(MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST)
The reaction to my previous post was very gratifying in the sense that it sparked off a discussion in the comments touching on hitherto little-asked questions of moral priorities in a time of increasing global political crisis. More interestingly, it also helped point out places where we don’t necessarily even agree on important terms and definitions — I am particularly thinking about a part of the discussion that veered off into analyzing the material consequences of oligarchy, capitalist or otherwise, but it turned out we didn’t all seem to agree on what oligarchy was, who oligarchs are, and so on.
So let me take the opportunity to cast my own light on what the choices are, overall, in terms of real and possible oligarchies. There are, at a global level, two “mainstream” forms of hegemonic politics, each with their own oligarchical backing. One of these is the Clintonian-Merkelist-Obamist-Sorosian politics that is a confluence of at least overt social-liberalism and a variety of economic neoliberalism. The other one is a Trumpian-Putinian-Bannonite-Orbánist instrumentalization of parochial nationalism. The former represents an oligarchic politics, democratically unrestrained trans-national capitalism, that has the potential to do great harm to the world if left unchecked. The latter represents a con game that starts out with cotton candy for the True People and eventually ends up with states under the control of local and not-so-local looters who instrumentalize nationalist conflict for crony enrichment — this too, is oligarchy.
(This is Fascism 101: There are a small number of people who genuinely support exclusivist nationalism who, if they play their cards well right now, will be able to briefly experience that special, depraved feeling of being able to surround yourself with your imagined extended flesh and blood like a warm blanket, as the “antibodies” of the national immune system destroy the lives of the unwanted. Everyone else, even the True People, will be sucked dry and converted into feudal peons.)
Both of these options are bad. The problem is that they are the only ones currently on offer, in the sense that they have a significant quantity of “boots on the ground” — two sorts of oligarchy. If you’re a genuine supporter of “ethno-states” or revanchist nationalisms or whatever, you will naturally ignore my warning and happily choose the latter option. It’s what seems closest to what you want. If you’re not in that category, things become a lot harder. The transnationalist oligarchy espouses a social ideology that is, at least at the level of words and aspirations, less noxious, but wrapped in a lethal package.
What seems to be the case, however, is that some people on the left of the spectrum, who nevertheless have understandable reasons to object to the neoliberal hegemony, have a tendency to lean, in a functional sense, to the side of revanchist nationalism. And this form of nationalism gains increasing power (due to the known failures of the major alternative), it seems tempting to make it out to be the real alternative, or at least the only one that will break the grey monotony of neoliberal choicelessness.
I see a few ways to understand this in terms of desired outcomes. One is that only when the Clinton-Merkel-Soros-Whatever worldview is defeated, will space be returned once again to better, hegemonic left-wing progressive politics. Precisely how this is to proceed when the entire world is under the control of nationalist autocracies, I am not entirely sure. Another is that only the revanchist nationalists have the means to save the world already, because only revanchist nationalists can make peace with other revanchist nationalists, due to ideological affinity. The problem is that is that everyone now has to live under nationalist autocracies.
This seems like a pretty lose-lose situation to me; the nature of nationalist autocracies is that even if they make peace now, we can’t trust that the irredentism they encourage won’t lead to nuclear war and world annihilation anyway. But if you don’t want to support the other, Clintonian hegemony, not least because it ends up leading to much the same places, you don’t have many other alternatives. A just, free, non-oligarchic world is presently not on offer, for whatever reason.
scarno
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.
Herman
Some people on the left lean on the nationalist side because the neoliberals have been in the driver’s seat for decades. They are our Ancien Régime. We have been told to listen to the experts for decades now and it has brought working-class people nothing but misery. Also, the neoliberals are authoritarians too in that they want to shift political power away from national legislatures and governments to supranational bodies like the EU.
There is an alternative to neoliberalism and authoritarian nationalism. The current governing coalition of Italy is interesting because it combines soft nationalism (basically national sovereignty and border protection/immigration regulation which I guess is now considered “fascism” to some) with populism. For example the supposedly evil Italian government is cracking down on the deplorable gig economy.
https://www.neweurope.eu/article/italy-rolls-back-labour-market-deregulation-dignity-bill/
The problem for the progressive left is that they cannot get passed their obsessive commitment to identity politics and open borders ideology. You cannot have a high-wage welfare state and have open borders at the same time. The Western European social model is being stressed to the breaking point by the migration crisis and so nationalists and populists are winning while the open borders/identity left and the mainstream right suffer defeat after defeat.
The situation in the U.S. is not much better as the country is polarizing along racial and cultural lines. The kind of unifying left-populism that is supported by Bernie Sanders (who has correctly attacked open borders as a Koch brothers idea) looks to be on its way out in favor of the divisive open borders/identity politics of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Herman
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.”
Charlie
I’m glad you brought this up, because it does need to be discussed before alternatives can become mainstream. However, I will make two points that contradict your analysis.
The former represents an oligarchic politics, democratically unrestrained trans-national capitalism
The oligarchic social neoliberalism model is anything but democratic, as decisions that affect the globe are being made in faraway places with no democratic input.
Second point: “The transnationalist oligarchy espouses a social ideology that is, at least at the level of words and aspirations, less noxious, but wrapped in a lethal package.”
