Alright, look, I really don’t want to do this, but this is the situation we’re in. The sky has cracked open and the fires of judgment rain down upon us. False prophets rise to glory, brain-eating parasites infest our homes and cities, beasts of the deep rouse from ageless slumber. Tiny sparks of hope gather and flash in the darkness, prevailing upon us exactly one course of action. For the sake of everything that lives, Bernie Sanders must be elected president in 2020.
For as much ink as has been spilled on this topic, the case for Sanders is radically simpler than anyone’s really making it out to be. There is exactly one thing that has to happen right now as a precondition for anything else – most importantly, for addressing global warming with any level of seriousness – which is that we need to form a political party capable of acquiring and wielding state power that is responsive to the needs of ordinary people, which necessarily means being actively opposed to the interests of rich fucks. Sanders is the only person who is even trying to do this, which is why it doesn’t matter how “good” he is or whatever. He’s literally the only horse available to bet on.
The One Rule of American politics is that you aren’t allowed to do anything that inconveniences rich fucks. In addition to this just obviously being the case, studies have demonstrated that, regardless of what politicians say they care about, the actions that in practice end up being taken by the government are those that accord with the desires of rich fucks and not the desires of anyone else. If, for example, you want to spend more money on education, you can do that, as long as you spend it on privately-owned charter schools where corporate consultants have their fingers in the till. You are not allowed to take the same amount of money and just give it to existing public schools, because that doesn’t give anyone the opportunity to extract profits.
It is sometimes possible to pass good policy in this situation. Passing Obamacare, for example, was probably better than doing nothing, in that it allowed more people to get health coverage. However, the policy was designed to maintain the economic power of insurance companies, which is why part of the result of implementing it was that premiums and deductibles went way up. Insurance companies had to cover more and sicker people, so they raised costs in order to maintain their profits.
Thus, on net, the effect of this type of policy is always going to be mixed: while the final sum might come out to be positive, it’s going to improve things for some people and worsen things for others. But we’re not in a situation where these sorts of tradeoffs are actually necessary. They aren’t happening because of scarcity or a lack of intelligent policy ideas; they’re happening because rich fucks have captured the political process and are using it to hoard resources. This is what it really means to say that 1% of people hold half the wealth: it means that we can make things much better for everyone else by only mildly inconveniencing the people at the top.
Now, it is coherent, in theory, to maintain that the best we can do with this situation is to acquiesce to it and continue to extract whatever tiny advantages we can, although I wouldn’t say that recent history provides any particular amount of supporting evidence for the proposition. However, there’s one case in which this is not even a plausible argument and we are absolutely required to come up with a substantive alternative, and it also happens to be the one that will kill everyone if we get it wrong: global warming. As you know, the amount of oil reserves currently owned by all of the oil-extracting companies and countries is several times more than the amount we can afford to burn if we wish to avoid total catastrophe. Because of this, even if we were to completely cease accruing new sources of carbon-emitting fuels tomorrow (which we won’t – emissions have been going up recently), no amount of green development would suffice to address the problem. The only way to preserve the existence of civilization is to keep it in the ground, which, because this stuff is already on the balance sheets, unavoidably means destroying a huge portion of the wealth of all the richest people in the world.
This dynamic is why the Democratic Party has taken no significant action on global warming, despite constantly crowing about how they accept “the science” and the need for “structural change” and slobbering all over Greta Thunberg. It’s because it is structurally impossible for them to do what is necessary. A party structurally dependent on its rich donors is never going to be able to advance policy which directly attacks those people’s wealth. The only tools available are hammers, but the problem has nothing to do with nails. We had plenty of advance warning about global warming, but we squandered decades of opportunity by allowing rich fucks to set the agenda, and now we’re out of time. We have about ten years left to get serious, which basically means one more president. If the next president is another do-nothing liberal who talks big and allows the oil to keep flowing, we’re all dead.
Also, the scale of the problem means that it can only be addressed by seizing and utilizing state power. That’s why we have to have a political party that does not maintain its existence by giving handies to rich fucks and is committed to doing what is necessary. We could, in theory, start a new party for this or use the Greens or whatever, but the entrenchment of the two major parties presents huge obstacles against doing so. There’s no inherent property of the Democratic Party that causes it to operate in the way that it does; the parties have modified their alignments in response to changing conditions before and they can be made to do so again. We’re also out of fucking time, and taking over existing infrastructure is a hell of a lot faster than building it up from scratch. Thus, the best available solution is to hollow out the existing leadership of the Democratic Party and replace it with people who don’t care about rich fucks and are only accountable to its base of voters.
The obstacle to doing this is not some kind of shadowy conspiracy or whatever. It’s the structure within which politicians operate. Rich donors provide basically all of the resources politicians require in order to run viable campaigns. (Again, rich fucks have so much unnecessary wealth that they can just straight up piss millions of dollars away on fucking political ads for the sake of slightly lowering tax rates that they were probably just going to evade anyway.) If you want to run for office as a Democrat, the DCCC will literally go through the contracts on your phone to see if you know enough rich fucks to be considered a real candidate, after which you will be expected to spend most of your time calling them up and schmoozing them for money. This dynamic has two equally important effects. First, because your existence as a politician is materially dependent on the largesse of your donors, you will be systemically disinclined to do anything they won’t like. If you were to try anyway, you would most likely be cut off and replaced with someone more pliable. Second, because you’re spending all of your time talking to rich fucks and hearing about their problems and their perspectives on things, you’re naturally going to come to understand issues in the way that they do and conceive of the same sorts of solutions that they would. Not only would you not be able to support nationalizing the energy companies, the idea would never occur to you in the first place.
This, then, is the true significance of Sanders’ small-donor fundraising operation. It is not that taking money from poorer people is more virtuous – in fact, it’s less, since you’re taking money from people who actually need it. Rather, it matters because it means that the Sanders campaign, and any campaign that follows the same model, does not talk to rich fucks, is not materially dependent on them, and does not take their interests into account when formulating policy. It is dependent on the approval of large numbers of ordinary people, which means it is only viable to the extent that it advances policies that people actually want.
Of course, the correct solution to this problem is for all elections to be publicly funded, so that this isn’t an issue in the first place. But that can’t happen right now precisely because rich fucks have already captured the process and they obviously won’t permit that sort of change. Thus, the only way to change things is from outside of the existing system: mass public pressure must be brought to bear on all politicians, such that those who remain on the side of rich fucks are either run out of town on a rail or have the fear of god put into them so that they vote correctly anyway. Doing this is explicitly the entire purpose of the Sanders campaign. It’s not just something he’s coincidentally adjacent towards; it’s specifically what he’s referring to when he talks about starting a “political revolution” and being the “organizer-in-chief.”
This is also the meaningful distinction between Sanders and Warren. Again, this is a lot simpler than people are making it out to be. Warren, as a smart person who was not always a politician, does have a decent understanding of what needs to be done to fix things. But she explicitly intends to work within the existing system to convince the current party elites to adopt better policies. She has in fact had some success with this, such as when she convinced the Obama administration, against its usual inclinations, to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But we’ve already seen how this strategy can easily be undone by adverse events and fails to penetrate to the underlying causes of the political dysfunction that makes it necessary. Warren could potentially be extremely effective as like Secretary of the Treasury or something, but her “plan for that” approach to politics simply will not work under current conditions.
Sanders, by contrast, is trying to change how things work such that it becomes possible for good plans to happen. You can see this distinction when, for example, Warren talks about abolishing the filibuster, while Sanders talks about enfranchising prisoners. Warren wants to change the rules so that the existing political establishment can more easily achieve its desired goals, while Sanders wants to fundamentally redistribute political power so as to change what those goals are. The reason Sanders is sometimes criticized for not having enough of a “plan” is because he realizes exact details of that sort are presently beside the point. As long as the Democratic Party itself is not willing to pass the sorts of policies that are necessary to address the problems we’re facing, the rules by which they would counterfactually do so are irrelevant. Sanders’ political revolution is a prerequisite to any of Warren’s plans actually being implemented.
The standard counterargument here is that this line of reasoning is self-defeating: if this is true, then it doesn’t matter who gets elected president, because there has to be a mass movement anyway. This argument is basically correct and also completely stupid. The fact that electing Sanders would constitute only one step in the process and not by itself achieve anything is the entire point. If there were already a mass movement there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. The fact that there isn’t is why we need some sort of dramatic intervention – something along the lines of electing someone with an absolute commitment to doing this exact thing to the most powerful and visible political office in the country. And because we have to start addressing global warming yesterday in order to retain some non-trivial percentage of a habitable environment, we need someone who is here right now, and Socialist Jesus isn’t here right now. Sanders is.
I’d like to be clear about how little I want to be making this argument. I don’t “like” Sanders. I don’t even understand what that’s supposed to mean. He’s a politician. Liking or disliking a politician is a category error. They either support policies that will improve people’s material conditions or they don’t. I really thought people understood this back when “George W. Bush seems like the kind of guy I could have a beer with” was a running joke, but it’s only gotten worse since then. It does not fucking matter whether Sanders reminds you of a guy you knew once or someone calls you a name. I can assure you that my hatred for bros, people who spend any amount of time on Twitter, and people who treat politics like sports fandom is uncompromised, but dorks on the internet are just not relevant data, even without taking into account the gravity of the actual situation we’re facing. As long as Sanders is not proposing to appoint Joe Rogan as Secretary of Political Incorrectness, this is just not stuff that matters, at all.
I don’t even think badgering people about how they’re going to vote is all that effective. People aren’t actually responsive to arguments and data; they form their opinions based on underlying ideological assumptions (which is in fact the correct way to do things, as otherwise it is much too difficult to avoid being bamboozled by selective data presentation. You actually would be susceptible to fake news, in that case). In order to change people’s behavior you have to either change their material conditions or change how they understand the world. But again, we absolutely do not have time for that shit. It would be great if we could hang around for 20 years building the ideal political movement with perfectly calibrated messaging that appeals to everyone equally, but if we’re actually trying to make something happen the arc of history is going to have to be a fuck of a lot shorter than that. We either take this chance now or we’re fucked.
So that’s it. I really am constitutionally opposed to telling people what to do, but in this case it actually is required of you as an individual that you go to the place and vote for the thing. Unless, of course, you’re some sort of purity-obsessed idealist who won’t vote for an imperfect solution to a real pressing problem, but I can’t imagine that’s the case.
Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump are the same person. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand anything.
First of all, they’re both rich fucks. This isn’t, like, a coincidence. People don’t “just happen” to get rich. Your relationship to the material conditions of your existence is one of the primary determinants of who you are as a person. Before we even get into any other considerations, the actual act of being rich is itself immoral. When you or I imagine being “rich,” we imagine things like having a big house in a quiet neighborhood and a fancy car and an extensive record collection, but this isn’t what being actually rich is like. Being actually rich means literally having more money than it is physically possible to spend – even after resorting to ridiculous luxuries like owning three summer vacation mansions filled with rare art collections that you only visit one week a year or buying a Hawaiian island. It’s difficult to really imagine what things like this are like, which is why a lot of people resist this argument: they can’t imagine a situation where losing money results in no material deprivation whatsoever. But this is the real situation that our society has decided to create for some people, and it’s the situation that Winfrey and Trump both inhabit every waking moment. Every dollar they hoard is a dollar’s worth of food taken out of the mouth of a starving person. There is no word for this other than “evil.”
People like to talk about whether rich fucks “deserve” their money or not, but this is completely irrelevant to the argument. Remember, we’re talking about money in excess of the amount that you can actually spend on all the luxuries and projects during the amount of time you’re awake each day. Since you would lose absolutely nothing by giving it away, since your life would remain exactly the same with or without it, whereas lots of other people’s lives would improve immeasurably upon receiving even the tiniest fraction of it, there can be no possible justification for keeping it, regardless of its source. It doesn’t matter whether the money came from a big sack you found in the street or whether it was a boon bestowed upon you by god herself in recognition of your exceptional personal character. Philanthropy, which we’ll discuss further in just a moment, has no effect on this, because the issue is not how much money is being given away, but how much is being kept. A person living paycheck to paycheck does not lose virtue points for not giving to charity, because all the money they have is already being put to valuable use. A rich fuck does lose virtue points for every dollar they keep in the bank, because that money is being kept from people whom it could be helping. It is the actual holding of the money, in a situation where billions of others need money to survive, that constitutes the immorality. And considering the scale of the situation, this pretty much overrides any other possible concerns regarding what kind of person someone is. Like, if you knew someone whose construction company built concentration camps, you wouldn’t really give a shit if they seemed nice and empathetic in person. This is almost exactly the same thing.
But even if we do feel the need to interrogate the source of money as an indication of its recipient’s character, Winfrey and Trump are still in the same situation. Just as being rich is not a coincidence, getting rich is also a matter of a particular type of interfacing with present social conditions. Again, when you or I imagine getting rich, we imagine things like getting a big promotion or writing a bestselling novel or something – something that reflects our own abilities and doesn’t hurt anyone else. This isn’t how getting actually rich works. In a capitalist society, they way you make money is through exploitation. People who work for a living can only ever make enough to cover their own expenses, maybe with some extra left over for luxuries and savings if their skills happen to be in demand at the time. The way you make walking-around money is by extracting the value of other people’s labor, and the way you make a lot of money is by extracting a lot of value from the labor of a lot of people. The way you get actually rich is by building an empire. I mean, that’s exactly the term we use, we call things “media empires” or “construction empires,” and that’s exactly what they are. They’re giant exploitation engines in which the lives of millions of people are ground up into lubricant for the lifestyles of the rulers. It’s really not even a metaphor; they literally consume people’s flesh and blood. The fact that Winfrey is a self-made man and Trump is a trust fund baby doesn’t really impinge on any of this. If anything, it reflects worse on Winfrey; Trump inherited his father’s immorality, while Winfrey built her towering edifice of bullshit with her own two hands. Because we live in a society that allocates resources immorally, the people who succeed in it are the people who are the most immoral. Making money is a bad thing that makes you a bad person.
Those are the general principles, but this particular comparison is especially interesting, because Winfrey and Trump are not merely representatives of the same class, but representatives of the same belief system, with exactly the same M.O. Like, Bill Gates got rich by being a monopolist, but his company actually did produce products that people use. He added something to the world. Winfrey and Trump do not merit even this basic distinction; they are pure self-advertisers whose only product is their own image. The way Trump operated was not by actually building things, but by buying other people’s products and inflating their value through hype campaigns. Since the hype always far exceeds any actual value (especially since Trump has negative taste and can therefore be counted on to always select the worst products), there’s inevitably a collapse, at which point Trump sends out his lawyers and accountants to pocket the proceeds and leave other people holding the losses. In almost exactly the same way, Winfrey attaches herself to other people’s books and ideas and uses them to inflate her own image. Since the marketing of these things always far exceeds their actual content (especially since Winfrey is a credulous hack and can therefore be counted on to always select the most diluted variety of snake-oil on display), the fad inevitably dies out, at which point Winfrey shields herself from any fallout by simply moving on to the next trend (or occasionally issuing a Serious Apology if there’s a real scandal). People like this are worse even than rentiers, since they don’t even own the things they put their names on. They are pure value extractors; perfect parasites.
Even more than that, though, the similarities in Winfrey’s and Trump’s approaches point to something deeper than circumstantial convergence; they point to the same underlying ideology. Focusing solely on image and advertising necessarily requires complete adherence to existing values and standards. This is because symbols have to have referents; people have to know what you’re talking about, and if there’s no actual underlying product with its own value, the only way this is possible is if you’re saying something that people already believe.
When personal computers first came out, they were a new type of thing, so people didn’t already understand what they could do. This meant they couldn’t be marketed with pure bullshit, but had to actually function such that people who used them got something out of it. The same thing happened with smartphones; Apple’s insufferable advertising notwithstanding, it was only once people started using smartphones and experiencing the various things they could do (not all of it good, but still) that they became popular. A less compromised example is the Sriracha hot sauce guy. Sriracha has become a cultural buzzword in the complete absence of any marketing or promotion of it whatsoever. I had no idea where the stuff even came from until I saw that article. Because it’s a quality product, you don’t have to conjure up fantasies of fun-loving bikini girls or rugged manliness in order to sell it. It’s actually good; it has its own value, and is therefore able to speak for itself.
So here’s the important part: if you don’t have something with its own value, then you do have to rely on all that other stuff; you have to piggyback off of preexisting sources of value. You obviously have to have some sort of value claim in order to make a pitch to people. If you have a valuable product, this claim can potentially be something new. The concept of “personal productivity” didn’t used to be a thing, but once various types of machines became popularly accessible, it became something that could actually exist and was therefore possible to value. New values like this may or may not end up being good things, of course, but at least they’re new, and they’re based on real things that people can do. If you don’t have a source of value, you have no basis from which to make a new claim, so you have to make an old one. You have to play to a preestablished fantasy.
The fantasy that Trump plays to is the fantasy of opulence. It’s the idea that money determines everything in the world, and therefore aligning yourself with money gets you the best possible experience. Buying Trump-branded products ensures that you’re getting the most expensive and therefore highest-quality goods, and therefore living the best possible life for that and only that reason. The fantasy that Winfrey plays to is the fantasy of self-help. This is almost exactly the same idea: that choosing the right products and thinking the right way amounts to a secret formula for living a perfect life. Buying the products and following the trends chosen by Winfrey’s magical insight ensures that you’re getting real true meaning, and therefore living the best possible life for that and only that reason. (Also, do people really not notice that Winfrey specifically plays to the Magical Negro stereotype? Her whole thing is being “spiritual” and “authentic” and using that to serve as a lifestyle guide for rich white women. I don’t understand why people who would raise hell about this sort of thing in any other context give a pass to the one person who deserves it the least.)
The only actual difference between Winfrey and Trump is aesthetic. Specifically, Trump caters to the masculine side of the consumerist fantasy, selling suits and steaks and golf club memberships to promote the ideal of being a big important businessman, while Winfrey caters to the feminine side, selling diets and empathy and mindfulness to promote the ideal of being a magical unicorn princess. The reason this makes Winfrey look better on the TV is that femininity is significantly closer to a real standard of what being a decent person is like than masculinity is. (As just a few examples, femininity includes care, attention to detail, a focus on practical reality, and a basic level of concern for other people.) But a) aesthetics, while nontrivial, do not override morality, and b) Winfrey’s aesthetics are still overwhelmingly the aesthetics of rich fucks, which is to say their similarities with Trump’s are greater than their differences. Trump’s business books actually are self-help books, just marketed to a different audience. Trump University is exactly the same thing as The Secret, sold with exactly the same language.
Thus, Winfrey, no less than Trump, is a complete prisoner of the existing social order. Under ordinary circumstances this would merely be pitiable, but because these people have actual power, they do not only suffer from but also actively advance these harmful values. Their ideological commitments go so deep that they are unable to escape them even when they’re trying to help. Trump’s idea of charity is giving away free rounds of golf, and his idea of helping people is Trump University, an actual shakedown factory so blunt mafiosi would consider it beneath their honor. Winfrey, while less of an explicit con artist and more of an actual philanthropist, still favors spectacle over substance, as most famously illustrated by her stupid car giveaway stunt. Like, first of all, this was a stunt. I fucking cannot stand people who treat stunts like they’re real things. They’re fake. That’s the whole thing that a stunt is. Anyway, the point is that this is also bad charity. Cars are a modern necessity, so people generally have the number of cars they need, and people attending Oprah tapings are not exactly those in the most dire need of financial assistance. The reason she did this was not out of any consideration of how much it would help people, but because it would reflect well on her: because the recipients are sympathetic and the narrative plays into the “American Dream” – and of course because it gives her a big televised platform to grandstand on. Indeed, this is the exact definition of “philanthropy”: even “good” philanthropy isn’t actually good, because philanthropy is bad charity that promotes the giver more than it helps anyone.
The more concise way to put all of this is that Winfrey and Trump have both killed people through active negligence. Trump hires undocumented workers on the cheap and skimps on safety, resulting in injury and death. Obeying the capitalist imperative to generate profit, he stiffs contractors for his own gain, forcing them to forgo medical care and other necessities. Winfrey promotes quack science, fad diets, and fraudulent psychology, covering up their reality with her own aura of glamour. These are things which people, trusting her, take into their bodies, physically harming them. It’s hard to trace causality here, but given her reach, it’s a statistical certainty that this has harmed people’s health and resulted in deaths. There’s no room for sentimentality here. (Also, people with sentimental feelings toward Winfrey should consider that Trump’s fans have exactly the same sentimental feelings towards him, for exactly the same reasons.) People like this have no place in any decent society. I mean, come on. Both of them sell magazines named after themselves with pictures of themselves on the cover, every month. Come on. I’m embarrassed to even be talking about this.
Maybe this line of argument strikes you as a particularly unfair variety of false equivalence, because Winfrey is clearly a much better person than Trump. Of course she is. Trump is the worst possible person; you get exactly zero virtue points for being better than him, because literally every human is a better person than Donald Trump (as are most dogs and cats and probably a fair number of moles and squirrels). Like, the fact that Winfrey is against sexual assault rather than being a confessed sexual assailant is, y’know, better, but it’s not impressive. Back in the day, we used to call things like that “meeting basic standards of human decency.” More to the point, though, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a good person or not. It matters what you do; it matters what effect your existence has on the rest of the world. It matters whether you’re doing something useful for people or whether you’re paving the road to hell.
13 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
Our only access to reality is through perception, and perception is always partial. Sometimes what we’re seeing is obscured by the glass we’re looking through, and sometimes what we’re seeing is actually just a smudge on the glass itself rather than something on the other side. Because of this, no piece of evidence is ever a slam dunk. Anything that looks good from one angle might turn out to be hideously ugly from another. What this means is that you need to have an organizing principle with which to make sense of your observations. Without that, each individual observation can only stand briefly on its own before the changing wind sweeps it away into insignificance; “whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.” If you don’t have the truth, you don’t have anything.
The tricky part, of course, is to determine what kind of thing we’re really talking about here; that is, what exactly is meant by “charity.” It’s originally a translation of the Greek word agape, which means something along the lines of selfless loyalty. It’s not something that you like or that makes you feel good, but something that you choose to be for, regardless of circumstance. Thus, the fact that someone says something that sounds good or does something that appeals to you can never be taken as independent evidence. It must always be evaluated for its accordance with the truth. As Nietzsche puts it, “the knight of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.” (You’re reading claws of love dot com, the internet’s #1 source for Nietzschean bible study.)
The part of this that’s wrong is the part where the truth is magic. It is incorrect to say, as people often do, that perception is “flawed” or “misleading,” as this implies that there exists a source of “correct” information that reveals things “as they really are.” In fact, there is no reality outside perception, but rather only reality through perception. This does not license us to engage in knee-jerk subjectivity. It does exactly the opposite. It requires us to go beyond each individual impression and to formulate a broad understanding composed of the data from multiple lines of perception. “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.” It’s not just that “that which is perfect” will never actually come, but that there is no such thing, which means that “that which is in part” constitutes everything that there is. We can never get out of the wicked game; no one is ever a saint or a hero, no indicator is ever universally reliable and no narrative is ever complete. We always have to do the work of figuring out how things fit together, how multiple perceptions accord, and how to create understanding out of disparate parts. You can’t do this using “just the facts,” because the facts themselves can’t tell you how to organize those facts. You need something outside of the facts. Christians call this thing “charity,” Nietzsche calls it “will,” but I just think of it as the truth. And in a society that insists on smooth, clean, one-line narratives, the truth will always cut hard against the grain. It is the responsibility of anyone who claims to be a person to make those cuts. This is the only way to make anything make sense. As Hamlet learned, there’s nothing contradictory about smiling, and smiling, and being a villain.
The Harvey Weinstein revelations have provided political operatives with a golden opportunity to do their absolute favorite thing in the whole wide world: accuse other people of hypocrisy. Accusations of hypocrisy are basically the coin of the realm in political discussions, so this isn’t exactly unexpected behavior. Given how impoverished such discussions almost always are, though, it’s worth considering whether the concept possesses any real value.
