Category: politics of the absurd

Bullshit and legitimacy

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 3 Comments

Every election under capitalism is of course conducted on a terrain of ideological distortion, but there are degrees. One the one hand, one could think of the kind of ideological distortion that narrows the range of acceptable debate artificially, but that presents the issues more or less fairly within those artificial parameters. An election conducted under those conditions would not be the most ideal or authentic democracy, but it would at least include some elements of democratic legitimacy — the people at large made an informed decision that the political authorities accept and abide by. On the other hand, an election where people made their decisions based on straightforward lies, crazy conspiracy theories, and magical thinking would strain the concept of democracy to the breaking point. People would think they were choosing between two options, but those would not in fact be the options they have been presented with. A simple coin-flip between the candidates would arguably be better than a vote under those circumstances.

Every election under capitalism is a sham to some extent — since the most important question is not and cannot be on the ballot — but the second option would be a complete sham. And that is exactly what happened in 2016. The level of ignorance and wishful thinking among Trump supporters and sympathizers is simply astounding, qualitatively worse than in any previous election. This doesn’t just extend to support for Trump, but to opposition to Hillary Clinton. There are a lot of legitimate reasons to dislike and distrust Hillary Clinton. She is a deeply flawed candidate and politician. But I have literally never heard a conservative express even a remotely legitimate complaint about Hillary. She is just a demon to them, about whom they are willing to believe anything (or at least share it on Facebook).

Both the “Donald Trump” and “Hillary Clinton” who appeared on the ballots of our Republican-leaning fellow citizens simply do not exist. They are sheer fantasies, created by media organizations that broadcast nothing but lies and propaganda. Indeed, this election was less a contest between two candidates than between two epistemic regimes — between the mostly sham of option #1 above and the complete sham of option #2. And the representative of option #2 — who, terrifyingly and yet appropriately, himself believes the lies and propaganda — has been installed because a critical mass of our fellow citizens who live in strategic places allowed themselves to be misled.

Who is to blame for this? One is of course morally obligated to seek the truth, but I am old fashioned in the sense that I believe you have more responsibility if you have more meaningful agency. If people aren’t thinking critically about their media consumption, that is partially their own fault — but isn’t it much more the fault of those who underfunded education? If people believe lies that fit with their prejudices and preconceptions, that is partially their own fault — but isn’t the bigger problem that a network broadcasting lies nationwide exists in the first place? If people let tribalism override their reason, that is partially their own fault — but don’t the leaders of the tribe bear responsibility for allowing crazy conspiracy theories to become their shibboleths?

I am angry at the family members I know who voted for Trump. The fact that they would vote for him makes me think less of them. I think they could and should have acted differently. But what is casting a vote for Trump compared to enabling the phenomenon in the first place? How much responsibility does your racist uncle have for believing the Birther conspiracy compared to the news media organizations who treated “billionaire believes racist conspiracy theory” as a legitimate news story? How much moral weight does that vote represent compared to the decision of the supposedly respectable and rational Mitt Romney to court Trump’s endorsement in 2012, legitimating him as a political player among Republicans? How much do we blame people for holding their nose to vote for Trump because they think the Republican is the lesser evil, compared to the Republican National Committee which could have, for example, not allowed Trump to even stand as a candidate without releasing his tax returns?

American democracy — a deeply questionable proposition on the very best day — failed in 2016. It did so partly because people are ignorant and gullible, but it did so primarily because our political and media elites have created a situation where people’s political choices are completely unmoored from anything even remotely resembling reality. The people responsible for this failure of democracy are not the voters who are ignorant and gullible, but the people who made it so difficult for them to be anything else.

On making them look like victims

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 6 Comments

It never fails. Any time someone expresses approval of a protest, a nice liberal will come along and declare that it’s counterproductive because it makes Trump (or whichever right-wing figure) look like a victim, further legitimating him in people’s minds. This cliche really came into its own after Richard Spencer was punched, but now it’s being trotted out in connection with the protesters who prompted Betsy DeVos to flee a public school. And it’s wrong-headed concern-trolling at its very worst, on every conceivable level.

First, these moves were not counterproductive. Both cases represented powerful symbolic actions, memorably and vividly demonstrating that people passionately oppose the targets and are willing to put their bodies on the line. And both actions carry possible concrete consequences — Spencer has complained that he feels less comfortable speaking in public and acknowledges that that hurts his cause, and billionaire Betsy DeVos could conceivably discover that her vanity cabinet appointment isn’t worth being constantly hassled by protestors.

Second, they do not make their targets look like victims. The punch made Spencer look like the buffoon he is, and the protestors at the public school made Betsy DeVos look like a coward.

