After the Future

Saying the Obvious

I think Israel's biggest problem with folks on the Left is that it elected Netanyahu, the Israeli equivalent of Trump. If the Israeli equivalent of an Obama had been head of state when this Hamas attack happened, the reaction on the Left would have been very different. These days, It always boils down to picking a red or blue jersey to put on. So because Netanyahu = the Right Wing "red" Bad Guy, Hamas = the Left Wing "blue" Good Guys. No matter how horrific their savagery, Hamas is fighting the good, de-colonialist fight. Would that things could be so simple.

The question that remains open for me is whether Israel will blunder here, as the U.S. blundered after 9/11, in confusing the need for revenge with the need to find a practical, realistic solution to terrorism.  Invade and suppress does not strike me as a practical, reallistic solution. But they have to do something, right? So here we are.

The Historical Significance of This Moment

Over the years, [Ian Bassin] said, that kind of alliance has mobilized against autocratic movements in countries including the Czech Republic, France, Finland, and, most recently, Poland, where the center-right joined with its opponents on the left to topple the antidemocratic Law and Justice party. The chilling counterexample, Bassin noted, is that during the period between World War I and World War II, “center-right parties in Germany and Italy chose a different course.” Rather than directly opposing the emerging fascist movements in each country, they opted “instead to try to ride the energy of [the] far-right extremists to power, thinking that once there, they could easily sideline [their] leaders.”

That was, of course, a historic miscalculation that led to the destruction of democracy in each country. But, Bassin said, “right now, terrifyingly, the American Republican Party is following the German and Italian path.” The belligerent Jordan may face just enough personal and ideological opposition to stop him, but whether or not he becomes speaker, his rise captures the currents carrying the Trump-era GOP ever further from America’s democratic traditions.

Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic 

My sense is that most of the Republicans who hate Matt Gaetz and now support Jordan have no sense whatsoever of the historical consequences of their fluctuating allegiances. They don't think in terms of historic calculations. It never enters into their minds. They and their staff just calculate what's good in the short term for their careers. As a group, these are not thoughtful, well-educated, or well-informed people. And so, while I hope at least some of them prove me wrong, they strike me as intellectually and emotionally incapable of making choices that support the long-term health of American democracy. Such thoughts are beyond the scope of their thinking. 

Do the voters who elected Republicans to the House in Biden districts in New York and California regret giving the GOP the majority? How many even think about majorities and minorities? And unless they voted for George Santos, most don't regret their votes because they don't even remember who they voted for or could tell you his or her name. Most are not paying attention to what's going on now in Washington. To the agree that they're aware of it, it's just the same old, same old with little significance for their lives. And the radical, anti-democratic force the Republicans have become is papered over by old caricatures about what they used to be, like fiscally responsible. What they have become is beyond the scope of their thinking because these voters rely on such cliches to navigate in a world they don't have the time or interest to understand more deeply. 

So most voters don't understand that we're on a razor's edge. And either they will not understand the historical significance of what we're going through until it's too late, or if somehow we avoid Germany's and Italy's fate, they will never understand how close we came. 

The Nihilism of the Intersectional Left

What I cannot understand is endorsing, validating, or standing in solidarity with war crimes. That so many student organizations did so is stunning. It commits them to positions anathema not only to the conservatives they often tangle with but to left-leaning liberals and progressives, many of whom now perceive a frightening difference in core values that too many had scarcely pondered before. 

Conor Fridersdorf

Simplistic moralistic thinking finds a way to justify the unjustifiable. It justified the Spanish Inquisition. It justified the French Terror. It justified the Cultural Revolution in China. The people who commit the worst atrocities are those who think they do it in defense of or inspired by some moral principle, and they believe that their actions serve justice and truth and that history will prove them right. The more moralistic the justification, the more brittle the thinking, and the more brittle the thinking, the greater the need to double down and to embrace an emotional fanaticism that blocks out all criticism. 

I have used my phrase 'ontological dizziness' most frequently to describe the kind of vertigo into which people with traditional values have been thrust in response to the dissolution of  the customary cultures into which they were born. They blame Liberals for this, but the post WWII consumerist society and its media are the real cause. These Americans shaped by Middle American customary culture embraced this shift into consumerism because they accepted that it was all a part of what made America great even as it has slowly dissolved the social infrastructure that supported their customs and traditions.

