The Reactionary Temptation
May 2, 2017 10:46 AM Subscribe

"Among many liberals, there is an understandable impulse to raise the drawbridge, to deny certain ideas access to respectable conversation, to prevent certain concepts from being “normalized.” But the normalization has already occurred — thanks, largely, to voters across the West — and willfully blinding ourselves to the most potent political movement of the moment will not make it go away. ."

Metafilter..... regular .... Andrew Sullivan writes (at length) about the current global wave of reactionary politics and searches for its intellectual foundations.

posted by lattiboy (114 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite

Oh, is he back to demonstrate more race science for us?
posted by Kitty Stardust at 10:52 AM on May 2, 2017 [36 favorites]

OP is one piece of BEYOND ALT:
THE EXTREMELY REACTIONARY, BURN-IT-DOWN-RADICAL, NEWFANGLED FAR RIGHT
- "To understand this new right, it helps to see it not as a fringe movement, but a powerful counterculture."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:52 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Has Andrew Sullivan managed to go a whole column without breaking out the calipers to measure skull bumps?
posted by indubitable at 10:53 AM on May 2, 2017 [21 favorites]

OP is one piece of BEYOND ALT:
THE EXTREMELY REACTIONARY, BURN-IT-DOWN-RADICAL, NEWFANGLED FAR RIGHT

a.k.a. the "Actually, socialism is exactly the same as fascism" article

love u, nymag
posted by indubitable at 10:55 AM on May 2, 2017 [16 favorites]

Here's the tell, pretty early on: "When I asked Anton bluntly about whether he believes race matters to a national identity, he turned uncharacteristically silent: 'I’m not going to say something that could be used to destroy my livelihood and career.'" And Sully is happy to drop it there. Oddly, he links to another NYMag piece by Jonathan Chait, who doesn't let it lie.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:59 AM on May 2, 2017 [17 favorites]

Good lord, it's even worse than I expected, what with the divergence into evo-psych and moaning about "leftist identity politics" when actual white supremacy is literally staring him in the face. For all the complaining about the left allegedly not understanding what happens, Sullivan once again makes sure we know he's the one who's really clueless.
posted by zombieflanders at 11:09 AM on May 2, 2017 [28 favorites]

Has Andrew Sullivan managed to go a whole column without it breaking out the calipers to measure skull bumps?

Related: Current Affairs: Andrew Sullivan Is Still Racist After All These Years
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:10 AM on May 2, 2017 [12 favorites]

Not giving air time to crazy talk goes a long way in marginalizing it, like it should be. Just because we've given air time to crazy talk doesn't mean we need to KEEP doing it, either.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:12 AM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

Don't aim your comments at him or his friends. Aim them at impressionable and/or young people who haven't made up their minds yet.

Picture a cute 12-year-old named Ava or Evan, doing simple web searches for what seems like a logical question to them, and answer their questions. Why is X a bad idea? Why do we have to be careful of Y?

Where are those answers?
posted by amtho at 11:17 AM on May 2, 2017 [17 favorites]

> You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.

Oh ffs. Okay lemme go back earlier in the essay. How does he propose we do this:

> There is, perhaps, a way to use reactionary insights and still construct a feasible center-right agenda. Such a program would junk Reaganite economics as outdated but keep revenue-neutral tax reform, it could even favor redistribution to counter the deep risk to democracy that soaring inequality fosters, and it could fix Obamacare’s technical problems. You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.

Oh, okay. Andrew Sullivan is proposing that the way to "arrest the reactionary momentum" is to implement a Romneyesque grab-bag of things that he, Andrew Sullivan, likes, because once Andrew Sullivan has what he likes, neonazism will no longer appeal to Republican voters.

Oh also we should do this without any unseemly use of force, because America, having almost elected Donald Trump President, is now clearly in favor of Romneyism.

This article is not best of the web. Andrew Sullivan is a bad writer with risible ideas, and it's ridiculous that print magazines publish him.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:25 AM on May 2, 2017 [59 favorites]

Oh, look. Andrew Sullivan wants us to take the right more seriously.
posted by Naberius at 11:27 AM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

Yeeeah I don't trust this guy to write this article, even though in a sense I kind of agree that "the normalization has already occurred" while liberals largely failed to understand it or confront it effectively.
posted by atoxyl at 11:28 AM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

The world is overflowing with high-quality left critiques of liberalism. As such, there is no need for a critique of liberalism from an obsequious right-winger who likes to pretend that his comrades on the right wouldn't murder him given half the chance.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:34 AM on May 2, 2017 [37 favorites]

I think there is a version of this article that exists that is a cogent analysis of what we can learn from the recent successes of neo fascism. But Sullivan isn't the guy to write it, and this is not the correct approach.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 11:34 AM on May 2, 2017

You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.

Relevant Star Trek episode.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:34 AM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

The world is overflowing with solid left critiques of liberalism. As such, there is no need for a critique of liberalism from a right-wing lickspittle who likes to pretend that his comrades on the right wouldn't murder him given half the chance.

Yeah as you said, Sullivan's response to this

Yeeeah I don't trust this guy to write this article, even though in a sense I kind of agree that "the normalization has already occurred" while liberals largely failed to understand it or confront it effectively.

is to say "hey liberals, you can totally arrest reaction by meeting it pretty much where I, Andrew Sullivan, already happen to stand!"
posted by atoxyl at 11:37 AM on May 2, 2017 [11 favorites]

Picture a cute 12-year-old named Ava or Evan, doing simple web searches for what seems like a logical question to them, and answer their questions. Why is X a bad idea? Why do we have to be careful of Y?

Yeah this is kind of terrifying. I recently did a Google search for Eugen Kogon, a Buchenwald survivor and author, and on the first page of results there already appears stuff like "Eugen Kogon (1903 - 1987) was a prisoner at Buchenwald and a "witness" for the politically correct view on the Holocaust. "
posted by thelonius at 11:38 AM on May 2, 2017 [14 favorites]

The instruction manual (!!) that came with my new hammer was more insightful than this ... thing.
posted by aramaic at 11:50 AM on May 2, 2017

Ok, so Sullivan isn't alone in thinking this twaddle, so this is my stock response to this centrist pleading:

We are not just talking about speech. This isn't some beard-stroking philosophical debate around the Algonquin Table. We are talking about policy here, and the alt-right proposes a set of policies that mean the real and actual marginalisation, deportation and death of millions. Any efforts to organise people behind these policies should be met with concerted effort to shut it the fuck down. This insistence on abstracting the speech from the policies said speech proposes is really easy to do when you're not likely to be affected by these policies.

Human progress has not been advanced by aiming for the general middle area between two extremes. It is advanced through the effort to raise the standard of living and freedom of more people. It's seldom pretty, it's sometimes violent, but it is always necessary. This is why centrism has no message: its position depends entirely on what the Middle Ground between More Oppression and More Freedom looks like. It's incoherent, but rather than confront the reality of needing the courage to face oppression, centrists actually blame the rise of oppression on radicals not being centrist enough. Which is a bit like blaming firefighters for not being more tolerant of arson.

In the end, Sullivan et al take the ultimate safe position of never having to face real danger from fascism, never having to criticise it themselves, and absolving themselves of any responsibility by shaking their fingers at those engaged on the side of liberation. 20 years from now, he'll be able to look back and say, "No, I didn't do fuck all to fight fascism, but at least I was polite."
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 11:51 AM on May 2, 2017 [71 favorites]

is to say "hey liberals, you can totally arrest reaction by meeting it pretty much where I, Andrew Sullivan, already happen to stand!"

Versus, I dunno, a countervailing movement that addresses roots of widespread disaffection :)
posted by atoxyl at 12:02 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

It is amazing how often everything is the fault of liberals being mean, especially actions performed by people who hate them. Just as amazing as how much good will the NYT reaped for publishing David Brooks and George Will's dribblings and how ever since NPR started its equivocating horseshit that the right came around to admitting the role and value of public broadcasting. If decades of capitulation got us this far, imagine how much further we could go!
posted by The Gaffer at 12:03 PM on May 2, 2017 [25 favorites]

It is amazing how often everything is the fault of liberals being mean, especially actions performed by people who hate them.

The nasty hoi polloi bigots Sullivan's country club fascism has been helping to breed for decades no longer know their place. Like David Brooks, he's now looking to blame everyone but himself.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:06 PM on May 2, 2017 [16 favorites]

I graduated college nearly 20 damn years ago, and in my Psychology class we did a respectful, thorough, intellectually rigorous dissection of The Bell Curve. As I recall we spent about a whole week (out of a 10-week quarter) refuting the theses of that one work.

I was talking about this in another thread recently but I feel like at some point people kinda... mistakenly assumed they didn't need to do this anymore? Or I dunno, if you are a serious student of psychology you probably do still learn about what IQ tests do and don't tell you, what biases can appear in research, how statistics can be abused, etc. But I don't think e.g. your average engineering student does, and the Bell Curve/Pioneer Fund folks (and hangers on) speak the right language to appeal to people like that - lots of numbers - in a way that I think opponents tend to underestimate?
posted by atoxyl at 12:12 PM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

Exactly. Hate is no way to move forward.
posted by amtho at 12:12 PM on May 2, 2017

Couple comments deleted; criticizing someone's ideas isn't violence; if you're not trolling, try harder to look like it.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:15 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

I just can't believe they let him in with the other Temptations.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 12:22 PM on May 2, 2017

David Brooks recently recently (re)married, and I immediately cracked something about whether it was to Andrew Sullivan so they could just spend their time stroking each other's apologist boners instead of torturing the rest of us with this crap.

