Yesterday an old friend got in touch to confide that he was thinking of leaving the United States on account of the political climate. He was writing to me because he had few like-minded friends to talk to. Ordinarily, our correspondence doesn't go much beyond exchanges of personal news occasioned by Christmas or Halloween (his favorite holiday, and one for which I have a soft spot).
I responded with unfeigned sympathy but also noted the evidence that a majority of Americans are sick of partisan polarization. Maybe it won't be much longer till sanity and common decency prevail. Then again, maybe not in our lifetimes. My friend and his wife, who at least would not be separating themselves from a family, will go on considering the option of making a break for it — but to where? Yesterday we tentatively browsed the menu of countries together till it got to be my bedtime.
Now, the phrase "my bedtime" has gained a certain complexity — I like to think of it as an elegiac echo — over the decade or so since I was diagnosed with a lymphoma that's not going away. The disease is also classified as a form of chronic leukemia, a wonderfully indolent form that just nudges me along through passages of fitfully ebbing vitality toward the night when I lay me down to sleep for the last time. I'd like to see America wake from its delirium before that.
Even in the prosaic sense, my bedtime promises otherworldly mysteries: labyrinthine dreams alternating with those treks through the dark house that are common to men of a certain age, during which I delight in looking at the clock and seeing that I still have hours to sleep. This is a pleasure I never knew in my youth, when the dead of night was just a rumored time between two drowsy moments. Last night was especially good. I awoke to a splendid thunderstorm and relished the lightning for the span of my trek before plunging back into Slumberland. This morning the wet earth only hinted at the events of the night, but I had witnessed them.
The approach of the Big Sleep doesn't promise any intra-sleep thrills that a mortal mind can contemplate. As far as my sentient self is concerned, the approach is all that remains; but that holds mysteries enough. I observe this old man and the continually rejuvenated world around him with a bemused sense that the world has the more crotchets of the two. It stuffs its manifold mind with real problems and fabricated ones, with practical solutions and theatrical ones, soon forgetting which is which in a frenzy of contention. No wonder my level-headed friend wants to go in search of his Shangri-La. The world will of course prove more durable than I will, but I can say that when there's no mirror in front of me, and especially when I'm out walking, I mistake myself for a healthy young man — except in one situation. At seventy-eight I can still sprint up a spiral stairway of twenty-nine steps and walk on. However, descending is another matter. The top of any stairway gives me pause. When I look down, the voices of childhood elders start murmuring somewhere in my head: So-and-so had a fall. Broke a hip. Bad thing at that age. Never the same after being laid up for a spell. The bone doesn't mend quite right, either. So active until that happened! All it takes is one fall, though. So I descend with care — pretty rapidly, but deliberately. Not with that brisk scuffing action whereby you float down in communion with gravity while punching the steps with the balls of your feet. I don't believe I could do it now if I tried. I dare not try.
Pride goeth before a fall. In American political life today, pride is the deadly sin that runs through all folly from one end of the spectrum to the other. Followers of Donald Trump have invested theirs in a mountebank who flatters them with a sense of mission. Their nemeses on the left, never at a loss for hubris, place them and practically everyone else outside the circle of respectful engagement. Lyndon Johnson's appeal from the Book of Isaiah, "Come now, and let us reason together," is the appeal of the many Americans who are sick of polarization, but it's lost on the deaf adders who guard the poles. In their vain certitude, they wage a shouting match reminiscent of a political joke which I shall condense to its essence: When a family find that their house is on fire, most of the members pitch in to put it out, but the proud grandfather stands bellowing at the flames, "We'll see who tires first!"
I hold out hope that America will wake from its crazy dream before my friend feels compelled to leave it and, if possible, before I'm gathered into the arms of Morpheus for good. There should be time yet. I have the relentless energy of a child who doesn't want to stop playing at bedtime; however, I understand that we children eventually fall asleep over our toys and are carried off to bed. I don't exactly mind being the one who tires first. It's just that I'd like to sink into oblivion confident that America will not soon follow.
Monday, September 23, 2024
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Don't Look at "Us"
The recent attempt on Donald Trump's life is appalling. The subsequent commentary is exasperating. I start reading each of the editorials and essays I come across, only to stop after a few lines and impatiently skim the rest in search of something that cuts through the usual lamenting of what "we as a society" have come to and the pointing-out that this is no way to solve problems. It seems that the authors, when confronted with such an occurrence, are occupationally compelled to put in their thumbs and pull out plums of general meaning.
Here, the general story being told is that of a polarization balloon that was blown up bigger — and bigger — and bigger — until boom! it produced this. But there is no such linear progression. Ever since Donald Trump became president-elect in 2016, there must have been millions of people wishing with resolute vagueness that something would make him go away and marveling that no one had acted on the wish as far as we knew. There must have been more than a few who made up their minds to act but couldn't manage it. The other day, someone happened to manage it. It was not the culmination of an advancing social disease.
I'm reminded of the "sick society" trope that was so much in vogue in the 1960s. It was typified by the reaction to the murder of Kitty Genovese and the mythical (later debunked) indifference of neighbors who supposedly "didn't want to get involved." For a long time thereafter, it was one of the givens of commentary and conversation that people (present company always excepted) were no longer willing to get involved in each other's troubles. Assassinations were similarly treated as evidence of a collective sickness.
As for polarization, study after study has shown that ordinary Americans are not polarized in their values but have been made prone to "affective polarization" — emotional aversion to people of different party affiliations — by misleading information and overwrought rhetoric. One thing I will say about cause and effect is that if a demagogue personifies chaos and threatens opponents with retribution, it does become marvelous that years go by without an assassination attempt. I have no objection to blaming the opponents as well when they've hysterically exploited the demagogue's bluster instead of setting an example of sanity.
And as for the would-be assassin acting alone, who knows what causal web produced the effect? Each such individual is, after all, an individual with personal demons.
Here, the general story being told is that of a polarization balloon that was blown up bigger — and bigger — and bigger — until boom! it produced this. But there is no such linear progression. Ever since Donald Trump became president-elect in 2016, there must have been millions of people wishing with resolute vagueness that something would make him go away and marveling that no one had acted on the wish as far as we knew. There must have been more than a few who made up their minds to act but couldn't manage it. The other day, someone happened to manage it. It was not the culmination of an advancing social disease.
I'm reminded of the "sick society" trope that was so much in vogue in the 1960s. It was typified by the reaction to the murder of Kitty Genovese and the mythical (later debunked) indifference of neighbors who supposedly "didn't want to get involved." For a long time thereafter, it was one of the givens of commentary and conversation that people (present company always excepted) were no longer willing to get involved in each other's troubles. Assassinations were similarly treated as evidence of a collective sickness.
As for polarization, study after study has shown that ordinary Americans are not polarized in their values but have been made prone to "affective polarization" — emotional aversion to people of different party affiliations — by misleading information and overwrought rhetoric. One thing I will say about cause and effect is that if a demagogue personifies chaos and threatens opponents with retribution, it does become marvelous that years go by without an assassination attempt. I have no objection to blaming the opponents as well when they've hysterically exploited the demagogue's bluster instead of setting an example of sanity.
And as for the would-be assassin acting alone, who knows what causal web produced the effect? Each such individual is, after all, an individual with personal demons.
Sunday, June 30, 2024
Quite Contrarian
The Family Property began in response to the election of Donald Trump. There followed a few essays about Trump's treasonous bent or Trump's dangerous personality or Trump's impending (in March 2017!) fall from grace with the Republican party, after which "Castle Trump will settle down to being a mad-king affair without the king." There was also a rumination on the way forward for Democrats that regained some prophetic ground, if I may say so.
June 2020 saw a short paragraph in praise of the demonstrations that were going on in American cities ("[t]hat grand movement to build a society free from racism") as contrasted with the actually anarchic nature of the Republican Party. True enough as far as it went. In this house, criticism of Trump and his crowd continues unabated; but after a while I found that when the spirit moved me to write political criticism, it most often turned my face into the wind blowing from the left. Objectively, this is a puzzle. There shouldn't be much policy to dislike on that side of me.
The New York Times once ran a guest essay containing a quiz designed to let you see which of six imaginary political parties would be the best fit for you. My responses placed me closest by far to the American Labor Party, though decidedly to its left on the cultural axis and (gulp) almost as much so on the economic one. While age was trundling others to the right, it had spirited me to the left flank of a notional labor party. Imagine my surprise. I find that I want things I'll never live to see, such as a gun-free America; things I might live to see if kept on ice for a good while, such as a robust welfare state; and things I could see right now if only the "anti-racist" dust would settle, such as an America proceeding to dissolve the significance of race. Of course, there's something missing from that list of progressive credentials: ideology. With ideology out of the way, it's easy to notice the symbiotic relationship between reactionary demagogues and radical dilettantes who can't grasp the harm done to the progressive cause by talking in Marx Deco jargon, trashing intelligible feminism for the sake of current vogues in gender politics, and proselytizing for neoracism. It's an error to shrug off the offenses of leftists, arguing that those of rightists pose the greater threat to the general good, because the two are joined. If the Right is the villain, the Left is its unwitting lackey. Take away the lackey, and the villain faces a harder task. Replace the lackey with a competent, popular alternative, and the villain is nowhere.
