Back in the medieval days, wars were the hobbies of princes and kings. They had little to nothing to do with the interests of the overwhelming majority of people, who were peasants. Nobles fought to expand their kingdoms, but if you were a farmer in the French countryside somewhere, it didn’t make much tangible difference to you whether the lord of the lord of your lord pledged his fealty to the Duke of This Place or the Duke of That Place. You or your sons might be conscripted into battle as part of your feudal duties, or hired to join the fight. Or your village might be plundered by some invading horde. But even then, your only real stake in the battle was your life. After the dust settled, so long as your rents or obligations remained the same, the title claimed by the head of some victorious army on some battlefield miles away was immaterial to you, even if the land he was fighting for included the little plot out of which you eked your living.

Back then, when wars were fought with swords, there was a physical limit to how destructive they could be. At their very worst — say, the Crusades, or the Norman conquest of England — they might displace or kill everyone you know, force a foreign religion on your community, and end your way of living forever. But these kinds of wars were rare, world historical events that we remember to this day. Much more often, wars were just a series of skirmishes between people much richer and more renowned than you. You might take a voyeuristic interest in them but they were otherwise inconsequential to your household, like the NFL playoffs or the Academy Awards.

Then came the modern world and the innovation of total war. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, war became something impossible for regular people to ignore. The bureaucratic machinery of the nation-state made it feasible to mobilize every last physical resource within a geographical territory, most importantly its population, and direct it toward war-fighting. Advances in military technology made it possible to slaughter civilian populations on a scale never before known to humanity.

Now everyone had a stake in the battles carried out by their governments, and success or failure in war relied as never before on the active participation of the national population. It became necessary, then, for the state to persuade regular people to embrace the cause. Without their consent, one risked, at best, a lackluster war effort, and at worst, a social revolution.

In the European world wars, it wasn’t particularly difficult to make this case. Defeat in war could mean conquest and occupation by a vengeful and bloodthirsty enemy. You could expect all of your wealth and possessions to be expropriated, your traditional legal and political rights denied, and, potentially, your family murdered. You didn’t have to be a flag-waving patriot to be highly motivated to do whatever was necessary for your government to prevail.

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It was a different proposition, however, with conflicts overseas. There was a limit to how many Americans in the twentieth century could be convinced that a German victory in World War 1 would fundamentally degrade their lives an ocean away. Even in World War 2, it wasn’t completely self-evident that a Nazi victory in Europe or a Japanese triumph in the Pacific would turn the lives of U.S. citizens upside down. A more laborious propaganda effort was needed to overcome the natural reluctance of Americans to fight someone else’s war.

The Nazis, of course, provided more than enough material to make an alarmingly convincing case, as did the Japanese. Likewise, the scale of Stalin’s crimes against humanity fueled a half century of effective propaganda against the Soviet Union. After that, in Vietnam, Iraq, and even Afghanistan, the U.S. government had to do more with much less. In each case, the absence of a plausible argument for seemingly endless war required levels of fear mongering and ideological bullying that produced only diminishing returns as each war dragged ever more disastrously on.

Now we’re seeing the start of a new propaganda effort, this time against Iran, and the case is so weak that it feels as if we’ve returned, full circle, to those medieval days when waging wars was the blood sport of an indifferent aristocracy, with no connection whatsoever to the stakes of our everyday lives. You open the paper and read about 60-day deadlines, uranium enrichment capabilities, and the ominous geo-strategic aspirations of a distant civilization few of us spend much time even thinking about. It’s all very abstract, technical, and intellectual. These are the concerns of princes in castles, not peasants on their plots. They’re hopelessly foreign. They’re vaguely reminiscent of the war games of dueling empires from an era we thought we had left behind. There is no line you can draw between them and the price of eggs, your inadequate health insurance, the addiction crisis on our streets, and your children’s shitty public schools.

To make it more visceral, we’re told that the enemy is weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon, the same as we’ve been told for decades. We’re warned of an impending nuclear holocaust, which is exactly how we were sold the invasion of Iraq. We’re told of the valor and heroism of the Israeli military and the backwardness of its dark, exotic enemies.

But it doesn’t feel like it did when the threat we were warned of consisted of thousands of Russian ICBMs pointed at American cities, when we climbed under our desks in classroom nuclear attack drills. Back then it felt like there was substance behind the propaganda, because there was. It felt like we might all pay the price if our country wasn’t vigilant enough. It was legitimately scary.

