TLP Weekend Edition (August 24-25, 2024)
What we’re reading, watching, and listening to this weekend.
📖 “30 Years Ago, Two Young Strategists Cracked How to Beat a Guy Like Trump. Are Democrats Ready to Listen?” by Timothy Shenk. This New York Times article revisits the rise of Democratic consultants Mark Penn and Doug Schoen in the Clinton era and makes the case there are lessons—and not just negative ones—to be learned there on how to restore Democrats’ connection to the working class. Certainly debatable but a fascinating read that may make you reconsider your priors. Shenk is also publishing a book this October—Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics?—which focuses on the rivalry between Schoen and strategist Stanley Greenberg. Recommended.
📖 “The Hybrid American Future That Wasn’t,” by David Jager. David Jager is the brother of Sheilah Jager, who had a lengthy relationship with the young Barack Obama. In this fascinating Tablet article, Jager describes their relationship and meditates on Obama’s political rise as heralding, at the time, a “hybrid future” that seems to have gotten away from us. This has been a slow motion tragedy.
Since Obama’s presidency, for all its rootedness in the ideal of a postracial America, racial tensions have markedly intensified. The divisions that seemed to be easing into a new pluralism at the time Obama dated my sister have now been replaced with an increasingly tense polarization. The progressive left swears that this is solely the working of MAGA populism, which they frame as a sinister return of old school white racist nationalism, if not outright fascism. Trump and his followers are deplorable racists—their avowed big-tent colorblindness necessarily being the cover for neo-Nazis and other outright racists who seek to restore the Jim Crow laws of the Old South. Only the progressive wing’s increasingly fragile and splintering views on race and identity, which more than a few argue have spiralled into incoherence, holds out hope for our future.
Despite these arguments, it is hard to avoid the sense that some large part of the polarization that exists is the direct product of the progressive strategy of reemphasizing racial binaries and putting race first in every area of our country’s social, cultural, and institutional life.
📚 The Confluence Trilogy, by Paul McAuley. The greatest science fiction author you’ve never heard of! The entire Confluence trilogy—Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars—is available in a Kindle edition for the low, low price of $4.99. I can’t recommend this highly enough. The trilogy belongs in the pantheon of the very best SF far-future epics.
Confluence—a long, narrow, artificial world, half fertile river valley, half crater-strewn desert. A world beyond the end of human history, served by countless machines, inhabited by 10,000 bloodlines who worship their absent creators, riven by a vast war against heretics.
This is the home of Yama, found as an infant in a white boat on the world's Great River, raised by an obscure bureaucrat in an obscure town in the middle of a ruined necropolis, destined to become a clerk—until the discovery of his singular ancestry. For Yama appears to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the revered architects of Confluence, able to awaken and control the secret machineries of the world.
Pursued by enemies who want to make use of his powers, Yama voyages down the length of the world to search for answers to the mysteries of his origin, and to discover if he is to be the savior of his world, or its nemesis.
📺 Station Eleven, on HBO Max. This well executed if divergent adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s excellent novel of the same name is worth watching over ten episodes. A post-pandemic dystopian show that doesn’t wallow in total despair and offers hope and optimism about the human condition even in bleak times. Theater, art, music, and graphic novels might save us all.
🎸 Left by Soft, by David Kilgour and The Heavy Eights. This sonic gem from Clean founder David Kilgour and his mates is the perfect headphone companion for your weekend stroll or whisky session. The instrumental title track nicely captures the sound of New Zealand indie guitar rock that Kilgour basically invented. Here’s the band playing the song in Dunedin in 2011.
Editor’s note: The Liberal Patriot will be on annual holiday break next week through Labor Day. Publishing will resume on September 3. See you soon and thanks for reading and subscribing!
Very cool. If your readers want an insightful history of rock and roll, about 15 years ago the singer/keyboardist of Vanilla Fudge, Mark Stein, asked me to help him with his autobiography. I said I'd do it on one condition---that we make it a full history of rock since the 60s. He agreed. He has been everywhere and played with almost everyone. See "You Keep Me Hangin' On" by Mark Stein and me.