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Matthew Schmitz
Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss Trump's loss on birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court, the victory of socialist candidates in Democratic primaries, and the film taking right wing Twitter by storm Citizen Vigilante. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schulenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So the Supreme Court ruled 6, 3 that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution protects birthright citizenship. Anyone born in this country, whether it's to a tourist or an illegal alien, is subject to the jurisdiction thereof and is as American as you or me. So seeing a lot of criticism of this from the right, I see it as really a decision upholding a kind of conventional received understanding of citizenship. This is kind of the notion I had of American citizenship and I've received from whatever high school civics classes and the Schoolhouse Rock level of civic instruction. So I think it's somewhat conservative in that sense. But I also think, as Dan McCarthy argues, for, as Dan McCarthy argues in a piece for Compact this week, that it's going to be destabilizing for our politics in other ways. Justice Roe upset American politics and led to the creation of a long running and very influential legal movement. Dan argues, so will this case. And I think there are pretty obvious reasons for that. When our current notions of birthright citizenship were enshrined in the 20th century, you didn't have the ease of movement that you do today. You certainly didn't have birth tourism as we now know it. So there are certain changes in technology and social condition that have made the of received understanding of birthright citizenship just harder to sustain, I think.
- [03:39]
Jeff Schulenberger
Well, I would just note here, it seems to me that the, if we're going to do the Roe analogy, if the case had, if, if the Trump administration had won this case, then they would have been the equivalent of the or, or if the, the Supreme Court had decided the case on behalf of the Trump administration, it would have been in the equivalent position to the Warren Court, which decided Roe. In other words, it would have been a judicial, a radical judicial act that would up it seriously upend, you know, long standing precedents. And so I think that's, that's a worthwhile thing to note. I saw something like a statement by Mike Johnson that suggested that, or I didn't fully understand the context of the statement. I just saw a sort of snippet of it, but it sounded like he was saying this was an originalist and textualist decision and was implying that that was a bad thing. So, in other words, you know, it would seem that originalism and textualism, which have been the sort of standard approach of the conservative judicial movement for a long time, are now maybe seen as problematic, because it seems to me what the Trump administration and the right wants to happen here is for a kind of radical remaking of policy by judicial fiat, which for a long time was precisely what the right objected to. So I think this makes sense in the current context because for the most part, liberals have become the institutionalists and the defenders of the status quo system, whereas conservatives are the ones now undertaking a revolutionary and radical project of trying to remake the American polity. And so it makes sense that they would actually want, quote, unquote, activist judges to make these kinds of radical moves. And so, you know, my, my basic view is the Roe analogy would, would be that if, if this had been decided on the Trump administration's behalf, that would in fact be a decision as radical in its implications as the Roe decision was at the time. And it would also be an example of, and this is of, of a kind of legislation from the bench of the sort that conservatives have long objected to. So I think that tells you something about this sort of revolutionary and radical turn of the conservative movement, which no longer sets out to, you know, preserve some version of the American status quo, but rather to overturn it and replace it with something else. Now, as far as the substance of the issue goes, you know, my general view is that there are reasonable points to be made about the, the, you know, vast changes that America that, that the world has undergone since this precedent was set in place. I believe there are a number of countries that have shifted from birthright to, to a more limited definition of, of citizenship in recent years. I believe that Australia is one of them. I read about this a little while ago. I can't remember the exact details, but there are a number of countries that have restricted birthright citizenship in recent, in relatively recent years in response to, in part to the, the much greater volume of, of migration and the possibility of birth tourism and things like that. So all of that is quite understandable And I think there is a case to be made. What I find frustrating here is that the right is not attempting to make the case that this has, that the circumstances on the ground have changed, and as a result, we need to rethink citizenship. They're not trying to take that case to the public. They're not trying to persuade anyone that we need to rethink this because times have changed. Instead, they're, they're asking us to simply imagine that, you know, the whole way that this has been done for the past hundred and some years is just wrong and was always wrong. So, and, and therefore anybody who, you know, stands for upholding the status quo is just an idiot or a dupe, as far as I can tell, is, is their position. And so I do find there's a kind of lack of interest in democratic persuasion on the part of the people advocating this change, which is reminiscent of some of what you find on the other side. In other words, that, you know, basically some position is arrived at and then everybody just has to accept it or will be denounced in this kind of highly moralistic way as soon as that, as, as, as soon as you fail to fall in line with the new position. So, you know, I think, and this is sort of a problem that's been cited precisely with the Roe precedent that in other words, instead of attempting to go through the democratic process and persuade people that we should adopt a more liberalized regime for abortion, the approach was to go directly to the Supreme Court and try to get it, and successfully get it to completely change tack and upend long standing precedents. So it seems to me that part of what's going on here is, you know, and obviously it's potentially difficult to do that because it might involve amending the Constitution. So, you know, I