Michael - this was so great, I sent it to my mom. I only send the really good stuff to my mom.
You’ve articulated so much of the angst, frustration, and utter despair I’ve felt since November. It’s maddening. As I continue to be gaslit into questioning my own grasp on reality for my belief in basic human decency, I take great comfort in knowing I’m not alone in this. Thank you.
awww, this is so sweet! I hope she enjoys it. And yeah, so much frustration and dread has built up in my life, and this letter is a very teeny-tiny part of releasing that energy into something hopefully productive... I'm sure I'll keep writing about these things, even though I'd like to return to pieces about book and art as well. I'm thankful you're here
Excellent essay, although I feel the brief mention of Fishman’s essay in The Metropolitan Review misrepresents that piece somewhat — my reading of it, at least, was less as a trad wife call-to-action, and more as an unpacking of a cultural impulse towards fetishization of novelty (for context, I’m approaching this from the perspective of a left-wing/progressive woman who *isn’t* married and *does* appreciate my accrued life experiences)
Oh yeah, I did appreciate how Fishman was attempting to unpack that — I also agree that there’s a weird fetishization of novelty. I think a larger disagreement that i had with that review (and i didn’t mention it in my essay) is that I thought her review was slightly misreading Rooney’s novel. Fishman shares that section where the character Eileen wonders whether she should have properly dated Simon earlier when she was younger, and it sort of presents it as if that was actually something Eileen could have decided herself alone. But when I skimmed back through the book, i was left with the impression that it was really Simon that pushed her away, and that Eileen wanted to be with him but that it wasn’t quite reciprocated.
I think that reading of the book messes with Fishman’s takeaways. If anything, when Eileen is older and (spoiler) her and Simon start to chart a future together, it only seems possible that a relationship could happen because Eileen and Simon independently took their own path, ‘experienced’ life, figured out what they each wanted from prospective romantic partners. So the book felt more ambiguous to me than ‘eileen likely made a mistake not being with him earlier’. If anything, she was only able to truly be with Simon because of those years of discovery and simply living life.
But yeah, I probably overly simplified by take on that book review admittedly. Also i’d really need to give a proper re-read to the novel to figure out what it was precisely about the review that felt like a misreading of Rooney and her stances on relationships…
I appreciate your comment :) it’s good pushback and reframing of what the review potentially was
No that’s a useful reminder of the book’s plot — it’s been a few years since I read it as well, so the Simon-Eileen of it all is a bit fuzzy! I could probably use a proper re-read as well :)
Great essay. One sentence struck me: "Hanania, and others like him, are showing that there is a new and successful lane for being a Nazi; just share the Nazi shit, and then say that they were actually just jokes, or silly attempts at edginess, you stupid liberal idiot." Apparently people in this lane don't know that Mel Brooks made a whole movie on this showing the stupid idiocy of trying to make jokes about Nazis.
Michael, you've got me riled! Struggle is indeed the way back to knowing, the way back to power. Gratitude to you, comrade, for the political clarity in the face of this fascist fuckery.
Thank you for writing this, but also for directing to Miri's piece, which is excellent and really articulates what I have disliked so strongly about TMR and its most prominent collaborators as well as the larger "new Romantic vibeshift" garbage floating around the Stack.
You're very welcome, I try to cite my work and also link to pieces that help fill in the gaps of my own thinking! Her piece is a really phenomenal look at the TMR and the whole 'literature is bad because of big publishing and woke' school of literary criticism that seems to be emerging. I'm not a fan of that mindset... But yes, there's good money in being a little reactionary!
"There is good money in being a little reactionary" -- you've hit upon the (overly hopeful) model for [redacted names I decided not to insult directly] countless other depressingly influential folx (ha ha) on this stupid site.
and! i really recommend reading or rereading Audre Lorde's piece on The Uses of Anger. Which I can send you if you can't find it anywhere. It was what popped into my mind instantly when reading the rage paragraph you wrote.
Michael I'm so late to the party but this was so powerful. I joke a lot these days that I sound like a boomer republican because my reaction to so much grievance is to "buck up." We need it! We need to confront friction and turn the grievances into action. It's not easy to build, but succumbing to your own powerlessness isn't the answer here.