The idea behind hypocrisy is that identifying a contradiction between a person’s stated beliefs and evident actions demonstrates that the person does not actually believe what they say they believe. This is already a problem, because it means that the best we can get out of the concept is a one-time, surface-level, circumstantial criticism of a single person. It doesn’t penetrate through to the part that matters. In the classic example of the anti-gay crusader who secretly fucks men, one might presume that the recognition that gay behavior is naturally occurring would serve as an argument against the underlying ideology. But of course this never happens; the underlying ideology is not simply “gay sex is bad,” but is rather adherence to the entire patriarchal world order. If you believe that patriarchy is the correct way for the world to be, then the particular causes and details and distributions of gay behavior are of only instrumental importance. This is where “ex-gay” therapy comes from: the belief that, despite the state of the underlying reality, something must be done. This is the kind of response that hypocrisy actually generates, because hypocrisy does not target ideology.
It is inherent to the concept that hypocrisy is always an argument against a person and not against an idea. This is true at the most general level. Patriarchy supposedly requires exacting standards of behavior on the part of men. They’re supposed to be the moral, honorable law-givers; that’s why patriarchy is allegedly justified. But whenever a man sticks his dick somewhere he’s not supposed to, it always ends up being framed as some woman’s fault. The ideology endures the failures of its adherents.
Hypocrisy is different from incoherence. Hypocrisy is when an action you take conflicts with your stated values. Incoherence is when your stated values conflict with themselves. For example, if you complain about the Republicans obstructing Obama throughout his tenure and claim that they should have tried to compromise, but you also complain about people who try to compromise with Trump and claim that they should obstruct him instead, you’re being incoherent (assuming you actually believe that and aren’t just being tactically cynical). The problem with incoherence is that it’s impossible for anyone to take your advice, because you’re advocating two different incompatible courses of action in the same situation. When you state incoherent values, you’re actually saying nothing. Thus, pointing this out to people has, potentially, the useful effect of forcing them to pick a real side.
Still, it would seem that hypocrisy retains the limited value of arguing against certain in-the-moment courses of action. You should be able to use it to either get a sincere person to change their behavior to be more in line with their beliefs, or to expose a cynical professor of righteous-sounding beliefs as a fraud. In practice, though, its signal-to-noise ratio is pretty shit, and there’s probably an explanation for that.
The reason hypocrisy doesn’t help to change people’s behavior is that everyone is already trying to act out their values. That’s what having values means: they’re the things that you’re trying to do. If someone’s doing something that goes against their values, it’s because they don’t realize that it’s doing that. So what’s required here is a material explanation of how the relevant behavior counterindicates the relevant values. For example, if someone claims to be a feminist, but complains about women who act “slutty,” it’s probably because they’ve internalized ideas about women’s sexuality being a source of weakness and frivolousness. In other words, they think they’re helping, because they think women need to be less sexual in order for feminism to succeed. The truth, of course, is that the problem is not the particular types of sexual behavior that women engage in, but rather the idea that there is a “correct” type of behavior at all. Substituting one mandate for another continues to oppress women. While some behaviors are in fact immoral (anything that doesn’t involve consent, obviously; also particular behaviors are potentially open to aesthetic rather than moral criticism, but that’s a whole other topic), the mandating of specific behaviors for certain classes of people rather than the development of a general moral theory is in fact what oppression is. Calling the person a hypocrite, though, doesn’t clarify any of this for them. You have to give them a real explanation.
As for discreditization, that doesn’t have a great track record either. I’m getting pretty sick of the tendency to turn every political issue into a referendum on Donald Trump, but unfortunately that’s the move here, because Trump is the biggest possible hypocrite. As you may have read on the internet somewhere, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt draws a technical distinction between lies and bullshit. The liar is someone who wants to convince you that a particular fact is not in fact a fact. A criminal trying to create an alibi wants you to believe that they were in a certain place at a certain time, even though they weren’t; establishing that belief in contradiction to the facts is their goal. The bullshitter, however, doesn’t care about the truth or falsity of the relevant facts in the first place; their goal is to use the appearance of facts to establish something else entirely. Our primary vector for bullshit is advertising. An ad will make a claim like “American Moms’ #1 Choice” or something, which looks like a fact-based statement. Presumably there was some sort of survey of American moms and most of them chose the product in question. And the company may in fact have conducted such a survey and gotten such results, if only for the sake of legal plausibility, but conveying that factual information isn’t the point. The point is simply to associate the product with positive-valence terms such as “America” and “Mom” and “#1” and “Choice.” In other words, bullshit may very well be true, but it doesn’t matter, because the intent of the statement is something else entirely.
So, Trump, who only understands the world in terms of marketing, will say whatever gets a positive response at the time, and will take whatever action seems like it will inflate his brand. Because of this, and because he has no other motivations, his stated beliefs and actions are entirely disconnected; he is a perfect hypocrite. The times when his actions and beliefs do align are mere coincidences; some of his beliefs may in fact be “true,” but they’re bullshit either way, because he doesn’t believe them as facts, but rather as instrumental vectors for self-promotion. He never actually encountered evidence that his inauguration had the biggest crowd ever, that was just the thing he had to say in order to make himself seem more impressive (the fact that it had the opposite effect was lost on him, because, in addition to being full of shit, he’s not very bright). Even if he really had had the biggest crowd, he still would have been bullshitting.
Now, some people have recognized this dynamic and been confused by it, because it seems to sort people into one of two camps. Either you’re opposed to Trump’s stated beliefs, in which case you oppose him, or you’re in favor of his stated beliefs, in which case you should be opposed to his actions, because he’s a hypocrite and is therefore betraying your beliefs, meaning you should oppose him. Thus, his thoroughgoing hypocrisy should prevent him from having any base at all. But the opposite is the case: Trump has an extremely strong base of support that is pretty much guaranteed to stick with him to the particularly bitter end. So this already completely discredits the concept of hypocrisy on an empirical level, because if it doesn’t work in the most glaringly obvious case, it’s clearly never going to work at all.
We can still figure out why this is, though. In the case of political support, stated beliefs are what matter. The government is big and complicated, so you can never assign simple blame for any particular failure. During Obama’s term, liberals made excuses for everything he failed to do or did wrong, and conservatives are doing the same for Trump right now. This is actually reasonable behavior. The president’s actual function is mostly “setting the agenda,” and given the limited number of options, the only thing you can really do is support the person who’s mostly somewhere in the vicinity of what you’re after. Conservatives understand this perfectly well. As much as they like to grandstand about decorum and shit, they know that Trump’s their boy. He’s the one who’s going to give them their judges and agency appointments. As long as it benefits them, they’re going to keep supporting him until it becomes politically untenable. Among ordinary voters, it’s the same thing: Trump is the only person even pretending to speak to their concerns, and he actually is sort of moving the general political agenda in their direction, and since that’s all they’re going to get, they’re going to take it. This is hypocritical, but it’s also just a basic utilitarian calculation, which is the only sensible way to approach electoral politics. (Of course, this is also why electoral politics are not worth spending much time on.)
What’s actually wrong with both Obama and Trump is not the fact that they’re hypocrites, it’s the fact that they’re liars. Obama ran as an anti-war candidate knowing full well that he was never going to oppose imperialism or indeed do anything at all about foreign policy other than formalize and normalize everything that he made it seem like he was criticizing Bush for. He played the role of racial redeemer without ever intending to do anything to help black people. He presented himself as a populist in public while specifically telling bankers that he was going to protect them from the people they fucked over. These are not instances of hypocrisy, they are instances of immoral belief. Calling these things “hypocrisy” lets Obama off the hook; it implies that nothing was really his fault, like he was just trying his best and if only he had more power and the opposition wasn’t so mean he could have fixed everything. What actually went wrong with Obama’s presidency was the fact that he holds beliefs that are actively harmful to humanity.
Trump is a somewhat different case; as mentioned, his claims don’t generally rise to the point of qualifying as “lies.” But there is one exception: the claim that he ever intended to act as a public servant at all. This was actually at the core of his campaign: he stated many times that he used to be a freewheeling capitalist, but now he was going to buckle down and serve the people. This, augmented of course by his unwavering allegiance to whiteness and masculinity, was the key to establishing in many people the perception that Trump was “on their side” and “the only one looking out for people like me.” Calling Trump a “hypocrite” does not attack this perception. It reinforces it; it makes it sound like Trump is trying his best but being stifled, which is exactly the excuse that his supporters are currently making for him. Undoing this perception requires targeting not his stumbles and gaffes, but the true center of his image: the fact that he’s a rich fuck. This is the relevant quality that ensures that he is never going to help anyone other than himself, but this cannot be seen by those operating under the notion that rich people are the “winners” of society, the ones who are the smartest and the most qualified. Hypocrisy keeps the dividing line in the same place, but attempts to position Trump on the wrong side of it. This can’t work, due to the simple fact that Trump really is a rich fuck; he really is a representative of the upper class, even if they’re all embarrassed by him. Turning people away from Trump requires redrawing the line where it really belongs. It requires, yes, class consciousness.
To address the specific recent issue, liberals are being accused of hypocrisy for acting all aghast about sexual assault while harboring people like Weinstein and Bill Clinton on their midst. It’s true that liberals are in the wrong here: they’re wrong to harbor predators, and they don’t actually care about sexual assault like they say they do. But neither of these things is an example of hypocrisy. What’s actually happening is that establishment liberals a) don’t really want to end patriarchy and b) care more about schmoozing and power-grubbing than changing society in any case. It’s not that there’s a contradiction between their beliefs and actions, it’s that their beliefs and actions are both morally wrong on their own terms. This line of analysis applies to basically any possible accusation of hypocrisy: the problem is never the contradiction; it’s either that the beliefs are wrong or the actions are harmful, or both. Ignoring hypocrisy doesn’t mean that things are “okay,” it means the opposite. The things that are really wrong are the things that should really be argued against. If, hypothetically, someone who claimed to care about gay people were to pose with the people responsible for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, it would make sense to call them out on that. But the reason it makes sense is not because it’s hypocritical. It’s because whitewashing history prevents us from understanding why things are wrong and therefore from being able to do anything about it, because fetishization of trendy causes harms those causes, and because making nice with evil people normalizes evil.
There isn’t actually anything wrong with liberals taking Weinstein’s money. The whole rejecting-the-tainted-donation pageant is actually really fucking annoying. Money is fungible, you dumb fucks! That’s like the entire point of the concept. There’s no such thing as “blood money”; money doesn’t change based on where it comes from. The money doesn’t magically “corrupt” you due to some kind of phantom influence from its source. In fact, it’s more virtuous to take bad money than it is to take good money. Bad people are probably going to use their money to do bad things, so taking that money and using it to do good things is doubly virtuous.1 Contrariwise, all those people donating $27 to Sanders’ campaign probably needed that money.
There is, of course, a real problem with having rich patrons, but it has nothing to do with hypocrisy. The problem is that having rich patrons is bad regardless of what you believe. Republicans also have rich patrons, but even though they aren’t hypocrites about this, because they believe that wealth itself has moral force, their situation is still just as bad. It’s still causing bad things to happen. The real problem is that establishing long-term relationships with rich fucks and relying on them as sources of support naturally entails adopting their values as your own. When you start thinking of rich fucks as your “us,” the question of “what’s good for the country?” becomes “what’s good for us rich fucks?” You start to see the world through their eyes, and to frame all problems in their terms. Hillary Clinton’s “no quid pro quo” defense against bribery was actually accurate: quid pro quo is not how the influence of wealth works in the modern world. Clinton’s problem wasn’t the money, it was the fact that she really was “one of them.” Her problem was that she wasn’t a hypocrite. Besides, the correct solution here is publicly funded elections paid for by progressive taxation, in which case it would in fact be rich people paying for political campaigns.
The ironic thing about hypocrisy is that it’s slung about like a vicious accusation, but it actually gives the target the maximum possible benefit of the doubt. Calling someone a hypocrite assumes that they’re not a liar or a con artist; it assumes that their beliefs are true and they’re making an honest attempt to live up to them, but that they just happen to be failing. Hypocrisy is always the weakest possible accusation you can make; there is always a better argument. Hypocrisy is like accusing a person of accidentally stubbing their toe, when the real problem is that they’re busy stabbing someone.
But it’s actually quite a bit worse than that, because there’s a real, vile reason why accusations of hypocrisy are the most common form of political discourse. They’re ubiquitous because they’re counterproductive. Conservatives obviously can’t argue against liberal sexism by being anti-sexist, because conservatives are also sexist. So, instead, they use accusations of hypocrisy to attack their enemies without actually engaging in any sort of discussion about ideas or behaviors. The goal is not to actually discuss sexual assault; in fact, it is to avoid discussing sexual assault in any real way. It is simply to take advantage of the opportunity to discredit one’s enemies while ignoring the real issue altogether. In other words, it’s bullshit. It pretends to be a political discussion, when it’s really nothing more than tribalistic sniping and noise-generation.
For us ordinary citizens, the problem is even worse. As people without power, we have no options other than to engage with society as it exists. This means that we are all necessarily complicit in whatever evils we are trying to destroy, no matter what they are. You can’t be against capitalism or sexism or racism without also engaging in capitalist and sexist and racist practices, because the entire thing about these things is that they’re social systems. They’re not mistakes that happen here and there, but are rather how the world we live in is constituted. So if non-hypocrisy is the condition for action, no action is possible. The concept of hypocrisy does not help us to distinguish between better and worse actions, because all actions are fatally contaminated in its eyes. The way to argue for or against actions is on the basis of material results, which can actually be analyzed rather than merely yelled about. This is the truly important reason we must jettison the concept of hypocrisy entirely. It forces us into a morass of fruitless defensiveness and scares us away from the real actions we’re capable of taking. It smothers us in self-righteous snobbery and prevents us from making real, bold arguments – the kind that might actually change something. One of the few genuinely important, non-bullshit functions of talking about politics as ordinary citizens is to get people to take stronger stances. Debating the merits of this or that policy is completely irrelevant for most of us, since we have no control over which specific policies actually get implemented. What we do have a non-zero amount of control over are our values and priorities, and it’s important to get these right.
This point might seem too simple to be worth making, but it is in fact the case that people use this line of attack all the time, against everything. If you use social media to criticize social media, you’re a hypocrite. If you buy a shirt with an anti-capitalist slogan on it, you’re a hypocrite. If you’re an anarchist, anywhere, ever, you’re a hypocrite. Again, there is potentially a real argument that can be made about the likely effects of certain actions; if there’s a readily available alternative to a company that uses sweatshop labor, or an easy vegan substitute for a meat dish, it can be helpful to point those things out. But they still exist in context: all consumption supports the economy that relies on sweatshop labor, and all food is part of the production chain that tortures animals. This is the difference between sincere progressiveness and reactionary accusations of hypocrisy: one aims at the best that can be done in this world, the only place where things can happen, and one is simply a shouting-down of any possible action at all.
Also, global warming.2 We all believe that the planet should continue to exist, and we’re all engaged in the behavior that’s destroying it. We’re all hypocrites. Like, seriously, we suck, okay? It’s great if you’re all self-actualized or whatever, except it’s actually not, because the world’s still being destroyed, which means you actualized yourself wrong (or at least prematurely). Quit trying to act cool.
These are the truly pernicious “purity politics.” They are the ones that come from the amoral center, striking against any possible alternative to the world as it happens to exist at this particular moment. If the problem is hypocrisy, then the solution is to stop expressing political beliefs – or, more dishonestly, to claim “nuance” and accuse your opponents of being “purists.” Hypocrisy motivates people to change in the wrong direction: away from proclaiming their values openly and honestly, and towards the most tepid and inoffensive actions. We want people to feel comfortable stating their beliefs as strongly as possible, because that’s the only way we can have a real conversation, and we want people to act like they mean it, because that’s the only way anything is ever going to change.
There is, then, a necessary solution, which is to be a hypocrite. You should say what you really believe and value, rather than saying that thing that makes you sound the most “reasonable.” You should then try to figure out what actions will be the most effective at advancing those beliefs, rather than which actions will expose you to the least criticism. Given the current state of the world, doing this will cause various people to hate you for various reasons, and it will leave you open to accusations of hypocrisy. The correct response is to not care. If someone has a real argument against you, that’s great, you should listen to them, but if it really is a real argument, hypocrisy won’t enter into it. In a world of ersatz rationality, where human potential is locked down by false certainty, the recklessness of hypocrisy is our best weapon against the worst future. The only worthwhile political stance is to be a first-world anarchist.
(It’s also a useful defense against taking yourself too seriously.)
Besides, it’s obvious that none of the people making accusations of hypocrisy care when the same accusations are leveled at them. If you don’t think accusations of hypocrisy are significant when they’re directed at you, then accusing others of hypocrisy as though such claims were significant is itself hypocritical. That’s not why it’s wrong, though. It’s wrong because it’s useless either way.
So, yes, for the record, Lisa Simpson is a total moron in that one episode. ↩
I’m starting to feel like this phrase should be mandatory in any article about anything. ↩
Ponies are apparently the major political issue of the current era. Some people think everyone should get a pony, others think that all ponies should be distributed exclusively to factory owners for the purpose of making glue, and still others think that ponies are nice in theory, but nobody should actually get to have a pony, because that would just be irresponsible. It’s all very contentious.
The first thing that’s strange here is that the meat of the pony is actually just the standard liberal-democratic agenda: healthcare, education, stimulus spending, and the rest of the welfare state. This is the normal stuff that liberals are supposed to be in favor of, so portraying it as magic beans is somewhat suspicious. The “free college” thing is an especially odd sticking point. We are constantly being told by mainstream politicians that education is the only viable path to the future and that anyone who doesn’t retrain themselves to meet the demands of an increasingly automated economy is going to get flattened by the steamroller of progress. But when people respond by making the completely obvious follow-up demand that education and retraining actually be accessible, they’re suddenly accused of pie-in-the-sky unicornism. The demand here isn’t for “ponies” at all; the demand is simply for oatmeal. And, at the risk of beating a dead horse, this demand is being made in a world where some people own multiple mansions with private jets to fly between them at will, while others are being evicted from roach motels and literally starving to death. If this is what we’re talking about when we talk about ponies, it’s long past time for rich fucks to pony up.
But we shouldn’t get complacent just because some people are being completely disingenuous. This is one gift horse that we really do need to look in the mouth. The facts of the matter are that America is a very rich country, and that it contains about 5% of the world’s population. It’s straightforwardly incoherent to rail against the 1% in the name of a guaranteed middle-class existence for all Americans, because middle-class America is the 1% of the global economy. I’m not saying that you’re only allowed to care about the worst things. Anything that’s bad merits opposition and anything that’s wrong merits righting. Given that we can’t transform the economy overnight, there’s nothing particularly immoral about enjoying a reasonable standard of living in America.
And it’s really bizarre and honestly very upsetting that we can’t actually talk about this. Everything is still being framed in terms of what’s good for “the economy” rather than what actually makes people’s lives better. The recent increased focus on inequality has caused a lot of people to start making the argument that inequality is bad for the economy, that it’s inefficient and decreases overall productivity. I’m sure this is true, but opposing inequality on this basis is an extremely terrible argument. When you do this, you’re completely conceding the only part of the argument that matters: the assumption that overall economic growth is the only acceptable value, and that every policy has to be justified on this basis. The omnipresence of this argument is not mysterious: it’s like that because it’s what rich fucks want. Given that rich fucks are already on top of the economy, the only thing that can further benefit them is accelerated growth. There’s only so much money you can steal from poor people, and most of it is already being stolen. So as long as the discourse remains constrained by this framework, not only ponies and oatmeal but even hay and salt licks are going to remain entirely out of our reach. The best we’re going to get is gristle.
Once we decide to take this seriously, though, it becomes incumbent upon us to ensure that we’re betting on the right horse. The thing is, America’s world-historical prosperity is not a coincidence. There is a specific material reason that America possesses enough wealth to provide everything for all of its citizens, and that reason is called imperialism. The whole “two cars in every garage” thing is an ideal of very recent vintage: it’s a direct consequence of America’s global dominance following the devastation of the second World War. America has more resources than everyone else because America takes them from the rest of the world, by force.1 So while it might seem justified to simply make the internal claim that America’s resources should be distributed more evenly, that claim rests upon the availability of those resources in the first place. In order to support such an arrangement, you’re implicitly required to support the conditions that make it possible. This is why liberals are imperialists.
So, in the final analysis, it is indeed the case that ponies are the ill-considered playthings of spoiled rich kids. In order to create a world that genuinely works for everybody, we have to focus on the basics. It is properly within the realm of human rights to insist that everyone should have a comfortable place to live and access to food and healthcare and maybe even internet-capable computers, but 70” TVs and new smartphones every year and overnight-shipped meal kits are things that we can only afford by offloading their real costs onto someone else. Like, the whole thing about the “information economy” or the “service economy” or whatever we’re calling it now is that it assumes that the resource extraction and manufacturing are being done elsewhere. Someone has to actually build the automated service kiosks, you know. So if we have that type of economy, what we have is precisely a global 1%: we have shit countries doing the shit work and doughy Americans yelling at their robot butlers.
At the same time, though, people also shouldn’t be obligated to constantly hustle in order to scrape together enough paychecks to survive, or spend eight years bullshitting for the sake of an official certification entitling them to an entry-level office job, or maintain an impeccably professional social media profile to prove right-thinking. Most of the “privileges” of our first-world society are actually shit deals. This is the truly pathetic thing about liberals: the unrealistic utopia they’re trying to sell us isn’t even any good. It’s a lame horse. So we can not only fulfill our moral obligations by evening things out on a global scale, but also provide a preferable alternative to the sad future of austerity and apps by making an actual good deal: dignified living in exchange for civil responsibility. This is the real positive argument that we have at our disposal, and making it effectively requires us to dispense with fantasy and describe the world as it really can exist, and how we really can get there though a long, determined march over the dead bodies of billionaires. Rather than a pony, then, what we need is something more like a pack-bearing mule. It won’t be any of the obvious choices on display; it’ll be a hybrid creature, something that we wouldn’t have expected to exist at all. I’ll be slow, and it won’t be pretty, but that’s okay, because it won’t be for show. For the first time in human history, it will be something that works.
As always, this brings us to the real problem, which is, as always, global warming. American-style outsized resource utilization is not just unfair, it’s literally destroying the world. This is also not a coincidence. The thing about fossil fuels is that they provide an immense amount of energy in a very small and effective package. Their existence is a great boon for humanity: everything about our modern lifestyles relies on the unprecedented amount of energy generation that they afford us. The problem is that, due to the aforementioned social arrangements, this boon has been largely squandered. We’ve used it to drive an unhealthy amount of growth solely for the sake of rich fucks’ desires for ego gratification and escapism. A responsible long-term plan would have used this energy to develop a global infrastructure for keeping everyone fed and healthy and then worked on converting that infrastructure into a more2 sustainable form. This is the kind of bootstrapping that actually works. If we had ever tried to do that, we’d already be done. Again, that’s what’s so frustrating and sad and insane about this whole arrangement. There never should have been a problem in the first place, but we went to the maximum amount of effort in order to create one, and we did it for no reason. We weren’t outmatched or conned; we didn’t make mistakes or fail to figure anything out. The reason the planet is burning is simply that we’ve shoved it into an oven.
As mentioned, the focus right now is on finding “solutions” to “problems” within the existing liberal-capitalist framework, and global warming is the strongest and most important example of why this won’t work. I’ll do you a favor and spare you the full rehashing, but the basic problem is that, while increasing the use of renewables is nice, what we’re ultimately going to have to do is stop using fossil fuels entirely, which is incompatible with a growth-based capitalist framework at all, let alone with the maintenance (and, indeed, promotion) of billionaire lifestyles. Global warming is just plain not a solvable problem within our current societal configuration. The society in which it is solvable has not yet been instantiated, and doing so will require destruction as much as creation. We are facing an Old Testament-level threat, and we require an Old Testament-style solution. We don’t need a pony here so much as we need four horsemen.3
This is extraordinarily important to keep in mind in the current context of “the resistance.” The particular grotesquenesses of the immediate present are strongly motivating a desire to get things “back to normal,” and even those attempting to look forward – the people who are increasingly being called “the left” – are mostly doing so within the parameters of the not-quite-discredited liberal-capitalist consensus (the fact that “socialism” now means “going halfway back to the New Deal era” tells you everything you need to know here). Certainly, some of the “norms” being “eroded” are in fact real accomplishments that we need to preserve, but a norm isn’t a good thing just because its a norm. The more important concern here is that our world was birthed wrong in the first place, resulting in many more and more important norms that are not mere politenesses but are in fact the carrots and sticks spurring us on down our current path to destruction. Most of these are still being upheld, and any real future requires their eradication. If humanity is to have any hope of tightening the widening gyre, the center must not hold.
