Notebook 4.24.25

Author

Ned Resnikoff
April 24, 2025

Hi all,

I’ve been sitting on a couple different ideas that I’m not sure can sustain entire posts, but that are a little too substantial for microblogging. So in the interest of clearing out some of the mental clutter, I’m going to give them their due below in what may become a semi-regular feature. (To the extent that anything about this newsletter is regular — more on that in a bit.)

In order, this post will include:

  1. An update on what I’ve been writing elsewhere.

  2. Some context on how I’m thinking about the future of this newsletter.

  3. More on Arendt and the notion of personal responsibility under dictatorship.

If you’re uninterested in housekeeping or self-promotion, go ahead and skip to Item 3.

New Writing

My most recent piece for Business Insider is about Cambridge, MA’s ambitious “Paris-style” zoning reform. The piece dives into what, precisely, “Paris-style” means, and then explains why Cambridge is setting a great precedent that other mid-sized cities should adopt.

Cambridge — like many other older cities in New England and the mid-Atlantic region — already has a fair number of dense apartment buildings and townhomes. Rather than destroying the culture or character of these cities, building more Parisian-style housing would signal a return to the pre-single-family era. Many of Cambridge's mid-rise apartment buildings were constructed before single-family zoning became ubiquitous in the United States in the early 20th century. And the ones that have survived are now highly coveted as luxury homes and architectural treasures; yet, for decades, it has been effectively illegal to build more of them. As Azeem wrote on X, Cambridge's previous, single-family-focused zoning laws meant that "85%+ of the existing housing" in the city would be illegal to build. In other words, Cambridge's upzoning may actually help to preserve the city's architectural heritage and New England character. At the same time, it is a model for how other cities can upzone in a manner that actually eases housing costs.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

And stay tuned for another forthcoming piece of mine in The Nation. This one will attempt to outline a left-YIMBY theory of power: a rough schematic of American housing policy’s class structure and the various interest groups involved. It is intended in part as a rebuke to those anti-YIMBYs of the left who argue that YIMBYs are blind to questions of class, redistribution, and corporate power. It’s also an attempt to systematize some of my own thinking on these questions as I try to tackle them in my book project.

As for the book: I’m around 30,000 words into a first draft at the moment, although progress is slow at this point. I’m venturing a bit further from my traditional wheelhouse, which means a lot of additional background research on, e.g., the history of American municipal government reform.

A Letter to Our Shareholders

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that I’m trying to figure out what to do with this newsletter: in particular, whether I should put up a paywall on some posts, and how that would change both the cadence and content of my writing.

I still haven’t made up my mind, but I want to be transparent about the current state of my thinking on the subject. Here’s the thing: now that I derive my income from consulting and freelance writing, I need to account for every hour that I’m “on the clock” in a way that I didn’t before. That’s especially true because I have a kid, and because the consulting work hasn’t fully taken flight yet. This newsletter used to be a silly little hobby I’d attend to on the weekends, but now it’s essentially unpaid work: it’s not a freelance gig and it isn’t the book project, but it exercises many of the same muscles and takes up time I could be devoting to one or both of those things.

Still, it’s work I enjoy and would like to continue. In thinking about how to continue it, I realized that this newsletter is essentially two products for two different audiences. Maybe one-third to one half of my readership is housing policy nerds, including both professionals and enthusiasts. The remainder are people who come here primarily for what you might call the resistance posting: more generalist writing about American politics in the age of Trump.

I think this newsletter’s biggest “value add” probably comes from the housing policy stuff, because that’s where I have some specialized technical knowledge, and where my writing might have some modest real-world impact. But the housing policy stuff is also necessarily pitched toward a smaller albeit more invested readership. The resistance posting brings in more readers overall, but I don’t think that audience is as “sticky” as the housing policy nerds.

So here’s what I propose to do: Keep my resistance posting out in front of the paywall, but write some regular paywalled content that focuses on the nitty gritty of housing policy, with state housing policy in California as a particular area of focus. That would allow me to do some deeper dives — in-depth analyses of specific bills, commentary on state housing politics from a semi-insider’s perspective, etc. — while also hopefully bringing in enough revenue to justify continuing the project.

This proposal isn’t set in stone by any means, so feel free to hit me up if you have thoughts.

Some People Are Just Nazis

My last post, about a month ago, was about Hannah Arendt’s great lecture, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” I particularly dwelled on Arendt’s description of the German intelligentsia’s cowardice and accommodation to the rise of Nazi, because I thought it provided a helpful frame for understanding the capitulation of some elite American institutions to Trumpism.

As I wrote previously:

Part of what makes it so disturbing when institutions like Columbia University or The Washington Post capitulate to Trump is that these places are the traditional strongholds of mainstream respectability. And while Trump may be powerful, he is not respectable; even as he crashes through the political and legal norms that hold the republic together, one might expect a bit more resistance from the longtime guardians of those norms.

But maybe respectability is the mortal vice leading some of these institutions astray. Because where the first Trump administration broke the rules of the old order, the second Trump administration is working to create a new one before our very eyes. What “respectability” means under this new order is very different from what it meant under the previous one. Arendt tells us “it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values for another.”

Arendt doesn’t name any names, but we can probably, with a fair amount of certainty, identify at least one of the people she had in mind while writing this lecture. That would be the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who served as both her instructor and her lover while she was a student at the University of Marburg. Heidegger would later join the Nazi Party and serve in various academic positions under Hitler’s regime.

Arendt and Heidegger would reconnect in 1952 when she visited him in Freiburg. They maintained an awkward but apparently affectionate relationship for the rest of their lives (she died in 1975 and he died in 1976); Arendt, though critical of her former lover, seemed to accept that he had never been a real Nazi. Perhaps he was instead one of those “members of respectable society … who were the first to yield.”

Specialists have spent decades arguing over Heidegger’s level of commitment to Nazism, the precise nature of his complicity with the regime, and the extent to which that complicity should taint our understanding of his philosophical work. On the latter question, I have no opinion: I remember having my shit rocked by Being and Time when I first encountered it as a philosophy undergraduate, but it has been a long time since I’ve revisited it. As a result, I have a difficult time parsing the debates over whether Nazi DNA is encoded into Being and Time and Heidegger’s other major works.

It’s a bit easier to weigh in on the other two questions. Regarding Heidegger’s activities under the Third Reich, I recommend this overview from Thomas Sheehan, which describes both Heidegger’s pro-Nazi activities and his post-war attempts at obfuscation. And as for what he really believed, we now have the contents of his Black Notebooks, unpublished during his lifetime. Here’s a taste, via the Guardian:

The most controversial passages of the black notebooks are a series of reflections from the start of the second world war to 1941. While distancing himself from the racial theories pursued by Nazi intellectuals, Heidegger argues that Weltjudentum ("world Judaism") is one of the main drivers of western modernity, which he viewed critically.

"World Judaism", Heidegger writes in the notebooks, "is ungraspable everywhere and doesn't need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people".

In another passage, the philosopher writes that the Jewish people, with their "talent for calculation", were so vehemently opposed to the Nazi's racial theories because "they themselves have lived according to the race principle for longest".

These passages still leave a couple unanswered questions. How did Heidegger square his antisemitism with his enduring love for Arendt? To what extent did his views on “World Judaism” remain consistent throughout his life?

But one thing is abundantly clear, though: Heidegger the Nazi Party member was also Heidegger the sincere antisemite. Arendt wrote with clarity and insight about people who become collaborators due to personal weakness, but we shouldn’t forget that some people are just Nazis.