Oligarchy and the Death of Worlds

I’ve never met a leftist who “lean(s), in a functional sense, to the side of revanchist nationalism.” I know a lot of us American leftists get put in a box with a similar label when we have the bad manners to demand that our government not demolish other nations with autocratic governments that don’t toe the line, or when we express pleasure that the probability of world-ending nuclear conflict has been slightly lessened due to the inconsistently peaceable policies of our despicable president. Acting in political ways with a goal of keeping my government from doing war-like things is never an endorsement of the governments that they want to do war-like things to. The imperial state and media are usually the ones making the opposite argument: that the only moral choice is war, and any resistance is an endorsement of autocracy.

My goof that should read:

“The problem for the progressive left is that they cannot get past their obsessive commitment to identity politics and open borders ideology.”

A just, free, non-oligarchic world is presently not on offer, for whatever reason.

“for whatever reason”

dude

Charlie:

Disagree. The social ideology “espoused” is merely the oligarchy that represents a second ” con game that starts out with cotton candy for their True People” Looking at how they like to imprison poor blacks and use the rest of us for slave and cheap labor, they are just as racist and sexist as the parochial nationalists. They just dress it up with cotton candy and seek a mental prison anyone who disagrees with their hegemony.

Both forces naturally operate inside the same polity and inside the same institutions, and there is of course a lot of hypocrisy on all sides going around. And I agreed at the outset that both have destructive outcomes. However, it is not the case that the ideological distinction between the two is empty, and it is not the case that that distinction is of no consequence.

“for whatever reason”

dude

Dude, indeed. I have spent a great deal of time on this blog talking about the “whatever reason” in the past. And I see some of the responsibility residing with the would-be proponents of a non-oligarchic world. That is, I believe, and have argued many times, that they’ve made themselves weaker than they need to be, for exactly some of the reasons mentioned on this thread as motivation to side with Trump…

Greg T:

You are correct in that the lurch to nationalism does not guarantee a successful outcome. It doesn’t absolve people from organizing to achieve a leftist vision of equality of rights combined with economic justice, but it provides a chance, an opportunity, however slim, of achieving it. So this is the calculation; it is necessary to break something pernicious even if the immediate alternative is undesirable. This is the calculation Trump supporters make.

The wrecking-ball desire I understand, but not this belief that it provides a slim opportunity to achieve economic justice.

I’ll support whatever destroys the awful status quo–and take a chance with whatever follows.

Interesting, I was just reading about Iron Law of Oligarchy
> rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an “iron law” within any democratic organization as part of the “tactical and technical necessities” of organization
and Iron Law of Bureaucracy
> In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
which seems to be related to control systems
> Control system has to move faster than the system it controls.

Rule by any oligarchic elite in history seems to end only one way…by a war or revolution that destroys the wealth/power on which the elite depend. I’m not too hopeful about a different outcome.

The question I would pose then is this;

Would a resurgent left be more likely in the transnational neoliberal oligarchic model? If so, how?

Would a resurgent left be more likely in the transnational neoliberal oligarchic model? If so, how?

Maybe it depends on which side wants more to defend their lies, and is better at it?

Rolling up on seven billion people on a ball of rock that can barely sustain one, I can’t help but but what these conversations are moot (in the generally accepted vernacular). Entertaining, enlightening, but whatever or whomever thinks it’s in control cannot stop the migration.

Ask the Neanderthal.

We have to stop doing what we’re doing. It isn’t working.

I agree with Ten Bears. We have this false dichotomy between oligarchs/kleptocrats all of whom want to loot us, just in kabuki different ways. Meanwhile overpopulation and climate change will destroy the world we know and that includes the current ruling class of looters.

Our current world is a dead man walking. We can save parts of it. We cannot save it all. But given our rule by criminal classes, our failure to address these existential issues, and the closing window for meaningful action, the fate of even the best positioned parts is in doubt.

I agree with the perspective that ultimately much of this is besides the point and we need to focus on what desirable things can be saved in a collapsing system. The problem is that every industrial society is necessarily global even if it barricades itself against perceived outgroups or favours internal production. And not only in terms of environmental issues. Because of this, I have a hard time finding the “destroy the neoliberal globalist system via revanchist nationalism to bring on a left-wing economic renaissance” strategy.

@Mandos — Temporarily putting aside the rest of your argument (and all of it at present), I’m going to take the one part of your “rule by global corporate overlords is our best bet” that is at least somewhat compelling on the face of it and address that.

What, innocent bystanders may be wondering, is maybe the only thing ever said in support of letting the pro-globalism oligarchic corporate overlords have their “destroy all nations” way that I fully agree with?

That a global government would make mass-action to stave off environmental catastrophe MUCH easier. (and, by extension, any other sort of worldwide good action, I suppose, coz, well, yes.)

In theory, this is entirely true. Now is the time to point out that communism, libertarianism, and laissez faire economics all work really awesome in theory-land. So, let’s look at practice.

Have the current pro-globalization powers that thus far shown themselves to be benevolent environmental stewards? NO.

Have they shown even any inclination that they wish to do more than pay lip service (some of them) to such an issue? NO. Most emphatically, NO.

Is there anything in the great global TPP or recent actions of the WTO any hint that lends one to think this is forthcoming? NO.