This time it feels cheap. It feels like we’re being fed fish sticks and french fries because they don’t think we’ll eat the fresh vegetable salad they’ve served themselves. It feels like they don’t even believe the bullshit they’re selling. It feels like 2003, when they whipped us up into a hysterical frenzy through the brute force of their vulgar and melodramatic war propaganda. It feels like the Dukes of This Place and That Place have a disagreement over the borders of their duchies and, to raise armies, need the rest of us to believe that it has anything to do with our lives. It feels like exactly the lie that it is.

Obviously the major news of the day is that Israel has started a war with Iran that it hopes to drag us into. I’ll have things to say about that in the near future. I had this piece written, however, before Netanyahu launched his attack.

For free subscribers, I’ve removed the paywall on my piece from two days ago on the violence in Los Angeles. I hope you’ll read it.

—LW

At the historic immigration protests in Los Angeles in 2006, when a half million people marched downtown to oppose new federal legislation on immigration enforcement, much of the viewing public saw only one thing: Mexican flags.

They were everywhere, and the optics were terrible. A movement of immigrants making the case that they belonged in America seemed to be advertising their fealty to one of the very countries they were fighting to not be sent to.

Immigration hardliners had a field day. Fox News’ Brit Hume called it “a repellant spectacle.” A group of immigration restrictionists in Arizona burned the Mexican flag in front of the Mexican consulate.

The movement learned quickly from the experience, and within weeks, immigration marches in L.A. were a sea of stars and stripes. The bill was stopped, but immigration reform never happened. A decade later, Trump was elected, then re-elected 8 years later, and here we are.

Now, once again, immigrant rights protesters in L.A. are being castigated for waving Mexican flags. It’s easy to understand the criticism: the images play right into Trump’s depiction of undocumented immigrants as a fifth column in America.

But if I were the son of undocumented parents in Los Angeles today, I’m not sure I’d care this time around. There’s no bill to lobby for. There’s no public opinion to be won over. We’re far past the point of persuasion. Voters were given a choice and elected Trump; he has a mandate on this issue. For the immigrant community in L.A., the fight is no longer political. The resistance effort is physical.

I was in downtown L.A. last Sunday afternoon, when the weekend’s violence reached its crescendo. Activists had taken the southbound lanes of the 101 freeway, and had then been pushed off of it by California Highway Patrol. For the next few hours, the police defended the freeway while protesters stood on surface streets and overpasses about 25 feet above them, hurling rocks and shooting industrial fireworks at the officers, who shot rubber bullets and flashbangs in return. Black plumes of smoke from torched Waymos clogged the sky. Police helicopters and quadcopter drones flew overhead. There were ear-ringing explosions every minute. Amber alerts kept popping up on my phone warning me of the conditions in downtown L.A. that I was right in the middle of.

There must have been a Mexican flag every 15 feet, interspersed by the occasional American flag or combination Mexican-American flag. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem the least bit inappropriate.

Trump’s attacks on immigrants have explicitly name-checked Mexico since the day he came down the golden escalator. At Stephen Miller’s behest, the latest ICE sweeps have targeted Home Depot parking lots, where Mexican and Central American day laborers gather. Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted out an anti-immigrant propaganda poster that was created by a white nationalist.

It takes a lot of willful credulousness to believe that Trump’s deportation crusade is not driven in significant measure by racial prejudice. Plenty of Latinos, to be sure, voted for Trump and support his crackdown. That is not incompatible with the persistence of racial disdain in Trump’s coalition. It’s a big country. Lots of things can be true.

Protesters are not waving the Mexican flag for the benefit of the TV-viewing public. They’re waving it for themselves. It’s a symbol of solidarity and defiance against what is very clearly an attack on a specific disfavored community.

“My family, everyone that lives here, they’re just afraid to go out,“ a young man named Daniel Flores told me. “They’re afraid to go to their jobs, the store, home. Even home is not safe for them.”

“In our neighborhood, a lot of the families are First Gen, and they’re the most hardworking people we know,” a social worker named Adriana from Boyle Heights, who was there with her sister Amanda, said. They told me their father is American, from L.A., and their mother is from Durango, Mexico. “We’re going to come out for our community because we know a lot of the parents.”

I think on some level, many of the haters understand the real meaning behind the Mexican flags but pretend not to. Despite its avowed contempt for identity politics, the right has gone all in on the idea that America is in the midst of a massive wave of antisemitism. Their response has been to plaster the halls of Congress with Israeli flags outside of their office doors. “We fly the American flag in America,” tweeted Representative Jim Jordan, who has an Israeli flag outside of his Congressional office door.

Do these politicians believe that their embrace of the Israeli flag is a sign of their dual loyalty to the United States? Obviously not. More likely, they regard it as a sign of their solidarity with a group they perceive to be embattled, no different from straight “allies” flying LGBT flags.