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.
bruce wilder
A just, free, non-oligarchic world is presently not on offer, for whatever reason.
“for whatever reason”
dude
Greg T
A very good post, Mandos.
I completely understand the gravitation toward Trump. The voters most victimized by the offshoring of production are his most fervent supporters. Clintonian-Merkel-Sorosian transnational neoliberalism is literally killing large segments of the population, here in the US and in much of Western Europe. Trump is a wrecking ball. His aim, and by extension his voters’ aim is to dismantle the globalist institutions that anchor the neoliberal order in place.
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.
Mandos
Charlie:
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.
Mandos
So I would like to avoid quibbling over “50 shades of oligarchy” and trying to discern minor differences in the fine-grained mechanics of how oligarchic hegemonies work. It’s extremely likely that e.g. Clintonian social liberalism is disingenuous and a con game and that any capitalist system depends on the exploitation of out-group labour (e.g. blacks in prison). However, the neoliberal complex doesn’t have an ideological axe to grind about there mere impurifying presence of members of other ethnocultural groups as neighbours.
Mandos
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…
Mandos
To expand on my response to Bruce, I have frequently criticized the desire of US leftists to make headway in electoral politics while simultaneously ignoring the underlying dynamics of said politics in the US electoral context. As the USA is the current hegemonic power (and continues to be, despite Trump!), this blind spot has been one of the key factors in the political ineffectiveness of the US left. Now a confluence of events has occurred as well as a new generation, so I (like Ian) am cautiously hopeful that a corner has been turned.
Mandos
Greg T:
The wrecking-ball desire I understand, but not this belief that it provides a slim opportunity to achieve economic justice.
Charlie
“I would like to avoid quibbling over “50 shades of oligarchy” and trying to discern minor differences in the fine-grained mechanics of how oligarchic hegemonies work. It’s extremely likely that e.g. Clintonian social liberalism is disingenuous and a con game and that any capitalist system depends on the exploitation of out-group labour (e.g. blacks in prison). However, the neoliberal complex doesn’t have an ideological axe to grind about there mere impurifying presence of members of other ethnocultural groups as neighbours.”
Don’t look at their words, look at their actions. By their fruits you shall know them.
Karl Kolchak
I’ll support whatever destroys the awful status quo–and take a chance with whatever follows.
ponderer
Well said. I think you are right that it is lose-lose. I noticed long ago the tendency of both neocons and Clintonian Democrats to fascists ideals, hero worship, and group think. I’m also cautiously optimistic that we’ve reached a turning point with a new generation. The stagnating economy has forced people to contemplate things they wouldn’t have otherwise. Watching your parents dig holes and then fill them up again for next to nothing, as sad as it is, may be the education they need.
brian
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.
Gunther Behn
Both models have two things in common — a relatively small number of persons at the top of a pyramid, who own and control and rule. And, corporations.
You may use different adverbs, but the end-state for both models is a mass of serfs, policed by security forces, all owned and manipulated to benefit a combination of corporations and Oligarchs.
That there seems no other alternative, and that one or the other Oligarch – Corporatist model is where humankind appears destined to end up (imagine Jared’s Prada loafer, stomping on a human face, forever) is enough to make a person pray for pandemics, miles-wide asteroids, or Gaia’s Revenge: Enough.
John
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.
Ché Pasa
Contemporary oligarchic control is the mirror image of the Progressive Era’s control by experts. Which in turn mirrored the Gilded Age’s control by robber barons. And so it goes, on and on and on.
The premise is preventing the Rabble from having more than a minor say (often not even that) in what governments and their sponsors do, and that will be the case no matter how a nation-state or empire is ostensibly organized.
After quite a bit of experience in these realms, it seems to me that it is not possible for large-scale polities to operate any other way.
On a small scale, that operating structure is not necessary — though it may be utilized. If it is, it is often the prelude to a small scale polity becoming a large-scale one, conquering or absorbing its less rigidly hierarchical neighbors.
Assuming that the United States won’t break up and that its imperial ambitions will continue in concert with the rest of the Anglo world, oligarchic control is essentially a given. The problem lies not with oligarchy itself so much as with the nature of the oligarchs and their class. They are truly vicious, cruel, and evil people (viz: Trump and his cronies) lacking in any sense of social responsibility — at least none that does not immediately benefit themselves.
Their vision, such as it is, focuses on their personal interests. Nothing else really matters.
Thus, for example, they can ignore (or only give lip service to) the problems of climate change, because they believe they are protected no matter what happens to the rest of us. What happens to the rest of us doesn’t matter to them anyway, regardless of the challenges. We, the Rabble, are expendable.
If there were some way to break the thrall most of the Rabble have for their Betters, who knows what would happen? Trump and his cronies are not breaking that thrall, they’re reinforcing it among their followers. They are not creating a new system, they are contending for power over the present system, and despite setbacks they are mostly succeeding — because what they want isn’t that much different what has gone before. Just more outrageous and criminal. And controlled by them as opposed to the weaklings of the “left.”
