For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothing’s given me more hope than the rage and the recalls. “San Franciscans feel ashamed,” Michelle Tandler told me. “I think for the first time people are like, ‘Wait, what is a progressive? … Am I responsible? Is this my fault?’”
San Franciscans are now saying: We can want a fairer justice system and also want to keep our car windows from getting smashed. And: It’s not white supremacy to hope that the schools stay open, that teachers teach children, and, yes, that they test to see what those kids have learned.
San Franciscans tricked themselves into believing that progressive politics required blocking new construction and shunning the immigrants who came to town to code. We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.
From Nellie Bowles, "How San Francisco Became a Failed City" in The Atlantic
Bowles, a progressive in good standing, laments, at least as I see it, the takeover of San Francisco by Jacobins on the identitarian cultural Left, which is a parallel phenomenon to the way the Republican Party has been taken over by Jacobins on the identitarian Right. We see much of what she points to in San Francisco dysfunction here in Seattle. There seems to be in both "progressive" cities a deficit of common sense that directly results from a kind of woke Jacobinism. By Jacobin I mean a kind of political fanaticism born of an unbalanced idealism that takes absolutist positions on particular values and issues. It's not that there isn't something true and important in what Jacobins assert; it's rather the absolutism of their assertions and their need to forcefully repress any dissent as being in bad faith or counterrevolutionary .
The Jacobin is someone who becomes captured by the logic of an abstraction in such a way that the abstraction and what one extrapolates from it become more real than reality. Jacobinism is usually associated with a kind of revolutionary zeal on the Left, as in the Jacobins behind the terror in France in 1793. But Neoconservative Jacobinism was the driving force behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003. MAGA Jacobinism was behind the storming of the Capitol on January 6.
As a side note, I haven't paid much attention to Jacobin magazine over the years since I assumed by its choice of the name that it was run by Leftist absolutists, but I was interested to learn this week on the Ezra Klein podcast that Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, is not himself a Jacobin by my definition of the term. Rather, he's a common-sense, 'non-identitarian' Democratic Socialist, which is how I would describe myself.
His interview with Klein made clear to me that he gets how the culture war is the biggest impediment preventing progress toward more important structural goals with regard to wealth distribution. Why? Because insofar as its brand has become aligned with Left identitarian politics, it prevents the lower 80% on Main Street--working class, and non-college educated people--from feeling comfortable with Democrats. It's precisely this kind of Left cultural politics that has led to the dysfunction Bowles describes in San Francisco. I don't know that Sunkara, if he lived in San Francisco, would have voted to recall Ches Boudin, but he is very clearheaded about the limitations of imagination and thinking on the Left that led San Franciscans to recall him. In any event, Sunkara has made a Jacobin subscriber of me after listening to this interview.
Despite Sunkara's not fitting my definition of a Jacobin (I'd say he has misnamed his magazine), I'd argue that a true Jacobin is someone who has an important insight or intuition, and he builds a reductionistic worldview from it that excludes any evidence that doesn't fit into it. It becomes crazy because of its surfeit of rationality and a deficit in understanding how people actually live and think.
To understand a Jacobin, you have to understand his foundational intuition, and then how he extrapolates from it. For Neocon Jacobins, Saddam ran a corrupt autocratic regime that that needed to be toppled so that in its place a model democracy could be created that would inspire other Islamic states to emulate. Again, a worthy ideal is at work there, but it's completely divorced from how people actually live and think in the Middle East. For MAGA Jacobins, the foundational insight is that the political system is run by corrupt elites from which the country must be saved. There's some truth there, but their idealism and the fanatic militancy of their solutions is completely divorced from reality. The fault does not lie in the validity of the original intuition about corrupt elites, but in the reductionistic worldview it engenders, which leads them to misidentify who exactly those elites are, which are mostly people the GOP's entire mission is to protect.