So I meant for this comment to be short: praise the excellent, clear-eyed quality of writing on display here, and offer up some of my own supplemental thoughts, but as I was writing, it really ballooned, so buckle up! And you don’t have to read the whole thing if you don’t want to, lol. Here goes:
This is really excellent and heartfelt writing that gets to the core of what the (western) world feels like right now, but I feel as though it could be taken even further. The lesson of the Holocaust, as seen by those in power, was less “never again” than it was “never again without plausible deniability,” and I think understanding that is crucial to diagnosing and defeating the current strain of Nazism that is on the rise. The Einsatzgruppen and the Ustaše murder gangs were just as integral a part of the Holocaust as the extermination camps, but most people, unless they have really studied the Second World War, have never heard of either, while nearly everyone has heard of Auschwitz. Despite lip service paid by western leaders about “never again,” the USA has effectively replicated Einsatzgruppen and Ustaše genocide techniques, or else armed and trained right wing paramilitary groups and military juntas to replicate these genocide techniques, all across the global south time and time again— in Vietnam, in Angola, in Argentina, in Israel, with the same justification as Nazism (the specter of Bolshevism) being used to justify these actions. Despite this, but these are never framed in history as holocausts, despite differing from THE Holocaust in only one way: a lack of industrialized murder camps.
I don’t mean to downplay the abject horror of the camps. They remain, by virtue of sheer efficiency, a unique evil in history, but they were also devised out of cost-benefit analysis: the Nazi war plan required millions of Jews, Slavs, Queer people and Communists to die, and they came up with a solution that was more time and cost effective than shooting every “undesirable” human in the head.
The lesson taken from the Holocaust by people in power was less that such evil must never occur again, but that if such evil *did* need to occur again, it’s better to do it the slower, less efficient way: with conventional weapons of war, because this way you will always have plausible deniability.
What we are witnessing now is not an aberration so much as it is a century of American-led terror abroad finally coming home to roost— The roots of German Nazism can be found in Africa, specifically in the German-led genocide in Namibia at the turn of the 20th century, another little-known, little-discussed facet of racialized industrial horror. The concept of the Brandmauer? that only ever applied to domestic politics. Germany and the rest of the postwar western powers (especially the United States) have always been happy to collaborate with the far right, so long as they did it elsewhere or otherwise had plausible deniability while doing so (see the FBI collaborating with white nationalists to stamp out Leftists movements in the 60s and 70s, or *insert CIA backed fascist militia or US-Allied fascist Junta of your choice here*). Fascism at its core is western liberal foreign policy applied to the homefront. What we are witnessing right now, sickening as it may be, is an inevitable result of everything the power elite have done since the Holocaust. It is an ugly bill coming due.
No I really love this, and I'm so glad you jumped in here because you're 100% right that I could have taken this further, and it's possible that I should have but, you know, this essay would have quickly become like 8,000 words... Another reader also pointed this out, but De-Nazification did not really work. It was not intended to work! The Western Allies after the war very quickly pivoted from their 'antifascism' to gladly folding the remnants of Nazism back into West Germany and their own countries. Nazism was fundamentally compatible with Western foreign policy, as you showed.
Yes, the chickens are coming home to roost :/ I would like to take what I wrote in this piece and try to push it closer and closer to where you're going. I'm not sure what that looks like, but I would like to peel back the layers...
I admit to not keeping up with the news as much as I should. I like to think that I can have good ideas that are less time sensitive, less swayed by day to day drama. I’ve said that most news isn’t really news to me, that if it doesn’t affect my daily life then it isn’t really news.
But I realize this is a flawed and privileged point of view. For one, just because it has not directly affected my daily life doesn’t mean that it won’t. And, just because it may never affect my daily life doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do something for the sake of those who it will affect, adversely.
So thank you for this kick in the ass: “I would like if we immediately cultivated a culture of friction, tension, strong disagreements, and struggle. Because Christ almighty, will we need it. We have to be messy. We have to break the fascists, and then rebuild the world.”
Yeah it's hard, I also try to tune out of the news (or at least the 24 hour news cycle, which is essentially entertainment), but it's good to be aware of it at least. I'm trying to be aware of what's happening without being completely flooded with information to the point that i'm useless, but it's not always working. The balancing act is so tough!!
