Esoteric Brezhnevism

Many years ago – sufficiently long ago that it was back when watching a VHS tape just happened to be the way a guy experienced video content if he hadn’t bought a DVD player yet, rather than it being an exercise in hipster consumerist nostalgia – I remember borrowing a cassette of a 1978 documentary, Blitzkrieg Bop , which profiles the “punk cult” that emerged around the Ramones and the CBGB scene in New York during the mid-to-late 70s. I’ve always remembered the corny tone of the narration and the hilarity of Village Voice journalist Robert Christgau proclaiming punk rock “very dangerous. It could lead to fascism. All of that is really true. No, you laugh,” he addresses those who would scoff. “All of that is really true. Yes, there is – there is an extraordinarily dangerous energy that these people are trying to unleash. How much of it there is in this country remains to be seen.” He pronounces punk “productive”, however, to the extent that it redirects this dangerous ener...

Who's afraid of Lightnin' Hopkins? Ever since Richard Spencer popularized the concept of the ethnostate within the Alt-Right, corporate media outlets have used the not-so-novel term as a scare word to associate white nationalism with “ethnic cleansing” and visions of an America plunged into chaos and terrorist violence. The reality, however, is that the ethnostate is a specter as old as civilization itself – and one that has always haunted the United States, regardless of whether it ever fully manifested itself as a formal reality. Discussions of the partition of the United States into ethnic zones have a long history in America, and perhaps the greatest tragedy of the American experience is that the can has been kicked down the road for so many years – centuries even – with talk of partition increasingly being relegated to the sphere of marginal neo-Confederate militia kookiness, the prospects seemingly less and less likely as the country’s population becomes ...

Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy (1932-2009) was, depending upon whom you might ask, either “The Lion of the Senate”, champion of the common man and an inspirational symbol of perseverance in the face of familial tragedy, or one of the most reviled politicians in the history of the United States. For run-of-the-mill conservatives, Kennedy was just an inveterate big-government liberal and a drunkard whose principal claims to noteworthiness were his last name and the fact that he had fled the scene of the drunk driving accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick in 1969. “But the Kennedy that the right both demonized for being a liberal icon and praised [after his death] for his willingness to ‘reach across the aisle’ was one and the same,” writes Lance Selfa. “And the media punditocracy’s assessment of him – a doctrinaire liberal turned bipartisan dealmaker – says a lot about what they consider the most important part of his legacy.” For Selfa, Kennedy’s career “is a...