A small but conspicuous element, the radical Left, is undermining progressive politics at a dangerous juncture. That's why a progressive-in-the-wild may feel compelled to stake out contrarian territory. For The Family Property, this has meant urging the Democratic Party to reject bad company, scorning the game of advocacy and the gamble of trying to move society by audacious feats of leverage, and blushing for progressives who fall into intellectual arrogance by aping academics. It has meant taking a stand against biological class warfare and, now, witnessing the fall from self-conscious enlightenment to vicarious savagery that comes of allyship with exotic bigots. Now and then, it has seemed necessary to mention that all this commentary comes from a primitive leftist point of view and not a Trump-averse rightist one.
Contrarian territory has its dangers. It's a wild wood in which you can stray off till you forget where you came from. A commentator with a large readership may, on finding that the majority of readers give the warmest reception to the most biased polemics, get to be an ingratiating polemicist. The term for this phenomenon is audience capture. Actually, it's a hazard for contrarians and non-contrarians alike.
A contrarian is a swimmer against the current. In the context of political commentary, the term can mean one who criticizes prevailing trends regardless of their orientation. More to the point, though, it distinguishes a dissident member of a camp from a member of a naturally opposing camp. A conservative who criticizes the progressive camp is not a contrarian. But what does it mean to be a contrarian progressive?
A camp is both a patch of ground and a gathering of people. The progressive ground is my proper place, but that doesn't mean that others who have gathered there are people after my own heart or that their visions and strategies — let alone their fads and conceits — seem right to me.
I've always detested Leninism and groaned at Marxism. I shun the fabrication Marxism-Leninism and maintain that Marx was reduced to a political phantasm when Lenin stepped off the train a century ago. His presence thereafter took the form of busts in the offices of Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist commissars, whose tyranny he justified to the world's Leftists while they underwent initiation into the new party-line Mysteries. By the time Khrushchev conclusively discredited Stalin, the Left had learned to shuttle between motte and bailey while heaving false Scotsmen over the stockade in defense of a humanitarian ideology that, in practice, couldn't be stopped before it killed again. Stalin? He was not a true socialist. Mao? Not a true socialist. Nor was Tito or Kim or Mengistu or Ceausescu or Mugabe.... Ah, but Castro! As brutal dictators-for-life go, that was more like it. His victims numbered in the thousands at most. He kept up appearances as a man of the people. Here, then, is an admissible socialist. And yet so is the progenitor of them all, Lenin, in circles where time and etiquette have effaced the record of his wholesale atrocities.
Long ago, I recoiled from the new fetishes of a liberalism starting its slide into academic captivity and later realized that I was mostly seeing a cohort of people who had earned self-assurance being supplanted by people born to it. Though I belonged to the second cohort, it was my lot to feel rubbed the wrong way. The incomparable Michael Kelly cut straight to the heart of the matter:
When the liberal degeneration had been going on for years, conservatism miraculously overtook it in a rapid collapse under the weight of a demagogue. Thereupon I witnessed the squandering of opportunity by my own side and knew that the opportunity had been misread. Donald Trump had cleared the way for a competent, sensible liberal alternative that might have brought the founding of a sustainable Democratic majority in national politics. However, ideological progressives thought they saw an opening for revolution.
And so we saw an attention-grabbing push to normalize democratic socialism. Not social democracy, which would, alas, have been hard enough to sell, but democratic socialism. This was alien to most of the Democratic Party's officeholders and faithful voters. In the congressional elections of 2018, candidates who espoused socialism of any kind were outliers among successful Democrats. The four progressives (including three socialists) soon to be renowned as The Squad contributed nothing to the party's return to power in the House of Representatives, as they had taken over safe seats. Nevertheless, they inspired liberal commentators to treat them as the vanguard of a new wave in American politics. It tended to be forgotten that not every wave is of the future. Meanwhile, young Democrats who had proved their broad appeal — the very people the party needed as its faces of the future — became faces in the crowd.
Confidence in a leftward destiny had already begun to fortify itself with intoxicating visions of demographic triumph. These were wishfully drawn from a 2008 US Census Bureau report predicting that the US would become a majority-minority country by 2040. However, that calculation rested on a system of racial classification absurdly like the one-drop rule of the Jim Crow South, and the dreams that were spun from it rashly assumed, to boot, that non-white immigrants would be leftist in their own politics or would at least attach themselves to their leftist patrons. It was all an egoistic delusion of the Left. There can be no functioning majority where there is no cohesion except among activists. The thesis of demographic triumph was faulty in all its parts, but social-justice progressives' delight in it was so much greater than their critical faculties that they believed it. They chattered about it. They publicly exulted in it. Yet when Republicans told the same story with the aim of alarming white voters, they deplored it as though they'd never heard of such a thing.
Critical faculties recede where intellectual arrogance advances. Threadbare Marxist brain-cudgellers would at least have avoided the mirage of demographic triumph, but their sleek Leninist successors differ from them in a way that must be sought between the lines of theory. The theoretical difference is that Marxists concern themselves with the interests of urban workers while Leninists concern themselves with the modernization of agrarian societies. V. I. Lenin merged the two through the medium of vocabulary but also introduced a strategic difference that has transformed the character of the "Marxist-Leninist" Left.
This change "from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals" is the element of Marxism qua Leninism that survives most vigorously in the American Left. Intellectuals are to lead; to lead where they list, with nothing to keep them from improvising signposts out of brainstorms as they go along.
There was the crusade to nowhere about defunding the police, and now the centrifugal quackery about sex and gender. There's the academy-driven denial of racial progress. There's the climate cult that shuns discussion of ways to cope with impacts that are already inevitable, preferring a monomaniacal campaign against fossil fuels combined with maximal alarmism about the future. In case after case, the Left demonstrates the impulse to proud perversity noted by Michael Kelly. Encompassing all the individual cases is a sphere of solipsism wherein no arc is particularly long, but each one bends toward self-justification.
The pursuit of progress, in the sense of social improvement, is the following of reasoned imagination and disinterested compassion. You may believe that imagination and compassion have already brought us to a state of equipoise worth keeping, in which case you're a conservative; or that they've overshot the mark, in which case you're a reactionary; or that we ought to follow them further, in which case you're some sort of liberal or progressive. But there's a separate sort of progressive who rearranges "the following of reasoned imagination and disinterested compassion" into an imaginative leading of reason in ruthless devotion to one or more interests. Such progressives are the temperamental descendants of Lenin's we. It's because of them, the branded Left, that I stay busy as a contrarian.
June 2020 saw a short paragraph in praise of the demonstrations that were going on in American cities ("[t]hat grand movement to build a society free from racism") as contrasted with the actually anarchic nature of the Republican Party. True enough as far as it went. In this house, criticism of Trump and his crowd continues unabated; but after a while I found that when the spirit moved me to write political criticism, it most often turned my face into the wind blowing from the left. Objectively, this is a puzzle. There shouldn't be much policy to dislike on that side of me.
The New York Times once ran a guest essay containing a quiz designed to let you see which of six imaginary political parties would be the best fit for you. My responses placed me closest by far to the American Labor Party, though decidedly to its left on the cultural axis and (gulp) almost as much so on the economic one. While age was trundling others to the right, it had spirited me to the left flank of a notional labor party. Imagine my surprise. I find that I want things I'll never live to see, such as a gun-free America; things I might live to see if kept on ice for a good while, such as a robust welfare state; and things I could see right now if only the "anti-racist" dust would settle, such as an America proceeding to dissolve the significance of race. Of course, there's something missing from that list of progressive credentials: ideology. With ideology out of the way, it's easy to notice the symbiotic relationship between reactionary demagogues and radical dilettantes who can't grasp the harm done to the progressive cause by talking in Marx Deco jargon, trashing intelligible feminism for the sake of current vogues in gender politics, and proselytizing for neoracism. It's an error to shrug off the offenses of leftists, arguing that those of rightists pose the greater threat to the general good, because the two are joined. If the Right is the villain, the Left is its unwitting lackey. Take away the lackey, and the villain faces a harder task. Replace the lackey with a competent, popular alternative, and the villain is nowhere.
A small but conspicuous element, the radical Left, is undermining progressive politics at a dangerous juncture. That's why a progressive-in-the-wild may feel compelled to stake out contrarian territory. For The Family Property, this has meant urging the Democratic Party to reject bad company, scorning the game of advocacy and the gamble of trying to move society by audacious feats of leverage, and blushing for progressives who fall into intellectual arrogance by aping academics. It has meant taking a stand against biological class warfare and, now, witnessing the fall from self-conscious enlightenment to vicarious savagery that comes of allyship with exotic bigots. Now and then, it has seemed necessary to mention that all this commentary comes from a primitive leftist point of view and not a Trump-averse rightist one.
