Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

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Trump, the Political Order, and Stephen Skowronek

July 16, 2018 /

Let’s start here: there’s something weird about the Trump presidency. He doesn’t seem to fit into a political order.

His supporters find it a good kind of weird: Trump is draining the swamp or shaking up the political establishment. His liberal opponents find it a bad kind of weird: Russian malfeasance and/or Jill Stein voters put Trump in office to wreak havoc on the American political system. The anti-capitalist left, as usual, has a variety of takes. I’ll set the leftist reaction aside for a future post.

What is it about Trump that’s so weird, then? What kind of outfit is Trump running here? Into what political order does Trump fit?

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On Pornography and Its Social Impact

July 9, 2018 /

If you’re familiar with my academic career, you’ll know I’ve written about pornography. But who am I kidding? I’m not famous.

You can find this writing in a book chapter and an article.

Both of these works are broadly accessible to audiences both inside and outside of academic philosophy. The article is a major expansion of the material in the book chapter, and so that’s probably the best place to look.

My perspective on these issues is not exactly abstract. I’m thinking about it from within an ongoing debate over whether and how pornography subordinates, and perhaps oppresses or marginalizes, women. This is a debate conducted largely within academic literature. I’d like to help move it beyond academia.

I recently discovered a blog entry about my article. Someone thought it interesting enough to write about. And so I wanted to reflect on my past work and how I might approach it several years later. It was fun to read the blog entry and get another person’s take on the ‘theory’ I’ve developed.

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mistaken identity

Mistaken Identity

July 2, 2018 /

There’s a big market out there for hot takes and sober literature challenging ‘identity politics.’

Many an ill-conceived book and article has been written on the topic.

I addressed some of this in one of my opening posts by drawing a distinction between identity politics and identitarianism. I still think this is very useful.

But I’ll admit to being a little crotchety on these issues. I’ve never had a high tolerance for nonsense, and whatever tolerance I’ve had in the past is declining. So this isn’t going to be a post about Mark Lilla’s Once and Future Liberal (it’s likely he never was). It isn’t going to be a post about “We are the Left” (they’re mostly a group of liberal or centrist Democrats, not leftists).

This is a post about Mistaken Identity, a book by Asad Haider!

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economic anxiety

Economic Anxiety and Trump’s Base

June 25, 2018 /

The New York Times recently reignited the debate on whether Trump’s base was motivated by something called ‘economic anxiety’ or something else. This something else is variably ‘racial anxiety,’ ‘status anxiety,’ or some other anxiety based on an identity term or sociological term.

The NYT cites status anxiety in the article linked above, while 538 argues for economic anxiety. Different conclusions, same framework.

I think the quick story here is that the social science research underlying these conclusions flows from many nice, tidy distinctions that can be studied empirically. These distinctions facilitate research, but may not map particularly well onto the actual world.

I’m looking at three questions in this post: Who in the world would do something as vile as vote for Trump, or, alternatively, who is most important to Trump’s base? Why would they do such a thing? And how does ‘economic anxiety’, or other forms of anxiety, fit into this picture?

I think we can approach these questions from a few angles.

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