Nowadays this is generally indirect, modern imperialism is less about pillaging and slave labor and more about opening up markets, but the basic idea is the same, and economic force is still force. Also we still have slave labor in America through the prison system, so there’s that too. ↩
Nothing is literally sustainable. Ozymandias, entropy, etc. ↩
Global warming is the third horseman, by the way. The first is conquest, a.k.a imperialism. The second is war, which is the state of nature that the world descends into when imperialism inevitably fails (for something that’s supposedly about spreading civilization, it’s a notably uncivilized endeavor). The third is famine, or more broadly resource depletion, which is what’s going to happen when we lose half of our agricultural yields, all of our port cities, and exist at the mercy of constant natural disasters. So, y’know, we’re getting there. The fourth is what happens after that. ↩
This whole healthcare debacle is starting to get under my skin. I’m used to everything being terrible, I don’t have any expectation of living in a just or rational society or anything like that, but this is different. It’s not just that the situation is empirically untenable (every country with universal healthcare is healthier than the U.S.), or even that it’s morally scandalous (if you can spend money to save someone’s life, you should obviously do that, even if it has other negative consequences). It’s that the argument against universal healthcare is actually, in the strict sense of the term, illogical. It contradicts itself.
While Obama was in power, Republicans went on at some length regarding the need to “repeal” Obamacare. This is a least a coherent statement. If you think a law does the wrong thing, your goal should be to repeal it. But as soon as they gained the ability to sign legislation (specifically, as soon as it became the case that throwing millions of people off of health insurance would be their fault), the phrase suddenly morphed into “repeal and replace.” This no longer makes sense. The objection to Obamacare was supposedly that the government shouldn’t be meddling in the health insurance market, in which case there obviously shouldn’t be any “replacement” for it, since that would also involve the government meddling in the healthcare market. And if the problem was just that Obamacare was a poor implementation of a good idea, then there was never any reason to cry “repeal” in the first place. The specific problems should have just been fixed.
Now, the actual motivation here is pretty transparent: Republicans are lying about wanting to improve healthcare in any way other than reducing the amount that rich fucks have to pay for it. But the same logic applies to Obamacare itself. While, politically speaking, it’s sensible to defend Obamacare against an alternative that’s going to be worse, what we’ve been seeing recently is a bunch of people arguing for Obamacare and against universal healthcare. This is incoherent. If you believe that the government should intervene in order to improve healthcare outcomes, then there’s no reason that needs to be tacked on to a system of private profit. Healthcare is basically just risk pooling: everyone pays a little bit in and less fortunate people take more out. Certainly, there are all manner of details to be worked out (I heard recently that healthcare is actually really complicated), but that’s the basic structure of the endeavor, and it works that way regardless of whether you have private insurance or a government-run system. Private insurance has the disadvantages of a) siphoning away some money as profit, making it more expensive and b) denying care based on cost, making it less effective. There are no “innovation” or “quality” advantages, because the insurance companies are not themselves the ones doing medical research or providing care. In short, Obamacare is only comprehensible as either a band-aid or a half-measure in the direction of the real solution (or both). It’s not the kind of hill that you die on.
So, the thing about this is, even before Obamacare, we already had socialized medicine. Private insurance companies are part of society, and they redistribute wealth based on need. Also, they’re already choosing who lives and who dies based on cost-effectiveness; we already have death panels. The only thing that would actually qualify as a “free-market” solution would be to ban insurance and force everyone to pay their own way on everything – which would include all other forms of insurance, which are redistributive in exactly the same way. The fact that people voluntarily choose to enter into insurance contracts is irrelevant because a) they don’t, insurance is almost always mandatory, and b) that doesn’t change the functional nature of the endeavor. If people are going to be doing this anyway, you might as well manage it such that moral standards can be applied and profiteering can be reduced.
In other words, civilization in general is a collective endeavor that exists for the purpose of redistributing wealth and reducing risk. I mean, obviously, right? Even on a straight Hobbesian view where you’re forming literally any type of society just so you can survive, that’s still what’s going on. The only way to coherently argue against universal health care is to argue against society.
Which means there has to be something else going on. People have problems with this sometimes; they think that once they’ve shown that something is “illogical,” they’re done, but that’s actually where you have to start. People don’t just have opinions beamed into their heads by cosmic rays. If something doesn’t hold up along one line of reasoning, there must be a different line of reasoning along which it does; otherwise it could never have come from anywhere in the first place. That is, the current healthcare system didn’t just randomly contort itself into the worst possible shape – it has to be serving an actual positive function.
Let’s start by considering the function of the term “Obamacare.” This name was made up by Republicans to make the law sound bad. Their strategic purpose was, of course, the same strategic purpose that Republicans always have: to associate the things they’re opposed to with black people. This has been successful to the point that we now have people who oppose the heavy-handed and disastrous Obamacare in favor of the reasonable and effective Affordable Care Act (non-comedy version). You’ll note that this is essentially the same opinion as “keep your government hands off my Medicare”: it draws a distinction between the good kind of benefits for good people and the bad kind of benefits for bad people. And in America, the bad kind of benefits, the kind we call “welfare,” are coded black. It is generally the case that the bad kind of government meddling (“your government hands”) is the kind the benefits black people, and the good kind of government meddling (“my Medicare”) is the kind that benefits white people. So what we’re talking about here is segregation.
The thesis that mass incarceration constitutes a “new Jim Crow” is in fact not hyperbolic enough. Segregation is one of the primary purposes of society in general. As mentioned, society is inherently a collective endeavor, which is a problem for rich fucks. They’re only capable of getting rich in the first place through collectivity (think through the logistics of owning and operating a corporation), but they wouldn’t be able to get rich if they actually had to pay what they owe. The way they square the circle is through segregation. Segregation is how you get around the fact that society requires you to care about other people. You establish a class of people who “don’t count,” and therefore contribute labor without receiving its full benefits – or without receiving any, in cases such as prison labor. In fact, prison labor is an extremely clarificatory example, because it shows us how things work now. Rather than branding certain types of people at birth with the mark of Cain, condemning them to wander through society as permanent exiles, we now have the proper procedures for this sort of thing. We fill out all the paperwork and consult with panels of experts and make the rational decision that some people aren’t really people. The old “Whites Only” signs strike us today as hopelessly backward, but the truth is we never really rejected them. We just evolved beyond the need for them. We no longer require explicit signage, because we now have a society that segregates itself automatically, as though it were the natural order of things.
So this problem is all over the place, and liberals are totally in on it. Charter schools are all about resisting integration by picking out “deserving” children and giving them real educations, while the rest languish in underfunded hellholes. Abortions are easily obtainable if you live in a major urban area and fuck you if you live anywhere else. Highly skilled workers don’t need unions, so there’s no reason to protect them; they don’t help anyone who matters. And the police are always there to protect and serve you – for certain values of “you.”
This is why running the numbers and arguing about what’s going to cost what and who’s going to get taxed this much to pay for that is all entirely beside the point. The point is that we’re having a debate about segregation. After all, health is pretty much the best possible thing to spend money on. Arguing about cost-effectiveness blunts the issue’s moral edge. And because that edge is extremely sharp, it’s very important for us to keep it honed. We need it to cut things. This is the real importance of this decision. We’re deciding whether the benefits of civilization are for everybody, or only for the “deserving.” And because segregation is no longer explicit, this is no longer an explicit decision. Simply trying to do the right thing for yourself (finding the “best deal” on healthcare, or sending your child to the “best school”) maintains the existing situation. Even if you don’t actively want the underprivileged to suffer (which, frankly, most people do), their suffering is required in order to maintain your lifestyle. It’s the cost of doing business.
Universal health care does have majority support, but that’s only because it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Ideology is a hell of a drug, but it’s not all-powerful. Still, even if we eventually get this one very basic issue under control, the general dynamics aren’t going away. You have to decide what you really want and do what it requires. Otherwise you’re just managing symptoms.
You’ve probably heard that there was a “march for science” this weekend, and you may have asked yourself what the hell that was supposed to mean. This is one of many things nowadays that is “common sense” and “shouldn’t be a partisan issue” and “it’s so ridiculous that it’s 2017 and we’re still talking about this,” which is exactly how you know that this is not where the real issue is. That is, there’s a notion that certain strains of political thought are “anti-science,” but of course this is absurd. Science is a methodology, not a goal, and for this reason, no one is actually opposed to it as such. Republicans are more than happy to support science when it’s being used to construct giant bombs and mass surveillance tools. Nobody is insisting that these things be done according to Biblical instructions. People who have goals that they want to achieve use the means that are available to them, and science is one of those.
First of all, the specific issue we’re talking about here is global warming, which is something that we should not euphemize, as it is and continues to be the single most important issue in politics. (If we’re particularly unlucky, it will continue to be the most important issue for the remainder of human history.) There’s a lot of talk concerning a “scientific consensus” on this issue and the fact that certain politicians won’t “accept” it, but this does not amount to an explanation. Science is, again, a method that can help you understand what the situation is right now, and potentially help you figure out how to do something about it, but only after you’ve decided what it is that you’re going to do. As explained by the Big D himself, David Hume, in a much-quoted-but-apparently-not-quoted-nearly-enough passage:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.
In short, science can, ideally, tell you exactly what the present situation is, but what it can tell you about what you ought to do about it is – again ideally – exactly dick. After all, the group of people who accept the scientific consensus on global warming includes Barack Obama, who, well, I’ll be generous and not say that he did nothing about it during the time that the issue was on his desk, but considering the scale of the problem, it’s difficult to argue against the conclusion that he basically sat on his hands.
Worse, “science” is in fact the thing that caused global warming in the first place. It’s more than a little peculiar to oppose global warming by demanding more science in politics, seeing as what actually happened is that extreme advancements in industrial technology outstripped our ability to monitor and control them via policy. If it weren’t for science, if it were simply a matter of choosing a policy, no one would ever have chosen for global warming to happen. But, you’ll object, that’s not science’s fault. It was the profit motive, or human short-sightedness or whatever. You are entirely correct. To attach the label “science” to the results of a scientific process is a category error. Science is the process and is not the outcome. The first sentence of this paragraph makes the same category error. Science is not the cause of anything; it can only be the means by which a cause produces its effect. For this same reason, science cannot save us. Indeed, treating science as a real thing and not clinging to it as a fetish means respecting it even when it cuts against you – when it demonstrates that getting what you’re after requires sacrifice.
And also for this same reason, “science” cannot be the thing that our recent marchers were in fact marching for. They are making the same error: what they are actually in favor of is the results of science. A common grievance is the fact that the current administration seems to be attempting to neutralize the function of the EPA, if not eliminate it entirely. This is usually framed as an attack on “science.” But “science” and “the environment” are not the same type of thing. “The environment” is what we want; “science” is potentially how we get there (again, it can just as easily be how we don’t get there). Insisting on “more science” does nothing to oppose those who don’t want to preserve the environment in the first place.
More than that, “the environment” is not actually what we want, either. There’s always going to be an environment, no matter what. Even a Mars-like lifeless rock is still “an” environment. What we want is an environment that is good for humans, and it is here that we finally get around to imposing some fucking constraints. The thing that’s really disgusting about global warming is that rich fucks are going to be fine. They have high-tech doomsday colonies in which to while away their decadent lives while the rest of the world burns. The thing that allows them to do this is science. The other thing that allows them to do this is a hell of a lot of money – money that could be used to help the people who are actually going to get fucked to death otherwise. This is the only thing that is intelligible as a political demand. We don’t want rich fucks to jump up and down and shake their pom-poms when they see a pretty picture of a nebula. We want their fucking money. To actually argue this, though, you’d have to argue that rich fucks are not entitled to spend their money however they please – indeed, you might even end up arguing that people in general have a moral obligation to use their resources to make things better for others. And that’s just not how we do things in America.
The reason, then, that one “fucking loves science” is because it is easy to do so. Like, I wouldn’t normally do this stuff. Y’know, everything’s so partisan these days. I don’t like engaging in politics, like some kind of union laborer. It’s just that I love facts, you know? Facts are the best.1 Which, like, yeah. Facts are facts, which is why that is a worthless statement. What matters is what you’re going to do about them. And if what you want to do about them were something that the people in charge of this society were okay with, it would already be happening. If you want something different, then, you should be honest about what it is you’re saying. After all, most of the problems that we aspire to solve using science have already been solved – for some people. As William Gibson famously put it, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. So if you’re going to protest, don’t settle for taking the easiest possible stance out of fear that you won’t get a sympathetic writeup in the New Yorker. Make a real claim. What you are actually in favor of is coercive economic redistribution.
Like, there’s apparently a hat with the word “facts” on it, because wearing that in public will totally show everyone what a functional and intelligent person you are. ↩
Now that our long national nightmare is formally underway, it behooves us to review the specific parameters of the current situation. This is a war, you know.
Back when this was all just a particularly unpleasant hypothetical, two potential silver linings were foreseeable. One was that Trump’s signature blend of cluelessness and incompetence would prevent him from getting anything significant done. He has no idea how to run a government, no ability to learn, and no convictions that he would ever feel the need to press forward on. If he actually did “drain the swamp” in any significant sense, he’d just wind up with an administration full of equally ineffectual toadies. In short, his term would merely be a period of stagnation. The other possibility was that his fundamental emptiness would relegate him to the role of figurehead, with the Republican establishment doing all of the actual governing and thereby advancing their standard-issue conservative agenda. This would be very bad, but it would be the type of badness that is within the usual operating sphere of American politics. It’d be the same as if any of the other Republican contenders had won.
What we’re looking at now is the worst of both worlds. Republicans have officially commenced with the ramming through of as much of their reactionary wishlist as is ram-through-able in however many years this is going to last, and Trump has also been shoving into his nascent administration the maximum attainable number of goons and cronies, as well as charging on with his own irrepressible instincts towards petty grasping and childish blundering. So what we’re looking at is basically the existing Republican dystopia smothered in low-quality Trump-brand steak sauce. And it’s not like we were doing fine before any of this happened. We were and are facing a large number of vitally important challenges that require drastic remediation yesterday. So we’re now in the worst possible situation at the worst possible time.
The Muslim ban is a great example of how this works in practice. It’s the type of thing that Republicans wanted to do anyway (recall that Cruz wanted to put every mosque in the country under surveillance, which kind of sounds like a big government program to enforce political correctness, but never mind that), but Trump managed to do it in the stupidest possible way. Anyone else would have gone through the necessary layers of lawyers to make sure that the order was basically defensible, but Trump’s Brute Squad just slapped something on his desk for him to sign. And the thing is, doing it this way caused more harm. It fucked up green card holders and other legal residents, who would not have been included in any competently drafted order, and the general uncertainty meant that a lot of people were just randomly detained for excessive periods of time, and even now many people are afraid to travel simply because no one can tell how this is going to shake out. And even with the laudable amount of opposition, the whole thing still has the effect of normalizing animus against immigrants.
More specifically, though, what we are in is the worst possible version of the same previously-existing situation. We were already ramping up inequality and failing to respond to global warming and arbitrarily murdering people at home and abroad. Indeed, even on the specific issues of deporting immigrants and admitting refugees, the United States under Obama was notably zealous and deficient, respectively. The rallying cry du jour is that we need to resist “normalizing” Trump, but you’ll note that this tactic has a rather vicious double-edge: if it is Trump specifically that is not normal, then everything else, the actual agenda that his administration is advancing, is business as usual. Oddly enough, the current sticking point is the opposite of “it can’t happen here.” It’s that people are unable to process the situation through any lens other than “it’s the Nazis again.” So, y’know, we’re all concerned about the rough beast slouching towards Washington to be born, but the fact of the matter is that the center has held, and that’s not really all that encouraging. It is not that our political system’s accommodation to Trump demonstrates that it is capable of holding up even against extreme destabilization. Rather, the fact that a neo-fascist uprising is able to resolve itself into business as usual proves that the potential was there all along. The violence was always inherent in the system.
I have no objection to labelling Trump a fascist. We came up with that concept for a reason; it’s useless unless we use it. But there’s a difference between throwing the F-word around and actually figuring shit out. Specifically, if we’re going to compare Trump to Hitler, we ought to note the obvious difference: Hitler had a plan. He had something that he wanted to achieve. Y’know, unlike Trump, Hitler actually wrote his own book, and it was about ideas instead of just being a self-promotional pile of dubious business bromides. Trump is the exact opposite of a mastermind. He’s a shark – all he can do is move in one direction, on mere instinct. Like, the reason Trump goes after the press is not that he knows an adversarial press is a cornerstone of a free society and he needs them out of the way in order to autocratize in peace. It’s because media criticism undermines his ability to act like a big man on the TV. That’s it. That is the sum total of his political orientation on the subject.
So because nothing about Trump is novel (in the substantive, non-spectacular sense of the term; that is, he’s a “novelty,” but he’s not novel), getting rid of him accomplishes nothing. Indeed, Trump is already impeachable on account of the emoluments thing, and the Republicans probably will want to wash their hands of him at some point. Even as president, his brand is becoming increasingly toxic, and turning against him will be an easy way for mainstream Republicans to reestablish their “Reasonable Adult” credibility. The potential future here is not exactly shrouded in mists: Trump crashes and burns, the Democrats prop up some gutless party hack like Cory Booker, who spends his terms tweaking and formalizing all the hideous policies Trump put into place, the discourse shifts ever rightward, and eight years later the Republicans get one more chance to finally destroy the world for good. This is the real danger that must be avoided. We cannot afford to get distracted by the particular grotesqueries of Trump himself. (He’s only going to be around for so long in any case. Trump’s health is getting surprisingly little attention: he’s the oldest person ever elected to the presidency, and he obviously doesn’t exercise or eat well. A random heart attack or stroke is entirely likely.) Caring about politics means fighting for a real future.
This is not to say that Trump is a fluke, or that he doesn’t matter. Quite the contrary, the point is that he is the logical conclusion of the line of reasoning presently embodied by the Republican Party. For example, if you’re concerned about Trump’s administration ignoring the normal processes of the government and overriding checks and balances and soforth, you’ll want to recall that it was the boring old pre-Trump Republican Senate that categorically refused to confirm any Supreme Court nominee put forth by Obama, and it is for that reason alone that Trump now gets to fill that seat. Let’s also recall that the Republican Party’s descent from bad faith into outright idiocy was pioneered by Sarah Palin, who was introduced into national politics by Captain Straight Talk himself, John McCain – the same John McCain who is currently trying to front like he’s got some kind of principled opposition to Trump, despite the fact that he’s not actually doing shit about anything. Let’s try to avoid falling for this obvious of a con.
Still, Trump clearly isn’t a “normal” Republican, so there’s a bit of a paradox to resolve here. One of the reasons people initially thought that Trump would be largely ineffectual was that he wouldn’t be able to work with the rest of his party, on account of heterodoxy. He was constantly clashing with the Republican establishment during the campaign, as well as making inconvenient promises like not cutting Social Security that people are now expecting him to follow through on. Indeed, if Trump really were serious about trying to become a popular and successful president, he would want to follow through on those promises, even if he had to fight the rest of his party in order to do so. He wouldn’t be able to pull it off, but it’s not like he’s ever shied away from wasting his time on a big dumb pointless fight. So it really does seem like it should be one or the other: either Trump is a dangerous eccentric, or he’s an empty ideologue. How, then, can it be both? Why isn’t there any real conflict between these things?
Abortion is one of the more visible issues in American politics, so that example should help us clarify things. As you know, one of Trump’s first actions upon entering office was to reinstate the Global Gag Rule, a longtime mainstay of the anti-abortion project. This marks him as a typical Republican: the same thing has been done by every Republican president since abortion became a big national issue. So we can refocus the question by asking: why does Trump give any number of shits about abortion? He infamously defended Planned Parenthood during the primary, he sure as hell doesn’t have any religious motivation, and the idea that he has any kind of opinion on the science of the matter is as laughable as the idea that he doesn’t want to fuck his daughter. When liberals rattle off their obligatory list of Trump’s transgressions, they usually include the time he said women who get abortions should be punished. But this isn’t really justified, because he obviously didn’t mean it. It’s an easy shot to take, but people who want to be able to credibly complain about “fake news” and “post-truth politics” need to hold themselves to a slightly higher standard of intellectual honesty. He never raised the issue himself; it only came up under repeated direct questioning, and his answer was obviously a guess. He figured that it was what he was supposed to say, and he walked it back as soon as someone informed him that it wasn’t. Certainly, this doesn’t mean he secretly supports abortion rights. It means he doesn’t care; he had literally never thought about the issue before the question came up, which is why he was completely unprepared to answer and had to resort to a “tough”-sounding guess.
It’s been justifiably speculated that Trump has probably paid for an abortion or two in his day, and if we go ahead and assume this is true for argument’s sake, you’ll note what it actually illustrates: Trump believes abortion is a man’s prerogative, not a woman’s. Trump is “pro-abortion” in the sense that he thinks women should be able to have abortions whenever their men tell them to. (The fact that poor men can’t afford to force their women to get abortions is irrelevant; I don’t think Trump is actually aware that there is such a thing as a poor person. The entire premise of Trump University was that anyone can just start conducting real estate deals whenever they want to. That’s how it was for Trump, after all.) This is closer to the pro-life position than it is to the pro-choice position; ergo, Trump is a Republican.
In fact, it’s exactly the same as the pro-life position. See, the pro-life position actually is about controlling women; the idea that abortion specifically is among the most important elements of the Christian faith is baldy implausible outside of the American political context. So the reason Trump and the Republicans are in sync here is quite simple: despite surface-level differences, they believe the same thing. We saw this quite clearly when Trump bungled his “Two Corinthians” reference at Liberty University. Why would people for whom Christianity is the most important part of their lives forgive such a blatant transgression? Because their Christianity as Christianity is merely window-dressing for their real beliefs, and they can tell that Trump’s underlying real beliefs mirror theirs perfectly well. Really, the fact that anyone thought that Trump wouldn’t be able to gain evangelical support just goes to show how shallow our political discourse really is. It doesn’t even account for the fact that people have beliefs that go deeper than basic demographic identification.
This same dynamic applies equally well to everything else. Trump does not actually dissent from Republican talking points, he just expresses them badly. The particulars of Trump’s positions differ from Republican orthodoxy only because Trump is an unsophisticated political actor. The Republicans have spent decades figuring out how to advance a reactionary agenda under the cover of “common sense” and “principles”; Trump has had no such advantage, which accounts for the difference in his messaging. But his underlying ideology is exactly the same. It may briefly disorient you to realize that Donald Trump is not a creative thinker. Everything that he has proposed is something that is already happening. We already have a border fence. We’re already surveilling Muslims. We’re already deporting massive numbers of people. We’re already killing suspected terrorists’ families.
People like to talk about how Trump is “manipulating” the media or “gaming” the system, but that’s not what’s happening at all. Trump’s messaging is completely naive; he lacks the protective layer of cynicism that someone like Obama uses to communicate to multiple distinct constituencies at once. Y’know, the fact that Obama was able to present himself as an anti-racist savior while also placating scared white people is exactly what manipulating the media looks like (and you’ll recall that the media actually does suck (for the opposite reasons from why Trump thinks it does), so there’s some ambiguity as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing). Trump is an inveterate liar in terms of actual information, but the reason for this is that everything he says is driven by ideology. He says whatever has to be the case in order for his beliefs to be true. It is because of this that he is the exact opposite of the family-friendly and mass-appealing Obama: Trump is an unambiguous, crystal-clear image of one particular ideology, so you are guaranteed to either love or hate him. He tells it like it is.
