Cormac McCarthy is often caricatured as a conservative writer, and maybe there’s something to that, but that claim gets reductionistic fast. In this episode, I explore Chapter 7 of Patrick O’Connor’s Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned, “A Maelstrom of Doing and Undoing: McCarthy’s Political Imaginary,” and think through McCarthy as a political writer whose work can’t be easily mapped onto our usual categories.

Rather than giving us a clean ideology, McCarthy forces us to sit with the tension between order and chaos, law and lawlessness, community and exclusion, freedom and violence. I reflect on Blood Meridian, The Orchard Keeper, The Stonemason, Tocqueville, technocracy, fragile dwellings, and the strange dignity of making a world even as it comes undone.

This is McCarthy’s politics: not a platform, not nostalgia, not utopia, but tragic attention to the people and places buried beneath the official story of progress.