Academia

I’ve already said all I plan to (for now) about what’s happening in the US. But if others want to discuss it, here’s an open thread.

Inspired by Chris’s recent photo-blogging post, I thought I’d share a less well known little gem about (the original) Ravenna: not a byzantine church interior full of mosaics, but the submerged crypt of an early medieval Church (the Basilica of San Francesco), populated by goldfish (and the inevitable coins thrown in for good luck).

Incidentally, it’s also the church where Dante Alighieri’s funeral was celebrated (he was exiled in Ravenna).

There’s been a recent fuss in various media arising from a tweet from economist Ben Golub regarding astonishment that economists haven’t “worked through” Smith and Marx. English professor Alex Moskowitz chimed in with a claim that economics can’t be a real discipline because economists don’t know the history of their own discipline. {long and somewhat wonkish response follows}
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Commentators in Europe are understandably agog about Trump’s rumblings that the US might somehow, possibly, annex Greenland at some point in the future. One would think asking Greenlanders how they see their future might have been a better idea. But I’m curious about how we should take these rumblings. Several possibilities suggest themselves, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

1. Trump lives in a fugue state. Today it’s Greenland, tomorrow it will be communists putting red stripes in our toothpaste. Or maybe it’s just a plea for attention. Move on.
2. Trump’s modus operandi is always to make outrageous demands in the hope of getting something much smaller. So perhaps he wants a somewhat bigger US military presence in Greenland, or a stake in its minerals. This is his way of getting there.
3. Trump is seriously worried about Chinese and Russian power. This is another example of his tendency to say the quiet (realist) part out loud: Greenland is going to fall into someone’s orbit; so it had better be ours.
4. Trump has a bad case of dictator envy. He thinks (all facts aside) that it’s unfair Putin and Xi Jinping have empires while he doesn’t.
5. Something else entirely.

Speculate away!

A curious one, this. We were looking through some old postcards (from the 1930s) and came across one with a picture of this church interior. Where’s that? Well, it turns out that it is just off the motorway on our journey between Bristol and Liverpool. A remarkable mosaic interior from the 1920s, modelled on originals in Ravenna. I don’t think it is widely known, and Droitwich isn’t known for anything much. I took a bunch of pictures, so scroll on Flickr for the others.

I’ve avoided post-mortems on the US election disaster for two reasons.

First, they are useless as a guide to the future. The next US election, if there is one [1], will be a referendum on the Trump regime. Campaign strategies that might have gained the Democrats a few percentage points in November 2024 won’t be at all relevant in 2026 or 2028, let alone in the aftermath of a regime collapse further in the future.

Second, by focusing on the marginal shifts between 2020 (or even 2012) and 2024, these post-mortems miss the crucial fact that the divisions in US politics have been more or less constant[2] for the last 30 years, as this graph from the Pew Foundation shows.

Throughout this period the Republican Party has been competitive only because, it has received the consistent support of 60 per cent of white men.

Of course, that wouldn’t be enough without some votes from non-whites and women. But there is no group other than white men where the Republicans have had a reliable majority over the past 30 years.

More precisely the Republicans represent, and depend on, angry white men. I first heard the term “angry white men” in relation to the 1994 mid-term election when the proto-Trump Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to their first House of Representatives majority in 40 years. The 1994 outcome was the culmination of Nixon’s Southern strategy, bringing Southern whites, angry about their loss of social dominance in the Civil Rights ere, into the Republican camp.

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Cabo Verde is not a rich country. To have an idea, the minimum wage is €130 a month and a meal in a restaurant costs around €10. The IMF classifies Cabo Verde as a developing country.

Development has long ceased to be defined in exclusively economic terms. In 1990, a “human development index” was introduced, and other indicators have followed. Yet, there is one dimension still missing from all international comparisons: the moral development of a society. On this dimension, Cabo Verde seems to be among the most advanced. Here’s why. [click to continue…]

Curtis Yarvin, darling authoritarian ideologue of many tech billionaires, is back in the news, along with his deep links to J.D. Vance, via Peter Thiel. It’s no secret that plutocrats tend to be off-the-charts economic libertarians, with extreme hostility even to wildly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which cost them nothing. So, if they were principled thinkers, it would seem logical for them to oppose dictators and wannabe dictators. But no, more and more tech bros are fans of Trump and Yarvin’s very Trumpy brand of authoritarianism. Elon Musk is the most visible tech bro fan; there are many more. What gives?

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A post I wrote last week sparked a lively debate, and one strand of that debate was whether it is appropriate to use the term “privilege” (“cis privilege” in particular) to describe the phenomena I was talking about. I identified mainly two clusters of objections, but please do let me know in the comments if I have overlooked any. [click to continue…]

I knew when my most recent book was assigned an end-of-October publication date that I would spend much of my book tour processing the election and its aftermath. As the title suggests, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop is partly a meditation on the future of feminism.

The book is partly a postmortem on #Girlboss and I had thought that the tour would become an occasion to discuss how feminism has to be, not just about shattering glass ceilings, but about changing the distance between the ceiling and the floor. Of course, the events of November 5 ensured that that is not how it went.

Instead, I have spent the last month and a half speaking with hundreds of feminists about their grief and rage—and wrestled with practical questions of how we move forward.

The last question of my launch at Brooklyn bookstore on the night after the election has stayed with me: why can’t we just give up on white women?

This question was certainly an expression of the justified anger that many women of color, and Black women in particular have been feeling—at the fact that the majority of white women once again voted for Trump. (This is not what the book is about, but it was a major thing folks wanted me to talk about in November.) But 5 bookstore events and 6 podcasts later, I have also learned to see that question as something else: the question of what kind of a future there is for feminism, understood as a movement of women across race and class lines.

To be clear, I see that question as distinct from the question of whether feminism as a set of values—as bell hooks put it commitment to ending sexist oppression—has a future. Speaking with audiences has convinced me that commitment to that value is thriving and spreading. The conversations with Gen Z women and gender expansive people I have had in the last several weeks have also made clear to me that we need that idea more than ever. After all, they are on the receiving end of a rising tide of reactionary masculinity that will no doubt shape the political years to come.

But what is less clear is that the way to achieve those values looks like the movement many of us associate with feminism. One thing I have realized in retrospect that some of the examples in the positive section of my book are actually of women and gender expansive people applying a gender lens within movements focused on racial or economic issues. In a recent piece in Teen Vogue, Olufemi Taiwo even reads Faux Feminism as a book about how to achieve feminist aims through movements that may not be legible as feminist, such as domestic worker movements.

On the other hand, some of the movements I take as examples for the feminist future in the book are movements that began as movements focused on the traditional “feminist” issues that cut across other social fault lines, such as sexual violence. One of these is Ni Una Menos in Argentina. One of the most interesting things about that particular movement is that it has created a sustained alliance with labor, partly through making claims about women as a group—most notably, the slogan “all women are workers” discussed by Luci Cavallero and Veronica Gago.

I don’t have the answers about the future of feminism as a movement—and I don’t think anyone can, because so much depends on how we organize in the coming years—but it is certainly a question of this moment.