cheese it, the cops!

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

But I'm Not On The Right

I'm still trying to destroy the left-right spectrum, and I'm going to do a three-part series: Why I Am Not a Leftist, Why I'm Not on the Right, and Why I'm an Anarchist, and what that means in this case. I really do think that a wretched mistake lurks at the heart of the left, starting with Marx, an unconscionable and utterly implausible detachment of means and ends.

150-year flood of mistakes

there's a real simple reason that poor folks get smashed more than rich folks by natural and unnatural disasters, as in texas right now: because political power coincides with economic power, everywhere, through all of human history, and history has given us no more obvious, consistent lesson. people can only be blinded to it by ideology. that's why some people get levees, but a million other things too. and that is why the whole history of leftism since marx, which with the exception of brief fizzings of left anarchism, is really really wrong: using the state as a mechanism for equality is just counter-productive overall and in the long haul. it is what it purports to cure: hierarchy, political and economic. and it really, really has not worked out, in public education, housing programs and a thousand other projects. this is just obvious, but is evidently non-reconsiderable.

 

insist

what i'd say about hillary against bernie is that, if you're going to have a democracy, then people's political principles or ideas or ideals should be represented, and not merely manipulated, in political space. and in particular the left side of the political spectrum has been manipulated into voting, over and over, straightforwardly, for oligarchy: precisely for what they most repudiate. y'all can do better, but you have to insist on it.

arguably technically nonsense

ross douthat: sanders is "arguably technically further to the left than trump is to the right." it seems to me like it would be hard to throw this shit around all day, as people do, without reflecting that you yourself have no idea what you could possibly mean. it doesn't seem to give even really smart people pause that the whole thing makes no sense, which is a real problem in this case, because it leads to unmeaning assertions. you can see that even douthat knows there's something wrong: "arguably technically": why not about seventeen other qualifiers?

not to get technical and shit, but just what sort of facts would be determinative in this matter? what would go to show that sanders is further to the left than trump is to the right? for decades, people have been arguing about who's left and right, or whether bill clinton or tony blair are on the left, etc. everyone who has a position somewhere along the spectrum (has an internally inconsistent position and) sees the whole line from their little point: everything to the left of their point is on the left, everything on the right is to the right, so it all depends on who's talking. but then, there is no line. also, even if there was, i don't really give a shit where any person is on it. those aren't the issues i'm worried about, and they concern social positioning rather than any substantive characterization of positions.

like i really, really don't see how people keep talking this way without quite becoming aware of their absolute inability to clarify the basic terms of their political structure. this inability issues not from their intellectual limitations but from the fact that the underlying concepts are inarguably technically gobbledygook.

it's over; nobody listens to techno

boy they are crucifying chris hughes on this tnr thing. i don't doubt that he is annoying, and you might understand that no writerly person can listen to phrases like 'vertically integrated' without wanting to poke someone in the eye. but i want to speculate that chris hughes may also be tired of the ideology that the staff represented, albeit ably considering what they had to work with. the new republic has had a number of phases of real controversy and wild debate, but i would say that over the last decade it has sunk into a basically uniform, unbelievably tired, american liberalism. this has gotten so repetitive; it so lacks any sort of imagination; it answers every problem with a bureaucracy; it basically hasn't changed since about 1932.

i hope someone like chris hughes quickly reached the point where he was just, 'am i reading that again in my own magazine? oh man that is some tired shit. why would anyone want to click on that?' the left has just got to re-think. there just can't be more more more paul krugman and hedrik hertzberg and michael tomasky, e.g.: miserable elitists and hyper-enthusiastic oppressors in the name of human liberation. there are so many things a left could be besides state state state, so many people it could encompass besides people who are simultaneously proponents of equality and extreme hierarchy, and who express their position with rigid self-righteousness and really unbelievable repetitiveness. it can't inspire anyone anymore to do anything.

and the new republic sank into the opinion-journalism mode of the moment. they present stuff as though it was propaganda: emphasizing all facts that help and none that don't, along with a constant rhetorical pounding of the same sentences and ideas. but however, their audience is 100% people who already agree with them, so whose responses are they trying to control? obviously rush limbaugh or glenn beck do the same: it's like they are desperate to persuade people who are already persuaded, desperate for the manipulated agreement of people who already agree. it's as though they are trying to utterly expunge their opponents in a debate, but their opponents aren't even there, and the only effect is to make their audience ever-more self-righteous and less self-reflective. on both sides, killing the other side is just a performance for themselves, designed so that everyone can feel superior together. why is that a worthwhile project? 

