What Is Left?

Culture, Economy, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Uncategorized, War and Politics

NOTE: This piece was originally published without my consent by a now-dissolving publication in March of this year. With the permission of my friend and former editor from that publication, who was fired along with his striking editorial colleagues during that labor dispute, I am posting it publicly here.

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Bernie Sanders presumptive loss of the Democratic Party nomination for president demonstrates the limits of electoral politics for the left. I have already seen some pre-postmortems speculating that Sanders simply arrived to soon, that his staggering margins among young voters presage a socialist wave of the future, perhaps a decade or two from now, when the rising left-leaning generations become a majority of the electorate.

This is bad analysis on two fronts. First because it under-credits Sanders’s catalytic impact on the consolidation of a collective political identity for the socialist left. The two decades leading up to Sanders’s 2016 run were marked by a number of powerful and public anti-establishment protests, from the street-fighting of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, through the Occupy movement in 2011, both ultimately put down by paramilitary police brutality. But these popular movements never coalesced around an explicit left-socialist program, and there was always the risk that their fringes would spin out into vulgar anarchism or libertarianism, and the rest subsumed into milquetoast Obama-style consensus liberalism.

Sanders, then, was a figure around which some fairly diverse left tendencies could coalesce to form a coherent popular bloc and legitimate mass movement at a time when the inextricably linked phenomena of neoliberal economic austerity and dire social atomization seemed as impregnable as they have ever been. There’s no need to indulge in crass great-man speculation in order to note that Sanders served as a necessary agent in the consolidation of socialist tendencies into an actual socialist movement. If he were not here, now, then it becomes spurious to imagine some future incarnation could capitalize on a political project that no one had organized in the first place. Whatever else it may be, history is contingent.

But the second reason this analysis fails is that it indulges in the same fantasy that has dogged Democratic politics for the last forty years at least, which is a crude demographic determinism that assumes that if we wait long enough, just until today’s youth are a majority, or until the country is “majority-minority,” or until women vote as a single bloc, then historical inevitability will kick in. Yeah, well, remember what I just said about history.

A more dispassionate analysis says that there is no reason to believe that demography is destiny, no reason to believe that a popular movement that reflects—what, a quarter of the country?—will either this year or twenty years hence have the power to wrest control of the state from all of the interests and resources that will continue to be aligned against it.

Nor is it “realistic”—to use the frequently disingenuous bugbear of conservative Democrats—to imagine that this is a simple problem of communication and outreach. If polls are to believed, a majority of Democratic voters and likely voters strongly support Sanders’s policies, from Medicare for All to an at-least-slightly more modest and less militaristic foreign policy, but the evidence is pretty clear at this point: policy agreement did not drive voting choice, certainly not in the numbers necessary. There is at least anecdotal evidence that this was the result of media coverage that obscured and obfuscated the very distinct divergences between Sanders and the rest of the field, and there is polling to suggest that a substantial chunk of voters who ultimately broke for Biden believe that he supports Medicare for All, which he explicitly, aggressively does not. But again, there is no reason to believe that this media landscape will be better or fairer in the future. If present trends in media continue, it will be worse and less fair.

The left may continue to make up marginal ground in legislatures, where campaigns are still run on a smaller scale and the pavement-pounding democracy of knocking on doors in a single district really does have advantages over mass media manipulation. (You can see this in races like the one that brought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to office, where the incumbent has effectively decamped permanently to D.C. and has only a kind of absentee-landlord connection to their ostensible home turf.) But if we are being—here is that word again—realistic, then we have got to admit to ourselves that on a national scale, in a country the size of this one, a country with two centuries of imperial inertia and a vast, entangled complex of corporate finance, media, and national security bureaucracy, the prospects of winning a free and fair election is very, very small. (Swings in exit poll data in a number of American states, including Massachusetts, during the current primary season, are already strongly indicative of direct vote manipulation, or would be taken as such if they were observed in any other country but our own.)

All of this leaves a conundrum for which I have no prescriptive answer. Labor organizing is the obvious suggestion, since it seems to present the only path to a locus of non-state power, but that will be a decades-long project at least, given the parlous state of American labor. I could of course, write, optimistically, that there is nothing inherently wrong with a decades-long project, that if the left is going to think in historical terms, it had better get used to the fact that history is rather long by definition. But, of course, the ice caps are melting; Siberia is thawing; the Great Barrier Reef has been bleached white.

