After the Future

Third Party Solution? II

Annie Lowry interviews Andrew Yang about the Forward Party in the Atlantic:

Lowrey: You say that Forward wants to represent rural Democrats and city-dwelling Republicans. Which policies are you pushing with this centrist party?

...

Yang: That is one of the more interesting communications challenges for something like Forward. We’re so accustomed to something falling on a left-right political spectrum. You frame it as a centrist party, which does describe a lot of the people that are drawn to Forward. But we’re trying to set up a system where the majority will of the American people actually gets reflected in policy.

Lowrey: Just to be clear, you are not defining the policy center. You’re not setting out any policies as you’re setting this party up. There isn’t a tax proposal or a health-care proposal that captures the will of the people unrepresented by the two parties. What does Forward stand for?

Yang: We stand for what people want to see in their own lives, in their family’s lives, and in their own community. The principles that we are championing are free people, thriving communities, in a vibrant democracy. And it is true that people in Mississippi will pursue those things in a different way than people in California. And we think that’s great.

Lowrey: What about Medicaid expansion? Is the Forward Party for the expansion of Medicaid to all adults in poverty?

Yang: I personally would be for anything that’s going to help people and families. I would guess that the vast majority of the people that are drawn to Forward would similarly be in favor. But we’re not as a movement going to apply litmus tests in that way.

Lowrey: Are there policy positions that would make a politician unwelcome to run under the Forward banner?

Yang: If they were for things that run afoul of the principles of free people, thriving communities, and vibrant democracy. And we’re emphasizing the last pillar, because we do think American democracy is eroding and disintegrating before our eyes.

Andrew Yang is not making a very compelling argument for the Forward Party here, so I thought that I try to identify why I am glad that he along with David Jolly and Christine Todd Whitman are going 'forward' with it. Jolly explanations in TV interviews I've watched does a better job of explaining the problem that the party is trying to solve than Yang does, imo. but here's my take: 

Lowry is trying to pin Yang down by trying to understand what the Forward Party stands for that isn't currently being offered by the Democrats by focusing on issues.  And Yang keeps dithering about how it's not about policy but about process, and these other vague generalities that make the Forward Party easy to not take seriously. The answer I'd give to Lowry is that the problem is not about what the two parties policies are but about how policies have become irrelevant because of of Red or Blue loyalties. There are lots of policies that Red voters like, but they won't vote for the Democrats who would implement them because they think the Democrats are too Liberal on most other things. The Forward Party, with the right candidate, might open up a space for voters to support a candidate where the specific policy issue is relatively untainted by culture-war antipathies. 

Polling has shown that conservatives will support "liberal policies" in the abstract, but won't vote for the Liberal candidate who would vote for it. Most people don't vote for policies; they vote for the people they trust, and people in Red areas don't trust people on the Blue team, and vice versa. Voters in red areas can't bring themselves to vote for a Democrat who by the very fact that she is a Democrat declares that she's a Liberal whose values by definition make her unworthy of their trust.  So the Forward Party might nominate a candidate with good local cultural values credibility who is not beholden to Republican orthodoxies and is free from anti-Dem prejudices who could support, for instance, sensible gun-safety legislation that most gun owners support in the abstract but who would never vote for a Democrat. It could free voters who lean right on cultural issues to vote for a candidate they feel shares their cultural values but could never support such legislation if she ran as a Republican. 

Most Americans neither identify as Republicans or Democrats. Last time I looked a few weeks ago, 27% of the electorate self identify as Republican and the same percentage identify as Democrat and about 43% identify as Independents. Lowry points out that most of those Independents reliably lean toward Republicans or Democrats, but the very fact that they call themselves Independents means that at least in their own thinking about themselves they are not knee-jerk voters--they might occasionally vote for the Blue guy even if most of the time they vote for the Red one. So in a district that votes 55/45 Republican in recent cycles, the conservative Independents might vote for somebody they trust more than whether he plays for the Blue or Red team. The Forward Party could be successful if it could promote candidates that were easier to vote for because of their trustworthiness and policy positions untainted by party affiliation. 

Elsewhere in the interview, Yang stresses that the Forward Party wants primarily to focus on local elections and to avoid situations where they might play a spoiler role in national elections. I think this is smart, and I hope they hold to it. It needs to prove itself locally first, and if it works there, it might establish a foundation from which to expand. I don't know if this will work, but I wish them success. 

I first addressed this issue in Third Party Solution? I

How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left 3

[Deleuze's and Guattari's] Anti-Oedipus resonated for a new era whose radical spirit was bent on subverting hierarchies. But, just as the swinging sixties notion of the sexual revolution had concealed its opposite, namely the repressive desublimation Herbert Marcuse indicted in One-Dimensional Man, so Anti-Oedipus’s injunctions towards non-fascist living produced a cure worse than the disease; so, at least, argues psychoanalyst Rob Weatherill in The Anti-Oedipus Complex: Lacan, Critical Theory and Post-modernism.

Although preaching against the Oedipus complex, Deleuze and Guattari enmesh themselves deeper in it by gleefully slaying all forms of authority, tradition, morality and restraint, encouraging us to murder our patriarchal masters ecstatically, cheering our ‘liberation’ even as we remove the last bulwarks against the inhuman rapacity of the market, argues Weatherill. Instead of supporting, as Freud did, the basic matrix of marriage and family, they favour ‘free-wheeling individualistic modes of pleasure’.

...The desire that Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari prized was a disappearing act in which one loses one’s identity and merges into some collective--trippy crowds at a Grateful Dead gig, perhaps, or enragés at demonstrations in Paris or Tehran. Instead of resolving one’s Oedipal complex on the couch, and sublimating one’s incestuous desires into de-sexualised and thus socially acceptable activities, we should realise the revolutionary potential of desire. Libidinal flows were to be prized, hierarchies toppled, and the mad orgy of pleasure joined.

