Unraveling Christopher Lasch's Minimal Self with Elijah Emery

What does the dual legacy of Christopher Lasch mean for the left tradition? Join us in this fascinating conversation with young scholar Elijah Emery as we explore Lash's ambivalence towards the left and how his work influences contemporary political discourse. We delve into Lasch's struggle with communitarianism, his views on religion, populism, and American history, and the complexities of his changing perspectives over time.

In this episode, we discuss Lasch's myth-making effort to create a unified history of populism and his critiques of the social democratic left. We uncover his seemingly contradictory opinions on racism within populism while also examining his views on law, politics, and neoliberalism. Elijah Emory expertly guides us through Lash's intellectual legacy, shedding light on the challenges and limitations of engaging with his work.

Lastly, we explore the various interpretations of Lash's writings, from the New Right and Post-Liberal elements to the Front Porch Republic and the Populist Left. Our conversation touches on his impact on contemporary political thought and how the left is engaging with his intellectual legacy. Don't miss this thought-provoking episode that demystifies the life and work of Christopher Lasch!


Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip  ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn

Links and Social Media:
twitter: @skepoet
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You can find the additional streams on Youtube

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 The Dual Legacy of Christopher Lasch
• 10:53 Lasch's Political Views
• 19:26 Politics and Nostalgia
• 32:50 Themes in Lasch's Work
• 43:42 Interpreting the Work of Lasch
• 54:34 Historical Shifts in American Politics
• 1:08:08 Critiquing Lasch's Historiography
• 1:17:03 Courts and Cultural Issues
• 1:23:32 Law, Politics, and Neoliberalism
• 1:31:50 Lasch's Views on Law and Society
• 1:43:43 Interpretive Rubrics of Reading Christopher Lasch
• 1:55:52 Engagement With Lasch and Leftist Intellectualism
• 2:12:23 Gnosticism and Modern Politics

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

I'm back with the young scholar Elijah Emory, who I think is the one person who is more than Shalon Van Ttne and maybe Elizabeth Lasch Quinn, who's read more Lasch Than Me I don't know if that's true. You have found essays where there are questions that I had, such as did Barbara Ehrenreich get read by Lash and did he accept the PMC thesis? and the answer is yes and no, despite the fact that people try to read them together today. I'm kind of tired of a adjudicating on that one term, since it's largely a semantic argument.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43

I wanted to talk to you about the dual legacy of Christopher Lasch again, and we were going to talk about liberals in the Russian Revolution, which, which is a book that I famously said was not important until I read it and then decided it was really important, even though it is different from all the other Lash books in that he seems more ambivalent about which parts of the left tradition he wants to side with, and I wanted to get your take on this. as a person who's read at all, i've been trying to figure out for a long time what was actually going on with Lash in the late 70s, into the 80s and right before his death of cancer in the 90s where he seems to flirt with communitarianism, give that up kind of formally. I guess he gives it up. Would you feel like he gives it up in Trunelnyhaven, or do we have to get to revolt for him the full throated?

Elijah Emery : 3:06

He completely rejects it in revolted the elites, but he doesn't seem that hyped about it in Trunelnyhaven. He talks in the section about nostalgia versus memory, about how the communitarian critique basically does this narrow equation of like tradition as intrinsically opposed to modernity, which is a categorization that he rejects. So he seems to think that the communitarians are, like at that point, better than a lot of the alternatives, but deeply wrong.

C. Derick Varn: 3:38

Right. so, as I like to say, and when I had read Lasch more cursely before I set out on this book project, i used to accuse him of going full windleberry. That was my way and for people who don't know, windleberry is not as well read anymore. Windleberry was this guy who was a one-time considerate or conservative writer, discovered ecology and also left communitarianism and I do think left communitarianism is his brand of it and kind of soft evangelical religion and went off. You know, lash's opinion about religion is totally unclear to me. He seems to really miss something about the Protestant world, but he also seems to not really fully accepted, it is true.

Elijah Emery : 4:41

So for me, this is definitely the most difficult question to address, and it's one that I don't have a good answer for because I don't know his private life.

C. Derick Varn: 4:54

But in the way they're gonna be another biography soon.

Elijah Emery : 4:59

There was a guy who was doing a biography at the University of Rochester who seems to have like disappeared. I've been trying to keep up to like what he's up to now, but there's like no record of him for like four or five years.

C. Derick Varn: 5:14

Wow, see, i have.

C. Derick Varn: 5:15

Yeah, i keep on finding articles about him doing the research and him actually talking to Lash's wife as well as Elizabeth Lash Quinn and who, in my head, i always make Elizabeth Lash Forrester because I'm a jerk People who know that as an itchy sister, but I have not heard much about that.

C. Derick Varn: 5:47

I know Daniel Tut has gotten more and more interested in defending Lash as of recently, from an almost purely psychoanalytic perspective and, despite the fact that I have Lacanians on all the time, my ambiguity about the scientific status of, let's say well, let's just say actually the psychological sciences in general and psychoanalysis in specific, but also cognitive behavior therapy, and and and and and. But that's not not here nor there, but I do find that there. You see that this wave of renewed interest that hasn't led people to ask these questions they're just concerned about, like every article that I find about this is like when did Lash depart the left, and I'm like well, the thing is, if you read his letters and essays, he doesn't think he does yeah, he's, he's um, i mean he doesn't change his positions.

Elijah Emery : 7:00

All that with the exception of rehabilitating, you know, changing basically his emphasis on populism, i think yeah, i was about to say we have to talk about populism.

C. Derick Varn: 7:11

Because that? because his emphasis on populism in his early work is entirely skeptical and he sounds like the general left. Well, i don't know it's entirely skeptical.

Elijah Emery : 7:21

But the parts he's most skeptical of are, for him, so negative as to discredit the whole movement and the defining elements of it. So he fixates on like how in the 1890s there was no ideological clarity for the populists and that let them to do you know whatever, and how.

C. Derick Varn: 7:39

This was the legacy that was picked up by the new left right um, and then I yeah, interestingly enough I think it's also picked up by this like new, new, new right. But so I'm gonna ask you you can finish what you're about to say then? because because I have because when I read his late stuff he emphasizes different things but he doesn't actually retract anything he said earlier on. I can't find where he said like I was wrong and I do think, for example, his critique of herringtonism and the social democratic left is that it basically learned all the opportunism and like overly simple materialism from the populist movement but didn't learn any of the virtues, and also was kind of.

C. Derick Varn: 8:36

He seems to imply in the late work now and I again I don't remember him stating this outright and I feel like I have to read these books every couple years now but that that the accusations of racism and whatnot in it are both true but also kind of a bad faith accusation, like people are trying to bury not just what's good in the populist, but also perhaps that people have some of the worst traits that were in the populist themselves and they're like the. The accusation of racism while true distances them from it, whereas you know you could accuse almost any movement from the 19th century of being. I mean the progress is, for example, super. I mean in many ways more racist, definitely out and out eugenicists, and yet that's not something that, yeah, i mean left historians know about it and talk about it, but in general it is not brought up in the general ire the same way say populist racism is yeah, i mean, i think that that one thing it's.

Elijah Emery : 9:56

He says that that racism, for example, is present, both in his writing in 1969 and in his writing in 1991. But what changes is the context within which that's enmeshed? and so he sees it as proof of a lack of ideological rigidity in his first writings about it and then in his second writings about it. What he sees it as proof of instead, is the fact that racism can be grafted on to the existing ideology of populism. It's just like a totally separate thing, which to me is a pretty unsatisfying way of going about it, and it's why I think that the true and only heaven, while it's like almost, it's one of like the more beautiful of his works in terms of its internal organization and the breadth of its, you know, its study, it's really leaving a lot out, clearly on purpose.

Elijah Emery : 10:53

For, as you've talked about, this myth-making effort of having like a unified history of populism, in the same way that what he was trying to do in 1969 was have a unified history of the American left, and I think actually that's the biggest difference is that previously he says like he's basically rehabilitating populism by associating it with the new left and with the number of the positive aspects of American socialism as he sees it, which is like more decentralized, more focused on on freedom than you know, communism in the Soviet Union or whatever. And then he has this really strange section in true and only heaven where he's like yelling at other historians who talk about, who talk about like the fact that populism can only be rehabilitated through its association with socialism, and tries to just like cut this rigid divorce in between the things that he had said were part of a similar historical tradition 20 years earlier and make it seem as if it's a completely separate historical tradition later.

C. Derick Varn: 12:11

So it's a completely different framing of class conflict in American life, basically, or not class conflict, but political conflict in American life so, reading the turn only heaven, which in one sense does give lashes own self mythology, where he finally goes down and explains the trajectory of his political career.

C. Derick Varn: 12:33

When I say it's a pathology, i don't mean to mean it's false, but it's it's augmented by time yeah, it's augmented by time and by reflection and can't be totally trusted because there's some things in there when I was reading it that I was like I'm not sure I can totally square this with what is in what is implied by the early pre-40 in trilogy, the, the agony of the American left, the world of nations and radicalism in America.

C. Derick Varn: 13:11

Yeah, what I find also interesting is, while lash is critical of, say, the black power movement for being too nebulous and the post-60s civil rights movement, the idea that he was a heron folk socialist, mostly associated with white people, really strikes me as strange, because one of the things he tries to do is take the kind of soft Christian populist socialism and Martin Luther King and recast it as a model of viable populism that understands human limitations and the tragic nature of human life.

C. Derick Varn: 14:02

What I've gathered is his turn against socialism isn't even so much an ideological one are like he feels like Marx is wrong or anything like that, is that he feels like socialists by the 1980s hate their subject, and I have gone back and reread a lot of socialist material from that time period, particularly, you know, his goodbye to the left essay, and I read all the essays around it too, including the, the Trotskyist one, but just a little in Ruben one, and what I found interesting about that is I'm like they really were at that time period like basically going well, the working class has false consciousness. That's why they're voting for Reagan. They took the narrow that the working class was voting for Reagan so generous, which I think is interesting, why I think I think it is so generous to.

Elijah Emery : 15:03

I mean he he thinks that a lot of the working class voted for Reagan, but he doesn't think they voted.

Elijah Emery : 15:09

He thinks they voted for Reagan because they hated liberalism, which is a little bit different because he's not saying that they're like irredeemably, you know, racist or have been won over, because he rejects the white backlash thesis actually, which is one of the weirdest and, i think, worst elements of history in the true me have.

Elijah Emery : 15:33

And it's just like he takes a paragraph, he's like this is fake and then he doesn't go into it anymore. But his, his, his answer is basically that, like you know, the element of populism associated with love of place, you know, love of country, etc. Was kind of swept out from under the Democrats feet and taken up by the Republicans and because they didn't trust the Democrats to deliver the goods anyway, people could say well, you know, these two are basically the same, but this one is culturally, you know, more welcoming of me or whatever. Yeah, and that's actually his big. His big qualm with Barbara Ernreich is that he uses her as the best example of left intellectual writing about the new class and he thinks that she doesn't recognize some difference between the bottom and the top, on the basis of support on the part of working class voters for Reagan right.