One might even think they greatly desire to inhibit the any of the evil nationalists from taking any pro-environmental action that would inhibit the Overlords of Profit from extracting as much short-term profit as they might, environmental consequences be damned.

So, well, in response to the idea of siding with them because they are the better bet to stave off annihilation, NO.

(one might make similar civil rights arguments, based on past actions, whereas evil Western nationalism did appear to be groping towards some good things over the past few hundred years, admittedly in fits and starts and with much awfulness along the way, tho not so uniquely awful as its critics claim, and in fact not uniquely awful at all; and yes, I’m including all the more progressive attempts at things in South and Latin America, some of which would probably still be going strong and doing great but for the forces of oligarchic globalism )

I should have posted this earlier but Michael Lind explains the situation better than I can. He makes a good case for opposing the transnational elite. Lind puts the choices pretty starkly:

“One possibility is that there will be a cross-class compromise, embodied in a new class warfare constitution that allows working-class majorities at least partly and imperfectly to check the domination of the managerial minority. The updated class warfare constitution should be a virtual one, like those of the Western democracies from World War II until the end of the Cold War: an informal, extragovernmental, extraconstitutional system of institutions rooted in the autonomous private and public institutions of the working-class national majority, and providing the working class with greater collective bargaining power in employment and politics.

The other possibility, perhaps more likely, is that today’s class war will come to an end when the managerial minority, with its near-monopoly of wealth, political power, expertise, and media influence, completely and successfully represses the numerically greater but politically weaker working-class majority. If that is the case, the future North America and Europe may look a lot like Brazil and Mexico, with nepotistic oligarchies clustered in a few fashionable metropolitan areas but surrounded by a derelict, depopulated, and despised ‘hinterland.’ What Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)—with its managers in skyscrapers and its oppressed factory workers underground—was for the first industrial era, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013)—with its sybaritic elite in orbit and its desperate earthbound slum-dwellers—might prove to be for the second managerial era: a prophecy in the form of a nightmare.”

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/05/classless-utopia-versus-class-compromise/

This is why I think the transnational oligarchy must be opposed vigorously. The stakes are very high since due to technological advances we are possibly looking at either permanent cyberpunk dystopia or some kind of environmental or other catastrophe that brings everything to an end.

In the American context I don’t think Trump is the answer because he is clearly allied with the plutocratic Republicans even if he has disagreements with them on trade and immigration. But I have not seen any sign that the Democrats are going to be able to effectively combat our slide into oligarchy either. Lind is probably correct that a major new working-class movement will have to rise up in the future. It will probably include elements from both the populist left and populist right.

Ten Bears comes close; but nobody here has a clue.
Stop! Everything! Critically review the last 900 years!
If one truely understands they\’ll know where to start.
In a word…don\’t!

If we Americans want to save our Republic from the One Percent and their political puppets, we best be stepping it up ASAP.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/398195-alabama-based-league-of-the-south-launches-russian-language

Between many nations’ slide to the right and climate change, the opportunity for anything remotely resembling a ‘happy ending’ (my personal definition for now is not ending civilization or life on Earth) is rapidly diminishing. As a actual lefty Boomer, I have few illusions left about politics but campaigned for Bernie, joined the DSA and continue to campaign for local/regional/state Berniecrats as much as possible. May take up small-scale farming in retirement in a couple of years as a backstop.

@MontanaMaven — will try to look this up; have seen several films along those lines and they are usually pretty good (there’s one from a couple of years ago I wish I could warn everyone away from; w/Donald Sutherland, but can’t remember name; themes are fine but execution is HORRIBLE, despite some decent moments), or, as The Who said, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

We are running out of time/chances, and HAVE to do better than that, soon.

On the hopeful side, just in fairly recent history, I think the French Revolution produced a clearly definable difference for the better, with mostly positive long term ripple effects. And while I think there will be more argument on the “for better or worse scale” about these, both the American Revolution and the Cuban one produced massive long term changes from what came before (I’d say the Cuban was a positive, for which I’m waiting to be pilloried, and the American one was at least positive as far as system of government, though I think it’s impossible to predict exactly how things would have played out if it never happened so who knows on the better/worse; God knows Manifest Destiny was a horrible thing and we’ve had plenty of scumbuckets in charge through the years; at the same time, it was a system that oftimes worked much, much better than most of the alternatives), and until the global oligarchs fucked everything up, social democracy was doing an awesome job in Europe.

(I’m not getting into all the other more short term changes in various countries, and I know I’m leaving tons of things out, but suffice to say a LOT of revolutions and power shifts have changed things at least temporarily very greatly for either better or worse, so who’s in power and what sort of policies they implement does make a huge difference; it’s been a long while since I’ve studied any of this, but not every government is “on balance bad”, and some make substantial positive gains for most people and/or the environment)

A non-oligarchic order is never “on offer”.

This view buys into the binary either-or mode of politics. Despite the heavy lock-in of the 2 party system in the US, there are still alternatives. There are a great many non-competitive races where third parties and groundwork for undoing the worthless binary choice itself can and should be done.

But most importantly, if your highest priority is “beating the proto-fascists”, then your ONLY choice is for the one non-proto-fascist party to run the most electable candidates it has, which happen to also be anti-oligarchic. Per the polls. That is, if your actual priority is “beating the proto-fascists”. This is the fallacy the MSM falls into time and time again. I hope we don’t do it here.