think it's possible to say, okay, well, this is just how constitutional law has been done for a long time. You know, these things aren't fixed in stone. They get reinterpreted. And in response to, in response to, you know, shifts in the broader culture and society, all that is fine. But, you know, that is of course, the sort of living Constitution argument of the, the Warren Court, which is long reviled by the right. And so it seems to me there's, there's kind of a number of, of sort of nested ironies here where, you know, my, my overall complaint about this is that there isn't an attempt to persuade people to shift their thinking about this in light of, you know, new circumstances. That is precisely the, the critique of the liberal Support for Roe as just this kind of, you know, vast change in policy by judicial fiat. You know, beyond that, I would say my overall stance is I, I think birthright citizenship tends to be the norm in the Western hemisphere in the Americas, and there is just a good historical reason for that. It tends not to be the norm in, in Europe. And I would note that Europe, despite not having birthright citizenship. In fact, I remember when I studied abroad in Germany and you know, sort of hung out with like these lefty professors and so on when I was there, you know, they would complain about the fact that, you know, there was this huge population of Turkish immigrants, for example, who had, many of whom had ambiguous or difficult citizenship status even in cases where their families had been there for a couple generations, since the sort of peak gas starbeiter era of the 60s and 70s. And so, you know, this is a long standing thing. And the thing they would point out is that meanwhile there were these relatively new arrived people from the former Soviet bloc who could claim some, you know, one, one or two German grandparents and as a result would have a much faster track to citizenship. So in other words, many of these countries in Europe have limited birthright citizenship for many decades. And it's not as if those restrictions have prevented them from having, I would say, much more severe problems with migration than the United States has. For all number of reasons. But I think one is that, you know, an advantage of the birthright norm is that it does encourage assimilation and facilitate assimilation on the part of second generation people from immigrant families. And so, you know, I don't think, I mean, I suppose the right, the right wing response would be, well, you know, we, we have to, you know, keep everyone out, deport everyone, and also not have birthright citizenship. You know, none of that seems very realistic to me. So, you know, my, my overall stance here would be, I think just on the basis of history and tradition, it makes more sense for the United States, like most of the other countries in this hemisphere, to have birthright citizenship rather than citizens. Something like what the Germans call Blutrecht, you know, citizenship by blood. It just, it just makes more sense given our history. And also, I don't think when you
- [12:46]
Matthew Schmitz
say it in German, you know, we don't want it. You say bludrecht.
- [12:51]
Jeff Schulenberger
That is, that's, well, that looks, in a serious way, but, but I mean, this is like an actual term that's, you know, at least when I was studying in Germany, it was still used to describe the immigration regime. So anyway, that's, that's kind of my stance. I'm. I'm not, you know, moralistic about. I think there are reasonable objections to the. The birthright citizenship norm in the current, especially in the current era, But I still think overall it's better. And, and I have yet to be persuaded, because no one's trying to persuade me. They just want to hector me about how I'm an idiot if I don't already accept the new norm.
- [13:28]
Matthew Schmitz
You know, certainly you have libertarians who look to the Gulf states as a kind of social ideal where there are huge numbers of workers that have no citizenship. Right. It's just a kind of economic unit. And so I think there are certain people who are probably hostile to birthright citizenship because they're hostile to. Not in part because they're just hostile to citizenship and political participation broadly. They'd love to see that eroded. I just want to draw one other element of what you were just discussing, Jeff, the way in which technological. Well, the comparison really between Roe and the Court's new decision. And it's worth bearing in mind that I think both Roe and our current controversies over birthright citizenship have been forced by technological changes. There's a great book by Kristen Luker called Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. And in that book she describes how America's abortion politics were utterly transformed by improved medical care and declining rates of maternal mortality when every pregnancy was a potentially fatal event for the mother. You could have an abortion regime that said abortion was illegal, but with the kind of de facto understanding that it could be medically indicated when the pregnancy threatened the life of the mother. And because any pregnancy might threaten a mother's life, a small town doctor could just make a decision in this case, this is the right thing to do. This is what I want to do. And you really had a kind of informal system of it wasn't abortion legalization, it wasn't abortion liberalization, but just the lack of medical care that we now enjoy today meant that abortion wasn't forced as an issue. But once it really became the case that almost any child could be delivered safely, both for the child and for the mother, abortion just emerged as an entirely different sort of issue than it had been before. And it really had to become politicized. It had to become public in a way that simply wasn't the case previously. And something like that has happened with birthright citizenship. Where Jeff talks about the lack of persuasion, Where I've seen these debates play out on the right, they play out very much in terms of originalism and textualism, because those are the terms prized by conservative legal elites, whether they're pro or anti birthright citizenship. I remember once seeing John Yoo, the kind of Berkeley law professor famously associated with George W. Bush's presidency, debating John Eastman, another law professor famously associated with Trump's presidency, on this. And they had very opposite views. Right. But they were arguing in originalist terms. So, yeah, you can argue about what was meant at the time that the 14th Amendment was ratified. But as with abortion, changing technology and again, actually changing medical care has cast this entire issue in a new light and has forced it