Matthew Schmitz (10:21)

I think it's plausible to believe that Europe is broadly turning to the right in cultural terms or will be doing so in the coming years. You see that, I think, already on an issue like migration. And there may be other kinds of shifts to the right in the continent. Certainly America has reacted in various ways against the progressivism that began to flourish in the second Obama term. So one way I see this speech by Rubio is as an attempt to offer a new account of a transatlantic alliance and transatlantic cooperation for this new era. The people around the administration see coming into being and very much want to advance. So instead of the liberal international order and shared values which are presented in neutral, universal and procedural terms, liberal terms, we have a kind of based and civilizationist account of European and American cooperation. As you say, Jeff, this idea is certainly at odds with a notion of restraint in foreign policy. I think it's also in conflict with other accounts of American interests that one could offer. So one could have a more hemispheric conception of America. Right. And we've heard a lot about the Monroe Doctrine, but to the extent that we're giving speeches about how America's fate is tied to Europe and we're more closely bound to them than to any others that would seem to prioritize that kind of parallel axis, the kind of latitudinal relationship over the longitudinal one with other countries in the Western hemisphere. So it's an interesting thing. And yeah, I think I take it as a kind of base recasting of the transatlantic relationship.

Ashley Frawley (12:50)

I think it was interesting because you had a few instances in international kinds of meetings where someone from the Trump administration is about to speak and they kind of get relieved because they think they hear keywords that mean, okay, nothing crazy is going to happen. We're on solid ground now. And that's, I find that really interesting because I think part of the reason why it's so difficult to have any kind of serious political discourse is that when people hear each other speaking, they're not really hearing the substance of what someone is trying to say. So this is why, Jeff, I thought your analysis was so good and interesting because it kind of went into what he was trying to get at. But when Europeans hear the, you know, talk of European roots and Christian terms and so on, they hear just blood and soil and, you know, oh, this is the typical kind of anti immigration talk. And when the Trump administration hears someone like Ursula von der Leyen or European bureaucrats talk, they hear kind of like wishy washy wokeness. And both sides are kind of taking each other really seriously and really literally, and they're not so it's very easy to think that wokeness is actually liberalism or that MAGA is actually blood and soil. And instead what both sides are actually trying to do is sort out ways forward in a extraordinary situation of political impasse. So Europe has figured out, or thinks it's figured out, that actually that big era of globalization or the era of imperialism, I should say, is definitely over. The era of outright, outright honest kind of ways of controlling populations isn't going to fly anymore. And they've figured out that the language of kindness and social justice and multiculturalism, this is, this is what's going to rule the day. But that's not an actual serious thing. It's just a rhetorical gloss for basic kinds of economic policies that are about maintaining and containing the present and an acquiescence to a lack of economic dynamism. So, you know, chasing growth through, as I always say, chasing growth, immigration and this sort of thing. And that gets recast as multiculturalism. And everybody kind of takes that seriously as though they really, truly are sort of multicultural and, and, and don't care about a lack of social cohesion in their societies that might be based on common values and so on. They actually do. And you can see this in like Nordic countries. There was a story a few, I don't know, a few months ago, something like that. But you see all these, like, just as an example, you see all of these child protection panics and so on, that Norway, Denmark and all these places, they take away children in large numbers. It's not a panic, it's actually happening. But it was very interesting because there was an American family that was being hounded by social services, I want to say, in Denmark. And the father who recounts the story on social media, trying to get attention to his predicament, how they had basically were handed out of the country on fear of losing their children. He talks about how his kids were targeted by social services because of their outright American pride, which they took to be a dangerous form of like fascism and so on, and a dangerous kind of disruption to the cohesion of, of Danish society. And these are supposed to be like these utopian kind of woke societies. But he, he says what the date, what the Danes want is regularity. What they want is a regularity of culture. Everybody has to be the same. And that is what allows, they think, allows their society to run. And I think that kind of story lays bare some of the misunderstandings in terms of what these societies actually stand for. We take everything at face value and actually what Europe is doing is rhetorically washing some very basic attempts to save and maintain a stagnating social order in an awareness that the attempt toward dynamism, growth and so on through other means besides these kinds of very safe things, like, as I said, immigration and lowering wages and this kind of thing were destabilizing, extraordinarily destabilizing. And because of mutually assured destruction and all that sort of thing, that this could not really go on, that any kind of conflict has to be very, very carefully kind of contained in small areas, or else you risk kind of escalation. And so they're looking at the United States and the fact that they're just so openly actually pursuing the same ends. And they're sort of like, well, you're, You're. You're giving up the game here, and you're saying. You're saying the quiet part out loud. We have realized that in order to maintain this very unstable equilibrium, we have to play a very careful rhetorical game. And so you see that they're constantly, whenever Americans speak publicly, there's this kind of, like, tension in the air, like, oh, my gosh, are they gonna. Are they gonna throw. Are they going to up. Upend this very delicate kind of order? And they may actually do by stating openly what isn't really said by sort of stating openly. Look, to have a coherent society, we need to have some kind of coherent system of values or whatever. I mean, the EU says it all the time. They say that all the time, but they have EU values, EU values of, like, multiculturalism and equality of women and so on. And they will come down hard on you if you don't have those quote, unquote values, you know, like around, you know, trans identities, this sort of thing, sort of liberal kinds of values. So there's the same kind of. It's the same ethos, but each side is taking the other side, I think. I think a bit too literally and not actually realizing that they are playing the same game, although the United States isn't playing the same game in the sense that they refuse to accept that the game, the end goal is containment. The end goal is maintaining a fragile equilibrium. They still think that you can pursue growth, solve economic problems through expansion, as opposed to infinitely dividing what already exists.

