A book, sort of....(posted in pieces in summer 2021, compiled here)
The 1990s: Golden Age, Golden Arches
Lexus trumps olive tree: The limitations of a "good liberal" (Part 2: "Suck on This")
While there are many nominees, I believe the two largest moral-political failings of the past twenty years (i.e. prior to the pandemic) have been the Iraq war and the 2008 crash and recession. These two deliberate catastrophes remain the centerpieces of our current Gilded Age.
Built on outright lies and brute imperial force, the Iraq war squandered any good will the US had gained on September 11. The war killed over 4,000 American servicemembers and wounded thousands more, physically and psychologically. To this day, suicide, addiction, and other “deaths of despair” continue to plague Iraq (and Afghanistan) veterans, and, not unrelated, the low income communities from which they disproportionately hail. The war killed 200,000 Iraqis (which is one of the lower estimates), devastated that country, and destabilized the region, leading to more violence and terrorism, not less. In Iraq, deaths of despair continue today. Not all are directly due to US policy, but many are. The war, pursued at the same time the rich got more tax cuts, hollowed out congressional budgets and an economy that could have served or invested in the majority of Americans but did not.
Meanwhile, inflated and lubricated by Wall Street credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and other derivatives and “financial instruments,” the housing bubble grew exponentially in the late ‘90s and 2000s, until it inevitably popped in 2008, wrecking the livelihoods of millions of Americans. Banks were bailed out (and yet not broken up). Millions of working Americans were not. They were left with more austerity—their bootstraps snipped. The crash itself was not as deliberate as Iraq, but all the financial deregulation steps and chicanery along the way were. It was bound to happen. Zoomed out, with a larger historical lens, we could see the coming crash as a “no-brainer.”
“The 2003 Iraq war? The 2008 crash? The W years, right? Damn Republicans! Conservatives! Causing such trouble both then and now (Phew! We liberals are off the hook).”
We liberals are most definitely not off the hook.
As for Iraq, liberals did not execute the war, but many prominent ones gave it legitimacy. Very many liberal intellectuals and journalists in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times made the case for war. Of course Fox supported it--that was to be expected--but liberals in the liberal papers of record helped provide the Bush administration the intellectual cover it needed. Over 60% of Americans supported the war on its eve. The liberal CNN, which had brought us the made-for-TV wars in Panama and Iraq I over a decade earlier, played the role of TV-war-drama producer again, parroting Pentagon talking points and even withholding viewpoints and images from its US audience that its international audience got to hear and see (i.e. they knew exactly what they were doing). That liberal MSNBC (whose parent company was GE, one of the largest defense contractors in the world, by the way) fired the pesky Phil Donahue, who raised too many questions of the war for the network’s liking. The New York Times, the "paper of record," reprimanded veteran journalist Chris Hedges for giving a commencement speech against the war at Rockford College. (Rather than adhere to a gag rule, Hedges quit.) And oh yes, prominent liberals in the Senate, including two future candidates for president/Secretaries of State (Kerry, Clinton) and one future president (Biden), gave the war its congressional cover to commence. None of these “good liberals” lost their jobs or even suffered the smallest career consequences. Most only rose in prominence or adulation. No, they don’t need to be personally canceled—true, people shouldn’t be remembered for their worst mistakes only. But their bad ideas need to be cancelled, and for a “mistake” (or crime) that big, they should be repenting, converting, begging for forgiveness from Iraqis, from maimed US soldiers, and spending the rest of their lives making amends. At the least, stop promoting new wars. But few of these liberals have really given any genuine mea culpas or underwent fundamental worldview shifts. They blame the bad intelligence only. “Mistakes were made.”
As mentioned, Tom Friedman argued for the Iraq War. He argued for it before it happened, and not even for the official “Iraq has WMD” reasons but, he said, in order to build a progressive Middle East. After it started, he said we invaded “because we could” and that therefore we should not apologize. Friedman, “good liberal” (as opposed to “bad conservatives” Bush and Cheney, Bill Kristol and Max Boot), believed in American exceptionalism--truly believed we could save Iraq and plug it into the globalizing world, which would then have further, natural democratizing effects. Iraq would finally be able to shed its dictator-backwater-oil-fiefdom status (never mind that we cultivated that for decades). And even with his infamous “suck on this” in an interview with Charlie Rose, I will still give him, good liberal, the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t in it just for the resource extraction (set aside the premise of Charlie Rose’s “now that the war is over” question, uttered quite prematurely there in May 2003).
As for the crash, liberals executed, cheer-led, and benefited from the financial deregulation and hysteric securitization that, among other results, inflated the bubble and then crashed both the financial and real economy. With the bipartisan Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, for instance, Congress and the Clinton administration repealed part of the long-standing Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial and investment banking since the Great Depression. The Clinton administration green-lighted the merger between Citicorp and Travelers. Additionally, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act (2000), signed by Clinton, allowed the unregulated trading of financial derivatives. While Enron’s “smartest guys in the room” were mostly Bush’s buddies and the company imploded while he was in office, that earlier 2000 law had greased its casino wheels, even with a nice little “Enron loophole” thrown in there that had specifically exempted the company from regulation of its energy trading. And while not strictly related to Wall Street but relevant to general capital-freeing trends, there was also the deregulation of telecom, the blessing of other massive mergers and acquisitions, and of course the “free trade” deals. Meanwhile, the mainstream press and liberal intelligentsia competed with each other over who could worship (the libertarian, Reagan-appointee) Alan Greenspan, aka the “Oracle,” more. Most of us in the liberal middle class--maybe not overtly political people--swam along with this tide. We were enjoying pretty good times, so why would we have questioned them? To the degree we paid attention, we occasionally quipped, too, about how smart Greenspan was, pretending to know what we were talking about or, better, admitting we didn’t know what we were talking about and therefore leaving the economy to such experts. If we were the more overtly political type, we reserved our ire for clearer enemies: Ken Starr, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, to name a few.
In short, Wall Street hegemony was a bipartisan project. Over time, the finance economy became cartoonishly unhinged from the real economy of housing, (non-finance) jobs, (non-finance) businesses, wages, education, debt, healthcare, childcare, elder care, and transportation, i.e. where working people--and all of us--actually live.
As for Friedman, he cheer-led and celebrated the deregulation of finance, hand-in-hand with his bread-and-butter “free trade.” If there was capital out there that needed loosening, Tom Friedman was its liberal champion--the champion of “open systems” and creative “risk-takers.” When it all crashed, he like many other commentators lamented this “great unraveling” but didn’t make the connection to the frenzy they had earlier stoked.
I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words.
I also eventually returned to Friedman’s bread and butter, to what he first wooed me with so many years before in The Lexus and the Olive Tree: trade and globalization. This was around the time of Occupy Wall Street (2011, three years after the crash). While reflecting on how the mainstream media was treating Occupy, i.e. very similarly to the anti-globalization protests twelve years earlier, and reflecting on financialization-driven inequality, it hit me that most of those earlier, seemingly sophomoric, Seattle “flat-earthers” were not against globalization per se. They weren’t against technology or progress. They weren’t isolationist. They, like me and like the anti-NAFTA protesters before them, had read their Adam Smith and their econ 101 about widgets and loaves of bread and comparative advantage and the benefits of trade and probably believed in some hypothetical, where power and decision-making is shared more equally, where trade makes sense. (By the way, NAFTA in the early '90s had been negotiated and signed in secret. Its business proponents wanted to fast-track it in Congress. When labor unions and most of the non-investor populace found out what was in it, they opposed it. Labor unions along with the now-defunct Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, in fact, offered proposals to make the trade agreement fair, but their proposals were suppressed.) The people in Seattle were attempting to force questions about power--power that was being wielded ruthlessly in the global economy but that was also being mystified by nice liberal platitudes about “bringing people together” or “change is upon us,” or even cute clichés like “golden arches.” And thus, "teamsters and turtles," indigenous peoples and farmers, Americans and internationals--hardly an isolationist or anti-cosmopolitan crew--were pushing back against the unaccountable, unelected, corporate-investor-dominated, secretly negotiating WTO. They were forcing the critical questions. A trade regime on whose terms? Globalization as defined and directed by whom? The so-called flat-earthers were trying to highlight the global economic inequality that was driven by so-called free trade. They were at least partially right:
Quite like the Occupy Wall Street of their time, [the Seattle Protests] were often mocked by critics as silly, aimless, and overly hand-wringy about the future.
The organizers were a hodgepodge of groups—unions worried about competition from cheap foreign labor, environmentalists worried about the outsourcing of polluting activities, consumer protection groups worried about unsafe imports, labor rights groups worried about bad working conditions in other countries, and leftists of various stripes simply venting their anger at capitalism.
In the decade that followed, the Seattle protests came to seem as not only silly, but also misguided…. America seemed to decide that we had much more important things to protest about, and the Seattle protesters have been largely forgotten in our pop media culture. It is a shame, because the worries of the Seattle protesters have been proven right on nearly every count.
For one, competition from foreign workers has slammed the US working class, and we do not have a welfare state generous enough to support displaced workers under these deindustrializing trends. The popular narrative obscures capital's role in this massive power play and pits workers in one country against workers in another.
When the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the sister of NAFTA, was proposed, Friedman glibly and gleefully admitted to a Minnesota crowd, “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean [sic] Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.” That line, delivered more than ten years after NAFTA, in the deindustrialized Rust Belt, was at best tone-deaf.
Paul Collier, who served as director of the World Bank’s Development Research Group from 1998 to 2003, criticized the economics profession for its uncritical championing of globalization and free trade in the The Future of Capitalism (as cited in Walden Bello's "The Rise and Fall of Multilateralism" in Dissent):
The profession has been unprofessional, fearful that any criticism would strengthen populism, so that little work has been done on the downsides of these different processes. Yet the downsides were apparent to ordinary citizens, and the effect of economists appearing to dismiss them has resulted in widespread refusal of people to listen to “experts.” For my profession to re-establish credibility we must provide a more balanced analysis, in which the downsides are acknowledged and properly evaluated with a view to designing policy responses that address them. The profession may be better served by mea culpa than by further indignant defenses of globalization.
We impose “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs) and conditions on poorer countries that were never imposed on us when we were developing. For instance, we used tariffs at times to try to protect our young industries. These SAPs, the forced lowering of tariffs and quotas, debt cycles, and monopolistic agreements have made some global-south elites wealthier, yes, but they have further immiserated millions of other people. Poorer countries are at the mercy of multinational corporations (MNCs) and the Western governments that the MNCs lobby. US, European, and some East Asian governments/firms have wrenched open these powerless countries’ markets in order to sell their cheaper goods there, for instance. The Western-dominated international institutions, e.g. the IMF, require that these countries implement austerity measures and cut public goods. They have cloaked all this in the language of development, of assistance, of bringing people together, while obscuring the vast power imbalances. However, the realities of “free" trade and globalization do not operate outside history, politics, and power, and these realities continue to corrode the shiny platitudes and promises of the international liberal world order.
