I’m not a leftist, so maybe that makes this concern trolling, but this comment seems indicative of FDBs comments on the lefts allergy to coalition building.
It’s impossible to build a coalition, and therefore political power, if you withdraw support from generally-likeminded politicians for having a few positions that run counter to your own.
I find this personally difficult too, since it’s so disappointing to learn that someone I think shares my worldview is “wrong” about something. But there are probably 50 or so positions that I feel emotionally close to - I can’t possibly expect anyone to agree with all of them.
Yeah, no, that's an unhinged position to have. FOSTA is a massive violation of rights and the whole trafficking meme you've bought is basically invented out of whole cloth. That AOC holds one good position should be celebrated.
Hmmm I wonder. I wouldn’t presume to know her true nature, but I ran for office (state rep) from a place of genuine passion and I have often wondered what would have happened if I’d won and had to squeeze that fire into a tight suit that bore no resemblance to my actual style, metaphorically speaking. I worry that the same could have been said of me, though the possibility felt and still feels unimaginable.
Yeah, I really have no brilliant and insightful response; just to say that I wonder if the AOC of the running shoes would be as surprised by these choices as I would have been if I’d gone through the process of becoming a rep. I just think it’s worthy to point to the grinder rather than the person. Though, again, I have zero skin in the “defend AOC” game one way or another.
If the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to neutralize, who can safely be ignored.
I look at how the reactionary Republicans put the screws to McCarthy during the speakership election and extracted concessions, and compare that to "The Squad." "The Squad" is long on talk but does nothing. That tells me all I need to know about them.
Yeah, when the chips are down, The Squad and similarly “progressive” politicians always bend the knee and dutifully - if somewhat grudgingly - do the bidding of their DNC masters.
The Democrats are experts at digesting radicals using the party structure. Look into the history of the congressional black caucus. Everyone's a radical until they try the wine
"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."
Troof. Unless, until and to the extent that the way the economic pie gets sliced is affected, it's all just a game. The equivalent of a shuffleboard league table on a cruise ship.
I am not a Marxist, per se, but this is one thing that the man got right.
I can’t give you two hearts for that one so here ❤️
True, I also dislike that vein of thinking in Marxism. I don’t understand why anyone would want to turn his thought into ideology, considering that such dogmatism runs counter to anything espoused by the philosophy itself.
Things that could be argued as incontrovertible imo are the acceptance of change as a tautology, the conception of dialectical materialism, and the tendency to have a holistic approach to understanding universalism, but personally I think people who miss the mark on those things don’t really know what they’re talking about regarding Marxism as a philosophy.
FWIW - you should study the history of the Air Line Pilot’s Association, specifically Flying The Line, by Hopkins. I mention this because we’re one of the few “successful” unions left in the US. I think there are some lessons to be learned from our history… maybe. More importantly, is that our existence shows you *can* have a successful union movement in the US, today, now. It’s not impossible, it doesn’t have to devolve into relentless factionalism, it doesn’t require impossibly perfect people in key positions to make it function.
Maybe it would cheer you up a bit. We function on hope as well as ideas.
There are lots of well-functionibg unions in the United States, but they tend to represent highly-skilled, not easily-replacable professions. Airline cabin crew, TV writers, professional athletes, skilled tradespeople, the AMA, these all act more like guilds than broad working-class movements.
You're probably never going to get a union of Walmart greeters or Amazon warehouse workers that functions as well as the airline pilot's union.
I was talking with my wife about this just last night. Not whales fighting boats or whatever, but how identity obsession makes coalition building impossible. In some ways, it seems to be openly antagonistic to such efforts.
People treat ideology the same way they treat tattoos and bumper stickers.
Even if this is right, it takes two to tango. I hear a specific allegation that The Elites were so spooked by Occupy Wall Street that they went all-in on identity politics, to divide and thus neuter the nascent populist uprising. It doesn't wash for me, at all: yes, elites fetishize and nurture exoticism, but part of what makes them elite is an adaptable cosmopolitanism. That is, they'll fit in anywhere because their milieu is one of novelty and innovation. Secondly, and far more importantly, the same ethno-narcissism we see from aggrieved racial groups in the US exists in Europe as well, where elites have not managed the issue in precisely the same way, or in some cases in a remotely similar way.
I just think it's cope, frankly, the idea that if The Elites stop being so Elites towards identity groups that they'll put down their BLM signs and Stop Asian Hate bumper stickers and start voting for Bernie. They won't. They are interested first and foremost in the primacy of their in-group - racial, ethnic, sexual, whatever - and things like multi-racial economics are a nice-to-have addition at best and a mere distraction at worst.
If anyone's tempted to get mad at the paragraph above, ask yourself this first of all: do you believe in structural racism in this country?
As Glenn Greenwald said, "Social issues don't threaten entrenched ruling interests: allowing same-sex couples to marry doesn't undermine oligarchs, the National Security State, or the wildly unequal distribution of financial and political power....If anything, one could say that the shift on this issue has been more institution-affirming than institution-subverting: the campaign to overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" continually glorified and even fetishized military service, while gay marriage revitalizes a traditional institution - marriage...And these changes are taking a once marginalized and culturally independent community and fully integrating it into mainstream society, thus making that community invested in conventional societal institutions."
If you identify too strongly with a movement, then any attempt to broaden the movement becomes a threat to the sense of self. It's normal for people to be passionate about politics, but there still needs to be a layer of separation there, where you can step back and say "this movement is not me, it's okay for it to contain some people and ideas that I don't personally like".
