Hotseat: John Summers

Back in the '90s, Thomas Frank's The Baffler magazine was a cleansing hatebath lampooning both capitalist doublespeak and squishy liberalism, the rare publication to be both smart and funny amid a lot of humorless political bluster. When the publication burned down—literally, in a fire—in 2001, right after Bush II was inaugurated, it seemed almost symbolic. After sitting out the Bush years, The Baffler was revived in 2009 under a new editor, John Summers. Baffler editors Summers and Frank, joined by contributor Rick Perlstein, will be in town to talk about their new book, No Future for You (MIT Press, 392 pages, $27.95), collecting essays from the past five years about the 1 percent, Harvard hucksterism and the tragic hounding of the late Baffler contributor Aaron Swartz, to whom the book is dedicated.

WW: No Future for You is a portentous title.

John Summers: The people who are planning the future are not planning it for us. That's what the title means. It does seem like the country is suicidal sometimes. The book is Baffler writing and arguments from not that long into the Obama years. Why did things not change? Our answer is that the economy didn't change. We just got a lot of the same experts trading places with slightly different agendas. Our strategy is to get on the outside of D.C., confront what [Thomas Frank] called the consensus.

You describe your magazine as "blunting the cutting edge." What does that mean?

It means that the magazine is hostile to vanguardism in every form—whether in the form of revolutionary left-wing politics, or the new ad campaign for whatever new commercial thing. In the '90s, it was supposed to be that the hipster was locked in combat with advertising, and [The Baffler's] pages were devoted to showing that those two things were very similar.

Portland is doubling down its bets on the tech economy helping the city. In the book, there is an essay about Cambridge's experience with that.

What we have here in Cambridge is called the innovation economy, which pretends it has little to do with the city except by driving the real estate and the rents up. It really is the real-estate speculators and the investor class. They're not very good neighbors. When you're in Portland and you don't own your own house—if they're bringing in tech people, you should just pack your bags.

So how has the focus of The Baffler changed over the years?

The main beat is the same: the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The tone is a little harsher. We're exasperated—when Tom was writing he was 25 and I was 23. You tend to get a little less patient with age. On the other hand, the targets are much more vivid than in the '90s. In the '90s, you could watch a Madonna video and call out commodification. It was fun. Now we see students with crushing debt, coming out [of college] with no jobs into a largely failed Democratic presidency. The mood is very different.

So you figure you'll just get older and angrier?

We've got a role to play, and we continue to play it, in a way that very few do. But the task of changing the culture based on common-sense assumptions is not one that can be accomplished in a couple years. It's great that we've got a magazine that can continue to renew itself. 

Negative thinking isn't too popular lately.

The culture is geared toward an overwhelming culture of celebration, and the propaganda that comes with it. The one existential crime in this country is to be accused of being too negative. This book calls the bluff. 

GO: John Summers, Thomas Frank and Rick Perlstein will be at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., on Tuesday, Oct. 21. 7:30 pm. Free.

WWeek 2015