into politics and public controversy in a way that wasn't the case previously. We mentioned birth tourism. But the most extraordinary and maybe fundamental challenge to birthright citizenship is actually posed by something other than birthright citizenship. It's basically jurisdiction shopping, surrogacy. The Wall Street Journal had a report on the Chinese billionaire Zhu Bo, and he's only one of the Chinese oligarchs they mentioned who's doing this. And he's had multiple American children born through surrogacy. What sense? Are they American children? Are they the children of Americans? Are they descended from any American? So are they descended from any American citizen? No. Are they descended from. From anyone who is resident in America? No, not in genetic terms. Right. But they are born in America. Right. Because you can actually have a fetus with kind of a totally independent genetic makeup placed in the womb of someone who is an American citizen or is resident in the United States of America. And then when that child is born on American soil, again not to an American, nor in a matter of speaking, is the child, you know, even descended from anyone at that moment resident in the United States, that child is an American, and whatever originalism has to tell us about the document, and obviously, you know, textualism, understanding the debates, understanding the document, reading it well, reading it closely, that's essential. But that project has nothing to tell us about this circumstance or how our public policy should address it. So that's just one element of this that really interests me.
- [19:14]
Ashley Frawley
There's another facet of it as well that's important to understand why there feels like there's this need to kind of clamp down on the concept of citizenship. And I absolutely agree with you, Jeff. There's a point that I want to make that we have to be wary of these kind of executive or judicial power games where, you know, the issue of immigration, issue of citizenship needs to be fought over politically. It can't just be, you know, something that's decided by executive fiat. And I think this shying away from democracy is really problematic, but I think also why that, why what's kind of fueling that is there's a perceived, not just perceived, there is an attack really on the concept of citizen, citizens, citizenship itself, and a desire to kind of weaken it and break it down and make it more open. And that's part of a long standing trajectory really since mid century, where any kind of cultural boundaries or distinctions between people are seen as like, exclusionary. And there's this, this desire to kind of have this openness, this, this, you know, if you think about like Karl Popper's the Open Society and Its Enemies, you have this kind of idea of like closed societies were our source of conflict, a source of the destruction that led to the Second World War and this sort of thing. So you need to kind of open it up and move away from these closed societies. And so citizenship by definition distinguishes people. Right? And it. You. But it has to mean something because if we're going to be, we're going to be democracies, we have to have some way of deciding who is the demos, who is it that decides these things. But at the same time, there's this move to kind of break down this demos, to make these kind of borderless worlds and move toward this concept of human rights so that membership in a community becomes entirely meaningless. And so people are trying to say, well, no, this has to have meaning. We need to know who we are. We need to know what it means to be an American. We need to know. And it can't just be by birth, because this isn't enough. I have a friend who went through the whole process of gaining citizenship and he took it really, really seriously. And he was there, like, ready to, you know, be a pro. He's Irish, you know, be a proud American when he gets his. And he's really shocked at like, how much the, the, the process of American citizenship was kind of, you know, the people almost seemed embarrassed to be doing it. He thought, um, and so I think what people are, are trying to react against what they're reacting against is the sense of like, well, you can't just be born here. That's not enough. You have to have a sense of, of belonging to a community that means something. And, and so there's this instinct to kind of shore that up and to say, like, well, you have to go through something more. It has to be more than that because increasingly, and you have these, these networks of NGOs and so on that are constantly trying to, you know, evade the boundaries that have been put up that say, like, as citizens, we have these rights and obligations, of course. And they're trying to evade this constantly. And so it's. It's this trend of. It's this pushback against this constantly eroding sense of the boundaries between nations and between communities to try to assert something meaningful there. I don't think. I don't necessarily know if it's the right way to go about it, because as. As, Jeff, as. As you said, there's a reason for this. There's a history here. And actually being. Having birthright citizenship actually can be a pathway toward assimilation, toward a person becoming American, as opposed to feeling like you never really belong somewhere. Like, I lived in Wales for 10 years and my children considered themselves to be Welsh. Like, my younger. My older daughter was born in Wales. So my younger daughter was born in Wales and she considered herself to be Welsh. She had a Welsh accent. She said school with two syllables and, and to. But she couldn't be Welsh. She could never really be Welsh because I. I wasn't. I wasn't Welsh. I'd have to go through a huge process, even though she was born there, even though she went to school there, even though she was learning Welsh and considered herself to be Welsh. So I think there are lots of arguments that could be made in favor of, actually the things that conservatives want are best catered to by birthright citizenship. But, Jeff, as you said, we're not really having this kind of open conversation. And it's really just like this reaction of, like, you know, this sense, like, the borders are becoming porous, rights are becoming meaningless. Like, rights attached to citizenship are becoming meaningless. We want to give these to these, like, have the sense of, like, human rights, which are constantly pushing against the rights that the demos decides. And so they're kind of reacting to that, saying, no, we have to kind of put up a wall here. And this is the most obvious place to do it. But you can't just do that because the whole point is the demos and democracy. You can't affirm that by writing riding roughshod over it.
