Sunday Notes and Reading List and Round Barns

I do not know if it is the reading glasses that are giving me headaches or if the muscle relaxers are to blame for my being tired and lethargic.

I went to sleep last night at 4:30, woke around eleven, did a little reading and a couple of posts, then I was back down until around 7:30 and then back down from 9 to 11.

Well, I did not go anywhere. That should make the government feel better. But I did not get to the laundry, either. 

I feel like taking another dive right now.

So, I give you a reading list for today:

Malcolm Forbes, The life and deaths of Joseph Conrad (Engelsberg Ideas)

From Daily Sabah: Tariffs, tax cuts: Could Trump's policies 'shake up' global trade?

Others, like Bernard Yaros of Oxford Economics, estimates a Trump presidency could raise inflation by 0.6 percentage points at its peak.

Previously, businesses bore the brunt as imported components got more expensive, said Kyle Handley, professor at UC San Diego.

But he noted: "If they do an across-the-board tariff of 10% to 20%, there's no way we're not going to see that on store shelves."

And it is unlikely that manufacturing can return to the United States in short order.

"We haven't made TVs in the U.S. in decades," Handley said, adding that U.S. factories are not producing at the scale needed to satisfy consumption either.

Trump claims earlier tariff hikes on China and others brought no inflation.

But Handley estimates the supply chain frictions exporters faced were equivalent to a 2% to 4% tariff hit – and companies tell Agence France-Presse (AFP) they have had to pass on some costs.

A 2019 paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that by end-2018, import tariffs were costing U.S. consumers and importers an additional $3.2 billion per month in added tax costs.

America Is Faustian: Gregory Laski interviews Ed Simon about “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.”

That contract which is America promises so much—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—but that of course obscures the atrocities on which the nation was founded. American politics has always had religion at its core, even if—especially if—the nation’s ostensibly secular. We’re always the city on a hill, the last best hope, and so on, in our imaginations. I think that anything which conjures the angels brings up the Devil as well, and that a working knowledge of Faust behooves us if we’re to understand that.

The Definitive History of Neo-Nazi Edgelords: Jordan Carroll reviews Spencer Sunshine’s “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s ‘Siege.’” 

Indeed, subsequent history has shown that, frequently, it’s the fence-sitters, provocateurs, and other bad faith actors who extend the fascist network to individuals or communities that wouldn’t otherwise encounter right-wing extremism. Ambivalence can even be a virtue in the role of fascist proselytizer. Many who wouldn’t bother listening to a convinced neo-Nazi will entertain someone who’s just making jokes or asking questions even if it leads them down the path toward white nationalism. Thanks to the internet, fascists no longer need to worry as much about recruits finding their contact information, but they do have to make themselves legible to algorithms and salient to popular conversations. People peripheral to the fascist network prove to be central to its expansion in these moments. Vampires always need someone at the threshold to invite them into places where they haven’t been.

The Siege case also shows us how flexible fascism can be. Neo-Nazism begins to look less like a personal creed with specific tenets and more like a reactionary structure of thought that changes based on context. Wherever someone imagines that life is a biological struggle for survival, hierarchy is rooted in nature, and the world is divided between creative elites and disposable subhumans, something like neo-Nazism is almost certainly quick to follow. One of Mason’s innovations was to rebrand neo-Nazism as the Universal Order, an abstract concept that allowed him to tolerate a great deal of ideological and even ethnic diversity in people willing to further his genocidal cause. Sunshine reveals how neo-Nazism adorned itself with the generalized misanthropy characteristic of the extreme subcultures of the 1990s, an important lesson to remember in the modern moment as fascism reclothes itself as transphobia and religious chauvinism.

Mexican War history for you:

 

Democrats’ problem with working class voters in Wisconsin 

After supporting Obama, Adams won’t be voting in 2024, he said. “I’m done with all that,” he told Kaufman. He has no faith that Harris will do anything to help people like him. All politicians are crooks, in Adams’ view. But if he did vote, he’d probably cast his ballot for former President Donald Trump, he said. Trump’s a crook, too, but “he’s a gangster,” Adams said, laughing.

I’ve heard similar reactions from Wisconsin dairy farmers who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. They liked it when Trump pledged to remember “the forgotten men and women of America.” They laughed off some of his outrageous statements. As a political outsider, they felt he would throw a rock at the two-party system that, in their view, abandoned ordinary people and really only served the interests of big corporations, especially when it came to trade deals like NAFTA.

***

Contrary to his rhetoric about representing the working class, Trump created a huge trade deficit and his 2017 tax cut gave corporations a new incentive to offshore jobs by cutting taxes on foreign profits.

Still, Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have capitalized on Democrats’ decision in the 1990s to shift away from working class concerns and embrace NAFTA. They are speaking directly to the voters who were left behind. 

***

But one of the most important questions candidates must answer is who is looking out for working class Midwesterners. Many Democrats have taken a pass on that issue in recent years. Unless they make it very clear that has changed, it will come back to bite them.

Sounds like Indiana, only our state party does seem to be even trying. 

 I once had a border collie; great dog.

Did you hear about the farmer who went crazy trying to find the corner in his round barn?

A Rural Revolution: Indiana's Round Barns (2020)

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