Eminent Americans

Cedric Johnson, a political science and Black studies professor, critiques the significant influence of Ta-Nehisi Coates in contemporary racial discourse. They discuss the intersection of race and class, examining how Black Lives Matter reflects a broader neoliberal agenda. Johnson shares insights from his book, focusing on the historical disconnect between wealthier Black advocates and working-class communities. The conversation delves into the need for nuanced policing reform, the impact of deindustrialization, and the potential of innovative public works projects to drive lasting change.

Reading List:* “Why the Culture of the So-Called Great Books is Hostile to Trans People,” by Naomi Kanakia* “Brandon Taylor’s online writing is vibrant, funny, and true. Why is his fiction trying so hard to be something else?” by Laura Miller* “A Review of ‘The Late Americans’ is Sending Book Twitter Into A Tailspin,” by Katherine Esters* “The New, Weirdly Racist Guide to Writing Fiction,” by Naomi Kanakia* “How to start your para-intellectual career,” by Naomi KanakiaMy guest on the podcast is Naomi Kanakia, author of 3 extant books as well as roughly 18 forthcoming books in seven different genres. We're going to talk about two big things. One is Naomi herself, her writing and what I would characterize as her unusually meta- approach to thinking and writing about the work of being a writer, her fascination with the subterranean motives and status moves that lie just underneath the wholesome public narratives that writers provide to the world and why and how they do what they do.  Before we get to that, though, we're going to spend some time on novelist and substacker Brandon Taylor. Taylor is a 34-year old black gay writer, primarily of fiction, now based in New York but born and raised in a small town outside of Montgomery, Alabama in a conservative Christian family. He spent a number of years in a graduate biochemistry program at University of Wisconsin Madison before leaving, without finishing the PhD, to focus on fiction, soon after earning his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Taylor has since published three works of fiction, the 2020 novel Real Life, which was short listed for a Booker Prize, the 2021 collection Filthy Animals, and most recently this year's Late Americans, which is maybe a collection masquerading as a novel. He's written book reviews and review essays for fancy places like the New York Times and the New Yorker, and he has a very popular substack, sweater weather, to which Naomi and I are both subscribers.If I had to briefly characterize why I think we find Taylor interesting for the purposes of this podcast, it's less because of his fiction, which is solid but not super distinctive, than because of the ways he deals, as a queer writer of color, with a few different conflicting tendencies within him. He loves the books he loves, irrespective of the race or era of their author. He has a somewhat agonized relationship to woke politics, seems to feel allergic to it in a lot of the particulars but can't shake a kind of global allegiance to it. He has a strong desire to connect with his readers, and he also has a somewhat thin skin. Naomi Kanakia is the author of three books, the YA novels Enter Title Here and We Are Totally Normal, and the nonfiction semi-self-help tract the Cynical Guide to Publishing. She also has three, count 'em three, forthcoming books: the YA novel Just Happy to Be Here, the adult novel The Default World, and the nonfictional What’s So Great About The Great Books? And she has a great substack as well, Woman of Letters , which you should subscribe to. She got her undergraduate degree at Stanford, and then an MFA at Johns Hopkins. I don't usually list my guest's academic credentials, but I think in this case it will prove relevant to our discussion.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

If you live in Austin as I have for the past 17 years, the phrase “new Austin” is pretty self-explanatory. Over the past few decades, the population of Austin has exploded, going from about 340,000 in 1980 to just shy of a million today, and that's actually a little bit of an understatement. That's just Austin proper rather than the whole metro area.With that growth has come a comparably dramatic shift in the city's culture. What was once a relatively low key college town with a great music scene and a strong hippie vibe has become a tech yuppy wonderland, for good and ill. Austin used to be weird and didn't have to think or talk about it. Then there was a period when it was visibly losing its weirdness, and we would say, "Keep Austin Weird," and that meant something meaningful. Now no one even says that anymore. We're dynamic and fascinating and great in many ways, but we're not weird, and we're even less weird every day.The building of Tesla's white, gleaming, vast and futuristic gigafactory is about as heavy-handed a symbol of this change as you can get. Construction began in the summer of 2020. The factory started producing cars in late 2021, and it had its official launch party, which had been delayed because of Covid, in April of 2022.And the Gigafactory isn't, in a sense, just the Gigafactory, it's the centerpiece and symbol of Elon Musk's whole empire, much of which has either relocated to or expanded into the Austin area over the past few years. So the Boring Company, which is his tunnel building endeavor, is now headquartered in Pflugerville outside the city. Neuralink, which I'm pretty sure is his mind control company, is building a big space in Dell Valley. SpaceX is building a facility in Bastrop and Tesla already has plans in the works to expand the Gigafactory, which at present has a floor area of about 10 million square feet, by another million or so square feet.So what does all of this mean for Austin? Other than to say it's new Austin versus old Austin. To help answer that question, I have Randy Lewis and Craig Campbell. Randy is the chair of the American Studies Department at UT Austin and the author of many books, many of them on film. He is also the founder and creative spirit behind the End of Austin, an online project dedicated to the change in Austin. Craig Campbell is an associate professor of anthropology, a scholar of visual culture and the Soviet Union, among other things, and one of the guiding spirits of the dystopian named Bureau for Experimental Ethnography. And Randy and Craig are here in particular because they're also collaborators on a new project that is focused on the Tesla Gigafactories in Austin and in Germany. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading list:* “The Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace,” by Mary K. Holland* “I Really Didn’t Want to Go,” by Lauren Oyler* “Lauren Oyler tries a fun thing David Foster Wallace never did again,” by Sophia Nguyen and Lauren Oyler* “Where be your jibes now?” by Patricia Lockwood* “The Wonder of Wallace-L,” by Maria Bustillos* “Reclaiming David Foster Wallace from the Lit-Bros,” by Jonathan Russell Clark* “Too Much Information,” by John Jeremiah Sullivan My guest on this episode of the podcast is Matt Bucher. Matt is the founding president of the International David Foster Wallace Society and the managing editor of the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies. Since 2002, he's been in charge of the David Foster Wallace listserv, Wallace-L. He's organizing the 2024 David Foster Wallace Conference, which is being hosted in Austin, Texas, where we both live. And he’s the co-host of The Concavity Show, a podcast about literature that often touches on Wallace and Wallace-related themes.His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Electric Literature, the Dublin Review of Books, the Austin Chronicle, and other places. His first novel, The Belan Deck, is out now.He’s on the show to talk about—wait for it—David Foster Wallace (DFW) related matters. In particular, I wanted to talk about two things. One is the world of hardcore DFW enthusiasts, the people who populate the listerv, attend the conferences, read and contribute to the journal, etc. What are the contours of this world, who are the major players, what are the key themes? And is there a certain kind of person who Wallace has an especially intense effect on?The other thing I wanted to talk about is the discourse around so-called DFW Bros, and the connected discourse around Wallace’s personal history of exploitative and in some cases abusive treatment of women. Is the DFW Bro a real thing? If so, is Matt not just a bro but the ultimate bro? If not, why has the concept become a real thing? What is it standing in for? Also, how much should we care, as readers of Wallace, about his record of treating women badly?You may notice that this episode of the podcast is considerably longer than previous episodes. This is because after we’d recorded what I thought was the episode, a new and much buzzed-about essay about Wallace was published in the London Review of Books, and I felt like I would remiss in my podcasterly duties if I didn’t hop back on the line with Matt to discuss it. So we did, which pushed the length of the podcast to over 2 hours, which would be too long except that it’s all pretty so interesting (scout’s honor). Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading list for episode:* “John Pistelli,” by Blake Smith* “The Souls of Yellow Folk, by Wesley Yang,” by John Pistelli* “The Souls of Yellow Folk—A Review,” by Daniel Oppenheimer* “Platonic Complex: Why Do the Intellectuals Rage?"“ by John Pistelli* “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” by Wesley YangCritic, novelist, and sorta-academic John Pistelliand I have two things on our agenda for this episode of the podcast. The first is Wesley Yang, the author of the 2018 essay collection The Souls of Yellow Folk and arguably the single most influential writer of the past decade when it comes to articulating the basic premises of the more substantive anti-woke perspective. John and I both wrote early reviews of Yang’s book, and both of us have remained relatively close Yang-watchers.My review, though it included a few modest criticisms of the book, was immensely admiring. Of the book’s centerpiece essay, “The Face of Seung Hi Cho,” I wrote:There aren’t many essayists alive today who can sustain the level of brilliance Yang maintains in the essay for as long as he does. Zadie Smith can do it. Dave Hickey and Joan Didion could do it once, but are too old now. David Foster Wallace could do it, but although he should be alive, he is not. Ta-Nehisi Coates looked like he was on his way toward being able to do it, but he made other choices. A few other writers, maybe, but not many.The essay doesn’t just teem with sentence-level excellence. Through all the micro-level fascination Yang has a larger point to make about what it is like to be an unlovable young man in America, a loser in the sexual and cultural marketplace, and the ways in which that loserdom intersects with and reinforces the experience of Asian-American-ness.John’s review of Yang’s book is a much more mixed assessment. He thinks some of it is brilliant, some not, and in general takes it to task for being a rather slapdash collection of things that don’t entirely hang together. He also makes the case (accurately I think, though I don’t have the theory background to confidently affirm) that Yang misdiagnoses the theoretical ancestry of wokeness and identity politics. For