Corey Robin's Blog, page 17

James Scott, 1936-2024

James Scott, the Yale political scientist who specialized in so many things, has died.

Jim was a scholar of peasant politics and societies, Southeast Asia, state planning, ecology, forestry, Balzac, and much else. He meant a great deal to a great many people, intellectually and personally, but there’s a small cohort of us, who came to Yale in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for whom he holds a special place in our hearts.

We had come to the political science department intending to study political theory, only to discover, upon our arrival, that the official political theorists on the faculty were neither political nor theoretical.

Though we tried to make it work as theorists, many of us in this cohort wound our way to working with Americanists like Rogers Smith, who bridged the divide between theory and empirical work, and/or Jim. If we were lucky, we wound up working with both of them. I was lucky.

In 1991-92, I got involved in the graduate worker union. By the summer of 1992, I was helping to lead it, and though I vowed with every semester that I’d step back from my union work, my involvement only increased with the years. For reasons that I can’t now remember, and against the advice and better judgment of my friends, I kept the department political theorists, along with Rogers, on my dissertation committee. But then in 1995-96, after I led a grade strike, the theorists—Steven Smith and Ian Shapiro—struck back. They revised their letters of recommendation for me, effectively blacklisting me from any future job in academia.

It was at that point that I retooled my entire dissertation committee. I made Rogers my main adviser, and I asked Jim to join my committee. I had taken a course with him on anarchism and always found him curious about ideas and up for an intellectual adventure. Unlike many of the faculty—who thought a dissertation on fear was somehow not really a topic of politics or theory (these were political scientists, mind you, but this was the 1990s, so that’s the way things were)—Jim loved my dissertation topic. And my approach: a combination of intellectual history (Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville) and revisionist reading of McCarthyism as a case study in political fear. Somewhere in my basement are his detailed comments—sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed—on each of my chapters. He was a big fan of my two chapters on Montesquieu, which were my favorites, too. He had good taste.

There’s a lot I could say about Jim as a scholar, but there are people far more well versed in his work and impact than I am, so I’ll leave that to them. And I could say a lot more about Jim as an adviser, but there are students upon whom he had far greater an influence, so I’ll leave that to them. I don’t mean that Jim wasn’t substantive; far from it. He affected multiple disciplines and is read by virtually everyone in the humanities and social sciences. And probably the natural sciences as well, since he was extraordinarily sensitive to questions of nature and the environment and the interaction between peoples, politics, and natural processes.

But it’s a testament to Jim as a person that despite being such an interested and invested adviser, and despite being such an intellectual heavyweight, he didn’t change my intellectual course or scholarship. “He wears his learning lightly” is a cliche among academics and scholars, but Jim really did. And his authority, too. He just let me do my thing, commenting and correcting, but never steering or directing.

Jim was that rare thing in academia: a genuine egalitarian. He was one of the most illustrious scholars of the social sciences, translated into multiple languages, recipient of every award, extraordinarily well read, yet he always treated me as if I were a conversation partner, as if my dissertation were a book, and he were just an interested reader.

From the get go, Jim was a firm supporter of the grad union. It’s fashionable now for academics to support academic unions—thank God—but this, again, was the early 90s. Jim was one of the very few members of the Yale faculty—Michael Denning, Hazel Carby, and David Montgomery were some of the others—whom we could count on for consistent support. In political science, he might have been the only member of the faculty to always support us.

It was 1993 or 1994, I can’t remember when, and the union had done some sort of action, I can’t remember what. I came to Jim to get him to sign some petition or something, I can’t remember for what. He immediately signed it but then said, sort of sideways, “I’m very cross with GESO.” I have no memory of what he was upset about, but here’s where his egalitarianism really kicked in. Despite his irritation, he never allowed it to be anything more than it was. He never played the part of the disappointed authority, the professor betrayed. He was just annoyed about something, he expressed his annoyance to me, and that was that. He was on one side of the power divide, I was on another, but in that moment of disagreement, which both of us knew would go no further than that, I got a glimpse of equality and respect.

Spaces available in course this fall

This fall, I am teaching a course, “Politics Through Literature,” which still has spaces available for students to register.

You can register whether you are an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, another college in the CUNY system, or at any college in the New York area. Please reach out to me for information on how to register if you an undergraduate outside the CUNY system. There is no online component; all instruction is in-person.

