O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
—W.B. Yeats, “A Prayer for My Daughter”
The distinctiveness of a place is its character—the genius loci, as the ancient Romans called it. It is what the poet Yeats understood as the indispensable spirit of place, whether that place be a dwelling, a town, a region, or even a country. Places and their particular qualities contribute to the shaping of who we are, even as we, collectively and over time, help shape those places. This mutuality gives rise to The Character of Place: the focus of the first of our two themes in this issue.
As our contributors demonstrate, the examination of those interactions between people and place benefits from an agile perspective, at once personal and objective, historical and contemporary. Plunging into the manic swirl of Las Vegas, social theorist Isaac Ariail Reed finds that the city “reminds us that this wild experiment called the American project has always been about the cultural struggle between puritan fastidiousness and the pagan imaginaries that, unleashed in the desert, operate ferociously in the pursuit of happiness and freedom.” Bringing an urgent agenda to his investigation, he asks “whether there is something about the twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century experience of Las Vegas that could be salvaged for a new version—and vision—of American democratic modernity.”
Central to that modernity is what some call the knowledge economy, one critical node of which is higher education, our many and varied colleges and universities. Those institutions exist, of course, in places, usually towns and cities, and the interactions between those settings and the teaching, learning, and life that go on in the schools may vary considerably, depending on whether the latter are large (often state-funded) universities or small liberal-arts colleges. Having grown up and worked in both kinds of places, Phil Christman, in his “A Tale of Two College Towns,” takes note of some of the differences in town-gown relations: “People expect a relatively small, selective, and liberal-arts-focused school to be a little weird. But the land-grant college or public university offers itself up as a public service, and is judged, probably unfairly, by different rules; meanwhile, it also crosses into more people’s daily lives more often and more dramatically, and thus offers itself up to be judged.” Yet for such differences, Christman finds the democratic humanism of these institutions, large or small, an essential, if increasingly endangered, ingredient of American democracy. Saving it, he believes, will require, “finally, that we reckon with the deep-seated anti-intellectualism of our common life.”
Capturing the spirit of one such college town—Charlottesville, Virginia—columnist Jamelle Bouie offers an annotated visual tour of a place that in the summer of 2017 “became a metonym for far-right violence in the United States.” With a selection of his photographs of the place he calls home, he aims to reveal the less apparent ways “the city has struggled to mark, commemorate, and make sense of that summer.”
For her part, in “Ethel Road Elementary,” poet and professor Lisa Russ Spaar returns to a remarkable year in her New Jersey childhood when she was bussed some considerable distance across Piscataway Township to a makeshift elementary school located in the disused cinder-block barracks of Camp Kilmer (named after the poet Joyce Kilmer, who was killed in World War I). The school itself—including an inspiring young teacher—was the site of experiences that seeded later awakenings and revelations about the America that her own boomer generation was starting to come to terms with, an America then being shaken up by an intensifying civil rights struggle and an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. Just as revelatory is what Spaar glimpsed on her bus ride to and from the school, including strictly segregated African American neighborhoods and the remnants of one of two local Utopian communities: “Also still standing along School Street in 1965,” she writes, “was the Kropotkin Library, the Stelton colony’s library named for the famed Russian anarchist. No wonder School Street felt to me like such a fantastical place.”
Can you go home again? The perennial question is asked, and to some extent answered, by author Jonathan Coleman in “Made in Allentown,” an account of his sometimes-wrenching return to the Pennsylvania city of his youth, a place now often characterized as a Rust Belt casualty. “The Allentown I grew up in,” he writes, “was far more than ‘Mack Truck Country’ and Lehigh Portland Cement and Western Electric and neighboring Bethlehem Steel—the place Billy Joel was singing about [in his song “Allentown”], the place he was also praising for its toughness, its resilience, in the face of an economy changing from manufacturing to service.” Encountering much that is new about the city, including an even more ethnically diverse population, he is repeatedly seized by memories of people and places, some gone and some still present: “My Allentown, though, was the Allentown of parks and trails and small bridges over creeks; of curious hex signs on barns…; a place that had three department stores, one of which, Hess’s, was—and always will be—the crown jewel, the cornerstone, the true signifier when people say the word ‘Allentown.’”
If the essays in The Character of Place evoke an America in which the past lives on, both troublingly and reassuringly, in our very uncertain present, the three essays in A Cultural Revolution on the Right take the measure of the ideas, ideologies, and broad cultural projects that set themselves against what many on the right see as contemporary America’s hegemonic progressive-liberal culture. As our authors show, these cultural movements bear very little resemblance to your grandparents’ (or even your parents’) conservatism, many of the ideas having originated among the alt-right or in the murkier reaches of the Internet before finding their way into the talking points of some of our national politicians. In “Vital Signs,” social critic and novelist Tara Isabella Burton examines a broad, somewhat inchoate movement that has been cheered on by many leading conservative intellectuals and embraced by various staffers of the Trump administration. “Somewhere between Trump’s shock victory in 2016 and the inevitability of his return,” she writes, “vitalism became not merely a pithy means of online identity formation but a renascent political and, indeed, spiritual project…. Vitalism—at least, a distinctly “based and red-pilled” iteration of it—is not only the provenance of Bronze Age Perverts and Raw Egg Nationalists and a whole ecosystem of right-coded bodybuilding influencers and post-Petersonian denizens of the manosphere but also, more broadly, the ideology underpinning the whole of the contemporary New Right.”
One of the more ironic features of the New Right’s cultural revolution is its frank adoption of the strategies and at least some of the ideas of thinkers of the radical left, including many of the so-called cultural Marxists. In “A Passive Counter-Revolution,” THR associate editor Nick Burns homes in on the strange intellectual relationship between political operative Christopher Rufo and the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci: “Rufo sees himself as leading a right-wing counter-revolution in the American cultural superstructure, focusing particularly on higher education. And his preferred guide in this effort is Gramsci, who, as he told the Wall Street Journal, ‘provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore.’” Looking at the programmatic results of Rufo’s campaign against DEI and wokeness, Burns finds that destruction so far seems unaccompanied by any blueprint for positive construction.
Perhaps no impulse within the right-wing cultural revolution is more extreme than the one that challenges the idea (and ideals) of democracy itself. In “High Priest of the Dark Enlightenment,” philosopher Antón Barba-Kay looks at the farrago of animadversions and neo-feudal fantasies produced by Curtis Yarvin and a clutch of similarly minded thought gurus: “The ‘Dark Enlightenment’ (or neo-reactionary movement: NRx) is one area of the wilderness of online writing that has sprung up over the past twenty years to contradict, unmask, and rage against a broad liberal consensus about society, religion, and politics…. Yarvin and this company have at various times proposed or predicted some combination of the following claims: that the Whiggish view of history as continuous moral progress is bunk, that liberal democracy is headed for permanent collapse, that democracy is an inefficient, entropic, and intellectually oppressive form of government, that the idea of equality is a mystification invented to serve the ruling caste’s interests, that purported differences in IQ between races and people do or should or will translate into their social superiority, that some form of monarchy or CEO supremacy is to be preferred to liberal democracy, that nation-states are dated entities, and that political regimes should be reimagined in terms of digital technologies. It is little wonder that some of Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarians have given Yarvin the come-hither.”
Whether the strands of this broad cultural revolution on the right can be braided into a coherent, constructive, and lasting cultural hegemony replacing the progressive-liberal one is a question unlikely to be answered during the current presidential administration. For now, they help justify a sweeping program of power consolidation and institutional demolition heretofore unimaginable to most American citizens.