After weeks of obsessively scrolling Bluesky for headlines, takes, follows, affirmations, and arguments, I’ve come back to reading in the long form. And one of my favorite long form writers of the last few years is Freddie DeBoer, currently of Substack. I go back and forth between being in awe of DeBoer’s bold thinking and maximalist writing, and being repelled by his animosity and lack of discipline. The animosity comes up now and again in his long form, but much less so than in his social, where he sometimes behaves in an unfortunate space midway between troll and viscous harasser. He does suffer from bipolar disorder, and is very upfront about this, and it is not surprising that social media would be an area where, even while properly medicated, he would suffer from impulse control.
Then again, in the long form, his less egregious lack of impulse control is exactly what I love about his writing. The ecstatic style is my preferred style. I am an avowed David Foster Wallace fan (the essays, not so much the fiction). I’m full on team Dostoyevsky, and anti-Tolstoy. In film I have long loved David O Russell, another artist barely in control of his mental health. Operating on that edge of sanity is, for me, inherently interesting. Also alarming for me about DeBoer was his association with the odious BariWeissoshpere, back when his last book was published, with its terrible title about some problem with elites. Any editorializing attacking “elites” is a red flag for me, because elites is so nebulous a term these days, and sets up a false premise that both references class struggle while also marginalizing it. Today’s anti-elitism is mostly just elite on elite violence. One elitist accusing the other of elitism to lower the other’s status and increase elevate their own elite perch in the discourse (aka their eliteness). As a democratic republic, our entire government is founded on a chosen few working on behalf of the many. To be one of few who has achieved much is laudable and generally deserving of a privileged place in the culture.
Anyway- this morning’s reading led me to the DeBoer article linked below; basically the Case Against Bill Clinton. What’s the Matter With Kansas’s Tom Frank wrote a similarly damning screed against Clinton (Bill and Hillary in his case) and “elites” called Listen, Liberal back in 2016. Listen, Liberal is long and tedious and more about the author’s anger that he and his ilk are not as influential as he’d like them to be than it is accurate in depicting what’s wrong with America and what needs to be done about it. Frank wants to go back to halcyon days of union progressivism that simply isn’t coming back. DeBoer’s essay is much cleaner, and echoes one of Frank’s main points: Clinton gave away the literal and figurative farm, and since that time, American liberalism (or the American Left as they’d both prefer) has been unable to get it back due to a compromise first attitude that telegraphs a desire to always be the sane and dignified party (as opposed to the ever crazier right), worthy of trust, and the clear adults in the room. But it hasn’t worked. Joe Biden and Barack Obama were two of the sanest, most aldutiest presidents going, and at the end of each of their presidencies the people of America decided they’d had enough of staid and proper shredded wheat policitics and instead preferred Cocoa Puffs, Count Chocula, Lucky Charms, Cookie Crisp- or whatever type of breakfast cereal my mother hated in the 1980s and would only buy on very special occasions.
But between shredded wheat and Count Chocula, I choose eggs and toast. I choose a croissant and coffee. I choose a high protein, low sugar power bar. And that’s what I like about DeBoer as well. He’s not interested in operating amongst the confines of most of the current debate. His opening line (he voted for Jill Stein) will alienate most adulty dems, especially the righteous incrementalists (of which I can be one), and his follow up trashing of AOC likely narrows even his most amenable audience, but later, on the part where- oh wait I think I read two of his essays this morning. One about how boring Chris Hayes’s thinking is (he’s a bigger fan than I am though), and the other about Bill Clinton. The main point about Bill Clinton is that moderation should never be a goal in an of itself, but an outcome of struggle (not a novel idea, it’s just that Obama and Biden era dem bipartisan fetishism routinely forgot the struggle part- unless it was with members of their own team- I say this as a proud Obama voter and despite believing that Biden will go down as one of the great presidents of the last 100 years1). The main point about the Hayes essay is that DeBoer is a self-declared Marxist.
Rather than be forced to choose between a full throttle free markets that rains down prosperity (Cookie Crisp)2 and a Compassionate Capitalism3 (Shredded Wheat)** self-professed Marxist DeBoer advocates for… I’m not exactly sure, “sever[ing] the exploitative relationship between labor and capital,” is his description of the first goal of Marxist thought, with the second being “providing our people with what they need to live contented lives, drawing from what our people can produce thanks to their abilities.” Not exactly a rousing clear prescription for an alternate and more effective form of government (eggs and toast), but at least it’s something other than the endless handwringing and dull mugging of the Pod Save America (shredded mini wheats) bros that’s been incessant since Trump 1.0. What it is, in my mind, if not in DeBoer’s words, is a need for more governance and economic models that can operate and thrive in the tangible world, rather than the theoretical: the worlds of finance, software, AI- where the cost of production is nil, profits sky high, and the barrier to entry is higher still. It’s the abstraction where most of our money is made in the US, but where almost none of our people work.
In the tangible world, in the physical world of post-easy-resource-extraction, that is, post-industrial, if not post-industrious- astronomical profits are just not possible anymore. Especially for service work and essential services. This is a world where often times the distance between labor and capital isn’t great enough to sever. The boss isn’t making 30 times entry level (excepting maybe Starbucks or similar mega franchise of which there are fewer and fewer), the boss makes 3 to 4 times entry level, plus a ton of tax write-offs if that same boss is also the owner. We don’t yet have a politics that fully addresses these folks. We have Cookie Crunch (eat whatever you want, we can always replace your teeth) and Shredded Wheat (it isn’t supposed to taste good when it’s good for you). Or we had Cookie Crunch and Shredded Wheat. This last election was CooCoo for Cocoa Puffs versus Kashi Organic Cinnamon Oats.
And Count Chocula won.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/on-the-occasion-of-this-election
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/liberalism-cannot-produce-outcomes
- Or not. ↩︎
- Basically champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends (aka the old-style republican and robber baron resource extraction economy) ↩︎
- The dual headed Janus of “I Feel Your Pain/The First Black President” Hollywood Producer funded Democrats and the “Compassionate Conservatism” of children should be taught to read other things than just the bible because my wife is librarian and or author Cheney Bush Republicans. ↩︎