There’s actually a much better case to be made that Jim Jordan has secret loyalty to Israel than that American protesters have secret loyalties to Mexico. Israel has plain lobbying interests in Congress and its American support groups spend a lot of money pursuing them. The theory that legislators might put Israel’s interests ahead of those of Americans is as self-evident as the theory that they put corporate interests before those of their constituents. What exactly is the theory as to why immigrants and their kids have some nefarious allegiance to Mexico? Their “Marxist indoctrination” by pointy-headed college professors and the New York Times? The debate quickly descends into a fever swamp.

What’s actually happening is not the least bit mysterious. People are waving Mexican flags to show that they’re unashamed of being immigrants or relatives of immigrants in the face of a campaign to malign them. That’s an important thing to do when you’re mustering your community to its self-defense. Those who despise immigrants, meanwhile, are using the opportunity to cast them as treasonous ingrates.

It may not be politically well-advised to make it so easy for your critics to vilify you by waving a foreign flag. But that case made a lot more sense in 2006 than it does today. Back then, legislation mattered to immigrant families, and American public opinion was thus critical. We’re beyond that now. Today, immigrant households in L.A. have only one thing left to strive for: to make it as hard as possible for ICE agents to do their jobs. Waving American flags does nothing to serve that goal.

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This feels like something that shouldn’t have to be said, but I oppose political violence. I opposed the antics on January 6, 2021 and I opposed the rioting and looting of the summer of 2020. I oppose the violence of the protests against deportations in L.A., which I saw firsthand. But my opposition to it is irrelevant. It has no bearing on anything. It’s entirely beside the point.

I’ve heard a dozen different versions of the argument that the L.A. protesters should follow the lead of the Civil Rights Movement, with its discipline and its commitment to non-violence and its camera-ready optics. I agree with that argument, in the exact same way I would agree with the argument that we should strive for peace not war, or that tornadoes and earthquakes are bad.

But I think it’s a category error. Maybe it’s because we’ve become so brainwashed by the conspiratorial thinking of twenty-first century politics that we reflexively assume that every mass protest is organized — that there are committees of people behind the scenes making strategic and tactical decisions that then manifest on the streets. That nothing happens spontaneously or organically anymore. So we assume from this that the “movement” is making poor decisions by “allowing” violent activity and other impolitic things like property destruction and waving Mexican flags.

This is a monumental misunderstanding, in my opinion, of what’s happening. I’ve been to dozens of left-wing protests in my life, maybe hundreds. When organized groups are behind them, they don’t tend to be shy about it. If SEIU is turning out members, they’re all going to be wearing purple SEIU shirts and carrying SEIU picket signs. Even groups that didn’t organize a given protest try to leave the impression that they did, by putting their valor-stealing activists at the head of the march with a huge banner with their name on it (ahem, International ANSWER).

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This branding was not present in downtown L.A. on Sunday afternoon. More or less every sign I saw was handmade. There was no stage, no speaker lineup, no protest marshals. I can already hear someone pointing out that if you wanted to make a protest look organic, you would dress it up exactly that way. But if your theory is that this was some color revolution psy-op, then the burden is on you to prove it, not on others to disprove it. And so far the only attempt to offer such evidence is this incredibly weak shit from the terminally galaxy-brained Mike Benz.

The more obvious explanation is that what’s happening in L.A. is not organized by anyone. It’s a genuine, spontaneous outburst of anger and resistance.

Already, that language sounds as if I’m lionizing it. That’s not my intention. I mean the words “genuine,” “spontaneous,” and “resistance” by their flattest and most literal definitions. Just because something is genuinely spontaneous doesn’t mean it’s good or pretty. It’s often precisely the opposite: spontaneous outbursts of political anger tend to degrade into riots and looting. That has already happened this week in L.A.

But I think it’s important to understand it as such because it carries an entirely different set of implications than does the idea that these protests are being controlled by anyone in particular. The Civil Rights Movement emerged over a decade of relentless grassroots organizing. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to compare it to, say, the 1965 Watts Riot and conclude, “the Watts rioters would have done much better if they had worn their Sunday best and engaged in non-violent civil disobedience.” Clearly that sentence is not wrong, but it’s about as useful as saying, “New Orleans would have been much better off if Hurricane Katrina had never happened.” Ok, yeah, sure. But Hurricane Katrina did happen.

