According to Wikipedia—
Compact is an American online magazine that began operating in March 2022. The magazine was co-founded by Edwin Aponte, a populist and founder of The Bellows, Matthew Schmitz, a former editor of the conservative ecumenical journal First Things, and conservative opinion journalist Sohrab Ahmari. When it was founded, The New York Times described the magazine's listed contributors and contributing editors as ideologically diverse, including religiously conservative Catholics, populists, and dissident Marxist feminists. The magazine's editorial line is critical of liberalism from both the left and the right.
You’ll find in Compact anti-Liberal Establisment thinking From Zizek and the Frankfurt School Left to Matt Schmitz and Sohrab Ahmari on the Integralist Right. What unites them is their celebration of populism as the driving energy of democracy. I read it because even when it’s wrong it’s smart, and when it’s right, it’s right in a way you won’t find in the NY Times, the New Yorker or the Atlantic. To give you a good taste of what they’re about is this recent piece on Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton by Matthew Gasda entitled “Goodbye to the Hamilton Decade”.
The idea that agrarian and working-class democratic populism has held back American progress is a convenient narrative. It explains why contemporary political elites would valorize a musical about one of America’s most profoundly undemocratic Founding Fathers. Hamilton supported an American king in all but name.
I was kind of amazed when Hamilton became such a darling for Liberals. Did they have any idea who Hamilton was? But I think Gasda explains why—Hamilton was the founding father who most celebrated the formation of an oligarchic, strong central government run by a wealthy, meritocratic/technocratic elite, an elite that Hillary Clinton came to represent:
Liberal audiences in 2016 mourned Hamilton’s death onstage partly because they needed a way to mourn Hillary’s loss, and console themselves in the face of the (to their minds) frightening rise of populism. The big Broadway and off-Broadway plays that followed repeated this template, which presupposes that the arc of American history bends towards expert-led solutions for social problems exacerbated by the backwards habits and views of the working classes. In essence, the “Hamilton decade” can be defined as an era in the American performing arts in which the rhetoric of theater masked a deeply elitist, self-serving, and very belated Federalism.
I have to say, there’s not much I disagree with there. I voted for Hillary, but I hated the Neoliberalism that Hillary and her husband stood for. Neoliberalism is the ideology of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, and it must be rejected for that and for so many other reasons. I vote Democratic because I believe it’s important to have competent, experienced people running the government in a society as complex and diverse as ours, and I don’t want chaos. Competency and actual governing just doesn’t matter to Republicans anymore. That’s why there’s a governing vacuum on the Right that is ready for the Integralists to fill.
But I’ve never been comfortable with the meritocratic elitism that typifies the Neoliberalism of the Democrats who dominate the Party. I’ve stayed in the Party because, one, there was no sane alternative and, two, because the Democrats seemed receptive, even if not enthusiastically, to figures like Bernie and AOC.
The problem for Democrats now is that they lost their opportunity to capture populist energies when in 2016 they chose Hillary over Bernie. Those energies now belong to MAGA, and I don’t think it had to go that way. But it is what it is. And that’s one of the primary reasons I supported Biden against the Establishment Liberals who have done everything they could to destroy his candidacy over the last month. He is a populist-friendly candidate, moreso than Kamala Harris can be. Going with the untested Harris is the greater risk. I can’t say I know much about Harris as a human being, but I hope she proves to be more than the careerist empty suit that I have so far taken her to be.
I didn’t think that Biden was trailing Trump by a few points because most people see him as old. When I hear people saying he had zero chance of winning, they were just trying to justify to themselves a position that after a while had become a self-fulfilling prophecy—they made their fears a reality by doing everything they could to destroy him. Biden trailed a little in the polls because lots of people in Middle America don’t like woke Establishment Liberals. Their way of saying No to all of that in early polling is to say No to the head of the party, but when push came to shove, I believe most would have come home to Biden rather than vote for the truly scary, rambling, old, crazy guy.
Dislike of Establlishment Liberal elites is why Hillary lost in ‘16. As a Bernie supporter in ‘16, I argued then that she was the Martha Coakley candidate of 2016, i.e., a candidate that Establishment Liberals like but nobody else does. I fear that Harris might be the Coakley candidate of ‘24. I’m not saying that Harris will lose, but I don’t think that she’s a stronger candidate now than Biden would have been had there not been an Establishment Liberal freak-out after his debate. Attempts to make Biden look like a woke Liberal have never succeeded, and a Bay-area product like Harris is more vulnerable in that regard in swing states. I hope she’ll surprise me. I want her to win, and I think it’s essential that everybody quickly unite around her and focus on defeating Trump.
But back to Compact. If Trump wins, I think it will be an important magazine to read, because it’s an ‘ecumenical’ space—embracing a broad spectrum from right to left—where thoughtful intellectuals are taking populism as a potentially positive force seriously. I’ve said some negative things about populism lately, but I would say now that I consider it a neutral, largely unconscious, raw energy that can be directed toward good or evil. Trump’s demagogic capture of populist energies has directed it toward evil, and I think that Integralist/populists like Schmitz and Ahmari underestimate the evil that Trump’s demagoguery has awakened in the body politic, and they are way too sanguine that guys like J.D. Vance, whom they see as a populist ally, can redirect it in a positive way. But I think that Schmitz and Ahmari are naive, perhaps dangerously so, but not themselves evil and cynical.