I wonder how much of this dysfunction arises from the unmet need for community, especially among the more secular and geographically mobile classes who make up the left-wing base these days. I would hardly be the first to observe that idpol-focused political organizations often end up looking more like churches, and nasty fundamentalist ones at that.
"The public problem of contemporary society is two-fold: behavior and issues which are impersonal do not arouse much passion; the behavior and the issues begin to arouse passion when people treat them, falsely, as though they were matters of personality. But because this two-fold public problem exists, it creates a problem within private life. The world of intimate feeling loses any boundaries; it is no longer restrained by a public world in which people make alternative and countervailing investment of themselves." (Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man)
He goes on to say (I can't find the exact quote) that the more social movements or other collective projects emphasize "getting to know you," the less people want to focus on the organization's actual goals (i.e., really, the less people *like* each other). He wasn't specifically thinking of identity politics, but they are a more intensified form of a trend he had noticed. He also thought this was really screwing up how people act in their *private* lives.
It's mostly due to the post-modern critique of systems of thought and ideology. I personally don't believe ideologies are capable of capturing the nuances of life in an accurate enough way to compete with crossing the river by feeling the stones. This thought diffuses throughout society as a feeling that seriousness and commitment are uncool.
The downside of this pragmatism is that there's no vision to rally around, from the perspective of building connections between people.
At this point I'm pretty convinced that if there is going to be a left wing in this country it will come from a revived trade union movement. When you ask your co-workers to take a risk for better pay or better working conditions, the stakes are high, and because the stakes are high you have to take it seriously. Most working-class workplaces are diverse, so you have to create a coalition that spans across age, race, gender, sexuality, religion and often language. Union density declined again in 2022, but more people are trying to organize their workplaces and form unions. If some of them succeed, we will have a real left. If not we won't. I hope we succeed.
The answer lies in union democracy, where corrupt leaders can be voted out. If you look at the Teamsters, they just had a reform slate vote out their corrupt Hoffa-aligned leadership. There is a movement within a lot of unions for 1-member 1-vote leadership elections, when in the past there have been convoluted delegate systems designed to protect incumbents.
Democracy isn't perfect and there's plenty of corruption in democratically elected governments, but democracy is the best system anyone's come up with so far.
Once they achieve their original mission, unions in the US become strong rent seekers, like other factions. Other countries' major unions seem much more involved the shared decision making for company or industrial sector, US unions seem happy to let the whole thing burn as long as they are going to get theirs. There's a reason it took bankruptcy to get the UAW to relent on their sweetheart deals that were really hurting the American manufacturers and there's gotta be a reason none of the auto transplant plants even want to unionize; VW was asking for a union council like they have in Germany and the workers still rejected the UAW.
I have always thought the German system (in a corporation, unions are by law part of the management board) to be genius - because it forces the unions to own the results for the business as a whole.
For was it not taught to the masses that certain categories of things are better rented than owned?
The only union Reagan ever "busted" was the Air Traffic Controllers Union, after they threatened to strike and shut down the entire country. NAFTA did far, far more to "bust unions" than that single confrontation. (You can't have industrial unions without industry....)
I have come to the conclusion that DEI/Wokeness is the latest poison pill to stop the left. While people are calling each other racist and accusing each other of "centering" whatever, nothing gets done. The trick, I think, is that DEI/Wokeness prevents the sort of solidarity between people that unions foster, and that solidarity is what fosters people working together.
You can see this in action whenever a PMC "liberal" refers to the "white working class." The working class isn't white. Yet, by affixing 'white' to 'working class', the PMC tries to equate class-based discourse with racism.
I've adopted this Strong Towns mantra as a model to follow in my own community. I know I can have little influence on the national conversation or movements like you describe, but I can still do good where I spend the majority of my time: my neighborhood and my city. It's the best antidote I've found for overcoming the exhaustion I feel any time national politics or political movements are discussed.
So, simply:
1. Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.
2. Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?
If there are and if you can afford to become a member, you can join the local Slack discussion group, where you're likely to find allies. I know from what my own city is going through on this topic that it's very complex, so enlisting those with the power to help is the next level of "next things." Having elected leaders on board, who make it a priority and put budget dollars towards it, helps -- but it's only one part of the equation.
It seems to me it wold be difficult to create a political movement based on labor representing shared goals when the labor landscape is wildly shifting and so rapidly changing shape. Why would anyone expect anything different than disorder?
I think what really betrays the Left’s loss of faith in substantive change is their obsession with Karens. Rather than form coalitions and seek a better society for all, they just want to smite and punish bad white individuals.
At least a few leftists like The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian have come to recognize such Karen bashing as a symptom of the Left’s impotence, which does nothing to build solidarity. Better late than never, I guess.
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
Well, I'm far more disappointed in the santimonious left these days. I expect the right to freak out and behave badly toward non-conformists. It what many, if not most of them do. The church in particular, is famous for dehumanization over the millennia.
But I never expected it from the left, which was far different when I was growing up than it is now. I expected better from them. That said, I don't think Huxley was pointing at a particular political party. All humans are susceptible to this conceit, no matter what side they are on. I deplore the behavior no matter the stripe of the person practicing it.
Yep. My main encounter with sanctimony was the religious right, particularly my own family. Hypocrites all. Holier than thou in every way. My current take is likely due to the fact that I grew up blue collar and have little experience of academia. Most of the left that I encountered were working class and just wanted a nod to the little guy. I still have a soft spot for this position even while I acknowledge the overreach of unions in catalyzing their own demise.