Why and how has Tom Friedman been so wrong on so many crucial questions? Or if not entirely wrong, why or how does he miss so much of the story? Why does he remain so obtuse? Why is he always prematurely celebrating? In addition to finance, trade, and Iraq, there’s Putin, Muhammad bin Salman, Ireland and the “Celtic Tiger,” the Afghanistan surge (if not Afghanistan as a whole), Libya, to name just a few. (On Syria, to his credit, I actually agreed with his conclusion to not militarily intervene although not with the broader Friedmanist sweep-and-schtick and Orientalist tropes he used to frame it). Why does he suffer no career consequences for being wrong? Why does he not at least slow down and write fewer “hot takes,” if not reflect on his deeper assumptions? We’re all bound to be wrong sometimes, after all, but he stays the course and rarely admits bad ideas. Instead, he just digs in and offers the “better fix” or “smarter guy needed” or “just more tech, almost there” approach. Instead, he just keeps traveling and writing about how cool Abu Dhabi internet cafes, or Tel Aviv gyms/juice bars, or Indian call centers, or Beijing hamburger restaurants, or Argentine farmers connected by fascinating cell technology are, and saying how those people are models for world peace, or something. (Here is McSweeney’s “Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Column.") Friedman remains a prominent “thought leader” in the liberal world, on the TED circuit. He wins Pulitzers. He gets the ear of presidents. He regularly opines on cable news. He garners momentous speaking fees. And without any fundamental shifting of worldview--perhaps because he maintains his fundamental assumptions--he only rises in influence.
Why was I so attracted to Tom Friedman’s ideas for so long, even after he was so wrong on some very crucial questions? And by now, you are starting to wonder: “Thomas Friedman? So what? Why focus on one particular columnist? (And by the way, you’re still talking about Iraq?) And so what if he was wrong, or maybe he was right in his own way and you disagreed? Are you going to ‘cancel’ him forever? Throw out all the people whom you disagree with or who have ever been wrong? Just because he is not left or ‘pure’ or radical enough for you?”
No. However, we need to talk about Tom Friedman because he is white, coastal (yet including Chicago), suburban (if not urban gentrifying), academic bubble-town, jet-setting, opinion-page, cable news commentator, well-graduated (if not always well-educated), cosmopolitan, (presumably foodie-wino-beer-snob too), mostly woke, somewhat hip, financially in decent shape, usually professional, liberal elite America personified.
Those worlds are not bad in and of themselves. I don’t want to declare culture war on “my people." However, even if we straddle or dabble in just one of those worlds, we are Tom Friedman, and we need to take stock of how those worlds shape us and how we, in turn, shape the larger world. We liberals don’t always acknowledge the power we wield—an act of omission which makes us even more powerful. We tend not to see or admit the damage we have wrought. Or when confronted with that damage, we point to our tolerant and cosmopolitan credentials and good intentions. We feel a little bad about any collateral damage and that feeling bad in turn makes up for it, as we all the while continue the damage. Like Friedman, we’re missing some major parts of the story. Many of us are too naïve, stubborn, self-absorbed, or worse--self-interested?--to admit our role in the rot at the heart of our society. And, we are further and further removed from that rot. Instead, we make each other feel good:
Friedman tells the privileged, and those who aspire to privilege, what they want to hear in a way that makes them feel smart; his trumpeting of US affluence and power are sprinkled with pithy-though-empty anecdotes, padded with glib turns of phrases. He’s the perfect oracle for a management-focused, advertising-saturated, dumbed-down, imperial culture that doesn’t want to come to terms with the systemic and structural reasons for its decline. In Friedman’s world, we’re always one clichéd big idea away from the grand plan that will allow us to continue to pretend to be the shining city upon the hill that we have always imagined we were/are/will be again.
“Friedman? The liberals?” you ask incredulously. “What about conservatives?!?”
I mean, of course. Today’s Republican party is absolutely off the rails and morally bankrupt. From the bad faith of national GOP leaders, sowing doubt on the election and therefore seeds to the January 6 violence; to the national “moderates” having no spine to stand up to its party’s brazen anti-democracy turn; to the Georgia GOP’s outright voter suppression laws; to Republicans in several states passing measures to bully transgender youth; to the Texas GOP’s deregulating its energy grid and then blaming its failures on a non-existent Green New Deal; to Fox’s business model of manufactured outrage; to even pre-Trump denial of climate change and so many other bad faith positions and policies. The Republican party--because of its potential within the most powerful country in human history--is the “most dangerous organization on earth." Four years of Trump was a horror show, each day worse than the previous. For conservatives who still dig in their heels for Trump, who if not storm the Capitol themselves still downplay, equivocate, or shift blame on such insurrections, shame on them--and where culpable in January 6 violence, they should be prosecuted. For both the true believers and the savvy cynics who play the true believers, absolute shame on them. The party’s madness would be very comical if it weren’t so deadly. Of course, they are to blame. As for non-Trump conservatives, of course they are to blame too, maybe even chiefly. After all, it was conservative godfather Milton Friedman and acolytes that forged the political economy that produced self-described liberals like Thomas Friedman (no relation), in addition to widening the socioeconomic divide and rotting out American society and then creating and mainstreaming Trump. But because so much has already been written about them (including by me, not famously, for instance) and because I am not a conservative and because I know them less (which I know is a problem and I also know that the binary is a problem in the first place), I am more interested here in the Thomas Friedmans than I am the Milton Friedmans. Among liberals is where I reside and move, and furthermore, liberals purport to give a darn about working people and the poor. That is our whole schtick, in fact: “we care.” So yes, of course, the problem is “them,” the conservatives. I don’t even suggest there is a comparison--it’s not even close. But, the problem is also us.
Lexus trumps olive tree: The limitations of a "good liberal" (Part 3" "Wall People")
Naturally the rise of Trump, the 2016 election, and questions of causality come to mind. Was it the “brahminization" of liberals then—or the 2008 crash or Iraq war that I have made much ado about— that brought us Trump? 1. No. 2. But yes, sort of, indirectly. 3. Regardless of Trump and electoral outcomes, there are other reasons we should care about these trends, namely human lives and well-being.
1. No. I am not saying that Democrats’ or liberals’ moving away from the working class is the reason Donald Trump won in 2016. I am not saying if only Hilary had campaigned in working-class Wisconsin. Or, if only Bernie had been the nominee (I’m not sure he would have won, by the way). Or, if only we had taken up “class war” we would not have gotten beat by the “culture war.” Or, if only we (or any society) had had some economic fairness that would have inoculated us from any bad idea, violence, or cult leader. Or if only the Democrats had pushed free-college-for-all that that would have dried up all the white grievance out there. Or, if only those Proud Boys had Medicare-for-all they wouldn’t have stormed the Capitol. Nor am I claiming that diehard Trumpers yelling voter fraud have coherent analyses of NAFTA and the WTO on their mind when they occasionally storm the Capitol. That mythical left-behind, white-working-class, economically anxious voter story has been overplayed. For one, all types of white--upper, middle, working, educated, uneducated, men, women, Catholic, Protestant--voted for Donald Trump in 2016 (and 2020). Two, much of the working class comprises people of color who have experienced decline and/or impoverishment even worse than their white counterparts--as racist structures exacerbate classist structures--and most of them did not vote for Trump in 2016 (although in 2020, Trump did shave off a few of their votes, which merits further inquiry). Furthermore, Trump’s election and Trumpism more broadly have roots deeper than the past fifty years’ deindustrialization: e.g. the electoral college and other counter-majoritarian fundamentals in the Constitution; white supremacy and anti-black racism; nativism; war fever and jingoism; settler colonialism, “manifest destiny,” imperialism, and resource expropriation; corruption, hucksterism, bravado, and lying. And so, I hesitate to draw any simple lines of causation regarding the 2016 election.
(In his recent piece “Backlash Forever” for Dissent, historian Gabriel Winant focuses on the famous “hardhat riot” of 1970, where building trades union members (a historical and potential left/Democrat constituency) beat up anti-Vietnam war protestors (a left constituency) in New York City. Someone like Chuck Schumer, looking back, saw that the Democrats had become too radical and that was why white ethnic communities eventually became the “Reagan Democrats.” A leftist, on the other hand, might argue that if only class analysis had been kept front and center--the New Left of the 60s shed some of the class analysis from the 1930s --then that coalition of the building trades union folks and anti-war protestors might have held together. Winant reminds us that history includes all types of contingencies and that no constituency is bound to vote one way or another, or move one way or another. An aggrieved (white) working class does not necessarily have to run into the arms of Reaganism or of fascism. So we can entertain counterfactuals--"what if we had only…?”--but we can’t predict other outcomes with any certitude.)
2.. But at the same time, yes, I believe that the liberal-assisted socio-economic rot helped make Trump possible. The landscape was ripe. “Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse,” writes economist Thomas Piketty, at the very beginning of his new book Capital and Ideology. Corporate dominance, malfeasance, and truth-bending predate our current age to be sure (and will continue after Trump to be sure), but corporations and their bought-off politicians have risen to much greater power the past several decades, and even more so since Citizens United. In 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page studied 1,799 policy issues and determined that “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." We all sadly have come to accept a certain garden variety of (legal) corruption in the system. But then the big crash happens—and no one is held accountable--and that deepens the sense that the deck is stacked, the game is rigged, which is true. The game is rigged. It deepens the sense, for many, that the Republicans and the Democrats, that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are the same, which is less true. They are not the same. I am not saying that Trump and his followers represent some coherent response to these ills. Trump, of course, is the embodiment, part-manufacturer, the beneficiary of these ills. And with Iraq, for instance, I don’t see direct causation. Trump had no consistent policy on Iraq (nor did he need to as he was debuting The Apprentice then). Die-hard Trump supporters, I presume, mostly supported the Iraq war, and so I don’t see them as angry that the nation was duped into it--maybe angry that they missed out on it? But what Iraq and the 2008 crash and subsequent bailouts hammered home was: only power and force matter, the truth does not matter, the rich and powerful can get away with anything, and our storied institutions are not that impressive. We are then left in a stark nihilism, which “is not a condition in which values disappear. It’s a condition in which values are toppled from their foundations” (says political scientist Wendy Brown paraphrasing Nietzche). Within this nihilist milieu, some people will organize for justice in spite of it. Some don’t see the absurdities and think the system is working just fine, maybe sheltered by their privilege, until they do see them and are surprised by them and then want to go back to “normal.” Some cynically advance their agenda on the waves of such nihilism all the while pretending this is normal. Some just check out because they see none of their actions mattering in the end. And, with “none of it mattering” and with such violent American roots as those mentioned above, some rally behind the biggest liar, corporate marauder, and bully out there. Unsurprisingly, in his four years, Trump oversaw even greater transfers of wealth from the working to the ruling class. He was the ultimate con man playing the ultimate con.