The course is listed as POLS 3440 and meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9:30-10:45.

Below is the course description from the syllabus.

This course takes up some of the most wrenching and destabilizing concerns of politics and art—money, sex, beauty, property, and the family—through great works of literature and political philosophy. Our canon ranges from the ancient Greeks to contemporary Black writers, from the gay graphic novelist Alison Bechdel to the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Along the way, we’ll ask ourselves the following questions:

1. Why and how is art a political concern? Why do members of a polity care so much about what their writers think and write? Does art do anything politically?

2. What is a proper political concern? Do questions of family life, or sexual intercourse and romantic love, belong in the political sphere?

3. How do our everyday experiences and fantasies of beauty and love, and of the body, reflect political categories like race or wealth? And how are race and wealth framed by our experiences and fantasies of beauty, love, and the body?

The goal of the course is threefold. First, that we come away with a greater attunement to, and a heightened awareness of, what we do with art and what art does with us. Second, that we acquire a greater understanding of why it is that the people of a polity, both citizens and politicians, get so rattled by art, by what is read in the classroom and seen on the screen or in a museum. Last, that we see politics itself as a form of art, a stylized performance that, like art, draws from and speaks to, and reconfigures, our most intimate and personal dreams and desires and longings.

Please share this announcement widely.

Marriage and Markets in Hayek and Freud

I’ve got a new piece up at The New Yorker on a new biography of Friedrich Hayek.

I got a chance to range widely. From Hayek’s dalliance with the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet—

In November, 1977, on a still-sticky evening along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek boarded a flight bound for Chile and settled into his seat in first class. He was headed to the Valparaíso Business School, where he was scheduled to receive an honorary degree. Upon arrival in Santiago, the Nobel laureate was greeted at the airport by the dean of the business school, Carlos Cáceres. They drove toward the Pacific Coast, stopping for a bite to eat in the city of Casablanca, which had a restaurant known for its chicken stew. After their meal, they steered north to Viña del Mar, a seaside resort city in Valparaíso, where Hayek would take long walks on the beach, pausing now and then to study the stones in the sand.

To the casual observer, it seemed like a typical autumnal recessional, the sort of trip that illustrious scholars enjoy at the end of their careers. This one had a wintrier purpose. 

To Hayek’s relationship to Freud—

Friedrich August Edler von Hayek was born on May 8, 1899, in his parents’ apartment in Vienna. Two miles away, Sigmund Freud was putting the finishing touches on “The Interpretation of Dreams.” “Fin-de-siècle Vienna” invokes a century-straddling city whose violent metamorphosis, from the crown jewel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the capital of the Austrian Republic, released into the world a distinctive swirl of psychoanalysis and logical positivism, fascism and atonal music. Though often omitted from the city’s syllabus, Hayek’s writings are among its lasting texts.

To what I think the smartest left readers of Hayek may have overlooked or under-emphasized—

Hayek’s is an economy in which a few can act, with all the power of nature, while the rest of us are acted upon. That domination is directly derived from his vision of the economy and his conception of freedom. It is a commitment obscured by Hayek’s readers, not only his right-wing defenders but also his left-wing critics. The latter tend to focus on other sources of domination or unfreedom: the cruel and carceral state that enforces Hayek’s neoliberal order; the remote global institutions that put that order beyond the reach of democratic citizens; the patriarchal family that offers tutorials in submission to the market; and the construction of the enterprising self that is so emblematic of contemporary capitalism.

Persuasive as these readings are, they don’t quite capture that moment of élite domination in the Hayekian market… 

To the relationship between Hayek’s theory of markets and the reality of his marriage—

The great trial of Hayek’s life was his twenty-four-year marriage to Helena (Hella) Fritsch, much of which he spent trying to get out of. Caldwell and Klausinger devote the last three chapters of their biography to the divorce—and for good reason, even if they can’t see it. In Hayek’s anguished bid to end his marriage, we find, just as Freud would have anticipated, the private pathology of the public philosophy, the knowledge problem in practice. That we should discover those pathologies in a marriage is less remarkable than it might seem. From the treatises of antiquity to the novels of Jane Austen to the economics of Thomas Piketty, writers of all sorts have understood the overlap between unions of soul and contracts of need.

You can read the whole article here.

