Dear Friend,

If you are receiving this, you are a free subscriber to Unpopular Front. I like to keep most posts available to a broad public and not add a paywall. This is good for you because you can read for free. And it’s good for me because I can reach readers who may not know my work. But this model requires periodically asking dedicated readers to chip in. Unpopular Front is completely reader-supported: I’m proud to say I did not receive a deal from Substack; it’s organically grown over these past four years. If you read, enjoy, and share Unpopular Front with friends and family, particularly if you are a journalist, academic, or political professional who uses it for work, please consider a paid subscription. When you opt for paid, you’ll get my weekly film and reading recommendations and join the very smart Unpopular Front community that adds a layer of insightful commentary to the posts.

We are inundated today with AI slop. Reading, writing, and, therefore, thinking, are all declining precipitously. We live in an era where the judgment of particulars is being destroyed by gross abstractions. The icon I chose for this newsletter depicts Dante holding up a book to the city of Florence. Without thinking too much about what it meant at the time, I took it from the cover of a book called Renaissance Civic Humanism, but “civic humanism” is not a bad way to describe the tradition I try to carry on with this newsletter. The concept originally came from the historian Hans Baron, a Jewish Weimar exile, who believed he had discovered a political and intellectual movement during a period of crisis in the Florentine Republic. According to Baron, the Florentine humanists, faced with domination by the despotic Milanese, combined classical learning with a renewed spirit of civic engagement to defend their native freedoms. Of course, Baron was no doubt thinking also of the fate of Germany and the tendency of the German Jews to forego political life and prefer Bildung, artistic and intellectual cultivation, instead. Civic humanism is a solution of a sort, on the level of thought if not practice: a synthesis of Bildung and politics. This approach can probably never be the basis of mass politics, hence the title “Unpopular Front” is fitting. Please help me keep this tradition alive in this small way. Maybe after our new dark age, it will provide one seed for a Renaissance.

At just $5 a month, it costs less than most things at Starbucks.