But the feel of historical acceleration that we all feel, the sense that the long duration of time is compressing before our eyes, with whole relative eras passing in the cycle of a day’s news, may herald some kind of break, a tectonic juncture in which one plate slips and a few things rattle loose. I don’t hope for catastrophe, but I do think the present COVID-19 outbreak, a symptom of the same forces driving climate change itself, of a metastasizing human civilization bumping in ever closer, weirder ways against the natural world in an age of near-instantaneous travel, heralds . . . something. Maybe the best and only hope for the left is to tighten our grip on the rails and steer the prow into unpredictable times.

Corona

Culture, Economy, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Sports, Things that Actually Happen, Uncategorized, War and Politics

for Matt Christman

The liberatory quality of not knowing
shit is quite honestly the strangest bit
of living indoors in hopes of avoiding it.
By it, I mean the damp and fungal growing
sense that the wheel of time, far from slowing
has slipped the axle. Calm is counterfeit
joy; real happiness is fear knit
together with the inevitability of going
anyway: the green ruined future
made beautiful by all the strange and new
life bursting from the cracked curbs and stairs,
effervescent blood from a torn suture
strikes the sidewalk where once weeds grew
and turns to flowers in the now-clear air.

Bloom

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bloom

Bring in the boss and sit him down. The head
of the table is perfectly appropriate.
It is the last head that we’ll ever let
him have. Yes, I’m saying we’ll kill him dead.
Lop off his noggin. Weigh his body with lead.
Throw it from the gunwale of a midnight motorboat.
See if all that money helps it float.
Go home and kiss the kids and put them to bed.
“How was your day today?” inquires your wife.
“It wasn’t bad at all,” you say, and then,
quietly, so as not to wake the children,
make the quick, familiar love of a long-shared life,
watch some TV, say a quick prayer, amen:
better to live than to hoard a hundred billion.

Ukraine

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I’d like to have a single, perfect call.
You on your side of the sea, and I on mine;
I with my morning coffee, you with wine;
the flights of fleeing geese, and chilly fall’s
first breath across the window pane. It galls
me: not to be very special, very nice;
not to be able to, friend to friend, entice
you not to be a criminal at all.
It isn’t fair. It isn’t true, nor good
when friends, such as we are, cannot aspire
through conversation’s friend, the telephone,
to be vague and yet completely understood:
what is it to talk, if not to conspire
against corruption’s favorite word: alone?

The Princess and the Peon

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We need a Disney Princess who one night
awakes in a sweat in her vast, cold bed to find
a prickling guilt in the back of her lovely mind:
what she has inherited is neither just nor right;
out in the fields of wheat, the peasants’ plight
is that his labor and his wealth are unaligned;
the commons closed, his status thus declined—
the owners took the surplus. Where Princess might
once have called the maid for milk and gone
back to bejeweled dreams and tiny snores,
this time she rushes to the palace’s marble stairs,
cries to the dawn that there will be a dawn,
princes brought down to raise up beggars and whores,
collective ownership, and headless heirs.

The Poor Suit of Happiness

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maid

Buy more takeout and hire a maid. Reside
in a mansion and summer in the south of France.
Winter in Aspen. Take the foolish chance
of inheriting every single cent. Slide
giggling through life and take a towering pride
in benefitting from mere circumstance.
Never, ever let the poor advance.
Among your peers, deliberately elide
ability and wealth. Hog the best spots
at the most exclusive schools. Oppose at each
instance any opportunistic ploy
to materially improve the lives of world’s have-nots;
they should’ve been better born; instead they leach
from our locked reserves of unnecessary joy.

He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy water; but, for the party that owed it, he might have more diseases than he knew for

Culture, Economy, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

One of the most telling features of our time is the habit of hailing as geniuses men whose time merely has come. That’s obviously true of our president, but it’s also true of the man many now credit and blame for his rise, the recently departed Roger Ailes. Encomiums to Ailes’s person have been mercifully few. George H.W. Bush called him a friend; fellow serial abuser and loudmouth Bill O’Reilly seems to have viewed him as a sort of beloved uncle, the guy who takes you to the ballgame when your own old man is too hung over to haul himself out of bed; the eminently embarrassing Tina Brown remembered him as a raconteur, indulging the common upper-class error of identifying as Falstaffian that which is simply gross. But even among his sharpest detractors, there’s a current of admiration: that Ailes wasn’t only bad and disgusting; he was, almost cinematically, a villain.

