TLP Weekend Edition (January 4-5, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
📖 “Here’s How Economic Populism Can Win,” by Jared Abbott, Dustin Guastella, and Sean Mason. In Jacobin, TLP friends from the Center for Working-Class Politics lay out a solid argument for how Democrats can reconfigure themselves to better align with working-class voters by confronting both the economic agenda of the super wealthy and “liberal cultural elitism.” They take issue with some of our recent posts on the matter, but we don’t mind. Provocative arguments all around.
📊 “What the ‘year of democracy’ taught us, in 6 charts,” by John Burn-Murdoch. In the Financial Times, data journalist John Burn-Murdoch offers up several interesting graphics showing trends from the “one and a half billion ballots cast across 73 countries” in 2024. Among the findings:
The incumbent in every one of the 12 developed western countries that held national elections in 2024 lost vote share at the polls, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of modern democracy. In Asia, even the hegemonic governments of India and Japan were not spared the ill wind.
📕 Storm of Steel, by Ernst Junger. Possibly the greatest book about World War I and maybe even the single best war memoir. As leftist writer André Gide wrote in 1942: "Ernst Junger's book on the 1914 War, Storm of Steel, is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith."
🎞️ The Clock, by Christian Marclay. This remarkable 24-hour film pieces together 100 years of cinematic history in a connected stream of movie and television bits tied to the minutes in a day.
James Bond checks his watch at 12:20 a.m.; Meryl Streep turns off an alarm clock at 6:30 a.m.; a pocket watch ticks at 11:53 a.m. as the Titanic departs. With each clip synchronized to the local time, The Clock collapses the fictional time presented on screen with the actual time of each passing minute. The work is both a cinematic tour-de-force and a functioning timepiece.
Building on his background as a musician in Boston and New York’s underground scenes of the late 1970s and 1980s, Marclay has for five decades combined visual and sonic fragments to explore the complex relationships between image and sound.
Playing now through February 17 at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. The exhibit is free with a reservation and a pass to the museum itself. We just saw part of the noon hour of the film and found it splendid. Check it out if you can!
🎸 The 8 Nights of Hanukkah, played by Yo La Tengo. For more than 20 years now, Yo La Tengo has been playing all eight nights of Hanukkah, first at the sadly closed Maxwell’s in Hoboken and now at the Bowery Ballroom in New York. The run includes no repeated songs, surprise opening bands and comedians, guest musicians, and a ton of cool covers of everyone from Randy Newman and Carole King to Black Flag and the Ramones. All ticket and merchandise proceeds go to different charities. TLP attended the final night this past New Year’s Day and got to hear a blistering version of “The Evil That Men Do” plus see Ira Kaplan’s mom close out the show with “My Little Corner of the World.”
The Jacobin article was interesting. Mostly correct but a couple of criticisms. They suffer from the delusion that the billionaires are on the Right. Many more, of the visible ones at least, lean Left. Bill Gates is probably the archetype of the " the cartoonishly villainous superrich" that they seem to think are Republicans. Every day he looks more and more like a Bond villain. And he is not the only one. I could list them but you know the names. This is especially pronounced among the heirs of the founding generation. There was some movement toward the Right in 2024 but it remains to be seen how durable that will be. There was already the H1B dustup before Trump was even in office.
Second thing the Democrats must do which seems to be lost on Jacobin writers is to distinguish between private sector unions and public sector ones. There is decent evidence that private sector unions have aided the working class, at least until they overreached and drove business abroad. Public sector unions have contributed to the immiseration of the working class both by excessive taxation and by maleducation of their children. Get your inner FDR on and oppose public sector unionization.
The Financial Times article was pretty obvious. The Establishment has failed and the governing parties are pretty much the definition of the Establishment. In the West, this failure is defined by the Green lunacy, the COVID overreach, immigration chaos, the forever wars (fought by the working class) and the various perversions supported by the Establishment.
GREAT post.