Damon Linker is back on the pod to talk about another former guest, the notorious R.O.D., Ray Oliver Dreher Jr. — i.e. Rod Dreher, one of the more fascinating, tragic, and infuriating writers of the Christian right over the last few decades.

Linker and Dreher first met back when Linker, who is now a man of the solid center-left, was a conservative and an editor at the Catholic conservative magazine First Things. They bonded over their shared horror at the Catholic priest abuse scandal, a lot of details of which were unfolding at the time, and also over their shared frustration with various figures on the Catholic right, including some important people at First Things, who seemed to be in some kind of denial about the severity of the scandal, or if not in denial about the severity of it then intent on shifting as much blame as possible away from the Catholic Church and onto other folks or forces.

The two remained friends over the next decade and a half, even as both of them went through various evolutions and migrations. Linker migrated towards the left, although not too far to the left, and Dreher went through a series of shifts, or perhaps repetitions, ever in search of some kind of structure or vessel or institution to contain or pacify his various aspirations, contradictions, and demons.

A few years ago they broke, as Dreher has broken with many former friends and comrades over the decades, over what Linker would characterize as Dreher’s extremism, though they’ve been in touch a bit more recently in the aftermath of Dreher’s public denunciations of the right’s tolerance of anti-Semites within its ranks.

In a recent essay, Linker writes of Dreher:

I’ve written enough posts about Rod Dreher down through the years that I could almost dedicate a stand-alone section of this newsletter to him. (That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Here is the most recent post, from just a few months ago, in which he plays an important part.) When I write something on him, my most engaged readers usually respond in comments that they used to admire Dreher and read him fruitfully but that at some point he became a reactionary and racist crank they could no longer abide. I’ve had periods when I’ve felt like that. But I keep coming back to him, even as he’s drifted further and further away from the (perhaps idiosyncratic) skeptical and pessimistic liberalism I affirm in my work.

One reason why I keep coming back to Rod is that I know him personally, we developed a friendship nearly a quarter century ago, and I don’t believe in dropping friends for political reasons. There are limits to that, of course. (A friend who began telling me Adolf Hitler made a lot of good points in Mein Kampf would no longer get invited over to dinner.) But I try as best I can to exemplify the ancient virtue of liberality in my dealings with people. That means demonstrating generosity and openness to difference.

But it wouldn’t be entirely honest to suggest I remain drawn to Rod purely out of a principled commitment to tolerate a longstanding friend who holds views with which I sharply disagree. The truth is that I feel like I “get” him on a deep, spiritual level.

I don’t feel like I get Dreher on a spiritual level, but I do feel like I perceive him insightfully, from the outside, on a psychological level, and though my perceptions and Linker’s don’t perfectly align, they end up proving (as you’ll appreciate it you listen to our conversation) quite complementary.

For both of us, Dreher is such a compellingly open wound of a person. He’s endlessly vulnerable, incredibly affable in one-on-one interactions (as I learned when I did my interview with him), reliably hysterical and apocalyptic when he’s dealing with the broad sweep of things, and also very principled in his idiosyncratic way, unable to gloss over the sins of his own side, in the name of unity, when they conflict with deeply held values of his.

This all is, in other words, primo Eminent Americans content, and it was a pleasure to have Linker back on for it.

My guest on the show today is audio producer Robert Scaramuccia, my longtime collaborator on the podcast.

Robert is leaving me, as of the end of this episode, so that he can get a healthy work/life balance in place in advance of starting an MFA writing program in the fall. We talk about the things you’d expect — our experience of working together, his thoughts on Eminent Americans, his plans for the future — but we also, fortuitously, focus a fair amount on a topic that I’ve thought about addressing on the show, in the past, but have never pursued because I couldn’t see a obvious way in. It turns out that Robert is wholly fascinated with video games. Pretty much exclusively, to this point, his engagement has been as a player of them. But his hopes, going into the MFA program, is to write about them seriously, and perhaps also to produce podcasts on them. He’s really effing serious about video games. They’re important to his identity, and intellectually and aesthetically fascinating to him. They even, as we get into, played a role in him dealing with some of the emotions around the long sickness and then death of his mother when he was in college.