- [24:03]
Jeff Schulenberger
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- [24:07]
Matthew Schmitz
that's time you will never get back.
- [24:10]
Jeff Schulenberger
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- [24:33]
Matthew Schmitz
So is Zoran Mamdani a New Yorker? J. Lo on Subway Takes said, you've got to be born in New York to be a New Yorker. Mamdani wasn't, wasn't born in New York. So I guess by the JLO standard of New York non birthrights or. Well, yeah, or her kind of her own nativism, you've just got to be born there. So he doesn't count. Jeff, you're a big Mamdani. Stan, you are a proud future constituent of Claire Valdez, one of the Mamdani endorsed socialist candidates. What do you make of the socialist wave we see sweeping the country right now? There's a little momentum.
- [25:20]
Jeff Schulenberger
I'm a resident of the Kami Corridor as it's now, as it's now colloquially known. Although one thing that's interesting about it is it's sort of the commie corridor is bisected by an extremely large population of ultra orthodox Jews. So there was an interesting, this is just a side note, but there was an interesting analysis of the numbers which kind of took issue with some of the claims that. The socialist Valdez and other socialists had only really benefited from kind of recently arrived, annoying sort of young PMC gentrifier types. But in any case by this analyst Michael of City Politics, Michael Lang. So people can check that out. But what he pointed out was that actually Valdez's, Valdez's win was, was in some ways even more impressive because the much more well established opponent, Antonio Reynoso, who is himself a progressive candidate and had the endorsement of the Working Families Party, which is sort of the traditional progressive party in, in New York. You know, he had the support of the entire block of Satmar Hasidim who are very big and powerful sort of power brokers within Brooklyn politics. And so Valdez had to overcome this quite large block of people voting against her and so she really had to run up the numbers with other groups. So in any case, that Lang analysis is interesting. Look, my overall sense of both Valdez and, I mean Valdez seemed particularly odd to me in a way because Reynoso, who she ran against, was a more experienced and established politician. It wasn't entirely clear to me what her major differences were with him on policy. He really just seemed to represent some more kind of more establishment rooted figure. And there seemed to be a kind of, even though I, as far as I can tell, he was not a, you know, particularly strong. I mean he had been Brooklyn borough president. So, you know, I, I assume he had had to be a little bit cautious in his statements about the Israel Palestine issue. And so Valdez kind of, you know, simply because he, you know, was managing a very large and complicated constituency as, as Brooklyn borough president. But he, you know, seemed not, he did not seem to be a sort of stalwart supporter of Israel. But nonetheless, Valdez kind of attacked him on that front and, you know, wanted to more forthrightly condemn genocide and, and so on. And so that, that, you know, in some ways is odd because it's not entirely clear, you know, why that. And I don't think, you know, that's a sort of decisive issue in terms of the day to day lives of New York's most New York City inhabitants. But it has become this kind of symbolic fracture point within the Democratic coalition. And that's what seems to be important here, that figures who don't go far enough in their rhetoric of sort of support for the Palestinian cause are immediately seen as suspect, even if they're largely progressive. And we saw this incident with San Francisco legislator Scott Wiener, who is vying to replace Nancy Pelosi, being denounced at a pride parade for his, you know, not being sufficiently pro Palestine again, trans.
- [29:09]
Matthew Schmitz
Picnic.