The “death of worlds?” That’s said to be inevitable, isn’t it? Nihilists long for it. Taking to the streets won’t stop it. Something has to happen to cause the oligarchs to change course, realize the errors of their ways, reform, take vows of poverty and chastity.
Margaret MacMillan has argued that what it took for the Anglo oligarchy/aristocracy and democracies was the utter devastation of the two twentieth century world wars. Is that (or worse) what’s necessary again? Is there no other way for them to learn?
Greg T
The question I would pose then is this;
Would a resurgent left be more likely in the transnational neoliberal oligarchic model? If so, how?
Willy
How does control by “experts” wind up as a disaster for common folk, as well as the earth itself?
Lies. Plausible, self-deceptive, rationalized, oft-repeated and then dogmatic. All these lies have to come from somewhere. I used to think advancing age brought about wisdom, and ways to discern lies. Maybe I was wrong. It may not be natural for everyone to become wiser. Most people seem to need to be told what wisdom even is. And I don’t think the real experts are (currently) in control.
Willy
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?
Willy
Re-read that, too vague, again.
A resurgent left means converts. They’re most likely to come from neoliberalism, liberalism, and independents, with a few conservatives and apathetics, who’ve had epiphanies after being hit hard by reality, who mostly don’t think they have anything to lose by offending their former allies.
Lies offering hope seem to be more influential than truth which offers fear. And for many, one guy who says that he’ll fix everything is easier than another guy who says we’ve gotta all get busy and do some hard work.
Ten Bears
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.
tawal
You left out the Kochtopus and the MIC guided Neeocons. In my opinion the People’s gravest enemies.
Hugh
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.
Mandos
Yes, but in a negative sense. There are several reasons for this. One of these is that the revanchist-nationalist model is always even more assiduous at rooting out left-wing elements than the transnational neoliberal model, because eliminating impurifying elements is the core of oligarchic nationalism/fascism. This is even the case when there is an early left-right cooperation on restoring access to social supports for the True People. (This is not to argue that neoliberals do not fight/purge the left, merely, that if the Bannonite right had a large enough majority, y’all would be on a bus to Mexico or somewhere, if you’re lucky!)
Another is that the nationalist right is not really serious about full protectionism in goods, but is firmly against labour movement and policy coordination. That is, they want to burn coal and have heavy industries, but you will still need large-scale trade in order to maintain the technological prosperity that they continue to want to offer consumers. Environmental consequences are still globalized and workers are eventually reduced to peons, after, as I mention in the post, a period of cotton candy for the True People. It is unlikely that any left-wing politics at a scale of consequence could be conducted in this environment.
Mandos
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.
Mojave Wolf
This is one of several posts I’ve seen from somewhat different points of view (though all leaning D and advising vote-D from a USian perspective) essentially saying that we must reconcile ourselves to a choice between being devoured by Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth, and one of these is much preferable to the other.*
On the good-for-Mandos side, he, as opposed to some/most of the people making this argument, does not argue that his preference between the two demonic entities who want to subjugate your soul is going to lead to a fair and just world if we just trust the giant multidimensional bat-winged tentacled squid monster over the indescribable multidimensional giant soul-eating mist. That the preferred side also eats souls should be ignored or denied in their view; Mandos acknowledges the soul-eating and likely world-ending destruction of his preference, but insists that getting your soul eaten by them will be lots more pleasant for most of us, and is a morally superior position in addition.
It will surprise no one who’s seen me comment in the last many years that I completely and utterly reject this argument, and find most of its premises to be distortions (tho much less distorted than the rah rah Dems of some people making similar arguments; at least he acknowledges that neither Cthulhu nor Yog-Sothoth is going to “save” you from the other).
Where he and I and most of this commentariat** all agree is that both sides suck. Where we massively disagree is what to do about it (and also who sucks worse and in what way).
I’m voting for people who seem to be at least *trying* to avoid capitulating to soul-sucking world destroyers and at least *trying* to find a path to avoid probable near-term extinction of most*** life forms on the planet, and minimize environmental destruction, and to make life as non-awful as possible for the humans living here. I may be pissed at Bernie over going along w/the OMGRussia! idiocy, and somewhat nervous about Ocasio-Cortez’s position on immigration (unlike Herman, who I mostly agree with, I don’t think she’s come down full out for open borders; if she did, I would have to reconsider some of my enthusiasm for her, but in general her desire to get big money out of politics and the hatred of the corporate elite on both sides for her would still incline me in her favor)
I would also like to note that, contrary to the prevailing “the other side is more fascist and will grind dissidents down harder” narrative by both Mandos and lefties, my real-life experience is quite diffeI don’t agree with ANY of you on everything, and IRL, it is MUCH easier to disagree with conservatives (including libertarians under the conservative heading here) on politics and still have a friendly conversation. The last time I pointed this out to a leftie talking about “fascists”, he responded by saying in what I would consider a shout that he was not shouting and and adding that the reason other people did shout at me (getting louder on the shouting spectrum as he went along) was because “we are educated and know what we’re talking about and they don’t!” This? Not convincing me that you are the more thoughtful, less fascist side. (see also: antifa, who as far as I can tell are full throated fascists in their opposition to anything they consider fascism, which as far as I can tell is anyone who disagrees with them on any of a number of things, some of which I happen to disagree with them on)(yes, I know, they are lefties, not Mandosian pro-centrists; like I said, I’m not really entirely on anyone’s side here, as everyone seems to have gone batshit crazy)
*the people making similar arguments for the R side are MUCH fewer, essentially limited to individuals in comments thread here, at NC & on twitter, and tend to be, as Mandos pointed out, more of the “wrecking ball to be overthrown later” variety. I.e. “if all probabilities lead to doom, choose the most chaotic route and hope something interesting happens.” I’m not quite that bleak in my own assessment, but it is vastly more appealing to me than “accept and help bring about Death by (Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth) because it will be slower and more pleasant than Death by (Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth) (I don’t even care which side makes a better metaphor here; they both fit the neolib vision better whereas the right wing is more like Death by Cloverfield Invasion, if we’re going the giant monster route, but again, I don’t want any of them)
**there seem to be a couple of people who think the either the mainstream dems or some variety of current right wing leadership are actually doing a pretty good job; y’all can ignore this comment coz we’re operating out of different paradigms, though I probably agree w/each side about some things
***and possibly not-that-far off all, tho I try not to think about those scenarios
Mojave Wolf
@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 )
Mojave Wolf
Ooops. Just went back and saw part of a paragraph disappeared.