The people I interviewed in L.A. on Sunday were primarily the American children and young relatives of immigrants. Their families are terrified — even those who are here with the proper authorization, as nobody has confidence in the fairness of the system. When Freddie Sayers asked me on the UnHerd podcast whether the protests were standing in the way of the exercise of democracy — after all, Trump was elected to do just this — it was a perfectly fair devil’s advocate-type question, but I think it misses the point if you’re trying to understand why this is happening. People who are afraid that their family members will be snatched off the street or their worksites don’t stop and think, “well, this is unfortunate but I guess the voters have spoken.” We’re humans and our primal obligations are toward our families, not our electorates. If there were realistic means of peaceful, democratic resistance to these raids, people would be pursuing them. They have been pursuing them for years, through advocacy, lobbying, and electioneering. None of that work has stopped this moment from arriving, and now it’s too late. Now people are simply trying to stop armed government agents from grabbing their relatives and pushing them into vans. The challenge has become not political, legal, or procedural, but physical. This is a very dangerous place to be. When the most fundamentally important things in our lives are under imminent threat and there are no feasible legal avenues for recourse, it’s exactly then that people turn to violence. To acknowledge this is not to condone it. It’s simply to understand how the world works.

Not only did I see the ugliness of the violence in L.A. firsthand a few days ago, I was directly threatened with it. So I’m not naive about its heinousness or the danger of the path it sets us down. But that’s not the point. This is not a value statement. It’s simply a recognition of the situation we find ourselves in. You can judge it all you want. You can wish it were something different. You can point out all the ways that non-violent civil disobedience is more politically efficacious. It doesn’t make a difference to the facts at hand. When state power is exercised in its rawest, most uncompromising way, forms of resistance to it tend to follow suit. If a better way is found, it’s usually after years of struggle, as in the Civil Rights Movement.

When Martin Luther King described riots as “the voice of the unheard,” he wasn’t condoning them. He was just recognizing that they’re what happens when you close off every other political choice to desperate people. “These conditions,” he said, “are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.” That’s where things are for the immigrant community in Los Angeles. And it’s where things will be for all of us if this authoritarian rule keeps up.

Here’s my piece in The Free Press on the violence in L.A.:

I also did a long interview on the subject with Freddie Sayers at UnHerd. I thought he was the perfect interlocutor: dubious but fair.

Hope you’ll give it a read and a listen.

—LW

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I’m in L.A. working on a story for The Free Press on the unrest here. I have complicated feelings on it. But for now I thought I’d just show you some pictures. I’ll share some words as well in a later post.

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Oliver Stone’s Platoon came out in 1986, eleven years after the end of the Vietnam War. It has been a little longer than that — about 13-and-a half-years — since the Iraq War ended, and we now have Alex Garland’s Warfare. I make this comparison not because the two movies are in any way similar, but because they’re completely different, and that difference suggests something about the way we have come to understand the two wars.

Platoon was a big, important movie. It won Best Picture and Best Director in the 1987 Academy Awards. As a child I loved it, because it’s a childish movie. It’s a story about the evils of war, portrayed through the interpersonal conflicts between three American soldiers. One of them is so villainous he oversees a massacre that is clearly a stand-in for the one at My Lai. Another is so virtuous that when the evil character assassinates him, he assumes a Christ-like pose in slow motion. The third is the protagonist, who goes into the war green and naive, and comes out of it schooled in the darkness of humanity. The movie makes heavy use of the soaring melodrama of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Warfare has no such moral lessons to teach the public. It’s a story not so much of a war as of a single battle in that war. Its characters aren’t moral agents with grave choices to make, as they are in Platoon. They’re desperate men trapped in a dangerous, confined space who are trying to get out of it. Their choices are not philosophical, but physical. They react to their circumstances; they don’t shape them.

I’ve never been in the military, much less in combat, so I can’t tell you which film is a more accurate depiction of the realities of war (though I could make an educated guess). But I can discern what they’re trying to do artistically and politically, and, further, what role their respective genres — the Vietnam War Movie and the Iraq War Movie — have played in our understanding of American warmaking.

Platoon was not an outlier in the Vietnam Movie genre of the 1970s and 80s. Its politics may have been more on-the-nose than Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, or Apocalypse Now, but like those other (and better) movies, it had many of the same things to say. All of those films served as correctives to the Hollywood myth-making that came out of the Second World War. In Europe and the Pacific, the United States had played the role of the world’s cavalry; on film, its heroes were portrayed by stars accustomed to playing cowboys, like Steve McQueen and Ronald Reagan. That rugged individualist tradition of war storytelling continued into the Vietnam War, with John Wayne’s 1968 film The Green Berets. The new crop of war movies was here to tell you that Vietnam was not World War 2. The United States was not the Lone Ranger, galloping into Indochina to save its damsels from the treachery of evildoers.