I used to wonder why the world was in such bad shape if there were so many smart people around. Well, the current behavior in academia is an object lesson. LOL! I'm sure there are more good profs and adjuncts than ideological ones. But, the extremists have achieved an amazing percentage of instituional capture and everyone is suitably cowed at the moment.
Indeed. As the psychologist and blogger Scott Alexander argued years ago, for many of these social justice types, cruelty is its own reward. Not that conservatives are the least bit better, but their cruelty is at least consistent with their ideology. Karen hunting and obsession with bad individuals is at odds with any meaningful left movement.
Yes. I have survived human cruelty and know it intimately. And some people do love to be cruel. It is unfortunate that power is often merciless. Sanctimony brings a chemical high - being "right." That said, I still hold out hope that heart matters as well.
“With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.” —The Desiderata
Fred, you're smart and a very good writer, but naive: Face historical, psychological facts: Humans ain't noble, wise, courageous, generous, cooperative, loving creatures. Read history, say, "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" or literature, say, "Blood Meridan" by Cormac McCarthy or most any work by Hemingway, Faulkner, Henry James, or Shakespeare, or essays by Freud who deemed human nature as "basically worthless." Or remember Mark Twain in his dotage calling people the "Goddamned human race." Which is literally and metaphorically true.
Large, sustained, successful, humane societies on this planet are not on the menu. Never have been, never will be, unless we evolve in a few millennia, which is possible, but holds no hope for us today. Yes, we have developed utopias or working-class paradises in our fantasies, but like Plato's Republic, they will never be realized on this dog-eat-dog planet we call Earth.
Am I wrong, too pessimistic? Even a casual reading of the front page of the NYTimes says that I'm not. That light you might see at the end of this dark tunnel is a freight train barreling right at us. Of course, I wish it weren't so: I have kids and grandkids, hostages to fortune, but the handwriting seems to be on the wall. We've tried repeatedly, in each generation, in each society, to make the world a better place. This is as good as it gets: Some people live pretty good lives; most don't. And no matter how you reshuffle the deck, you still get pretty much the same results. Even our best efforts often end up making things worse, e.g., Christianity, communism, capitalism. Even science, our best friend, gave us atomic, biological, and chemical weapons, now the most dangerous threats to life.
Heidegger said that "only a god can save us." He's right, but the catch is that that deus ex machina happens only in staged dramas, not in real life. A god never snatched the atomic bombs out of the sky before they demolished Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nature followed its cruel laws. And so must we; and our most stringent, unbreakable law is that Man is wolf to man.
Humans can on occasion be noble, wise, courageous, generous, cooperative and loving. At the individual level that means aspiring to better yourself. At the societal level that means encouraging conditions that make it easier for man's better natures to flourish.
Granted, we can indeed. The Marshall Plan for Europe after WWII comes to mind, also the Peace Corps. But, by my lights, those are exceptions to the rule. Human nature asks and demands: "What's in it for me?" We're more animal than angel. Shouldn't we admit that fact and work from there?
You could well be correct, of course: It's difficult to get a fix on all history. But driven to being a Schopenhauerian, I see more hate, discontent, violence, and selfishness in our psychology than fraternity, comity, and cooperation.
It's critical to get this right: If we mistake who we are, we can't solve our problems and move forward. After long study, I conclude that Ecclesiastes, Macchiavelli, Nietzsche, and B.F. Skinner understand the problem and who we are better than St. Augustine, Montaigne, William James, or Carl R.R. Rogers. In short, Pogo had it right: We have met the enemy, and it is us. It's a bummer, but I try not to let it get me down and just give up.
I hear you, I believe you, but the painful truth, by my lights, is that even self-sacrifices are loaded with selfishness: the strong desire to protect what's important to you, and the grasping for fame and glory can't be ruled out. What little boy doesn't want to be Hercules or Superman? Life is necessarily short, but fame can last forever.
Ooh, and here's a comment from a reader of the NYTimes that says it better than I can:
"America is mentally ill. We are a collection of millions of mentally people who are our family, friends, and neighbors. Consequently, American culture is toxic. Bootstrapping, machismo, misogyny, and rugged individualism is utter nonsense but with serious consequences. Mental illness is stigmatized as weakness in a culture that glorifies ignorance and toxic masculinity.
We are sick, and we need to fix it. January 6 was a classic example of mental health gone very bad. We commonly see violence, idiocy, macho posturing, lies, and mostly at the hands of men.
Politicians are largely to blame for creating the climate that allows this hideously uncaring climate to persist. It makes money for them. Compassion is nowhere to be seen. To paraphrase Peter O’Toole to Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia, “We are a hateful people, stupid, vicious, and cruel.”
Combining this tendency of the brain with the constant onslaught of negativitiy from the MSM and you have a perfect storm of misperception. Billions of acts of love and kindness happen every day without you or I being the wiser. We would not have achieved our level of civilization without them. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. The brain really struggles with this. Our sight is our strongest sense and greatly informs our perception and by extension, our belief system. The brain struggles with the abstract (which is why those with brains who can parse the abstract are so highly paid).
“Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” —Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Unfortunately, it's also true that billions of acts of hate and meanness happen every day. In fact, in my experience and reading, the bad far outweighs the good. As an example, virtually all history professors will say at some time during their lectures that "History is about war, but sometimes peace breaks out." It's the same with everyday life. I marvel at the rudeness, thoughtlessness, and aggressiveness of drivers, waitresses, grocery store workers, retail store clerks (to avoid them, I shop online), police, city workers, and repairmen. Granted, a small percentage of them can be nice, but I argue that they are the exception to the rule.