But is desire revolutionary? ... Deleuze and Guattari thought so: ‘It is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence--desire, not left-wing holidays!--and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.’

That jibe against ‘left-wing holidays’ makes it clear they thought proletarian struggle worth less than the ostensibly revolutionary potential of liberating desire. Deleuze and Guattari clearly cared little for collective norms as means of improving the workers’ lot. In this, these post-modern French theorists were not so different from the neoliberals who would, before the decade was over, take power in the White House and 10 Downing Street. A society devoted to self-gratification is easier to control. Such, at least, had Marcuse argued eight years before Anti-Oedipus was published, in One-Dimensional Man. His notion of repressive desublimation was used to argue that the countercultural liberation of Eros is readily co-opted by conservative forces.

His point was that the unleashing of untrammelled desire seemed to end repression, but only resulted in another, more sophisticated system of exploitation. Under fascism we may have desired our own domination for sado-masochistic reasons; under late capitalism, we supposed that sexual freedoms and consumer choice would free us, while, Marcuse argued, in reality these freedoms were really new means for us to desire our own domination.

...Deleuze and Guattari became, in effect, complicit with the system they ostensibly sought to destroy.

One corollary of Deleuze and Guattari’s eulogies to the revolutionary potential of desire was what has been called the happiness fantasy – a deluded pursuit of power, sexual conquest and money that, as often as not, is a male masturbatory fantasy. Indeed, the history of happiness since the war can be traced from Reich’s orgone accumulator through Marcuse’s repressive desublimation and Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines to Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation and Donald Trump. Deleuze and Guattari reckoned that desire would overturn the social order; more likely, its liberation, at least under neoliberal capitalism, has unleashed that order’s most rapacious, exploitative tendencies.

And yet Anti-Oedipus did serve as a radical manifesto for the post-modern era, not least in its subversion of identity. Consider the thynnine wasp one last time. Instead of being trapped in the prison-house of being, it was engaged in a flight of becoming, its identity fluid, its passion spent as it fertilised the orchid. In the post-modern era, such becoming was part of a gleefully godless liberation theology for which Deleuze and Guattari had proselytised. Gender was fluid, identities exchangeable – perhaps even the biologically determinate constraints of sex could be overcome. Instead of being doomed to be, one could become multiple. Instead of remaining what one was born as, one could become what one wanted--multiple, provisional, fluid. Identities became masks one could pick up in the marketplace, wear, and discard at will. In this way, desire exploded identity.

Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere, pp. 45-46

Be careful what you wish for. 

At some point when I have more time and have assimilated Jeffries arguments better, I want to dig into this more deeply. But for now let me say just this: In the popular political imagination the political left and the cultural left have become conflated, and as anybody who has been reading here knows, I align myself with the former, but in no way associate myself with the latter. The former is inspired by a transcendental ideal of Justice; the latter by a "godless liberation theology". The second is in opposition to and works consciously or unconsciously against the first. And the "progressivism" of the second has become too much associated in the American public's imagination the progressivism of the  Democrats because of the party's capture by intellectual factions on the cultural Left who are more influenced by Guattari and Deleuze than by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This has given Progressivism a bad name among ordinary Americans.

Liberation, yes. But liberation from what? I would say from delusion and obsession, i.e., from objects of desire that are unworthy of our deepest aspirations. But in the godless, postmodern "theology" that pervades the cultural left, Liberation is framed as delivery from the Oedipus Complex and its repressive traditional social norms. The goal for this kind of "progressivism" is to live in an anti-Oedipal, normless society. Such a society might produce admirable postmodern cultural icons like Madonna and Lady Gaga, but it also has no ground to condemn figures like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein who are the other side of the 'desire' coin.

By what moral standard within this postmodern liberation theology can we judge the first two admirable and the second two not? It just comes down to aesthetic preference. You can call Trump and Weinstein predators, but when they retort that "We're just following our transgressive desires; we don't believe in conventional, alienating, life-sapping norms. Who are you to judge us?" Well, what's your retort? It just comes down to your not agreeing, but by what standard can you claim that you're right and they're wrong? Why should anybody take you seriously? It just comes down to aribitrary opinions about what constitutes naughty or nice behaviors. 

The better solution is to accept that norms are necessary, and they must be continuously but gradually improved. And the standard by which we measure such improvement is Justice understood as an inspiring transcendental ideal. You can't force better norms on a society because that only leads to backlash. You have to awaken dormant parts of the human soul. You have to inspire people to want not just to behave well but to become good, and you can't do that if you don't believe it's in most people to become that or you believe that Goodness and Justice are just arbitrary social constructions. 

And the bottom line is that a majority of Americans are never going to accept your program because hardly anybody wants a Skinner's Box society, which is ultimately the only kind of society that would enable you to achieve your behaviorally correct goals. 

By all means, let there be an avant-garde that explores reality beyond the fringes of what is conventionally acceptable, but let them remain on the fringes. The challenge for society inside the fringe is to develop norms that align with the Tao of things, that is, with Justice understood as a transcendental ideal. You have to believe that there is such a thing if there's any hope of bending the long arc of history toward it. And then you have to have the will to do the work that's necessary to achieve it. 

Deleuze and Guattari, Trump and Weinstein believe in no such arcs and would argue anyone who does is naive. But while the first pair might not have had in mind the second as exemplars when they wrote Anti-Oedipus, they bear some responsibility for promoting the normless imaginary in which Trump, Weinstein, and the sociopathies associated with Neoliberalism thrive. And so do intellectuals on the cultural Left bear responsibility who accept such a liberation theology without understanding its perverse effects. 

See also "How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left" I and II

The Coming Violence

These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.

There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.

What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them. 

