Citizen-Eject

I have a new piece out for Sublation on the failure of liberal and left-wing conceptions of citizenship to adequately protect citizens from denationalization. Prominent recent cases include Shamima Begum in the UK and Suhayra Aden in Australia. Both liberal and left-wing accounts increasingly center individual agency, and this emphasis makes it easy for states to deny the role they’ve played in creating the conditions for terrorism and to concretize this denial in the form of denationalization. There are discussions of Althusser and especially Balibar, whose book Citizen Subject is referenced in the title. It’s available here, with no pay wall:

https://www.sublationmag.com/post/citizen-eject

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Deaths of Despair

I’ve co-authored a paper for Journal of Medical Humanities on the deaths of despair crisis. You can read it here:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09795-0

It’s an honor to have worked with Daniel George, Peter Stirling, Megan Wright, and Cindy Cain on this piece. In it, I suggest despair is rooted in what I call the Five A’s – anomie, alienation, atomization, anxiety, and absurdity. To deal with the problem at its roots, we need to deal directly with these deeper causes, both alone and in combination.

If you don’t have access to the article, try this link: https://rdcu.be/c9XET. If you have trouble getting access and you want to read it, you’re very welcome to email me about this at bmstudebaker@gmail.com.

The Reaction to the Fall of Silicon Valley Bank

The fall of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) generated several different media narratives. All seem to agree that SVB failed because it was dependent on low-yield long-term US treasury bonds. These bonds were safe in the years following the global financial crisis of 2008, but they lost value when interest rates increased in 2022. The disagreements are over what this fact means.

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The Function of Marianne Williamson’s Candidacy

Marianne Williamson is running against President Biden in the Democratic primaries. As I write this, she is the only declared candidate, though Biden has given every indication that he will run for a second term.

I don’t have anything against Williamson personally or against her religious views. But there is a lot of evidence that Williamson is a weak candidate who cannot mount a competitive primary campaign against Biden. In this piece, I will present this evidence to you, and I will make the case that Williamson’s candidacy creates the illusion that the primary is being contested when in fact there is no meaningful left-wing opposition to Biden within the Democratic Party. This is not to suggest that Williamson herself intends to create this illusion or has any negative intentions of any kind. Nevertheless, her decision to run allows party apparatchiks to pretend the party is ideologically diverse and welcomes internal dissent when in point of fact it does not.

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Infrastructure Dreams and Living Nightmares

In recent weeks, there’s been a great deal of media attention on a train that derailed in Ohio. The derailment highlights a contradiction that has haunted American politics. On one hand, there is an increasingly vocal set of progressives and libertarians who have dreams of revitalizing American cities with big infrastructure projects. They want high-speed rail, fifteen minute cities, lots of cycling, walkable streets, and tall apartment buildings. These movements often rally around acronyms – YIMBY, NUMTOT, and the like. On the other hand, there is the infrastructure that actually exists in the United States. It’s crumbling, and it’s expensive to maintain, let alone replace. Between urbanist dreams and rusty realities there sits President Biden. Biden was faced with a pivotal decision. He could shore up the existing infrastructure, fighting back against the rust. He could commit America to a new paradigm, replacing what’s decaying with new ideas. He could not do both. He chose to do neither.

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