Third, even granting that the targets look like victims, how is this legitimation effect supposed to work? I wish someone would find me the person who said to himself, “I used to oppose Neo-Nazi ideology, but once I saw that some guy got punched for espousing it, I gave it a second look” or “I was a big supporter of public schools, but after seeing that Betsy DeVos fled from five or six protestors, I now advocate liquidating them and privatizing the education system.” But they can’t, because there is no such person.

And that’s because perceived victimhood does not automatically grant authority. Sometimes perceived victimhood can be instrumentalized to reinforce authority, but it can just as easily be explained away — ask Black Lives Matter about the latter phenomenon. And claiming victim status is always risky, because you could wind up looking like a pathetic whiner and undermining your own cause. Like, say, if you espouse an ideology claiming you’re part of the master race but are scared to go out in public because you might get punched. Or if you’re a billionaire who doesn’t even try to engage with what is objectively a really, really small group of peaceful protestors. Or if you’ve been installed as President of the United States and spend all your time complaining about perceived sleights.

But this post is probably self-undermining, because by subjecting liberal concern-trolls to such a harsh critique, I’m just making them look like victims and legitimating their position.

It could happen to you

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 10 Comments

Like everyone, I mocked the tweet. Deep down, I never thought it could happen to me. Now I wish I had stopped to think things through, because I didn’t know how to respond. A terrorist had actually kidnapped my baby. By all indications, he had rigged the poor little tyke with a bomb set to go off in one hour. Somehow, miraculously, I had wound up in the same room with him. And now I faced a terrible choice: do I torture the terrorist, or let my baby be blown up, by the bomb that he had rigged the baby with, and then left the baby at some remote location while winding up in a situation where he could be tortured by me?

I couldn’t help but pause and think about the improbable series of events that had led me to this awful juncture. In a way, I was naive. As the President or CEO of a major company or important inventor or celebrity or whatever the fuck I would have to be for someone to even bother to kidnap my infant child, I had been too lax on baby security. Continue reading “It could happen to you” →

Obama’s last, best gift

~ Adam Kotsko

In recent days, some people have been joking that Obama should resign a few days before the end of his term so that Biden can say he was president. In some iterations, this is a way of subtley screwing over Trump, who has already received gifts addressed to the “45th president” and a brief Biden interregnum would make him 46th.

I of course support this plan, but I think it could be taken a step further: Biden should also resign the day before Trump’s inauguration. This would make Paul Ryan President, and since it is not permitted to hold two government offices at once, he would have to resign his House seat. Presumably he could win again in a special election, and he could technically be elected Speaker again even without being a member of the House, but reopening the question of who should be Speaker could throw things into chaos.

There’s a certain poetry to it, insofar as one of the highlights of Biden’s vice-presidential career was screwing with Paul Ryan in the debate. I also like the idea of potentially derailing, or at least complicating, Ryan’s career by giving him what is so clearly his ultimate goal: “You’re an ambitious young man, clearly you want to be president — well, here you go!”

Their fake news and ours

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 5 Comments

The term “fake news” has recently come back into vogue, to refer to the false news stories that circulated freely on social media and most likely contributed to the cruel technicality that occurred on Election Day. This is not the first time “fake news” has been a major topic of conversation, however. The term was also routinely used for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report in their heyday, as well as The Onion. The comparison may seem unfair, given that contemporary fake news spreads malicious lies — like the story that Hillary Clinton was running a child molestation ring at a pizza parlor — while the old brand of fake news spread jokes. But I think there is more in common here than most liberals would feel comfortable admitting.

Like contemporary fake news, the fake news of yore served primarily to form in-groups. For liberals, the retreat to The Daily Show was motivated by a justified sense that the mainstream media was no longer trustworthy given how easily the Bush Administration had manipulated them. Only a news report wrapped in overt liberal outrage and exasperation could be trusted. This is of course a variation on the perpetual right-wing theme of “media bias,” which in this case was actually based in reality rather than on paranoid conspiracy theories. But The Daily Show by and large didn’t give us facts unavailable elsewhere — indeed, it was almost totally parasitical on the mainstream media it was skewering. What it actually gave us was a certain attitude, a sense of being “in the know,” of realizing how wrong Bush & Co. and their toadies in the media were. And they really were wrong! But The Daily Show didn’t give us tools for clearly articulating why or building an alternative. Maybe that’s not the job of a comedy show, but then it’s also not the job of a comedy show to be your primary news source.

I would also advance a potentially more controversial point: like Daily Show-style fake news, contemporary fake news isn’t meant to be taken literally and it probably mostly isn’t. As a point of evidence, I note that only one idiot showed up at the pizza parlor looking for child molestors. Given the thousands of people who read and shared the story, you would expect the place to be inundated with concerned citizens if people were taking it literally. I assume that the conservatives themselves regard the “self-investigator” as a naive idiot. They know these stories are bullshit, but they don’t care because there is a deeper truth at work. “Democrats want to corrupt our children” — that part is true whether or not Hillary Clinton literally rapes children, and the important thing is that that basic message gets across.