Matthew Schmitz (19:58)

Trump's foreign policy is going to be defined most likely by the approach he ends up taking toward Iran. And there are news reports, Axios, other outlets, that the administration is getting closer and closer to some kind of more serious action there with Israeli support and aid, probably. This can't be as simple and surgical as what happened in Venezuela, a story that itself hasn't played out to the end. So I think, Jeff, you said it's hard to explain this administration's foreign policy through the lens of realism and restraint. Right. The favored phrase of certain wing of erstwhile Trump supporters, maybe. And you see, it's like the American conservative becoming increasingly critical in their account of the Trump administration. So I think the central question is this. Can Trump articulate, can he navigate between kind of realism and restraint on the one hand, and this foreign policy interventionism forever war that he rejected on the other hand, can he navigate between the two? And is there some kind of doctrine that can be articulated between those two poles? It seems to me it hasn't yet been articulated.

Jeff Schulenberger (21:27)

Right. So in response to the Venezuela intervention, which on this podcast, I offer limited praise to the conduct of this intervention, pointing out that it was both competently executed and limited in its scope in a way that compared favorably to, say, the disastrous intervention in, in Libya on behalf of the rebels against Gaddafi, which led to a sort of situation of state failure and, and ongoing catastrophe. And so, you know, I will say that there's, there's clearly a kind of, I suppose, within this foreign policy apparatus whose, whose ambitions are, seem to be ever shifting and difficult to define in terms of a single clear agenda and set of aims. Nonetheless, there is a kind of element of tactical restraint in terms of how things have been approached. You could see that in the previous bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities, which again, was sort of carried out in a, in a, in a more limited way and was not tied to any more ambitious attempt at regime change. So clearly, on one level, that there is a kind of dimension of that. But at the same time, I think the, the broader question is what actually the vision behind all of this is and what is the new sort of world order that, that the architects of this foreign policy want to see emerging out of that, out of this, and that I just don't understand. I, you know, I find a lot of the rhetoric to be, again, this kind, you know, this sort of Stephen Miller talking about a world of just kind of harsh, brutal power relations. You know, this, I just, I'm not sure that this kind of thing actually works because it basically, and it is in some sense at odds with, you know, and maybe this is a broader kind of tension within the regime that goes beyond the kind of restraint versus kind of neo imperial ambition which is, you know, the Trump ideal of the deal, where, you know, a deal is, is a, an arrangement in which all parties get something out of it that they can take some satisfaction in. But then when you listen to certain people like Miller or when you listen to Rubio just kind of waxing eloquence about how wonderful it was when Europe went around and just dominated the world, it seems like there, there's something like a desire for just, you know, pure dominate, you know, kind of unilateral domination that is far more naked and open. I mean, the irony is that, you know, again, if you, if you listen to Rubio's speech, he'll talk about the post Cold War era as one of sort of Western weakness and retreat, which in some ways is quite strange, particularly if you came up through sort of left wing thought and, and activism in, in a way that I did, you know, which is that, you know, the, the sort of unipolar moments of, of American global power was exactly the moment that Rubio is casting as one of, of weakness. And you know, the way to, the way to resolve that enigma is simply to say that there was a vision that, that, that there was a vision of American power behind that that carried some benefits for some portions of the American population and for parts of the American power structure, while carrying downsides for other parts of the American population and other parties within the American elite. And what I don't quite grasp about this administration's approach is it, I mean, clearly there's just a level of rhetoric here, but there does seem to be some sort of sense that, you know, that was just some sort of bad deal that needs to be renegotiated. But then the, if the new deal you're offering to the rest of the world is just sort of surrender to America and let us plunder you, then, you know, there are pretty simple reasons why that arrangement is not one that has been attempted in