Contrarian territory has its dangers. It's a wild wood in which you can stray off till you forget where you came from. A commentator with a large readership may, on finding that the majority of readers give the warmest reception to the most biased polemics, get to be an ingratiating polemicist. The term for this phenomenon is audience capture. Actually, it's a hazard for contrarians and non-contrarians alike.
❖
A contrarian is a swimmer against the current. In the context of political commentary, the term can mean one who criticizes prevailing trends regardless of their orientation. More to the point, though, it distinguishes a dissident member of a camp from a member of a naturally opposing camp. A conservative who criticizes the progressive camp is not a contrarian. But what does it mean to be a contrarian progressive?
A camp is both a patch of ground and a gathering of people. The progressive ground is my proper place, but that doesn't mean that others who have gathered there are people after my own heart or that their visions and strategies — let alone their fads and conceits — seem right to me.
I've always detested Leninism and groaned at Marxism. I shun the fabrication Marxism-Leninism and maintain that Marx was reduced to a political phantasm when Lenin stepped off the train a century ago. His presence thereafter took the form of busts in the offices of Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist commissars, whose tyranny he justified to the world's Leftists while they underwent initiation into the new party-line Mysteries. By the time Khrushchev conclusively discredited Stalin, the Left had learned to shuttle between motte and bailey while heaving false Scotsmen over the stockade in defense of a humanitarian ideology that, in practice, couldn't be stopped before it killed again. Stalin? He was not a true socialist. Mao? Not a true socialist. Nor was Tito or Kim or Mengistu or Ceausescu or Mugabe.... Ah, but Castro! As brutal dictators-for-life go, that was more like it. His victims numbered in the thousands at most. He kept up appearances as a man of the people. Here, then, is an admissible socialist. And yet so is the progenitor of them all, Lenin, in circles where time and etiquette have effaced the record of his wholesale atrocities.
Long ago, I recoiled from the new fetishes of a liberalism starting its slide into academic captivity and later realized that I was mostly seeing a cohort of people who had earned self-assurance being supplanted by people born to it. Though I belonged to the second cohort, it was my lot to feel rubbed the wrong way. The incomparable Michael Kelly cut straight to the heart of the matter:
The left-liberalism that considers itself the true faith (but which eschews the name it appropriated and ruined and now calls itself progressivism) ... is an ideology of self-styled saints, a philosophy of determined perversity. Its animating impulse is to marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many people as possible: If it were a person, it would pierce its tongue.
When the liberal degeneration had been going on for years, conservatism miraculously overtook it in a rapid collapse under the weight of a demagogue. Thereupon I witnessed the squandering of opportunity by my own side and knew that the opportunity had been misread. Donald Trump had cleared the way for a competent, sensible liberal alternative that might have brought the founding of a sustainable Democratic majority in national politics. However, ideological progressives thought they saw an opening for revolution.
This was either the end of democracy or the prelude to an election cycle in which anyone should be able to defeat the incumbent and his collaborators. To the Left, that prospect was a mesmerizing light in the sky, a sign that might appear once in many lifetimes. When conditions were right for anyone to win control of the US Government, the Left had a chance. The day had come to spring out of the wilderness and take the tide at the flood.
And so we saw an attention-grabbing push to normalize democratic socialism. Not social democracy, which would, alas, have been hard enough to sell, but democratic socialism. This was alien to most of the Democratic Party's officeholders and faithful voters. In the congressional elections of 2018, candidates who espoused socialism of any kind were outliers among successful Democrats. The four progressives (including three socialists) soon to be renowned as The Squad contributed nothing to the party's return to power in the House of Representatives, as they had taken over safe seats. Nevertheless, they inspired liberal commentators to treat them as the vanguard of a new wave in American politics. It tended to be forgotten that not every wave is of the future. Meanwhile, young Democrats who had proved their broad appeal — the very people the party needed as its faces of the future — became faces in the crowd.
Confidence in a leftward destiny had already begun to fortify itself with intoxicating visions of demographic triumph. These were wishfully drawn from a 2008 US Census Bureau report predicting that the US would become a majority-minority country by 2040. However, that calculation rested on a system of racial classification absurdly like the one-drop rule of the Jim Crow South, and the dreams that were spun from it rashly assumed, to boot, that non-white immigrants would be leftist in their own politics or would at least attach themselves to their leftist patrons. It was all an egoistic delusion of the Left. There can be no functioning majority where there is no cohesion except among activists. The thesis of demographic triumph was faulty in all its parts, but social-justice progressives' delight in it was so much greater than their critical faculties that they believed it. They chattered about it. They publicly exulted in it. Yet when Republicans told the same story with the aim of alarming white voters, they deplored it as though they'd never heard of such a thing.
Critical faculties recede where intellectual arrogance advances. Threadbare Marxist brain-cudgellers would at least have avoided the mirage of demographic triumph, but their sleek Leninist successors differ from them in a way that must be sought between the lines of theory. The theoretical difference is that Marxists concern themselves with the interests of urban workers while Leninists concern themselves with the modernization of agrarian societies. V. I. Lenin merged the two through the medium of vocabulary but also introduced a strategic difference that has transformed the character of the "Marxist-Leninist" Left.
Thus, Lenin thought of his modernizing revolution as a proletarian revolution and of workers playing the leading role in the revolutionary movement. They do so, however, as represented by intellectuals or, as Lenin put it more often, by his Party or simply by "us." The Introduction of "the Party" is generally seen as Lenin's major modification of or contribution to Marxism, but it does not merely add an organizational element that was absent in Marx's Marxism. Marx's social-democratic successors had added such an element long before Lenin did, but it continued to express Marx's concern with the working class. The introduction of Lenin's "party of a new type" involves a change of the ideology from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals. The Party is, and "we" are, in Lenin's mind clearly distinct from the working class and must lead that class where it would otherwise not go. In short, it is intellectuals, not workers, who give direction to and lead the revolutionary movement.
— John H. Kautsky, 1994, Marxism and Leninism, Not Marxism-Leninism, p. 43
This change "from a laborite ideology to one of intellectuals" is the element of Marxism qua Leninism that survives most vigorously in the American Left. Intellectuals are to lead; to lead where they list, with nothing to keep them from improvising signposts out of brainstorms as they go along.
There was the crusade to nowhere about defunding the police, and now the centrifugal quackery about sex and gender. There's the academy-driven denial of racial progress. There's the climate cult that shuns discussion of ways to cope with impacts that are already inevitable, preferring a monomaniacal campaign against fossil fuels combined with maximal alarmism about the future. In case after case, the Left demonstrates the impulse to proud perversity noted by Michael Kelly. Encompassing all the individual cases is a sphere of solipsism wherein no arc is particularly long, but each one bends toward self-justification.
❖
The pursuit of progress, in the sense of social improvement, is the following of reasoned imagination and disinterested compassion. You may believe that imagination and compassion have already brought us to a state of equipoise worth keeping, in which case you're a conservative; or that they've overshot the mark, in which case you're a reactionary; or that we ought to follow them further, in which case you're some sort of liberal or progressive. But there's a separate sort of progressive who rearranges "the following of reasoned imagination and disinterested compassion" into an imaginative leading of reason in ruthless devotion to one or more interests. Such progressives are the temperamental descendants of Lenin's we. It's because of them, the branded Left, that I stay busy as a contrarian.
Thursday, May 16, 2024
The Magical Other
When I was growing up in the American South, my parents were friends with a couple from Britain. The woman was English; the man, Scottish. She was my father's secretary, which is to say the entire staff of a hole-in-the-wall agency. (Think The Maltese Falcon, adapted to advertising.) He was a landscape gardener who had come to the New World to oversee a project and had, appropriately, put down roots.
Both were estimable human beings. By no design of their own, they were also, to me, emissaries from the outside world. The wife was a kindred spirit of certain American aunts — ladylike, kindly, becardiganed — but a spirit brought on the wind from far away where the Queen's English was spoken. The husband was a revelation. Compact, angular, brown as a nut, clear in his thinking, which he set forth in the Queen's English insofar as the royal diction rose to his own, he was a Scot among Scots and, no doubt, a gardener among gardeners. It was a fact that he knew more of the world than anyone else in our living room. He was unfailingly civil, but he was not a man to be bested in a matter of opinion. His effect on me can be gathered from my older brother's complaint that I hung on his every word (having theretofore hung on my brother's).
