I'm not very familiar with the Drift, but I found n+1 to be mostly an intellectual ground zero for a generation of rich, privileged Brooklynites from Ivy League schools that gentrified that once-vibrant borough to insane smithereens and simultaneously created a "ideologically pure" political mindhive that ironically let themselves off the hook for offenses they were most guilty of, but loved ferociously, heinously calling everyone else out on. This group simultaneously near-destroyed all American subcultures and countercultures, and then moved on to infiltrate and destroy old-world cultural institutions throughout New York, and made a mockery of left spaces, who are now all totally run by smug yuppies from Brooklyn's laptop community. These are the people who think they're qualified to debate Adolph Reed on race and have become intrinsically anti-working class (and reactionary and puritan when you get down to it). They've made leftism and liberalism (and maybe even the idea of "culture") a dirty word for most working and middle class people. These are probably the worst people in recent US history. And I say that as someone who knows, and mostly likes on a human level, a lot of those people, and it makes me sad to see what they've devolved into on Twitter these last few years.
As far as the ignorant and continuing attacks against people who I'd actually consider on the actual left-liberal side of politics - but not going for some fake, dishonest purity - like Taibbi and Kirn, whose weekly podcast is full of truth, wisdom, warmth, humor, alongside a deep, profound literary knowledge - it's par for the course for rotten schmucks who invaded and destroyed New York's now-worst borough. They can't handle Taibbi and Kirn's honesty, and any criticism of - and especially bad news about - the new, post-liberal, post-left Democrats because it implicates them wholesale. I'd also argue that Anna Khachiyan has become one of New York's most important cultural commentators, because she sees through that empty cohort and knows how to deflate them thoroughly in a few sharp words, and she's turned archness into a high art form.
People should ask themselves why they're more mad about gentle, humorous and honest commentary from free-thinking liberal, literary types than actual conservatives? And what happened to open discourse and discussion and the exchange of ideas? Ten years ago Taibbi, Kirn and Khachiyan would have been NYC's intellectual heroes, and while they certainly are to the non-bodysnatched, Brooklyn wants to scare you away from even knowing what they say. (Even the Village Voice would be considered forbidden contraband now. We could certainly use a new Nat Hentoff, who'd also be considered dangerously "problematic" now.)
The Democratic Party is almost every way is indistinguishable from Bush2 era GOP.
Liz Cheney and David Drum are resistance heroes. Pelosi campaigned for a pro-gun, anti-abortion dufus (Cuellar) against Jessica Cisernos, who supports fun control and abortion. Bill Clinton passed NAFTA, gutting our manufacturing base for elite profits, when GHWB couldn't.
Obama continues Bush2 bailouts without pause and ignored his mandate to put those bastards in jail, but grovelled before them instead.
I have been complaining about this since Clinton gave the eulogy for Richard Nixon, saying ol' Tricky Dick was just misunderstood.
Kirn's Lost in the Meritocracy was one of my favourite reads of the past couple of years. The book really delves into the mindset of the modern-day literary/intellectual social climber that Kirn so refreshingly is honest about. To dismiss him as some kind of shallow political parrot because you disagree with his contemporary views is childish.
Thank you Ross! I love Walter Kirn and find him to be super smart and very much an old school liberal/libertarian type - maybe like Kurt Vonnegut. His podcast with Matt Taibbi is terrific and the last part always talks about a piece of literature that they both choose. Last week's choice was The Metamorphosis. Great discussion!
To admit that there are liberals who disagree with wokery is too inconvenient to their positioning - easier to pretend everyone who disagrees with them is "right wing," "far right," "white supremacist," "misogynist," etc. These people are simpletons who think in juvenile Manichean dichotomies.
It was easier when they had absolute hegemony over the center left media but Substack has upended the apple cart, thank god.
Knowing much less about Kirn than the author I still appreciate this article. Something began to happen around 2015-living outside of the USA the last few years it's even more obvious to me when I visit-you're either liberal/left all the way down the line or you're a fascist. It's a bit terrifying. An 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' like effect when friends of mine perform it and I guess easier for those of us on the old school or socialist, materialist (I won't get out of bed for anything less than Single Payer?), actually paying attention or whatever the fuck you want to call it left to see. Ross good as always.
