Login
I for one am very grateful to Treena and Carol Balds for having turned me on to MSNBC, which if you haven't watched in a while, is now terribly important. My old friend Eddie Glaude from Princeton is on Morning Joe! This is a really really important segment that aired just now. We are dealing with incipient fascism here. Get it straight.
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
The modern Republican Party doesn’t give a damn about democracy – it is rapidly becoming the American fascist party.
This party is devoted to three ideas: that power is only legitimate if Republicans wield it, power must be acquired by any means necessary, and the party is accountable to no one once it has it.
Are Democrats protesting your inaction on gun violence? Expel them!
Does the public want to speak against your extremist proposals? They’ve got 30 seconds each – if you let them speak at all.
At risk of losing your supermajority due to changing demographics? Bypass your own state constitution and redraw legislative districts early to keep it!
Lose the election? Deny the outcome!
And what if one of your own is charged with a crime? Reject it all as a witch hunt, and undermine the justice system to protect them.
My friends, the Republican Party is only committed to maintaining its own power. Nothing more, nothing less.
We must continue to protest this radicalism in the streets, and punish it at the ballot box.
Authoritarianism is not just an external threat. It’s right here in America.
I have never advocated political violence in any published writing or in any talk. You can read the talk I posted yesterday, for instance, and you will find no recommendation of left-wing political violence, indeed no mention of that possibility. Yet it inevitably happens, in Q&A sessions, that the topic comes up. The way it generally unfolds is that my listeners or readers observe that I make the following claims: the existing political system lacks democratic legitimacy; those in a position to wield institutional power are unresponsive to popular demands; and both major parties fully support police violence, with the Republicans growing ever more tolerant and even encouraging of vigilante violence. Hence, in order to reach the kind of goals I lay out, it seems like some form of political violence would be inevitable. So am I advocating political violence?
I personally do not intend to commit any political violence, nor would I encourage anyone else to do so. I’m at a loss, though, for why anyone considering such a thing would view me as an appropriate confidant or mentor. I am far from an activist. My praxis is objectively that of a middle-class liberal intellectual, and even on the level of individual choices and the various virtue-signals one tends to send, I am not particularly left-coded (e.g., I’m not a vegetarian or vegan).
In fact, I don’t want to be advocating anything at all — I want to undertake a purely analytic and diagnostic project. The problem is that contemporary academic culture will not allow me to do that. If I didn’t put down some kind of prescriptive agenda, people would simply hallucinate one on my behalf. So yes, I end Neoliberalism’s Demons by saying that we need to eliminate the market society in favor of a radically democratic planned economy. That’s the only way to make sure something like neoliberalism can never happen again. That’s the political goal that informs my analysis. It’s not “realistic,” but at least it’s explicitly stated, so I don’t have to bat away a bunch of phantom political agendas that people arbitrarily foist on me.
How do we get from here to there? I don’t know. I’m an idea guy. If we can get there by reading books and talking about them, then I should be among the leaders of the movement. If it takes something else, then maybe I can play more of a supporting role — ideally teaching classes, but maybe writing up some propaganda or even washing dishes or something.
My real agenda, my personal investment, for my intellectual project is that I want to figure out and share what I take to be the truth about our political situation, to the best of my ability. And as far as I can tell, the truth is that we are in a really, really bad position. The power of nonviolent resistance has been exhausted at this point. The media is too corrupt and the political class too brazen and arrogant to concede to popular demands, no matter how much we maintain the moral high ground. The electoral system continues to be a site of political blackmail rather than a venue for the public to influence the direction of public policy. No governing party in any major country seems to be at all serious about addressing the most urgent problems we face — and those problems are genuinely urgent.
In that situation, with all formally legitimate means of political change cut off, my question — which I repeated quite forcefully in the Q&A for my talk on Milton Friedman at Wabash College — is what the powers that be think is going to happen. We are told that the human race is facing environmental ruin that will kill millions, and yet no one with the power to do anything actually does it. Is it not inevitable that someone will take matters into their own hands?
It does seem inevitable — but it largely isn’t happening. And that in itself is an aspect of our situation that I struggle to understand. It seems like in a world where people open fire into random crowds because they can’t get laid or drive into protestors because they’re worried the Jews are going to replace them, someone would get it into their heads to physically threaten the people destroying the world. Why aren’t they?
