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HOME ABOUT ARCHIVE SIDECAR CONTRIBUTORS SUBSCRIBE YOUR ACCOUNT REVIEWS Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals and Abstractions: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s Oxford University Press: New York 2015 NICHOLAS DAMES FICTIONS OF CAPITAL More than thirty years later, the onset of the 1980s retains a darkly mythic pull over Western imaginative media. One memorable, iconic version of that transition is Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 Boogie Nights, where a murder/suicide at a New Year’s party coincides exactly with the opening moments of 1980; it is the bloody pivot moment in the film’s narrative of the capture and dismantling of an artisanal industry—in this case, pornography—by newly overabundant capital seeking any and all commodities to transform. The banner that stretches outside the scene (‘Good Bye 70s . . . Hello 80s’) might just as well be a Dantean warning. This is not just an American narrative; witness Elena Ferrante, in the final volume of her Neapolitan quartet, The Story of the Los...

HOME ABOUT ARCHIVE SIDECAR CONTRIBUTORS SUBSCRIBE YOUR ACCOUNT REVIEWS Alexander Keyssar, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA 2020 544 pp, 978 0 6746 6015 1 TOM MERTES APPOINTMENT BY THE PEOPLE? While Biden promotes his global summit on democracy, a majority of Americans think their own presidential-electoral system is seriously flawed. Opinion polls show that support for reform of the Electoral College has been running at between 60 and 80 per cent since the late 1960s. Indeed, as Alexander Keyssar documents in Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?, criticism of the indirect mechanism inscribed in the Constitution began soon after its inception. Presidential elections mediated by state electors were ‘the most deplorable proofs of the imbecility of our system’, according to New Jersey Senator Mahlon Dickerson in 1819, while Virginian Congressman John Randolph called the process ‘a mockery, the shadow of a shade of an election’. Fif...

HOME ABOUT ARCHIVE SIDECAR CONTRIBUTORS SUBSCRIBE YOUR ACCOUNT DYLAN RILEY FAULTLINES Political Logics of the US Party System To read the 2020 election results, it may be useful to specify the four fundamental elements of us politics in the contemporary period. First and most importantly, the two political parties are constituted by coalitions of rent-seeking groups, both at the top—the big donors, higher-level elected representatives and party officials—and, to a certain extent, at mass level. With stagnant secular-growth rates, the party struggle in the us has become to a large extent a zero-sum redistributive conflict, which explains the extreme severity with which it is carried out. This structural condition shapes a further feature: the personalization, or charismatic inflection, of political leadership, underpinned by the presidential system. If this can be traced back to Reagan, or jfk, it was institutionalized by the Obama White House and has been heightened under Trump. The...

Which is the Real "Working Class Party" Now? Donald Trump self-immolated, but the results of Tuesday's election show the seeds of a profound switch in roles for the Democratic and Republican Parties Matt Taibbi Nov 6 963 1,356 In an irony he is humorously ill-equipped to appreciate, Donald Trump by losing this week may have gained something for the Republican Party bureaucracy he took such pleasure in humiliating four years ago: a future. Defying years of muddle-headed media analyses, Trump underperformed with white men, but made gains with every other demographic. Some 26 percent of his votes came from nonwhite Americans, the highest percentage for a Republican since 1960. The politician who became instantly famous — and infamous — by saying of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” performed stunningly well with Latino voters. Exit polls, which can be unreliable, pegged his national support at 32%-35% of the Latino vo...