Today I took Klara to campus because I had to meet with a student. During a break between classes, Klara positioned herself in the midst of the student flow and had a blast, greeting everybody, accepting compliments and showing off her shoes and bracelet. 

There are people of all kinds of ethnicities on campus, and that’s great because I want her to get used to folks of different appearances. She’s used to dark-skinned people, for instance, but somebody with a pronounced Semitic look (like my sister) freaks her out. It was very weird back in Florida this summer because Klara was literally scared of her aunt. 

After having fun on campus, we went to the Indian restaurant where Klara discovered kofta. Turns out, she loves it. 

Life is so unfair. I’ve been struggling on this diet for months. And yes, I lost 27 lbs, which is half of what I need to lose. And then N went on this diet and lost 15 lbs just like that. He didn’t even suffer! Not that I want him to suffer, of course, but it’s hard to admire somebody’s easy success when it’s not as simple for you to achieve it. 

Of course, if Lilla simply said everything I already know about neoliberalism as a threat to democracy, I wouldn’t have liked the book. I hate to be in agreement because it’s a massive waste of time. 

Once and Future Liberal also told me things I didn’t know about the trajectory of the US liberalism since the 1950s. (There is a lot more in the book about the trajectory of the US Republicans but I knew all that stuff already). I now understand why “incrementalism” was such a dirty word in the last election and where the idea of Liberals as elitist comes from. 

Plus, the book is funny and offers many good jokes. So it’s enjoyable to read, too.

I read this book because I saw many angry denunciations of it, and that sort of thing always makes me want to find out for myself. And I’m glad I did. 

One of the dangers of neoliberalism is that it destroys democracy, hollowing out democratic institutions and turning people into isolated, disaffected consumers who are incapable of solidarity. Liquid capital doesn’t like civic engagement and sweeps it away. This process has been studied at length. Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells, McGuigan, Zizek, Dardot and Laval have all written about the difficulty of preserving any meaningful form of democracy in the era of neoliberalism.

All the names I mentioned, though, belong to European thinkers. They do mention the US in their work but Europe is the main focus of their attention. In the US, there is little original work on neoliberalism as an ideology and a way of being. Mostly, it’s all about neoliberal economy, as if one could isolate the economic from everything else. 

Lilla is finally bringing these ideas to this side of the Atlantic. Neoliberalism, he points out, impacts people irrespective of their political affiliation. You can’t subtract yourself from the dominant ideology. All you can do is realize this and start noticing the ways in which it acts upon you. 

Lilla’s argument is that neoliberalism has destroyed any meaningful form of conservatism, as we have seen in the 2016 election. But it didn’t leave liberalism untouched either. Right now is the best moment for liberalism to win a decisive victory because the opponents are so morally and politically bankrupt. It’s not going to be easy, though, because the neoliberal attributes of alienation, lack of solidarity, self-absorption, etc are destroying the Left, too. 

What we need to do is to start noticing the ways in which we have absorbed neoliberal mentality. The manner in which the Left does politics today is so infected by neoliberal (or you can also say consumerist) mentality that it’s doomed to fail. 

Lilla is a great fan of the welfarist aspect of the nation-state. He believes that the praise of fluidity needs to stop and we should at least try to create a dam to the forces that are eroding the nation-state model. It is only within that model that anybody has at least tried to create welfare protections, so ditching it is a mistake.

I don’t know if it’s possible to resist the lure of neoliberal ideology. But I’m glad somebody is at least trying. As Lilla says, this is the kind of resistance we really need. 

I’m reading Mark Lilla’s new book, and it’s a very good, intelligent attempt at popularizing Zygmunt Bauman and everybody else who is writing about neoliberalism. I’ll write a review when I finish, which will be soon because it’s a short book.

But for now I just want to share this great quote that I don’t want to forget:

Identity is not the future of the left. It is not a force hostile to neoliberalism. Identity is Reaganism for lefties. 

It’s good to know that even though Bauman died, his ideas are gaining popularity. 

Cohen admitted on Monday that Trump’s company had been working to land a project in Moscow during the presidential primary, but it fell through.

Instead, Moscow landed a project in Washington.

Cohen admitted on Monday that Trump’s company had been working to land a project in Moscow during the presidential primary, but it fell through.

Instead, Moscow landed a project in Washington.

Sanders’s 2016 campaign started as, essentially, a protest movement that didn’t particularly seek expert policy advice in crafting its proposals and certainly didn’t receive it, given fear of retaliation by presumed victor Hillary Clinton against anyone who worked for her opponent…

Sweet Lord in heaven, what sorry crap people won’t spin to feel like victims. 

I just read this cutesy story on FB about a woman in her late 50s who suddenly gained a ton of weight and was worried about it. But her husband brought her a box of eclairs and said he loves her at any size. And everybody is like, “Wow, what a great husband.”

And I don’t know, it’s great he loves her at any size, but such a dramatic weight gain at this age might be a signal that she has a serious health issue. The husband should get her a doctor’s appointment instead of the eclairs. Of course, the only person in that thread that suggested this was labeled a fat-phobic bigot.

A few years ago, student advisement was outsourced to “professional advisers” who were hired as a large group for that purpose. It was sold to us as something that will allow professors to do less admin work. 

Of course, it turned out to be complete bunk. We still have to advise students and, what’s worse, we have to convince the students that everything the advisers told them is bunk. 

Example. A student came in yesterday who is a native speaker and who placed out of language courses. The “professional adviser” told him he only needed to take a single Senior Essay course to get a degree in Spanish. It took me 30 minutes to convince him that you can’t get a degree just on the strength of being a native speaker. He clearly thought that I was just being mean to him after all the wonderful promises of an easy and fast degree he had gotten from the adviser. 

We constantly meet with these advisers to explain to them how the program works. We create simple laminated sheets they can keep in front of them at all times that list the requirements but this shit keeps happening. 

Outsourcing is dumb. Creating needless and expensive bureaucracies is idiotic.