Þe Right-Wing War Against Rootless Cosmopolites Never Ends
& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-26 Su
First: “You Shall Not Replace Us!” in Historical Perspective
Apropos of history rhyming, another possible analogy that sparks thought, in my head at least, is that between the domestic politics of the late French Troisième République in the 1930s and the United States today. This is properly the bailiwick of the highly estimable John Ganz, whose ‘Stack, IMHO, you should certainly subscribe to (and pay for):
But today I want to take up some of the slack. Let us raise the curtain on the French Chamber of Deputies, soon after the inauguration of Léon Blum as Prime Minister. We give the mic to France’s right-wing future Nazi collaborators, as reported by William L. Shirer:
William L. Shirer (1969): The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France, 1940 (New York: Simon & Schuster): ‘At the opening session of the new Chamber a rightist deputy, Xavier-Vallat, taunted the Premier for his Jewishness:
XAVIER-VALLAT: Your arrival in office, Mr. President, is incontestably a historic date. For the first time this ancient Gallic-Roman country will be governed—
HERRIOT (the Speaker): Be careful what you say, M. Vallat!
XAVIER-VALLAT:—by a Jew. I have to say aloud what everyone is thinking silently—that to govern this peasant nation which is France it is better to have someone whose origins, no matter how modest, spring from the womb of our soil rather than have a subtle Talmudist…
And he warned that the country would now be run by “a small Jewish coterie.” Blum for a moment was beside himself with rage but before he could respond Herriot censored Xavier-Vallat and declared the incident closed. For the reactionary press, however, it was just a beginning.
In L’Action Française, Maurras and Daudet had a field day. “France under the Jew” was the title of Maurras’ first editorial the day after Blum took office. “We now have a Jewish government,” he warned his readers.
Daudet excelled him in inventing insulting titles for the new Premier: “Blum, the gentle yid,” “the radiophonie Hebrew,” who presided over the “Cretin-Talmud cabinet.” France, said Daudet, had returned to the times of
the traitor Alfred Dreyfus. The domination of a rabbinical Jew, Léon Blum, a total stranger to our manners, customs, and ways of understanding and feeling, multiplies the peril of war by ten times...
Previously the Right had assaulted Blum for his pacifism. Now it cried out that because of his hatred of Fascism he would lead the country into war against Italy and Germany. L’Action Française harped on the fear. “It is as a Jew that Blum must be seen, conceived, understood, fought and brought down,” wrote Maurras. “This last verb may seem a little strong. I hasten to say I do not mean that Blum must be beaten down physically—until that day when his policies lead us into the war which he dreams of waging against our Italian friends. That day we must not fail to do so.”
Gleefully Maurras quoted some lines that André Gide, whose literary fame in the thirties had become enormous and who in 1936 was just abandoning a naive faith in Communism, had written in 1914: that Blum was “too Jewish” for his own good.
It comes [Gide had written] from the fact that Blum considers the Jewish race superior, as called upon to dominate after having been long dominated, and that it is his duty to work for its triumph with all his force. Doubtlessly he foresees the possible advent of the race…. He seems to think that the time will come which will be the time of the Jews…
Quickly on June 5, the day after Blum took office, Gide hastened to explain that what he really meant to say in 1914 was that the Jews had a passion for justice and the truth and it was that which “animated” Blum. He was extremely happy, he added, at the triumph of the Popular Front in general and of Blum in particular. Under such leadership, he was sure, France would resume its role as a “pioneer of civilization.”
The Right complained that Blum had stacked his government with Jews. Henri Béraud in the anti-Semitic and Fascist-oriented weekly Gringoire named thirty-two Jews who, he said, had been given prominent posts in the ministries, including one by the name of Dreyfus. Even Pertinax (André Géraud), the influential press commentator on foreign affairs, would complain later that Blum had unnecessarily courted anti-Semitism “by surrounding himself in the Premier’s office by ten, if not more, Jews.” Actually only two Jews held prominent posts in that office: André Blumel, a former law-partner of Blum, and Jules Moch, a young naval engineer. Blum himself was the only Jew among the ministers…
LINK: <https://archive.org/details/collapseofthird00will/mode/2up>
Nowadays, the very tight identity between hated Jews (hated as a religiously-despised other) and “rootless cosmopolites” (hated… as eroders of the hierarchical ethnic-centered community) is a lot less tight than it used to be. It used to be very tight indeed: Karl Marx, in his early writings, used “Jewishness” in the place in his argument where he later chose “bourgeois”. But the underlying pressures are similar.