People in such a vertiginous state will grab onto whatever is near at hand to steady them, so they grab onto a guy like Donald Trump, a classic American huckster in the P.T. Barnum mold, and a guy whose gaudy faux success is a parody of the old American Dream. Perhaps there is a kind of comfort in being conned by Trump. What could be more American? 

But we see how the Cultural Left is affected by ontological dizziness in more subtle ways. The Cultural Left seems, relatively speaking, to be more sane because they are better adapted to and so benefit more from the values world shaped by Neoliberalism and its consumerist understanding of freedom. It's harder for the Left to truly grasp the underlying metaphysical nihilism that shapes this values world because their lives are so comfortable in it."I'm not a nihilist," they say to themselves. "I'm a good person who plays by the meritocratic rules, and I have all the socially approved, politically correct attitudes. What's nihilistic about that?"

Only the most self-aware intellectuals on the Cultural Left embrace their nihilistic presuppositions as a basis upon which to develop a politics and public morality. In the postmodern milieu that is still hegemonic for such thinking, there is no possibility for a transcendentally based morality; some other basis must be found, and the result over the last couple of decades has been the emergence of a new juxtaposition of desire (freedom to consume) with the unjust plight of the marginalized (those whose desires are culturally-politically thwarted). This leads to ham-fisted political moral judgments where the only salient moral criterion is where you sit in the hierarchy of marginalization.

The response to Hamas's butchery in Israel by campus groups influenced by this desire/mariginalization moral logic will, I hope, lead to its eventual intellectual and moral de-legitimization. For anyone with a sliver of basic, genuine moral sense, the fundamental vacuousness of this kind of Leftist moralizing has been exposed because until now it has seemed to many people of good will to be moral-ish. What is their moral-ish logic? They will say that, yes, Jews have been historically marginalized, but the Palestinians are being marginalized by the Jews, so Palestinian marginalization counts for more; therefore any horrific thing Palestinians do to fight against their Jewish oppressors is justified. Does the moral reasoning here get more complicated than that? 

Now it remains to be seen if Israel's response will sink to the same level of nihilistic moral reasoning: They started it, so we'll finish it. Will they? 6000 bombs in a few days? Cutting off power and water? Is this strategic or is it just vengeful lashing out?

On Checking Your Privilege

For the record, the real reason privilege checking fell out of favor is because checking your privilege doesn’t do anything. Like so much of cultural studies-inflected pseudo-left practices, it’s an entirely symbolic and semantic ritual. It turns out that even in the rare event that members of privileged groups actually checked their own privilege, they’re fully capable of going out into the world and deepening that privilege and abusing the people who don’t have it. Just like a lot of people put BLM signs in their windows and then avoided Black neighborhoods, just like a lot of men go to academic conferences and call themselves allies and then get aggressive with women at the conference hotel that night. The problem with making moral hygiene the centerpiece of your political project is that morality is a function of behavior, not of thought or emotion or intention. I’m sure Stancil sits at his laptop and talks about being good and thinks good things and feels good things and mistakes all of that for being moral. But only doing is moral, not being. So let’s do the right thing, yes for Black people and women and the poor and also for everyone else, and let’s forget about who’s performed the empty ritual of privilege checking. Who gives a shit?

Freddie de Boer

Agreed. Where we probably disagree is on what the telos of our "doing" is, which for me is a gradual personal and societal movement toward a transcendental ideal of justice. But like de Boer, I find it impossible to take this kind of performative moralism seriously. It changes nothing except to ingrain more deeply in the performer the delusion of his being a good person if he's conformist enough to have the right attitudes and to say the right things and to wear the right t-shirts. 

BTW, what de Boer is saying here is pretty much what Dietrich Bonhoeffer was describing in Christian terms in The Cost of Discipleship.  B distinguishes between cheap grace and costly grace. He lived the latter and paid with his life, as did MLK. Paying with your life isn't the only proof of moral seriousness, but having something in your life that defines your moral horizon and that is worth dying for is.

I think that's why the military is so attractive for a certain kind of idealistic young man or woman. I've met many over the years as students in my classes whom I have deeply admired despite their politics being completely different from mine. I see their idealism as too often having been manipulated by the venal or grandiose or moronic militarists who have brought us absurdities like the invasion of Iraq or the American Civil War. These kids have the guilelessness of  doves but who need a little more of the shrewdenss of the serpent. But what makes them admirable is that willingness to pay the cost. There is a seriousness there that is lacking in almost all their far more liberal classmates.