From Marx’s Capital to Student Housing at Berkeley

The summer after I graduated college, a group of friends and I moved out west and lived together in Berkeley, California. There were about ten of us in Rochdale Village, a complex of student cooperative housing on Haste Street, just off Telegraph Avenue, not far from the Berkley campus.

I hadn’t thought about those apartments, or their name, till this afternoon, when I was reading Marx’s chapter on cooperation (chapter 11) in the first volume of Capital. I’m reading Capital in a new and amazing translation by Paul Reitter; it’s edited by Paul North. Wendy Brown has a foreword, and Will Roberts has an afterward. It’s due out this September. I’ll be reviewing it.

In the middle of chapter 11, Marx has a long footnote on workers’ cooperatives. He mentions one, in Manchester, that was so successful on so many terms, it provoked the Spectator to sniff that while it had “immensely improved the condition of the men” working there, it “did not leave a clear place for masters.” Leading Marx to comment, “Quelle horreur!“

This particular set of cooperatives was located in the borough of Rochdale within the wider metropolitan area of Manchester. Begun as a consumers’ cooperative, North explains in a useful editorial note, The Society of Equitable Pioneers eventually became a workers’ cooperative, “providing a model for the application of socialist ideas that workers emulated elsewhere in Great Britain.”

So potent was the example that it eventually made its way across the Atlantic, providing an inspiration for affordable housing in New York City, under the Mitchell-Lama program, for cooperating farming in Wisconsin, and student housing in Berkeley.

What I Saw—and Learned—at a New York City Student Walk-Out for Palestine

I was working at my desk this morning when I got a text from my daughter, who’s 16 years old, and a student at Brooklyn Tech. She wanted to know if I would go with her to a walkout for Palestine that had been organized by and for New York City high school students. Having dragged her to so many demonstrations when she was much younger, I was thrilled to be asked to join her on this one.

We met up, and at 3 pm, the students converged at 52 Chambers Street, where the Department of Education is located. I was impressed by a few of the increasingly familiar elements that distinguish this generation of protesters from previous ones—the extraordinary diversity of the students, the variety of boroughs they were coming from, the initiative of the students (from every corner of the protest, a different student would start a chant whenever the crowd fell silent), and the leadership role of female students.

But what most struck me about the protest was how frequently I heard the phrase “the truth.” In my more than thirty years on the left, I’ve never heard so much talk of “the truth.” The speakers and the chanters invoked the phrase repeatedly.

The media claims we live in a country whose citizens and residents believe in something called truthiness rather than the truth, that reality no longer matters to people, that the young are truth-addled and fact-adjacent. But judging by these students, that seems like the opposite of, well, the truth. They were absolutely passionate on the topic, seeming to me almost old-fashioned in their belief in the truth, in their conviction that the truth would set them free.

One of the other watchwords of the protest was “scholasticide“—the destruction of education and knowledge. This is obviously a huge problem right now in Gaza, where schools and universities are being obliterated by the Israeli state, and students and teachers are being killed day after day. Some of the most eloquent speakers at the protest connected, with minimal hyperbole or rhetoric, that destruction to what’s happening in New York City public schools and universities, where budget cuts, austerity, and the persecution of pro-Palestine teachers are degrading the state of education in this city. They invoked the words of Frederick Douglass, one of the most far-seeing American theorists on the relationship between the denial of knowledge and the subjugation of a people, to make sense of why they, these students, were protesting Israel’s destruction of Gaza in front of the New York City Department of Education.

We hear a lot of talk and speculation about why young people in America are so passionate on the topic of Palestine. From the students I was listening to today, the connection is clear. They see in Gaza the destruction of heritage, the obliteration of knowledge, the assault on institutions of learning. Far from seeming like a world away, it seems like the world in front of them. There’s been an assault upon the obligation of each generation to pass on to the next generation the intellectual legacy that was passed on to it, and whether the site of that assault is Gaza or the New York City school system, the problem is systemic. For people who are coming of age now, it’s also personal.

On the other hand…at one point in the rally, when I was taking a lengthy video shot, panning out across the crowd and the signs, a very sweet-looking student standing next to me—he couldn’t have been more than 15—said, “Your camera’s not on, sir.” He turned to his friend and said, “My dad does that all the time.”

Whatever we’re not teaching them, in other words, they’re still teaching us. In more ways than one.