I’ve never been a serious gamer, but some of it I get. it was part of the mix with my friends when I was growing up, now has a significant presence in the social lives of my 10 and 15 year old sons, and is just this huge thing, obviously, in the social and emotional world of boys and young men and increasingly not so young men. It also seems to me a topic that hasn’t received nearly the degree of serious literary and journalistic attention that it clearly deserves. It gets a lot of ink, in a certain sense, but so much of it is quite shallow, and so little of it seems to even begin to grasp the profound role that games and the ecosystems around them have played, and are playing, in the social and psychological lives of the people who play them.Really enjoyed the conversation. Hope you do too. Apologies in advance as the pace of release slows down for a bit. Still working on finding a new producer, and have some good leads, but for a little while at least I’ll be on my own, and so I will not be as productive. Not going away, though!

My guest on the show today is the inimitable Sherman Alexie, poet, novelist, Substacker, and occasional screenwriter.

I would be surprised if you don’t already know who Alexi ise, given that he’s been an award winning and best-selling writer for decades now and is almsot certainly the best known Native American writer of our time.

I asked him on, naturally, to talk about genre television. I’d noticed over the past few years that whenever I posted something to Substack about whatever random genre TV I happened to watching at the moment, Alexie would often pop in to respond. It became clear that we shared an earnest love of TV as emotional comfort food, and I wanted to talk to him about that. It naturally spins off into all sorts of other issues about childhood, reservation culture, literature and other forms of media, and politics.

It is, in other words, an immensely fun conversation. Hope you enjoy.

Peace

My guests on today’s episode are historians Andrew Hartman and James Livingston. Andrew is a professor of history at Illinois State University and the author, most recently, of Karl Marx in America. Jim is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University and the author, most recently, of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea.

I asked Andrew and Jim on the show to talk to me about Karl Marx and his continued influence on the American left. Really, if I’m being honest, I asked them on to help me solve a problem that I’ve been feeling increasingly compelled to solve, which is that I have a very strong intuition that Marxism is a profound drag on the capacity of the American left to achieve what I would like it to achieve, which is to exert meaningful power in opposition to big money in all its forms, but I am embarrassingly vague on the why or how Marx continues to exert such pull.

The bosses have so, so much power in America, and I fear it’s slowly killing us, and we desperately to find a way to rebalance the scales. But precisely the kinds of people and groups to whom we’ve looked, historically, to organize fundamental resistance to the evils of big money are the ones who seem least capable of talking and acting in ways that might get the job done. And I blame Marxism for some, though certainly not all, of that incapacity.

So I have all these very strong feelings, but I don’t know how to talk to the people I might hope to persuade in a language that might be persuasive to them.

I could tell a story about the various sins of various Marxist movements of the last century that might be persuasive to some people — and in fact have told versions of that story — but I don’t think that that story would be persuasive to contemporary Marxist-influenced intellectuals. They know all that history, have already baked it into their perspective. What I’d need to do is talk theory to them, and I don’t really grasp the theory. And maybe even more than not understanding the theory, I don’t understand, viscerally, why people continue to be so drawn to it. I don’t grok the lived experience of being a 21st century American leftist who feels compelled to draw on Marxist concepts and language to think and talk through the problems we face. I can’t mirror those neurons. And it kind of drives me nuts.

So this episode is a very selfish effort to help reduce the level of my vexedness, and I appreciate Jim and Andrew for their indulgence of me and for their uncompensated labor in bringing some clarity to my confusion.If you’re interested in learning more about Andrew’s new book, by the way, the American Prestige podcast is producing a six-part series, Marx Prestige, where Andrew and Daniel Bessner work their way through the history covered in the book. I’m looking forward to it.

