Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

Postmortem

Posted by Jason on

Alright shitheads, bereavement period’s over. Time to get serious. Here’s what we’ve learned – by which I mean here’s what we already knew and have been lying to ourselves about:

  • The media is completely useless

There has been quite a lot of introspection about whether the media was doing “enough” to “stop” Trump, or whether it was “enabling” him. This is not the point. The issue is not how often the media got it “right” or “wrong”; the issue is that none of it mattered either way. I mean, they did get things right, for the most part. The media is made up of educated people. They knew what was going on and there were all kinds of investigations and things. They got the facts right and most of their arguments were correct. No one cared. Every newspaper in the country endorsed Clinton in the strongest possible terms, and none of that ink moved one single vote. Clinton was declared the definitive winner of all three debates. Didn’t fucking matter. Everyone was all anxious about whether Trump would try to skip the debates, but he might as well have, because they had absolutely no effect on anything.

All that shit about Clinton’s “ground game” and the “Obama Coalition” was also meaningless. There is no “vetting,” there are no “qualifications,” the debates are not “job interviews.” All just made-up terms inflated by professional hacks to justify their paychecks. The election spectacle has no actual function. This past year has been a complete waste of everyone’s time and money. This is the thing that Trump was the most right about. It is now a proven fact that there was no reason for him to play the game as dictated by the David Brooks contingent, because those people are irrelevant idiots and their game is bullshit.

(This is also the thing that Clinton was the most wrong about. Her entire political life has been hobbled by the mistaken impression that she was required to play pattycake with the gatekeepers of Seriousness and hire a bunch of dull campaign hacks to make sure that everything was being done The Right Way. Even as someone without natural charisma, she would have been better off without them. And it should be pretty clear by now that none of it protected her from sexism in any way.)

Also, what the fuck was all that polling shit for? The amount of yammering about polls was completely insane. Every fucking day it was some new set of arbitrary percentages that supposedly meant something. There was a whole fucking Game of Thrones-level dramatic arc about whether FiveThirtyEight‘s methodology was still valid. All meaningless. Like, what was even supposed to be the point of it? Was there supposed to be some perfect, magical poll that would somehow have locked the election for Clinton? What is the purpose of telling people what the results are supposedly going to be when those people are the ones who are actually going to be making the decision? All the time spent preparing and running and rerunning and analyzing and analyzing and analyzing those polls was time that could have been spent fighting.

Relatedly, the media is a tiny niche population. There are 325 million people in this country. The media speaks for about twelve of them. Which is a real problem when you combine it with the fact that media types fucking love to hear themselves talk. All day, every day, the media is constantly chattering to itself, about itself, and the only people listening, aside from other members of the media, are idiots like me who have nothing better to do with their time. Immediately before the election, everyone in the media was writing pieces under the assumption that Clinton was going to win handily. There were actually debates about whether it was going to be a blowout or just a landslide. How many voters did the people writing these pieces represent? Not fucking enough. We like to make fun of the “right-wing echo chamber” in which hardcore conservatives live, but it is actually us “informed” media-consumers who occupy the smallest and most distorting bubble. The people applauding each new “takedown” of Trump were suffering from just as severe a case of epistemic closure as anyone reading Breitbart or InfoWars. It’s a hell of a drug.

(If we can get slightly technical for a moment, one of the big problems with the internet is the way it facilitates the “small world” illusion. Even as it seems like there’s an incomprehensibly huge amount of stuff going on, you’re really only communicating to your tiny group of friends, while the rest of the world has no idea what the fuck you’re on about. The way you feel about flat-earth theory is exactly the way most people feel about your opinions on most topics. You might know what I mean if I ask you which set of pronouns you prefer, but upwards of 99% of the world would literally not understand the question even after having it explained to them slowly and repeatedly. It is not interpretable within their worldview. You can scroll through page after page of tweets supporting a sexual assault survivor without realizing that they represent about 0.01% of the real-world population. The world is a big place.)

