“Remember we are talking about revolution, not revelation; you can miss the target by shooting too high as well as too low. First, there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness, but there are rules for radicals who want to change their world; there are certain central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time. To know these is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police “pig” or “white fascist racist” or “motherfucker” and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, “Oh, he’s one of those,” and then promptly turn off. “
– Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals”
I had mentioned that after the duopoly conventions I wanted to touch on three subjects: one, where the “two” party system goes after this election, two, the Republicans’ attempts to scare their way out of losing it, and three, the Democratic-left coalition’s capacity to lose yet another sure thing by alienating the public. I am dealing with the last subject first.
For one thing, Democrats, never forget – never, never, never, never as in FUCKING NEVER – that the only reason we’re stuck with “President Trump” is because the country knew that the alternative to the Democratic candidate was FUCKING DONALD TRUMP and a critical mass of people in critical states still found the Democrat inferior.
As I said at the time, saying “you don’t like Hillary Clinton, do you?” is like asking “you don’t like gonorrhea, do you?” My answer is no, does anybody? I mean, gonorrhea is something you could survive and get treated for, as opposed to sticking your dick in a glowing green drum of radioactive waste, which is what voting for Trump would be, but if you tell me I HAVE to get gonorrhea, or that gonorrhea is actually the healthiest of my alternatives, you can’t be surprised that people reject your political establishment altogether, and voting Trump is just the most nihilistic expression of that. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Recently Cornel West twitted, “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics. In this sense, I agree with my brothers and sisters like Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Paul Street and Bob Avakian.” By the same token, if a centrist, “neoliberal” or right-libertarian like myself votes Biden that is not necessarily an affirmation of the radical left politics of West or Chomsky. It’s just… Christ on a pogo stick, look what the alternative is.
And even then, if it was another vote for Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, I can’t say I wouldn’t vote Libertarian if Hillary was the alternative to Trump.
This is what Trump is counting on. He’s not popular even with his OWN people, really; they rationalize his manifest character defects as assets in their projection of him as “a rough man who has to do rough things.” They HAVE to make the NotRepublican nominee look worse, because they can’t make their boy presentable. They have a harder time doing this with Biden and even Harris because they don’t have as many negatives as Clinton, but just because it’s not going to be as easy to smear the Democrat this time doesn’t mean that the Democrats’ fellow travelers have to give the Republicans help.
For example: Antifa. I have at least one liberal friend who refuses to acknowledge these people as allies, since they are often just as violent and either-or in their alignments as the alt-right. This makes it that much easier for the Party of Trump to foist the argument that anyone who opposes them are at best unwitting allies of Antifa, which is some dangerous, all-encompassing conspiracy against Our Gratest Most Americanest President EVAR.
Now, the excuse given on the Left is that Antifa is actually not an organized group, which I guess is true because no one can seem to agree if it’s pronounced “anty fa” or “aunt Teefa.” It’s sort of like how the vegan movement had to change the pronunciation of the word from “vague un” to “VEEgun” because the City of Las Vegas sued them for defamation.
Not to mention, Weimar Germany actually had organized left-wing gangs fighting the Freikorps and Nazis on their level, but did that stop the Nazis from taking the government? No. Partially because the Nazis could pose as the people saving the public from street violence. A bit of history that advocates fail to point out.
But on the less extreme part of political debate, you have the general issue of political correctness, or as it’s sometimes called, “wokeness” (the term woke, like ‘social justice’ being one of those terms that was actually an in-group compliment until the behavior of that group became overbearing). Among the various issues PC creates, you get the opposite problem from Antifa. If Antifa seem too violent for the general public, the PC police are making it that much harder for the rest of us to fight the Trumpniks with words because they’re more concerned with thoughtcrime than winning with the general public.
To take an early example from the Trump period: Stephen Colbert, hardly a Trump supporter, did a routine on May 2017 against him, and at the time, Vox magazine didn’t like it.
