Political Observer.

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Sep 23, 2025

Editor: Greg Lukianoff is co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.” These political hacks, moderled themselves after Mr. Bloom’s hysterical book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” (Simon & Schuster, 1987). As a way to make their book ‘The Coddling’ appear as the sucessor of Bloom’s 1987 diatribe, that seemed the perfect cap-stone the waning Reagan Years?

Editor: From Mr. Bloom’s New York Times obituary:

Allan Bloom, the professor of political philosophy whose book on American universities became a best-selling text for conservative attacks on contemporary intellectual life, died yesterday at the University of Chicago’s Bernard Mitchell Hospital.

Mr. Bloom, 62 years old, died of peptic ulcer bleeding complicated by liver failure, said a spokesman at the University of Chicago, where Mr. Bloom had taught since 1979. He had been hospitalized for several weeks.

The publication of Mr. Bloom’s book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” (Simon & Schuster, 1987) transformed him from an obscure professor, little known outside the University of Chicago, to a cranky icon of conservative views about education, music, morals and the values held by society.

The book — a long, sometimes dense account of two decades in higher education, as seen through his own experience teaching at Chicago, Cornell and Yale — attributed many university problems to administrators’ having acquiesced to student demands in the 1960’s and 1970’s. He criticized the passing of such traditional university ideas as the reliance on the so-called great books of Western culture, and lamented that even students at the nation’s most elite universities seemed to have “lost the practice of and the taste for reading.” ‘Essential Reading’

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At first Mr. Bloom said he had trouble finding a publisher for the book because it was considered stuffy and he was relatively unknown. But it came out just when tuition at private universities was soaring and questions about the value of education were mounting, and it resonated with American readers. It was No. 1 on The New York Times’ best-seller list for 10 weeks and has sold more than one million copies in the United States.

The book’s success surprised Mr. Bloom as much as it did everyone else.

“Sometimes I can’t believe it,” he told a reporter in 1988. “It’s fun being No. 1 on the best-seller list. It’s like being declared Cary Grant, or a rock star. All this energy passing through you. . . . “

But the book’s belligerent tone made Mr. Bloom a target of considerable criticism himself. His philosophical opponents questioned his scholarship and denounced him as rigid, sexist, elitist and anti-democratic. David Rieff, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, called Mr. Bloom vengeful, reactionary and an academic version of Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North. He said “The Closing of the American Mind” was a book “decent people would be ashamed of having written.”

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Saul Bellow wrote his Novel ‘Ravelstein’ that featured the fact that ‘Ravelstein’ was gay!

Editor: Mr. Greg Lukianoff on ‘Hate Speech’ consonate with Critical Race Theory?

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Or consider hate speech. The concept was developed in the 1980s by leftist legal scholars like Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda, and it shaped the campus speech codes and so-called political correctness of the 1990s. Intellectuals on the right were quick to contest the idea of hate speech — U.S. law does not recognize a general hate-speech exception to the First Amendment, and never has. Charlie Kirk rejected the idea of using hate speech rationales to crack down on free speech. Yet after Mr. Kirk’s assassination, Republicans rushed to promise crackdowns on hateful expression, deploying the same concept.

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Editor: Reader self-emamcipate from New York Times political chatter!

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii153/articles/yongle-zhang-reconfiguring-hegemony

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Winnism’s prospects

Fundamentally, both Fukuyama and Trump want the us to keep winning. However, Fukuyama predicates this on a ‘global fight’ for liberal-democratic principles, while understating the costs of such commitments. He epitomizes the ‘globalism’ that maga vilifies: spending American resources on state-building programmes to promote the spread of liberal democracy and sustain the us-led system; pressuring nations still ‘caught in history’ to move towards its specified end. Yet this hegemonic commitment has required formidable material underpinnings—and these are now starting to erode.

The scale of us sovereign debt provides an indication of the crisis. By 2024, federal debt had reached $34.5 trillion, or 125 per cent of gdp, and interest payments on it are running at $1 trillion per year, surpassing discretionary defence spending and approaching Social Security outlays. Persistently high interest rates create a debt-snowball effect and diminish capacities for crisis response. Unprecedentedly, the us Treasury Secretary has had to reassure the markets about the creditworthiness of fresh us government debt.footnote³⁵ Ultimately, however, this depends upon the capacity of a robust real economy to serve as a tax base. Although nominal us gdp figures continue to rise, its real economy encompasses a hollowed-out manufacturing sector, crumbling infrastructure and declining consumer-spending power. The us faces intensifying competition as developing countries move up the value chain, challenging high-end sectors such as semiconductors and ai. Meanwhile, the overall decline of heavy industry has potentially grave implications for us military capability, which ultimately depends on the American shipbuilding industry to update the us Navy’s fleet and on Boeing’s production capacity for the us Air Force.