It was pretty surreal watching Matt Taibbi be interrogated by Danial Sachs Goldman (yes, that is his real name) and (now as it turns out) Jeffrey Epstein associate and benefactee Stacey Plaskett and people side with the oligarch and sex pest enablers.
Great post. I always appreciate your insight into Ellis’s written work and was happy to read your support and admiration for Walter Kirn as well.
Perhaps most relevant is the recognition you note of modern political criticism “implying [Kirn] has little agency of his own.” Ellis and Kirn have a unique perspective that is nuanced and sometimes contradictory. So should we all.
I would be very interested in hearing you expand on how the lack of agency way of modern thinking has permeated much liberal and progressive thought across a number of social issues.
I think in general each side (conservative and left) makes the mistake of assuming people have little agency. Certainly there's a pathology on the left. In general, people struggle to imagine there are others out there who think very differently than they do!
kirn's twitter output is nothing but 65IQ boomer vagueposting dipshittery like "***They*** won't ALLOW you to say the N-WORD (free speech)... but go ahead and have another experimental mRNA injection!!!"
maybe he was once a passable writer, many years ago, but these days he has terminal brain worms.
yeah it's not like his public twitter account is littered with exactly that type of boomer cringe. nah, don't check for yourself, just get mad based on nothing but your own assumptions.
Just checking in to see if you could find one single, solitary tweet to back up your bullshit.
I can't tell you how surprised I am that you can't. I totally could not have predicted this. Who would have possibly thought that you were exactly the kind of person this article was written to criticize?
Adults know that they have to make their own points, and not demand people go looking for silly bullshit that doesn't exist because they can't do it themselves.
Looking forward to you producing that particular tweet. I'm sure it's going to be everything you said it was. You seem like a serious person that serious people take seriously.
This is a smart piece of criticism, and I thank you for making it.
Honestly, I've been disappointed by a lot (though not all) of The Drift's writing, even though I instinctively identify myself with its milieu (the identity politics-focused left-liberal elite - and yes, I'm part of what another commenter called the "rich, privileged Brooklynites from Ivy League"). Do you have any advice for someone coming from that perspective to engage with ideas that argue against my purview? Someone who wants to take them seriously, but also argue against them and hopefully convince some people to my side?
My advice would be, in general, to just engage with them and try to understand why someone would believe something very different than what you believe. You can be empathetic to arguments while deconstructing them. It's good to debate, and this very weird 2010s left-liberal opposition to debate (don't platform the bad guys!!!) was always very dumb to me and bound to backfire. William F. Buckley was happy to go to toe-to-toe with James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg, and we were all better for it. The intellectual culture was healthier then. Sometimes, too, you have to recognize you'll never convince someone entirely. But your only hope to persuade is to make the effort in the first place, not retreat into a silo.
Right on. Discussion, debate, respect, variety, intellectualism, the richness of difference!
The "rich (post-left), privileged Brooklynites from Ivy League school" type that thinks only engaging with others from their cohort is acceptable, and only within the narrowest of possible parameters, have created this absurd, untenable, intellectual quagmire that we're in. (Not to mention being responsible for wide swaths of Brooklyn looking like Phoenix or Houston — Anywheresville, USA.)
--
"At bottom, identity politics rests on problematic ideas of political authenticity and representation. These derive from the faulty premise that membership in a group gives access to shared perspective and an intuitive understanding of the group's collective interests. This leads to two related beliefs that are wrong-headed and politically counterproductive: that only a group member can know or articulate the interests of the group, and that any group member can do so automatically by virtue of his or her identity." - Adolph Reed
I'm not very familiar with the Drift, but I found n+1 to be mostly an intellectual ground zero for a generation of rich, privileged Brooklynites from Ivy League schools that gentrified that once-vibrant borough to insane smithereens and simultaneously created a "ideologically pure" political mindhive that ironically let themselves off the hook for offenses they were most guilty of, but loved ferociously, heinously calling everyone else out on. This group simultaneously near-destroyed all American subcultures and countercultures, and then moved on to infiltrate and destroy old-world cultural institutions throughout New York, and made a mockery of left spaces, who are now all totally run by smug yuppies from Brooklyn's laptop community. These are the people who think they're qualified to debate Adolph Reed on race and have become intrinsically anti-working class (and reactionary and puritan when you get down to it). They've made leftism and liberalism (and maybe even the idea of "culture") a dirty word for most working and middle class people. These are probably the worst people in recent US history. And I say that as someone who knows, and mostly likes on a human level, a lot of those people, and it makes me sad to see what they've devolved into on Twitter these last few years.