Yang it is post-structuralist theory that sets the stage. John writes:A deeper flaw … makes itself known in the concluding pages of this book, when in essays from 2017 Yang provides a detailed critique of the social justice left. He accuses its activists of having absorbed a set of lessons from poststructuralism that posit both language and institutions as nothing other than vectors of power, obviating the old liberal ambition to reform institutions by using language to persuade a majority to abandon its prejudices and alter its practices. By contrast to the social justice left’s radical ambition to bring in an egalitarian millennium through linguistic and institutional engineering, Yang concedes the manifold injuries social life deals to those who have lost its lottery while also worrying that attempts to reduce harm through new forms of undemocratic social control may only entrench new hierarchies under the false labels of peace and equality.Why do I call this theory flawed? … Social-justice theory comes ultimately from Marxism, which is the attempt to overcome existential alienation by altering power relations within political and social institutions. Marx began as a Romantic rebel and ironist, hailing Prometheus and imitating Sterne, until he became convinced that his alienation could be ameliorated through a total social transformation, one premised on what we now call identity politics. What differentiated Marx’s scientific from his precursors’ utopian socialism was precisely the identification of a mechanism—in the form of a social class—that could effect the transformation of an inegalitarian society to an egalitarian one. A social class whose exploitation was the engine of the entire system could, by resisting that exploitation, bring the system to a halt; having been exploited, this class would not replicate exploitation in its turn but rather abolish the class relation as suchJohn and I talk about the brilliance of Yang at his best; his snarky aside, in his review, about my review; his subsequent penance for his snarky aside; the possible connection between Yang and old school neocon Norman Podhoretz; and Yang’s recent descent into anti-trans, anti-woke monomania.The other thing on our agenda is the emergence of a newly influential cohort of writer intellectual types who earned their PHDs in humanities fields—in particular English and English-adjacent departments—who are exerting influence primarily through non-academic channels. They are writing for high or middle brow magazines—The Point, Compact, American Affairs, Tablet, etc—or, as in John's case, they're writing the vast majority of their words for their own websites and newsletters. I proposed this to John in an email exchange before our conversation, and he wrote:I do see what you're getting at with the post-/para-academic set and the full emergence of the humanities into the online public sphere. ... I would personally draw a distinction between people I see as trying to transmit to the public the current ethos of their academic fields ( Merve Emre would be the chief example here, probably also becca rothfeld and Jon Baskin) and more strictly renegade figures making a public bricolage of academic theories past and current extra-institutional or countercultural energies (e.g., Geoff Shullenberger and, well, me), with Blake Smith and JEHS somewhere in the middle). From the perspective of a certain kind of, say, economist, though, this might be the narcissism of small differences, as we're all talking various sorts of unverifiable gibberish! (Not meant as self-deprecation: I am only interested in unverifiable gibberish.)Some of these folks have academic posts, but often rather marginal ones (John is adjunct at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, for instance; Justin Smith-Ruiu is at the City University of Paris). Other have left the academy entirely. That these people constitute a coherent group, I should say, is very much a hypothesis in progress. I described it to John, when inviting him on the podcast, as a "very wobbly, inchoate hypothesis." My hope is that it is slightly less wobbly and inchoate by the end of our discussion. John  is the author of four novels—The Class of 2000, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, Portraits and Ashes, and The Ecstasy of Michaela—as well as diverse short fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism that has appeared in many venues. He writes a weekly newsletter on literature, culture, and politics at SubStack. A longtime teacher with a Ph.D. in English, he has uploaded the lectures for two full university literature courses at YouTube, alongside other lectures, audio essays, and audio fiction. His fifth novel, Major Arcana, is currently being serialized for paid subscribers to his newsletter. I reached out to John after Blake Smith, a writer we both follow, wrote a whole post on his newsletter about how great John is. Here’s a bit of what Blake wrote about John:John Pistelli is my favorite critic—one of the few people I ‘read,’ in the sense of regularly checking his substack/tumblr (GrandHotelAbyss) and recommending to my friends (I am a very poor ‘reader’; I don’t have much room in my head for contemporaries, or maybe I already have too much room devoted to them and have to tetchily defend the cramped remainder from my own tendency to envy, revile, etc., them—one of the reasons my Twitter is locked!). He’s erudite—with an easy, expansive mastery over the modern canon and its scholarly-critical adjuncts—and abreast of ‘internet culture’ in ways that I’m not but (mostly) appreciate someone else being (more from the implied ‘however’ later).Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Timothy Lensmire, professor of Education at the University of Minnesota and the author or editor of, among other works, White Folks: Race and Identity in Rural America; Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching; and Whiteness at the Table: Antiracism, Racism, and Identity in Education. He is also a co-founder of the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective (MCWC).Tim and I talk primarily about two things: the powerful critique that he and his MCWC colleagues have made, from the anti-racist left, of Peggy McIntosh’s seminal essay on white privilege (commonly known as the “invisible knapsack” essay), and Tim’s own work on whiteness and white identity.We also just talk, in general, about the ways that both the left and right over-simplify the complexity of being white in America, and how these over-simplifications get in the way of getting to where most (or at least many) of us would like to get.Episode reading list: Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Reading list:* Corey Robin's Facebook Page* Not Yet Falling Apart: Two thinkers on the left offer a guide to navigating the stormy seas of modernity, by moi* Straight Outta Chappaqua: How Westchester-bred lefty prof Corey Robin came to loathe Israel, defend Steven Salaita, and help cats, by Phoebe Maltz Bovy* Online Fracas for a Critic of the Right, by Jennifer Schuessler* Scholar Behind U. of Illinois Boycotts Is a Longtime Activist, by Marc ParryA few years ago, I got this text from a friend after my guest on this episode of the podcast, Corey Robin, said something nice about my book on Facebook: “When Corey Robin is praising you on Facebook, you’ve arrived, my friend.”He was being funny, but also just saying a true thing. Corey Robin is a big deal on the intellectual left in America, and for the better part of a decade, from about 2012 to 2019, his Facebook page was one of the most vital and interesting spaces on the American intellectual left. Back in 2017, I wrote this about Corey and his most influential book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin:The Reactionary Mind has emerged as one of the more influential political works of the last decade. Robin himself has become, since the book’s publication, one of the more aura-laden figures on the intellectual left. Paul Krugman cites him and the book periodically in his New York Times columns and on his blog. Robin’s Facebook page, which he uses as a blog and discussion forum, has become one of the places to watch to understand where thinking on the left is. Another key node of the intellectual left is Crooked Timber, a group blog of left-wing academics to which Robin is a long-time contributor, and another is Jacobin, a socialist magazine that often re-publishes Robin’s blog posts sans edits, like dispatches from the oracle.I've long been fascinated by Corey's Facebook page, in particular, because it was such a novel space. It couldn't exist prior to the internet, and if there were any other important writers who used the platform in that way, as a real venue for thoughtful and vigorous political discussion, I'm not familiar with them. It didn’t replace or render obsolete the magazines, like The Nation and Dissent, that were the traditional places where the left talked to itself. It was just a different thing, an improvisational, unpredictable, rolling forum where you went to see what people of a certain bent were talking about, who the key players were, what the key debates were. And Corey himself, in this context, had a charismatic presence. To even get him to respond seriously to a comment you made on one of his posts was to get a little thrill. To be praised by Corey, in the main text of a post, was to feel like you were a made man. Over the past few weeks I've spent some time dipping into the archives of his page, and while there I compiled a list of notable names who showed up as commenters. My list included: Lauren Berlant, Matt Karp, Tim Lacy, Miriam Markowitz, Annette Gordon Reed,  Doug Henwood, Jeet Heer, Freddie Deboer, Raina Lipsitz, Elayne Tobin, Scott Lemieux, Paul Buhle, Jedediah Purdy, Jodi Dean, Alex Gourevitch, Tamsin Shaw, Rick Perlstein, Greg Grandin, Katha Pollitt, Joel Whitney, Liza Featherstone, Andrew Hartman, Rebecca Vilkomerson, Samuel Moyn, Tim Lacy, Yasmin Nair, Bhaskar Sunsara, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, Gideon Lewis Kraus.This is just the people I recognized (or googled ) in my brief time skimming. The full list of eminent leftist Americans who populated Corey's page over the years would surely run to hundreds of names, which is to say that a significant portion, maybe even a majority, of the writers and intellectuals who comprised the intellectual left in those years was reading and participating in his page. How this came about, and what it meant, is one of the topics we cover in the podcast, which ended up being a kind of stock-taking of sorts of the very recent history of the American left. We also talk about Corey’s involvement as an organizer with GESO, Yale's graduate student union, when he was getting his PhD in political science; his retrospective thoughts on why he over-estimated the strength of the American left in the mid-2010s; what he got right about Trump and Trumpism; and why Clarence Thomas may be corrupt, but is at least intellectually honest about it. Corey is a professor at Brooklyn College and the author of three books: Fear: The History of a Political Idea, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (revised and re-issued as Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump), and most recently The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and Jacobin, among many other places.  Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Episode Reading List:* From Queer to Gay to Queer, James Kirchick* How Hannah Arendt’s Zionism Helped Create American Gay Identity, Blake Smith* When the Pope Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, That’s Ahmari, James Kirchick* Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake, Blake Smith* Are Conservatives the New Queers?, Blake Smith* Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, John PistelliI have a working hypothesis that no one has suffered a more dramatic decline in a certain kind of social status, as a result of changes in left-liberal elite culture and politics, than white gay men. Less than a decade ago they were at the vanguard of social progress, having led a gay rights movement that achieved an extraordinary series of legal, political, and cultural victories. Now they're perceived as basically indistinguishable, within certain left-liberal spaces, from straight white men. In some activist circles they may be even more suspect, since they're competing for leadership roles and narrative centrality where straight men wouldn't presume (or particularly desire) to tread. My hypothesis, if it's accurate, is interesting on its own terms, as part of a much longer history in America of ethnic and other minority groups rising and falling in relative cultural, intellectual, and literary status. It's also interesting, however, for what it tells us about the recent evolution of left and liberal politics, as they've shifted and reshaped themselves in reaction to both great victories, like the legalization of gay marriage, and to depressingly intractable problems like the persistent racial gaps in wealth, health, incarceration, and crime.I’m less interested in the justice or injustice of this shift in standing (though I’m somewhat interested) than I am in the facts of it and its implications. Why has it happened? What does it feel like for the people who have experienced it? What are its implications? Will there be a backlash? To assist me in thinking through what it all means, I invited to the podcast Blake Smith and Jamie Kirchick. Jamie is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and the author of last year’s New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. He has long been an outspoken critic of some sectors of the gay left and what he perceives of as their desire to subordinate the project of achieving full civic and political equality for gay people to a more radical, revolutionary project to tear down conventional bourgeois ideas of gender, sexuality, marriage, family, monogamy, and identity. In a recent essay in Liberties, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Jamie compares the liberal tenets of the gay rights movement to the radical aspirations of what he calls “political queerness”: With its insistence that gay people adhere to a very narrow set of political and identitarian commitments, to a particular definition that delegitimates everything outside of itself, political queerness is deeply illiberal. This is in stark opposition to the spirit of the mainstream gay rights movement, which was liberal in every sense — philosophically, temperamentally, and procedurally. It achieved its liberal aspirations (securing equality) by striving for liberal aims (access to marriage and the military) via liberal means (at the ballot box, through the courts, and in the public square). Appealing to liberal values, it accomplished an incredible revolution in human consciousness, radically transforming how Americans viewed a once despised minority. And it did so animated by the liberal belief that inclusion does not require the erasure of one’s own particular identity, or even the tempering of it. By design, the gay movement was capacious, and made room for queers in its vision of an America where sexual orientation was no longer a barrier to equal citizenship. Queerness, alas, has no room for gays. The victory of the gay movement and its usurpation by the queer one represents an ominous succession. The gay movement sought to reform laws and attitudes so that they would align with America’s founding liberal principles; the queer movement posits that such principles are intrinsically oppressive and therefore deserving of denigration. The gay movement was grounded in objective fact; the queer movement is rooted in Gnostic postmodernism. For the gay movement, homosexuality was something to be treated as any other benign human trait, whereas the queer movement imbues same-sex desire and gender nonconformity with a revolutionary socio-political valence. (Not for the first time, revolution is deemed more important than rights.) And whereas the gay movement strived for mainstream acceptance of gay people, the queer movement finds the very concept of a mainstream malevolent, a form of “structural violence.” Illiberal in its tactics, antinomian in its ideology, scornful of ordinary people and how they choose to live, and glorifying marginalization, queerness is a betrayal of the gay movement, and of gay people themselves. In the podcast I refer to Jamie as “a man alone.” This isn't quite true. He has comrades out there, in particular older gay writers like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch, who share many of his commitments and critiques. Generationally, however, Jamie seems more alone than they do, without a cohort of gay intellectuals of roughly his age who share his intellectual reference points, his liberalism, and his very specific experience of coming of age as a gay man and journalist in America when he did, at his specific point of entry to AIDS, the decline of print and rise of online journalism, and the political advance of gay (and more recently trans) rights. He’s a man alone but also, if the premise of this