(Also, the fact that Clinton won the popular vote is nice (as well as being genuinely important to remember for the purposes of analysis, especially regarding people who think the problem is that Clinton was a terrible candidate and everyone hated her), but it has no bearing on any of this. Even if she had won the election, the fact that anything approaching 50% of the population looked at Trump and said “yes” or even “sure, why not” contains the entirety of the problem. The fact that Trump is actually going to be president is certainly its own category of disaster, but we lost the battle as soon as he was accepted as a general election candidate. That alone proved that no one who mattered was willing to fight when it counted. Y’know, as painful as this all already is, we have to remember that Trump is not the worst-case scenario. There will come a night on which the glass finally breaks, and when that happens the Responsible Adults will all be down on their knees, poking thoughtfully at the shards. The story of 2016 is this: America allowed Trump to happen.)

Perhaps the most pitiable aspect of all this is the fact that the media was very, very serious about the whole thing, and that seriousness specifically was nothing but empty posturing. People don’t take things seriously just because the media says they should. This whole thing was and is a joke to most people. They’re wrong, but the punchline was delivered anyway.

  • The American political system is completely useless

A Trump presidency is exactly the situation that the entire American political machine is designed to prevent. A large mass of uninformed people made a rash decision based on limited and confused information. The electoral college, the primary system, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the party apparatuses are all designed to safeguard against this, to restrict the ability of the people to make sweeping changes based on momentary whims. Instead, they all indirectly conspired to achieve the exact opposite.

It is easy to understand the basic reason this happened: specific procedural details do not have general effects on outcomes. Sometimes they work one way, and sometimes they work the other. It was initially thought that the Democrats had the electoral college advantage this time around, with Clinton only needing one or two big states to clinch it. And that could very well have been the case; votes could have been distributed slightly differently to achieve the inverse outcome. But in neither case does the process confer any sort of legitimacy on the results. There is no connection between moral or even factual correctness and political victory. The actual outcome of this election was a draw; Trump essentially won on a coin flip. (The fact that this is the second time in living memory that this has happened and the final results favored the Republicans both times is potentially suspicious.)

So not only is there no point in defending the specifics of one particular process, the opposite is true: what we must fight for is dynamism, the ability to change the process as needed. All those people talking about how important it is to respect the process in tumultuous times are worse than wrong; they aren’t even part of the relevant conversation. They’re completely out to lunch, filling out checklists as the world burns.

(Oh, by the way, a Trump presidency guarantees that the U.S. will not respond to global warming in anything approaching an adequate manner. That probably wasn’t going to happen anyway, but now we can all rest assured that we’re definitely going to burn to death. We are past the critical point of action, so the destruction of the planet is now a certainty.)

  • America is not one country

Both sides were completely convinced that they were going to win, and both of them were correct. Within each subculture, there was no debate. The only issue, this whole time, was how many voters were going to turn out for each side. No one was ever going to be “persuaded.” There are, of course, the famous “undecided voters,” but they’re the exception that proves the rule: only a tiny percentage of people are not already in one camp or the other. The celebration of the increased diversity in Congress is all well and good, that’s certainly an improvement, but it’s not a consolation. It’s more evidence that America consists of two trains running on completely separate tracks.

Frankly, it’s starting to look like the Confederacy was on the right side of history. I mean, the Civil War was never really resolved; it ended in the temporal sense, but Reconstruction was thwarted, and we’ve been fighting that battle ever since. There is increasingly little point in pretending that we actually have any kind of “union” going on here. The obvious problem is that, if we accept a division, we are abandoning half the population to a situation that we believe to be immoral. But while force may be justified where something like slavery is the case, there’s little point in trying to save people from a hell they’ve chosen for themselves.

  • The Republican Party is alive and thriving

The speculations about whether Trump was going to destroy the Republican Party were bad enough when he was losing – even without being able to win national elections, the party would still wield massive, agenda-setting power on the state level and in the Congress. But now that whole angle is just downright comical. The Republicans are not “relics” who are being “left behind” because they’re “on the wrong side of history.” This sort of teleological complacency is exactly why the Democrats are such a bunch of losers (see also the use of “this is 2016, why are we still debating this” as though it were an argument rather than an admission of defeat). There is no “march of progress,” no moral arc inscribed onto the universe. “Progress” is a story we tell ourselves after the fact; it has no claim on the future. The first black president, married to a descendent of slaves, has been succeeded by someone who would probably be a literal Klansman if that weren’t bad branding. History does not move in a straight line; it is a tangled mess. Good things happen, but things do not gradually “get better” of their own accord. The corpses keep piling up. This is a war, and we are not fighting it hard enough. While we’ve just been trying to run out the clock, the other team has been constantly scoring behind our backs. If we don’t start getting our shit together with extreme severity, “history” is going to start looking a lot worse than even the pessimists among us have fantasized.