 

gruber

the jonathan gruber/obamacare scandal is devastating. in this era of incredibly stupid partisanship, the fact that it more or less unfolded on fox news makes it invisible to half the population, while making nothing else visible to the other half. the coverage by msm outlets other than fox has been unbelievably pathetic, discrediting to them, quite substantiating 'left-wing media' as a phrase encompassing, say, the new york times or the atlantic. i am telling you that you must watch some fox during a democratic administration, or you are just getting barraged with propaganda and nothing else, as this scandal shows. but it is truly as though most of the people i know are physically incapable of watching fox even for a moment. 

really what emerges is a portrayal of the way washington works now. so, gruber - mit prof/white house consultant/important source of the plan itself - starts the ball rolling by saying they'd never have got the thing through if the american people knew what was in it, that they depended on our stupidity. then it turns out that he was functioning simultaneously as an extremely well-paid consultant, and an independent authority. they took his advice on policy and on pr, then appealed to his material specifically as independent academic analysis of the aca's effects. he was writing op-eds presenting himself precisely as an independent authority, with bio squibs that did not identify his inside role. then he went out and made perhaps millions helping states with their exchanges, as pelosi and many others routinely appealed to his 'independent' research and 'mit' as evidence for the costs and benefits of the program. there were many utter disasters among the state exchanges, of course. simultaneously with this whole process, gruber was, according to himself, thinking to himself 'we've got to pull the wool over the eyes of the american public to get this thing passed and implemented'.

he was enriching himself and certainly compromising his own academic integrity and that of mit continuously. it is a very disturbing portrait of interlocked political parties/operations and academic institutions/experts, where the professors give the political positions credibility or an air of objectivity or even science, while also cashing in and moving back and forth between government and academia, one way or another. i think this should make any rational person doubt the credibility of mit professors. if you looked at the intersection of harvard, wall street, and the obama admin, you'd see the function of expertise in squishy totalitarianism, and the disturbing way that money and power flow through academic institutions, controlling every aspect of the way they are administered, who they hire, what sort of research they fund and pursue and tenure, and so on.

what you'd want to look at are things like contributions and expenditures in the endowment; uses of the research output by partisan politicians; migration of faculty into the state and migration of officials to the faculty and thence to the investment banking industry or lobbying; the ideological diversity or the reverse of the faculty; direct federal grants for research and the backgrounds of the faculty funded and the uses of research in justifying federal programs or partisan hobbyhorses, including the funding of the grants themselves; where they send their graduates. 

maybe you think that, since all harvard profs are liberals and vote democratic, they are egalitarians. well, it is time to stop listening to their yap and start attending to their actual effect: who they are and whom they hang out with and whom they are funded by and whom they serve and what they really want, which is only an ever-ascending prestige and the ascendency of their like in the various hierarchies. that the harvard or stanford administration or faculty are enemies of privilege: surely no one can possibly think something like that? withering skepticism of the research is appropriate in this situation. (ladies and gentlemen, the vast faculty of the kennedy school of government.) and i'm telling you that even humanities professors at these institutions are interlocked with the admin and political parties, and of course with the ways their own positions are funded and ways to enhance their salaries or collect the junkets or get that pic with michelle obama.

but it's the depravity of the sales strategies by the white house and the democratic party that really sticks: the condescension, the contempt for us and for the truth and for democracy, the routine miserable lack of integrity or decency in our political process, the total dedication to manipulation, the underlying incompetence.

when i figure out how to get it and embed it, i'll post the special report panel from tonight with goldberg, fournier, and krauthammer, with a report that gives a very clear account of events. obviously it's a report produced by an organization that wants to focus scepticism on the administration. but that's what we need, with regard to every administration. it's reaching the point where the nytimes is going to have to cover it, and not just cover the fact that fox is covering it as a way to discredit the story itself. to do that, the only relevant thing is to throw specific doubts on specific parts of the reporting, correct?

left behind

i do love a commie. the approach is to prevent people from buying and selling staple goods in tiny quantities on the street, which they are doing because the gov can't get them into the shops.

“These right-wing contraband groups are still at work, with their anti-national and parasitic spirit, riding on the backs of the people and sucking their blood,” Maduro said Tuesday, assuring TV viewers that the government “had neutralized the perverse effects of the economic war”.

we had a hundred years of this dreck. why is maduro pursuing this? to help ordinary people. 

anyway, the 'thinking' is a problem, but what i will never forgive the communists for is the rhetorical bilge. to this very day, the worst rhetoric in the world is produced by the communist party of china and north korean state media. back in the day they poured it out from capitals and party offices all over the world in heaping helpings, 24 hours a day, at their captive populations and at the world. it's a grim attempt to manipulate people, incessant, a dead sea of drivel, infinite in expanse. and yet the only thing it shows - and it shows this with crystal clarity - is the moral and intellectual level of the people who utter it. it makes their mindlessness and slavishness and murderousness evident to anyone who is listening anywhere at any time. no one believes or supports whatever might be clothed in the gibberish: i have no idea what that would even be like. all anyone ever did was capitulate or try to resist. people seem to be nostalgic for this idealistic moment. i'm afraid i can't understand who you are, or why, or how.

or, let me speculate. it seems impossible that anyone could want to produce language like that emitted by communism through the 20th century, or want to hear it, and if no one did, how could it happen at all? i think perhaps what it promised was an erasure of subjectivity, a cure for loneliness. if we all talk the same way at the same time, we will join together into a single subject, stomping with our giant feet into the future. this unity of all and erasure of each is actually the rapture for many political tendencies, left and right. but it's not enough to yearn to be one thing altogether. i think you'd better think about what sort of thing that is. in this case, it's a collective subject who talks like someone suffering simultaneously from paranoid schizophrenia, extreme stupidity, and murderous rage. it hardly matters though because then i won't be alone.