Yes, yes, Fox News ruined grandma. She was so nice when you were little, puttering in the garden and slipping you Werther’s when your mom wasn’t looking; now, in your twenties, you’re appalled to find her locked into the fixed belief that Barack Obama is an agent of Allah, who may well be the devil. Well maybe grandma was always a little mean to folks who weren’t her beloved grandchildren, and you just didn’t know what “colored people” meant, exactly, when you were nine. We can be rightly skeptical of the hypothesis that all the depredations of modern media are the result of the news flowing, dumb as water, into the empty basin of consumer demand without completely letting our, um, our preexisting conditions off the hook. The first major outlets to serve the public appetite for Clinton scandals back in the nineties were venerable outlets like The New York Times; Fox followed them in and turned up the volume. The strains of racism and paranoia that were Ailes’s bread and butter since he cut his teeth in Nixonian politics were already here: the Southern Strategy did not, after all, create the South, and Ailes didn’t create the strategies; he just produced them for TV.

Fox News hasn’t bestowed our terrible politics on us; it’s in the follow car with the camera. What’s given us the current derangement is, ironically, the competent political imago imagined as its opposite, the drip-down technocracy of social stagnation prettily papered over by the pretty lights of new gadgets. It is the abandonment of minority communities to the hucksters of for-profit education; it is the signing over of public utilities to take-over scammers; it is the abandonment of the Midwest to unchecked deindustrialization; it’s the drug war; it’s the rising cost of insurance; it’s the use of the public’s money and property as insurance for the failed bets of the financial industry; it’s trillions of dollars spent on war when we can’t keep bridges out of the rivers; it’s student debt; it’s the economy, stupid. The governing consensus destroyed democratic politics—it told you that the prospect of future cost made any present program and any future progress irresponsible and impossible. All that was left was gesture, a commedia dell’arte of symbolic typologies: an entertainment. So it wasn’t Clintonian scandals that created Fox News; it was Clintonian politics.

The reason this genealogy is important is because there remains, on what passes for the left in America, a habit of organizing against monsters rather than against the conditions that created them. Ailes can rot, but he isn’t and never was the rot. Fox News is actually dropping in ratings, and it remains to be seen whether it can retain its potency with its stable of stars reduced to its morning Bachelorette cast and the backwards-aging face of the eternally petulant Tucker Carlson, who forever threatens to turn back into a bawling infant before our very eyes. Even if it went off the air tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter one whit. Some other dirty trickster will step into the gap; several are already nipping at Fox’s swollen heels. They’ll never go away unless we wrench politics back to the real concerns of the actually human.

The Poseidon Misadventure

Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Things that Actually Happen, Uncategorized, War and Politics

I’ve said before that the Democratic Party isn’t really a political party at all, but rather something closer to a think tank—a kind of failed academic enterprise whose principal output is dubious research written in the style of a press release and the occasional bemusing and ineffectual appearance on the cable news. Although they endlessly carp that dastardly Republican gerrymandering has locked them ever out of real legislative power, in point of fact it’s the institution of the Democratic Party that’s benefited. The GOP gave birth to a feisty swamp monster of Tea-Party activism. Convince yourself all you want that this was the result of Koch-Bros astroturfing; in reality, it’s the Republican Party that’s been roiled by primary challenges to established teat-suckers; it’s the Republican Party that’s tossed out its goldfish-mouthed leadership in favor of a class of politicians really committed to exercising power. The Democratic leadership looks hardly different than it has for my entire adult life, a grim and aging collection of Clinton apparatchiks totally secure in their sinecures—all the more so because the only time the party ever does use what power it has, it’s to quash any discontent from its base or its leftward flank. It would be tempting to call it a zombie, but a zombie is living dead; a zombie is compelled by a lustful, powerful hunger. A zombie is all appetite—it is more than alive. The GOP is a zombie. The Democratic Party is a ghost—diaphanous, spooky, and utterly unable to interact with the actual world. At best, it can rattle the pots, or leave a little trail of slime.

The ACA, which may or may not die in the Senate, only ever made sense as an intermediate step toward a universal provision of health care. It was a big, ugly, ungainly, cobbled-together thing that, for all the partisan paeans to its wonderfulness and indispensability, never really worked very well. The part that did work was Medicaid expansion. In other words, the part that worked was the single-payer program that the Democrats so ardently refused—continue to refuse—to endorse. Supposedly the party of incremental progress, they seem to view each increment as the final end state of civilization and history. America Is Already Great, and all that. In order to sell progress as incremental, a series of steps in a journey of miles, there must be some destination in mind, a vision of a truly better society, an ideal. But the Democrats don’t have ideals; they just need you to be scared of Republicans.