Writer German Lopez said: “Colbert was in the middle of a monologue launching various insults at Trump, including some fat shaming, ‘presidunce,’ and ‘pricktator.’ In the course of this, he said, ‘The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.’ … In a setting in which Colbert is deliberately trying to find a way to insult Trump, it’s telling that he resorts to suggesting that Trump is engaging in sexual acts with another man. The suggestion is that the worst thing that could happen for these men is if they engaged in homosexual acts together, as if that devalues them as men, makes them submissive, or emasculates them.”
On one hand: Point taken.
On the other hand, the fact that the Left has to second-guess and virtue-police EVERYTHING helps explain why they’re not very popular right now.
Much like how the N-Word is permissible in the black community (I call it The Richard Pryor Clause), Lopez, as a gay man, is probably aware of how often joking insults are thrown out between gay men. I should think that people who are aware of their own identity ought to be able to tell the difference between homophobia and a slap on two authoritarian personalities who, like most authoritarians, trade in machismo. The fact that Putin is much more officially homophobic than Trump ought to drive the point deeper.
I mean, thanks to President Grab ‘Em By The Pussy, and his esteemed predecessor, President It’s Not Perjury If It Was Just Over A Blowjob, we have reached a point in popular culture where we are THIS close to Gilbert Gottfried being able to tell the Aristocrats joke on broadcast TV. And some Puritans want to spoil it for all of us.
It is perhaps telling that the right-wing backlash to Colbert got more press attention in the long run than the left-wing/PC critique. See, in his remark, Colbert also told Trump, “you attract more skinheads than free Rogaine” and apparently Trumpniks took this as a group attack on their core demographic.
But that also reveals that the Right is a lot better at seizing the narrative than the Left.
Which is one reason why this line of rhetoric is dangerous if you’re a minority, and by “minority” I mean lacking in numbers or unpopular. One of the key reasons we have this “alt-right” crap going on is that we are at a dangerous point in American history. Whites are grouped into this generic category of “white” because it’s possible for them to blend into the system, so they’re considered the majority even though the old English-Dutch culture of the United States was supplanted by immigrants from other European countries a while ago. But even this super-category of “white” is going to eventually lose its numerical majority in the next fifty years. At the same time the default white culture is still dominant. So whiteys like myself are feeling conscious of that in a way they previously had not been, partially because of the demographic change and partially because various groups (black, feminist, LGBT, etc.) are engaged in identity politics. This is why some of them say things like “Why don’t we have a White History Month?” as though a profound conclusion had just come to them.
So when everybody wants to group themselves into collective identities, the group that already is the largest identity gets a political advantage. That will probably continue even after whites lose their numerical majority, because by the Left’s own conclusions, whiteness is identified with the established culture. By contrast, there are conflicts within the Hispanic community, within the feminist community (for instance, as to whether trans women should be included) and within the LGBT spectrum. Some of this is inevitable, and simply casting identity politics as an issue here doesn’t mean that they aren’t valid for the purposes they serve. However, various leftist groups often use rhetoric in ways that alienate the majority and explain some of the politics we’re seeing now. In some cases, that’s inevitable too. But there’s a difference between a necessary confrontation and an unnecessary confrontation.
To elaborate, let me compare two slogans.
“Black Lives Matter” is a necessary phrase precisely because of the fact that the phrase needs to be stated. It is a reference to the fact that for much of American history, black lives have not mattered and do not matter. This has been clear to activists for years, with regard to police brutality as well as mundane cases such as applying for home loans. The long term implications as to why white people should care have become that much more obvious with coronavirus: as many leftists have pointed out, the pandemic disproportionately affects non-white communities. That does not mean it is not affecting white communities. And it is spreading to white communities – after it ravaged large centers like New York and was then contained – because the disproportionate rate of cases in minority communities that tend to be in “blue” Democrat-run states means that the Trump Organization feels no need to create a national mask mandate or testing regime, since they’re not “his” people. But since the virus, unlike Trump, doesn’t care about skin color or state lines, the virus will spread even to “red” Republican states if it is given the environment to do so, an opportunity that Trump’s Republican state governors have been more than happy to provide. More broadly speaking, this is simply the most stark example of how there’s one public support system for the white and well-off in America and one for the rest of us. And when you need to contain a pandemic, that just doesn’t work. If you actually believe that All Lives Matter, then you have to assert that Black Lives Matter, otherwise your life is now threatened by this unequal system too.