Peace.

This converstion with Greg Berman, former longtime CEO of the Center for Justice Innovation and author of the Small Sanities Substack, is both like and unlike a lot of previous conversations I’ve had in the anti-woke liberal space. It’s like it…

My guest today is friend of the pod Blake Smith We talk mostly about Blake’s recent essay for Colossus magazine, “The Education of the Broligarchy,” which is about what we can learn about the tech elite from what’s become known as the Silicon Valley Canon, a widely shared list of books that all aspiring tech overlords should read. .

Unrelated to that, I want to share an exchange I had on Substack notes with Vladislav Davidzon, an Eastern European Jewish writer now based in the US. It began when I posted this note.

I don’t really get the logic of Trump’s decision to invade. Even if it goes amazingly well, even if a mature liberal democracy magically coalesces in the aftermath, there’s no real constituency for that in the U.S. No one will care in nine months much less two years and nine months.

His response: “You really are this clueless??”

What’s amusing to me in retrospect is that I genuinely didn’t know which way he was going to go with this, given the dizzying array of theories about the motives for this war and the fact that you can’t even predict, in this case, what someone will say from knowing which side of things they’re on. Is it oil? Israel? Epstein? Dementia? Was it the frictionlessness of the operation in Venezuela?

I’d already seen all of these theories, and more, all of them always offered with utter confidence, and I didn’t know which one Davidzon would proffer. The answer was none of them. He sent to me a piece on Tablet by Park MacDougald that was an (utterly deranged, from my perspective) argument that the attack was a carefully calibrated action that followed organically from the very well thought through theory that Trump hold of US foreign policy in the middle east, “an overdue correction to decades of a flawed U.S. Iran policy instigated by Barack Obama that transformed the globe into a more dangerous and more unstable place than it has to be.”

I said in response that this seemed deranged to me, given what we know about Trump’s psyche, and Davidzon’s response was this:

You seem to be deeply integrated into a fanatical worldview - so it seems like a waste of time to engage with that- Trump derangement syndrome is as real as much as he skillfully and sardonically ratchets it up to make the people maddened by him froth at the mouth and attack him - however - Trump - whatever his other failures may be - is a radically perceptive and intuitive about power relations. He has brutal and unsentimental and predatory and often correct judgments of power relations. He is a savage bruiser and that approach is very well matched to the way that things operate in the Middle East.

I recount all this not to try to dunk on Davidzon, but to reflect on the fact that 23 years ago I supported the war in Iraq.

I was 26 at the time, and wasn’t publishing, so I had the good fortune not be to responsible, even in the tiniest measure, for pushing us towards that terrible mistake. But my reasoned conclusion was that on balance it was a good idea. And I say “reasoned conclusion” earnestly, because even though it was a dumb thing to believe, I really did think it through in a fairly rational way. Doing something to upset the cruel status quo over, I concluded, was better than just tolerating or propping it up, as we’d seemed to cynically be doing for so long. Even rolling the dice had to be better than leaving Hussein in power, right? Right.

Every war is its own thing, and I genuinely hope that somehow this war makes things better for the Iranian people, and the world, somehow. Maybe Davidzon sees things more clearly than I do. I doubt it in this case, but it’s always possible.

My point is that I continue to be amazed at how radically differently people who are smart and not overtly crazy can view the same set of facts.

I find it fantastical that anyone could look at Donald Trump at this point and see what MacDougald and Davidzon see, which is someone capable of acting strategically in any way, even a brute intuitive way. Davidzon finds it “fanatical” that I view Trump this way, as a captive of his own broken psyche; this is evidence of my Trump Derangement Syndrome.