Well, fair enough. Republicans are scary, though given the alacrity with which the Democrats rushed to praise Donald Trump for blowing up another little piece of Syria, you have to imagine that this relative terror is a matter of proximity, that the farther you get from the border, the more it appears that the American government moves with an awful unanimity of terrible, singular purpose. Anyway, the thing about the health care debate, such as it is, is that while every Democrat voted no, no one bothered to articulate a compelling alternate vision. Republicans want to kill you! Yes, yes—look, life is a conspiracy against itself; we’re all gonna die. You become inured to this sort of thing after a while. What we want to hear is not that the seas are rising (the Republicans!) and we’re gonna die alone (the Republicans!) and tumorous on the street because our chemo costs $50,000 every half hour and a hangnail is a preexisting condition (the Republicans!). What we want to hear is that there can be a better world, that through collective endeavor we can as a people feed our poor, care for our sick, and find at least some better balance between our rapacity and the health of our planet. Instead we get negation; we get Trump is a meanie and Paul Ryan wants to eat your kids, which does not get the 40% of people whose boss is a meanie and who can’t pay their deductibles to the polls.

The specter of Democrats literally singing in the halls of Congress because they imagine that more than a year from now they’ll reap some reward from the GOP’s pettiness and failure to construct any real alternative system is just despicable. Who are these people? Even if the bill dies in the Senate, even if they take the house in 2018 . . . Liberals accuse the GOP of forgetting about people, of sacrificing public good to the cruel idols of their idées fixes, but it’s the ostensibly liberal party that is actually abstracted from the human mass; it’s Nancy Pelosi for whom this whole thing is just a career. The Republican Party steers the ship of state toward an iceberg, and from below decks, Steny Hoyer gleefully cackles that this sure is gonna reflect badly on the captain. Grab your life vests people, though they may not save you, because the water’s real cold.

When Her Muscles Start Relaxin’

Culture, Education, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War,
if you think about it, why? Could we have not,
like, talked it out, I mean, over a pot
of black coffee? I hear they’ve got this tour
of Antietam, this wonderful field, where actually more
folks were killed and wounded than I thought,
I mean, you can’t imagine, like: a lot.
Couldn’t they settle over nine holes, lowest score?
Or match play? My point is, I don’t think
many of us appreciate how rough
it was to die in mud. The telegraph
was all they had to get the news. One blink
at negotiations? I’d have gotten tough.
Life in the seventeen hundreds! What a laugh!

By the Way, Which One Is Pink?

Economy, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Things that Actually Happen, Uncategorized, War and Politics

In one regard, I agree with former President Obama’s most zealous partisans: you can’t really blame the guy for cashing out. The pecuniary temptations of the post-presidency are unique; not even Silicon Valley offers so much no-strings cash for so very little actual work. Wall Street is awash in cash, and if some loony brokerage wants to part with roughly two weeks’ worth of its CEO’s annual compensation for the privilege of hearing a charming fellow mouth vague platitudes about the future of the present, then, well, as one of Obama’s twitter defenders put it, you can certainly imagine any number of far more awful things that they could do with the money. Ever since we declared George Washington a new Cincinnatus for his selfless decision to return to his mansion, his millions, and his slaves, Americans have vastly overestimated the moral rectitude and vastly under-accounted for the brazen tawdriness of our leaders. As one poorly-known novelist with whom I have a passing acquaintance once put it, “Never begrudge another man his successful scam.”

But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Obama’s defenders on this account are stupid and immoral. Obama’s promise was never much more than a brand, but good brand managers are mindful of the value of its goodwill. Regardless of whether he does or does not give overcompensated speeches to Wall Street, the Obamas will live in magisterial splendor for the rest of their lives; his pension alone represents twelve years of minimum wage labor; his and Michelle’s book deal, reportedly worth upwards of $60 million, represents approximately 1,200 years of earnings at the median household income in America. What makes his for-pay, Wall-Street speechifying so ethically odious is not that he’s taking their money per se; rather, it’s that he doesn’t need to. The worst impropriety is the unnecessary one.

In a strange way, I think Obama will be remembered both as one of America’s better presidents—he wasn’t a letch, he wasn’t a moron, and he managed to keep the sub rosa hum of our endless imperial wars ever so slightly abstracted from the persona that occupied the office—and one of its most disappointing. While he could never have been the radical break with the recent past that he appeared to promise, there was some minor hope—I even held it weakly myself—that his judicious temperament and his rarely used but still welcome capacity to occasionally prick the swollen edifice of his office, to laugh at it, might mean that he was something very slightly different than we’d seen before. Well, his defenders say when you start bitching about the money from the bank, everyone else has done it. To which the obvious reply is: yes, exactly.