So, you take the tragic view, ala Thomas Sowell. I get that. I'm an adult survivor of horrible child abuse. I know about the dark side of humanity. Part of my journey has been crawling out of the abyss of bullying and neglect I endured as a child. How I did was by exercising hope. Without hope, we are merely animals going through the motions. With hope for possibility, we can send rockets to the moon, feed billions of people, create artistic masterpieces, and love each other.
Humans definitely have weakness, stress, greed and sanctimony that leads to less than optimal behavior. And yet, we also have the power to choose to create a better world - all of us, every single instant. Maybe I can't change the whole world. But, I can change my immediate world by lifting people up, by holding space open for possibility, for love, for opportunity, for healing. I have faith that my drop of contribution matters and that my choices have impact. I will continue to hold this faith even if we descend into war or chaos or deprivation. I have already survived horrors. I can survive them again if I must. You might consider Victor Frankl's “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
You get to choose your own view, of course. That said, you create what you focus on. “With our thoughts we make the world.” —the Buddha
As in so many things, Buddha was wrong in this, too: Our thoughts come to us from our Unconscious; we don't choose them; they just appear. We act or not on them, but that, too, is not a choice.
I've read "Man's Search for Meaning" at least twice. I'm unconvinced; we make up and tell ourselves stories, guiding fictions, according to psychoanalyst Alfred Adler: "The guiding fiction is originally the means or device by which someone seeks to free himself from his current difficulties. In each mind there is a conception of a fictional goal or self ideal to get beyond the present state and to overcome the present deficiencies and difficulties." Such conceits seem real and can, we think, work. Logicians would term it post hoc, ergo propter hoc. (The easiest person to fool is yourself.) Our bodies are programmed to survive at all costs, to reproduce, and to protect our offspring; those that don't are evolutionarily defective.
But I'm off-track; back to business: I have a book recommendation for you: "Free Will" by Sam Harris.
All the best. Enjoyed the communication. Maybe talk soon; if not, have a good life, and I'll try to do the same.
Absolutely. And I'm more than a little bored with grand, sweeping generalizations on how the world is inherently doomed. Sorry, that's just an excuse to sit on your hands, when this flawed world has seen progress, plenty of it in fact, because people got off their asses. So what if you can't build a fucking utopia in your lifetime? Make your corner of the world a little kinder, more just, more interesting than it otherwise would be. That's what I'm aiming to do, and no deluge of bad news is going to convince me it's not worth trying.
"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."
You see, this is what the really powerful people are afraid of, so we have all this LARPing about and division, and we burn cities because of a single black man with a very checkered past already overdosing on drugs at the hands of an asshole white cop and not the thousands of black people every year that die at the hands of, usually, other black people. And then people like you, as much as I like you, give them cover in a tacit way pretending that the summer of 2020 was about anything other than mass chaos and cover for looting and destruction by those on the streets and division to divert from real change on the part of those in power.
"But nobody, nobody believes that such a thing is possible." No we don't because people like you, again as much as I like you, see AOC as "constrained" when what she really is, is a sellout and a poser. There is really very little difference between that attitude and the people who are still devoted to Trump despite all his many flaws (and, no, one of them is not stealing state secrets--God I can't roll my eyes that far into my head) or devoted to "moderates" of either party who will bring "sanity" (read: a contemptible, rotten, but stable status quo) back to the country.
I really think the vast majority of the people dinging the Atlantic are not pinning their hopes on the Orcas saving us all, they're just marveling at the Atlantic's response. Can't we have ANY fun?
I’m not a leftist, so maybe that makes this concern trolling, but this comment seems indicative of FDBs comments on the lefts allergy to coalition building.
It’s impossible to build a coalition, and therefore political power, if you withdraw support from generally-likeminded politicians for having a few positions that run counter to your own.
I find this personally difficult too, since it’s so disappointing to learn that someone I think shares my worldview is “wrong” about something. But there are probably 50 or so positions that I feel emotionally close to - I can’t possibly expect anyone to agree with all of them.
*Cough* COVID *cough* vaccines *cough*
Yeah, no, that's an unhinged position to have. FOSTA is a massive violation of rights and the whole trafficking meme you've bought is basically invented out of whole cloth. That AOC holds one good position should be celebrated.
Hmmm I wonder. I wouldn’t presume to know her true nature, but I ran for office (state rep) from a place of genuine passion and I have often wondered what would have happened if I’d won and had to squeeze that fire into a tight suit that bore no resemblance to my actual style, metaphorically speaking. I worry that the same could have been said of me, though the possibility felt and still feels unimaginable.
Yeah, I really have no brilliant and insightful response; just to say that I wonder if the AOC of the running shoes would be as surprised by these choices as I would have been if I’d gone through the process of becoming a rep. I just think it’s worthy to point to the grinder rather than the person. Though, again, I have zero skin in the “defend AOC” game one way or another.
If the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to neutralize, who can safely be ignored.
True! Who are some examples of people in our era who have successfully repelled that superpower? Only Bernie comes to mind?
I dunno, Sanders is pretty much neutered.
Trump.
Well yes, and it has material incentives with which to make those purchases. Have we tried having those?
The word Freddie DeBoer was really looking for was "sell out." AOC is a "sell out."