  • America is fucking racist

No one who genuinely opposes racism could possibly have considered supporting Trump. Even if you assume (pretend) that his campaign was not primarily about racism, the raw volume of it should have been a dealbreaker. Unless of course that was the deal you were looking to make in the first place.

Also, religion doesn’t matter, at all. There was never any such thing as the “Religious Right.” They were always just bigots. There are no “values voters,” in the sense where “values” means things like humility and integrity and all of that fluffball shit. In exactly the same way, “conservative principles” were never anything more than the self-important preening of a tiny handful of pompous pseudo-intellectuals. People do, of course, vote based on real values, and the realest of those values are, more often than not, racism and sexism.

  • America is not ready for a female president

I normally wouldn’t discuss things in these terms, but the conclusion seems to be unavoidable. There’s a book (or at least a pretentious blog post) to be written about the exact mechanics by which Clinton’s gender destroyed her, but it’s hard to doubt that it did. She’s basically a human checklist for the ideal presidential candidate, and, if the common media understanding of the situation is correct, her gender should have been an added bonus, a chance to make history. That understanding is not correct. We still live under patriarchy, and a woman still takes a step too far when she attempts to claim the mantle of rulership – even when she is someone who has devoted her life to preserving the existing social order, even when she is specifically expert at walking the finest line through the minefield of gendered expectations, and even when her opponent is as though chosen specifically to let’s say “heighten the contradictions.” Nothing is enough to overcome the fear of a female planet. It remains the overriding concern of a great many people – including women – that the center of the universe be a dick.

One specific fun fact that we are all now inescapably subject to is that sexual assault is not disqualifying behavior for the most important job in the world. Most people are, in fact, totally fine with it, and this group, again, includes a lot of women. This is another example of something the media class agrees on and most other people don’t. While the media whipped itself into a frenzy over the deeply troubling implications of The Tape, parsing and reparsing it endlessly to determine What It Means For America, everyone else was simply hearing normal masculinity, and it was their interpretation of the situation that was correct.

It’s been much noted in much despondency that white women went for Trump, but there’s nothing unexpected about this. Feminists have their own brand of epistemic closure: they believe that all women are naturally sympathetic to feminism. Not true. The real feminist insight here is that men and women are not so different in this regard. Most women are sexists (meaning sexist in the normal sense, against women – yet another thing that’s become clear is that people cannot be relied upon to correctly interpret basic factual statements). White women went for Romney and McCain as well; white women have always gone Republican, because race is what politics in America is about. Gender is not. The recent popular upsurge in feminism has achieved cultural acceptability by abandoning its political content, and these are the wages of that sin.

Actually, America isn’t ready for a black president either (which would be the other half of the reason this happened). Obama was obviously exceptional – his legendary charisma (and ideological chameleonicity) superseded the normal dynamics of the situation. While we’re reminiscing, let us recall that Obama’s 2008 campaign was run on 0% issues and 100% rhetorical razzmatazz. Trump actually did stumble into real issues on occasion; he had more substance than Obama. Which is not surprising, because . . .

  • Elections have always been reality shows

I read something somewhere calling Obama “the first celebrity president.” Come on. Reagan? Kennedy? Roosevelt? Hell, Washington himself was nominated solely on the basis that he was a war hero and people liked him (which itself was mostly because he was tall). The notion that this election had a notable absence of policy discussion, or that Trump introduced reality-show style feuding into politics, or that our discourse has degraded to the level of insults and implications, is entirely mistaken. All of these things have always been the case. Which is to say that . . .

  • Trump is not an anomaly

All the talk about Trump destroying “democratic norms” is completely backwards. What has happened is that Trump has demonstrated (entirely on accident) that those norms don’t actually exist. But of course this is how norms work in any case: they only exist to the extent that people convince themselves that they exist. Other than that, they don’t actually do anything.