In other words, what’s happening right now is not that an alien presence has descend upon our previously-innocent political system, corroding it from without. It is that Trump is giving us a glimpse behind the veil; ordinary, unsophisticated observers are finally able to see clearly the invasion from within. So you can see why, for anyone who actually wants to do anything about any of this, the whole “this is not normal” thing is kind of unbelievably fucking annoying. Liberals now have the perfect foil, someone who single-handedly justifies their entire ideology as well as a man for whom “foot” and “mouth” aren’t even separate concepts, and they’ve taken the opportunity to stab themselves in the chest.
The critical point is not that Trump is not a threat, or that we don’t need to resist him. It is that we can’t miss this chance. If we merely remove Trump himself and leave everything else the same, we will be doing nothing but drawing the curtain back again, reconcealing the truth. Given the stakes, we cannot allow this to happen. We must accept the deeper truth behind these events; we must walk through the threshold and into the lair of the beast. If this really is a “never again” type of situation, then the only way to make that so is to avoid jumping at every possible shadow, and to instead hunt down the thing that caused this and make it die.
Specifically, what the fuck is all this shit about Russia? I’m really not interested in litigating the details here, so let’s just assume that the allegations we’ve heard are uncontroversially true. Russia hacked both the DNC and the RNC, released the DNC information to damage Clinton, and held onto the RNC information to blackmail Trump after he won. If this is the case, what it means is that the Russians provided true, relevant information to the American voting public, who then used it to make an informed decision. (While drawing moral equivalencies is always tiresome, it bears repeating that the U.S. does way worse shit than this every day before breakfast. We’ve overthrown democratically elected governments, for god’s sake.) The idea that this constitutes “interference” that “tainted” the election is deeply disturbing – again, people who think “fake news” is a problem really need to get their heads in the game here.1 You either care about the truth or you don’t. In fact, the theft and release of this information was more than simply justifiable, it was actively moral. That information is ours by rights. What possible argument can there be against letting people know how the political parties that claim to represent them actually operate? If the Democrats lost due to the truth about them being revealed, there is very obviously only one way to interpret that situation: the Democrats are doing a bad job. There’s no point in helping them win elections absent a justification that makes them deserve to win.
Furthermore, if Trump is being blackmailed, what that means is that Americanselected a blackmailable candidate. It’s still our fault. I mean, the question at issue here is not particularly rhetorical. The reason for these histrionics is that liberals are embarrassed as hell that they lost to a personified temper tantrum, and they’re looking for someone, anyone else to blame. They’re trying to recast the threat of Trump as something foreign, something from out there rather than in here. The truth, of course, is exactly the opposite. Even assuming that the worst is true regarding Russia’s intentions and actions, they didn’t make Trump rich. They didn’t make him a celebrity. They didn’t establish a pattern of scapegoating immigrants, promote a culture of anti-intellectualism, or create a discursive structure in which sexual assault can be dismissed as a minor personal foible. I mean, I’m sure they’ve done all of that for themselves, but we didn’t need their help to do it here. That was all us, baby. America, home of the brave.
There’s no getting around the facts here. Lewis Black once joked that even Michael Moore’s harshest critics couldn’t possibly consider him un-American, simply because, as a fat white loudmouth in a baseball cap, no other country could have produced him. The same observation goes triple for Trump. He’s a doughy, ignorant, gauche, small-minded trust-funded bad investor with fake hair, an oversized tie, and a suit that doesn’t fit. Come on. You couldn’t get more American than that if you baked a baseball into an apple pie and shoved it up a bald eagle’s ass. Say literally anything else you want to about him, but “un-American” is just not in the cards. This is the real reason people can’t stop paying attention to him. He’s us. He’s the part of ourselves that we hate. He’s a puppet, but he’s not Russia’s puppet. He’s our puppet. He is doing the things that our society implicitly tells people to do, and he is being rewarded for it in the way that our society implicitly tells people they will be rewarded if they do those things. He’s the monster, but we’re Dr. Frankenstein.
It’s not just the tacky surface-level stuff, though. This is the part that’s really important. The reason Trump won a national election in America is that Trump is the exact embodiment of American ideology. People are having real trouble with this, so it merits a substantive explanation. Trump’s primary character trait is his absolute unreflectiveness on all subjects. This explains the way he talks, for example: he never thinks about what he wants to say before he says it or considers the right way to convey a point to a particular audience, he just immediately barfs something out. And it explains his famous difficulties with basic facts: as soon as he feels like something is true, it becomes one of his basic assumptions, and he never reexamines it. This same dynamic operates on the level of ideology. Each of Trump’s beliefs is simply the unrefined version of something that American society tells people to believe. Capitalism allocates money meritocratically, so the richest people are therefore necessarily the best. Women should be defined by their utility to men, so sexual assault isn’t a real issue as long as you keep it quiet. Society should be organized to implicitly favor white people; any other arrangement would be “playing identity politics.” America is more important than other countries, so what “foreign policy” is actually about is using the rest of the world to benefit America as much as possible. As unhinged as he is, Trump has never once introduced a new concept into American political discourse. Everything he’s ever said has simply been particularly bilious regurgitation of established reactionary phobias and fetishes. It is beyond critical to understand that everything Trump says and does is merely the channeling of our existing social prejudices and the amplification of them up to 11. (Incidentally, the explanation of why 11 is louder than 10 is basically the distilled form of all of Trump’s arguments.)
“When Schwartz began writing ‘The Art of the Deal,’ he realized that he needed to put an acceptable face on Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trump’s voice, he explained to the reader, ‘I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.’ Schwartz now disavows the passage. ‘Deceit,’ he told me, is never ‘innocent.’ He added, ”Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?” Trump, he said, loved the phrase.”
No offense to the guy, I’m sure he’s lost a fair amount of sleep over all of this, but his interpretation here is completely backwards. Hyperbole is always truthful; the definition is literally that it’s an overstatement of the truth. And that’s exactly what Donald Trump is. He’s capitalist hyperbole. He’s a ridiculously overdone version of something that is nevertheless true.
The fantasy of capitalism is that what’s good for business is good for the individual, and Trump is a complete prisoner of this fantasy. That is, the idea behind capitalism is that money is a heuristic: it isn’t itself valuable, but it represents value. Being rich isn’t good for its own sake, but because the way you get rich is by doing things that are genuinely worthwhile, by making the world a better place (this isn’t actually true, of course; the real situation is closer to the opposite, but that’s the idea). Most people, even capitalist diehards, understand this implicitly. Like, Steve Jobs didn’t take a salary, and Bill Gates has his charity foundation; these things aren’t redemptive, but they’re evidence against naivete. Rich fucks of this ilk understand that they have more money than they deserve and they’re trying to do at least a little something about it, which means they understand that capitalism is not a source of moral values. Donald Trump does not understand this; he is incapable of understanding anything in any other terms. This is why, when Trump was asked what he had sacrificed for the country, he answered that he had created jobs. He didn’t understand the question because he couldn’t, because in capitalist ideology there is no such thing as sacrifice. Everyone does best by doing what is best for themselves. That’s exactly what the “Trump brand” represents: the raw, dumb force of the empty heuristic of money. Similarly, the reason he’s fixated on his vote margins and crowd sizes is that he can’t get behind them to the thing that they are supposed to represent. If he actually wanted to do something as president, he wouldn’t have a problem, because he’s already there; he could just do it. But what he actually wants is the accolades without the substance; rather, he doesn’t understand that there is such a thing as substance behind surface indications of success and popularity. And the reason he gains support for acting this way is that his supporters believe the same thing, and this is not surprising, because this thing they believe is exactly the thing that everyone in America gets taught in middle school: that money is your score in life, that the “invisible hand” magically makes everything work out so long as everyone makes sure to act as selfishly as possible – and, furthermore, that history is defined by which white men are the toughest and have the biggest ideas. They think that Trump is going to “get things done” because they have been told their whole lives that people who look and act like Trump are the kind of people who get things done.
But America isn’t that bad, right? Doesn’t our current American society also tell people to be charitable and racially sensitive and respectful to women and soforth? Yes, exactly, which is why Trump thinks that he does those things. Our society does not tell people to, for example, understand racism as a structure and think about how their actions might unwittingly perpetuate it despite good intentions. It does not tell men that horniness and privilege are not justifications for overriding women’s humanity. You have to figure things like that out for yourself, and Trump does not figure anything out for himself.
Ergo, support for Trump is the same thing as support for these underlying social ideals, the kind that people are normally not gauche enough to state out loud. Hence the claim that Trump “tells it like it is”: he doesn’t state these ideas literally, because he thinks he believes in things like equality and freedom, but he conveys them without applying the usual layer of politeness to smooth them out. He cannot appear other than as he is.2 And in the same sense, opposition to Trump is the same thing as opposition to these ideals – or rather, it should be, except that liberals are doing their best to fuck the situation up.
Okay, that’s an overstatement. People get that Trump represents resurgent bigotry and soforth. In fact, there have been a number of encouraging signs in this regard. Opposition to the Muslim ban was both immediate and correctly focused: everyone knew it was about attacking Muslim immigrants, so they responded not by litigating the particular details of the order itself, but by expressing their support for Muslim immigrants. Things don’t usually go this well. During the run-up to the Iraq War, for example, the principled opposition to it (which very much existed) didn’t get much of an airing in the mainstream. There was a big dumb debate about the whole “weapons of mass destruction” thing, which was always just a smokescreen. People didn’t get, at first, that the Iraq War was about imperialism. But everyone got immediately that the immigration order was about racism. This represents progress. Americans in general are now less deluded about what politics is really about than they were ten years ago.
But we’re still not quite where we need to be yet. As mentioned, people keep trying to construct Trump as a foreign threat or a chance anomaly, rather than trying to figure out what it is about our society and our politics that caused this. And people keep talking about how Trump is doing things that are “unconstitutional” and harping on his administration’s “incompetence” and “disorganization” – as though the situation would be better if Trump were playing by the rules and implementing his policies effectively. None of this is to downplay the threat posed by Trump’s administration. Far from it; our moral responsibility at this point is to play up the threat that has been with us all along.
The ongoing drama over Trump’s cabinet appointments provides a good example of the distinction. What we’ve been hearing over and over again is that these nominees are “unqualified” for their respective positions. In fact, while each of them is unqualified for what liberals imagine their job is supposed to be, they are all supremely qualified for the jobs that they are actually going to be doing. I wasn’t totally clear on this at first; I was particularly confused by Tillerson. Certainly, a horrible choice; putting an oil executive in charge of foreign policy is like putting a meteor in charge of dinosaur outreach. But it seemed weirdly random, like Trump had just picked the name of a rich executive out of his rolodex. However, if we make the simple assumption that these choices were all intentional and not mistakes, things become less mysterious. Trump hasn’t stocked his cabinet with random nobodies; he’s taken the termites that were already crawling around in the woodwork and given then more to gorge on. Regarding Tillerson, as this article explains, he was, as an oil CEO, essentially acting as a de facto Secretary of State already:
“In Kurdistan, during the Obama Administration, Tillerson defied State Department policy and cut an independent oil deal with the Kurdish Regional Government, undermining the national Iraqi government in Baghdad. ExxonMobil did not ask permission. After the fact, Tillerson arranged a conference call with State Department officials and explained his actions, according to my sources, by saying, ‘I had to do what was best for my shareholders.'”
Tillerson’s previous job was to open up foreign markets to the American oil industry, and as the official Secretary of State, he’s going to be doing exactly the same job. DeVos’s life’s mission has been to destroy public education, and that’s exactly what she’s going to continue doing in a more formal capacity. Pruitt made a career for himself out of suing the EPA to block environmental regulations; he is now being given an opportunity to cut out the middleman. Carson is going to be a do-nothing black figurehead in charge of urban development because the only interest Republicans have in urban development is in using it to ward off charges of racism.
Not only does lining all this up correctly help us to understand what’s going on here, but we’ve also just seen what the consequences of getting this wrong are. Puzder’s nomination was withdrawn not because he was going to be a Labor secretary intent on crushing labor, but because of “controversy.” So now Trump is going to find some other goon to do exactly the same job. This is not a “win” in any sense; no progress has been made, and no danger has been forestalled. So yes, unqualified blanket resistance to Trump’s agenda is the correct approach, but if we simply oppose these things because the ethics paperwork hasn’t been properly filed, we’re merely delaying the inevitable. We have to cut along the veins in order to draw blood.
You may be anticipating that my point here is that we need to focus on the “real issues” and not get distracted by petty cultural trivia. In fact, this is a perfect example of a wrong line to cut across, and the reason for this is that culture is a real issue. It’s the realest issue. As explained, that’s where all of Trump’s horrifying beliefs come from: he absorbed them from the culture. And that’s the real danger of Trumpism: that it’s going to change the culture for the worse, that it’s going to make our society a worse place to live. The arithmetic here is pretty simple. If the threat posed by Trump originates from the fact that he’s nothing but a writhing blob of unexamined ideology, and if that ideology is in fact the general ideology of American society, then the idea that we need to “defend American values” against this threat is exactly wrongheaded. We need to erase and rewrite the parts of the story that led to this particularly nauseating plot development.
This is why Clintonism leads naturally to Trumpism. It’s not a matter of “failing” to win an election; it’s a matter of logical implication. If your entire philosophy of government is to just give constant handjobs to corporations, that opens the door for someone like Trump to come in and say: why bother with “rational” administration at all? Why convolute things unnecessarily? Why not just let businessmen do whatever they want directly? Indeed, why not? If we don’t have a substantive answer to that question, we don’t have a real argument against Trump. We just have our cute little insults and nicknames.
Again, the common framing wherein we must avoid “normalizing” Trump is severely deficient. First, as explained, Trump is already normal. Like, he was already a celebrity and a media draw. That’s why he won despite being completely incompetent (and despite not even wanting to win in the first place). It was Clinton, the one insisting that we respect women and care about structural racism, who was the freak.3 Liberal fantasies notwithstanding, anti-racism hasn’t yet been normalized for real. What we might call the John Oliver Strategy, simply insisting to yourself that “this is not normal,” accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is whether Donald Trump is actually considered a normal American. Norms are not personal fetishes. They are social conventions, and the convention right now is to treat Trump as though he really is a valid occupant of the office. Because of course he is; he’s actually sitting in the chair right now. If that strikes you as wrong, even sickening, you have to make it wrong. This is work yet to be done. Liberals assumed that an overt predator and blithe racist could not possibly gain enough support to win the presidency; they assumed that racism and sexism had already been denormalized. This is not the case. And now, in their confusion, they cling to the notion that what’s happening now is “not normal,” that if we can just make it go away (or worse, wait it out), everything will eventually go back to how it’s “supposed to” be. There is, of course, no “supposed to.” History will be what we make of it – or what we fail to make of it.
Some obvious objections present themselves: Clinton won the popular vote, American culture cannot be reduced to one simple ideology, opposition to Trump is widespread and popular. All true; the problem is that these aren’t actually objections. All of this is the case, and Trumpism is happening anyway. There must, then, be a missing link: something that we think we’re doing right, but we’re actually dropping the ball on.
This is where is gets a bit subtle. The uncharitable interpretation is that most people’s opposition to Trump is merely aesthetic. They don’t like Trump because he’s an uggo and he talks dumb, whereas they liked Obama because he was pretty and he talked fancy, and neither opinion was based on any real convictions. This is exactly half right – the aesthetic angle is half bullshit and half serious fucking business (it seems like this is always the case with aesthetics). So it’s important to clarify which half is which. We’re all aware that Obama was and is subject to a ridiculous amount of celebrity worship regarding such qualities as his handsomeness or his cute family or his good taste in music or his “inspirationalness” or whatever, and this is all bullshit, and to the extent that opposition to Trump is simply the flip side of this, opposition to the fact that he has bad hair and lacks culture, it is equally bullshit. People aren’t robots, though. It’s not just a matter of checking off the correct policy boxes. There is, underneath all the tabloid fluff, a real distinction here.
To make this clear, let’s look at one of the more trivial recent comparisons: Trump’s and Obama’s behavior at the inauguration. Barack and Michelle waited for each other and walked together, while Donald ignored Melania, who was later helped along by the Obamas. If we interpret this incident as the Obamas being “nice” people and Trump being a “mean” person, it is completely meaningless. We’re talking about the Presidency of the United States here, not the Miss Congeniality award. But if we think about what type of behavior we’re looking at, and what it represents, we get to the part that actually matters. What we’re talking about is the way husbands treat their wives, which means we’re talking about one of the basic distinctions upon which we construct our gender ideologies. The Trumps’ marriage models the ideal of the rich man who buys a hot trophy wife as decoration and isn’t really aware she exists outside of that role, while the Obamas’ models a partnership between two different but morally equal humans (I’m not trying to give them any special credit here, but people do perceive them that way). This is a real, substantive distinction. The latter conception of romantic relationships is the type of thing we want our society to move towards. I’m not really willing to call it feminist, since the entire concept of the “first lady” is already irredeemably sexist (and I’d actually prefer de-normalizing romance, but that’s another story), but it’s at least less bad. It’s gesturing in something like the right direction.
In addition to the fact that seemingly trivial things can point to real issues, “official” political problems are frequently bullshit. One of the big things people are still tripping over their own feet on is the issue of Trump’s tax returns. Releasing your tax returns is an important part of the Official Democratic Process, so it’s a Real Issue that Serious People care about. It doesn’t actually matter, though. Trump’s conflicts of interest are way down the priority list of things we need to care about right now. Furthermore, there’s no point in litigating this issue any further, because we’ve already lost. Pushing the issue during the election would have been a decent tactical move to prevent Trump from being elected in the first place, but nobody bothered, and now it’s too late. Trump has absolutely no incentive to release his tax returns, and he already knows he can get away with not doing it, so he’s not going to. That’s it. Further furthermore, even if you get the information and get Trump impeached or whatever, all you’ve done is gotten rid of one guy. You have had absolutely no effect on the underlying issues, and you have done nothing to prevent a version of Trump with clean tax returns from gaining power in exactly the same way.
Again, though, there is a non-bullshit version of this issue, which is the version that applies to our social dynamics in general rather than solely to one person. That version is this: Trump gets extreme benefit of the doubt based on the fact that he’s rich (and white and male and etc.; you can apply this line of reasoning the same way in other cases, but one thing a time here). The assumption behind this is that our society allocates resources justly – that people without money are not worth listening to, whereas people with money are necessarily better than everyone else. This is, of course, the exact argument made in Trump’s favor: sure, he’s a ridiculous jackass, but he’s rich, so he must be doing something right. And when liberals argue that Trump is a “failed” businessman or a “fake” billionaire, they are actually making this same argument: that’s it’s only because Trump is not a real rich person that he is not worth listening to. A “good” businessman who wasn’t “corrupt” and who really “earned” their wealth by building “successful” casinos would be the kind of person we should have as president. Now, more than ever, we are obligated to advance the exact opposite ideal: anyone who gets rich in this society must be doing something wrong. So the focus on tax returns specifically masks a deeper and more important issue: rich fucks should not be president. The correct situation would be almost the opposite of what we have now: anyone whose tax returns are so complicated that reading them would actually reveal anything should be automatically disqualified from participating in the government.
In short, we need to split aesthetics down the middle in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. Ignoring aesthetics is both undesirable and impossible. Aesthetics are how people see the world. Understanding this gives us a clear opening: we can show people a better view.
One important consequence of this is that we should not forsake insults, but rather start getting our insults right. Certain types of people like to claim that insults are always wrong, that you should always address the issues and not the people, but there’s no real justification for this (plus there’s an obvious ulterior motivation to this argument). Ideas are made of people, which is why insults are the exact tool required to drag self-important blowhards down into the muck that the rest of us have to live in. The catch is simply that, like everything else, insults can be executed well or poorly; good insults are truth-apt. Insulting Donald Trump for being fat and ugly is not truth-apt, because plenty of fat and ugly people are decent human beings, and plenty of slim and attractive people are fascists. However, pointing out that Trump is a rich person who eats garbage food and can’t seem to find a suit that fits is truth-apt, for a particular reason. That is, it’s not that there’s something wrong with you if you dress poorly or like KFC. Everyone sucks at something, and that doesn’t make you a bad person. But the justification for wealth is that being wealthy is better than not being wealthy in an absolute, substantive way; this distinction is pretty much Trump’s entire argument for himself. So, if that’s not true, if wealth isn’t really enough to buy you a better life, if care and discernment earn you more of a return than throwing money around, then that justification falters, and that argument fails. The fact that Trump is a rich person who nevertheless has no culture or discernment demonstrates that wealth by itself is not necessarily any good. And of course this goes further: the fact that we have a society organized around accumulating wealth and not around cultivating traits that are actually worthwhile is why people who are conventionally successful within current social parameters are bad people.
In other words, good insults, like good aesthetics, go somewhere. Trump’s obvious boner for his daughter, for example, is entirely within bounds, because it illustrates the fact that patriarchy is disgusting. Such behavior follows naturally from the assumption that women are required to present themselves in a manner that is sexually gratifying to men. It is the same assumption as that behind diet crazes and ass implants and pornographic pop music videos. If, then, you feel that Trump’s behavior toward women is disgusting, that means you have your head on straight. Being disgusted by disgusting things is the aesthetically correct reaction. But you have to realize what it is you’re actually disgusted by. You’re disgusted by Trump’s deviance from norms of politeness, but also by his adherence to norms of gender relations. Your resolution, then, should be to follow your disgust through to its necessary conclusion. When you’re doing it right, hate is a productive force. If you really hate someone, surface-level pokes and jabs don’t cut it. You don’t pick fights that you aren’t willing to see through. The only thing that suffices is to get inside the thing that they really are, deep down, and destroy it for real.
The most common narrative that has arisen from the election results is that Clinton lost by playing up “culture war” issues and ignoring “economic fundamentals.” Now, obviously, the Democrats have abandoned labor and this has been both electoral suicide and a moral catastrophe. I don’t think anyone’s confused about that. But this is not a dynamic with any specificity to this election; it has always been the case. I have never known a world where labor had real political influence. Furthermore, Trump obviously didn’t win on economic policy, because he did not have an economic policy. All he did was jump up on a platform and hoot “bring back jobs!” over and over again like a badly-trained baboon. In short, the people claiming that Clinton lost by relying on non-white and female identity politics are missing the rather glaring point that Trump won by relying on white male identity politics. This is evidence in favor of identity politics: it proves that this is something that people really care about, that white men still have this advantage, and that there remains work to be done here.
There have been a lot of people pointing to “culture war” issues like nonbinary pronouns or whatever and saying “this is why the Democrats lost.” These people are either cowards or traitors. If they’re only willing to take a stand on an issue when it’s popular, they’re cowards. If they are pretending to care about things like gender equality when they actually don’t in order to gain credibility, they’re traitors. Either way, these people are the real threat. They are the ones who are trying to stop us from fighting the battle that actually matters. This is why god invented the guillotine.
Exactly this was Clinton’s true fatal flaw: she failed to make this a real fight. For instance, during the first debate, Clinton baited Trump by bringing up Alicia Machado, a pageant contestant whom Trump had publicly degraded. This was clearly an intentional gambit, as Clinton had the name at the ready and brought it up pretty much out of nowhere. And it worked: it led to the man who is currently President of the United States advising the nation to “check out sex tape” at three in the morning. So why didn’t it matter? Well, because it was just one more dumb controversy in an already insufferable election full of them. Why do we care about Trump being mean to some random lady? It’s not because we care about her personally, but because no one should be treated that way. Specifically, we care because this sort of behavior is part of a general pattern of sexist degradation, which affects all women. Ergo, the fact that Trump engages in this type of behavior demonstrates that bullying and misogyny are among his basic values, and that his administration would be harmful to women.
Indeed, shortly after this happened, the Access Hollywood tape came out, providing clear evidence that Trump was not merely a brash and unrestrained type of guy, but in fact a serial sexual predator. Again, Clinton brought this up in the next debate to score a point, and then dropped it completely. She never actually advanced the argument that Trump should have been disqualified from the presidency on feminist grounds rather than just because of all the “qualifications” bullshit that no one cares about. For example, those ads where women repeated all the mean stuff Trump said about women do not actually rise to the level of being feminist. They’re just claiming that Trump is a bad person who says bad things. It’s actually impossible for an argument of this type to be convincing, because only people who were already opposed to that stuff will find it to be affecting (indeed, people who agreed with that stuff in the first place may come out with their convictions strengthened). If you want to make an issue of something, you have to raise the issue.