Lastly, there is the possibility that we are already too far gone. That the leading “centrist-once-in-a-while-benevolent-oligarchic” party has burnt off so much of its once trustworthy image, that in a genuinely democratic system, the proto-fascists would actually win. This can happen and has elsewhere. The US isn’t so exceptional that it wouldn’t be the case here. All the conditions for it exist.

In this case, the argument would be whether or not it is justified to undermine a “fair” democatic contest for the greater good. That’s an interesting question, you can make a case both ways, but I’d say it is not. But lets say we’re going down the road where we are actually examining this question. That is, voters in favor of an authoritarian government have the upper hand, given the existing electoral rules. In such a case, would it be sensible to ADD to the power and legitimacy of the national security apparatus? This is what the Dem party is doing. It’s insane. What any “resistance” should be doing is *dismantling* or at least dialing back the power of the national security apparatus while there is time. Of appeasing voters who vote authoritarian on economic grounds, while there is time.

These issues supersede the “lesser of two evils” angle, which is false anyway, if you actually want an “electable candidate who can beat the proto-fascist”.

Blue State Red Guy’s theory is that the 1% are conspiring with Russia … against the near-hysterical and unanimous opposition of both political parties (leadership as well as rank-and-file), and the corporate media. How’s that cognitive dissonance working out?

One day you’ll notice that the ADL is the foreign interference that you’re hallucinating is Russia.

Uhmm … BlizzardOfOzzz … you still haven’t answered the question: are you one of those Alex Jones nutballs that believes those dead kids and teachers and grieving parents, first responders and members of the Sandy Hook community are crisis actors, that Sandy Hook was a “false flag”, and that those dead kids are not dead?

Post truth reporting is all the rage. Anderson Cooper should yowl like Alex Jones to up his reporter cred. I’d buy CNN supplements if they were guaranteed free of demons. Plus they’ll need the money to help pay for all those out of court settlements.

The Clinton-Obama-whatever wing will fall, clearing way for a new left-ish solution some places, more nationalist autocrats in others. Then there will be war between the two groupings. The new left-ish choice will be weaker and nebulous prior to the war, then will be increasingly well defined during the conflict.

I say “some form” of a world war because its not clear to me how the conflict(s) will play out with nukes in the mix.

The thought of any independent media, that isn’t controlled top-down by a tiny handful of oligarchs (what they call “truth” for some reason), just totally enrages many libs.

Gore Vidal said that Obama’s weak spot was being too impressed with the generals because he had no military experience of his own.

Here’s a good example of my main concern:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/25/methane-deathtrap-threatens-democracy/

I’d substitute “humanity” for “democracy” here – if our atmosphere warms suddenly like this article supposes, the Four Horsemen will ride across the planet and all politics will matter considerably less.

Yes, the notion of white nationalists hooking up worldwide a la Steve Bannon’s latest wet dream is frightening in the shorter term, but failure to address and cope with climate change is looking more and more like a fatal error on humanity’s part. (FYI we live in the American Midwest in a large ag state – large in acres, not in population – and thus are paying more attention to both climate change AND white nationalism which is becoming a greater problem post-election.)

Speaking of the Clintonian Neoliberal faction with its minor identity politics feints toward tolerance, multiculturalism (if toothless and meaningless symbolism, etc.), I had to enjoy the irony that Madelaine Albright just published a book simply titled “Fascism: A Warning.”

Yes, of course, the same Ms. Albright who stated of half a million dead Iraqi children due to economic sanctions (that harmed former US Ally Saddam Hussein not at all), “We think the price is worth it.” Well, alrighty then!! As Ian points out in a previous post, of course, not that a significant number of Americans care to the point of even noticing our endless slaughters of inconvenient brown people living on the other side of the planet.

And I think most people reading this blog know the reason we only get the 2 “choices” Mandos discusses is that that is all the political elites will allow; anything significantly different and their standard of living might symbolically be threatened. And that’s not allowed.

The two “choices” Mandos discussed are a bit like the game, “Good Cop, Bad Cop”. Sure, you are invited to think that dealing with the Good Cop is a “good” choice, that provides options that you don’t have with the Bad Cop. And, who knows? — the Good Cop and the Bad Cop themselves may not be faking it — you don’t have to assume that is part of the design; the Good Cop and the Bad Cop may sincerely embrace alternative philosophies of policing and interrogation based in differing worldviews and their own respective personal characters.

But, it is not a “real” choice for anyone down-ladder from the Cops, and by extension, from the perspective of anyone in much higher authority, they are complementary options. The Cops do not work for you, the Cops work for The Man.