The following: “I may be pissed at Bernie over going along w/the OMGRussia! idiocy, and somewhat nervous about Ocasio-Cortez’s position on immigration (unlike Herman, who I mostly agree with, I don’t think she’s come down full out for open borders; if she did, I would have to reconsider some of my enthusiasm for her, but in general her desire to get big money out of politics and the hatred of the corporate elite on both sides for her would still incline me in her favor)”
was supposed to finish with “but I nonetheless find them both far superior to any of the currently available alternatives.
Not lesser-evildom at all, just wanting someone to be basically decent in policy and preferably in character. Both of these are. Give me this wing of the dems, please, if you want a “can win” alternative.”
Herman
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.
someofparts
The point I take from that link is that we need to emphasize creating local grassroots structures. It sounds like that could/should include churches where lefties like me need to put aside our secular elitism and respect the power of existing faith communities to bring people together.
I guess overall I find that encouraging because local politics are still relatively responsive to activist efforts. In our current situation, it would be great to see local organizers coordinate nationally to push back against the efforts of the Koch brothers to turn state legislatures into tools of the oligarchy.
V
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!
V
I made some typo errors and got put in moderation?
WTF?
Blue Guy Red State
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
I like to recommend Visconti’s 1963 movie “The Leopard” in these discussions. One kind of governing power or way of life symbolized by The Prince is destroyed in revolution and from its ashes arise another bunch of autocrats. From Wikipedia: “The Prince muses upon the inevitability of change, with the middle class displacing the hereditary ruling class while on the surface everything remains the same. “ The Prince saw the truth that it was just the beginning of the same old same old. So let’s dance.
Mandos
Sorry, the automatic spamulation model does these things sometimes.
Mandos
This post got listed in a Naked Capitalism links post. Hi folks.
Anyway, MM made some great points I want to respond to, but it might take me a couple of days to get to it.
Mojave Wolf
@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)
Willy
Leadership is commonly defined as a tribal elder’s guidance and management of a group. But in modern reality it’s often where a player sees the direction the group is going in and runs in front and shouts: “Follow me!” (Worked for Obama and Trump but Hillary wasn’t so good at it). I don’t think most rabble know the difference. They unconsciously want to ascribe knowledge and wisdom to the guy who likes leading parades. And thus any old pharaoh gets to play Son of Ra.
Should Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Manly white men are progressive!’ schtick be revived? Is it possible for reasonably intelligent tough guys playing POTUS to not have international meddling tendencies?
I’m seeing that most modern conservatives are ignoring Schwarzenegger’s anti-Trump rants. Maybe photos from his flabby man days are burned into their brains. Since he’s back at it, maybe doing his videos shirtless (perhaps with minigun), would get them more traction. Of course Ahnold isn’t all that progressive, but he seems to have remembered enough of his naturalization test studies to have some patriotic cred.
I’d recommend Bernie work out, lose the glasses, look less the Brooklyn nebbish. Not sure what takes the place of the minigun. I don’t think a macho and empowered Bernie would make us all wear our underwear on the outside. At least Teddy didn’t.
Which leads to international meddling. Why is it wrong to call American meddling, Russian meddling, Iranian meddling, Chinese meddling, Hillary meddling… all at the different international meddlings, very risky and usually wrong for the rest of us? Sure, some of the official “leadership” meddlings were some kind of reasonable preventative action. But the sharply pulled errant string can ruin the fabric. Are we going to get better leaders only after we get better rabble? Does the rabble always all have to hit f’ing bottom first?
peteybee
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”.
Willy
Drain the swamp (as originally defined by Trump).
Make parties illegal so candidates must run on their own merits.
Force all candidates to compete in a political version of the NFL combine, including taking the Wonderlic (exemption from the bench press only allowed with a doctors note).
Bring back the Fairness Doctrine (Fox News might be allowed, but would have to change it’s name to Views).
Make all forms of covert manipulation (Cambridge Analytica, etc) illegal.
