Two futures

The centre will not hold, and the coming years will present a clear choice between cosmopolitan socialism and the authoritarian right

Photo credits: Jack Califano.

NOTE: Because it’s fairly long, this is my first paywalled post in a few weeks. Right now, I’m offering heavily discounted paid subscriptions, so if you’d like to support my work and read everything here in full, click here to get a full 50% off. It isn’t sustainable to write everything for free, so if it’s within your means, you’d be doing me a solid by chipping in a few bucks.

---

Jack Califano, a photographer whose shots of the Mamdani campaign were featured this week in Vanity Fair, also took a series of striking pictures at CPAC earlier this year. If you’re unfamiliar with the Conservative Political Action Conference, it’s one of the largest annual right wing gatherings in the United States and attracts reactionary fellow travellers from around the world. I’ve never been myself, but every year reporting from intrepid journalists like Will Sommer and dispatches from the likes of Chapo Trap House offer instructive portraits of its generally freakish goings on (it’s six years old now, but if you’ve never listened to Chapo’s episode on CPAC 2019 I cannot recommend it enough).

In the main, CPAC is basically a burlesque carnival of gleeful sadism and decadent cruelty; a place where denizens of the reactionary right can let their proverbial hair down and collectively gorge themselves on Id-driven fantasies of violence and revenge. I was struck particularly by Califano’s photos this year, because I think they capture this particularly well. At risk of talking like a CPAC attendee myself, there is something these images radiate that is positively demonic. No doubt Califano’s chosen lighting has something to do with that, but I think it mainly serves to draw out what was already there. (Incidentally, you’ll find the rest of his CPAC photos here and do consider following his work on Instagram).

Credit: Jack Califano.

I was thinking about them again this week in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s victory and, in particular, in contrast with all the lovely images it has produced. What these evoke — visually, spiritually, morally, and otherwise — is something basically the opposite of CPAC. That’s true in the literal sense that the youthful, multiracial coalition of support Mamdani mobilized looks quite different from the crowds you’d would see at CPAC. But there’s also more to it than that.

I am generally hesitant to emphasize the affective dimensions of politics, and the last person to gush about a “politics of joy” or whatever other phrase might substitute. But turning all of these images over in my mind this past week, I think what they capture about the starkness of the alternatives we’re going to face as the liberal consensus continues to crumble is pretty damn hard to understate.

Reflecting the broader ethos of the Mamdani campaign itself, there is something defiantly joyful in what Califano’s pictures of it convey. You see dynamism. You see hope. You see the faces of people who are under no illusions about the perilous state of things in the 21st century or monumental challenges their movement will confront, but remain resolutely alive to the vital possibilities and promises of multiracial social democracy nevertheless.

Credit: Jack Califano.

This is, to say the least, very different from what we see on the MAGA-ified contemporary right — whether in the United States, Brazil, France, Israel, or Hungary — which instead draws its élan from democratized sadism and the acid bath of postmodern resentment.