C. Derick Varn: 16:39

I think people also need to remember that the PMC thesis answers originally implicated was the PMC as a political subject, which is something that lash was always just not super big on. He wrote a whole lot about the confusion, like the new left obsession with students in the 60s in the early books so he actually goes against a lot of his reasoning in the turn.

Elijah Emery : 17:05

Only heaven in revolt of the elites to clarify it, kind of from the left honestly, and de-emphasize culture, and so you wind up kind of not knowing why he thinks people switched from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans and it's just because he doesn't take any account of mid-century political economy. He does start like picking it up again in the late 80s and early 90s, but by that time the suburbanization effects defensive, you know, housing values tied up in that it's all, it's all happened and it's completely changed the social base of American politics.

C. Derick Varn: 17:49

So you just don't have a good answer for it yeah shelling.

C. Derick Varn: 17:51

Then Tyne and I, who you know, shelling, and I argue about this a lot, where I accused lash of he's a Marxist, esque, yeah, and shallon accused me of being dogmatic, but I was like no, i mean, he believes in dialectics and he takes culture seriously and that was his both attraction to and repulsion from, like, the Frankfurt school, yeah, but he in many ways is a workerist and that he does not see anything beyond that, particularly after the advent of the atom bomb, revolution. For him, the great, you know, the great unanswered question in World of Nations is revolution obsolete? and the answer that he gives seems to be not really, but I don't know what it is and you don't either, and most of what you're saying is a metaphor that makes it meaningless. But you could read him at the end of that is saying no like at the end of all, is revolution obsolete?

C. Derick Varn: 18:54

yeah, it's not obsolete, no, that that it is obsolete, that, like revolution, is because you can read it as I'm saying no, it's not obsolete, but it's so obscured now that we can barely talk about it. Or you could read that as saying just yes, it's obsolete, no, we can't do it anymore. There is no revolution on the horizon and everything you're doing is just a metaphor as a cope for that. And it's actually having read that essay now about five times. It's ambiguous. It's like he doesn't know what he thinks about that. I think real question.

Elijah Emery : 19:26

I think I found myself revisiting a lot of these like end sections of the most important essays and the most important books in order to kind of understand the minimal self and then also understand the apparent turn towards Christianity, which is for me like the big thing that I can't quite figure out how real it is.

Elijah Emery : 19:50

And what he seems to like do is, you know and this is tied up with the whole narcissism thesis that it's it's a form of regression and to get around it.

Elijah Emery : 20:03

In his revolution obsolete, he talks about how any new revolutionary culture will need to pick up things from the past, basically, and oppose the anti-culture with, like the preservation of the past and the preservation of the continued reality of the material world in the form of, like, stopping climate change, basically. And then he has a very similar point about what the use is of reverting to like Judeo-Christian morality which is his term, not mine, which is is that it gets around the contradictions of the present by requiring one to grapple with an entirely different set of tensions. That leaves one able to more effectively develop the self-discipline and the independence necessary to adapt to the change circumstances of the present. And so I think the answer to is revolution. Obsolete is, yes, but we can still kind of go backwards in a way, but like only mentally to a time when it wasn't obsolete, which is one of the weirdest answers possible, and it's why it's so hard to thread the needle between like is he criticizing nostalgia or is he doing nostalgia?

C. Derick Varn: 21:27

it seems to be having it both ways a lot of the time, and this has been something that I've settled out with you and I are both kind of defenders of lash as not a reactionary, which I stand by, but I think why he's so useful for both the right and the left actually, and depending on well, except for certain parts of the left, he's not useful for a certain kind of feminism, but the reason why it's so useful everybody else is that his social psychoanalysis and his idea that, like, personality is replicated from material conditions into culture and thus a feedback loop on individual personality itself.

C. Derick Varn: 22:21

So, yes, he does think that there's individual temperaments and you know that people have have differences beyond their cold from a you is not a full Foucaultie and even though sometimes he seems to flirt with it, he also seems to sincerely think that. You know, what I find most conflicting about him is exactly that point you got into, and it even shows up in his critique of the populist, because while he talks about, like well, populism, particularly in the early books, degenerating into paranoia because it had a very, it had a very cynical view of class relations, that that was given to conspiracy theories, because it didn't have a view of culture or put are of like systemic political economy was very much like they are out to get you political economy, which he seems to critique it for a lot of the time.

C. Derick Varn: 23:21

But I've read Blake Smith, who is a writer on Earnhardt and tablet yeah, not, not a guy that I think I share politics with, but he's pointed out some pretty, some pretty accurate contradictions in like this writing.

Elijah Emery : 23:42

I think I think I've Smith is I talked about. I have like a section at the end of the thesis which I just sent in and like my advisors are like this way too long, but anyway, where I talk about different interpretations of lash in contemporary politics and Smith is the right wing. I put him with the right, the right wing reader of lash, who I think is probably the most eloquent, purely because he doesn't do what most of the right does, which is fixate on just the true and only heaven and revolted the elites and that one essay about communitarians that lash like when he argues with Lily and Ruben.

Elijah Emery : 24:27

Yeah, and and Smith has this really nice reading of the use of the minimal self in particular, and what I disagree with him about is that he says that there is this really big contradiction between lashes, psychoanalysis and his populism. But I think that what he does pick up on is that lash is too uncritical, as you say, in a lot of ways of especially late in life populism's relationship to politics as a whole and it's in corporation into the Democratic Party doesn't like.

C. Derick Varn: 25:03

Yeah, i've done a show on this with Rob from the right. We both discussed. We both discussed how William James Bryant ended up in the Democratic Party before you could even justify it by the FDR Alliance, when it is still primarily a conservative Dixie Crab party yeah, and he.

Elijah Emery : 25:20

I mean he was the nominee, four times like that's.

C. Derick Varn: 25:24

He was the standard bearer, he was the party and in many ways he begins the popular, like the image of the popular front that is solidified by the end of third periodism, prompting the CPU SA to actually play ball with the Democrats during the FDR regime, and that literally being manifested during the war. The thing is I've always wanted to say that's like a moment of original sin because I'm a Marxist and I'm concerned with Marxist stuff. But when I look at like the, how did the populist left get absorbed by the Democrats who are at this time? I mean, there's still neo-Confederates in the impromptu position in the party when Bryant comes in and And Bryant was not a racist I mean one of the things that people forget about. The scopes monkey trial is like one of the reasons why he rejects evolution is like having a fight with H L Minkin, and all that is because he thinks that Darwinianism, as he understands it, necessitates racism.

Elijah Emery : 26:35

Yeah, he's, he's against. He's like if Darwinism is real and survival, if the fittest, is real, then the people who don't survive are going to be tossed away by society. So for him it's like it's a moral issue. And it's a moral issue, i mean he, he got in like a lot of trouble. It was a big issue at the 1896 convention in particular, he wanted secretly to include an anti lynching platform and then was talked out of it, because then, you know, the South would have just completely left the Democratic Party.

C. Derick Varn: 27:10

Right And so so the original, like if the original sin of the popular front actually for me as much as I want to be a narcissistic Marxist and say it was our fault actually really does go back to William J Leaning Bryant. But the other question I have about that, elijah, that I want your pick on is when I was talking to Rob from the right podcast about this not about Lash, but just about this in particular I kept on going like why isn't anyone talking about how the sharecroppers went away? Because that's the base of that party. And after that you either become a paranoid weirdo after the 1890s, after Bryant and also or you become a socialist. And then I'm like but let's also look at the trends of land ownership Sharecroppings, now limited to a rump part of the South and like the lower Midwest, and that's it. Yeah, it's going away.

Elijah Emery : 28:09

Yeah, i mean, the social base of populism just was completely eviscerated, and it was. It was linked to what Brian was running on in 1896, the first time, which is free silver. And you know it was these rolling debt cycles that basically eviscerated the economy of the South and the West and caused a lot of people to just flee to the cities, where they became integrated into these urban machines. And so by the time that FDR comes in, basically from not exactly from the urban wing of the party, but from a much more urban wing of the party you know he's based in New York then either Woodrow Wilson or Brian, a lot of these former sharecroppers or their descendants, were now part of the New York or the Illinois delegation rather than being from the Nebraska delegation or the Alabama delegation or whatever. So a lot of these, these voters are kind of reallocated. But the just peculiarly populist politics really is destroyed by the debt crises of the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century is my understanding of it. So that's kind of my take too.

C. Derick Varn: 29:32

But one of the things I find so interesting about WASH's cultural histories of the left is that he does kind of see that in the 80s, the late 80s, with the, with the shift in suburbanization, really you know, the stuff that began in the 50s really taking hold, and he does kind of see it with fortism I mean, that's the brilliance of cultural narcissism as it takes, you know, social fortianism and pairs it with actual political economic analysis. And yet one of the things I find so fascinating about the true only heaven because I used to say that the most reactionary book is there were both of the elites, but you've actually convinced me to read it again- It's very weird.

Elijah Emery : 30:15

I mean, it's like just it really is politically implacable. But anyway, finish what you were saying.

C. Derick Varn: 30:20

No, yeah, but. But. But the true and only heaven. Not just in its rejection of progress, because WASH's rejection of progress in the book is actually more limited than people think. It's not like the generic postmodern like oh all progress is bullshit. It's more that, like, moral progress is is decoupled from material progress Is decoupled from material progress.

C. Derick Varn: 30:40

We can't really say like to assume we're making political progress because of material progress. It's just not wise. So it really is a specific reading against Wigish history, which even most progressives now accept Basically. Yeah, i mean, the weird thing about progressives now is they both accept it. They both accept the critique of Wigish history and the in the end, of progress, but also can't drop their moral frameworks that assume it at all Like and I'm going to sound like a luster McIntyre or another person who everybody thinks is a critic McIntyre, or another person who everybody thinks is a communitarian who wasn't, at least from his perspective That there really isn't, in light of modern stuff, anything like guiding what would even be meant by moral progress. It's not like we assume that people become kinder, nicer and better with political and technological development. Now we seem to talk about like the right side of history, but by right side of history what we really mean is we think more people think like us than not.

Elijah Emery : 31:56

Yeah, well, this is the, this is the appeal of the on the so called universal class which is what lash associates with the PMC in the true and only have it, but not in revolt to the elites, which is this class united by a culture of critical discourse and the assumption that everyone can be integrated into, into its class, but that that runs up against the material constraints of industrialization. And then now, in the 80s or the 90s, the shrinking of the middle class and the growing, once again, of the ranks of the poor. So, basically, you know, it is exactly as you say, it's a, it's a limited rejection of progress based on the fact that it's economically unfeasible.

C. Derick Varn: 32:51

Basically, right Basically like okay, if you assume moral progress is is based off this, and you're going to have some big problems because the economy that this is based off is, in last year's mind, is already dead And and we are just living in its ashes, which is always like my big joke about the culture of narcissism. I mean, i was making jokes about it down Twitter. I was singing Yeah, i thought they were funny, carly Simon But but I was also told someone knows, narcissism isn't the category for lash of which neoliberal man or woman or human would exist. It's for this manner. Yeah, that's for this, and what we would actually be is something like total psychic devastation.

Elijah Emery : 33:37

Yeah, i'm actually I actually sort of agree and sort of disagree. I think that basically, the conclusion I've come to in comparing the true and not the true and we haven't excuse me culture of narcissism with the minimal self, is that the strategy? I got to let my cat and give me one second.