Make all foreign attempts at lobbying/influence transparent.
BlizzardOfOzzz
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.
Willy
Why is Trump so anti-Iran, yet so pro-Russia? War with one but peace with the other. Another POTUS might be more fair and balanced.
Both are plenty pissed at the US. Iran sponsors terrorists. Russians create chaos. One plays checkers, the other something more like chess.
Or maybe Iranians really are just browner?
Ten Bears
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?
BlizzardOfOzzz
Hey Ten Bears – I actually read up on it a bit, just for you. It seems the latest is that some families of the deceased are suing Alex Jones, who now says he has changed his mind and that the massacre was real. That’s good enough for me, I guess. Case closed, eh? Nice to have some positive evidence (of which, I will note, if it weren’t for Alex Jones, we still wouldn’t have any shred).
In general though, I do think that every single thing about the mass media is fake, that it is run by utterly depraved and evil people, in thrall to demons, whose goal is the damnation of as many human souls as possible. If CNN should have ever happened to broadcast a factually true statement, it’s only certain to have been by accident, or in service to a greater and more malicious lie.
Mandos
I have heard this since forever. It never pans out. Including politically. Even multi-party proportional representation systems tend to converge to two blocs, except during crisis moments (which is the merit of PR). At large enough scale, things coalesce in binaries. Binary or near-binary (think e) structures are efficient. Dualism is real. The wish that a structural third option will arise has come and gone several times since I started political bloggery. It won’t. At a global scale, there are two ideological blocs. Each bloc is really diverse. But there are two.
Mandos
So I’ll start taking a little bit of a stab at a response to Montanamaven’s contributions:
This is not *quite* my position. *Currently,* I am of two minds — one the one hand, that we are likely to have missed most/all opportunities to avoid a very large disaster or at least mitigate it, and on the other hand, I am hopeful that we are turning a sort of corner/inflection point, but that is for another post.
In the *past*, however, I have always taken the position that the thing we’re calling globalist neoliberalism or transnational capitalism or whatever, while bad and harmful, also contains opportunities that right-wing nationalism does not. My fundamental critique of the (what I like to call) “guns-and-butter” left, which in the past has been disproportionately represented in the commentariat, is that they were blind to those opportunities for needless reasons they perceived as being in keeping with an ethical stance to me was the worst and most illogical form of ideology — the ethics grounded in nothing they could easily articulate, or based on essentially useless nostrums. A sort of anti-consequentialism, the reverse of utilitarianism, where the morality of the ends had no effect on the morality of the means, and to suggest otherwise was to reveal oneself as irredeemably corrupt.
Concretely, it meant that using and considering the tools of political systems and modern mass media on their own terms, instead of being a necessity in a time of mass communication, was a nearly unthinkable idea, tainted beyond all recognition. (This is why I think things have improved: now we have Ocasio-Cortez talking about socialism on American TV, and organized structures, often staffed with very young people, who have much less compunction about these things.)
Back in those days, this blog and others had “guns-and-butterists” saying that the nastiness of the Republicans was a distraction that kept people voting for Democrats and preventing the rise of a third party. Now we have people arguing that far-right cutouts are in fact a better alternative than neoliberals, and that a return to a robust nation-state politics will produce better conditions for domestic workers. (Some of them, at least.) Like it was before the 70s.
I hate to break it to you, but nation-state social democracy was only a compromise to block the threat of…internationalist communism. It was never really the case that the nation-state was the guarantor of worker economic security. Without the threat of transnational worker solidarity, the new phase of nation-state social democracy won’t last long, if it even ever really happens.
So while I think the chances of pulling the chestnuts out of the fire are slim and getting even slimmer, I will still bet on globalism as a better vehicle for the left. And I will still blame the left—a previous generation, at least—for missing opportunities on its own. It’s not merely a matter of both versions of oligarchy being equally horrible, but one being a little more pleasant. It’s that, while bad, they really are different in the opportunities they present. Or were different.
Willy
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.
Jon Cloke
Too few writers are paying any attention to rootless, nationless, offshore transnational actors, so this is a welcome addition – I do however think you make a false binary here. Your ‘democratically unrestrained trans-national capitalism’ works to both the parochial nationalists as well as the neoliberals, depending on which is the most useful tool for getting what it wants done.
The discourse for a given set of actions is crafted to fit the project in hand; the justification for the war in Iraq, for instance, was melded from a peculiar mix of narratives. On the one hand, “Saddam has WMDs and represents a very real threat to Europe and global peace” spoke to the parochial self-interests of the Coalition of the Willing, but on the other hand “liberating Iraq from a murderous dictator and democramarketizing it, which will be paid for by Iraqi oil income” also speaks to your neoliberals…
The shifting alliances this creates are sometimes Frankensteinian in their complexity – the war in Syria was driven initially by the weakness of Obama in alliance with the old NeoCons such as Murdoch and Cheney, whose joint company owns oil exploration rights in the Golan Heights, granted illegally by the Israeli government and which it needs regime change to operationalize – add these actors to painting various jihadi groups including al-Qaeda-in-Syria as the ‘moderate opposition’ and you have a very evil, toxic mess indeed…
Increasingly these global elite alliances are acting through the optics of transnationally-owned media operations acting in concert with special operations sections of the advertising industry (WPP in South Africa is an example). The conflict in Syria, begun by Hollande to distract attention from France’s failing economy, perfectly exemplifies Bourdieu’s famous (1991) quote about the Gulf War: “The Gulf War is not really taking place” – there is no war going on in Syria, ‘just’ a transnationally-orchestrated massacre…
RobotPliers
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.
