The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Pride? It's Accordion Awareness Month! In the spring of 1975, The Who were recording another album. They had not had a hit single in three years. Their lead guitarist and main songwriter was thinking of moving on. Goodness, he was about to turn 30! Paul Sexton wrote on November 29, 2022 , “After the film version of his musical epic  Tommy , Pete Townshend found himself disillusioned with The Who, and felt that the band had reached a natural conclusion. But he was urged to persevere, not least by his guru Meher Baba, and the album was completed to considerable acclaim and success.” He gave the band all the songs he had — except one. Sexton wrote, “The number was called  Squeeze Box , and Pete admitted in his autobiography  Who I Am  that he wrote it entirely for his own amusement, and didn’t even include it among the batch of songs he presented to Roger Daltrey for consideration for the upcoming album project. The man who persuaded Townshend that he should do t...

  On Wokeness, Its Nature, and Its Prospects EUGYPPIUS In response to my piece  on leaving academia , a few asked me for my thoughts on Wokeness, and how one might go about doing away with it. There’s nothing I would like more, than to have a good answer to this question. Alas, I’m very pessimistic about achieving any victory here, but I also don’t think Woke is going to be a permanent menace. Sooner or later, the forces driving this ideological cancer will try to circumscribe the Woke, and if they fail, they will themselves be consumed by it. The damage has been done and the pre-Woke world can never be re-achieved, but Wokery isn’t a stable ideological system. It is instead the mere ideological expression of a revolutionary process. I’ve written a lot about the phenomenon of the high-low alliance. The idea isn’t original to me; a great many thinkers, from  Bertrand de Jouvenel  to Curtis Yarvin and others, have articulated the same basic idea in varying terms. It’s ...