“Black Lives Matter” addresses the point of systemic inequality. The question is what to do about it. Which leads me to address another politically-correct phrase: white privilege.
The term “white privilege” does refer to a real thing. For instance, if a black man speaks bad English, abuses women and gets involved in organized crime, they call him a “thug” or a “gangsta.” When a white man does all that, they elect him president. My problem, at least, is the use of the term “privilege.” The dictionary definition of privilege is a special right, advantage or immunity enjoyed by a particular group. And while many on the Left would describe that as the definition of whiteness, they fail to grasp that it wasn’t until fairly recently that people “of color” were about to overtake the collective “white” culture, nor was it always the case that that white culture was monolithic. Not too long ago, people were wondering if Irish Catholic presidential candidate John Kennedy was going to be taking orders from the Pope. But even then, there was an idea that there was an equal standard of law for everybody, and both labor and civil rights campaigns were intended to enforce an actual standard of fairness.
Which is what we’re getting at. The problem if (say) Dylann Roof actually gets fair treatment after shooting up an African Methodist church and Eric Garner gets asphyxiated for selling loosies is not that Roof shouldn’t have been taken in without violence, but that cops so quickly resorted to violence in the case of Garner for a non-violent offense. The standard is not a privilege. The offense is that the standard is being violated. (Privilege would be the cops in Kenosha letting Kyle Rittenhouse walk around with a semi-auto rifle during protests and then walk away from cops AFTER shooting three people, during unrest that started after cops shot Jacob Blake multiple times in the back, allegedly because he was reaching for a weapon that he would have had to get from his car.)
Again, if inequality is real (and it’s kind of hard for even Republicans to argue otherwise) the question is what to do about it. And phrasing the legal standard that most of America does live with as “privilege” is very dangerous, actually, because it plays into a lot of right-wing and moderate fears about socialism. Most of these fears are unjustified (especially in comparison to what’s running the country now), but it is true that most leftist regimes (as opposed to Canadian and European social democrats) were far more interested in leveling the culture they inherited as opposed to reforming it. It usually takes less time and effort to bring everybody down to a certain level as opposed to raising everyone up. And frankly, that requires getting rid of “bourgeois” ideas like personal freedom and political debate.
This is how the Trump National Convention could have the McCloskeys do a video testimony in the safety of their home and talk about how their privilege of a zoned suburban neighborhood was equivalent to the common right to defend house and home. This is how they can phrase an attack on “privilege” as an attack on your rights. And I’m sorry, but if you wonder why they keep going to this tactic, it’s because it’s been proven to work in the past.
When the Republican Party is so malign and dysfunctional, they can only succeed by convincing the majority of “normal” America (including some black and Hispanic voters) that at the least, if they can’t vote for Republicans, they can’t align with the Democrats either. It helps that as with “white privilege” so much of the Left is determined to address a real problem in a counterproductive way that alienates many of the people who need to be reached.
Feminism is another example. “Patriarchy” is invoked in such a way that, “conservatism” being what it is these days, inspires the opposition to double down. There was a 2018 article in that noted right-wing rag The Guardian about this: “On 7 January this year, the alt-right insurgent Steve Bannon turned on his TV in Washington DC to watch the Golden Globes. … In the course of a passionate speech, Oprah Winfrey told the audience that ‘brutally powerful men’ had ‘broken’ something in the culture. These men had caused women to suffer: not only actors, but domestic workers, factory workers, agricultural workers, athletes, soldiers and academics. The fight against this broken culture, she said, transcended ‘geography, race, religion, politics and workplace”.
“Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, was one of 20 million Americans watching. In his view, the scene before him augured the beginning of a revolution ‘even more powerful than populism’, according to his biographer Joshua Green. ‘It’s deeper. It’s primal. It’s elemental. The long black dresses and all that – this is the Puritans. It’s anti-patriarchy,’ Bannon declared. “If you rolled out a guillotine, they’d chop off every set of balls in the room … Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch.’ He concluded: ‘The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo 10,000 years of recorded history.”
