My New Year's Resolution: A Premium Subscriber Preview As I Finish My Book Confronting the Idolatry of Ideology

Now that I can write again, it's time to finish my A-Z guide - and your help is very much appreciated!

So while this Substack has offered a broad range of content across genres and styles, its primary purpose is pretty simple: to build up a readership for the books we’re going to publish this year by our primary contributors, Alec Ott, Fred Tribuzzo, Tom Cosentino, P. David Hornik, and myself. And I anticipate that at least a couple more authors will join this list soon enough - especially my fiancée, Sally Shideler, who I’m pushing to write more since she’s so damn good at it.

We’re not actively hunting for new books and authors right now - I’d like to focus on the great ones we already have first - but when promising titles or contributors cross our paths, we’re certainly open to considering them. We hope that, by summer or fall, we’ll be ready to start actively seeking new book submissions again. (And by the way, anyone and everyone subscribed to this Substack is certainly invited to submit their books to us at that time, or, for right now, pieces they’d like published here. We want a diversity of views!)

Given this primary purpose, I’ve been hesitant to put very much content behind the paywall. We’re more interested in connecting with as many readers as possible to buy our future books rather than collecting a little bit of cash through subscriptions. And frankly, when I offered the paid option, I simply didn’t expect that many people to select it.

But now, six months in, we’ve got both more paid subscribers and free subscribers than I anticipated. We're incredibly encouraged by and appreciative of this response! So it’s time to provide some superior, exclusive content for those subscribers - and, we hope, find new ones! But what would be best? we wondered. Last night on New Year’s Eve, as we were contemplating what to write about this year’s resolutions, it finally came to me.

As our regular readers here have observed, I’ve started being able to regularly write again. We’re now at 18 installments since November 29 in my series on antisemitism and culture, with the 19th scheduled for tomorrow. The PTSD symptoms of hyperarousal and intense, suicidal depression still hit me almost every day, but lately I’m finding some good hours, usually in the middle of the day, to write: both here and at Jewish News Syndicate, where I'm a freelance contributor. I’m trying to be optimistic and assume this ability is the result of both the new medication combination my new psychiatrist has prescribed, and also of the greater emotional support I’ve gotten from my family lately, although it’s still a bit too soon to really know for sure.

But regardless of what’s causing the return of my ability to write for sustained periods, I’m going to take advantage of it! This year, I’ll finally finish one of the book projects I’ve been developing since 2015: The Joy of Political Sects.

Since my college undergraduate days circa 2002-2006, my primary political preoccupation has been ideology. I’ve been endlessly fascinated by all the varieties of belief systems, from Far-Left to Far-Right and everything in between. Early on, I caught on to how political ideologies, and the depth to which their most devoted proponents embrace them, mirrors how religious true believers behave. Having made that connection, I’ve made studying the range of “isms” my specialty ever since starting my activist writing and editing career in 2009. And when the opportunity came in 2015 to write a book on the subject for my then-publishing home Liberty Island, I jumped at the chance, beginning researching, outlining, and planning a guide to everything I’d learned over the years. I decided to organize it in an A to Z fashion, with each letter representing one important ideology - from “A is for Anarchism” to “Z is for Zionism.”

But over the years, as I developed various versions of the project, I ran into several challenges, which slowed me down and prevented me from ever finishing a draft.

First, I struggled with figuring out the proper balance of fact and opinion: how much should I just summarize the ideologies and present their histories in a dispassionate way, as opposed to offering my own weird insights and commentary?

Second, I realized I was chasing after a moving target. Ideological movements kept evolving and changing, as did my opinions on them. I’ve racked up 10 versions of this project as it’s shifted over the years, each with differing subtitles.

Third, I was conflicted over where I stood on ideology as a whole. While I knew a lot about many different ideologies, I wasn’t sure if ideology itself was good or bad. I kept waffling over whether I should advocate for particular ideologies or if a broadside against them all was more appropriate. By this time I was starting to grow more and more Bible-based, and was beginning to think it wasn’t a coincidence that “ideology” and “idolatry” sounded so similar. How much of my strange religious views should I infuse into the book?

Fourth, and perhaps most frustratingly, I realized that what I really wanted to write was probably going to be too “controversial” for most “conservative” or “right-wing” readers. I was a self-styled “counterculture conservative,” eager to push people’s buttons and provoke them, but I wasn’t sure just how far I could get away with going, while still staying in the good graces of the “conservative” organizations which funded my work.

So it's been quite a journey bringing this project to fruition! But at this point, I’ve resolved these questions and am ready to start writing: no longer caring about offending my former “conservative” “friends” I’m just going to tell the truth and write whatever the fuck I want.

And I’m going to let my Biblical prophetic freak flag fly. My particular religious tradition can be found in the middle of the Bible. I most sympathize with Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and all the desert prophets yelling in anger at a people that had abandoned God and embraced idolatry.

I know where I stand now on ideology and their corresponding “political movements”: they suck. They’re fucking evil idols drawing worship away from the one True God. Ideologies must be condemned and attacked in the most passionate terms. So that’s what I’m going to do in the series of essays that I’ll draft for this Substack - which I’ll then edit and expand into the book. (And BTW, the antisemitism and culture series will still continue, and will remain publicly available for all.)

I welcome everyone’s comments, suggestions, and feedback as I craft this no-holds-barred prophetic polemic. Please consider upgrading your subscription to participate.