This man's sister and their aged mother once came over from Scotland to visit. Naturally, they joined the occasional gathering at our place. The mother was quiet and retiring. The sister was quiet but not retiring. Her quietude was that of serene self-assurance. Whereas her brother had stimulated my mind, she began to captivate it. There was no flirtatious charm involved in this. I no longer remember a word she said. I don't even positively remember the subject matter. What I do remember are her voice and manner as she talked to me — to me alone, at one side of the group, addressing me by name again and again. Her speech had a plaintive lilt that suited it to the work of moral enthrallment. I found myself being gently thrown off balance and made to feel that I could recover only by coming around to her way of thinking; that not to come around would be to prove unworthy of a rare mentor.
Perhaps the conversation had to do with religion. If so, it was hardly my first experience of religious exhortation. It was, though, my first exposure to that lilt; or, rather, to the oracular foreignness which it signified. It was my first encounter with the Magical Other.
That encounter had two salutary effects. It awakened me to the world and, at the same time, to the threat of manipulation. I'm pleasantly surprised to recall that I was capable of noticing that threat, especially in an Other who was undoubtedly benign and undeniably possessed of lulling gifts. To the extent that her spiel instilled a sense of guilt and a fear of unworthiness, it stirred wary reflection. Why, I wondered, should I feel this way?
The wariness of that moment prepared me for subsequent encounters, both direct and mediated, with Magical Others. To a green American, the most bewitching of Others are those who hail from what was once called the Third World (after the dominant capitalist and communist worlds) and is now called the Global South. Individual personalities may come across as abashingly unspoiled or as penetratingly shrewd, but all benefit from a sense that these people have lived, that they're of the real world. While we have nestled in lofty plastic-feathered nests, they have roamed barefoot down among nature's truths. So runs our tremulous conceit. But if we're even half as intelligent as we're green, we'll notice that truths are not the foremost things that endure out there in the world of down-to-earth Others. Parts of that world owe their otherness to a lack of virtues that rightly matter to us very much. Those unborn virtues are most easily named as superannuated vices: inescapable hierarchy, crushing patriarchy, and entrenched corruption, to name but a few.
I once had a neighbor who had immigrated to the United States from a country in South Asia as a young man. During our first extended conversation, he turned to musing on something he missed about the old country: a style of community life in which one could always drop in at a friend's house unannounced. In our suburban American community, that was out of the question. I began to deplore the spreading influence of American culture, which threatened to change the character of countries like his native one; but the first words were barely out of my mouth when he turned on me in undisguised exasperation as if to say, "Not that again! Not you, too!" He went on to explain that his old country was, apart from certain fondly-remembered graces, in dire need of such a change. There, every phase of society had been customarily corrupt for so long that no indigenous process of reform was possible. The only hope of improvement, he said, lay in wholesale Americanization. That was the word he used. Not modernization, not democratization, but Americanization. And he was sternly in earnest.
Then there's bigotry. The concept of race may be a European invention, as our own social-justice authorities tell us, but bigoted non-Europeans have always managed nicely without the concept. What is race, after all, but one of many motifs for lumping people together and thereby submerging their humanity? What color is to one bigot, clan is to another, and caste is to yet another. Each classification, to the respective bigot, is a far deeper thing than any rationale for classifying that meets the eye of an outsider. "Let me tell you about those people," says the exotic oracle. "You don't know them as I do." Thus begins a bitter tale of perfidy, rapacity, exploitation, and aggression — all on the side of "those people" and all inherent in a collective character. General calumnies that would get a domestic bigot banished from one's circle may pass for revelations because one fails to reflect that there is such a thing as an exotic bigot. American society doesn't differ from others in the existence of racism, but in the constant grappling with it.
Most of the American students currently devoting themselves to passionate "pro-Palestinian" (effectively pro-Hamas) activism may, as thoughtful observers attest, be innocent of personal antisemitism. However, they've subscribed to a partisan view of a foreign ethnic conflict, a view in which agitation against the state of Israel is inseparably overlaid on Jew-hatred. The Columbia University campus newspaper has identified Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group allegedly linked to Hamas through a fiscal sponsor, as organizers of the protest encampments at Columbia and beyond. As far as US-based supporters of Hamas are concerned, the underlying antisemitism can remain hidden. Or it can be implicitly displayed in a callous attitude toward atrocities against Israeli civilians. Or it can be treated as a lesson long since learned by Magical Others and now imparted to green Americans: that Jews are proper objects of loathing.
Hamas itself is fundamentally antisemitic, even unto its antecedents. Its 1988 charter makes that clear, and the 2017 revision which apologists tout as a laying-down of religious fanaticism and a taking-up of respectable nationalist aspirations is merely the sort of update that might be suggested by a public-relations consultant. It rings the changes on its subject in a way that brings it within the affective sphere of civilized discourse while substantively leaving it where it began. SJP, with its blatant antisemitism and its endorsement of violence, appears to serve as the terminus of a supply chain for importing poison seed into America.
Leftists' cool indifference to the bestiality demonstrated by Hamas on October 7 — the sadistic massacre of civilians that spared neither infants nor their grandparents — the orgy of rape and mutilation — is something new. It's literally alien to the American political arena. This acceptance of the utmost depravity is no outgrowth of American hatred or American arrogance, much less among Americans who fancy themselves progressive. It had to sprout from seed brought from far away where pitiless war on other Others is destiny.
Both were estimable human beings. By no design of their own, they were also, to me, emissaries from the outside world. The wife was a kindred spirit of certain American aunts — ladylike, kindly, becardiganed — but a spirit brought on the wind from far away where the Queen's English was spoken. The husband was a revelation. Compact, angular, brown as a nut, clear in his thinking, which he set forth in the Queen's English insofar as the royal diction rose to his own, he was a Scot among Scots and, no doubt, a gardener among gardeners. It was a fact that he knew more of the world than anyone else in our living room. He was unfailingly civil, but he was not a man to be bested in a matter of opinion. His effect on me can be gathered from my older brother's complaint that I hung on his every word (having theretofore hung on my brother's).
This man's sister and their aged mother once came over from Scotland to visit. Naturally, they joined the occasional gathering at our place. The mother was quiet and retiring. The sister was quiet but not retiring. Her quietude was that of serene self-assurance. Whereas her brother had stimulated my mind, she began to captivate it. There was no flirtatious charm involved in this. I no longer remember a word she said. I don't even positively remember the subject matter. What I do remember are her voice and manner as she talked to me — to me alone, at one side of the group, addressing me by name again and again. Her speech had a plaintive lilt that suited it to the work of moral enthrallment. I found myself being gently thrown off balance and made to feel that I could recover only by coming around to her way of thinking; that not to come around would be to prove unworthy of a rare mentor.
Perhaps the conversation had to do with religion. If so, it was hardly my first experience of religious exhortation. It was, though, my first exposure to that lilt; or, rather, to the oracular foreignness which it signified. It was my first encounter with the Magical Other.
That encounter had two salutary effects. It awakened me to the world and, at the same time, to the threat of manipulation. I'm pleasantly surprised to recall that I was capable of noticing that threat, especially in an Other who was undoubtedly benign and undeniably possessed of lulling gifts. To the extent that her spiel instilled a sense of guilt and a fear of unworthiness, it stirred wary reflection. Why, I wondered, should I feel this way?
The wariness of that moment prepared me for subsequent encounters, both direct and mediated, with Magical Others. To a green American, the most bewitching of Others are those who hail from what was once called the Third World (after the dominant capitalist and communist worlds) and is now called the Global South. Individual personalities may come across as abashingly unspoiled or as penetratingly shrewd, but all benefit from a sense that these people have lived, that they're of the real world. While we have nestled in lofty plastic-feathered nests, they have roamed barefoot down among nature's truths. So runs our tremulous conceit. But if we're even half as intelligent as we're green, we'll notice that truths are not the foremost things that endure out there in the world of down-to-earth Others. Parts of that world owe their otherness to a lack of virtues that rightly matter to us very much. Those unborn virtues are most easily named as superannuated vices: inescapable hierarchy, crushing patriarchy, and entrenched corruption, to name but a few.
I once had a neighbor who had immigrated to the United States from a country in South Asia as a young man. During our first extended conversation, he turned to musing on something he missed about the old country: a style of community life in which one could always drop in at a friend's house unannounced. In our suburban American community, that was out of the question. I began to deplore the spreading influence of American culture, which threatened to change the character of countries like his native one; but the first words were barely out of my mouth when he turned on me in undisguised exasperation as if to say, "Not that again! Not you, too!" He went on to explain that his old country was, apart from certain fondly-remembered graces, in dire need of such a change. There, every phase of society had been customarily corrupt for so long that no indigenous process of reform was possible. The only hope of improvement, he said, lay in wholesale Americanization. That was the word he used. Not modernization, not democratization, but Americanization. And he was sternly in earnest.