It isn’t that Clinton overplayed her hand here, what with the glass ceilings and the empowerful messages to little girls and soforth. It’s that she played the right card on the wrong trick.4 She didn’t have the temerity to actually make the argument that voting for a woman to beat Donald Trump was the morally correct course of action. But she should have, because that was always her best argument. Contrary to tired denigrations of “vagina voters,” the vagina opening should have been made bigger. Consider: if we actually took sexual assault seriously as a society, this whole thing – everything that is going to happen because of this – would have been prevented.
So this is not a limited point about how one person could have won one election, nor is it my own personal advocacy for the kind of politics I would like to see. It is the only way to save the world. People have been going on a lot about our “democratic institutions,” and whether they’re “strong enough” to resist Trump’s attempts at autocracy. This question is entirely irrelevant. State institutions can’t stop fascism, because fascism is a state phenomenon. It’s what happens when the state stops fucking around. Like, the fact that Hitler is a dictator doesn’t mean that he goes around personally telling each Nazi solder which Jews to kill. He uses state institutions to do that.
Since Hannah Arendt is currently popular among people who buy famous books so that they can pretend like they’re intellectuals, let’s try engaging with something she actually wrote. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she discusses a period towards the end of World War II, in which Heinrich Himmler attempts to halt the Final Solution, imagining that this will put him in a better bargaining position with the Allies. Himmler, Eichmann’s superior, orders him to stop transporting Jews, and Eichmann ignores the order, believing it to be against the will of the Fuhrer and therefore “criminal.” As Arendt explains, this situation inverts our normal conception of “legal orders”:
“The extensive literature on the subject usually supports its case with the common equivocal meaning of the word ‘law,’ which in this context means sometimes the law of the land – that is, posited, positive law – and sometimes the law that supposedly speaks in all men’s hearts with an identical voice. Practically speaking, however, orders to be disobeyed must be ‘manifestly unlawful’ and unlawfulness must ‘fly like a black flag above [them] as a warning reading: ‘Prohibited!” – as the judgment pointed out. And in a criminal regime this ‘black flag’ with its ‘warning sign’ flies as ‘manifestly’ above what normally is a lawful order – for instance, not to kill innocent people just because they happen to be Jews – as it flies above a criminal order under normal circumstances. To fall back on an unequivocal voice of conscience – or, in the even vaguer language of the jurists, on a ‘general sentiment of humanity’ (Oppenheim-Lauterpacht in International Law, 1952) – not only begs the question, it signifies a deliberate refusal to take notice of the central moral, legal, and political phenomena of our century.”
Opposing something like the Muslim ban on the grounds that it is an “illegal order” begs the same question. Immigration policy and national security are explicitly the President’s job. If you’re just trying to be a good American and uphold cultural values, you’re going to follow those orders. The people who opposed the Muslim ban did not simply look up the correct thing to do in their book of official regulations. They came to their own interpretation of the situation and made their own choice. The fact that the order was issued in so rushed and haphazard a manner clarifies this point: because there was not a big legal infrastructure built up around it, the only reason it was ever enforced at all was that some people made the individual choice to do so. And some people didn’t.
“We’re turning a blind eye—we’re pretending we haven’t seen the Syrian passport.”
And in that very same link you can see the problem:
“’Policies don’t execute themselves by magic. They actually have to be carried out by people,’ he said. ‘This travel ban…is not just horrific and unwise, but it’s illegal. It’s requiring the people who execute it to break the law.’ If you’re a government official—CBP, ICE or otherwise—and you’re being asked to do something that violates the law, he said, just don’t.”
Okay, so, if the order didn’t “violate the law,” if it was issued “wisely,” then that would be just fine, right? Like, the reason Rosa Parks is a hero is because forcing black people to move to the back of the bus was an “illegal order,” so she was just standing up for traditional American values when she disobeyed it, right? The fact that the people who stood up to the ban were praised by its opponents for “upholding the law” at the same time as they were attacked by its supporters for “failing to uphold the law” proves exactly that there is no “unequivocal voice of conscience” in this matter.
This applies on a much more basic level. Trump is the president right now. That’s just the fact of the matter. So it’s also a fact that anyone who wants to play ball has to deal with him. And yet people like Elon Musk get criticized for serving on official advisory committees – for following the rules and doing their job. If you’re opposed to that, if you think the fact that some jackass has a fancy title imparts no obligation on your part to respect or accommodate them, then what you are actually opposed to is the concept of formal authority, and hence the idea of the presidency itself.
To put it simply, you can’t praise “American values” and the “rule of law” and “process” and soforth as the source of everything just and righteous while also advocating resistance to “illegal orders.” It is incoherent for the United States to say “you must follow our orders at all times, unless they are illegal, in which case you must not follow them,” because the United States itself is what determines what’s illegal or not in the first place. (Retreating from legality to morality does nothing to resolve this problem; replace “the United States government” with “United States cultural norms” and you get the same contradiction.) This is, after all, what totalitarianism means: the state determines everything. Obviously, then, the only way to oppose it is to have standards and values that are independent of the state, and that are therefore capable of contradicting it. It is not our institutions that have to stop Trump; it is us. It is you and me, personally.
And it is you and me who have not been doing a very good job of this. People keep pointing to shit that has been happening this entire time and being like “welcome to Trump’s America,” like that means anything. Like, can you believe that America is racist now? And that we have an incoherently aggressive foreign policy? And that we’re stockpiling nukes and inflating the military for no reason? And that the government spends all its time making sweetheart deals with corporations and ignoring real problems? As a particularly dramatic example, Trump’s first approved military action killed an eight-year-old girl, so of course this is evidence that the American military has just now become a horrible child-killing monstrosity. Yet, in a disgustingly poignant twist of fate, that eight-year-old girl was Nawar al-Awlaki, whose equally innocent brother, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was killed by Obama in pretty much the same manner. If you care about one of these killings and not the other, you are not engaged in politics. You are acting in a reality show. You’re the puppet.
Rhetoric also matters here. Both Trump’s RNC address and his inauguration speech were criticized for being “dark” and portraying America as a bad place where lots of bad stuff is constantly happening. News flash, assholes: America is a bad place where lots of bad stuff is constantly happening. That’s exactly what liberals are supposed to care about. Like, when liberals need to signal their support for Black Lives Matter, we’re in an emergency situation and the police are fascists and there’s death in the streets and racism is intractable, but when they need to signal their opposition to Trump, then America is a wonderful land of magic and opportunity, and anyone who thinks it needs some kind of fundamental change must be some kind of crazy person, probably a demented narcissist. The reason this dynamic is really pernicious is that liberals have ended up arguing against things that are actually good, simply because Trump happens to be standing in the general area near them. For one thing, the fact that a political outsider won a national election by appealing to common sentiments and attacking received wisdom is unambiguously a good thing. It removes barriers to entry, allows new ideas into the conversation, and creates the possibility for change. More importantly, we really are in an era of “American carnage,” but it’s not because of terrorist immigrants or gang violence or political correctness or lack of competition. It’s because of America’s murder-driven neocolonial foreign policy, because of police brutality, because real political values are subordinated to media-friendly horse-race vapidity, and because capitalism has developed to the point where it’s now devouring itself. We must have the courage to articulate the true response to “make America great again”: the past was bad. Coal mining was bad. Child labor was bad. Jim Crow was bad. Marital rape was bad. And, to the extent that these things from the past still exist in the present, the present is also bad. The only thing that holds the possibility of being good is the future, but that can happen only if the future is something different from both the present and the past – something new.
Fucking this up is how you get shit like this (the first paragraph is from Trump’s inaugural, the second is some liberal trying to criticize it):
“At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction, that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy famously said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.’ In the first three minutes of his presidency, Donald Trump has already eviscerated that notion.”
Breaking news update, assholes: Trump is right and JFK was wrong. Liberals have gotten so deranged over this whole thing that they are now arguing against the idea that the purpose of a nation is to serve its people. When you don’t have principles, when you think the problem is that there’s a “bad guy” and you have to “stop” him, your arguments end up incoherent. People object to Trump’s insistence on the centrality of a single strong leader, but they do this by wistfully reminiscing about how great Obama was. People object to Trump’s cheap appeals to patriotism, but they do this by claiming that he’s going against American values. In short, the liberal argument against heavy fascism is simply to advance light fascism as the preferable alternative – as the only alternative. But being able to hold more than one idea in our heads at a time is the advantage we have over people like Trump. It’s tempting to retreat to the basics in the face of scary situations, but it is precisely times like these when we require the power of our best tactics.
Furthermore, trying to pin everything on Trump himself is itself the thing that we’re supposed to be arguing against: the idea that rich white men should always be the center of attention. Obviously, Trump has a huge amount of formal power right now, and we can’t just ignore him. But we also don’t have to hang on his every tweet and obsess over every quirk of his phrasing. We have better things to do with our time – not just things that are far more enjoyable, but things that matter more. Trump fronts like he’s the big dynamic decider man who does whatever he wants, and the media abets him in this by portraying him as a black swan. We have to stop doing this. We have to stop pretending like he matters as a person, because he doesn’t. He’s not a black swan, he’s a white swan. He’s the whitest possible swan. He’s a white swanpremacist.
This is what it actually means to take the high road. It does not mean staying positive or playing nice or following the rules. Playing nice in a situation like this is more accurately referred to as cowardice. What taking the high road means is doing the thing that is right rather than the thing that is easy. It means adhering to the truth absolutely, no matter how inconvenient it is, no matter what advantages it requires you to forsake, and no matter what it forces you to do. Mocking Trump for being dumb and incompetent is easy. Attacking the underlying causes of his support and developing a substantive alternative is right. The reason fascism extends naturally from capitalism is that capitalism is an empty ideology, and fascism, say what you will about its tenets, is at least an ethos. It’s not so much something to believe in as it is anything to believe in. There’s no point in “stopping Trump” is you don’t have something that you’re stopping him for. Ergo, our very straightforward task is to create something better to believe in – and, given the causes of this situation, this has to be something better than “progress,” better than “success,” and better than America.
Of course, we can’t simply do this ourselves. We have to construct a common framework that goes beyond easy digs and makes all of this make sense. Assuming that our reasons for opposing Trump were the same as everyone else’s is what made the election results “surprising.” Remember, being surprised doesn’t mean that something “weird” happened; events themselves are not “weird” or “normal,” those characteristics come from our interpretations of them, so what being surprised means is that your understanding of the situation is lacking. The fact that everything’s going so wrong now does not mean that we’ve gone astray and we need to get back to where we were before. Understanding Trump as hyper-normative rather than merely grotesque reveals that events are unfolding according to their own internal logic, and it also reveals the necessary character of any possible resolution. Avoiding this conflict is indistinguishable from surrender. “Winning” will not mean anything unless and until this becomes a real war.
And yet you still get motherfuckers claiming that Russia “hacked” the election, when there has been not even the suggestion of any such thing. And of course these are the same people who rend their garments every time Trump talks about illegal voters, lamenting how, oh how could our glorious political process ever have descended to the depths of such tawdry accusations. ↩
This is what the term “authenticity” refers to, and I encourage you to take this opportunity to consider whether authenticity is actually a good thing. ↩
Yes, Clinton is a grasper and was never really going to follow through on any of these things. That strengthens the point: even insincere, token acknowledgment of these points is too much for “normal” Americans to handle. ↩
Hot take alert: Donald Trump is the most politically correct candidate ever to compete in American politics. That was a joke, about it being a hot take. I’m completely serious.
Listen, I’m as interested in writing an internet blog post about political correctness as I am in discussing slash even being aware of Trump in the first place, but this is what the situation is. We should be better than this, but we’re not. The temptation, certainly, is to throw up one’s hands and declare that none of it makes any sense. But what a contradiction actually means is that your assumptions are wrong – the facts cohere based on a different standard than the one you’re applying.
And this is precisely what’s being lost in the chatter: that there are actual facts on the ground that have very little to do with Trump or with the media or with the electoral process or anything other than the actual politics of the situation. Someone like John Oliver can, for instance, do an entire segment on Trump that’s all about who he is as a person and says absolutely nothing about the politics behind why anyone supports him.1 I mean, the man’s definitely a head case, there’s a psychology dissertation or two in there for whoever’s got the stomach, but when it comes to the actual politics of the situation that ain’t really matter. He’s been bloviating for years without ever rising above D-list tabloid fodder – it’s only now that the planets have aligned and the first seal has opened (the first horseman is a false prophet bent on conquest, just FYI) that his politics (such as they are) have coincidentally attained national significance. Trump is not the test, he is the failing grade you get a week later after not studying. There’s a real reason this is happening.
And remember, Trump is our mistake – the people’s choice. The elites wanted to stop him, but they either couldn’t get their act together or they decided that it ultimately wasn’t going to be worth it. At this point, the actual direct cause of Trump showing up on the TV and being taken seriously is that many millions of people voted for him. And now it’s the general, and he’s been consistently polling in the 40% range. This is not a statistical anomaly; that number represents real human people who want him to be President. Trump supporters do not view him as merely a conveniently-placed fool; they view him, frankly, as a hero. They are voting for something that they feel Trump embodies. Our task, then, is not to “stop Trump.” This would merely be to chase away the vampire’s shadow, leaving the real monster free to feed. Our task is to determine the nature of the thing that Trump supporters are supporting, and kill it.
So yeah, I’m going to do this once and then I’m going to stop and also get off my cross. The last thing I want to say before we get started is that I’m definitely right about this. This is the one true Trump take,2 so after this you will be fully and correctly informed and you won’t have to read any more thinkpieces or anything. You’re welcome.
The Trump campaign begins and ends with racism. Anyone who tries to dodge this fact is not a credible source of political analysis. There are exactly two statements of Trump’s that have actually mattered in terms of gaining him support: The Wall, and Ban All Muslims. Nothing about how he acts or the media coverage or anything else matters unless people have a reason to support him in the first place, and racism is the reason.
Neither is Trump properly understood as a protest candidate. Certainly, part of Trump’s appeal is the way he ruthlessly attacks traditional politicians in impolitic terms, especially because most of these attacks are entirely justified. But taking this as an explanation belies the fact that Trump’s supporters are the most zealous that we’ve seen in recent history – they take him seriously. They do not view their candidate as a destructive buffoon who happens to be useful at the present time; they actually like him. Hard to believe, I know, but you can’t get anywhere with your analysis until you learn to cool your projectors. Trump supporters also do not think that he’s going to “tear down the system” or any such thing; part of his appeal is the idea (fiction) that he’s a “successful businessman,” meaning his supporters view him as competent (again, deep breaths).
Trump is, however, seen as an alternative to the existing Republican establishment, and this does not make sense. The Republicans have always (that is, since the party realignment in response to the Civil Rights Movement) been the party of racism, so supporting a conventional Republican candidate is a perfectly effective way of expressing your support for racism. And this isn’t just a misperception, because the Republican establishment also sees Trump as a dangerous outsider rather than as a useful idiot. So something about him really is different; racism as racism is not a complete explanation.
One proposed difference is that Trump is “explicit” about his racism, as opposed to the “political correctness” of typical Republicans, and this is what his supporters are supporting. They don’t want someone who merely advances racist policies, they want someone who gives full-throated voice to their grievances, who stands up and says “yes” to racism. But there’s a rather overwhelming flaw with this interpretation, which is that Trump never does this. I’m a little weirded out that no one seems to have noticed this. Trump expresses his racism in exactly the sameterms that all Republicans do. Trump takes precisely the standard Republican line of claiming that the Democrats are cynically exploiting anti-racism as a political shibboleth (a useful line because it happens to be true), whereas he’d be “so good for the blacks.” Trump always makes the standard move of couching his opinions in plausible deniability by saying things like “some of them, I assume, are good people”; he follows to the letter the typical discourse pattern of saying something racist, denying that it’s racist, then calling his critics the real racists. He’s walked back basically all of his “controversial” statements in response to media pressure. These are the exact behaviors that Trump supporters are supposedly rebelling against! And yet, when white supremacist Andrew Anglin said that Trump was “giving us the old wink-wink,” he somehow saw this as a new, positive thing, even though it’s what every Republican politician has been doing this entire time.
In exactly the same way, all of Trump’s “dangerous” policy proposals are merely gaudier versions of Republican boilerplate. His global warming denialism, gun humping, torture fetishism, myopic focus on the national debt, glib slashes to taxes and spending, and dick-swinging foreign policy have all been standard-issue for decades. Trump wants to ban Muslim immigration, but Cruz wanted to sic COINTELPRO on every mosque in the country. Indeed, The Wall itself is just a bigger and dumber version of something Baby Bush came up with: the whimsically-named Secure Fence Act of 2006.
Even Trump’s rhetoric is unusual only on the most basic level of tone. In terms of content, he’s saying exactly what every Republican always says. He attacks Clinton by saying she’s a “corrupt” political operative who panders to disadvantaged people solely for their votes, which is how every Republican attacks every Democrat. His claim that Obama “founded” ISIS is exactly the claim that Republicans always make about Democrats on foreign policy: that they’re “weak” and possibly secret anti-American traitors, meaning they don’t murder people indiscriminately enough and therefore allow “the terrorists” to do whatever they want. His insinuation that “Second Amendment people” could “do something” about Clinton follows directly from Sarah Palin’s “target map” and Sharron Angle’s reference to “Second Amendment remedies,” and uses exactly the same thin layer of plausible deniability. His histrionic paranoia about the election being “rigged” is exactly how Republicans justify voter ID laws. Indeed, his only transgression is that he cleaves to the Republican party line too strongly for his plausible deniability to remain plausible – his deviance is actually excessive conformity. Trump is nothing but an amalgamation of the various body parts the ruling class has collected over the years – the Frankenstein’s monster of American politics, a Republican in Republican’s clothing.
So this is the dilemma: if Trump support is about racism, then why is literally any other member of the Republican party not good enough? The Republican Party is already the party of racism; an insurgency is not required on this issue. Anyone who values white supremacy should be comfortable supporting basically any Republican candidate. This applies just as well to every other issue, as none of Trump’s policy stances are at all unusual. How does Trump represent an alternative to mainstream conservativism when all of his policies are entirely in line with conservative orthodoxy (the only real differences are the incidental hip-shooting claims that he later walks back or ignores, such as his praise for Planned Parenthood)? And if it’s about image, if it’s a rejection of the self-aggrandizers and empty suits that constitute the existing political class, then how in Loki’s name is daughterfucking Donald Trump the person who represents an alternative to that? The only reason he’s not twice as empty as the usual politician is that he’s three times as full of shit. He panders, hedges, vacillates and dodges, he uses extreme vagueness to cover up the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he harps on low-content talking points, he substitutes insults for discussion. He has backpedaled and then repedaled and then rebackpedaled on every issue he has actually addressed, including The Wall. He is not an “unconventional” candidate at all; as someone with no beliefs, he has nothing going for him other than typical campaigning behavior, so all he actually does is double down on it. He is the most conventional candidate, ever.
So what’s odd about all of this is that it seems like a bunch of sound and fury and more sound signifying no substantive policy distinctions. And of course Trump himself is a high-concept parody of a human being, so there’s significant difficulty in understanding how anyone can even tolerate being aware of him for extended periods of time, let alone want him to be the person with his finger on the button. And this is where the confusion comes in, because after running down all the possibilities, there doesn’t seem to be anything left. It’s not like anyone can possibly be unaware of any of this; the one thing you can certainly say about the media’s coverage of Trump is that there’s been enough of it. It seems, then, that Trump supporters have deliberately chosen the worst possible candidate.
One thing that actually does distinguish Trump supporters is a particular strain of desperation. They are not just middle-aged whites, but middle-aged whites undergoing a suicide epidemic. In other words, Trump supporters are desperate in the philosophical sense: they are people in the throes of an existential crisis. And when you’re having an existential crisis, what you want isn’t money or stability or progress. What you want is to feel important. You want to feel great again.
If we’re going to get this right, we have to pay attention to what Trump supporters are actually saying. Primary sources are a critical safeguard against confirmation and status quo biases. Still, you can’t just trust what people say, and people’s statements about their own motivations are perhaps the least trustworthy category of things. You have to get the story from the horse’s mouth, but you also have to translate it out of horse-language, if you follow me.
So step one is to listen to what Trump supporters have to say for themselves. Seeing as this task does not require insight, The Atlantichas done a fairly good job of it. Okay, I shouldn’t be making fun; The Atlantic is awful, but Conor Friedersdorf has asked Trump supports the exact question at issue here, which is: how is Trump anything other than a less-competent version of a standard politician? So I guess I’m grateful. I guess. I mean, a lot of this is just flatly hilarious:
“We have to stop talking about complete nonsense, and start talking about Making America Great Again.”
But no, we’re being serious here. This is serious. Serious disease.
Distilling, there are essentially three ideological vectors for Trump support. The first is what we already know: these people are fucking racists:
“The world is rising while America falls.”
Hmm I wonder what that could refer to.
“I think my interest stopped right around 2008 because everything started to get really nasty.”
Hmm I wonder what that could refer to.
“He could take the “black lives matter” group and show them how to make black lives matter.”
yawn
“A stage on which extremists are permitted to gesticulate and spew their venom via freedoms initially formulated by the much-maligned ‘angry and wimpering’ white male”
zzzzzzzzz
Sorry, let’s keep moving. One thing to note here is that this stuff is completely baked in to our political discourse, such that, for example, “the middle class” is basically just code for “white people.” Check this out:
“Politicians pay lip service to the middle class but spend no time helping them. Black lives matter more and illegal immigrants who break the law get a free pass.”
See how “black people” and “illegal immigrants” are the groups that contrast “the middle class”? But again, this type of expression is typical in American politics, so it’s unusual that it would drive support for Trump. The fact that this whole spectacle is based on racism should always be kept in mind, but there has to be more to it than that. We have to be talking about a particular aspect of racism.
The second angle is that Trump is going to “fix things” because he’s a “successful businessman.”
“He’s spent his whole life and career making deals and negotiating deals. In his own words, he negotiates to win.”
As opposed to people who negotiate to lose?
“Trump is not the caricature that pundits would have you believe. Trump did not build his economic empire just with luck.”
“I am thankful for his support and I am ‘Trusting’ that he will treat AMERICA as a business & focus on her sucess.”
“Like him or hate him, he is a businessman”
Truer words.
So yeah, this is all dumb for all of the obvious reasons, but it’s going to become important later, so just keep it in mind. Specifically, the idea that a politician is going to “fix things” actually reflects support for the status quo – it assumes the system as constituted is correct, that it simply has flaws that need to be removed, rather than the whole thing needing to be reimagined/destabilized. So this is another point against the idea that Trump is a protest candidate.
That is, it’s true that Trump voters are mad at the establishment, but who isn’t? While there is an aspect of anti-elitism here, it’s anti-elitism of a very particular type:
“Guess what? They just called me dumb. Now here is the problem. The arrogance and ignorance––together, the dumbness––of these ‘elites’ at the NYT, economics departments, etc. is the true source of misinterpretation of the Trump movement. We are not dumb. We are investment bankers, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, rocket scientists. And yes, we might also be farmers, but farmers can actually also be quite smart.
But guess what. We believe YOU (not you, Conor), are very, very dumb. If you are an established economist, you understand NOTHING about economics, and now everyone knows it. If you are the NYT, you printed fake evidence that led to a corrupt and bankrupting war. We believe you are very, very dumb, and shouldn’t say anything, whatsoever. You lost ALL authority over the last 15 years. Most people around me could take on any NYT journalist or professor from whatever fancy school and destroy them––intellectually––on any stage, anytime. We laugh at these people, and we laugh when they are called ‘elites’. They are not elites, they are complete failures.”