one of the central places we experience one another as subjects, and hence a place at which we experience both our own distinctness from one another and the various real dimensions of unity, is in linguistic communication. so i think the idea might be that if we all say the same words in unison, we would really have become one person. both the desire and its practical outcome should be critically examined, and what it amounts to on the ground is a simulation of unity achieved by the merest coercion. that draws people away from, not toward, one another.

i think totalitarian collectivists, left and right, thought that they were in a war against subjectivity. they experienced the idea that there was a private sphere of interiority as a threat, and they often denied that there coukld be any such thing. this in turn might suggest that there is no good distinction between sincere belief and external enactment, a position explored in many flavors of philosophy and psychology in the same period. (turning test; behaviorism; pragmatism (belief means 'willingness to act'); wittgenstein; various flavors of economic or materialist determinism; some forms of social constructionism that focus onn language as the site of the reality.) but then there is no real distinction between a bunch of passionate people all chanting a slogan they find compelling at a demonstration, and a huge mass of persons, forced to attend, chanting the the officially prescribed slogan under the eye of machine-gun emplacements. communism transitioned without apparent self-consciousness from one to the other. it is not necessary to believe in an integral or private self in order to reject this whole line of thinking. indeed, i hardly know where to begin to refute it, or why to bother, really; it is a sequence of howlers and unexamined metaphysical assumptions.

we might try a genealogy. on the level of intellectual history, we might say that both left and right collectivism - like the left and right themselves - emerge out of and reject romanticism in various ways. so, a clear early version of leftist collectivism is rousseau; on the right we might try herder. (we might focus on the emerging sites of general will or collective consciousness as essential to the left/right distinction: class and nation (the class is not in rousseau, quite).) but romanticism emerged in part out of a rejection of the enlightenment project, which did have elements of collectivism: for example it focused on rules of inquiry that we could all defer to. and a main thrust of romanticism as it emerged was the most extreme individualism ever articulated, an attempt to carve out an authentic sphere of subjectivity. here we might mention emerson, fuseli, poe, carlyle, kierkegaard, caspar david friedrich, baudelaire.

in addition, philosophy even of the enlightenment had been busily enclosing consciousness. we only know our own ideas: descartes, hume, and schopenhauer were agreed on that, anyway, and man did it get bad in german idealism. but also german idealism was always searching for a way out. the basic problematic in kant is how to get a world out of representations in consciousness, though i think he just made the problem more intense. hegel did find it in forms of collective consciousness, marx in a return to an actual external material world knowable by science: an enlightenment epistemology with a romantic and post-romantic politics. for the romantics were also characteristically apocalyptic and also yearning for justice. here we might go second great awakening, evangelical abolitionism, utopianism a la owen or fourier. hegel's philosophy anticipated the end of history; emerson kept hinting at it; nietzsche seemed to think that we were about to be transfigured. 

what 20th-century totalitarian collectivism of both left and right brought forward was an extremely complex response to this material. you couldn't have real collective identity in a worldthat for each person consisted in that person's representations. so it took the form of disenclosing consciousness, or opening it to the social, the nation or class or race or whatever it may be (i wish it had consistently also placed the social i  the wider world). but it was responding not to our primordial enclosedness; we are not enclosed; but to the philosophical dead end of hyper-intense individual consciousness found at the height of romanticism. both the self-enclosed idealism and the erasure of individuality entirely were fantasies, though: we've never not been distinct and non-distinct from one another and the rest of the world. the representational theory of mind was false, and the solutions assayed were quite the over-reaction.

this would all be but an interesting series of ideas or mistakes or whatnot were it not for the millions of corpses.

you and i are exactly as isolated from people and exactly as joined together with them as ever: both can be problems. no amount of coercion can ameliorate this, but i understand that everyone will keep trying. for god's sake get better writers next time round, though.

they tried to make people write novels in that key, or poetry, or symphonies. they tried to base university curricula on its shining exemplars. in the words of elvis costello: maybe they should be hung by their tongues.

  

still doing time

as you may know, i think most leftists who are left of, say, obama, are post-marxists, whatever they may say: they are still trying to make marx's predictions come true, still trying to read history through his lens. no empirical data can budge or change this at all: it has nothing to do with reality, but with the emotional momentum of a century-and-a-half old quasi-relgion started by a prophet/messiah with the power to foretell the future (admittedly, he asserted that it was scientific, but so did many eschatological preachers of the 19th century).

so here are some aspects of the content. first of all, since we haven't flown as predicted into the commmunist ecstasy at the end of history, we must still be in the phase of capitalism. so we don't even notice that capitalism and socialism have merged: that it's state/corporate economic/political/military power that's the problem. but, it has to be odd for any marxist to think that capitalism has avoided the terminal crisis as the prophet predicted. starting as long as a hundred years ago, marxists referred to the contemporary phase - whatever it was at the time - as late capitalism, a lovely expression of wishful thinking. seems like you'd get embarrassed about that as the decades tick by, and i would have suggested a number of other dialiectical phases: "late late capitalism," "extremely late capitalism", "unbelievably late late capitalism" and so on.

