David Austin Walsh
Historian. Academic Advisor @ University of Virginia. Columnist @ Boston Review. Book: TAKING AMERICA BACK: THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT AND THE FAR RIGHT // Yale Press // April 2024
- London is very charming! Almost makes me forget my Anglophobia. Almost.
- What is the best place to buy vintage men's clothing in London?
- Paging @dieworkwear.bsky.social
- A Catholic gave the UK its major cultural export.
- Look, I'm not a practicing Catholic and I'm married to a Jew, but there is a *reason* I consider Catholicism to be the most authentic form of Christianity.
- I'm flying to England tomorrow and I promise you I am going to be absolutely *insufferable* over there about coming from an Irish Catholic family from Chicago.
- New pope is also apparently from my dad's old neighborhood and only two years younger so there's a non-zero chance they've interacted before.
- I'm going full Luddite in my classes next year. Zero-tolerance policy for laptops, phones, etc. I don't want to have to do a blue book exam but that may end up being what happens.
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View full threadI ban laptops generally, but you can't go truly fully luddite, because many will have accommodations that more or less require you to let them use laptops. I will say, banning laptops--which I started doing about a decade ago--makes for an unquestionably better class.
- The thing is that *any* allowance for smartphones or laptops in the classroom opens up space for this shit.
- I don't blame you. How about having them get the large format blue book and they use it all semester for quizzes, discussion questions, etc. and you keep control of the books. Remember, the Luddites were right all along. The Industrial Revolution did destroy their way of life.
- I mean, if we're going down anyway may as well go down doing what we believe.
- I'm been back on blue books for a while now. Blue book is definitely the way to go. In theory I'm with you on the full luddite but I realize that some students do actually take their notes on laptops and can barely write by hand at this point. So still torn on that one.
- Eh, I think they're gonna have to. They can still use ChatGPT in real-time from their laptops and phones if those are allowed in the classroom.
- I've been zero tech (with exceptions for students who have or are seeking accommodation), and will be doing a bluebook exam as well.
- Yes, obviously with the access asterisk. I had my students write their weekly reflection assignments in class in their physical notebooks and it went fine this past semester, so I figure why expand it next year.
- There's no other way to do it. Lectures, small-group discussion, mandatory in-person attendance (no Zoom!), and handwritten assignments.
- Ironically I've always wanted to do this, because I despise how much classroom management has become responding to emails and administering a Canvas website instead of the actual substance of the course.
- Okay, now it's gotten sad.
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View full threadUnlike Buckley a half a century ago, there's little to suggest that Hanania is personally charismatic or charming. But maybe that's besides the point -- or rather maybe traditional understandings of charisma are meaningless in Silicon Valley/VC culture.
- Maybe it's simply that Hanania's views are representative among wealthy VC-connected elites who essentially serve as the tastemakers of elite liberal/centrist culture, and his respectabilization, for want of a better term, is downstream from that.
- It's fairly obvious what Hanania's game here is. The more interesting question is, why are these liberals and centrists playing along? Why are they invested in making Hanania a respectable conservative interlocutor?
- Part of me feels genuinely bad for Aella -- if you look up her background she's basically from a crazy Evangelical cult family in Idaho and writes openly about her father abused her. But on the other hand she is a terrible person.
- London mutuals: I am going to be in your city next week! Looking for recommendations for things to see/do/eat/drink/visit/read/etc.
- Generative AI has made grading such a paranoid nightmare.
- To me, this is the great unanswered question of our age: how is that American liberalism managed to fuck up so utterly definitively despite having ample opportunities to shore up American social and political institutions?
[This user deactivated their account]- Hence why I said that the Marxist explanation is correct!
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- Which of course also informed Obama’s post-2008 economic response… At the minimum the story of liberalism’s 21st-century collapse must begin in 2008, which of course owes heavily to Clintonian triangulation.
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- No, I'm not familiar with it and I should read it! I'm going on vacation next week and need to start a new book. (I was thinking Grandin's latest but it's a brick and I don't want to carry it around with me...)
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- This is, I think, worth a longer conversation, especially considering that the dominant view on the left today is that Cold War liberalism was a genocidal, world-historical catastrophe that also irrevocably eroded democracy in America.
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- Well, yeah, I mean obviously basically all of America's structural problems are directly downstream from the failure of Reconstruction -- but c'mon, I asked a specific question about *agency*!
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- Well, that's a depressing thought: the only thing that kept the populist right out of power in the second half of the 20th century was Cold War liberalism.
- A fuckup, by definition, is an unnecessary or self-inflicted mistake that is a consequence of one's own agency. Trump's tariffs are *fuckups* in a way that the COVID lockdown and subsequent economic crises were not. So what were the Democrats' fuckups from 2020-2025?
- There's the Gaza genocide, obviously. Also add not actually prosecuting Trump until it was too late to the list. What are the others? And what lessons can we learn from them?
- There's the hard Marxist answer about liberalism and capitalism which is almost certainly right, but even then I think we still need more nuanced and granular analysis of what went wrong and why.
- I guess what I'm gesturing towards is that the failure of American liberalism in the 2020s is both structural *and* a product of liberal agency and political culture. The structural explanations are clear and compelling. But what, then, were the fuckups?
- Something I wasn’t really prepared for with Trump 2.0 is how systemically weaker almost all of institutions were in 2025 even compared to 2020.
- It’s not enough to say that Biden fucked up our best chances to reform—although that *is* almost certainly true—but rather that Trump is an emergent feature of a society in apparently terminal decline.
- These motherfuckers I swear.
- I spent the morning trying to get ChatGPT to make photorealistic images of Ivy League suits and it couldn’t get the 3/2 roll or dartless fronts right. AI is a bunch of bullshit.
- Goddamn the COVID vax is giving me everything—headache, muscle aches, chills, fever, insomnia.
- Has there ever actually been a successful wall-to-wall organizing campaign at an American university?
- Penn State will be rug-to-rug soon
- How'd y'all accomplish that?
- To harp again on a point that I've made before: there is no mass constituency *in favor* of Trump's war on the universities but there's no mass constituency in favor of the universities, either.
- Nothing brightens your day like getting an unsolicited email from a grad student about how much they loved your book!
- Look, at the end of the day the reason why MAGA beat liberalism in 2024 is that it provided a vision—albeit an incredibly stupid one—of a future that is different and (supposedly) better than the present.
- And when all that liberalism offers—all that it *can* offer—is the unsatisfactory status quo (and the occasional ferociously hostile “how dare you!!!” towards critiques of the status quo)… well… of course it’s going to lose!
- That doesn’t mean that liberalism is down for the count, especially as the catastrophe of Trump’s tariffs sinks in. But as long as the limits of American liberalism’s political vision is defending the status quo, there’s no reason to think that Starmerism isn’t in our immediate political future.
- Not coincidentally the only political history/theory guys I know who got TT jobs this year are conservatives.
- “Finally, scholars from JHU & AEI have designed a program, the Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative, that aims to encourage conservative, libertarian & heterodox students & graduates to consider a career in higher education, & to support them_” hub.jhu.edu/2025/04/21/j...
- I’m trying not to have sour grapes here—although it’s hard!—but there is no doubt in my mind this is a direct consequence in conservative/RW investment in developing spaces like Hamilton at the University of Florida.
- And to be clear these guys are talented scholars and there is basically no other pathway for them to get jobs in academia.
- Embracing the most dandified asshole look imaginable for the last day of classes at UVA.
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- Pincord is the best I can do at the moment!