This isn’t anti-elitism in general, it’s actually pro-elitism in opposition to the current set of elites. The claim is that they aren’t “real” elites. Which is why it doesn’t contradict Trump being a rich fuck. It isn’t that he represents “ordinary” people, it’s that he represents the good kind of elites. So another way to think about the issue here is to ask: what kind of elite is Trump?
Relatedly, “make America great again” is more than just a slogan. Many of these people are quite preoccupied with the idea of “greatness”:
“He will expect greatness from us, he will tell us how to get to great, he will inspire people to be better than they are and have hope that their efforts will not be thwarted by bigger government.”
“Do we see greatness in America still on a daily basis or even in the movies? The Trump Family is the picture of the American Dream, and I believe Donald Trump is an honest man. When Donald Trump says that he wants to make America great again, I believe him. He has written books for all to read but that is not enough. He wants to lead.
Granted, Donald Trump cannot promise greatness among us as a society or a country. However, he can promise to be a leader for greatness, and he is fitted to do so.”
“He truly wants to make America Great Again, the same way he wanted to make his company great.”
So, again, the question is: what kind of greatness are we talking about here?
The third argument is that Trump is “politically incorrect,” and that this is a good thing.
“I do not believe that I am a racist, sexist, homophobic, or any other negative label that has been affixed to Trump supports. Rather, I feel that political correctness has run amok in this country”
you don’t say
“Beyond speech codes, ‘trigger warnings,’ or Twitter outrage mobs, the preeminence of political correctness among the culture class indicates a momentous shift away from formerly prominent middle-class cultural values and towards something entirely different.”
“Political correctness is a main reason why America is in trouble because it is a grind and so draining to be so politically correct everyday in our personal and professional lives.”
You’ve heard all this before, but look at what’s actually happening here. These people aren’t just saying that they like Trump because he’s politically incorrect. They are saying that, for them, political correctness is a substantive policy issue – one that they prioritize highly enough for it to be a determining factor in deciding who they support, as well as something that they actually expect the President of the United States to do something about. Friedersdorf, understandably confused by this line of thinking, followed up on it in a more in-depth interview, and received the following response:
“This is a war over how dialogue in America will be shaped. If Hillary wins, we’re going to see a further tightening of PC culture. But if Trump wins? If Trump wins, we will have a president that overwhelmingly rejects PC rhetoric. Even better, we will show that more than half the country rejects this insane PC regime. If Trump wins, I will personally feel a major burden relieved, and I will feel much more comfortable stating my more right-wing views without fearing total ostracism and shame. Because of this, no matter what Trump says or does, I will keep supporting him.”
“Having Trump in the White House would both give me more confidence to speak my own opinion and more of a shield from instantly being dismissed as a racist/xenophobe/Nazi (all three things I have been called personally) [ed: waaaaaaaaaah].
Under President Obama, our national dialogue has steadily moved towards political correctness (despite his denunciations), but with President Trump, I think our national dialogue will likely move away from being blanketly PC. Even though, as you pointed out, Obama has criticized PC speech, he doesn’t exactly engage in un-PC speech like Trump does. I don’t expect a President Trump to instantly convert people, but when you have someone in the Oval Office giving decidedly un-PC speeches and announcements, I think that would change the discourse, don’t you?”
It’s at this point that the Atlantic Effect kicks in, as Friedersdorf is unable to come up with an explanation for this beyond “liberals have gone too far.” So this is our starting point.
The obvious interpretation is that “politically incorrect” is just a more palatable way of saying “racist.” This is why the speech at issue is always racial slurs. The fact that people will deny this is not informative; everyone in America denies that anything is about racism at all times (which they have to do, because everything in America actually is about racism, at all times). Whereas the overwhelming majority of anti-PC complaints originate from white people upset that they can’t use slurs, the clear conclusion is that white people want to be racist, but don’t want to actually make the argument “I should be allowed to be racist.” Thus, the going interpretation is that people are tired of politicians pretending like everything is proper anti-racist policy, and they like Trump because he comes right out and “says what they’re thinking” re: race.
But again, this is not enough of an interpretation, because Trump does not actually do this. He also pretends like he’s the one offering the best anti-racist policy. Despite the baffled protestations of the explainer class, Trump is not operating sui generis; he is navigating the same constraints that all politicians face. He actually does have to disavow white supremacists and make up a fake women’s healthcare plan and pretend like he cares about black people. The only difference is that he’s bad at it.
Furthermore, you’ll note above that none of his supporters themselves avow their racism in explicit terms. They express their opposition to political correctness in politically correct fashion. Thus, the thing that they’re supporting as an attack on “political correctness” must be something other than bluntly stated racism, because they’re not getting that, and they don’t even seem to really want it. So what do they want?
And remember, this is not a matter of mere aesthetics. People think that this is a real, substantive political issue, and that Trump is going to do something about it. Moreover, it is not just that people like hearing their own values stated bluntly, it is that these people consider “politically incorrect” expression itself to be an important value. So this is it: we need to figure out what we’re actually talking about when we talk about political correctness.
(Look, I told you I don’t want to do this, alright? Just give it up. You weren’t doing anything useful today anyway.)
Given that Trump is seen as an alternative to the current crop of Republican elites, we can start by asking what it is that distinguishes Trump’s brand of racism from the rest of the Republicans’. As mentioned, there doesn’t seem to be much of a distinction at all. Trump always claims that he’ll be the best for “the blacks” and that Democrats are the real racists and blah blah blah. This is the same nonsense we’re always subjected to.
Actually, the first question we should ask is why Trump’s signature issue, illegal immigration, is an issue at all. It’s not a real problem, because Mexican immigration has been falling and immigration is not exactly an economy-killer. It’s also not a culture war thing; liberals don’t care about it (nor do they care about all the people Obama has deported). It’s an internal issue amongst conservatives, and if we think about why the Republican Party itself would care about it, the answer becomes clear. The Republican Party is the White Man’s Party, and it’s getting to be the case that there aren’t enough white men left for them to be able to win national elections. The largest and most quickly rising minority population is Latinxs,3 so that’s where the numbers have to come from. And this actually shouldn’t be that hard; we’re talking about people who are mostly religious and family-focused, and there isn’t really any overwhelming historical issue preventing Latinxs from voting Republican the way there is for black people. So that’s the angle: an immigration policy that appeals to Latinxs while placating the usual racists could help the Republicans overcome their demographic disadvantage.
But of course the voters themselves don’t care about party strategy, so if that’s all it is, then why do so many Republican voters list illegal immigration as one of their highest-priority issues? Well, because they’re looking at the same situation, but their motivations are reversed: they don’t want to compromise; they want immigration policy to work in white people’s favor. They don’t want to take advantage of the demographic shift; they want to stop it. What “political correctness” means in this context is taking Latinxs’ concerns into account. Trump voters want someone who won’t do that.
And precisely this was Trump’s original claim to political fame. By referring to immigrants as a bunch of criminals and rapists, he unambiguously signaled that his immigration policy was intended for the benefit of white people and only white people. And this is why it doesn’t matter that his policy is completely impractical and makes no sense: because this isn’t a real issue, it doesn’t have to. The establishment’s half-hearted opposition to Trump is half-hearted precisely because it is purely tactical: Trump represents a bad strategy for achieving the same goals the ruling class wants to achieve. But for the voters, because this is a symbolic concern, the desired solution is also a symbolic one. And the unavoidable symbolism of The Wall is: Whites Only.
We’re not quite there yet, because, again, this isn’t actually how Trump’s rhetoric works. Continuing with the symbolism of The Wall, Trump has also said that it will include a “big, beautiful door” for those who want to come here “legally.” This echoes the concerns of the voters: they often say they don’t object to immigration itself, but to people who don’t “play by the rules.” So the “door” symbolizes something slightly more complex than simple segregation. We can be more specific here. Consider this:
“I don’t have a problem necessarily with Mexicans who come here legally, obey our laws, and eventually learn to speak English. I do have a problem with those who look at our immigration laws and say, ‘Nah, I’d rather not obey those.’ This is one of my biggest issues with Hillary Clinton and her policy of amnesty.”
What is “learn to speak English” doing in that list? Why does that matter here? It’s not a law. Mexican immigrants are perfectly capable of coming here legally and contributing to the economy while still speaking their own language in their own communities. Why is that a problem? Yes, I know, racism, but why specifically? I mean, these people don’t get mad when they hear white people speaking any other foreign language, right?
Again, the significance is symbolic: immigrants who don’t learn English are maintaining their own culture. It isn’t just that immigrants are people of a different race, it’s that they’re not from here, they have their own beliefs and ideals, and that’s not okay. The “good” kind of immigrants, the ones who “follow the law,” who properly assimilate themselves into Whitopia, are acceptable; the “bad” kind, who stubbornly insist on retaining their own inferior cultures, must not be permitted. Hence the seemingly irrational anger with which some people react to hearing Spanish spoken in public: such an experience smacks you in the face with the fact that there are other worlds out there. To a certain type of person, this feels like a personal attack.
In fact, our misguided friend is quite explicit about this:
“[Referring to himself]: In favor of “melting pot” culture instead of multiculturalism.”
“I think most of my opposition comes from what I feel is a loss of the patriotic American identity and the advancement of multiculturalism and political correctness.”
So “political correctness” is the same thing as “multiculturalism,” and this is different from the “melting pot culture” which represents the traditional “American identity.” Thus, the connection between anti-PC and anti-immigrant ideologies is not mysterious. Both targets are faces of the same demonhead.
The idea that non-white people are actually inferior used to be the primary justification for racism, but today it’s a fringe belief (though it does very much still exist). What we now like to talk about instead is “culture.” It isn’t that black people are less capable than white people, it’s that “black culture” is holding them back. It isn’t that people from the Middle East are genetically prone to violence and intolerance, it’s “Islamic culture” that drives them to it. This is also the connection between “political correctness” and “moral relativism”:
“I think it comes down to a perception that America has already drowned in a post-modernist nightmare of moral relativism, from which extreme political correctness and protest culture stem. Trump, on the other hand, is all absolutes. Everything he says, accurate or not, is stated in absolute, definitive terms. His personal morality is clear: He respects people who work hard, are loyal, innovate, and ‘win,’ and he shuns those who don’t meet the criteria. Cruel as it may sound, I think America needs to reenergize these fundamental cultural values before we can ever hope to create a better society.”
Obviously, this person has no idea what the words they’re using actually mean – how could “protest culture” possibly stem from a lack of strong morals?4 What they’re talking about is accepting other culture’s values and practices as potentially valid ones. That’s why the preferable alternative is “absolute” support of America’s own “cultural values.” And that’s why it’s okay for people of any race to live and work in America – as long as they adhere to the right standards. The correct ones, in terms of politics.
It isn’t just that these people don’t want to explicitly argue that white men should be the center of everything, it’s that they can’t. When the implicit centering of white male opinions is the foundation of your worldview, requests that you incorporate other people’s opinions into your understanding become literally incomprehensible. Because the demand doesn’t make sense, it gets understood as something else. Ergo, the request that you let other people talk becomes an attack on “free speech,” and the insistence that other people’s opinions are more valid than yours on certain issues becomes “censorship.”
To understand this technically, the old regime of pure segregation is dead, for a number of reasons, and there are two possible alternatives we can pursue in its wake.5 The issue is not whether we’re going to have an all-white society or a diverse society. That ship has sailed. Globalization is the fact of the matter. The question is how we’re going to respond to it, and this is what Trump supporters are supporting: one answer to that question. They oppose “multiculturalism,” under which there are multiple valid cultural standards, and support “inclusiveness,” under which there is one standard that everyone is allowed (meaning required) to follow. “Inclusiveness” means including many different types of people in one culture. “Multiculturalism” means multiple different cultures all overlapping and interacting with each other.
If this seems overly theoretical, some practical examples should clarify that this is both a wide-ranging issue that is currently in high contention, and a basic practical distinction that you probably understand implicitly. Once upon a time, there was a thing called the “Western literary canon,” which included all of the most important stuff that white men ever did. This was a single standard for intellectualism: if you were familiar with it, then you were “educated”; if not, then not. Eventually, it was subjected to the obvious criticism that people other than white men have also done important stuff, and there are two possible responses to this criticism. One is to include non-white-male works in the canon, so that it’s still a single standard, but now it’s fair and representative and accessible to everybody. The other is to kill it, based on the argument that you can’t come up with any kind of objective standard as to which works are the “most important.” Were this situation to obtain, there would not be a single standard, but rather multiple different overlapping sets of works that different groups of people considered important for different reasons.
Another good example is music, which, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this already-bloated post, is ground zero for multiculturalism. The most prominent instance here is gangsta rap. The reason white people flipped their shit when gangsta rap got popular was that it operates under a different standard of values than conventional pop music; it does a different type of thing. It presents black criminals as subjects to be understood as subjects rather than as cautionary objects to be pointed at from a safe distance. Hence the claim that it “glorifies bad behavior”: white people were trying to understand it using their own set of values, whereby pop music is supposed to be abstracted and aspirational. Naturally, then, the hip-hop artists that white people single out for praise are those who are “socially conscious” and “professional” – the ones who follow the correct set of values.
Arbitrarily many examples of this pattern may be accumulated. We have TV shows like Master of None, where an Indian-American is portrayed as an everyman and immigrant experiences are normalized, plays like Hamilton, which reverse-whitewashes American history, and pop stars like Rhianna, whose persona is based on the idea that she’s the “bad” kind of black woman. Regardless of how good any of these things are, the point is that they represent a fundamental shift in perspective. The ideal of inclusion is that non-white people are accepted as long as they acclimate themselves to white people’s standards and practices. Everybody can, in theory, have equal rights, as long as what they’re equal to is white people’s standards. We are currently on the border between this ideal and the ideal of multiculturalism: the idea that there are multiple, simultaneous, equally valid (at least potentially) sets of standards.6
So the reason this distinction is flaring up right now is that we’re on a tipping point: multiculturalism exists, but it isn’t fully accepted, and the wave is eventually going to break one way or the other. And the reason the issue has specific political significance is, of course, Black Jesus. It is the least coincidental thing ever that this is happening at the end of the first black president’s term and in opposition to the possibility of the first female president – and in response to both of them being heralded as “progress,” as the wave of the future. Trump supporters see that the tide is turning against them, and they are desperately trying to hold the line.
Now, you might find this is a little odd. Surely Obama, though a black man, represents the interests of the white supremacist ruling class, and is therefore a perfect example of inclusiveness and not multiculturalism, right? And Clinton re: feminism7 and both of them re: capitalism and everything else are all pretty much the same deal. So why the animus? Well, one way to look at it is that Obama has a bad habit of saying things like “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin.” Policy aside, when Mr. America says things like that, it conveys the idea that black people count as equal participants in society. That, y’know, they matter.
Liberals like to imagine that this whole problem is just a misunderstanding. If only conservatives knew “the facts,” and gave up their “conspiracy theories,” they’d stop “voting against their own interests.” Conservatives, whether they realize it or not, have a better understanding of the situation – they understand that symbols are real things. You can’t just put a black man in charge of a fundamentally racist country and expect everything to keep humming along. Something has to give, and what conservatives are doing is trying to make sure that the future breaks one way and not the other. They know that if they allow the door to be left ajar, it’s eventually going to get kicked open.
This might not seem like that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is. I said earlier that this was not a matter of mere aesthetics, and it’s not: it’s a matter of deep aesthetics. Going from being the center of the universe to not being the center of the universe is actually the largest possible transition. It’s the death of god. Remember when everyone got all freaked out at the possibility that the Earth might revolve around the Sun, and not t’other way ’round? Why would that matter? What possible implications for daily human life follow from the particular implementation details of how planets move around? The answer is that it implies that humans are not the center of the universe, that we happen to exist in the universe rather than the universe existing for us, and this is an unacceptable conclusion. Consider similarly the broad popularity of Lovecraft-style “cosmic horror,” where the entire thing that’s scary about it is that humans are not accorded a privileged position in the universe.
Again, symbols are real things, which means that these sorts of shifts have real, practical consequences. The recent sea change regarding rape culture is entirely due to the fact that women have centered the conversation on themselves. This change would not have been possible as long as men controlled the discourse – no amount of “argument” or “reason” would have done the job. Like all political questions, it’s a question of who counts. There remains the work of translating symbolic gains into both policy changes and broader cultural changes, but what makes these next steps possible is the initial symbolic action of changing perspectives.
Understanding this, Trump supporters are trying to shut the door – to recenter white men’s opinions as the universal standard of judgment. This is why it is coherent for Trump to propose an ideological test for immigrants. Everyone is welcome, as long as they properly assimilate themselves to our standards. The reason conservatives constantly harp on symbolic culture-war issues is because they know that there’s a fight to be had. It’s not misdirection or confusion; it’s good tactics. Which is not to say I’m accusing anyone involved of an excess of imagination. Going “back” to the days of unquestioned white normality is just as impossible as “staying the course.” But this raises a contradiction, because we never actually stopped clinging to “traditional American values.” What happened in response to the post-war equality movements was that we reinterpreted them as being about traditional values all along – as though the founders actually had desegregation (or even abolition) in mind when they wrote that “all men are created equal.” And, as mentioned, the ruling class has fully assimilated these movements in the name of inclusiveness, staving off (for now) their radical potential. But if no one who matters is actually advocating multiculturalism, then why have conservatives devolved into aggrieved reactionaries?
You’ve probably been waiting for me to point out the most obvious flaw in the anti-PC argument, which is that it gets the situation exactly backwards. It is black people who are forced to tiptoe around the issue of racism; white people are more than welcome to express their grievances as bluntly and stupidly as possible. Most of all, what characterizes anti-PC arguments is manliness: we need to “toughen up” and stop being so “sensitive.” This is the same thing that characterizes most of Trump’s rhetoric, and it gives the lie to the idea that anything he’s doing is actually unacceptable, because there is nothing more socially acceptable then masculinity. The sad truth is that the situation that reactionaries long for is already the case: white male opinions were never decentered. This explains the fundamental paradox of political correctness. Anti-PC people attack the idea that one’s means of expression should be restricted, and they do this by insisting that others adopt the correct means of expression. “Merry Christmas.” “Islamic terrorism.” “All lives matter.” We must use these exact words, the politically correct terminology.8 What political correctness actually is, then, is the maintenance of white male normativity.
We got a very clear example of how this works recently, when Clinton made her “basket of deplorables” comment. This should have been a slam dunk: it’s an entirely accurate and damning description of the situation, and it’s also an appealingly honest assessment of the type that a normal uncoached human would make. Clinton was both making a strong argument for herself and overcoming her primary flaw. She was telling it like it is. As it turns out, though, what she said was politically incorrect: she was immediately and roundly criticized not for being wrong (she wasn’t), but for saying something she shouldn’t have said. There was no praise for her “authenticity,” no celebration that a politician was finally speaking the unvarnished truth, no defense that she was just making a point and didn’t really mean it. She had committed the unforgivable sin of violating white people’s safe space, and she did it without even issuing a trigger warning.
And it is because political correctness is the maintenance of normativity that Donald Trump is its avatar. This is why someone as incompetent as Trump has been so successful: because he’s on the winning team. Trump is not the less conventional version of the typical Republican candidate; he is the more conventional version. He is the most conventional person possible. This is the truly fatal flaw in the argument against political correctness: the people who rail against it are the most conventional, unoriginal, safe thinkers of all. Their transgressions are barely even performative. Speaking out against political correctness is easy. It’s expected. It’s politically correct.
Think about the content of Trump’s insults toward his opponents: they’re corrupt, they’re liars, they’re not tough enough. These are all completely conventional arguments! They’re the exact things we hear over and over again in every election, and yet somehow when Trump says them they become some sort of horrifying breach of civilized norms, or something. The position that all politicians are clowns and we need a rough tough action ranger to come in and shake things up is the most conventional political opinion that it is possible to hold. Do I really need to point out that Trump, is, like, famous? That he’s conventionally successful within current social parameters? That he gets constant media coverage? That none of this would be possible if anything he said or did were actually beyond the pale? That, in certain circumstances, criticism actually functions as validation? That this can only mean that all of his statements and actions are socially acceptable?
For example, Trump doesn’t explicitly support fringe conspiracy theories; rather, his characteristic move is to fail to deny them. “Some people are saying that, I don’t know, you tell me.” Again, it’s odd that people view this sort of thing as “telling it like it is.” So what is it, actually? What it is is a matter of perspective. If you want to know what Obama’s religion is, the obvious thing to do is to ask him, because, like, he’d know. But this requires you to do something unusual: it requires you to accept a black person’s perspective as a valid source of truth. Thus, the basic act of raising the question, of refusing to consider the matter settled, performs an important political function: it recenters the issue on white people. It isn’t a fact until white people accept it. And the media is, for the most part, completely fine with treating things this way. As long as white people have opinions on something, no matter how dumb they are, it’s a “controversy,” and we need to “hear both sides.”
Trump’s strength is not that he is an “unconventional” candidate who’s willing to “say anything” because he’s not bound by the “normal” constraints of politics. It is exactly the opposite. Trump is a hyper-normative candidate: what is unusual about him is that he takes the conventional wisdom too seriously, without a protective layer of cynicism. It is this that comes across as “sincere” to his supporters, who are also true believers in the lies. It’s not just the deep unoriginality of all of Trump’s (attempts at) policy proposals; it’s that his entire angle rests on appealing to cheap cliches and uninterrogated conventional wisdom. This lack of nuance is not an intellectual failing; it is itself a value. It is the point.
The truth behind Trump’s blatant lack of substance is not that he has “fooled” people and “fallen through the cracks” of the vetting process, but that he has passed the actual test. He may have dented the empty shibboleths of respectability (which exist primarily so that pundits can congratulate themselves on upholding them), but he has obeyed to the letter the real rules of the game – he has succeeded according to the parameters of the system. This is what’s really scary about his campaign: not that it is “abnormal,” but that it is the most normal thing that has ever happened.
But now we’ve actually worsened our contradiction; it seems like political correctness isn’t even a matter of optics anymore. What is haunting Trump supporters is only the specter of multiculturalism. But if the ruling class supports a standard of inclusiveness to ward off the threat of multiculturalism, and if Trump supporters are fighting for the same thing, for the same reason, then why the conflict? And if Trump supporters are merely drawing at shadows, then whence their zealotry? Why are they acting like this is some sort of civilization-defining struggle? What could they possibly want that they don’t already have? Are they actually fighting for nothing?
Yes. That’s exactly it. They are fighting for nothing.
(Christ, this is ponderous even by my standards. Music break.)
We still haven’t quite answered the question of “why Trump?” Again, his angle isn’t actually different from the Republican party line, so it seems like any other candidate should have been able to ride the same wave. I mean, all of them made a big show about being the most opposed to Obama and hating Muslims the most and all the usual garbage. Why the preference for the least competent and most clownish version of the same old thing? At this point, to simply ask the question is to be confronted with the truth, in all its terrible clarity. It is precisely because Trump is a pudgy, bumbling, fraudulent, crude, petty, egotistical know-nothing that he is the only candidate who can carry this torch. Donald Trump is the human personification of mediocrity, and this is the true source of his power.
Recall that Trump supporters like the idea that he’s Big Bobby Businesspants and he’s going to “make deals” and hire “the best people” and so forth. The question, again, is: why is this a difference between Trump and the rest of the Republican clown car? The idea that “government should be run like a business” is among the party’s most tired cliches. Specifically, they just had a candidate who was precisely an empty business suit with magic underwear beneath it: Mitt Romney. And yet Romney is now somehow part of the craven political establishment that Trump voters are telling to take a hike. So: what is the substantive distinction between Business Douche Mitt Romney and Business Turd Donald Trump?9
The difference is just that: one of them is a douche and one of them is a turd.10 Romney presents himself like a professional. He doesn’t look like a hamster wearing a chinchilla suit or talk like an abortive Turing Test attempt. He seems like he might actually know some stuff about business, as opposed to being an expert in bankruptcy, he’s genuinely religious, as opposed to quoting from “Two Corinthians,” and he’s an actual family man, as opposed to . . . well, you know. Romney acts like an actual elite, whereas Trump acts like a hobo’s idea of a rich person.