The theory of democracy is that authority is held responsible to the popular will, or the possibility of popular protest, dissent, criticism and reform, by the relative ease with which mass movements and public opinion can organize within at least nominally democratic institutions. The goal is always to use the ballot (or the riot or the strike) to displace or discipline entrenched elites and structure institutions to be more responsive to the general public, more respectful of the general welfare, etc. The goal is always to get a better police chief who may put his thumb on the scale in favor of the Good Cop’s way of doing. Against this idealism, of course, is the experience of our times and the inevitable operation of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, mentioned in an earlier comment.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy, applied in a polity with an enduring democratic (small-c) constitution, is a theory of political anacyclosis. (Without the nominally democratic constitution, political anacyclosis will also continue, but maybe with more violence(?) and radical(?) change in institutions — a polity can be so resistant to reform that it becomes brittle.) That is, it implies, I think, political evolution that follows a cyclical path, punctuated by occasional crisis and regime changes with reform, reforms that (whatever their nature) erode and are corrupted by the never-ending operation of political ambition. In a caricature, we can imagine initial idealism or prudence in the moment when new institutional designs are brought into being giving way, with the passing of generations, to cynicism and corruption, as power inevitably slips upward in the hierarchy and the ephemeral solidarity felt by a mass of people in a moment of revolutionary crisis dissipates. In human affairs, real political permanence is almost an illusion and political change of a fundamental nature has to be reinforced and re-enacted over the course of generations.

That is a long-winded way of expressing my impatience with political ideologies that look to a millenial end of history, or hope to institute reforms that will somehow magically turn into an automatic, self-driving utopia. And, also my impatience with those for whom progress is always and everywhere an illusion and nothing ever changes as the new boss is always just as bad as the old boss, etc. I won’t say anymore all those lines.

My problem with what Mandos wrote — the part that frankly horrifies me — is that he apparently prefers what he regards as The Good Cop (the face of the supposedly liberal-minded, internationalist Oligarchy) and in this preference, treats the left impulse to escape this false choice as the enemy.

The American liberal/mainstream Democrat critique of the movements behind Bernie Sanders, etc., is . . .: that it’s clear that many people — some of them who consider themselves to be on the left in some sense — would prefer to stab American liberal causes in the eye and allow wide-ranging, global-scale illiberal victories, rather than accept that there is currently a choice between a more liberal-minded capitalist oligarchy and a violent nationalist crony capitalism.

Good Cop, Bad Cop — that is the choice on offer, “for whatever reason” and resistance is not only futile but counter-productive and blameworthy.

There are a number of reasons to despise this argument, but I do not propose to rant about it — some ranting is inevitable given my feelings, but I will try to restrain myself. I would, instead, offer a few observations of a meta-nature on how Mandos’s argument works.

First of all, it side-steps what I would take to be the defining nature of “the left” as a political impulse: that is, that the left from age to age, always seeks to represent the general good of the masses against the (self-interested) elite, the slaves against the masters, the working class against the bosses and the capitalists, the excluded against the privileged and seeks to alleviate oppression by means to establishing the operation of universal principles in place of particular privilege.

Say what you like about the personalities or the program, the critical thing about Sanders to me is that he deliberately and in principle sought to finance his candidacy and movement exclusively from small-dollar donations. If you want a politics of your own, you have to be willing to pay for it. This is so fundamental I should not have to explain it, but for many Barack Obama / Hillary Clinton fans and voters, loyalists to the Democratic establishment — . . . well, they are delusional if they think the Democratic establishment isn’t run for the benefit of its owners, who are definitely not the Democratic electoral base.

It is particularly telling for me that Mandos so heavily discounts the scandal revealed by Wikileaks disclosure of DNC emails: “I don’t personally believe the emails had much to do with anything.” Just to remind everyone briefly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken control of the official national Democratic Party, compelled it to favor Clinton’s primary campaign in contravention of the nominal Party rules requiring institutional neutrality and hijacked the Party fund-raising apparatus to circumvent campaign finance laws, draining the Party of funds and channeling all those funds to Clinton’s own campaign, at the expense of all other national and State Party activity on behalf of candidates for lower office, while focusing fund-raising on very, very large donors. In crude terms, Clinton made it very clear, who she wanted to own her candidacy. Mandos dismisses all this as ephemeral — and that he does so, exposes a structure to his argument to which readers here ought to attend.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy has been at work in American politics for a long, long time and both Parties have moved away from their once relatively broad bases of electoral support as they have grown dependent on finance from business corporations and massively wealthy individuals. The apparatchiks of the Parties feed on the funds and the fundraising and the top-down manipulation of the public those funds finance. If you think multi-millionaire Rachel Maddow is a truth-telling, idealistic intellectual, you have been captured by the Borg — being of an advanced age, I know quite a few people personally who suffer from this syndrome (– it is not that different as a disease than being a fan of, say, Sean Hannity).

I said, I would not rant, and I can see I am not keeping the promise very well. My meta-point is simply that all the institutions that might serve as a foundation for a left have been eroded away or bought by the oligarchs. See Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class, or Thomas Franks, Listen, Liberal.

To me, there is no Left that does not seek in some wise to organize the 90% politically to oppose and restrain the 0.1% and their well-paid minions among the the professional and managerial classes, the 9.9% (like lambert strether, i find this statistical caricature a useful thumbnail sketch)

Mandos has used his rant against nationalism, a rant so extreme and broad in its implicit principles and characterizations, as a prophylactic against pretty much any sort of politics of mass organization. In Mandos’ political philosophy, it seems to me there can be no Left, left. The people the left would be organizing from among the 90% are, in Hillary’s immortal turn of phrase, deplorable and must be rejected out of hand. The only responsible thing is to embrace the Good Cop, to ensure that the Populist Demagogue does not use the restless dissatisfaction of the masses to displace the Bad Cop with the Worse Cop, or something.