- [29:09]
Jeff Schulenberger
Right. Okay. Okay. So in any case, that the, the fracture point over Israel is sort of interesting because it, it doesn't really concern the issues of sort of municipal urban politics. And obviously the, these latest candidates are being sent to Congress, so, you know, they will have some say on, you know, votes for, for sort of military aid to Israel and other countries. So I suppose it, it has more relevance there than it did in the, the Mamdani mayoral election. But nonetheless, I think the important thing here is, is that there's a fracture point being set up between the establishment and the, these sort of insurgent forces. And the fracture point really is around the Israel Palestine conflict. And in my article on why, how Trump is, sorry, how Mamdani is Trumpifying the Democrats, I argued that this sort of serves a similar purpose to immigration in the politics of about a decade ago within the Republican Party. And, you know, you can sort of make certain analogies here. Like, you know, people at the time would point out, well, you know, a lot of these people who are so riled up about immigration actually live in these places where there are very few immigrants. You know, these sort of rural areas of Kentucky or whatever that are turning to Trump. Like, these are not places that have seen huge influxes of immigrants. So why are they so concerned about this? So, I mean, to that extent, you know, and we could complicate that take. But the point is that it is a symbolic fracture point that's being used to kind of polarize the factions within the party, the establishment versus these kind of insurgents. And so that seems quite interesting. I think my argument in the piece I wrote about this is just that Mamdani is very much sort of following the Trump formula of using populist appeals and sort of clearly articulated symbolic fracture points to challenge the establishment. And as with Trump, the establishment is looking very weak in its ability to counter these. To counter these developments. And the thing that really stood out to me in these elections is it really wasn't that long ago that the New York Democratic establishment was quite good at fending off progressive challengers. Obviously, we have AOC defeating Joe Crowley in 2018, but other than that, we have, for instance, Cuomo, who was defeated resoundingly by Mamdani last year, fending off challenges from both Zephyr teachout, sometime Compact contributor and law professor, and Cynthia Nixon, Sex and the City Star, you know, both of whom framed themselves as progressive challengers. Cuomo beat them both by similar margins in 2014 and 2018. And, you know, at the time, it would seem there was a kind of. There was a kind of, you know, establishment machine that was just able to turn out the vote. And that machine seems to have been broken at some point. It just seems to not work anymore. And meanwhile, the DSA has actually become an effective organizing machine. And so people need to understand why that is and what the nature of the appeal that's being made is. I mean, a number of people have said, you know, the basic reason the Democratic establishment lost its juju is just that it was resoundingly defeated by Trump in 2024. And so people are looking for, you know, more vigorous seeming opposition to, you know, a mostly unpopular president. And, you know, part of the president's unpopularity is a kind of entanglement in foreign wars. And so that partly explains the power of these symbolic appeals related to foreign policy. So, you know, it seems to me basically the. The playbook that's being used here is, you know, we can sort of say, oh, you know, the people who vote for these. I mean, it was this low turnout election. The people who vote for people are mostly not the sort of downtrodden, but these kind of. These kind of annoying, gentrifying Aries and so on. To me, all that just seems kind of beside the point. I just don't entirely see what that matters. It seems. It's very reminiscent to me of 10 years ago when people would say, oh, the people who support Trump aren't really, they're not really working class, they're like these suburban boat dealers and you know, they're really just, you know, these kind of disgruntled petty bourgeois types. Fine. I think that's, that's basically to some extent accurate. It's basically some, to some extent accurate about this. I recommend people check out Dan Evans's book A Nation of Shopkeepers, which while focused mostly on, on the UK is a valuable primer of how, yes, the petty bourgeoisie is. You know, whether the sort of educated gentrifier types or the sort of disgruntled suburban auto dealers, these are the sources of the energy of populist movements in the past 10 years. That's just the reality. And you know, you can just sort of dismiss it and say, oh, these people aren't like the real folk or something, but it's just pointless. The other text that I go back to here is Julius Cryon's the Real Class War, published in American affairs around 2018, I believe, which also goes into this, that really what we have are populist movements driven by the sort of middle to upper middle, the sort of squeeze middle to upper middle. You know, whether it is small business owners or you know, sort of the over educated, underemployed pmc. That's just the reality of the politics that we're seeing. And you can just kind of dismiss it and say it's fake, but all the evidence of the past year suggests, or the past several years suggests to me that it is not fake. These are real emerging movements in politics. And I can't say I know where they're going to go, but I think it behooves us to just be cold blooded and analytical and trying to understand this instead of just kind of bringing out our cultural grievances with the people who are, you know, driving these movements and just sort of dismissing them on, on those grounds of kind of cultural signifiers and markers. It's just not, it's just not a very serious mode of analysis and it's a lot of what I'm seeing right now. So anyway, that's roughly my take, but I mean specifically, I think Valdez and Chevalier, the who won in Upper Manhattan, you know, they seem kind of like dingbats to me. I think Matt Taibbi said, you know, campus dingbats, socialism, you know, that seems basically right, but at the same time, so what, I mean, this stuff is, it is proving effective. They're also proving Organizationally effective. You know, there are a lot of politicians who have had relatively dumb messages over the years, but are nevertheless able to build up, you know, a base of support and be organizationally effective. Whether these people will be that in the long term, I don't know. I will say that the dsa, you know, contrary to my own relatively dismissive attitude about it some years ago, is proving itself to be an actually effective political force, much more so than the democratic establishment, which, you know, not that long ago was actually a very effective machine and seems to just be completely dead. So that's roughly my, my take.