I appreciate the voice and tone with which you wrote here, Michael, but I have to ask, then: what is the answer to the titular question? Is it the far right? Or is it simply those who persist - even when all information would point to them being wrong fuckheads - regardless of whose politics it is?
that is definitely the big question... and I promise that I'm not being cheeky and withholding when I say this, but the question is unanswerable in a piece of writing, because all a person can do here is either attempt to read the future (impossible) or give an account of what has already happened. Where the future is being decided now is in places of power (government, business, cultural institutions), and if people want to influence that answer then they have to start making the future happen. That's a question of organizing and showing up in the physical world!
I've been in awe of your writing since being directed to your piece on living the wrong/right life and this one's another beautiful piece that speaks to what's important!!! You're excellent at writing about topics that are often over-intellectualized, drowned in stats, etc., in an emotionally tangible and evocative manner. What makes us do things at the end of the day is relating emotionally to the world and seeing that there are others who care and feel the same way.
It's so, so crazy-making to me that a platform like Substack keeps amplifying likely filthy rich, far-right voices like Bari Weiss and Richard Hanania in a rapidly deteriorating political and cultural environment. I absolutely agree that despite all legitimate gripes one could have with the corporate project of DEI and all its concurrent practices, I'd rather fight that kind of minor demon than what feels like the literal devil hounding our societies. That part reminded me of something Devon Price has written, that it's not a crime to be 'annoying' online or in real life, we should be able to deal productively with 'annoying leftists'! But materially destroying livelihoods and the conditions for human flourishing like far-right movements always do, that is a crime!! It's so sad that seemingly a good number of self-proclaimed leftists keep falling for the bad-faith critique of leftist politics, morphing in the process into some sort of useful idiot for the far-right or just straight up a far-right figurehead.
Germany, on many levels, didn't properly deal with the Third Reich until the 1970s/80s, so in a way, the electoral results seem like a festering, that was never fully addressed, coming to the fore again. Compounded, of course, by decades of economic mismanagement and the Germans' very own version of British managed decline.
I never finished Babylon Berlin, but I remember I stopped watching when they started showing the seeds of Nazism and fascism being sown and people got caught up in the violence. It was very painful to watch, knowing what would eventually happen ten, twenty years down the line, and terrifying, too, not despite but maybe because of hindsight, which actually felt more like premonition or near-contemporary commentary.
This is the loveliest comment, I appreciate it so much. Right, agreed on all accounts about the 'useful idiot' tendency, which seems to be popping up in a lot of different places where people on the Left/center-left are stuck in the 'critique liberals' mode without also pushing against the far-right.
And you are so right about Germany! Like you said, the western allies tried 'de-nazification' after the war in West Germany, but it really didn't work until much later (if at all). I mean, the Americans and the Brits (plus the Soviets) were gladly plucking top former Nazis and folding them into their own administrations, so how could have denazification ever worked if the Nazi bureaucratic structure was essentially allowed to survive? Makes no sense, and like you said we're suffering the consequences of those terrible decisions. It's deeply maddening and frustrating... I appreciate you reading though!!
Another great essay, Michael. I’d vote for you 😉 Please don’t have a nervous breakdown at the thought of running for a political position like I just did.
no one will be surprised that this is what i'm going to hone in on - you said the important stuff well as you do, and i really cannot engage w that trad wife stuff for more than 1 second
it is striking how similar Christian Freidel's moment rn is to Daniel Brühl's in 2010 or whatever. when inglourious basterds came out i was like "am i allowed to have a crush on that guy"
hahahah. there is something about these german boys!!! i was almost one of these pretty german boys, but then i lost the blonde hair to go with my blue eyes when i was 8 :/
Michael - this was so great, I sent it to my mom. I only send the really good stuff to my mom.
You’ve articulated so much of the angst, frustration, and utter despair I’ve felt since November. It’s maddening. As I continue to be gaslit into questioning my own grasp on reality for my belief in basic human decency, I take great comfort in knowing I’m not alone in this. Thank you.
awww, this is so sweet! I hope she enjoys it. And yeah, so much frustration and dread has built up in my life, and this letter is a very teeny-tiny part of releasing that energy into something hopefully productive... I'm sure I'll keep writing about these things, even though I'd like to return to pieces about book and art as well. I'm thankful you're here
“Why these tech guys can’t just run a boring business and not cuddle up with a Nazi is beyond me”
Oh that’s easy! In 2025 platforming and promoting Nazism is big business. These people will always go where the money is.