Tom Nichols

I thought this quote from Nichols was an appropriate follow up to my post yesterday about the foolishness of some moderates who think the more prudent course is to compromise with a paranoia-driven fanaticism by refusing to hold Trump to account legally. There is no remedy for fanaticism, so compromising with it makes no sense. There is only containing it and suppressing it.

Yes, I understand that doing so will feed the paranoia. But the problem with paranoids is that their behavior and attitudes create the enemies that would not exist if not provoked by their paranoid behavior and attitudes. Once paranoia is acted out violently, it's too late to talk them down. It must be dealt with by the lawful exercise of the police powers of the state. And then, yes, the political process should address the legitimate grievances that are the underlying causes of right-wing fear and resentment--what I call ontological dizziness--insofar as that's possible. That's the purpose of my A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity series. 

In the meanwhile the forces of sanity need to contain the forces of insanity. Fanatics we shall have always among us, but J6 was a break point, and GOP complicity in abetting or condoning that violence should de-legitimate the party for all truly sane, patriotic Americans, which most Americans are. The problem is that too many Americans still don't understand what's at stake; they tend to minimize the dangers posed by this paranoia-driven fanatacism--how its inherent authoritarianism deeply threatens both the execution of fair elections and the judicious application of the rule of law. But hopefully that is changing.

True patriots must use the tools available to them to suppress the paranoia while they still have those tools available to them--the law and elections. If there are no longer fair elections or the judicious application of rule of law, there is no longer America. Moderates fear that if the true patriots use the law they will lose the elections, but if patriots don't defend the rule the law for fear of feeding the insanity, what's the point of their winning the elections? 

Update: After posting above, I read Rich Lowry NYT op ed entitled "A Defense of GOP Paranoia":

If it is too difficult now for Democrats to imagine how they might react to such a prosecution of one of their own, they might have a clearer sense soon enough. An indictment of Mr. Trump would invite retaliation, and if Republicans retake the White House, a motivated G.O.P.-controlled Justice Department could be expected to aggressively pursue a reason to indict Joe Biden over his son Hunter’s business dealings.

In the tumult over a Trump indictment, both sides will accuse the other of violating the country’s norms and traditions. But there’s no doubt that a fierce Republican response, deeply distrustful of the authorities and openly defiant, would be profoundly American.

Yes, paranoia, is deeply American.

Lowry really seems incapable of seeing what's going on in terms other than Red Team vs. Blue Team. Lowry purports to want to help Democrats and independents to understand why GOP paranoia is justified, but it seems that it is he who needs much more help in understanding why Democrats, Independents, and Never-Trump Republicans cannot understand why Trump is never held accountable for the blatantly illegal things he does. 

The assumption here is that if the FBI were to come after Biden or Obama, Democrats would be just as upset as  Republicans are that the FBI is going after Trump. Yeah, they would be if the sole justification was revenge, and not holding the accountable for egregious illegal behavior while in office.

I feel like with Lowry, heir to the Wm. Buckley legacy as editor of National Review, we're dealing with someone here whose moral development was stunted in Middle School. Buckley, whatever his limitations, was not a moral moron. Can you think for a moment, Rich, not just about what's good for the Red Team but what's good for the country?  Hunter isn't the president. You get that right? He's no threat to the good governance of the country. He, unlike Trump's kids, has no involvement with Daddy's administration. Whatever they have on Hunter is likely to be dwarfed by what they could get on the Trump kids, but have at it. Go after Hunter, if that makes you feel better. If he broke the law, indict him. Sheesh. The pettiness is breathtaking. 

Here's what Republicans like Lowry can't quite grasp. They assume that because Democrats don't share their pinched, moralistic world view, that they must be even more corrupt and immoral than they are.  But they just aren't by any objective standard. How many of Trump's, Reagan's, and Nixon's associates have been indicted? Lots. How many of Obama's? None. Is that because the FBI has a bias favoring Democrats? Hardly.  

Are there venal, corrupt Dem swamp creatures here and there?  Sure. Go after them if they actually broke the law. But go after them because they broke the law, not just because you want to get even. But there's less to go after because most Democrats believe in the rule of law in the way Republicans don't. Republicans habitually do clumsy illegal and corrupt things in a way that Dems don't. Trump is off the charts, but he's following in the footsteps of Nixon's Watergate and Reagan's Iran-Contra. The idea that Republicans are the party of law and order is facetious. More Republicans get indicted because more Republicans break the law.

Rich, If and when the Dems put up a lying, corrupt, promoter of insurrection, stealer of top-secret documents, who is the first to undermine the peaceful transfer of power in our history , and who otherwise had continuously abused the power of his office for the most venal reasons, then let's talk.  

The Moderate Fallacy against Indicting Trump

If the matter culminates in an indictment and trial of Mr. Trump, the Republican argument would be more of what we heard day in and day out through his administration. His defenders would claim that every person ostensibly committed to the dispassionate upholding of the rule of law is in fact motivated by rank partisanship and a drive to self-aggrandizement. This would be directed at the attorney general, the F.B.I., the Justice Department and other branches of the so-called deep state. The spectacle would be corrosive, in effect convincing most Republican voters that appeals to the rule of law are invariably a sham.

But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it? It would be a risible claim, but potentially a politically effective one. And he might well continue this campaign even if convicted, possibly running for president from a jail cell. It would be Mr. Trump versus the System. He would be reviving an old American archetype: the folk-hero outlaw who takes on and seeks to take down the powerful in the name of the people.

We wouldn’t even avoid potentially calamitous consequences if Mr. Trump somehow ended up barred from running or his party opted for another candidate to be its nominee in 2024 — say, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. How long do you think it would take for a freshly inaugurated President DeSantis to pardon a convicted and jailed Donald Trump? Hours? Minutes? And that move would probably be combined with a promise to investigate and indict Joe Biden for the various “crimes” he allegedly committed in office.