I would not deny that any effort to politically organize the 90% to check the unrestrained power of the mega-rich or giant multinational business corporations involves some accomodation with the political psychology of what might be called authoritarian followers. (There is a valuable social psychology literature on both authoritarian followers and the social dominance orientation of demagogues — it really can improve one’s understanding of politics.) In the hands of ruthless demagogues, that psychology can be exploited to produce political fascism, as was demonstrated in the 1920s and 1930s. A soi disant Left drawn from the professional and managerial classes of university educated folks and aspiring to the intellectual chatter and personal status and financial independence of even subaltern leadership positions can feel alienated from that psychology, prone as it may be to anti-intellectualism, suspicion of out-groups and so on. To which, I say, a genuine Left committed to democracy has to get over their self-regarding narcissism and compete against the right-wing demagogues — that is just the way it is. It can be done, it has been done by figures as disparate as Harry Bridges and Martin Luther King and FDR.

Another meta-level point I would make about Mandos’ argument and the casual way it justifies punching Left at Sanders and the impulse Sanders represents is that it lets centrist (neo)liberals off the hook, relieves them of responsibility for the substantive consequences of their policy advocacy cum acquiescence. I am sure Mandos feels he’s done plenty of criticism of the Obama/Clinton Democratic establishment and its policy choices. But, he’s willing to abandon that critique given the latest turn in the weathervane toward Trump. That was then, this is now, or something — he thinks he’s adapting to circumstances, responding to the most immediate threat, blah blah.

The thing is, if you lack an anchor to your politics, you do get turned around. As he observed in his earlier post,

In a weird twist of fate, American liberals and (some) leftists are finding themselves . . . sid[ing] . . . openly with what was traditionally considered a very reactionary part of the US security and foreign policy state.

In Mandos’s argument, this “weird twist of fate” is not evidence of moral vacuity and a lack of vision or sense of responsibility — the diagnosis that pops to my mind when I gaze on the banal face of Hillary Clinton’s groundless self-regard — but reflects a High Moral Purpose, a willingness to sacrifice for High Principle in a way that trumps mere “survival”. “Peace at any Price?”, Mandos seems to huff, “no way!” I am sorry, but this is grandiose virtue signalling at best and just silly at worst. And, that’s to overlook the tendentiousness of a narrative that starts out attributing a dovish position to mainstream Democrats that they have not embraced in the living memory of anyone under 40+, as well as very real restraint advocated in the past by self-identified conservatives. Stripped of the nationalist taint that Mandos affects to find so repulsive that he is willing to sacrifice survival itself, the foreign policy preferences of a Patrick Buchanan don’t look so bad to me, in comparison to Obama or Hillary Clinton multiplying wars and instituting a disposition matrix or bombing Libya into near-total chaos. Politics makes strange bedfellows, they say, but I think I could sooner justify being in bed with Buchanan than James Clapper or Robert Mueller — do I need to tell anyone about scorpions?

I might be more sympathetic to a “enemy of my enemy, an ally” argument, if Mandos could spare me the false righteousness. If you are standing up with Madeleine Albright, of 500,000 children is a price worth paying fame, as another commenter observed, your political calculation isn’t saving a principle, or even a faint wisp of a shadow of one — what you are doing is dressing up your passive acquiescence as a pretense of virtue.

I said I was going to forego the rant, and then i ranted anyway. I cannot help myself apparently. Dispassionate is not so easy and where a Mandos post is concerned, sarcasm is really hard to avoid. But, I do not bear Mandos no personal ill-will. I am confident that I cannot change his mind, though his mind may change without my help soon enough, open-minded as he is to every passing breeze.

I wanted to write an extended comment, because I wanted to say something about becoming self-aware about the consequences of the political arguments we take up or put down, while swimming in the stream of the political narratives of the day, as broadcast in corporate Media and distributed as memes in corporate social media. I see justifications for punching Left at Sanders or the political impulse he represents that bear a resemblance to Mandos’ argument here as being quite common in the left’s political discourse. I don’t see civil rights or respect for sexual or racial or religious identities as somehow naturally opposed to concern to reform the institutions that give us extreme inequality of income and wealth, but I do see mass-membership organization of political movements as being basic to the ability to push back effectively against unrestrained oligarchic domination. There is something suspect about a concept of political identity that is so abstract and atomistic that it does not permit organization of concerted action, but does furnish a rhetoric of righteous hostility and cynical narrative critique to be deployed against policy reform from the popular left, but not against the oligarchs and their minions.

The weakest aspect of Mandos’ argument, from the earlier post, is his attribution of even a shadow of sincerity to the liberal Democratic establishment. Political media is chock full of propaganda narratives, chosen for their manipulative potential more than their content. Trump seems to say whatever floats thru his consciousness, whatever he senses might get attention and a reaction from his audience. In that respect, he’s just a purer version of the propaganda conduits called politicians, who carefully straddle a line between the rhetorical symbolism that will motivate (or de-motivate) an electoral base while preserving the ability to deliver policy to a (narrow) donor-base. A lot of ordinary people find the conventional banality imposed on the rhetoric of Democratic politicians like Clinton, as they try to balance over this straddle, to be both boring and frequently baffling. More politically aware folks have to be aware that the establishment Democrats have been ceding power steadily to the Republican Right for a decade, narrowing the electorate, spending big bucks to run blue dog losers, and so on, all to maintain this lucrative straddle. What they have been avoiding, refusing to harness, refusing to voice even, is mass dissatisfaction over the quality of governance: wars that never end, deteriorating infrastructure, declining life expectancy, declining economic prospects for the young. And, these are the Good Cops!!!