C. Derick Varn: 33:56

Yeah.

Elijah Emery : 33:57

I'm sorry about that.

Elijah Emery : 34:22

Anyway, the you know it's and this is the big argument against the culture of narcissism from a lot of psycho analytic thinkers was that it neglected primary narcissism in favor of secondary narcissism.

Elijah Emery : 34:38

And I think that the distinction is that secondary narcissism continues to be more and more untenable because it requires this equalization of the self to the institution in a way which isn't possible in an era where large institutions, bureaucracy, strong unions, the company caring for you your whole life, basically because of the Fortis model, where none of that is sustainable anymore.

Elijah Emery : 35:04

But the kind of more frightening thing in the minimal self is that lash starts to equate the separation anxiety that he associates with narcissism, or that he says narcissism is a survival strategy from with consumer capitalism itself and that this act of simultaneous desire and addressing of the desire which you get from engaging in in the market basically by you know you hand over this money, you get the thing without seeing obviously all the work that went into it enables this deeper primary narcissism to continue even more in a prior era when a lot of people did work in factories, or new people who worked in factories, and so that there were restrictions on this total equalization of the self to the market, and so you're right that it is this form of total The year market world.

C. Derick Varn: 36:08

But it also in some ways would be flipping from secondary narcissism to primary narcissism, where the yeah, where the attachment, like the attachment disorder, being manifested socially, is like exactly. Right, yeah, like I mean, ironically, what am I? what am I? what am I? more provocative thesis is I'm working with on turning into an essay in the book with shallon is the idea that minimal self might actually be the most Marxist of lashes books.

Elijah Emery : 36:47

Oh it is an it section where he is talking about this And I went back and read it again I was like, oh my God, he's saying that capitalism is our mother. You know, like this is his big, his big realization. And yet it's so wrapped up in so many of the later themes like he's playing with myth in this really explicit way by saying that there's, you know, humanity is in mashed with two brothers, narcissus and Prometheus, and they're both taking us down paths that seem divided or are really the same, and we've already gone much too far down in them. And then, in the same book, he's like we need to restore a Judeo Christian way of thinking about selfhood, and so what it is is. It's kind of like this perfect mesh of all of the things which are so confusing about him, And if you can get through the minimal self, i think you really understand a lot of the rest of his project, with maybe the exception of the revolt of the elites, which is so weird as a book.

C. Derick Varn: 37:55

That book is much stranger Because on a superficial reading it reads like a Steve Bannon rant. on a deeper reading and I say this as a person who's now read it, i think, three times, four times. I'm about to embark on time number four or five, i would you find it to be at the end like this is. This is for almost disassociated from itself.

Elijah Emery : 38:27

Yeah, it kind of it's it's operating on so many levels.

Elijah Emery : 38:32

it's like on the one hand, like a more explicit political pamphlet, then like a lot of his other stuff, but then like you dig down into it and there's like in, in, i think it is either the second to last or the last essay.

Elijah Emery : 38:46

There's this section where he's talking about the conception of modernity and the conclusion seems to be that there is no such thing as modernity, that like that's the big conclusion he's come come up with. that modernity is is superficial, because it assumes a distance from the past that doesn't exist, and that there's no difference between now and the past that is meaningful at all in terms of altering human consciousness, and like that's how he kind of like rejects in the same essay. he's like psychoanalysis doesn't really do much like basically, which is such an insane thing to say from his perspective, and it's why I don't really ever know what to do with revolt, the elites. I'm probably going to be with you reading, reading it for my third time sometime in the next couple of months, just to try to figure it out again, because it's just so strange.

C. Derick Varn: 39:43

Yeah, i think the Alpha for a mega periods are actually the liberals in the Russian Revolution, which is a book that no one told me was important And then I read it. I'm like No, i think this is important. I think, for example, his his calling of John Dewey's utter incoherence shows up throughout his work, including his stances in the war, which I want to point out. his stances on the war were pro war war one, but opposed to war war two, and yet he's a progressive.

Elijah Emery : 40:25

Yeah, john Dewey is like a character who lash gives a lot of eye or two And I've seen like some writing which I can't totally remember being like it's only because Dewey was such a great influence on lash which I totally like. I was just kind of weirded out by it doesn't seem like that. But Dewey speaks to like what lash sees as the heart of the worst elements, i think, of the liberal project, which is the self assured social engineering that neglects to recognize how incoherent it really is And you know, and tries to like cordon things off. It's almost, it's very similar Actually, i think like Weber or something like that, like this analysis of the process of rationalization and how lash thinks about Dewey, where his critique of Dewey and the war, which shows up again in the new radicalism in America, talks about how, like the conception of the war, like Dewey's conception of the schools, assumes that it can be cordoned off into the sphere that were this, you know, this little box which doesn't affect the remainder of society, and that that's completely false, that society is ultimately interconnected And that, as a result, you can't just pretend that your actions in one area of life, whether it's conducting a war or building a school system are not going to deeply penetrate into the remainder of the culture and speak to how that whole culture is constructed And you know it more broadly, how the economics of that culture and the organization of that polity is constructed.

C. Derick Varn: 42:17

Yeah, i've been called a lot of stuff about what I do and make lectures about war with Dewey, like just there are many times where academics will go to me. Well, it's because of this influence And I'm like, i'm sorry, the plain language of the text, and in this case the plain language of the text in all periods of this man's writing, is anti-Dewey.

C. Derick Varn: 42:37

Is Dewey imp. It shows the compartmentalizing of American culture and political economy in such a way that it leads to total political incoherence and weird opportunism. that doesn't even make that much sense. Yeah, like.

Elijah Emery : 42:54

And then, on the other hand, you have like the opposite effect, i think. Like I see, kind of like if you want to expand this, to like Lash's work more broadly, this difference between Dewey, who's like seen as by some people a significant influence, and Foucault, who's basically ignored, even though a lot of his stuff seems to come up very heavily in both the world of nations and even in a heartless world actually, where Lash is very taken with this process of classification and discipline, and he has this line in his essay on the asylum in the world of nations.

C. Derick Varn: 43:34

Oh yeah, just straight up lifted from history man. It's like Yeah, and at the time when that book wasn't well translated in America. I was actually like I had to do some Foucault scholarship. When I encountered that, i'm like wait, was there even a version of this book in English readily available? I found out. I think there was, but it was brand new. Like no one has read that yet.

Elijah Emery : 43:56

It was super new. But he says in the same essay he's like I have a strong suspicion that one could say that many institutions, such as the modern family, also corresponds to this process of classification and discipline. but later scholarship will have to take this up And it's like here you see the germination of Haven and a Heartless World which then contributes to everything else. So there's these just really funny connections between which people he thinks, because he is an intellectual historian, are good to run with and which people he thinks should be laughed out of the academy, basically if they weren't so dangerous.

C. Derick Varn: 44:40

What I find fascinating about Lash is because people associate him as a fundamentally American thinker, as an American as in his figures, even going all the way back to a revitalization of people like Jonathan Edwards, who I have read more in the context of understanding evangelical history through the work of Mark A Noll which, by the way, Jonathan Edwards, is much more important than that fire and brimstone saying that we used to teach in school. We finally stopped teaching it because even the conservatives complained, apparently, But I also live in a Mormon area.

C. Derick Varn: 45:19

The Mormon said because of culture, how, Like that's a whole different ball game. I can't explain Mormon. Well, lash has a lot of stuff on Mormons in his book actually some of which. I think is wrong.

Elijah Emery : 45:35

He has. Like I actually was talking about it with a couple of Mormon friends of mine. I was like well, i was just reading this. He says that the amazing thing about Mormonism is it combined polygamy with a high respect for women. He has a line to that effect. One of them was like that's complete. What are you talking about? They just completely were against the suggestion. I figured I should probably go with their analysis and didn't know any further on the Mormonism.

C. Derick Varn: 46:05

So when I actually read that essay I was like that is a weirdly superficial take. This is somebody who's encountered Mormon history but actually doesn't know it very deeply and doesn't really know Mormon culture. There's a sacralization of women in Mormon culture, but I think that's a different thing than respect. Yeah, than respect. There's a sacralization of women in Islamic culture.

C. Derick Varn: 46:38

I also think he talks about the sexual libertinism on the Mormons, beyond even polygamy, which is actually kind of true and died out in the 20th century, for example, sex work was legal and it felt like city until the end of the Mormon wars. Basically And again, i actually think it's interesting you can't really comment on that as progressive or regressive from a feminist perspective cleanly. I think the actual logic for it is much more complicated and much more rooted in a particular concern and also some sad realities of coming out west with a whole lot of female converts and no men and men dying and raids and wars and whatnot. But he also doesn't seem to understand Mormon racism that much either In the world of nations. That's the essay, because I just happened to live in Utah and know a whole lot about Mormonism now that I was like bro I get what you're trying to say and I think there is a kernel truth that I say There's a lot more of sharecropper.

C. Derick Varn: 48:10

I also objected as a dogmatic Marxist to what he was calling working class. I'm like sharecroppers aren't working class, it's almost a feudal relation. And I'm like America's weird because we just never called our peasants peasants and our surfs surfs. They're either slaves or freedmen-ish, because that wasn't supposed to exist here. But we had sharecropping And we had basically indentured mining because the whole company town situation with compelled work was also pretty much it's like that's not. I remember if you read some of the radical union stuff of the 1890s and the American mine workers, we're not even proletarianized, we're basically surfs, we're on company manners. So I found that I found lash. That's the part of lash that I really struggle with because sometimes he's so good on seeing class relations that are not clear and being really specific about it. Like one of the things about the PMC talk is like he's really clear that he does not see intellectual and bureaucrats and all of that middle tier as the same thing until Trin only heaven. And he's describing this post-fortis universal class that's trying to emerge and failing.

Elijah Emery : 49:46

About like 10 pages earlier. He's like the only thing that seems to unite the new class is that they are called the new class by the American right. So he's again. He's just like hedging things, i think, in terms of what you were saying about how he sees class relations, the example that gets me the most was when he's talking about the syndicalists in America in the Trin only heaven he has. That he's like the base of the syndicalists was in the mining camps in the West where people could remember only a generation earlier, the freedom being prospectors or cowboys, and I've like these were terrible jobs, like nobody is looking. It's horrible to be in a mining camp, but it's also awful to be a cowboy or a prospector. Like this is just completely at odds with the entirety of the established historical record on what these jobs actually felt like and how they actually were received by the people who worked them.

C. Derick Varn: 50:48

Yeah, see, this is the thing that I do think is legitimate the Khrushchev Kalaishon. He has this, he's right. I will say, for example, for all the Marxist criticism at petty bourgeois virtues, and I think we're right to be critical I actually do think, and I think even most Marxists if they're being consistent well and behold, for me these days to hold any Marxist to anything consistent, ever even like the plain reading of basic text, but that the rentier relations that we associate with petty bourgeoisie now would inculcate a completely different set of values than artists in petty bourgeois in the Americas. I was reading that Amitago Bordega did not consider the American Revolution a national revolution because it didn't involve race, which I think is also funny. You consider it to the Civil War than the British Empire, but which I've pointed out that I was like. Well then, like the more the national revolutions in France and England, then they considered it also aren't national revolutions.