History rhyming: America today as a mirrored version of the French Late Third Republic… The French Third Republic faced a very sharp existential threat from its external enemy Nazi Germany and its internal enemies Philippe Petain and Pierre Lavall and their faction, which it did not survive. America faces no equivalent combination amounting to an existential threat—yet.
One Audio:
Tom Keene & al.: Surveillance: Inflation Control With Rogoff: ‘Ken Rogoff, Harvard University Economics Professor, says now is the time to act on inflation. David Kostin, Goldman Sachs Chief U.S. Strategist, explains the factors behind the firm’s call for the S&P 500 index to hit 5,100 by the end of 2022. Dana Peterson, Conference Board Economist, expects services activity to return to pre-pandemic levels next year. Alan Ruskin, Deutsche Bank Chief International Strategist, says now there is even more reason to have a much higher terminal rate. Dr. Bhakti Hansoti, Johns Hopkins Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, says vaccine uptake is improving as omicron spreads…
LINK: <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2021-12-15/surveillance-inflation-control-with-rogoff-podcast>
One Picture:
Very Briefly Noted:
David Leonhardt: Risks to Older adults: ‘Good morning. Ready to give up on Covid? Spare a moment to think about older people… <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?CCPAOptOut=true&emc=edit_nn_20211223&instance_id=48549&nl=the-morning&productCode=NN®i_id=64675225&segment_id=77758&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F3edfa459-391f-50b8-869a-b4a12d0a866c&user_id=8a3fce2ae25b5435f449ab64b4e3e880>
Robert McCauley: Why Bitcoin Is Worse than a Madoff-Style Ponzi Scheme: ‘A Ponzi scheme is a zero-sum enterprise. But bitcoin is a negative-sum phenomenon that you can’t even pursue a claim against… <https://www.ft.com/content/83a14261-598d-4601-87fc-5dde528b33d0>
Anne O. Krueger: How Erdonomics Sank Turkey: ‘=Following years of mismanagement by an authoritarian president, Turkey’s economy is reeling. Without new leadership or a course correction that includes a tighter monetary policy, Turkish households’ economic prospects will continue to darken, and the impact on the country’s stability will become impossible for others to ignore… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/turkey-economic-crisis-erdonomics-by-anne-o-krueger-2021-12>
Tim De Chant: 2021 Was the Year the World Finally Turned on Facebook: ‘Can a name change save the company’s tarnished reputation?… <https://arstechnica.com/features/2021/12/facebook-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-year/>
Wikipedia: Gretchen Rubin <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Rubin> <https://gretchenrubin.com/books/> <https://gretchenrubin.com/blog/>
Justin Baragona: _’“Fox News’s The Five is not sitting around the table today—as all five panelists are filming remotely due to Omicron. Jesse Watters: ”So I think we’ll have to acknowledge here we are in boxes. We don’t want to be in boxes. We hate being in boxes. We resisted being in boxes" <https://t.co/lSNyOSuwER>…
Brad DeLong: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Chaucer on “Chevauchée”: ‘From 2003… One side effect of having the text of 10,000 books from Project Gutenberg newly-downloaded onto your laptop is that you can read the introduction to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales while proctoring your undergraduate exam. But I just ran across a passage that puts a shiver in my spine, a passage about the KNIGHT’S son, the SQUIRE…
Paragraphs:
Matt Levine: The Purdue Bankruptcy Didn’t Work: ‘Opioid addiction is of course a huge societal problem in the U.S. There are also the huge legal and economic problems of figuring out who is financially responsible for the costs of that epidemic and who is entitled to financial compensation, and then making the responsible people pay and channeling the money fairly to the people entitled to it. That is a big responsibility with enormous social consequences, and in the U.S. that sort of responsibility generally gets put on a bankruptcy court. These big social decisions about fairness and responsibility are made by a bankruptcy judge, who has a ton of power and flexibility to try to craft the best possible solution. But not unlimited power, and perhaps not enough power…
LINK: <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-12-23/the-purdue-bankruptcy-didn-t-work>
Joe Gagnon & Madi Sarsenbayev: The Dollar Has Only a Modest Effect on Trade Prices Outside the United States: ‘For countries that supply most of global trade, including many small and medium-sized economies, the dollar has at most a modest impact on their export prices, and the export channel of monetary transmission continues to operate. These results support the traditional view that countries can have effective independent monetary policies and that the United States does not uniquely set monetary conditions for the world…