Sadly, the answer is no on both counts.

_{Brooks married his research assistant; Sullivan is still apparently married to Aaron Tone and I'm very happy for them.}
posted by aspersioncast at 12:23 PM on May 2, 2017

Any genetic argument for racist belief is BS from the very outset. There's more genetic variation between any two average members of the "white" race than between any average member of the "white" race and any average member of the "black" race, because we dump so many different genetic legacies--anywhere from the Asian continent to Europe and anywhere else there are populations with lighter skin pigments on average--into the white crab bucket while there's relatively less genetic diversity among the populations we dump into the black crab bucket. Born in Egypt or Syria? You're white for now, but maybe not for long. But the people we identify as black tend to come from less diverse genetic backgrounds, so any random American white person is likely to have more genetic legacy in common with any other random American identified as black than with the next random white guy over. Racial identity may be real in the U.S. and elsewhere throughout the world, but that's not because it's rooted in any real story of human evolutionary biology or any coherent science.
posted by saulgoodman at 12:27 PM on May 2, 2017 [7 favorites]

I sorta miss a time when we were just getting frustrated with Sullivan's country club brand of conservatism instead of the full-on Handmaid's Tale meets the not-fun bits of Transmetropolitan with a dash of Birth of a Nation that we seem to have stumbled into.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:27 PM on May 2, 2017 [17 favorites]

Brooks married his research assistant.

It's incredible to me that he needs a research assistant to crank out his fatuous, cherrypicked apologia for the corporate stranglehold.

The NYT should just chain a couple of dozen monkeys to keyboards, stick them in front of Fox News, and put chablis in their water bowls. They'd save tens of thousands of dollars a year.

I sorta miss a time when we were just getting frustrated with Sullivan's country club brand of conservatism instead of the full-on Handmaid's Tale meets the not-fun bits of Transmetropolitan with a dash of Birth of a Nation that we seem to have stumbled into.

We didn't stumble into shit - people like Brooks and Sullivan have been laying the groundwork for this disaster for over 20 years.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:30 PM on May 2, 2017 [14 favorites]

Also, like, how long and how often do we have to permit "certain ideas access to respectable conversation"? I graduated college nearly 20 damn years ago, and in my Psychology class we did a respectful, thorough, intellectually rigorous dissection of The Bell Curve. As I recall we spent about a whole week (out of a 10-week quarter) refuting the theses of that one work. Bam, done - respectable analysis applied; work found wanting. What more is owed?

There's this common idea that each person needs to debunk each instance individually for it to count. That is, it doesn't suffice that you have worked through the Bell Curve once in college; every new instance of this kind of argument needs to be thoroughly investigated by you personally to count as not "ignoring it or dismissing it entirely;" similarly, it's not just enough for you to have investigated the Bell Curve, but everyone who critiques it needs to similarly spend a whole week doing so; and likewise for every iteration of each racist, creationist, and similar such argument. The end result is that virtually no one can satisfy the requirements, except perhaps those who devote 100% of their time to doing so.

What this shows is that there is actually no need for you personally to have spent a week on the Bell Curve, except as a useful case study that can then be quickly generalized to many other similar instances of BS. Clearly, the only sensible way for society to deal with falsehoods and bullshit is not to require every person to respond with in-depth research to every claim, but merely to assign trusted experts to the job, and do it once, thoroughly. You don't need to study the Bell Curve -- just link to the best extant debunking. And we don't have to respond to Sullivan or the alt-right folks he wants us to listen to, because others have done that already, and we can just point to them.

What these sorts of things deserve as response is a single link directing readers to the best anti-alt-right essays out there. And if the Sullivans complain, another link directing them to a meta-commentary like this one, explaining why individual instances of the same bullshit not only don't require individual responses, but in fact require us to not respond individually.
posted by chortly at 12:43 PM on May 2, 2017 [23 favorites]

> It's incredible to me that he needs a research assistant to crank out his fatuous, cherrypicked apologia for the corporate stranglehold.

He doesn't need a research assistant to crank out his fatuous, cherrypicked apologia, silly. He needs a research assistant to marry.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:44 PM on May 2, 2017 [14 favorites]

I've always been disappointed with the Left's dismissal of this topic.

Which isn't to say that I agree with Andrew Sullivan. He is shooting from the hip, deciding what things he's willing to give up to get the ideals he wants traction with no real proof that it's successful in changing minds.

But it's amazing how little devotion there is to understanding what is successful in changing minds. Instead we take that as intractable and hope it doesn't poison the next generation. Despite the fact that we don't understand how our use of social media is influencing the next generation.

As a citizen who has put a lot out there on the internet, I should have an understanding of how my language helps shape discourse. But the more common response I see here and around the internet is that just considering that question is abhorrent. And I can understand the concept is triggering, because it's similar to the ways marginalized people have to adapt language to mitigate the way society harms them.

But if we could actually learn how to unteach hate? That has the power to fast track so many movements. Most liberals defer to history as a guidebook for activism. Which is awfully limited since history is basically a blueprint for who we want to stop being.
posted by politikitty at 12:46 PM on May 2, 2017 [17 favorites]

Specific to Sullivan, the problem with his proposed strategy of casting a net somewhere in the general direction of the Political Middle as a means of pulling people away from either extreme (apart from the obvious flaws of Horseshoe Theory) is that frankly, I think Americans have been played out over this tune. When a politician simply throws out a grab-bag of policy proposals that hew to the middle, the aim is of course to draw in votes from those on the left and the right of the center, betting that you'll get enough votes to win. This is Opportunistic Centrism. The downside is, politicians who do this tend to come across as calculating, dishonest and - worst of all - devoid of real convictions. I think we got a great illustration of how this plays out last November.

Moral Centrism, by contrast, is more the idea that avoiding any extremes is a moral position, because by some weird metric, extreme = bad and nothing is relative to context. It's a safe, comfortable position to take, and I think many of us take a centrist position on a lot of issues, but to take one absolutely is completely ahistorical. Like, take the 8-hour workday. I don't know how centrists imagine this thing we take for granted came into being; maybe that workers asked very nicely and bosses realized the err of their ways and out of the goodness of their hearts lobbied for a shorter workday. But no, people had to march, fight, get arrested, break things, and shed blood for overtime to happen. Would it have happened without radicalism? Perhaps, but you know, when you're starving you don't really have a lot of time to wait. Which, again, is why centrism usually stems from a place of comfort. They can afford to wait.

So, Sullivan's ideas aren't just wrong; they aren't even original. He's about a few decades too late with this point of view, and certainly a year or so behind when it comes to proposed strategies for dealing with the alt-right. Par for the course, I guess.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 12:52 PM on May 2, 2017 [15 favorites]

> That is, it doesn't suffice that you have worked through the Bell Curve once in college; every new instance of this kind of argument needs to be thoroughly investigated by you personally to count as not "ignoring it or dismissing it entirely;" similarly, it's not just enough for you to have investigated the Bell Curve, but everyone who critiques it needs to similarly spend a whole week doing so; and likewise for every iteration of each racist, creationist, and similar such argument. The end result is that virtually no one can satisfy the requirements, except perhaps those who devote 100% of their time to doing so.

Oh but also their acid skepticism for claims only extends to ideas that they have a stake in doubting that's important to note. It is profitable for them to doubt the things they get paid for doubting, and it's pleasurable for them to doubt the things they personally don't want to believe, but if it's neither profitable nor personally beneficial to doubt something, the standards switch around, and it becomes bad or rude or unpatriotic to doubt at all.

Identifying this tactical application of radical doubt and radical followerism is not enough to stop it. Ignoring works from people who pull shit like this is not enough. Instead we must find, follow, share, and support worthwhile writers, while withholding financial support and eyeballs from rags that carry this nonsense.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:54 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

This is a false dichotomy:

A) each person needs to debunk each instance individually for it to count... virtually no one can satisfy the requirements, except perhaps those who devote 100% of their time to doing so.

B) assign trusted experts to the job... a single link directing readers to the best anti-alt-right essays out there.

I don't think anybody seriously expects every person to engage on every issue all the time. It may sound like that if one is used to feeling blamed or pressured by various hostile groups, and there may actually be some people who believe this, but certainly not most people.

Occasionally, when one has the energy, it's invaluable to engage individually maybe with a little fresh insight, both because demonstrating widespread understanding and acceptance of ideas is important for political stability and because there are distinct audiences out there that need differently-tuned communication. Also, first-hand accounts and stories are powerful, and powerful narrative is helpful.

Also, only saying "an expert says this is bad, here's a link to the expert" is just as convincing, to some, as saying "the Catholic Pope says this is bad, here's a book written by monks".

What many are arguing for is a system of thought that does hold up under scrutiny, that benefits from critical thought, and that is consistent across human experience. So, arguments that become essentially an appeal to authority or ad hominem attacks are missing the mark. Better is possible, even easy, given the tools available currently.
posted by amtho at 12:58 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

As a citizen who has put a lot out there on the internet, I should have an understanding of how my language helps shape discourse. But the more common response I see here and around the internet is that just considering that question is abhorrent. And I can understand the concept is triggering, because it's similar to the ways marginalized people have to adapt language to mitigate the way society harms them.

You're basically saying why your own concerns have a hard time being addressed here. Between the folks being punched in the face (metaphorically and literally) and those trying to stop the punches, there's not a lot of time and energy that can be devoted to deal with how to fix a fundamental problem that has existed since humans started creating cultures and societies. It's sadly inevitable that this once again gets characterized as the left not being able to do so is a "dismissal" that is somehow a failure they should be blamed for. Which, I feel, is itself part and parcel with the same both-sides-do-it-ism Sullivan and Brooks (and many others) love to tout as part of their bona fides.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:58 PM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

Trying to block someone from speaking publicly, as has occurred recently, will never win hearts and minds. Nope.
posted by tunewell at 12:58 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics

Ah

Well, it is true that people sometimes make over the top, deliberately provocative comments online (like one I one came across here in which someone said it would be their ideal to see all boys socialized to learn to always keep their mouths shut and keep their opinions to themselves and all girls socialized to speak up and never shut up in the face of opposition, etc.), that taken only naively at face value seem less concerned with any broader ideal of justice than pitting identity groups against each other and settling old scores. But those voices don't represent any serious, mainstream Leftist position I'm aware of, so it seems unfair to hold the Left as a whole accountable for them, if that's the kind of divisive identity extremism Sullivan means here. I don't know. Not sure it's even worth it to engage with his thinking here, considering his history.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:02 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

If only Andrew (Sullivan, not Jackson) had been around after the Civil War. We could have avoided the entire Jim Crow era.
posted by mondo dentro at 1:02 PM on May 2, 2017

Most of the criticism of Sullivan in this thread seem brought to bear on something outside the article.

This is not a piece on a total defense of any kind of speech, nor is it a defense of racism. It's yet another think piece trying to understand how in the hell we ended up in a place where Donald Trump could be elected president, and it's attempted through a tour of various strains of thought that seem to have contributed and could be understood as fronts in the battle.

You can argue about whether we need another piece like this or whether this one sheds real light on it, or whether ideas really actually mattered much at all in the last election, and I'd love to read those arguments. But that doesn't seem to be what's going on in-thread, and at the moment I'm persuaded that I'm safer paying attention to Sullivan than critics here if the highest quality responses they can bring to bear are truly on display.
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:03 PM on May 2, 2017 [7 favorites]

Not gonna lie those students blocking Charles Murray absolutely won my heart

And here lays the open door to anything goes. Free speech should never be up for grabs.
posted by tunewell at 1:13 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

Free speech does not, and should not, include hate speech. It does in this country, and that is one of the biggest failures of America, and I would argue one of the biggest reason for the rise of Trump. Opening the door for genocidal maniacs in the name of "free speech" is an incredibly privledged hot take, that puts the safety of Jews, Muslims, POC and queer people at risk, all in the name of "free speech".
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 1:16 PM on May 2, 2017 [25 favorites]

Freedom of speech in the US has nothing to do with private organizations funding other private organizations to have people speak, often at private venues not open to the general public.
posted by zombieflanders at 1:18 PM on May 2, 2017 [19 favorites]

The focus on the sins of the "SJW's" is phoney bullshit and in and of itself is pure propaganda. We've got the Republic almost completely taken over by oligarchs and theocrats, and heavily armed rightist thugs running around, waiting to be told it's OK to start killing liberals and blowing up mosques, yet it's young lefties who stay stupid shit--who make up a tiny fraction of the population, and have an even tinier fraction of the power in the US--who we're supposed to wring our hands over?

It's not just Sullivan who says this. There are a lot of lefties who obsess over it, as well. They should all stop and focus on those raping the planet for profit.
posted by mondo dentro at 1:18 PM on May 2, 2017 [41 favorites]

And that doesn't even get to folks like Milo, who invite violence by targeting specific groups for harassment or worse in their speeches.
posted by zombieflanders at 1:19 PM on May 2, 2017 [11 favorites]

What this shows is that there is actually no need for you personally to have spent a week on the Bell Curve, except as a useful case study that can then be quickly generalized to many other similar instances of BS. Clearly, the only sensible way for society to deal with falsehoods and bullshit is not to require every person to respond with in-depth research to every claim, but merely to assign trusted experts to the job, and do it once, thoroughly. You don't need to study the Bell Curve -- just link to the best extant debunking. And we don't have to respond to Sullivan or the alt-right folks he wants us to listen to, because others have done that already, and we can just point to them.

Well I don't mean that every person ought to put hours into debunking it in depth - indeed that is something for a smaller number of informed people to do. I mean that, as someone who occasionally surveils the alt-right, I think there's a mismatch in number and enthusiasm between the cadre of online writers enthusiastically reviving it and those willing and prepared to confront them. I think for a number of formerly marginal far-right ideas there's been a bit of a "didn't we put this to bed?" attitude that failed to see what was coming through alternative media and the sophistication of its presentation.

Pure ridicule is not necessarily a bad response, though - c.f. phrenology jokes.
posted by atoxyl at 1:31 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Or to be more particular since it matters with regards to the Berkeley case, it means the government can't stop you unless you are making comments that intentionally advocate immediate and specific lawless activity that is likely to be acted upon.

There is definitely an argument to be had as to who gets access to public resources such as university lecture halls to make their case.
posted by Zalzidrax at 1:31 PM on May 2, 2017

Oops, forgot to finish my thought. There is an argument to be made about how to fairly allocate public speaking platforms such as university lecture halls, but that is so far from police coming to your house and arresting you and confiscating your computer that people whining about people exercising their own free speech to say "we don't want these assholes to speak here" need to calm right down and stop dishonestly comparing that to actually not having freedom of speech.
posted by Zalzidrax at 1:42 PM on May 2, 2017 [9 favorites]

I find it increasingly frustrating that like this collection, everything that isn't leftist thinking is seems to be bundled up together and called alt-right. This kind of bundling prevents any kind of nuanced discussion of any of the issues raised because the entire bundle is tainted. That's not to say that there aren't abhorrent parts of the bundle but not all the pieces necessarily fit together except as the last election's voting bloc.
posted by shagoth at 1:44 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

Most of the criticism of Sullivan in this thread seem brought to bear on something outside the article

Ok, I suppose we did jump straight into shitting all over the source. Let's engage with Sullivan's reactionary-whispering.

You first though; I'm still mad.
posted by aspersioncast at 1:51 PM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

The instruction manual (!!) that came with my new hammer was more insightful than this ... thing.

I assume the manual had a section on who is worthy to wield it.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 1:51 PM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

Free speech should never be up for grabs.

"Free speech" in the US context does not mean freedom from the public consequences of your words, it means no federal prior restraint on speech.

If you are preaching hate, you're free to do it - but you'd better get ready for the blowback on the street. THAT is how a democracy works.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:52 PM on May 2, 2017 [18 favorites]

I've had my run-ins with young campus idealists, rudely assuming things about me because of my age, or social standing, or melanin content, or reproductive organs, or what I do with them. Yeah, they're annoying as fuck, and it's not cool to have to be so careful about using the wrong pronoun. But so fucking what? I'm a big boy. I can take it. And besides, I think I have bigger things to worry about. You know, like climate apocalypse, globally resurgent right-authoritarianism, and nuclear war? Are you really going to tell me that those things are made more dangerous because some kid told you to check your privilege?

Yeah, it's a bad "strategy" (do they really have one? I doubt it) to block chumps like Murray. A lot of what passes as "antifa" is self-absorbed and immature acting out. But you know what's just as bad, and maybe even worse? Inviting provocateurs to campus, as if they have anything useful to share with a university community. As if they're there to do anything other than getting a rise out of people. Hell, that's their fucking business model. If you want to get the conservative voice on campus, invite conservative intellectuals to speak. Not Ann fucking Coulter! There's no real excuse for her to be invited to a university. Have some standards, university people!

BTW, Sullivan is not alt-right. He's not even alt-light. He'd be thrown out of the helicopter into the sea shortly after many of us. I'm not so sure he realizes that, though.
posted by mondo dentro at 1:56 PM on May 2, 2017 [14 favorites]

One comment deleted. Folks, the article isn't about campus protests of speakers - it's about something else altogether, and in any case we've had this "what about the PC police on college campuses" fight about a hundred times in the last few years. If anyone's really hankering to have it again I invite you to go read those old threads. This one's about Sullivan interviewing/etc these reactionary folks, it's not actually about lefties.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:01 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

The first five comments have nothing to do with TFA, but are an excellent representation of a thesis of TFA. Irony.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 2:02 PM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

It's sadly inevitable that this once again gets characterized as the left not being able to do so is a "dismissal" that is somehow a failure they should be blamed for.

There's a difference between a failure and a missed opportunity, though at the end of the day, people are still marginalized and being harmed by a society mired in gridlock.

This is research that the Left should be passionate about. It's critical to being a decent ally and facilitating change. And while society might try to define us by our points of marginalization, our primary experience is one as an ally with some vector of privilege.
posted by politikitty at 2:09 PM on May 2, 2017

We had eight years of a president trying to be an ally to a Congress full of people who openly declared their willingness to oppose literally anything he wanted to try. But no, that gridlock is the Left's fault.
posted by rtha at 2:27 PM on May 2, 2017 [24 favorites]

The first five comments have nothing to do with TFA

:'(
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:30 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

If you consider yourself a progressive but you spend more time fretting about right-wing provocateurs losing out on paid speech opportunities than you do about women getting shut out of conference panels and legislative bodies where our futures are discussed and decided; and if you have more to say about leftists' failure to seriously engage with the same racist ideas very famous conservatives have been propagating in the international media for decades and decades than you do about the media's failure to offer POC similarly prominent, irrevocable platforms, well... you consider yourself wrong. I mean what is it? Can some of you all just not accept that a white man's ideas could ever be truly unworthy of attention? Andrew Sullivan's ideas are truly unworthy of attention. Get him off the damn stage already.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 3:11 PM on May 2, 2017 [30 favorites]

But it's amazing how little devotion there is to understanding what is successful in changing minds.

Yeah it's not like there was a three or so year period where every third DKos post was about how some Berkeley linguist had cracked the secret of persuasion.

Oh wait there was.
posted by PMdixon at 3:54 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

Yeah it's not like there was a three or so year period where every third DKos post was about how some Berkeley linguist had cracked the secret of persuasion.

OK, here's some sarcasm:

Yeah, it's so great that all that discussion and research has stayed fresh and people are actually using it _all_ _the_ _time_ to actually effect change. I particularly love how everybody took it upon themselves to engage fruitfully with their friends and relatives back home in small towns, instead of desperately looking for advice on how to avoid controversial discussions over the holidays. It's also so great that nobody was exhorted to "just not engage" with people who committed the mortal sin of believing different things.

end sarcasm

This is not to imply that everyone must engage all the time. Only that having that as the _default_ is not healthy. People who disagree with you have real political power, and they should have real political power. The way to advance the culture in such a system is through persuasion. That's where the energy should go, all the time, constantly renewed. This is where the real fight is.
posted by amtho at 4:16 PM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

People who disagree with you have real political power, and they should have real political power. The way to advance the culture in such a system is through persuasion. That's where the energy should go, all the time, constantly renewed. This is where the real fight is.

That's a beautiful sentiment (apart from people disagreeing with me "should" have power, because I mean, what?) but political reality is a bit different from this. The Tea Party had zero interest in winning over leftists; they sought to unite and strengthen the right. And here we are. And yet despite this glaring lesson, ostensible leftists remain convinced that we should diffuse our efforts towards the right instead of shoring up the left. It's baffling.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:25 PM on May 2, 2017 [19 favorites]

I think "shoring up the left" is a bit problematic if you wish to make inroads with white people and keep the coalition of POC. The Tea Party "secret" was that they were 92% white and had a metric shit ton of money.

It's baffling to me how people so immersed in racial politics seem to have this blind spot that the US electorate is still about 70% white and a majority of those white people voted for an openly racist sexual predator.

If you downplay social justice issues you alienate the POC, if you don't you alienate the white people. It's basically the bizzaro ACHA debacle or 2016 Dem primary redux.

( And before the "but Obama!" replies: I don't think many people appreciate that Obama was elected after the most disastrous 8 years a political party has had in modern politics and was probably the best orator of my lifetime)
posted by lattiboy at 4:46 PM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]

It's baffling to me how people so immersed in racial politics seem to have this blind spot that the US electorate is still about 70% white and a majority of those white people voted for an openly racist sexual predator.

It's more like 62% and a majority of voters did not vote for the openly racist sexual predator.

I mean I absolutely think that at this point the best case possible scenario is something like the Continuum future and don't rate that as very likely compared to a kleptocracy with the trappings of democracy but get your facts straight if you're going to doomsay.
posted by PMdixon at 5:11 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yesterday, I spent several hours taking photos at the May Day march in Los Angeles, including a few taking pictures of the pro-Trump "counter protest."

That there was a counter protest at all to the idea of supporting workers and immigrants is bizarre, and the counter protest was a hodgepodge of nativists, Russians, theocrats, neo-Nazis and Trump worshipers. There were about 50 of them, bounded by a double line of LAPD officers, with megaphones and banners. Across the double line, there were about 200 angry protestors shouting at them, shouting at the police, and filming.

The Trump protestors alternated calls for unity — "He's your president too!" — and invective — "You're all losers and morons" — without any apparent apprehension of the contradiction. Sad looking young boys with high and tight haircuts held signs reading "Don't Attack Our Brother Russia." A man wearing a dirtbike helmet, mask and goggles, and an American flag as a cape, tried selling bottled water to his compatriots, with the pitch that it was $2 because "Trump himself filled the bottles at the White House." (When I told him that there was free water just a block away at the regular rally, he told me that Trump would cut my taxes by 20 percent.)

There were more people who identified as immigrants than not, including a man who said he came to the U.S. as a child because there was nothing left for his family in Mexico ("because of the socialists"), and said that the U.S. needs to stop taking Mexicans because he'd seen that there was nothing good left there.

One banner was simply the words "Cultural Markism" (sic) with an X drawn through them.

Plenty of them seemed like they wanted to engage, wanted to be listened to. A young Latino with a "Make Renting Great Again" was trying to convince a member of one of the many communist splinter parties that Trump's opposition to Wall Street meant that he was going to fix the bureaucracy that made building so difficult, driving up rental prices in LA.

The longest conversation I had was with a woman who was worried that I'd shot her smoking a cigarette, and that her son would see the photo. He was about 14, and she'd recently caught him smoking, and had lied to him and told him that she'd quit. She had recently broken up with a man who she had been dating — when they started going out, he was a non-smoker and she'd told her son that she stopped smoking then. But over the course of the relationship, she'd picked it back up, and then he'd started smoking too. She was a working class single mom, out there on her own, and had gone off some distance to smoke. That was the one thing that both sets of protesters agreed on, she said: They both didn't want smokers anywhere around them.

Again and again, the Trump group hurled insults at the "Bolsheviks," "socialists" and "Marxists" that made up the regular demonstration. They flew a "blue line"/"blue lives matter" flag, and the American flag upside down. And then they wondered why the other side wouldn't unite with them, to defend America. And that seemed to make them mad again. A man with a huge cut-out Trump mask used his megaphone to question why the May Day protestors weren't at work.

There were two arrests at the protest and march, to my knowledge, and both of them were right there in front of the Trump protesters. One was a man who responded to the Trump protesters' chants proclaiming free speech by burning a flag; the police swooped in immediately, one of them shouting about "destroying private property." I wasn't close enough to see anything but a scrum; I caught it later from a cell video. The other was a guy who threw a plastic bottle that missed any of the Trumpers by a good 20 feet. The cops hustled him out too; the Trumpers sang "Hey Hey Goodbye" like they were at a baseball game.

For most of the main rally, the vibe was that of a party. Socially conscious rap on the stage, a few meandering lectures about the indigenous people that held the land hundreds of years ago (but no recognition that I heard of the millions of indigenous people still living in the area today; LA has the most Native Americans of any county in the country). Paletas, raspas, danger dogs, t-shirts, flags (American and Mexican, mostly), all for sale. A band on a truck played Santana covers and rolled slowly through the streets.

Near the Trump protest, though, it was mostly people that wanted to yell at each other. The Trump protesters all seemed sad in their moments between calls for unity and insults. At least, lonely. No one was talking to each other — they were either staring at cell phones or talking to media. On the lefty side, there was an old guy with dreads freestyling into a PA about how the LAPD was there for them, not us; a guy with a press pass from an animated news network with an inscrutable green logo was getting cell footage of him screaming "Fuck the pigs!" into the faces of LAPD officers a few inches away. There were a few Black Bloc types in their ready-to-riot outfits pointing to a few stocky white dudes that had come over to their side, saying I should take pictures of them, that they were Nazis — one pointed to a t-shirt a guy was wearing that said "Valhalla Glory," saying it proved he was a white supremacist. I asked the guy about it; he said no. I googled it later, and it's a shirt made by some military vets apparel company. At the same time that was happening, one of the Trumpers with a megaphone was chanting "We are Nazis! We are Nazis!" The guy with the Valhalla shirt said he was pro-Trump, and looked pretty abashed at the other pro-Trumpers declaring themselves Nazis, but then somebody threw a punch at him, and the police swarmed in again. They didn't arrest anyone, just went on a weird little march in a circle through the crowd, moving people out of their way.

When one of the women with the megaphones started talking about how we'd all need to stand together once North Korea nuked Los Angeles, I got the crowd to start chanting "Join Us!" It was one of the nicer moments, in my humble opinion, because they didn't have any answer to that. They tried "U-S-A!" but we had just as many American flags. Finally, some kid from their side did duck under the police tape and come over to us, but he got treated like a threat and was swarmed by black-clad people until the LAPD got in there and got his hands behind his back before letting him go and pushing back the mob around him.

As he started to mingle and talk to people, I got the crowd chanting "¡Uno Mas!"

All of this is kinda a long-winded intro, but I think Sully mistakes the rise of reactionary populism for an affinity for right-wing policy answers, and if it was anyone else it would be weird to miss the contradictions in his center-right policy prescription as an answer for it. From talking to people, a handful of things seem pretty clear: A lot of the populists do genuinely want a national socialist approach (like, yeah, the Nazis, with the baggage that entails, but with a gentrified name to avoid having to recon with the Hitler Problem) where social welfare combines with a strong sense of belonging through nationalism — which, fuck you very much, Sully — is "identity politics." The weapon that keeps this as a right-wing/neoliberal/"conservative"/GOP tool is anger: the protesters want to be hated by the "liberal elites" or "cultural Marxists" or whatever the enemy du jour is, and are kind of baffled when they're not. They need that antagonism to paper over what seems to be (see: recent essay on 4chan) a deep, alienated loneliness. The vacillation between hatred and naive incomprehension that the people they're insulting don't want to join their cause is really wild to behold up close. If it'd been another context, it might have been profitable to actually talk to them and get them to think that through, but I wasn't there for that. Maybe part of it was that throwing insults back was working to take the sting out of getting a high wall of hate directed at them — they didn't seem to take the insults seriously, but were rather trying to get the anti-Trump protesters riled up to get arrested, which they would then use to confirm their belief that "the left" was hopelessly violent and afraid of their ideas.

Which is a trope that Sully and the revanchists use too: That liberals are afraid of their ideas, so seek to constrain the conversation. But the thing is, Sullivan is mistaking his Catholic and conservative inclinations for intellectual depth, and ignoring the actual contradictions between what people say they want, what they behave like they want, and what things people shouldn't actually get to impose their preferences on. Like, with devolved government: Plenty of people say that they don't want a strong central government, full of bureaucracy, and that they feel like they've lost their voice. But they also don't want to bear the expenses, in time or money, of having a devolved government. The centralization of the government, the fundamental idea behind representation to begin with, is that a lot of these decisions are complicated so need expert-level familiarity to make informed decisions, and that there are a ton of decisions to be made, and that you get real benefits with economies of scale by having e.g. one set of emissions rules for the entire country, rather than having every hamlet decide on something that might not effect them, but will effect their neighbors. If people wanted to govern themselves on the level that folks advocating a return to 18th century small government thought, school board elections would have 90% turnout and New Hampshire would have the most effective legislature in the country. Similarly, if people actually wanted domestic manufacturing, they wouldn't need protectionist tariffs — they would pay extra to get a t-shirt not made in a sweatshop abroad. So not only does the average person not have the expertise required to assess the proper level of mercury regulation, they don't want to devote their time and money (through increased taxes) to have those decisions devolved to their level.

The idea of a small, devolved government flatters the egos of voters, but by removing the powers of the government, all it does is remove constraints upon those entities more able to marshal resources to exert their will, i.e. corporations and robber barons. I mean, for all the bullshit about how the Wilsonian expansion of government took power away from the people, and how that's gutted the middle class, one would think that we could use the ample historical record of actual lives prior to that expansion (which really started with the Progressive wing of the Republican Party, natch) to recognize that inequality was extreme, regular people got fucked, and that racism was about the only thing that a poor white person could pin their self worth on.

Finally, to rebut the notion of the "re-education camps" as mentioned in the article regarding Obama transgender protections: If you recognize that there are transgender people, and that this self awareness of gender is a real, persistent thing, you must recognize that there are transgender students. From there, the protections follow, and it's not an imposition upon people who are not transgender to have transgender students protected. This is framed by the Claremonters as a moral opinion, one upon which reasonable people may disagree, ergo the complaints about being "re-educated" out of wrong opinions. But it's a question of fact. If you agree that transgender people exist, then you must recognize that there are innocent transgender children, and that as such, an obligation to protect them from people who would punish them for something they are in order to protect their own ignorance, well, it seems like complaining about "re-education camps" is bullshit and deserves to be treated as such. And as for questions of fact, it is generally reasonable to regard them as remedied by education. This is yet another instance of reactionaries attempting to appropriate the surface-level understanding of relativism and post-modernism to turn their opinions into matters of unquestionable faith. You may believe that Mario Mendoza was the greatest baseball player ever, but that belief must be based on something other than facts, and no amount of sincerity of belief will overcome that.

It's also worth noting that Sullivan ignores the implicit framing of many of the examples of the downside of progress. He notes that the Protestant reformation did launch a century of religious wars, but it's tendentious in the extreme to pretend that means that Protestants are responsible for the horrors of the Inquisition.

And finally, since this is already way too long, it's worth noting that Sullivan overlooks the actual historical evidence for Strauss's theories as embraced by Republicans: Dick Cheney and many of the neo-cons are devout Straussians. The idea that his critiques of an elitist state and progressivism would keep us from fucking over the middle class or getting into illegal wars of adventure abroad are contradicted by the previous Republican regime. If it's madness for progressives to just insist that ongoing problems are because we still have further room to improve, it's even more madness for the reactionary right to pretend that their reactionary bullshit wasn't just tried, leading America to war and the greatest depression since the 1920s.
posted by klangklangston at 5:14 PM on May 2, 2017 [51 favorites]

"That's a beautiful sentiment (apart from people disagreeing with me "should" have power, because I mean, what?) but political reality is a bit different from this. The Tea Party had zero interest in winning over leftists; they sought to unite and strengthen the right. And here we are. And yet despite this glaring lesson, ostensible leftists remain convinced that we should diffuse our efforts towards the right instead of shoring up the left. It's baffling."

I understand your point, and on some issues I agree, but overall that makes the mistake of assuming the symmetrical framing implied by "left" and "right." They aren't equivalent in effective strategies and trying to treat them as if they are is a frequent tactical misstep.

Similarly, the "right" wants and in general benefits from violence in politics, because they are asymmetrically rooted in violent power. That doesn't mean that the left should totally cede the use of force, but rather to recognize that e.g. Black Bloc is never something that will threaten or beat the right on their own terms, only embolden it. The right uses violence to enforce its own order and authority; the left (generally) to disrupt and thwart. If you want the right to recognize your power, don't smash Starbucks windows, learn to march in formation and hold a line.
posted by klangklangston at 5:24 PM on May 2, 2017 [9 favorites]

The 2016 ELECTORATE was 69% white, not 62%.

Don't say "get your facts straight" and be wrong.
posted by lattiboy at 5:40 PM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

learn to march in formation and hold a line

Left-right-left started to look like triangulation, after a while.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 6:38 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

And yet despite this glaring lesson, ostensible leftists remain convinced that we should diffuse our efforts towards the right instead of shoring up the left. It's baffling

If there are enough leftists to win elections (distributed over the map according to the rules of the game), why hasn't the left been winning elections handily? Either that or the assumption that political opinions might be closer to normally distributed than linearly distributed (much less fat-tailed) would lead one to believe that on top of shoring up one side, you might well need a coalition including people that don't strictly overlap your location on a spectrum.

But on top of that, frankly, it's weird that Trump didn't hemorrhage support from the right, to a degree that should have crippled him -- or in other words, the right should have been the opposite of shored. Why? Trump doesn't look like a conservative at all, even though he is more or less the embodied Id of the Republican party.

Well, maybe the answer is in some strains of thought that looked irrelevantly outside the mainstream a year or two ago, but have actually gained more influence than anyone suspected. Maybe part of the war is thinking about how to discredit those ideas, much in the same way that the right-wing media is constantly making war on the idea that the public sector could possibly be good for anything.

Or, maybe the Democrats and progressives just need to be more pure of heart and platform. Maybe they just need to be scathing enough in their criticism of Andrew Sullivan, or anything that remotely resembles centrism. Maybe we need to become the mirror image of the tea party, certain of the totality of our vision and unable to learn from anyone else in the world.
posted by wildblueyonder at 7:17 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

This FPP and the thread leaves me a bit bewildered with its stirred depths of emotion and viewpoint.

I do like the Lincoln quote about human defensiveness though:

“Assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and though your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and tho’ you throw it with more than Herculean force and precision, you shall be no more able to pierce him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw.”"
posted by storybored at 7:30 PM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

Assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart

That was then and this is now, doo dah, doo dah.

What we do now, which we are able to do because of phenomenal recent progress in ICT, is skip with tremendous efficiency straight to the retreating and closing all avenues part by choosing an online ingroup.

That way, we get to make our own assumptions about who is trying to dictate to our judgement, or command our action, or mark us as one to be shunned and despised. Now that's empowering.

brb just gotta check my phone
posted by flabdablet at 7:57 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

social welfare combines with a strong sense of belonging through nationalism

The thing is, such a phenomenon already existed a century ago! Except it was part of a mass movement that favored popular democracy, not authoritarianism. And it was even promoted social justice. Yes, it had it was influenced by the racism of the day, but it wasn't explicitly racially chauvinist, for the most part, and undoubtedly improved conditions for all Americans.
posted by Apocryphon at 8:36 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

If there are enough leftists to win elections (distributed over the map according to the rules of the game), why hasn't the left been winning elections handily?

Well, maybe the answer is in some strains of thought that looked irrelevantly outside the mainstream a year or two ago, but have actually gained more influence than anyone suspected.

Which is... something that can only possibly happen on the right?

I don't think most further-left people I know tend to believe there are a huge number of committed socialists out there. I think they tend to believe something like the following:

a.) many people do not actually have an extremely fixed political ideology

b.) many people are highly disaffected, hate (mainstream) "politicians," distrust other elites, and are rightly dissatisfied with material realities of their lives.

c.) many such people are likely to be amenable to left-wing political solutions if presented in a way that speaks to them.

d.) many such people are also demonstrably amenable to far-right political solutions, and the far right is wasting no time trying to recruit, so the left better get its shit together.
posted by atoxyl at 10:18 PM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]

skip with tremendous efficiency straight to the retreating and closing all avenues part by choosing an online ingroup.

We do have the ability to reach people, most people, in those moments when they are choosing an in group (whether they know that's what they're doing or not). We may not know when that will be for a particular person, but that moment when someone wonders, "Why not make everyone X" or "Why shouldn't people all have to pay for their own Y" -- they have the ability to do a search, and their searches will find something, and that moment is critical.

It's probably happening thousands of times all over the world, every day.
posted by amtho at 3:14 AM on May 3, 2017

I understand your point, and on some issues I agree, but overall that makes the mistake of assuming the symmetrical framing implied by "left" and "right." They aren't equivalent in effective strategies and trying to treat them as if they are is a frequent tactical misstep.

Oh there isn't any kind of symmetry between left and right (and note here that I'm talking about the establishment wing of these branches). I'm only noting a difference in strategy that, I think, stems from an endemic defeatism on the left. The right was effective in understanding solidarity and working from the ground up. The fact that they had piles of money behind them isn't particularly relevant because, well, the coffers of the left aren't exactly bare, either; it just misapplies where the money gets spent.

What I'm noting here, rather, is the difference in strategy between the two in terms of how they respond to a loss of power. For the right, this meant trying to pull everyone further to the right and embrace even the more fringe aspects of the movement. For the left, the continuous refrain, despite all evidence to the contrary, is to extend efforts ... to the right as well, and utterly shut out the more fringe aspects of the movement.

I think it's a reflection of several things, among them, a disconnect between what establishment left leadership believes should work in the abstract and what actual leftists are asking for. In the abstract, broadening the base of policies to encompass more centrists should work; in reality, when solid blue Democratic voters see, for example, Nancy Pelosi saying Democrats shouldn't toe the party line on abortion, is it any wonder they opt to stay home, or opt to leave the party for more radical circles? What exactly does it tell ostensible Democrat voters about the convictions of the party leadership when this constant capitulation takes place?

If the establishment left aims to take power back, they would do well to learn the value of solidarity and conviction. I really think that's the heart of it. The voters are there, the money is certainly there, but the conviction is almost entirely lacking.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:58 AM on May 3, 2017 [12 favorites]

many such people are likely to be amenable to left-wing political solutions if presented in a way that speaks to them.

What "speaks to [a large fraction of the supposedly 'reachable'] them" is racism. If them saying do themselves in more or less explicit terms isn't enough to demonstrate that, there's a whole bunch of empirical work that keeps coming back to that as the answer.
posted by PMdixon at 6:49 AM on May 3, 2017

they have the ability to do a search, and their searches will find something, and that moment is critical.

It's probably happening thousands of times all over the world, every day.

It sure is. And the really cool part is that what they find is largely determined by the same astonishingly efficient mindless machinery that lets us insulate and tribalize ourselves so conveniently in the first place.

I'm by nature an optimist, so it's my personal view that almost every identifiable grouping of human beings contains only about 5% complete pricks at any given moment. Clearly, those are the people who are and always have been the reason we can't have nice things.

I am also quite firmly persuaded that the single biggest contribution social media technology has made to the human condition is the completely unprecedented reach and effectiveness of the organizational and recruitment toolset now available to that 5%.
posted by flabdablet at 6:59 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

What "speaks to [a large fraction of the supposedly 'reachable'] them" is racism.

Or, perhaps, not leading with an pitch where they must atone for their whiteness and admit their privilege? Or telling them this society they feel so alienated from is in fact a gift they have unknowingly used to suppress POC and women? That because of historical factors it is "their turn to listen"?

Yes, it remains a total mystery why more of these disaffected white youths are forming a counter culture.
posted by lattiboy at 7:59 AM on May 3, 2017

Not to say that some of those aren't valid points, but if politics is the art of persuasion, and you're worried about the rise of White nationalism, having wokeness be the current cultural gateway to liberalism isn't ideal.
posted by lattiboy at 8:05 AM on May 3, 2017

I think because many of us have read some Andrew Sullivan and have an idea what he's about, it's hard to engage objectively with his stuff. I remain unconvinced that searching for the intellectual foundations of an inherently anti-intellectual reactionary movement is a worthwhile endeavor, but you do you, boo.

And yet despite this glaring lesson, ostensible leftists remain convinced that we should diffuse our efforts towards the right instead of shoring up the left.

Let's conflate "leftists," "Democrats," and "liberal progressives" for the purposes of this argument (already conceding narrative ground to the author). These "ostensible leftists" who remain convinced that "we" should diffuse our efforts to the right are not leftists, they are just proof of how far right the Overton Window has shifted.* The neo-reactionaries Sullivan's talking about are so fucking extreme that a whole bunch of people with mostly moderate liberal opinions who would have been Reagan voters thirty years ago are essentially branded--and think of themselves as--leftists.

If there are enough leftists to win elections (distributed over the map according to the rules of the game), why hasn't the left been winning elections handily? Either that or the assumption that political opinions might be closer to normally distributed than linearly distributed (much less fat-tailed) would lead one to believe that on top of shoring up one side, you might well need a coalition including people that don't strictly overlap your location on a spectrum.

Both assertions beg the question. The "rules of the game" include things like N.C.'s 12th Congressional district and Illinois's 4th. So the distribution on the map is fundamentally altered by the rules of the game. WRT the second point, the idea that political opinions fit on a normal distribution, or even a horseshoe, is pretty contentious in the first place, but that "coalition including people that don't strictly overlap your location on a spectrum" already exists within both major American political parties, both of which lumbered around to be nearly unrecognizable from where they began (and both of which have in some ways shifted to the right).

Maybe part of the war is thinking about how to discredit those ideas, much in the same way that the right-wing media is constantly making war on the idea that the public sector could possibly be good for anything.

Sure. Which to me Sullivan isn't doing by attempting to find their intellectual foundations. Nor are his conclusions particularly useful in that respect: The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans.

Let me know when you see a Stormfront piece about trying to understand the point-of-view of an inner-city gay Chicana, or a Breitbart article on working-class liberals in Reno, or for that matter a National Review think piece on why young black men might think they should run from the cops, and then fucking come talk to me about bubbles and accelerated extremism of identity politics.

*This has been hashed and rehashed, but there's not a ton of evidence of an organized "left" in the United States in any demographically meaningful sense; we're talking about a country where a centrist Democrat was labelled a socialist and a Progressive Dem from Vermont is considered a dangerous extremist on the far left.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:17 AM on May 3, 2017 [14 favorites]

Allow me to introduce y'all to the Rubin Report, a supposedly liberal Youtube talk show I came across. I started with an open heart - a liberal talking to...everybody, and I mean everybody, all the alt right greatest hits. Let's see where this "liberal" takes it. Guests up and down the spectrum. I had nothing to do except sit and listen to something all day, why not?

There are some moments where I do find myself nodding along with snippets by things guests I wouldn't often afford credence, and many more where I'm rolling my eyes. The tedium really made me punchy on about the 11th interview (it was a long day) because the one. single. consistent. thing. about the show is how this dude mentions how the regressive left is shutting down political debate in every. single. episode. and every. single. guest. agrees heartily with him. Whatever else is going on, everyone in this show's orbit seems to agree that the "regressive left" is the real, intractable problem in politics today.

No. Fuck you, Rubin. Politics has consequences. When people call you racist/sexist/otherwise horrible, maybe you are. The whole point is that, yeah motherfucker, some aren't up for debate. Some things produce horrible outcomes and they have to stop. Bring on a guest or three who will tell you why, instead of Sam Harris fifty bazillion times, then I'll stop flinging poo at you Rubin. The left isn't "regressive" for not wanting to retread old ground. Go away and take your platform with you.

Rinse and repeat for Sullivan.
posted by saysthis at 8:52 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Let me know when you see a Stormfront piece about trying to understand the point-of-view of...

Being able to do this well would be an advantage for whichever group could do it.
posted by amtho at 9:05 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Being able to do this well would be an advantage for whichever group could do it.
Totally.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:24 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

In the abstract, broadening the base of policies to encompass more centrists should work; in reality, when solid blue Democratic voters see, for example, Nancy Pelosi saying Democrats shouldn't toe the party line on abortion, is it any wonder they opt to stay home, or opt to leave the party for more radical circles? What exactly does it tell ostensible Democrat voters about the convictions of the party leadership when this constant capitulation takes place?

It tells me at least one of the following:

(1) Pelosi understands the electoral landscape. In some states, any kind of support for abortion is going to mark you off limits for even many people who might be sympathetic to the rest of the platform, and that there are more states where a completely unqualified pro-choice position will get you in trouble. Disallowing any position other than unqualified pro-choice and branding yourself as the abortion party means giving up on those states. Giving up on those states has electoral consequences that are not only damaging to reproductive freedoms but across the spectrum of policy interests.

(2) Pelosi may understand abortion as an issue with genuine tensions rather than a single moral pole.
posted by wildblueyonder at 9:24 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

What "speaks to [a large fraction of the supposedly 'reachable'] them" is racism. If them saying do themselves in more or less explicit terms isn't enough to demonstrate that, there's a whole bunch of empirical work that keeps coming back to that as the answer.

That's an answer. I don't think it's the only answer but I guess assuming you've already lost is one way to go.
posted by atoxyl at 9:41 AM on May 3, 2017

> Yes, it remains a total mystery why more of these disaffected white youths are forming a counter culture.

And yet we had an entire campaign - and now an administration - that admonishes everyone to listen to poor rural whites, that their issues have been ignored, that we are insensitive to their needs, that we have lorded our privilege over them, that we should be ashamed of our ignorance about their lives and the struggles they face. And so on.

Sauce for the goose, but not for the gander, I guess? I'll take my seat at the back of the bus like I'm supposed to. According to you.
posted by rtha at 9:41 AM on May 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

"And yet we had an entire campaign - and now an administration - that admonishes everyone to listen to poor rural whites, that their issues have been ignored, that we are insensitive to their needs, that we have lorded our privilege over them, that we should be ashamed of our ignorance about their lives and the struggles they face. And so on."

Except of course that the administration doesn't listen to the needs of, or really give a flying fuck about poor rural whites. If it did it would be talking about opening solar plants in coal country - to give the miners jobs; instead of promising that the future will be a glorious coal filled future. It would be pushing the republicans to make minor tweaks to the ACA instead of trying to destroy it while vowing to give it the qualities of a single-pay system.

While it's true that the left has a hard time engaging with poor rural whites, their actual policies tend to help those folks out far more than the country-club elite republicans would.
posted by el io at 9:58 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I remain unconvinced that searching for the intellectual foundations of an inherently anti-intellectual reactionary movement is a worthwhile endeavor

Yay! Engagement with the article. We all win.

Frankly, I'm not convinced either. Even to the extent I'm considering that the ideas Sullivan is touring are somehow in play, I suspect they might not be foundations so much as soldiers -- they're marshalled, not motivating. But I'm not certain of that.

Let's conflate "leftists," "Democrats," and "liberal progressives" for the purposes of this argument...

Not sure if it's clear that when I'm quoting "ostensible leftists remain convinced that we should diffuse our efforts towards the right...", I'm not responding to Sullivan/the author, but someone in-thread who's apparently advocating turning electoral attention left-ward rather than considering ideas that might be motivating the right.

the idea that political opinions fit on a normal distribution, or even a horseshoe, is pretty contentious in the first place

I'd love to read more about any research that indicates how opinions are distributed. Contentiousness aside, though, a normal or other middle-lumped distribution is generally a safer bet for most things human than a linear one.

"coalition including people that don't strictly overlap your location on a spectrum" already exists within both major American political parties

Sure, which is why they're the dominant parties. Some people seem to be proposing that the problem is that either Democrats are too alloyed, or that there's a bigger coalition of support to be had by a harder turn to the left.
Maybe part of the war is thinking about how to discredit those ideas, much in the same way that the right-wing media is constantly making war on the idea that the public sector could possibly be good for anything.
Sure. Which to me Sullivan isn't doing by attempting to find their intellectual foundations. Nor are his conclusions particularly useful in that respect: The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans.

Let me know when you see a Stormfront piece about trying to understand the point-of-view of an inner-city gay Chicana, or a Breitbart article on working-class liberals in Reno, or for that matter a National Review think piece on why young black men might think they should run from the cops, and then fucking come talk to me about bubbles and accelerated extremism of identity politics.

If your point is that extremism seems to be vastly accelerated on the right, if you think that's a problem to be addressed, then you're at the question of how. If you're at the question of how, you might care about questions such as whether/when disdain is effective, the limits of pejoratives like "deplorables", and what ideological currencies if not ideas are being traded in. If you're in that place, you might have more in common with Sullivan than you think, whether or not you conclude that there's a dimension to the left's identity politics that's contributing.

I would agree that conservative and reactionary media have a vacuum of stories with an empathetic or strategic angle that reaches outside the tribe. The fact that the left can do this in its media seems like a strength to me. Apparently one that needs more exercise if Haidt is to be believed.
posted by wildblueyonder at 10:01 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Except of course that the administration doesn't listen to the needs of,

I've found it fruitful to consider psycho-social and cultural needs, not just economic-material ones.

The discovery of a conservative counter-culture is literally a decade out of date. Leo Strauss as conservative lamppost is an almost 30 year old idea at this point. All of this was going on and being interrogated for a while now. The presentation as a startling new development is worse than wrong, it's boring.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:11 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.

Nothing like an immigrant pulling the ladder up before other immigrants can climb it.

(Do these people recognize that they are Burke, Paul Reiser's character, when they watch Aliens?)
posted by srboisvert at 10:13 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

or for that matter a National Review think piece on why young black men might think they should run from the cops

Does Glenn Beck's recent change of heart count?
posted by Apocryphon at 10:20 AM on May 3, 2017

Sauce for the goose, but not for the gander, I guess? I'll take my seat at the back of the bus like I'm supposed to. According to you.

Oh please.

We were talking about why so many white boys are joining the ranks of nationalist causes. I think the current stance and language of many progressives is one reason a lot of these white boys (many of whom don't have stable jobs or relationships and have little prospects for a proper "adult life") are latching on to it. It's all the fairer economics of progressivism with none of that messy "rectify past injustice" stuff.

And yes, of course POC have had it worse since forever, but that truth doesn't seem to be making a damn bit of difference in our current politics. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but the absolute rejection of questioning the way the most vocal and visible progressives communicate is something I don't understand.

I've known plenty of "young conservatives", that is not who we're dealing with now. The smarmy, bow tied Ayn Rand fan is being replaced by the milk-drinking, tattooed troll who hates snowflakes and bankers. It's confusing and kind of terrifying and the only people on the left responding to it are Antifa with their performative violence. (And yes, I do sometimes enjoy a Nazi being punched, but know deep down it's a bad thing)
posted by lattiboy at 10:25 AM on May 3, 2017

I think the current stance and language of many progressives is one reason a lot of these white boys . . . are latching on to it.

Whereas I think they are spoiled and whiny little suburban shits who don't want to work for anything or care for anyone and are mad that the world doesn't grant them any of the instant gratification they've been getting from Call of Duty, prescription opioids, and gonzo porn. Because that describes the three kids I know who fit into the alt-right mold perfectly.

I mean, I guess that isn't necessarily contradictory.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:56 AM on May 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

We were talking about why so many white boys are joining the ranks of nationalist causes.

Honestly, I don't think it's that complicated. They have a lot of energy and no actual power. They have been raised in a world which told them they should get respect, access to women they desire, and power and when that doesn't happen they get angry.

An easy solution is presented to them by a bunch of wealthy older white men and sexualized white women - join us and you will get respect, access to women, and power. When that continues not to happen, and their anger grows, it's directed towards "women who won't have sex with me" (see sexism) and "[slur] taking all our money/jobs" (see racism).

It's a self reinforcing cycle which is difficult to break out of because it means questioning the core assumption that one is owed respect, access to women they desire, and power. It's also externally reinforced by the right and the left due to both sides internalized sexism and racism, which makes it seem normal to value the lives and opinions of white men over everyone else.

This doesn't account for gay white men, of course, and of course it's #notallmen, but given the rhetoric and makeup of the current reactive, identity-politics driven right it seems to cover a lot of the bases. You would probably see a similar cycle of "energy + power seeking direction" in the white antifa/black bloc on the left, just with a different internal reinforcing cycle.
posted by Deoridhe at 11:58 AM on May 3, 2017 [6 favorites]

I suspect a lot of these young hard-right wingers would normally be as disengaged as the more anarchist young Lefties who reject incrementalism except that there is now a president and a media ecosphere that speaks directly to them. Normally these people wouldn't vote at all. They'd reject their electoral options as too centrist and waste their vote on some third-party "protest" candidate like Augustus Invictus.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:41 PM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Whereas I think they are spoiled and whiny little suburban shits who don't want to work for anything or care for anyone and are mad that the world doesn't grant them any of the instant gratification they've been getting from Call of Duty, prescription opioids, and gonzo porn.

Okay, but now you've become indistinguishable from an old man in the comment section of a local paper complaining about "the youth of today". (Maybe not the gonzo porn bit)

If these kids had leftist views instead you'd likely defend them with arguments about the stagnant job market and housing becoming unaffordable and student loans and a million other valid things.

Or maybe not, I'm just guessing you don't talk that way about every other kid in their situation.
posted by lattiboy at 12:53 PM on May 3, 2017

Did you post this FPP just to insult and get in fights with anybody who disagrees with you?
posted by zombieflanders at 12:58 PM on May 3, 2017

See, the thing is neoliberalism sucks. We're getting to a point where dismantling any and all protections from corporate/capitalist exploitation has been the dominant political project on both sides of the aisle for longer than some of these affected young men have been alive. I don't doubt it's hard to be a kid on the verge of graduating high school in a dead-end Rust Belt town with no opportunity. The difference is in the solution being offered. The Centrists (and I include most Dem politicians here) say you can keep your head above water with some help from us. We'll enact very minimal protections and try to make it so you can afford a few basic things. The actual Left says we need to recognize that the system is rigged to make life easier for a select few, and we need to find ways of fixing that. And yes, that means we have to look at the ways in which we have some things easier than others, and why that is, and also try to understand the ways in which our choices make life difficult for others, too. The Right says you can be one of the small handful of winners in this world if we put things back they way they were when your great-grandpa was alive. In fact, you'd already BE a winner if it weren't for those people taking away what's rightfully yours. Never mind that the people sending this message have absolutely no intention of helping anyone, it's so much easier to believe in this message because it locates the problem in an easy-to-grasp Other.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:08 PM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Free speech does not, and should not, include hate speech.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis

And who decides what hate speech is?
posted by Beholder at 1:13 PM on May 3, 2017

The way these guys are expressing their grievances is wrong. But their actions do not invalidate the legitimacy of their grievances, because their anger are a subset of the total frustration and disempowerment felt by that generation, especially the '90s post-Cold War milieu promised not only unlimited opportunities to straight white men but to all young people. The alt-right have opted to express that disappointment and anger through radicalization. But that doesn't mean they decided to burn things down for the hell of it. It's not unlike the radicalization of jihadists, really, just different external pressures and different outlets.

I suspect a lot of these young hard-right wingers would normally be as disengaged as the more anarchist young Lefties who reject incrementalism except that there is now a president and a media ecosphere that speaks directly to them.

And, if there was a young leftist anarchist anti-globalization etc. movement like there was in 1999, perhaps a good number of the alt-right wouldn't even exist, because they'd have a less sectarian and bigoted ideology to feel solidarity within. And they'd have better, more productive, less hateful ways to channel their agitation towards.

The actual Left says we need to recognize that the system is rigged to make life easier for a select few, and we need to find ways of fixing that. And yes, that means we have to look at the ways in which we have some things easier than others, and why that is, and also try to understand the ways in which our choices make life difficult for others, too.

The reason why the Left in the U.S. has been a dead end for so long because it's been scapegoated through easy Red Baiting for a long time. (Though the rise of a self-proclaimed socialist in a national presidential campaign would seem to indicate the tide is turning.) It would seem that in modern age the tactic is to bandy about the boogeyman of 'Cultural Marxism' and to paint the left as a bunch of safe-space hoarding Tumblr activists obsessed with policing thought and behavior through shame and censorship, instead of allowing them a place to share in the social justice they seek to achieve.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:20 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

And, if there was a young leftist anarchist anti-globalization etc. movement like there was in 1999, perhaps a good number of the alt-right wouldn't even exist, because they'd have a less sectarian and bigoted ideology to feel solidarity within. And they'd have better, more productive, less hateful ways to channel their agitation towards.

Absolutely. I think the acceleration of income inequality, rent-seeking behaviors, the crashing of the economy every time we got a Republican president, mass surveillance and endless wars just destroyed the unity of the Green/Leftist youth I seemed to be surrounded by when I was a teenager. The young people I interact with on the Left today appear defeatist in many ways. They've fully internalized that there is no hope of changing the system from within. It seems they'd rather have nothing than accept small steps in the right direction. And I can't say I totally disagree, either, seeing how many times we take one step forward and are pushed three steps back. They don't think Liberals can be counted on not to sell out to big money and corporate interests in the end. But they seem to be ignoring how successfully the Right has been dragged even further right by their fringe groups. I mean, once upon a time George "Poppy" Bush proudly served on the board of Planned Parenthood. That's totally unthinkable now for any Republican who wants to even run for Town Dogcatcher.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:33 PM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

I don't think it's completely defeatist- the surge of enrollment in the Democratic Socialists of America seems to indicate that people are willing to act in some manner instead of giving up entirely- but there doesn't seem to be a leftist united front on the horizon anytime soon, given that the Clinton vs. Sanders, identity politics vs. economics split is still being refought every time there's a discussion of any kind.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:42 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm just guessing you don't talk that way about every other kid in their situation.

Nope, just the spoiled and whiny little suburban shits. Most of the kids I know manage not to be this, OR bigots.

something something get off my lawn grumble
posted by aspersioncast at 1:48 PM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Free speech does not, and should not, include hate speech.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis

And who decides what hate speech is?

Society.
posted by srboisvert at 2:10 PM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

There's more genetic variation between any two average members of the "white" race than between any average member of the "white" race and any average member of the "black" race, because we dump so many different genetic legacies--anywhere from the Asian continent to Europe and anywhere else there are populations with lighter skin pigments on average--into the white crab bucket while there's relatively less genetic diversity among the populations we dump into the black crab bucket.

This is incorrect. Because of migratory bottlenecks there is far less diversity in the populations outside Africa than within.
posted by srboisvert at 2:18 PM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Yup. I don't have a cite handy, but at one point one of my anthropology instructors commented that there are places in Africa where groups living a few miles apart are more genetically distant that Australian Aborigines are from Norwegians. All non-African groups descend from a very minor branch of one of the splits of the great genetic tree of Africa.
posted by tavella at 2:51 PM on May 3, 2017

Here's a chart from Current Biology to give you a rough idea.
posted by tavella at 2:54 PM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

That's an answer. I don't think it's the only answer but I guess assuming you've already lost is one way to go.

I have given up in the sense of expecting to have any influence on the course of institutions. I have given up on any hope of change through electoral politics, though I do hope that harms can be mitigated in small ways. I remember the protests of the Bush years, and the effect they had.

I look around and I see Capital ascendant, triumphant, hegemonic. Capital has no role for most people that they are likely to experience as meaningful. And there is no longer any outside of Capital. There is no frontier to escape to, no one outside of the web of interactions mediated by money and with the function of justifying past and enabling future fixed cost investments.

And the angry young men know this. They aren't angry because of wokeness, they are angry because they live in a world that doesn't need them. The return in exploiting them as resources doesn't justify the risk and overhead, to put it in the language of Capital.

They are angry because they know that they could vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow and the machine wouldn't even notice.

There's no point in intellectual argument or engagement because what is actually driving them is the base human need to matter, to have an impact. And as far as they know the only impact they can have is to damage the machine.

I don't think it's worth trying to come up with an alternative vision for them because they are correct. Capital has swallowed the world, found them wanting, and spat them out.

So I think we are in the early phases of a war of those cast out by Capital against it. And because it is hegemonic, what are they to be but atavistic? Why do anything when next week or next month or next year it'll be completely commodified?

So yes, I think I've lost. Honestly I think we all lost as soon as the first limited liability corporation was conceived. I expect the rest of my life to be ugly and on a steady downward trend, as either Capital succeeds in optimizing away the inefficiencies or the angry young men succeed in tearing everything down.

In the meantime I try to do what I can to make things less shitty as best I can. That's all I got. But I don't see any point in attempting persuasion because at a very root level their complaint is correct - that they don't matter - and any attempt to change the world such that it is incorrect will be absorbed by Capital.

So yeah. I already lost.
posted by PMdixon at 4:01 PM on May 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

You haven't had time to try everything yet, especially given recent advances in education, research, and communications tools.
posted by amtho at 11:32 PM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Capital has no role for most people that they are likely to experience as meaningful. And there is no longer any outside of Capital.

I mean, despair away.

I'd argue against the assumption that there's any base human need to "matter" - that varies quite a bit culturally doesn't it?

WRT US culture I suppose there may be something to it. Your formulation would still require more introspection than I'm seeing from these guys. Maybe there's something latent.

I still think there's a disproportionate amount of ink being spilled considering the motivations of a relatively small number of people, who are given electoral and cultural weight because their demographic has been so pandered to.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:55 AM on May 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

Indeed, it's pretty infuriating that almost nothing has been written outside of leftist pubs on the supposed "moderate" conservatives, libertarians, and the kind of people that consider centrism to itself be an act of radicalism. These were (and in many cases still are) the people who created the climate where this kind of extremism can flourish, who made excuses for bigotry, and who maintained that the problem was always the left's unwillingness to reach out. All the while, they're encouraging voter suppression, supporting individual states' ability to take away basic civil rights, letting horrible economic plans in places like Kansas take hold, and all manner of evil that is exactly what we're being assaulted with now.

They may not have been speaking the language of people like Trump, but they sure as hell didn't seem to mind his kind of policies until he was the face of them, and they deserve to be under the magnifying glass far more than either the neo-Nazis or the leftist cariacture that people like Sullivan are making a lot of money off of propping up as the new anti-intellectual bogeyman.
posted by zombieflanders at 7:24 AM on May 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

These were (and in many cases still are) the people who created the climate where this kind of extremism can flourish

As someone who stands for radical centrism, this is bullshit. My support for centrism is based in the belief that only widely supported policy change is sustainable. That social change isn't created by political movements, but that they must move forward together.

I advocate for social change that is far more liberal than this country currently supports. I advocate for policy change that is centrist. An expansion of the EITC over minimum wage or UBI. In every townhall at work, I ask our CEO how the company is addressing important issues like bathroom access, domestic violence, body acceptance and diversity. And write feedback with business friendly ways they could move the needle forward while keeping shareholders happy.

I am currently not on speaking terms with my parents because they couldn't back down from a lot of sexist and transphobic views that bubbled to the surface over the election cycle. I have not gone 'no contact' because it's important to me that every angry email they send gets a short polite "I'm sorry you feel that way. But I can't travel to visit you until I can be confident that you understand how to communicate to me in a non-hateful manner."

Accepting the limitations of the democratic process (that policy change is constrained by social progress and public buy-in) is not the same thing as tolerating or accepting hate. Being a centrist means that I am in the room and there to speak up when this intolerance comes out at times when people's defenses are down and they're more susceptible to change. And I truly believe this because I follow the work of political psychology, like Brendan Nyhan and Jonathan Haidt and stay open to the fact that it is groundbreaking work and thus should be open to criticism and duplication.

The problem is that when I speak up against hate, you stop seeing me as a centrist. Whether it's in a crowd or online, or the fact that you don't come to thanksgiving with my family. When liberals stand by and awkwardly don't call out an off-color joke, because they're exhausted and don't want to do the emotional labor, you see them as part of the centrist problem.
posted by politikitty at 2:16 PM on May 4, 2017 [6 favorites]

« Older Fruits just want have fun | A Runner in Exile Newer »

This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments

MetaFilter

The Reactionary Temptation
May 2, 2017 10:46 AM Subscribe

Tags

Share

The Reactionary Temptation May 2, 2017 10:46 AM Subscribe

Tags

Share

The Reactionary Temptation
May 2, 2017 10:46 AM Subscribe