TLP Weekend Edition (November 9-10, 2024)

What we're reading and checking out this weekend.

A view of Wigan Pier, made famous in The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell. Check out a nice review of the book by Musa al-Gharbi in this week’s recommendations. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

📖 “American Industry Must Rise Again,” by Julius Krein. On Unherd, American Affairs editor Julius Krein offers a brilliant analysis of the contradictions of contemporary industrial policy in our country. Everybody seems to be for industrial policy these days but few have really thought much about it and how to make it successful. Krein is a supporter of the idea but his analysis will challenge many of the facile assumptions made by advocates. Good industrial policy is hard and you will learn much about how hard by reading this article.

📊 "Understanding America in 2024: Hopes, Fears, and the Connections That Shape Community Perceptions," by Dante Chinni and Ari Pinkus. The American Communities Project, an awesome venture out of Michigan State University, classifies every county in the U.S. with a "community type" with the goal of better understanding people from different areas. In this piece, Chinni and Pinkus examine the diverse array of attitudes that Americans have about the election, including where people find sources of hope and optimism as well as their fears and concerns for the country. Take a look at their map and see how people from your community are thinking about the state of things.

📰 "Millions of Movers Reveal American Polarization in Action," by Ronda Kaysen and Ethan Singer. The New York Times last week released an interesting analysis of migration trends since the COVID pandemic in 2020, which reveals an America that is continuing to self-sort—if often unconsciously—by politics and culture. The authors paint this portrait with stunning levels of visual detail showing that many people from politically mixed communities have in the past few years moved to areas of the country in which there are more people who share their political views. They take care to note that shared politics isn't necessarily the main driver of these moves, but it is nonetheless a byproduct that has increasingly helped create more ideologically homogeneous communities.

📖 “Book Review: The Road to Wigan Pier,” by Musa al-Gharbi. In his Symbolic Capital(ism) newsletter, Musa al-Gharbi writes an extensive review of George Orwell’s neglected classic, The Road to Wigan Pier. He highlights how Orwell’s book was based on his travels to working-class towns in England in the mid-30s, where he stayed in working-class hotels and exclusively talked to working-class people. Al-Gharbi notes how Orwell draws out the contrast between the outlook of these working-class people and that of the left-wing professionals who fashionably identified as socialists (it was sort of the “wokeness” of the time). He sums of the lessons of the book, which have a great deal of purchase in the current moment:

Many of Orwell’s peers also railed against fascism. However, he argued, their behaviors did not seem to reflect a sincere commitment to preventing its flourishing. Most narcissistically focused on the left, often spending most of their political efforts on internecine squabbles and status competitions rather than reaching out to persuadable people in a manner that those people find persuasive, accessible or compelling…

Despite expressed terror about fascism, most socialists, it seemed to him, could not be troubled to exert meaningful effort to understand the appeal of fascism (in an accurate and non-prejudicial way)—nor were they willing to seriously explore why so many find their own movement distasteful. Instead, they engaged in self-serving narratives about the deficits and pathologies of “those people” who aren’t already on board, while taking part in indulgent symbolic politics that accomplished nothing positive “in the world” for the genuinely vulnerable, marginalized or disadvantaged in society—but which did tend to alienate the very people who needed to be integrated into the movement…

The path forward, Orwell suggested, is for social justice activists to abandon their snobbishness and parochialism, their moral grandstanding, their inclination towards abstraction over practice, their insistence upon off-putting eccentricity, and their tendencies to surveil, micromanage, and paternalize others—to focus on what’s essential and important—in order to build a broad-based coalition that addresses people’s material concerns, yes, but not at the expense of their “ideal interests” (to borrow a concept from Weber). However, it was unclear to Orwell whether social justice activists actually cared about their professed causes enough to do what must be done in order to achieve their expressed ends.

🎶 “Nine Predictions for the Future of the Music Business”, by Ted Gioia. In his Substack newsletter, The Honest Broker, Gioia, one of our sharpest cultural critics, who is enormously well-informed about the music business has, amazingly, good news: “I’m going to surprise you today. I see a happier future for our music culture. The new golden age might not arrive tomorrow or next month, or even next year. But if I take a long enough time horizon, the trends are encouraging.”

Here’s one prediction, #6 on his list:

Boring, passively-consumed music won’t disappear, but all the excitement will be elsewhere.

Spotify will continue to churn out formula-driven playlists, padded with generic AI content. If you’re looking for “Ambient Music for Sleeping” or “Electronica for Reading” or other aural ooze, they will be your go-to source.

And the private equity firms and major labels who bought the rights to old songs will continue to push them everywhere. You will hear dead rock stars on TV commercials for detergent and toothpaste.

Yawn.

The algorithmic sludge will flow 24/7, but this won’t be the source of energy and excitement in our music culture. The more the bosses try to turn everything into a formula, the more they ensure their own irrelevance.

Let’s hope he’s right!