Remember how het up the media was about Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns? Probably not, because literally no one in the country cared. I’m dead serious about this: does anyone really think there is even a single person who voted against Trump because he didn’t release his tax returns? Given this, what’s the point? Why should any candidate bother releasing their tax returns, ever? How is the process anything other than an establishment-class circle jerk?

Understanding this compels some unfortunate conclusions. If Trump’s unusualness was entirely aesthetic, then there’s no “excuse” for why he won. His “abnormality” didn’t cost him the election, but it’s not why he won, either. He won on the merits. The people comparing Trump to Brexit were entirely correct: Brexit did not succeed because of lies, and Trump did not succeed because he’s a con artist. They both won because more people wanted them to, and the fact that this impulse has triumphed twice so far (and is generally growing in strength everywhere) forces us to reject the comforting notion that these things were flukes. This is the new wave of horror poised to sweep over the 21st century. Face it.

  • Democracy is a real thing and a real danger

All the people hyperventilating about the unprecedented threat posed by Trump to democracy seem to be forgetting that Trump was supported by ordinary morons and opposed by a shadowy cabal of hyper-educated, unaccountable elites. The Founding Fathers may have been a bunch of slavefucking lawyers, but at least they understood that democracy was a threat that needed to be contained and not a magical wish-granting unicorn princess. Every idiot who’s ever rhapsodized about the power of “the people” has now received what they were asking for.

(This is also why we’re double-fucked on global warming. People will never vote to lower their own standards of living in order to save the planet.)

  • Structure decides

There was an article somewhere by some political scientist talking about how structural factors such as which party holds the White House and how the economy is doing correctly predict the outcome of every modern presidential election, and how the factors for the current election predicted a Republican victory. I’m sure most such theories are just as wrong as everything else, but something along these lines is certainly the case. For example, it has almost always happened that a two-term president has been succeeded by someone from the other party, likely as a result of the fickle mushhead contingent wanting “change” or something (this is part of why the two-party system is a greater evil than either party). Trump is an agent of historical and material forces exactly as much as Clinton is a victim of them. They’re both puppets. Which, again, means that everything the media does every election is a complete waste of time. None of this shit about temperament or experience or gaffes or any of it matters at all.

This suggests a somewhat more optimistic interpretation of the results. During the primaries, Clinton was never polling well against any of the potential Republican candidates. We all know how much polls are worth now, but it’s conceivable that she would have lost to any Republican. Someone reasonable-seeming and non-alienating like Kasich could very well have flattened her. So the fact that the election was a virtual tie indicates that Trump actually underperformed expectations. He was such a bad candidate that he almost blew a gimme election. The only reason he won was that he was ultimately a typical Republican – or at least close enough for government work. (Not that there’s anything okay about a typical Republican being president).

This is also why the whole exhorting-people-to-vote ritual is a particularly obnoxious waste of everyone’s time. You will never move significant numbers through individual hectoring. If you want to move numbers that matter, you have to move the structure. For one thing, indirect voter suppression is a critical issue that has not been given its full due. Which leads us to the most depressing interpretation of the results: Trump won because of Shelby County v. Holder; in other words, he won because Jim Crow isn’t actually dead yet.

This dynamic also implies a strategy: given that “electability” has been revealed as an empty shibboleth, the Democratic Party would do better to run candidates who are as far to the left as possible. An extreme leftist, even one as insane and incompetent as Trump, could have won in 2008. Of course, no one who is in a position to implement this strategy cares; quite the contrary, the Democrats are always highly concerned to make sure that no one with scary ideas gets any significant amount of party support. This is among the many reasons why supporting Democrats does not help.

There, that’s it. That’s the situation. Decide what you’re going to do about it. Now.

Pitiful human

Posted by Jason on

Americans like to talk a big game about how politicians work for the people and we can “fire” them and so forth1, but we’re completely full of shit. Sideshow Bob had it right: the only things we care about are low taxes, vicarious violence, and the safe, comfortable feeling of being ruled. But the situation is actually worse than that, because there’s a particular behavior that we engage in with renewed intensity every four years, which goes beyond foolishness to become completely unconscionable: we look to politicians for leadership.