Trump did get many of us to talk seriously about fascism. Certainly, Trump was a grotesque mutation of our politics. That mutation and its logical culmination (for now) that stormed the Capitol should shock us. We should remain horrified. We must thoroughly condemn such fascistic trends and organize against them. However, we must note that Mussolini’s definition of fascism was "the moment when you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between political and corporate power." And so, by at least one definition, from the original fascist Il Duce himself, we had been flirting with fascism for some time, well before Trump. Or, to put it another way, we thus far have avoided classical totalitarianism, but we have been living under what political theorist Sheldon Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism" for some time:
Unlike the Nazis, who made life uncertain for the wealthy and privileged while providing social programs for the working class and poor, inverted totalitarianism exploits the poor, reducing or weakening health programs and social services, regimenting mass education for an insecure workforce threatened by the importation of low-wage workers. Employment in a high-tech, volatile, and globalized economy is normally as precarious as during an old-fashioned depression. The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement….Downsizing, reorganization, bubbles bursting, unions busted, quickly outdated skills, and transfer of jobs abroad create not just fear but an economy of fear, a system of control whose power feeds on uncertainty, yet a system that, according to its analysts, is eminently rational….[Instead of politics dominating economics as it does in classical totalitarianism] economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.
Tangentially, I do not presume all Trump voters, or conservatives in general, to necessarily be more racist than all liberals. For sure, Trump was a rabid racist espousing racist ideas and enacting racist policies, and his most rabid followers are racist and/or are willing to tolerate such racism in exchange for tax cuts or federal judgeships or other short-term political gains. But, racism as the cause is an unsatisfactory explanation, and in general, we should be wary of any monocausal explanations. I agree with Clinton administration-exile, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich who writes in The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It:
Racism and xenophobia were proximate causes of Trump’s 2016 victory and they continue to contribute to his support. But, racism was not and is not the underlying cause, however much the oligarchy may want Americans to believe that racism was responsible for Trump.
(A word on liberals’ own racism, later.)
3. Regardless of whether you agree with my second point--that liberals are to blame too for making Trump possible--I think widening inequality and liberals' role in that inequality is a worthy moral, existential, and material question, transcending (but including) presidential politics and electoral outcomes.
There have been similar liberal approaches to and reproaches of the other “populist” shock of 2016: Brexit. To be sure, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and the other “leave” mouthpieces used racism, jingoism, and outright lies in their appeals to voters, including working-class voters, to push their cynical agenda. In my opinion, I think the “leave” campaign and vote was wrong-headed. I would have voted “remain” if it were up to me. I am for more international cooperation. I believe our species’ survival requires international, cross-border cooperation. In theory and in rough practice, I am for a “European union.” For a united nations. However, while there were some social democratic and peacemaking impulses in the slow build-up to what would become the EU (described at length, compellingly, in Tony Judt’s Postwar, for instance) and while the EU is much more egalitarian than the US, we should not pretend that it is just a little, equitable, cosmopolitan, peace-and-love-and-kumbaya model of democracy. The same cross-border investor-to-investor, capital-mandated, bank-driven order--with a capital-serving monetary policy--that dominates the US and the globe dominates the EU. Workers, for sure, have much more security in the EU than in the US and other parts of the globe; Britain and its workers have much more muscle than most other countries and workers, who would have had more legitimate complaints against the EU than Britain; and the Brexiteers do not represent a coherent response to the EU’s capital-labor power imbalances. But, I believe painting all "leave" voters as just racist brutes is self-serving and misses some of the point. And, it will continue to miss the point in the future if the status quo is left untouched or, as has been the liberal response to Brexit, reflexively worshipped. Valid arguments (including left arguments) against the EU must be taken into account as people try to hold together or reconstruct some type of European union.
The same incredulous reaction by the international, liberal, center/center-left establishment toward Trump and Brexit--that obtusely asks “How could this have happened?”--treats its left flank with the same incredulity. And often with the same disdain. Thomas Friedman set the record straight in 2016 when he said that it was no longer “Democrats vs. Republicans.” It was “Web People vs. Wall People." In predictable fashion, Friedman put Bernie Sanders supporters in the same category not only as his ‘99 Seattle protesters but also with Trump loyalists. They are the wall people. To use a term that has been grossly over- and misused, “They’re all populists.” “Right wing populist” or “left wing populist”—populist is the term used to brand them all.
The actual Populists, however, emerged in the late 1800s as a movement of mostly farmers and some urban workers to challenge the corrupt monopolistic railroads companies, banks, bonanza absentee “farmers,” and unchecked corporate power in the first Gilded Age. They would eventually challenge, too, the unchecked and indifferent power of the two major political parties. “Populist” was a name they gave themselves, endearingly, not pejoratively like how today’s intelligentsia uses the term. Some decades later, in the middle of the 20th century, as a new professional academic class reigned, historians like Richard Hofstadter helped turn populism into a dirty word in works such as The Age of Reform and “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” And so, the populists of the 1890s--and by extension, the New Deal coalition populists of the 1930s and the populists of Hofstadter’s day--came to be seen as anti-elite, anti-intellectual, backwards, racist, nativist. The same for today’s populists. We liberals thus are able to reduce all their rabble-rousing to psychology, to pathology.
Yes, William Jennings Bryan, who carried the national populist mantle in the 1896 presidential election (within the Democratic party), would go on to argue the wrong side in the Scopes monkey trial and say many other stupid things in his career. Yes, Thomas Watson, who originally helped build a cross-racial coalition of farmers, would go on to become an infamous racist. Yes, there were some anti-Semites and nativists in the populist lot. But, these caricatures along with Hofstadter’s official history have obscured the larger, on-the-whole positive legacy of the original populists. These negative connotations and general misuse of the term (by all, including leftists) prevail in today’s mainstream discourse, as historian Thomas Frank details in his latest book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. Yes, the populists of the late 1800s were anti-elitist, but the elites of both parties had their boots on poor people’s necks. The populists, yes, were often anti-intellectual, but professional political economists advocated for the gold standard, for instance, i.e. a serve-the-rich monetary policy that held the day until 1933. Official academic agrarians pushed for more mechanization and only greater crop yields in the name of profits (soil and families be damned). The most prominent social scientists of the day promoted bogus race science that justified the racist social order. Anti-black racism, anti-Semitism, and nativism were very prevalent among most elites, too. Populist platforms of the 1890s meanwhile included: the direct popular election of US senators, the use of initiatives and referendums, an end to the gold standard, a graduated income tax, public ownership of the railroads, public ownership of the telegraph and telephone lines, and an eight-hour workday for factory workers. These ideas were not taken seriously by Republican and Democratic elites at the turn of the century. Especially after northern Republicans had abandoned reconstruction, there were few substantial differences between the two parties.
Even with how US history is taught today, there is often either contempt for or condescension towards the populists, towards those working people. Textbooks downplay or dismiss the working-class populists and then laud the middle-to-upper-class enlightened “Progressives” who followed. The progressives did much good, yes, but their legislative victories were made possible by the earlier organizational, movement work of populists and labor unions. Also, white middle-class progressives were not devoid of their own race and class prejudices. And so, while populism was not without its contradictions, racial or otherwise, it was much more integrationist than other movements, than other parties, than much of the rest of society. Black populists joined white coalitions, but they also represented a force unto themselves, as detailed in Omar Ali’s In the Lion’s Mouth, for instance.
If this were only semantics or just a know-it-all history teacher’s “Actually, did you know...” correction over the term “populist,” it would not be worth discussing. But it is more than semantics. These forged negative connotations and this conflation of all “populists” right and left--and their subsequent dismissal--is power in action. It is a power over not only the historical narrative but also over our current discourse. It is a power that dismisses any criticism and that can shut down, sometimes violently, any calls for change.
Lexus trumps olive tree: The limitations of a "good liberal" (Part 4: "Web People")
Good liberals, good “web people” on the other hand, see ourselves as smart and educated, elite but not elitist, righteous and empathetic, cosmopolitan and tolerant, pragmatic and post-ideological--even post-political.
*
If those “wall people,” especially the uneducated ones, are the problem, then we the educated ones are the answer: “innovators...experts...change-makers...value-adders… professionals...creative disruptors...(MacArthur) geniuses...Rhodes scholars...Ivy Leaguers, or new-Ivy Leaguers...Nobel Prize winners...strategic advisors...whiz kids...great talent...the smartest guys in the room…the best and the brightest.” Thomas Frank, aforementioned author of The People, No! wrote an unfortunately timely book before Trump’s election in 2016, Listen Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? On liberals and education, he writes:
The first commandment of the professional class is the idea of meritocracy, which allows people to think that those on top are there because they deserve to be. With the professional class, it’s always associated with education. They deserve to be there because they worked really hard and went to a good college and to a good graduate school. They’re high achievers. Democrats are really given to credentialism in a way that Republicans aren’t.
(After writing Listen Liberal and The People, No!, Frank jokes, he lost a lot of his liberal friends, who wanted him to go back to writing about the conservative base with books like his earlier What’s the Matter with Kansas?) “You can join us in this meritocracy,” we tell the un- and undereducated. If only it were that simple.
Certainly expertise and competency are good things, in general and in government, especially when it comes to pandemic response, for instance. No doubt education can be good, especially when it is liberating. It can open doors for many people. We have, however, come to fetishize the smart people, to celebrate innovations for innovation’s sake, to hoard our degrees, and then to weaponize them as justification for our power, vis-à-vis the uneducated, or rather, those not educated like us. Moreover, education delivered as the solution by itself—without any interrogation or adjustment of the power relations between capital and labor, between the ruling and the working classes —is not only inadequate, but also, it further entrenches the power imbalance. There are the familiar critiques: unequal K-12 education due to segregation, racism, and poverty; unequal access to higher education; many of the “well educated” are just “well graduated” (T.Frank), i.e. with only more social connections and not necessarily more skills or ethics; people of color who graduate from college still do not necessarily get ahead, even compared to white non-college graduates, because of deep racist structures; and of course, debt. But even more so, pushing education always and only is disingenuous. Cristina Viviana Groeger writes on “The Education Fix”:
Education as the solution to inequality often places the burden of reform onto individuals with the least power, rather than directly challenging the unequal balance of power in the economy. But the problem goes even deeper: the American educational system has become a very effective tool for reproducing socioeconomic inequality, not minimizing it....
Today, perhaps the most common framework for understanding the relationship between education and jobs is the theory of human capital, which holds that one’s skills and knowledge determine how much money one makes. To reap the benefits of the modern “knowledge economy,” individuals must gain more human capital through education and training. If higher levels of education are available only to a small number of people, they will monopolize “high-skilled,” high-paying jobs. Expanding access to education, however, allows more individuals to enter these positions, reducing skill premiums and thus reducing inequality.
The United States has long had one of the highest rates of educational access in the world and continues to lead on measures of educational attainment. Despite this impressive record, the United States also has one of the highest rates of socioeconomic inequality and one of the lowest rates of social mobility across the Global North. High levels of education thus coexist with high levels of inequality. If education were in fact the best policy tool to reduce inequality, how could this be true?
The simple equation implied by the theory of human capital—more education equals less inequality—can’t account for the U.S. experience. It also misunderstands how the educational system has historically changed the economy around it. Indeed, we should be more attuned to how education contributes to the concentration of wealth and power today. Our national faith in education can become a trap if it succeeds in distracting us from what matters most in reducing inequality: the collective economic and political power of workers themselves.
Or, as Thomas Frank explains:
If you look at historical charts of productivity and wage growth, these two things went hand in hand for decades after World War II, which we think of as a prosperous, middle-class time when even people with a high school degree, blue-collar workers, could lead a middle class life. And then everything went wrong in the 1970s. Productivity continued to go up and wage growth stopped. Wage growth has basically been flat ever since then. But productivity goes up by leaps and bounds all the time. We have all of these wonderful technological advances. Workers are more productive than ever but they haven’t benefited from it. That’s the core problem of inequality.
