The online debate about “wokeness” torments me, because it is so amazingly stupid and uninformative. But it also torments me because I am torn between two thoughts.

The first is that there has to be room to discuss the potential pitfalls of the various lingustic formulations that one used to group together as “political correctness” and now designates as “wokeness” (I can see literally no difference between the two categories). Those pitfalls might, in any particular case, include a tendency to alienate the very groups they’re meant to serve, an inaesthetic clunkiness, or even the simple fact that they periodically seem to arise suddenly from who knows where, like neoliberal “best practices” that become instant unconditional requirements.

The second is that no white male leftist who takes a blanket anti-PC or anti-woke stance — especially in mainstream media contexts — can expect to be trusted, because they are objectively treating their white male perspective as the point of neutrality from which they can hand down judgment of what activists and theorists of other groups should say and focus on.

How does one reconcile these two thoughts? The first step is to recognize that the second thought is more important, both ethically and strategically. Even if individual “woke” speech expectations are short-sighted or self-undermining, the blanket anti-woke screed objectively, performatively reinstates the power hierarchies that all leftists should be seeking to unravel. Especially given how often the anti-woke white male leftist has access to bigger platforms than the activists they’re critiquing, it is a clear example of punching down — when we presumably don’t want to punch our allies in any direction. Strategically speaking, it is more likely to give aid and comfort to our enemies than to somehow make leftist ideas more persuasive or leftist organizing more attractive.

It may well be the case that PC or woke language is holding back the left in this country, but I would humbly suggest that white men who want to be part of that strategic conversation should adopt the rule of first shutting the fuck up and listening. Learn to process your defensiveness and gut-level objections into sincere questions. If you get frustrated and need to vent, save it for the DMs. With time, you will realize that no one is mandating that you have to adapt your speech unconditionally to whatever the latest rando on Twitter demands. Doubtless we will all stumble as we seek to practice this spiritual discipline, but hopefully we will train ourselves to resist the urge to pitch op-eds to publications that are eager for anti-leftist content and would never consider publishing the perspectives of actual activists or organizers.

Every American public intellectual must eventually face a hard truth: American electoral politics are not worthy of sustained analysis. Only when placed in a broader context of economic transformations and extra-electoral struggles do they take on any genuine interest, and even then the strictly electoral aspect is bound to be the least compelling part of the narrative. Taken as a whole, our ruling classes are beneath contempt — an ensemble of short-sighted, corrupt mediocrities — and the few exceptions are basically a rounding error.

The response to such a dispiriting situation might seem obvious, namely, to avoid talking about or engaging with electoral politics unless strictly necessary. That difficulty, however, is that the whole of what passes for American public life is oriented around electoral politics. Policy decisions are normally discussed solely in terms of possible electoral strategies and outcomes, and even private conversations about politics tend to devolve into a binary choice between Democrats and Republicans. It is not enough for us to show up to vote — we must be perpetually campaigning for our preferred side, which means maintaining the party discipline of all those around us.

There is a difference between Republicans and Democrats. It is not as large as I wish it were, but it is large enough to make a difference and large enough to make the trouble of voting worth it for me as a harm reduction measure. Whenever there’s a primary, I vote for the left-most Democrat, and whenever there’s a general election, I vote for the Democrat. These elections happen, at most, once or twice a year, and they represent an important, but fundamentally uninteresting binary choice. No one needs the amount of political news the average American — much less the average “very online” American — consumes in order to make that choice. If the goal is to affect election outcomes, then we are all wasting an unfathomable amount of time, in the outer reaches of a region light-years from the point of diminishing returns.

We used to hear a lot in the early Trumpocene that we should not allow Trump’s latest antics to “distract us” from the truly important things we should be paying attention to. People seem to have grown tired of that rhetorical pose as it has become increasingly clear that there is no underlying agenda behind the antics — he really is as racist and callous and self-aggrandizing as he appears. The surface is the reality. As annoyed as I was by their rhetoric, though, I’d suggest that the distractionists actually did not go far enough: all of it is a “distraction,” none of it is real. Yes, it has real effects, and yes, it makes a difference. But all of our politicians are, with certain admirable but marginal exceptions, corrupt opportunists who are responding to forces more fundamental than those tracked by polling and pundits. The really interesting questions are why they act like they do, why our ramshackle apartheid “democracy” keeps producing these results, why the news media invests billions of dollars annually in convincing us that the petty grievances and bad-faith arguments of this class of sad losers is the most important and interesting thing in the world.