There isn’t a set of algorithms we can run this kind of dispute through in order to resolve who is right and who is wrong. What we can do, I think, is continue to put our ideas and premises and prejudices in genuine conversation with other people who see the world differently than we do. My experience has been that if this process is undertaken earnestly and openly, it tends to move one toward greater self-knowledge and wisdom. Which doesn’t, to be clear, miraculously enable one to arrive at the right answer on thorny questions. But just the fact that there’s a thing we can do, a process we can engage in, that will reliably move us toward greater self-knowledge and wisdom is pretty damned miraculous in its own right.

In that spirit, hope you enjoy this conversation with Blake. Peace.

My guest on the show today is Jonny Thakkar. Jonny is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Swarthmore College and one of the founding editors of The Point. He’s the author of various articles, most recently “Beyond Equality” in the newest issue of the Point, and the 2018 book Plato as Critical Theorist.

I asked Jonny on to talk about his late friend and mentor the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, who was his advisor at the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought and, as you’ll hear in our discussion, his occasional advisor on matters of the heart.

He wrote about Lear, after his death, along with a collection of other remembrances from friends and colleagues of Lear’s:

His own career path was so individual as to be impossible to emulate. Institutionally speaking, he had completed two undergraduate degrees, one in history and the other in philosophy, followed by two graduate degrees, the first a Ph.D. on Aristotle’s logic under the supervision of Saul Kripke—a prodigy in contemporary logic and metaphysics who was only eight years older than Jonathan, had no expertise in Aristotle and only ever supervised one other dissertation—and the second a professional qualification in psychoanalysis that licensed him to treat patients clinically. His philosophical interlocutors were many and various, among them Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Williams, J. M. Coetzee and Marilynne Robinson, but he was no dilettante. He wanted to understand what it meant to be human, and he simply followed that question wherever it took him. Without end, I should add: he took up the study of ancient Hebrew in his mid-seventies because he had become so puzzled by the treatment of the prophet Balaam that he wanted to make sure he wasn’t missing anything in translation!

That ethos of constant self-development was central to what you might call Jonathan’s philosophy of life. Some people use the term “perpetual student” pejoratively; for Jonathan, being open to learning from the world was the key to human flourishing. As he told matriculating undergraduates in a 2009 address, “the aim of education is to teach us how to be students.” In the preface to Open Minded, he wrote that achieving tenure at Cambridge in his twenties freed him from professional pressures to such an extent that he was forced to confront the meaning of his own existence. “I realized that before I died, I wanted to be in intimate touch with some of the world’s greatest thinkers, with some of the deepest thoughts which humans have encountered. I wanted to think thoughts—and also to write something which mattered to me.”

We talk about Lear’s work, but also about what it means to be, or be influenced by, what Lear called a “local exemplar,” which is someone who has a profound influence on the people around him or her. An exemplar could be a real mentor in the classic sense, as Lear was for Jonny and other students of his, or a writer who affects other people just through text, which is how he functioned in my life. It could also be someone who just said or did something once or a few times that stays with us, imprints itself on us, and changes us in ways that unfold over time.

So we talk about how Lear played that role in our lives, but also about the ways in which Thakkar may be playing the role of local exemplar, as a teacher, in the lives of his students, and more generally what it is about someone, or something, that makes it capable of influencing us in these ways.

One reason we ended up in this space, I think, is that I’ve been wrestling a lot, lately, with the question of how writing does or doesn’t influence people, because I’m writing a book, on relationships and therapy, that edges into the territory of self-help, and I’ve become moderately obsessed with not replicating the mistake that so many self-help books make on this front, which is thinking that in order to help people, the thing to do is give them straightforward advice on how to do or be better.

This always seems to me like a fundamental misunderstanding of how texts change people, and in some ways an odd one to make in particular for the therapists and psychologists who write so many of these books. If anyone should understand that the human psyche is tricky and that real change tends be a product of close relationships and communal structures playing out over time, rather than advice distilled to words, it should be therapists.

Texts do change people’s lives, but it’s indirect. They’re poetic. They’re narrative. They’re allusive and elusive. They’re not precision tools to achieve a predictable outcome in readers.

