Author: Justin DaMetz

Father of Julian and Evelyn, Husband of Tabitha, Christian theologian, writer, 5th grade teacher, book addict, displaced Middle-Earth resident

Dylan

I’ve recently been drawn to diving back into Bob Dylan’s discography, triggered probably by a review of his latest album in Jacobin, and by running across a reference to him in a blog post I read. (This is really all it takes to send my down rabbit holes sometimes.) I (typically so) discovered and fell in love with the music of Dylan in college, as I entered into leftist politics and thought. Over the years since then, I haven’t listented to him a ton, but have always been happy to listen to him whenever he comes across my shuffle playlist.

But, I want to dig deeper, so I’m attempting a listen through of his studio discography, followed by The Bootleg Series. We’ll see how far I get. For now, though, I was just listening to the Essentials Playlist on Apple Music, and remembering how much I love songs like “Tangled Up in Blue” (my all-time favorite Dylan track), “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Molly’s Farm”, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and the Nashville Skyline take on “Girl from the North Country” with Johnny Cash. What a national treasure. Can you believe he’s 79, and still going strong as ever? May we all be so blessed.

informality

As I so often am, I have been thinking (agonizing) about writing this blog, mainly on the question of “what is it for?” One only has to click on the Housekeeping or Personal and Introspective category tags here to read a whole litany of navel gazing and reformulations and resets on this blog over the last couple of years. Such are the wages, I guess, of a really intense intersection of imposter syndrome and delusions of glory and insecurity and a drive to write.

So anyways, I’m constantly reexamining my purpose in writing a blog, to the point much of the time of paralysis. I’m trying to remedy that, and I think that means more informality and less planning and polish. Too often, I think I envision this blog as some part of a larger, professional publication, when its really not. Its more of a journaling exercise, or at least it should be, with the possibility of some reader interaction. Trying to write a professional type blog here is not sustainable, and it takes away from my opportunities to write for publishing elsewhere (because I’m constantly posting that kind of stuff here.)

So, here’s a public commitment to more informality and meandering and journaling. And to checking my page views a lot less, or at least to not stress about those numbers as much.

Excerpt #17

“Left but not woke” was how commentator David Frum once described Bernie Sanders. In his 2016 bid for the Democratic nomination, Sanders’s economic platform was decidedly ambitious and his rhetoric indisputably populist. In an era of small-government austerity and technocratic solution in, Bernie often sounded like a New Deal dinosaur, blissfully unaware that history had ended in the 1990s, or that Democrats had become a party of right-thinking college graduates rather than blue-collar workers. He offered a worker-centered economic agenda, without the alienating cultural aesthetic that dominates liberal media and the universities.

No one can deny Sanders’s influence on the future of the US left. His platform has upended the policy consensus on Capitol Hill, and his talking points are now regularly imitated by down-ballot candidates across the country.

Yet many of his most outspoken disciples fail to embody his unique appeal. Instead of the single-minded focus on working class issues, they often embrace the liberal culture war while peppering in some of Bernie’s popular programs.

[…]

Progressives and socialists are now pairing ambitious and urgently necessary proposals like Medicare for All with wildly unpopular and sometimes counterproductive policy positions. Further, progressives have embraced a racial used worldview that reduces whole populations to their skin color. “Woke” ideology has prevented many on the Left from grasping the possibility that a Mexican American may care more about health care than immigration, that a woman might be more motivated by economic promises that electing a first female president, or that Trump might be able to improve his vote share among working-class black voters.

Even the political style of the Left seems designed to turn away potential new recruits. Far from signaling a commitment to vital social causes, being “woke” has become synonymous with an embrace of niche cultural attitudes found only in higher educated urban districts and among Twitter users – 80 percent of whom are affluent millennials. The Sanders campaign attempted a break with the online consensus when it rejected the fringe term “Latinx” in its historically successful efforts to court Latino voters. And while Sanders failed to win over infrequent, rural, and small-town voters, he recognized how important it was craft a majoritarian message that could appeal to them.

Dustin Guastella, “Everyone Hates the Democrats” in Jacobin no. 40