- [36:52]
Ashley Frawley
Is it not worth asking though, an effective force for what? Because from my perspective, it seems like this kind of like undergrad economics and quote, unquote, socialism, driven more by fear of being tossed down into the working classes and not getting the life I did. This is, maybe it's a total character, but just like not getting the life that you were promised and you know, like bread and circuses socialism, like free stuff kind of thing. I mean, is it important to be effective if your goals kind of suck?
- [37:24]
Jeff Schulenberger
I mean, Good question. I guess. I'm just, I, you know, I, I, and I've made similar arguments to this myself. I mean, part of the problem is I think a lot of the. Okay, here, I will, I will throw down a gauntlet here and say a lot of this line of argument has, which I have made myself, has proceeded from the premise that, you know, there's something going on in the populist right which is going to add up to some sort of, you know, political project that will actually speak to, you know, the deeper kind of problems of political economy of the day. Whereas these people are just fakers who are worried about their own, you know, declining status. And I mean, sure, there's some truth to that, but the point is, the populist right is, is failing and has failed in all sorts of ways. So, you know, in other words, if you don't have that point of contrast, I'm not sure if you don't have an effective point of contrast to say, well, you know, as flawed as it may be, the populist right is at least, you know, kind of pointing to and trying to address certain, you know, fundamental issues of political economy, whereas the socialists, so called, are not, I mean, fine, but the populist right is, is completely failing at that and in my view has shown itself, you know, basically incapable of, as incapable of addressing these things as, as the socialist left. So that means we're kind of in an open terrain Again, and I'm not saying I expect anything good out of this. And I agree. I don't know organizing for what. But I do think, and that the, the only positive thing I'll say about it is it is good to see the Democratic establishment humbled and defeated and to see it collapse like, because it, you know, has, has done a great deal of harm. It's. It really, you know, is. Has been moribund. You know, the sort of decaying walking corpse of Joe Biden was a perfect symbol of it. It's been moribund for a long time. And so, you know, I don't know whether anything I like will come out of this. But I, you know, I'll say that Mamdani has been maybe less, less bad than I expected. But I, you know, I, but I do see a kind of opening of the field and I don't know where it'll lead. But I think if you don't have the populist right as some sort of positive project, you know, broadly positive kind of democratizing project in the making anymore to use as a foil for these people. I'm not sure what that kind of line of critique amounts to anymore. Does that. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's my gauntlet still waiting in line again.
- [40:10]
Matthew Schmitz
That's time you will never get back.
- [40:12]
Jeff Schulenberger
Save time and money with stamps.com over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com. join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply in compact.
- [40:36]
Matthew Schmitz
This week you can read an article by Isaac Simpson, Citizen Vigilante and the rise of Base Exploitation. Simpson describes this new film by the German director Uwe Bohl, Citizen Vigilante as part of a broader genre of basploitation films, films that exploit kind of politically incorrect or taboo subject matter to attract kind of an audience interested in that content, just as classic exploitation films once promised their viewers an unimpeded view of frank sexual material. I watched Citizen Vigilante last week as a began trending on Twitter and it's certainly one of the worst films I can recall seeing. It has effectively no redeeming artistic qualities, but it has a certain significance and a real interest politically, as Simpson describes. It manages to touch a nerve in the way that some of these exploitation films once did and the kind of embrace of it by the online right really struck me as interesting in itself, because what you have in this film is Armie Hammer playing a landlord. The film is set in Europe. Armie Hammer is a landlord in this country, in Europe. He manages a bunch of properties all across the city and country, large housing units. We see him visit a brothel that is in some building he owns. He also spends time in a bar in a building he owns. So he's a bit of a slumlord. We also see Armie Hammer take off his shirt at one point and he has a large tattoo of the Hebrew letter Aleph on his torso. Now, this is a real tattoo that Armie Hammer has. It's a celebration of his Jewish heritage. But still, that's a choice made by the filmmaker to display that it's easy to remove that tattoo. So the film displays Armie Hammer as a Jewish slumlord. And he described in the title of the film as citizen vigilante. He also in the film describes himself as a citizen. I'm a citizen concerned about whatever these migration issues, the downsides of diversity. But despite that self description of his as a citizen, the film is at pains elsewhere to point out that he is not in fact a citizen of this European country. He is an American. And he also entered the country without a visa illegally. So you have this situation where this man who's presented as a citizen is not a citizen. This man who's kind of going around just executing migrants is probably the only person shown on screen in the entire film who has no legal rights, right to be in the country. And then to kind of top it all off, this sort of avenging angel of New Right populism can be very easily seen as a sort of wandering, cosmopolitan Jew kind of fitting into these classic stereotypes. So there's just a lot going on in the film in terms of the politics of it.