podcast is accurate, a man alone who has been publicly articulating a set of feelings and arguments that is shared by many of his gay male peers, of various generations, but hasn’t yet taken shape in the form of a political or intellectual reaction.Blake Smith is my first return guest to the podcast, having recently joined me to discuss Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic Andrea Long Chu (the “it girl of the trans world,” as I called her). He is a recent refugee from academia, now living and working as a freelance writer in Chicago, writing for Tablet magazine, American Affairs, and elsewhere. At 35 he is only a few years younger than Jamie, but is the product of a very different set of formative biographical and intellectual influences. Raised in a conservative Southern Baptist family in a suburb of Memphis, Blake’s big coming out, as he tells the story, was less as a gay man than as the kind of academically credentialed, world-traveling, city-based sophisticate he has become. If Jamie’s sense of loss is maybe something in the vicinity of what I proposed at the top of this post–that he went from being in the ultimately victorious mainstream of the gay rights struggle to being seen as a member of the privileged oppressor class, at best a second-class “ally” and at worst an apostate to the cause –than Blake’s experience is less about any personal or political loss of status or standing than it is a variant of the venerable intellectual and literary tradition of pining for a scene or scenes from eras prior to your own. Think Owen Wilson’s character in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, who was magically transported back to Paris in the 1920s, the scene he’d always romanticized, only to fall in love with a woman from that era who herself romanticizes and eventually chooses to abandon him for another, earlier cultural moment, the Belle Époque scene of the 1890s. For Blake, the key era, maybe, was the brief post-Stonewall period before AIDS superseded all other concerns––so the 1970s, more or less– when gay male life was sufficiently out of the closet for a gay male public to come into existence and begin to define itself and understand how it related, or didn’t relate, not just to the straight world but also to feminism, women, Marxism, black civil rights, and other left-wing and liberal movements. In a recent piece in Tablet, Blake writes about the magazine Christopher Street, founded in 1976, and its project of helping to bring into existence a coherent intellectual and cultural community of gay men:In its cultural politics of building a gay male world, Christopher Street featured poetry and short stories, helping launch the careers of the major gay writers of the late 20th century, such as Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Larry Kramer. It also ran many essays that contributed to an emerging awareness that there was a gay male canon in American letters, running from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to John Ashbery and James Merrill.Christopher Street was by no means the only venue for the construction of a gay world, but [editor Michael] Denneny and his colleagues were perhaps the sharpest-minded defenders of its specificity—their demand that it be a world for gay men. In a debate that has now been largely forgotten, but which dominated gay intellectual life in the 1970s, Denneny’s Arendtian perspective, with its debts to Zionism, was ranged against a vision of politics in which gay men were to be a kind of shock force for a broader sexual-cum-socialist revolution.For Blake, what’s been lost or trumped is less the liberal politics that Jamie champions and that Christopher Street more or less advocated than the existence of a gay male world of letters that had fairly distinct boundaries, a relatively private space in which gay men–who may always remain in some way politically suspect, even reviled, by the mainstream–can recognize and talk to each other.  As he writes in another recent essay in Tablet, maybe half-seriously, “One should, …know one’s own type (Jew, homosexual, philosopher, etc.) and remain at a ‘playful distance’ from those outside it, with ‘no expectation of essential progress’ toward a world in which the sort of people we are can be publicly recognized and respected. No messiahs, and no end to paranoias and persecutions—but, in the shade of deft silences, the possibility of cleareyed fellowship with one’s own kind.”Jamie, Blake, and I had what I found to be a really exciting conversation about all these issues and more. Give it a listen.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This podcast was recorded about a week before its subject, Andrea Long Chu, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, so it doesn't come up in the conversation with Blake Smith, but it's interesting to keep in mind as he and I analyze Chu and try to understand the particular role she plays in the broader intellectual and journalistic ecosystem.Our story begins in early 2018, when the hipster intellectual magazine N+1 published a long essay titled “On Liking Women.” The essay, which went rather viral, was about the author’s transition to being a woman, her fascination with the 1967 radical tract the SCUM Manifesto, the dynamics of sissy porn, and her complicated feelings about wanting to be a woman, wanting women, and the universal fear of being feminized.Its author, Andrea Long Chu, was at the time a doctoral student in comparative literature at NYU, and in all respects unfamous. The essay would change that, rather dramatically. In the way that Ta-Nehisi Coates was, for a time, the black intellectual, and Wesley Yang was the Asian intellectual, Chu became, and perhaps remains, the trans intellectual