C. Derick Varn: 51:58

Bordega, you sound like Lin Bao, but even less coherent. Bordega is a weird figure another day, but I was thinking about the way that I actually do think there is a real sense in which our bourgeois revolution is proto-bourgeois. It even Lash doesn't really get that.

Elijah Emery : 52:16

He doesn't mention it, he never mentions the American. Revolution.

C. Derick Varn: 52:20

Yeah, it's actually this weird gaping hole when he talks about 18th and 19th and early 19th century America, because he already sees the problems developing in late 19th century America, which I do think is insightful, which is why this is why early Lash and late Lash are both interesting, because I don't think they completely contradict each other, but I do think they read history differently.

Elijah Emery : 52:46

Yeah, i mean, it's basically whether or not. I think the most basic difference is if you interpret, how you interpret the pivotal development of a formerly proletarian class in the United States. Do you say that it was something which substantively altered the way that political conflict between, like broadly construed, the elites and the people and I'm using that because he doesn't early on he frames it as capitalist versus workers sort of, but he doesn't do it later Or do you frame the development of this proletarian class as merely changing the battle lines between, like a union of the middle classes and the lower classes against the rich in some way? So it's basically like I don't know. I mean I would think otherwise if it didn't go against everything he ever wrote. That it's like is it natural for there to develop a proletarian class in the United States? It's basically, i think, the early Lash and the late Lash. It's a change of interpretation into whether or not they are for, like, the revolutionary subject or not in the American context.

C. Derick Varn: 54:15

Basically, So I'm going to put on my English teacher critical mode for a second, because people forget that I'm not actually a historian, a pedagogue, and I'm trained in philosophy, anthropology, english literature Just a good reader. A good reader, you can learn a lot of things. But I noticed, actually even in the style of the essays, that after minimal self, there's a shift. And I'll tell you what I noticed in the shift. Instead of exploring conceptual arrangements of ideas of which classes are organized, so in the world of nations, you deal with essays on, like the security state, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 60s, black nationalism, the multi-diversity.

C. Derick Varn: 55:09

When I encountered that word I'm like, oh, we were doing stupid jargon in the 50s. I just forgot. No one told me this jargon The progressive consolidation of creating progressive liberalism out of the prior progressive movement, which was mostly an intellectual and bohemian movement, with populism and elements of socialism to stabilize actually a dying Brahmin, early Papua's class. That's his reading of what FDR actually is. Why FDR didn't call himself a progressive is because he was trying to subsume that movement.

Elijah Emery : 55:47

Not as much of a traitor to his class as he seems, is Josh's reading.

C. Derick Varn: 55:51

Yeah, he's actually selling out newer capitalists to save older ones and allegiance with other elements of society by throwing them a bone ie Marxist terminology. I know this makes me unpopular, but I believed it all my life. Fdr Stalin is like all the other European guys in that he's a bone-apartist figure. He is the American form of bone-apartism. When you hear conservative scholars go after him it's like well, stalin, hitler and FDR are all the same thing. They're full of shit.

C. Derick Varn: 56:31

But there's a rational core to part of. It is where there's a total breakdown of entrepreneurial capitalism as we traditionally understood it, a brutalization and strengthening of the state that we had not seen in human history since the end of the Ampik Empire. I don't think people really understand how the European war spreading all over the globe really solidified nations and states as things that were really really weak. Comparatively, you can even see this in the size of the state, the size of the state balloons from 1929 to 1951. It's just exponentially larger. Lash interestingly to me, lash almost hits on that stuff all the time, but he doesn't call it that. He's not interested in Marxist terminology. I never can tell. Is it that 50s Cold War thing where you're hedging your bets and not actually admitting you're a Marxist.

Elijah Emery : 57:34

I mean he calls for, he cites angles in the very favorably in the asylum chapter He cites angles.

C. Derick Varn: 57:46

He's definitely, although the Frankfurt School's critical theory is interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 57:50

I don't want to go into Gabriel Rockhill's attacks much, but I have pointed out that even the Stalinist in this time period are using the same language because nobody wants to completely own their communism, because while anti-communism is kind of at a die-down during the 40s because of the war also something missed in Rockhill's article because they're complaining about people making allegiances with a government that's literally in alliance with the USSR but that people are afraid that it can come back at any moment. For example, a lot of the early Frankfurt School texts aren't translated into English, even though they're published in America. They're kept in German so that people don't get too uppity. I can think about, for example, i think Refenstahl and Grossman. both have work that has only been translated recently and they were first published in the United States. They just published in German. So there's this time period, particularly as you get into the 50s and 60s, where people are being really cagey, although they'll cite Marx positively but they don't say like I am sympathetic to Marxism because you can't do that He calls.

Elijah Emery : 59:12

he's like we need democratic socialism in this country at the end of the agony of the American left.

C. Derick Varn: 59:17

Yeah, he does although he also my fairing, so a lot.

Elijah Emery : 59:22

I think what's funnier is that he's simultaneously saying, basically, that he sees FDR I don't think he would use the term Bonaparteist figure, i just don't know what he would think about that but he definitely sees him as a consolidation of the power of the old Brahmin elite. And then he also is like, of course, like in the beginning of the Trudonly Heaven essay. He's like well, i finally found FDR very inspiring and we're very upset when Harry Truman pursued the Cold War. So I think his opposition or support of these figures is much more oriented around foreign policy than just a willingness to pursue accommodation with the Soviet Union, than anything else.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:08

He basically sees accommodation with the Soviet Union as a human necessity and so like, and he doesn't. He also does seem to think, well, socialism isn't that bad Like. That's basically his argument, although I get the feeling that he would think that, you know, democratic socialism in America would look very different than even democratic socialism in Europe, much less what we see in the USSR at the time I mean. So I think that's why it's so hard to pin down, is because, particularly as late work there's, you know, shalon interprets it as pretty much a continuity, and I keep on reading it and there are elements of continuity there, but even in his style. So here's what I noticed it's different. Yes, the new American radicals are profiles, but true and only heaven, even though it's not a profile book. It's not a book that you would think would be written as intellectual profiles. That's what ends up being, and so there's a lot more concern.

Elijah Emery : 1:01:24

Especially, especially the politics of the civilized minority. That and the syndicalist chapter, my two least favorite in the book, because they like focus on these very narrow examples most of the time. Like you know, he's like to understand the politics of the civilized minority. I'm going to explain three social science textbooks from a 20 year period And that shows how liberals thought of politics and it's like, really like I'm not sure about that, but it's exactly what you're saying. it reverts to profiles, and it's profiles either both of people and of books.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:07

Right. Profiles of books are common in his work but like, for example, normally when he's, if you read the world of nations, about half of that is reviews of books that were turned into the chapters. but they always open up to, like, the entire social history of the topic of the book, to engage with the book on the movement of history, i mean, and that's why those books are so interesting. I also have pointed out that lash clearly wrote them. where there's arguments made not by just the S argument in the essay, but the way he's selecting essays, in what order And in the true and only heaven you have profiles of thinkers and ways of thinking, which is which is no longer trying to. I mean, yes, there's contextualization but, like when lash talks about the feminist movement in agony of the American left, he's talking, he's always contextualizing it. It's like these parts of the feminist movement are rejected. These parts are accepted. They're accepted for mostly conservative reasons. actually, the liberal rehabilitation of those conservative reasons is actually a little bit of bad faith. But here's why this happened.

Elijah Emery : 1:03:19

Here's examples This is the early 20th century feminism, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:24

And the 19th century feminism too, he's actually bigger than that, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:29

And then look at these authors, look at when this comes up. You think about right before the asylum chapter there's a chapter on a very specific, lonely female writer who's been lionized in feminism and he contextualizes what's actually going on there in her life and how these letters are like correspondences between women who have been taken out west but not given opportunity to work. but they come from a class where they're kind of stable but they're really isolated. So it would generate this discourse that can be recuperated by feminists later. I mean, that's the kind of stuff he's doing And then, in true and only heaven, I don't think he's really doing that. in the same way, He kind of does it with the populist movement to defend the populist movement.

Elijah Emery : 1:04:18

He actually engages for his populist analysis much more in intellectual history, like in a crowd sweeping it, rather than like stuff where he's like talking about his depiction of the authoritarian personality, for example, which is much more profile based. But I think kind of like the whole book can kind of only be justified as almost a novel rather than a work of history, because otherwise it just leaves so much out. It's making this very specific argument for seeing history this way and it's marshalling a number of sources for that, but is very conspicuous in what it's choosing not to do And that's the big difference. I think, in terms of the style also, that the early works are trying to fit as much in as possible and the true and only heaven and revolt of the elites, which are seen as these really sweeping histories, especially true and only heaven, are actually very piecemeal a lot of ways.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:29

Yeah, i would agree with that And I mean all his books. But but, but Hayden in a Heartless World, cult of Nostalgia, and the Minimal Soul for basically essays, collections, well, and Russians and liberal American numbers in the Russian Revolution which are, which are not Okay, and agony of the American left may not agony American left is weird because it feels like it's essays, but it's definitely actually written as a cohesive narrative And you know the two books, the other two books that trilogy are like profiles or their World of Nations is basically. I did essays about book reviews. Let me talk about all the history that these book reviews for a while.

Elijah Emery : 1:06:13

Yeah, Well, I noticed in his nostalgia section he also just like, basically plagiarizes from a Harper's article that he wrote Oh yeah, he self plagiarizes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:23

Yeah, that was cooler to do back in the day.

Elijah Emery : 1:06:25

Well, what's really funny is what he leaves out, which is that it's like basically the same section, except he takes out a sentence that says history cannot be twisted for present purposes or something along those lines, And he just removes that, which kind of suggests that the trunely haven't twists history for present purposes. I kind of see, I think like trunely haven't.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:55

I think of it as a deliberate counter myth.

Elijah Emery : 1:06:58

Yeah, i think that's the best way to read it And you can see it also in the figures he fixates on. There's basically I mean it's divided into two. It basically does the same thing that agony of the American left and world of nations does in reverse.

Elijah Emery : 1:07:13

It's like a palindrome where agony of the American left is like. Here is a counter history of the American left which is inactive, myth making but it's also contesting consensus history with these examples of real conflict, so it's less mythical. And then world of nations is like and here is why the liberal historiographic project is wrong. And then trunely, haven't you get to? and it's. Here is the liberal historiographic project and why it's wrong. And it's about progress. And here is me writing about George Surrell and Reinhold Niebuhr and applying their thinking to all of these disparate movements to fit them together in a counter history. And those two thinkers he writes a lot about. Like if you command death myth in there, it's big. In the Surrell and the Niebuhr sections I mean, that's one of the things I'm like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:08

If he's become a Surrellian, then Surrell is to me the most problematic. A problematic, i mean one, what he actually did, which was I'm gonna promote socialism by spreading anti-Semitic conspiracies. That I don't even believe. I'm gonna talk about the myth of violence, which I actually think is weirdly. I don't like on violence or the book on myth, but I actually weirdly think he's correct.

