... what are we going to do?
Fight, fight, fight!
One of the under-discussed, but most important functions of political parties, is keeping the kooks out. Kooks, in this case, are people who carry ideas concerning the acquisition of power, and/or the practice of governance, that are deleterious to society’s over all function.
I.e., they’d fuck society over for the advantage of the kooks, although this motivation is often hidden, consciously or not, behind any of a multitude of facades. Two that come right to mind are religion and the good of the people.
It’s become apparent that the Republican Party has failed in this primary function, and that’s why it’s sinking into the Sea of Disrepute with independents, the a-political, and the horde of former Republicans who’ve fled their sinking ship. Their total devotion to a President who appears to teeter on the edge of autocratic dementia marks them as being a collection of the power-hungry and the kooks.
Which leads to the obvious question: What about the Democrats? As they are now functioning as the de facto conservatives in the American political landscape, if they want to practice responsible governance, they must attract enough of the independent centrists and center-rights to win elections, and that means keeping their own kooks out of power. Consider this mail I recently received from a former “very conservative” friend of mine:
I have been “feeling” my way through politics most of my adult life. I listen to the debates, and I think “that side just makes sense to me”. I try to listen objectively, but I tend to agree with conservative thinking over liberal thinking. In fact, as open minded as I try to be, sometimes I want to throw my pen and say “does that liberal even HEAR what he is saying?”
And I’ve heard this refrain many times over the years from other folks. To my mind, there are two possible problems for the liberal:
- The liberals are failing to communicate effectively, OR
- They’re kooks (and not liberals).
And I do worry about the far-left wing, especially in light of a recent TV news report (WCCO) in which they interviewed a woman attending the brief visit of President Trump to Bemidji, Minnesota. Her statement, boiled down, was that she had voted Clinton in 2016, but, gee, the Republicans seemed to make so much more sense, so maybe she’d vote Trump this time.
Although she could have easily been a plant, and I shouted at the TV Are you fucking kidding me!, it does occur to me that if the far-left is viewed as the current or future state of the Democrats, this response, as ill-informed as it is, makes sense.
So what is it about the far-left that’s bothering me? Andrew Sullivan has been ranting about this since, oh, January I suppose. To me, since I live in the middle of the country, it’s seemed a bit obscure, as I’ve not run into any actual proponents of what’s called critical theory. For those who are interested, this incident may be an example of critical theory brought into our reality.
However, this tweet, touted by Sullivan, finally brought into focus the reason critical theory needs to be bounced around and then out of the realm of serious political discourse:
Ignore the polysyllabic jibber-jabber, which I’m not dissing, as technical jargon has its place, but … here it’s just meant to distract the reader from the real intellectual abyss at the center of critical theory.
And that’s the refusal to debate.
Debate, the free exchange of ideas and critiques, is the most important part of improving one’s intellectual state, after the process of study. By the word debate, I don’t confine it to the formal, face-to-face debate, but all informal modes, all of which Professor Singh rejects with this important “standard reply”:
I would be delighted to accept an invitation in the future should there be an opportunity for a reparative and contemplative – rather than adversarial – exchange of ideas.
[Typos mine]
In essence, the use of the word reparative is an implicit insistence that her position is right and all others are wrong, and contemplative means beyond debate.
Or, to use Sullivan’s pithy summary: And also perhaps because debate is one of the most effective tools in rooting out ideological bullshit.
I think my formerly very conservative friend would be beating her head on the table if he were exposed to Singh’s patronizing statement.
But it may be worthwhile to talk about fascism at this point. I have little political science training, so sometimes I get a little confused why some labels are applied to one side of the political spectrum, but not the other. I’m aware that non-monarchical, non-theocratic autocrats on the right, who accept no limits on power or the processes of gaining power, are called fascists.
But what about the left? Often, behind the veil of Power to the people and Workers should own the means of production – slogans which have their own valid motivations – autocrats also operate, from V. Lenin to Gorbachev, Mao to Jinping, from one Kim to another Kim. Importantly, these far-left regimes gained political power through the unrestrained use of violence, both to gain it and retain it. Usually, power retention is achieved via purges, a common feature of far-left regimes.
And, swinging back to the right side of the political spectrum, autocrats also gained power through unrestrained power. Think of the Brownshirts, or the Spanish Civil War: fascists all. And purges are also a salient part of the fascist regimes, most spectacularly in Nazi Germany[3]. Left & right, purges hide behind ideological (“capitalist!”) or religious (“blasphemer!”) curtains, but always leave their victims bereft of political power, or bereft of their lives, but the real point is that purges function as a tool of those looking to gain more and more power.
I appreciate there may be operational differences, such as left-fringe draping themselves in veils imprinted with people slogans, while fascists use faux-religious claims, but in the end they operate the same.
So let’s call them, left and right, fascists.
Each side claims to be so right that they need not debate any longer. They’re right because they say they are. And that claim is not only hubristic, but it functions as an operational bulkhead, because if you tell your followers that they need not debate with those who would critique them, but merely impose their mob politics on lesser, weaker groups – which applies both left and right – then you, the mob boss, have effectively closed off a weak chink in your ideological armor.
You’ve told your followers to be orthodox, as you define it.
Of course, it’s not a perfect bulkhead. Some people have the audacity to think for themselves. You’re better off without them.
But if the ideology of your mob is sufficiently divergent from reality, a corrective slap to the head will – eventually – occur. We saw this with the Soviet Union, as it discovered its ideological approach could not keep up with the Western approach. We’re seeing it in California now, as the climate change deniers are seeing all their specious claims going up in smoke.
It’s worth taking a moment to note the importance of debate. The point of debate is to persuade the audience, if not the adversary, of the correctness of your position: to change minds, and consequently actions. But it’s not physically violent. I chug into a debate on my own two legs, and I chug out, again on my own two legs – not on a stretcher. And that’s the most important point of agreeing to, and benefiting from, being part of a liberal political system[1] – to accept the centrality of reason[2], to understand that being wrong in the arena of reality and reason implies being open to changing one’s mind, and accept that engaging in political violence is utterly unacceptable and will be punished.
For my purposes, I think I finally understand what has Sullivan and other thinkers, such as Jonathan Chait, so upset for the last year or so. By discarding this key part of the liberal political system, those supporting critical theory become illiberal.
And, bowing to the power of words, I think illiberal is not strong enough. Let’s call them incipient fascists. Or just fascists.
If you think you’re beyond debate, if your goal is political power and the mob is good enough for you, you’re a fascist. Kiss your brothers on the right on the cheek before you plunge that knife into their backs. Because that’s the essence of mob politics. The knife, not the kissing, that is; I request the kissing merely as a sentimental indication that critical theorists were, once, civilized.
1 Not be confused with “those damn liberals.” There’s a large difference between the two, and the liberal democracy properly encompasses what we today call socialists, to Democrats, to right-centrists – but not the critical theory supporters, nor the Party of Trump.
2 And this is why the magical thinking rampant in many religions finds the liberal democracies in which they are embedded an uncomfortable fit. Indeed, as they stray further and further into this magical thinking, that tells them that their divinity has selected them to be important, the less and less well they fit into that democracy, until it becomes an evil that has been revealed to them, and must be replaced with a benevolent theocracy. Or escaped into insularity, where many turn out to conceal crimes by the leaders. Sometimes I wish I was a social scientist who was being paid to actually measure these tendencies, rather than just a software engineer, noticing them in passing.
3 I’ll bet you thought I’d forgotten about the Nazis.
