My guest on the podcast today is Freddie deBoer. He is the author of three books: The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, and a new novel, coming out in October, The Mind Reels. He has another book under contract about the ways in which disorders, in particular mental health disorders and forms of disability, are becoming anchors of personal identity in a way that is bizarre and fairly destructive.
Freddie is also, and more influentially, a long time blogger, essayist, and now Substacker who has carved out a niche for himself as a left-wing critic of liberals and the left, with a particular emphasis on the characteristic flaws and sins of identity politics and what we now call wokeness.
The anti-woke rhetorical space is a fairly well saturated one, at this point, but Freddie is one of the OG critics of contemporary leftist thought and practice. He was there before almost anyone else, when it comes to this most recent iteration of the cycle, and I think he and Wesley Yang are probably the two writers who’ve had the most influence on how other people, on the left and the right, critique wokeness. He’s far from a household name, but he’s had a direct influence on people who are household names. If you know, in other words, you know.
There are various reasons for his relative obscurity – and I should emphasize that it’s only relative, as he has 66,000 subscribers on Substack, many of them paid subscribers – but the main three, I’d say, are this. He struggles with bipolar disorder, which he has written a lot about, and in 2017, in the grips of a manic episode, he made some libelous accusations against another journalist and in general just blew up his life. The scandal has made him persona non grata at a lot of publications (and even, as we discuss, made it difficult for him to get non-media jobs).
Reason two, not wholly unconnected, is that he’s a prickly personality. He takes no prisoners in his writing. He attacks people who might otherwise be his allies. And he’s just temperamentally allergic to playing the game at all.
The third reason are his politics, which don’t really align with anyone’s else politics in a way that makes it tough for him to find a sympathetic intellectual community, much less an institutional home of some sort. He’s a Marxist who has contempt for most people on the left. He’s someone with a severe psychiatric disorder who really detests the left-flavored movements and ideologies that tend to be associated with mental health advocacy. Unlike so many anti-woke types, he’s both a hard-core critic of Israel and a staunch pro-trans ally. Etc. He fits in nowhere.
That’s a lot of what we talk about in this conversation, his difficulties fitting in. We also talk about my feelings about him. I’ve been reading Freddie closely for a long time, and over the years I’ve developed a fairly strong parasocial attachment to him. He lives in my head. I worry about him, I get frustrated with him, I have thoughts on what he should and shouldn’t write about, and I theorize about his psyche. All in my own head. We don’t know each other, had never met even virtually until this conversation. So this is my opportunity to unload many of my thoughts about Freddie on to Freddie, and he’s a gracious recipient.
Three other quick housekeeping things:
This is my monthly paid episode, so you’ll get about 30 minutes or so free, and then for the rest you’ll need to become a paid subscriber.
You’ll notice at the end, if you get to the end, that I’m introducing a new element of the podcast. I’m giving each guest three lightning round questions: Who should I have on the podcast, in their opinion, if I want to stay in touch with the deep currents of the contemporary American intellectual scene? If they had to host a podcast, what would it be about? And who do they have an intense, unrequited parasocial relationship with?
Finally, I recently noticed that Terry Gross now has a co-host on Fresh Air, Tanya Mosely, and just in general has been emitting an I’m-leaving soon vibe. Mosely is presumably going to inherit the show, and she’s solid, as is longtime substitute host Dave Davies, but let’s be honest: I’m natural heir to the Fresh Air legacy, or if not me specifically then someone like me, which is to say not an off-brand Terry, which is what Mosely and Davies are, but rather someone who has their own unique vibration, as Terry does.
I thought about launching a campaign to anoint me as the next host of Fresh Air, but I realized that a more generative endeavor would just be to think through who out in the world of media and broadcasting would be good for the job. So if you have any thoughts, send me an email.
