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Degenerate that he was, Foucault hit on something that’s actually got quite an ancient pedigree. For many of the early literate civilizations, there seemed to have been some idea that words and space/time were linked such that some formula involving the former could change the latter. Pharaoh would strike the name of a hated predecessor off of a temple and replace it with his own; this was taken to indicate that he had actually been the pharaoh the whole time and built the edifice himself. Such thinking was perhaps the origin of magic, with spells able to alter space and time using words. In our time, the media is the means through with such sorcery is effected. Vaccines are unnecessary, then bad, then good, then vital, then perhaps not without risks, then not actually vaccines. Nothing changed but the words, but we are clearly meant to accept each change as the reality that always was. Foucault understood that power, even as it damned him, like Faust.

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I'm hippy-dippy enough to say Foucault et al were on to many somethings -- there really is sometimes that intermittent magic of the stars somehow aligning when people put their full heart and soul into something and everything finally clicks. Whether one credits that to divine providence or the power of redefining discourse or something else, there does sometimes seem to be a certain ambiguous wiggle room in the nature of reality. I rolled my eyes at most theory in college, but the very best of it really did blow my mind and I'm grateful to have had that in the mix during my formative years.

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Foucault was always evil but never without perceptiveness and creativity. It’s a shame he couldn’t turn it inward.

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Well said.

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The author writes “What began as institutional resistance amid the Trump interregnum has become actively vengeful governance under the Biden regime—a policy agenda nonsensical as to most of its official objectives but coldly strategic as retribution against structural opposition..”

He provides as one example “printing enough funny money to substantially devalue the dollar”

A great deal of money creation outside of normal loan formation occurred over 2020-21, a total of $11.0 trillion was created through a combination of Fed QE and deficit spending. 62% of that creation ($6.8 trillion) occurred in 2020 and the other 38% in 2021. Biden was not president when the bulk of this money creation occurred.

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Very clearly written analysis of the interplay of critical theory and on the ground and practical progressive power plays, thanks

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“…but as bastardized into politics and policy becomes a cheap excuse for magical thinking.” Brilliant summary of life in K-12 education!

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Jul 27Liked by The Ivy Exile

The value of the dollar is up over the past 5 years.

Maybe consider that the right wing propaganda you've imbibed isn't actually real.

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Hey Erek, appreciate your willingness to engage with content with which you disagree! I acknowledge that your argument could be technically true depending on exactly which statistic one chooses to look at but, in terms of the lived experience of average Americans going to the grocery store and paying rent, inflation has been extremely painful. Re: "right wing propaganda," I was raised a progressive (by 60s activist social workers), studied public policy in college so I could become a professional progressive, and went into public interest journalism to help advance the progressive cause. Being a lefty do-gooder was a huge part of my identity. But over the years working at PBS and Columbia University I became increasingly disillusioned; the expansive liberalism I'd grown up with had been superseded by narrow, prejudiced, dumbed-down pseudo-technocracy. The governing class in which progressives put so much faith is no longer living up to that awesome responsibility, if it ever did. And so I was dragged, kicking and screaming, from the left to the center, which is one of the central themes of this Substack. I warmly invite you to click around, agree or disagree, to explore how and why I was reluctantly compelled to change my mind (but not my values) on a lot of things.

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Jul 27Liked by The Ivy Exile

I'm not suggesting you become a lefty. But recognize the Republican propaganda for what it is a lie to smear Biden that isn't supported by the data.

Now, if you have an argument as to why monetary policy can reduce the value of the dollar relative to the price of goods without affecting its value on forex markets I would be happy to hear it.

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Jul 27Liked by The Ivy Exile

Inflation happened world wide. Because of Demand Pull inflation. ( That's when it's caused by demand exceeding supply) not because of money printing. If it was money printing we would see that reflected in the Forex markets. I looked this up on 5 year trends against the Euro and the Yuan both of which the dollar is trading strong against. So inflation isn't because the value of the dollar declined, it's because of corporate price hikes and demand exceeding supply after the Pandemic lockdowns reduced the supply of goods worldwide. The international phenomenon of inflation tells you it wasn't American monetary policy driving the inflation as America weathered it better than others.