Now, if the problem was that workers weren’t educated enough, weren’t smart enough, productivity would not be going up. But that productivity line is still going up. So we can see that education is not the issue.
It’s important that people get an education, of course….It’s a fundamental human right that people should have the right to pursue whatever they want to the maximum extent of their individual potential. But the idea that this is what is holding them back is simply incorrect as a matter of fact. What’s holding them back is that they don’t have the power to demand higher wages.
As a teacher in a lower-income school district, I am guilty often of just telling that standard story: “if you go to college, then you can make it...so, write this essay.” Upward mobility may occur as a result of education, but by itself, it’s an incomplete story.
*
Liberals have rightly called out the incessant railing against (coastal) “elites” by Fox/Trump/Huckabee/Cruz/Palin, etc. for the nonsense that it is. Liberals have rightly defended the scientific process in the name of public health or mitigating climate change, for instance, and have rightly defended intellectuals against our country’s perverse anti-intellectualism. However, in response to Trump, many liberals have chosen to embrace elitism. We took that faux culture war served up by the right, from Phyllis Schlafly to Bill O’Reilly, and we won it. And we continue to win it, with some of us indulging in it and never moving beyond it. In opposition to Trump, elitism has been even more appealing. Along with the meritocracy and our education, this elitism is the psychological salve some of us needed: “We are the answer. At the least, we are not the problem.” We feel sick, yet good about ourselves, when we see those statistics of white non-college graduates going for Trump. Embracing elitism, though, is not a wise or humane response because, among other reasons, outright classism comes along with it. We throw around the terms “white trash” or “trailer trash” quite liberally, making fun of West Virginia or “Pennsyltucky”--essentially making fun of poor white people. However, I do not believe all rural/rural-ish voters are Trump voters (nor are all poor), and I don’t believe all Trump voters are “deplorable” people, as deplorable as I find Trump and as regrettable as I find the act of voting for him. I am certainly guilty myself of using those epithets and conflating those constituencies, but especially juxtaposed to our own role in the social rot, I don’t believe those are fair judgments for liberals to make.
*
We liberals are righteous and empathetic. “In this house, we believe, ‘Black lives matter. Women’s rights=Human rights. No Human is Illegal. Science is real. Diversity makes us stronger. Love is love.” So reads the sign in front of many liberal households. Check, check, check--those are ideas I can get behind. With a vicious Trump administration, we could not take any of those statements for granted, sadly, apparently. But as illustrated by the sign, our liberal politics have been reduced to statements of right belief. Additionally, notice how none of our core statements “in this house” touch on economics, let alone class, war, or empire. What if we added, “In this house, we also believe: ‘We should share my property tax revenue equally among school districts in the state (or country); We should tax the rich much more (and that might include me); We should build lower-income housing on this block; There is power in a union; Organize workers, especially ‘gig’ or ‘sharing economy’ workers who deliver to this house (even if that means I might have to pay more for their services and/or not get that thing I don’t need right this instant (but seriously let’s also talk about gig company CEO compensation!)); This house [where applicable] was purchased in a real estate frenzy, on the other end of which I still ended up ok; Reinstate a new Glass-Steagall Act; And while no human is illegal, I also understand that many immigrants follow their own countries’ wealth that has previously been extracted by the US and other western/colonial powers through war, overt/covert coups, and through ‘Washington (bipartisan) consensus’ IMF and World Bank 'structural adjustment programs,' so called ‘free trade’ deals, and other mechanisms.” And "Science is real, but 'science,' like 'technology,' never exists outside of political choices and 'science' can be put to destructive ends, so to clarify we want 'science for the people.'"
Or the other sign: “Hate has no home here.” “...and neither do you, dear black people and other racialized minorities, because of both de facto and de jure segregation BUT that is not ok!... we need to fix that ...but in the meantime, we really enjoy the home mortgage interest deduction, which continues to be a huge subsidy to (disproportionately) white, wealthier families and thus one driver of the racial wealth gap. (But when you do move in, please don’t bring down our school district’s standardized test benchmarks, which would bring down the quality of our school district, and might affect my child’s ability to get into _[INSERT ALMA MATER]__ in order to reproduce or even advance beyond our social class.)”
The yard signs are fine, sure—we had the second one--but if liberalism is just believing the right things, then liberalism is pretty easy. Liberalism is then just about managing our affectation and policing others’ affectation. Language certainly does matter, but part of this liberal focus on language/right ideas/affect only, part of this liberal inertia, I believe, stems from the fact that we are getting wealthier and wealthier. Maybe not billionaire or millionaire wealthy like Tom Friedman himself, but many of us are doing ok, even through this pandemic and recession. (Are the “Thank you essential workers” signs partly guilt-driven, especially for the lower paid workers, disproportionately of color, out there making deliveries to us as we work comfortably from home?)
One reason why many of us had that ability to work from home amidst a pandemic is that we are white-collar “professionals,” and the nature of our work allows us to. By itself, becoming professionals is not a bad development. I think the doctor, the teacher, the scientist, the accountant should be professionally trained and credentialed. We professionals, however, have become our own class—the “professional managerial class” as Barbara and John Ehrenreich first coined the term in 1979, i.e. not labor but for the most part not the owners of capital either. In turn, we are and we know fewer working-class people, and as a result, I hypothesize, we care less about their issues. We seek foremost to protect our own interests, even if we don’t admit it. Therefore, from Bethesda, Maryland (where Friedman lives) and from all of the proverbial Bethesdas, we opine and preach a little too easily.
A note here on white liberal racism (as promised), as much has been made of white conservative racism. We white liberals for the most part have not reckoned with our own destructive racism. Racism is about the policies and practices—even more than ideas—that contribute to racial inequality, even when those policies appear or pretend to be race-neutral. Especially when it comes to housing and education, we good liberals clutch our (white) pearls very quickly and strategically. Richard Rothstein has written about (often liberal/Democratic) government- and individual-led racist housing policies under the New Deal, under the Great Society, and in the wake of the 2008 crash up to the present day. Lily Geismer has focused on Boston’s Route-128-corridor suburbs from the 1970s to today as emblem of Northeast, liberal-led segregation in Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. Matt Lassiter has researched similar dynamics in the Sunbelt in The Silent Majority: Politics in the Sunbelt South. The latter two wrote together in 2019 in the Times: “The political culture of upscale suburbs revolves around resource hoarding of children’s educational advantages, pervasive opposition to economic integration and affordable housing, and the consistent defense of homeowner privileges and taxpayer rights.” Our home values, which we cherish, which we try to improve above all else—“you got to build equity!”—are directly tied to racism, as Professor Dorothy Brown writes. And now, with young white liberals moving back to city centers--some staying once they have school-aged kids, some darting back out to the suburbs once they do--they are shaping education decisions from Brooklyn to the Bay Area. Chana Jolfe-Walt reports on this phenomenon in the five-part podcast series Nice White Parents.
In the lead-up to and after the 2016 election, TV news and opinion pages debated the false choice, “Was it class or was it race that brought Trump to power?” as if class and race have ever been unentangled in our politics. Much of the mainstream media settled, definitively, on “race.” “They are all racist” was the final answer/cause (“and we’re not” was implied). A tangent to that false choice/debate was that the Democrats’ Sanders/left flank was “class reductionist.” That it didn’t care enough about racism. Attempting to swat back that upsurge Sanders/left flank in the primary, Hillary Clinton had said to a campaign crowd in February 2016, “Not everything is about an economic theory, right? If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism? (No!!!) Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”
No. But when it comes to racism, for instance, banks for years helped segregate neighborhoods. After decades of predatory exclusion, banks then took up predatory inclusion. Banks targeted people of color in the subprime mortgage crisis, in the lead up to the 2008 crash. No, breaking them up wouldn’t end personal prejudice, and it wouldn’t automatically end racist practices, but breaking them up, placing them under more transparent and democratic control, and removing perverse, racist incentives could reduce racist effects.
Personal racism (or personal sexism or homo- or transphobia) is extremely significant, and in the case of policing, it can be deadly (although racist policing’s roots are in the racist political economy). Anti-bias training has its place, and we white folks have a lot of interior homework to do to overcome our biases. However, if we view racism (or any -ism) as something essentialist or primordial—and “racist” as just a personal label and “anti-racist” as just a personal badge of honor—then there’s no way out of our mess and then unfortunately (or conveniently?) there are no political-economic solutions. The only answer in that case is, “Those people should be less racist.” (“Not us” is implied.). "More education." Racism (or sexism), however, is mediated most destructively through the racialized, capitalist political economy, and its remedies require action inside the political economy. “A Liberal ‘Moral Reckoning’ [Alone] Can’t Solve the Problems that Plague Black Americans.” And, “Caste does not explain Race.” (And "history is not the end; it is only more battleground where we must meet the vast demands of the ever-living now." )
*
"There’s something happening here"
In addition to having the right ideas, we liberals have empathy. We cultivate empathy for the victims, for the have-nots, for the less fortunate. That, of course, is a good thing. But our woke empathy often stops there and then serves to shield us from actual analysis, from actual politics. It can obscure the power or any violence involved, especially power we have wielded. “How can we change without any of us really having to change?” is what many of us are asking. This form of empathy, in turn, forgives us for not fundamentally changing anything in the end.
Thomas Friedman, like many liberals, had much empathy for the losers in the 2008 crash, for instance, and thus some sympathy with Occupy Wall Street: “There’s something happening here,” he observed. (Conservatives/Republicans for the most part had no sympathy.) Friedman’s hot take, however, devolved into his predictable, vapid tech punditry: “Is this ‘the Great Disruption’ or ‘the Big Shift’ that is naturally evening all things out?” It’s as if he pontificates long enough, the protests, which he sees as appearing naturally in "shifting systems," will disappear naturally too and the inequities will cure themselves naturally. And, he’ll never have to really analyze, for one, any power imbalance between (finance) capital and labor in the system, or why wages are stagnant, or how Wall Street bankers avoid jail and only rise in political influence. He’ll never have to really indict anyone.
