#David Klion

[plitnick]

Bernie Sanders' refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza is alienating his base

Only one US senator has called for a ceasefire. You’d probably guess it would be Bernie Sanders, who has established himself as the leader in the Senate in supporting Palestinian rights, even if that is damning with faint praise. But it is not Bernie, but Dick Durbin of Illinois who remains the only senator to call for a ceasefire. Why has Bernie explicitly refused to call for a ceasefire? I…

[argyrocratie]

"We have good reason to worry about this: As Israelis count their dead, politicians in Israel and the US call for Palestinian blood in direct, genocidal language. “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant yesterday. “Finish them, Netanyahu,” said former Ambassador to the United Nations and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. “Neutraliz[e] the terrorists,” said Democratic senator John Fetterman. Jews share memes about the highest number of Jewish casualties since the Holocaust, not bothering to ask who, right now, is being ethnically cleansed, or how many massacres of this size Gaza has seen in the last dozen years. This language deploys the bombs that fall on Gazans from the sky, leveling whole neighborhoods, wiping out families without warning, huddled in their homes because they have nowhere to flee. “There are body parts scattered everywhere. There are still people missing,” one man north of Gaza City told CNN. “We’re still looking for our brothers, our children. It’s like we’re stuck living in a nightmare.”

We will likely soon see this genocidal impulse spread, as the Israeli government hands out automatic weapons to West Bank settlers, many of whom were already armed eliminationists. In this way, Jewish grief is routed back into the violence of a merciless system of Palestinian subjugation that reigns from the river to the sea. It is mobilized by US politicians who support Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government, which has intensified Palestinian death and displacement and disappeared any hope of a diplomatic solution. It is marshaled to drum up support for sending weapons to Israel, even as we know that, as Haggai Mattar wrote in +972 Magazine, “there is no military solution to Israel’s problem with Gaza, nor to the resistance that naturally emerges as a response to violent apartheid.”

(...)

On October 7th, my own feelings fluctuated wildly. My first feeling was fear. To listen closely to the genocidal language of this Israeli government over the past year has been to live in terror of the day they would find the excuse to pursue it. Writing in n+1, Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion recounts the words of a campus activist in the wake of 9/11: “They’re already dead,” he’d said on the day Bush declared war on Iraqis, their fates sealed. I felt these words in my body, sobbing loudly in front of the screen. There were also bursts, very early on, of awe. I watched the image of the bulldozer destroying the Gaza fence again and again and cried tears of hope. I watched Palestinian teenagers seemingly out joyriding in a place half a mile away that they’d never been; a Gazan blogger suddenly reporting from Israel. But these images were quickly joined by others—the image of a woman’s body, mostly naked and bent unnaturally in the back of a truck; rooms full of families lying in piles, the walls spattered in blood. I wanted desperately to keep these images separate—to hold close the liberatory metaphor and banish the violent reality. By the time I began to accept that these were pictures of the same event, I was distraught, and contending with a rising alienation from those who did not seem to share my grief, especially as the scope of the massacre came into view.

(...)

Part of what has made the experience of this event feel so different from the status quo—and so different to Palestinians and Jews—comes from the fact that Palestinians were undeniably the actors, for once, not the acted upon. The protagonists of the story. I consider it an enormous failure of our movements that we have not been able to build a vehicle for that kind of reversal in any other way thus far. Our Jewish movements for Palestine were not powerful enough to stop other Jews from gunning down Palestinians in peaceful marches at the Gazan border fence, or to keep Palestinians from being fired, harassed, and sued for speaking the truth about their experience or—God forbid—advocating the nonviolent tactic of boycott.

And now, we do not have a shared struggle able to credibly respond to these massacres of Israelis and Palestinians. With all of the work that many Jews and Palestinians have done to reach toward each other over the years, I believe at heart it is this failure that is now driving us apart. There is no formidable political formation that I know of that can hold the political subjectivity of both Jews and Palestinians in this moment without simply attempting to assimilate one into the other. No place where Jews and Palestinians who agree on the basics of Palestinian liberation—right of return, equality, and reparations—are poised to turn the synthesis of these two subjectivities into a coherent strategy.