Arno Mayer, 1926-2023

The historian Arno Mayer, who had such an influence on my work and eventually became a friend, has died at 97. He wrote books on everything from the French Revolution to the First World War to the Holocaust to the creation of the State of Israel. He was one of a cohort of brilliant scholars at Princeton University who made the study of history, in which I majored as an undergraduate in the 1980s, the most exciting discipline and department in the world.

I have a tribute to him at the New Left Review. Some excerpts:

Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a marginal country, Mayer was repelled by nationalism and drawn to cosmopolitanism like those other great historians of Europe from small countries: Pirenne (Belgium), Huizinga (the Netherlands) and Burckhardt (Switzerland). That inheritance led him to diplomatic history, a world in between states. Mayer told this origin story so often – and the story has so often been told ­– that I’ve come to think of it as the equivalent of a family myth. I see his in-betweenness differently.

I was introduced to Arno as an undergraduate at Princeton by my roommate, the son of the European intellectual historian Stuart Hughes. I don’t know if it was my personality or my connection to Hughes, but for whatever reason, Arno immediately made me feel like family. His writing gives the impression of an old-world Jewish sophisticate, but in his being and bearing, he reminded me of nothing so much as my very non-academic Jewish American family from the suburbs of New York. 

…

Other diplomatic historians studied the relations between states. Arno looked inside of states, at the domestic relations and power struggles within. When he wrote about the French and Russian revolutions, he turned not to Marx or Lenin but to The Oresteia and the Hebrew Bible, master texts of familial violence and personal vengeance. Where other Marxist historians of the twentieth century spoke of the transition to finance capital and the corporate form, Arno was more impressed by the staying power of the family firm.

His most daring and enduring ideas – that the First and Second World Wars were like the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century; that the history of modern Europe is not one of a rising bourgeoisie but of a regnant aristocracy; that the Holocaust might be compared to the pogroms of the Crusades, a work of detoured ambition, in which a marauding army from the West, crazed and stymied in its quest for the lands of the East, acts out its zeal and frustration on the helpless Jews caught in the way – are not the creations of a contrarian. They are reflections of a spirit seeking to dispel the depersonalizing aura and bureaucratic myths of modernity in favour of more intimate, domestic, familial, and lineal, but no less tractable or terrible, examples from the past.

…

Where we imagine today’s city as the home of the left, The Persistence of the Old Regime reminds us that the city can be the natural space of the right. At the turn of the last century, European cities, particularly imperial capitals, employed vast numbers in the tertiary sector of commerce, finance, real estate, government and the professions. Members of those sectors, which included much of what we today would call the PMC, often outnumbered the more traditionally recognized ranks of the urban proletariat. Far from generating a cosmopolitan or metropolitan left, they were a breeding ground of the radical right.

Until recently, Mayer’s political geography of the city might have seemed of historical interest only. With Israel’s war on Gaza, it bears re-reading. 

You can read the entire tribute here. May his memory be for a blessing.

We’re all norm eroders now

Up at The New Yorker this morning, I’ve got a double review of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s new book, Tyranny of the Minority, and Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath’s The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution, which came out last year.

My essay addresses the Constitution and the rise of the right, and asks whether any part of the Constitution might help us counter the right. I come out, surprisingly, thinking that, maybe, yes, it might. That’s what I learned from Fishkin and Forbath’s “wonderfully counterintuitive” book, as I say.

The other surprise, for me, is the shift in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s position. Five years ago, you may recall, they were the leading scholarly voices arguing against the norm erosion of Donald Trump and the GOP. Now, in their work, they call for an erosion of the Constitution, the deepest norm of all in American politics. What happened?

Find out here.

How ChatGPT changed my plans for the fall

Until now, I’ve avoided getting myself worked up about ChatGPT.

Prompted by this article by a Columbia undergraduate this past spring, I thought that if a student knows enough about paper-writing to make ChatGPT work for them, in the way this student describes in his piece, without detection by a minimally alert instructor, that student has probably already mastered the skills of essay-writing far more than the author of this piece seems to realize. I at least could rest easy with the knowledge that if a student used ChatGPT to write a paper for me, and it was good, I wasn’t not teaching that student what they needed to learn how to do.

But this recent article, by a Harvard undergraduate, made me think again.