This liberal empathy translates into much charity, philanthropy, and direct volunteer service, three things we rely on in the immediate, absent systemic change. But, that philanthropy can also, cynically, inoculate us against future systemic change. This type of empathy forges a post-political politics, i.e. a world where there are no bad guys or structures—and where there is no history—and where there are only stand-alone problems waiting to be fixed, principally by us and our smarts and our tech. This do-gooder energy is certainly directed at domestic problems, but it does have a curious bent towards the international. Bono, Bill Gates, George Soros, the Davos and Aspen crowds, the Clinton Global Initiative all encourage us to donate to and fight for women’s empowerment in Sri Lanka, malaria treatment in Kenya, or education in the Andes--all laudable efforts, to be sure. There was something about international work that drew me, personally, to volunteer-teach in Uganda for sixteen months some years ago and that draws plenty of Peace Corps-type volunteers out into the globe every year. Furthermore, thousands of trained medical workers, engineers, and other practitioners deliver on-the-ground, life-saving work to the world’s poorest (doing much more good than my unskilled self could have done in my short time overseas). Some of those people also try to fight the structures that keep people so poor. However, some little (or big?) part of me (us?) went to Uganda because I knew I would be lauded for doing so. It was safe work. That is, it was safe to talk about, among family and friends, because it didn’t challenge anyone’s comfort or politics. People were very happy to donate to the cause (for which I’m grateful). It might have been different, though, if I spent those sixteen months standing with Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama, trying to form a union. Or to stick with the international, it might have been different if I spent sixteen months in solidarity with indigenous Amazonian peoples resisting extractive corporations from the global north. And so, while a lot of worthy work is being done globally, very little of that thrust from Bono, Gates, etc., questions international “free trade,” or questions World Bank/IMF/Washington Consensus global capitalism, or questions the intellectual property rights regime (even during a pandemic), or questions 800 US military bases worldwide, or questions imperialism or settler colonialism more broadly, or questions offshore tax havens, or questions global north corporate extraction from and then dumping in the global south. If there are villains, they are only the military government in Myanmar or the Janjaweed in Darfur (villains to be sure). If there are any western villains, they are only the earlier, more removed ones: Belgium’s King Leopold or maybe Cecil Rhodes (but the British exceptionalists, who have influenced the American exceptionalists, are quick to distinguish their rapacious colonialism from German and other colonialisms). If there are specifically American villains, they are the easy ones: George W. Bush (before his recent rehabilitation, at least) or Donald Trump.
This then is the limitation of Nicholas Kristof-style, international-humanitarian journalism. Kristof, fellow Times columnist and fellow “good liberal,” is better intentioned, better informed, and humbler than Friedman and does a lot of good reporting, but we typically aren’t challenged to go beyond the occasional UNICEF donation, the biennial November vote for Democrats, the service/mission trip, or the Amnesty International petition.
“Why did we think Bill and Melinda Gates could fix the world?” Journalist Anand Giridharadas used to report back to the Davos/Aspen/TED world what they wanted to hear, on how good they were at changing the world. One day at Aspen he decided not to (in a short speech that is worth a listen). That speech evolved into a larger critique and into his book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, in which he takes aim at the do-good-by-doing-well world. Specifically on the international front, he notes:
It isn’t just that solving things at the global level (which, in the absence of world government, often means privately, which often means plutocratically) lacks legitimacy. Pushing things up into that realm gives globalists “moral cover or ethical cover for escaping their domestic obligations as citizens in their own national setting.” It is a way of doing good that allows them to ignore the fact that their democracies aren’t working well. Or, even more simply, it allows them to avoid the duty they might otherwise feel to interact with their fellow citizens across divides, to learn about the problems facing their own communities, which might implicate them, their choices, and their privileges—as opposed to universal challenges like climate change or the woes of faraway places like Rwandan coffee plantations. In such cases, diffuseness or distance can spare one the feeling of having a finger jabbed in one’s face.
Relatedly, I believe this is one reason why so many liberals today have contempt for labor unions (in addition to the fact that so few of us are in them, especially blue-collar ones). Unions are necessarily frictional and, when successful, they exact demands that would not have been given without that friction. That does not fit with the smart-technocrat, wise-arbiter, benevolent-manager, philanthropist, globe-trotting-doing-good view of ourselves. Especially when there is a strike or some other disruption, “Those transit workers...those airport workers...those hotel workers...those nurses...those teachers...need to get back to work...or at least clear the street...so I can get back to work and get on with my own life and travel...and changing the world.”
*
Liberals, especially vis-à-vis their left flank, are the pragmatic ones. They own the mantle of pragmatism. Richard Hofstadter criticized the populists as romantic reactionaries. Chuck Schumer said the “far left” in the 1970s scared away “the Baileys” (the “imaginary Irish-American Long Islanders with whom Schumer consults on decisions”). Bill Clinton would regularly “counter-schedule," i.e. tell traditional left constituencies, such as labor opponents of NAFTA, certain “hard truths." The press loved Clinton’s counter-scheduling. They loved his performative transgression. They got to talk about his personality, his "political genius," his savviness. Throw in James Carville’s quips, and it was all made for TV. “The future is upon us. Get on board, you stubborn, backwards, ideological assholes” (paraphrased). Friedman carried that torch in the papers: “Get on the tech/‘progress’ train, you Luddite regressive assholes” (paraphrased). “It is a no-brainer,” and yet at the same time, “It’s too complex for you to appreciate.” Obama told the same hard truths to opponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or opponents of the expanded drone program, or left critics of Obamacare: “Get serious, you unserious assholes. We’re serious.” (paraphrased)
It is one thing to argue, “You know what, on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, let’s put aside our important differences and take fifteen minutes (or however long it takes with voter suppression) and vote for Joe Biden, in order to defeat Donald Trump. That is the pragmatic thing to do at this moment. Particularly in swing states.” Ok. Along with plenty of other folks on the left, I agreed with that reasoning and voted that way, although I did not take it as a foregone conclusion, and I know many serious people who did not come to that conclusion. I believe we do have to engage, to some degree, with the Congress, the state legislatures, and the American public that we have, i.e. not as left as we wish they were. However, it is quite another thing to claim the mantle of pragmatism all the other days in between: “We can’t discuss universal healthcare, or ending the Afghanistan war, or climate change and a Green New Deal, or Wall Street reform. We need to be pragmatic.” This ever taking up the mantle of so-called “pragmatism,”-- combined with the lack of any deep working-class-centered, organizing, base-building efforts aimed at pushing the needle on these issues in between elections while at the same time crushing left insurgencies—makes it feel like establishment liberals/Democrats are just fine with the status quo. They have, after all, resoundingly won the culture war, and so the status quo is working quite fine for many of them. “Would you rather want Trump? Would you rather want Romney? Would you rather want McCain?” Viewing its left-flank as naïve purist ideologues, this center digs in even more into its center. It fools itself into thinking that, because it is the center, it is post- or non-ideological. “Moderation in all things!” quoting some classical Greek—or was it Roman?--poet, patting ourselves on the back. But moderation in and “consensus” with an extremely right-wing (on the aggregate), extractive, massive-carbon-emitting, consumerist, nuke-and-base-building, extremely financialized, wealth-sucking-and-hoarding, sanctions-wielding, racial-capitalist, settler-colonial, rapacious empire is not ideology-free. As even the Oracle Greenspan said, when questioned in the middle of the crash about his own ideology, “Remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to --to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.”
(At the same time, I believe there are too many “ultra leftists” out there who think their correct beliefs and snark on Twitter alone will win the day and that the “revolution” is around the corner and that anyone who engages with any political realities, from a local tenant fight to a union issue to a school board election to a Bernie to a Biden is a sell-out, but who have no political praxis themselves to get to their political dreams. I admit that post-navy and still from time to time, I relish in some ultra-leftism because it requires nothing of me other than being correct, on sleepy low-tech Blogspot--not even on Twitter.)
*
The Milton Friedman-Ronald Reagan conservatives love their economic growth. However, nowadays, liberals match or try to outdo conservatives in this cult of endless growth: “We just need more innovation...more entrepreneurs... more creative disruption...more adding value...more value added...more STEM higher education...more computing technology...more STEM secondary education...more start-ups...more STEM primary education...just a little more tech...just a little more job training (for you, that is; my job is secure, especially with my elite education and social network) and we will finally get to the promised equilibrium...no need to ‘divide the pie’...just ‘grow the pie’! (Friedman)...the losers are just temporary losers...they too can get plugged into this startup-innovation world...if needed with the assistance of our generous philanthropic friends just waiting to help: Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Cuban.” “Go learn how to code,” Rahm Emmanuel tells the losers. “All you need is a laptop,” Friedman encourages them.
Because these innovators are more woke, more green, more pink, or more hip than the captains of industry of the past and because we professionals are now closer—at least in regards to our perceived social capital, if not our actual capital—to the winners than to the losers, we care less about the labor that is “creatively” disrupted. We don’t criticize those who own the innovations. We watch the surplus value, created by labor, get vacuumed upwards. We don’t question the violence that polices this arrangement. Today, it is even easier to avoid these questions because so much of that labor has been outsourced, off-shored, gig-ified, casualized, “shared,” and altogether removed from our spaces. This trajectory will likely continue. Stand by for the next fetishization of the next innovation. John Patrick Leary, author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, writes:
Innovation is an example of the ways in which the production and circulation of commodities becomes imbued with fantastic and even theological properties detached from the labor that produces them, or in the case of many common uses of the verb “to innovate,” detached from any object. So when liberal politicians promote an “innovation agenda” that includes student debt forgiveness for “startup founders,” as Hillary Clinton did during her 2016 presidential campaign, it is unclear how this differs from any other form of corporate welfare. And when conservative politicians or CEOs lament how labor unions or public regulation of the private sector “impede innovation,” we can recognize this as both a ludicrous obfuscation but also another example of the bourgeois contempt for labor.
The problem, of course, isn’t technology, innovation, or STEM education (similarly, the problem isn’t trade in and of itself). They are neither good nor bad. The original Luddites themselves weren’t actually anti-technology. They smashed the machines because they had no say over how the machines were to be used. “Each generation stumbles into the quicksand of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests. In modern times [and the Luddites’ time] this means the interests of capital,” Shoshana Zuboff’s notes, quite simply, in the beginning of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. The problem is capitalism.
*
How we obscure power is also how we obscure history. To the degree that Americans even look, we have a tendency to view large social-economic-political processes as naturally occurring (maybe people from other countries do the same?): settlement, industrialization, increasing technology, urbanization, then de-urbanization and suburbanization, offshoring, outsourcing, economic shifts from the Northeast and Midwest to the Sun Belt and then to Mexico and Bangladesh, globalization, scientific advancement, automation, artificial intelligence, and financialization, to name a few. We treat them as if they just happen, like leaves falling off a tree or an older man going bald, as if past policies and conscious decisions did not shape these forces every step of the way, for both bad and good. Yet, we know that laws, litigation, and the occasional “lawfare”; investment, non-investment, and divestment choices; the occasional violence; public and backroom deals; contracts, arbitration, and strikes; lobbying, advocacy, and legislation; geography, the availability of resources, and the extraction of resources; the occasional expropriation and exploitation of those resources; education, training, and the occasional miseducation; and access and the occasional hoarding have shaped these processes through and through. In years past, liberals might have put up some roadblocks and safety rails, asked difficult questions, and nudged these tectonic shifts toward slightly more just outcomes, or at least pretended to (or maybe I am being too kind). But liberals now too often enable, cheerlead--sometimes out-cheerleading conservatives--and apologize for the above shifts.
“When you live in a time of change, the only way to recover your security and to broaden your horizons is to adapt to the change--to embrace, to move forward,” said Bill Clinton upon the signing of NAFTA. Change is presented as some type of extrinsic force assumed as always good and moral that comes upon us, not something done by powerful presidents, congresspeople, corporations, interest groups, and constituents.