maybe they got too embarrassed by this approach, though they are not folks who are easily embarassed. so now we're in "neoliberal capitalism" or perhaps since we're thirty years past reagan and thatcher, we're in "late neoliberal capitalism." well the power of capital and political/miltary systems connected with it just keeps consolidating, shows no sign whatever of disintegrating: quite the reverse. so this is where climate change comes in: it will provide the terminal crisis of capitalism: it is the realization of prophecy. people, i must say, are sitting home wanting it to be as bad and imminent as possible, and asserting - while brooking absolutely no dissent - that it is as bad and imminent as possible. it's still science, too.

anyway, i have no idea why you'd want to enter into this line of thought, or even how you'd go about making yourself believe stuff like that, but it is very pitiful. the left has just got to got to got to grab something else, or worship a new messiah or something, cause this shit is boring and ridiculous and interminable. 

 

smell the reeking pile of horseshit

i have no idea what arthur c. brooks thinks he's doing in this piece, but the attempts to naturalize or biologize the left-right spectrum  are just pitiful. some folks want to imprint it on your amygdala, while others go olfactory. folks have wound themselves into such partisan tizzies that they cannot think their way outside at all; they have lost even a rudimentary power of self-reflection. they are trying to say: everyone in the whole world, insofar as they are human, is trapped in the democratic/republican, or socialist/laissez-faire dynamic forever. this would be surprising, since the whole thing is at most a couple of hundred of years old, and both sides are miserably incoherent authoritarianisms. of course brooks also goes for the jonathan haidt chestnut defining liberals as those who oppose authority and conservatives as those who enthuse about it. this too is surprising since every single liberal solution to every single thing is the state the state the state, which is just coercive authority, whatever people may have convinced themselves it is (our collective identity etc). and one thing i want to say about questionnaire research of the haidt variety: it shows either that liberals are anti-authoritarians, or that they are skull-crushingly self-deluded. seriously, i say the data supports either hypothesis equally, which might make one reflect on the methodology just a bit. fortunately we have an external reality - the actual solutions advocated and the actual political system as it stands - by which to measure the truth of this answer.

anyway, at least start grappling with this: people in dallas are more conservative than people in chicago. men are more conservative than women. rich people are more conservative than poor people. white people are more conservative than black people. now, wouldn't this tend to entail that this is at least partly to be explained by, or that it is correlated, with a set of smell facts? we would expect, if this line of research is right, that people from dallas tend to smell different than those from chicago. and of course there is a long traditional history of the claim that poor people smell different than rich people, or black people than white people. or indeed, that their brains are different or that they have different bumps, etc.  even y'all can do better than this.

 

state and climate

it's obvious to naomi klein and to many others that capitalism is to blame for climate change; that's why it is a very convenient problem: because it obviously makes socialism ever-more urgent. but let me ask you this: how good were stalinist russia or romania, or maoist china, on greenhouse gas emissions, or environment in general? say you socialize all industry or something and prohibit people from driving cars or cooking hot dogs. what you would be doing is turning the economy over entirely to precisely the sort of people who run the government now. do you think, for example, that they'll be less concerned with economic growth than titans of industry are now? you want to put every center of power in the same hands. that is a realistic formula only for making every aspect of the problem worse.

we do not live in a capitalist world. we live in a squishy totalitarian world in which state and capital are interlocked at every location. they are pretty much equally implicated in climate change. handing more and more power to the state does not reduce the economic pressures toward expansion, etc; it just puts everything in the hands of a sclerotic bureaucracy. say you think fracking isn't the best idea we ever had. well who is responsible for fracking up pennsylvania? private companies operating in tandem with government agencies. correct? why do you think making the state the lone fracker would improve matters? 

think seriously, in general, about the nature of the 20th-century fossil-fuel economy. who developed these resources where? interlocked state/private concerns. who controlled and exploited middle east oil, for example, and who does that now? who developed the world infrastructure for the fossil fuel economy, the interstate highway system, e.g.? to recommend nationalizing or internationalizing extraction  or consumption is to recommend an even more rigid, uninterruptable, world-bestriding hierarchy. this won't even ameliorate the problem it is supposedly designed to address. as to its other effects: they don't bear thinking about.

putting all resources in the hands of the state is, if history shows anything, the very formula of corruption, and if you really do want your richest people and your bureaucrats and political flaks to be exactly the same people, this is the correct formula. on the other hand, if you want to reduce the exploitation of resources, etc, it's ridiculous.

we'll get y'all back

it should be relentlessly emphasized that the notion of collective identity has various dark sides. the idea that if 'they' kill 'our' kids, 'we''ll kill 'theirs' back treats groups rather than individuals as moral agents. really, from collective identity would follow collective responsibilty: if the gov of the usa were our collective identity you'd be responsible for the drone program or for surveiling angela merkel. well, obviously shit is a lot more complicated than that even if we are all complicit through taxation. we are less complicit in that the taxation is compelled. then again, that's why it's laughable that it really is our collective idenitity.

subversive blimp

now here's an extremely good idea: flying a blimp over that nsa installation in utah. it's whimsical, and yet it shows that there is resistance. also, it has the funny flavor of spying on the spies. it sort of suggests vulnerabilities, but in a harmless way.  it's the kind of thing you do when you can't really do anything. it's especially right that it's greenpeace and the tenth amendment center. nsa and the atmosphere of total digital surveillance shows why left and right don't matter anymore.