Elijah Emery : 1:08:41

Well, that's the part Lash rejects also, which is funny. Yeah, i know, even though that's the part that he does.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:49

Right. I mean it feels like he got protesting too much, because you are like people who only read those two books the last two that we've been and then maybe go back and re-culture of narcissism, since it's so famous.

Elijah Emery : 1:09:03

That's the. I call it the Red Scare reading list.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:06

Right. They tend to have, like a, to think that Lash was always idolizing American artisans, that he has a very naive view of the late 17th and 18th century, although one of the things that I find interesting about that is and you can, i'm sure, all people kinds of people make hay about this that both Westward expansion is mentioned as a fact that has material problems but not as a fact that really happens to people like that involves this placement And the other two gaping holes is like the American Revolution and the Civil War are basically just almost completely absent in Lash's historiography.

Elijah Emery : 1:09:58

And I think the same thing is true of the New Deal. honestly, as I've said before, It's there more than the American Revolution or the Civil War, but it's not there at all. And what's funny is that Lash actually does touch on the 1856 to 1860 period in revolt of the elites, because he writes about Lincoln's speeches during the time, but he doesn't talk about the Civil War.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:24

And the New Deal is interesting. I think you're right about that, because the only time he makes a lot of hay about the New Deal and not about what it does, except in the chapter on FDR and the consolidation of the.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:38

Brahmin elite, the Brahmin elite with the leftovers of the socialist movement. And the other thing I've always pointed out is like in his histories he talks a lot about the SPA and the Knights of Labor, fairly and accurately, including their flaws, but the Communist Party, even though it's like he writes about people who leave it.

Elijah Emery : 1:11:00

He puts it in agony of the American left and it's supposed to be a big, like it's in the title essay.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:06

It's like socialism, communism and black nationalism And communism is like And it's like a paragraph, it's like a paragraph.

Elijah Emery : 1:11:14

And he's just like-.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:15

And it's like a bridge between socialism and black nationalism is like well, all the black nationalists were-.

Elijah Emery : 1:11:23

Became communists.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:24

Before the well they became communists. Are they left the Communist Party? Yeah, it gets when he gets into like a hero cruise, but he just ignores it, he doesn't pay attention to it. I find that fascinating because he's quite right about some things. He says about the SPA and it's the sessas over the IWW And like when it was pivoting left and right and why And when it was, but then like doesn't mention the CPUSA at all, which was almost as big as an organization by 19,. Like by 1939.

Elijah Emery : 1:12:01

His history of the American left very conspicuously removes, i think, the two things that most of the American left would suggest are victories, which are the radical phase of the New Deal and the civil rights movement. And he says that these two things, the radical phase of the New Deal, he ignores and he focuses on FDR as opportunist, fdr as Brahmin and the stuff going on within the brain trust, not within union organizing and like on the street politics of the period. And the civil rights movement. he just like says his populist but is not a left-wing movement And he downplays the socialistic elements of the movement.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:44

Here's my thing I think we upplay the socialistic elements of the movement because the socialistic elements is like Adolf Reed points out in this stuff on Ruskin that he's been writing recently They lost like they lost in real time, and the only exceptions actually are the two big ones. But the only people who became more socialistic in out of the 60s, who didn't go into something like the Panthers or the Black Liberation Army or something like that, are actually, weirdly, malcolm X, who moves from being basically a Black here and folk nationalist to a kind of national separatist socialist, but socialism for everybody and light on that. But he's very like if you go back and look and hit. Like he hates capitals. But he hates capitals because he thinks it's one, because the rhetoric about socialism really comes in after his trip to Mecca. Like that's where it really ends up. The kid starts to think that like Sarah a bit more or less, although what he means by socialism seems something like European style social democracy that's slightly less racist than it actually was in Europe. Like that's it, that's all.

Elijah Emery : 1:14:21

But I mean, I agree with you, I but Lash doesn't say that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:27

He just doesn't deal with that at all.

Elijah Emery : 1:14:28

Like it's not. But he doesn't give it either of these movements a fair hearing and then say why they're not fair. You know elements of success on the part of the American left And they may not be. You know there's very good reasons to say why both of them are not. But Lash doesn't. He doesn't focus on the failures And the unmitigated. I always it's not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:57

So here's the thing why I don't. I think, if you want to explain why the radical movement of the civil rights movement and of, let's just say, the general gestalt of the new deal and its radical parts, when the, when the CIO comes up and you have industrial unionization and the TUL gives up its well, doesn't give up its Stalinism, but basically says like, okay, look like we're. We've never required someone to be a communist to be one of our unions. So, as long as you're doing industrial unionizing, we're now going to do a popular front, not just a united front from below, which means and to get into communist terminology, because even I think these terms are even far into communists now united from below is you're willing to side with people, but only who aren't formal communists, but only in workers organizations and only in workers organizations led by workers. Are you not in general organizations?

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:03

The reason why they thought that is in America. No one can figure out how to even you'd even fucking do a united front from above or from above and below, because a united front from above requires you to make tentative deals against certain things or for certain things, but never to support a government and a parliamentary system with a bourgeois party. So you either block shit or you do help bourgeois people, do stuff that was specifically help the working class, but you don't support their government. And since we're not a parliamentary system in the United States, that is not a relevant strategy. You just can't do it here There's so, interestingly enough, the only way third parties have ever really been able to have an effect in America is by voter-based threatening, upsetting and then consolidating with a major party.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:04

And that's not just a popular front thing like that's the entire history of even the farthest right elements of the US unless one of those elements can completely suppress one of the other elements. So, for example, like the radical Republicans, suppress the progressive wigs are actually. That's really the only time it's fucking happened.

Elijah Emery : 1:17:28

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:30

Like that's like no, it only happened during the Civil War and that's when one party completely failed. So it's, it's something to really think about, about why that happens, right? So if you're someone like Lash and isn't dealing with this and you wanna talk about why that went wrong, i think all of Lash's culture stuff and his training as a cultural historian just doesn't help him there.

Elijah Emery : 1:17:57

Yeah, i mean I, i I lament the fact that he has no, he basically I mean he has no understanding of the legal framework of the United States, among other things.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:07

Yeah, i find that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:08

I find that wild.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:09

And the only time he hits at it is in that debate with Larry and Ruben, when he's when he quote quits the left in that first issue of Takoon, when he's a siding with the communitarians, but then he says like look, the Warren court solved a social conflict in America that was very unpopular, by naturalizing in law And I think it's not gonna go well for everybody because because it's moved law from something that's political, contested, to natural and something that it leads to And conservatives can do that too, although he doesn't really think they're going to at this point, but I'm like he does, sort of he does see that, like he talks about that And I think honestly he's right about that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:51

Like that, the social conflict around the civil rights movement, which I don't think what it degenerated into a civil war, but could have degenerated even more than it did into a days of lead, like situation, and the naturalizing the political conflict into a legal interpretive conflict removed it from like whether or not it had to be popular and you had to run people over. But interestingly enough and I hate to say this, but this is something where reactionaries are right it leads to people not legislating or passing civil or amending the constitution anymore, like that's what immediately happens Immediately?

Elijah Emery : 1:19:31

Yeah, i mean there's. There haven't been. I think this is one of the big problems with the New Deal is that the New Deal never on, just like replacing the sitting conservatives on the Supreme Court with liberals. And this is the same strategy that Reagan attempted to do 40 years later and where we're seeing the fruits of that strategy now, but it didn't culminate in these like sweeping changes to the constitution which were still plausible at the beginning of the New Deal. But one thing I would push back on where it's very funny that people fixate so much on how the courts removed popular discussions of civil rights. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act all come after Brown v Board, like a decade after. In fact, in many ways the intervention on the part of courts and it actually is true for busing Busing is really legislated through the courts rather than occurring through legislatures, and it has to do a lot with the peculiarities of like the way American schools are organized on a county level or on a district level.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:56

We could talk about the way everything in America is organized weirdly, because we organize it through hyper federatedness the likes of which the world has rarely known. We even do that with tax collections. So I know it. like Americans pay low taxes And I'm like actually we don't, but we pay so many different kinds of weird ass taxes to so many different levels of government that when you're only looking at the federal marginal income rate, we do and we don't pay super high VAT taxes, but like we do actually pay pretty high taxes. Yeah.

Elijah Emery : 1:21:34

I mean, right now I'm probably a part of, i'm a part of a city, but if I went, like, a little bit north, i'd be part of a village which is different from the town, which is different from the water like collection area, which is different from the garbage. you know administration, anyway, it's exactly as you say. it's extremely, it's hyper federated in the oddest ways possible. And I think but I think basically, like what I would say is just that this put it all in the courts does happen with a lot of big cultural issues, but I actually think it happens less with civil rights than people often say it does, because this was the last major cultural issue that was answered legislatively Or maybe that's overselling it, but anyway it had tremendous legislative and popular involvement which is not true of gay rights, abortion, whatever I mean.

Elijah Emery : 1:22:37

on the state level, obviously, but in terms of national changes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:42

What if I'm fascinating about all these separate abortion? abortion is actually the most complicated because, while it is popular now, my entire life it was about 50-50. And even now, if you break down people's opinion on what kind of abortion should be limited, and not just the yes or no, you actually have like 2020, 2020, 2020, something like that, like breakdowns, what people think is okay, and I find that to be expected actually to some degree, because I think that's an issue where it's easier to argue now that there's been decades of it existing, and I think it's important. But I also have pointed out that like kind of what the Supreme Court has done is something that Lash would probably have picked up on that. It's like, well, the Supreme Court has politicized it in a way that's actually good for everybody, because while one side can claim a victory that it couldn't claim, it can't claim it at every state, and it does actually give Democrats and non-blue states a reason to vote. So there's a cynical reason why you like what people go, like. Why do they need Democrats to do anything about it? I'm like, well, didn't they win the midterm? I mean like, well, they didn't win the midterm. So let's be honest, they just didn't lose as bad as we all historically expected them to, but they did significantly better than anybody would have predicted.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:16

Pre-row being reversed And I think Lash would be onto the cynical side of that, what I don't think he would see, particularly in late. Lash, just like I said, there's just bracketing out a political economy and manifested in economics selectively, like we've talked about. He's very good on it And when he's talking about the 70s and part 80s, He's talking about especially the relationship between foreign affairs and domestic industrial needs.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:46

Right, but he's bad on it when he's talking about the 17th, 18th century, 19th century, and the other thing that he brackets out that I think is super interesting is exactly what you're talking about. Law is not talked about in him except in like four essays, and it's kind of cursory.

Elijah Emery : 1:25:12

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:13

I mean, i agree with you on the, by the way, on civil rights, because it's expanded, the civil rights amendment is when that all ends and the legislative advantages stop. But what I will say is we don't have enough power, even with the legislative advantages and the civil rights movement, to really push a constitutional change of any significance. There are amendments after Brownby board, but there's not that many and they're like super superficial.

Elijah Emery : 1:25:43

Well, the amendments after Brownby board are like the entirety of the. I think you mean, are you talking about just after the civil rights act?

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:51

Yeah, yeah, after the civil rights act, yeah.

Elijah Emery : 1:25:55

No, i think like the other thing is that it's not really remanded to the courts as much as it's remanded to within the bureaucracy, so like within the EOC, within state level investigative bodies.