Then, when some of the unpretty data starts to come back and when the people who had no say over any of these changes rise up in fury, we don’t really repent or change our thinking. We resort to the passive voice: “Mistakes were made.” Or, we make new pseudo-physics laws that suit us: “Crashes just happen. Jobs get offshored. That’s the way it is.” If we don’t just tell them to “go code,” we might express sympathy for the losers: “I feel bad for the Mexican farmers who lost their livelihoods and must migrate here…. We should really retrain those American workers who lost their jobs,” as if deliberate decisions on NAFTA, WTO, or financial deregulation did not wreck those livelihoods. We add, “If only we would have known. That was the current of the time, though,” which of course ignores the dissenting opinions that were present and squashed. Some liberals (and fewer conservatives) now express some limited remorse on having been on the wrong side of, or at least, for not having the full picture on a numbers of issues: NAFTA; the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, and financial deregulation in general; welfare reform; the crime bill; increased militarization of the southern border; WTO or at least the WTO’s admission of China; Afghanistan or at least the Afghanistan surge; Iraq; Puerto Rico, as recent as 2016 with the PROMESA.
“Mistakes were made. It’s what the intel said. Colin Powell, ‘one of the good ones,’ told us so!” Why and how do we keep believing all the bad intel? When are we going to stop? It’s starting to feel insincere and deliberate.
As for Friedman: when reflecting back on the possibility that deregulation led to the crash, he digs in further and argues that deregulation “done right” would have been fine and could still save the day. As for trade: to the Seattle protests, he says, “I'm for such higher standards, and over time the W.T.O. may be a vehicle to enforce them, but it's not the main vehicle to achieve them. And they are certainly not going to be achieved by putting up new trade walls.” He tries to kick the conflict down the road to some future evening-out or sorting-through process that never comes as he meanwhile ridicules the frictional, potential evening-out right before him in Seattle or any attempts before then. What will be the vehicle to achieve those higher standards then, Tom? Will those just come about naturally? As for Iraq, Friedman remained a true believer even after “Mission Accomplished” turned quite sour. At the same time, he berated the Iraqis for not being grateful enough to “such good people,” i.e. the American soldiers, who should have been "greeted as liberators" (D. Cheney). As the war turned even uglier, it was not that its premise was wrong but that we needed the right and savvier plan, the right general—David Petraeus! PhD from Princeton! McChrystal? McRaven?—the right technology, more “surgical strikes” (maybe more in number but definitely more surgical), the right diplomat—Richard Holbrooke? George Mitchell?—the right framing and messaging, the right speech, the right president—John Kerry? Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Thanks, Mr. Bush, we’ll take it from here—some silver bullet or innovation yet to be discovered for which the Iraqis will eventually be shocked and awed, in gratitude. “Fight it better!” Friedman and other Iraq liberal-hawks sounded a lot like their Vietnam liberal-hawk forefathers. And yet astonishingly, Friedman says he was not a cheer-leader for the war, and yet contradictorily, he stands by his original cheer-leading the war. “Mistakes were made. At least, we (or some of us) feel bad about them.”
*
"It’s the circle of life. Hakuna matata, baby!"
This vision of our educated, elite, empathetic, cosmopolitan, pragmatic selves colors our relationship with our three most prominent donor and/or booster constituencies: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood.
Wall Street is full of dizzying innovation. The smartest guys from the most elite schools go to the Wall Street banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Credit Suisse. Some do tours of duty with the big consulting groups: McKinsey, Boston Consulting, Accenture, Deloitte, Bain. McKinsey is the smartest of the smart, of course, the elitist of the elite, figuring out smart ways to cut postal jobs, execute mass layoffs, save money at ICE prisons, “turbocharge” opioid sales, or prop up authoritarian regimes, if the price is right. Other whiz kids spend time with the management consulting firms, law firms, mortgage lenders, and the ratings agencies that act as “palace guards” (R. Reich) around the banks. And then, there are the hedge funds.
Despite the crash, the whole apparatus continues on. And since all the innovators brought down the house in 2008, we kept them around to innovate our way out of it. We laugh, correctly, at the “Trump made a lot of money, therefore he can run an economy” logic, but we keep inviting Larry Summers and friends to run/advise/fix the economy under the same logic.
The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and its Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, were important steps and better than nothing, and as is often given the excuse, “maybe all we could have asked for from that Congress (or any Congress).” (Or, maybe not. Maybe we could have asked for more. Democrats did control both houses and the presidency). Dodd-Frank unsurprisingly leaves the power dynamics of the whole finance edifice untouched--just a little regulation at the top. (When Chris Dodd left the Senate, he spent six years lobbying for the Motion Picture Association of America and then joined the white-shoe law firm Arnold and Porter. Barney Frank joined the board of Signature Bank. Frank defends his earlier and current ties to the financial industry, firing back at critics for applying a “purity test." And more broadly, regarding all elected officials and congressional staffers who worked on Wall Street reform:
Wall Street, K Street and firms representing financial interests have hired at least 15 of the 47 lawmakers who left Congress after serving on the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee in August 2008, just before the financial crisis entered its most intense chapter. That number includes six of the 10 senators to leave Congress after serving on the Banking Committee. Seventeen of the 40 most senior staffers who served on the House Financial Services Committee in August 2008, as well as 15 of the 40 senior staff who served on the Senate Banking Committee at that time, later joined or took jobs representing a large financial institution.)
The problem isn’t investment banking. It’s who controls investment, the way investment is done, and the way investment reigns, not only with contributions and intense lobbying but also as a “virtual senate” on every issue. Chomsky, again:
To quote from the professional literature, free flow of capital creates a “virtual senate” of lenders and investors who carry out a “moment-by-moment referendum” on government policies, and if they find them irrational—that is, designed to help people, not profits—they vote against them by capital flight, attacks on currency, and other means. Democratic governments therefore have a “dual constituency”: the population, and the virtual senate, who typically prevail.
Highlighting the markets’ “liking” a candidate or “disliking” a particular bill has traditionally been a Republican ploy—a good fear tactic to convince people that any slight tack left will “ruin the economy (which is defined only as the stock market).” But as the Republicans become more and more unhinged—encouraging Capitol insurrections, for instance—the markets prefer Democrats more and more. That may be so—that Wall Street investors prefer “stable” Democrats to Trumpist Republicans—but that should not be the mantle we take up. “The Dow prefers Obama! (or Clinton! Or Biden! Or ____!),” the networks chatter, delivering that news triumphantly, with zero context or self-awareness.
Democrats’ favorite Wall Street banker over the years has probably been Jamie Dimon. This is despite JP Morgan Chase, led by Dimon, being central to the bubble and 2008 crash, despite the bank being implicated in scandal after scandal. “But! Dimon supports gay rights…. He believes climate change is real…. He believes that no human being is illegal…. He has made a lot of diverse hires…. He believes black lives matter…. Last year, after George Floyd’s murder, he formed a committee to tackle racial inequality…. He has recently spoken out against the Georgia voter suppression law…. He was Obama’s friend, at least for a time…. Dimon criticized and made fun of Trump from time to time…. He even has gone beyond the yard sign sentiments! He has talked about income inequality, for example:
A big chunk of [people] have been left behind. Forty percent of Americans make less than $15 an hour. Forty percent of Americans can’t afford a $400 bill, whether it’s medical or fixing their car. Fifteen percent of Americans make minimum wages, 70,000 die from opioids [annually].
He put $350 million into a program to train workers for the future! In a similar vein, Warren Buffett even admits, ‘There’s class warfare, alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ Buffett is our favorite billionaire.”
Despite his quips against Trump, Dimon and the Business Roundtable he chairs were instrumental in getting the Trump tax cuts passed. Despite his “concern” over income inequality, he doesn’t think the $31 million he brought home last year, or CEO pay in general, is part of the problem. It appears, to him, that lack of training and education is the main problem. “Just a little more job training and education. We’re almost there!” Dimon, the central (smart, media-savvy, woke) villain in Robert Reich’s The System. and the Roundtable
Could use their outsized political influence to push for laws requiring CEOs to consider all their stakeholders, not just shareholders. Rather than make it harder for workers to unionize, they could fight to make it easier, and to give workers larger voice in management decisions and a greater share of the profits. Rather than reflexively seek tax cuts, they could push to raise taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans like themselves, so there’d be more school funding to prepare American kids for the jobs of the future. They could seek a higher minimum wage, a larger Earned Income Tax Credit, universal healthcare, and other measures to make left-behind Americans more secure.
Dimon personally is fine with a little redistribution of income, but he and his compatriots will never stand for a redistribution of power, which might get to the heart of the inequality and the rot. In a similar vein, despite his admission of rich-led class war, Buffett vocally opposed the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009, which could have precipitated some redistribution of not only income but power.
There is a role for investment banking, but investment that is more regulated, more accountable, more democratic, more productive. Or at least, less parasitic to the rest of the real economy. Investment that serves the public and that does not control our politics for its own corrosive ends. The Reddit-Gamestop phenomenon this past January did get many people thinking about how messed up Wall Street’s model is, at least for a short while: “How is it that hedge funds make so much money betting against companies? Is that fair? Can renegade subreddit investors defeat the hedge funds? What is a subreddit? Who is WallStreetBets? Wait, how does all this work again?” The title of Thomas Friedman’s column right after the craze, “Made in the U.S.A.: Socialism for the Rich. Capitalism for the Rest” seemed to indicate that the GameStop thing led to some surprising epiphany for him. Nope. It did not. Instead of raising any challenging questions regarding labor/capital/power/inequality, he sidestepped and pontificated circularly over interest rates and other red herrings. Then, on CNBC, when asked what was happening, he provided even more drivel:
It is like watching a giant National Geographic nature film. First, there are people we call Lions “Long Sellers” who notice a Wildebeest hobbling around. We will call the Wildebeest “GameStop stock”. And of course, the Lions killed and ate the Wildebeest by driving the stock price from $63 to $4 dollars a share. When they did this, they made a fortune. Then along came the Hyenas. They are called “Short Sellers”. They fed off the carcass of the Wildebeest, “GameStop”. Yet, these are magical Hyenas. They made the carcass grow 50% larger than it really was. They did this with leverage.
Soon afterward came the Vultures, “Short Squeezers aka Reddit Army” This is a whole new group. The Vultures, “Short Squeezers” basically in turn ate the Hyenas. Now the really smart Vultures ate and flew away when the price hit $400 or so. The dumb Vultures hung around and kept eating. The Lions came back and ate the remaining Vultures. By the way, they are still eating. The latecomers. Eventually, when it is said and done the stock will return to the $4 value it had before this all happened. It is the circle of life, Hakuna Matata baby!
This supposedly passes for analysis and expertise. He closes:
What we’re seeing here is the democratization of finance...of short-squeezing...In America now, we do everything sort of laissez faire…. We kind of let it all happen and then we try to regulate it afterwards to try to find some hybrid balance and I think that’s the process we’re in now around news with Facebook and Twitter and now our markets.
This is his eventual evening-out, which just happens naturally over time on a libertarian internet he imagines exists. No comment on whether this game, be it played by lions or vultures, is fair, moral, or sane. No comment for the human beings left in the wake of “leveraged buyouts” and other capital games, more broadly, such as retail workers left without jobs and health care.