I look at how the reactionary Republicans put the screws to McCarthy during the speakership election and extracted concessions, and compare that to "The Squad." "The Squad" is long on talk but does nothing. That tells me all I need to know about them.
Exactly. They were criticizing the Republicans for showing "disunity."
A family member this week informed me with glee that conservatives were "divided" and asked how I was dealing with that.
I said I'd seldom been happier with the state of the Republican party. No friction means no action.
Yeah, when the chips are down, The Squad and similarly “progressive” politicians always bend the knee and dutifully - if somewhat grudgingly - do the bidding of their DNC masters.
Squad supporters make the excuse that Squad members grudgingly fell into line.
So what? The vote counts just the same.
The Freedom Caucus Republicans are nihilists, members of the Squad, whatever their other failings, are not.
"Sell-out" implies she had something to sell in the first place.
Valid point.
The Democrats are experts at digesting radicals using the party structure. Look into the history of the congressional black caucus. Everyone's a radical until they try the wine
She's a somewhat liberal young person who's good at tailoring a message. Not the firebrand people want (or fear).
Last summer I spent a week kayaking just outside of Robson Bight. Pods of Orcas all around us. Hard to describe how incredible it was.
I can think of a journalist or two who would benefit from doing this type of thing occasionally.
"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."
Troof. Unless, until and to the extent that the way the economic pie gets sliced is affected, it's all just a game. The equivalent of a shuffleboard league table on a cruise ship.
I am not a Marxist, per se, but this is one thing that the man got right.
Genuinely surprised you’re not more of one, lmao. But, maybe that’s just the Marxist in me speaking 😂
Cats tend to be pragmatists rather than dogmatists.
I can’t give you two hearts for that one so here ❤️
True, I also dislike that vein of thinking in Marxism. I don’t understand why anyone would want to turn his thought into ideology, considering that such dogmatism runs counter to anything espoused by the philosophy itself.
Things that could be argued as incontrovertible imo are the acceptance of change as a tautology, the conception of dialectical materialism, and the tendency to have a holistic approach to understanding universalism, but personally I think people who miss the mark on those things don’t really know what they’re talking about regarding Marxism as a philosophy.
I should have added that there is a reason that I refer to the two legacy parties in the US as "Team R" and "Team D" respectively.
Because I hear better arguments from sports fans on why they support a given team than the empty slogans that most political followers recite.
FWIW - you should study the history of the Air Line Pilot’s Association, specifically Flying The Line, by Hopkins. I mention this because we’re one of the few “successful” unions left in the US. I think there are some lessons to be learned from our history… maybe. More importantly, is that our existence shows you *can* have a successful union movement in the US, today, now. It’s not impossible, it doesn’t have to devolve into relentless factionalism, it doesn’t require impossibly perfect people in key positions to make it function.
Maybe it would cheer you up a bit. We function on hope as well as ideas.
http://www3.alpa.org/publications/Flying_The_Line_1/Flying_The_Line_1.pdf
https://www.alpa.org/-/media/ALPA/Files/eLibraries/Communications/publications-other/flying-the-line-vol-2.pdf?la=en
There are lots of well-functionibg unions in the United States, but they tend to represent highly-skilled, not easily-replacable professions. Airline cabin crew, TV writers, professional athletes, skilled tradespeople, the AMA, these all act more like guilds than broad working-class movements.
You're probably never going to get a union of Walmart greeters or Amazon warehouse workers that functions as well as the airline pilot's union.
Did anyone make a joke using "orcanizing"?
If not, the internet sucks even worse than usual.
I was talking with my wife about this just last night. Not whales fighting boats or whatever, but how identity obsession makes coalition building impossible. In some ways, it seems to be openly antagonistic to such efforts.
People treat ideology the same way they treat tattoos and bumper stickers.
Which is a real bummer.
But only a cynic, surely!
Even if this is right, it takes two to tango. I hear a specific allegation that The Elites were so spooked by Occupy Wall Street that they went all-in on identity politics, to divide and thus neuter the nascent populist uprising. It doesn't wash for me, at all: yes, elites fetishize and nurture exoticism, but part of what makes them elite is an adaptable cosmopolitanism. That is, they'll fit in anywhere because their milieu is one of novelty and innovation. Secondly, and far more importantly, the same ethno-narcissism we see from aggrieved racial groups in the US exists in Europe as well, where elites have not managed the issue in precisely the same way, or in some cases in a remotely similar way.
I just think it's cope, frankly, the idea that if The Elites stop being so Elites towards identity groups that they'll put down their BLM signs and Stop Asian Hate bumper stickers and start voting for Bernie. They won't. They are interested first and foremost in the primacy of their in-group - racial, ethnic, sexual, whatever - and things like multi-racial economics are a nice-to-have addition at best and a mere distraction at worst.
If anyone's tempted to get mad at the paragraph above, ask yourself this first of all: do you believe in structural racism in this country?
As Glenn Greenwald said, "Social issues don't threaten entrenched ruling interests: allowing same-sex couples to marry doesn't undermine oligarchs, the National Security State, or the wildly unequal distribution of financial and political power....If anything, one could say that the shift on this issue has been more institution-affirming than institution-subverting: the campaign to overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" continually glorified and even fetishized military service, while gay marriage revitalizes a traditional institution - marriage...And these changes are taking a once marginalized and culturally independent community and fully integrating it into mainstream society, thus making that community invested in conventional societal institutions."
Shades of "You Aren't The Shit You Like" here.