Elijah Emery : 1:26:07

Within the judicial creation of the administrative state program, Exactly Which you know here's the thing Which he touches on, because he's talking about it in the culture of narcissism. exactly that thing the effect of the interplay between federal lawmaking and rulemaking, and corporatism in its American form. But he's not formalizing it or picking up where exactly it's emanating from or why exactly it was established beyond, like vaguely talking about, you know, to defend the power of the Brahman class and its later forms.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:47

Right, i think this is. this is actually something we need to kind of pick apart, and we'll do it another day, but I think that's an interesting observation, because I've become increasingly convinced that Marxists and this is not just lash do not take law seriously as part of the base of production.

Elijah Emery : 1:27:11

That's why I'm going to law school, for exactly that reason.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:17

Because money, contract law, a lot of the limitations of businesses, a lot of the ways we talk about Capitalism, changing from mercantile capitalism to entrepreneurial capitalism in the settler colonial period, into, I would say, mercantile proto-capitalism, into agrarian settler capitalism and then into industrial capitalism Those are developments of technology. But the later changes and I know people are and I don't think they come this is where it gets complicated I don't think they come from the law. Neoliberalism is not a political project imposed upon people, the way someone like David Harvey says. It is a development of things that were already beginning during fortism, expanded out because the public-private partnerships have already begun all the way back to the new deal. Frankly, What has changed is workers have an informal but real seat at the table. It's not an equal one, but they are considered the wobbly leg of a three-part stool. As profits change, they're cut out. But what I've also pointed out, the more I've really seen it, this is all also reflected in changes in law and in legal interpretation.

Elijah Emery : 1:28:54

One thing about that is it lags behind. For example, the Clinton welfare bill is in the 90s right And this is what people commonly associate actually with the end of New Deal Welfareism. That is the legal end of New Deal Welfareism. It's not under Reagan, it's not under Bush, it's under Clinton And it's because the underlying structure has already been removed.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:22

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:23

And so now we're just formalized it in law and a nominally left liberal party will put an impair to Arnett which, by the way, if you read Naomi Klein's book, the Shocked a book that I am on record over and over again being obsessed with hating for now 15 years I point out that the client actually shows this happening in multiple countries.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:51

This is not unique to the United States, nor is it imposed by the United States in all instances, and in some cases, like the case of Sweden or the case of, say, parts of Nicaragua's neoliberalization, the neoliberalization is achieved more easily because the public, private suspension into the state warfare was already there And there's so much state power assumed by the leftist forces that they can push it in ways that say Pinochet actually couldn't. And that and the reason why I hate that book is like making it something like it was a conspiracy of people who backed Pinochet And yes, the Chicago was were involved And yes, that's real completely cuts out the fact that, even in her own description, the legal changes are formalized under nominally left, liberal or sometimes nominally socialist regimes And so, and it's because they're reactive, in my opinion, they're not active.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:54

Well, this is. I mean, here's the thing. Why is always the most conservative element of the state Like? and by that I don't mean it is conservative in content, i mean that it exists to codify things that are already happening, or it exists to protect the status quo. Literally, that's what rule of law means is a stable status quo.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:14

Yeah, the reason why people don't like it, like the reason why you don't want rule of law to break down, is because the status quo breaks down so much that you have stasis. Use a Greek term. Stasis encourages out and out and direct political conflict, so war by other means just becomes social in civil war. But You know, that is the whole R. In the case of fear and Marxism There's a class base or some other political subject. It's a revolution. The point about that is that's like something that people I think are rightly afraid of, why they like rule of law and why we always think of law as kind of. I think a lot of liberals think of law as a progressive force. But one thing I think Lash is right about is we're drawing that opinion from a time period in American history that's actually quite rare.

Elijah Emery : 1:32:11

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:12

And in that sense I think he might be right that the victories of the civil rights movement are not left-wing, but not in the way he sees it. They're not left-wing because they don't really interpenetrate into the social realm beyond education, and by social I also mean like social welfare. The denuding of social from its economic context is like a post 1980s phenomenon. Even in America We didn't used to say social conservative to mean like I'm socially conservative but economically liberal. That phrase would not have made sense before the late 1970s. It just wouldn't have been. It would have been a nonsense phrase, kind of like when you encounter neoliberalism in World of Nations and you realize he means something completely different than what he means by neoliberalism. In the true and only heaven which is neoliberalism, we mean it And I had to go and look stuff up and like what were people meaning by neoliberalism in 1967?

Elijah Emery : 1:33:11

Because it was not The Kennedy administration. Right, like liberalism, is back baby after the quiet Eisenhower years.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:18

Right. But it's also interesting because I'm like and he talks about the movement of the left. I mean, there is a truth in that book where he talks about like the radical left gets a lot of his energy actually not from the Soviet Union, but from this weird movement where there's stuff happening in the third world but also the Kennedy administration happens and everyone's excited about that And that thing. Those things happen together and there's somehow, even though they're kind of directly opposed, They're like, complimentary to the psyche of the student revolutionaries.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:51

Right, it's like the welding of like revolutionary revolution as metaphor from like national liberation movements is something I don't know another. I'm going to end you with this thought. Lash is often interesting in that how much of a Marxist framework he picks up. But particularly in World of Nations, he describes things that Marxist would describe like we would have the debate on whether or not the national liberation movements are socialist revolutions or bourgeois revolutions or bourgeois revolutions And like Lash sees that, but he doesn't see it in those terms.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:33

He's like, well, these regimes are going to have to be neo-developmentalists and they're going to have to be actually integrated into one of the blocks of geopolitics And so like they can't be models for revolutionaries or even radical politics in the core, because there's no way for that to happen and there's no occupation for you to overthrow. And I think Lash is even like more right than he even knows. But he doesn't frame it. Like when I explained that essay, i always explained it in Marxist terms, but then I have to go back and say that's not actually what he says.

Elijah Emery : 1:35:11

Like here's what he says I saw this poll on Twitter which was like which of the branches of Marxism is the most dead right now? It was like Frankfurt School Marxism, Gromsky and Marxism. It had a couple of others, and I often wonder how much of this is impenetrable to me because I don't have a good handle on Gromsky, who is the? you know, that's the branch of Marxism that's the most influential on Lash's thinking.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:42

Yeah, it's also the one that's hardest to understand because it's not even fully translated in a lot of like Gromsky and thinking is actually projected by later thinkers. Yeah, but go ahead, mike. Yeah, gromsky is the one that right. Gromsky is the one that all the right wingers have a boner for because they actually believe in cultural hegemony. The way that Gromsky describes it, which I have always actually seen as a strike against Gromsky.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:08

It's kind of like my problems with the, with the Frankfurt School. I'm like, yeah, reactionaries like Richard Spencer with the culture industry and got all wet about it. Like you know, i don't know what's good. In fact. My other thing is I do think, after Pollock and I don't want to slander Pollock actually think Pollock's an important thinker and Lash doesn't pay enough attention to him in his critique of the authoritarian personality, but that Frankfurt Schoolers are too anti working class. Because, as I've had other people point out, that there's another study that use the same parameters, done by American sociologists at the same time, and it actually found findings that were more consistent with Marxism than the Frankfurt School, findings that, like, no, actually working class people aren't particularly more authoritarian. It's really varied and there's no personality clearly associated with it, although it does seem to be particular, to kind of upper middle class thinking, and I find that interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:11

I guess we end on a well, there are left wing elements to the end of Lash's life, but a lot of this shit's weird And it's opaque because I feel like the man was so productive, that like, and so selective that, while I get more out of him than I get out of, say, david Graber, actually have a lot of the same oh, this challenge can be so mad at me about saying this, but actually some of the same problems with Lash that I do about David Graber, that like he's motivated, particularly in his late work with like coming up with a counter narrative myth and one that isn't like, oh, i'm going to show you the problems with the left wing and take off your rose colored glasses Something that I'm you know are pink wash glasses in this case. So I'm saying I'm very sympathetic to actually I think he's mostly right in those books, honestly even about stuff like the collective actor problem with black nationalism and like stuff about like, well, you know, when you compare yourself to other nationalisms that have a nation like far away that they're supporting and they're trying to integrate as a diaspora movement. It's kind of a different thing than trying to have a nation within a nation. That's a break off of a nation but also maybe stays in it, at the same time putting on whether or not you're a cold for our political black nationalist And I think that's like that's a fair critique.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:41

It's also an obvious one. It's like you know, it's so obvious that it doesn't get made And I think people forget about it. But I find I just find the in the in stuff so, so confusing. Yeah, because I also don't. I mean, like I still think you would agree with me that you don't think lashes and out and out reactionary Definitely not, or even a conservative.

Elijah Emery : 1:39:07

No, he's like barely. the thing that would most point him in that direction is just becoming religious, and that's not even clear, right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:17

His stuff about and what he values in the Judeo Christian cultures like a is like an integrated sense of self. A lester McIntyre.

Elijah Emery : 1:39:25

Yeah, he's like it's very demanding.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:28

Right And the demands will will. actually, you know, even if you don't become a Christian, you will have an integrated person hood because of the conflict of those of that kind of discipline on yourself.

Elijah Emery : 1:39:39

He's like you know, he has a line and revolted the elites. It's like an honest atheist is always to be preferred to a fake Christian or something like that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:49

So it's, you know, it's a matter of honesty and and that he reminds me of, like John Gray, who's always you know when, his five types of atheist book we just like who did right suck.

Elijah Emery : 1:40:01

Who wrote one of the book covers of of revolt of the elites?

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:06

Yes, I know I mean John Gray's and John Gray's and John Gray's one of my fascinations, because he's he's too cantankerous even to be a paleo conservative.

Elijah Emery : 1:40:18

I love. I love his quote. I was reading something of his from writing about the Thatcher administration. He's like I love thatcher because the thatch rights for the closest thing we had in England to Bolsheviks.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:35

I mean it's he moved. One day I need to have a symposium, because I've read most of his books and and I can tell you what dark barn is. If I give in to despair, my conservative impulse will come back and I will be John Gray. I will not even be recognized with most people as a conservative, because I will not. I will hate conservatives for being too fucking liberal and Christian. Anyway, I will not hate them. I mean, think about John Gray As a crazy note. He's a conservative socialist and I mean that, and he's extremely conservative and extremely socialistic. But he's one of the few that's not from an aristocratic background, It's from pure misanthropy. People need help. Maybe the state can do it, because maybe people are less dumb With. Their needs are met, but they're always going to be stupid and this is always going to fail. That's his attitude.

Elijah Emery : 1:41:45

Yeah, Lash gives people a lot more credit than John Gray does.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:49

Right, that's the other thing. Lash doesn't. Actually, i mean, i don't love the biography about him that's readily available, because it's clearly written from a religious conservative's perspective.

Elijah Emery : 1:41:59

But the guy? I've listened to a couple of interviews by the guy and his conclusion is like well, ideologically you just can't put Lash anywhere, which is a lot more honest than trying to slot him into the conservative project.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:14

Like Roger Campbell tries to do since Lash died.

