Esoteric Brezhnevism

  Retrieving quarters from a drawer to do my laundry, I’ll sometimes notice a coin minted in 1992 or 1989 or 1990 and think to myself, “That was a good year” or “Things were still pretty good back then.” The nineties as a whole, which coincided with my adolescence, are actually one of my least favorite decades in some ways; but I retain an affection for the early nineties and late eighties, which for me constitute a micro-era unto itself, with an array of aesthetic flavors and feelings that climax the eighties while also promising something new, yet to fully materialize. Most of my childhood memories of moviegoing are clustered around these years, and there were great movies being released every week back then: Die Hard (1988), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), Parenthood (1989), Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), Cyborg (1989), Dick Tracy (1990), Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Batman Returns (1992) – the output of new and cool distraction...

Meghnad Desai with Bill Clinton There is a growing consciousness among nationalists and even conservatives that the “Left” – those parties or cultural elements that previously defended the interests of the working class – have largely abandoned the proletariat in favor of “woke”, identity-oriented platforms that not only do not serve workers’ interests, but actually further capital’s ends. Neoliberal economist and propagandist Meghnad Desai, formerly of the London School of Economics, provides a useful summary of a major contributing factor to this decades-long trend in his largely boring but occasionally interesting 2002 book Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism . The key to the dismantling of the workers’ state, as he explains, was the abolition of the gold-based monetary system established by the Bretton Woods Agreement: This was a historic moment. Just as the British government was rejecting Keynesian reflationary polic...

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...