The article went on: “For some sceptical liberals, there is a resistance to the ideological implications of grand concepts such as “patriarchy” (or “neoliberalism”), which are seen as oversimplifications of a more complex reality. Among gender studies academics, it is no longer in wide use. Once a term debated in endless articles, conferences and books, many theorists now regard it is as too blunt and monolithic to capture the nuances of oppression. Paradoxically, some on the right have enthusiastically taken up the term – regarding it not as an evil to be stamped out, but as a ‘natural’ difference between the genders, ordained by God or biology, to be protected against rampaging feminism.
“But for those who have lost a basic trust in the forward motion of human progress – or who were born too recently to have known it – ‘“patriarchy’ seems exactly the word to explain the continued existence of pervasive, seemingly ineradicable inequality.”
Which in a way seems to hit on where we are. Even as right-wingers like Steve Bannon (who once allegedly described himself as a Leninist) take up the social warfare tactics of the Left, the “progressives” and their more radical kin seem to have given up on the Biden-Obama idea that this is basically a good country that just needs to maintain the march of progress. And given that Biden’s best chance of victory is to appeal to the majority and cast himself as the “normal” alternative to polarization and the overbearing political correctness of the Right, there are a lot of people – not just Trumpniks – who see their goal as taking this country in the opposite direction.
I think “Topple the Patriarchy” is the feminist version of “Kill Whitey.” I mean, yes, we understand that if you say “Kill Whitey” you don’t REALLY want to kill every white person in America, but it just doesn’t come across diplomatically, you know what I’m saying? It’s like when Donald Trump started his presidential campaign saying that Mexicans “aren’t sending (us) their best … they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists… and some, I assume, are good people” and then wondered why everybody got the wrong idea about his immigration policy. Well, Donald: Either you didn’t explain it very well, or we didn’t get the wrong idea.
The problem, (which if you think about it, applies to both political poles) is that when you demonize a certain group in order to rally or convert people, the audience may not think you’re talking about some abstract Evil or some minority that is so numerically miniscule as to be politically unimportant (for example, the 1 Percent, Muslims, or libertarians). When you cast yourself as “Us” and your targets as “Them” some people may think you’re talking about THEM.
And then you wonder why you get such negative responses for that statement from people that you don’t have any personal disagreements with. It’s almost as if they think you don’t acknowledge their humanity or see their perspective, and they’ll never be able to reason with you.
It’s become pretty obvious that the conservative movement has been degraded because of that attitude. “Progressive” people may want to consider that the Right are not the only folks who have to worry about such temptation.
Again: I don’t think my problems with the Left are nearly as important in the short run as my problems with the Right, but the same people who wail and rage about the Electoral College and a first-past-the-post political system set up by dead white slaveowners are deliberately avoiding the point that said system allows them to persist in the belief that any vote for the official NotRepublican candidate is necessarily a vote for the woke socialists. You can be assured that the Church of Trump is doing everything it can to create that impression among the remaining moderate/right people who are still on the fence about voting for their Messiah.
Like a lot of people my age, I was a fan of Pink Floyd, and recently I was reading the Wikipedia article on Syd Barrett, who was their main singer-songwriter in their little-known early period. At that point in the mid-1960s, Pink Floyd under Syd were much more of a psychedelic pop/singles band than they later became. Things changed because Barrett, well, lost his damn mind. Possibly due to latent conditions, very likely due to drug abuse, he started to do things like detune his guitar to the point that the strings would fall off. Or on stage he would play just one guitar string for the entire song. Or he would not play at all and just glare at people. This is why the band hired David Gilmour as their new guitarist. At the time the plan was that they would officially keep Barrett, but as a stay-at-home songwriter, like Brian Wilson had become at that point in the Beach Boys’ history.
The band realized that that wouldn’t work out when Syd asked the other band members to work on a new song in the studio. The song was called “Have You Got It Yet?” At first the song started conventionally, but as the other band members played along with Syd, he started changing the tune on them, and they couldn’t keep up. And they restarted, and he did it again, more than once, and every time, he would return to the chorus: “Have you got it, yet?” Eventually, they realized that the whole thing was an elaborate joke, and they were never going to get “it” and so they walked out and quit playing with Syd. Permanently.
I think the Left is in serious danger of doing that to the whole country.