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My Dinner with [Marc] Andreessen
Billionaires I have known: Part One of a three-part series
The second was the hulking object standing by the front door: a sculpture by the French modernist master Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), a smaller version of a massive, beloved downtown public monument Chicagoans call “ Snoopy in a Blender.” Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is the daughter of a sharp fellow who began scooping up commercial real estate in the bedraggled lands around Stanford University that became Silicon Valley, becoming its pre-eminent landowner, which is kind of how aristocracies start in the dim mists of time. I see from a follow-up email that among the things discussed were David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, on the geographic patterns of American political culture and their persistence; the anti-Enlightenment philosopher Julius Evola (I had just begun exploring the explicit anti-liberalism of those close to Trump, like Steve Bannon); 1970s New Left historiography on regulatory capture; Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind; Jimmy Carter’s embrace of austerity; the magnificent volume Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century(I was hard at work then on my book about the 1976–1980 period); and Jonathan Haidt on personality type and ideology (someone else must have brought him up; I can’t stand him).
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