(...)

One of the most terrible things about this event is the sense of its inevitability. The violence of apartheid and colonialism begets more violence. Many people have struggled with the straightjacket of this inevitability, straining to articulate that its recognition does not mean its embrace. I am reminding myself that it was from Palestinians, many of them writing and speaking in these pages, that I learned to think of Palestine as a site of possibility—a place where the very idea of the nation-state, which has so harmed both peoples, could be remade or destroyed entirely."

...

-Arielle Angel, “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other” (October 12, 2023)

[readingsquotes]

The city of Gaza, home to more than half a million people a year ago, lies in ruins, with much of its surviving population crammed into unsanitary refugee camps in the southern end of the Gaza Strip that Israel has also bombed and from which there is no escape. In January, Oxfam calculated that Palestinians were dying at a daily rate that exceeded civilian casualties in any other recent conflict, including Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan, or Yemen. An International Court of Justice ruling that same month determined it “plausible” that Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza. This is to say nothing of the war’s expansion beyond Gaza, including Israel’s major attacks on the occupied West Bank and in Lebanon, killing hundreds more civilians in recent weeks.

For the most consistent and left-wing critics of Israel’s occupation, this inventory of horrors has become rote, while for Israel’s far-right governing coalition, it is an inventory of successes. In June, the Israeli government tweeted a video in which a freed hostage says, “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza,” and if one accepts that genocidal premise then it follows that Israel’s slaughter has been productive. Israel and its left-wing critics may be diametrically opposed in their goals, but they agree on some basic facts: that Israel is ruthlessly pursuing the destruction of the Palestinians of Gaza, with no regard for moral niceties or international law, and with the unapologetic belief that Jewish life is sacrosanct and Arab life is worthless.

...What the historian Rashid Khalidi has aptly characterized as a hundred-year settler-colonial war on Palestine is rendered, in the liberal Zionist imagination, as a tragic conflict between two peoples alike in dignity—though it is obvious most liberal Zionists identify more strongly with the people who are dying less.

...the liberal Zionist position: unshakeable support for Israel and its war paired with boilerplate criticism of Netanyahu’s wartime leadership, as though that were somehow separable and unrepresentative.

...By scapegoating Netanyahu, who has dominated the Israeli political system for most of the past fifteen years, liberal Zionists have been able to preserve in their imaginations the idealized Israel many of them fell in love with decades ago—the Israel that was founded by secular socialists from Eastern Europe and that branded itself as a paragon of enlightened governance, even as it engaged from the beginning in colonization, land theft, murder, and expulsion on a scale that Netanyahu’s coalition can only envy. By denying the essential nature of the Zionist project and its incompatibility with progressive values, liberal Zionists have also been in denial at every stage about the war to which they have pledged at least conditional support. They have insisted that the situation is “complicated,” which is the framing Ta-Nehisi Coates absorbed during his tenure at the predominantly liberal Zionist Atlantic, and which he denounced as “horseshit” following a trip to the occupied West Bank in the summer of 2023. “It’s complicated,” Coates told New York magazine last month, deriding that common talking point, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

[protoslacker]

There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and weeks after 9/11. Somehow, the upshot of all the denunciations and condemnations is the right’s unchallenged hold over the discourse, and, more importantly, the ultimate facts on the ground.

David Klion at n+1 Magzine. Have We Learned Nothing?

The comparison is apt

[wanlittlehusk]

“They’re already dead,” I recall a campus antiwar activist saying to me on the night Bush announced that the US had begun bombing Iraq. He was right; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were about to die in Bush’s folly, their fates already decided. At the time I understood and somewhat appreciated what the activist was saying, but I also was parochial enough to wonder whether he even cared about the Americans at Ground Zero who were literally already dead (never mind that Iraq had nothing to do with what happened to them). Today, though, his words echo in my head as I think about the Palestinians in Gaza, and the agony of knowing that they’re already dead no matter what any of us feel or think or say.