It’s correct to treat elections like morality plays – that’s the only way to extract any value from the spectacle. Elections aren’t about the issues, obviously, but they’re a time when everyone’s talking about politics, so it’s a good opportunity to, you know, talk about politics. Even people who use elections as opportunities to argue against involvement in electoral politics are taking advantage of this dynamic. So as annoying as this all often is, it’s ultimately a positive thing. The problem is that we’re bad at it. When you hear someone arguing that Hillary Clinton is “qualified” and will therefore “get things done,” you have left the realm of politics and entered the realm of fantasy football. The questions of “qualified for what?” and “which things?” are the entire substance of what we’re supposed to be talking about, but we’ve become so alienated from our values that we’ve forgotten how having values actually works. So we instead fall back on lazy shorthands, a prominent recent example being the framework in which Clinton and Sanders are politically equivalent except that one of them is “idealistic” and the other is “pragmatic.”

It’s just as easy to turn this around. Clintonian triangulation is precisely what led to the current situation; to advance it now as a solution can hardly be called “practical.” Clinton’s belief that starving people can be placated by effective management is an article of faith that has been disproven by the facts. This is even clearer in the realm of foreign policy, where Clinton is the last living hawk. If the history of the 21st century so far has taught us anything, it has surely been the folly of attempting to export stability through the American military. Even the ruling class is starting to back off from this approach, or at least clean up its image, or at least avoid the issue by focusing on domestic policy. Yet Clinton clings to her belief in American exceptionalism like a rosary, praying for the day when our bombs and bullets will finally kill chaos. She’s an idealist.

Meanwhile, the only reason Sanders ran as a Democrat is that he knew it was the only way he’d get any media attention. He never gave Jill Stein the time of day because he knew that associating with her would have been a political death sentence. Furthermore, none of his policy proposals were either outside the current limits of political discourse or particularly radical. They’re basically all either obvious things, like raising the minimum wage and taxing rich fucks, or things that have been implemented successfully in other countries, like universal health care and subsidized college education. The Sanders campaign was nothing more than the pragmatic approach to making things slightly better, given where we are right now.

This explanation is just as facile as the alternative; the point is that framing political conflicts in this way drains them of their substance. There’s not really any such thing as “idealism” or “pragmatism” – every action is based on beliefs and tends towards a goal, and every ideal represents itself practically as a set of steps taken in the real world for the purpose of moving towards it. The actual conflict in the Democratic primary was very simple: Sanders was attempting to return the party to the era of welfare-state liberalism, while Clinton was attempting to rally the ruling class around inclusive neoliberalism. Clinton won, and, thanks to improbably favorable circumstances, now has the near-unanimous support of the political establishment. That’s the story.

Yet this misunderstanding is not entirely the fault of gutless, drama-craving media types; Sanders’ support was largely grassroots, and it is his hardest-core supports who understand this the least. They’ve created all on their own the narrative that Saint Bernard is our last hope to save the American Dream from the clutches of the Email Demon. Everything from dumb memes about how Sanders is a cool hippie while Clinton is an “out-of-touch politician” to exhausting focus on Clinton’s “scandals” and “corruption” has the effect of turning political discourse into pageantry. Those stupid shirts with Sanders’ hair on them are tombstones, marking a spot that was once political and is now merely fashionable. This is the actual reason that “Bernie or Bust” is a stupid idea: if you’re relying on one specific person to save you, you’ve already lost. The issue is not that, god forbid, some people might not vote for Clinton, it’s that we’re all being insufficiently idealistic. I mean, come on. This whole thing is based on the idea that one brave honest man is going to march into the White House, roll up his sleeves and start getting down to brass tacks. You call that an ideal? I’ll tell you what my ideal is: I want us to stop dropping everything every four years so that we can elect a Boss of America to tell us all what to do and what we should believe and then immediately go back to sleep as soon as the party’s over.