Mallam
No, actually, the war in Syria began when Bashar al Assad started shooting and murdering peaceful protestors. It fell into “total war” when the first jets dropped bombs on Yarmouk refugee camp in December 2012, accelerating further with mass gas attacks and barrel bombs in 2013.
Which perfectly encapsulates a lot of the thinking that is poisoning the left. In addition to the problems Mandos laid out with lots of “left” being stuck in their nation-state chauvinism which will lead us to global fascism (inevitably), the left has too many people fighting the “last war”. So stuck in past narratives about Vietnam and Iraq that everything that happens globally is being masterminded by elites, even as “the workers” are rising up to overthrow dictators! That’s who was involved in the Arab Spring; doctors, students, teachers. Libyan Revolution, the Egyptian Revolution, the Tunisian Revolution, and yes, the Syrian Revolution. It is to completely deny any agency to these people, to tell them that they are forever stuck with dictators, and if they rise up they will be slandered by parts of “the left” who should otherwise be expressing their solidarity. It’s Spain all over again, and Franco (Assad) has “won”. It’s no wonder so many are able to find common cause with the far right when their foreign policy looks no different than Pat Buchanan’s.
Bernie Sanders is giving me hope, though. He’s starting to hone in on foreign policy in a serious way that breaks from “realism”, paleo conservatism, and neo-conservatism/liberalism. There is no such thing as “socialism in one country”.
BlizzardOfOzzz
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.
steeleweed
Democratic Republicanism was established as an experiment. Maybe it’s time to admit that the experiment has failed. In fact, maybe it’s time to consider that homo sapiens sapiens is a “failed experiment”. Having discarded several thousand years of successful and truly communal living, we don’t seem to be doing anything right now.
someofparts
Gore Vidal said that Obama’s weak spot was being too impressed with the generals because he had no military experience of his own.
peteybee
@mandos
re: it will always boil down to two options
Look at Germany. Multi party system at work. France – their system still has “2” but it did a noticeable reshuffle. Israel has a working PR system in parliament, accurately reflecting the militarist beliefs taught to citizens from childhood. Look at the US Republican party – it experienced a non-trivial transformation by it’s tea party constituency. The D party has potential to to the same.
Maybe another way for me to get at what I want to get at, is how exactly is there a contradiction between supporting major reform of the “less-bad” half of the power structure, vs the desire to prevent toe “more-bad” half from gaining power? The contradiction is in the wishes of those who insist on maintaining the losing “less-bad” half in an unchanged state, where it (a) continues to still be bad in perpetuating inequalities, and (b) continues to lose ever more often, due to point (a).
The way out of a dilemma is not to give up.
Blue Guy Red State
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.)
Willy
Bliz, I don’t even know what a liberal is anymore.
What’s worse in media: conspiracy theory sensationalist independents, or an elite media claiming all ownership of credibility? Some think the former makes it too easy for the latter. Ideally, people would be able to scan everything/anything and then use the principles of logic to best deduce veracity for themselves.
Mark Level
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.
Hugh
Sort of on topic: the BEA’s report on second quarter GDP came out today. This is the part that caught my eye.
“Current-dollar personal income increased $183.7 billion in the second quarter, compared with an increase of $215.8 billion in the first quarter. Decelerations in wages and salaries, government social benefits, personal interest income, and nonfarm proprietors’ income were partly offset by accelerations in personal dividend income and rental income, a deceleration in contributions for government social insurance (a subtraction in the calculation of personal income), and an upturn in farm proprietors’ income.”
Wages, salaries, government social benefits, and personal interest income are flows to us rubes and they are “decelerating”. And from these you get contributions for government social insurance. We are getting less and so our contributions are less, and remember the contributions of the rich are capped. Meanwhile personal dividend income and rental income are the province of the rich as are farm proprietors compared to the rest of us (although it will be interesting to see how Trump’s trade war affects farmers next quarter).
Anyway what this shows is that the economy is doing super for the rich while the rest of us are being left behind. We can talk this group, that group, nationalists vs globalists, Democrats vs Republicans, populists vs elitists, but the bottom line/universal constant in these discussions is that we rubes are getting screwed.
bruce wilder
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.
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 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.
Chiron
@Mallam
How is Tel Aviv this time of the year? How abouta violent revolution in Israel killing 10% of the population?
The Arab spring didn’t achieve anything, Lybia is a failed state, Syria is being destroyed by terrorists supported by Israel and US, the Kurds so loved by the Left are basically working for Israel/US, the same with Iraq and Iran is the next target.
What is needed is less Israel and Zionist Warmongers in Washington telling the world how the things should be.
Mandos
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.