Steve Randy Waldman: Mass Representative Democracy: ‘Among the kids, participatory direct democracy is often taken as the ideal to which democratic polities ought to aspire. But at least in theory, the case for representative democracy is strong. Political decisions really matter. They should be made well. But they are hard. Whatever interests and values you hold dear, it takes a lot of work to inform and educate yourself…. The genius, in theory, of representative democracy is that voters hire specialists to do the information work for them. In a representative democracy, it is not really your job as an ordinary citizen to have a strong view about the details that actually get legislated…. [But] modern representative democracy is simply a system whose predictable result is governance by competing coalitions of insiders, who develop deep relationships and thick connections to one another, while the electorate they notionally serve becomes an inchoate, threatening demon that must be flattered and appeased…. Direct democracy enfranchises the citizenry to decide upon matters of whose details and ramifications they are rationally ignorant, with predictably imperfect results…. But what if… we self-affiliated into groups of common interest of no more than, say, 1000 souls, for whom personal, physical “town meetings” could be regularly arranged?… Instead of a few hundred Congresspeople, we’d have 250,000 representatives whose full-time job it would be to stay and live among and interact with their constituents, and participate in the online legislature…. The hard part of being a representative is representing. The problem we should devote ourselves to is the challenge of making one person’s voice become a capable stand-in for many others’ necessarily absent…
LINK: <https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9069.html>
Peter Andre, Ingar Haaland, Chris Roth, & Johannes Wohlfart: Inflation Narratives: ‘Inflation has recently surged in both the US and the EU. This column uses responses from surveys of a representative sample of the US population as well as academic economists and US firm managers to show that households and managers are more likely than experts to think that the current surge in inflation will be persistent. Since the narratives individuals use to explain movements in inflation appear central to whether inflation expectations remain anchored, communication strategies by policymakers could put emphasis on specific narratives that highlight that inflationary pressures are unlikely to persist…
LINK: <https://voxeu.org/article/inflation-narratives>
Tim O’Reilly: Why It’s Too Early to Get Excited About Web3: ‘“Web3” as we think of it today was introduced in 2014 by Gavin Wood, one of the cocreators of Ethereum. Wood’s compact definition of Web3, as he put it in a recent Wired interview, is simple: “Less trust, more truth.”… The Ethereum community’s early writings on the topic offer measured assessments of the trade-offs and challenges ahead for Web3, but most popular accounts today are suffused with hype and the glamor of financial speculation…. Yes, exchanges like Coinbase are making a lot of money, but unlike traditional financial exchanges, what’s being traded isn’t general-purpose money but a speculative asset class that may be wildly overvalued. Nor has blockchain replaced trust in the way that Gavin Wood hoped…. The failure to think through and build interfaces to existing legal and commercial mechanisms is in stark contrast to previous generations of the web, which quickly became a digital shadow of everything in the physical world…
LINK: <https://www.oreilly.com/radar/why-its-too-early-to-get-excited-about-web3/>
Matthew C. Klein: The “Banker to the World” Is Back: ‘Foreigners have been lending in droves to the Federal Reserve, buying oodles of Treasury debt, and parking tons of deposits and repos into the U.S. banking system… to finance purchases of corporate bonds, stocks, and direct investment abroad, as well as to finance the yawning U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods. In effect, foreign savers have been behaving like risk-averse bank depositors who support risky cross-border lending and equity investing by Americans, while also covering the U.S. import bill essentially for free…
LINK:
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Here we have not the full book, not the full galley, but the introduction-conclusion-elevator-pitch package for my Slouching Towards Utopia book, which, alas!, is not yet (but it soon will be) pre-orderable on Amazon, or anywhere else:
I do confess I am not at all sure how to market this. I am arrogant enough to believe that it is certainly as good and as worthwhile as Guns, Germs, & Steel; or Capital in the 21st Century. But things have to go exactly right to get an audience even 1/100 as large as theirs, and I have no idea how to trigger that…
So peoples’ takes on the current publishing market—and virality—are going to be of great interest to me over the now-nine months until publication. I have decided that posting a sentence a day on twitter:
is a thing to do. What other things should I be doing to maximize my chances?
RE: promoting Slouching Towards Utopia. You've been "teasing" it in your old and new blogs for a decade. Dedicated DeLongophiles are eager to purchase the book. Reaching the rest of the world is a little more problematic. Would your publisher support a book tour? Assuming COVID doesn't continue to impair travel, that would be a strategy. Obviously, you'd concentrate on are with major research universities and large graduate and undergraduate populations.
“Frontline” special on PBS. Any producer-adjacent people reading comments?