I decided to ask my daughter to run through ChatGPT a bunch of take-home essay questions that I had assigned to my students this past year. One course was on politics and literature, the other course was on American political thought. I’ll admit I take a certain foolish (and, I now realize, complacent) pride in asking somewhat out-of-the-way type questions of my students. So I wasn’t too worried.

The initial answers ChatGPT spat back reinforced my complacence. All of them were well written and structured, good on the surface. There were none of the usual flaws you find in student writing: each sentence logically followed the other, paragraphs had points, transitions were purposeful rather than obfuscatory, that is, trying to cover the tracks of an unjustified leap in logic or evidence.

But all of the answers lacked a clear or strong thesis, provided needless exposition, referred to texts not read for class, and made basic errors about the texts, mistaking their genre and so on. If not easy to prove as not the student’s own work, they’d still be easy to assign a grade of C or lower to, simply on the basis of my rubrics for papers.

I was feeling pretty good about things.

Then my daughter started refining her inputs, putting in more parameters and prompts. The essays got better, more specific, more pointed. Each of them now did what a good essay should do: they answered the question. It became clear that so long as a student has a minimal sense of what a paper is supposed to look like or do, or at least knows what a bad paper (by my lights) looks like, they could easily use ChatGPT to come up with excellent answers to even the most out-of-the-way questions.

Where I had initially thought that such a student would have to have mastered quite a few skills in order to do this—that is, would be able to write such a paper on their own—it’s clear to me now that that’s not necessarily the case. Students just have to be able to spot the difference between good work and not good work, which even the most struggling students can already do. It’s always been amazing to me that students who have a difficult time writing a thesis statement can spot it a mile away in another student’s essay. Likewise, a well structured paragraph or paper. That doesn’t mean they can do it themselves, though.

In all my nearly 30 years of teaching, I’ve never once assigned an in-class test. But it looks like until a better option comes along, I’m going to have to go with in-class midterms and finals. It makes me sad, but I’m not sure what else to do.

Update (4pm)

As much as I complain about grading papers, it makes me sad that I may not be able to do this kind of work with students anymore.

For me, grading was never about grades; it was about the intensive feedback, the ongoing revisions of drafts, the individual conversations with students, that went into doing good work.

Good work was never about writing good papers. It was about being able to order your world, to take the confusion that one is confronted with, and turn it into something meaningful and coherent. And to know that that doesn’t just happen spontaneously or instinctively; it’s a practice, requiring, well, work.

That’s not simply a skill for college classes. That’s a life-long practice, of being able to see a situation, pick out those elements that matter and lend it significance, and bring clarity out of chaos.

That’s critical to being a good friend, a good parent, a good citizen, a good neighbor, and having a good life. I really, firmly believe that. I wouldn’t spend as much time as I do on student papers if I didn’t.

But now it all kind of seems pointless. I’ll still do that work in class, obviously, but there is something about clear writing that is connected to clear thinking and acting in the world, that I don’t think can easily be replicated in other mediums.

The only thing, in my life, that has even come close to what writing forces me to do is psychoanalysis, not therapy, but five days on the couch, with your analyst behind you saying almost nothing. Only on the couch have I been led to externalize myself, to throw my thoughts and feelings onto a screen and to look at them, to see them as something other, coldly and from a distance, the way I do when I write.

We are all totalitarians now

One of the most interesting dimensions of our contemporary crisis of democracy discourse and literature is its moralism.

If you listen to the talking heads on MSNBC or read more sophisticated academic treatments of the topic, you’ll find a frequent claim that mainstream Republican leaders who are not Trump—people like McConnell or McCarthy—are cowards or careerists. Unlike the Greenes and Gaetzes of the party, goes the argument, these men are not ideologically opposed to democracy. They’re just insufficiently committed to democracy. That’s the problem.

If they were ideologically principled, if they were honorable, if they were dedicated, out of conviction, to democracy, these leaders would take on the authoritarians in their midst. In the past, the argument continues, Republican leaders did just that: Goldwater, famously, told a Watergate-addled Nixon that he didn’t have the votes in the Senate and that it was time for him to go. But today’s leaders are saddled by their interests; bound to expedients of the moment, they refuse to do what must be done. And so we swirl down the authoritarian drain.