As far as the ignorant and continuing attacks against people who I'd actually consider on the actual left-liberal side of politics - but not going for some fake, dishonest purity - like Taibbi and Kirn, whose weekly podcast is full of truth, wisdom, warmth, humor, alongside a deep, profound literary knowledge - it's par for the course for rotten schmucks who invaded and destroyed New York's now-worst borough. They can't handle Taibbi and Kirn's honesty, and any criticism of - and especially bad news about - the new, post-liberal, post-left Democrats because it implicates them wholesale. I'd also argue that Anna Khachiyan has become one of New York's most important cultural commentators, because she sees through that empty cohort and knows how to deflate them thoroughly in a few sharp words, and she's turned archness into a high art form.
People should ask themselves why they're more mad about gentle, humorous and honest commentary from free-thinking liberal, literary types than actual conservatives? And what happened to open discourse and discussion and the exchange of ideas? Ten years ago Taibbi, Kirn and Khachiyan would have been NYC's intellectual heroes, and while they certainly are to the non-bodysnatched, Brooklyn wants to scare you away from even knowing what they say. (Even the Village Voice would be considered forbidden contraband now. We could certainly use a new Nat Hentoff, who'd also be considered dangerously "problematic" now.)
The Democratic Party is almost every way is indistinguishable from Bush2 era GOP.
Liz Cheney and David Drum are resistance heroes. Pelosi campaigned for a pro-gun, anti-abortion dufus (Cuellar) against Jessica Cisernos, who supports fun control and abortion. Bill Clinton passed NAFTA, gutting our manufacturing base for elite profits, when GHWB couldn't.
Obama continues Bush2 bailouts without pause and ignored his mandate to put those bastards in jail, but grovelled before them instead.
I have been complaining about this since Clinton gave the eulogy for Richard Nixon, saying ol' Tricky Dick was just misunderstood.
Kirn's Lost in the Meritocracy was one of my favourite reads of the past couple of years. The book really delves into the mindset of the modern-day literary/intellectual social climber that Kirn so refreshingly is honest about. To dismiss him as some kind of shallow political parrot because you disagree with his contemporary views is childish.
The first thing I ever wrote for my Substack a few months ago was partially about Kirn's book: https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/the-dorky-social-climbers-of-the
Thank you Ross! I love Walter Kirn and find him to be super smart and very much an old school liberal/libertarian type - maybe like Kurt Vonnegut. His podcast with Matt Taibbi is terrific and the last part always talks about a piece of literature that they both choose. Last week's choice was The Metamorphosis. Great discussion!
Yes, it's the best podcast going. Everyone should listen to it!
To admit that there are liberals who disagree with wokery is too inconvenient to their positioning - easier to pretend everyone who disagrees with them is "right wing," "far right," "white supremacist," "misogynist," etc. These people are simpletons who think in juvenile Manichean dichotomies.
It was easier when they had absolute hegemony over the center left media but Substack has upended the apple cart, thank god.
Knowing much less about Kirn than the author I still appreciate this article. Something began to happen around 2015-living outside of the USA the last few years it's even more obvious to me when I visit-you're either liberal/left all the way down the line or you're a fascist. It's a bit terrifying. An 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' like effect when friends of mine perform it and I guess easier for those of us on the old school or socialist, materialist (I won't get out of bed for anything less than Single Payer?), actually paying attention or whatever the fuck you want to call it left to see. Ross good as always.
It was pretty surreal watching Matt Taibbi be interrogated by Danial Sachs Goldman (yes, that is his real name) and (now as it turns out) Jeffrey Epstein associate and benefactee Stacey Plaskett and people side with the oligarch and sex pest enablers.