Then there's bigotry. The concept of race may be a European invention, as our own social-justice authorities tell us, but bigoted non-Europeans have always managed nicely without the concept. What is race, after all, but one of many motifs for lumping people together and thereby submerging their humanity? What color is to one bigot, clan is to another, and caste is to yet another. Each classification, to the respective bigot, is a far deeper thing than any rationale for classifying that meets the eye of an outsider. "Let me tell you about those people," says the exotic oracle. "You don't know them as I do." Thus begins a bitter tale of perfidy, rapacity, exploitation, and aggression — all on the side of "those people" and all inherent in a collective character. General calumnies that would get a domestic bigot banished from one's circle may pass for revelations because one fails to reflect that there is such a thing as an exotic bigot. American society doesn't differ from others in the existence of racism, but in the constant grappling with it.
Most of the American students currently devoting themselves to passionate "pro-Palestinian" (effectively pro-Hamas) activism may, as thoughtful observers attest, be innocent of personal antisemitism. However, they've subscribed to a partisan view of a foreign ethnic conflict, a view in which agitation against the state of Israel is inseparably overlaid on Jew-hatred. The Columbia University campus newspaper has identified Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group allegedly linked to Hamas through a fiscal sponsor, as organizers of the protest encampments at Columbia and beyond. As far as US-based supporters of Hamas are concerned, the underlying antisemitism can remain hidden. Or it can be implicitly displayed in a callous attitude toward atrocities against Israeli civilians. Or it can be treated as a lesson long since learned by Magical Others and now imparted to green Americans: that Jews are proper objects of loathing.
Hamas itself is fundamentally antisemitic, even unto its antecedents. Its 1988 charter makes that clear, and the 2017 revision which apologists tout as a laying-down of religious fanaticism and a taking-up of respectable nationalist aspirations is merely the sort of update that might be suggested by a public-relations consultant. It rings the changes on its subject in a way that brings it within the affective sphere of civilized discourse while substantively leaving it where it began. SJP, with its blatant antisemitism and its endorsement of violence, appears to serve as the terminus of a supply chain for importing poison seed into America.
Leftists' cool indifference to the bestiality demonstrated by Hamas on October 7 — the sadistic massacre of civilians that spared neither infants nor their grandparents — the orgy of rape and mutilation — is something new. It's literally alien to the American political arena. This acceptance of the utmost depravity is no outgrowth of American hatred or American arrogance, much less among Americans who fancy themselves progressive. It had to sprout from seed brought from far away where pitiless war on other Others is destiny.
Saturday, April 13, 2024
The Archimedean Gamble
"Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the earth." For one small creature to move the rest of creation, it would take only a fulcrum and a cosmic lever. Centuries later, stock-market speculators dreamed of parlaying small stakes into great fortunes. That would take only borrowed capital and some brilliant choices: leverage.
Now, in America, small clusters of political adepts sit atop gigantic levers whose tips they've wedged into the national brain.
An extreme case as to the smallness of the interest represented versus the greatness of the lever is the "trans lobby" that has lifted its constituency far above most others in sociopolitical salience. Larger interest groups with at least equally pressing needs for attention have got nothing like the activist network that operates ubiquitously, overbearingly, in service to people who have had a sex change. No lobby has ever succeeded in — or had the undreamt-of effect of — distorting shared reality in so many particulars or at such a fundamental level. It's been only a few years since the cultural Left expanded its standard string of epithets for the oppressors of society from "white male" to "white straight cisgender male"; but soon the radioactivity of the cisgender blighted the male (and female) and even the straight (and gay) in leading-edge public discourse. Then trans orthodoxy slipped its leash and begot non-binary orthodoxy. At this rate, the world in which we all need to function will lapse back, epistemically, into the primordial soup — in honor of a precious few.
A similar case in more condensed form is that of the Palestinian lobby. The activist network itself appears to be smaller and organizationally less substantial (though a study of its funding would be instructive); but it has made the most of its prior standing with the Left, at the same time drawing energy from Israel's recklessness in Gaza, to gain inordinate prominence in US politics. A president of the United States can neither dictate to a determined Israeli government nor abruptly sever ties with it, but American leftists absorbed in the Palestinian cause are nevertheless concentrating their anger on President Biden and other Democrats at the risk of bringing back Donald Trump and his enablers in this year's elections. As usual with activists of the Left, they think more about influence within their own collective than about the benefits of collectively controlling the government. If they prove instrumental in transferring state power to the Right, as they have proved in reviving the ancient scourge of antisemitism, it will be a dramatic consequence of leverage: a modern nation of some 340 million upended by the Palestinian interest.
The greatest case of leverage is the domestic race-based one, the one commonly condensed into the terms DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), CRT (critical race theory), BLM (Black Lives Matter), and anti-racism (meaning remedial neoracism). Here, the interest supposedly represented is larger than in the trans and Palestinian lobbies, though still just a bit over 14% of the adult population. It certainly does not amount to the combined numbers of arguably non-white people, as there is no such interest group either extant or incipient. This lobby, though it may cast its rhetorical net more broadly, is understood to claim representation of black Americans. However, even that claim is extreme. The black Americans envisaged by the small cluster of political adepts atop this lever are the black members of the cluster itself: ideologues who re-imagine the requirements and aspirations of working-class black communities as hankerings to abolish the police, to decriminalize the drug trade, and to normalize academic weakness.
The race lobby gets most of its ideological content from black academics. It gets its strength primarily from white activists and secondarily from a host of everyday white progressives anxious to lend their weight to a social-justice cause. It bestows its benefits on vigilantes, black and white, who gratify themselves by bullying the politically disfavored at DEI sessions, indoctrinating children, shaming students, or laying traps for the unwary wherever people interact. In concept, the work being done is that of "decentering": the truly Archimedean feat of dislodging the biggest part of society from its too-conspicuous position. The requisite fulcrum is the idea of white guilt, compressed into a monolith and held in place by white progressives' earnest team spirit. (In the heyday of #MeToo, progressive men would talk to each other about "taking one for the team" by enduring false accusations of sexual misconduct — which they failed to recognize as indulgent gallantry.)
However, reliance on white progressives' gallant modeling of guilt and repentance is a poor long-term strategy for the race lobby. Not only will it tend to pall on the models themselves, but the greater number of Americans who have been direct or indirect objects of the bullying, indoctrination, shaming, and trapping will lose patience. Unlike the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, which won hearts and minds by assailing unnatural barriers, the race lobby will lose them by unnaturally assailing comity. That other movement was a destined bid for justice. This one is an opportunistic scheme.
The opportunism is not solely a matter of picking up political influence in a seller's market for specious arguments (that nothing has really changed since the Jim Crow era, that white people and all their works are inherently racist, that past discrimination calls for present discrimination). The group at the public center of the race lobby, which might have risen above common special-interest activism, proceeded to sink below it. At first, the words "Black Lives Matter" were readily understood as a statement, a declaration of truth around which all people of goodwill could rally. Opinion surveys showed that a large majority of Americans responded favorably to those words. But by the third year of the "racial reckoning" that began with the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police, that response had faded markedly. In the meantime, the words had hardened into a brand fraught with alienating associations; particularly the news that a flood of donations to the Black Lives Matter organization had benefited insiders even as some local chapters and families of police-violence victims complained of not receiving promised funds. Under the individual control of one remaining BLM founder, Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter Network Foundation spent nearly $6,000,000 on a 6,500-square-foot house, which it called both a campus for (apparently rare) content-production activities and a safehouse for persecuted activists. Cullors nevertheless posted videos of herself making private use of the house: cooking in its kitchen, observing the first anniversary of George Floyd's death — the end of a banner year for fund-raising — with Champagne. She resigned from the organization soon after that anniversary. Her personal acquisition of luxurious properties along the way would perhaps be no one's business but hers if her journey from working-class Marxist to purchaser of mansions made more sense.
Meanwhile, variously-affiliated activists in the Black Lives Matter movement and the greater race lobby have given themselves to the Omnicause (race, climate, Palestine, what-have-you) with the predictable result that they're seen to vanish into the throng of a progressive bazaar rather than stand as a rallying-point for racial justice. Now they must expect trust and support only from people who subscribe to all their causes instead of the larger set who subscribed to their original one. Full trust and steadfast support become unlikely in any case, since a unifying Omnicause implies commerce in some ulterior object or objects — whether socialism or anarchism or habitual activism. Grand though the race lobby is, it will disintegrate because its moral currency is bogus.
But nothing could be more certain to disintegrate than the cloud of casual epiphanies that has accumulated in the sex-and-gender space: that sex is not binary; that there's no such thing as biological sex, anyway; that a declaration of altered gender is sufficient to make it so. Among the people touting this ad hoc successor to fundamental knowledge, there's probably not one who would bet anything of value on its survival beyond the typical lifespan of a sociopolitical fad: about three years. As a challenge to established language and meaning, it's feckless. As a challenge to established science, it's in a class with Lysenkoism. This too shall pass, but not harmlessly.