any long term way. I mean, going back to Rubio's glorious Spanish ancestors, the, the early periods of American colonization by the Spanish did involve a great deal of, of naked plunder. But even within the Context of the 16th century Spanish Empire, this was quite, you know, this was seen as quite morally problematic. It occasions enormous debates and it was also seen as fundamentally unstable in the, the orders, in the political orders that it created. You know, civil wars broke out between different factions of colonists in places like Peru because, you know, the vision was simply one of sheer domination and, and plunder and therefore, you know, created this spirit of, of sort of winner take all, which was going to just cause social breakdown. And so the Spanish Empire essentially had to rein in this initial period, you know, internally like that, there were reforms enacted in the middle of the 16th century that reacted specifically to the fact that, that the first generation of conquistadors saw themselves as entitled to just going around and openly and nakedly plundering things. And this created all kinds of crises, you know, for the empire, you know, for the maintenance of power in the newly conquered territories and so on. So, you know, when I hear this kind of bluster, and this goes back to what I was saying about naivete, when I hear this kind of bluster about, oh, you know, we can just be the strongest and the greatest and everyone will just bow down to us, that's just a, that's a spectacularly naive way of looking at the world. So as far as, as far as the Middle east goes, you know, I think I've said this before, but obviously there is the kind of more, you know, tactical, restrained deal making camp who I'd associate with the Witkoff Kushner contingent who are out there sort of, you know, trying to come up with deals. And so there is that, and then there's, you know, just some kind of residual version of the, the form of American power that has been exercised in that region for, for many decades, which again, is, is, seems to be mostly articulated in terms of just this, this kind of, the sheer kind of braggadocio that I think, I think is, is ultimately going to, you know, fail to, to offer anything that will create the basis for a new, for a new kind of peaceful and, and sustainable order. So again, that's just kind of the, and I haven't said much about Iran here. I guess my, my question is, I just, I still just don't quite understand, you know, what the, what the ultimate game plan is.

Ashley Frawley (29:32)

It strikes me also as really naive because you have a situation where Iran is internally unstable as well, and the people, you know, are, seem to be demanding a basic level of normality. You know, and I think we've talked about this before, but it seems like a lot of the situation in the Middle east is compounded made worse by the fact that governments appear happy to pick fights and have more. They're happier in the world of like, grand, grand international conflict of where they're pursuing something and going somewhere and significantly less comfortable with actually the business of governing at home. And so when you have this kind of tremendous instability internally, there isn't a huge amount of incentive to simply lay back and take it. When you have an aggressor as powerful and as symbolic as the United States and so the situation is extraordinarily unstable. And you could say the same really for the United States, that this kind of going back and forth between realism and restraint, between neo imperialism and sort of pragmatism is a similar kind of issue. You've got government shutdowns and so on, and a certain disorientation around how to actually govern and the everyday business of governing that is expressed in these sort of like weird, you know, clear out the government and make it more efficient and this sort of thing that just seems to make daily life much, much more disorganized. And this is paired then with trying to make a big, big statements and big moves on an international stage. And seems like so many governments are trying to defer an inability to govern, an inability to do basic things, to give a sense of normality or to sustain a sense of normality long term that makes these kinds of situations particularly volatile.

Matthew Schmitz (31:35)

I had been secretly priding myself on the fact that Compact has offered zero coverage of Clavicular, the online influencer, as every other magazine has rushed to bring out an article on him. But we're very unimpressively folding. We're bending and we're going to discuss him here. Steven Adubato, our assistant editor and podcast producer, is joining us for the segment. Welcome, Stephen. Who is clavicular and why is he suddenly on everyone's social media feed and being interviewed by the New York Times and so on and so forth.

