Notebook #5

American paleoconservatives, Erdoğan statements, the MFA vs. MoNE, the Zionist-Turkish axis, Nasrallah

This is a weekly roundup of interesting news items or things I’ve been reading. The first item is free, the rest is for paid subscribers only.

A building in Kreuzberg, Berlin, displaying Turkish verb endings, via Vanessa H. Larson

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Killing time

I don’t read a lot of books about American politics these days. Between doing a PhD on Nietzsche, writing a book about the Turkish far-right, and expecting a baby, there simply isn’t a lot of time for it.

I still read

John Ganz

’s When the Clock Broke though. I’ve long enjoyed his Substack and thought it’d be fun reading, which it was.

So this book is a history of the US in the late 1980s/early 1990s (Bush 41) looking at political and cultural trends that led to the Trump phenomenon. Ganz has chapters on economic deregulation, David Duke, talk radio, the LAPD, immigration, and New York mobsters.

The book is written in that way where the author’s own voice stays in the background, and he just gives you a chain of little descriptions, one event after the other, almost from start to finish. If you understand the context and the references, you can sound out the argument. It’s not the most accessible book for people who aren’t familiar with America, but it’s certainly a very cool way to write, especially for cultural history.

You won’t be surprised, dear reader, that I often thought about parallels to far-right politics in Turkey. I’ve long written about Turkish Islamism’s affinity for Trump, but sometimes it’s still hard to explain. Reactionary nationalism is a very simple, robust structure. I think its reaction isn’t primarily directed against those in power (liberals, etc) but against time itself. That’s why the reactionary constantly dreams of the counterfactual — what if modernity hadn’t emerged in the Christian West, but the Muslim East? What if the Ottomans hadn’t declined? Perhaps they weren’t going to. Perhaps we were cheated of our true fate.

Then politics becomes a quest of bending back time, of un-doing something that should never have happened in the first place. Nietzsche was the great theorist of this emotion, and anticipated its political impact on the 20th century.

When the Clock Broke carries the theme of time in its title. The phrase comes from a speech paleoconservative economist Murray Rothbard gave in support of Pat Buchanan in 1992:

Then Rothbard reached his furious coda. He recalled how he was once told that his libertarian ideas were outdated and that socialism of communism was inevitable. “'You can't turn back the clock!’ they chanted, ‘you can’t turn back the clock. But the clock of the once-mighty Soviet Union, the clock of Marxism-Leninism, a creed that once mastered half the world, is not only turned back, but lies dead and broken forever.” The task of the paleo movement was now to “finish the job,” to end the “soft Marxism” of liberalism that still dominated America:

“With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that it can be done. With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal... We shall repeal the twentieth century.”

The place went wild. “Up to Murray's speech it had been a pleasant, amost scholarly atmosphere,” an attendee recalled. “Murray's speech changed the tone. At the conclusion, the crowd leapt to their feet, chering wildly, ready to storm the capital. I have never seen anything like it. Some even had tears in their eyes.”