Corey Robin's Blog, page 21

“A November 1944 letter to Horkheimer, for example, finds Adorno recalling that he ‘had a lot of fun’ meeting with the Berkeley Public Opinion group to develop preliminary questions on the ‘F-Scale.'”

—Eric Oberle, Theodor Adorno and the Culture of Negative Identity, p. 152

I highly recommend Oberle’s book. It’s a little outside my usual reading these days, but it has some really fascinating readings of old and familiar texts and terrific biographical nuggets like this. I’ll be blogging about it more once I get rid of this cursed flu.

Yesterday, on Twitter, I tweeted a version of this claim:

Beto, Harris, Klobuchar, Biden, Gillibrand, Booker: The basis of their candidacies is ultimately them, their person. That’s what they all have in common.

Sanders and Warren are the only two candidates whose basis is a set of ideas, well worked out over the years, about the economy and the state.

The tweet was one part of a much longer Facebook post, in which I elaborated the point. Here’s a short excerpt from that post:

Among the many reasons that I have no time for the first set of candidates is that I’m so tired of these quintessentially American campaigns that are so wrapped up in the personality of the candidate, tied up in a bow of banalities—Biden as the white working class Joe! Harris as a woman of color who’s a prosecutor for the people! Beto as the white man on a horse! Klobuchar as the abusive boss (maybe she’s hoping to give Trump a run for his money)! Booker as the man of love—as opposed to mounting a comprehensive political argument about our world.

One of the things I’ve always found so strange about liberals and Democrats is how much they make fun of Ronald Reagan as an intellectual and political simpleton—when the slightest review of his speeches and writings (many of which he wrote himself) would show just how intense was this man’s worldview, how slowly and carefully he worked it out over the years and decades of his move to the right—while running to embrace candidates almost entirely for their charisma (or putative charisma; I’ve never understood how people could persuade themselves to fall in love with a John Kerry or a Biden or a Gillibrand) and life story.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again: the last successful Democratic candidate who had an actual story to tell about American politics and the economy, about where we were and where we were going, was Bill Clinton. I hated that story, but it was an analysis. Even Obama, whose speeches I’ve been reading so closely, didn’t really have much of an analysis of American politics and the economy, despite his populist nods throughout the 2008 campaign.

Without the larger context of my Facebook post, however, some Twitter Democrats were angered by the initial tweet. And let me know in no uncertain terms.

So let me try to set out a broader account of what I’m getting at here.

I think some part of the pushback I got on Twitter (where people rushed to assure me that Beto or Booker or Gillibrand has a long list of serious policy proposals under their belt or on their website) reflects the larger parlous state of our political discourse and analysis. When it comes to presidential elections, people seem to have only two ideas of how it is that a candidate runs. I’m going to borrow from one of the more irritating usages from the 2008 Democratic primary and call it the beer track analysis and the wine track analysis.

The beer track analysis holds that politics and elections are above all about personality. Voters, in this theory, respond to some elusive notion of who the candidate is, is she like me, can I identify with her, is she likable? (As if Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter were likable. And if you’re thinking of Habitat for Humanity Jimmy, you need to go back to Christian scold-y Jimmy of the 1970s. He really wasn’t likable.) It’s basically the “Would I like to get a beer with this person” that we heard so much about during George W. Bush’s first presidential run in 2000.

Now the people who proffer this kind of analysis never think of themselves as being motivated by such jejune considerations. No, personality and likability are just how the rubes and masses respond to politics. It’s unfortunate, of course, but rubes are going to rube.

No, the people who proffer this analysis think that they’re interested in a different, more sophisticated, set of considerations. They’re part of the wine track, you see, and what they care about is that all-important, Ivy-League-credentialed, wonk-mystical and stat-esoteric concern called “policy.”

Got that? The beer track cares about personality, the wine track cares about policy.