If you identify too strongly with a movement, then any attempt to broaden the movement becomes a threat to the sense of self. It's normal for people to be passionate about politics, but there still needs to be a layer of separation there, where you can step back and say "this movement is not me, it's okay for it to contain some people and ideas that I don't personally like".
I wonder how much of this dysfunction arises from the unmet need for community, especially among the more secular and geographically mobile classes who make up the left-wing base these days. I would hardly be the first to observe that idpol-focused political organizations often end up looking more like churches, and nasty fundamentalist ones at that.
https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2019/04/03/how-a-petty-tyrant-turned-a-functional-dsa-branch-into-a-church/
That is a wild and depressing story
"The public problem of contemporary society is two-fold: behavior and issues which are impersonal do not arouse much passion; the behavior and the issues begin to arouse passion when people treat them, falsely, as though they were matters of personality. But because this two-fold public problem exists, it creates a problem within private life. The world of intimate feeling loses any boundaries; it is no longer restrained by a public world in which people make alternative and countervailing investment of themselves." (Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man)
He goes on to say (I can't find the exact quote) that the more social movements or other collective projects emphasize "getting to know you," the less people want to focus on the organization's actual goals (i.e., really, the less people *like* each other). He wasn't specifically thinking of identity politics, but they are a more intensified form of a trend he had noticed. He also thought this was really screwing up how people act in their *private* lives.
Liberals have turned into witch hunters so dour and humorless that they make Cotton Mather look like Johnny Rotten by comparison.
All politics are only a game now.
It's mostly due to the post-modern critique of systems of thought and ideology. I personally don't believe ideologies are capable of capturing the nuances of life in an accurate enough way to compete with crossing the river by feeling the stones. This thought diffuses throughout society as a feeling that seriousness and commitment are uncool.
The downside of this pragmatism is that there's no vision to rally around, from the perspective of building connections between people.
At this point I'm pretty convinced that if there is going to be a left wing in this country it will come from a revived trade union movement. When you ask your co-workers to take a risk for better pay or better working conditions, the stakes are high, and because the stakes are high you have to take it seriously. Most working-class workplaces are diverse, so you have to create a coalition that spans across age, race, gender, sexuality, religion and often language. Union density declined again in 2022, but more people are trying to organize their workplaces and form unions. If some of them succeed, we will have a real left. If not we won't. I hope we succeed.
The answer lies in union democracy, where corrupt leaders can be voted out. If you look at the Teamsters, they just had a reform slate vote out their corrupt Hoffa-aligned leadership. There is a movement within a lot of unions for 1-member 1-vote leadership elections, when in the past there have been convoluted delegate systems designed to protect incumbents.
Democracy isn't perfect and there's plenty of corruption in democratically elected governments, but democracy is the best system anyone's come up with so far.
Apparently engineering unions are completely unhinged, according to some friends in the field.
Once they achieve their original mission, unions in the US become strong rent seekers, like other factions. Other countries' major unions seem much more involved the shared decision making for company or industrial sector, US unions seem happy to let the whole thing burn as long as they are going to get theirs. There's a reason it took bankruptcy to get the UAW to relent on their sweetheart deals that were really hurting the American manufacturers and there's gotta be a reason none of the auto transplant plants even want to unionize; VW was asking for a union council like they have in Germany and the workers still rejected the UAW.
I have always thought the German system (in a corporation, unions are by law part of the management board) to be genius - because it forces the unions to own the results for the business as a whole.
For was it not taught to the masses that certain categories of things are better rented than owned?
The only union Reagan ever "busted" was the Air Traffic Controllers Union, after they threatened to strike and shut down the entire country. NAFTA did far, far more to "bust unions" than that single confrontation. (You can't have industrial unions without industry....)
I have come to the conclusion that DEI/Wokeness is the latest poison pill to stop the left. While people are calling each other racist and accusing each other of "centering" whatever, nothing gets done. The trick, I think, is that DEI/Wokeness prevents the sort of solidarity between people that unions foster, and that solidarity is what fosters people working together.
You can see this in action whenever a PMC "liberal" refers to the "white working class." The working class isn't white. Yet, by affixing 'white' to 'working class', the PMC tries to equate class-based discourse with racism.
Of course it is, that is why its part of HR.
The labor movement has always been the base of the only thing worth having as a "left wing".
I've adopted this Strong Towns mantra as a model to follow in my own community. I know I can have little influence on the national conversation or movements like you describe, but I can still do good where I spend the majority of my time: my neighborhood and my city. It's the best antidote I've found for overcoming the exhaustion I feel any time national politics or political movements are discussed.
So, simply:
1. Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.
2. Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?
3. Do that thing. Do it right now.
4. Repeat.
That book’s been on my shelf since last Christmas, I need to read it!
What if the answer is "affordable housing"? What *is* the smallest thing I can do to address that right now?
I might start with exploring Strong Towns' website. Here's a link to their top content on affordable housing: https://actionlab.strongtowns.org/hc/en-us/articles/4407770933396-Affordable-Housing-Top-Content. Second, I'd search to find if there are any local Strong Towns groups in or near my area, which you can do here: https://www.strongtowns.org/discussion-board.
If there are and if you can afford to become a member, you can join the local Slack discussion group, where you're likely to find allies. I know from what my own city is going through on this topic that it's very complex, so enlisting those with the power to help is the next level of "next things." Having elected leaders on board, who make it a priority and put budget dollars towards it, helps -- but it's only one part of the equation.