Maybe the problems seem simply too big, or the system too unassailable. (I’m presumably contributing to the latter in some small way with my buzz-killing analysis.) Maybe the record of the times that the left gave itself permission to use unlimited ultra-violence have disillusioned people — maybe that means so poisons the end as to render it unattainable. Or maybe everyone has decided, collectively, that if we can’t get it done via the institutional structures that happen to exist at this moment of history, then that’s a sign we shouldn’t do it. It works if you work it! And center-left parties can eke out small, largely symbolic gains that the right completely swamps, until our cities flood and our crops fail and millions upon millions of people die in unescapable heat waves.
What can we do as individuals in the face of this mass apathy and willful ignorance? Not fucking much! Not much at all. As the man says, the wrong life cannot be lived rightly — yet there is a certain duty to truth, a certain obligation to acknowledge it as the wrong life. But despite everything, despite the inauguration of Donald Trump, despite the fall of Roe v. Wade and the resulting rise of almost unimaginable misogynistic state violence, despite the fact that the weather is obviously unfixably permanently broken and half the country burns down every year — despite all that, there are a lot of people out there who really don’t see that it’s the wrong life, who in fact are offended that I would criticize the team they’ve chosen to back in the game of politics, a team that is surely made up of good people who are doing their best.
And to that, all I can say is: no. That’s the one ethical duty that I fully and unhypocritically live by. I don’t know what they will do with it — probably nothing. It will probably even make them dig in their heels and become even more apathetic and willfully ignorant, more attached to whichever team of ghouls and empty suits they’ve pathetically identified as fans of. But they can’t say no one ever told them.
Trust_In_The_Law
akotsko
What fun. Let's all have a jolly old flirt with fascism shall we? Italy, Israel, USA, UK, Russia. Anyone else want to join in?
This is how we turn Earth into lone and level sands stretching far away. Literally.
A thousand Ozymandias statues, proclaiming how "great" they made their nation.
The only thing we can logically do is COOPERATE. We are facing a planet-scale problem. You think global warming gives a shit about your precvious national boundaries?
It used to be obvious with pollution. I remember Chernobyl. "Radiation doesn't care about national b boundaries" was how ecocriticism said it at the time.
But ecocriticism wasn't loud enough. And ecocriticism was subtweeting "theory" aka flirting with symbolic fascism lite by using words like "dwell." And ecocriticism was positioning itself as "ecology is neither left nor right."
So ecocriticism was about as useful as a chocolate teapot for addressing the real issue at hand, which we all knew about since the mid-1950s (and before if we'd really been paying attention): global warming.
Time to stop kicking this fascist ball around and do what you were always going to have to do anyway: COOPERATE.
This is where Shelley, who stood up to the institutional bullying at Eton at age thirteen aka nailed it young and was ridiculously brave to the point of foolhardy, really really comes in handy:
Since when did “structural” mean “immutable”?
You “have to” see it that way, you poor sad bigot people. You have to because you can’t. You can’t because you know. But you make like you don’t. The effort.
So you have no room to cry. So you have no room to smile. So you have no room to really cry. So you have no room to laugh. So you have no room to really really cry. So…
You talk Jesus but you missed a spot. Right on the exit wound you don’t even know you have. Forgiveness. Mercy.
Don’t you see? You’re creating the horrible rigid structure you’re aiming at. You’re creating it for yourself too.
There is a moral panic about transgender issues sweeping America. While it is raging most viciously in the Republican Party — see: the odious speeches at CPAC last week; Tennessee banning drag shows and gender-affirming health care for minors; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requesting information from public colleges about students who have sought hormone treatment and reassignment surgeries — the panic’s tentacles extend much further. There is no better moment, then, to read historian Brandy Schillace’s piece about the Institute for Sexual Research, a groundbreaking facility in interwar Germany that heralded a just, humane future for gay, trans, and non-binary individuals, until fascism arrived. Schillace is at work on a book about the institute, and you can also listen to her talk about it on a recent edition of NPR’s All Things Considered:
That such an institute existed as early as 1919, recognizing the plurality of gender identity and offering support, comes as a surprise to many. It should have been the bedrock on which to build a bolder future. But as the institute celebrated its first decade, the Nazi party was already on the rise. By 1932 it was the largest political party in Germany, growing its numbers through a nationalism that targeted the immigrant, the disabled and the “genetically unfit.” Weakened by economic crisis and without a majority, the Weimar Republic collapsed.
Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, and enacted policies to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” What began as a sterilization program ultimately led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet and Polish citizens — and homosexuals and transgender people.
When the Nazis came for the institute on May 6, 1933, Hirschfeld was out of the country. Giese fled with what little he could. Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street. Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books, some of them rare copies that had helped provide a historiography for nonconforming people.
The carnage flickered over German newsreels. It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Nazi youth, students and soldiers participated in the destruction, while voiceovers of the footage declared that the German state had committed “the intellectual garbage of the past” to the flames. The collection was irreplaceable.
Gender and sexuality are a spectrum. In common discourse, we lose sight of what that means. Very Online approaches to gender and sexuality seem to say that gender and sexuality are a spectrum, but everyone is at a very specific and static spot on that spectrum. That fits with the more everyday discourse that was able to absorb the normalization of homosexuality on the condition that every individual clearly fits into one specific box. But that’s not how it is, and everyone probably understands that. Even among people who are exclusively heterosexual, there is a spectrum of how attracted they are to the opposite sex — how many partners they seek, how much monogamy is a struggle for them, how sexually motivated they are at all, etc. Enough people seem to be able to rest more or less content with monogamy that the whole thing basically “works,” but if we’re being honest, there are some people for whom it was never going to happen and who therefore never should have been expected to get married or have exclusive relationships.
Everything relating to sex and gender is like that. On the spectrum of same-sex desire, for instance, there are those for whom it’s a non-negotiable exclusive preference and others who could make a basically heterosexual lifestyle work, and a whole range in between. We see this from history — there are a lot of men, for instance, who were known to be primarily same-sex attracted but were able to hold together a marriage and have children. By the standards of the time, those marriages may have even been relatively happy! And on gender identity, there are people who absolutely need to transition or else their life will be constant suffering and others who can tolerate living in public as their assigned identity as long as they have some private release, and a whole range in between.
The political strategy of the “closet” was to require those people who exist in the more liminal spaces to hide, then relentlessly stigmatize and persecute the people for whom conformity was simply never going to be an option. The latter incentivizes the former — you’d only choose to live as homosexual or trans if the cost of denying it was worse than the social costs of acknowledging it. All but the youngest generations are familiar with this dynamic at first-hand. Every 80s kid, including myself, looks back and is horrified at the casual homophobia that was flung around the schoolyard in those tense days just before public acceptance of homosexuality gained critical mass. We were being groomed, from a very young age, to be homophobes. And the goal of that project was emphatically not to convert homosexuals or trans people, at least not among intelligent conservatives. The goal was to use the non-negotiable homosexuals and trans people to make sure that everyone who could stand to conform, would conform. Those who couldn’t conform and were never going to be able to conform were made into living sacrifices to normative heterosexuality.
That’s why the strategy of coming out of the closet was so powerful. The entire system depended on the idea that sexual minorities were freaks and monsters, and the majority could sustain that belief because so many people with those inclinations kept them secret. Once they stopped keeping it secret — often at great personal cost to the earliest generation of activists — the dynamic could no longer hold. Sexual minorities were not those strange scary outsiders. Everyone knew someone who belonged to a sexual minority, often intimately. The strategy was so powerful that it led to the legalization of gay marriage by a conservative Supreme Court — a move that would have been unthinkable in my childhood, but seemed obvious and long overdue when it finally happened.
Now the first generation of children is growing up for whom this new regime of gender and sexuality is normal. And what many — including myself — would now like to see is an inverse of the strategy of the closet. Instead of a default assumption of conformity unless the non-normative is totally irresistible, the approach should be to allow young people to experiment and see what really works for them. Hence young people should ideally be allowed to follow their curiosity and attraction before claiming a sexual orientation. More kids will wind up dating or even having some intimate contact with people of the same sex than wind up “being” homosexual in the long haul, and that’s okay and natural.