Despite what I’m sure is a case of massive self-deception on their parts, the wine track folks really do believe that they, rational beings that they are, spend hours on end researching carefully all the policy planks and proposals of the various candidates. And that they only reach a determination of which candidate to choose based on their close reading of a meta-data study they found on J-STOR that confirms the viability of said candidate’s toolkit of policies.

These are the types of people who will tell you, after much careful study, and with no apparent sense of irony, “I really think that Klobuchar’s tax-advantaged savings account proposal is the sweet spot of this campaign: it’ll do more than anything for poverty alleviation but it’s got real electoral juice.” They’re the people who’ll tell you, when you say you don’t understand why candidate x is running, go to their website. And think they’ve done something in doing so.

What I think both accounts—the personality and the policy, the beer track and the wine track—miss is the role of ideology, of political argument, of collective story-telling.

Now just so I’m clear: When I say ideology and argument, I don’t mean a candidate needs to channel Rawls. I mean, does she have a story about the American polity, about how we’ve come to the impasse we’re in (Trump, rampant inequality, rampant incarceration, a party of unadulterated nativism and racism and misogyny, the 1%, non-existent unions, winnowing voting rights, growing strike waves, impending extinction of the planet, etc.), about who is responsible for it (not just a villainous Republican Party but also a larger political economy and set of social actors), and how we’re going to reverse and undo this development.

The great realigners had such a story. Read FDR’s Commonwealth Club speech. Read Lincoln’s Cooper Union address. What you take away from those speeches is not a list of policies but a narrative, an ideologically-laden narrative, of the last however many decades of American politics, and how those years need to be brought to an end. Above all, they locate a variety of social ills (in Lincoln’s case, not just slavery but also winnowing democracy, constitutional decline, and so on; in FDR’s case, the end of the frontier, the Depression, reaching the limits of capitalist expansion) in a socially malignant form: the slaveocracy, in Lincoln’s case, the economic royalists, in FDR’s case. Again, they didn’t give you a laundry list of issues (sexual harassment here, taxes there, voting rights over there); they wove the whole thing into a single story, a single theory, locating each part in a larger whole.

Some non-realigners also have such an analysis. I’m not a fan of these, but you could definitely say Bill Clinton had such a story, Richard Nixon had such a story. And I would say that Obama had such a story in his speech on Jeremiah Wright.

So to bring this back to my original post: I don’t doubt that all of the candidates in the Democratic primary have their itemized list of policy proposals (many of them, of course, responses to Sanders’s 2016 campaign and the subsequent take-off of AOC and other Democratic Party politicians), as a lot of their supporters on Twitter rushed to point out to me. But policy is not ideology; a list of issues is not a political analysis or argument; a website is not a story. I don’t hear from most of them what I’m talking about here. So I stand by what I said: only Warren and Sanders have the kind of analysis I’m talking about, the kind of analysis that can mobilize voters to do what must be done.

Now it is possible, as my friend Alex Gourevitch pointed out to me in an email, that a candidate like Harris has a story. We saw a version of that story in a couple of the speeches she’s given over the last decade in which we she celebrated her work in prosecuting the parents of truant schoolchildren. As near as I can tell, these are, to date, her most elaborated narrative of how she thinks about the state and society. They’re clear, coherent, and tell you exactly how she thinks about the world—where the problems lie, where the solutions lie—and what policies go with it.

The problem, of course, with that narrative is that it is now in bad odor. It may express the truest version of what Harris thinks, but carceral capitalism is not a winning platform, the way it was under Bill Clinton. This isn’t Harris’s fault; like a lot of other candidates of her generation, she came up as a politician under the hegemony of the Clinton New Democrats. They had developed a once-in-a-generation political story or analysis, and now that story/analysis is not acceptable. Hillary Clinton found herself in a similar boat. So Harris can’t run on the one story we have some reason to believe she really believes. So she’s got to get another one, or failing that, a laundry list of platform items, or failing that, a compelling story about herself.