[fiercynn]

On October 7th, my own feelings fluctuated wildly. My first feeling was fear. To listen closely to the genocidal language of this Israeli government over the past year has been to live in terror of the day they would find the excuse to pursue it. Writing in n+1, Jewish Currents contributing editor David Klion recounts the words of a campus activist in the wake of 9/11: “They’re already dead,” he’d said on the day Bush declared war on Iraqis, their fates sealed. I felt these words in my body, sobbing loudly in front of the screen. There were also bursts, very early on, of awe. I watched the image of the bulldozer destroying the Gaza fence again and again and cried tears of hope. I watched Palestinian teenagers seemingly out joyriding in a place half a mile away that they’d never been; a Gazan blogger suddenly reporting from Israel. But these images were quickly joined by others—the image of a woman’s body, mostly naked and bent unnaturally in the back of a truck; rooms full of families lying in piles, the walls spattered in blood. I wanted desperately to keep these images separate—to hold close the liberatory metaphor and banish the violent reality. By the time I began to accept that these were pictures of the same event, I was distraught, and contending with a rising alienation from those who did not seem to share my grief, especially as the scope of the massacre came into view. “I have anti-Zionist Jewish friends who are rightfully scared,” writer and reporter Hebh Jamal wrote in a recent Mondoweiss article. She observes how, despite all their sympathy for Palestinian suffering, this may be the first moment such allies are tasting the fear—and the state of mourning—that has been real for Palestinians for decades. She has also lost someone this week—a cousin, 20 years old. “I do not rejoice over death. I rejoice over the possibility to live,” she writes, and as such “I cannot condemn the militants if I believe even for a second that there might be a possibility of all of this finally coming to an end.” Hebh describes the sense of possibility that many Palestinians have felt in these events, as they have disturbed—perhaps only momentarily, it remains to be seen—the dominant paradigm in which they are condemned to die waiting for their freedom, as so many other nonviolent avenues to liberation have been punished or ignored. Her reaction appears common to so many of the Palestinians I know and trust that I must try to feel my way into it.

- Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief at Jewish Currents [x]

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Years ago, Russiagate enthusiast David Klion really uncorked one.

It’s incredible how many years I wasted associating complexity and ambiguity with intelligence. Turns out the right answer is usually pretty simple, and complexity and ambiguity are how terrible people live with themselves.

This was handy to me, in the sense that it perfectly encapsulated the exact opposite of everything I believe. I remember reading this and turning it around in my head, over and over; I imagine a sociopath viewing it the way Patrick Bateman viewed that business card. It’s perfect. I mean, the sentiment behind it is utterly demented, but it’s still perfect, beautiful in the same way a virus is beautiful under a microscope.

I don’t even really know how I’d go about defending the essential concepts of complexity and ambiguity in the abstract. I guess I would point to the indisputable existence of chronic and intense complexity in our world. Like the complexity inherent to the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem, primogeniture in the British aristocracy, the relationship between extradimensional geometries and the potential for reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics, the linguistic dynamics of the Voynich manuscript, microtonal music, the geopolitical conditions that led to the Yemen-Saudi Arabia conflict and the tangle of alliances involved, Brownian motion, the anthropology of the Kula ring, programming a physics engine for a 3D video game, technical architecture involving uneven distribution of load-bearing elements in a limited space, escaping saṃsāra, parsing the various levels of linguistic etiquette in the Korean language, solving the Riemann hypothesis, rendering realistic computer-animated human faces in variable lighting, the history of anarchism and its various schools, the line of succession for the office of Holy Roman Emperor, Hungarian language case structure, Bernoulli’s principle, Microsoft Excel, black holes, the internal politics of the Chinese Communist Party, the legacy of brutalism in contemporary architecture, Finnegans Wake, cricket, Heiddegger’s dasein, making the perfect pizza dough, and literally every other thing that has ever crossed the human mind. You can wash your hands of nuance all you like; you live in a world that will always defy your clumsy, reductive efforts. Life’s complexity is irreducible.