It seems to me it wold be difficult to create a political movement based on labor representing shared goals when the labor landscape is wildly shifting and so rapidly changing shape. Why would anyone expect anything different than disorder?
I think what really betrays the Left’s loss of faith in substantive change is their obsession with Karens. Rather than form coalitions and seek a better society for all, they just want to smite and punish bad white individuals.
At least a few leftists like The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian have come to recognize such Karen bashing as a symptom of the Left’s impotence, which does nothing to build solidarity. Better late than never, I guess.
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
Well, I'm far more disappointed in the santimonious left these days. I expect the right to freak out and behave badly toward non-conformists. It what many, if not most of them do. The church in particular, is famous for dehumanization over the millennia.
But I never expected it from the left, which was far different when I was growing up than it is now. I expected better from them. That said, I don't think Huxley was pointing at a particular political party. All humans are susceptible to this conceit, no matter what side they are on. I deplore the behavior no matter the stripe of the person practicing it.
Yep. My main encounter with sanctimony was the religious right, particularly my own family. Hypocrites all. Holier than thou in every way. My current take is likely due to the fact that I grew up blue collar and have little experience of academia. Most of the left that I encountered were working class and just wanted a nod to the little guy. I still have a soft spot for this position even while I acknowledge the overreach of unions in catalyzing their own demise.
I used to wonder why the world was in such bad shape if there were so many smart people around. Well, the current behavior in academia is an object lesson. LOL! I'm sure there are more good profs and adjuncts than ideological ones. But, the extremists have achieved an amazing percentage of instituional capture and everyone is suitably cowed at the moment.
Ah, well. Humans will human, ya know? ;-)
Indeed. As the psychologist and blogger Scott Alexander argued years ago, for many of these social justice types, cruelty is its own reward. Not that conservatives are the least bit better, but their cruelty is at least consistent with their ideology. Karen hunting and obsession with bad individuals is at odds with any meaningful left movement.
Yes. I have survived human cruelty and know it intimately. And some people do love to be cruel. It is unfortunate that power is often merciless. Sanctimony brings a chemical high - being "right." That said, I still hold out hope that heart matters as well.
“With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.” —The Desiderata
"The Democrats, I’m afraid, remain the Democrats."
Although a truism, that's one of the more scathing indictments I've encountered.
FWIW, I'm for the yacht-financed Seals Against Predation.
Fred, you're smart and a very good writer, but naive: Face historical, psychological facts: Humans ain't noble, wise, courageous, generous, cooperative, loving creatures. Read history, say, "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" or literature, say, "Blood Meridan" by Cormac McCarthy or most any work by Hemingway, Faulkner, Henry James, or Shakespeare, or essays by Freud who deemed human nature as "basically worthless." Or remember Mark Twain in his dotage calling people the "Goddamned human race." Which is literally and metaphorically true.
Large, sustained, successful, humane societies on this planet are not on the menu. Never have been, never will be, unless we evolve in a few millennia, which is possible, but holds no hope for us today. Yes, we have developed utopias or working-class paradises in our fantasies, but like Plato's Republic, they will never be realized on this dog-eat-dog planet we call Earth.
Am I wrong, too pessimistic? Even a casual reading of the front page of the NYTimes says that I'm not. That light you might see at the end of this dark tunnel is a freight train barreling right at us. Of course, I wish it weren't so: I have kids and grandkids, hostages to fortune, but the handwriting seems to be on the wall. We've tried repeatedly, in each generation, in each society, to make the world a better place. This is as good as it gets: Some people live pretty good lives; most don't. And no matter how you reshuffle the deck, you still get pretty much the same results. Even our best efforts often end up making things worse, e.g., Christianity, communism, capitalism. Even science, our best friend, gave us atomic, biological, and chemical weapons, now the most dangerous threats to life.
Heidegger said that "only a god can save us." He's right, but the catch is that that deus ex machina happens only in staged dramas, not in real life. A god never snatched the atomic bombs out of the sky before they demolished Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nature followed its cruel laws. And so must we; and our most stringent, unbreakable law is that Man is wolf to man.
Humans can on occasion be noble, wise, courageous, generous, cooperative and loving. At the individual level that means aspiring to better yourself. At the societal level that means encouraging conditions that make it easier for man's better natures to flourish.
Granted, we can indeed. The Marshall Plan for Europe after WWII comes to mind, also the Peace Corps. But, by my lights, those are exceptions to the rule. Human nature asks and demands: "What's in it for me?" We're more animal than angel. Shouldn't we admit that fact and work from there?
You could well be correct, of course: It's difficult to get a fix on all history. But driven to being a Schopenhauerian, I see more hate, discontent, violence, and selfishness in our psychology than fraternity, comity, and cooperation.
It's critical to get this right: If we mistake who we are, we can't solve our problems and move forward. After long study, I conclude that Ecclesiastes, Macchiavelli, Nietzsche, and B.F. Skinner understand the problem and who we are better than St. Augustine, Montaigne, William James, or Carl R.R. Rogers. In short, Pogo had it right: We have met the enemy, and it is us. It's a bummer, but I try not to let it get me down and just give up.
I hear you, I believe you, but the painful truth, by my lights, is that even self-sacrifices are loaded with selfishness: the strong desire to protect what's important to you, and the grasping for fame and glory can't be ruled out. What little boy doesn't want to be Hercules or Superman? Life is necessarily short, but fame can last forever.