Mandos
peteybee: Multiparty systems work in many countries. These systems still form binary hierarchies of blocs most of the time. I am very “plugged in” to the politics of multiple European countries. Germany has a top-level binary choice between a reactionary nationalist party, and the rest of the political spectrum. This choice is essentially driving all political action at a domestic federal level. There is a second-level choice between status-quo neoliberalism and…less status-quo. Even Die Linke, the official heirs of East German socialism, currently fall well within the nested binary choices, they do not represent currently a third top-level choice.
France has started to make a habit of a final presidential choice between a LePen and a not-LePen.
Italy briefly broke the mold and is settling back on a different binary. And so on.
Mallam
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.
nihil obstet
Thanks to bruce wilder for taking the time and effort to respond so thoughtfully. My problem with Mandos’ apparent belief that we have to fold ourselves in to one of the two mainstream parties is that both make our society and the world worse. After the political horrors of the Reagan/Bush regimes of the eighties, I reluctantly let myself be convinced that more accommodation to the mainstream would minimize the damage being done by the Personal Responsibility/Privatization mantra intoned by the Republicans. And that would have been fine if things had improved, even though more slowly than I would have liked. But now we’ve had forty years of that experiment. More than a generation of increasing poverty, insecurity, loss of freedom, ill health at home, and war, atrocities abroad. Worsening environmental damage both places. The lesser evil can be defended as a short term strategy, not a long term goal.
Eventually, we must think through our social structures to define what we should be working towards and the tactics to get there. One thing we need to think beyond is politics as consumerism — here are your two choices, pick one. There comes a time to say, “Neither,” and to work actively to get enough of our compatriots to join us in building something that is more good than evil.
Mojave Wolf
@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.
Mojave Wolf
@Mandos — I think you are confusing Montana Maven & me. I’m the one referencing the Cthulhu Mythos as a metaphor for the warring factions of oligarchy. (unless I missed something; MM did have a movie rec that I saw, but while I haven’t seen “The Prince” it didn’t sound like that particular sort of horror movie)
Now to your actual response to my quote — the nice thing about this is at least we’re clearer on where each other stands.
Yes, looking at what’s on offer, I absolutely think the nation state model is still offering (far) more hope than what we’re calling neoliberal global oligarchy (a lot of neolibs seem to not like being called that these days; I don’t really care what you call it; it is what it is and at least we all know what we’re talking about when we say this).
I’m entirely unclear why you assume all attempts to keep the nation-state model must necessarily be right wing, and/or racist. This sort of reminds me about people who say this about anyone who opposes open borders. On the positive side, the last guy I argued about open borders with on twitter brought up a complete non-argument and then started talking about putting his fist in my face for calling him delusional about the not-relevant-to-what-I-said idiot point he brought up*, so we’re ahead of the game on that one.
There are a lot of competing visions of what the world will be like out there, and they are not all the same. And we may wind up w/a cyberpunk dystopia (h/t to whoever brought up that reference upthread; I have often thought that seems where we’re headed, except w/out the semi-benevolent–or at least more benevolent than the humans–Gibsonesque AIs to reign in the worst corporate impulses; we’re more likely to get something along the lines of what exists in Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired or Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs books, except worse and more hopeless), that’s no reason to capitulate to the idea.
Should we get something akin to this, I suspect you will continue to have various “we like these ethnicity/religious groups/non-religious groups better than others so support us” factions competing, as now. How many of them actually mean what they say and how many are using it purely as a money-making/power-grabbing tool is almost irrelevant, since almost all of them are going to put personal status accumulation over whatever ideals they have, based on what I’ve seen so far (a few pet ideas a few “eccentric” outliers may vigorously push notwithstanding). And yes, in a world where those are the only meaningful choices on offer, it will occasionally make a difference which group is in power. We aren’t there yet.
*if I ever say “we have too many people here already”, referencing the US, I am not referring to whether we have the technical capacity to at least temporarily feed everyone, much less whether we can feed double the entire current world population. That is not what I mean by too many people. And if you think the world will be fine and dandy with twice as many people as we have now, yes, I think you are delusional. Deeply delusional. Among other things. No, I do not think that would be a reason to hit me in the face if we were in person. I have had this conversation w/people in person and no one threatened to hit anybody. I wonder if the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is screwing up people’s brains, or something.
Mojave Wolf
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.
Mandos
Yes, sorry, I think I confused MW with MM, oops. 🙂
Willy
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
Not really. It follows from the analogy, the entire point of which is that both cops are working for The Man. The Man likes the Bad Cop’s politics better, the Good Cop is just there to offer an appearance of a choice (I mean, again, that’s the entire point of the analogy), so of course the Bad Cop always maximizes his advantage.
This is point at which I step out of charitable acceptance of the Good Cop/Bad Cop/breakout analogy. 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. This is not anywhere near as intellectually tidy as the Good Cop/Bad Cop analogy. However, it now allows us to discuss, at a fine grained level, what the actual points of influence there are in the system. From this perspective, Bruce’s horrified accusation that I reject the prospect of overthrowing the false choice of cops is simply unintelligible.