The challenge, though, is that to be heard at all in what we laughingly call the public sphere, the intellectual must — or at least feels they must — somehow contextualize their point in the struggle between the sad losers everyone hates. So that sucks.

On Election Day — you know, the day when millions of Americans showed up to stand in line and cast their votes — Hillary Clinton won a commanding plurality of the vote. The fact that Trump was installed as president despite losing the popular vote by 3 million votes is a profound injustice that delegitimates everything he has done and will do. The fact that the loser has been installed as president twice in as many decades, after a century where the Electoral College had been a purely empty formality, is a crisis and an outrage. We also know for a fact that the Republicans have rigged the vote for the House of Representatives so that Democrats would need to win a double-digit landslide to get even a narrow majority in that chamber. It so happens that the Republicans narrowly won the popular vote this time around, but they could have lost 10 more percentage points and still clung to power. And we can all surely recall when the Republicans stole a Supreme Court justice from Obama and installed one of their own choosing, after their illegitimate loser president was installed. All of this appears against the background of systematic voter suppression by Republicans, explicitly targetting racial minorities who tend to vote Democrat.

This means that all three branches of the US government, and the underlying electoral system, are operating in open defiance of the popular will. And all we hear about is how the Democrats need to change their strategy or message to start winning again. I share the view that the Democrats need to change their strategy and their message, but such commentary fails to grapple with the reality that they are facing. The system is rigged against them and is poised to grow even moreso if the Republicans manage to control a second round of redistricting and continue purging voter rolls.

But the Democrats can’t say that, because the Democrats can’t or won’t risk undermining the legitimacy of the system as such. In a very real sense, Democrats are no longer a political party. They are the party that is in favor of continuing to have constitutional structures and norms and something like the rule of law. They are the party of de-politicization, in an era when the Republicans are intent on politicizing literally every institutional lever of power until there is no remaining ground that is even nominally neutral. And this leads to obvious pathologies, where they avoid taking action that would look too “partisan” — for instance, prosecuting Bush-era torturers and war criminals, or alerting the public to Russian interference in the election as it was happening. So great is their commitment to institutional neutrality that they will not even use their institional power to counter obvious abuses by the other party.

Hence even if they are swept back into power, the Democrats have painted themselves into a corner. Any effort to restore the electoral system to neutrality will appear as a partisan power grab, given that the Democrats have failed to educate the public about the reality of gerrymandering and voter suppression. More generally, every time Democrats dutifully accept a new built-in advantage for Republicans, they set up a scenario where taking it away appears as an attempt to give an unfair advantage to Democrats. And so we are subject to an endless racheting up of Republican advantages and extremism, with Democrats occasionally sweeping in to clean up the worst messes caused by the other side — and being demonized for it.

Admittedly, there is a lot to be said for that option — even the thinnest veneer of legality holds open the prospect of taking back power peacefully, whereas delegitimating the system risks triggering a civil war that Democrats would surely lose. But you have to wonder how long a party organization can persist when its only apparent goal is to cover for the de facto tyranny of their opponents.

Two fantasies have arisen in the wake of Trump’s unexpected ascension to the White House. The first is that the Deep State will save us. The second is that the media, fighting for its survival, will finally grow a spine and a conscience and, well, save us. Both fantasies are galling. Asking the CIA to save democracy is so ridiculous that I’m not even going to waste the effort of coming up with some clever analogy.

And the fact that CNN can portray itself as a heroic front of resistence makes me literally sick to my stomach. CNN has been a force for evil, full stop. Continue reading ““We could be heroes…”: The Deep State, the Media, and the Crisis of Legitimacy” →