I have run out of steam. I will leave it at that.

Bruce: first of all, I would like genuinely to thank you for that response, as it made many things about your thinking clear to me. You’re right that it did not change my mind — as I do not expect to change yours, and never have so expected! — but it is a powerful and very lucid clarification of the very points and interpretations of the world I disagree with. I even appreciate (really!) that despite your obvious passionate rejection of my opinions, you manage only to emit at most one or two things that could be construed as personal attacks, such as implying that I am a weathervane.

But: you get very many things wrong. I would like to at some point go into great detail, but it was a very long post with a number of turns that don’t work, logically, politically, or factually. I can only deal with a small amount of it at the very moment, due to real-world commitments.

For example, I don’t agree with your analogy of a choice between Good Cop/Bad Cop and attempts to escape from the dichotomy. If we accept for the sake of argument the mere minimal analogy that the two choices represent a Good Cop/Bad Cop distinction (not sure even if *that* analogy goes through plausibly), I am totally in favour of attempts at escaping it.

But why does every attempt so far (of the kind that, I think, you’re referring to) at escaping the Good Cop/Bad Cop game look suspiciously like capitulation to the Bad Cop to little benefit? We’ve been around this mulberry bush many times now; capitulation to the Bad Cop has not sent away the Good Cop or shown us the exit. I suppose you could see the rise of DSA and the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez phenomenon as being a turn only possible by the defeat of Clinton. Even if that were true, it definitely remains to be seen whether this will bear a fruit that even begins to offset what the very election of Trump has wrought, let alone his policy choices. The Bad Cop maximizes the value of each capitulation to it.

I have given my views in the past of how to harness the Good Cop (again, allowing this analogy for the sake of argument), particularly during the Obamacare debate, I won’t recapitulate them here due, again, to time constraints.

On the matter of Buchanan, well, I understand the attraction of a politician anywhere on the political spectrum with a non-interventionist foreign policy viewpoint. But your hypothetical stripping of Buchananism of its retrograde elements is just that, a hypothetical. In reality, the non-interventionist part is an outgrowth of the retrograde parts, not the other way around. Can you have a progressive non-interventionism? Of course. Can you have one while allying with Pat Buchanan? Not without sacrificing the progressive part.

It’s pretty difficult to have a conversation with people who can’t even agree to basic facts about what happened with the Arab Spring, the Libyan, Syrian, and Egyptian Revolutions, and their respective counter-revolutions. First, as I have said repeatedly and will do so again: I opposed militarily intervening in all of these conflicts, and I believe pressure can be brought to bear by other means. The question is political will to make use of those means, knowing that The Powers That Be aren’t going to like it. They like the status quo and would prefer Brown People under the thumb of a dictator since they’re easier to control than change. However, if you can’t even accept reality of what was actually happening on the ground, how are you to respond with any kind of foreign policy prescription at all? If your response to any extermination campaign on behalf of dictators is to “do nothing,” then your policy is Buhananism. You’d be holding the signs “make peace with Hitler because he never attacked us on our soil”. It’s blood and soil politics, but with a veneer of “anti-imperialism” — as if imperialist dictators are anti-imperialist themselves. Of course, we intervened in many ways that you might agree with, such as placing an arms embargo so that rebels had no access to anti-aircraft weapons, left defenseless. That’s your foreign policy. Might makes right.

In any case, it was not me who told the people to rise up against dictators, and it wasn’t my choice — or America or Russia or Europe, or their political elite — to make. They made the choice. They sacrificed the blood. This is in stark contrast with the Iraq War, where we invaded and occupied their land against their will. Yet here you are, slandering and lying about what happened, blaming the Israeli government and the US, even though it is Assad who has killed the bulk of the civilians. That is to be expected: he has an Air Force. A lot of this Revolution was set off by another catalyst that we have decided to be out of our control, and that’s the rapidly changing climate. What, you think there’s going to be “stability” in light of all this? And when there’s not, and people begin to get restless, dictators have the right to shoot protestors who revolt? How is this a “left” politics in any sense of the word? What’s your prescription when the climate refugee crisis accelerates? Turrets on our borders? Was it “intervention” when Europe and Italy contracted military death squads to Gaddafi so he could “control” the border? We were intervening, but to prop him up to keep out undesirables.

When the revolutions that you have been clamoring for are happening, it’s all a conspiracy concocted by the West. The revolution was being televised all over social media, and instead it was just be slandered and lied about. I can only hope it’s simply a coping mechanism since otherwise it’s to knowingly advocate for mass slaughter.

@Bruce Wilder — ::applause::

Nothing else really to say. Not sure whether we agree on all the details of everything, but close enough. Thanks for taking the time to write this.

We’ve been around this mulberry bush many times now; capitulation to the Bad Cop has not sent away the Good Cop or shown us the exit.