The whole delirious season of leverage shall pass. And then what? If it has ended with a sigh of exhaustion, America may patiently sort out the visions from the hubris and apply bits of them to its historical work in progress. But what if it has ended with a snap? What if it has culminated in unendurable strain on a majority that knows itself to be wronged? The activist minority that yesterday propagated its will through the mass of the center-left may today find itself alone at the peak of ambition — suddenly unsupported, doomed to tumble into the maw of a reactionary beast. Sitting atop a gigantic political lever is a lot like riding a tiger.
Now, in America, small clusters of political adepts sit atop gigantic levers whose tips they've wedged into the national brain.
An extreme case as to the smallness of the interest represented versus the greatness of the lever is the "trans lobby" that has lifted its constituency far above most others in sociopolitical salience. Larger interest groups with at least equally pressing needs for attention have got nothing like the activist network that operates ubiquitously, overbearingly, in service to people who have had a sex change. No lobby has ever succeeded in — or had the undreamt-of effect of — distorting shared reality in so many particulars or at such a fundamental level. It's been only a few years since the cultural Left expanded its standard string of epithets for the oppressors of society from "white male" to "white straight cisgender male"; but soon the radioactivity of the cisgender blighted the male (and female) and even the straight (and gay) in leading-edge public discourse. Then trans orthodoxy slipped its leash and begot non-binary orthodoxy. At this rate, the world in which we all need to function will lapse back, epistemically, into the primordial soup — in honor of a precious few.
A similar case in more condensed form is that of the Palestinian lobby. The activist network itself appears to be smaller and organizationally less substantial (though a study of its funding would be instructive); but it has made the most of its prior standing with the Left, at the same time drawing energy from Israel's recklessness in Gaza, to gain inordinate prominence in US politics. A president of the United States can neither dictate to a determined Israeli government nor abruptly sever ties with it, but American leftists absorbed in the Palestinian cause are nevertheless concentrating their anger on President Biden and other Democrats at the risk of bringing back Donald Trump and his enablers in this year's elections. As usual with activists of the Left, they think more about influence within their own collective than about the benefits of collectively controlling the government. If they prove instrumental in transferring state power to the Right, as they have proved in reviving the ancient scourge of antisemitism, it will be a dramatic consequence of leverage: a modern nation of some 340 million upended by the Palestinian interest.
The greatest case of leverage is the domestic race-based one, the one commonly condensed into the terms DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), CRT (critical race theory), BLM (Black Lives Matter), and anti-racism (meaning remedial neoracism). Here, the interest supposedly represented is larger than in the trans and Palestinian lobbies, though still just a bit over 14% of the adult population. It certainly does not amount to the combined numbers of arguably non-white people, as there is no such interest group either extant or incipient. This lobby, though it may cast its rhetorical net more broadly, is understood to claim representation of black Americans. However, even that claim is extreme. The black Americans envisaged by the small cluster of political adepts atop this lever are the black members of the cluster itself: ideologues who re-imagine the requirements and aspirations of working-class black communities as hankerings to abolish the police, to decriminalize the drug trade, and to normalize academic weakness.
The race lobby gets most of its ideological content from black academics. It gets its strength primarily from white activists and secondarily from a host of everyday white progressives anxious to lend their weight to a social-justice cause. It bestows its benefits on vigilantes, black and white, who gratify themselves by bullying the politically disfavored at DEI sessions, indoctrinating children, shaming students, or laying traps for the unwary wherever people interact. In concept, the work being done is that of "decentering": the truly Archimedean feat of dislodging the biggest part of society from its too-conspicuous position. The requisite fulcrum is the idea of white guilt, compressed into a monolith and held in place by white progressives' earnest team spirit. (In the heyday of #MeToo, progressive men would talk to each other about "taking one for the team" by enduring false accusations of sexual misconduct — which they failed to recognize as indulgent gallantry.)
However, reliance on white progressives' gallant modeling of guilt and repentance is a poor long-term strategy for the race lobby. Not only will it tend to pall on the models themselves, but the greater number of Americans who have been direct or indirect objects of the bullying, indoctrination, shaming, and trapping will lose patience. Unlike the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, which won hearts and minds by assailing unnatural barriers, the race lobby will lose them by unnaturally assailing comity. That other movement was a destined bid for justice. This one is an opportunistic scheme.
The opportunism is not solely a matter of picking up political influence in a seller's market for specious arguments (that nothing has really changed since the Jim Crow era, that white people and all their works are inherently racist, that past discrimination calls for present discrimination). The group at the public center of the race lobby, which might have risen above common special-interest activism, proceeded to sink below it. At first, the words "Black Lives Matter" were readily understood as a statement, a declaration of truth around which all people of goodwill could rally. Opinion surveys showed that a large majority of Americans responded favorably to those words. But by the third year of the "racial reckoning" that began with the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police, that response had faded markedly. In the meantime, the words had hardened into a brand fraught with alienating associations; particularly the news that a flood of donations to the Black Lives Matter organization had benefited insiders even as some local chapters and families of police-violence victims complained of not receiving promised funds. Under the individual control of one remaining BLM founder, Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter Network Foundation spent nearly $6,000,000 on a 6,500-square-foot house, which it called both a campus for (apparently rare) content-production activities and a safehouse for persecuted activists. Cullors nevertheless posted videos of herself making private use of the house: cooking in its kitchen, observing the first anniversary of George Floyd's death — the end of a banner year for fund-raising — with Champagne. She resigned from the organization soon after that anniversary. Her personal acquisition of luxurious properties along the way would perhaps be no one's business but hers if her journey from working-class Marxist to purchaser of mansions made more sense.
Meanwhile, variously-affiliated activists in the Black Lives Matter movement and the greater race lobby have given themselves to the Omnicause (race, climate, Palestine, what-have-you) with the predictable result that they're seen to vanish into the throng of a progressive bazaar rather than stand as a rallying-point for racial justice. Now they must expect trust and support only from people who subscribe to all their causes instead of the larger set who subscribed to their original one. Full trust and steadfast support become unlikely in any case, since a unifying Omnicause implies commerce in some ulterior object or objects — whether socialism or anarchism or habitual activism. Grand though the race lobby is, it will disintegrate because its moral currency is bogus.
But nothing could be more certain to disintegrate than the cloud of casual epiphanies that has accumulated in the sex-and-gender space: that sex is not binary; that there's no such thing as biological sex, anyway; that a declaration of altered gender is sufficient to make it so. Among the people touting this ad hoc successor to fundamental knowledge, there's probably not one who would bet anything of value on its survival beyond the typical lifespan of a sociopolitical fad: about three years. As a challenge to established language and meaning, it's feckless. As a challenge to established science, it's in a class with Lysenkoism. This too shall pass, but not harmlessly.
The whole delirious season of leverage shall pass. And then what? If it has ended with a sigh of exhaustion, America may patiently sort out the visions from the hubris and apply bits of them to its historical work in progress. But what if it has ended with a snap? What if it has culminated in unendurable strain on a majority that knows itself to be wronged? The activist minority that yesterday propagated its will through the mass of the center-left may today find itself alone at the peak of ambition — suddenly unsupported, doomed to tumble into the maw of a reactionary beast. Sitting atop a gigantic political lever is a lot like riding a tiger.
Monday, March 4, 2024
Entrification
The time is the late 19th century. A certain Transylvanian nobleman has been busy, in the words of a certain Dutch professor, "leaving his own barren land — barren of peoples — and coming to a new land where life of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn." The new land in question, multitude of corn notwithstanding, is England. It could easily be America. An immigrant to either of those modern countries could be there in quest of a new life, but Count Dracula is there in quest of new sustenance for his old life. That's another matter. New lands are under no obligation to serve ancient ends.
Now the time is the early 21st century; the time of the 2024 primary elections in the state of Michigan, USA, to be exact. A national columnist has come for the sort of coffee-shop interview in which columnists often plumb the local mind. However, his appointed interviewee is neither a local nor some common coffee-drinker, but Nihad Awad, a Palestinian-American immigrant based in Washington, DC, and National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). After the massacre in southern Israel perpetrated from Gaza by Hamas last October, his public remarks on the subject ranged over hill and dale of common decency in a "catch me out if you can" manner that ended in his being caught out. The Biden administration condemned his palpable callousness and stopped cooperating with his organization.
Awad went to Michigan, where a noteworthy proportion of the population is of Arab descent, to urge a Democratic revolt against President Biden for continuing to support Israel despite its intense bombing of Gaza. That sounds pretty much like a normal campaign to influence public policy, but Awad's conversation with Charles M. Blow of The New York Times produced this:
This man's compulsion to punish at any cost and his Bronze Age patter about "my enemy" and "my friend" belong to the Mideast, not the Midwest. In a candid moment, he displayed the nihilism of his ancestral culture more than was good for an American political cause. Reader comments on the interview were preponderantly negative. Some readers deplored the language of vengeance; others expressed alarm at what they were beginning to see as the wholesale importation of a foreign feud. Both the interview and the general reaction to it should be eye-opening. Immigrants to the Land of the Free mustn't think they can make so free as to set up arrogant cultures-in-exile replete with all their ancient hatreds and morbid habits: the very plagues which many people have tried to escape by moving to America. And liberal-minded Americans ought not to believe in welcoming immigrants on the immigrants' terms. The novel form of nation that defines itself by its political ethos doesn't need demographic continuity to remain itself, but it does need continuity — which for some immigrants will mean rebirth — at the level of political ethos.