Steven Adubato (32:18)

So Clavicular is the Name of the 20 year old influencer named Braden Peters, who hails from my home state of New Jersey. He actually graduated from Seton Hall Prep, which is where my brothers graduated from school and I teach at Seton Hall University. But he rose to fame because he is known for his looks, maxing, as they call it, which involves him shooting up several hormones, testosterone. Also, they say that he used crystal meth. Don't know how that helped develop his look. But also most astonishingly, he's smashed his facial bones in with the hammer in order to achieve a kind of perfected, proportionate face. But in addition to this, he's made waves for showing up at events with some controversial influencers like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, despite him claiming to be apolitical. Also, he got arrested for hitting someone with a truck. But again, he's kind of making waves for his, the extreme lengths he's gone to, to quote, unquote, looks. Max.

Matthew Schmitz (33:26)

Yeah, my, my impression, and I want to stress this is only an impression because I've paid less attention to it and no less about it than I think many of our listeners will. But my impression is that he's not. His fame or notoriety, such as it is, is not tied to the transgression of these politically correct boundaries in the way it is for someone like Fuentes. So Fuentes is prominent in large part because he says, you know, whereas with clavicular it's, you know, he, he's maybe doesn't, you know, decry that in strong terms he's willing to pal around with these people who do that. But his own claim to prominence is instead this looks Maxine, this very specific attempt to perfect, you know, his male beauty as he understands it. And I think Sam, Chris, the English writer, had a great piece on clavicular and on Look's Maxine and what he argued there was that clavicular, he's often seen as kind of an incel or part of this dangerous right wing tendency among young men. And Chris said, well, he's maybe just better understood as someone who's responding. And he's responding to a sexual marketplace in exaggerated terms, but terms that are nonetheless kind of logical and typical. So if this marketplace is very crowded and it's hard to gain kind of prominence, one logical strategy might be to maximize a particular trait you have. So you just become the most, you become outstanding on one single dimension rather than trying to be well rounded, which will make you simply indistinct. Right in this highly competitive sphere. And so he's looks maxing. And Chris's post, really his essay on his substack n mythological, linked to someone called the Crooked Man. And I found this figure more fascinating than clavicular himself. So clavicular, you know, his looks maxing, I guess. You know, he's trying to hammer his facial bones in certain ways and he's trying to get his shoulders to be almost as broad as he is tall. Right. He's doing all these things and he doesn't want to have an ounce of fat on his body. So he just is, you know, perfectly photogenic. Well, the crooked man is doing something much stranger. He is lifting weights with only one side of his body.

Ashley Frawley (36:22)

Oh, yes, I've seen that.

Matthew Schmitz (36:24)

So he's just extremely muscular on one side of his body, but not on the other. And then he also is trying to kind of beat in his cheekbone just on one side of his body, on the side that isn't muscular. So that on his muscular side he would have a nice pronounced cheekbone and a beautiful kind of thick neck, beautiful bulging muscles. And so if you see him from that Side, he looks very impressive, but then if he turns 180 degrees, looks like a dweeb. And I think that maybe helps express the basic logic of Clavicular better than Clavicular himself does, because Clavicular's aspiration to beauty maybe just remains too conventional and bourgeois and legible, whereas Crooked man is actually kind of taking the logic of maxing up in a purer way because he is just becoming the most distinctive and the most kind of algorithmically irresistible, separate from conventional notions of symmetry, beauty, and all this. So I guess my comment on clavicular would be down with clavicular and up with Crooked man.

Jeff Schulenberger (38:02)

I don't know.

Matthew Schmitz (38:02)

Maybe Crooked man is a neo Nazi or something. So that's not a comprehensive endorsement, but I think he's more purely. Purely pursuing the logic of maxing.

Steven Adubato (38:14)

So on one hand, I think there's something kind of queer coded about any man who's that concerned about maximizing their physical appearance. And, I mean, there's something kind of reminiscent of the homoeroticism of figures like Yukio Mishima. But in the case of Clavicular, the fact that he's using hormones and smashing his face in with the hammer in order to make himself more attractive, rather than like Mishima, just like working out and lifting weights, it's less homoerotic than it is, just, as they say, fake and gay, which speaks to how dull and unimaginative our current cultural ethos is. But for that matter, the fact that we're holding up the man with a pretty face and good body as the ideal of a beautiful man indicates how beauty has kind of been reduced to this base, instinctive level that is little regard for, like, the beauty of a strong personality type. You know, we don't think of a sexy man as a man with confidence, with the strength of personality and charm, or someone who has a drive to accomplish and build things, you know, and this is why I think a young man aspiring to be attractive, I think he should aim less to have this Adonis body type and pretty face and should aspire to emulate the sex appeal of a man, say, like someone like Tony Soprano, especially for a Jersey boy like Clavicular, you know, who, despite, you know, Tony's. Despite having an archetypal dad bod and not really having a pretty face, was able to charm numerous women, as we saw in the show, just with his personality alone.