Instead, we can argue in terms of whether e.g. a wholescale breakdown of the system is somehow more desirable (or inevitable), whether there are ways to salvage parts of the system we like or dislike, what it could possibly mean to “exit” the system and what its consequences are, etc, etc. I have presented arguments of this nature, in various contexts, in the past.
I take the Good Cop/Bad Cop analogy (and its intellectual underpinnings) to be a way of short-circuiting the discussion to a very specific type of moral outlook, essentially designed to presuppose it in the discussion. 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. 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.
So maybe, this was never about overthrowing false choices.
Mojave Wolf
@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.
Mojave Wolf
Instead, we can argue in terms of whether e.g. a wholescale breakdown of the system is somehow more desirable (or inevitable), whether there are ways to salvage parts of the system we like or dislike, what it could possibly mean to “exit” the system and what its consequences are, etc, etc. I have presented arguments of this nature, in various contexts, in the past.
That is a whole different discussion, imo.
& are you talking about breakdown of civilization in general or what? Assuming the former . . .
Inevitable, maybe. Desirable? Only in a worst case scenario, by which point it will probably be too late, environmentally speaking. If there was no global warming and only a billion people on the planet and no nukes that someone has to take care of, then, sure, maybe that would be the best option. Since this isn’t the case, I’m not really examining that particular hypothetical.
Mojave Wolf
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.
bruce wilder
I am thinking this discussion might benefit from some meta-level discussion of “the system” as I roughly conceive it. Because I simply do not recognize this, as referring to my views:
,
To say the political economy as a functioning social and political system is complex is certainly true, but unless one’s goal is to obscure, by itself that observation is not helpful. The point of introducing a simple model is to suggest a way of sorting out the complexity, by identifying bits of structure and relate that structure to observed function and dynamics, producing some insight.
If my “good cop, bad cop” metaphor has power, it is because it fits and explains experience. I certainly meant to place it in a larger theoretical context by invoking Michel’s The Iron Law of Institutions, mentioned earlier by another commenter. How Mandos gets from where I thought I was to ” the highest moral value is non-compliance with any kind of hegemonic system” I cannot fathom.
We live in a political economy importantly organized by hierarchy and authority. There is certainly a large part of the soi disant left that is so uncomfortable with authority that they want to pretend we can work to abolish authority altogether in our political relations. Anarchists do have some useful ideas and insight and right-wing types find it convenient to adopt a rhetoric of anti-authoritarian critique at times. The politics of authority reflects deep-seated ambivalence as well as vested interests in power and the social psychology of dominance and conformity. My chief complaint about mainstream economics is that the Big Lie of a free market system serves as agnatology, obscuring the implications of hierarchy in organizing the political economy, handicapping the public discussion of policy.
My view, in line with the insight of the Iron Law, is that authority and the usual course of institutional evolution is problematic. Right and left tend to represent opposite poles of ambivalence on authority and its corruption. If the right is in favor, the left is opposed, which means the left is the usual source of reformist impulse that leads popular discontent in putting a check on predatory or parasitic tendencies of those in authority.
I think the Left choosing to support the Democratic establishment as the lesser evil has demonstrably made the conservative Republican Party worse and worse, as the effective policy center of the Dems has also moved right, with bi-partisan enabling of war and economic predation. That that is a reasonable interpretation of the political dynamics of the last 30 years is not an argument i thought I had to repeat in detail in this forum. The Dems feel dependent on their big donors and a Media owned and operated by a relative handful of giant business corporations enmeshed in a networked business ecology, not their hapless, manipulated and de-motivated voters, who are now deranged by gas lighting and Trump obsession, if they pay any attention at all.
The reality is more complex than “good cop, bad cop” — but the reality of that complexity is not at all friendly to Mandos’ thesis, just as the steady ratchet of the American elite political configuration to the right, as governance has deteriorated and popular discontent has grown, tells against his general outlook. Winging off into non specific abstraction seems like a dodge.
Willy
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
So again we reach a point where Bruce is using a logic and terminology and starting assumptions I mostly understand and agree with, but then somehow comes to conclusions/an interpretation of the present reality that is entirely opposite to my own. It deserves a whole new post but I don’t know when I’ll get around to writing it. But the core of the disagreement is this:
I don’t agree that this is what has made the conservative Republican Party worse and worse (and it certainly has become worse and worse!). I fundamentally don’t (and have never!) agreed that this is the dynamic at play. Because I was essentially nodding along in total agreement with the preceding two paragraphs, I experienced massive figurative whiplash when reading this paragraph, and I don’t know where to begin.
bruce wilder
@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.
Hugh
We may be living in a political economy. We should be living in a society. Aristotle of all people 23 centuries ago recognized that the economy was an aspect of society, and not the other way around.
Choosing the lesser of two evils, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, etc. result in what we used to call the ratchet effect. These rationales are insidious. They sound reasonable, pragmatic. But they concede defeat from the outset. We still are all going to hell, just more slowly. Things keep getting worse, never better, one click of the ratchet at a time. What was considered outrageous and out of bounds twenty years before gets portrayed as not just commonsense but normal and necessary twenty years later. This is the kind of argument Mandos is making. The kicker is that it is unclear which of his two options really is the lesser evil. And as said before with climate change and overpopulation breathing down our necks, both options will soon be irrelevant.