I chose to approach my subject, which I call by the disposable name of entrification, through a case that features concrete entry into the US before abstract entry into a sphere of political influence. It boasts a clear beginning, a fairly striking middle, and at least the risk of a self-inflicted end. However, entrification is not some effect of immigration. It's the change wrought in American political life by flooding all zones with entryism.
The practice known as entryism is commonly associated with 20th-century Leninist movements, whose leaders would prompt rank-and-file members to join moderate parties or politically neutral organizations for the purpose of radicalizing them from within. Today this practice is rampant on all sides, in varying degrees of calculation.
It's hardly necessary to recount how a cohort of Americans bred in the downstream shallows of Leninism has entered and then influenced news organizations, NGOs, university administrations, local governments, and the national Democratic Party. As for the Democratic Party, left-wing enthusiasts have gained such prominence in the collective mind of the news media that they're almost universally referred to as the party's "base" although they constitute a small minority well to the left of the median Democratic voter.
While "the Republican base" always refers to a numerically dominant mass of voters, it offers a study in entryism more or less loosely defined depending on the conclusion one draws from the study. The most accurate conclusion is probably the one that refers back to the Republican "Southern strategy" and related efforts to build electoral strength by pulling in socially conservative, not to say racist, voters who had little in common with the party's plutocratic establishment. After Trump — an outsider himself — personally captured those voters in the presidential campaign of 2016, he turned their subversive influence to his own advantage.
The Republican case seems pretty rough-and-ready as entryism goes; one in which a force for radicalization was carelessly introduced by the establishment itself and then harnessed to the purposes of a latter-day interloper. It's true that there's another factor to be weighed: a marked sympathy with foreign autocrats and particularly with Russia's Vladimir Putin. At this writing, a powerful faction of congressional Republicans is blocking military aid to Ukraine, much to Putin's advantage. Meanwhile, Trump has conspicuously refrained from holding Putin responsible for the death in captivity of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny. Trump has long been accused, without substantiation, of being in Putin's power. If he is, the Republican case suddenly becomes one of entryism in the extreme. However, a conscientious weighing of available evidence tends to the conclusion that Trump and his ilk simply like autocrats. They're probably not foreign agents, but rebels without a plan. Either way, they've taken over a major political party and started using it to wreak havoc. They're filling in part of a national pattern of entrification.
American parties and institutions that ought to steady the life of a democratic republic are now scenes of anarchic disruption from within. Cannon to the right of us, cannon to the left of us volley and thunder from captured heights. And in front of us, figures loom out of antiquity heralding nihilism. That, at least, must be thrown back.
Now the time is the early 21st century; the time of the 2024 primary elections in the state of Michigan, USA, to be exact. A national columnist has come for the sort of coffee-shop interview in which columnists often plumb the local mind. However, his appointed interviewee is neither a local nor some common coffee-drinker, but Nihad Awad, a Palestinian-American immigrant based in Washington, DC, and National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). After the massacre in southern Israel perpetrated from Gaza by Hamas last October, his public remarks on the subject ranged over hill and dale of common decency in a "catch me out if you can" manner that ended in his being caught out. The Biden administration condemned his palpable callousness and stopped cooperating with his organization.
Awad went to Michigan, where a noteworthy proportion of the population is of Arab descent, to urge a Democratic revolt against President Biden for continuing to support Israel despite its intense bombing of Gaza. That sounds pretty much like a normal campaign to influence public policy, but Awad's conversation with Charles M. Blow of The New York Times produced this:
He doesn't only want Biden to be politically corrected; he wants him politically crushed.
...
Awad said he doesn't like Trump and doesn't welcome a second Trump term, but he's prepared to accept that outcome for the sake of punishing Biden. "I'm going to live under Trump, because I survived under Trump, because he's my enemy," he says. "I cannot live under someone who pretends to be my friend."
This man's compulsion to punish at any cost and his Bronze Age patter about "my enemy" and "my friend" belong to the Mideast, not the Midwest. In a candid moment, he displayed the nihilism of his ancestral culture more than was good for an American political cause. Reader comments on the interview were preponderantly negative. Some readers deplored the language of vengeance; others expressed alarm at what they were beginning to see as the wholesale importation of a foreign feud. Both the interview and the general reaction to it should be eye-opening. Immigrants to the Land of the Free mustn't think they can make so free as to set up arrogant cultures-in-exile replete with all their ancient hatreds and morbid habits: the very plagues which many people have tried to escape by moving to America. And liberal-minded Americans ought not to believe in welcoming immigrants on the immigrants' terms. The novel form of nation that defines itself by its political ethos doesn't need demographic continuity to remain itself, but it does need continuity — which for some immigrants will mean rebirth — at the level of political ethos.
I chose to approach my subject, which I call by the disposable name of entrification, through a case that features concrete entry into the US before abstract entry into a sphere of political influence. It boasts a clear beginning, a fairly striking middle, and at least the risk of a self-inflicted end. However, entrification is not some effect of immigration. It's the change wrought in American political life by flooding all zones with entryism.
The practice known as entryism is commonly associated with 20th-century Leninist movements, whose leaders would prompt rank-and-file members to join moderate parties or politically neutral organizations for the purpose of radicalizing them from within. Today this practice is rampant on all sides, in varying degrees of calculation.
It's hardly necessary to recount how a cohort of Americans bred in the downstream shallows of Leninism has entered and then influenced news organizations, NGOs, university administrations, local governments, and the national Democratic Party. As for the Democratic Party, left-wing enthusiasts have gained such prominence in the collective mind of the news media that they're almost universally referred to as the party's "base" although they constitute a small minority well to the left of the median Democratic voter.
While "the Republican base" always refers to a numerically dominant mass of voters, it offers a study in entryism more or less loosely defined depending on the conclusion one draws from the study. The most accurate conclusion is probably the one that refers back to the Republican "Southern strategy" and related efforts to build electoral strength by pulling in socially conservative, not to say racist, voters who had little in common with the party's plutocratic establishment. After Trump — an outsider himself — personally captured those voters in the presidential campaign of 2016, he turned their subversive influence to his own advantage.
The Republican case seems pretty rough-and-ready as entryism goes; one in which a force for radicalization was carelessly introduced by the establishment itself and then harnessed to the purposes of a latter-day interloper. It's true that there's another factor to be weighed: a marked sympathy with foreign autocrats and particularly with Russia's Vladimir Putin. At this writing, a powerful faction of congressional Republicans is blocking military aid to Ukraine, much to Putin's advantage. Meanwhile, Trump has conspicuously refrained from holding Putin responsible for the death in captivity of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny. Trump has long been accused, without substantiation, of being in Putin's power. If he is, the Republican case suddenly becomes one of entryism in the extreme. However, a conscientious weighing of available evidence tends to the conclusion that Trump and his ilk simply like autocrats. They're probably not foreign agents, but rebels without a plan. Either way, they've taken over a major political party and started using it to wreak havoc. They're filling in part of a national pattern of entrification.
American parties and institutions that ought to steady the life of a democratic republic are now scenes of anarchic disruption from within. Cannon to the right of us, cannon to the left of us volley and thunder from captured heights. And in front of us, figures loom out of antiquity heralding nihilism. That, at least, must be thrown back.
Thursday, December 14, 2023
Scrooge and Shelley
I revert now to my lymphoma because I've locked horns with a cold virus despite an inappropriate assortment of white blood cells. (The cell imbalance and the cancer marker have been creeping up for some time.) The family doctor knows about my underlying condition, and the specialist, when apprised of the details, said I should be all right.
Let it be understood that they both take quite a serious interest in my wellbeing. My current hematologist is a young man whose careworn heart sometimes shows through his professional composure in a way which I count to his credit. One day when I sat down for my periodic test results, I found him looking distinctly weary. When I mentioned it, he confided that a case had not gone well; that this sort of thing was to be expected in his line of work, but still.... Of course there was no more that he could say to me. As for my own case, the numbers were food for thought but not overly so. He'd see me again in three months.
Several quarters have gone by since then. Has it been a full year? Now, with the data gaining on me in gently rising waves, we entertain the idea of resuming treatment — or not, if it seems that, all things considered, it's not imperative. The last such conversation included my doctor daughter, who had gone along for the purpose of getting up to date on my case.