What’s interesting about this moralistic turn is how it pushes against what once was supposed to be the genius of American politics, born of the hard-headed realism of the Framers of the Constitution. That genius was embodied, above all else, in the idea of the separation of powers. Though many liberals have come to question certain parts of the Constitution—even the Supreme Court is now an object of liberal critique—the basic constitutional framework of the separation of powers remains a source of affection and pride.

Why do people value the separation of powers? Because concentrated and undivided power is an invitation to tyranny or autocracy. But how does the separation of powers actually stop tyranny? What is the precise mechanism of its operation?

James Madison famously provided the answer in Federalist 51:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. 

The Framers’ gambit was that self-interested men, zealously pursuing and jealously defending their interests, would defend the prerogatives of their office and the powers of their institutions, thereby frustrating the designs of wannabe tyrants or autocrats in the making. Guarding freedom didn’t require high-minded guardians of freedom. It simply required men to be what they were: selfish, narrow, and small. Such men would hate to have their power taken away from them, so they’d do everything they could to hold on to it. Including opposing tyrants and autocrats. Allowing men to think small, the Constitution ensured that the whole would remain big.

If that kind of thinking sounds familiar, it should. One can find similar modes of argument in the eighteenth-century discourse of a burgeoning capitalism—private vices lead to public virtues, the invisible hand, and all that—and in the later political science of pluralist democracy. Both of those streams—free-market capitalism and pluralist democracy—would rush together in the twentieth century, producing a raging river of commentary about the Soviet Union and leftist totalitarianism. What is the great sin of the left, it was asked, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks? It is the left’s insistence that men and women should think and act on behalf of the collective, the whole, rather than attend to such homier virtues as private property, the family, one’s narrow circle of friends and interests.

Yet in today’s discourse of democracy, it is precisely such self-interested, small-minded men and women who are thought to be the enablers of tyranny. Precisely because they are too committed to their interests and insufficiently concerned about the needs and values of the whole. What democracy needs, it seems, are the kinds of high-minded virtuecrats that patrol the pages of Rousseau.

An entire edifice of thinking, extending from the Framers to Isaiah Berlin, has been toppled. Without anyone’s seeming to have noticed.

Alan Arkin, 1934-2023

Alan Arkin was a part of my childhood.

He lived in Chappaqua, where I grew up. His son Tony was in my grade. Arkin used to come to our elementary school, I’m guessing, though I can’t remember for sure, for something like career day. He’d be spotted around town.

More important to me was “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” Not only was it one of my favorite movies as a kid; it was also one of my dad’s. It’s one of the few movies where I remember my dad laughing out loud. The other was Mel Brooks’s “Spaceballs.” Anyway, I have fond memories of my dad and I laughing through “The Russians Are Coming.”

In memory of Arkin, who died a few days ago, I watched “The In-Laws” last night. A movie where I still laugh out loud.

What struck me this time is how much the movie is about the Latin American debt crisis of the 1970s. I mean, it’s not really about that. It’s about the falling in love of two fathers with each other. That’s the real marriage in any marriage: the one between the in-laws. But the sovereign debt crisis is the story’s backdrop. There’s a lot of discussion of hyper-inflation, and at one point, the Peter Falk character, who’s in the CIA, predicts that if the crisis continues, there’ll be things like “atonal music.” It’s a nice touch. It really does capture the anxiety of the late 1970s over countries in the Global South defaulting on their debt and the fear that inflation was trending toward Weimar-levels.

In one of the last lines of the film, Falk’s character says that he’s getting out of the CIA. The reason? Once upon a time, when he and his comrades were fighting communists, he felt like the CIA meant something. But now, in the era of Carter and the IMF, he feels like he’s risking his life for “the international monetary system.”

After I finished the movie, I did a little reading up on Falk and Arkin. Falk had tried to join the CIA out of college. He got rejected because he had been in a union that was dominated by Communists. It was the 1950s. Arkin’s parents were in the CP orbit, and his father, it seems, was blacklisted.

Just one of many stories of the many actors whose lives intersected with communism and whose careers were shadowed by that early encounter. And though Falk and Arkin were not particularly political actors later in their lives, the intensity of that earlier political specter seems to live in on the intensity of their acting, particularly Arkin’s.

Farewell to a wonderful actor who gave me and my father so much laughter and joy. May his memory be for a blessing.