The same would apply to gender identity. In the past, only those who were in indisputable agony could pursue some kind of gender reassignment, and only at the cost of pathologizing themselves. Now, however, people who are uncomfortable with their gender identity — which, if we’re honest, includes almost everyone, at least at some times and to some degree — should be able to experiment, including living publicly as a member of the target gender (i.e., “socially transitioning”). The assumption is that more people are going to experiment than wind up adopting a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth, and especially more than wind up surgically transitioning. And that’s okay!
In contrast to the closet system, which aimed to churn out as many passable cisgendered heterosexuals as feasible, this system aims to make sure that no one whose life would have been enriched by non-normative gender or sexual practice is missed. The reality of evolution probably indicates that the majority of people will still remain other-gender attracted and have gender identities that correspond with that assigned at birth. But the number of people who wind up claiming non-normative identities will be larger than it was under conditions of systematic persecution and repression.
And the number of people who temporarily try out those other identities can be expected to balloon, given the realities of the teenage libido and the quotidian body-horror of going through puberty. More people are going to pursue that faint stirring of attraction to someone of the same sex when they don’t have to worry about being beaten up after school (including by that cute boy or girl) and more people are going to see if living as the opposite gender is the solution to their discomfort with their own body than they would in a situation where such a thing would have been simply unthinkable — both conditions that held during my lifetime (meaning during the lifetime of people who are raising young kids today).
All of that is happening now, at least in areas where policy enshrines some kind of openness to gender and sexual minorities. The fact that it is happening was predictable, and it is good. It opens up a situation where fewer people have to live lives of quiet despair for the sake of fulfilling an arbitrary role. It is the one way in which our children’s lives might be better than ours.
And so of course, a vocal minority of parents absolutely hate it. In response to this massive, positive social change, they are trying to reinstitute the closet. The strategies are the same as always — tarring all sexual minorities as pedophiles, equating all non-normative practices with the most extreme (e.g., acting as though social transitioning is tantamount to irreversible surgery), stripping gender and sexual minorities of basic political rights, etc., etc. The goal cannot be to eliminate homosexuality and trans experience — every intelligent person knows that’s impossible. The goal, rather, is to make the cost of expressing homosexual inclination or trans identity so high that the marginal few who could go either way find a way to make conformity work. In other words, a hard core of people who have no choice but to express homosexual inclination or trans identity will have to live thwarted, persecuted lives to marginally increase the odds that some bigot’s son or daughter will suck it up and settle into a “normal” marriage and produce a grandchild or two, so that the next generation can in turn suck it up and conform as well.
It’s an ugly political strategy that draws in ugly people and makes them uglier. People are going to die — whether by vigilante violence, or “gay panic” or “trans panic,” or suicide — because of this. And all to perpetuate a form of life that isn’t really making anyone happy at the end of the day. Why would people spend their lives and tarnish their souls for this? They claim it’s out of love, but I think it expresses a profound hatred of their own children, or at least of what their children might be or become apart from them. Perhaps it’s even a hatred of the part of themselves that wishes it could have had free range to experiment! It’s probably not helpful to speculate about that too much in individual cases, though. The larger reality is that the political strategy of the closet was a brutal, violent system, and a brutal, violent system produces brutalized, violated people who go on to be brutal and violent.
And it is by no means obvious that they will fail in their ambition to reinstitute the closet! The strategies are right there, familiar and ready to hand. For all but the youngest generation, they are a sad kind of muscle memory. All it takes is for the forces of repression to seem stronger and suddenly a lot of people will find a way to conform — as we can already see in the rank cowardice of most ostensibly “liberal” politicians and commentators on trans issues. Surely we are all old enough to know that progress is not automatic, that social justice does not depend on the date on the calendar, that every gain is reversible. The acceptance of minority gender and sexual identities was a contingent historical achievement, and allowing those gains to be reversed will have been a contingent historical failure — on the part of people who responded to irrational hatred with a pose of “reasonableness,” flinching in the face of a bully just as most of us did in the schoolyard.
Gay_Pride_Flag.svg
akotsko
An interview with Clara E. Mattei, the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.
FreshRSS 