They were, instead, about America’s loss of innocence. It’s not that these movies lacked for heroes, it’s just that the heroes weren’t cowboys. Their heroism came not from their military prowess, but from the moral integrity that allowed them to see through the propaganda of generals and politicians and recognize the madness of the war around them. In this, they were proxies for the American public, who were learning to see past the mythology of World War 2, to put away childish things, to stop playing Cowboys and Indians.

Warfare is the inverse of both genres. Many of the characters in the film show great competence in combat, but their abilities aren’t showcased as expressions of their awesome courage or moral conviction; if anything, they’re just technical skills, well-executed. These are not cowboy-soldiers, but nor are they literary protagonists experiencing the disenchantment of their received worldviews. This may be in part because, unlike their Vietnam counterparts, the characters in Warfare are professional career soldiers, not conscripts. But I think it has more to do with the fact that the American public no longer needs to be shaken free of our naive attachment to some fairy tale version of war. Vietnam already did that for us. We went into Iraq with a healthy level of cynicism about the entire enterprise of armed conflict and a deep skepticism of the motives of our political leaders that was absent when we first became militarily engaged in Vietnam in the 50s and 60s.

Warfare certainly isn’t a pro-war movie, but I don’t know if I’d call it anti-war. I don’t know if I would have said so about Generation Kill, either, when it came out 17 years ago. Neither is a parable with a lesson at the end; to the extent that they horrify the viewer about the realities of the Iraq War — and that extent is profound — they do so merely by depicting it in an unflinching way. These are not political films, and for good reason. We don’t need to be told what to think about war or what to believe about America’s role in the world anymore. Decades of American foreign policy have belied the childish morality of the fables we were once told. The Iraq War was what the Iraq War was, and what it was was Hell. Warfare only needs to reflect that reality back to us. It doesn’t need to persuade, only depict. And in doing so it makes a more profound impression on its audience than the greatest directors of the 70s and 80s were ever able to.

You don’t have to read the other articles before this one, but if you’d like to, here are my essays on Making America, Parts 1 and 2.

America’s historical mythology has always been rooted in the northeast. In a sense that’s no surprise, as that’s where the story of the United States began. Following along this historical vector, America’s political and cultural traditions were born in Europe, transplanted to the East Coast, and then exported westward.

But in another sense it’s entirely arbitrary. It just so happened that through centuries of national evolution, the brick-and-mortar institutions at the center of elite cultural production — the brand-name universities, museums, and media companies — remained stubbornly attached to the cities along the Acela corridor, from DC to Boston. Thus, for the same reason we’re indoctrinated from birth to associate Christmas with snow, we look to the historical events of the northeastern states as the catalysts of change and development in America. The things that happened in the South and the West, we unconsciously assume, were either epiphenomena or the reflection of a transitory social stage that eventually gave way to the superior civilizing force emanating from the upper eastern seaboard.

But that’s not the only way to look at the forming of modern America. There is a more geographically expansive perspective, which envelops the continental U.S. as a whole as both the subject and object of change, and which brings into the picture the deep foreign influences of countries beyond just those in Europe.

When you consider the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of the Western states and territories — by which I mean about 60% of the contemporary American landmass — the textbook version of American history remains chronologically the same, but thematically quite different. In the West, the most consequential event in American history, the Civil War, was experienced, at the time, as an almost foreign conflict in a distant land. The U.S. government itself was, in the western mind, something of an abstraction. The lives led by American settlers in the West felt less like those of citizens than those of a kind of U.S. diaspora.

Before the development of the transcontinental railroad, it’s hard to overstate how isolated California, which was the only place in the West with a substantial non-Indian population, was from the rest of the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, California was a far flung and generally neglected outpost of Mexico. By 1850, when it became a U.S. state, it was, to its American settlers, as autonomous and culturally disconnected from the urban civilization emerging on the East Coast as the American backcountry colonies had been from the English landed gentry. The fastest way to get there from the east coast was by ship, either around Cape Horn at the very bottom of the planet, or through Panama, which involved a treacherous and often deadly equatorial land crossing that by itself could take as long as a week. It was faster to get from New York to India, or from California to Australia, than it was to get from one side of the North American continent to the other.

If the Union’s victory over the Confederacy was the seminal event that changed the destiny of the United States forever, not just objectively but in the hearts and minds of Americans along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida, it was the discovery of gold that did so in the West. In the decade after 1848, when James Marshall noticed a few sparkling flecks of the metal on John Sutter’s ranch, California’s population exploded. “From that point on,” writes historian Elliott West, “the region would be the most culturally and ethnically mixed part of the nation.”