Pay attention, because this is where it gets important. Certain types of people will look at a dynamic like this and conclude that Trump supporters must be stupid: why else would they support the wrong kind of rich person? Thinking of people you don’t understand as stupid is how you prevent yourself from learning anything. We’re all familiar with Donald Trump the television character, but that’s just it: we’re all familiar with him. No one is confused about who Donald Trump is. Trump supporters are looking at the same person the rest of us are, but they’re judging him by a different standard. So, given that Trump supporters actually like their candidate, what is their standard of judgment? What are the criteria, the values, by which Trump as opposed to Romney is judged to be the right kind of rich person? Trump supporters want him to hold the highest office in the land; they are trying to create a world where Trump is the true definition of an elite. (Continue to take deep breaths.)
Some intriguing evidence here comes from one of Friedersdorf’s correspondents, via an analogy to The Great Gatsby:
“Perhaps Nick Carraway is representative of the disillusioned ‘Silent Majority’ wishing to ‘Make America Great Again.’ Donald Trump personifies a modern-day, extremely brash Jay Gatsby, clawing feverishly for that elusive ‘green light’ at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s beckoning dock. Is it not better to place your chips on hopes and dreams rather than certain nightmares? Those of us who buy into Trump’s vision, nearly to the point of blind trust, are loudly professing our disgust with the current immoral situations that taint and threaten our blueprint of the American dream.”
I trust that you have some initial difficulty understanding how anyone can look to Jay Gatsby as a positive archetype. It is true that, unlike everyone around him, Gatsby actually wants something, but he goes about it in the worst possible way. In blind pursuit of an uninterrogated goal, he embraces everything base and grotesque about his society, squandering his talents and charisma, such that his downfall becomes inevitable. There’s ultimately no possibility that Daisy will accept him, because he has nothing different to offer her. He is merely a less stable instance of the same pile of trash. The whole point of the book is that the standards to which Gatsby acclimates himself are horrible; if he’s the best kind of elite we’ve got, we’re screwed. All of which is to say that the word “great” in the title of The Great Gatsby has a very peculiar meaning – the same meaning that it has in the slogan “make America great again.” It indicates inspired adherence to hidebound goals, the subordination of the flame of life to the dead weight of the past. It is, in other words, not greatness at all. It is mediocrity.
Take special note of the phrase “threaten our blueprint of the American dream” (also go ahead and laugh at “taint” if you need to cheer yourself up). In 2005, in response to a reported design flaw in the original PlayStation Portable hardware, Sony President Ken Kutaragi argued that “nobody would criticize a renowned architect’s blueprint that the position of a gate is wrong.” Obviously, this is absurd; the whole point of being a “renowned architect” is that you don’t get things like this wrong. More significantly, an expert, properly understood, is not someone who simply knows how to do one thing well and doesn’t accept criticism. It is someone with a deep and broad understanding of their discipline, such that they can draw from different traditions and techniques as applicable, in order to meet a variety of standards at once. A true expert must be multicultural.
So if we want to be better at creating a society than Sony is at creating hardware, “threatening the blueprint of the American dream” is exactly what we ought to be doing. Like, this isn’t super hard to understand. America was founded on slavery and genocide. It is not a legacy to uphold; it is a challenge to overcome. America is just a blip on the historical timeline, and even within that blip, what we consider “American values” today would be unrecognizable to the people who founded the country. To embrace the “American dream” as being “good enough” is to embrace mediocrity. To pursue greatness is, instead, to challenge our received values: to strike at the old idols, to destroy the standards that constrain rather than elevate, and to create new, better values.
And this is the exact thing that Trump supporters are afraid of. Remember how the only demographic correlate that explains them is that they’re suicidally desperate white people? What causes desperation? It’s not setbacks or difficulty, it’s when standards change, such that you realize that you have no hope of succeeding, no matter how well you do. These people were born into a world where they were inherently important just because of who they were, and that world is passing them by. The new world will, in fact, be just as bad: the crumbs will simply be portioned out based on utility to capital rather than identity. But when it’s your identity that’s on the chopping block, it’s a little hard to care about getting things right. Much easier, and much more comforting, to simply reassert your initial claim: to reappropriate the concept of greatness for yourself, based on nothing. Who better, then, to represent this ideology than a mediocre white man who thinks he’s better than everyone else? What better enemy than a historically accomplished black person?
Now, obviously, all politicians are mediocrities, it’s the nature of the enterprise, but the thing about Trump’s primary opponents is that they all had something going for them. Bush was the well-bred, establishment-backed dynast, Rubio was the bright young star, and Cruz was the sharp, passionate intellectual (I guess). Rubio in particular is an important point of comparison, because he was the Chosen One, the person who was going to bring balance to the Force save the GOP from itself. He was supposed to have crafted the Great Compromise on immigration, enabling him to ride the wave of accomplishment and Latinx support into higher office. He blew it about as hard as possible, but the point is that he represented a new direction for the party, and this was scary. Not to mention the fact that, you know, he was a Cuban named “Marco Rubio.” What Trump represented that no other candidate did was a steadfast refusal to accommodate to a new future. It is appropriate, then, for the man who represents this to be a gigantic baby, because he actually functions as a security blanket.
While Trump also “has something going for him” – his alleged business acumen – it’s a very particular type of “something.” It doesn’t require him to know anything or have actual skills, he just has to “delegate” and make “judgment calls.” He has to have “leadership,” which is not actually a thing.11 And of course he has to have been born rich, such that being a rich fuck is his identity rather than a contingent result of particular circumstances. It doesn’t even matter if his tax returns come out and he turns out to be broke – he can never not be a rich fuck. Trump is not a Steve Jobs type who is known for his vision and for pushing new ideas. He doesn’t actually advance anything, he just “makes deals.” He defends his sorry escapades in Atlantic City not by pointing to anything he actually accomplished or any lives that he actually made better, but simply by pointing out that, hey, he made out all right. What else is there?
The critical contradiction in the schoolbook version of capitalism is that, on the one hand, the only rule of capitalism is fair exchange: giving equal value for equal value. A worker is supposedly hired at a rate that equals their marginal contribution to production, meaning it should be a wash for the business. A perfectly efficient market is one where nobody makes any profit – but the possibility of profit is the only thing that motivates businesses to exist in the first place. The missing ingredient is exploitation: getting more out of an exchange than you put in. In other words, making a “good deal.” Of course, this is not a hypothetical argument. The fantasy of capitalism is actually true: some people really do get their money for nothing and their chicks for free.
The reason for the popularity of MBAs and management books and soforth is that they promise entry into the fantasy world. The idea that there is such a thing as a “business secret” betrays the fact that there is no real skill involved; it is merely a matter of positioning yourself on the right side of “the deal” (The Secret itself is exactly the same thing). And this, also, is why real estate and stock picking and other forms of capital investment are such hot topics among wannabe business assholes: because they let you make money without actually doing anything. It is this desire that Trump University exploited. If you just learn Trump’s “business secrets,” you too can be a self-important jackass with more money than sense. Per capitalism, business – the “art of the deal” – is actually the art of taking credit for other people’s work.
(Hence it is beyond appropriate that The Art of The Deal itself was 100% ghostwritten. This is what I’m talking about when I say that Trump is the most normal candidate possible: everything about him lines up perfectly. Honesty, the only thing that’s strange is that we didn’t see it coming.)
Some people consider things like skill and wisdom to be beneath them. Not only do they care only about being “in charge” rather than actually being good, they specifically desire arbitrary power. It’s not really power if you have to earn it; authority is necessarily unjustified. The Trump fantasy is about becoming rich and powerful without ever learning anything or developing any skills, and the reason it’s convincing is that Trump is exactly that person. In other words, the fantasy of the business mogul is the same as the fantasy of the white master race, or the fantasy of the masculine genius. It is the fantasy of abstract greatness, untethered from any of the inconveniences of hard work or introspection or compromise or doubt. Rather than having the capability of greatness, you simply are great, just because, and you can just sit there feeling great without actually doing anything. It is about being someone great rather than actually doing something great.
If Trump’s appeal is his self-presentation as a great businessman, then the specifics of his business practices – the nature of his “greatness” – is the critical point. Liberals have attempted to exploit this by pointing out that Trump isn’t actually any good at business, but this argument falls to one of the most basic rejoinders: if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich? The fact is, entirely apart from any practical assessment of what he’s done with his life, Trump lives like a successful business mogul, and for his supporters, that is the entire game. It is, in fact, better for them that Trump has gotten where he is without ever actually accomplishing anything, because that just makes him more of a winner. The truth is that Trump’s mediocrity is not a liability that must be covered by a con; it is an asset – it is his only asset. People support Trump precisely because he is a mediocre businessman.
Another way of saying this is that Trump is a mansplainer. The salient aspect of his much-parodied speaking style is that he talks as though everything he can think of to say is meaningful simply because he’s the one thinking it and saying it. More notable than anything that he actually says is the fact that he just keeps talking. He has to be sure that everyone knows his dumbass opinions about every single thing that happens (hence also his identification with Twitter). The core element of mansplaining12 is believing that you know better than someone else just because of who you are, and who they are. If you try to interrogate the situation to determine who knows what, you run the risk of exposing yourself as ignorant, having your preconceptions shattered, and losing your glib self-assurance. In order to maintain your own sense of importance, you lock yourself in your own perspective, and talk over anything that might refute you. Rather than trying for greatness, you settle for mediocrity, and then just mouth off as though there were no discussion to be had. This is exactly what Trump does, every second of every day. He obviously knows nothing about anything, but he thinks he does, just because he’s a rich white man. His own perspective is the only one he sees any value in considering. It doesn’t matter how long the generals have been fighting ISIS, or what the demographic and economic indicators say about immigration, or what the actual crime statistics are. They can’t possibly tell him anything he hasn’t already figured out, because if they could, that would mean that he’s not special. He’s just some guy. And it is because he is not actually good at anything real that he has no option other than to embrace every practice designed to make useless white men feel better about themselves. Trump is every oppressive social schema crammed together into an approximation of a human being; he is the anthropomorphic personification of unearned and unjustified advantage, and people support him because they want to maintain those advantages for themselves. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that what Trump is doing could never come close to working for anyone other than a white man, right? That even a milquetoast centrist like Hillary Clinton has to constantly walk on eggshells to cover for literally the one thing that differentiates her from any other central-casting political operative?
This is also the significance of Trump’s beyond-parody aesthetics: he’s too good to have good taste. Good taste requires learning about things and placing them in context and exercising restraint and taking other people’s subjectivity into account. All that shit is for poor people. What’s the stuff that only rich people can afford? Gold. Marble. Tall buildings. Whatever, just cram it all together and put my name on it so everyone knows I have more money than them. Oh, you think it’s tacky and stupid and wasteful? Fuck you, I’m going to make it ten feet taller and slap another coat of gold paint on it.
In the same sense, this is why, for some people, a burlap mannequin like Trump is actually appealing as a person. His personal shoddiness proves that you can be a big fancy rich asshole without actually having to make the effort to be any kind of worthwhile person. You don’t actually have to bother trying or looking halfway presentable, as long as you’re the right kind of person. Trump’s “authenticity” has nothing to do with whether he’s sincere or truthful; it’s that no amount of money can disguise the fact that he is a true schlub.
You may be thinking that all of this sounds like the opposite of Trump’s promise to “make America great again,” but remember what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the feeling of greatness minus the substance. The key word is not “great,” but “again.” Hence the advocacy of simplistic nationalism in response to globalization. Hence unjustified confidence and bluster as a response to the hollowness of standard political discourse. Hence, especially, The Wall, which represents escaping from all problems by simply shutting out the rest of the world, responding to the fear of the monster in your closet by hiding under the covers. The slogan would be better rendered as “make Americans feel like precious little angels again.”
All the statistical details about how immigration affects the economy are entirely beside the point. What immigration means is change: it means that the country is going to become something different than what it is right now. The ideal of inclusiveness – of “melting pot culture” – is a safeguard against this. It’s okay for lots of different types of people to come here, as long as they play by our rules, as long as they do their part to keep our country the way we want it, as long as they don’t do upsetting things like speaking Spanish in public or wearing burkas to the beach. People seemed to get a little bit confused when Trump referred to himself as “Mr. Brexit,” but whether he actually had any idea what he was talking about or not,13 he was exactly right. Brexit represents exactly the same thing as The Wall: responding to the big scary outside world by shutting your eyes and plugging your ears.
It is a necessary aspect of greatness that you can’t get it back – it is something that flares up and then burns out. This is the danger that’s always present in “comebacks” from great artists. They’re exciting because they offer the promise of the same original inspiration channeled through improved skills and experience, but that can’t actually happen. They’ll either be trying to do the same thing they did before, in which case it will necessarily manifest itself as a pale imitation, or they’ll do something different, in which case it might actually be great, but it won’t be the same greatness. The recent Stooges album (yes, there was one; no, you don’t need to know anything about it) was completely pointless, because the Stooges can’t exist in the current situation, even when they are the actual Stooges themselves. Whereas Sleater-Kinney’s recent album (which wasn’t really a comeback, but close enough) is actually great, because, as they always do, they did something different. It’s not another album from a ’90s band, it’s a new response to a new situation. What Trump supporters are opposed to is doing something – anything – different.
And since this is what we’re actually talking about when we talk about “traditional American values,” this isn’t some new thing that’s happening just now. We’ve been slowly drowning in it for a very long time. Consider the commonplace idea that “real Americans” are “salt-of-the-earth types” who believe in “traditional values.” Even ignoring how much bullshit this is and taking it on its own terms, isn’t this a completely lousy ideal? It’s an attack against any kind of self-improvement at all; not merely acceptance of current circumstances, but active embrace of the idea that one ought not do any better then one is already doing. It is love of mediocrity.
It’s been noted that Trump is the least plausible candidate to garner evangelical support, ever (especially since Clinton appears to have sincere religious beliefs that she doesn’t go around throwing in people’s faces), but this assumes that evangelicals adhere to the commonly-portrayed peace-and-love fairydust version of Christianity. They don’t. That is not their actual religion. In truth, Trump is a devout believer in exactly the same faith as evangelical Christians. You may have heard recently about something called the “prosperity gospel,” which is essentially bizarro Calvinism. The world is divided up into the “saved” and the “damned” (a.k.a. “winners” and “losers”), but what separates them is not divine predestination, and it’s also not faith or good works. It’s just money. But money by itself is an empty heuristic, and the prosperity gospel mostly appeals to poor people. So it’s not about being rewarded for hard work or anything like that. It’s just about showing up and deciding that you’re going to be one of the “saved.” It is, again, exactly the same appeal as that of The Secret, and of Trump University.
In other words, “positive thinking” is an alternative means of support for the belief that you’re special just because of who you are. And for people with that belief, the fact that the world is simply too complex for any one person to understand is unacceptable. If understanding the world requires keeping an open mind and listening to lots of people with different backgrounds and perspectives, this necessarily compels the conclusion that white people, and men, and you, are not special.14 Each person simply has one perspective among many.
The psychological aspect of white supremacy is the belief that a mediocre white person deserves more than an accomplished black person, a.k.a. Abigail Fisher Syndrome. When Abigail Fisher doesn’t get into UT Austin because she’s a mediocre student, she doesn’t take advantage of the transfer program and resolve to work harder. That would be admitting that she wasn’t good enough; she doesn’t actually want to go to Austin, she wants to be thetype of person who gets in to Austin. That’s why she has to argue that she deserved it in the first place. She can’t just live her own life, she has to make a federal case out of it. Trump becoming president would prove that white male privilege trumps everything else, and that is what his supporters are voting for.
If white people really were superior, there would be no need for white supremacy. This has always been the central contradiction in oppressive discourse: it tries to portray the oppressed group as both hopelessly inferior and overwhelmingly dangerous at the same time. If black people are simply criminal thugs, how are they capable of destabilizing a well-designed society? If women are fundamentally unserious, then why do they have to be bullied out of public spaces? The truth is that oppressed groups really are a threat to polite society, for the precise reason that polite society sucks.
So when your John Oliver types try to argue that Trump is not actually a winner, but is in fact a loser, they are entirely missing the point. Trump is evidently on top of the world; he has won. So the only coherent response here is to argue that Trump has won at a bad game – but that game is American society itself. Again, regardless of how much of a fraud Trump is, he actually is a rich fuck. Our society has decided, implicitly, to value his contributions at an extremely high level. If this was a bad decision, then the aspects of our society that enabled it have to be destroyed. There is no other way to prevent the next Donald Trump from arising. Trumpism actually does represent the limitations of American politics, not because it is an “aberration” that has “broken” the system, but because it is the complete fulfillment of our current discursive structure. To counter it with “normalcy” is to ensure its survival. To respond to the specific immorality and incompetence of Trump himself by clinging to “American values” is to accept a state of permanent Trumpism. I mean, if Trump himself is the problem, then an honest, even-tempered, respectful candidate who advocated the same policies would be perfectly acceptable. Right? Actually, the inverse case is far more apropos: a candidate who was just as much of a ridiculous jackass but who actually advocated good policies would be someone we would be right to support, even though we would have to fight the New York Times in order to do it.
What the Trump campaign truly represents, then, is the retrenchment of mediocrity against the threat of greatness. This, finally, is the real danger, the worm gnawing at the roots of the human project. If mediocrity means accepting what we’ve already got as being “good enough,” then it is a natural fact that mediocrity rules. Once achieved, goals become crutches; once instantiated, vision becomes constraint. As soon as you settle, you’re dead. Which is why fighting for the absolute validity of any one standard is ultimately the same as fighting for nothing. If you win, you will accomplish only the destruction of your sole defense against the inexorable march of time, which is guaranteed to leave you bleached in the desert alongside Ozymandias.
This dynamic was well understood by mediocrity’s most implacable foe: Friedrich Nietzsche. First, because this is just completely amazing, here is Nietzsche’s commentary on our current situation:
“We ‘good Europeans’ – we, too, know hours when we permit ourselves some hearty fatherlandishness, a plop and relapse into old loves and narrownesses – I have just given a sample of that [ed: Nietzsche is referring to his own feelings about Richard Wagner] – hours of national agitations, patriotic palpitations, and various other sorts of archaizing sentimental inundations. More ponderous spirits than we are may require more time to get over what with us takes only hours and in a few hours has run its course: some require half a year, others half a life, depending on the speed and power of their digestion and metabolism. Indeed, I could imagine dull and sluggish races who would require half a century even in our rapidly moving Europe to overcome such atavistic attacks of fatherlandishness and soil addiction and to return to reason, meaning ‘good Europeanism.’
As I am digressing to this possibility, it so happens that I become an ear-witness of a conversation between two old ‘patriots’: apparently both were hard of hearing and therefore spoke that much louder.
‘He thinks and knows as much of philosophy as a peasant or a fraternity student,’ said one; ‘he is still innocent. But what does it matter today? This is the age of the masses: they grovel on their bellies before anything massive. In politicis, too. A statesman who piles up for them another tower of Babel, a monster of empire and power, they call ‘great’; what does it matter that we, more cautious and reserved, do not yet abandon the old faith that only a great thought can give a deed or cause greatness. Suppose a statesman put his people in a position requiring them to go in for ‘great politics’ from now on, though they were ill-disposed for that by nature and ill-prepared as well, so that they would find it necessary to sacrifice their old and secure virtues for the sake of a novel and dubious mediocrity – suppose a statesman actually condemned his people to ‘politicking’ although so far they had better things to do and think about, and deep down in their souls they had not got rid of a cautious disgust with the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy quarrelsomeness of peoples that really go in for politicking – suppose such a statesman goaded the slumbering passions and lusts of his people, turning their diffidence and delight in standing aside into a blot, their cosmopolitan and secret infinity into a serious wrong, devaluating their most cordial inclinations, inverting their conscience, making their spirit narrow, their taste ‘national’ – what! a statesman who did all this, for whom his people would have to atone for all future time, if they have any future, such a statesman should be great?’
‘Without a doubt!’ the other patriot replied vehemently; ‘otherwise he would not have been able to do it. Perhaps it was insane to want such a thing? But perhaps everything great was merely insane when it started.’
‘An abuse of words!’ his partner shouted back; ‘strong! Strong and insane! Not great!’
The old men had obviously become heated as they thus flung their truths into each other’s faces; but I, in my happiness and beyond, considered how soon one stronger will become master over the strong; also that for the spiritual flattening of a people there is a compensation, namely the deepening of another people.”
Returning to business, and sparing you the disquisition on how thoroughly Nietzsche has been misrepresented on this point, the relevant argument is as follows:
“In an age of disintegration that mixes races indiscriminately, human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war that they are should come to an end. Happiness appears to them, in agreement with a tranquilizing (for example, Epicurean or Christian) medicine and way of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of resting, of not being disturbed, of satiety, of finally attained unity, as a “sabbath of sabbaths,” to speak with the holy rhetorician Augustine who was himself such a human being.
But when the opposition and war in such a nature have the effect of one more charm and incentive of life – and if, moreover, in addition to his powerful and irreconcilable drives, a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself, in other words, self-control, self-outwitting, has been inherited or cultivated, too – then those magical, incomprehensible, and unfathomable ones arise, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and seduction, whose most beautiful expression is found in Alcibiades and Caesar (to whose company I should like to add that first European after my taste, the Hohenstaufen Frederick II), and among artists perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear in precisely the same ages when that weaker type with its desire for rest comes to the fore: both types belong together and owe their origin to the same causes.”
The narrowness of a single set of unquestioned values, as seen most prominently in nationalism, is a source of power, but also a fatal restriction. It offers an easily-understood goal to aim for, at the cost of being completely unable to operate outside of the context of that one goal. When one gains the “historical sense” of other cultures and value systems, one comes to understand one’s own values as transient, contingent, and even accidental, and one is inflicted with doubt. It becomes impossible to advance once you start thinking that every step you take might be in the wrong direction. This is the threat of multiculturalism – it is what the ranters against “postmodern political correctness” are actually afraid of. Recall that the argument is often along the lines of “things are changing too fast” and “it’s impossible to keep up with all the new terminology” and “you can never know what the right thing to say is.” This is exactly what we’re talking about: people don’t know how to deal with clashing standards.
Naturally, then, there are two possible responses. One is simply to reject doubt – to build a wall against the influences of other cultures. This allows you to “go back” to advancing in the way you were before, but only in the sense of mere denial. You already know that your teleology is phantasmic, so all you’re really doing is going to sleep. The other option is to embrace danger, to harness the conflict within yourself and start moving, even in uncertainty, even knowing that your pursuit may soon reveal itself as quixotic. Indeed, one may even value this danger itself, accepting that the struggle to determine how to advance is part of what advancement itself actually is.
We are, of course, living in an “age of disintegration” with far more “mixing” going on than Nietzsche could ever have anticipated, and the primary response to this has been cowardice. There’s too much noise, too much tension, and all anybody wants is for it all to go away. We want things to “make sense” again. And while it actually is legitimately scary, this is still a better situation than any possible alternative, because it means that we have a chance. We are not obligated to retreat; we can accept the terms of the battle against ourselves, and we can fight. This is our opportunity to turn our gaze towards actual greatness.
The catch is that it doesn’t come lightly; in fact, everything is organized against it. The revolt of mediocrity is not just expected, it’s built in to the basic structure of how the world works. As Nietzsche points out, morality aside, Social Darwinism doesn’t actually happen. Greatness is not the natural result of an optimization process – any optimization process. It can’t be, for the very reasons we’ve just discussed. On the contrary, all roads lead to mediocrity:
“As for the famous ‘struggle for existence,’ so far it seems to me to be asserted rather than proved. It occurs, but as an exception; the total appearance of life is not the extremity, not starvation, but rather riches, profusion, even absurd squandering – and where there is struggle, it is a struggle for power. One should not mistake Malthus for nature.
Assuming, however, that there is such a struggle for existence – and, indeed, it occurs – its result is unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin’s school desires, and of what one might perhaps desire with them – namely, in favor of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority – and they are also more intelligent. Darwin forgot the spirit (that is English!); the weak have more spirit. One must need spirit to acquire spirit; one loses it when one no longer needs it. Whoever has strength dispenses with the spirit (‘Let it go!’ they think in German today; ‘the Reich must still remain to us.’). It will be noted that by ‘spirit’ I mean care, patience, cunning, simulation, great self-control, and everything that is mimicry (the latter includes a great deal of so-called virtue).”
