Compact

The Dissident's Jacobin Magazine

Compact magazine lives up to its name with a 260-word mission statement whose brevity tests my exercise in close reading these documents. This source is so scant that for the purposes of this article, I am combining it with a related dissident magazine, The Bellows, whose statement is even briefer. This is not an arbitrary connection, however, as the two publications share a founder, Edwin Aponte, several contributors, and a similar editorial line. Indeed, The Bellows could be seen as something of a botched test run for the shinier and better-funded Compact.

Along with Unherd, whose even slighter mission statement is made redundant by the others we have been discussing, these publications (especially Compact) most clearly fit the mold of a dissident Jacobin. They are not quarterly policy journals like American Affairs, nor like IM-1776 do they always let their freak flag fly with grandiose content produced exclusively for those who have drunk the kool aid. Instead, like Jacobin, they produce polished takes on the news of the day.

These publications aim to take dissidence to a wider, more mainstream audience, even as their editorial lines maintain the classic occasion of all dissident media: crisis, flux, a sense that the old approaches have become unbalanced.

The Bellows’ statement indeed begins with such a cliché: “Ours is an unsettled moment in history,” a uniquely unstable period in which politics as we know it is rapidly changing. “The political ground is shifting beneath our feet, with alliances and coalitions falling apart and coming together in new and interesting ways, minute by minute.” In these heady times of metamorphosis and realignment, one needs the guiding light of the dissident magazine “to recognize this state of flux and navigate it authentically” because at any moment some Democrats might become Republicans, and some Republicans might become Democrats, and that might change everything.

This discourse of flux imbues the normal ebb and flow of liberal politics with an exciting sense of crisis and impending transformation, but the only crisis these alternative outlets solve is the CVs of those shut out of the existing channels. “Tragically, those authors who do not fit squarely into the left-liberal media landscape are feeling the squeeze, with fewer and fewer outlets willing to take the reputational risk of publishing their work.” Enter publications like The Bellows to help stifled leftists unjustly barred from The Nation and The New Republic make their transition into professional dissidents.

Whereas The Bellows opposes the tragic situation of liberal media from the left, Compact supposedly does so from the right, with a loose range of contributors and perspectives, however, that doesn’t always amount to a clear editorial line. Compact indeed aims to reach a wider audience than committed partisans of the right with a slick, generic dissidence and a diverse cast of “heterodox” writers ranging from the new stars of dissident social media to burned-out Jacobins and Verso Loft inhabitants looking for a new edge.

This nondenominational dissidence manifests in the vague oppositional posture presented in its mission statement, which sources its title compact to “a political union drawing together different people for a common end,” something that “depends not on shared blood, but on shared purpose.” The common end and purpose shared in the compact between Ben Burgis, Adrian Vermeule, Curtis Yarvin, and Freddie deBoer remains nebulous, but perhaps this is the point. The dissidence is defined so loosely that it can encompass anyone with a complaint about modern life.

Although it pits itself as a bold new opponent of liberalism, Compact simply reiterates the classic Jacobin indictment of liberalism for failing to live up to its ideals. The editors “believe that the ideology of liberalism is at odds with the virtue of liberality,” while claiming to “oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.” For these anti-liberals, liberalism is not tolerant enough. It doesn’t respect difference and weakness. They are the real liberals! This blather is optimized to sound oppositional without saying anything at all. After all, would Barack Obama himself (noted admirer of Compact contributing editor Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed) object to this pursuit of liberality?

The hollow dissidence of Compact extends to its stated “desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right.” Never mind that all this talk of “seeking” and “desiring” an ideal form of society is impotent utopianism, the “possible future” envisaged by Compact—social democracy—is an amorphous and perhaps historically-exhausted concept that means little without further elaboration or context.

Although the rhetoric of defending community may trigger the left, Compact’s conservative-tinted democratic socialism, which promises to challenge an “overclass” even vaguer than the 1%, basically amounts to an unwoke Jacobin, something that was also the deepest ambition of The Bellows. This might explain why after fleeting conflict with Jacobin, Compact is attracting so many in their orbit. Demonstrating the kayfabe of dissident media, Bhaskar Sunkara’s water boy Ben Burgis has in fact become a Compact contributor only months after writing Jacobin’s rebuke of Compact’s launch.

But the cherry on top of Compact’s generic dissidence is surely its header branding as “A radical American journal.” Radical in what sense? Radical to whom? The “overclass” that funds it? Its mission statement alludes to Marx when claiming, “Rightly understood, to be radical does not mean going to extremes. It means getting to the root of things.” But do Compact’s slick takes on current events produced by an eclectic mish-mash of professional media dissidents really get at the root of the liberalism it decries? Or is this gesture toward Marx just another way to put another “radical” point on the board?

Compact’s glossy radicalism calls to mind an insight made by someone who graced the initial issues of both the supposedly adversarial Compact and Jacobin. “In today’s market,” as Slavoj Žižek observes, “we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol . . . Virtual reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its sub­stance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance.” Within this “attitude of the hedonistic Last Man,” “Every­thing is permitted, you can enjoy everything, but deprived of the substance which makes it dangerous. (This is also the Last Man’s revolution - ‘revolution without revolution’.)”¹

Like Zizek’s decaffeinated coffee that “smells and tastes like real coffee without being the real thing,” this is the virtual reality offered by “A radical American journal.” It allows its audience to enjoy at once Marxism without Marxism, leftism without wokeness, social democracy without democratic socialism, liberality without liberalism, radicalism without radicalism, dissidence without substance.

1. Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 105.