The first to arrive and supplement the sparse population of Indians and Hispanic “Californios” were not Americans but Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians, Tasmanians, and native Hawaiians. Then came the hundreds of thousands of overland gold seekers from the east along the Oregon Trail, as well as by ship from France and China. After them came the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad, which brought not just more Americans but also English, Germans and Scandinavians to both California and the rest of the western states and territories. By 1870, New York, the state with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents on the eastern seaboard, ranked only ninth when you factored in the West. Ahead of it were Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, California, Utah, and Dakota. “The percentage of immigrants in five Idaho mining towns (68.1 percent),” writes West, “was nearly twice that of Boston and Brooklyn (35.1 percent and 36.5 percent).” San Francisco had the largest per-capita foreign born population of any city in the country.

It would be a monumental mistake, however, to imagine that the West that emerged from this mass migration was a melting pot. Americans are accustomed, with good reason, to thinking of the decades following the Civil War in the former Confederacy as the period of the worst racial violence in our country’s history. It was in fact a sequel. As West writes, “events in the East after 1880 were a reprise of those in California and elsewhere in the West after the U.S.-Mexico War.”

In Gold Rush California, the principal victims were not free blacks, of whom there were but few, but Mexicans and Californios, of whom there were many. In the three decades following the discovery of gold, notes West, the rate of lynchings in California was nine times greater than that of Mississippi from 1880 to 1930. In 1854, the murder rate in Los Angeles, fueled by racial terrorism, was 56 times that of New York City. What emerged from this bloody period was a California and larger western region that was deeply multicultural, but with an uncontested ethnic pecking order. White, Anglo-Americans sat at the top of it.

This would comprise a merely regional subcategory of our national history but for the fact that the Gold Rush catalyzed the economic integration of the entire continent, just as the Civil War reconstituted the political integration of the United States. The real Gold Rush wasn’t from the miners extracting the metal from the creeks and hillsides of the western Sierras, but from the eastern merchants who set up shop in San Francisco, Sacramento and the mountain boom towns to sell those miners everything from boots to chocolates at obscenely inflated prices paid for in gold dust. Gold seekers in California produced little for themselves and consumed vast quantities of food, equipment, alcohol and sex, nearly all of it imported from the east. Then, as placer mining depleted the sources of gold on the earth’s surface, it was replaced by hydraulic mining, which blasted it out of mountains with industrial power hoses. With this shift, labor was displaced by capital. Instead of unskilled workers from around the world, the new mining companies needed huge, expensive machines and the means to finance them, along with the legal basis for exploiting claims, whether found or stolen. Thus emerged the legal and financial services industries of San Francisco that thrive to this day.

With the northeast as the first person narrator of our country’s history, we tend to think of America’s internationalist character as a secondary cultural layer that was placed, especially during the turn-of-the-century wave of migration through Ellis Island, atop a political foundation that is fundamentally Anglo-Saxon. And from that perspective it is not inaccurate. But from the western perspective, which begins at a later date in our history, American internationalism is baked into the dough. From this vantage point, the ancestral nationalism of the New Right feels far less intuitive. Indeed, it feels like a foreign import. In the West, immigration and multiculturalism is not something that happened to us. It is what America has always been.

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Pedro Gonzalez recently published a very smart essay on art and the New Right at The Metropolitan Review, a Substack I’d never heard of but to which I have now become an unpaid subscriber. Pedro’s argument, distilled to the point of doing it a disservice, is that right-wing art sucks, and for the same reason that left-wing art sucks: because politics makes art terrible.

This isn’t a “response” to Pedro in the sense of arguing with his thesis, since I enthusiastically agree with it. But I have a lot of thoughts on this subject, as I, like Pedro, have a foot in each of these two worlds.

Before I was a journalist I was a left-wing political activist by profession. About a decade into my career I shifted from engaging in politics to writing about them instead. The reason was simple: I enjoy writing and I don’t particularly enjoy protesting and organizing.

So why was I an activist in the first place? If you had asked me that question 15 years ago I probably would have subjected you to a lengthy discourse about power and inequality, but in retrospect it really came down to two things: I believed that left-wing politics were a moral obligation, and collective action inspired me. As I got older I realized I didn’t like doing it and didn’t have any particular talent at it, either. Those are both very good reasons for changing careers, but I nevertheless felt selfish for doing so. I hadn’t found a way around that moral obligation part.

Because of this residual sense of moral obligation — and by that I mean guilt — I made the mistake a lot of journalists make: I chose to think of my new profession as a mission instead of a craft. Activism is tedious work and I didn’t want to do it anymore, but I still needed to believe I was purifying my soul by creating political change in the world. As a journalist, I could bring public attention to the things I cared about without the burden of the activist work ethic and lifestyle. I could pretend to have my cake and eat it, too.