The whole “corruption” thing is actually really important here, because it’s the kind of thing that sounds like a political issue while actually being entirely irrelevant to almost everything. Case in point, there’s a recent bit of scandal about favorable arms deals being made to countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation. That’s, y’know, a bad thing, it’d be better if that wasn’t happening, but fixing that problem won’t even slightly impede the imperialist death machine that’s slowly grinding the Middle East into a big pile of exploitable resources. Again, Clinton’s agenda here is not subtle: she’s entirely open about being an interventionist; we don’t have to uncover any secret emails to figure that out. Focusing on corruption here implies that an “uncorrupted” version of Clinton would be the ideal candidate – that Clinton has the correct agenda. This is why arguing based on corruption is always a garbage strategy: it cedes the entire debate as its first move. Political corruption is like an inverted iceberg: the part below the surface is minuscule compared to the massive problems that loom in plain view. The scandal is always what’s legal.

Indeed, if Clinton really were the amoral weathervane she’s so often portrayed as, wouldn’t that actually be the best possible situation? Wouldn’t that mean that she would adopt any position that her supporters pressured her towards? Isn’t that exactly what we want out of democracy: a candidate who is perfectly responsive to the people’s will? Clinton initially resisted the call for a $15/hr minimum wage, but, due to popular pressure, she’s since adopted it to the extent that it’s now one of her official bullet points. This is the kind of thing that gets her called “conniving,” but isn’t that exactly how the political process is actually supposed to work?

What Sanders holdouts have largely failed to realize is that Sanders didn’t actually do anything. He didn’t run a particularly effective campaign or offer any kind of insightful take on the issues. His remarkable success was due to the fact that he simply hammered on the issues that people already cared about. What his success actually demonstrates is that there is a broad base of support waiting for anyone willing to advance a politics that actually tries to help people, so the proper response is to get on with it.

Many people have complained that Clinton was essentially appointed as the nominee by the DNC, that the primary amounted to little more than a “coronation,” but like, no shit. Why would the Democratic Party ever have done anything else? What possible incentive would they have had to produce and support candidates who would have been genuine threats to the existing political establishment? Indeed, the only reason we saw such candidates this time around is that the necessary work had already been done. The reason Sanders was able to get anywhere was that he was responding to existing demands; he did not convince anyone that he was right, he gave people what they were waiting for. And it’s the same situation on the other side: Honky Kong’s climb up the Empire State Building has nothing to do with how big of a monkey he is and everything to do with the road that has already been paved for him by the past eight years of escalating reactionary psychosis.

Closely related to all of this is the criticism that Clinton doesn’t seem “authentic” or “human,” and that’s what really gets to the heart of the issue. What people actually want out of politics is a “leader,” someone who is “strong” and doesn’t “flip-flop,” and who is “convincing” by virtue of being authentically human. What people really want is not to see their values instantiated; it is to be told what to think. Consider the fact that Obama never had to deal with any of the shit that Clinton is currently navigating; he was hailed as a literal messiah for advancing exactly the same agenda. The only difference is that he looked good doing it. The problem is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, when Obama finally got around to leading from behind on gay marriage, many Obama supporters shifted their opinions along with him (and vice versa) – as though one’s opinion on the actual issue were a mere coincidence. And the vehemence of Obama’s opposition demonstrates the very same thing. It is entirely unrelated to his anodyne policies; the motivation is also that Obama is seen as a powerful leader (let’s dispel with this fiction that he doesn’t know what he’s doing), but one of the wrong type; hence, the Antichrist. Most famously, Mitt Romney’s health care plan suddenly became the end of the American Dream when it was a black guy what done it. People who can be influenced in this way are people who don’t actually care about the substance of the issues. They can be led into any position by someone who talks good on the TV.

David Foster Wallace, as usual, expressed this tendency very well while completely failing to realize that he should have been interrogating it (italics original):

“[T]he electorate . . . seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness in the men [sic] who want to ‘lead’ and ‘inspire’ them.”

This is precisely how most people feel about politics, and it is an unproductive and bad sentiment to hold. You may recall that the politician Wallace is referring to here is John McCain, which, come on. Any theory that leads you to support friggin’ McCain is not well-calibrated. And of course this problem is all over the place: liberals will, in the same breath, mock conservatives who voted for Bush because he seemed like a guy you’d like to have a beer with and gush about how much better Obama is because he’s so hip and attractive. So while the fact that Clinton is a bad campaigner is convenient at the moment for people who oppose her policies, reliance on this dynamic represents an extreme danger. Remember, ol’ Honky Kong is getting quite a lot of support based on the fact that he’s “not a politician” and he “tells it like it is.” The road to hell is paved with sincerity.