But that’s the thing about stories and ideologies and analysis: unlike Medicare for All, or some other issue you’re willing to support (at least rhetorically) because it polls well or because Bernie has shifted the discourse, an ideology or analysis is not something you come by over night.

Lincoln, Reagan (I’m less certain about FDR on this, I’ll confess) worked their way over the years to what they said. We mistake that point for authenticity; I don’t think that’s the significance here. What I’m talking about is not the authenticity of a candidate’s positions, how anciently or recently she’s adopted those positions (FDR’s, of course, changed radically over the course of his first and second term) but the credibility and depth of their analysis. Voters will forgive all sorts of adaptations and policy revisions; they find it harder to accept the idea that yesterday you thought this—where this is not support or opposition to a healthcare policy, but something more fundamental about the relationship between states and markets and society—and today you think that.

Developing a story or analysis or ideology takes time; it’s not something you crib and adapt in response to polls. It doesn’t mean a candidate needs to be as ancient as Sanders (Bill Clinton, of course, was quite young, but he nevertheless had a whole analysis of the problem). But it does mean that her political voice has to have some sense of continuity, and if she’s changed her positions or policy (as Reagan did, as Warren has), that she has a credible story about how she came to that new position.

Now that I’ve finished my Clarence Thomas book—it’ll be out in September, pre-order it now—I’m catching up on my reading. Adina Hoffman’s Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures wasn’t first on my list, but once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down.

Hecht was a screenwriter, the force, or one of the forces, behind films like Scarface, Notorious, Twentieth Century, and many other films. “He invited 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today,” said Godard. As Hoffman explains:

Screwball comedy’s airborne patter; the brooding tones of the gangster saga; the newspaper farce and its hard-boiled banter—these were among Hecht’s signature modes, and whether or not he fathered these forms, he certainly played a major role in their upbringing.

Hecht was something else: a Jew. An American Jew, in fact, a Jewish-American. As Hoffman shows, he took to the hyphen with all conviction of a convert. (Indeed, his onetime collaborator Herman Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane, said, after one of Hecht’s many explosive episodes involving the question of Judaism, “Six years ago Ben found that he was a Jew, and now he behaves like a six-year-old Jew.” It wasn’t really true, but it captured something about Hecht’s zeal.)

I was going to say that, for me, the Jewish Hecht is the real power of Hoffman’s book. Hecht, you see, aligned himself in the 1940s with the most right-wing forces of the Zionist movement, the Revisionists as they were called. Menachem Begin visited him in Nyack (this was a famous visit of Begin to the US, which Hannah Arendt mobilized fellow intellectuals to protest. Arendt called Begin the leader of “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” That should give you a sense of how far-out Begin was and how adventurous Hecht’s expeditions were.)

Hoffman captures Hecht’s sympathies, and this larger world of right-wing Zionism, with great sensitivity. You see in Hecht’s extravagances—and he got a lot of justified hell for that—a premonition of the Zionist project, what it would mean and come to mean, to an American Jew. It’s a cliche of nationalism studies that the author of a national identity will often come from outside the nation; think Napoleon, Stalin, or even someone like Alexander Hamilton. In Hoffman’s hands, and through Hecht’s outsider eyes, we see what Zionism meant to so many Jews. So much so that Begin spoke at his funeral, and there was a move in 2003, while Ariel Sharon was prime minister, to have Hecht reburied in Jerusalem.

But as I said, I was going to say this, the Jewish Hecht, is the real power of her book. But without giving anything away, Hoffman does something at the end of the book that nearly took my breath away, bringing Hecht’s Judaism back to the question of his filmmaking. Late in life, Hecht wrote a searing and sentimental book about the Kasztner trial in Israel. (No need to dwell on the details, but the trial raised profound questions about the role of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis and the role of those collaborators in the construction of the Israeli state. Arendt takes up the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem.) Hecht was in his element: denouncing the Diasporic Jew, the collaborating Jew, the compromising Jew.