- [44:39]
Jeff Schulenberger
Does he also run the brothel? Sorry, I have.
- [44:42]
Matthew Schmitz
He does not. Yeah, that's. I mean, it's.
- [44:44]
Jeff Schulenberger
Does he own the property that. The brothel.
- [44:45]
Matthew Schmitz
Yeah, he owns the property where the. Where the brothel is.
- [44:49]
Jeff Schulenberger
So he's a Jewish. You might say a Jewish sex trafficker.
- [44:53]
Matthew Schmitz
Yeah, he's. Yes, yes. He's really a kind of purveyor of vice, you know, running these sort of degrading establishments, you know, so that. That's. That's. But. But he's also presented very much as a hero. So this is not. If it. If you can kind of find some of these kind of tropes that might make one a Little queasy in the film. Its point is not to revive any of the more disreputable chapters of German cinematic history. It's, it's very, very celebratory of Armie Hammer. So to the extent that he is Jewish or his presence is a Jewish character, that's just part of how great this guy is. But maybe setting aside the potential religious reading of his character, it's funny that he's described as a citizen. He's constantly calling on people. He puts out these videos. He says, basically, people of Europe, rise up. I am acting on your behalf now, but you must act on your own or something. And it's so interesting because what you really see is a message in the film that I think is distinct from kind of a conventional understanding of European populism or of right wing populism. So the notion of populism is that you have this people, they should exert agency, they should rise up, take control politically. They can keep out the foreign intruders who are, you know, causing this violence and mayhem. And that's how things will improve in their country. Right, that's a kind of populist account. But in this film we actually see the populace, the local populace of this place described as Europe, doing nothing. They don't do anything at all. And it's because they're not doing anything that Armie Hammer, the hero, has to act. But he is not a member of the populace. He is, you know, we've speculated. Is he Jewish? What we don't know, the one thing we do know is that he is an American. So what you have is effectively the film presenting a situation in which the people of Europe are unable to act on their own behalf. The people of this country that's put upon. And in order to vindicate justice, an American acting outside the law must act. And this is really kind of the almost a return to the second Bush administration where there is this notion of if there is some kind of threat to justice or freedom overseas, we need a kind of cowboy style Americanism to go sort it out. We need to not worry about the UN Security Council resolutions, this, that or the other thing, whatever the Pope is banging on about, let's just go handle this. And so I think there's a way that which citizen vigilante, which has been embraced as a kind of new right, right wing populist document, actually kind of revives the neocon dream where you have the Americans sorting things out in far off countries for people who can't handle it themselves. And I guess you Know that's still a vision that can find an audience.
- [48:29]
Ashley Frawley
It seems like there are several layers of irony here because isn't Armie Hammers like, isn't he named after a socialist symbol?
- [48:37]
Jeff Schulenberger
Yeah.
- [48:38]
Matthew Schmitz
So this is the really, this is
- [48:40]
Ashley Frawley
maybe the, this wandering Jew with social
- [48:44]
Matthew Schmitz
history I have seen actually funny enough because last week the entire right wing Internet was saying this is great. Then it immediately fractures and people are saying but could it be an op? Could it be an op?
- [48:55]
Ashley Frawley
Because I was like somebody's running something here.
- [48:59]
Matthew Schmitz
So people started asking that. But yeah. So Armie Hammer the actor is the grandson, I believe possibly it's the great grandson of the early 20th century industrialist Armand Hammer. Armand Hammer was a child of Russian Jewish immigrants to the U.S. he got involved in oil exploration, other things. He was known as Stalin's favorite capitalist because he cultivated extensive business ties in Russia. He himself had left wing political leanings. And so he was kind of interface between American corporations and this large and important though communist country. And as you mentioned actually Armand Hammer, whose name Armie Hammer bears army is just short for Armand. Armand Hammer was named by his parents after the symbol for the socialist Labor Party which showed basically the arm of Vulcan, a strong arm holding a hammer in the air. This kind of symbol of the defiant workers. So yes, Armie Hammer, the star of the right wing film sensation is surely the only active actor today who's actually named for a socialist symbol. I mean this, you know, his, his name gives him more left wing cred than the most kind of unhinged Hollywood liberal could ever have.
- [50:40]
Ashley Frawley
Could we not give it a kind of more generous reading like that? From what you describe, it kind of reminds me, I don't. Is it. I haven't seen the film so I'm kind of at your mercy here. But Hammer's character could be like this. He doesn't belong because he represents or he's not a citizen at least because he belongs to something else. Like he represents civilization. So like the defending. Yeah, the west against the, the, like the, the people who represent anti citizenship. There's lawlessness, state failure. So it's not necessarily about legal citizenship so much as like who belongs morally to this, to this civilization.