They are educable, and at least by the founding of this magazine, they have shown that they are open to populists thinking from the Left. If Trump and the MAGA movement lose decisively in November, it might drive cultural-right populists like Schmitz and Ahmari, Hawley and Vance, to ally with the Sanders/AOC/Black Caucus populists on the Left. Okay. Maybe I’m the one who’s naive. But as another Compactarticle entitled “Why the Left Gets J.D. Vance Wrong” posted last week points out, most Liberals aren’t aware of how much Vance has done already with populist Democrats:
But with the possible exception of Hawley, [Vance] has probably been the GOP senator most willing to work with Democrats to push back against corporate power and support working families. Here are a few examples:
He co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) to lower the price of insulin.
He backed legislation with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to claw back executive pay when big banks fail.
He spearheaded legislation with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to regulate the rail industry following the disaster in East Palestine.
He worked with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) for drug price transparency and to promote greater credit-card competition.
He introduced a bill with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to battle corporate mergers.
At least he tries to get the stuff done on behalf of the ‘demos’, the people, unlike most of his GOP colleagues, who think their job is to be a performance artist.
I am not trying to soften my negative opinion of Vance the Integralist, and I hope the Democrats attack him with everything they’ve got to make sure he never gets near the White House. He’s young, inexperienced, and he’s clearly in way over his head, and the worst possible thing that could happen to him as a human being would be if his ticket were to win, because it will likely make him into a monster. I don’t see him, at least yet, as a monster. I see him as dangerously naive, but I also see his populism as more savvy than what you’re seeing from most Establishment Liberals.
Most Liberals don’t understand why those in the Hawley-Vance populist faction in the GOP, despite their Trumpism, see themselves as defenders of democracy. They assume its cynical bad faith and that they are no different from hacks like Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan. But I think those in the Vance-Hawley faction genuinely see themselves as Jacksonian defenders of the interests of the ‘demos’—and they see the Liberal elites as anti-democratic. They see, I think to a large extent correctly, Liberal elites as Hamiltonians that have nothing but contempt for the demos unless they share their meritocratic, cosmopolitan values.
How their self-image as pro-democracy fits with their support of Project 2025 makes a perverse kind of sense if you believe, as they do, that the Administrative State is swimming with anti-democratic Liberal elites whom only a strong executive can purge. They must use the executive powers of the anti-democratic administrative state to destroy the power of the anti-democratic administrative state. This, of course, is crazy on so many levels. But I assume for now that they are not monsters, and so I’m just trying to understand how they justify the extremism in Project 2025 to themselves.
Hopefully they won’t have the opportunity to find out how crazy their ideas are, but one way or the other, populist energies are a thing to be reckoned with in the next several cycles and beyond. And sane Americans of good will, whether they lean right or left in their cultural values, need to find a way to agree to disagree and to get focused on structural issues that benefit the bottom 80%, the demos, and to unite in resistance to the other malignancies of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. It can’t be done without the support of the ‘demos’, and so working with populist energies will be an important theme in this blog/newsletter going forward.
So for that reason I think that Compact will be important to read if Trump loses, because it will be the place where Left populism might find a voice that it does not find in elite media now. And I’ve not given up hope that a left populism will find a way to play a larger role in the Democratic party should it survive the election in November. There’s a core of populists there already to work with.
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Bonus Material for the Hard Core:
These final paragraphs of Gasda’s article discussing the Frankfurt School’s Walter Benjamin’s take on art and politics will give you a feel for the kind of thing you’ll read in Compact. It’s not categorizable as either Democrat or GOP—given the current arrangements. It’s Left Populist:
A genuine artistic radical wouldn’t praise a Hamiltonian elite like Hillary Clinton, for producing a play about a historical event we generally agree is good (women’s suffrage). Doing so not only deadens our intellects and moral sensibilities, but worse, it inevitably serves and reinforces the prerogatives of the powerful. For Benjamin, any work—no matter its stated politics—that is too tied to the newspaper or what we now call the news media, “belongs to capital” and will always be counterrevolutionary.
Progressive art by and for the bourgeoisie will always side against the proletariat—if the author is only writing and is only experiencing the solidarity “in the mind,” and not “as a producer”—not working from the same material and social conditions of the oppressed class. The bourgeois or PMC or Hamiltonian activist (any of those terms serve), according to Benjamin, just ends up “at the side of the proletariat … a well-wisher, an ideological patron.” They’re there, using a conventional musical or social-realist drama to prove they’re “on the right side of history,” thus running cover for their own self-interest.
Benjamin instead urged the bourgeois author—backed by capital and formed by an elite education (as both Brecht and Benjamin himself were)—to work “directly and simultaneously with people who, at some point, meant little to him”: to give up power and prestige, and take the same risks as the oppressed represented onstage had to take. The author must follow the example of Brecht, and become a producer—not in the glamorous Broadway sense, but in the sense of joining the proletariat and working under adverse conditions.
Taking the leap Benjamin advised means putting yourself in other people’s heads, no matter how scary, even if it means getting mixed up with tangible human evil. A really radical artist will risk being called names or exiled from progressive circles to bring out the truth of the deep and complex interrelations of all classes, monies, and political forces. This next era of American theater doesn’t need more progressive kitsch, but a flexible, plural, and humanistic wisdom.
This is not all good art does, but it’s a part of it insofar as it seeks to shatter the illusions of those among the top 20% who think they are the good guys because they wear a BLM tee and dig the rap-style lyrics of Hamilton.
But you will find whackadoodle Claremont Institute hackery like this on it from time to time. As I said, they are “ecumenical” with filters that are sometime looser than I’d like.
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