multi-dimensional

i think there are three ways to try to make the left-right spectrum coherent, or to say what it means: (1) state vs capital, (2) future vs past, (3) collectivist vs individualist. obviously one's positions on these dimensions need not coincide, so any particular person's positions can well be both left and right if we're using all three. that is, obviously these are not 3 ways of saying the same thing, though you might wish they were. (2) is just a bunch of wacky propaganda bullshit. people purporting to speak for or as or from the future need to chill.  i dealt with the first in the atlantic piece, or really it needs a lot more than that. the third is the grossest thing ever. just make your mind up to this: collective consciousness or decision-making is compromised by coercion. however, when the left goes 'what about the collective?' they actually do mean precisely and usually exclusively coercion. it is really the most repulsive, most disingenuous reversal one could readily imagine. 

individualism and collectivism really can't be opposed. if you and i unite, it is precisely you and i who are uniting. but still, you and i might always disagree. that could be good too.

late leftism

one thing about the left-right spectrum: it has been such a long, long slog and i am so so tired. it's just sadly fatiguing to watch the repetitions. really it's a century and a half of the same. there's always a revival of leftism in progress: new waves of intellectual marxism from adorno to zizek to pikkety - hardt and fucking negri, here to save the day - new revivals of radical unionism or something. each time it has its energizing quality: a revival of the inspiration. but each time it's harder to get it up, really. i swear, it's still ripples of 1848, itself a ripple of 1789. nothing has been so thoroughly explored and exploded historically or intellectually; the left-right spectrum is still an etiolated version of that now, for some reason. if you can't think in some way outside that, you can quiet down now; i already know what you're going to say. man the phrase 'late capitalism' is very...grueling. likewise "neoliberalism'.

little leftist and rightist totalitarians have devoured millions of people in their projects. one great contribution that they made together to history is the "cult of personailty", which you'd have to say is at least very funny. 

 

forced to be, you and me

one thing i do really see as running throughout the history of the left is an enthusiasm for collective consciousness. the idea of forging such a consciousness politically goes back at least to hobbes, though, in the modern period. but rousseau's 'general will' adds an inspiring twist and starts to frame the thing in terms of social justice. now, i am going to say that we are not fully distinct from one another, nor from the rest of the world. but the applications of this thought have been nightmarish. even in rousseau, the collective consciousness is forged by subordination (dissenters will be 'forced to be free'). 

we have an impulse to merge, to lose ourselves, to be at once expanded and erased. perhaps it is because we are sexual creatures. but truly, the idea is that if everyone could be fully subordinated by one set of rules or rulers - with the materiel to make it stick - we would finally be as one. we wouldn't be lonely anymore.

plato, in setting out his ideal polis, based it on the idea that the polis is analagous to the human self (it is divided into the same three parts, etc.). the dream of unity is old, so are the mechanisms used to simulate it (plato likes lies and eugenics, which is fairly par for the course).

i think we should agree on things and we should act in concert if the action is good. but we are also stuck with our irremediable distinction from one another, and any of us can dissent from any consensus, which is one reason we're not all one self/will/belief system together. and the consensus is very likely to be wrong, and very likely to be merely enforced.

it is not only the left, though, that likes or worships a merger of many into one. the very idea of the corporation as a legal person enshrines collective consciousness in law. hegel was as enthusiastic about the idea as marx, and called The Thing the nation or state. mussolini liked it as much as did pol pot.

in every candidate for collective identity - nation, class, race, corporation - listen to the high-flown rhetoric, and then watch the actual coercion and force by which the collective action and identity is actually achieved. what is supposed to be an antecedent reality that we're detecting (our 'social nature' etc.) is a fiction brought to a leering semblance of reality by violence.

what i hear when someone brings in the collective or the people or whatever: you have to agree with me, because you are me. so if you disagree with me you betray yourself. thus, by your own fiat i will constrain you: the whole idea calls you a betrayer of yourself in order to attack you. this is what modern political philosophy often means, bizarrely enough, by autonomy, citizenship, democracy and so on. it's what habermas means, for example.

transcend

if you read this blog, you are familiar with my perhaps somewhat incessant attack on the left-right spectrum. honestly i might have been getting a little pissy about the whole thing, and i never had much success getting anyone to sign up. but yo, it's up at the atlantic. dedicating that one to the shade of ralph waldo, baby.

i am the world

sometimes,one wonders who is more committed to collective consciousnesses and general wills, the commies or the cappies. together, we are koch!

