The stupidity, it burns

22 May 2008, 1500 EDT

Via Matthew Yglesias and a quick google search I learn that the right-wing blogsphere is all in a tizzy over the fact that the Decemberists played at Obama’s Portland speech. This apparently matters because:

1. The left-wing mainstream media isn’t reporting that some percentage of people clearly attended to hear the Decemberists rather than Obama. Ergo, Obama’s not really all that popular. Or something.

2. The Decemberists often play the Soviet National Anthem before their concerts. Given that they named themselves after the participants in an 1825 anti-absolutism rebellion in Russia and that (I kid you not) The Crane Wife contains a duet involving a dead confederate soldier and his pregnant lover/wife, this proves they’re some sort of anti-Americans.

There’s no doubt that the Decemberists are very left-wing. But if this is the kind of stuff that Obama’s going to face rom the right-wing blogsphere during Presidential campaign, I suspect he can rest easy.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.