Damon Linker

Dear me. If we uphold the rule of law, the lawless won't like it. Linker seems to believe that if the Democrats don't indict the egregious criminality of Republicans that Republicans will refrain from using the law as a weapon against Democrats. Really?

Here's the problem with moderates like Linker, Brooks, et al. They think they're smarter than Democrats because they are not driven by partisan passions, which they assume is all that's driving Democrats. They think of themselves as understanding the situation better because, as moderates, they are by definition more rational and sensible, that they have a clearer view of what's happening in a way that impassioned Trump haters do not. They see the big picture, but really they don't. They have no real understanding about how their reasonableness leads to a kind of misreading of the situation. 

They are like the moderates in 1850s who thought that the more sensible Southerners would prevail and so they needed to keep compromising with Southern demands. Fugitive Slave Act? Sure, if it makes Southerners happy. But it never makes them happy because fanaticism is never satisfied with compromise. Perhaps because people like Linker are so moderate and rational they are incapable of understanding how fanaticism works. With the GOP now, as there were in the South in the 1850s, there are still some non-fanatics, but they have no influence. None. There is no possibility of compromise if there are no sane actors to compromise with. 

Moderates think that to indict Trump is to pour gasoline on the fire, but the fire has already broken loose in the forest; it's burning out of control and moving toward the cities. One of the chief symptoms of this out-of-control fire is its toleration of egregious criminality.  And as there is no compromising with a raging forest fire, so there is no compromising with the fanaticism of the  GOP; It can only be suppressed or contained.

The Democrats, for all their limitations, are cast in the role of firefighters, whether they want the job or not. And only they have the tools to suppress and contain the fire--suppress by defeating Republicans in the next two election cycles, and contain by insisting on the rule of law. For the firefighters to give up the rule of law is for them to surrender one of their most important tools to contain the spread of the fire. Linker seems to think that if you refuse to contain the fire, it will just go out on its own. Clearly that's not going to happen. Appeasing fanaticism looks weak and feckless because it is. It's a failure of nerve.

The Democrats must persuade non-fanatic Americans that they must use both tools to fight fanaticism--elections and the rule of law. Remember, Republicans are only 23% of the electorate, so the fight here is to persuade Independents that Republican fanaticism is the most important threat to their liberties, and that the rule of law is really what's at stake here. Better to make the case for the rule of law by using the rule of law, than to appear feckless in appeasing fanaticism. 

Yes, it might be too late--the fire might already be uncontainable. But it might not be, so Democrats have to use every tool they have as effectively as they can use them. And I can guarantee that if the firefighters unilaterally disarm by refusing to enforce the rule of law, the game is lost and the negative consequences that Linker predicts will ensue anyway. Does he really believe that if the Democrats are lenient with Republicans that the Republicans will be lenient with Democrats? 

Of course they won't be because to think so assumes that they are sane actors when they are not; they are fanatics. And so that's why Republicans must be kept out of power. But even if Republicans regain power, we have reason to hope that, at least in the short run, the GOP's use of the courts as a political weapon against Democrats will be as effective as their use of the courts to assert Trump's claims about election fraud. The Democrats must use the courts while they still respect the rule of law, or in the long run the courts will become precisely the political weapons that the fanatics already, wrongly, believe they are. 

Update: All the above being said, I agree with Douthat--

It seems like a reasonable presumption that the documents in question are more serious than just some notes to Kim Jong-un but that the potential incrimination falls short of Trump literally selling secrets. But that’s a presumption, not a prediction. I’ve learned to be unsurprised by Trump’s folly and venality but also by his capacity to induce self-defeating blunders among people and institutions I would have considered relatively sensible before his ascent.

So no predictions, just the warning: Don’t miss.

 

A Word about Liz Cheney

I can think of few jobs that are less desirable than being a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. There's a reason why so many Republicans with a lick of sense and a shred of human decency retired. Only a fool would  think of it as a prize to be clung to. It's a prize only for people who have nothing more productive to do with their lives, which would include almost anything. Peter Meijer, Jaime Herrera-Butler, and now Liz Cheney "paid no price" for their vote to impeach Trump; they have all been freed to do something useful, work that will put less stress on their integrity as human beings. They should get down on their knees and thank God that they have been delivered from one of the deeper rings of hell. Their story is not a tragic one, but of liberation. The beast spit them out, and now they can recover their humanity. I congratulate them. 

My view about the worth of any our lives has less to do with one's politics or admirability by whatever conventional standard but rather if when the moment demanded it you stood up and did what was required. Most people are called to do that in quiet ways that don't make headlines or are even noticed at all, and some do it in ways that are in the media glare. None can know what the mix of motives are, and it's none of our business anyway. The main thing is that each of us when we hear the voice of conscience, we hearken to it. In Cheney's case, she clearly stepped up, and I'm grateful she did. Any speculation about other motives is silly. The same is true for Mike Pence, who similarly, after four years of feckless sycophancy, did the right thing. 

I don't think this makes them losers, because they gained more than they lost. They simply did the right thing when they were called upon to do it, just like millions of decent human beings do everyday in ways less publicly visible. The only difference is that history will remember them for it, and history will forget all the others about whom we can say that whatever is left of their humanity and integrity continues to be digested in the belly of the beast that has become the Trumpian GOP. 

How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left 2

Sean Illing interviews Stuart Jeffries, author of Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern, and the discussion focuses on themes I've been making for years now about why the Left hasn't the resources to fight the Right. I'll say more about it below, but my argument over the years is that insofar as the Left has been captured by Postmodern theory, its politics align with Neoliberal capitalist objectives. In other words, the anti-capitalist postmodern theorist is as incoherent as the traditional values conservative who celebrates capitalism.

Sean Illing

I wanted to avoid the temptation to ask you to define postmodernism at the top, but I feel like we have to do it, right?

