I guess this is gripes and grumbles day at Literature R Us. Because I feel like taking a poke at two usually semi-okay guys, neoliberal Matt Yglesias and largely repentant neocon godfather turned uber anti-Trumper William Kristol.
Matt’s offense occurred during a recent post at his Slow Boring site featuring an account of his visit to a “Power to the People” concert in suburban Maryland, which proved to be, if you’re Matt Yglesias, pretty goshdarn intense:
The show was fantastic. In addition to the Dropkick Murphys, it featured the Foo Fighters and Public Enemy along with legends like Joan Baez and Bruce Springsteen but also a surprisingly compelling performance by Jenny from “Gossip Girl,” who sang Soundgarden songs while Tom Morello played guitar.
You had me at the Dropkick Murphys, Matt. But in the big finale, when all the folks gathered on stage to lead the crowd in what was surely a rousing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s kitsch classic This Land Is Your Land, things got a little out of hand, according to Matt at least, because, as Matt tells it, Tom Morello, well, he sort of disrespected Woody’s legacy by implying that Woody championed the contemporary cliché that this is not “your/our” land but rather it belongs to the Native Americans and “we” are illegitimate interlopers.
Now, I am at one with Matt with deploring the ritualistic “land acknowledgement” fetishism among the “progressives”. Population migrations and, yes, conquests are the stuff of history. We do Native Americans an injury rather than a favor by substituting pity for policy and encouraging them to pity themselves, endlessly sighing over a lost fairytale life that never really existed in the first place, like the “Lost Cause” of the American South. So, yes, this land does belong to everyone who’s here in it, indigenous and interloper alike. But then Matt goes off the rails, in my opinion, when he uses the song, which, clearly, I find a bit tedious in the first place, to extoll the legacy of Woody: “Now what’s true is that Guthrie and other midcentury leftists, to their eternal credit, pushed for a more inclusive vision of the American national community.”
But Woody wasn’t just a “leftist”, Matt. He was a communist, and a dedicated one too, who did not flinch in support of the Party Line even after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which surrendered the hapless Poles to the less than tender mercies of Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Ron Radosh, whose authoritative study The Rosenberg File made him anathema to soggy-minded liberals everywhere, was on the case back in 2011, writing for PJ Media and pointing out that Woody, along with Pete Seeger, sang anti-war songs to discourage U.S. participation in World War II in support of beleaguered Britain right up until the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. in June of 1941. Yeah, this land belongs to you and me, but Poland belongs to Fritz and Boris.
Matt has a vested interest in turning communists into leftists, because, as he wrote recently in his “Slow Boring” blog, he has Reds in the family, discussing his father’s parents, who were both members of the Communist Party until 1957 when Sovie Premier Khrushchev shocked “everyone”—everyone, that is, who was willfully blind—by revealing at least a few secrets from Uncle Joe’s all but infinite chamber of horrors. Up until then, Gramps and Granny, like Pete and Woody, swallowed whole the Soviet Unions endless “misinformation” regarding the various famines, purges, and ruthless wars of aggression and oppression waged by Stalin throughout his bloody reign. But, as Matt “explains”
To the people on the inside of American Communism in the 1930s, Communism was the movement that was saying fascism was bad. Communists were leading the charge for the Spanish Republic against the allies of Hitler and Mussolini. Communists were also the ones in the United States saying forthrightly that racism was bad.
Now, it is true that the Communists were against fascism—until they were for it. It’s also true, or truish, that “Communists were leading the charge for the Spanish Republic against the allies of Hitler and Mussolini,” though George Orwell, in his famous book Homage to Catalonia, seems to take a less rosy view of the Reds than Matt does.
As for “Communists were also the ones in the United States saying forthrightly that racism was bad,” if Matt’s grandparents wanted to join an outfit that said “forthrightly” that racism in the U.S. was bad, they could have joined the National Association of Colored People, or Norman Thomas’ squeaky clean, non-totalitarian Socialist Party of America. But apparently they didn’t do that. Matt’s implication that if you wanted to oppose racism in the U.S. back in 1930s you had to join the Communist Party is ridiculous.
Okay, I’ve made fun of Matt’s taste in music and trashed his grandparents. Isn’t that enough for one day? Sure. Now it’s time for Bill.
I have, very grudgingly, admired Bill Kristol for realizing, from the time Trump made his golden escalator descent, that this was a man from Hell, a man utterly unworthy of the public trust, a feat that remarkably few on the right were capable of performing. Kristol went even further in realizing that the Republican Party itself, which for decades he had celebrated uncompromisingly as the absolute pillar and exemplar of Western Civilization had proved itself, by embracing or even merely “accepting” Trump, to be as corrupt as its new leader. Not only that, Bill kept saying so out loud, infuriating many of his former bosom buddies, like Jonah Goldberg, so infuriated by Bill’s apostacy as to suggest that if Bill didn’t cool his jets just a bit, he might turn into “Jen Rubin”. Mean!1
Recently, Bill posted a post—really a “subpost” within a larger post—labeled “Our Elites Booked It”, which begins as follows:
Yesterday I remarked that “seeing support for President Trump collapse among the public—with very little help from our pitifully complacent and fearful elites—is heartening. Even inspiring.”
I didn’t go into any detail to justify my swipe at our elites. I don’t really think much justification is needed. But I thought I might mention here one of the most helpful characterizations I’ve heard of their behavior. It came from Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the grassroots activist organization Indivisible and a key organizer of the No Kings demonstrations, in a conversation we had under the auspices of the New Haven Democracy Project.
What follows is an account Leah gave of a film she saw—“a 2014 Swedish dark comedy called Force Majeure”—in which a father wildly abandons his wife and two children in response to a mistaken report of an avalanche. The “moral” is that the father, by his hysterical display of instinctual cowardice, has forever lost the trust of both his wife and children. And so, Bill explains, have our elites.
Well, sure. But just who are “our elites”? It seems to me that certain portions of our elites performed better than others. As a Democrat, I was, over and over again, deeply disappointed by the “elites” of my party, often making terrible decisions and often displaying terrible incompetence. But the Republican elites weren’t just wrong-headed and incompetent. They were criminal. It has long been my contention—and I am not alone—that following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, virtually the entire membership of the Republican Party decided “If we play by the rules, we’ll lose. We have to cheat. There’s no other way.” Immediately after Bill took office, the entire party embarked on a course of “ruin, then rule,” as I have explained at length, most lengthily here. And prior to the Golden Descent, Mr. Kristol was one of the very loudest of the cheerleaders. I have said, repeatedly, that Mr. Kristol devoted most of his life to the destruction of the Democratic Party, only to end up destroying the Republican Party instead. We have met the enemy, Bill, and it was you.
1. Mean if you know who the fuck Jennifer Rubin is/was. Jennie, as I suspect she may prefer to be called, was once a, well, ridiculously skewed defender of Israel. Like Bill, she has given up her Middle Eastern obsessions, in public, at least, to confront the evil at home. She now runs a substack site, The Contrarian, with Norman Eisen.