Elijah Emery : 1:42:20

Yeah, which is completely not true.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:23

Which is also why, for the longest time, the only people who talked about Lash were conservatives. And then, unfortunately and I do play a role in this, although I'm not the person who told Angela and Ago to read it, but Angela and Ago and I we'd never actually directly talked ever. I just read her stuff, corresponded with like we both like Christopher Lash and no one remembers who he was, and then the lead up to Trump happening and like everybody, including the Red Scare people and the Claremont Institute and like everybody's all back over Christopher Lash again, and at first I'm actually kind of excited. Then I get what I'm getting, what they're reading from, and I'm like where did you get that?

Elijah Emery : 1:43:18

I mean, i just spent a while rereading or not rereading reading for the first time, like every major essay published on it in the past, like 10 years, 15 years, okay so, you might have read more, because I have actually only cracked the.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:34

I've read like 15. So there's only 15.

Elijah Emery : 1:43:38

There's not any. There's like there's so few of them And it's. I mean it's really like he's. He's got kind of. He's talked about a lot more than he's written about. But I have a strong suspicion, because I've talked to a couple of guys. I have a strong suspicion a lot of people talk about them.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:56

Don't read him. The only thing they you have the revolt of the reed. There's a bunch of blog posts about the Takun 1 exchange where he gets really mad at the right and then at the end the Trotskist and Len and Ruben respond to them and he like freaks out and says like the left is not to sound like the Platypus affiliated society, basically said the left is dead and doesn't even know it. No, i can't really be associated with that anymore. Why So?

Elijah Emery : 1:44:25

For me, what's what's way more worrying is the people reading him behind closed doors in the right and discussing him.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:32

Yeah, I have a lot.

Elijah Emery : 1:44:34

So like I talked to somebody who's now with JD Vance's people, who was very, very into lash but he also to his credit he was like no, he's a socialist, which is very funny.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:52

I was reading the comments to Blake Smith's article on unheard And I not that I love on her, but I was like reading it and I'm like holy crap, there's like this like bunch of people reading lash on the right with like an interpretive rubric that only reads culture of narcissism, through through the revolt of the elites, doesn't know anything about the early stuff And maybe maybe they kind of skim agony of the American left because they don't think they think that's just trying to own the left, which is not trying to do, and their interpretive rubric is really weird. And I also remember that I read Julian S L A is essay about about him breaking from lash, and I remember writing him and going like where do you get this interpretation of lash?

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:45

Yeah like you're breaking from an interpretation of lash that I just don't recognize. Yeah. And then I'm like, but if I was reading true and only heaven and revolt of the elites only, and I was reading it with a weird guide like the Claremont Institute or like some just some reactionary priest I know, or something, i probably could get what he got out of it.

Elijah Emery : 1:46:11

I mean, i I kind of understand it because I read. First I read true and only heaven, and then revolt of the elites in 2020, where, like, the things that were really at the forefront were identity, politics, stuff. It was like when I was reading it, basically and bridging the gap between like what, what the distinction between populism is and how it relates to, like a cultural context. And then I went back and continued reading it and now my conclusions about what all these books mean is completely different. But I think it basically comes down to that there are entirely different languages spoken between each of the four main groups. Reading lash, who I can kind of go over now.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:00

Yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's end the night on this. Who do you think are reading lash and what are their basic interpretive rubrics?

Elijah Emery : 1:47:07

So these are my groupings of it. There's the new right and the post liberal elements of the new right, and this includes most prominently Patrick Deneen. It also improves includes Blake Smith and Jeff Schellenberger, and then, on the other hand, it sort of includes people at the front porch republic and a lot of people who are like vaguely communitarian, vaguely post liberal.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:39

I've read some of the front porch stuff also that we need to be very specific. They're right wing communitarian, Like they're yeah, they are. They're not just normal commute. Because, like, yeah, because I, like, i do like pointing out that, like if you were like Charles Taylor, who's a communitarian, he's not a right winger, or our Michael Sandel, who is not a left winger, but also not a right winger, um, he really likes China, for example, Yeah, this group basically fixates on um lash as like think of lash as conception of religion.

Elijah Emery : 1:48:21

Actually it overemphasizes it, but they do expound upon it and privilege the late writings over the middle ones and then just completely ignore the early ones and fail to recognize any similarities between lashes psychoanalysis and his religious conception. And then it's also integrated into the like lashes pure populist, which is what comes up in the front porch republic And it's a vision of populism which, as you say, is very right, you know, communitarian. And then you often find that a lot of the people who are more practical I like I would put Blake Smith and Jeff Schullenberger in this they're connected to like more vibrant intellectual projects, um, kind of deemphasized lash. They say he left the left, they point to a couple of tensions within him, but they don't really go into him into as much detail as a lot of the post liberal still, because they recognize that his project is not their project. Is my suspicion Right? Um, then there's like the post left sort of.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:23

I also want to emphasize it like, interestingly, the people who leave lash and have that reading are Jewish.

Elijah Emery : 1:49:35

But Which read the? uh, the read Like.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:38

Smith, i mean like like I don't know when tablet went from being like Buzzfeed for Jews into being a conservative outlet, which seems to have happened slowly over the course of about like Nine years. Yeah, because I remember liking tablet actually at one point in my life.

Elijah Emery : 1:49:56

But I still kind of I read tablet and then I read Jewish currents and it makes me very confused.

Elijah Emery : 1:50:02

Um yes, yes, it does Um, uh, but yeah, I, I I actually think I think I would kind of separate Smith because I think he actually, as I've said earlier, does actually have a pretty good reading of lash He doesn't go into. I think his reading contextually is wrong in terms of, like, how he can combine it with the political project he seems to be interested in. But I, you know, I don't think he's lying about anything which is different in my mind from like, especially what the French Republic does. But anyway, I think then there's also like the post left which is like, and it's probably best picked up in, just like talking about red scare and things associated with red scare, And what this does is it is it reduces lash to a critique of identity politics, Um, and focuses lash.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:09

Critique of liberalism as only identity politics to us. Exactly, they seem to reduce liberalism just to identity politics, which is weird.

Elijah Emery : 1:51:18

And it combines a reading of revolt of the elites and, uh, culture of narcissism and doesn't seem to focus on anything else, not even true.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:30

Doesn't read minimal self, yeah, yeah.

Elijah Emery : 1:51:33

Also and you know, I think that's an incorrect reading and it's frankly a pretty narcissistic reading. And the big example of this like shrinking lash and then deploying him strategically is I don't know if you know Emmett Penny um, who he wrote an article called the revolt of the green elites and compact, And I think it's a pretty good article. I don't think it misrepresents lash that much, Honestly. I've talked to him a couple of times, But I think what it does is it deploys lash within discussions of like environmentalist politics and nuclear energy, which last just didn't write about, And I think that replicates in miniature And that's Emmett Penny's like pet cause to.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:21

Yeah, it's a shtick Um nuclear barbarianism. That's his fucking hand on Twitter, exactly.

Elijah Emery : 1:52:28

And it replicates in miniature a lot of what the post left associated people do, which is they take him, they take lash, they put him in this context that he didn't really write about identity politics and then strategically deploy him on those terms.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:42

Yeah, let me do that. What marks do I mean? like the way they read Marx's relationship to the left tradition. he's like basically an argument from absence, except that there actually is evidence that Marx associated himself with the left. Like but, but their, their argument is mostly a oh, this one time Marx was really annoyed with socialists, so he didn't. He doesn't use that word here. I'm like, yeah, but he does other places.

Elijah Emery : 1:53:05

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:06

Like, and and particularly with some of the people who are European and, like, speak the languages that stuff is written in. I'm like, and you have to know it, like, are you really reading selectively, cause you can't blame it on a translation error? You can read it in the original, like, yeah, anyway, so that's, that's their thing, basically. And then there's like me and Tut.

Elijah Emery : 1:53:28

There's well, you guys are. You guys are the last group. I have one group in between. So first I have the center, which is like the Axios article on Steve Bannon, but also earlier, the attempt to deploy Lash as like is Barack Obama a Lashian conservative? Is this like article from 2008 that Andrew Sullivan published?

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:49

Yeah, yeah, weirdly there's this. I also kind of I'm going to get in trouble for this, but Kevin Matt Mateson, who is Lash's student, i see as this, but from the just the slightly more pro-Obama side, like yeah was Lash critiquing the narcissism that leads to Trump.

Elijah Emery : 1:54:06

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:07

Like, like both this interest like the difference between them is, like that, andrew Sullivan's way more annoying and less punk, but also like one of them is a D and one of them is sometimes an R.

Elijah Emery : 1:54:21

Yeah, And I think, basically, like the centrist engagement is super limited. It doesn't seem to really delve into him as a thinker. It just is like, ah, this is the thing everybody knows about him. And here are like a couple of quotes that are, you know, split off from anything else and just exist in a vacuum. And there's this awareness that he's important, but not an awareness of why or what that means.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:46

And in the final group, i would say that maintenance about Mateson. Honestly I agree with him. So, sullivan, who else would you include in that list?

Elijah Emery : 1:54:58

So I it's very, very small, Like there's no. there was an article in the New York Times earlier this year called or in 2022 that was someone on the left turn on the label progressive, which mentioned the true and only heaven and like is progress the goal? But it was just like Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and Hillary Clinton called herself not a democratic socialist.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:26

So it like you know it's kind of it's New York Times stupid. Okay, gotcha.

Elijah Emery : 1:55:31

Yeah, And that's. that's basically how it like comes up.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:34

I think like another good example of this is whenever I'm sympathetic to the revolt of the elites is when I read the New York Times. Yeah, perfect.

Elijah Emery : 1:55:43

Or like when Eric Levitt's got into lash very briefly on Twitter, he's like this is an interesting book, and then he just like never dealt with it again, but he did mention it in like a couple of tweets. So the main point about the center is that there's not very much engagement.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:57

And then finally there's the left, which is, you know, i chose to define very broadly, so it includes between super fricking hostile and then like me and Tut and like show in Vontain and I guess Sam Adler barrel, yeah, and Chris layman, chris layman And I might I actually might move if I was. if we're defining it super broadly, i'll move Kevin Mateson, because Kevin Mateson and Chris layman are like yeah. I basically were classmates.

Elijah Emery : 1:56:33

So I see, i see it kind of like the left when it engages with lash either, is usually playing defense kind of. And this is like Chris layman's whole thing, where it's like he knows lash, he wants to point out that lash is not a conservative or a reactionary And you know it's very defensive. It doesn't really go into a lot of the ambiguities. It doesn't go into why lash can be interpreted ambiguously And it doesn't go into him as an intellectual thinker. It goes into like what political projects he was associated with during his life And I thought like probably the best example of this is the recent Jacobin article from Christian Lorenzen which is like why do we keep coming back to Christopher lash? Certainly there's plenty in lash to raid, but his lasting appeal is due, i think, to a deeper quality in his writing which just like doesn't engage with the topic at all. And it's a very nice article, it's very well written, but it doesn't talk about anything enduring or lasting about lashes, intellectual thinking or his politics.

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:42

Somebody asked me to have that guy on the show and I read that. I finally got somebody give me that article And when I read it I'm like I think I might and I don't mean this insultingly, because this person is probably well educated, needs very, he's a very good writer, But I'm like, what would I interview him about?