Stuart Jeffries

So the simple idea is that postmodernism is what comes after modernism. And modernism was a very earnest and serious commitment to progress, a commitment to overturning the frills and furbelows of Victorian culture and early 20th century decorative culture, in the arts and in architecture. It’s joyless, really.

And postmodernism is a rebellion against all that. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we should become leaner and fitter and meaner in our architecture and in our literature. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we’re on some path to improving ourselves as human beings, that we’re heading toward some kind of absolute perfection. Postmodernism disdains all that. It says that’s garbage. The postmodernists said we’re going to tear up the rule books to make buildings, to make art, and make it all about expression and fun.

Now the weird thing about postmodernism is that when you put it like that, it sounds great! But my book is about how there’s another “ism” looming as postmodernism emerges and it’s called neoliberalism, which is a new form of capitalism and very much the world we’re living in now. We’re living in a neoliberal era and postmodernism has become a cultural handmaiden for that.

...

Sean Illing

Do you feel like the emancipatory potential of postmodernism was squandered? Like, there was a genuine subversiveness to it that could’ve been revolutionary, but in the end it gets commercialized and becomes another trick of capital.

Stuart Jeffries

Absolutely. If you read Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition [the book that coined the term “postmodernism” in 1979], or if you read Gilles Deleuze, both of them are quite radical thinkers. Both of them are born of the disappointment of the failure of the student rebellions in ’68 in Paris. Their ideas are filled with mourning over the lost revolution.

But they’re not Marxist revolutionaries anymore. And Deleuze, the great postmodern theorist, starts to think about desire as a liberator. So forget about socialist organizing, forget about trade unions and barricades — it’s all about desire. Desire is truly revolutionary.

And that just seems so incredibly naive to say now, because you think of how desire — sexual desire, the desire for products, the desire for material titillation — is utterly conformist. Our desires are constantly manufactured and then sold back to us. Desire is so obviously a tool for capitalism.

Marxism was the last grand narrative for the Left, and once you give up on the grand narrative all you have is individuals, and what motivates individuals? Well since the metaphysical imaginary for both capitalism and postmodernism is rationalist materialism, the only thing that makes life worth living is desire, and that's a very individual thing, so the politics becomes not about defining a collective vision for a better society, but rather only the negation of whatever impedes individual desire.

As soon as you understand that, you understand everything that has gone wrong on the cultural Left and why it was so easily captured by Neoliberalism, why it isn't subversive or revolutionary in any truly meaningful way and is really just a branch of the same disease that brings us unimpeded capitalism, which thrives on unimpeded desire.

The inevitable result is that a Progressive politics without a narrative loses to a politics that has one. The folks on the Right haven't heard the news yet about the unbelievability of grand narratives. Maybe they should take a course on it. In the meanwhile, the people on the Right, whose desire is primarily grounded in wanting to destroy the cultural Left and its capture of American cultural institutions makes it very easy for them to get organized in movements designed to do just that.

What does the Left have to offer as a counter--anarchic, evanescent, happenings like Occupy or quixotic, unpopular riots like the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle? But except for a few of the most hardcore on the Left, as soon as Left politics stops being fun or entertaining, there is no 'desire' for it. And besides, the politics of the Left can't compete with the politics on the Right for being fun. Those folks on January 6 were having a ball. Owning the Libs is great sport. Watching Libs get apoplectic about Trump is a hoot. 

Liberals just don't understand how boring and uninspiring is their sanctimony, how ridiculous their woke fetishes, how easy they are  to mock and to dislike. Their political naïveté and rhetorical ineptness bred in university seminar rooms is truly breathtaking, and yet all the youngsters these days in the media who went to prestigious universities and liberal arts colleges are its acolytes. The Right scares them, as it should, but this generation simply hasn't the ability to push back because it has no place to set its feet. The cultural Left has become the new "establishment", but theirs is an establishment without a foundation except for old habits that grew out of beliefs they no longer hold. 

The only possible argument against Neoliberalism needs a foundation that lies deeper than desire. That is an intellectual impossibility given the presuppositions held by the cultural Left, and so inevitably it will be defeated, if not by the Right, by a more sophisticated and deeply grounded movement on the Left. 

Listening to the entire interview is well worth it. See "How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left III" where I talk more about Jeffries book. 

See also How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left I and "Young Socialist Intellectuals".

Theda Skocpol on Looming Illiberalism

In an inteverview in the Atlantic:

Skocpol: {Trump]’s not necessary for an authoritarian movement to use the GOP to lock in minority rule. The movement to manipulate election access and counting is so far along. I think it’s too late, and we’re vulnerable to it because of how we administer local elections.

What’s happened involves an interlocking set of things. It depends not just on candidates like Trump running for president and nationalizing popular fears and resentments, but also on state legislatures, which have been captured, and the Supreme Court. The Court is a keystone in all of this because it’s going to validate perfectly legal manipulations that really are about locking in minority rule. In that sense, the turning point in American history may have happened in November 2016.

Godfrey: The turning point toward what?

Skocpol: Toward a locking-in of minority rule along ethno-nationalist lines. The objective is to disenfranchise metro people, period. I see a real chance of a long-term federal takeover by forces that are determined to maintain a fiction of a white, Christian, Trumpist version of America.

That can’t work over the long run, because the fastest-growing parts of the country are demonized in that scheme of things. But a lot of things liberals do play into it: Democrats are the party of strong government, and they’re almost as fixated on the presidency as Trumpists are. People on the left started bashing Joe Biden less than a year into his presidency. Why won’t the president just exert his will? Well, that doesn’t work.

The hour is late. This election this fall is critical.

This supports themes I've been developing over the past year. It doesn't matter whether or not Trump's grip on the party is loosening. The party has already been corrupted by him no matter whether he runs or goes to jail. And I think it's pretty obvious to anybody who thinks about it that the southernized GOP bent on one-party rule, has no interest in preserving an open society and has enormous structural advantages that benefit it in the short run. But I've also argued that it can't retain power in the long run for the same reason that the Puritans couldn't retain power in England after Cromwell. Powermad fanatics are loathsome, and the most dynamic and affluent elements in American society simply won't put up with them.

