We're All Just Having Fun Here

liberatory politics are only a game, now

So some killer whales have been sinking boats. Which, you know, is interesting and kind of cool. Ah, but we live in Discourse, so some doof at The Atlantic has written in grave concern about these destructive cetaceans.

This is dumb, obviously, a parody of the Very Serious mindset in a Very Serious magazine. Most people, I hope, are not really “rooting” for the orcas who are attacking boats, in any explicitly political sense - not out of concern for some boats or their likely-wealthy owners but because you shouldn’t put any real political hopes in these absurd events. Most people are just invoking a spirit of exhausted unhappiness with the status quo and celebrating a little bloodshed-free violence wrought by objectively cool animals. The piece takes seriously that which is, mostly, not meant to be taken seriously. And if people could just mock it and move on, great. But I’m not sure that’s what’s happened.

Now, look. Some of these people seem a little more in on the joke, some a little less. But these do not strike me, generically, as people who are locating all of this in a healthy perspective. I mean… a “radical position on some issue”? What? What issue? The issue of aquatic mammals attacking boats for reasons that we can’t possibly comprehend, given that they possess an alien intelligence and work according to motives all their own? To what end? “Chaos, anarchy, and misanthropic destruction”? To .0000000000001% of the world’s naval vessels? Yes, enjoying orcas attacking some random boats is natural and funny, and rolling that into a metaphor of radical politics in a humorous way is fine. But that’s not all that’s been happening with this story, is it? I’m not just talking about a few random tweets, here. I’ve been following this story for days now, in various forums, and growing increasingly sad as people seem to invest more and more in this, emotionally. What’s going on here, exactly?

This tweet is, I think, on the right track, generally. No such thing as a liberatory orca politics does exist, and the story is merely a playful metaphor. But, for one thing, there appears to be a lot of people who don’t feel that way. More to the point, perhaps we could consider what this means about the larger moment. That is indeed what liberatory politics amount to, now: a joke. It’s a LARP, cosplay, kayfabe. Self-parody. The theater of the absurd. A pastime, a shared bit of gallows humor. Nobody believes in the capacity for actual liberation, in any meaningful sense. It resides entirely in the world of wistful humor. People are defensive about the orcas because they have no actual movement to be defensive about.

Though we still live in the same world of rabidly emotional politics, the notion that the unrest of 2020 might lead to lasting material change is now so quaint as to be actively embarrassing. DSA continues to implode, as whatever definition it once had as a practical class-focused organization has collapsed in the face of constant identity politics hunger games and in-group ratfucking. Bernie Sanders turns 82 years old this fall; it’s hard to know how to even judge leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, given how constrained they are by their marginalized position within the political system. Explicitly identity-based political groups and movements remain neutered by their own constant infighting, lack of coherent demands, and perpetual allergy to coalition-building. BlackLivesMatter has proven to be a font of petty corruption and chronic mismanagement of funds, while the organic energy it cultivated three years ago has been dispersed into a series of nonprofit jobs and elite college scholarships, into diversity statements and language codes, which obviously don’t threaten the edifice of racial inequality. What’s left of the women’s liberation movement wanders around defanged, as its members constantly accuse each other of practicing “white feminism” and appear totally uninterested in the concept of liberation for women as such. American movement conservatism stumbles along, having abandoned its philosophical lodestar of evangelical Christianity, in thrall to a deranged and serially-corrupt idiot who has recently been indicted on major charges. And yet its progressive counterpart has little in the way of clear objectives to take advantage of the moment, still playing defense. The Democrats, I’m afraid, remain the Democrats.

I was at an organizing meeting not too long ago, one put together by a good local lefty organization run by sensible people and dedicated to a specific material cause. As so many IRL organizing meetings are, the meeting was admirably focused on the here and now. There was little to complain about. But when a speaker closed by saying “All power to the people,” I winced. Because it was emblematic of that inescapable feeling that attends radical politics now - the feeling that it’s all kitsch, like a Googie-architecture portrayal of the space age. The palpable sense that everyone is quietly aware that the whole thing is a type of pantomime, people going through the motions with no real sense of possibility, unwilling to entirely give up on the profound moral necessity of radical change but at this point entirely incapable of lying to themselves about the reality of what’s actually possible. We are all of us at a lefty Renaissance festival, our hammer and sickles no more authentic than Ye Olde Meade Hall, feeling like parents trying to keep the myth of Santa Claus alive to a child that’s probably just too old to keep buying it. Pity me, for I am a true believer in that which no longer believes in itself.

Hey, you know what would be a much bigger symbol of radical progress than some killer whales attacking a couple dozen random small watercraft? A diverse working-class movement based on shared economic need, coming together across demographic distance and using their labor power to earn a better, more just world for all people, rallying under a banner of shared sacrifice and the universal brotherhood of all. But nobody, nobody believes that such a thing is possible. Not anymore. It’s easier to imagine whales delivering our salvation than it is to imagine us delivering it to ourselves.