Trump’s policies—however crude—respond to a real problem of hegemonic overextension. Trump’s attacks on ‘globalism’ seem exaggerated, but they may reflect the fact that the us no longer has the economic capacity to sustain a global hegemonic system at any price. At some point a certain degree of strategic retrenchment will be inevitable, with the us choosing to act in certain areas, on certain issues, and refraining from doing so in others—reducing support for Ukraine and demanding that the Europeans step up, while extracting a quid-pro-quo mineral agreement from Kyiv, for example. Trump’s tweets about annexing Greenland, not to mention Canada and the Panama Canal, were widely derided. Yet there may be a coherent calculation of national interest behind his ‘neo-Monroe Doctrine’, based on consolidating America’s status as a hegemon over its three neighbouring oceans, thereby laying the groundwork for a reconfiguration of America’s hegemonic modality.

Trump’s mission of industrial rejuvenation constitutes a formidable challenge. The path to it—the tariff-based strategy to coerce trade-deficit reductions and manufacturing repatriation—remains obscured by systemic contradictions. It is predicated on three assumptions: first, that exporting nations cannot overcome their dependence on us markets; second, that American consumers will tolerate inflationary pressure; third, that domestic capacities—not least: skilled engineers—will be able to sustain manufacturing resurgence and supply-chain reintegration. China’s refusal to capitulate to Trump’s tariff demands demonstrated the asymmetry of the relationship—American reliance on Chinese goods exceeding Chinese dependency on American markets. Federal incentives may attract initial manufacturing investment, but systemic impediments—policy volatility, fragmented industrial eco-systems, chronic shortages of skilled and assembly-line labour—persist. The us government cannot pledge to subsidize the huge increase in payroll costs that real reshoring would entail. In any case, despite Trumpism’s protectionist tendencies, there is no real alternative to neo-liberalism on offer. The Big Beautiful Bill leads with tax cuts for the rich. Trump is neither willing nor able to challenge the mechanisms of wealth distribution in the us.

Fukuyama’s indignation at Trump’s consolidation of power by undermining key ‘rule of law’ norms—judicial independence, press freedom, civil liberties—fails to address Trumpism’s deeper problem for his paradigm.footnote³⁶ For Trump has succeeded in shaking up America’s rigid political institutions, strengthening executive power and breaking the gridlock that plagued Clinton, Obama, Bush and Biden. But he has done so by deepening the system’s patrimonial tendencies, through his own highly unconventional political behaviour and his family’s blatant profiteering. Moreover, while weakening—indeed, assailing—the norms of liberal-democratic rule, Fukuyama’s second pillar, at home and abroad, he has arguably been more responsive to popular pressure, the third pillar, than recent Democratic Administrations.

Trump has so far largely succeeded in aligning American foreign policy with the perceptions of those who feel they are losing from globalization. Through a sovereignty-centric redefinition of us interests, he has re-categorized previous assets of the American imperium like usaid as external impositions. Liberal-democratic international institutions, constructed over decades, have become dispensable burdens, unless delivering tangible benefits. Economic concessions extracted from traditional allies—forcibly rewriting their domestic spending plans—get reframed as ‘wins’. Trump’s ‘repatrimonialization’ of foreign policy, to use Fukuyama’s term, relies on the exaggeration of American advantage over other countries through one-man public diplomacy, conducted in highly personalist terms, through face-to-face talks or social media barrages.

Trumpism’s victory discourse operates as a permanent confrontation with America’s liberal-democratic status quo—rolling the dice, pocketing the ‘wins’ and shrugging off the losses. Its operational algorithm systematically amplifies marginal gains while obfuscating costs—whether inflationary impacts or systemic uncertainties. This selective victory narrative intertwines with an escalating personality cult. Trump functions as the nexus connecting all the factions of his fractious base: Republican traditionalists, tech-right ideologues, the maga movement. His persona thus becomes the symbolic banner for this inherently contradictory coalition, revealing how personality cults emerge not merely from individual grandiosity but from the inherent logic of populist politics.

Will Trump’s victory narrative eclipse Fukuyamian liberalism, or is it more likely that the latter will undergo some sort of resurgence? The unstated truth of the ‘end of history’ paradigm was that liberal democracy’s triumph relied upon the hard power of the us—crucial for imposing its Cold War victory—as much as its ideological attraction. Fukuyama’s teleology remains dependent upon us global primacy. Yet the price of its hegemonic architecture is becoming unsustainable, compelling structural transformation—with Trump as its provisional agent. Should Trump succeed in renewing the economic foundations of American hegemony while preserving its institutional structures, the notion of an Anglophone liberal-capitalist ‘end of history’ may take on a new lease of life.

Conversely, failure might raise the question of whether American hegemony can perpetuate its ‘winning’ status under either paradigm. Though facing real systemic challenges, Trump’s responses have been rash and hasty, constituting a high-stakes political gamble. The repatrimonialization of government has suggested unpredictability rather than strength. Its main message is that countries need to rely on themselves. In that sense, Trump’s wager may end by accelerating multi-polarization. If so, we may expect a proliferation of colourful victory narratives, as Trump inspires other nations to develop their own ‘winning’ brands. Amid the hubbub of voices, perhaps a discourse serving the working class will find room to grow.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii153/articles/yongle-zhang-reconfiguring-hegemony

Political Observer.