We're not Hungary or Russia where habits of illiberalism are the historical norm. The problem for the forces of sanity in the short run is that most Americans don't think it's as bad as all that. They think that things will get back to normal again, and so the only thing that will arouse them to the reality about what is really happening is for it to happen, and that might require them to experience a good dose of illiberal minority rule. 

Is there a risk that these illiberal fanatics will find a way to consolidate power through the mechanisms of the surveillance state and the military. Yes, there is. And it would be infinitely preferable for us not to run that risk, and as Skocpol says, that's why the midterms are so important.

And it could be a lack of imagination on my part, but it seems to me that this is where American federalism is a bulwark against centralized tyranny. The New England states, most of the Mid-Atlantic states, and the states on the west coast just won't go along with it. Will a GOP Federal gov't declare martial law and occupy these states if they resist? Would the military go along with such a thing? Possibly. But it's hard to imagine such a thing being sustainable. 

And I could be underestimating the illiberal Right, but its leadership has yet to prove that it has the intelligence, discipline, and sophistication to pull something like this off in a society as dynamic and complex as that in the U.S. Whatever success in the U.S. the forces of illiberalism might have in the short run, the reality is to complex for them to control it in the long run. Roger Stone and Steve Bannon are trickster agents of chaos, not strategic geniuses. The other prominent GOP leaders are trolls and hacks who have yet to prove that they have a broader strategic perspective than winning the next news cycle. The militias are full of cranks high on their own delusional thinking. Too many are like the guy in Ohio who attacked the FBI office with a nail gun. 

Whatever the similarities on the level of cultural breakdown, and there are many, we're not the Weimar Republic of the '20s. We're much bigger, more diverse, more economically dynamic, and too allergic to federal overreach, and the fanatics on the Right will overreach. Overreaching is what they do. 

We are living in unprecedented times, and it's impossible to say how all this will play out. We are so used to thinking pessimistically, but we could be surprised by something unexpectedly positive. I do really believe in the basic decency and sanity of most Americans. The problem with them is that most don't grasp the seriousness of what we're facing. Politics is for them like sports, an entertainment, and many root for the Red Team because that's what they've always done, and most Americans have no idea how a hard turn to the Right will concretely impact their lives for the worse. They need to be aroused, but once aroused, they will push back against indecency and insanity. 

So the question before is us whether we're going to save democracy the easy way by refusing to elect Republicans or the hard way by having to endure their illiberalism. We'll find out in the midterms whether the forces of sanity are already aroused enough to resist the forces of insanity. Did anybody expect Warnock and Ossoff to win in Georgia? I know I didn't. I'm feeling more optimistic than I have in a while. We'll see soon enough if I'm just indulging in wishful thinking . 

The FBI on a Slippery Slope

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, from The Shovel

We are certainly no fans of Donald Trump--let’s make that clear from the outset. But yesterday’s raid by the FBI on the home of a former president sets a dangerous precedent.

A precedent which now means that anyone who evades taxes, attempts to undermine an election, sexually assaults women, manipulates the value of their assets, uses state resources to enrich themselves or aids and abets the overthrow of a democratically elected government will be subject to investigation. Is that the world we want to live in? Where anyone accused of insurrection can be subject to questioning from law enforcement officers?

It’s a slippery slope. Before we know it, regular citizens accused of defrauding the government, concealing evidence, manipulating financial documents, tampering with witnesses or perverting the course of justice will also be held to account. Or to put it another way, if we simply shrug our shoulders and fail to question the actions of the FBI, soon any old Joe Citizen who is suspected of ripping classified government documents into small pieces and flushing them down the toilet will be obliged to answer to law enforcement, as well as their plumber. Read more.

As Michelle Goldberg points out today in a post entitled "The Absurd Argument Against Making Trump Obey the Law", in addition to the predictable nonsense from the Rubios and McCarthys, moderate Nervous Nellies like Tim Alberta, Andrew Yang, and Damon Linker--she doesn't mention David Brooks--are wringing their hands about the implications. She goes on to point out the obvious:

What has strengthened Trump has not been prosecution but impunity, an impunity that some of those who stormed the Capitol thought, erroneously, applied to them as well. Trump’s mystique is built on his defiance of rules that bind everyone else. He is reportedly motivated to run for president again in part because the office will protect him from prosecution. If we don’t want the presidency to license crime sprees, we should allow presidents to be indicted, not accept some dubious norm that ex-presidents shouldn’t be.

This is what moderates don't seem to get: All they have is the law to fight against forces in American society that have no respect for it. If they refuse to use it, they are unilaterally disarming in a way that they will inevitably lead to the loss of the rule of law. We

Use it or lose it. We cannot be held in thrall by the threats of right-wing extremists. Fonts of conventional wisdom like Brooks--who, btw presciently thought the J6 Committee hearings would be a waste of time--should be doing everything they can to make the case to their still reasonable conservative friends that they must support the rule of law or all is lost. People in the mushy middle must come to understand that we're in a cold civil war that is becoming increasingly hot. There's no avoiding that; there's only containing it. Appeasing Right Wing paranoia hoping to avert backlash is the path to insuring the triumph of lawlessness. It must be confronted head on by using the full extent of the powers the law affords. 

Again, Goldberg--

Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted because of politics, but he also shouldn’t be spared because of them. The only relevant question is whether he committed a crime, not what crimes his devotees might commit if he’s held to account.

Gotti Residence Searched by FBI for Evidence of Crimes--and in Civil Case Takes 5th

Would we have seen any less of a defense of John Gotti if Republicans had elected him rather than Trump? Here's what they'd say:

John Gotti is a Catholic and a good family man. He's not a politician, but a successful businessman who understands how to get things done. Sure, he's not perfect, but he's all about traditional values, and he hates the sanctimonious Libs as much as I do. I love that guy, and he loves people like me. 