But it’s not just that complexity is ubiquitous and inevitable. It’s that complexity is good. Complexity is what makes life interesting, and complexity is what makes art enjoyable. We have brains that have developed an exquisite ability to parse complicated, multivariate information - the fact that you are reading these words right now and understanding them is a miracle of raw processing - and we crave the opportunity to exercise them. We create all manner of strange hobbies specifically because they’re intellectually taxing, like those guys who do Rubic’s cube-style puzzles that have dozens of blocks. Overly simplistic games like Tic Tac Toe quickly bore us, and we go looking for deeper challenges. We inject our art with symbolism and reference in order to connect with it on a deeper and more satisfying level. Recently, the dominance of simplistic stories of good heroes and bad villains has robbed movies of some of their essential power. The injection of absurd rules into what stories can be told in Young Adult literature has rendered the genre a wasteland. Morally, the ability to traffic in complexity is absolutely essential, as the basic task of ethical development lies in expanding the moral imagination, and you can’t achieve that unless you’re willing to imagine that there are things about another person that go beyond your simplistic impressions, that they suffer under problems that are too (yes) complex for you to fully understand. Life would be powerfully boring without complexity.

Ambiguity, meanwhile, is just the state of most of life. We’re ambivalent, about most things, most of the time. I think that’s good, but either way - it just is.

I was inspired to remember Klion’s little koan by this bizarre piece of therapy-speak nonsense from Adam Grant in the New York Times. Grant is one of those 21st-century hucksters who peddle pseudo-psychology to unhappy people, dressing up everything they already want and think and feel in a patina of legitimacy derived from self-help ideology. The modern American cult of therapy takes a useful and necessary medical practice, meant for specific contexts and purposes, and generalizes its habits to the entirety of human life. Its folklore exists to justify what insecure people can’t justify for themselves. Narcissistic personality disorder is thought to occur in less than 1% of adults, and yet every ex-boyfriend in this country suffers from it. Curious! But not actually curious, given that an army of opportunists have built careers out of telling people just that kind of story - everyone you don’t like is a sociopath; every time you don’t get everything you want, you’re experiencing trauma; every conflict you get into, about anything, ever, is evidence of a toxic personality in the other person. Are you sure your boss is just another human being with legitimate pressures and needs, and your disagreements the product of the inevitable friction that results from a universe where friction is inevitable? Or could they be operating under the influence of the Dark Triad??? Sure. Why the fuck not. This is what therapeutic rhetoric has become, in this culture, an excuse architecture for every spare selfish impulse you ever have. And people like Grant get rich peddling it.

(That word, toxic - I think it’s a fallen soldier, at this point, a write-off. It has been applied so liberally, and so witlessly, that it no longer has any value. I’m sure I’ll still use it, out of habit, but today it suffers from a uniquely intense combination of lack of meaning and relentless overuse.)

Grant’s concern today is, I’m not kidding, the evil of ambivalent relationships. He presents several studies that show that, when we traffic in ambiguous interactions with other people, the stress takes a physical toll. He writes, “The most toxic relationships aren’t the purely negative ones. They’re the ones that are a mix of positive and negative.” Puzzlingly, Grant does not define what the actual boundaries of an ambiguous relationship might be; how would such a thing be quantified? InterPersonal Ambivalence Units (IPAUs)? I’m torn here, because taken literally that line means that the most toxic relationships are those that do not fall clearly into a binary of perfect affection or perfect enmity. Which, of course, is a category that includes every human relationship, ever, in the history of human relationships. To read more generously, we might take it that Grant means that relationships that don’t pass a particular threshold of certainty when it comes to friend or enemy status are the most toxic. But where is that threshold? If we’re going to be justifying all of this with reference to scientific research, shouldn’t there be some level of scientific precision in the essential question of what relationships are actually toxic? The studies here don’t inspire me with confidence; they’re exactly the kind that keep failing to replicate, and when you check how they’re operationalized, it’s always some sort of dubious self-reported scale. I don’t know. I’m confused as to who and how this helps.