The easy and obvious move would be to mock Hecht, demanding machismo and martyrdom, denouncing compromise and collaboration, from the safety and comfort of his Nyack estate. Hecht wasn’t the first armchair warrior; he wouldn’t be the last.

But Hoffman does something far more interesting:

Ben Hecht, no martyr he, knew a thing or two about compromise—and even if he’d recently bristled on live national television at the mere suggestion that he’d sold out, he had in fact spent his life making deals, hustling, opting for the actual over the ideal, improvising with wile, collaborating, if you will, in the more positive sense of that term. Much of his best work had, in fact, been the product of collaboration—and while whipping off a Hollywood script with an old pal like Lederer or MacArthur, or doctoring a screenplay for Hawks or Hitchcock. Selznick or Zanuck hardly entailed the same crushing ethical concessions as did bargaining for Jewish lives with Nazis during wartime, Hecht himself certainly never aspired to the purity it seems he demanded of the players in this wrenching life-and-death drama. That paradox seemed to land squarely in his blind spot.

Hoffman appropriately holds back here, but it’s a fascinating insight and question she raises about compromise and collaboration: when it produces barbarism and when it yields art.

But there is something much more profoundly subversive at play here, beyond the usual culture/barbarism meditation that we’ve come to expect from writing on the 20th century and Jews. Hoffman also seems to be suggesting, offering, collaboration as the hidden thread of Hecht’s whole life: of his artistry, of his life as Jew and as an American. All of it was compromise, all of it was collaboration, all of it was genius. What else is Hollywood, at its best, if not collaboration and even compromise? The genius was in the compromise, in the collaboration, not in the purity. There’s a sense throughout the book of that kind of miraculous alchemy, where vice becomes  virtue.Brecht, or Adorno, or one of those guys said the mansion of culture is built on dog shit. He, whoever it was, offered that up in a declensionist mode. Hoffman turns that around and serves it up as exaltation.

It’s the kind of question Hecht would have scorned as fancy and highfalutin, yet it’s the kind of question that haunted him throughout his life—drawn as he was to the seamy side of the gangster world, the world of Jewish terrorism, the world of the cynical newspaperman, yet always rousing himself to make great art and tormenting himself for failing to do so (in his head, at least).

I’ve got a piece in The New Yorker—my first—on political conversions. I look at the case of Derek Black, a white nationalist who is no longer a white nationalist, and Max Boot. With the help of Burke, Arendt, Isaac Deutscher, and Daniel Bell, I try and make sense of why it is that you so often see converts from left to right—and why they have such an impact on the right—but don’t often see converts from right to left with nearly the same impact. (Incidentally, that was a topic—converts from right to left—that I wrote about nearly 20 years in Lingua Franca.)

Anyway, here’s a taste:

Derek Black didn’t become a white supremacist. He was born one. His father, Don Black, was a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and the creator of Stormfront, one of the most popular white-nationalist Web sites in the United States. Derek’s mother, Chloe, had previously been married to David Duke, America’s leading neo-Nazi and Derek’s godfather. Smart, articulate, and savvy, Derek co-hosted a radio show with his father, addressed conferences, and wrote articles on the Web. From an early age, he knew how to package racism for a crowd that was warm to the message but uncertain about its implications. He didn’t argue for the supremacy of whites. He said that whites were a group, one of many, that had the right, like other groups, to defend its interests and identity. Races weren’t unequal; they were different. White nationalists were the “true multiculturalists.” He had his dad scrub Stormfront clean of Nazi signs and racial epithets. Press too hard, speak too crudely, you’ll lose people. All things in moderation.

A gifted code-switcher, Derek had the ability—strangely not rare among racist demagogues—to understand and relate to people who weren’t like him. That came in handy in 2010, when he enrolled at the liberal New College, in Sarasota, Florida.

And it goes on. Have a read.

