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.
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“Democrats’ Black Voter Problem”
analyzes the Democrats’ struggles with black voters at : “[A]mong black voters in Oakland, there’s never been an overwhelming sense of loyalty to Harris. I interviewed black Oakland residents both before and after she became the presidential nominee. Since she lost the election, I’ve interviewed several more. The lack of enthusiasm she inspires among black voters speaks to her weakness as a candidate. But more importantly, it indicates the long-growing disillusionment of black Americans with the Democratic Party, which was borne out in Donald Trump’s successful courtship of the working-class black vote during the election. In particular, Trump doubled his support from young black men.” The piece includes ample on the ground reporting from Oakland. Here is a sample: “Michelle is a 60-year-old black woman who grew up in [Kamala] Harris’s neighbourhood in Berkeley before moving to Oakland at the age of eight. She’s deeply involved in local politics. And over the years, she has gone from being a lifelong Democrat to a Trump supporter. ‘We’ve always had a messianic complex,’ she said of black American voters and their loyalty to Democrats. ‘There were always figures who could dazzle us with bullshit.’ The final straw for Michelle was the Democrats’ ‘insane’ policies on immigration. Democratic politicians ‘blatantly drop like 10 or 15,000 immigrants into a black neighborhood, blatantly giving them resources they don’t give us,’ she said. The wave of new immigrants under Biden, she believes, is driving down working-class wages. Moreover, she said, ‘a lot of the young males are dangerous.’ She knows older immigrants who have been in Oakland for decades who feel the same way about the new arrivals.”
“This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time”
The “maverick thinker” discussed in this quite hyperbolically-titled New York Times op-ed is Wolfgang Streeck, a German intellectual who I have previously discussed on Handful of Earth. Christopher Caldwell writes in the op-ed: “Understand Mr. Streeck and you will understand a lot about the left-wing movements that share his worldview—Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. But you will also understand Viktor Orban, Brexit and Mr. Trump.”
Caldwell continues: “At each stage of neoliberalism’s evolution, Mr. Streeck stresses, key decisions have been made by technocrats, experts and other actors relatively insulated from democratic accountability. When the crash came in 2008, central bankers stepped in to take over the economy, devising quantitative easing and other novel methods of generating liquidity. During the Covid emergency of 2020 and 2021, Western countries turned into full-blown expertocracies, bypassing democracy outright. A minuscule class of administrators issued mandates on every aspect of national life—masks, vaccinations, travel, education, church openings—and incurred debt at levels that even the most profligate Reaganite would have considered surreal.”
The conclusion of the op-ed shows how elements of the American liberal intelligentsia are beginning to recognize their own irrelevance after the election: “Mr. Streeck’s new book is not about Mr. Trump’s triumph. But his message (or his warning, however you choose to read it) is not unrelated: The left must embrace populism, which is merely the name given to the struggle over an alternative to globalism. With globalism collapsing under its own contradictions, all serious politics is now populist in one way or another.” For more on this topic, see my essay from this summer: “We Are All Trumpians Now.”
“Conversations with a Young ‘Nazi’”
writes on her interactions with a young right-wing crypto enthusiast at . She reports on the enduring edgelord phenomenon among extremely online young men: “Early on, I got him to confess the real motives behind his anti-social politics. He said since 8th grade his goal was to be the least normie possible, that’s how he ended up there. He was nonchalant about it. He said he was an angsty teen, he wanted to stand out, he was chronically online, he wanted to believe whatever is ‘the most controversial yet true.’ He used to think being anti-racist was controversial, but every large company now supports race mixing. So he turned to fascism to own the libs.”This is one of the reasons I wrote in my “Election Reflections” that formerly “woke” leftists disillusioned after the 2024 election “may jump ship to far-right politics in order to sustain the psycho-emotional thrill that no-strings-attached radicalism affords.”
Of crypto, Tsantekidou goes on to write: “This is how all of these memecoins, shitcoins and NFTs work. Someone comes up with a new idea, rumps it up in online chatrooms, creates a ‘lore’ out of thin air- what in the normie world we call ‘marketing’- and gets very online people to buy into it with the promise that they are invested in it for the long haul. Of course, the creator inadvertently isn’t and cashes out as soon as the coin's price gets a bump.”
“Bereave the Hype”
At
, reflects on how the “sense of trust and collaboration that had made hip-hop what it was, was dismantled so gradually that it’s not difficult to forget it ever existed or minimize its eminence then and how it might have been so easily dismantled…”She continues: “Here’s where Kendrick Lamar’s just-released GNX enters the hip-hop epic for me, from a lonely dark alley between the dressing room the studio and the stage, longing for accompaniment, a peer he can trust and settle down with to discuss praxis, but shrouded in hubris and resentment of those peers for valid, sentimental, and inflated reasons, and forcing himself to court tension over alliance. I am bored with the aromantic courtship between amorous enemy-emcees. I’m hyper aware of its desperation, how it indicates their need for real muses, and renewal of the passion that has long been dampened by the duties of fame and self-agrandisement…I’m left with the feeling that I’m witnessing a great artist and a great form, submerged and undone by the weighty residue of his ego. And I’m no longer even rooting for him to outrun it; I’m praying the genre outruns him and his enemy-cronies and reminds them they are grown men writing one another poems, in love with one another and the form so intensely that they are forgetting what love is, how it requires more strength than cruelty to uphold.”
Holiday concludes: “I think, at fifty, this genre, bent on youthful arrogance and real street philosphizing, needs some of the incoherence of free jazz for its finale-ing. It’s been literal for so long, (there was a moment of mumbling but about the same 5 things it’s literal about), now maybe it’s time to stop telling stories and start burdening language with the unsayable utterance.”
“The Enclosure of the Human Psyche”
At
, draws “an analogy between a historical development known as the enclosure of the commons and the condition of the human psyche in the context of a digitized society. The enclosure of the commons is the name given to the centuries-long process by which lands available to the many were turned into a resource to be managed and extracted by the few….[S]tructurally similar processes are unfolding with the aim of enclosing the human psyche and transforming it into a resource to be managed and extracted.” He argues that “The senses are the gateway to the psyche. To enclose the psyche, it would be necessary to enclose the senses first. So, in this case, the fences and hedgerows become the devices that channel, direct, and colonize our perception of the world.”Sacasas continues: “The enclosure of the commons subjected the land to more efficient and persistent means of extraction, time was money. Improvement meant activity. So, too, with the psyche. The mind at rest, the psyche in a moment of silence, is like the land lying unused and unproductive. From this vantage point, what we might feel as the problem of distraction is just the logic of enclosure at work. The unceasing stream of notifications and pings, the persistent way even the built environment beyond the screen hails us—all of this is just the necessary operation of the engines of value extraction efficiently at work on the raw material that is the human psyche. When the enclosure of the psyche is complete, we lose the right to wander and roam and loaf about in thought, just as the enclosure of the commons restricted freedom of movement and disdained economically unproductive but life-affirming forms of leisure.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Thank you for sharing Vincent :-)
I dunno about "grounded" but I love Substack slander and read about how the Substacks creators/founders won't admit that substack is social media, that substack has a perception of having a Nazi problem, that he can't promo his substack anywhere before other sites throttle links (except Bluesky) rendering substack a walled garden and how social media hasnt solved the problem of people with different viewpoints being together and not moderating content can eventually push force people off the perform.