 

right and left: threats to the nation

the pew center survey on polarization is interesting. the most dramatic result, as they emphasize, is that about a third of people who are defined as 'consistent conservatives' or 'consistent liberals' regard the other side as "a threat to the nation's well-being". obviously, both sides are right about that. as you might imagine, i am going attack "consistent', which is defined here. 'consistent' here means toeing the party line. but on each side that just means a random grab-bag of mutually incoherent positions on this and that. so, the basic right-left divide is defined in terms of anti- and pro-big-government. now, nothing about either of those positions has anything at all to do with issues like gay marriage or abortion, for example (on these and many other questions, a 'consistent conservative' has to endorse various incursions by the state into people's private lives, while the liberal position should be understood as attacking the legitimacy of various state constraints on autonomy or choice.) to be a consistent conservative on the pew scale is to be both a small-gov libertarian and an enthusiastic proponent of a big military and the domestic security state. in other words, the most consistent people on the pew scale are the people who most boldly endorse flat contradictions. these, i say, are basically social configurations or something, because they are certainly not anything like actual political ideologies; rather, they are randomly assembled collages of prejudices. seeing how passionate people are about endorsing such things at least provides some comic relief amidst the stupidity and suffering and catch-phrases.

so obviously we are suffering from our political polarization. people are always trying to prescribe a cure; mine is philosophical i guess. try to make your positions consistent not with the narcissistic empty crap of hillary clinton or ted cruz, but within themselves. don't try to be consistent with your facebook friends, but with yourself. then there will be no left/right polarization because there won't be any left and right. 

insincere

when democrats talk about income inequality, all they want is political hierarchy. when republicans talk about individual rights, all they want is economic hierarchy. neither party's ideology is compatible with even a vaguely sincere egalitarianism. 

somewhat wrong, very wrong, and extremely wrong

i watched a bunch of the last day of cpac. now i want to consider this "nuanced analysis", attributed by dan balz to henry olsen, who distinguishes four factions of the republican party: somewhat conservative, very conservative, moderates, and liberals. i say this is a perfect example of what i call "spectrum blindness": you can't see anything about anything if it has to fall on the left-right spectrum. so, rand paul, who killed the straw poll, is a severe peacenik, screamingly anti-nsa, and more or less sympathetic to gay marriage and marijuana legalization. but he's anti-welfare-state in a big way, and will start by savaging government spending. sarah palin who finished the whole thing up with a masterful if substanceless stand-up routine howled small government throughout, except for the part where she was extremely about increasing military and intelligence spending. rather a silly juxtaposition. there was a lot of anti-immigrant talk, and jesus and "pro-family" (=anti-gay) stuff came from a number of speakers. then you have heldover bushy national-security state pure huge gov hawks. now when you try to range these extremely incompatible positions by which is very and which is somewhat conservative it obviously makes no sense, and these factions are more incompatible with one another than with the obama they all hate. so, you've got to go: libertarians; neo-cons or military-security hawks; religious/social reactionairies; and chimerae such as palin. it's amazing that people can keep going 'sorta right, right, very right' when it just obviously has nothing to do with reality. who's further right: palin or paul? dan balz has no more idea than anyone else, really.

left behind

as you may be aware, i view the left/right spectrum as the most useless contraption ever patented. so here's the problem with tracing it to burke and paine. read 'common sense'. now consider it in the light of the politics of the contemporary left. oops no it's far right: pure classical liberal individualism. it's literally a tea party document, and is certainly much closer the ideology of the pauls than, say, the clintons. indeed, if you had to say, you'd say that burke is closer to obama than is paine. there just was nothing like the left/right spectrum in american politics or political thought until the late 19th century. the left originates if anywhere before marx in rousseau, with his intensely uneasy, or just fully incoherent combination of classical liberal conceptions of individual rights with 'general will' or collective consciousness. 

disrespectrum

as you may know, i reject the left/right spectrum as a way to describe anything, though sometimes i slip and use the locutions because everyone else is working with it. so the nyt or guardian, say, while in every sentence using 'crazy', also in every sentence go 'far right.' is cruz to the right of john mccain? in virtue of what? what does that mean? think of the set of positions you yourself associate with 'the american right': cheney's poisitions, say, and also rand paul's. really we need a taxonomy and not this bullshit anymore.

also i want to say this to the american left: you are outraged that someone would try to stop obamacare or whatever it may be; you want government running smoothly (and you regard protest movements as insane). now, i want you to understand what you are supporting when you support the democratic party, obama, and so on: among other things wall street in a huge way, and a total surveillance state. you are supporting the most intensely bourgeois vision of america ever articulated: government by lawyers, professors, bankers, google, and standardized-testing experts. are you comfortable with that? are you aware of that in yourself? i have this funny feeling that by your own ideals you are endorsing something terribly wrong. and you and many others are being pushed into taking a set of randomly grouped or flatly incoherent positions, or positions poised exquisitely opposite your professed principles, because you are flummoxed by this left-right bullshit.

etymology

in the oed, the earliest citation of the use of the terms 'left' and 'right' in the political-spectrum sense are in carlyle's french revolution (1837), and one supposes that the use of the concepts or this way of conceptualizing politics is somewhat earlier in france and is associated with interpretations of the 1789 revolution and its aftermaths. it does not appear in american politics, i believe, until the late 19th century; it is completely irrelevant to the american political spectrum of the early and mid- 19th century, in which the dissident wing was christian, individualist, etc. now, of course, the question of when the terms became commonplace is not the same as when the conceptuality or something like it came into being, and you could no doubt read medieval politics through left-right spectacles. you really, really shouldn't, and you should indeed jetison the whole thing imediately from your thinking.