Has he done some shady things on the side? Who hasn't? Why is the FBI picking on him? The FBI has hated him from the beginning, and they've rigged the whole system against him. They hate him because we love him. And so what if took the fifth yesterday over 400 times. Why should he cooperate with a corrupt system that is persecuting him for no good reason? 

Is the spirit of Marco Rubio's comment about the events in Mar-a-Lago on Monday so far from this?--

“The F.B.I.’s actions, less than three months from the upcoming elections, are doing more to erode public trust in our government institutions, the electoral process and the rule of law in the U.S. than the Russian Federation or any other foreign adversary,” Mr. Rubio said in the letter [to the FBI]. (Source)

No, Marco, it's you and other Trump wannabes who are eroding trust in our in our institutions by refusing to allow a perfectly legal process to play out. You know it, and you don't care what real harm you are doing.

Why do people like Rubio defend this guy? Why say anything at all? We all know that Rubio will have to eat his words sooner or later, so why does he feel the need to say something so baseless and untrue?  Is it simply something so feckless as seeing in Trump a charisma that they lack and feel that their future success depends on mimicking it? Are these guys really so craven and stupid?

I've said it before--if you want to understand GOP intentions, just listen to what they falsely accuse Democrats of doing. It's an infallible guide to predict what they would do if they were in a position to do it. That's why they must be kept out of power. 

As Peter Baker points out in the same article excerpted above--

Mr. Biden has not publicly demanded that the Justice Department lock up Mr. Trump the way Mr. Trump publicly demanded that the Justice Department lock up Mr. Biden and other Democrats. Nor has anyone knowledgeably contradicted the White House statement that it was not even informed about the search at Mar-a-Lago beforehand, much less involved in ordering it. But Mr. Trump has a long history of accusing adversaries of doing what he himself does or would do in the same situation.

His efforts to politicize the law enforcement system have now become his shield to try to deflect accusations of wrongdoing. Just as he asserted on Monday that the F.B.I. search was political persecution, he made the same claim on Wednesday about the New York attorney general’s unrelated investigation of his business practices as he invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying because his answers could incriminate him.

“Now to flip the script and falsely claim that he’s the victim of the exact same tactics that he once deployed is just the rankest hypocrisy,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment. “But consistency, logic, evidence, truth — those are always the first to go by the board when a democracy comes under assault from within.”

We know that Trump has no moral compass and will say and do whatever will advance his interests no matter who else gets hurt, but we're learning from Republicans that they admire his success and seek to imitate him in almost every respect. While I feel evermore confident we will never see Trump in office again, we won't be rid of the people whose souls he has corrupted for a long time coming. 

Stop Saying that Republicans Are the Party of Law and Order

Order maybe; Law, not so much.

Too many in the punditry are talking about conservative Republicans as if they're hypocrites because they endorse the lawlessness of J6 or because they're now calling to defund the FBI. The GOP has not been a party that respects the rule of law for a long, long time--at least since the Republican Party became southernized after Nixon. The Republican Party has inherited the autocratic ethos of the Southern Democrats who have always felt that they are justified to break laws without compunction that they believe are based on liberal principles. There is nothing more liberal than the enlightenment concept "rule of law", if by it we mean that whatever legislatures produce through the democratic process. That's not the 'southern' idea about what law is about. 

I wrote Rule of Law vs. Law and Order in February 2020. Here's a relevant excerpt:

I wrote a long piece in October entitled Law and Order and the Jacksonian Right in which I argued something that I don't think most Liberals understand, which is that for Law and Order Conservatives, the emphasis is on Order, not on Law.

...Republicans see themselves as the party of law and order. I think this only makes sense if you understand that the more important word in that pairing is "order", in the sense of social order, not the political or legal one. Or to put it another way, the political and legal order has legitimacy only insofar as it is a reflection of the social order. The social order that shapes the politics of [American] social conservatives traces its roots back at least as far as the 1820s when the party of Jefferson became the party of Jackson. Then a rather primitive, premodern customary sense of American identity came to dominate in the political sphere, and in doing so replaced the modern, enlightenment imagination embraced by most of the founders. It was a collective return of the repressed. 

We were taught in school that the Jacksonian democracy was a good thing, that it made America more representative of the will of the people. We tend, however to romanticize the "people" because we were not taught that the "people" who saw Jackson as their hero couldn't have cared less about the rule of law and the kind of virtue that is necessary for a true republic to thrive. With the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the older republican imagination of America infused with Enlightenment ideals was displaced by an imaginary that legitimated the lawless, loutish, violent impulses exemplified by Andrew Jackson himself. These Jacksonian Democrats never really cared about good government; they just wanted to be left alone to do their lawless, loutish, violent thing, especially regarding their slaves, the Indians, and the Mexicans. Trump, despite his un-Jacksonian bone spurs, is Jackson redivivus. 

Law and Order is not the same as the Rule of Law. Laws are only legitimate for law-and-order Conservatives if they align with and support their traditionalist social order. Any laws that undermine that order or are out of alignment with it have for them no real legitimacy. Law-and-Order conservatives in the past have often approved lynchings, or the kind of thievery and dirty tricks that led to Watergate, or the defiance of the Bolland Amendment that led to Iran Contra, or the contravention of international law that led to the invasion of Iraq, or now the egregious, flagrant, out-in-the-open lawlessness of Donald Trump.

Conservatives feel not need to take the law seriously except when they get to use it as a club to punish their enemies. What matters is the conservative sense of order, and any illegal actions Conservatives commit need not be punished so long as they either promote the traditionalist social order or transgress it in minor ways that don't destabilize it. Shoplifting is a far more serious crime than tax fraud. 