Versus the hedge funds, I obviously root for the part-time day traders and thank them for exposing the system’s folly, at least for a short time, but we should not kid ourselves that this is the “democratization of finance." Additionally, as Eric Levitz wrote in New York Magazine, “Whatever utility the GameStop rally theoretically had as a spectacle, its first-order consequence was to transfer wealth from ordinary Americans to Robinhood and Wall Street market makers.” Levitz not only chides Friedman fantasies but also attempts to sober up AOC, Matt Taibbi, and other, less credentialed left tweeters:
On a platform [Robinhood] that drastically underrepresents the supermajority of Americans who have less than $1,000 in savings, it was possible for some progressives to mistake the cause of recreational investors for that of the proletariat. Rallying to the cause of Robinhood traders may feel righteous. But it also has led leftwing lawmakers to the precipice of endorsing deregulation to facilitate riskier recreational speculation.
*
"Start-Up America: Our Best Hope"
Because we are so connected to our devices, or we are so susceptible to its top-notch PR, or so much of its advertising whispers to our hip lifestyle and personal branding, or we are too easily mesmerized by every innovation, or in many ways its devices have made our lives easier (sort of), or we get to use so many of their products for free (sort of), or many of its titans contribute to Democrats instead of Republicans (and we’re used to big business traditionally donating to Republicans), or so many Obama administration alums went to work there, or the industry seems to validate our meritocratic vision, or for any number of other reasons, liberals give much deference to Silicon Valley.
While Silicon Valley wields sway over our politics comparably to Wall Street, there is a major distinction between the two. Former New York attorney general and governor Eliot Spitzer, in the Academy Award-winning Inside Job (about the bubble and 2008 crash) notes the difference with Wall Street, “High tech is a fundamentally creative business where the value generation and the income derived from it actually comes from creating something new and different.”
It’s important not to fixate on just producing and consuming and on always having to produce/consume “something new and different.” Spitzer’s quote doesn’t touch on the labor-capital relationships around that creation. But compared to Wall Street at the least, Silicon Valley provides something of social value. Spitzer is right. Nevertheless, the sector’s power and influence is highly problematic.
The leaders of the big tech firms are the ubermenschen: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page/Sergey Brin. Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos have fallen slightly out of favor, but ubermenschen like them can keep creating and recreating themselves in addition to creating products and innovations. Even when we hold them in contempt, we aspire to be them (and they will soon cycle back out of our contempt). Bill Gates makes major decisions on global health and public education that affect the lives of millions of people who don’t use or even know Microsoft. Steve Jobs is the turtlenecked guru telling us to “Think Different,” still from the grave, and making his sleek products a countercultural lifestyle choice. Bezos is probably an asshole, but he [sic] can get us whatever we want to our doors in five minutes, and so we don’t really care that he is an asshole. Amazon has masterfully put the customer first, creating "Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company," as he put it in his last letter to shareholders. We dutifully obey and consume. Zuckerberg is a bit clueless and sloppy, or cleverly appears to be clueless, but he remains the boy-wonder. Musk may have some idiosyncrasies, but he will kindly open-source his solar-battery intellectual property with us, he says, to help save Earth before he takes us all to Mars. (Bezos/Blue Origin also might take us to Mars, depending on who’s faster.). Page and Brin stay under the radar enough to remain elusive, and in turn Google remains benevolent in our eyes.
Who better than Thomas Friedman to encapsulate our fascination with big tech? In a 2014 column, after visiting Silicon Valley, he could not contain himself:
Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, explains how his online storage and collaboration technology is enabling anyone on any mobile device to securely upload files, collaborate, and share content from anywhere to anywhere. Laszlo Bock, who oversees all hiring at Google, lays out the innovative ways his company has learned to identify talented people who have never gone to college. Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, explains how his start-up has, in the blink of an eye, become one of the biggest providers of overnight rooms in the world — challenging Hilton and Marriott — without owning a single room. Curt Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, which invented Siri for your iPhone, recalls how one leading innovator just told him that something would never happen and “then I pick up the paper and it just did.”
What they all have in common is they wake up every day and ask: “What are the biggest trends in the world, and how do I best invent/reinvent my business to thrive from them?” They’re fixated on creating abundance, not redividing scarcity, and they respect no limits on imagination. No idea here is “off the table.”
His visit and column happened to coincide with the TPP debate and therefore his punch-line just happened to be: “Silicon Valley tries new ideas all the time; Washington should too; pass the TPP—’fast-track’ it even (i.e. more ‘free trade’!).”
Big tech is no better or worse than any other industry. But what is unique about big tech is its particular branding in our popular cultural and collective psyche and, thus in effect, the mystification over how it actually gets us the hardware and software we need and don’t need. Behind the “Genius Hour”; behind the necessary and less necessary apps that enabled virtual teaching this past year; behind the million-dollar donations to civil rights groups after George Floyd’s murder; behind the pledges to reduce carbon emissions and Amazon paying its HQ2 employees to bike to work; behind its tear-jerking widower-trying-to-not-forget Super Bowl ads; behind its ostensible iconoclasm convincing us that buying their products is a small act of “resistance” akin to Vaclav Havel’s famed “green grocer” or Orwell’s Winston Smith (until Winston succumbs to Big Brother at least, or until we realize everyone else has the products too); behind the 18-minute-curated, usually necktie-less, thought-leader-led TED-talk promising the next innovation that will finally free us; behind the billionaire asceticism and gurudom; behind the self-congratulation for helping to topple dictators in the 2011 Arab Spring; behind its seemingly apolitical “we just love science” posturing; behind the kegerators, coffee bars, and ping pong tables in hip work spaces; behind all these, like in most other capitalist ventures, lie the extraction of natural resources, the expropriation of labor-generated surplus value, the accumulation of massive profits, the emission of much carbon, the pressure on municipalities to keep taxes and regulations low, cut-throat anti-competitive practices tending toward monopoly, and racialized/gendered hierarchies that facilitate such flows.
Rob Larson’s (very accessible) Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley details how much of the research and development for what would become the internet, what would become the personal computer, and what would become the hardware and software in between, were developed in publicly funded Department of Defense and other government and public university labs. Then the “pirates of Silicon Valley” obtained that intellectual property for cheap or free or stole it from other, smaller developers. Then, by the 90s, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had gobbled all of that up, and they respectively used strong-arm tactics and “network effects” to establish and maintain their oligopoly. Meanwhile, Bezos was doing similar things focused in the new online retail world, ruthlessly driving out smaller competitors, for instance. Google/Page/Brin and Zuckerberg/Facebook mounted similar feats with “search” and social networking. All of this is, in one breath, fine and unsurprising. We shed no tears for the Pentagon not getting credit, for example. However, this reality does not square, to say the least, with the image Silicon Valley projects of itself as the meritocratic, libertarian, from-the-ground-up, world’s laboratory.
Shoshana Zuboff’s (much longer and more philosophical but still very accessible) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism details how, first, Google and then Facebook mined our behavioral surplus and sold it to advertisers and how we have incorrectly viewed this as neutral-to-benign. And how we have only begun to realize what’s happening now, twenty years into their project. Comparing Google’s “declarations'' to its users to the Spanish conquistadors’ declarations to the Native Americans, who couldn’t fully know how much their entire world was about to be upended (partially because the declarations were in Spanish), Zuboff writes:
Surveillance capitalists deftly employed the entire arsenal of the declaration to assert their authority and legitimacy in a new and undefended digital world. They used declarations to take without asking. They camouflage their purpose with illegible machine operations, moved at extreme velocities, sheltered secret corporate practices, mastered rhetorical misdirection, taught helplessness, purposefully misappropriated cultural signs and symbols associated with the the themes of the second modernity--empowerment, participation, voice, individualization, collaboration--and badly appealed to the frustrations of second-modernity individuals thwarted in the collision between psychological yearning and institutional indifference.
In this process the pioneer surveillance capitalists at Google and Facebook evaded the disciplines of corporate governance and rejected the disciplines of democracy, protecting their claims with financial influence and political relationships. Finally, they benefited from history, born in a time when regulation was equated with tyranny and the state of exception precipitated by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 produced surveillance exceptionalism, further enabling the new market to root and flourish. Surveillance capitalists’ purposeful strategies and accidental gifts produced a form that can romance and beguile but is also ruthlessly efficient at extinguishing space for democratic deliberation, social debate, individual self-determination, and the right to combat as it forecloses every path to exit.
Facebook these days seems to be involved in one scandal after another, including and since the 2016 election. But these are “mini-scandals,” according to Zuboff, inside that much larger tectonic shift, where all of our behavior is commodified for prediction/futures/virtual/AI technologies, which we do not and will not own. And, this is what should scandalize us, but it does not.
As for Silicon Valley’s--or Jamie Dimon’s or Coca-Cola’s, for that matter—progressive credentials and the power of “woke capital” to discipline Republican-led voter suppression in Georgia, for instance, we should not hold any illusions. As a last resort, we should only make very temporary, very critical common cause with such behemoths and stand removed from them. Elizabeth Bruenig reminds us why:
For one: Capital is unfaithful. It can, and does, play all sides. Many of the courageous businesses that protested North Carolina’s 2016 “bathroom bill,” for instance, also donated to political groups that helped fund the candidacies of the very politicians who passed the bill. It isn’t possible to cooperate with capital on social matters while fighting them in other theaters; capital can fight you in all theaters at once, all while enjoying public adulation for helping you, as well.
Setting aside the fact that capital can in a single moment be both heroic and diabolical — Amazon wants you to be able to vote, but it would prefer if you didn’t unionize — it is, incredibly, even less democratic, accountable and responsive than our ramshackle democracy.
Capital rallies to the defense of democracy while aggressively quashing that very thing in the workplaces where its workers labor. It’s tempting, perhaps even satisfying, to call the government’s boss, but after the dressing down, you’re still just a customer, worth only as much as you can pay them or make them. That the jerks who’ve done their best to enervate our democracy are in the same boat as us is a cold comfort.
Not unlike the US government, big tech celebrates itself for enabling certain elements of the Arab Spring, or the Orange Revolution, or the Hong Kong protests, but just as likely enables a different authoritarian regime elsewhere in the world--the highest bidder--to crush its opposition. Profits are its goal. The rest is incidental. And when the US government or military is the highest bidder, when its endless wars need the right technology, Silicon Valley will happily oblige, albeit not without some courageous dissenters.
In January, shortly after the Capitol riots, both Facebook and Twitter banned Donald Trump. That may have been the right move. However, we should note that they did so only after years of his ugly discourse helped bring in much revenue to the companies (just as the liberal TV news became the “resistance” to Trump only after giving his campaign so much free air time and enjoying the ratings he brought in. On the whole, this is a dangerous development. “We can have democracy, or we can have editing power in the hands of a few ad moguls, but we definitely can’t have both.” Facebook and other social media companies can’t be the public square and an unaccountable private enterprise at the same time. Furthermore, any capital-led censorship will eventually, predictably take aim or capitulate to others taking aim at anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movements, as Facebook, Zoom, and YouTube recently did with several Palestine solidarity events.