(Actually, this is something that leftists need to be particularly worried about. It’s easy to assume that fascism/totalitarianism and socialism/anarchism are “opposites,” that anything that leads a society towards one pole necessarily leads it away from the other, but there’s no real reason to believe that this is the case. Fascism and anarchism share at least one very important trait in common: they both want power dynamics to be raw and transparent, bureaucracy to be a tool rather than an ideology. If you’re sick of “stalemate” and “gridlock” in the government and you want to bring in someone who will “shake things up” and “change the system” – someone who will make the trains run on time – you are in fact advocating a dictatorial coup. Fascism is capitalism with a human face.)

Despite our big talk, we’ve managed to get all of this completely backwards. We give politicians the right to be human, while we sink ourselves into the muck of politicking: yelling at people about how to vote, preemptively triangulating positions based on “feasibility,” endlessly compromising our own values into oblivion. The simple fact of the matter is, when you perceive a politician as being ahead of you, when you find yourself looking to them for guidance, you have failed in the task of politics. We must demand the opposite: fewer inspiring speeches, smaller ideas, less leadership. To look to a politician for leadership is among the most vile inversions a human being can make, worse even than looking to a lawyer for morality or to a businessman for expertise.

Evidence of this inversion is everywhere. We talk about government spending as though it were a family budget – we humanize the government. Spending is “irresponsible”; taxes are “punitive.” And this is more than just politics, of course (which is to say that politics is more than just politics). We read self-help books and “lean in” to turn ourselves into more effective workers; we program ourselves with the correct political opinions to smooth out our social interactions; we perform “life hacks” to “maximize” our “productivity.” We humanize the machine while automating our own lives. The obligation to support evil in order to avoid catastrophe is precisely the psychic violence that our political system inflicts on us. There may be more or less that each of us can do on a material basis, and we may disagree on tactics in any event, but we can all – we’re all morally obligated to – resist psychic death.

Politicians ought to be seen like lawyers: despicable people upon whom we foist a sordid but necessary job so that the rest of us don’t have to do it. Our role is not to do their job for them; our role is to hold the line, to cleave as strongly as we can to what is actually right, regardless of what kind of short-term compromises we have to make for the purpose of self-defense. I appreciate how Eric Foner described this:

“Here’s the point. I am a believer in the abolitionist concept – that the role of radicals is to stand outside of the political system. The abolitionists said, ‘I am not putting forward a plan for abolition, because if I put forward a plan, people are just going to be debating my plan. ‘Oh, it’s going to be two years, five years, seven years.’ No: I’m putting forward the moral imperative of dealing with slavery.’ And if people are convinced of that, then politicians will come up with a plan to do it. That means politicians are eventually going to pick up those ideas and use them in other ways and turn them into political strategies.

. . .

Our job is to put out new ideas, different ideas, pressure people, and I don’t care fundamentally if Obama or Hillary gets the nomination in 2008. Sure I have an opinion about it but I don’t think that’s our job to worry about it. All of this maneuvering, ‘Oh, what do we do in this or that election.’ We are not politicians. Politicians do it better.”

So yeah, by all means vote. You might as well lean away from the volcano’s edge rather than towards it. Just remember that, in allowing our politics to come down to a choice of ruler at all, we have failed in a far more significant sense than we ever could by simply electing the wrong person. So don’t pretend like voting for “the right person” is at all morally laudable, or like it counts as “progress.” Don’t let the fact that voting is “something you can do” confuse you into thinking that that’s where the action is. Don’t forget whose side you’re really on, and don’t forget who your hands were made for. Most of all, don’t forget that the real issue is and always will be the fact that people are being slaughtered, poisoned, enslaved, and mutilated, every second of every day, and that all of this is happening for no reason. Or, to put it in classical terms: ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your country has been doing to you.

  1. There was an Aaron Sorkin clip I vaguely remembered that I was going to link here to illustrate this point, but I watched it again and lol no. Just use your imagination. ↩