- [51:25]
Matthew Schmitz
So this is a very fair question. I think what you can say is that most kind of vigilante stories and many kind of vigilante films when you, the man who acts outside the law ends up being, you know, he is excluded from the law. He kind of, he, by acting outside the law you kind of end up being excluded from the community. And that exclusion can basically take two forms. One, in a way, the sovereign is excluded. Right. The sovereign who is able to act above the law is unlike the other members of the community and so is set apart in that way. Or if you're just acting outside the law and you're not the sovereign, then you end up having to leave the community at the end of the drama. And this is something you see in Clint Eastwood films very often, something like the Outlaw Josie Wales, many other kind of Eastwood's vigilante Westerns. The man who acts on some kind of notion of extralegal justice ends up having to leave the community because he set himself outside it. So in that sense, I think you can read the kind of statelessness of Armie Hammer or. Well, he's not stateless, he's an American. But the fact that he's not part of the community, he's defending as just reflecting the basic logic of vigilante dramas.
- [53:01]
Jeff Schulenberger
Yeah, I'm tempted to go on an excursus of Walter Benjamin's critique of violence here, but. Right. I think this figure of the outsider who must. It's related, you could argue, and this is related. This is the. It's related to a kind of Schmittian idea about sovereignty, which is that the figure who in some sense fundamentally decides upon the law is one who must also stand outside of it, even. Even as they occupy the center of it. And so this is, you know, left wing Marxist account of this comes in Benjamin's critique of violence. But, you know, basically the, the sort of right wing version of it would be that there's a figure who, you know, ideally should be the sovereign, who in some sense must stand outside the law in order to preserve it and therefore must be able to do things like. And this is, you know, maybe a connection to sort of Bushira neocon stuff, you know, must be able to do stuff like torture people and you know, have black sites in various parts of the world in order to preserve the loss. So that, that this, there has to be a realm outside of the law in order for the law to be preserved. And so the idea here is that the state in these, you know, sort of decadent, libtard European countries is failing to, you know, perform that role. And so this other figure must step in. So the other thing that I think is interesting here is like the appeal of the vigilante movie. Obviously this is a very popular genre in an earlier era. The, the, you know, various, you know, Charles Bronson's Death Wish and various other Films that, you know, were kind of in that line, very popular in the seventies in a period of urban decay and decline. And, you know, it. It's the. We published a piece by Alex Nazarian a couple of years ago called the Dangerous Lure of the Vigilante. Kind of looking back on this era when the vigilante was something of a folk hero figure in the 70s, do in, in relation to the rise of figures like Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse who became folk heroes on the right in, in a period of sort of widespread urban disorder in the early 2000s. And so it's not surprising that this. And the other thing that's worth noting here is there are actually two books that came out just in recent months about the Bernie Getz shooting on the New York City subway, which is maybe, you know, the most famous celebrated, slash reviled case of vigilantism. So it's interesting to see this re emerging, but emerging in this kind of transnational context. It would seem that the peak of urban disorder from the early 2000s is waning and we're now in a period of when murder rates seem to be going back to historic lows and overall crime seems to be in decline in the US and so at this point, it's, it's, it's kind of. Even though I think the, the renewed appeal of this figure can't be separated from the facts of these cities allowed to sink into disorder, it's also true that it's, it's kind of, you know, the film seems to embody this kind of more memeified form of the vigilante who's less a kind of concrete response to an immediate and concrete problem and more occupying a kind of symbolic role in relation to a set of kind of, you know, I mean, obviously the concern is less about urban disorder in the US and more about, you know, migration and the crime that that's brought in Europe. But nonetheless it, I think, you know, embodies this general spirit of a civilization under siege that the right and the populist right has sort of seen itself to, to occupy in recent years.
- [57:02]
Ashley Frawley
Well, that's why the, the message would be of, of right wing populism isn't like, you know, citizen vigilantes, passport holder, vigilante. It, it goes back to the, the idea of like birthright citizenship, that it has to mean something. So the citizen is the person who defends the nation when the state won't, not someone who carries the right papers without.
- [57:23]
Matthew Schmitz
Thanks to Ashley. Thank you, Jeff. For more go to compactmag.com sale you can get a full year of Compact for just $10. It's our best deal ever. We're still running it, but it will only be going for a limited time, so please go there and take advantage of that offer. CompactMag.com sale.
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Ashley Frawley
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Matthew Schmitz
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Jeff Schulenberger
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Ashley Frawley
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Matthew Schmitz
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Ashley Frawley
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Jeff Schulenberger
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