of the moment. Later that year she wrote another splashy piece,“My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy,” for the New York Times. Her 2019 book, Females, got an immense amount of attention. In 2021 she was hired as a staff critic for New York magazine, and in that role has written a series of buzzed about reviews. She’s not famous, exactly, but she’s almost as close to it as journalists get it. She is now friends, for instance, with the genuinely famous Emily Ratajkowski, whom she profiled in The New York Times Magazine, and who later interviewed Chu for her own podcast, High Low with Emrata.As she says to Ratajkowski, some of this success was a matter of timing. There was a space waiting to be filled. Trans issues had gotten big in the culture, and while there were a lot of good trans memoirs out there, and an increasing number of trans people making a name for themselves in the “influencer” space, there was neither an intellectual nor a magazine feature writer who had yet made a name for him or herself reliably and stylishly explaining the trans thing to the world. Chu has been able to step into this space so successfully because she is a stylish writer, because she has a command of the relevant theory, and also because she has that thing that so many it boys and girls of journalism have had: she’s a tease. She comes close and dances away. She reveals and withholds, issues grand pronouncements, and then implies that she’s just kidding … maybe.Here she is at the end of her breakout essay, I am being tendentious, dear reader, because I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period. This is most emphatically not something trans women are supposed to want. The grammar of contemporary trans activism does not brook the subjunctive. Trans women are women, we are chided with silky condescension, as if we have all confused ourselves with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as if we were all simply trapped in the wrong politics, as if the cure for dysphoria were wokeness. How can you want to be something you already are? Desire implies deficiency; want implies want. To admit that what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire is to admit just how much of transition takes place in the waiting rooms of wanting things, to admit that your breasts may never come in, your voice may never pass, your parents may never call back.…This is not to garner pity for sad trannies like me. We have enough roses by our beds. It is rather to say, minimally, that trans women want things too. The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love.I’ve been reading and listening to Chu recently, and I find myself atypically confused. I honestly don’t know what she’s trying to say, about gender and sexuality and sex and politics, nor whether she actually believes whatever it is she’s trying to say. I don’t know if she’s the real deal or, like so many it boys and girls of the past, she’s performing a role that is ultimately too disconnected from a genuinely grounded self to write things that are meaningful.To help me process my confusion, I reached out to Blake Smith, who recently wrote a highly critical piece on Chu. Officially, Blake is an historian of modern France coming off a Fulbright in North Macedonia, and before that a PhD from Northwestern University. Unofficially, but more relevantly for our purposes, he’s been writing up a storm of intellectual but accessible essays over the past few years, for a variety of publications, most often Tablet, where the Chu piece was published. These fall into a few different buckets. One is what I’d call his ongoing project to identify potential intellectual and creative resources for the revivification of liberalism. This has manifested in critical essays on various eminent and obscure European and American intellectuals, including folks like Michel Foucault, Philip Rieff, Judith Shklar, Leo Strauss, Jacob Taubes, Richard Howard, and Roland Barthes. Another bucket is criticism of woke thinking and writing, and a third is his interest in queer theory. His Chu piece falls into both of the latter buckets, although Chu has a complicated relationship to woke. It may overlap with the first too, though that’s not as obvious a connection.His Chu piece begins not with Chu herself, but with the archetypal conversion (or transition) story of western civilization, that of Saul of Tarsus, who had a vision of Jesus while on the road to Damascus. He abandoned his Judaism, changed his name to Paul, and dedicated his life to evangelizing for the new faith. Or, in Smith’s tart description, he just changed his stripes, remaining “what he had been before—an antagonizing, persecutory self-promoter,” but with a new lexicon of values and a new set of targets. Smith writes:In his letters to churches throughout the Roman Empire, Paul gave an account of himself as being uniquely guilty and abject—the “chief of sinners”—and especially favored by God. In doing so, he created a powerful and enduring model for the way people seek attention and influence in Western culture, from the Confessions of Augustine to the ubiquitous self-narrations of our own moment. Flamboyant rejection of a former life, a lurid picture of its depravity and danger, the wrenching rapture of being overtaken and undone by an outward power, a new self to be declared and recognized by others, new enemies (shadows of the old self) to be exposed and attacked, and a continual staggering back and forth between declarations of one’s utter unworthiness and ethical exaltation.One of the most successful contemporary practitioners of this mode of confession, in which a conversion is narrated in a mode of self-abasement and self-aggrandizement, is the essayist