i hope you'll be very happy together.

just an addition: neither left nor right are political positions; if they were, people would try to make them make sense or hang together or something. they're social affiliations. so here's my advice for you if you're on the right or the left: stop pretending to take positions or make assertions. it only makes you look ridiculous. smile at people who are wearing or driving the right brand, have to right haircut, live in the right region, went to the right school, and so on, and make obscene gestures otherwise. really that's all you're doing anyway.

headline:

Mexican Man Fakes Death To Avoid Gang Rape Charge Before Getting Elected As Mayor

 

Neither a Rightist nor a Leftist Be

By Crispin Sartwell

 

     One traditional task of philosophy is to examine the conceptual underpinnings of other areas of inquiry: for logical consistency, for example, or in relation to various aspects of intellectual history. A particularly urgent case is provided by the basic way we define political positions: the left-right spectrum.

    I think that the arrangement of positions along this axis - progressive to reactionary, or conservative to liberal, or socialist to capitalist, or for that matter Democrat to Republican - is conceptually confused and historically contingent. Let's take a few minutes to think about the left-right spectrum rather than from it.

     It can seem permanent and inevitable. But this taxonomy arose at earliest immediately before and during the French Revolution, in the late 18th century, with figures such as Rousseau and Burke. It only crystallized fully with the emergence of Marxism in the middle of the 19th century. Before that, or elsewhere than in the West, there have been many intellectual structures for defining and arranging political positions. There are likely to be many others after the left-right spectrum dissolves.

.

    One way people talk about left and right is in terms of time: progressives want time to continue to move forward or even want to accelerate it, taking us into a future bright with promise, while conservatives want time to stand still or even run backward to a golden age. Either approach appears to depend on a conception of time on which it is extremely malleable, its pace and direction depending on the outcome of the next election.

   I think that is incompatible with any plausible conception of time in metaphysics or in ordinary experience. No one needs to help make sure that time keeps moving forward and, proverbially, no one can stand in its way. Sarah Palin and Rafael Correa, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Beyonce, the 'stone-age' Suruwaha people of the Amazon and the prime-time hosts of MSNBC: they overlap in time, all moving temporally in the same direction at the same rate, contemporaneously. Among other moments, they all exist precisely right now.

 

    Another way that the left-right spectrum is conceived is as state against capital. This is central to contemporary American politics, as Democrats urge that government makes many positive contributions to our lives, while Republicans argue that it is a barrier to the prosperity created by free markets. On the outer ends we might identify Chairman Mao against Ayn Rand: state communism against laissez-faire capitalism.

    Much of the left wants to constrain the power of capital by increasing the power of the state, while many on the right want to reduce the power of the state in order to unleash the power of capital. Putting it mildly, the assumption of both groups that state and capital, or political power and wealth, are opposed forces, or can be pitted against one another, is not historically supported. As a matter of historical fact, political hierarchies and economic hierarchies tend to coincide. Beefing up one almost always beefs up the other.

    We might consider, for example, the relation of the NSA to Booz Allen or to Google, or the relation of Goldman-Sachs to the Department of the Treasury, or Halliburton to Defense, or regulators to the corporations they regulate. In many ways, the distinction between state and corporation in the U.S. is notional.

    As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue in their recent book The Making of Global Capitalism, capitalism arises together with the modern state, and each is inconceivable without the other. From the East India Companies to the robber barons to neo-liberalism, capitalism has depended on the state to project force; subdue, train, and control populations; and curtail competition.

     Communism of the variety practiced in Maoist China or the Soviet Union only represented a slightly different and even more extreme merger of state and capital, placing both squarely in the hands of party bureaucrats who lived in luxury and had at their disposal an abject population. Marx prescribed placing banking, transportation, and communication into the hands of the state, an evidently unpromising direction in which to pursue human equality. Contemporary China, the EU, the United States, and the Islamic Republic of Iran are all intensifying and increasingly sophisticated mergers of polity and economy.

 

 

    One way to see the incoherence of the left is to focus on one of its basic values: equality. The means proposed by the left to increase economic equality almost always increase political inequality, because these means consist of larger state programs: that is, of more resources and rules, coercion and surveillance in the hands of officials or state contractors, including in welfare-type programs. But wealth flows toward power, and vice versa, and it is plausible, I believe, to argue that ever-more pervasive state power has coincided with ever-more extreme and chronic structural inequalities of resources.

    The right runs into similar problems with the concept of liberty. Right-wingers' commitment to individual rights is often baldly incompatible with their enthusiasm for the security state or opposition to gay marriage or marijuana legalization. Probably, both left and right were invented by the people who became 'the left'. But 'the right' has encompassed an extraordinary range of positions, from fundamentalism to fascism to libertarianism. These positions are at least as incompatible with one another as any of them is with American liberalism, for example.

 

    Indeed, we might think of all the positions that fall comfortably anywhere on the left-right scale as a single ideology, because they all in practice prescribe extremely pervasive hierarchies, and hierarchies tend to coincide. We tend to oscillate between an emphasis on state and corporate hierarchies, while the overwhelming fact is that they are not distinct; the thing grows ever larger.