The notion that human relationships fall simplistically and reliably onto a linear spectrum of “positive” and “negative” is so fundamentally contrary to my lived experience that I don’t really know how to begin here. We have multivariate, inscrutable, often unknowable personalities; these personalities are shaped by innumerable Byzantine internal forces and by a relentless stream of formative experiences. The notion that any two personalities are going to interact with each other in some kindergarten polarity of positivity and negativity seems farcical, just mathematically. And, personally, I find that ambiguous relationships can be among the most stimulating. In particular, they can be very sexy - when you’re first getting to know someone who might be (but might not be) a potential romantic interest, that ambiguity, that not knowing, is one of the best parts. Of course, sometimes the way that not knowing plays out is that you’re interested in them and they’re not interested in you, and it hurts. But that’s how it goes; it’s precisely the chance for failure that makes success sweeter. [...]

I would like to summon a charitable reading here, but there’s a kind of too-cute maximalism that makes it hard. Grant writes that “Even a single ambivalent interaction can take a toll.” Even a single ambivalent reaction! My God! What are we to take from this information? I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but we are a mortal species with finite lives that evolved by chance on an indifferent rock in a universe devoid of transcendent meaning, cursed to watch those we love die around us until we die in turn. We exist on a planet where our genetic endowment compels us to be selfish in pursuit of food, sex, and status, and there are 7 billion of us, all competing for limited resources and jockeying for status in competitions that are often inherently zero-sum. I’m going to go ahead and suggest that never having a single ambivalent interaction is perhaps an unrealistic expectation for anyone. And this gets to this paradox of self-help woowoo that I’ve talked about before: the vision of healthy human life becomes so unattainable that people end up developing guilt and shame over their inability to live without guilt and shame. Being “self-actualized” is just another unfair expectation nobody can reach. Which is perverse! I genuinely cannot comprehend what supposedly-therapeutic purpose is served by telling people that even a single ambivalent interaction is going to “take a toll.” Who is this helping?

Ambivalence is an invitation for rumination.

Well, yes, Adam. Yes it is. You’ve got me there. So, how could rumination be bad?

We agonize about ambiguous comments, unsure what to make of them and whether to trust the people who make them. We dwell on our mixed feelings, torn between avoiding our frenemies and holding out hope that they’ll change.

Again, this is presented as though what’s discussed is obviously something that we must try to avoid at all costs. But why? Is agonizing over things really that bad? I think I’ve done a lot of growing by agonizing over things in my life. That’s just part of the endowment of being a person, agonizing over things. Why are mixed feelings unhealthy? In a world this complicated, with relationships that are so full of interlocking and unconscious dynamics, aren’t mixed feelings unavoidable and ultimately benign? And why are we assuming that our “frenemies” are the ones who have to change? Is there really no chance at all that we’re the ones who should change? This gets to another point of mine about all this weird “everything is therapy all the time” self-help horseshit: life is full of zero-sum interactions between people with competing and legitimate interests. [...] This whole world of pop psychology insists that the individual is sacrosanct, that anyone who deals with insecurity or anxiety or self-doubt is the victim of injustice, and they are entitled to do whatever they want to self-actualize. But what do we do when two people are trying to self-actualize in ways that conflict with each other? I have no idea, and I don’t think these gurus know either. [...]

And, as I so often do, I have to say to this general ideology: the purpose of human life is not to feel comfortable all the time, bad and dark feelings are an essential part of being a person, and while you are entitled to having your physical self protected, your material needs met, and your basic autonomy respected, you aren’t entitled to never feel pain, sadness, insecurity, anxiety, self-doubt, or that you’re “invalid.” Society could never accommodate such an entitlement, and it’s a bad goal anyway.