If you’re having trouble believing this, think about your own attitude toward the meme that Trump is having sex with Ivanka. Do you literally believe this? Do you ever have a strong opinion one way or the other? Or are you happy to help the meme circulate because it fits with the message that Trump is gross and beyond the pale? I don’t want to draw a false equivalency here or shame people for joking about that — though there is something pretty ugly about such joking, which would probably be hard to maintain if we really thought about it literally as something that had happened, and was maybe even still happening, in real life — but just to give you a sense of the attitudes at work and suggest that conservatives, as fellow human beings, are capable of holding similar attitudes toward questionable stories that reinforce a narrative they want to promote.

This parallel would be a matter of purely historical curiosity if Hillary Clinton had not run a Daily Show campaign: pointing and laughing at Donald Trump’s obvious wrongness without ever clearly articulating an alternative. That kind of worked on liberals, but it was just as ineffective at reaching conservatives as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were. Now we’re learning that fake news was to blame for that, but let’s give the conservatives some credit: they knew the fake news was fake. They just hated Hillary so much they didn’t care. And for not realizing that was the case and continuing to reach out to conservatives to the detriment of mobilizing her base, I kind of hate Hillary too.

For-profit social media is not fixable

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 4 Comments

Yesterday, I received a Facebook direct message telling me that I was a Jew who should get into the gas chamber. Normally I just block and delete such things, but this one was so flagrant that I felt I had to report it. This morning, I got a message telling me that Facebook had taken action — they sent that user a note reminding him of the Community Standards.

This is more response than I have gotten from the dozens of reports I have sent to Twitter over the years. To be fair, I have seldom been in the mood to write the dissertation they expect me to write, so maybe it’s my own fault. Or maybe the form is a placebo and they set it up to be intimidating on purpose, so that they can blame the reporters for not providing adequate information.

From their perspective, this tepid response makes sense. They get more money if they can show higher user engagement. Right-wing hordes are among the most engaged users of Twitter especially. The same goes with fake news on Facebook — the combination of outrage and in-group formation that fake news stories generate is an engagement gold mine.

We need to admit that right-wing harrassment and conspiracy theories are baked into the business model of social media at this point. And with right-wing political hegemony for the foreseeable future, it will only get worse, because the range of “acceptable opinion” will shift even further to the right. Asking nicely and filling out all the proper paperwork will not change this underlying material reality.

If social media is worth having, then the answer is to build a non-profit alternative to the for-profit sites. Wikipedia could provide a model here. It is not-for-profit, it includes strong self-policing mechanisms, and it is arguably the most trusted and useful site on the entire internet. Wikipedia shows us that a non-profit internet not only can work, but can thrive.

Self-Defeating Centrism

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 10 Comments

During his eight years in office, Obama deported a record number of immigrants, which is traditionally a Republican thing to do. He can’t openly take credit for it, because it would alienate his base — and if he tried, Republican voters literally would not believe it. Part of that is the right-wing echo chamber, but part of it is also that people reasonably expect the liberal party to do liberal things.

Obamacare is another great example: it IS the market-based alternative to socialized medicine, which is traditionally a Republican thing. But he can only sell it to his base as a necessary compromise (despite the fact that it passed solely with Democratic votes), and meanwhile Republican voters still think it’s socialized medicine — because, again, they expect the liberal party to do liberal things. In this example, we have the added twist that they assume anything the liberal party does is liberal, hence the health care debate is now skewed sharply to the right as a Republican policy becomes the far left edge of possible options.

We can see the same dynamic with gun control. Democrats basically decided to give up on this issue and haven’t pushed any serious gun control measures in a long time, other than symbolic gestures after particularly horrifying mass shootings. But the gun lobby refuses to take yes for an answer: they still rile up their base with images of Obama or Hillary sending in the jackbooted thugs to take all the guns. Yet again, we’re dealing with the self-enclosed fantasy world of the right, but also with the fact that people reasonably assume that both sides of a controversial and important issue will be represented in the political system.

In these and so many other cases, centrism is a clear political loser — you turn off your own supporters and gain nothing. If you were designing a political strategy with the goal of long-term defeat, I don’t think you could do better than actual existing Democrats.

The bankruptcy of hypocrisy critiques

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 7 Comments

I thought that Trump’s seizure of the presidency would put an end to hypocrisy critiques, but liberals are still reaching for the same tired “point and laugh” gotchas. One that came across my Facebook feed today points out that conservatives think that flag-burning shouldn’t be protected by the First Amendment, but that they should have the right to take assault rifles to McDonald’s under the Second Amendment. See, the contradiction — and try to stifle your smug laughter — is that they think one constitutional right should be restricted, but another shouldn’t! How can they even live and function with such cognitive dissonance going on?!