We saw that Brexit movie on HBO last night. God was it dreadful.

Set aside the fetish for elite movers and shakers behind the scenes, the conspiratorial mindset of master manipulators of public opinion. (It’s kind of a weird moment where everyone across the spectrum seems to have their own versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)

What was most grating about the film was how utterly familiar and clichéd was the lead character Dominic Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who was the mastermind behind the Leave campaign.

In Benedict/Cummings, we get—inadvertently, I’m quite convinced: self-importance; failed attempts at oracularity that wind up being platitudinous; incomprehensible scribbling on the white board, meant to signal that we’re in the presence of the political version of John Nash, that resolve on the insertion of a “back” in between “take” and “control”; historical grandiosity that can never quite decide whether Brexit is the most important event since the fall of the Berlin Wall or Alexander the Great’s decision to launch the Persian campaign.

Watching all of this, getting increasingly bored and irritated, I suddenly remembered where I had seen it all before: in the television ramblings of Pat Cadell.

Caddell, for those of you who don’t know or remember, was the pollster impresario behind Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign. He never was really able to repeat that victory again, though he certainly gave it a go with Gary Hart in 1984, Joe Biden in 1988, and Jerry Brown in 1992. But, boy, did he hold on for decades, trying to position himself on TV or elsewhere as the man who held all the keys to the castle.

All the same elements that we see in HBO’s portrayal of Cummings were there in Cadell: the impulse to self-dramatization, the combination of crackpottery and kitsch, and the sheer luck or happenstance of having won one campaign, propelling him, in the mind of his admirers and detractors, to the level of genius.

And at the same time, despite the grandiloquent homages to history and community and destiny, the HBO film gives you no real sense at all of what this guy actually thinks or is about. Just some vague sense of him—as was also true of Cadell—lurching from one cause to the next campaign to the next candidate, always in search of something, something. You do, however, get a much clearer—and, ironically, more poignant—sense of what the maestro behind the Remain campaign thinks and feels. Which may or may not have been deliberate.

I guess it’s just an irresistible conceit of the genre, the man behind the scenes of the political campaign, always reinvent to the wheel.

Speaking of which, the film’s obsession with online data tracking, micro-targeted ads and such: there was a whole spate of this kind of discussion back in the 1980s, just when more localized and computerized forms of marketing and market research were getting going, and how that all was going to completely and utterly transform our politics. In fact, my sister Jessica gave me a book for either my high school or college graduation that was all about this topic. I remember poring over page after page, chapter after chapter, of discussions about how zip codes were destiny, and how all political choices would be determined by this newfound granular knowledge of our consumer choices. The fetish for technology and microscopic knowledge as the grand explainer of politics never ends.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen the film, you can give it a pass.

Imagine you’re a law student today—remembering how Gorsuch was appointed for a seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland; thinking about how Kavanaugh was appointed despite the obvious truth of Christine Blasey Ford’s claims about his attempted assault on her; and anticipating the very real possibility that Trump may get yet a third appointment to replace Ginsburg.

The Supreme Court of your future will consist of a six-person right-wing majority.

Two justices of that majority will forever have the stench of credible charges of sexual assault or sexual harassment hanging over them.

Four justices of that majority will forever be the appointees of presidents who didn’t win the popular vote (or five justices

if you throw in Alito, who was appointed in Bush’s second term, which Bush did win with the popular vote but wouldn’t have won had he not won the electoral vote, with the help of a conservative Supreme Court, in 2000).

Three justices of that majority will forever be the appointees of a president whose victory, many in elite liberal circles of the law believe, was secured with the illegal collusion of Vladmir Putin.

Put that all together and it’s hard for me to see how the law students and budding law professors of this generation aren’t going to view the Supreme Court and the enterprise of constitutional law with a skepticism so jaundiced, it will make the arguments of Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory seem like Thomistic natural law.

An interesting historical parallel arises.