[mattpayton]

The One Vice Presidential Pick Who Could Ruin Democratic Unity by David Klion

[mirrorbreaks]

I think this is a worthwhile article

[fuchsiaswingsong]

"There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and weeks after 9/11. Somehow, the upshot of all the denunciations and condemnations is the right’s unchallenged hold over the discourse, and, more importantly, the ultimate facts on the ground."

[dappercyborg]

[septictankie]

[antoine-roquentin]

David Klion: It’s pretty clear at this point that we are not going through an actual coup and that Biden is going to be inaugurated as president on January 20th, whether Trump wants to admit it or not. At the same time, nothing quite like what’s happening now has ever happened before in the United States. How would you describe what Trump and his dead-enders are doing, and how concerned should we be in terms of the stability of US political institutions?

Corey Robin: You can’t understand what’s happening now without a historical perspective on conservatism and the right. The right was born in response to the French Revolution, as a reaction against the democratic emancipation of the commoner. Across more than two centuries and many continents, the right has never lost that reactionary ethos.

But what the right learned, slowly, over time, was that to mobilize against a democratic and democratizing left, it could not simply assert a traditional, static, and familiar defense of hierarchy; instead, it had to mobilize a dynamic movement of the masses, a populist politics of the right to counter the masses of the left. That populism was never democratic, but it knew how to draw from the tropes of democracy to push back against democracy. It learned how to use the languages of racism, nationalism, imperialism, and sexism to give a broad circle of the masses a taste of privilege over their subordinates. The fruition of that long learning process—of using populist vernaculars against democracy—was the American right that emerged in response to the 1960s and the New Deal.

For all the talk of Trump’s populism and racism and nationalism, the fact is that he was far less successful at using those vernaculars to mobilize the masses than his predecessors on the right—Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush. Nixon and Reagan were re-elected with large popular majorities. Trump, like Bush, lost the popular majority the first time around, and unlike Bush, lost it a second time around.

What Trump and the Republican Party have grown increasingly dependent upon are not populism or mass politics of any sort, but rather the Electoral College, the Senate, and the courts. Historically speaking, this is a great—and terrible—reversion for the right, a return to the time when it depended not on its popular touch but on its control over anti-democratic state institutions. It makes today’s right a lot weaker than the right of the Reagan era, and makes it seem much more like the Tories of early 19th-century Britain.

This is why you now see Trump doing what he’s trying to do with the vote. The Republicans can’t win presidential campaigns the way they once did: Since 1992, they have won the popular vote exactly once. Their only hope now is a combination of the Electoral College and the courts.

Far from being concerned about US institutions being insufficiently stable or resilient enough to contain Trump or a similar figure, I’m far more concerned about the stifling stability and resilience of institutions like the Electoral College, the courts, and the Senate, and their ability to prop up Trump and the GOP.

DK: You’ve maintained from the beginning that Trump is actually a historically weak president, in spite of his authoritarian bluster. Can you elaborate on why you thought so back in 2017, how those predictions have been borne out since, and what makes Trump weaker than other recent presidents?

CR: I thought Trump was weak for two reasons, neither having anything to do with his skill or character, but with larger political forces and structures.

The first is that conservatism is an inherently reactionary politics that depends on the real threat of an active, emancipatory left: not the specter of a threat, not the discourse on Twitter, but an actual social movement that has taken state power and is engaged in a project of dispossession of elites. When the left is defeated or disappears, the right’s power ebbs. That is what has happened in the US. The left is, historically speaking, relatively weak, so it’s difficult for the right to get the juice it needs.