In reality, I can construe those two positions as mutually consistent. American national identity is the guarantor of all constitutional rights, and therefore there must be a limit to acceptable critique or protest, to avoid undermining the very right to critique and protest. Particularly potent symbols of national identity — in particular the flag — should be held as sacrosanct for that reason. Prooposing otherwise would be, in this viewpoint, the true contradiction. Similarly, America is a nation founded on individual empowerment. There is no contradiction between a strong social bond and an armed populace — indeed, they go together because an armed populace is best positioned to fight for the individual rights that make America America.

If that construal seems incoherent or artificial, I encourage you to read Pericles’ funeral oration in Thucydides, which uses exactly the same rhetorical moves. This is all straight out of the standard toolbox of democratic patriotism, from time immemorial. It is not an ideology I embrace, but it is one that makes sense on its own terms, and it is one that is obviously very compelling for a strong plurality of our fellow-citizens.

Part of its power is its respect for emotions and symbolism, for something other than cold logic. A right isn’t an abstract formula, it’s something embedded in how you live every day — the kinds of symbolic identities you embrace and revere and the ways you perform your own self-reliance as part of that symbolic identity. From this perspective, the liberal “gotcha” point feels empty and meaningless. Worse, the hypocrisy-policing pose always implicitly assumes that the target is trying and failing to embrace empty liberal formalism. If they don’t draw the “correct” conclusion — in this case, that some old sheet of paper should be obeyed when it tells us people should be able to desecrate our sacred symbols but ignored when it says we should be able to have means of self-defense — they must be stupid. Isn’t it funny how stupid they are? You almost wonder why they keep winning so many elections.

I submit that assuming everyone is trying to be a good liberal but is too stupid to pull it off is a losing strategy. Of course, I’m probably being hypocritical because I keep trying and failing to persuade people of this. Or something. I don’t know. I kind of hate everything right now.

Love Trump’s Hate

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 12 Comments

In my initial reflections on the election result, I said that I felt ashamed. I was not the only one — anecdotally, that word showed up a lot in people’s gut reaction. In some ways, it’s a strange thing to say, especially when we look closely at the phrasing. I didn’t notice anyone saying that they were “ashamed to be an American” or “ashamed to be part of a country that could elect a man like that.” They were just “ashamed,” full stop.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the presence of shame indicates that enjoyment has taken place. And oh, how we loved to hate Trump! And how we loved to perform that hate! It gave us every kind of political satisfaction. He was at once a horrible danger to the republic, meaning we were righteous and even brave for denouncing him, and a clown, so that linking regularly to his hate speech functioned as a kind of joke. It’s like we were all living in an episode of Family Guy, where racist and misogynist rhetoric is flying around and the audience is expected to laugh at it (i.e., to enjoy it on some level) while maintaining the plausible deniability of disapproval. Can you imagine? In this day and age? Best of all, we could indulge this hate more and more, because it was what would guarantee us victory. We wanted, needed him to go further — no matter how much it coarsened an already appalling public discourse, no matter how much it risked legitimating the very sentiments we hoped would delegitimate him.

After the initial shock, a similar cycle seems to be starting up. There are important differences, of course, now that it appears that he will actually assume office — though we get to continue writing our Electoral College fan fiction, hoping that the hated and antiquated institution will somehow save us. Now we point and laugh at his ignorance of what the presidency even entails, at his utter lack of planning for winning, etc. All of his transparently incompetent cabinet picks and advisors serve an analogous function — they show how he is simultaneously a horrible threat and that he’s an incompetent who can’t achieve anything. His promise to deport millions of people is at once the definitive proof that he’s a racist who means what he says and a logistical nightmare he can’t possibly carry out.

In a weird way, it’s as though the way we deal with him hasn’t fundamentally changed. And I bet we will one day look back at this reaction, at the ease with which we were able to fall into the familiar pattern of Trumpertainment, with shame.

Rebooting the conservative continuity

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 6 Comments

Many years ago, I argued that one of the biggest problems facing conservatism is how baroque and complicated its “universe” had become. Its fans are expected to have immediate recall of obscure concepts and plot points, while tolerating obvious continuity errors in matters like when personal freedom is good and when it’s bad, when the government should be small and when it should be much more heavy-handed, etc. The result has been a dwindling audience as fewer and fewer people are willing to put in the work of becoming emotionally invested in such a complex fictional universe all for the sake of justifying their support for some pretty mediocre contemporary content.

In that post, I argued that it might be time for a Crisis of Infinite Earths of conservatism, which could wind down the unnecessary complexities while still maintaining some kind of continuity over time. Continue reading “Rebooting the conservative continuity” →