My latest: an essay on my teacher Carey McWilliams’s great (in both senses) book The Idea of Fraternity in America.

“Pushed to the edges of American life, fraternity is not, after all, easy to repress: ‘What has been eclipsed may reemerge.’ If old models of community and connection fade, fraternity can appear in new guises and through new voices. Fraternity’s discontinuous story and political marginality…gives rise to a certain kind of hope[:] fraternity’s friends, aiming not to dominate but to endure, maybe even to endure joyfully, can always find modest and worthwhile work to do.”

Recent thoughts about enchantment and disenchantment from two writers who are always worth reading:

https://blog.ayjay.org/dark-enchantment/

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-world-is-not-enchanted-youre

As did those of 1824, the 2024 elections are revealing the aching need for political organizations capable of linking citizens both to the constitutional order and, more importantly, to one another.

We are waiting for another – doubtless very different – Martin van Buren.

“Elections are at most the tip of the political iceberg. They simplify and organize opinion, and under ordinary circumstances they provide an unambiguous outcome, but at the price of obscuring the existential variety of political experience and opinion…The meaning of an election lies in the relation between electoral quantities and human qualities, convention and nature. Elections, in other words, are occasions for narration, and the need to tell their stories rightly poses a decisive test for our political life and art.” (McWilliams, The Politics of Disappointment)

When Tim Walz says “mind your own damn business,” I think he’s speaking about forbearance, not indifference; he’s suggesting a community-tending ethic of not meddling, of mutual care with a light touch. This is tricky: lack of solidarity can be mistaken for lack of meddling. Still, it’s promising: he’s inviting Democrats to consider a public philosophy more substantive than “the right to choose” (which means indifference).

Twenty years ago, you could find a sentence like this in a DSA publication: “There is one moral value about which there is an honest difference of opinion on the left, especially on the religious left, and that is the issue of abortion.”

http://religioussocialism.com/pdf/2004.tumn.pdf

Wendell Berry (from Sabbaths 1994, VII, with some elisions):

​

I would not​ have been

an essayist except that I

​have been bewildered and afraid​

​

Wilson Carey McWilliams on SDS, but as if explaining what happened to DSA over the past few years:

“The old understandings” in DSA were perhaps never as clear as I wish they had been. But there was at least a culture of resisting “most left-wing person in the room” contests, and a sense that “socialist” didn’t mean “progressive turned up to 11.“​ I don’t know where in American organizational politics one now finds that ethos.

Looking at the city: a free re-translation of the Greek words behind the term “political theory.” It’s refreshing to think of my academic discipline as a subset of something wider (wilder?): to thoughtfully observe, to contemplate, parts of life having to do with common purpose and common activity.