Lear understood this. I asked him once if the style of his essays was deliberately looping and associative because he was trying to emulate something about the rhythms of psychoanalytic practice, and his response was surprise. I just try to write clearly, he said, and the more I think the more I believe him. I think there was something so integrated in the way he did all these things – teach, write, practice psychoanalysis – that his version of writing clearly became this thing that I perceived as indirect, and that it is because of this, in some sense, that his writing has the capacity to affect people in a way that most self-help literature doesn’t.

I didn’t know Lear well, as a person, but he had, and continues to have, a big influence on me. That’s even more the case for Jonny, as you’ll hear. I don’t think he’s for everyone, but if he might be for you, I really encourage you to pick up one of his books or find one of his essays online. I’ll drop in some links to a few of below. He was a remarkable person.

Hope you enjoy. Peace.

Jonathan Lear articles:

* “Aims of Education”

* “Inside and Outside the Republic”

* “A Case for Irony”

* “Wisdom Won from Illness” [this is actually the whole text of one of his books]

* “Transience and hope: A return to Freud in a time of pandemic”

* “Jumping from the Couch: An Essay on Phantasy and Emotional Structure”

* “Can the virtuous person exist in the modern world?”

My guest on the show this week in Timothy Shenk, assistant professor of history at The George Washington University and author, most recently, of Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, which I reviewed for Air Mail some…

My guest on the show today is Ash Carter, writer and editor for Air Mail magazine and all around chronicler of the post-war cultural elite. I asked Ash to come on after reading the most recent in a series of profiles he’s written about great editors of the 20th century, some of whom, for reasons we discuss, were semi-cancelled in the last decade or two.

He’s written about, for instance, former New Republic editor and owner Marty Peretz, Peretz’s longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier, Vintage Classics legend Gary Fisketjon, New York Review Classics visionary Edwin Frank, and Dick and Jeanette Seaver of Arcade Publishing.

It’s a fun conversation that hits on a few of my abiding concerns: the legacy of the WASP elite on our culture and politics, the ways in which we should think about people who do bad things but have made great things, and graphic design, which Ash cares about more than the average magazine editor.

I lead off the episode by saying something, perhaps against my better judgement, about Jeffrey Epstein (or Jeff Epstein, as we started calling him in my family for some reason).

Here’s what I say. I am genuinely befuddled.

I was listening to Jay Kang and Tyler Austin Harper’s podcast, Time to Say Goodbye, and they weren’t full conspiracy on Epstein, but I’d say 70% conspiracy.

Here’s Harper, for instance, on a recent episode:

it does appear to be true that …. There is an international network of very powerful pedophiles that have a not inconsiderable amount of leverage on various halls of power. It shouldn’t be lost. We’ve said this on the show before, but two out of the last four presidents were people who were very friendly with Epstein. But I think the real story here is that, yes, you have this hard kernel of like true blue elite pedophiles

And then on the other side of things I was reading some posts by Michael Tracey and Matt Taibbi, and their perspective seems to be that Epstein was basically an immensely sleazy guy who paid for sex with young women and didn’t look too closely at whether they were over or under 18 but didn’t necessarily have a particular desire to have sex with underage women. Their paradigm is that a lot of this is Russiagate style hysteria/moral panic, fueled both by conspiracy theorists of all stripes and by various political and media actors who are cynically pumping up the story to drive clicks and gain electoral advantage,

Claude AI comes in somewhere in the middle, telling me that “the evidence strongly supports that Epstein … Epstein deliberately and systematically sought out minors. The infrastructure he built—the recruitment network, the payments, the documentation—wasn’t consistent with someone who simply preferred young-looking women and occasionally made mistakes. It was consistent with someone whose preference was specifically for adolescent girls.”