Trump’s presidency reflected that: Compared to the Republican presidencies of Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush, Trump’s was significantly less transformational, and its legacy is far less assured. Next to “law and order” and “the silent majority” (which Nixon made part of our political grammar), next to “the era of big government is over” (which Reagan bequeathed to Clinton as the ruling doctrine of the age), next to Bush’s war on terror and the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, none of Trump’s attempts to permanently transform the political climate—not of the Republican Party but of the whole political culture—seems even remotely comparable. With the exception of the tax cuts, Trump was hardly able to get much legislation through Congress; many of his executive orders will be undone by Biden; the only custodian of his legacy, ironically, will be the courts, which many had seen as the antidote to Trumpism and caretaker of the rule of law.

The second reason I thought Trump would be weak is that all presidents are elected to oppose or defend a larger political regime. A regime, in US political history, is the combination of ideology, interests, and policies that govern over an extended period of time. In American history, we had the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican regime, Jackson’s Democratic regime, Lincoln’s Republican regime, FDR’s New Deal regime, and now Reagan’s free market regime. Whatever the party of a specific president elected may be, he will be forced to operate under the larger regime’s assumptions and expectations of good governance. Bill Clinton was a Democrat, but he had to govern like a Republican; Eisenhower was a Republican, but he had to govern like a Democrat.

There are some presidents who are affiliated with a dominant regime, but the regime is vulnerable. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter were those kinds of presidents, and they are considered to be among the weakest. From the moment Trump was elected, I thought he belonged in that Hoover/Carter category. The Reagan regime is increasingly unable to provide the answers and policies to govern the country, much in the same way that the New Deal seemed unable to offer answers during the 1970s. The fact of that weakness made Trump quite weak. Again, the fact that he was so unable to push through legislation, that his budgets were more liberal, in some ways, than Barack Obama’s, and that the Republicans, when they controlled all the elected branches of government, were not able to implement big parts of their program—all that suggests how weak the Republican regime is.

In the coming years, once the emotional context of Trump’s presidency fades away, I think more and more people will see just how weak he really was.

[brotheralyosha]

DK: I think we’re onto something with this idea of Ratner as Shylock archetype. Right in the title, and in everything that drives the action of the movie, is an economic sector that Jews have languished in for most of our history.

When we talk about capitalism now, we’re often asked to distinguish between, on the one hand, the real economy of manufacture and production, and on the other, a new economy of abstractions—financial products, derivatives, apps—which is where the real money is. What’s interesting about gems is that they exist somewhere in between. A gem is a physical thing that is mined and refined and processed and sold, but its value is entirely positional and social, a way to flaunt wealth and social status. On top of that, a kind of unfashionable way to do it. Ratner is both the old economy—the medieval merchant—and a modern exploiter of the Global South.

AMB: So if Ratner is a Jewish archetype, what’s unfamiliar about him here is that he’s not the mid-20th-century American Jewish archetype. It’s actually one that goes back a thousand years. It’s much easier to understand this character as a manifestation of that thousand-year-old archetype than it is in relation to a Philip Roth character.

Our esteemed former colleague Noah Kulwin wrote this piece about how you see in Ratner the lineage of Alexander Portnoy and Duddy Kravitz, and I don’t agree. Yeah, he’s a gross guy, and those are also gross guys, but he’s a really different thing. He’s, as Jacob was saying, a shlimazel with no privileged relationship to history. Those characters are so self-conscious, that’s their whole thing. They’re like, “Oh, we are in the process of becoming white, and it’s breaking our minds, and our mothers.” Ratner is just a guy. He does not have self-consciousness.

JP: Ratner’s over-leveraged, and there’s this sense that he may have to flee. He’s also immune to humiliation. When he’s naked in the trunk, he’s just like, “Don’t worry, I’ll be right inside.”

AMB: He has extra clothes with him. He knows it could happen at any moment.

JP: Exactly. He’s ready, and also sort of immune to it. The only thing that can conquer him is a bullet in the head.

“An Unserious Man,” Jewish Currents, by Arielle Angel, Jacob Plitman, David Klion, Nathan Goldman, and Ari M. Brostoff