    If this criticism can even be meaningfully articulated, then the left-right spectrum should not be uncritically pre-supposed as a neutral or factual way of characterizing political positions. It needs to be established. People who find impossible the task I suggested earlier  - thinking about it rather than from it - accept it as a sheer irrational dogma.

    Left and right are arrangements in practical politics, and many political parties in many parts of the world understand themselves as falling along that spectrum somewhere. But as a framework or taxonomy of political positions, or for the purposes of, say, research in political science, it has got to be optional. You've got to keep open the possibility that it is a flawed or tendentious paradigm or could be replaced with a better explanatory framework. If not, then you are yourself embroiled in the ideologies that you're supposed, in political science or political philosophy, to be trying to understand; you are inquiring in a circle.

    As a first move, I'd suggest replacing left and right with up and down. We might usefully think about political positions in terms of whether they seek to constitute political/economic inequalities or to dismantle them.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches in the political science department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is Political Aesthetics.

 

 

i love the way you love

Ayn Rand and Vlad Lenin, Kim Il Sung and Barry Goldwater, Barack Obama and Rand Paul, Francois Mitterand and Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro, Friedich von Hayek and Leo Trotsky, Alain Badiou and Augusto Pinochet, for all I know, disagreed on several matters. But they agreed on this, or said they did, or have been represented as saying they did, even if they acted entriely incompatibly with it: the state was a force that was historically pitted against private capital. To reduce one was to increase the other and to increase one was to reduce the other. They vary inversely and the balance between them that you recommend constitutes the fundamental way of characterizing your political position. From an anti-authoritarian, anti-statist, or anarchist point of view, this spectrum stretches from authoritarianism on the one end to authoritarianism on the other, with authoritarianism in between. It makes anything that is not that incomprehensible. It narrows all alternatives to variations on hierarchy, structures of inequality, or profoundly unjust distributions of power/wealth. And also as a single ideology, it is merely false. Massively, quite obviously false; throughout the last five centuries, economic and political hierarchies have been massively mutually reinforcing. This is not to say that in some local moment the balance could really shift according to some left or right political progam; it is meant to point out that the choice is extremely constructed and incoherent.

 

as anselm argued, that is a vocal performance than which no greater can be conceived in soul music, proof of the existence of god. it's dynamic, baby.

 

that's - yes! - little beaver and willie clarke doing everything from b.b. to shaft.

constitutional terrorists

so now everyone (including maybe joe biden) is chorusing terrorists! about the tea party. (richard cohen is late to the nihilist party.) nocera says they are "waging jihad on the american people." and you were getting ticked with hints that obama was unamerican? the rhetorical pitch is excruciating; there's no hiigher place to jack it up to. ok, tell you what, you can have these tropes as long as you don't mind at all when i call nancy pelosi a maoist who hates god and is trying to destroy our sacred american way of life. it's true that obama isn't a muslim. he's a satanist, etc. so chill out about that; surely it's a fairly mild criticism. and just don't start appealing to your reasonableness and fact-based opinions. obviously we're all well beyond that.

i'll insist on this: if someone takes a shot at michele bachmann or rand paul, or opens fire at a vbs, i want joe nocera and richard cohen to accept exactly as much responsibility for that as they assigned to right-wing or anti-muslim or anti-immigrant blogs for the norway shootings, or to sarah palin on gabby giffords. remember last time you said 'words have consequences' etc? then think about the idea that tea partiers are terrorists and jihadists and nihilists who are trying to destroy our country and who are beyond the reach of rational discussion.

why

i think that the mainline left wants government growth in order to accomplish specific admirable goals: the amelioration of poverty, for example. but i also do think that there's an underlying commitment to statism almost no matter what, because the basic idea is that the state is all of us together; it's our collective action and identity; it ameliorates not only poverty (well...) but our aloneness, our individuality. this is why inside that discourse 'individualism' is a name for evil, what we're supposed to be fighting against. the state is our solidarity, our unity, or even our love etc. now all of this would be relatively groovy, if the whole thing did not obviously rest on coercion. the reality so luridly puts the lie to the ideology that i find it hard to imagine how the ideology persists.

true

jackie calmes in the nyt points out the obvious: that the debt debate is really coming down to a fundamental difference about the 'scope and role' of government. there is much to be said for a clash on this basic question, for the occasional foray into basic political visions/principles. now i think it's true that the republicans want to aid the wealthy. but on the other hand they are opposing any increase in taxation on anyone for any reason: indeed a rigid position (and a principled one). but from the other side, you get the feeling from the left that government is simply and obviously a good thing, good for its own sake, that higher taxes and a bigger 'public sector' is self-evidently good in itself. that's the sort of position rachel maddow takes up, i think. and also some of my facebook friends (nadelhoffer, anyone?). i suppose that no one will simply flatly state that, but that doesn't mean it isn't in effect what they hold: we will accept no position that doesn't include revenue increases; obama will veto it if there isn't more tax money. when the position gets that raw, i just have to say it just can't be right. we are on the edge of showing that statism and leftism amount virtually to the same thing in our actual political spectrum. well, you could start backwards into keynes, marx, and rousseau, for example: cultists of the state. a libertarian left is possible and sensible; i'd just like to see more of it.