Right wing pundits have been spreading this lie non-stop because it is an attack on Biden trying to make him own inflation that began before the election and that went down steadily each year since his policies took effect.

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I am not an economist and admittedly don't have that kind of granular insight. Certainly an honest observer has to admit that inflation has been a global problem and that the Trump administration's massive spending in 2020 helped create much of it. However, when inflation was already becoming a crisis it was counterproductive to pursue massive spending legislation like the infrastructure bill and the so-called "Inflation Reduction Act." I don't think it's unfair to assign at least a significant chunk of the blame to the Biden administration.

But, let's say for the sake of argument that I'm totally off base and Biden's hands are totally clean regarding inflation, what about my other examples of the administration's spiteful mode of governance: the EV mandates, unnecessarily draconian Covid policies, and ushering 10 million plus impoverished migrants into the country despite public outcry? Or another topic I've written about, the blatantly illegal student loan giveaways that only exacerbate the root problems?

I disagreed with Barack Obama about many things, but progressives' narrative frame in those years was hopeful, earnest, and generous. That's what made J.D. Vance's book a bestseller, well-intended progressives genuinely curious about what was afflicting the white working class and determined to understand and uplift those communities. But under Biden progressives' narrative frame has been more akin to a colonial power punishing the natives after an uprising to break their will, exacerbating divides rather than bridging them.

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Is should add that Foucault’s own critique of technocracy is exceptionally perceptive, and can be read very productively and usefully precisely against the trends in government which we’re all concerned about. There is in fact a traditional conservative reading of Foucault.

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As much as I didn't care to read Foucault at the time, in hindsight I'm grateful for the exposure. A lot of critical theorists have important, fascinating things to say -- the real problem is when their thorny complex texts are reduced to Cliff's Notes and laundered into policy and politics.

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Yes - the real problem is that a lot of these thinkers come to students having been chewed up, half-digested and regurgitated ten thousand times by mediocrities.

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Things will get worse but then they will get better. The thing about technocracy is that it does not succeed on its own terms: it makes material conditions worse. That it also makes moral and spiritual conditions worse means that we are in for a very difficult period in the short-medium term, but this is, sadly, I think necessary to eventually reverse course to something better.

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I certainly hope so, and you're probably right that it's going to take a lot of pain to wake enough people up. My concern, as discussed in the next post called "Social Justice by Algorithm," is that technocracy controls or will soon control enough technological infrastructure to automatically squelch any viable opposition. If not for Substack and the whims of Elon Musk, we'd be in a far more constricted information environment with much more aggressive policing of inconvenient "disinformation."

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I share the concern, and actually have been working on an academic project on how what you call 'social justice by algorithm' was all more or less predicted by Alexandre Kojeve. But I think that if that vision is realised, it will be so immiserating, and so bad at achieving the outcomes it is designed to achieve, that it will soon collapse in on itself.

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That sounds interesting, please keep me posted! I hope that you're right about that, I tend to think "there's a lot of ruin in a nation" and the frog boiling will continue to be slow enough and feel inexorable enough that most people will just accept it as the inevitable way of things. We already have two-tiered justice systems in major cities and college campuses treating people very differently based on race and gender, for instance, that would have seemed inconceivable a few decades back.

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I think the pain just isn't bad enough yet. Eventually it will get there!

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Ivy Exile, when you wanted to be a public interest journalist, how did you decide what journalism was in the public interest? Ralph Nader's Public Interest Research Groups claimed to research subjects which were in the public interest but actually researched subjects which interested them. They researched subjects they thought the public ought to be interested in rather than those which the public is actually interested in. Were you trying to do the same thing?

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Hi John,

You raise a critical point -- that the notion of the "public interest" is inherently subjective and certainly not truly defined by academics, nonprofits or foundations however much they dominate the sector. When I entered the field I was way more aligned with conventional wisdom than after many years of exasperating experience -- gradually concluded that speaking one's truth with best intentions is as close to the real public interest as possible.

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