Hello, I had hoped my first posting here would be on something more interesting, (I am collecting articles from American History Review, NewPol, ILWCH, Labor Studies Journal and the like on the debates between Eric Arnesen, Herbert Hill, Philip Foner, Judith Stein, David Roediger et al. and hope to get suggestions from the mailing list for my reading on the important issues discussed there) but I was sort of blown away by this (maybe I shouldn't have been?) and was eager to share it here: I was reading Russel Jacoby's 1976 article "The Politics of Crisis Theory" and I happened to click on the homepage of the Telos website. I was intrigued to see an essay on Martin Sklar, one of the founding editors of In These Times, with whose strange turns in politics (supporting Palin and the Tea Party late in his life) I was somewhat familiar. The essay/obituary, which, although I haven't read all the way through, seems to give a favorable assessment of Sklar, was written by none other than the Executive Vice President of The Heritage Foundation Kim Holmes. I thought the presence of one hard-right wing, institutionally attached commissar on the pages of the relatively obscure new left journal might be a fluke, so I browsed a little on the website and found an editor's note on the Summer 2019 issue saying that editor Russel Berman (of the Hoover Inst.?!!), had stepped down "to pursue an opportunity at the U.S. State department. When I looked Berman up, I was startled to find out just how prominent that job was. He, along with the *current* editor of Telos, David Pan, were on Trump/Pompeo's "Commission on Unalienable Rights", which released its report in July 2020 (here's a video ( https://www.state.gov/unalienable-rights-and-the-securing-of-freedom/ ) of Pompeo's speech at the release of the report, the report ( https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Draft-Report-of-the-Commission-on-Unalienable-Rights.pdf ) itself, and UC Irvine Law School's letter ( https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/International%20Justice%20Clinic%2C%20UC%20Irvine%20Law%20%28CUR%20Submission%29.pdf ) to the Commission protesting its privileging of religious freedom over other rights in the UDHR. Aside from Mike Pompeo's evangelical fundamentalism, the emphasis on religious freedom in the report and in the minutes of the meetings--referenced in the UCI letter--seem to also be a result of Russel and Pan's editorial focus in Telos on Political Theology, specifically that of Carl Schmitt)
I looked more into Pan and Berman's work at Telos and found this: Pan, who took a break between academic posts to be a management consultant at McKinsey, in this video of a conference at the "Piccone-Telos Institute waxes" nostalgic about Trump's "populist revolution" and exhorts Telos's contributors to develop a "populist critical theory" to respond to Trump's ascendancy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3THaMAiGHU ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3THaMAiGHU ) Here is an interesting summary ( http://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/konturen/article/view/3977/3755 ) of Telos's "lurch to the right" by Joseph Lowndes (U. of Oregon) . His article is rather short, though; here are some particularly striking examples of Telos's recent contributors (of course, it is not that Telos " allows" these people with their disturbing connections to be published, but what the authors actually write that is disturbing, but as the journal's right-wing "critical theory" is basically impenetrable to me, I can't offer summaries of these contributors' articles; go read their contributions and make up your own mind about them) : Alain de Benoist (one of the leaders of the New Right in France, and head of the Research and Study Group for European Civilization and speaker at Richard Spencer's NPI conferences), Paul Gottfried (a direct mentor of Richard Spencer and member of the Mises Institute, author of such gems in his magazine Chronicles as "Michelle Obama and the Woke Capitalists Destroying America" , Chronicles is owned by the Charlemagne Institute whose mission is to "defend western civilization"), and Gary Ulmen (a former co-editor of Telos, whose hagiographic Telos essays ( http://www.amerika.org/tag/gary-ulmen ) on Carl Schmitt are reposted by American Nazi site amerika.org) just to name a few. There is much more to (what seems to me) the bizarre case of Telos, including vile Islamophobe Pierre-André Taguieff ( http://www.telospress.com/the-revolt-against-the-elites-or-the-new-populist-wave-an-interview/ ) , and at the same time, "Blue Labor" (someone please tell me what this is) communitarian traditionalist, basic income-advocating political theorist Adrian Pabst. ( http://www.telospress.com/author/pabst/ ) Would someone offer an explanation of Telos's shift to the right under Piccone. Was Piccone and his critical theory ever on the left at all? Why does there seem to be such a close relationship (and not many degrees of institutional separation) between Telos, the Heritage Foundation, Hoover, so called "paleo-conservative" outfits with strange anti-capitalist pretensions like Oren Cass's American Compass, the Claremont Institute, the American Conservative, American Affairs, etc. the eccentric "libertarian" think tank the Mises Institute, and Nationalist and/or fascist organizations like the Research and Study Group for European Civilization, the American Renaissance, Rockford Institute, National Policy Institute, etc. And what's the deal with Carl Schmitt? I was surprised to see a lot of references to him in some of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's writing (specifically, they apparently discuss "Schmittian" concepts of sovereignty in their Multitude trilogy). Thanks, --Townson Cocke -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#1462): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/1462 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76802098/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