It also says that when it comes to the question of other men being involved, it’s murky: “The names that circulate publicly—Clinton, Trump, Dershowitz, various billionaires—appear in flight logs or visitor records, but presence at Epstein’s properties doesn’t establish participation in abuse. Epstein cultivated legitimacy by surrounding himself with prominent people, many of whom may have had no idea what else was happening.”

I say all this not to offer my own two cents but just to articulate the opposite, which is that I have no clue. The evidence is too vast, and my time too limited, to feel as though I can have a direct interpretation of the evidence, and many of the people to whom I typically turn for a relatively sober account of reality, against conspiracy theory, or moderately conspiratorial. And then the people like Tracey and Taibbi complicate things too, because although their extreme skepticism of official narratives is so often distortionary, and therefore not a good guide to what’s actually going on, in some cases it can provide a very useful signal for when we should be skeptical of official narratives,

They were more right than wrong about Russiagate, or at least right about certain things that most people got wrong. So is this Russiagate all over again, and if so, what the hell does that mean, because as I ponder the comparison I realize I still don’t even know what to make of Russiagate?

I don’t know. It was always the case that the gatekeepers were wrong about some big things, but it used to be the case that we just swallowed their narratives anyway, because we weren’t exposed to alternatives. Now we’re living in this fractured informational environment where we’re so much more acutely aware of the fragility of the conventional narratives, and so much more exposed to alternatives, but our brains haven’t gotten bigger in proportion in order to sift through the data more efficiently and effectively.

I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about these things, and have a lot of faith in my capacity to perceive what’s going on most of the time with some accuracy, but here I’m just adrift, and I wonder if in my adriftness I’m experiencing firsthand something like what most people who don’t think, read, and write about this stuff as much as I do experience when confronting the political world, and what role this plays in pushing them into self contained bubbles or tribes that replicate, in a way, the single narrative cognitive environment we all had back in the days of the gatekeepers. So there’s still a conventional narrative that we have to protect us from too much cognitive dizziness, it’s just that there are many of them at once.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on Epstein. I’ll keep trying to get a handle on it, but I won’t have any guests on to talk about it because who needs another podcast about the Epstein files.

Hope you enjoy my conversation with Ash.

Peace.

My frequent conversation partner Blake Smith is back on the pod today to talk about his book-in-progress on the pioneering gay editor Michael Denneny as well as a related essay, “For the Love of the Gay World,” just published in a new anthology.

In both endeavors, I think, he’s doing some version of the same thing, which is to make his case, that gay men briefly had, then lost, but could have again a coherent, self-reflective cultural and intellectual world by and for themselves. As he writes:

Part of what the playwright Larry Kramer called, two decades ago, the tragedy of today’s gays is that in order to begin a potentially generative, or productively divisive, conversation about the state of male homosexuality (its culture and politics, its problems and affordances) we must undergo an ordeal of conceptual and historical clarification. Without doing so, we are likely to miss the real objects of our agreement and disagreement, wasting time with opinions expressed in each interlocutor’s jumble of inherited, half-comprehended categories.

It is hard for gays to talk sensibly to each other about where we are and how we got here; the ideas by which we understand that ‘we’ and its emergence in time are so contested and confused. This makes gay thinking peculiarly dizzied, harried and disoriented. It is often in doubt whether there is any gay ‘we’ (or any gay thinking) —or whether ‘we’ do in fact wish for our talk to reach out to such a ‘we’ rather than merely confirm ourselves individually in what we already take ourselves to think and know.

In the following I will try to do two things at the same time. I will try to clarify the routes through history by which certain concepts have come down to us, and to trace their relationships and contradictions. Disentangling homosexual, gay, and queer, and the movements by which these terms were conceived and contested, may allow us to talk more with more clarity about the objects of our dis/agreement. At the same time, as I lay out—in a sketchy, rapid, and admittedly contestable fashion—this history, I will show how there came to be, at a few different times and places, a self-conscious articulation of the interest and pleasure that we take in talking to each other about ourselves, and of the desire to perpetuate ourselves individually and collectively that is adumbrated in this talk.

Our talking together both reflects and forms what Hannah Arendt (whose relevance to gays will become clearer over the course of this essay) called a world. Which is not a physical place. A world, in this sense, is what is communicable to a group of people, what they can hold together in their talk. It is also the set of practices by which that communicability is maintained (the fact, for instance, of our having a shared vocabulary and grammar, but also of our having reasonably similar psychologies and common objects of perception). Worlds can expand and contract, and also collapse. Whether we want to speak to someone about an apparently external object or an apparently internal thought, the possibility of our doing so successfully depends there being already a world that contains us, our intended interlocutor, and the topic we want to address.

His framework involves a periodization of three distinct eras: the “homosexual” phase of the late 19th and early 20th century, when doctors, psychologists, and the men they studied were constructing new categories of identity; the “gay” era that emerged in the mid-20th century and flourished after Stonewall; and the “queer” phase that began in the 1980s and now dominates how we talk about sexual minorities.

His argument, stripped down, is that the gay era represented something genuinely new in the world. Before that point there existed various ways of characterizing sex between men, but there wasn’t a publicly visible and accessible identity oriented around the idea of two men being together as romantic equals, without one becoming feminized, without requiring a status differential, old and young, top and bottom.

This emerged organically from bars and cruising spots and men finding each other in mid-century American cities, and then from that base there evolved a self-conscious culture, one in which Denneny, through his magazine Christopher Street and his editorial work at St. Martin’s Press, was a central figure.

Then in some respects this culture died, or attenuated. Literally died, in many cases, with so many deaths from AIDS. But also at the hands of the queer paradigm, which supplanted it first in the universities, and then much more broadly in the culture. Queer as an identity, in Blake’s construction, did a few things. It conceptualized the queer as a potentially universal, or universally accessible, counter-normative, transgressive force. Anything could be queer, or queered, if it stood or was understood at certain angles to the normative.

More problematically, from Blake’s stance, it subsumed the gay male identity into a larger queer collective identity that included first lesbians and transgender people but soon anyone, including old fashioned straight folks, who wanted to align themselves with the queer. And this has meant, among other things, that there is simply less psychological and cultural energy available for the maintenance and development of the gay world, as Denneny understood it, particularly in the aftermath of the death of so many gay men from AIDS and particularly because gay men don’t biologically reproduce themselves. They need more conscious, deliberate reproduction of their culture, their world.

A subtext of our discussion, which we reference but don’t really delve into, is that Blake’s political orientation has shifted a lot over the last year or so, since Trump was left. He hasn’t gone left, precisely. His policy preferences remain roughly the same, basically old new school new deal left liberal social democracy-esque. He’s just not interested anymore in aiming his fire at certain elements of the left.

I think I’ve undergone a shift as well, though to a much lesser degree, and with no guilt. I’m more interested in critiquing and thinking about the flaws of the right, now that those flaws are so evident and so damaging to the country. That’s definitely a shift. But it still feels important to me to critique the left, in part because that’s just my beat, but also because the stakes are really high.

To this point, my brother Jonathan said something to me the other day that I hadn’t thought about but made a lot of sense. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has been involved in the organizing there against the ICE invasion. What he said is that it’s pretty clear to him that people in the Twin Cities have internalized the hard lessons from mistakes made after the George Floyd killing. They’re thinking, much more strategically than the last time, about how to act so as to elicit sympathy rather than aversion from the broad mass of people in the middle politically. They’re sidelining the idiots from antifa and the abolish the police crowd. They’re super conscious of the need to avoid riots and looting. Etc.

And you can see the results, how powerful and effective their opposition has been. I think critique is a small but important element in the process that leads to that result. So I’ll keep being a pain in the ass on that front, but spend more time looking at the right and also try to spend more time in the space where I think blake is right now, which is trying to think constructively, creatively about new possibilities for culture and politics that we might want to explore on the other side of the culture wars.