As Nihil pointed out, capitulation to the good cop hasn’t worked out so well either. (and, obviously, many of us would disagree about whether rejecting both equates to capitulating to either cop; I had plenty of arguments w/both Trump & HRC supporters in the lead-up to 2016 about my refusal to support either; still stand by my decision and feel better about it all the time, and in hindsight think your “bad cop” has been a slightly better result–despite massive awfulness–than your “good cop”, at least thus far). Obviously, what HRC would have done is conjecture, other than signing the TPP asap, but she–and both the D & R mainstream types–scare the fuck out of me on foreign policy. No, no one wants a nuclear war w/Russia, but I think they are overestimating their ability to keep a hot war w/someone who can actually fight back and has lots of nukes contained within their expected limits, and the vast lot of them clearly, imo, DO want a “small, limited” hot war w/Russia, either for profiteering or because they think this is no different than picking a fight w/Iraq or Syria or Libya (i.e. I think these people are dangerous nuts), and failing that, at least want more pointless wars in the middle east or wherever they can find one. Between these things and the TPP, really, really hard for Trump to do worse (tho on several fronts he appears to be trying)

I suppose you could see the rise of DSA and the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez phenomenon as being a turn only possible by the defeat of Clinton.

Nah, had Clinton not cheated Bernie out of the nom, we’d have President Sanders and even more Ocasio-Cortez types. But we’re supposed to pretend that didn’t happen or was minimal, just like we’re supposed to pretend that a few bots somehow made a significant difference in the last election.

Granted, Clinton losing MIGHT make them rethink the whole “massive blatant cheating” thing. Almost certainly not, based on what we’ve seen so far, but on the positive, their supporters have become so convinced Putin hacked the voting machines that they have joined the called for hand-counted, hand-marked paper ballots, ideally w/mechanisms in place to keep them from getting “lost”. And that would be a huge positive development.

And Clinton winning would have meant “Ha! We can cheat w/impunity whenever we want and no one will care!” And thus we would have oligarchs locked into the election winning forever and ever, and violence the only recourse. I’m happy to have avoided that.

Even if that were true, it definitely remains to be seen whether this will bear a fruit that even begins to offset what the very election of Trump has wrought,

Driving the establishment types and the sadly huge % of people who they successfully manipulate batshit crazy? Remains to be seen what ultimate effects from this, tho they could wind up being negative beyond the mental health of the people directly affected.

The “rise of white nationalism”? As far as I can tell, this has almost nothing to do w/Trump and LOTS to do w/the avalanche of free publicity the media keeps giving people who’ve been here since the 70’s, who most of us successfully ignored, and who had zero impact on the public at large. They are still tiny, albeit larger, and again ignore their entire new celebrity to mainstream media who have picked them as the new demon and tried to make it look like “oppose establishment=be a racist”. Again, in the larger scheme of things, relatively minimal consequences thus far.

That Trump’s election might be used to demonize ALL non-establishment types? Well, the establishment types are certainly trying, but at least so far appear to have failed.

Loss of decorum in the white house? WHO CARES????

let alone his policy choices.

Here we agree. Most of them suck (tho many of these are not unique to him, and the things he gets pilloried the worst for are usually not that different from his predecessors or arguably good, such as not invading and bombing and chest-thumping adequately), tho the worst of them are not things our establishment cares about and often even come around to his side on (see: anything related to women’s bodily autonomy & reproductive freedom, or animals or the environment or the long term habitability of the planet)

The Bad Cop maximizes the value of each capitulation to it.

Yes. We agree. Yet The Good Cop never does, at least not in a way that anyone sees value.I think there’s a lesson about “The Good Cop” here.

Hopefully not dumb question. If the hypothetical democratic socialists did gain popularity and some sort of hegemony at least in DC, how could “Good Cop, Bad Cop” sabotage their efforts?

@Mandos? I assume your first paragraph is describing a point of view you disagree with? At least for practical purposes, I think it has a lot more validity than you give it credit for, regardless of whether it’s an exact match, which I don’t think BW was trying for, anyway.

The cops aren’t two agents serving a master exterior to themselves, they represent together a complex, bifurcated system with a number of feedback systems, and a series of intentional agents acting within the system, some of which, of course, have more power than others, much more power.

I both entirely agree with you here and somewhat disagree, depending yet again on interpretation. Competing oligarchic visions of what they want the world to be like, none of them serving any master other than their own comfort/profit/status seeking? Yes. Entire agreement. (this is where I like my “giant evil gods” Cthulhu Mythos metaphor, but that has the disadvantage of most people probably not having a clue what I’m on about; good cop/bad cop is universally understood, and is correct insofar as both are trying to screw you over, just one is being superficially–and perhaps really–nicer about it)

But . . . The establishment of both parties serving the oligarchs who give them money (i.e. an agent–or loose coalition of diverse agents–other than themselves)? That’s where the good cop/bad cop comes in. (and if you are a believer in either the one of the more powerful and single-minded versions of the deep state or one set of oligarchs running amok, then you got the cop analogy down).

I kinda view it as a mix of these things, and don’t really care which someone runs with, since however you characterize the current powers that be, I want a new and better set.