Even at the time, I didn’t actually believe this act was real. But I wanted to believe it was, so I tried to cover topics and write stories that would expose the injustices of the world and elevate the noble work of the activist heroes who were combating them. For obvious reasons, the activists were happy to play along. It was a symbiotic relationship, like that between a bee and a flower.

It was fake adversarial journalism. It’s not that I did sloppy work — I’m still proud of a lot of that early stuff — but my self-assigned function was to write propaganda for non-profit advocacy groups I believed in. I wasn’t alone in doing this. My perception of my professional role was, I think, in the American media landscape, unremarkable. This is what most reporters were up to. Eventually I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t real journalism.

This recognition dawned on me slowly, but it was impossible to deny after Covid hit. Suddenly working in my industry felt like working for the Politburo. There was a rigid expectation of conformity from professional peers and a complete intolerance of dissent. If you entertained the lab leak theory you were racist. If you questioned the wisdom of defunding the police you were racist. If you humanized Trump voters you were racist. If you stuck to the assigned party line, and, better yet, led some witch hunts against a few heretics, your career might advance rapidly. Reporters were arguing explicitly for the kind of journalism I had practiced only with a sense of embarrassment — the kind that puts one’s political agenda first and everything else a distant second. It was self-destructive, but more than that, it was pathetic.

Journalism isn’t art, but it’s part of the same larger industrial apparatus of cultural production. It recruits from the same middle-class, urban, college-educated pool of talent. The “creators” who populate both fields share many of the same prejudices and predilections. There is the same sense of moral obligation to a certain kind of politics, the same self-confidence in one’s enlightened worldview, the same disdain for the same disfavored people.

And so politics corrupts art in the same way it corrupts journalism. Whether you’re a journalist or an artist, if you bow to its demands, your vocation becomes your moral purpose and your craft becomes propaganda. If you’re a novelist or a filmmaker, your plots become moral fables and your characters become two-dimensional stand-ins for various political constituencies. If you’re a painter or a sculptor your work becomes a mere vehicle for the lessons you wish to impart to an amorphous, less enlightened public. It becomes cynical and boring, which may not be the enemy of journalism, but it certainly is of art.

It doesn’t help that art and politics (and journalism) share the same incentive structure. If you’re a new or unknown entrant to either profession, the quickest path to attaining professional recognition is to collect some scalps. If you’re an artist, you turn your anonymity into an advantage by presenting it as a badge of your authenticity, and casting the fame and commercial success of your established incumbent rivals as evidence of their corruption. If you’re a revolutionary, you stake out positions more radical than your mainstream rivals are politically capable of embracing — the easier to condemn them as hopelessly compromised by power. The point is to attack the legitimacy of the consecrated leaders in your profession to position yourself as their more worthy successor. In both fields there is an ever-present gravitational pull upon the margins toward the avant-garde.

The two fields flow in and out of each other. Novelists, filmmakers, songwriters and conceptual artists naturally borrow from the arsenal of radical politics to establish their standing as rebels in the artistic field. Political radicals likewise have a convenient affinity for art that codes as subversive. These cultural assets are fungible. If you have a professional interest in cultivating an image that distinguishes you from the establishment, you’ll use whatever’s within reach.

We’ve become accustomed to thinking of this dynamic as a left-wing phenomenon only because we became accustomed by the experience of the twentieth century to thinking of the left as the cultural transgressors against a relatively more conservative political and cultural establishment. But that paradigm came apart years ago. Once left-wing political radicalism was embraced by every establishment figure from Kamala Harris to PepsiCo, it was no longer possible to subvert anything from the left. Suddenly it was the edgelord right, with their “ironic” swastikas and Kekistan flags, that had the prudes of the establishment clutching their pearls. Now it’s wearing a MAGA hat that confers transgressor status, and early adapters from Kanye West to Dimes Square scenesters have seized the opportunity.

But now that the right is the political establishment and billionaire tech tycoons are reinventing themselves as anti-woke, the subversive pose of the avant-garde right is as ridiculous as the Nike-endorsed revolutionary politics of police abolitionists. That’s why Babylon Bee is so unfunny and the Daily Wire has lost every shred of edginess and now just seems mean. It’s all transparently fake and nobody buys it except those who have an interest in pretending to.