Imagine you’re a progressive law student coming of age between the 1910s and the 1930s. You’re a student of someone like Felix Frankfurter or his ilk, politicized by the labor movement, the Socialist Party, or the Depression to join various radical causes.

You’ve read a lot of legal realism. You come to a view of the Court as not a source of legitimacy but as the bastion of the American ruling class, forever enforcing the dictates and injunctions of capital. And you start casting about for a legal philosophy or theory that would not empower that Court but defang, even strangle, it.

I have to believe we’re in for some version of this from the legal left in the next decade or two: not an effort to rehabilitate the law in more progressive directions but an effort to systematically delegitimize the law and the Court, recognizing to some degree that that has already been accomplished by Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and the right.

It’ll be interesting to watch.

In shul this morning, I came upon this passage from the Talmud: “Everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven.” It’s an arresting thought, on two grounds.

First, we tend to think of omnipotent power as causing fear, even terror. Yet the one thing, the Talmud says, that omnipotent power cannot determine is whether we are afraid of it.

Second, we tend to think of our fear as something we don’t control, as an automatic and instinctual response to some power or threat. Yet here is the Talmud suggesting that everything within us is out of our control—except for our fear.

As it happens, these two claims are similar to the arguments I’ve often tried to make about the politics of fear: that fear in politics does not reflect a simple, automatic, instinctive response to threats; that our sense of what is threatening in politics is mediated through our prior moral and political beliefs; that when it comes to the objects of our political fear, we have choices, our responses are not predetermined.

Fear is a serious constraint on our freedom, but it is also an opportunity for freedom, an occasion to exercise moral and political choice, to make a determination about whether to be afraid or, failing that, to make a determination about how we should respond to the object of our fear, whether to flinch, flee, or fight.

The Supreme Court has always been the scandal of American democracy. How do you justify the power that nine unelected judges—almost all of them, historically, white men—wield in a society that styles itself a democracy?

That scandal reached a peak in the last third of the twentieth century, when a combination of hard-right judicial theorists (Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia among them) and nervous liberals started worrying about what was called “the counter-majoritarian difficulty” or the “counter-majoritarian dilemma.”

The result of that reconsideration of the Court and judicial review was, among other things, the theory of constitutional interpretation that we call originalism. Originalism held that the only justification for the Court reviewing and overruling the decisions of democratically elected legislators was that it was doing so on the basis of the Constitution itself. Not the living Constitution—that is, as a progressive document whose meaning changes over time—but the original Constitution. Because the original Constitution, as a written text, represents the expressed will of the people, enacted in actual words that are binding across time. Counterintuitively, when it comes to the Court, the idea is that it is the cold, dead hand of the past, interpreted through the abstemious and self-effacing modesty of the present, that is most likely to yield the greatest democracy in the future. That, any rate, was the theory, and it came to be adopted by many liberals as well. As the liberal Laurence Tribe, paraphrasing the liberal Ronald Dworkin (paraphrasing either Nixon or Friedman on Keynes), would say in 1998: “We are all originalists now.”

What a difference two decades make. In the now of 2018, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of having two Supreme Court justices—Gorsuch and Kavanaugh—elected by a president who lost the popular vote (that is, does not, on any credible theory of democracy, represent the will of the majority of the people) and confirmed by a group of senators who represent a minority of the people (that is, do not, on any credible theory of democracy, represent the majority of the people). Those two justices—a minority chosen by a minority and confirmed by a minority, with each minority marinating in whiteness, maleness, and wealth—will comprise 40% (or 2/5) of the 5 votes that will be striking down progressive legislation and policies of Congress and the states, legislation and policies reflecting the will of the majority. This is the new frontier of the counter-majoritarian dilemma.

The politically smartest—because it is the truest—answer to this latest iteration of the counter-majoritarian dilemma is to go after all three of the institutions that have come together to create this latest iteration of the scandal of democracy: the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College. We cannot stop merely at criticizing the Supreme Court, packing the Court, calling into question its legitimacy. It is the entire panoply of these three institutions—the Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College, which are baked into the constitutional design of this country—that we must confront.