Not to mention a lot of the tech guys are fascist sympathizers themselves (at best)
Excellent essay, although I feel the brief mention of Fishman’s essay in The Metropolitan Review misrepresents that piece somewhat — my reading of it, at least, was less as a trad wife call-to-action, and more as an unpacking of a cultural impulse towards fetishization of novelty (for context, I’m approaching this from the perspective of a left-wing/progressive woman who *isn’t* married and *does* appreciate my accrued life experiences)
Oh yeah, I did appreciate how Fishman was attempting to unpack that — I also agree that there’s a weird fetishization of novelty. I think a larger disagreement that i had with that review (and i didn’t mention it in my essay) is that I thought her review was slightly misreading Rooney’s novel. Fishman shares that section where the character Eileen wonders whether she should have properly dated Simon earlier when she was younger, and it sort of presents it as if that was actually something Eileen could have decided herself alone. But when I skimmed back through the book, i was left with the impression that it was really Simon that pushed her away, and that Eileen wanted to be with him but that it wasn’t quite reciprocated.
I think that reading of the book messes with Fishman’s takeaways. If anything, when Eileen is older and (spoiler) her and Simon start to chart a future together, it only seems possible that a relationship could happen because Eileen and Simon independently took their own path, ‘experienced’ life, figured out what they each wanted from prospective romantic partners. So the book felt more ambiguous to me than ‘eileen likely made a mistake not being with him earlier’. If anything, she was only able to truly be with Simon because of those years of discovery and simply living life.
But yeah, I probably overly simplified by take on that book review admittedly. Also i’d really need to give a proper re-read to the novel to figure out what it was precisely about the review that felt like a misreading of Rooney and her stances on relationships…
I appreciate your comment :) it’s good pushback and reframing of what the review potentially was
No that’s a useful reminder of the book’s plot — it’s been a few years since I read it as well, so the Simon-Eileen of it all is a bit fuzzy! I could probably use a proper re-read as well :)
if/when i re-read it, i'll let you know! perhaps i'll feel differently about her review afterwards...
Great essay. One sentence struck me: "Hanania, and others like him, are showing that there is a new and successful lane for being a Nazi; just share the Nazi shit, and then say that they were actually just jokes, or silly attempts at edginess, you stupid liberal idiot." Apparently people in this lane don't know that Mel Brooks made a whole movie on this showing the stupid idiocy of trying to make jokes about Nazis.
haha seriously!! Love this comment, makes me want to check that out again...
Michael, you've got me riled! Struggle is indeed the way back to knowing, the way back to power. Gratitude to you, comrade, for the political clarity in the face of this fascist fuckery.
thank you :') solidarity right back to ya
Thank you for writing this, but also for directing to Miri's piece, which is excellent and really articulates what I have disliked so strongly about TMR and its most prominent collaborators as well as the larger "new Romantic vibeshift" garbage floating around the Stack.
You're very welcome, I try to cite my work and also link to pieces that help fill in the gaps of my own thinking! Her piece is a really phenomenal look at the TMR and the whole 'literature is bad because of big publishing and woke' school of literary criticism that seems to be emerging. I'm not a fan of that mindset... But yes, there's good money in being a little reactionary!
"There is good money in being a little reactionary" -- you've hit upon the (overly hopeful) model for [redacted names I decided not to insult directly] countless other depressingly influential folx (ha ha) on this stupid site.
thank you, as always, for this.
and! i really recommend reading or rereading Audre Lorde's piece on The Uses of Anger. Which I can send you if you can't find it anywhere. It was what popped into my mind instantly when reading the rage paragraph you wrote.
I really should finally read that... I'm going to add that to my list. Thanks Laurel :)
You're welcome! It's pretty short, so that helps with the reading~
Michael I'm so late to the party but this was so powerful. I joke a lot these days that I sound like a boomer republican because my reaction to so much grievance is to "buck up." We need it! We need to confront friction and turn the grievances into action. It's not easy to build, but succumbing to your own powerlessness isn't the answer here.