Great post. I always appreciate your insight into Ellis’s written work and was happy to read your support and admiration for Walter Kirn as well.
Perhaps most relevant is the recognition you note of modern political criticism “implying [Kirn] has little agency of his own.” Ellis and Kirn have a unique perspective that is nuanced and sometimes contradictory. So should we all.
I would be very interested in hearing you expand on how the lack of agency way of modern thinking has permeated much liberal and progressive thought across a number of social issues.
I think in general each side (conservative and left) makes the mistake of assuming people have little agency. Certainly there's a pathology on the left. In general, people struggle to imagine there are others out there who think very differently than they do!
kirn's twitter output is nothing but 65IQ boomer vagueposting dipshittery like "***They*** won't ALLOW you to say the N-WORD (free speech)... but go ahead and have another experimental mRNA injection!!!"
maybe he was once a passable writer, many years ago, but these days he has terminal brain worms.
Yeah, where did you get that quote from again?
I mean, it's not like you would make something up like that, right?
Why, if that was the case, that would mean you are exactly the kind of idiot Barkan is talking about.
yeah it's not like his public twitter account is littered with exactly that type of boomer cringe. nah, don't check for yourself, just get mad based on nothing but your own assumptions.
Just checking in to see if you could find one single, solitary tweet to back up your bullshit.
I can't tell you how surprised I am that you can't. I totally could not have predicted this. Who would have possibly thought that you were exactly the kind of person this article was written to criticize?
Shocked! Shocked I say!
took me less than 30 secs of scrolling down kirn's timeline to find a tweet fully as retarded as my example lmao .lol
And yet you don't post the link here.
Almost like you're totally full of shit.
and yet you don't go look at kirn's account yourself. almost like you have no interest in forming an opinion based on facts.
Oh, and stay classy.
Adults know that they have to make their own points, and not demand people go looking for silly bullshit that doesn't exist because they can't do it themselves.
Looking forward to you producing that particular tweet. I'm sure it's going to be everything you said it was. You seem like a serious person that serious people take seriously.
Fair and firm analysis. A well timed column.
This is a smart piece of criticism, and I thank you for making it.
Honestly, I've been disappointed by a lot (though not all) of The Drift's writing, even though I instinctively identify myself with its milieu (the identity politics-focused left-liberal elite - and yes, I'm part of what another commenter called the "rich, privileged Brooklynites from Ivy League"). Do you have any advice for someone coming from that perspective to engage with ideas that argue against my purview? Someone who wants to take them seriously, but also argue against them and hopefully convince some people to my side?
My advice would be, in general, to just engage with them and try to understand why someone would believe something very different than what you believe. You can be empathetic to arguments while deconstructing them. It's good to debate, and this very weird 2010s left-liberal opposition to debate (don't platform the bad guys!!!) was always very dumb to me and bound to backfire. William F. Buckley was happy to go to toe-to-toe with James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg, and we were all better for it. The intellectual culture was healthier then. Sometimes, too, you have to recognize you'll never convince someone entirely. But your only hope to persuade is to make the effort in the first place, not retreat into a silo.
Right on. Discussion, debate, respect, variety, intellectualism, the richness of difference!
The "rich (post-left), privileged Brooklynites from Ivy League school" type that thinks only engaging with others from their cohort is acceptable, and only within the narrowest of possible parameters, have created this absurd, untenable, intellectual quagmire that we're in. (Not to mention being responsible for wide swaths of Brooklyn looking like Phoenix or Houston — Anywheresville, USA.)
--
"At bottom, identity politics rests on problematic ideas of political authenticity and representation. These derive from the faulty premise that membership in a group gives access to shared perspective and an intuitive understanding of the group's collective interests. This leads to two related beliefs that are wrong-headed and politically counterproductive: that only a group member can know or articulate the interests of the group, and that any group member can do so automatically by virtue of his or her identity." - Adolph Reed
"Discussion, debate, respect, variety, intellectualism, the richness of difference!"
All things that are loathed and despised by the pseudo Left.
Fine analysis.
Agreed. Thanks for the response, Ross.