The principle to mount against that scandal of democracy is simple: one person, one vote. In a democracy, no one’s vote should count for more than any other person’s vote. In the democracy of the future, where the 2/5 Rule of Gorsuch/Kavanaugh shall dominate the polity, it seems like the opposite will be the case. Every rich white man’s vote that stands behind the votes that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will cast on the Supreme Court will carry more weight than that of everyone else.

Mounting this kind of political program against the scandal of democracy—which involves confronting a good deal of the Constitution, not all of it, but a good deal of it—would be radical. I don’t expect the Democrats to do it. It seems like a great task for the socialist left to take up. And very much in keeping with the historical reality of the socialist movement, particularly in Europe. Democratic reform in Europe was won by the socialist movements. Democratizing ancient, sclerotic institutions of the state has always been the project of the socialist left.

The title of Keith Gessen’s new novel is A Terrible Country, but the novel is less about a country than a city: Moscow. Not just Moscow as a city in its own right, though the city is very much a character in the novel, but the experience of Moscow by an American millennial, Andrei Kaplan, a 30-something academic in flight from his failures in Brooklyn, failures of love and work, family and friends. A Terrible Country, in other words, is the anti-Brooklyn novel.

If the Brooklyn of the public imagination is the place where young intellectuals move to make their lives among writers, journalists, academics, and artists, public lives that happen out of doors, in parks and readings and rallies and talks (now in election campaigns, too), Kaplan’s Moscow is the opposite. Everything of interest happens inside. In part by necessity.

For most of the novel, the city is so damn cold. Gessen registers the cold’s many moods. Even spring is haunted by the cold: as the rooftop snows begin melting during the ever so slightly warming days, the sub-zero nights freeze the droplets into murderous icicles, which then fall on the heads of unlucky passersby the next morning.

The cold is one barrier. The vast tracts of Moscow’s thoroughfares—avenues, plazas, ring roads, highways—are another. The entire city seems as if it was dreamed up by Robert Moses in the late stages of his hubris, with no constraining hand of Jane Jacobs.

A master artist of physical desolation, Gessen gives us a city that can’t be lived in public. As the narrator observes near the novel’s end, “The city was closing itself off from itself.” That becomes not only a through line of the novel (even in springtime, even in love, Andrei is constrained by the sprawl) but a symptom of the neoliberal world that we slowly begin to realize Gessen has been sketching for us, without our noticing it. Every road, every sidewalk, every street, courtyard, cab, bus, train, subway—everything that’s out of doors is a conveyance to somewhere else, somewhere inside.

I don’t know of another urban novel that devotes so much of itself to the getting of places. One thinks of A Hazard of New Fortunes, but instead of the Marches’ epic quest to find the perfect home, we have an equally epic quest, rendered in exquisite detail, to get from home to home, place to place. Or Notes from the Underground, where Nevsky Prospect is the setting of the Underground Man’s struggle for public recognition. Gessen offers a wonderful little homage to that famous moment of Dostoevskian confrontation, where the Underground Man confronts his tormentor, a haughty officer who scarcely notices him, only this time the settings are a bar and a hockey rink, and the tormentor is a lowlife without a cause. An urban novel of interiors, A Terrible Country serves as an unexpected comment on not only the St. Petersburg of Dostoevsky but also Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air.

A Terrible Country is the anti-Brooklyn novel in a second sense. Though Andrei develops a circles of friends, and even a girlfriend, the central relationship in the book is between him and his grandmother, with whom he returns to Moscow to live. She’s frail and failing, slowly slipping into dementia, and through his care-taking of her, Andrei becomes a grownup. Capable of not only the greatest gentleness—some of the most tender passages in contemporary fiction have Andrei cooking for his grandmother, walking her to and from the market, shopping for her, and playing anagrams or reading to her—but also terrible betrayal.