Russia used to be an enemy of these law-and-order conservatives when it was ruled by the godless communists, but now that it is a nominally Christian, traditional-order autocracy, they see it as an ally. They are very happy to accept its help in keeping Trump in power. They are gleeful that Brennan, Comey, Yates, and all the national security types who appear on CNN and MSNBC are in such a snit about Trump's dismantling of the government and institutions they have devoted their careers to defend. 

And so this explains why Evangelical Christians support Trump. They see him as someone who is restoring the old social order. His personal behavior and lawlessness are irrelevant because they see hm as sent by God to destroy the godless secular Liberal Order. If that means destroying American democracy, so be it. Better a kingdom or autocracy where civil laws align with divine law (in the primitive lex talionis sense) than a democracy that is out of alignment with it. The authoritarian thugs, of course, don't care about the divine order; they just care about maintaining power. But they understand that they need to be seen as champions of the divine order if they are to maintain their base of support.

Liberals need to understand what they're up against with Republicans. The law is no constraint for them because they don't think it's legitimate. We're currently in a cold civil war that is likely to get very hot in the next decade. On the one side Independents and Democrats believe in the rule of law; on the other side, the southernized Republicans who don't. The latter group only believes in using power--violent power if necessary--to impose their idea of social order on everyone else. The law has legitimacy only insofar as it aligns with their idea of underlying social order, which is for them best articulated in Christian Nationalism. 

So nothing is more important than Independents and Democrats keeping Republicans out of power, and to do that they must not vote for them, and when in power they must use the full extent and power of the law to keep their lawlessness in check. 

Alex Jones Trial: Is Trump Watching?

When Jones tried to argue that he believed he was telling the truth, [Judge] Gamble clarified the difference between an alternative reality media world and a court of law. In the law, she told him, truth was actually a real thing.

“You believe everything you say is true, but it isn’t,” she pointedly told him. “Just because you claim to think something is true does not make it true. It does not protect you. It is not allowed. You’re under oath.” (Source)

I would pay good money to see Trump testify under oath about his involvement on J6 and his financial relationship with the Russian. 

Update 8/10/22: From then NYT this morning:

Donald J. Trump declined to answer questions from the New York state attorney general’s office on Wednesday, a surprising gamble in a high-stakes legal interview that is likely to determine the course of a civil investigation into his company’s business practices.

In a statement released shortly after the questioning began on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, explaining that he “declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution.”

After the deposition began, two sources with knowledge of the matter confirmed that he was refusing to answer questions, citing the Fifth Amendment.

First opportunity to claim the 5th of many more to come. I hope we see the video at some point. 

 

 

So Much Crime, so Little Time

In all the fuss about J6, I wonder if congress or anybody will ever get to the bottom of Trump's relationship with Russia. I suspect that his treasonous relationship with Russia will only come to light once his sedition here has been proved. Since I'm feeling more confident about the latter, it's just a question of whether there will be time enough to get around to the former.

I feel confident that if given the time, i.e, if the Dems hold the house, it is more likely that it will be proved because with Trump it's always worse than what people, even people like me, can imagine. There's no bottom for this guy. And to think that he's still the front runner for the Republican Party. It's astonishing. Something truly, hypnotically evil works through him, and it works best on people prone to religious fanaticism. 

So while it still seems unlikely, it's not impossible that the Dems might hold on in November. Perhaps the country will figure out that it really doesn't want a glad-handing, spineless moron like McCarthy as Speaker. But being a gullible ignoramus is the Republican brand these days. Kari Lake? Doug Mastriano? Really?

The question is whether there will be enough conservative Independents who will see through the con. I'm not optimistic about that for reasons I've explained here--a lot of people vote for Trump simply because they don't pay attention to politics and just vote out of habit for the party they've always vote for.  But maybe times are anomalous enough to break the old habits. Maybe Republican insanity and overreach will become the new stereotype. I live in hope.

Sinema Explained

To win Ms. Sinema’s support, Democratic leaders agreed to drop a $14 billion tax increase on some wealthy hedge fund managers and private equity executives that she had opposed, change the structure of a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations, and include drought money to benefit Arizona. (Source)

Here's a Dem who really cares about the little guy. 

Update 8/8/22: I realize this is how politics work, but really--

Mr. Manchin’s recent surprise agreement to back the Biden administration’s historic climate legislation came about in part because the senator was promised something in return: not only support for the pipeline in his home state, but also expedited approval for pipelines and other infrastructure nationwide, as part of a wider set of concessions to fossil fuels.

It was a big win for a pipeline industry that, in recent years, has quietly become one of Mr. Manchin’s biggest financial supporters.

Natural gas pipeline companies have dramatically increased their contributions to Mr. Manchin, from just $20,000 in 2020 to more than $331,000 so far this election cycle, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission and tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics. Mr. Manchin has been by far Congress’s largest recipient of money from natural gas pipeline companies this cycle, raising three times as much from the industry than any other lawmaker.

...A spokesman for Mr. Manchin said the Mountain Valley Pipeline “will help bring down energy costs, shore up American energy security and create jobs in West Virginia.” An official in Mr. Schumer’s office said the pipeline deal “was only included at the insistence of Sen. Manchin as part of any agreement related to this reconciliation bill.”

Good for Shumer for making the deal because it's a net positive, but what both Manchin and Sinema show is how the Senate works, which is to make it cheap and easy for big-money interests to thwart good legislation. They don't have to bother at all with the Republicans; all they have to do is pick off one or two venal Dems with bribes made legal by Citizens United. BTW, when people talk about blue-dog Democrats or moderate Democrats, they don't mean reasonable Democrats, but more often they mean those who like Manchin and Sinema are bribable by moneyed interests--fossil fuels, Wall Street broadly understood, and pharmaceuticals being the most notorious.