And a similar dynamic plays out for the Jacobins on the Left. There is a difference between having extreme views and being a Jacobin. Bernie Sanders or AOC are not Jacobins. They might appear to have extreme views in relation to others on the political spectrum, but they are not purists. Sunkara talks in his interview about how AOC is taking flak from her Left because she actually wants to work to get some things done, and that requires compromise and working with the enemy, which the Jacobins to her Left cannot tolerate. A true Jacobin is an absolutist for whom compromise is anathema.
For Left identitarian Jacobins, the fundamental intuition is that American society is built on the exploitation of people of color and other marginalized populations and that justice requires that those historically marginalized become privileged. In order to do this, the justice system, so historically biased toward oppressing the marginalized, must be constrained from doing so in the future, and if that means a reduction in public safety, or homeless people shooting up and dying on the streets, or street muggings, store robberies, and other street crimes going unpunished, it's a price justice requires that the heretofore privileged must pay.
In their minds it's a way to restore balance, a balance that I'd agree needs to be restored. The question is how?
Jacobins are moral absolutists who are incapable of patience and who too easily feel contempt for anybody who does not share their absolutism. Such absolutism is mostly performative for other absolutists and, to say the least, alienating for everybody else. And it's counterproductive if you have any understanding about how politics work. Jacobins have no real understanding of human nature or a sense for how humans--and human societies--actually grow and change. For them there's no faith in the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice; it must be justice now, and it must be forced down the throat of anybody who resists.
It's for that reason that Progressives are not Jacobins. Progressives in my definition believe that both moral and material progress are a possibility, but that it is a long, difficult slog toward their achievement. Jacobins--whether on the Left or the Right--are like adolescent idealists who are spirited enough to feel deeply the transcendent power of Justice, who see clearly and are disgusted by the hypocrisy of those in charge, and who in their youthful zeal want to destroy the whole corrupt thing.
I sympathize. But it's one thing to be an idealist, and it's another thing to know how to make progress toward those ideals. Wisdom requires that we not only feel deeply the ideals that inspire us to work toward bringing the world into a deeper alignment with Justice, but to have a felt understanding of the intransigency of the resistance that impedes us. And a big part of that intransigency is to be found in the depths of our own souls, where progress toward an inner transformation of that intransigency must be made first in order that we might actually have the capacity to confront and overcome the intransigency in the world. That capacity is moral, and moral capacity has nothing to do with Jacobin moralistic absolutism.
There is simply no true material progress without moral progress--the two are one and the same. One without the other isn't progress. That's why developments in technology are not progress by themselves. They become part of the movement toward progress when they serve moral ends. Technocapitalism has no moral ends. But there is no true individual moral progress that does not in some small way have a correlative transformative material effect on the world. The progress of the human spirit is deeply entwined with the spiritual renewal of the earth. [See note 1]
Patience with ourselves leads to a patience with with the world. The trick is not to confuse patience with complacency, and to refuse cynicism, and to believe that the little things matter, that the small, often faltering steps we take forward matter--often more than we know.
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Note 1. Such a grand statement needs more unpacking than I can give it here. My main point is to counter the broadly held idea both east and west that spiritual progress is all about getting out of space time, the house of illusions and exile, and into eternity. I would argue that the solution to the feeling of cosmic homelessness is not to find a home elsewhere, but to gradually build it here on the earth. The goal is not to escape into transcendence but rather the be focus points in space and time through which transcendence is infused into the earth, which is the historical evolutionary process that will effect its renewal. The Christian Neoplatonic frame I use to support this idea can be found here.
I realize that such a framework for most people--even Christians--seems too fantastic to take seriously. So it seems for now. But a metaphysical imaginary like this is required if humans are to find the inner resources and the practices that will give them the moral capacity to fight what is coming. A purely secular progressivism cannot provide that.
My ongoing series--temporarily suspended, but to be resumed shortly--A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity is an attempt to rehabilitate Christian Neoplatonism in a postmodern key. I argue that Christian Neoplatonism is the ur-cultural operating system for Western Civilization. It lies there in the background mostly misunderstood but still shaping us in ways we are mostly unaware, but can be more fully awakened and developed in a way that could be restorative.