“Survival of the fittest” is a somewhat inaccurate term. “Fittest” connotes “strongest” – that is, “greatest” – but what it actually means is “best adapted,” which means it is a quality that is not just contingent on but entirely defined by its environment. Certainly, nothing can be said to be “great” which only applies to one tiny set of arbitrary conditions. In the context of evolution, anything more than what is required for survival and reproduction is a waste of energy. Hence, cavefish evolve to lose their sight – to become weaker and less capable, simply because such capabilities are not required of them. With no adaptive pressure, capabilities above and beyond what is immediately required never evolve – no animal ever becomes any better than it absolutely has to be. Naturally, this trend reaches its zenith in the human body, an absurd tangle of vulnerabilities that barely performs its one function of supporting a bloated mutant brain. In short, evolution does not tend towards greatness; it tends towards mediocrity.
Social evolution works in exactly the same way. From a functional perspective, the most successful people are, in fact, people like Trump: those who do exactly what is required to accumulate resources under the current set of rules, and who don’t waste their time with anything extraneous like imagination or taste or morality. The “starving artist” is a somewhat inaccurate stereotype – people who are genuinely good at something tend to be at least somewhat successful – but it remains the case that the people at the top are generally not the best, but the most broadly palatable – the people with the fewest complications and the simplest focus.
Nietzsche’s counterideal to the rising nationalism of his own time was the “Good European”: one with expansive values and broad allegiances, who undertook the difficult task of loving “the farthest” rather than settling for the easy comfort of merely loving their neighbors. Just so, our present task is to reject the simplistic, small-minded ideals of Americanism, understand ourselves as citizens of humanity, and act accordingly.
I mean, globalization is really a good thing, right? It’s kind of hard to keep this in mind under the current circumstances, but increased cultural exchange and productive efficiency really are beneficial. They make people’s lives better. That’s not where the problem is, and even if it was, the clock’s not going to turn back. The only way to go is forward. We have no other option than to make this work, and a return to an imaginary past – whether the blind conformity of the pretend ’50s or the blithe complacency of the pretend ’90s – is not going to work. We require a different future.
And just so no one gets any silly ideas, the Democrats are not capable of resolving this. They are also the problem. Supporting a candidate based on “competence” and “qualifications” is also active embrace of mediocrity and a retreat into the past – as is claiming that “America is already great.” Hillary Clinton is the candidate of the neoliberal consensus, the goal of which is precisely to establish a fully inclusive system of global exploitation. At this point, that may be the preferable alternative, but it’s still evil. And as the evil that’s actually going to happen, it demands our opposition. To defeat Trumpism via Clintonism is to win the battle and lose the war.
It is no accident that The Wall has become the synecdoche for this entire campaign. It is, of course, the perfect representation of Trump himself: as dull as it is senseless, impressive only in what an absolute waste of space and resources it is. But it is also the prefect representation of the ideology that informs his support. It is something understandable that doesn’t actually make sense. It is the simplest, easiest response to the new problems of a complicated world. It is something that looks big and impressive, but is in fact pathetically small-minded. It is a toddler’s idea of greatness. Look what I built, Mommy. Look how big it is. Aren’t I special? Did I do a good job, Daddy? I did it all by myself; you don’t have to bail me out this time. Are you proud of me? Do you love me now, Daddy?
The Democrats have exploited this metaphor in their amicable, self-serving way, promising instead to “build bridges.” But of course this is no solution; the point is precisely that all those bridges lead to the same place – while leaving the existing walls intact. Because The Wall is not actually something new that is going to be built “over there”; it is something that exists directly in front of each of us. There are walls going around us and through us; they divide our homes and criss-cross our streets; they direct our movements, curtail our futures, and overshadow our thoughts. The job of politics is to decide where to build walls, and the task of liberation is to advance the negative response to this question.
Which is why, despite everything, we’re actually not screwed. Quite the contrary: this is a fight we can never truly lose, because the existence of the struggle itself is already victory. Mediocrity rules, but desire burns. You can quell the voice of doubt in your head down to a whisper, but you can’t silence it. It’s still there, waiting for the still of night to rise up again, to get its claws back in you.
Ultimately, Trump is not the enemy. He is merely the shadow cast by our society, something that has to exist given the way things are right now. He really is just some guy. I’m pretty sure everyone realizes that it’s impossible to avoid picking a side at this point – not that it was ever possible before. But there are more than two sides to each story. It’s not enough to merely be opposed to the worst possible thing. You have to look underneath the speeches and the processions, feel the blood pulsing through the hidden veins of the world, identify the real fault lines, and strike. This is how to tear the walls down.
Not to mention that substituting personality for politics, complete with the culmination of soundbytifying the whole thing into a goofy nickname, is Trump’s exact strategy. Abyss/monsters/etc. ↩
Somebody please come up with a better way to do this. ↩
This is actually pretty funny: the anti-PC argument is that PC types are “relativists” for whom “anything goes,” while simultaneously being uncompromising tyrants who insist on one exacting standard of behavior. ↩
These alternatives are typically conflated via the absolutely meaningless umbrella term “diversity,” which is why we have to go through all of this. ↩
By the way, multiculturalism is not going to be the “end of history” or anything. There will still be a ways to go from there – or, rather, multiple different wayses to go. For one thing, we can question the idea of having standards at all. As Marx said, even true liberation will not be the end of history, but rather the end of “pre-history,” i.e. the beginning. ↩
This is what the term “white feminism” refers to in this context: inclusive but not multicultural feminism. ↩
And this is only a paradox for people who claim they’re opposing the “restrictiveness” of political correctness, because words actually do matter. Not in the Sapir-Whorfian sense that they control what we’re allowed to think, but in the Wittgensteinian sense that they represent collective agreement. ↩
Holy Hera I hate this post. What am I doing with my life. ↩
This is the fatal contradiction in egoism, by the way. If the self is all that matters, then no one can ever have any claims on anyone else, meaning that the self doesn’t matter. In order to argue that, for example, men’s opinions matter more than women’s, you need patriarchy to exist as an external structure that can be appealed to for judgment. Without anything external, you can’t make any claims at all. Egoism is a spook. ↩
The AP fact-checked all the presidential candidates on global warming. The results are exactly what you’d expect; the only important thing to note is that this has nothing to do with “scientific literacy” and everything to do with pandering. Clinton got the highest score because she’s currently pandering the hardest to establishment liberals; Cruz got the lowest score because he’s currently pandering the hardest to the know-nothing crowd. None of these people are actually going to do anything about the issue.
Aside from that, though, there’s something a little disturbing in the perspective of the scientists who performed the review. Sanders lost points for the following statement:
“The scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change, transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable.”
This is apparently an “overstatement,” which I guess is technically true. There will probably still be a few places on the planet that are actually livable. Given the situation, though, it’s hard to argue that a little hyperbole isn’t justified.
Here are the scientists’ criticisms of this statement:
Dessler said, “I would not say that the planet will become uninhabitable. Regardless of what we do, some humans will survive.” Harvard’s Jim McCarthy also called the comment an overstatement, as did other scientists when Sanders said it. Recent research on the worst heat projections in the hottest area, the Persian Gulf, finds that toward the end of the century there will be a few days each decade or so when humans cannot survive outside, but can live with air conditioning indoors.
Talk about cold comfort. “Some” humans will still survive, probably! It will only occasionally be impossible for people to go outside! Like, I get it. The planet is not literally going to go up in flames, and it is important to have an accurate understanding of the specific things that are going to happen. But what’s actually disturbing here is the bit about air conditioning.
It’s disturbing because it reflects an assumption that we’ll be able to do an effective job of ameliorating the consequences of global warming, even though right now we aren’t doing shit to actually prevent it. Recall that not everyone has access to air conditioning under current circumstances, even in America. The scientists here are considering the worst-case scenario, but assuming a best-case response to it. This assumption is not justified.
Our collective failure to do anything about global warming has two root causes. The obvious one is that humans are terrible at long-term planning, especially when there short-term benefits to be had by ignoring it. Not much more needs to be said about this. But there’s another problem that gets much less attention, despite how fundamental it is to everything that’s wrong with society: humans care more about their relative status than their absolute status.
This fact explains how we got into this mess in the first place. It wouldn’t really be that hard for rich fucks to create a stable, sustainable society, given the sort of resources they have at hand. It would, of course, cost them a lot of money, but they’d get a lot out of it: there wouldn’t be any railing against the 1%, they wouldn’t have to bother controlling the political process or hiring mercenaries to shut down protesters, etc. Economic activity could be redirected toward more improvements in technology and medicine, which would benefit rich fucks the most even as they also benefited everyone else. Furthermore, this wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice in practical terms, since no one can actually use the amount of money these people have. They could spend like 90% of their wealth on this and still maintain their ridiculous standards of living. They’d just be normally obscenely wealthy instead of obscenely obscenely wealthy.
And that’s the problem. Being unfathomably richer than everyone else is what actually motivates these people. In other words, what they care about is their relative status. It isn’t just rich fucks either; everyone is like this. For example, this is why poor white people can be persuaded to abandon their class interests in favor of white supremacy: it gives them someone to look down on. If they united with poor black people, they could make themselves better off in absolute terms, but then they’d all be together on the bottom; poor white people would be worse off in relative terms.
So this is why pollution happens: people are willing to destroy their environment to gain a competitive advantage over their neighbors, even though they all have to live together in the same destroyed environment (note that “competitive advantage” is the actual term used in business). But that’s not all. This is also why global warming is going to get worse before it gets worse.
Everyone assumes that once really bad things starts happening, we’ll all get serious and start doing something about it. But if we aren’t doing anything now, why would we start once it gets harder to do so? Indeed, the opposite is true: as the overall situation worsens, there will be more to gain from minor competitive advantages; fossil fuels will become more valuable in a situation where fewer people have access to them. Ergo, people will keep burning them, and things will keep getting worse. And that will be humanity’s epitaph: we chose to be rulers of a wasteland rather than citizens of a decent society.
And Sanders isn’t going to do anything about this either. Here he is playing coy in Rolling Stone:
. . . His [Eugene V. Debs’] vision is a vision that I share.
Including an “overthrow of the capitalist system”? No, no, no. Now you’re being provocative. If you follow my campaign, have you heard me talk about overthrowing the capitalist economic system?
I mean, obviously. The guy is running for President of Capitalism. What else is he going to say?
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been consistently impressed by Sanders (excluding his position on gun control). I wouldn’t have thought the Democratic Party was capable of fielding this good of a candidate [update: in the least surprising turn of events ever, it turns out they’re not]. But in this case, “good” isn’t good enough, because “overthrowing the capitalist economic system” is the one and only thing that can stop global warming.
This is old news by now, but the amount of oil that is currently owned is about five times more than enough to push us over the brink. In order to avoid catastrophe, this oil must not be burned. But for the owners, this is equivalent to burning the amount of money that the oil is worth. This will never happen. This is also why “clean energy” isn’t going to do shit: the oil is already owned, so burning it in addition to using clean energy sources will still provide a competitive advantage, so it will still happen even in an ideal situation where there’s enough solar power to provide free energy for everyone. And, as mentioned, as things get worse, the incentives to use these resources will only increase. The only solution is for the government (that is, all the governments) to buy up or otherwise appropriate all of this oil and keep it in the ground.
And of course, this isn’t a one time thing. Even if some miracle invention fixes global warming (n.b. not happening), the incentives that caused the problem will still be in place. There will eventually be some other technology that destabilizes our environment in the same way, and the same thing will happen again.
It’s usually a sort of saving grace that our ruling class is totally incompetent. As Machiavelli pointed out when he wrote The Prince, just because someone happens to meet the current criteria for being a member of the ruling class doesn’t mean they actually know shit about ruling. And this is great, because the fact that there’s no master plan is what allows the rest of us to make our own lives in the cracks of the system. A competent ruling class would have already undermined us all so thoroughly that I wouldn’t even be able to conceive of any of the stuff in this post. In this case, though, it might be worth the tradeoff.
Leveling up is the worst mechanic in video games. Naturally, it’s also one of the most popular. From a design perspective, it’s useless at best and counterproductive at worst. From an aesthetic perspective, it’s actively evil.
Let’s start by clarifying what it is we’re talking about. Leveling up is about advancement through your in-game capabilities increasing, as opposed to your abilities as a player. There’s no such concept in a game like Super Mario Bros., where Mario’s abilities are the same throughout the entire game. While there are power-ups that can temporarily increase your abilities, these are situational upgrades rather than a persistent part of Mario’s character.
In Mega Man, on the other hand, the abilities that Mega Man gains by defeating each boss become part of his permanent arsenal. By the end of the game, Mega Man is much more capable than he was at the beginning. Indeed, if you’re having a hard time against one of the bosses in a Mega Man game, one way to proceed is to defeat a different boss in order to get their weapon, and then use it against the boss you’re having trouble on. In this way, the player can advance without actually getting better at the game. Not that this is necessarily a problem; having a variety of challenges available is a good way to keep the player from getting stuck, and they’ll presumably get better at the game naturally as long as they have the opportunity to keep trying.
This still isn’t really what we’re talking about, though, because Mega Man’s weapons are new abilities: they make him more capable, but not necessarily more powerful. There may be situations in which a new weapon isn’t actually useful. Not only that, but the player has to learn what each weapon is good for and decide when to use it, so in that sense these upgrades actually make the game more complicated to play. What we really mean by “level ups” is a general increase in power rather than a specific increase in capabilities. In Super Metroid, for example, Samus can collect energy tanks to increase her endurance, new suits to reduce the amount of damage she takes, or new beams that are strictly superior versions of her existing beam (as opposed to separate weapons in the way that Mega Man’s are). All of these are what you might think of as “background” upgrades; they make the game easier without providing the player with any new options. Of course, Super Metroid also has plenty of upgrades that do actually give Samus new abilities; there’s a clear distinction between upgrades that allow you to do new things and upgrades which are mere improvements.
Thus, we can draw a distinction between two concepts which are often conflated: skill growth and power growth. The first allows the player to do new things, resulting in increased gameplay options and possibly even increased difficulty, while the second makes the things that the player can already do more effective, resulting in a mere decrease in difficulty.
You may have noticed that I’ve deliberately avoided using any examples for the genre that is actually about level ups: RPGs. The problem with RPGs is that the concept of leveling up is so baked-in to the basic formula that it’s very difficult to separate out the relevant concepts. It’s typical for a “level” in an RPG to refer to everything at once: all of your character’s parameters increase, and you also learn new abilities, and your abilities also get stronger without actually doing anything different. Plus there’s things like new equipment, which sometimes gives you a mere power increase, or sometimes gives you what looks like an ability but is actually just a power increase (such as “increased critical hit rate” or “extra damage against dragons”), and sometimes actually gives you new options (such as a staff that regenerates your MP but can’t be used to attack). The point is that RPG design is generally a mess and what I’m taking aim at here is not everything that gets called a “level up” but the specific concept of general power growth.
Skill growth isn’t a problem; indeed, it’s easy to see why it’s an effective mechanic. In games like Mega Man and Super Metroid, skill growth is used to ease the player into the game. The player starts with only the basic abilities, allowing them to get a handle on the fundamentals, and then, with a foundation established, learn to use the new abilities one at a time. Giving the player all the abilities at the outset would be overwhelming; it would actually make the game harder to play. Furthermore, since each skill has a specific function, the process of gaining skills itself can be strategic. In Mega Man, as mentioned, you might try to gain a specific weapon for the purpose of defeating a specific boss. In this way, the player can chart their own path through the game based on an understanding of what capabilities they need to have in order to perform certain tasks (and Mega Man is really the simplest possible example here; a game that utilized this sort of progression in a meaningful way would really be something).
Power growth offers none of these advantages and also contains several drawbacks. The basic problem is that power growth adds nothing to the gameplay. Attacking a monster and dealing 50 damage is exactly the same operation as attacking it and dealing 500 damage. Furthermore, since the game’s challenges have to get harder to compensate for the player’s increased power, there’s not even any practical effect from leveling up. If a monster has 500 HP and you deal 50 damage per hit, you need to hit it 10 times to win. If, after leveling up and moving to a harder area, a new monster has 5000 HP and you’re dealing 500 damage, the situation is exactly the same. It looks different, but the actual actions you’re taking are identical to what they were before. In this way, RPGs often confuse the issue by offering a lot of flash that makes it look like something is going on when you’re actually just using the exact same tactics in every encounter. Thus, level ups often conceal a lack of actual gameplay.
It’s worse than that, though, because power growth can actually cannibalize real gameplay. For example, say you’re up against a boss that counters any physical attacks you hit it with, so instead you need to beat it with magic attacks. But suppose you’ve leveled up enough that the counterattacks aren’t strong enough to stop you. You can just blithely bash away with physical attacks and win anyway; you don’t actually have to learn the boss’s characteristics or how to deal with them. You don’t actually have to play the game.
The reason for this problem is that challenge relies on balance. To illustrate this, consider a boss battle from any Mega Man game. If you’re not familiar, they look like this:
See those two bars? One of them is Mega Man’s health meter, and one of them is Guts Man’s. When Mega Man hits Guts Man, Guts Man’s health goes down by a certain amount, and vice versa. The fact that both bars are visibly the same size makes the situation admirably clear: the difficulty of the battle is based on the ratio of the amount of damage Mega Man deals to Guts Man to the damage he takes from Guts Man’s attacks. If Mega Man has a weapon that is highly effective against Guts Man (that’d be Bomb Man’s weapon), he might be able to win by just shooting repeatedly and not bothering to avoid any of Guts Man’s attacks. The player doesn’t have to learn anything at all; the battle becomes trivially easy. On the other hand, if Mega Man does very little damage compared to how much he takes from each hit, he may have to avoid almost all of Guts Man’s attacks in order to have a chance. The player may have a hard time even after learning how to effectively dodge most of the boss’s attacks; the battle becomes excruciatingly hard. A well-designed boss battle will have a damage ratio that puts it between these two extremes: with the correct weapon, the battle should be easy but not trivial; without it, the battle should be challenging but doable for a moderately skilled player.
But if the player can increase Mega Man’s overall power by “leveling up,” then they’re in control of the damage ratio (intentionally or otherwise), which means the actual design of the battle goes out the window. If you’re having a hard time against a boss, you have no idea whether it’s because there’s something about the gameplay you have yet to learn or whether you just haven’t leveled enough. If you’ve leveled too much, you’ll just blaze through and miss the opportunity to learn anything. In this situation, the developer has in effect abdicated their responsibility to design a meaningful encounter, instead obligating the player to “guess” what level they need to be at in order to have a good experience (the extent to which game designers often seem to be looking for any possible excuse to avoid actually designing their games is rather disheartening; see also “procedurally generated levels” as a selling point).
But it’s not just that power growth sucks, it’s also that it’s totally clowned by its cooler, more attractive cousin: skill growth. Skill growth does everything power growth can do and more, and it looks good doing it. This is easy to understand if we look at a game that uses both mechanics, but cleanly separates them so that they can be analyzed individually. That game is Final Fantasy Tactics. Whenever one of your characters takes an action, they grow in two ways: they gain Experience, which eventually levels them up in the power growth sense, and they gain Job Points, which can be used to purchase new abilities. If you play the game with this in mind, it will quickly become apparent that Experience is completely boring. It gradually accumulates and makes you stronger and you never actually think or worry about it in any way. Trying to pay attention to it is like watching someone else run on a treadmill.
Conversely, Job Points are not only interesting, they’re also awesome and basically the entire point of the game. There are several reasons for this. The most obvious is that getting new abilities is fun and interesting. A new ability allows you to do something new in battle, and since Final Fantasy Tactics is pretty well designed, new abilities are generally distinctive: they allow you to do a new type of thing rather than just being a different version of something you can already do. Another reason is that you get to choose which abilities to get, so you can make a plan about how your team is going to work and design the kind of characters that you think will be effective, or creative, or challenging, or even just fun. Thus, we get the same sense of character advancement that power growth offers, but in a way that’s both interesting and conducive to actual gameplay.
Finally, the act of gaining Job Points itself also involves a choice, because each character only gains Job Points for the class they are currently using (pedantic caveat: not actually true, but close enough). So if you want to, for example, make a White Mage that can also use Time Magic, you have to decide when you can allow the character to train in the Time Mage class and when you’re going to need them as a White Mage. And this isn’t an isolated decision, because you have other team members with the same dynamic; if one of them is training as a White Mage, the others are free to do something else. Thus, there’s an interesting tension between growing your characters for the long term and winning each battle in the short term; unlike with Experience, you don’t just get everything for free.
What all this adds up to is that you could completely excise the concept of Experience from Final Fantasy Tactics and you would lose absolutely none of what makes the game good. So from a design perspective the solution to power growth is pretty simple: just say no. Pick a power level and design your game around that. If you want to provide a couple of options for the player to make things easier or harder for themselves, that’s fine, but these ought to be explicit choices rather than just something that happens as you play the game. Furthermore, the limits of these options need to be designed appropriately in order to provide an experience that’s still meaningful even when it’s a little easier or harder.
Gameplay isn’t everything, though. The actual purpose of levels is, of course, aesthetic. They represent a character’s growth over the course of the story. If you’re making a game with a Hero’s Journey type of story, where the main character starts off as some nobody and goes through some trials and stuff and becomes powerful enough to save the day, using level ups to gradually increase the character’s attributes is a great way to represent that, even if it doesn’t actually change the gameplay.
The problem with this is that the Hero’s Journey is a bunch of fucking horseshit. Real things don’t actually happen because of some guy who’s just so strong and smart and powerful that he can defeat all the bad evil forces and make things nice and peaceful for everybody. That’s not how the real world works. It is, rather, how the rulers of an oppressive, hierarchical society want you to think the world works, because it justifies existing power structures.
For example, the jobs of a CEO and a janitor are so different that they can’t be meaningfully compared in terms of value. But we accept that a CEO should have higher pay than a janitor because we consider it to be a “higher level” job. If we instead view these two jobs are merely two different sets of skills, both of which are required for a company to operate, then the justification for not merely “outsized” CEO pay but for any pay discrepancy at all vanishes.
The truth is that the world works the way it does as a result of specific abilities that people have. The members of the ruling class are not better than you. The reason rich fucks are rich is that they’re good at the specific things that our society rewards. Warren Buffett, who is certainly one of our more self-aware rich fucks, has made precisely this point with regard to himself:
“I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner.
But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing — and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.”
In other words, there’s no actual justification for someone like Buffett being rich. It’s just how things happen to be set up at the moment. Those who are invested in maintaining our current level of injustice want you to believe that the people on top of our society are there because they deserve it, because they’re just better. But they aren’t, and they don’t.
This isn’t just about rich fucks, either. The same analysis applies to the rest of us. The big paradox of justice in the internet years has been that, while the internet has been an incredible boon to the spread of anti-oppression ideologies, it has resulted in very little structural change. Marginalized people have more opportunity than ever to have their voices heard, and inconvenient ideas no longer require official channels for dissemination. At the same time, economic inequality has been steadily worsening and social progress has largely stalled out. The unfortunate truth is that “power” in the form of large numbers of people agreeing on the internet does not actually accomplish anything. What internet activists often fail to realize is that we are not dealing with some sort of cosmic scale, where we just have to put all of our weight on one side to move it. We are dealing with a specific socio-historical situation and specific sorts of actions are required to affect it. Of course, if I had any idea what these actions were, I’d be doing something a little more productive than blogging about game mechanics. But the least we can do is let go of the false hope that says that everything will work out as long as we care hard enough.
And this is where things get really interesting, because not only is there actually a game mechanic that can convey this in a way that’s applicable to the real world, but it’s precisely the good aspect of leveling up that we were just talking about: it’s skill growth. Pretty crazy coincidence, right? The alternative to power growth that’s better for gameplay just so happens to also be the alternative that’s compatible with justice. Except no shit, because it’s obviously not a coincidence, because good design is the same thing as meaningful existence.
Claws of Love 