BUCK UP, yes exactly! I love that sentiment. Appreciate you reading, I hope you're doing well all things considered...
So I meant for this comment to be short: praise the excellent, clear-eyed quality of writing on display here, and offer up some of my own supplemental thoughts, but as I was writing, it really ballooned, so buckle up! And you don’t have to read the whole thing if you don’t want to, lol. Here goes:
This is really excellent and heartfelt writing that gets to the core of what the (western) world feels like right now, but I feel as though it could be taken even further. The lesson of the Holocaust, as seen by those in power, was less “never again” than it was “never again without plausible deniability,” and I think understanding that is crucial to diagnosing and defeating the current strain of Nazism that is on the rise. The Einsatzgruppen and the Ustaše murder gangs were just as integral a part of the Holocaust as the extermination camps, but most people, unless they have really studied the Second World War, have never heard of either, while nearly everyone has heard of Auschwitz. Despite lip service paid by western leaders about “never again,” the USA has effectively replicated Einsatzgruppen and Ustaše genocide techniques, or else armed and trained right wing paramilitary groups and military juntas to replicate these genocide techniques, all across the global south time and time again— in Vietnam, in Angola, in Argentina, in Israel, with the same justification as Nazism (the specter of Bolshevism) being used to justify these actions. Despite this, but these are never framed in history as holocausts, despite differing from THE Holocaust in only one way: a lack of industrialized murder camps.
I don’t mean to downplay the abject horror of the camps. They remain, by virtue of sheer efficiency, a unique evil in history, but they were also devised out of cost-benefit analysis: the Nazi war plan required millions of Jews, Slavs, Queer people and Communists to die, and they came up with a solution that was more time and cost effective than shooting every “undesirable” human in the head.
The lesson taken from the Holocaust by people in power was less that such evil must never occur again, but that if such evil *did* need to occur again, it’s better to do it the slower, less efficient way: with conventional weapons of war, because this way you will always have plausible deniability.
What we are witnessing now is not an aberration so much as it is a century of American-led terror abroad finally coming home to roost— The roots of German Nazism can be found in Africa, specifically in the German-led genocide in Namibia at the turn of the 20th century, another little-known, little-discussed facet of racialized industrial horror. The concept of the Brandmauer? that only ever applied to domestic politics. Germany and the rest of the postwar western powers (especially the United States) have always been happy to collaborate with the far right, so long as they did it elsewhere or otherwise had plausible deniability while doing so (see the FBI collaborating with white nationalists to stamp out Leftists movements in the 60s and 70s, or *insert CIA backed fascist militia or US-Allied fascist Junta of your choice here*). Fascism at its core is western liberal foreign policy applied to the homefront. What we are witnessing right now, sickening as it may be, is an inevitable result of everything the power elite have done since the Holocaust. It is an ugly bill coming due.
No I really love this, and I'm so glad you jumped in here because you're 100% right that I could have taken this further, and it's possible that I should have but, you know, this essay would have quickly become like 8,000 words... Another reader also pointed this out, but De-Nazification did not really work. It was not intended to work! The Western Allies after the war very quickly pivoted from their 'antifascism' to gladly folding the remnants of Nazism back into West Germany and their own countries. Nazism was fundamentally compatible with Western foreign policy, as you showed.
Yes, the chickens are coming home to roost :/ I would like to take what I wrote in this piece and try to push it closer and closer to where you're going. I'm not sure what that looks like, but I would like to peel back the layers...
I admit to not keeping up with the news as much as I should. I like to think that I can have good ideas that are less time sensitive, less swayed by day to day drama. I’ve said that most news isn’t really news to me, that if it doesn’t affect my daily life then it isn’t really news.
But I realize this is a flawed and privileged point of view. For one, just because it has not directly affected my daily life doesn’t mean that it won’t. And, just because it may never affect my daily life doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do something for the sake of those who it will affect, adversely.
So thank you for this kick in the ass: “I would like if we immediately cultivated a culture of friction, tension, strong disagreements, and struggle. Because Christ almighty, will we need it. We have to be messy. We have to break the fascists, and then rebuild the world.”