Elijah Emery : 1:57:59

I know more about the subject than he seems to know from that article He's doing in that article, a very different thing than you're doing, but I think it speaks to a broader conception of what to do with lash from the left, like, oh, he's part of our project. Why, i don't know, but his writing is very nice. Like you know, there's not a deep engagement And the only people I talked about who have deep engagement are you and Todd, basically, and Lane when he was going over it with you on pop the left. And this is just in public published works.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:39

Right, i mean Lane did one piece where he picked up on Trin only having, during his divorce And you know, started speculating about gender essentialism and got all mad that Lacanians, because they don't take Freud's gender stuff like literally. But which lash does? That's Tuts. You know, psychological complaint is like that. The symbolization of psychoanalytic thought is often quite well understood by lash, but that he reads like mother, father and all that like like, in a way, a lot of the American and British psychoanalysts did, but he reads it literally And it's which, for all that, i don't love Lacan, lacanians don't. Well, they read that all symbolically. So it's, it's. It's an interesting thing, i will say this project has gotten me between. Between this and Todd, i've actually read a couple of people who were roughly associated with lash. Not Jackabee, the client of public man, what's his name? He also wrote on public intellectuals. Oh he, because there's the, there's the jet, it's a Russell.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:22

McCoby book on public intellectuals, but there's another one, a Richard Senate. Yeah, i've read more Richard Senate now, and I've read a lot more Phil reef because I'm now realizing that like I should also write an essay about how Susan Sontag and Lash are mirrors of each other. but the feel reef is actually as explainable, as important. to lash a psychoanalytic thinking is brown probably It was a touch says more, so I'm not sure.

Elijah Emery : 2:00:55

Like what I should have learned stuff. His late stuff is all reef.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:00

Okay, um, because what I find it interesting. Well, that makes sense, because reef is like a Freudian sociologist as opposed to a Freudian psychologist, like which has one big examination of reef.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:14

in revolt, The elites right, but it seems to inform like a lot of like, because, digging into reef, i'm now like, oh, i'm getting where some of these classifications and minimal self and cultural narcissism actually came from, because for a while I was like where the hell is? this is not coming from terror management theory. This is, this is not just him having a pissing match with the Frankfurt school, like what is actually going on here, and fill reef, particularly Freud. the mind of a moralist is actually helpful in figuring that out. Um, so I'm enjoying this journey. I also had to read a whole lot of Randolph board, which I never knew I was going to do.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:04

Yeah, i know He's one of the Bohemian left intellectuals that he really respects, which I think people when people read new radicalism they miss that he does respect a Randolph born. He does respect Jane Adams. He does not seem to respect John Dewey.

Elijah Emery : 2:02:23

Um, in fact, the more you go through that book the less he seems to respect people Like yeah, his, his favorite chapter is the chapter on the war in unanalyzable feeling, where he just like complains about all of the people who he just talked about in the American liberals and the Russian revolution.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:43

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:44

Um yeah, which which haven't. when I read the American Rivals and the Russian Revolution I was like, oh, this is where he writes about all this shit, Like, like, and you know there's whole chapters of, basically there's two chapters that I could have just entitled in that book. Why do we sucks Like although I will also say in kind of defensive, dewey, he actually doesn't deal with Dewey's frostiest adjacent period or his friendliness to Marxism in the nation or any of that Like, um. so it's selective And I'm just going to. I know that lash, when he's running about education, it's very old man, yells at cloudsy, but that's the part in his work throughout his life where I'd never disagree with him.

Elijah Emery : 2:03:42

Like you, you, education day sucks.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:45

Yeah, it's the perspective of the teacher. Right, yeah, and it's all Dewey's fault, um, which is kind of I hate to say it Kind of like. Actually, another thing about me when I moved from being a conservative to being a Marxist, which was a four or five year process, uh, when I kind of broke with conservatism but was lost. But the one thing I never dropped was a hatred of John Dewey, I think, maybe like that part of lashes lash book, just like we just really hate John Dewey. Like whenever, whenever Lash is writing about John Dewey, i'm like, yeah, fuck that guy. Like, and he's such a, if you're an education and you hate John Dewey, you are a weirdo. Why? Why, because, like, progressive constructivism is the default pedagogy. But anyway, that's for the other day. Thank you so much for coming on, elijah. We're gonna have you back on in three or four weeks, maybe when you get your mind back, because you did just finish this thesis And it is late there in Yonkers. Oh, didn't mean to.

Elijah Emery : 2:05:01

Sorry, yeah, it is late here. My AirPods just completely ran out of battery so I didn't hear anything. But anyway, thank you very much for having me on your show, because I assume you just did like a closing thing.

C. Derick Varn: 2:05:14

Yeah, i just closed out and thanked you, but the other thing I said is we're gonna have you back on to talk about a particular article that somehow manages to butcher John Updike, a writer that I've write it and defended, which I know everyone's gonna go from calling me the white Sean King lookalike to like that dude really is white. He likes John Updike And Lash because one of the worst readings of both people somehow that I think I've read in a long time and we're releasing for patrons. And then maybe over the summer, when you've had some break and you finish up your thesis, we can actually go back and talk about specifically the book of Lash that almost nobody reads American Levels and the Russian Revolution, because I think that book is so important actually Yeah, I can do it anytime after February 15th, because I told myself I'd give myself, other than this podcast, a month off of Lash Thinking.

Elijah Emery : 2:06:23

I'm gonna go back to it.

C. Derick Varn: 2:06:25

I find that when I do podcast after I've done research for the Lash book for a lot that I just like start sounding like I hate him, like I start breaking down every arm commit he makes and mock him unfairly and I'm like I don't even mean this. I'm just tired of fucking reading this shit.

Elijah Emery : 2:06:46

It's exactly that It's draining. It gets you really tired because it's just engaging with all the downfalls in American history, basically. But anyway, thank you very much for having me on, and I'm excited to come back soon to talk about how bad the Lash and Updike article is, and then something else later.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:08

I normally talk about how first things is a Christian magazine that does kind of have intellectual standards, but that one is so bad I can't read it.

Elijah Emery : 2:07:15

You have to read the whole thing, like the whole thing is so great because half of the articles are like the worst articles I've ever read. And this was literally I was reading this the day before I handed in my final draft of my thesis, So I was feverishly changing my conclusion to be like this is terrible, this is awful. And then a couple of the articles are just like this is you know, he was a very nice guy and so it's just like butchering his intellectual history, or like he was such a sweet fellow.

C. Derick Varn: 2:07:48

So to think of that, to be fair to Lash, that is one thing that everybody, right and left, says about him is like he was a really really kind person.

Elijah Emery : 2:07:59

That's one reason I can like live with him in my head for so long, because I don't think he's like a mean guy.

C. Derick Varn: 2:08:04

Yeah, don't go on a Marx quest, my friend, because Ingalls well, ingalls is kind of a bad person to me at times, but by our morals gainers but also really charitable and kind in others. But Marx, for his brilliance and he is brilliant he's an asshole. I find like whenever I'm reading Marx, i just like go on Twitter and I'm like declaring war on everybody and calling everybody Lesallians and like I'm like breaking out anachronistic insults about political tendencies that no one's thought about for 150 years, just like because it gets in my head and I'm just like God, you're all Lesallians, i hate you all.

Elijah Emery : 2:08:56

You should start doing that more formally, just calling people in the comment section Lesallians.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:00

Are you seeing me that I'm Twitter, like you're your Sally and your mom's a Lesallian and your dad's a prudunist and you're probably a precutinist yourself. How can you be a Lesallian and a precutinist? I don't know. it depends on your mood. Those are opposite deviations. but whatever, you're a bad person and I hate you and you should die. Also, you're stupid And it's like because there's a whole lot of Marx's actual political biography is like he said terrible shit about this person but then when this person died, he cried and showed up at his funeral and I was like, yeah, yeah, marx, you're one of those guys.

Elijah Emery : 2:09:41

Well, i do love all of like the stories. You're like he would just be listless for days on end and then he would work feverishly and then he would spend the rest of his time playing with his kids. So he seems like also kind of a fun person, but definitely much more of a curmudgeon.

C. Derick Varn: 2:09:59

I think being his daughters other than the abject poverty part of that was cool. And also until the breakdown of the first international, he does seem like he was a good person to work with actually when he was on. And yeah, marx complicated guy. But because I bring it up, because that's the person I read even more than Christopher Lash, is like reading every shred of Karl Marx I can get And then also reading the secondary literature and going like you guys are making this consistent when it isn't R, like yelling, i don't know how you got a PhD where you could say what the plain text of the text says doesn't say that Like just doesn't seem like what you get a PhD to do. And they're like well, that's a basic reading I'm like well, i think your reading's made up.

Elijah Emery : 2:10:58

Well, that's actually what you do. Get a PhD to do.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:02

I remember when somebody yelled at me for, like, well, you're just quoting Karl Smith, he's really fighting against the political juicing all the way back to Hobbes. And I'm like, yeah, so what? I'm just quoting what he says in the first chapter, because it's also famous, but also it's the fucking thing that defines his politics. So why don't we talk about that? Like, instead of all this weird esoteric, epistemological minutia that you want to like deal with?

Elijah Emery : 2:11:27

so you cannot deal with the fact that Karl Smith was a fucking fascist, yeah, and you'll find when you go to the first things thing, it's going to be the same way for Lash. For them, but with Gnosticism.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:40

Oh, no, no, no. Whenever first things brings up Gnosticism, it's bad Like-.

Elijah Emery : 2:11:45

There's like the intro essay is like. Lash was so brilliant. He had an essay on Gnosticism.

C. Derick Varn: 2:11:54

Oh man, is that why they like? what's his face? the canon writer, um loved Ashbury. Can't remember his name now.

Elijah Emery : 2:12:12

Things cut out for a second sorry.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:13

No problem I was talking about. is that why they also like this guy in the Western Canada? Yeah, harold Bloom. They love Harold Bloom because he also Yeah, I think so, gnosticism.

Elijah Emery : 2:12:23

Yeah, they're just very, they're like Gnosticism is so dangerous.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:31

Oh man, i love it when you have people trying to apply like 15th century heresology to like modern politics. Yeah, they're like this is the G that amongst what Lash was trying to do.

Elijah Emery : 2:12:44

He was trying to deal with the repercussions of Gnosticism.

C. Derick Varn: 2:12:48

That's Eric Von Kuhnlenten. That's like who really was trying to deal with it, like thought all of liberalism was really imitating the eschaton. But that's esoteric paleo conservatism. You have to be deep in it And actually by me admitting that, i know that I'm admitting how deep in I was.

Elijah Emery : 2:13:09

That's okay. That's okay, you're out now.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:14

Like we used to be like, well, you know, and actually I was secular at the time and I was like really struggling with how to deal with all these people really concerned about, like, about, like Gnostic takeovers, And I'm like eventually I was like, by Gnostic do you mean Jew? Like that doesn't make sense, Like, but anyway, have a good night, Elasha.

Elijah Emery : 2:13:39

All right, good night. Thank you so much for having me on Good night.

C. Derick Varn: 2:13:42

Elasha and good night.