Then I caught a November cold that is now a December one. It occurs to me that I've never kept a cold so long since an occasion in my single life when I was foolishly bent on "just getting through" one without proper care or even heating. This time, the care and the heating are top-notch and yet the family doctor's reinforced prescriptions seem to drag me up a grade by small degrees. My capacity for just getting through, which nicely complemented my folly for so long, has become a thing of the past. I don't really doubt that I'll get over this cold and be all right till some later date. However, at the season of the year when a Victorian miser might be prompted to snarl about reducing the surplus population and we ourselves see a world plunged in cruelty and violence, it feels less morose than usual to muse a while on natural death.
The English language, not atypically among modern languages, causes us to speak of "being" dead. We say, for example, "when I'm dead," which seems to mean that death is a state and that one will someday exist in that state. We may claim that when we say dead we mean non-existent, but the I and the am make a counter-claim. When Dickens begins A Christmas Carol by proving to us that Jacob Marley "was as dead as a door-nail," he succeeds only in establishing Marley's inertness; not his nihility. Sure enough, the essence of the man presently comes calling.
How hard, really, should we try to purge every suggestion of persistent "being" from our speech and thought? By my own lights, I'm a Christian. That's an audacious way to frame a confession of faith, but it's a fact: there are Christians, and there are Christians. I must say I don't expect to wake up after death and find myself lounging on a cloud or strolling through some underpopulated meadow. I'd be surprised to find myself at all. What I expect is to be utterly transmuted for the remainder of a long cosmic journey. That idea of transmutation, whether accurate or not, is a screen through which the thinking I can never pass. And God? God I conceive to be constitutive wisdom and beckoning goodness, a spirit seen as in a glass darkly but also glimpsed in the light that
The author of those lines, Percy Bysshe Shelley, gained a reputation for irreligious thought early in life, when he and a friend were expelled from Oxford for issuing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He continued to call himself an atheist and might even have shrugged if told how his dissent from religion was to be simplified and amplified in years to come. However, the briskly materialist atheists who have claimed Shelley as one of their own would not have produced his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (quoted above) or anything like this:
There are atheists, and there are atheists. It seems that Shelley's revolt was against organized religion and the anthropomorphic notion of God as the central figure in a creation myth — which is, after all, a human conceit.
Ebenezer Scrooge (surrogate for Dickens's predominantly Christian readership) listens to Marley's ghost speak in terms of humble Christian charity. We receive essentially the same urging from Shelley, who ends his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" with nothing less than a prayer:
A spirit that binds you to fear yourself and love all humankind can be adored as intellectual beauty, but it cannot be reduced to intellect. It must be a beautiful something suspended in the intellect. Shelley doesn't differentiate that thing from the divine. Rather, he overcomes the error of thinking we see the divine in what amounts to a superior sort of graven image, an idealized humanoid projection. Religion can meet the poet on common ground by supposing individual sentience to be a lens that focuses the pervading universal Spirit with various results. His poem does impart the two most vital religious teachings, snatched from the fire of idolatry. There's no call to be scandalized by that. And to claim that the gravity of the teachings owes nothing to a sense of the divine would be disingenuous.
As I was saying, I don't expect to find my I still functioning after death. For that matter, even Marley's ghost promises no such futurity to Ebenezer Scrooge. He frightens Scrooge with a vision of life misspent and oblivion denied; the implicit alternative being life well spent and oblivion granted. That's all right. It's a pleasure to think the world will keep turning and the universe will keep doing whatever it does, with the little fillip of conjecture that one pure grain of me will be gathered in and borne swiftly on.
It's taken several days to write this, but it will take more of them to cure the cold. My body's resilience has lost the old snap. I am getting better, though, and don't doubt that before long I'll again be my ageless self tramping the countryside with my equally ageless wife. Like a child, I feel indestructible at those times when I'm not feeling rotten. I fully expect to write again. Still, mindful that the statement "There's always a next time" is not strictly true, I'll take this occasion to say that my life has been a richly blessed one that led me to the politics — and, come to think of it, the theology — of gratitude. Being part of the world is a great gift.
When death does come, I'll try to take it well. You who remain will please feel bound to fear yourself, and love all humankind.
Let it be understood that they both take quite a serious interest in my wellbeing. My current hematologist is a young man whose careworn heart sometimes shows through his professional composure in a way which I count to his credit. One day when I sat down for my periodic test results, I found him looking distinctly weary. When I mentioned it, he confided that a case had not gone well; that this sort of thing was to be expected in his line of work, but still.... Of course there was no more that he could say to me. As for my own case, the numbers were food for thought but not overly so. He'd see me again in three months.
Several quarters have gone by since then. Has it been a full year? Now, with the data gaining on me in gently rising waves, we entertain the idea of resuming treatment — or not, if it seems that, all things considered, it's not imperative. The last such conversation included my doctor daughter, who had gone along for the purpose of getting up to date on my case.
Then I caught a November cold that is now a December one. It occurs to me that I've never kept a cold so long since an occasion in my single life when I was foolishly bent on "just getting through" one without proper care or even heating. This time, the care and the heating are top-notch and yet the family doctor's reinforced prescriptions seem to drag me up a grade by small degrees. My capacity for just getting through, which nicely complemented my folly for so long, has become a thing of the past. I don't really doubt that I'll get over this cold and be all right till some later date. However, at the season of the year when a Victorian miser might be prompted to snarl about reducing the surplus population and we ourselves see a world plunged in cruelty and violence, it feels less morose than usual to muse a while on natural death.
The English language, not atypically among modern languages, causes us to speak of "being" dead. We say, for example, "when I'm dead," which seems to mean that death is a state and that one will someday exist in that state. We may claim that when we say dead we mean non-existent, but the I and the am make a counter-claim. When Dickens begins A Christmas Carol by proving to us that Jacob Marley "was as dead as a door-nail," he succeeds only in establishing Marley's inertness; not his nihility. Sure enough, the essence of the man presently comes calling.
How hard, really, should we try to purge every suggestion of persistent "being" from our speech and thought? By my own lights, I'm a Christian. That's an audacious way to frame a confession of faith, but it's a fact: there are Christians, and there are Christians. I must say I don't expect to wake up after death and find myself lounging on a cloud or strolling through some underpopulated meadow. I'd be surprised to find myself at all. What I expect is to be utterly transmuted for the remainder of a long cosmic journey. That idea of transmutation, whether accurate or not, is a screen through which the thinking I can never pass. And God? God I conceive to be constitutive wisdom and beckoning goodness, a spirit seen as in a glass darkly but also glimpsed in the light that
like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
The author of those lines, Percy Bysshe Shelley, gained a reputation for irreligious thought early in life, when he and a friend were expelled from Oxford for issuing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He continued to call himself an atheist and might even have shrugged if told how his dissent from religion was to be simplified and amplified in years to come. However, the briskly materialist atheists who have claimed Shelley as one of their own would not have produced his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (quoted above) or anything like this:
There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.
— Note on Queen Mab, published two years after The Necessity of Atheism
There are atheists, and there are atheists. It seems that Shelley's revolt was against organized religion and the anthropomorphic notion of God as the central figure in a creation myth — which is, after all, a human conceit.
Ebenezer Scrooge (surrogate for Dickens's predominantly Christian readership) listens to Marley's ghost speak in terms of humble Christian charity. We receive essentially the same urging from Shelley, who ends his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" with nothing less than a prayer:
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
A spirit that binds you to fear yourself and love all humankind can be adored as intellectual beauty, but it cannot be reduced to intellect. It must be a beautiful something suspended in the intellect. Shelley doesn't differentiate that thing from the divine. Rather, he overcomes the error of thinking we see the divine in what amounts to a superior sort of graven image, an idealized humanoid projection. Religion can meet the poet on common ground by supposing individual sentience to be a lens that focuses the pervading universal Spirit with various results. His poem does impart the two most vital religious teachings, snatched from the fire of idolatry. There's no call to be scandalized by that. And to claim that the gravity of the teachings owes nothing to a sense of the divine would be disingenuous.
As I was saying, I don't expect to find my I still functioning after death. For that matter, even Marley's ghost promises no such futurity to Ebenezer Scrooge. He frightens Scrooge with a vision of life misspent and oblivion denied; the implicit alternative being life well spent and oblivion granted. That's all right. It's a pleasure to think the world will keep turning and the universe will keep doing whatever it does, with the little fillip of conjecture that one pure grain of me will be gathered in and borne swiftly on.
It's taken several days to write this, but it will take more of them to cure the cold. My body's resilience has lost the old snap. I am getting better, though, and don't doubt that before long I'll again be my ageless self tramping the countryside with my equally ageless wife. Like a child, I feel indestructible at those times when I'm not feeling rotten. I fully expect to write again. Still, mindful that the statement "There's always a next time" is not strictly true, I'll take this occasion to say that my life has been a richly blessed one that led me to the politics — and, come to think of it, the theology — of gratitude. Being part of the world is a great gift.
When death does come, I'll try to take it well. You who remain will please feel bound to fear yourself, and love all humankind.
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