Ooh, and here's a comment from a reader of the NYTimes that says it better than I can:
"America is mentally ill. We are a collection of millions of mentally people who are our family, friends, and neighbors. Consequently, American culture is toxic. Bootstrapping, machismo, misogyny, and rugged individualism is utter nonsense but with serious consequences. Mental illness is stigmatized as weakness in a culture that glorifies ignorance and toxic masculinity.
We are sick, and we need to fix it. January 6 was a classic example of mental health gone very bad. We commonly see violence, idiocy, macho posturing, lies, and mostly at the hands of men.
Politicians are largely to blame for creating the climate that allows this hideously uncaring climate to persist. It makes money for them. Compassion is nowhere to be seen. To paraphrase Peter O’Toole to Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia, “We are a hateful people, stupid, vicious, and cruel.”
Ok. But don't forget the availability heuristic that our brains use to prioritize data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
Combining this tendency of the brain with the constant onslaught of negativitiy from the MSM and you have a perfect storm of misperception. Billions of acts of love and kindness happen every day without you or I being the wiser. We would not have achieved our level of civilization without them. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. The brain really struggles with this. Our sight is our strongest sense and greatly informs our perception and by extension, our belief system. The brain struggles with the abstract (which is why those with brains who can parse the abstract are so highly paid).
“Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” —Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Unfortunately, it's also true that billions of acts of hate and meanness happen every day. In fact, in my experience and reading, the bad far outweighs the good. As an example, virtually all history professors will say at some time during their lectures that "History is about war, but sometimes peace breaks out." It's the same with everyday life. I marvel at the rudeness, thoughtlessness, and aggressiveness of drivers, waitresses, grocery store workers, retail store clerks (to avoid them, I shop online), police, city workers, and repairmen. Granted, a small percentage of them can be nice, but I argue that they are the exception to the rule.
So, you take the tragic view, ala Thomas Sowell. I get that. I'm an adult survivor of horrible child abuse. I know about the dark side of humanity. Part of my journey has been crawling out of the abyss of bullying and neglect I endured as a child. How I did was by exercising hope. Without hope, we are merely animals going through the motions. With hope for possibility, we can send rockets to the moon, feed billions of people, create artistic masterpieces, and love each other.
Humans definitely have weakness, stress, greed and sanctimony that leads to less than optimal behavior. And yet, we also have the power to choose to create a better world - all of us, every single instant. Maybe I can't change the whole world. But, I can change my immediate world by lifting people up, by holding space open for possibility, for love, for opportunity, for healing. I have faith that my drop of contribution matters and that my choices have impact. I will continue to hold this faith even if we descend into war or chaos or deprivation. I have already survived horrors. I can survive them again if I must. You might consider Victor Frankl's “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
You get to choose your own view, of course. That said, you create what you focus on. “With our thoughts we make the world.” —the Buddha
As in so many things, Buddha was wrong in this, too: Our thoughts come to us from our Unconscious; we don't choose them; they just appear. We act or not on them, but that, too, is not a choice.
I've read "Man's Search for Meaning" at least twice. I'm unconvinced; we make up and tell ourselves stories, guiding fictions, according to psychoanalyst Alfred Adler: "The guiding fiction is originally the means or device by which someone seeks to free himself from his current difficulties. In each mind there is a conception of a fictional goal or self ideal to get beyond the present state and to overcome the present deficiencies and difficulties." Such conceits seem real and can, we think, work. Logicians would term it post hoc, ergo propter hoc. (The easiest person to fool is yourself.) Our bodies are programmed to survive at all costs, to reproduce, and to protect our offspring; those that don't are evolutionarily defective.
But I'm off-track; back to business: I have a book recommendation for you: "Free Will" by Sam Harris.
All the best. Enjoyed the communication. Maybe talk soon; if not, have a good life, and I'll try to do the same.
Absolutely. And I'm more than a little bored with grand, sweeping generalizations on how the world is inherently doomed. Sorry, that's just an excuse to sit on your hands, when this flawed world has seen progress, plenty of it in fact, because people got off their asses. So what if you can't build a fucking utopia in your lifetime? Make your corner of the world a little kinder, more just, more interesting than it otherwise would be. That's what I'm aiming to do, and no deluge of bad news is going to convince me it's not worth trying.
Wow. I'm really glad I'm not one of your grandkids.
That makes two of us. But thanks for proving my point.
Nuke the whales!
LOL!
"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."
You see, this is what the really powerful people are afraid of, so we have all this LARPing about and division, and we burn cities because of a single black man with a very checkered past already overdosing on drugs at the hands of an asshole white cop and not the thousands of black people every year that die at the hands of, usually, other black people. And then people like you, as much as I like you, give them cover in a tacit way pretending that the summer of 2020 was about anything other than mass chaos and cover for looting and destruction by those on the streets and division to divert from real change on the part of those in power.
"But nobody, nobody believes that such a thing is possible." No we don't because people like you, again as much as I like you, see AOC as "constrained" when what she really is, is a sellout and a poser. There is really very little difference between that attitude and the people who are still devoted to Trump despite all his many flaws (and, no, one of them is not stealing state secrets--God I can't roll my eyes that far into my head) or devoted to "moderates" of either party who will bring "sanity" (read: a contemptible, rotten, but stable status quo) back to the country.
Wut?
I really think the vast majority of the people dinging the Atlantic are not pinning their hopes on the Orcas saving us all, they're just marveling at the Atlantic's response. Can't we have ANY fun?
They might be trying to do so, but twitter transmutes all attempted messages into pure stupidity. There is no way around it.