Andrea Long Chu. In 2018, Chu, who transitioned from male to female, established her reputation with essays for N+1 and The New York Times on her desire for femininity and her feelings about her new vagina. “Few of us” trans women, she argued, “dare to talk about” the truths she purportedly exposed in these essays—that transition is motivated by fetishistic investment in the most external, sexualized aspects of traditional femininity (“Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts”)—and that transitioning had made her more dysphoric and “suicidal.”Chu positioned herself in national publications as declaring hidden truths that other people like herself had been too cowardly to avow. Publications from The Point to The Nation to Vogue interviewed her, and New York magazine has more recently hired her, while scholars devote articles and even special issues of journals to her contributions to gender theory. The most notorious of the latter was her 2019 pamphlet-length book, Females, published with Verso, a press that once had something to do with the left. In Females, Chu worked on two different double registers. She played at once comic and serious, giving herself the right to backtrack her most radical claims as ironic “bits.” She gave, moreover, a reading of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto (1967) as a statement about the nature of desire as such, for everyone, and as a kind of prefiguring of her own transition. It was as if Chu became the protagonist of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, who is convinced that a local writer’s autobiographical poem is in fact the elaborately allegorized story of his own life. Where Solanas had called for the extermination of men, she took her plan only as far as a failed attempt to murder Andy Warhol. Females ends with Solanas, at a distance of half-a-century, killing another “Andy”—Chu’s former, male self. 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It would be very easy to hate Ezra Klein. He’s only 38, and already has been a pioneering political blogger, a pioneering explanatory journalist for the Washington Post, the founder of Vox.com, the author of the best-selling book Why We’re Polarized, and now a marquis podcaster and columnist for the New York Times.The amount of good fortune that’s come his way is staggering. Not just journalistic and political good fortune, but personal good fortune. His wife, the journalist Annie Lowrey, is a successful journalist with a national profile. Presumably their two kids, whose names are presumably Leo and Daisy, are good looking and brilliant. He’s even rather tall. It’s hard for me to believe this, but the internet says he’s 6’2” (it seems plausible in this photo of him). As journalist Matt Welch wrote of him, in a 2012 profile: “He’s impossibly young, infuriatingly accomplished, and impressively wonky. In a town full of journalistic flop sweat, he glides instead of glistens, handsome enough to make the ladies turn their heads, and affable enough that their boyfriends compete for his attentions, too.”Klein is an American prince, in other words, and I should hate him just on general principle. But I don’t. He’s so earnest, and so hard-working and diligent and thoughtful. His podcast, which I listen to pretty regularly, is excellent. He’s incredibly sharp and informed about politics and power, in particular, but he’s also omni-curious. There are a lot of political types on the show, but also philosophers, scientists, historians, economists, novelists, political scientists, tech types, you name it. I say this not to suck up to Klein, but to try to pin down what’s interesting about him, which is actually rather elusive. He’s super smart, but unlike his good friend and fellow Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias, he’s not super smart in a particularly interesting way. He has been a pathbreaker in the form of his journalism at various points – first as a political blogger, then as an early hardcore wonk journalist for the Washington Post, then as a founder of Vox – but it would be hard to identify what particular ideas Klein has been influential in articulating or promulgating. The big idea with Vox was that it would revolutionize how journalism provides background and context, and it was a bust on that front. His recent book on political polarization sold well and was buzzy for a little while, but I don’t see much evidence that it’s thesis has any staying power. I don’t even remember the thesis. As a thinker, he always strikes me as living in a relatively narrow band somewhere toward the center of wherever the progressive consensus is. So why does he seem so central to it all, and so representative of … something? To try to answer that, this inaugural episode of the Eminent Americans podcast traces Klein as he molds himself into a punchy political blogger right out of college, and then transforms into an omniscient explainer of the world at the Washington Post and Vox, and then transforms again, into who he is now, this more humble, and more chill, maybe-better-maybe-not version of himself. And we look at how he’s been a cipher/symbol/driver for broader trends in journalism and media the whole time. My two guests are Matt Welch, author of the greatest of all Ezra Klein profiles, and Mark Oppenheimer, my brother and longtime comrade-in-arms when it comes to parsing the American intellectual scene. Matt is an editor-at-large for Reason magazine, and one of the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast and newsletter, which is hilarious and great. Mark is the author of various books on religion and American culture and, as of a few weeks ago, author of his own substack. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe