America Last
February 28, 2017 8:53 AM   Subscribe

 
I thought this would be an interesting discussion to have. If it belongs in the catch-all thread, feel free to delete it, but I think this is a larger, broader topic about the history of Fascism and the consequences of political action.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 8:55 AM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yep. The problem with disengagement from politics is that politics has this annoying habit of insisting on engaging with you. Sometimes it's your water bill skyrocketing. Sometimes it's having to travel thousands of miles or to spend your life savings on health care. Sometimes it's tanks and grim-faced men in uniforms.
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:10 AM on February 28, 2017 [101 favorites]


If this isn't a piece that says "There's no such case" I'm going to be very cross.
posted by boo_radley at 9:10 AM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


jesus christ look at the other dumb ass articles this person wrote. This shit is why liberals are starting to say stuff about "the left", all the chapo rich boy "omg im left not liberal" tendency to whip around "neoliberal" in such a way that prevents them from having to do thing except for hot take all over the place

froth
posted by beefetish at 9:23 AM on February 28, 2017 [36 favorites]


I suspect as a participating member of society disengagement isn't even possible.

You can't opt out. Might as well engage productively
posted by leotrotsky at 9:24 AM on February 28, 2017 [11 favorites]


Ordinary liberal prescriptions have no chance of success under a regime that has moved into an overt fascist mode

My thinking has been that the kind of thinking that got us here is not the kind of thinking that will lead us out; however, I tend to disagree that disengagement is an answer. I take the point that resistance attempts that strengthen the fascist regime need to be abandoned, but I think there is a point to be made that we do not yet know what attempts will do that, and what might yield fruit. These are early days yet, as long as they have seemed.

The question for those currently mounting a resistance, aside from its inherent limitations, is what prelapsarian state American liberal activists are trying to get back to.

Perhaps this is a time to start discussing and articulating what future we should be moving towards, instead of assuming a return to the past structures and methods? There is an opportunity here to articulate a different vision, a different future that deals with the inadequacies of the past that have lead to this moment. It remains to be seen if that will happen, but I think it's fairly presumptuous to assume that this is only about a return to the status quo.

Fascism needs an enemy to build itself against, but what if the enemy were to retreat and disappear? What would it fight against then?

Facism & authortarinism is good at finding that enemy, whether it is internal or external. If the interal political resistance goes away - the Trump administration will build its focus on the foreign war/foreign enemy.

If I were a little younger, I would leave America and put down roots somewhere else. If there is a country where there seems a greater hope for promoting democracy, then that is a choice people should explore. Is America so much better than everyplace else? Why can’t we take our democratic ideas elsewhere and make those places better, by our example and productivity? Why should we feed this particular machine with our minds and bodies?...

...Every totalitarianism, once it gets past a certain point, ends in the same familiar way. There is simply no historical precedent for a peaceful conclusion....

...Our task is to protect the only lives we have been given, which are now under assault by the determined enemies of life itself.


This is where I think the argument is lost, at least for me. It is a capitulation, a statement that because this doesn't end without a lot of violence and death, we should only worry about ourselves and not others. The article notes that American fascism is unlike the forms that have come before, because of the position of strength America is in. I agree with that, but I think the article fails to follow that thought through - if this is a different form, why does it necessarily follow that it must end the same way? Why assume its inevitability? Or does that strength allow for a different outcome to play out because this is a different time and a different set of circumstances?

I'm not an American, but I'm watching and am worried; about the country and about the people I know there, and I'm watching and engaging in my own country of Canada (which has its own problems and problematic history). I think ceding the field is a dangerous move ("I'm told that Average Joe's does not have enough players and will be forfeiting the match." "It's a bold strategy Cotton, let's see how it works out for them.") and leads to the very real possibility of no one being left to help you when your time comes to be fed to the machine, as the poem warns us. What is needed now is not disengagement, but engagement - engagement with each other, engagement with people different from your self, a realization of a self-interest that recognizes that the well-being and welfare of others as being critical to that self-interest. An engagement with a different vision of what the country could be, while recognizing that the vision is still articulating itself and struggling to be born. A reminder that democracy works when we engage all the time, not just at election time.

I don't know how this ends, but I think that people just dropping out and trying to ignore it as best they can leads to worse, not better, outcomes.
posted by nubs at 9:28 AM on February 28, 2017 [17 favorites]


Yeah I don't think so.
posted by atoxyl at 9:32 AM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Silence is collaboration.

These people will go out of thier fucking way to avoid having to do anything ever.
posted by The Whelk at 9:35 AM on February 28, 2017 [92 favorites]


Yeah fuck this guy. Being able to ignore what the fascists are doing because you can blend in and it won't fuck up your life is pretty much the definition of privilege.

Disengage as necessary to maintain your mental health but don't pretend that appeasement works in regards to fascists.
posted by vuron at 9:38 AM on February 28, 2017 [71 favorites]


If you do not resist, you collaborate.
posted by Etrigan at 9:39 AM on February 28, 2017 [41 favorites]


This isn't soccer. If you leave the field, you just let the other team win bigly.

That's not very good when you're fighting proto-fascism.
posted by jaduncan at 9:39 AM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Thanks for all the hot take responses to the article title, but read it please.
posted by TypographicalError at 9:40 AM on February 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


If I were a little younger, I would leave America and put down roots somewhere else. If there is a country where there seems a greater hope for promoting democracy, then that is a choice people should explore.

I tell you what, you show me a country where I can get in, where I'll be employable and where I will not face huge discrimination as a visibly queer person. It should also be somewhere where I can expect access to some kind of care and support when I get too old to work.

Also, suggestions about telling the aged parents that I will never see them again because I don't expect to be let back in to the US.

So if we don't....resist, then Trump won't deport anyone? If we don't say anything about the ACA, then everyone will keep their healthcare? I mean, this doesn't make sense on the face of it.

There's definitely an actual question here, though: how can some kind of new paradigm come into being? And maybe another question: What do we do when resistance is very, very limited in its effects? Like, really militant resistance to deportation can probably help somewhat, but a lot of people are still going to be deported and some of those people will die.

Another problem with this article: creating a parallel society costs money, and that means some kind of access to the levers of power or else benevolent dictatorship by a handful of wealthy people with some left sympathy. We're looking at, for instance, a huge amount of money donated to Planned Parenthood - but that money won't come even close to paying for all the care that Planned Parenthood could provide with state funding.
posted by Frowner at 9:40 AM on February 28, 2017 [23 favorites]


The idea of disengagement definitely raises my activist hackles, but I do think there are some fair points in this article.

1. American Fascism has been long in the making, and even if we elect normal (neoliberal seems to be a dirty word around here) democrats into all branches of government, it will continue apace.

2. Fascism has never not been defeated by war and death, and the American version is much stronger than anything that has every existed on the planet.

3. America is not a political project worth saving, and it might be better to abandon it than to reform it. (this is a very common criticism of most rights-based discourse, but seems to stick in the craw of American liberals for some reason)

4. Resistance feeds the beast. This is a common fascist tactic and may be bolstering support for Trump (among his supporters) even as it may sway the occasional congressperson to grow a spine.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 9:41 AM on February 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Thanks for all the hot take responses to the article title, but read it please.
I am arguing that the only moral thing to do in reaction to the fascist onset is to disengage, in every way possible: physically, economically, spiritually, philosophically. And I am arguing that to engage in any way is to be morally supportive of fascism — which probably includes this essay as well, and any thought processes I might have toward fascism, because in that way too I am strengthening it. I only know that the normal democratic means are no longer relevant, since we have nobody in power to represent our moral position, nor are we likely to, now that things have gone this far.
The article is itself a hot take response to the article title.
posted by Etrigan at 9:41 AM on February 28, 2017 [26 favorites]


BRB, becoming a being of pure spirit and light.
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:43 AM on February 28, 2017 [42 favorites]


I read it. The central axiom/random assertion that resistance legitimises fascism is so very dubious that I don't feel particularly better off. Ironically for a left-wing perspective, it ignores the successful history of union and left-wing agitation.
posted by jaduncan at 9:44 AM on February 28, 2017 [21 favorites]


This shit is why liberals are starting to say stuff about "the left", all the chapo rich boy "omg im left not liberal" tendency to whip around "neoliberal" in such a way that prevents them from having to do thing except for hot take all over the place

On the other hand say what you want about those dudes and their style of interacting with critics, and whether it's effective in promoting action, but I think "disengagement and get out of the country if you can lol" is pretty much the opposite of what they argue for overtly.

(Hot taking all over the place is the 21st Century Condition.)
posted by atoxyl at 9:44 AM on February 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


successful history of union and left-wing agitation.

for varying definitions of successful
posted by R.F.Simpson at 9:45 AM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


No the thesis is not solid.

I know that it's fun to pretend that Democrats = Republicans but that is demonstrably not true and the people pushing that narrative have something to sell you.

Why is the US not worth saving?

Why do we assume that the only way to defeat fascism is through world wars?

Considering that resistance is keeping Republicans from enacting the majority of their agenda thus far why is resistance a bad thing?
posted by vuron at 9:48 AM on February 28, 2017 [29 favorites]


The time has come to explore modes of existence that only make sense under a fascist regime

Certainly begins on the edge of wacko conspiracy theorist rhetoric.

I'll be waiting to see what happens in '18, the current administration could be effectively immobilized, get out the vote kids. Judge Ruth has a personal trainer and seemed pretty on top of the situation at a college talk (Stanford?) she gave a few days ago. Big issues but no government official came to my door forcing me to sign allegiance to Trump this week. Checks and balances and division of powers have actually worked recently.

Some of the extreme suggestions like calling for impeachment for "things the left just doesn't like" could be counterproductive in a chicken little cries wolf too often kinda way. (Both ways, Trump suggesting to Fox morning reporters that Obama is causing the leaks is wackadoodle too, but rather more expected and discounted).
posted by sammyo at 9:57 AM on February 28, 2017


Jesus, this is as bad, if not worse, than some of the crap written about "Obama's Amerika" and his vision of a socialist utopia.
posted by tgrundke at 9:59 AM on February 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


The question for those currently mounting a resistance, aside from its inherent limitations, is what prelapsarian state American liberal activists are trying to get back to.

I'll just quote Barber quoting Moltman (not my religion but important). Which nicely frames the long view of civil rights as a religious movement:
Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.
My own religion has a less pithy formulation of this. Also in Barber's own words:
In the American struggle for justice and freedom, moral dissent has always seemed impractical when it began. Yet people of conviction have responded to the psalmist’s basic question by answering, “Here I am. Send me.” In 1896, when the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky stood alone to write a dissenting opinion. By any political calculation at that moment, his words were simply a waste of time. But looking back, we can see that every legal challenge to segregation in the twentieth century was based on the careful reasoning of Justice Harlan, whom history would name the Great Dissenter. Without his words, NAACP attorneys could not have successfully argued for the desegregation of public schools nearly six decades later in Brown v. Board of Education. Justice Harlan lost by a landslide in 1896. But he won history.
There's a reason why Barber refers to the current movement as a Third Reconstruction. Reading his contextualization of the Third Reconstruction has prompted me to read American history, with its waves of spiteful legislation against minorities, government corruption, election fixing, and back-room diplomacy. In short, there is no "get back to," and there is no single, ultimate, achievable goal, only a multigenerational movement for justice wherever and whenever necessary.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:00 AM on February 28, 2017 [32 favorites]


The question for those currently mounting a resistance, aside from its inherent limitations, is what prelapsarian state American liberal activists are trying to get back to.

Wrong. For every anti-Trumper I know the question is "What better state can we move forward to?" I can't stand sneaky little framing tricks like this.
posted by Lyme Drop at 10:00 AM on February 28, 2017 [27 favorites]


4. Resistance feeds the beast. This is a common fascist tactic and may be bolstering support for Trump (among his supporters) even as it may sway the occasional congressperson to grow a spine.

As a parent of a special needs child, I get this in some very visceral ways - I have learned that sometimes the best strategy is not to engage in resistance and/or insistence as that leads to escalation on both sides. But that doesn't mean disengagement, either - it means finding different ways of engaging, not taking my ball and going home. So yes, it is a point - resistance can escalate things. But that is the start of a conversation about what is possible that potentially doesn't, or when escalation is the answer, as opposed to "I'm privileged enough to just take my ball and go home."
posted by nubs at 10:02 AM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


For things to get better, there would have to be nothing less than a democratic revolution, because the situation before, as I explained, was only slow death, a silent strangling that would have continued under a Hillary Clinton presidency: We would have seen the same terrorist oppression of immigrants and the same radical exclusion of poor, uneducated people of any color from the “meritocracy,” all of it couched in the respectable language of neoliberal personal responsibility.

At least Trump expostulates of the same basic ideology in overt fascist terminology. The Democratic Party would have to cease to exist as the ideal neoliberal vehicle for the resistance to be said to have worked. Is that even possible to conceive? Other than Sanders, I do not know of any member of Congress who is not beholden to neoliberalism in its essence. There would have to be room for true democratic expression, including for democratic socialism, whether under third parties or a rejuvenated progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

This is like a distillation of the dumbest shit I have to put up with from the Bernie Bros I haven't unfriended yet, who are sorely tempting me with their latest round of shitlord sack-grabbing over Perez beating Ellison.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:02 AM on February 28, 2017 [33 favorites]


OK, let's briefly look at this.

If we are up against a true Hitler, who has the National Guard at his beck and call and who has already signed executive orders to implement mass deportations by decree, then the internet is of little help.


A) not all fascists are 'true Hitlers'
B) You fight because people need help. People you claim to be allies to need help, because they have faced and bourne the brunt of the authoritarianism you note in this piece.

Fascism needs an enemy to build itself against, but what if the enemy were to retreat and disappear? What would it fight against then?

JFC, this is as dumb and ahistorical as something could be. Is the history of authoritarian states that they stop when the enemy is objectively beaten down and exists only as a rhetorical and political device? Stalin's post 1945 purges suggest not. Pol Pot working his way through a third of the population suggests not. The DPRK's camps suggest very much not.

So let's take this argument on with the central claims it makes. Firstly, it says that Trump is an extremist form of neoliberalism. OK, I can't say I agree, but OK. In that case, what is the justification for stopping resistance when the situation has not massively changed?

That moment was long ago, when we could have chosen social democracy over neoliberalism, but we as a people, particularly our intelligentsia, decided not to, over a period of 30 years. More specifically, we deliberately sacrificed whatever remained of our democracy to make sure that the collective good had no chance of ascendancy when we went for Hillary over Bernie.

That is...that is quite a sentence, given that Bernie's people set so much of the policy agenda. My central problem with this thesis is that it suggests that nothing good can happen when they came within tens of thousands of votes of passing the most left wing policy slate for at least a generation.

Mussolini experienced the peak of his power long after the consolidation of his dictatorship in the 1925-1929 period. It was in the 1930s, all the way up to the Ethiopian war in 1936, that consensus was greatest toward the fascist principle. It took abject defeat in World War II to finally end fascism, and for people to come out of the woodwork and claim that they had always been anti-fascist, even if they hadn’t expressed it. Hitlerism likewise only ended with total defeat in war. Every totalitarianism, once it gets past a certain point, ends in the same familiar way. There is simply no historical precedent for a peaceful conclusion.

So. Fight. Now. Win now. Fight to get off the slippery slope and then argue for different policy from that point. What is hard about this? It is not only winnable, it's fighting against a man who is rapidly approaching historically significant levels of disapproval already. That is a fight that's slowly being won, and to give up now is tactically and morally idiotic.

In short, this piece is vacuous shit, and is fundamentally just suggesting giving up when the political and demographic fundamentals suggest a hard and slow victory is possible. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
posted by jaduncan at 10:03 AM on February 28, 2017 [47 favorites]


If we accept that there is something on the other side of this collapse, the questions are "What?" and "What can I do now to ensure that the something else is not only better than the now, but also the before."

I am among those who believe the American experiment is in its failure. That's fine. Everything ends. But I am terrified of what is on the other side, especially when people who are rightly outraged by the GOP and this administration are not gearing up/mentally girding themselves/laying the groundwork to fight for something better.
posted by crush-onastick at 10:05 AM on February 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


With friends like these, who needs enemies?

That's what Ana Marie Cox would like to know.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:05 AM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.--elie wiesel
posted by Postroad at 10:07 AM on February 28, 2017 [28 favorites]


Oh, shit, I just realized part of why I'm so mad at this: It's the same quote-philosophy-unquote that the Star Wars movies espoused -- anger leads to the Dark Side, so you can't be angry even at the worst evils imaginable, or else you somehow become them.
posted by Etrigan at 10:10 AM on February 28, 2017 [21 favorites]


Oh, and Hillary, good luck fighting Trump with your poll-tested reactions. Your calculated “offenses” against his offensiveness against women or minorities or Muslims are going to be as successful as the sixteen Republicans who’ve already tried it. You won’t be able to take on Trump because you do not speak the truth, you speak only elite mumbo-jumbo. Trump doesn’t speak the truth either, but he’s responding to something in the air that has an element of truth, and you don’t even go that far, you speak to a state of affairs—a meritocratic, democratic, pluralist America—that doesn’t even exist.

I can't help but think that this is an attempt to justify his having been beating this drum back last year as justified, after the fact. It's not "moral" because it's actually better than doing something to help people through the political process. It's "moral" because he needs very much to believe that he's an okay person and that this is somebody else's fault. The gadflies want to believe that they're just commenting on the awful state of the world, but at some point, when you reach a critical mass of commentary, you're no longer just observing the state of the world. You're creating it.
posted by Sequence at 10:13 AM on February 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


Fascism needs an enemy to build itself against, but what if the enemy were to retreat and disappear? What would it fight against then?

Oh, here's Laverne Cox on one of the groups the administration is fighting against:
When trans people can’t access public bathrooms we can’t go to school effectively, go to work effectively, access health-care facilities — it’s about us existing in public space. And those who oppose trans people having access to the facilities consistent with how we identify know that all the things they claim don’t actually happen. It’s really about us not existing — about erasing trans people. (emph added)
The answer is that "the enemy" can't retreat and disappear, because "the enemy" is intimately connected to race/ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexuality. There's a whopping lot of privilege associated with the idea that millions of people can just "disappear" by not talking about their politics.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:15 AM on February 28, 2017 [26 favorites]


This piece starts out okay, but quickly descends into fantastical SANDERS-WOULD-HAVE-WON garbage:

The petty bourgeois liberals who so eagerly supported Hillary Clinton, and were so adamant against Bernie Sanders’ meager demands on behalf of aspirational millennials for a modicum of democratic socialist reforms, will be relieved to know that Tom Perez, Barack Obama’s labor secretary and an exemplary neoliberal, has now triumphed over Sanders’ choice, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a true progressive who would have set the Democratic Party on a different path. We are talking about a democratic revolution as the price worthy of participating in American social and political life at this dangerous juncture, and we can’t even elect a Democratic chair who is the choice of the candidate who would (probably) have defeated Trump!

Look, the people I know who supported Hillary Clinton ALSO support socialism. They didn't support Sanders because of his myopic positions surrounding race and gender. I'm sure there are people who feared Sanders because of the socialism, but I don't actually know any of those people, including myself.

I like and respect Ellison, WHO IS A DEMOCRAT, and who is interested in making the party better from the inside. My liking for him has less than zero to do with how Sanders feels about anything.

The strike announced for Feb. 17 encountered immediate resistance from those among the petty bourgeoisie; they are said to be fighting a new Hitler, but they cannot imagine taking a day off from work, which would interfere with their routine “obligations.”

This guy doesn't appear to know what he's talking about? At all? Feb 17 was not supposed to be a general strike, ever. It was the first day of targeted action, leading up to the strike on March 8th. You don't get to sneer at people for being pathetic bourgeois scum when you can't even be bothered to get the facts about the people/events you are railing against.

"I can't believe you pathetic fauxcialists wouldn't even participate in the general strike! Too addicted to your LATTES, amirite?"
"The general strike is next month"
"CLASSIC NEOLIBERAL EXCUSE"
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:16 AM on February 28, 2017 [27 favorites]


I think this piece annoys me so much because it suggests that it's better not to fight and that the failure can be tied to your own imperfect allies. The shirking of responsibility absolutely disgusts me. Inaction is acquiescence, and if you're arguing that Trump is 1925-1929 Mussolini (as this author is), it's necessarily abhorrent to then say that you can't be bothered to try to prevent 1930's Mussolini as an outcome.

I think Trump is a one term nightmare who is a jackass but has suggested a path for the next fascist who isn't such an idiot, so it's important to kerb stomp the arguments as well as the man. Shivani is arguing that civil conflict is inevitable and that Trump himself is a proto-dictator. If you think he's the man but you can't be bothered to resit, just own it and call yourself an effective collaborator. I just never, ever, ever want to see Anis Shivani claiming the moral high ground over anyone who actually bothers to resist.
posted by jaduncan at 10:17 AM on February 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


Philip K. Dick defined reality as that which doesn't go away when one stops believing in it. Although on an emotional level I understand the impulse to try to make politics go away by refusing to believe in it — to "delegitimize" it by looking away — I suspect, to my dismay, that politics is in fact real.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:23 AM on February 28, 2017 [21 favorites]


not voting, not participating, not commenting and simply retreating into private life?

Internal exile worked for some in the DDR but only because it wasn't chosen by all.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:25 AM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yep this is the worst form of Bernie-broism.

Bullshit argument wrapped up in psuedo intellectual trappings.

The same sort of argument that was being made last year by HA Goodman and company. The same sort of argument that said Trump and Hillary were the exact same.
posted by vuron at 10:26 AM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


One last, pernickety note: it is a strange neoliberalism that wants to cancel free trade agreements, impose tariffs and limit imports. Words have meanings, and neoliberalism doesn't just mean 'bad'.
posted by jaduncan at 10:39 AM on February 28, 2017 [19 favorites]


If one can leave the country, I would say, do so; America is not a project worth salvaging.
How about the people of America who lack the privilege to just pull up stakes and re-locate to a pleasant island nation where they can write self-congratulatory articles tarring and feathering straw men using ahistorical bullshit as exhibits A through Z? Fuck this guy.
posted by xyzzy at 10:40 AM on February 28, 2017 [16 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted. Folks, if we're going to have this as a separate thread, it needs to not be about the primaries and the DNC leadership contest; that stuff can go over here. Also I'm going to suggest that bringing in "the worst of my social media contacts said x" isn't usually a way to have useful discussions here.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:42 AM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


successful history of union and left-wing agitation.

for varying definitions of successful
posted by R.F.Simpson at 16:45 on February 28 [+] [!]

Within living memory, America was a place where it was legal and socially accepted for companies to refuse service to ethnic minorities, where sexual harassment in the workplace was the norm, where women were openly discriminated against and mocked for thinking they could do high level work, and where queer people and PoC had to leave places by sundown. Black people used to get lynched. Mathew Shepard was killed for being gay. Being trans was not even vaguely acceptable as a thing in many areas. It was also a place with far higher levels of workplace injuries and unsafe practice, and there were the death tolls to prove it. Things have been worse than now. Much worse.

Is the work done? No, very much not, and in some areas and times things regress. Have major successes occurred? Yes. You can go and talk to people, right now, today, who were brought up as sharecroppers and effectively banned from all normal jobs. You can talk to miners who were previously not given respirators. I would argue that on a lot of occasions union and left-wing agitation has worked and worked well.
posted by jaduncan at 10:51 AM on February 28, 2017 [21 favorites]


If you do not resist, you collaborate.

I don't go for the sink or swim argument. There is always a third option that people will terrorize and shame you into not seeing because if you did, their ride on easy street comes crashing to a halt. This entire argument encourages people into buying into the dreaded choice of two hamster wheels -- run like an idiot on one -- or the other, but waste your life run, run, running yourself into the ground.

There is always more than two choices, and when both sides are badly mismanaged and corrupted, enabling one is just as bad as enabling the other. It's a rigged game -- make this cabal powerful and wealthy as they ignore you -- or make the other cabal powerful and wealthy as they ignore you.

The current political system is stuck in a time that has no resemblance to the present and it is broken. To resist, in fact, is to collaborate, and to collaborate is to resist. They have become one and the same thing. It is a forced choice no different than picking a card from a magician's deck -- it doesn't matter what card you take, the outcome has already been determined and now the facade of choice is the misdirection to give people the false sense that they had something to do with the card they picked. It's an illusion and a scam.

Well, that's just a silly game. You supposedly have people with their little university degrees whining and complaining, but offering no third alternative that makes sense now. Do not resist. Do not collaborate. The end result will be the same because none of it will make a grain of difference.

Find a new system. Find a new way of doing things based on the reality you are now facing. Starve the puppet masters by not playing their game to begin with: it's a three card monte racket and you are going to lose no matter how closely you keep your eyes on the shuffling. The guilting, shaming, and fear-mongering deflects attention away from the problem that the people have no real choice: whoever is connected enough to throw their hat in the ring gets to run and you have no way of opposing it. It's like having a death grudge against someone using Colgate because you use Crest.

It's sanctioned insanity; it's a waste of life; it's destructive, and there are more sensible ways to run a country without millions of people having to get hosed.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 10:58 AM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Man, this article pissed me the hell off.

He eventually, in the final paragraphs, reaches something resembling a point, which is that (in his view, as I understand it) protesting against things Trump is going to do anyway is essentially politicizing and both-sidesing them, causing those who see themselves on Trump's "side" to dig in their heels and see supporting them as part of their political identity, whereas if we walk away it will become harder to defend those things. I think?

But we only get there through a LOT of "NEOLIBERALISM!!!!!" and butthurt about the primaries and the DNC election (which, per mod note, is a rant for another day) and calling people like me, who were shaken awake by Trump's election and now realize that we were not paying attention to things that were deeply wrong in the Obama administration and regret that, "petty bourgeoisie." I mean okay, if it makes you feel better to insult me then fine. A lot of the politics and world affairs aspects of all this mess are over my head, but I know deep down in my bones that there is value in standing up for the people, real people, I know who are scapegoats of this administration and feeling scared. The world I want to go back to is not "LOL OBAMA NEOLIBERALISM DRONES," but rather a world in which Market Street is not shut down during the commute hour due to a bomb threat against the Anti-Defamation League, in which we don't hear news each week of a different Jewish cemetery being vandalized, in which we don't have white men shooting Indian Americans and screaming "Get out of my country"while POTUS says NOTHING, in which there aren't literal neo-Nazis in the White House, in which people aren't trying to tear down and piss on my own community's legacy of speaking out against the internment and anything like it. Staying silent on those things is not going to cause the Nazis and racists to hate us less, because they have their own demagogues whipping them up into a frenzy against nonwhites no matter what we do or do not do.
posted by sunset in snow country at 11:00 AM on February 28, 2017 [20 favorites]


The question for those currently mounting a resistance, aside from its inherent limitations, is what prelapsarian state American liberal activists are trying to get back to.

This person either doesn't have any understanding of the history of the US radical left, or is trolling us. While rolling around in a giant pile of privilege.

Possibly both.
posted by ryanshepard at 11:02 AM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


The current political system is stuck in a time that has no resemblance to the present and it is broken. To resist, in fact, is to collaborate, and to collaborate is to resist. They have become one and the same thing.

There are ways to resist that do not include signing up for your local Democratic Party club and promising to vote only for D candidates forever and ever.
posted by Etrigan at 11:03 AM on February 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


There are ways to resist that do not include signing up for your local Democratic Party club and promising to vote only for D candidates forever and ever.

But what if it turned out that we built community respect and solidarity though things like mosques raising money to help repair vandalised Jewish graves and local people being welcoming and political supportive to immigrant neighbours for nothing? /s
posted by jaduncan at 11:08 AM on February 28, 2017 [15 favorites]


All kinds of ethical choices outside capitalism then become possible, ranging from living communally on a small scale, reclaiming territory outside the stressful purview of urban gentrification, growing one’s own food and exiting the capitalist health care system, and engaging in barter and cooperation to create a sustainable and aesthetically fulfilling existence.

Won't the creation of separate economic and health care systems eventually result in needing organizations to govern those systems? And because there's a threatening fascist government with existing state organs that you just can't trust and just because people are going to be people, those separate systems will require their own self-defense and policing. In the end, it'll just be a form of independent government, with it's own law, military, and eventually culture.

It basically sounds less like he's supporting a more complete and moral form of "civil resistance", and more like he's giving a soft sell for the road to civil war. The writer is an expert on fascism, so he might believe a civil war is an inevitable outcome anyways.
posted by FJT at 11:09 AM on February 28, 2017


This guy comes across as a defeatist asshole. Why does he insist that the left has to go backward? HRC laid out a reasonable path forward, Sanders has laid out a reasonable (albeit more progressively lofty) way forward.
We resist in order to survive this administration and we resist in order that those who hope to fill the vacuum once it's gone have support in their efforts.
I agree that there can be activism in some sorts of passive acts -- disengagement from capitalism (be less of a consumer), divest from wall street, choose clean energy over entrenched oil dependent technologies, but he is not specifically advocating for that, he's saying to tuck tail and run. Fuck that.
posted by OHenryPacey at 11:19 AM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


This article is so disastrously out of touch, I can't even. "What if the enemy just disappeared"? Oh, for fucks sake! For the last time (not actually, but I sure do wish!): LGBT identities are not political points by choice of the people living those identities. We didn't fucking choose for our literal existence to be debated, so we can't really just "opt out" of it either. But believe me, I fucking want to.

And I'm sure there are a lot of women who can relate, who are starting to feel this kind of slog that comes with being forcefully dragged into a boxing ring, made to throw punches, and then having the paparazzi constantly shout "it takes two to tango!" I mean FOR CRYING OUT LOUD WE CAN'T EVEN GO TO THE FUCKING BATHROOM.
posted by FirstMateKate at 11:41 AM on February 28, 2017 [24 favorites]


I'm not a big fan of the word "resistance." First, my politics really haven't changed that much, I'm just more aggressive about lobbying my congresscritters in support of them. The second is that anti-trump or anti-115th congress really isn't a vision. Many of the issues that concern me involve fundamental cultural change in areas that can't be addressed by government. Laws alone are not going to end straight violence (including economic, medical, and relationship violence) against LGBTQ people.

By a strange coincidence, I have a deep sympathy with America's unsung history of utopian separatism, (I'm a Mayflower descendent after all). Yes, I think we need the coops and community spaces in an age where that's increasingly gobbled up by big business. But I think one lesson of the 18th and 19th century utopian separatists is those spaces are ultimately small and fragile.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:41 AM on February 28, 2017


Here are some quotes that I found particularly interesting, and that don't line up with the straw man that many here are constructing.

There is simply no historical precedent for a peaceful conclusion.

I only know that the normal democratic means are no longer relevant, since we have nobody in power to represent our moral position

If one is older or is restricted or does not have the mobility I speak of, then one can stay in place, but at the very least one should downshift, retreat from capitalism and morally disengage from anything having to do with saving this country’s place in world politics (i.e., its empire).


A fascist power that is the leading roadblock to world progress, in places as far away as South America and India, is not something to devote one’s only precious life to.

I have to say that the amount of resistance we’ve already seen in response to Trump, from the judiciary to the intelligence bureaucracies to ordinary people who have come out in historic numbers to try to protect the rights of their fellow citizens who happen to be from other countries, is surprising and welcome,


The general reaction to his points are alarming. Are you guys really that attached to the mainstream left? Also, the discussion regarding the author's individual levels of privilege is particularly galling since he is a Muslim immigrant and thus uniquely affected by the Trump regime.

The implication that author is saying we should stop helping our oppressed neighbors is simply not there.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 11:44 AM on February 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


NOPE! Though yes, building healthy non-consumerist, creative, supportive, etc. socially/politically engaged lives in community is important.

Here's an excerpt from Rabbi Prinz's speech, that was given at the March on Washington. He spoke just before MLK, and thoroughly albeit briefly tackles this question of disengagement:

"The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence. "
posted by nikoniko at 11:48 AM on February 28, 2017


Trump and co. have no interest in governing (ruling) within the confines of constitutional law and precedent. He thinks government is broken and therefore doesn't have to play by the rules--a point of view that got him elected. You can't explain or even demonstrate to him how he is wrong, how what he is doing is harmful and dangerous because he stopped listening to you the moment you started talking. It's like trying to use logic and reason in an argument with a toddler--it will not work and it will end in tears. The thing is, with a toddler you can (usually) put him or her into "time-out" and reboot back into safe mode [I CAN MIX METAPHORS IF I WANNA]. Not sure how to put Trump into time-out, though. Disengaging from him & his politics seems like a *really* bad idea. Again, anyone with a toddler knows how quickly they can find trouble when no one is watching.
posted by tehjoel at 11:52 AM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Here are some quotes that I found particularly interesting, and that don't line up with the straw man that many here are constructing.

It's things like this:

What if, instead of eight years of Obama-era activism, the people had delegitimized politics by not voting, not participating, not commenting and simply retreating into private life?

I could be misinterpreting him I suppose - if I want to go out of my way to give credit maybe he's using a very narrow definition of "politics?" For me "politics" has a broad definition and personal disengagement from politics is more or less the exact opposite of a radical left-wing approach. I share his lack of faith in the mainstream Democratic Party - its effectiveness in resisting and its own vision - but when I look around I see a.) a lot of people who feel the same way to one degree or another and b.) a lot of people who are already disengaged from politics, but who just might engage if there was something that spoke to them. That should be an opportunity for the left.
posted by atoxyl at 11:53 AM on February 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Quote:

Clinton’s 1996 anti-immigrant legislation was arguably the most draconian American immigration law ever passed. For example, it retroactively punished legal residents for minor crimes, henceforth called “aggravated felonies,” provided the authority to expel immigrants who had lived here for decades and enshrining the loathsome concept of expedited removals, meaning deportation without judicial hearings. Likewise, Obama continued the “enforcement”-first policy, for example by deputizing state and local authorities to act as immigration police. Everything Trump wants to do to embark on his ethnic cleansing campaign has been bequeathed to him by neoliberal presidents of both parties.

posted by smidgen at 11:53 AM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


This is like a distillation of the dumbest shit I have to put up with from the Bernie Bros I haven't unfriended yet, who are sorely tempting me with their latest round of shitlord sack-grabbing over Perez beating Ellison.

Yep this is the worst form of Bernie-broism.

all the chapo rich boy "omg im left not liberal" tendency to whip around "neoliberal"


Impressive that so many folks here have decided the problem with this faff-brained call for totally apolitical quietism is that it's too far left and too activist and talks too much about neoliberalism!
posted by RogerB at 11:56 AM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


For me "politics" has a broad definition and personal disengagement from politics is more or less the exact opposite of a radical left-wing approach.

I mean when I read this I see a lot of "drop out" sort of rhetoric which has always been at least halfway bullshit as supposedly-left-wing praxis. Do you think I should be reading this differently?
posted by atoxyl at 11:56 AM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


The implication that author is saying we should stop helping our oppressed neighbors is simply not there.

"What if, instead of eight years of Obama-era activism, the people had delegitimized politics by not voting, not participating, not commenting and simply retreating into private life?"

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that responding to oppression by not commenting on it, not fighting racist narratives and not supporting people when they attempt to gain political backing isn't really continuing to help our oppressed neighbours. In fact, I'd argue that it seems a bit like you would stop helping them in a democratic society because you'd deny them the incentive for politicians to appeal to people who cared about them not being oppressed.

If I squinted, it could look like it was there after all.
posted by jaduncan at 11:58 AM on February 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


The moral high ground in this case is built on the inevitable mountain of corpses from letting fascism run amok. If you sit out the fight with your arms folded, people aren't going to let you come in and institute fully automated luxury communism because you stayed on the moral high ground while everyone you are allegedly building a society to protect is dead.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 12:02 PM on February 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


"Okay okay first we let them kill all the minorities, then they'll finally realize that socialism is great and beg for us to intervene" sounds pretty shitty if you're going to be one of the dead ones.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 12:03 PM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


If one is older or is restricted or does not have the mobility I speak of, then one can stay in place, but at the very least one should downshift, retreat from capitalism and morally disengage from anything having to do with saving this country’s place in world politics (i.e., its empire).

Okay, look, what does this even mean? How does one "retreat from capitalism" without either taking a route that doesn't scale (squatting, maybe, or working on organic farms for lodging) or having a big pile of money to buy and equip a self-sustaining farm? What do you do when you "retreat from capitalism" and get diagnosed with a serious illness? What do you do if you have a chronic condition or want to have a baby or need to manage a transition? Like, I am very, very familiar with how people do those things while having zero dollars, and it is very, very hard, and the resources are very, very strained.

Most of the people I know who went "back to the land" or squatted or whatever did that for a while and then stopped, because it is very, very hard as a long-term way of life.

"Retreat from capitalism and break the system" might work if you...wait for it....organized a mass movement and everyone retreated simultaneously so they could, like, physically take over buildings (and overwhelm the army and the police, of course, or convert them or a little bit of both). How might you do that? Sell newspapers on the street corners, of course! Or perhaps you could build on existing mass movements that have sprung up to undertake specific political struggles?
posted by Frowner at 12:04 PM on February 28, 2017 [20 favorites]


What if, instead of eight years of Obama-era activism, the people had delegitimized politics by not voting, not participating, not commenting and simply retreating into private life?

Well, among other things, the corporations would've eaten the public's lunch even more than they actually did, since they don't disengage and don't retreat and don't care whether you're fighting them or not; they just consume everything in their path that they are not physically blocked off from, and that includes every aspect of your so-called "private life." Formal mechanisms of political power are not the only means by which people are exploited, bro.
posted by praemunire at 12:04 PM on February 28, 2017 [12 favorites]


"Okay okay first we let them kill all the minorities, then they'll finally realize that socialism is great and beg for us to intervene" sounds pretty shitty if you're going to be one of the dead ones.

Accelerationists are always the ones cheering from lawn-chairs off to the side as the train engine plunges off the cliff.

They never seem to pay much attention to the terrified passengers in the traincars that follow.
posted by leotrotsky at 12:07 PM on February 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


There is simply no historical precedent for a peaceful conclusion.

Except for South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, Serbia, most of the former Warsaw Pact countries, Ukraine and the Baltic Republics. (And I'm sure I'm forgetting at least a few)

I only know that the normal democratic means are no longer relevant, since we have nobody in power to represent our moral position

Depends on what you mean by "our moral position." If your moral position is "the capitalist imperialist state must be smashed and replaced with a socialist utopia" then yes, there is no one in power representing you. If you have a less ambitious moral position, like "the US should be a functioning democracy that takes care of all of its citizen and is a responsible actor on the world stage" then there are lots of people you can look to who share your views.
posted by firechicago at 12:14 PM on February 28, 2017 [16 favorites]


I find it interesting that the author of the piece is a Pakistani-American, so not so privileged really. (But he's also a Harvard grad and a literary critic and seems to be a prolific purveyor of litcrit hot takes as well.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:20 PM on February 28, 2017


R.F., let me try to respond to your gist of the strengths of the article (I did read it) and not to the other portions of it, which I found infuriating in ways detailed above.

1. I disagree with his historical analysis regarding the success of various responses to fascism and dictatorship: many dictatorships have been brought down with the passage of time and sustained interior pressure. It does take a very long time. So do wars, though. "Peaceful conclusions" are possible, they just also suck and a lot of people die during them. That's a reality of fascism. But history refutes the idea that war is a requisite to end totalitarianism. Which is good, because war has no chance of ending ours.

1a. I disagree categorically that knowing we're unlikely to succeed itself makes certain forms of resistance illegitimate. Don't get me wrong--I think it's absolutely reasonable to ask what has a likelihood of success. But there are certain situations where likelihood of success has no bearing on the moral questions being asked. Many cities are setting up immigrant rapid-response networks. I think these will probably reduce the number of deportations and help blunt their awful effects--but millions of people are still going to suffer with or without these networks, so "success" on a grand scale is probably not possible. Joining these networks is probably not a successful act of anti-fascism, but it can help your neighbor or your family or your friend. I feel morally obligated to do this no matter what. It will require of me political action to do this: the city and state must fund these endeavors or they can't be done effectively. This seems to me to be an obvious corequisite.

2. I only know that the normal democratic means are no longer relevant, since we have nobody in power to represent our moral position

If he believes that Sanders and the Sanders wing represent his moral position, I have good news for him about Sanders! He's still a senator and has a bloc of allies (including, as noted, Keith Ellison.) He may be interested in e.g. Barbara Lee of Oakland. There's also state and local parties (he lives in Houston, which is shifting left right now.) Also... normal democratic means are, definitionally, the running and electing of officials representing your policies to power. There are many political organizations trying to do this on state and local levels as we gear up for national contests. By assuming the result of those contests he makes them inevitable, at a time when, as many have noted, we do still have an (adulterated) franchise and progressive/leftist strength is higher than it's been in generations. Why not opt out of national politics and opt in, hard, to the Houston left?

3. If one is older or is restricted or does not have the mobility I speak of, then one can stay in place, but at the very least one should downshift, retreat from capitalism and morally disengage from anything having to do with saving this country’s place in world politics (i.e., its empire).

I think this is a reasonable ask except for the word "downshift" which is... Retreating from capitalism and turning in to community based activism is not a downshift; it's a hell of a lot of work. If he's advocating for everyone who remains to do that work, then we're on the same page. However, there's no way to do that work without engaging with the wider world at least in part. How can you "provide for your children and family" and not at least acknowledge that they face new threats in terms of loss of healthcare, deportation, criminalization, even the draft? Is there a way to acknowledge the external threat, mourn it, but refuse utterly to engage with it? What do you do when the cops come? When ICE comes? When you can't afford care? How can you return to models of mutual aid as the money trickles away? If he's interested in engaging with these questions, I'd be very interested in reading that article.

4. A fascist power that is the leading roadblock to world progress, in places as far away as South America and India, is not something to devote one’s only precious life to.

Honestly, this is the most compelling point he makes. I don't blame anyone for getting out! Refugees are refugees. But for those of us who cannot leave, his next line is really awful: "Even if Hitler is winning, do you want to join him as an ally, do you want to entertain ideas of moderating and refining and containing him, do you want to keep looking for the good Germans to overturn the oppressive order once and for all? And what if, in that effort, you become collateral damage?" No, I super don't! But I am willing to try anything to maximize survival of the people who remain, especially the most vulnerable. I assume that if things get bad enough I will be collateral damage. That is what resistance means if it is not toothless.

I am extremely pessimistic about political action's restraining capacity on this president, especially the more fascist he gets. However, using political action as one among many tools to add as much protection as possible to the people around me doesn't require me to engage in any illegitimate or unreasonable "hope." I would never ask a young American today to be hopeful. I would ask them to be angry and involved. The fact that he conflates anger and energy with a naive faith in the greatness of the American political process is the deep weakness of this piece for me; the other deep weakness is the conflation of all resistance with political engagement on the federal level; the third is an ahistorical narration of the course of human history (global development goals didn't actually stall in the 90s, we've cut world poverty by some enormous amount by then.)

That's why I don't like this article.
posted by peppercorn at 12:22 PM on February 28, 2017 [21 favorites]


The reaction against "neoliberalism" is because it's such an ephemeral boogeyman that few of the people that constantly use it as a reason why the "Democrats are a part of the problem man" are willing to define what "neoliberalism" actually means other than some vague politicians are selling you out to the corporations argument.

It is literal the same arguments that I saw posted over and over on Reddit last year. That your only choices were between rapid descent into authoritarian capitalism with Republicans or the death of a thousand cuts under the Democrats.

So the argument is that engagement means that you are legitimizing a system and that we should totally "tune in, turn out, drop out" to borrow a phrase from the 60s. But the reality is that disengagement isn't really a choice for the vast majority of Americans. Millions of Americans stand to be demonstrably hurt by the current administration and the idea that if we just disengage with Trump we can somehow limit the effect of his policies is complete and total nonsense.

Is disengagement with politics going to protect LGBT individuals from discrimination and abuse? Is disengagement with politics going to result in fewer undocumented workers being deported often separating families? Is disengagement with politics going to prevent people with a non-Christian faith from being harmed?

Of course not so basically what he's saying is that we should just sit back and let the fascists target our fellow Americans because resisting Trump just encourages him or some such nonsense.

How did MLK put it? Oh yeah, in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.

No sorry we've seen the results of what happens when you give silent consent to fascists and the result is incredibly ugly.
posted by vuron at 12:22 PM on February 28, 2017 [11 favorites]


I guess the problem I have with this piece is that it does not contain any concrete suggestions for how the "disappearance" of the opposition is going to work out - what would it look like? How would it change things? Do we have historical precedents that might guide us? What does "retreat from capitalism" actually mean? Is it "jettison your retirement savings and throw yourself wholeheartedly into revolutionary activity"? Is it "minimize your expenditures and use the remaining money to forward revolutionary aims"? Is it "try as much as possible to live a life off the grid"?

And what is an anticapitalist medical system? Where are the anticapitalist hospitals, centrifuges, scalpel producers, medical schools, etc? Is it "you should put the revolution ahead of your medical needs and work toward the revolution, dying of treatable conditions when you get them, rather than trying to have health insurance because that requires you to be enmeshed in the system"? Is it "you can go to your anticapitalist medic"? I mean, some of those people who've done the whole "when there is no doctor" training are really quite good for a lot of basic stuff, but they can't prescribe and they can't do any kind of surgery more complex than surface stuff.

Also, on this "everyone who can up stakes should go somewhere else" thing: do other places want us? I mean, European Americans weren't wanted when we showed up here. Anything that's going to work has to scale, and mass population movement is serious business.

What I'd like, to engage more with this piece, would be more information about what he's actually proposing and why he thinks it will work.
posted by Frowner at 12:23 PM on February 28, 2017 [14 favorites]


As long as you keep half the country barely comfortable, you can gleefully grind up the other half and get away with it, and the mass street protest that everyone is cheering is nothing more than a substitute for meaningful resistance. Example, are tens of thousands of Democrats willing to turn their life upside down and move to Kentucky just so they can vote out of office an evil old turtle?
posted by Beholder at 12:29 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Are you guys really that attached to the mainstream left?

Yes. They are. Trump getting elected is the best thing that could have happened to this country. Now we are at least presented with an opportunity to confront the fascism which has metastasized in post-911 America.

You may not agree with the author's conclusions (I don't), but he is right on the money when he says:

They, the country’s thinkers, especially those who consider themselves progressive, are the conveyors of the virus that has led to fascism. We are not yet ready to give up empire (we call it our “world standing”), and therefore the fascism that goes with it; we just want a nice human face on it, an Obama or a reformed Hillary Clinton.

The allowances that mainstream democrats make for the excesses and actual atrocities committed by our intelligence community and military has to stop here and now. If you aren't willing to give up the Empire then I'm not willing to support your party. I didn't vote for Hillary, and will not vote for any Democrat until they have vocalized not only their rejection of fascism at home, but most importantly abroad where it is ultimately several orders of magnitude more destructive and apparently run amok beyond any reasonable system of checks and balances.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 12:31 PM on February 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


This is a sloppy argument. He does this rhetorical slight of hand near the beginning of the article where he says that fascism and neoliberalism are basically the same thing (without ever defining either of them). Then he argues for the rest of the article that fascism has been rising in the U.S. and his main evidence is: every president starting with Reagan has been a neoliberal. As he continues arguing, he gets even sloppier and starts smushing together neoliberalism and capitalism, and capitalism and fascism. Those things may have threads in common, but talking as if they are all synonyms is absurd.

At any rate, I think his premise is wrong. I don't think fascism has been rising in the U.S., but I do think nationalism has. And nationalist movements have sometimes been defeated peacefully. It doesn't always take an all-out war.

And, finally, as someone who actually moved out of the U.S. five years ago for non-political reasons, I find his idea that Americans should just pick up and move to another country if they can and "make those places better by our examples and our productivity" to be so naive that it's almost insulting. It's also naive in a particularly American way. That whole idea is based on the same sort of American exceptionalism that he is arguing against elsewhere, which just makes his argument look more ridiculous. Implicit in the argument, "Oh, Americans should leave if they can" is the idea that of course American immigrants are so amazing that any democratic country will just happily open their doors to them, and of course American immigrants are so special that they can teach the local people important things that no one would figure out otherwise. It doesn't seem to have even occurred to him that many countries don't want more immigrants of any type--Americans included--because they're too stressed by trying to take care of their own citizens, or that the American way of doing things isn't necessarily considered a shining example of the great and good in many countries.
posted by colfax at 12:38 PM on February 28, 2017 [10 favorites]


Thank you to the other who have so eloquently dismantled this essay, because after reading it my head exploded, and I cannot afford to have it explode again during the process of responding because I still haven't found all the pieces of skull that fell behind my desk
posted by Anonymous at 12:49 PM on February 28, 2017


Impressive that so many folks here have decided the problem with this faff-brained call for totally apolitical quietism is that it's too far left and too activist and talks too much about neoliberalism!

The internet's favorite syllogism:

I don't like X.
I don't like Y.
Therefore X is Y.
posted by DaDaDaDave at 12:50 PM on February 28, 2017 [10 favorites]


Our president is a man who interprets silence as consent; so to are most of the men of his party, which controls the nation.

The privileged have the luxury of withdrawal from the public discourse; the oppressed do not.
Mr. Shivari of Harvard may have the wealth to fly off to Canada or some other progressive bastion. Millions of Muslim-Americans, LGBT, Latinos, and just plain poor folks like myself do not.
When the political struggle is the discourse about your very right to exist, to disengage from that struggle is an action of suicide.

Accelerationists are no better than the rapture-seeking Evangelicals that have hijacked christianity. Functionally, they are the same meme instantiated within an eco-socialist rather than a abrahamic mindset. They will find that apocalypse is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If this man offends me, it is because he whispers so very much like the shadow of my soul.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 12:50 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


Yes. They are.

AElfwine Evenstar, could you please try to refrain from speaking with this lofty omniscience about what other people's motives are? The author of this piece doing it is one thing-- someone doing it here is another.

I think the mainstream left is broken and generally doing a terrible job. But I think the visions of Sanders, this guy, and you (including your whole purity test "If you aren't willing to give up the Empire then I'm not willing to support your party" stance) are even more broken and cruel. You are glad that the world is on the verge of burning down, because it might shift global politics into something you find more personally palatable? Well, okay. I actually know a lot of people who are very likely to die or be separated from their children because of this administration, so my calculus is different.

My preference for incrementalism and working from within isn't based on fear or a love of neoliberalism or a passion for empire. It is because both those approaches have a better track record than civil and/or nuclear wars, and because I find the human cost of your approach to be obscene.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 12:52 PM on February 28, 2017 [32 favorites]


Alternative counter culture is the only effective adversary of fascism. Counter culture can express itself in infinite ways, from hermits to communes. Certainly, though, the nuclear family makes a fine counter culture node. The trick is to improve linkages between the nodes. That is where fascism is defeated.
posted by No Robots at 12:52 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


The general reaction to his points are alarming. Are you guys really that attached to the mainstream left?

There are multiple, varied, really well thought-out points as to why this article is baseless, naive, and poorly constructed. The article sin't even good enough to warrant as much though that people like Etrigan and Frowner and Peppercorn have put forth. And yet you're being rude and reductionist and dismissive. If you honestly wanted to know why people are having such strong negative reactions to the article, maybe just listen to them instead of contemptuously assuming it has something to do with blind party worship
posted by FirstMateKate at 1:01 PM on February 28, 2017 [13 favorites]


My preference for incrementalism and working from within isn't based on fear or a love of neoliberalism or a passion for empire. It is because both those approaches have a better track record than civil and/or nuclear wars, and because I find the human cost of your approach to be obscene.

Repeated for emphasis.
posted by Anonymous at 1:01 PM on February 28, 2017


When has it ever been primarily about our President and MoC preserving the Empire?

I've never had moral representation on any level of government higher than a city council. In the 1990s, most of my politics was spent on securing funding for a campus office, building support networks, encouraging employers to adopt non-discrimination and domestic partnership policies, and advocating for inclusive religious groups and community organizations. With federal protection revealed to be as fragile as it is, that work is just as important today.

And I think the history of the Civil Rights movement supports that local and organizational change is necessary alongside change at the federal level.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:06 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Trump getting elected is the best thing that could have happened to this country.

Please tell this to the family of Srinivas Kuchibhotla and get back to me.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:06 PM on February 28, 2017 [19 favorites]


This belief that counter culture is the only effective adversary to fascism assumes facts not in evidence.

Spain was ruled by a fascist regime from 1939-1975 did have an effective adversary in the form of Spanish counter-cultural movements? It certainly didn't expire due to military intervention.

We tend to focus on the big examples of Fascism in the form of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and how the alliance of Western Democracies and Soviet Dictatorship were necessary to stop while ignoring the fact that fascist movements have been prevented from gaining significant power in other Western Democracies. The US has flirted with fascism before and will flirt with fascism again but to assume that a lack of opposition is going to moderate Trump's authoritarianism is nonsense.

Trump/Bannon are using the totalitarian playbook for silencing dissent and the success or failure of that strategy depends on how willing the US electorate and the press are willing to be compliant.
posted by vuron at 1:07 PM on February 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


Impressive that so many folks here have decided the problem with this faff-brained call for totally apolitical quietism is that it's too far left and too activist and talks too much about neoliberalism!

Gee, thanks! Isn't interesting how bad reasoning don't actually have to have a logical connection to its conclusion, because it's not cohesive or rational, but can still be criticized on that basis?
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:09 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


I mean, if it helps, I agree with OP and with AElfwine that the American legacy of foreign devastation in the name of empire is unparalleled in human history and an unspeakable, unforgivable evil, and if there were some way to end the American project without ruining the lives of all of the people here, I'd be on board in a second. I have never blamed anyone for abstaining from voting because they couldn't bring themselves to vote for a future genocide.

Just... explain to me what exactly I can do to give up the Empire except (1) wait for the collapse of America, which (a) might not happen and (b) will kill millions at a low estimate, or (2) try to agitate for the retreat from overseas empire (knowing that the retreat from domestic empire will never occur) in the areas of America where I have power which sometimes include electoral politics. There's (3), which is totally disengage from the capitalist imperialist project, which isn't imaginary but as mentioned above is almost impossible to sustain long term. I take this idea seriously. I just don't agree that it's most likely to have an effect. But I'm open to being argued out of that opinion. Which this article didn't do for me.
posted by peppercorn at 1:10 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


Trump getting elected is the best thing that could have happened to this country.

I don't even know where to begin with such a hateful statement. People have died, people have been attacked, people have been denied the ability to go home, civil rights rollback has already begun, etc, etc. And we're not even 2 months in.

This accelerationist garbage is so absolutely heartless I still have trouble believing people actually think that way.
posted by thefoxgod at 1:10 PM on February 28, 2017 [26 favorites]


could you please try to refrain from speaking with this lofty omniscience about what other people's motives are?

I am merely taking people at their word when they defend the dominant left in this country.

including your whole purity test "If you aren't willing to give up the Empire then I'm not willing to support your party" stance) are even more broken and cruel.

Really? More broken and cruel than murdering women and children with drones and JSOC? More cruel than destabilizing entire regions of the planet decimating generations of their inhabitant's chances for a normal and productive life, and in the process damning even more innocents to deaths that would have otherwise been easily preventable?

You are glad that the world is on the verge of burning down

No, I am not. I am glad that we are finally presented with the opportunity to confront American fascism in all its forms.

Well, okay. I actually know a lot of people who are very likely to die or be separated from their children because of this administration, so my calculus is different.


I actually know a lot of people who have died and/or been separated from their children/parents because of the last three presidential administrations, so yeah my calculus is now different given that two of those administrations were led by democrats.

because I find the human cost of your approach to be obscene.

I find the murder of women and children by fascist military and intelligence establishments obscene....especially when perpetrated by liars (i.e. presidents) who espouse "liberal" or "progressive" values.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 1:11 PM on February 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


Trump getting elected is the best thing that could have happened to this country.*

*But not 70% of the people living in it. But, hey omelettes and eggs, right?
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:15 PM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


The accelerationist argument doesn't even make sense.

You have 2 ways change will happen: by elections or by force.

Trump's put the rollback of voting rights into high gear (starting with the Texas case). The chance of electoral revolt will get harder and harder thanks to Sessions, Trump, the GOP Congress, and the GOP state leadership. It would have been far easier under Clinton. Not easy, because I'm not convinced the majority of Americans agree with the goals the far-left accelerationist types even want, but at least you'd have fair elections.

And force --- you think the citizens can rise up against the US military? Especially when the most well armed are all on Trump's side? We can maybe put up a bit of a struggle, but the chance of victory is very low.
posted by thefoxgod at 1:16 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


explain to me what exactly I can do to give up the Empire

I believe it has to start locally. So number 2 seems like a good first step. Could you please clarify, though, what you mean when you say:

knowing that the retreat from domestic empire will never occur
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 1:26 PM on February 28, 2017


I am merely taking people at their word when they defend the dominant left in this country.

This is absolutely false, and you know it. I'm sure it is comforting to believe that everyone who is different from you is a monster, but it is exceptionally naive and childish.

Really? More broken and cruel than murdering women and children with drones and JSOC?

Yes, because you apparently think "pre-existing systems of cruelty and slaughter elsewhere plus a huge uptick in cruelty and death here" will somehow magically result in universal justice. This is utopian nonsense.

You are writing as if people here don't agree with you about the fundamental evils of American imperialism, but that is also false. People are disagreeing about the methods to fight the evils of American imperialism. If you think the election of someone who enthusiastically supports torture, has promised to invade our allies to steal their oil, and who has repeatedly implied he wishes to use nuclear weapons is somehow going to result in LESS American imperialism and war, then, fine. Hold that thought close and cherish it, but it is gibberish. If you think empowering US white nationalists with an enormous military is going to kill American imperialism, then good luck with that. From where I'm sitting, you and your cohort just helped give a high-octane steroid boost to the very system you claim to hate.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:27 PM on February 28, 2017 [18 favorites]


we cannot speedrun to the final boss of American Imperialism basically
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:30 PM on February 28, 2017 [12 favorites]


I find the murder of women and children by fascist military and intelligence establishments obscene....especially when perpetrated by liars (i.e. presidents) who espouse "liberal" or "progressive" values.

So better to elect an idiot version of Darth Vader crossed with Mr. Deeds, who is at least openly contemptuous of the people he's going to kill?

This is the 'rip the mask off' argument, and it is in fact less humane and more ideological when it comes to the human cost. This is the false equivalency that is destroying our politics.

What happens when the revolution does not, in fact, come? Or when it fails? The history of accelerationism ends with its back against the wall. Literally.

Maybe the cynical compromises that killed fewer people and didn't seek to aggressively foreclose any progress weren't so bad after all.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:31 PM on February 28, 2017 [12 favorites]


Also, even if your primary concern is citizens of other countries, Trump is clearly worse. His slogan is "America First" and he wants to dramatically increase our military and the aggressiveness of American military and "diplomatic" power. He's not only a disaster for Americans, but for the world. Many more people around the world will die under Trump than would have died under Clinton.

I do think the US has been one of the worst countries in terms of international aggression (the US and Russia are far ahead of the rest of the pack here). But there's no way in which Trump is _better_ for that problem, he's the most aggressive towards other countries that I've ever seen (unsurprising given his hero Putin).
posted by thefoxgod at 1:32 PM on February 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


Step 1: eagerly give America to fascists to teach neoliberals a lesson
Step 2: “Withdraw”
Step 3: ???
Step 4: End of Imperialism!
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:33 PM on February 28, 2017 [21 favorites]


also -- and this is something i have started thinking about more -- given that our foreign policy has been kind of interventionist and dumb for decades, and given that countries worldwide up to this point have been working under the assumption of american hegemony, what does stepping back from empire actually look like? i feel like the usual level of commie yells about this is where we're sitting around being like "fuck, extrajudicial killings are bad, our attempts at peacekeeping and war making are often marked by a level of brutality and incompetence that fucks things up royally" but this machinery doesn't go away overnight. and i'm not a fucking policy analyst or whatever, but it's like - then what? i'm kind of tired of the entry level moral condemnation, talk is fuckin cheap
posted by beefetish at 1:37 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


This belief that counter culture is the only effective adversary to fascism assumes facts not in evidence.

It might be helpful to look at the work of C. Wright Mills. In his "Letter to the New Left," he affirms that, "[t]o be 'Left' means to connect up cultural with political criticism." Mills' activist approach contrasts with the whiff of fatalism that one gets from the Shivani piece, but it seems to me that both authors look to defeat the enemies of democracy by establishing strongholds of cultural critique.
posted by No Robots at 1:37 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


If you aren't willing to give up the Empire then I'm not willing to support your party.

If "giving up the Empire" denies me access to my life-saving medication, then I am not willing to give it up.

"Leaving the system" is an ableist, ageist solution, and one that's only feasible for people who are young and privileged enough to survive detachment from the grid.

I've noticed recently how intersectionality has been coopeted by the privileged into an argument that we who fight for incrimental change are both terrible and deluded. Nothing is ever good enough and no advance is ever real, because every achievement ignores *some* group. And what this means in practice is that it's better for us all to suffer with the unfair status quo than to have some sort of incomplete advancement. This sort of nihilism is its natural endpoint -- our entire system is evil, and everyone who tries to do anything within it is ultimately terrible.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 1:47 PM on February 28, 2017 [30 favorites]


I'm sure it is comforting to believe that everyone who is different from you is a monster

Please cite or kindly retract your assertion.

Yes, because you apparently think "pre-existing systems of cruelty and slaughter elsewhere plus a huge uptick in cruelty and death here" will somehow magically result in universal justice.

I have little hope for universal justice anytime soon. What I do have hope for is that Trump's presidency will energize progressives to become involved beyond voting for President every 4 years. I hope that the new energy can be focused on defeating fascism both at home and abroad.

The alternative to Trump was electing another establishment Democrat who would have continued the slaughter. Furthermore, these atrocities would not have been opposed domestically because apparently establishment democrats only worry about fascism overseas when Republicans are in the White house.

You are writing as if people here don't agree with you about the fundamental evils of American imperialism

I am sure many do agree with me, but there is a very vocal group who do not. They were willing to defend the atrocities and overreaches of the Obama regime for 8 long years while innocents were being murdered. It was all sanitized and made perfectly reasonable.

From where I'm sitting, you and your cohort just helped give a high-octane steroid boost to the very system you claim to hate.

Hardly. Foreign policy will change little. Notice how every major foreign policy issue Trump has opined on is being walked back. The "high-octane steroid boost" was actually administered by one Barack Obama who took the worst abuses of the Bush administration and codified them into the U.S. code making them permanent. Furthermore, he accelerated the trend of making our low-intensity operations secret and permanent.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 1:47 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Honestly, I don't even agree with the main point of the article, but I do think his critique of political action is interesting and insightful. I also think that many in this thread have dismissed the article wholeheartedly (which, whatever, it's a discussion forum) but there are many valid critiques of his thought.

Among them: what constitutes withdrawal? what constitutes political action? what about peaceful resolutions of fascism in the past? etc.

At the end of the day, I guess it's a willingness to die in the heat death of fascism rather than the slow torture of neoliberalism. As a dirt-poor gender non-conforming white person (after all, such statements must be made with a declaration of personal privilege), I'm honestly not sure how I'd rather go. Or what would be better for my fellow humans. Regardless we probably won't have to decide and climate change will do the trick.

Also, the term accelerationist gets thrown around in these types of discussions, but it's not the right term. Accelerationism is an actual political philosophy that does not involve the heightening of contradictions. (see the incomparable work of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams) The argument we seem to be having here is Nihilism/Fatalism vs. the opposite (?)

Apologies if any earlier comments came off as rude, tensions are running high, and I (we?) seem to be getting more helpless as the days go by.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 1:48 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


what does stepping back from empire actually look like?

It most probably looks like letting a bunch of other murderous assholes be murderous assholes on a more regional scale but more comprehensively within that scale.

It offends every muscle in my typing hands to say anything that could be construed as even indirectly defending the American imperialist project, but I do not see how anyone who has even the faintest knowledge of history can delude themselves that an America suddenly gone totally isolationist and non-interventionist would not result in a dozen replacement candidates putting themselves forward to be chief bully of the world or their region. America's not uniquely evil, it's just uniquely powerful, and we no longer exist in a world where conflicts contain themselves based on the sheer lack of resources of the contending powers to cross the next water barrier.

Does this mean we stand back and accept American imperialism as the least of all possible evils? No, but it does mean we had better have thought things out past "1. America goes down in flames. 2. ??? 3. Tea and cookies for the planet!"
posted by praemunire at 1:48 PM on February 28, 2017 [13 favorites]


One can think "wait till 2018!" is dangerously naive, and even that there is no trajectory that does not end in mass violence, while still thinking this article is garbage.

So I would argue that if we’re seeing fascism, it is a peculiar form of fascism indeed, because it looks like 100 percent neoliberalism from where I am.

This is fucking stupid and says more about where he is than he thinks.
posted by PMdixon at 1:51 PM on February 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


Please cite or kindly retract your assertion.

Citation: your entire comment that followed this request.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:57 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


Mod note: It's fine to talk about the article and the general issue of how to go forward, engagement vs disengagement, what can politics do against fascism, etc, but let's not make this about individuals in the thread, or about whether Mefi criticized Obama enough.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:57 PM on February 28, 2017


finding out that the writer was not a privileged white douchebag man was actually surprising, because this sentence:

Clinton’s 1996 anti-immigrant legislation was arguably the most draconian American immigration law ever passed.

is one of the most goddamn ignorant things that i have ever fucking read or heard about immigration, and i have a dad who used to watch fox news.
posted by joyceanmachine at 1:57 PM on February 28, 2017 [20 favorites]


Clinton’s 1996 anti-immigrant legislation was arguably the most draconian American immigration law ever passed.

is one of the most goddamn ignorant things that i have ever fucking read or heard about immigration, and i have a dad who used to watch fox news.


Just in case anyone's unclear:

Alien and Sedition Acts

Chinese Exclusion Act

which might seem vaguely familiar these days.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:14 PM on February 28, 2017 [18 favorites]


My take is that we got here because so many U.S. citizens are disengaged from U.S. politics. Somewhere around 40% of citizens who are eligible to vote didn't vote in the 2016 election. Presidential candidates are playing to and hoping to manipulate a tiny percent of swing voters. A lot of people like to vilify the small percentages of people who voted third-party, but what about that 40% who can't be bothered at all? I have to imagine that if we had 80% or more voter turnout, Presidential politics would be vastly different.
posted by Cranialtorque at 2:18 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


Notice how every major foreign policy issue Trump has opined on is being walked back

This is blatantly false.
posted by PMdixon at 2:20 PM on February 28, 2017 [10 favorites]


...I can't even with this piece.

Should the Suffragettes have put up no resistance? Child laborers who worked under inhumane conditions? The Civil Rights Movement that marched all over the country in protest of the Old Jim Crow? The trans and queer people who stood up to police at Stonewall? The people currently protesting police killings of unarmed Black people?

Fascism finds scapegoats, whether or not you, the target, want it to. There's an incredibly famous poem about this very phenomenon that I'm sure most here have heard in one of its many incarnations:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I'm not giving up my resistance; I hope you won't either.
posted by Excommunicated Cardinal at 2:20 PM on February 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


See, this whole thing is why I wish people would give examples.

Aelfwine Evenstar seems to feel that progressives becoming involved in ways other than voting is the kind of thing advocated by the OP. This is not, to me, the most natural reading of the OP, but it's also not something I disagree with. If "withdrawal" means "get involved in organizing that is not focused on getting out the vote for whoever the party runs, and this could take many forms from the relatively modest to the very militant", then sure, let's go.

I think an essay which said "by withdrawal I mean [thing], and this is why I think it would work" would get a lot more traction, because we could explore why it might or might not work. Maybe this guy has fantastic ideas and a strong historical argument - I would like to see those things.
posted by Frowner at 2:21 PM on February 28, 2017 [17 favorites]


I do not see how anyone who has even the faintest knowledge of history can delude themselves that an America suddenly gone totally isolationist and non-interventionist would not result in a dozen replacement candidates putting themselves forward to be chief bully of the world or their region

Why do people always equate not murdering innocent people with isolationism? Is the only way we can be engaged in the world is to murder people? It seems that there is probably a middle ground between America first and Charlie don't surf.

Frowner, while I agree with many of the critiques of the establishment left in this country presented in the article, I ultimately disagree with the conclusions.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 2:24 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


is one of the most goddamn ignorant things that i have ever fucking read or heard about immigration, and i have a dad who used to watch fox news.

Yeah without contextualizing against something more narrow than "our entire history" that claim is dumb as hell. I assume he means this? That's a good link, because at the bottom you can find links to the other major immigration laws in U.S. history and whaddaya know, there's a lot of competition!
posted by atoxyl at 2:29 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Trump getting elected is the best thing that could have happened to this country.

No. His SC appointees will be haunting us for decades. Depending on their health, perhaps close to 40 years. That's an entire adult life, 22-62, from graduation until almost retirement. It's difficult to even measure in words how much suffering and pain and death 2-3 Trump SC appoints can inflict upon the public in that period of time.
posted by Beholder at 2:31 PM on February 28, 2017 [10 favorites]


...exiting the capitalist health care system

Bwahahahaha. Good luck with your herbal-magnet-homeopathic cardiac bypass surgery.
posted by SinAesthetic at 2:34 PM on February 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


I think an essay which said "by withdrawal I mean [thing], and this is why I think it would work" would get a lot more traction, because we could explore why it might or might not work. Maybe this guy has fantastic ideas and a strong historical argument - I would like to see those things.

Agreed. The article was frustrating on two points. First almost all of it is devoted to a broad generalization that the primary political interests of the left are on preserving neoliberalism and Empire, and second in being extremely vague as to what "withdrawal" actually entails or even what he's calling "political action."

And coming into this from a position of profound burnout from three months of fingerpointing and scapegoating, I think that vagueness coupled with the insinuation that one is part of the problem is little more than irresponsible clickbait, regardless of how erudite it might appear.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:37 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


high fives Frowner I was just working on a comment to that effect

and high fives praemunire too. something I am excited about in this current climate is that more of us appear to be agreeing on some baseline left-ish things -- "I'd like to see an alternative to how the US manages its international relations!", for example, and I'm hoping this leads to more exploration of concrete/material ideas
posted by beefetish at 2:37 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Good luck with your herbal-magnet-homeopathic cardiac bypass surgery.

Couldn't we assume, with a little generosity, that the author is talking about various self-maintenance measures one can take to minimize the need for big-ticket treatments (many of which, in many countries, are covered by government insurance)?
posted by No Robots at 2:40 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


The problem with health care is you never really know when you are going to need a horribly expensive hospital stay.

Yes you can do stuff to manage your risk levels but there is still going to be X number of Americans that are going to need to be hospitalized for an extended period of time this year.

And there is two options, either have insurance or wait until you can be treated in the emergency room.

For millions of Americans prior to the ACA there was no choice, they simply had to rely on ERs.

So if you are about to lose your insurance right now because the Republicans are fuck you we got ours what is the disengagement strategy? The truth of the matter is you can't disengage from the current medical system in any meaningful way.

Most Americans by a similar token can't disengage from the economy, rent or a mortgage gotta get paid.
posted by vuron at 2:50 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


The author seems to be arguing that people who are unhappy with the current state of society should minimize their commitments, both material and spiritual/intellectual, to it. That seems most reasonable. Even if you reject the passive aspect of this, it is still helpful as an activist to have a minimal commitment to the existing system. Of course, everyone's idea of what is minimal is different. A house, a car and a job to pay for them is not negotiable for a lot of people. But the author doesn't say that these must be dispensed with. The most important thing is to resist any self-identification with the system. As a worker, I am just that, a worker in an inhuman system. Home and car ownership are obligations that I have not escaped, but I do not regard them as essential to my well-being. I recognize that job, home and car do in fact tie me to the system that I hate. I enjoy these things, but I certainly would trade them for a new society in which work, home and travel were more humane.
posted by No Robots at 3:05 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Couldn't we assume, with a little generosity, that the author is talking about various self-maintenance measures one can take to minimize the need for big-ticket treatments (many of which, in many countries, are covered by government insurance)?

In all seriousness, I don't think we can assume that, no. Because many of the most effective things that you need to do in order to minimize the need for big-ticket treatments? They involve seeing doctors and using prescription medication. Eating well and exercising are important, but they are not appropriate replacements for seeking things like medication for your high cholesterol or high blood pressure. They are not appropriate replacements for colonoscopies and mammograms. They are not appropriate replacements for vaccines. Or STD tests. Or prenatal care. There is no way to do appropriate preventive care without the modern medical system unless you accept as a cost for this a significantly higher risk of very preventable and very serious health conditions.
posted by Sequence at 3:06 PM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


Couldn't we assume, with a little generosity, that the author is talking about various self-maintenance measures one can take to minimize the need for big-ticket treatments (many of which, in many countries, are covered by government insurance)?

Given the intrinsic ableism of that assumption?

I'm finding it increasingly hard to be charitable to the writer. He hasn't show much evidence of earning it.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:07 PM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


Then, by all means, celebrate your capitalist health care system.
posted by No Robots at 3:09 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm pretty sure Salon just needed to nail down its "x shares from the Bernie-Woulda-Won people, x clicks from pissed-off hatereads" quota for the day. Salon gonna Salon
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:10 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


My preference for incrementalism and working from within isn't based on fear or a love of neoliberalism or a passion for empire. It is because both those approaches have a better track record than civil and/or nuclear wars, and because I find the human cost of your approach to be obscene.

Yes, this. There is an essay floating around which I found years ago, which deflates a particular fetish of the Right's, namely the perverse longing for and romanticization of social collapse so they can be the Rugged Individualists that they think themselves to be, stripped of the chains of polite society with its obnoxious insistence on laws and stuff. (The essay is here, although it's only peripherally related.) Some people have called this the "Survivalist Fallacy" and it's essentially the Ayn Rand-reading Right's complement to "accelerationism", just accelerating towards a different end state.

The fallacy isn't in preparedness itself, but rather in the assumption that in some sort of catastrophe that you would end up coming out ahead, instead of being one of the many anonymous victims of chance and circumstance and bad luck and wrong-place-wrong-time, despite whatever plans and preparations you might make to the contrary. It's ignoring that the negative outcome is just far more likely, in almost every reasonable scenario, for most people including yourself and everyone you know. But that's no fun to think about, so the Lib-prepper crowd don't, and go ahead stockpiling their ammo and bullshitting about the times, carefully cherrypicked, throughout history when this would have helped.

It strikes me that there is an analogous fallacy on the Left which crops up from time to time when things seem desperate, which we might call the Revolutionary Fallacy or (in this particular political cycle) maybe just the Accelerationist Fallacy, and involves the romanticization of violent revolution and/or social collapse in an eerily similar way. It's helped and legitimized, to some extent, by the fact that many institutions—including the United States, in a limited and of course exceptionalist way—actively work to retrospectively burnish particular popular revolutions and discourage consideration of whether they were really warranted or worth the cost. (And I'll admit that it is, to some extent anyway, impolite to question the sacrifices of people once those sacrifices become a sunk cost—except, very critically, when considering doing the same thing again in the future.)

For every successful popular, violent uprising that leads to regime change, I'd wager that there are a whole bunch that aren't successful, and even of the ones that are successful in the short term, a significant fraction of those don't really achieve the long-term goals of improving conditions for most people (and some, historically, have been horrifically negative). And while you can find some catastrophes that led to positive social change over time—the Black Death is one I've seen frequently tossed around—I struggle to find a non-repugnant moral framework that would justify causing or contributing to such a catastrophe because of the possibility of a long-term positive outcome, especially given the implied uncertainty in predicting future events in a chaotic world.

Incrementalism isn't sexy or romantic or fun; it doesn't produce the sort of grand backdrop against which we can imagine our ideals made manifest without compromise. But it produces a whole lot fewer dead people, and I'd wager that if they were around to be asked, quite a few of them might have preferred a more incremental approach to whatever led to their demise.

This is not to say that violence is never a solution or never warranted, but it should be very carefully considered, as should decisions to knowingly "accelerate" catastrophe via political means, active or inactive.

You'd better be damn sure that the game is worth playing before you start tossing chips around at that particular table.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:15 PM on February 28, 2017 [21 favorites]


I'm pretty sure Salon just needed to nail down its "x shares from the Bernie-Woulda-Won people, x clicks from pissed-off hatereads" quota for the day. Salon gonna Salon

This one's pretty good because I am kind of an obnoxious lefty guy and I'm now pissed that people think I'm anything like this kind of obnoxious lefty guy.
posted by atoxyl at 3:16 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


People can depend on something without cherishing it.

I guarantee you the only way to improve on the current medical system is through policy engagement but I guarantee you the Republicans want you to have an even shittier version of the status quo.

Current estimates are the 24000 Americans will die every year who would otherwise survive if ACA is repealed.

I guess 24000 Americans is acceptable for some people to maintain moral purity.
posted by vuron at 3:18 PM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


I believe it has to start locally. So number 2 seems like a good first step. Could you please clarify, though, what you mean when you say:

knowing that the retreat from domestic empire will never occur


I see you've noted elsewhere in this thread that you don't agree with the article's conclusions so we're probably on the same page-ish re: 2. Adjacent pages, maybe.

Retreat was maybe a bad word regarding domestic empire? What I meant was that I can't see how we could possibly decolonize America without dissolving America; giving the land back to its indigenous inhabitants in any meaningful way would end up fracturing the nation into geographically dislocated states at a minimum, and totally erase it at a maximum. So we can certainly and should certainly retreat from domestic empire, but since we're not going to give the land back unless we also collapse, (2)/agitation in regards to the end of domestic empire is really just (1)/praying for the end. (3)/personal disengagement strikes me as the most realistic option here, honestly; individual people who own land can give or sell that land to the relevant tribe in a lot of cases, more feasibly than, say, bringing about the end of the States as a political entity.
posted by peppercorn at 3:22 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Current estimates are the 24000 Americans will die every year who would otherwise survive if ACA is repealed.

I guess 24000 Americans is acceptable for some people to maintain moral purity.


The author did not suggest anything like the repeal of ACA.
posted by No Robots at 3:27 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Even if you reject the passive aspect of this, it is still helpful as an activist to have a minimal commitment to the existing system.

Why? Activists are not all revolutionaries and need not be. It's arguably more important as an activist to have a maximal commitment to the system, if you're trying to improve it. (Lebowski, nihilists, etc.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:30 PM on February 28, 2017


It's arguably more important as an activist to have a maximal commitment to the system, if you're trying to improve it.

Sure. But some of us don't want to improve it. We want to end it.
posted by No Robots at 3:33 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


Mm, No Robots, wouldn't you say that the repeal of the ACA is-- surprisingly, in my view-- apparently stalled due to political pressure from "Resisters"? If Congress had not faced a groundswell of vocal opposition, if everyone had taken the article's advice, don't you think the ACA would be gone by now? The article doesn't have to suggest the repeal of the ACA for it to be a logical outcome of stopping a particular tactic currently being used.
posted by peppercorn at 3:41 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Also, the term accelerationist gets thrown around in these types of discussions, but it's not the right term

It's a term "thrown around" by the author of the piece as well; to wit: "The point is to end empire, the point is to want to accelerate its end, which Trump surely is embarked on doing already."

Then, by all means, celebrate your capitalist health care system.

Oy. Is anyone here "celebrating" it?
posted by Lyme Drop at 3:42 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


He recommends disengagement from the political system which means capitulation on the Republican agenda.

Unless you think challenging Trump and Ryan/McConnell on ACA repeal isn't resistance.

I understand why some people are unwilling to sacrifice their principles but for me personally preventing the deaths of 24000 Americans is worth abandoning some moral purity and being willing to work with those neoliberal Democrats.

Unfortunately too many people were willing to live with the consequences of a Trump presidency so they either declined to vote or voted third party despite third party votes being absolutely pointless in our electoral system.

Some people welcome a Trump presidency because they have dreams of a brilliant progressive uprising in response to fascism but personally I think the costs of an accelerationist future are too damed high even if it was 100% guaranteed to happen.

Unfortunately I think all too many of our fellow Americans are closet fascists and are all too willing to give up autonomy to the strong man if it has the chance to lower their taxes and preferably put race relations back to the Jim Crow era.
posted by vuron at 3:43 PM on February 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


Sure. But some of us don't want to improve it. We want to end it.

In other words, 'immanentize the eschaton.'

You'll lose. Most people don't actually have a positive view of anarcho-syndicalism, which would almost certianly wind up being technolibertarian Shadowrun corporatism anyway, given the alternative loci of power.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:49 PM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


You know, some of us are fine with immanentizing the eschaton, too, but pretending that "end America" or "end capitalism" are the same thing as "end the world" is pretty disingenuous.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:50 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well, fair enough, but I was getting at the history of the catchphrase as wielded by Buckley types against leftists, more than the literal meaning.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:52 PM on February 28, 2017


It seems to me that a lot of the problem is that people literally cannot imagine a world where people aren't being exploited and murdered. If your imagination is limited to "how can we make capitalism slightly less awful for a larger percentage of people", that's not progressive, and it's certainly not leftist.

I voted for Clinton, myself, in case i need some kind of "not invested in purity tests" cred. I vote mostly Dem, except when there's an actual leftist local candidate with a hope in hell of winning. I'm a both/and kind of girl, and i'm entirely capable of acting on the awareness that the Dems are Slightly Better Than The Other Guys while still supporting real leftism with my energy & dollars.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:56 PM on February 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


What about "how can we make capitalism much less awful for everyone?" Is "progressive" always and only anti-capitalist?

To be honest, I don't really care if people think I'm a "real leftist" or not, if that's a barrier to making the system less awful for more people. Ideological piety isn't just a problem on the right.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:01 PM on February 28, 2017 [10 favorites]


Capitalism can't be less awful for everyone. Capitalism is inherently exploitative. It's inherently about creating classes of Haves and Have-Nots. I'm all for reducing the distance between those two groups in the interim, sure -- i'm not an accelerationist -- but yeah, i'm pretty clear that real leftism is anticapitalist, period.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:05 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


Sure. But some of us don't want to improve it. We want to end it.
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.
posted by PMdixon at 4:05 PM on February 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


I had somehow naively thought that after over a month of the Trump administration that the argument that Trump and Clinton are the same would have been put to rest, but incredibly, that seems to not be the case.
posted by peacheater at 4:05 PM on February 28, 2017 [16 favorites]


Replacement of the current system is either done from inside the system through the ballot box and social engagement or it is through revolutionary action which is often violent or inspires violent reaction.

Given the past history of revolutionary periods my preference is for incremental change within the current paradigm rather than a revolutionary overthrow of democracy or capitalism.

Maybe if I didn't have older parents and a young daughter my appetite for demolition of the current system would increase but I have to question people all fired up to replace the neoliberal world order with anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-syndicalism, etc what are you willing to give up to achieve your end state? How many of your fellow Americans are worth sacrificing to that end? Because I will honest my tolerance for sacrificing a lot of Americans in a quest to achieve a Star Trek future is pretty low.
posted by vuron at 4:06 PM on February 28, 2017 [12 favorites]


I had somehow naively thought that after over a month of the Trump administration that the argument that Trump and Clinton are the same would have been put to rest, but incredibly, that seems to not be the case.

I know/know of someone who voted for Nader in Florida in 2000 and defends it to this day.
posted by PMdixon at 4:07 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


No one is saying "Trump and Clinton are the same". People are saying, "Trump and Clinton are both tools of an inherently unjust, exploitative, murderous imperial project, and choosing either one is choosing complicity with that project." Which is absolutely 100% true, even if you don't personally like that fact. Again, i voted for Clinton. I encouraged other people to vote for Clinton. I just don't pretend i don't have blood on my hands because of it.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:08 PM on February 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


What about "how can we make capitalism much less awful for everyone?" Is "progressive" always and only anti-capitalist?

Whether capitalism is ultimately compatible with justice/its harms can be adequately offset by policy is the line between social democrats and socialists, pretty much. I might be a little beyond that line at this point but in American politics as it stands I personally have a hard time complaining about (committed) social democrats.
posted by atoxyl at 4:10 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is a fairly long-running theme in certain (especially academic) left circles. There's a whole ethos of "radical passivity" and "Bartleby the Scrivener is ethical revolution" and so forth that I remember hearing from otherwise brilliant people like, ten years ago. It is always, always said by upper middle-class white people.
posted by kewb at 4:19 PM on February 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


Capitalism may have inherit hierarchies, but I, for one, don't see any form of complex social organization that doesn't. The same goes for suffering. There just aren't examples of a widescale social organizations that lack the issues you are pointing to with capitalism. There are too many of us to revert back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and that's really the last time we've had (eg) the level of gender equality we are working towards today.

Condemning people for a lack of vision requires that vision to exist. I'm not sure what utopian future you are planning to work towards, but, until you have a concrete vision and can point at working models (theory here doesn't count), count me out.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:22 PM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


And yes, that means we have blood on our hands. But I don't think there's a world where people with agency don't have blood on their hands.

Which is a discussion for another day, really. The fact remains that most people were dormant during the Obama administration, and that's probably part of the reason Trump won.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:24 PM on February 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


Oh, and to clarify, these people use the term "radical passivity" in a really naive way that totally misses what people like Levinas actually mean when they use it.
posted by kewb at 4:25 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


vuron: Because no leftists have older parents or young children? (I mean, i don't have young children; i'm not cruel or selfish enough to have children in this world. But lots of people are, and do, and some of them are even - gasp! - anticapitalists.) Because leftists are all somehow starry-eyed idealists who don't realize that violence is scary and dying isn't like in the video games? Because somehow no one, ever, can have looked at the way in which the world is going to hell and decided, rationally and in a clear-eyed fashion, that enough is enough, no matter what?

And "How many of your fellow Americans are worth sacrificing to that end?" Well, how many Iraqis and Afghanis are worth sacrificing so you can keep living in the world you have now? Why should i, or anyone, care about Americans in particular? A nastier, more racist and murderous bunch of people it would be hard to find.

To be clear: I'm not calling for violent revolution. I'm not "calling for" anything. And while I think people are badly misreading the article, i don't agree with it either. It's just sad to me how many people think that the world we live in is an okay one, or that there's anything called "America" that's actually worth fighting to keep.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:33 PM on February 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


how many Iraqis and Afghanis are worth sacrificing so you can keep living in the world you have now?

According to Madeline Albright at least half a million...but that's only counting children....and that was before the subsequent American invasion...sooooo more than half a million children?
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 5:00 PM on February 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


i'm not cruel or selfish enough to have children in this world.

Wow. My feelings about not having had kids yet have certainly changed in the last year or two, but it is perhaps relevant to point out that without that 'cruel selfishness,' humanity literally ends.

It's just sad to me how many people think that the world we live in is an okay one, or that there's anything called "America" that's actually worth fighting to keep.

I don't agree with this, but I understand it.

But perhaps consider that whatever comes after the thing called "America" might still be worth fighting to prevent. Indeed, you're correct that the end of America isn't the end of the world. And I don't see China or Russia or any number of other powers agreeing to sign on for the End of History because America's packed it up, when they could just fill the vacuum.

A popular uprising has no means to resist a modern military (that is willing to simply crush it). The current basic world order is protected with literal doomsday weapons.

Enough is enough, no matter what? What does that even mean?

"For the last time son, there were emails. "
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:02 PM on February 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


> Enough is enough, no matter what? What does that even mean?

It really should be read in the context of vuron sneering about revolutionaries. Vuron seems to think no one could actually rationally come to the conclusion that the system can't be fixed from the inside and therefore should be smashed. I was attempting to use language to indicate the contrary.

(You certainly shouldn't take it to be me endorsing any particular set of goals or tactics. I don't even want the same thing from one minute to the next, it's definitely not useful to look at me as some kind of standard-bearer for the Left.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:16 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


i can't go through all the comments - 12 hour day at work, lack of time, but i did read the article

1 - this did not read as a well-reasoned call for disengagement - in fact, it actually makes a much better case for revolution

2 - but he is dead wrong about one thing and so are the rest of you for not noticing - america is not going to fascism from a position of strength, it, like the other historical regimes, is coming to it by weakness

our empire is in fact close to collapsing along with its economic supports

our mores as a civilization are collapsing (and thank god for that because they're not very good)

"make america great again" is an admission that we have been DEFEATED by history - and we have

we will see the truth of this before 2020 - and trump, the fascist wannabe is going to end up as the patsy, the scapegoat, the guy everyone will unfairly blame for everything that's coming (alhough i'm sure he'll do a few idiocies to help it along, the fact remains that this was going to happen anyway and isn't really his fault)
posted by pyramid termite at 5:19 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


You're not going to have the kind of revolution you want unless you have systems capable of replacing the old ones.

And you don't get those without heavy investment, and dare I say it, political engagement in building those systems.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 5:35 PM on February 28, 2017 [10 favorites]


I've read the article and some (but not all) of the comments here. I deeply disagree with disengaging. I think this is a problem Democrat-leaning folks often have, this sense that something which isn't immediately and completely successful is therefore a waste and should be abandoned. In my view, that kind of attitude is why Donald Trump is the President of the United States -- the inclination of some on the left to let the perfect (in their minds) be the enemy of the good.

The Republicans have us completely beaten on this front. If they lose, they put their nose to the grindstone and start scheming. When they lose in the Supreme Court, they stack the lower federal courts with conservative to moderate judges so that we aren't left with a choice between Warrens on the left and Souters on the right, but Garlands on the left and Alitos on the right. When they lose the House in 2006 and the White House in 2008, they funnel money to the state legislatures and prepare to redraw district maps based on the 2010 census in a way that lays the groundwork for an unassailable GOP majority in the House.

At every turn, with every diminution of power, they begin scheming to circumvent their losses. The only way to fight back is to do the same, instead of retreating under the color of "protest."
posted by eaglejudge at 5:52 PM on February 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


Mm, No Robots, wouldn't you say that the repeal of the ACA is-- surprisingly, in my view-- apparently stalled due to political pressure from "Resisters"? If Congress had not faced a groundswell of vocal opposition, if everyone had taken the article's advice, don't you think the ACA would be gone by now? The article doesn't have to suggest the repeal of the ACA for it to be a logical outcome of stopping a particular tactic currently being used.

Protests have indeed been effective on the ACA and on the immigration EO. I heartily congratulate the participants. And I hope activism does halt this juggernaut. However, some of us require, for various reasons, some distance from the social sphere. For some of us, it helps clear our thought which then allows us to act more effectively. Perhaps the problem here is a "one size fits all" mentality on the part of the author and his readers.
posted by No Robots at 6:29 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's just sad to me how many people think that the world we live in is an okay one, or that there's anything called "America" that's actually worth fighting to keep.

These two things are not like each other.

It's possible to believe that the world we live in is not a good one, but it is one that's getting better. It's also possible to believe that the world we live in is not a good one, but it's the best of the options we have available to us.

And it's also possible to believe that the world we live in is not a good one, nor is it getting any better, but that there are things in the country worth saving. The immigrants who come here don't think we're terrible and should be destroyed. Nor do the countries in NATO which count on us. The United States has had a massive impact upon the world, both for evil and for good, and our absence won't suddenly make the world right again. (In many ways, our absence will make it worse -- our failure, for example, to sign onto any kind of carbon tax pretty much dooms the planet.)

This level of nihilism gets you nowhere, and I think even it reveals a level of privilege. To paraphrase Chesterton, only the privileged can afford to be anarchists. The rest of us know exactly what we could lose, and we have no desire to lose it. Sometimes, that's because we're "selfish" enough to form the kinds of attachments which might lead us to fear for others in a social collapse. Sometimes, that's because we have medical conditions that mean we will die in a social collapse. And, yes, sometimes that's because we do have some level of comfort.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 7:03 PM on February 28, 2017 [8 favorites]


There is absolutely no "disengagement" if you have children & care about their futures.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 7:16 PM on February 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


"Sometimes, that's because we're "selfish" enough to form the kinds of attachments which might lead us to fear for others in a social collapse. Sometimes, that's because we have medical conditions that mean we will die in a social collapse. And, yes, sometimes that's because we do have some level of comfort."
So i'm soulless and healthy now, apparently? Clearly i am not personally terrified for literally everyone i know in the US, all my family and loved ones, and clearly i have no health issues of my own, i don't benefit from the ACA that was literally the only way i could get insurance for the last several years. I have zero attachments and zero medical conditions, and neither do any other leftists in the world? We're all just monsters (which is what Chesterton means by "anarchists", btw; he doesn't mean anything that an actual anarchist would recognize).
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:21 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


"One last, pernickety note: it is a strange neoliberalism that wants to cancel free trade agreements, impose tariffs and limit imports. Words have meanings, and neoliberalism doesn't just mean 'bad'."

God, this fucking essay is just a dog's breakfast of argument by definition and ad hominem, innit? Fascist doesn't mean neoliberal, neoliberal doesn't mean fascist, fascist doesn't mean imperialist…

So, couple three things:

First off, I've been reading Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, and the way it starts off is, basically, hippy punching. But it talks about all the Weathermen and Days of Rage as angry men looking to "cop out" of the responsibility of building radical change. This essay is pretty much entirely a justification for copping out.

Second, I went off on my Facebook feed about other assholes calling Tom Perez a neoliberal and not a "real progressive." To quote myself:
Tom Perez was a fantastic leader at the DoL, energizing its enforcement of wage-theft laws, fighting to increase the minimum wage, ensuring that disability rights were a priority, giving important ammunition in the fight against Uber-style "gig economy" exploitation of workers, and working to improve labor rights for undocumented workers. He finally got the "fiduciary rule" implemented, which basically says that financial advisors have to act in the best interest of their clients (something that the GOP is fighting right now to repeal). He settled the strike at Verizon, ensuring workers got a square deal. He ensured that home health care workers were eligible for overtime.
Prior to that, he led the DoJ's Civil Rights Division, where he fought voter ID laws, beat back Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa, Az. over his racist, anti-immigrant tactics, got the police chief who wouldn't arrest George Zimmerman fired, and fought for LGBT students, and fought against private prisons in Mississippi. He made enforcement of non-discrimination statutes in LGBT cases a priority.
Third, any time I hear a "revolutionary" talking about burning the house down, I think "People live in this house!"

Really, I just think that connects to a tremendous ignorance of history and revolutionary struggle, both on the part of this author and some that would support him here. Fascism always ended by war? Not in Portugal, who had the Carnation Revolution. Not Spain. And since we're pretty far from orthodox fascism — the author admits only knowing two fascists, basically — Peronism didn't end with a war. Pinochet didn't end with a war.

"Vuron seems to think no one could actually rationally come to the conclusion that the system can't be fixed from the inside and therefore should be smashed. I was attempting to use language to indicate the contrary."

OK, and I kinda hate to do this, but: What does "smashing capitalism" even mean? I mean, beyond articulating what an overall vision of smashed capitalism looks like, what are the first steps here in America? It ain't democratic socialism, at least under the Scandinavian model, since they're still underpinned by market capitalism and extensive private property rights. I mean, are we talking constitutional amendments, or are we talking armed takeover of American institutions? What's the political program to get amendments through? What's the political program to get people engaged in mass revolutionary violence? Or is your plan some kinda Tahrir Square thing?

And fundamentally, what would distinguish the US from other socialist revolutions? Because those in large countries haven't gone very well — even most revolutions in small countries haven't gone very well.

There are definitely times when armed resistance is justified — it's hard to argue otherwise, given America's founding mythos, but since part of what makes America "exceptional" is that it didn't descend into chaos and tyranny after the 1776 Revolution — but it's rare that it ends well for any citizens. It tends to destroy democratic institutions and corrode public participation.
posted by klangklangston at 7:23 PM on February 28, 2017 [15 favorites]


What does "smashing capitalism" even mean? I mean, beyond articulating what an overall vision of smashed capitalism looks like, what are the first steps here in America?

For my money, it means first and foremost building our families as miniature models of the kind of state we would like to build. We remain in the system, but we are not of the system.
posted by No Robots at 7:30 PM on February 28, 2017


klangklangston: I said quite clearly above that i don't have a plan. None of this is about my "plan". Some leftists think the system can't be fixed from inside. Some leftists -- including, yes, people who are not soulless evil monsters who love war -- think revolution is the only path forward. That's all i said. I'm not one of them, at least not right now. (But that's at least in part because right this minute i don't think there's ANY path forward. There's just doing what i can, and hoping the world doesn't come completely off the rails until after everyone i love is dead.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:31 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


You know the thing that really depresses me sometimes? The 1968 Republican party platform was significantly to the left, in most respects, of the 2016 Democratic party platform. And yet ostensibly-progressive people are all so eager to talk about how "we've come so far". We haven't. We've fucking gone backwards, in so many ways. And folks are so happy to shit on any actual dreams of betterness that aren't just "more capitalism that's just slightly less ruinous" because oh, you people are just starry-eyed radicals, that would never work. How dare folks not just fall in line and vote Democratic? At least they'll kill everything more slowly.

By Real Leftist standards, i'm not even a real leftist. I sound a lot more radical than i am, here, because hippie-punching just pisses me off that much.
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:37 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


"For my money, it means first and foremost building our families as miniature models of the kind of state we would like to build. We remain in the system, but we are not of the system."

Ironically, this is what the fascists also meant when they were fighting capitalism.

"Some leftists -- including, yes, people who are not soulless evil monsters who love war -- think revolution is the only path forward. That's all i said. I'm not one of them, at least not right now. (But that's at least in part because right this minute i don't think there's ANY path forward. There's just doing what i can, and hoping the world doesn't come completely off the rails until after everyone i love is dead.)"

Some conservatives, who are not soulless evil monsters, want to return America to a nostalgic vision of past glories and restore the dignity of the working/middle class.

But they're fucking wrong and hurting America.

Just like many leftists who think their scholastic Marxism demonstrates the politically correct move forward.

"You know the thing that really depresses me sometimes? The 1968 Republican party platform was significantly to the left, in most respects, of the 2016 Democratic party platform. And yet ostensibly-progressive people are all so eager to talk about how "we've come so far". We haven't. We've fucking gone backwards, in so many ways. And folks are so happy to shit on any actual dreams of betterness that aren't just "more capitalism that's just slightly less ruinous" because oh, you people are just starry-eyed radicals, that would never work. How dare folks not just fall in line and vote Democratic? At least they'll kill everything more slowly. "

Yeah, you know that in 1968 there were still an estimated 10,000 sundown towns in America, including Glendale, Ca., Levittown, Pa., and Warren, Mi., right? Being gay was still functionally illegal in California.

I could go on. But while I understand that leftists and liberals are feeling pretty morose right now, pretending that there's been no progress is stupid and counterproductive.
posted by klangklangston at 7:51 PM on February 28, 2017 [12 favorites]


You know the thing that really depresses me sometimes? The 1968 Republican party platform was significantly to the left, in most respects, of the 2016 Democratic party platform.

That is quite depressing. We've gone forwards in some ways, but clearly those advances aren't as permanent as many of us had thought. And there's no doubt that the post Nixon era has seen a hollowing out of politics to a point that isn't unprecedented in American history (e.g. the spoils system), but was definitely a change from the immediate postwar society. And many people have had much to say about that.

"more capitalism that's just slightly less ruinous"
That's really not a fair characterization of what progressives in the liberal (actually liberal, not 'socially liberal, economically moderate') tradition hope to achieve.

How dare folks not just fall in line and vote Democratic? At least they'll kill everything more slowly.

Killing people more slowly in the real world means killing people at a slower rate. Not killing everyone more slowly in unison. Ergo, killing fewer people.

And it buys you time to either improve policy or foment your revolution. Either way.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:55 PM on February 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


Dear God, this is getting old. Just stop already.

I have zero attachments and zero medical conditions, and neither do any other leftists in the world? We're all just monsters (which is what Chesterton means by "anarchists", btw; he doesn't mean anything that an actual anarchist would recognize).

Yes. If you are willing to let Donald Trump win because somehow that will bring about a revolution which will somehow feed starving children in Africa, you are a monster.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 7:57 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


Did you miss the part where i fucking voted for Clinton? Which i said, like, two or three times? I was not "willing to let Donald Trump win", jesus fucking christ. Are you even reading anything i'm saying or have you just turned me into some kind of platonic straw-Leftist?
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:58 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


pretending that there's been no progress is stupid and counterproductive.

Pretending there hasn't been regression in other areas is as well.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 7:59 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


The Real Leftists i know do shit like spend their free evenings cooking for & feeding homeless people (and getting chased, and sometimes beaten, by cops for it). They work tirelessly to unionize their industries. They work as medics at street protests, in rain and snow, and they get beaten by cops for that, too. They help get actual leftists elected at a local level, where it's still sometimes possible to have real progressive political views that aren't punished by the Establishment. They write and talk and theorize about the better world they want to make, and then they go out and do their damnedest. They are incredibly politically engaged and aware, and they're doing real, material things to support their communities. Most of them are queer, many are not white, and several of them are trans.

I am not one one-hundredth the person any of them are. I'm lazy and comfortable and the best i can do is throw them money, sometimes, and solidarity, always. But this idea that they're some kind of privileged head-in-the-clouds radicals, coming from people here on MetaFilter, is just fucking laughable.
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:08 PM on February 28, 2017 [7 favorites]


But this idea that they're some kind of privileged head-in-the-clouds radicals, coming from people here on MetaFilter, is just fucking laughable.

adrienneleigh, my problem right now is that defending a group you're not part of is incredibly disingenuous. You don't have the ability to defend "the Real Leftists" you know, because you're not one of them. You can point to how they "write and talk about the better world they want to make," but you can't tell us about it, nor can you give us (detailed) descriptions of just how their accelerationist position (which you have defined as being the meaning of a Real Leftist) will make the world a better place. All you can do is take offense for them.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 8:15 PM on February 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


The Real Leftists i know do shit like spend their free evenings cooking for & feeding homeless people...unionize their industries...work as medics at street protests...help get actual leftists elected at a local level, where it's still sometimes possible to have real progressive political views...They write and talk and theorize about the better world they want to make...They are incredibly politically engaged and aware,

I'm not sure why you assume that there are no less radical progressives, i.e. 'people here on MetaFilter' who do those things? I would bet there probably are.

My own level of involvement isn't that high, either, but I do try to do some actual service in areas like that on a regular basis and I don't think that's uncommon. I wouldn't be so quick to attach the.....um....polar strength (if that makes sense) of someone's views to their level of motivation.

To pick some hapless absentees we can all beat up on, you will find lots of people militant about being milquetoast on FB & etc. The civility patrol, as it were. And they are out there doing that in the real world too, on the Rotary club or whatever. And they probably feed some people. And that is OK.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:17 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


I have done no such thing as define leftism as accelerationist. Some leftists are accelerationist. Some are revolutionary, which is not the same thing. Some are neither. You are just bound and determined to misread everything i say.

(And I am, in fact, a goddamn leftist, i'm just a really shitty and lazy one. I'm not taking offense for some group i'm not part of.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:18 PM on February 28, 2017


Mod note: Ok, folks, we're talking past each other and it's time to move past adrienneleigh's personal opinions. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 8:24 PM on February 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


After this conversation, I certainly understand the appeal of the OP's position on disengagement, that's for damn sure.
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:35 PM on February 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


For what it's worth, I heard you when you said you voted for HRC, and I understand you're not against harm reduction despite your views on a larger scale. It's not on you to carry the weight for other folks' views or decisions.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:47 PM on February 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


"For my money, it means first and foremost building our families as miniature models of the kind of state we would like to build. We remain in the system, but we are not of the system."

Ironically, this is what the fascists also meant when they were fighting capitalism.


There is no irony here. Fascists and those who oppose them know that the war is fought in the home. That's been my point, and, as far as I can see, the point of Shivani.
posted by No Robots at 9:19 PM on February 28, 2017


"There is no irony here. Fascists and those who oppose them know that the war is fought in the home. That's been my point, and, as far as I can see, the point of Shivani."

People who fight them rarely use the idea of building our families into miniature models; the myth of domestic virtue is predominantly used to reaffirm right-wing views, and is a pretty big subgenre of fascist propaganda.

So, yeah, arguing that the solution to fascism is to embrace a fascist trope is like rain on your wedding day, little bit. And arguing that the war is fought in the home is pretty dubious too.
posted by klangklangston at 10:20 PM on February 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


"For my money, it means first and foremost building our families as miniature models of the kind of state we would like to build.

I like the vision of the state as, essentially, a macrocosm of one irritable woman and one cat and their 24/7 power relationship. this is a good model for the world I think. unless you like mutual respect and egalitarian cooperation and then I don't know.

more seriously, however, those of us without families can't help smash capitalism? I had thought centering the Family as the essential unit of society was itself, while not a specifically capitalist artifact, something our capitalist society enthusiastically endorses and even demands. a change would be nice. I know fascism has no happy thoughts for the unanchored and unchilded woman, but I like to imagine some system does.
posted by queenofbithynia at 11:27 PM on February 28, 2017 [12 favorites]


One thing we might ask ourselves about the 1968 Republican platform: Why was it that way? It's pretty clear that "America was great and has now declined" is not an accurate description of the whole mess of ups and downs in US history. What happened to make the sixties and early seventies what they were? (If you have a chance to read old Time or Newsweek, you will be amazed by how far left the default was on a lot of issues, even though it was also garbage on women's issues and GLBTQ stuff.)

I think some things were:

1. Social movements generally, activated by the civil rights movement and opposition to the war;
2. Economic boom - you're a lot freer to protest when you can get casual labor pretty much whenever
3. Soviet Union
4. The huge ideological shift necessitated by the Depression and WWII. To get people to fight in the war, there was all this "common people are great", homes fit for heroes, etc all through the Allied countries. The Four Freedoms, etc. That stuff starts as, IMO, pretty cynical stuff, but if everyone keeps repeating it enough, they start believing it. (Whereas now, we have real 20s/30s style political gangsterism - actually what Trump reminds me of is the atmosphere in France in the 30s.)

But my point is, those conditions arose in response to a specific mixture of world events and activism, not just because people were better.

What is worrying to me is that you have about 25 good years between the Civil Rights movement really getting going and the mid-seventies, and then you have forty years of revanchism by the right. "Insane with hatred" is, to me, the best description of them.
posted by Frowner at 12:13 AM on March 1, 2017 [22 favorites]


queenofbithynia, et al: For "families", in No Robots' posts, i think it's safe to read either "communities" or "households". I don't think they're talking about the nuclear family structure here (that certainly wouldn't be very leftist), but rather about what one might call one's inmost sphere of concern.
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:24 AM on March 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


So, yeah, arguing that the solution to fascism is to embrace a fascist trope is like rain on your wedding day, little bit. And arguing that the war is fought in the home is pretty dubious too.

And as I was getting at above isn't left wing politics on the other hand traditionally very much about, you know, mass action? The idea that it can instead be about your personal decision not to engage with capitalism is not one that strikes me as having proved itself very effective in comparison.

(Though I'm not knocking e.g. intentional communities as a small-scale test bed for different ways of organizing life.)
posted by atoxyl at 1:34 AM on March 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


Reading the linked piece and the comments here I had to think of Le Guin's story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".

I know that during WWII some people at least were better off seeking refuge in rural areas than in cities. Militant resistance during the occupation in some cases saved people, in some cases it killed lots of people. An act of resistance could result in the Nazi's killing dozens or hundreds of relatives or neighbours in retribution. In the end it depends on particular circumstances, on tactical ability and strategic goals, and the sacrifice that affords. Blanket statements to the effect that "silence is collaboration" or "resistance is futile" are worse than useless. I don't think you should judge too harshly on anyone for refusing to sacrifice themselves or, conversely, for refusing to participate in the sacrifice of someone else.
posted by dmh at 2:54 AM on March 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


No Robots might be specifically talking about the nuclear family structure.
posted by XMLicious at 3:17 AM on March 1, 2017


I know that during WWII some people at least were better off seeking refuge in rural areas than in cities. Militant resistance during the occupation in some cases saved people, in some cases it killed lots of people.

The analogy to those who sought refuge int he countryside during WWII is not middle-class white people taking their ball and going home and calling that resistance; it's undocumented workers, sexual minorities, and the like finding communities where the bullshit is less likely to be enforced.

Hiding in the countryside is only a temporary tactic, not a strategy for dislodging Nazism. that ultimately took a war, and took people risking things to fight that war.

People capable of taking those risks choosing to drop out of political action because they won't be harmed by these policies, or at least not harmed as much as others, is hardly the same as people under direct threat literally fleeing their homes to take refuge in rural areas where the Nazis have less of a surveillance apparatus.
posted by kewb at 3:59 AM on March 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


queenofbithynia, et al: For "families", in No Robots' posts, i think it's safe to read either "communities" or "households". I don't think they're talking about the nuclear family structure here (that certainly wouldn't be very leftist), but rather about what one might call one's inmost sphere of concern.

This does not change Klang's point. The state as the model of the domestic sphere (and vice versa) always always always always always works in a service of fundamentally right wing goals. Different scales of organization have to look different. If you try and make them all look the same, you will hurt people.
posted by PMdixon at 5:29 AM on March 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


The state as the model of the domestic sphere (and vice versa) always always always always always works in a service of fundamentally right wing goals.

Yeah-- it was 100% literally the philosophy of Empire in 19th century England. Your domesticity at home powers benevolent empire! Don’t worry about government decisions that don’t concern you, just stay home and raise up soldiers to carry the White Man’s Burden and future wives to bear them heirs!

Given that a huge number of novels from the period are about how toxic and nightmarish this vision of “don’t get involved, just mind your house and your family and it will all work out” actually was, it’s particularly disturbing to hear this philosophy reclaimed as the path to leftist paradise.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 6:00 AM on March 1, 2017 [10 favorites]


Ok but where do I sign up to get my Real Leftist badge, and who is gonna teach me the handshake?
posted by FirstMateKate at 6:22 AM on March 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


You must make your own by hunting down Richard Spencer, punching him, cutting a lock of his hear and weaving it into the badge. The handshake is both of you hunting down Richard Spencer and punching him.
posted by PMdixon at 7:32 AM on March 1, 2017 [7 favorites]


In "Omelas" the framing is such that only resistance possible is to walk away. It's a parable about a supposed utopia/dystopia, and it's divorced from complexities like real economies and governments and militaries.

"One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt."

Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.


If insisting on a direct application to politics, it's a better fit for "family values" and "compassionate conservatism" than liberalism.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:46 AM on March 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


Liberals see socialist talk of ending the system as a burning to the ground. One counter to this canard is to assert that socialism can start in the home. Liberals have basically capitulated all talk of family to the right. I see nothing wrong with socialists taking some of that back. And this is not meant to be exclusive. As I said, radical activity can take place in all kinds of contexts, from hermits to communes. Choose your space, build it, defend it.

Liberalism has gained a lease on life by presenting itself as a reformist alternative to socialism and fascism. That game is ending and the choice is stark: socialism or fascism.
posted by No Robots at 7:51 AM on March 1, 2017 [3 favorites]


"Trump and Clinton are both tools of an inherently unjust, exploitative, murderous imperial project, and choosing either one is choosing complicity with that project." Which is absolutely 100% true, even if you don't personally like that fact. Again, i voted for Clinton. I encouraged other people to vote for Clinton. I just don't pretend i don't have blood on my hands because of it.

Unless you are living a very atypical lifestyle, you already have so much blood on your hands as an American that voting—picking the least-bad option from between two choices—is a hilariously, trivially small addition, meaningless to anyone except the person doing it, and far less important in any reasonable analysis than the possible effect that voting could have.

Every time you turn on the lights or put gas in your car or eat industrially produced food or pick up a smartphone, you have blood on your hands in a far more direct way than voting for the lesser evil in a national race. And yeah, no shit, it's tough to avoid doing any of those things, but capitalism doesn't much care about anyone's consent.

You either end up with your hands bloody or you go full Amish (and to be fair even the Amish participate in capitalism, albeit in a sort of arms-length way, so it might not even be enough if you really wanted to split hairs).

Avoiding complicity isn't an option for most people in the West, and people who think that they're going to get themselves Leftist Bonus Points for not voting on account of complicity, if they're arguing about it on the goddamn Internet using a computer plugged into a grid powered by Wyoming coal and full of Congolese cobalt and Indonesian gold and Brazilian tin and Chilean lithium and assembled by a Chinese peasant living in a Foxconn dormitory surrounded by anti-suicide netting in one of the most polluted cities in the world... they're displaying a level of self-absorption that borders on delusional. As if their moral cleanliness matters against that.

There's no walking away from Omelas. There's nowhere else to go.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:46 AM on March 1, 2017 [32 favorites]


Liberals see socialist talk of ending the system as a burning to the ground.

I'm less and less clear as to whether I count as 'liberal' in any given context, but yes, 'ending the system' in an abrupt way is functionally burning it to the ground. The root feature of a state is a monopoly on violence. Whatever future state you want to get to, either you accept some version of incrementalism or you are willing to have that monopoly suspended even if only temporarily. I'm not cool with the second option.
posted by PMdixon at 8:53 AM on March 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


There's no walking away from Omelas. There's nowhere else to go.

This is probably a better formulation than my "there is no [longer] any outside of Capital."
posted by PMdixon at 8:55 AM on March 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


Kadin2048: Unless you are living a very atypical lifestyle, you already have so much blood on your hands...

Every time you turn on the lights or put gas in your car or eat industrially produced food or pick up a smartphone, you have blood on your hands in a far more direct way than voting for the lesser evil in a national race. And yeah, no shit, it's tough to avoid doing any of those things, but capitalism doesn't much care about anyone's consent.
Okay, so this is ridiculous. If somebody is holding a gun to your head and tells you to do something terrible, the sin is theirs, not yours.

That is, in our society, we are coercively forced into behaving in destructive ways. That doesn't make it our fault as individuals. Yes, do whatever you can to edit yourself out of the murder machine, but your individual culpability is so utterly insignificant compared to machinations of the political and corporate classes as to be negligible.

(And I say this as somebody who is spending as much of my time and money reforesting the land, investing in renewables, and minimizing my consumption as is humanly possible. This is because when the house is on fire, it doesn't matter whose fault it is—you put out the fire first, and worry about who pays the bills afterward. But don't try to tell me that my infant child is a monster just for having the rotten luck of being born an American.)
posted by ragtag at 12:20 PM on March 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


But don't try to tell me that my infant child is a monster just for having the rotten luck of being born an American.

They are the beneficiary of acts of violence, sometimes phrased as having blood on one's hands. I agree that the moral implications people draw from that fact are often much less sophisticated than they should be.
posted by PMdixon at 12:27 PM on March 1, 2017 [4 favorites]


Mod note: Folks, this will go a lot better if we don't make it about anyone's personal family members.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:28 PM on March 1, 2017


That game is ending and the choice is stark: socialism or fascism.

We heard that before, in the 1930s. One of the reasons FDR is revered is because, in many ways, he saved democracy in the US.

There is always a third option. Which is good, because the socialist utopia you are trying to push on us doesn't exist.

"Forward the revolution!" has real consequences, and none of those are positive. The US is relatively unique in that our revolution worked and resulted in a reasonably stable government. Odds are, we wouldn't be that lucky this time. Especially since you wouldn't be rebelling against some kind of faceless Man. You're saying we should fight fellow citizens, and you're saying we should do this because of a completely avoidable set of events which, IMHO, the left is entirely too excited about.

But please. Lay out your plans for your ultimately futile revolution. Exactly how are you going to destroy the most powerful military in the world? And, more importantly, how are you going to go from government overthrow to a society without the sorts of prejudices which we try to use the legal system to fight? I can see abortion being available in a destabilized society (less government oversight FTW!), but I could also see a return to sundown towns and to mob-supported attacks on queer people.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 1:11 PM on March 1, 2017 [8 favorites]


Lay out your plans for your ultimately futile revolution.

Phase 1: socialist takeover of the Democratic Party. Close call in 2016, no?
posted by No Robots at 1:33 PM on March 1, 2017


Yes. They are. Trump getting elected is the best thing that could have happened to this country. Now we are at least presented with an opportunity to confront the fascism which has metastasized in post-911 America.

I think this perspective is reprehensible.

Handing our goverment over to a supermajority of actual fascists to allow them to quite literally destroy lives, social support systems and the country's underlying democratic foundations is not "the best thing that could have happened" to this or any other country. Especially not out of a misguided hope that an oppressed populace will suddenly cry freedom and rise up against them.

That's not how this works.

That's certainly not how it will work in the short term, where large groups of Americans will quite literally die or lose their civil liberties from fascist policies that would not have put in place if the other party had won.

That's also not how it will work in the long term, either. The status quo will be maintained. Or the country will convulse into civil war. Or perhaps our destruction will be capped by an invasion force. Russia seems like a likely colonizer at this point. Two of the largest fascist dictatorships (Germany and Italy) were overthrown from outside, not within. Russia collapsed in a bloody revolution. The modern era has shown us what happens to fascist authoritarian states. Doesn't usually end well.

I didn't vote for Hillary, and will not vote for any Democrat until they have vocalized not only their rejection of fascism at home,

tl;dr: But her emails.
posted by zarq at 1:51 PM on March 1, 2017 [19 favorites]


Trump getting elected is the best thing to happen to this country since Bush got reelected which was the best thing to happen to this country since Bush got elected which was the best thing to happen to this country since Reagan got elected which
posted by beerperson at 2:17 PM on March 1, 2017 [7 favorites]


Mod note: Couple comments deleted. Please take Bernie/Hillary stuff back over to the DNC thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:40 PM on March 1, 2017


Phase 1: socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.

Without getting into the particulars of individuals and elections -- any kind of "socialist takeover of the Democratic Party" that would seem likely to lead to the kind of radical change discussed in this thread would require many new and sharply different people. Not one person, any one person, in a prominent role. In national office, or party office.

And while my personal definition of "socialist" is more flexible, I'm not sure who qualifies as "socialist" under the kind of criteria put forth in this thread, and you'd need a bunch of them for a party "takeover."

I'd be on board for Phase 0: Socialism is not a bad word.
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:13 PM on March 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


^Warren Beatty deserves a lot of credit for serving the seemingly hopeless cause of socialism in the United States. There are, certainly, many other great American socialists. I mentioned above C. Wright Mills. I have also mentioned in many other threads Harry Waton, who emigrated from Russia in the late 19th century and became prominent in socialist and Jewish circles in New York. His book, The Philosophy of Marx, is available in full text. It is written for a general audience, and I heartily recommend it.
posted by No Robots at 3:42 PM on March 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


His book, The Philosophy of Marx, is available in full text. It is written for a general audience, and I heartily recommend it.

There's an Adlai Stevenson line that comes to mind here.
posted by PMdixon at 4:23 PM on March 1, 2017


Phase 1: socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.

If I hadn't thought this was a bad idea before, you've totally managed to sell me on its stupidity.

"My ridiculous idea* or my opponents'" isn't a selling point for your cause.

* And make no mistake: full blown socialism of any type (not incrimental change) is ridiculous by American standards.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:46 PM on March 1, 2017


I realized today that I just can't do politics anymore. I'm not saying it's moral, I'm just saying I can't do it. I've been trying to talk to people and figure out what needs to happen. I've been trying to show up to DSA and SURJ meetings, I've been trying to do something positive in my community, but I just don't have the energy or the will anymore. It's an uphill battle at best. I worry about the people I know who may be deported, I worry about hate crimes, I worry about people losing access to healthcare. I have friends who are scared to return to the country they grew up in.

It's just that every time I try to do something, there's some argument about how it's not the right thing, or how it's just not enough, because everything just keeps getting worse. Why go to the DSA? Socialism isn't the future, don't I know that? I must have been a Sanders supporter. If only people like me would grow up, maybe we'd actually get something accomplished. Protest? Look at how the violent left is now all over the news -- the other day a completely random stranger sent me a message on Reddit asking if I was still ashamed to have been part of such an ugly protest, and if I'm happy to have played right into Breitbart's hands.

Last night, I guess it was the VOICE program that just made me feel like I'm burned out. It's just terrifying, and I can't fight anymore.

Everyone is so fucking quick to say "if you feel like you can disengage than you're encouraging fascism," or some other pithy comment about how it's a mark of privilege and how ashamed you should be for thinking it's an option. And they'll add on a note about "of course, self-care is important," but it's not like there's some clear definition of what that actually means. At what point does my need for self care make me just another entitled slob who can't be bothered to fight because, as the story goes, I must not be personally affected enough?

Maybe the best thing I can do is embody everything that's wrong with the left, who would talk about revolution but can't even keep up with the news without breaking down, who would say they believe in something but won't even pick something sensible. Who would disengage because it's an option they have, the naive Bernie Bro giving up before the fight even begins. Maybe this is the model for how not to be, for how to ensure that this country loses the war against fascism, against enemies abroad and at home. Fuck me, but I guess that's all I was ever good for.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:54 PM on March 1, 2017 [5 favorites]


There's an Adlai Stevenson line that comes to mind here.

Cryptic, but a google search indicates the likely reference as, "[c]ommunism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity – in short, of tyranny – and it is committed to making tyranny universal."

For contrast, here is what Waton says in his book:
The propertyless were the first ones that felt the need and perceived the possibility for change and improvement. At first, their conception of the possibility to change and improve the conditions of existence was very limited. But in time their conception widened and heightened, until in the mind of the great pioneers of the propertyless it attained to a universal scope and sublime height and the idea of a kingdom of heaven on earth was born.
Americans have until now been successfully diverted from socialism. We'll see how that plays out over the next few years.
posted by No Robots at 5:45 PM on March 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


If I hadn't thought this was a bad idea before, you've totally managed to sell me on its stupidity.

When blocked by this kind of hostility, we can work on the varieties of micro-socialism that Shivani writes about. These micro-movements will, in time, develop cohesion and inter-dependence, and thereby enable a peaceful transition.
posted by No Robots at 6:06 PM on March 1, 2017


"Liberals see socialist talk of ending the system as a burning to the ground. One counter to this canard is to assert that socialism can start in the home. Liberals have basically capitulated all talk of family to the right. I see nothing wrong with socialists taking some of that back. And this is not meant to be exclusive. As I said, radical activity can take place in all kinds of contexts, from hermits to communes. Choose your space, build it, defend it. "

(Some) liberals see (some) socialist talk of ending the system as burning it to the ground. That's because, historically, a lot of people calling themselves revolutionary socialists have taken over governments and burned them to the ground, with generally not-great results. Liberals have not capitulated talk of family to the right; that's different from saying that the model of domesticity-as-state isn't pretty goddamned fascist.

This takes only a cursory familiarity with political history in the 20th century.

Liberalism has gained a lease on life by presenting itself as a reformist alternative to socialism and fascism. That game is ending and the choice is stark: socialism or fascism.

Not really. Liberalism preceded state socialism or socialism as a philosophy, especially as a political philosophy. Also, there's something called "social liberalism," because liberalism and socialism aren't exclusive.

"Okay, so this is ridiculous. If somebody is holding a gun to your head and tells you to do something terrible, the sin is theirs, not yours."

Hey look, you've stumbled onto one of the hugest questions that existentialism attempts to answer (the general consensus: Even with a gun to your head, it's still your choice. Take responsibility).

"But don't try to tell me that my infant child is a monster just for having the rotten luck of being born an American."

I don't think anyone would say your child is a monster (though I think it's fair to point out that the main difference is power, because babies — like cats — are tyrants only constrained by their size). But your child has benefited from tons of monstrous acts on their behalf.

""Forward the revolution!" has real consequences, and none of those are positive. The US is relatively unique in that our revolution worked and resulted in a reasonably stable government. Odds are, we wouldn't be that lucky this time. Especially since you wouldn't be rebelling against some kind of faceless Man. You're saying we should fight fellow citizens, and you're saying we should do this because of a completely avoidable set of events which, IMHO, the left is entirely too excited about."

One of the whole points of orderly elections was to prevent the need for revolution by force — every election can (ideally) be a bloodless revolution.
posted by klangklangston at 6:45 PM on March 1, 2017 [6 favorites]


Cryptic, but a google search indicates the likely reference as, "[c]ommunism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity – in short, of tyranny – and it is committed to making tyranny universal."

Actually I was thinking of the more well known and possibly apocryphal anecdote in which during his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai E Stevenson 'Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!'
Stevenson called back 'That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!'

You don't seem to have an especially good theory of politics if your path to the mass revolution is "well here's some books."
posted by PMdixon at 5:16 AM on March 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


You don't seem to have an especially good theory of politics if your path to the mass revolution is "well here's some books."

There is my doctrine of micro-movements.
posted by No Robots at 6:38 AM on March 2, 2017


Liberals have not capitulated talk of family to the right; that's different from saying that the model of domesticity-as-state isn't pretty goddamned fascist.

Family as model for socialism doesn't seem far-fetched to me, but I guess it depends on what kind of family you're familiar with.
posted by No Robots at 6:46 AM on March 2, 2017


> You don't seem to have an especially good theory of politics if your path to the mass revolution is "well here's some books."

yeah everyone knows the path to mass revolution is selling newspapers, not giving away books.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:54 AM on March 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


> Maybe the best thing I can do is embody everything that's wrong with the left, who would talk about revolution but can't even keep up with the news without breaking down, who would say they believe in something but won't even pick something sensible. Who would disengage because it's an option they have, the naive Bernie Bro giving up before the fight even begins. Maybe this is the model for how not to be, for how to ensure that this country loses the war against fascism, against enemies abroad and at home. Fuck me, but I guess that's all I was ever good for.

NO. You are NOT allowed to do that. because that is MY JOB.

stick to your lane, everyone. stick to your lane.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:56 AM on March 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


shapes my droog unless you are busting out hot takes about how doing things is wrong full stop i think youre ok

also going to stuff like DSA and SURJ exhausts the living piss out of me. its not for everybody. its ok. if i knew you in real life this is the part where i would take you out for a beer and show you really bad communist minions memes because this is a long game and perfect tactics isnt how we get there. wherever there is
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 2:40 PM on March 2, 2017 [7 favorites]


Disclaimer: Non-American here (and new $5-noob).

This is devastating to read. It's like watching your house torn down by armed robbers, and then reading a transcript detailing the act, and getting told (correctly) that it's basically your own fault. You may not agree to every detail in the transcript, and rightly so -- in fact you find the report a bit incoherent -- but the judgement is inevitable and you know it's true and just.

My problem isn't that I cannot agree with the author's economical arguments. This problem is secondary, it's mostly zaxlebax, to borrow from libertarian parlance. Morally, we find the author's character very difficult to challenge, and I have to say the political indictments of the Left are quite sobering.

We're living in collective PTSD time, and I sense that the author has received much influence from Albert Camus, the advocate of the entire European PTSD generation. Or perhaps both are influenced by their observations of Fascist history. Like Camus, Anis Shivani is compelled to say that his homeland is ugly and despicable, and state of reality we're in is ultimately unnormalizable (Camus would say the nature of big-R Reality itself can only be understood through our interaction with it, and this interaction is fundamentally big-A Absurd.) Like him, Shivani basically says we know what's right and good but we cannot exercise it -- that time has long passed and we can't return by means of nostalgia. Also like him, the author says maybe what we can do is to create things that are authentic, humane, good-natured, beautiful and moderate at individual, family and community levels -- or resist with full means while willingly embracing the inevitable punishment associated with the excess of justice. Those thoughts were now new then and are not new now.

What I found disturbing is the Manichean argument for "retreat" or "disengagement", whatever the author calls. It seems that the author thinks that The We can somehow disengage from The Them (which is evil). There lies the danger. There's no clear "We" vs "Them". Those identities are quite fluid and dangerous to play with. It is dangerous to deal with them in absolute terms. How can "we" be so absolutely sure of our "us-ness"?

And also, why should America be left to burn? If America goes down, we go down together.

So while I can feel for the author's moral sentiments, I find this unsettling and inconsistent. By all means, I agree that we should act small and local, and protect our fellow human beings, especially the weak and the children. We must prepare our children for a harsh world in which they must resist evil and make gentle the life of this world. Their moral sense-organ must be functional and muscles strong.

---

As dmh recalls Le Guin's story Omelas, I recall Philip K. Dick's VALIS:
The Empire never ended.
Such has happened, and will happen again.

The same PKD also said the following, in 1978:
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

The power of spurious realities battering at us today -- these deliberately manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realize, they can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them.
But the children were never really born immune, and especially not in this era of hyper-propaganda, hyper-control of society, and technocracy of terror. By all means, help the children.
posted by runcifex at 3:03 AM on March 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


The 1968 Republican party platform was significantly to the left, in most respects, of the 2016 Democratic party platform.

Well, as long as you're White, cis, heterosexual, and male . . . Sure!
posted by Anonymous at 7:01 PM on March 6, 2017


> Well, as long as you're White, cis, heterosexual, and male . . . Sure!

I am, at most, two of the above, and i've actually read the full text of both documents. I'm not trying to say the 1968 Republican platform was a marvel of leftism! It certainly wasn't! It's just that neither was the 2016 Democratic platform. By the standards of the rest of the world, the Democrats are a center-right party.
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:02 PM on March 6, 2017


By the standards of the rest of the world, the Democrats are a center-right party

Which has *nothing* to do with the relative liberalness of the two platforms.

Declaring that identity politics are somehow meaningless is a sleigh of hand trick used by the alt-left to delegitimize the Democrats. (Right now. Were the issues the Democrats addressed flipped, they'd be making the opposite argument. I'm not sure it's possible to argue that the system needs to be destroyed in good faith.) Identity politics matter.

Not to mention: of "the rest of the world," both China and Russia are oppressive, completely non-democratic regimes with policies towards LGBTQ people ranging from overt discrimination to violently oppressive. Many countries in Latin and South America have anti-abortion laws that effectively condone death in childbirth. Regardless of the laws in India and several other countries, the women I know who have lived there for awhile wouldn't have felt comfortable doing so alone -- sexual harassment is rampant.

Declaring the Democratic platform to be center-right, in other words, is only accurate if you pick and choose both the issues you care about and the other countries you want to compare us to.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 1:46 AM on March 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


Can "alt left" not be a thing we say here? It's a term that was invented by the right and amplified by Sean Hannity, and it's only ever used as a pejorative. People actually identify as alt right. That's an actual movement. "Alt left" is just a rhetorical device that was originally intended to deligitimize opposition to Trump as fringe extremism.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:39 AM on March 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


Alt left" is just a rhetorical device that was originally intended to deligitimize opposition to Trump as fringe extremism.

Would you like to propose another term? Frowner has objected to using the term "left" (broadly) as an insult, but we need a word for the sort of accelerationalist / destructive / both-sides-ism ideology that's pushed from some groups on the left. These people are real and (as with the alt-right) likely to punch seriously above their weight unless they're recognized as the problem they are.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:11 PM on March 7, 2017


we need a word for the sort of accelerationalist / destructive / both-sides-ism ideology

"the straw left"
posted by RogerB at 3:23 PM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


"2004 Nader voters"
posted by PMdixon at 3:26 PM on March 7, 2017


Are you suggesting these people don't exist? Because they totally do -- we saw them at work in the Stein voters this election cycle (and we've seen some of them here).
posted by steady-state strawberry at 7:44 PM on March 7, 2017


Yeah, see, I really don't know how much I want to propose a pejorative term that someone can use to broadly label the leftists they disagree with here on this site. That's the sort of thing that contributes to why I'm, you know, not all that into talking about politics with people anymore.

I should have removed this thread from my recent activity, sorry.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 8:37 PM on March 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


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