedated beagles in mesh bags filled with starved sand flies. Later, the beagles were placed in outdoor cages for nine consecutive nights, in an area dense with sand flies infected with a parasite that carries the disease with which the researchers were trying to infect the dogs.”Woodhouse’s reporting demonstrates just how organic the collusion between government health agencies, journalists, and scientists can be when power players like Fauci determine that information must be suppressed and facts rewritten. Fortunately, a FOIA request by the White Coat Waste Project coupled with Woodhouse’s reporting corrects the record and proves that Fauci and the NIH did indeed fund the torture of dogs.
“How 1980s Yuppies Gave Us Donald Trump”
revisits the legacy of the 1984 Democratic Party presidential primary race for Politico. The article is an excerpt from his new book, Triumph of the Yuppies. McGrath argues that “If you really want to understand Trump’s appeal…you need to wind back the tape to the 1984 Democratic primary, the almost-pulled-it-off candidacy of Colorado Senator Gary Hart and the emerging yuppie demographic that made up his base. They don’t remotely resemble the working-class base we associate with Trump today. But together, they helped shift the Democratic Party’s focus away from its labor coalition and toward the hyper-educated liberal voters it largely represents today, eventually creating an opening for Trump to cast Democrats as out-of-touch elites and draw the white working class away from them. In fact, if it weren’t for 1980s yuppies and the way they shifted America’s political parties, the modern MAGA GOP might never have arisen in the first place.”McGrath continues: “The impact of Hart’s candidacy was twofold. First, it took the term ‘yuppie’ from the features section of the newspaper to the front page. Second, it signaled a shift that was taking place, announcing that the massive baby-boom generation — or at least the well‐educated portion of it — had arrived politically. Those Boomers, who had questioned all the rules in the ’60s and turned inward in the ’70s, were now ready to exert their influence at the ballot box.” While there are important differences between the Yuppies of the 1980s and the contemporary professional-managerial class, a clear historical understanding of the Yuppies seems essential to fully grasp the PMC.
“The Radical Right is Winning on TikTok”
reflects on the results of the recent European Union Parliament election for Unherd. She focuses on the surprising levels of Gen Z support for right-wing parties in France and Germany, contending that “while some youth have responded [to mass immigration] by breaking Left, a growing subset views immigration as the central cause and driver of their woes. For the non-elite youth dwelling in what Le Monde recently described as the ‘France of the forgotten,’ for example, France (or indeed their England, or Germany, or Belgium) is a place of shrinking opportunities, rising costs, decaying infrastructure, and rural alienation. And its younger members feel as though they’re invisible, lost between the comfortable moral certainties of wealthy urban progressives, and a perceived influx of queue-jumping migrants with whom, increasingly, they experience themselves as competing for resources.”Harrington concludes: “As long as TikTok is part of the landscape, we can expect short-form, primarily visual, algorithm-driven and increasingly tribal political movements to play a central role in the public square. We can expect the new centrality of visual appearance, charisma, and emotive viral messaging to intensify polarisation. There is, after all, little room on TikTok for long-form policy development, civil debate, or even judging people by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin. So buckle up: Gen-Z radicalism is here to stay. The arc of their history is, it turns out, short-form and viral. And right now, it bends sharply to the Right.”
“The End of India’s Politics of Necessity”
At the Institute of Art and Ideas, Faisal Devji draws on Hannah Arendt’s concept of “animal politics,” or “any politics dedicated only to securing access to food, shelter, employment or other bodily needs,” to help interpret the results of India’s recent elections. He argues that the Indian coalition governments of the 1990s and early 2000s were defined by animal politics, at the expense of the countervailing approach “driven by the disinterested vision of the good society” that had been present in earlier eras of post-Independence Indian politics.
While Nadrendra Modi’s decisive electoral victories in 2014 and 2019 seemed like a potential departure from this tradition of coalitional animal politics, Devji argues that “Hindu nationalism’s vision of collective identity turned out to be about self-interest. The liberties it promoted were those of impunity in attacking minorities or amassing wealth. And having achieved most of what he had promised in the endeavour to recover Hindu pride, Mr. Modi had nothing left to offer apart from an animal politics. It was the very thing that had brought down the Congress-led government in 2014.”
“The Unabomber, Me and the Poisoned Myth of the American West”
In a New York Times op-ed, Maxim Loskutoff takes the opportunity to attack Ted Kaczynski. Loskutoff writes that Kaczynski’s only “innovation was a new, cowardly kind of violence…Homeless and lashing out, confused, pedantic, reactionary, he pretended to have new ideas to mask his old ambitions, cherry-picking from French philosophers, Luddites and environmentalists. But the truth is, he was just trying to justify what he and so many other boys here want — to get away from their parents, transcend their peers and remake society in their own image.”
Loskutoff continues: “Strangely, Mr. Kaczynski’s mythology seems only to have grown since his death. Young people still spread messages from his manifesto across social media, creating their own story of ‘Uncle Ted as a fiery anti-technology prophet. We must hate ourselves, I thought, reading their posts, for the way we seek heroes from the worst among us.”
These are hackneyed talking points about the Unabomber. Loskutoff’s self-righteous dismissal of Kaczynski is all the more reason why it is important to revisit the Unabombers’ philosophy and the conditions that helped produce it. In my essay, “Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament,” I argue that “Many invoke the Unabomber’s violence as ‘proof’ of his insanity. However, if we are to understand the paradoxes of the postwar predicament—paradoxes which continue to shape the present moment—we must understand Kaczynski’s thought beyond the limits of his ‘provable’ insanity…By studying—rather than dismissing—Kaczynski’s thought we may, like him and his fellow mathematician Kurt Gödel, become overwhelmed by paradox and even flirt with the ever-present danger of paranoia. Nevertheless, and perhaps paradoxically, it is only by taking that risk that we stand the chance of approaching the truth.”
“The Work of Art”
offers a much-needed critique of the following quote by sci-fi/fantasy author and “videogame enthusiast,” Joanna Maciejewska, which went viral on multiple social media platforms last week:
Sacasas responds: “Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.”
He continues: “I wonder, in other words, whether the work of doing the laundry or washing the dishes—these are almost always the examples, but they stand in for a host of similar activities—might not provide a certain indispensable grounding to the artistic endeavor, tethering it to the world in a vital rather than stupefying manner. Or, to take another angle, whether a fidelity to such tasks might not yield certain virtues that might also sustain the artist in their labors: attentiveness, patience, perseverance, or humility, for example.”
For an exploration of the roots of Maciejewska’s worldview, see my essay, “The Left’s Problem with Technology.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.