Lately I’ve been trying my hand at writing a novel. I was going to write a book of commercial nonfiction but I don’t really have anything to say anymore. I don’t know exactly where a book by me would fall in the left versus right political marketplace, but wherever it ended up I suspect it would be cynical and derivative, because that’s what most books about politics and policy are now, in my jaded opinion. I find myself even reading far less about current events these days. When I read nonfiction it’s not about what’s happening now but what happened 250 or a thousand years ago. The book I just finished was about the War of Independence, which was relatively recent history for my tastes. But mostly I read fiction. I never used to read novels; now I can’t stop. I devoured three Cormac McCarthy books in a month and a half. I’m now reading my first Stephen King novel. Why did I not do this decades ago?

I actually know the answer to that question. When I read books about politics and policy it’s largely to accumulate knowledge, which can be deployed as cultural capital in the daily struggle of professional and social status competition. It’s part of the endless quest for recognition, which is at its starkest in the world of politics, where the objective is power. For a politician, that means, more or less, the raw power of state violence, which has been pacified by civilization into law. The more that journalists have become absorbed into the political field, the more they tend to seek a thinly veiled version of the same thing. Their professional objective becomes the accumulation of the symbolic power of mass opinion formation, which is another word for propaganda.

Art is different, and, in my opinion, better. We seek art — or at least I seek art — as a refuge from the Hobbesian muck of politics. At its least corrupt, art is not about power but about meaning. It’s about complicating our understanding of the world and thus enriching it, while politics is about reducing our worldview and, in the process, impoverishing it.

In his essay, Pedro discusses The Road, which is the best novel I’ve ever read. The world of The Road is Hobbesian in the extreme, but that’s not really what the story is about. It isn’t about good and evil, or about saving the world. It’s about the daily plight of human existence in a world without purpose, and it’s about the love between a father and his son. I wouldn’t want that story to be reduced to some stupid melodrama of oppressors and resisters, with a neat and tidy life lesson at the end. I don’t want art to cheapen the human experience. I want it to reflect its complexity and fullness.

I have a couple of Oakland pieces up today, one for locals and one for everyone.

For the San Francisco Standard, I gave Oakland’s new mayor, Barbara Lee, some advice she didn’t ask for on how to deliver for this disastrously misgoverned city. (This is the one for the locals.)

In the Free Press, I wrote about the Ballers, Oakland’s new independent league baseball team, which is providing some hope for a city that desperately needs it. (This one is for everybody.)

For those who care about non-Oakland topics, I highly recommend this grim analysis of the geopolitics of the Gaza genocide at this pivotal moment in the conflict, by my friend Murtaza Hussein:

Have a happy long weekend.

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I said my last post about Matt Taibbi would be my last post about Matt Taibbi. Turns out I was wrong. I have something more to say.

Matt wrote a truly outstanding essay 24 years ago. The whole thing is worth reading, not just for the points it makes about media propaganda but also for the masterful quality of its writing.

In it, Matt explained the Israel-Palestine conflict in as clear terms as any description I’ve seen:

But Palestinians have a very simple reason to hate Americans. Americans are supporting the occupation of their country by Israel. Israeli armed forces, the same people who are bulldozing neighborhoods and shooting into crowds, use American weapons— even American missiles. The United States is basically a colonial aggressor to most Palestinians, some 360,000 of which are living as refugees in Lebanon.

Things have obviously gotten somewhat more complicated and a great deal more violent since October 7, 2023. But not that much more complicated. The occupation is still the occupation. The Palestinians are still stateless. And now they’re being ethnically cleansed in Gaza and as we lose our free speech rights here in America. The factor that has changed is that there was a horrific massacre and mass kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and civilians by Hamas which was the proximate cause of Israel’s current genocidal military campaign. Israel is now exacting its revenge. These are the basic outlines of the situation today. This isn’t rocket science, or sophisticated financial instruments.

Yet this is Matt from a year ago, after being asked where he stands on Israel’s genocide in Gaza:

Israel Palestine is a story I have never liked to comment on . . . it’s a very, very complicated story with a lot of history and I don’t know anything about it.

There are things about this story that make me nervous and i feel like the first rule in medicine is “do no harm,” so if I don't say anything, I'm not doing any harm.

I don't want to talk about this thing, I just . . . don't.

I don't feel like I need to be in the middle of it . . . I just don't want to chime in.

And here’s Matt from yesterday:

I’m not on anybody’s side, don’t want to be.

Since I’m not going to be reporting from Gaza, what’s being demanded is that I provide commentary on a subject about which I know very little but the whole world already has Extremely Strong Opinions.

A younger Matt Taibbi didn’t show that this kind of hesitation or lack of confidence on this particular topic. What changed between 2001 and now? Has he become less knowledgable about the conflict in that nearly quarter century? Or have the incentives shifted?

Miss Rachel is not an expert on the Middle East, either. She’s never gone and reported from Gaza. My kids love her. They learn a lot from her. So could Matt.

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