Matthew Schmitz (39:49)

All right, I think we need to book an appointment for you with Dr. Melfi. You may need to have your head examined.

Ashley Frawley (39:58)

The difficulty here is kind of treating these people as weird kind of aberrations, because, I mean, they are, but obviously they are, you know, just like last rights in a culture of narcissism that every culture reproduces itself in, in personality. And so you have these people that are just sort of extreme versions of different issues that we're trying to work through with great imperfection in society. They're this sort of like extreme one sided version of things. So you, you, you can see in a person like this the intense frustration of around sex and having productive relationships with other people that leads them into this kind of like destructive mode where they're like, okay, well I have been thwarted from my ability to have meaning and you know, generative sex and a life with another person. And so I just want to destroy that. And I'm going to turn women into objects. I know it's a very like cliche thing to say, but like the way that they talk about women is like voids and this kind of stuff where the woman becomes an object. So you, you kind of want to destroy the thing that you can't have. So this intense frustration that people at the margins feel with, you know, around the being able to realize the meaning and value of life beyond themselves leads to this kind of like intense turning themselves into things, turning other people into things so they can like move them around and they can make them have some control over them. And when they can't even do that, then they get really destructive. So you can see this, I think, in the, in the, in a part of the trans movement where people are like, wow, why do some of these people like not even try to pass? And it kind of reminds me of like grotesque art. If you like go back in history with these like grotesque paintings of nobility and so on with like really, really ugly. It's this desire to kind of destroy the thing that you, that you can't have and so you sort of embody it and in a destructive and gross kind of form. There's sort of some of that going on with the guy who's just like doing half of his body. This sort of thing where you kind of signaling extraordinary distance from it that you've just kind of given up on all of it. And it's just shock and destructiveness and it's all just, you know, it's all just ironic detachment and so on. But I think tells us something deeper about what is going on in our society that we're all so alienated from. You know, if you look at like education and so on, it's the way that sex is talked about. It's like masturbation is this wonderful, fun thing that you can do in pornography, is this, you know, okay, be careful and everything. But it's safe and it's sterile and it doesn't involve all of the possibility of being a parent and responsibility. You can just treat people like objects and this whole world of like, life and generation and continuity becomes all sort of fraught with risk and cut off from you and been very fearful and actually really just something that other people who are in a better position, you know, who really know how to do this properly, that's all for them. And you, you can have your pornography and this kind of thing. And so there's this kind of disorientation around a desire and a normalizing of people growing up becoming men, becoming women, that people don't really know what that means anymore. So it all becomes. Everything becomes about creating these things as objects creating these things. You know, we said this before. I don't. I may not know what it means to be a man, but I can at least approximate one physically. So then the body becomes this kind of project, as opposed to the project of having a family, of transcending yourself by living beyond yourself, of having meaning of something to pursue. I think all of these, in these kind of hilarious and silly people, you can see a lot of. A lot of the difficulty that our culture is having with celebrating human life and our relationships to each other. And you can see it collapsing by creating, making everything into an object that is then either grotesquely transformed or like, beautified as a way of deferring from the actual project of making something in the world.

Steven Adubato (44:26)

But this is why I'm saying that there's something so base and kind of infantile about this conception of beauty as something purely aesthetic. Just having the pretty face, face and good body. You know, as you're saying, Ashley, there's this lashing dimension to the immaturity found in relationship dynamics that shows that, you know, there's this narcissism behind of our. Our lack of ability to develop a fully rounded personality, but also to find such fully rounded personality types attractive. So, you know, young people looking for a relationship instead, you know, they go for someone with a pretty face rather than someone with a compelling personality. And this is because our sense of what it means to be in relationship with someone has become so hollow and so shallow.

Ashley Frawley (45:08)

Yeah. But also, like, particularly when it comes to women, that's why you are so right that it is very gay coded because this is like the male gaze is very physical. But I mean, I have been mistaken before where I thought someone was attractive and then I was like, oh yeah, he's that guy. I remember him, he's really hot. And then I went on a date with him by mistake because I thought he was hot. And then I realized he was insane and I was like, oh, that's now he becomes really disgusting and weird and weird looking as well, you know.

Matthew Schmitz (45:40)

So with that, thanks Ashley.

Ashley Frawley (45:44)

Thank you Jeff.

Matthew Schmitz (45:45)

Thanks Steven for joining us. For more, go to compactmag.com subscribe.

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