Yeah it's hard, I also try to tune out of the news (or at least the 24 hour news cycle, which is essentially entertainment), but it's good to be aware of it at least. I'm trying to be aware of what's happening without being completely flooded with information to the point that i'm useless, but it's not always working. The balancing act is so tough!!
I appreciate the voice and tone with which you wrote here, Michael, but I have to ask, then: what is the answer to the titular question? Is it the far right? Or is it simply those who persist - even when all information would point to them being wrong fuckheads - regardless of whose politics it is?
that is definitely the big question... and I promise that I'm not being cheeky and withholding when I say this, but the question is unanswerable in a piece of writing, because all a person can do here is either attempt to read the future (impossible) or give an account of what has already happened. Where the future is being decided now is in places of power (government, business, cultural institutions), and if people want to influence that answer then they have to start making the future happen. That's a question of organizing and showing up in the physical world!
I've been in awe of your writing since being directed to your piece on living the wrong/right life and this one's another beautiful piece that speaks to what's important!!! You're excellent at writing about topics that are often over-intellectualized, drowned in stats, etc., in an emotionally tangible and evocative manner. What makes us do things at the end of the day is relating emotionally to the world and seeing that there are others who care and feel the same way.
It's so, so crazy-making to me that a platform like Substack keeps amplifying likely filthy rich, far-right voices like Bari Weiss and Richard Hanania in a rapidly deteriorating political and cultural environment. I absolutely agree that despite all legitimate gripes one could have with the corporate project of DEI and all its concurrent practices, I'd rather fight that kind of minor demon than what feels like the literal devil hounding our societies. That part reminded me of something Devon Price has written, that it's not a crime to be 'annoying' online or in real life, we should be able to deal productively with 'annoying leftists'! But materially destroying livelihoods and the conditions for human flourishing like far-right movements always do, that is a crime!! It's so sad that seemingly a good number of self-proclaimed leftists keep falling for the bad-faith critique of leftist politics, morphing in the process into some sort of useful idiot for the far-right or just straight up a far-right figurehead.
Germany, on many levels, didn't properly deal with the Third Reich until the 1970s/80s, so in a way, the electoral results seem like a festering, that was never fully addressed, coming to the fore again. Compounded, of course, by decades of economic mismanagement and the Germans' very own version of British managed decline.
I never finished Babylon Berlin, but I remember I stopped watching when they started showing the seeds of Nazism and fascism being sown and people got caught up in the violence. It was very painful to watch, knowing what would eventually happen ten, twenty years down the line, and terrifying, too, not despite but maybe because of hindsight, which actually felt more like premonition or near-contemporary commentary.
This is the loveliest comment, I appreciate it so much. Right, agreed on all accounts about the 'useful idiot' tendency, which seems to be popping up in a lot of different places where people on the Left/center-left are stuck in the 'critique liberals' mode without also pushing against the far-right.
And you are so right about Germany! Like you said, the western allies tried 'de-nazification' after the war in West Germany, but it really didn't work until much later (if at all). I mean, the Americans and the Brits (plus the Soviets) were gladly plucking top former Nazis and folding them into their own administrations, so how could have denazification ever worked if the Nazi bureaucratic structure was essentially allowed to survive? Makes no sense, and like you said we're suffering the consequences of those terrible decisions. It's deeply maddening and frustrating... I appreciate you reading though!!
Another great essay, Michael. I’d vote for you 😉 Please don’t have a nervous breakdown at the thought of running for a political position like I just did.
haha you are too nice!! the feeling of running for anything fills me absolute dread... no thank you lol!!
no one will be surprised that this is what i'm going to hone in on - you said the important stuff well as you do, and i really cannot engage w that trad wife stuff for more than 1 second
it is striking how similar Christian Freidel's moment rn is to Daniel Brühl's in 2010 or whatever. when inglourious basterds came out i was like "am i allowed to have a crush on that guy"
hahahah. there is something about these german boys!!! i was almost one of these pretty german boys, but then i lost the blonde hair to go with my blue eyes when i was 8 :/
really really beautiful piece
Rayne!! means the world to me that you said that, thanks so much. Hope you're doing well -- Keep in touch!