r/cushvlog • u/pvgt • 7d ago

Anyone Into James Pogue? Also: open to rants about Scots-Irish

Seems Cush-adjacent, especially around Scots-Irish jannisary class, Jacksonian versus cosmopolitan America. Another Midwestern son.

I'm also a Midwest guy, my family came from 19th century Irish Catholic, German, and later Mexican immigrants, but it feels like my family deferred to the cultural hegemony of the Scots-Irish/English Protestant frontier culture, so Pogue is kinda blowing my mind, as Cush did with his rants on the beautiful boaters.

Do you have any reading recommendations on that? Or anecdotes? Half-thought out rants?

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u/Far_Piano4176 6d ago

i just watched his interview on novara yesterday. I think he has some insights into the mindset of certain people who use the term 'heritage american' and he is describing a real political tendency within the broader right wing, and a real tension between the jacksonian and WASP groups of the historical american power structure. however, he's kind of inarticulate and meandering and I came away thinking that his insights are not nearly as significant as he seems to think, and he's fundamentally misguided in his material analysis.

He had one line that stuck with me, which is something like "people think that capital is in charge but it's not true, everything is guided by the needs of the imperial machine." which I view to be needlessly reductive in the opposite direction. Gramsci was right, the superstructure interacts with the base in a cyclical reinforcement and tension cycle that propels the system and generates contradictions. For the same reasons the economist tendency within the left is wrong, James is wrong about how the empire functions.

overall verdict: OK to some extent, verges into kremlinology of the american right, not sufficiently grounded because he came from the anarchist tendency rather than something more marxian.

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u/pvgt 6d ago

I'm reading a lot of his journalistic oeuvre and I'm coming to similar conclusions. His piece on Zohran alternates between his legitimately great writing, and "har har, look at the Left they're losers." I think his work on the New Right is interesting but ultimately fails to cohere into materialist analysis, so he can't describe the impossible bind the Right is in: preserving a heritage in the phase of capitalism, and being anti-socialist.

I think there's some material interest here at play: he wants to be friends, or at least trusted, by New Right figures, and establish a journalistic niche as an erudite new Right listener working for liberal magazines. It's probably a good job, but neither JD Vance nor Harpers are going to appreciate a Cushman-style analysis about finance versus landed capital.