I think this is ultimately where everyone from me to Bruce to Hugh to Sean Brennan to Che Pasa to Different Clue to Nihil to Reality Checker (hi! are you still around?) to Wendy to Ten Bears to Herman to Stewart to whoever I left out will strongly disagree with you — none of us view the current neoliberal oligarchy Democratic Blairite establishment, or the WTO or what have you, as a good option to side with except in very specific circumstances, or see them as provide an adequate long term outcome. The lot of us disagree vehemently on many things, but not on this.

This moral outlook, represented heavily in a certain kind of left-wing discourse, grounds itself in the sort of ultra-anti-consequentialism that I mentioned in the recent past — that the morality of the ends has no effect on the morality of the means, and that the highest moral value is non-compliance with any kind of hegemonic system, including instrumental compliance.

Here’s where I think you are being completely unfair to BW’s argument, to a really extreme degree. I am familiar w/the kind of thinking you are talking about and loathe it, to the point of wondering whether some of the people who sound like that are in fact deliberately diverting–or trying to divert–energy for change into hopelessness or futile and pointless posturing. Not all, I know; some people just take anti-authoritarianism to counterproductive ends w/out really thinking it through. But that doesn’t strike me as AT ALL what is going on here. He is, I think, being VERY consequentialist in his thinking. The difference of opinion is that you and he WILDLY disagree on the likely set of consequences to two different courses of action.

Not only is it an outrage that I refuse to consider the overthrow of the false choice of the Good Cop and the Bad Cop, it is a further outrage that I identify that overthrow with its actual, observed, repeated functional outcome, the further maximization of the Bad Cop’s bad behaviour.

Not at all what I see him as saying. The problem is that NO ONE HAS OVERTHROWN ANYONE yet. Some people thought Trump might’ve overthrown the bad cop and given us a new one, but on domestic policy he’s given us a worse bad cop (whilst giving us a slightly better one on trade and a much better one, imo, as far as not having invaded anyone new yet or stepped up the warfare in other places as much as had been previously on order).

Bernie was really the populist Trump pretended to be, but your “good cop” and its enablers successfully kept him out (and, in case you haven’t noticed, are trying as hard as they can to prevent any further such encroaches on what they perceive as their rightful rulership, and co-opt as many of the interlopers as they can).

Meanwhile, what is the good cop offering in its place? (if you don’t like the cop metaphor, please assign a Lovecraftian pantheon name to the good and bad cop, respectively; I will happily roll with whatever you prefer) Everything will still keep getting worse, but slower.

GEE, WHY DOES NO ONE WANT TO SUPPORT THIS? (barring people who think the GOP are treasonous racist agents of the great overlord Putin and must be stopped or the US will turn into a nation of cross burning KGB assets out to slaughter all minorities and establish Gilead where the US used to be; sadly I’m actually friends w/people who think something akin to this and its really not much of an exaggeration)

What we are all arguing, from somewhat different points of view, is that your preferred team ain’t getting it done, and clearly are learning nothing and do not have our best interests at heart; and telling us that Cersei is worse than Tywin and somewhere out there Ramsay Bolton is lurking is not sufficient reason to back Tywin Lannister; we’re holding out for the Starks or the Targaraens; if they’re not on offer now we’re going to keep trying till we get them.

My groggy self just woke up, failed to go back to sleep, and whilst trying, realized this entire argument can be boiled down to the following:

Both of the options Mandos says are “on offer” are actively and with great determination pursuing policies that are killing the entire biosphere and making life increasingly miserable for the great majority of its inhabitants in order to benefit a very few.

Neither are going to change the core of their policies unless persuaded by, at the very minimum, overthrow of their preferred candidates at the ballot box (hopefully naught more is needed).

Each of these “on offer” options wishes to convince its voters that it is the “good” side, that will, ultimately, make things better (or, in the case of whoever is in power at the moment, to convince people that it actually is making things better). Failing that, each side would like people to conclude nothing can be done to provide better options so why waste your time/energy trying.

Mandos appears to have bought into the “pick the appropriately virtue signalling evil or you are baaaaaad, as opposed to those who support the good virtue signalling evil” paradigm.

I’m not even trying to be snarky or use hyperbole here. That is literally and actually how I see it (or, alternately, that Mandos knows better and is just trying to persuade others of what strikes me as an absolutely ludicrous position, basically, a more intellectual and nuanced alternative to “Russia!Russia!Russia!” but he once asked us to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is making all his arguments in good faith, and I have endeavored to do so)

From my point of view, this is liking asking the lab animals to thank the less sadistic of the people experimenting on them and don’t bother looking for a way out or a chance to bite. Just accept that you are going to be tortured, possibly to death, and appreciate the nicer torturers.

Or, w/regards to climate change, thank the person offering you a small cup of water to put out the raging fire and be very appreciate that they are not like the nutjob pretending the fire doesn’t exist and wants to demonstrate this by handing you a can of gasoline.

No.

If anacyclosis is all there is, can we just skip the step of ochlocracy? It sounds nasty.

There’s actually an Institute for Anacyclosis out there. I’ll try to direct my Trumpian conservative friends to that place. But they’ll need to be able to properly pronounce the term first.

@Mandos

Good.

Let’s not mar a moment of clarity, by immediately creating a strawman: I would say “a” dynamic, not “the” dynamic. It is, as they say, complicated, eh?

Hopefully, we will have an opportunity to revisit this analysis.