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2 weeks ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger
In a recent Financial Timesfeature, the literary scholar Orlando Reade traces a phenomenon that has also been of interest to me for over a decade: the influence of René Girard on a growing subset of the American right. The starting point of Reade’s discussion is the conversion experience of sorts that JD Vance experienced at a 2011 speech given by Peter Thiel at Yale Law School.
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3 weeks ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger
I haven’t followed Chris Hayes’s career all that closely, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen his show, but my general prejudices about MSNBC hosts didn’t lead me to expect all that much when I got a review copy of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.
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3 weeks ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger |Ashley Frawley
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:15:53Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Ashley Frawley joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss her Compact column, "How Society Got a Sex Change," and its relevance to the evolution of liberalism.
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4 weeks ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger
Various of the Trump administration’s initiatives of the past three months seem to have been informed by a class theory of politics derived from the work of James Burnham and his intellectual progeny. The theory is roughly the following: “Woke” is the ideology of the managerial class; therefore, the way to defeat woke is to go after the institutions that sustain that class.
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1 month ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger
It has been a big few weeks for Canada. Just before the Liberal Party returned to power in Ottawa under the globalist technocrat Mark Carney on the basis of an improbable revival of Canadian nationalism, one of the country’s greatest living artists has bequeathed us another great work.
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1 month ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger
I’ll be brief today, as I’m currently in Boulder, Colo., participating in a conference on “Renegade Futurism.” I’ll be speaking on a panel later about “AI as God,” which prompted me to revisit some things I’ve written about AI over the years. In lieu of a full post, I will republish a few parts of a newly relevant old essay on the subject, along with some brief framing remarks. Compact’s Substack is a reader-supported publication.
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1 month ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger
A good deal of my writing in the years 2020-22 involved revisiting material I had studied in graduate school in a particular historical moment—the final years of George W. Bush’s administration and the first years of Barack Obama’s—and applying it to a new moment, that of the pandemic and its political fallout, which both resembled the prior one and did not. Compact’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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1 month ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger
My candidate for tweet of the week comes from Putin’s (alleged) Rasputin:Dugin posted this on April 9, the day the “yippy” bond market prompted President Trump to pause most of his “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs (with China the big exception). Whether the Russian philosopher intended it this way or not, I think we can be quite precise about what he’s getting at, with some help from Stuart Jeffries’s 2021 book Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern.
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2 months ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger
In a recent post, I quoted a line from Anton Jäger that has stuck with me: “The left’s real trauma might be that neoliberalism died without them actually killing it.” Jäger wrote this in March 2020, the last time we saw a stock market crash comparable to (although significantly larger than) the one occasioned this week by Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.
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2 months ago | 
compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger
In a Washington Postcolumn this week, Shadi Hamid argues we are already at “the beginning of the end of the Trump era.” Trump still has nearly four years left in office, but according to Hamid, the “vibe shift away from the vibe shift” has commenced. After the November election, he recalls, he briefly “thought that a new era had begun—one of Trumpian hegemony,” but now, he goes on to argue, “Trump is squandering what might have been a once-in-a-generation realignment.