It is through his grandmother that Andrew gets drawn out of his claustrophobic world of online teaching, cafe internetting, and the like. It’s telling that the world of this novel opens up in this tiniest of spaces, the grandmother’s apartment. (“Inside that circle,” says the narrator, “and inside the city that the circle had created within the larger city, was a whole other world.”) Gessen renders its window sills, medicine cabinets, even plumbing, with great care. There’s a memorable scene involving a clogged drain that recalls the opening passages of The Wealth of Nations and chapter 15 of Capital: two books about the worlds nested within worlds that is modern capitalism.

But it is the relationship itself, between Andrei and his grandmother, that love across the generations, that is the real motor of the novel, which adds to the sense of its disruptions of the canons of contemporary urban fiction.

There is one sense, however, in which A Terrible Country is not the anti-Brooklyn novel, in which it becomes a novel of something larger than urban matter and anti-matter. And that is the emphasis it places on money. There’s not a bowl of soup that’s purchased, not a bottle of vodka that’s drunk, not a coffee that’s consumed, not a cab ride that’s taken, not an hour on the internet that’s used, that we don’t know the price of. That’s how much of an obsessive theme money is in this novel. It’s been a while since I’ve read a novel of such detailed and deliberate attention to the cost of living, in both senses of the word. Virtually every experience involves a commodity; virtually every experience has a price.

Gessen captures, like few other contemporary writers, the cost of modern life. Whether through his own experience, study, or intuitive sympathy, he seems to know that terrible feeling of material deprivation and anxiety, where the cost of commodities is less a subject of academic abstraction than a real constraint on what we can and cannot do. “She needed to make money,” says Andrei of his girlfriend. “Yulia was trapped.” If Andrei’s love for his grandmother is the motor of the book, money is its gasoline. Once it runs out, the motor stops.

That nexus of finance and freedom, of cash and capability, is a central motif of the novel, making its sense of constraint and grim proportion, of money and measure—so evocative of the nineteenth-century novel—a resonant and necessary new key of contemporary fiction.

It’s going to be a busy fall with lots of talks and presentations. Here’s the schedule. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello!

Tuesday, September 25

5 pm: “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump”

University of Edinburgh (Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History; School of History, Classics, and Archaeology; School of Social and Political Science)

Meadows Lecture Theatre, Doorway 4, Medical School, Teviot Place

Tuesday, October 2

4 pm: “Invisible Man: The Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas’s Jurisprudence”

Rutgers University (Department of History and Raritan)

Alexander Library, 4th Floor Auditorium

169 College Avenue, New Brunswick

Friday, October 5

6 pm:“On Fear and Governance”: A conversation about Euripides’s The Bacchae with director Anne Bogart and poet Monica Youn (followed by a performance of the play)

Brooklyn Academy of Music

BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place

Monday, October 22

4:30 pm: “Invisible Man: The Black Nationalism of Clarence Thomas’s Jurisprudence”

Princeton University (Law and Public Affairs Seminar)

301 Marx Hall

Thursday/Friday, November 1-2

On Clarence Thomas

Symposium on 50 Years Since 1968: The Global and the Local

Brown University: time and place TBA

Monday, November 5

5 pm: “Race Man: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas”

University of Cambridge (Joint Seminar of the Faculties of American History and Political Theory and Intellectual History)

Old Combination Room, Trinity College

Tuesday, November 6

On Der reaktionäre Geist, the German translation of The Reactionary Mind

Munich: time and place TBA

Thursday, November 8

On Der reaktionäre Geist, the German translation of The Reactionary Mind

Berlin: time and place TBA

Wednesday, November 28

12:30 pm: On Clarence Thomas

New York Public Library (Berger Forum)

476 5th Avenue

UPDATE: It turns out that the 11/28 Thomas talk at the NYPL is not for the general public. My apologies.