All of this should serve to demystify big tech, but we are still too easily shocked/awed, and simultaneously anesthetized. Especially when time is money and “science is real” and “math!” look at all the “value” Bezos/Amazon, for instance, has “unlocked” for us:
Customers complete 28% of purchases on Amazon in three minutes or less, and half of all purchases are finished in less than 15 minutes. Compare that to the typical shopping trip to a physical store – driving, parking, searching store aisles, waiting in the checkout line, finding your car, and driving home. Research suggests the typical physical store trip takes about an hour. If you assume that a typical Amazon purchase takes 15 minutes and that it saves you a couple of trips to a physical store a week, that’s more than 75 hours a year saved.
And yet, most of are still un-“fulfilled,” even less so for the workers getting us our fulfillment. In some corners, thankfully, there is now chatter and even the occasional walkout in reaction to tech workers’ grueling hours. But that conversation--who actually is included in the term “tech worker” by the way?--mostly excludes Amazon warehouse workers on Staten Island or Foxconn factory workers in Taiwan or copper miners in the DRC. Could they not be considered tech workers as well? Or is our empathy limited to our professional friends?
In the 2020 Democratic primary, candidate Andrew Yang brought to the fore some very important issues: automation, displacement of workers, and of course, universal basic income (UBI). Yet, that welcomed conversation never touched on the fundamentals of labor, capital, and power. And when the hegemonic faces of capital are that warm to a potential idea, like UBI, it should give us some pause (although not necessarily torpedo the whole thing). There was no discussion of the history and politics that brought us to this juncture. Yang and the commentariat presented automation as some natural, ahistorical, apolitical force that just happens inevitably. And he, entrepreneur, naturally as the one innovating our way out of it. But this obscures all the so-called entrepreneurs and innovators in the past 50 or 150 years who have hoarded the material and intellectual property. Who have outsourced, off-shored, “shared,” gigged, part-timed, and now automated jobs every chance they have gotten in the name of “staying competitive,” which means in the name of profits. The robots are not the bad guys. Who owns the robots, though, owns the world. They are the bad guys. And while the media mostly dismissed Yang as an unviable candidate (although viable for New York City?), they nevertheless admired his entrepreneurship and how he taught other people in distressed cities entrepreneurship—i.e. start-ups saving the world. But what is “entrepreneurship” when it is divorced from questions of labor, power, extraction, and accumulation? John Patrick Leary, again: .
The prophetic meaning embedded deep in its history allows innovation to stand in for nearly any kind of positive transformation, doing for the twenty-first century what “progress” once did for the nineteenth and twentieth. In the United States, innovation also suggests a high-tech update to the myth of “Yankee ingenuity” or “know-how” — the spirit of mechanical cleverness and entrepreneurial energy once associated with New England’s artisan class. Like the mythical inventors of the American industrial age — Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison tinkering in their workshops — the innovator is a model capitalist citizen for our times.
But the object of most innovations today is more elusive: you can touch a telephone or a phonograph, but who can lay hands on an Amazon algorithm, a credit-default swap, a piece of proprietary Uber code, or an international free trade agreement? As an intangible, individualistic, yet strictly white-collar trait, innovation reframes the cruel fortunes of an unequal global economy as the logical products of a creative, visionary brilliance. In this new guise, the innovator retains both a touch of the prophet and a hint of the confidence man.
When the innovator Yang and the McKinsey whiz kid Buttigieg and the other darlings seemed unable to stop Bernie (and when Biden was not yet in vogue), Thomas Friedman, James Carville, and the other really serious guys began “paging Michael Bloomberg” , innovator extraordinaire waiting in the wings. He, apparently, was just the right technocrat, the right billionaire, the right moderate at the right moment who would save the day by convincing enough fellow wealthy white Bethesdans to jump from the Trump ship, and who would fix this country, presumably. “Paging Michael Bloomberg.” Which shows either just how out of touch Thomas Friedman and company are or how much contempt they have for working people or both. Michael Bloomberg, who made his billions through a financial data company, Bloomberg LP, which provides Bloomberg Terminal subscriptions, which “provides access to a wealth of real-time financial market data,” which is kind of like the marriage of Silicon Valley and Wall Street (sort of). Michael Bloomberg, under whom “stop and frisk” skyrocketed in New York City. Michael Bloomberg, under whom New York City became even more a playground for the rich while so many more people could no longer afford housing (which, to be fair, is not only a New York City problem). (Then there was the liberal, “Cuomosexual” desire for Andrew Cuomo to run when people remembered how rusty Biden was and after Cuomo gave many press conferences with much bravado, but I will leave that alone.)
Meanwhile, lost among the confidence men vying for the presidency and hardly discussed in the news were two extremely important--and bad--developments, in deeply blue, “very liberal” California: the failure of Prop 15 and most especially, the passing of Prop 22. Prop 15 “sought to raise taxes on high-value commercial properties to undo some of the damage of the 1970s ‘tax revolt,’ which over the last decades has kept California and other states from raising revenue for public services.” It failed by 4 percentage points. Chevron, Disney, and the real estate industry fought to defeat it. Then, with Prop 22, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and other “gig” companies spent $200 million to overturn Assembly Bill 5 (2019) and gain exemptions from labor law. Prop 22 passed with a wider margin, and Uber, etc., now do not have to classify their drivers as employees. Predictably, the gig companies and the Yes-campaign highlighted how wonderful and freeing it is to be an “independent contractor,” to work when you want to and make extra cash. They also heavily incorporated people of color into their ads and tried to paint labor unions and the No-campaign as exclusive, rigid, and racist. One ad for Prop 22 even appropriated the words and voice of Maya Angelou as it showed drivers of color getting ready for work each day: “Lift up your eyes upon….” However, despite the Maya Angelou poems and the “If you tolerate racism, delete Uber” billboards, these companies “have built an entire business model on gaslighting people of color and exploiting them for cheap labor.” We sing Uber's praises in regards to its "innovations" and its "efficiency," but much of that obscures the venture capital flowing in, its overall unprofitability, and yet the value its drivers nevertheless produce for the company. It is most efficient in demeaning its workforce and most "innovative" in creating a race to the bottom, even with other workers outside the company. (Side note: Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, is the chief legal officer for Uber. He helped push Prop 22. He was in Obama’s Justice Department. The Biden administration had apparently entertained hiring him as well, but brought on other Uber executives instead.)
As a non-Californian, I can only hypothesize how landlords and Silicon Valley capitalists won in their respective ballot measures, against public investment and against unions, while the state went 65% percent for Biden/Harris on the same day, on the same ballot. Maybe blue-California young professionals were taken by the Angelou ad. Maybe they didn’t read the propositions carefully. Or, maybe it all makes sense. It does fit with the brahmanizing Democratic demographic. We educated, cosmopolitan web people for the most part don’t drive for Uber or Lyft, but we use them, and they are very convenient, admittedly. We web people don’t work for TaskRabbit or DoorDash or Instacart, but we use them--all very convenient, too. At the same time, we get to rate some of these workers. It appears to be a fair, egalitarian system: "Drivers can rate us, too...and they should just be nice, then there's no problem." Yes, but they can’t affect our wages or livelihoods. In this power imbalance, some of these workers have to grovel to earn our favor because our unfavor can burn them. In regards to AirBnb, we typically aren’t affected by the business model's “negative externalities” on the housing market, vis-à-vis our own relative housing security, and therefore we don’t think about that when we book our own, very convenient AirBnb trip. Furthermore, we can drive, we can deliver, if we wanted to. Those jobs don’t take that much skill, unlike our own professions. Subconsciously or consciously, we think, “Anyone can do that. Ipso facto, you don’t need benefits or a union.”
Employing the Amazon-perfected "Customer-Centric"(-at-the-expense-of-workers-and-all-else) framework, these companies actually pushed their political messaging out through their apps to their customers, insinuating, "Don't let these 'outside agitators' get in the way of this nice thing we've got going. That might raise the price of your ride home or lengthen the wait for those items you need at your doorstep."
I do foresee a time in the future--or perhaps I am being too generous again--when we empathetic liberals will look back and say, “Shoot, if we had known, at that juncture! How could we have foreseen the widening inequality?” Like, on NAFTA, on the WTO, on Glass-Steagall repeal and 90s financial deregulation, on PROMESA and Puerto Rico, on Afghanistan, and on Iraq. We will give half-apologies. “Mistakes were made. It was the bad intel! Did we mention they sent the trustworthy Colin Powell to the UN?” Prop 22 in California was one of those very junctures, and we did more than punt. We gave everything away to the other team. Unless, of course, that has been our team all along.
California-style liberalism, which is most of our style of liberalism, is a “a simulacrum of social justice,” “the Biden administration is the Californication of the Democratic Party,” and, beware, Prop 22 is coming for the rest of us in other states.
*
Several hundred miles south of Silicon Valley lies Hollywood. Because politics in the US is celebrity and campaigns are theater, it is no wonder that “Hollywood” (to include New York-centered entertainment or the music industry or big-time athletics, for my purposes) plays an outsized role, particularly for liberal/Democratic politics. True, there is the uglier Republican underbelly: Reagan, Trump, Kid Rock, Brett Favre. True: thousands of actors (i.e. most of them), film- and theater-workers, comedians, athletes, and athletics-workers do not make it to the upper echelons, from where they can Tweet liberal platitudes. True: many of these artists and athletes do keep their courageous, radical edges despite the co-opters’ best efforts. But fairly or unfairly, the Hollywood-and-politics that most of the country sees is on Oscar, Emmy, Tony, or Golden Globe nights--or on Tucker Carlson’s recap the next day--where awardees take their jabs at Trump or Bush (but certainly not at the guy in between). While I typically agree with those jabs, it is no wonder that, especially amidst the incredible wealth and opulence, Hollywood’s liberal preaching comes off as hypocritical and tone-deaf. Robert DeNiro says, “Fuck Trump,” at the Tonys. And yes, fuck Trump, certainly. And fuck Tucker Carlson too, absolutely. But, there is a major disconnect there. Much of the focus is only on the liberalism of correct beliefs: “In this mansion, we believe…. Hate has no home on this yacht.” Or, on representation. While very important, “Hollywood’s sudden wokeness is disproportionately obsessed with representation and the skin-deep skirmish over which well-paid celebrities win a golden trophy while studios and productions overwhelmingly employ low-paid, overworked hourly contractors [disproportionately of color].” Finally yes, there is a problem with how much those at the top make, but more so, the problem is how they use their wealth and power as influence to keep structures unjust, benefiting them even more in the end. We should be wary not just of Trump and Kushner but of all real estate moguls, including DeNiro. That is, including liberal ones who preach liberal platitudes quite freely, while at the same time shaping laws to their absentee-landowning advantage in places like Barbuda, post-Hurricane Irma.
And, on the topic of acceptance speeches, there is a limit though to what’s tolerated and applauded. When Michael Moore (who is somewhat problematic, as are his films) delivered his 2003 acceptance speech for “Best Documentary” (for Bowling for Columbine) and went after George W. Bush and the lies behind the Iraq war--very briefly too, by the way (Moore isn’t usually brief)--he was booed heavily by the crowd and cut off. Liberal late-night talk-show hosts, pundits, and guests like Keith Olbermann and Al Franken criticized Moore afterwards. It was only a couple days into the war, and its fever had gripped conservatives and liberals alike. War is good for business, especially the war-movie business.
"When My President Sang 'Amazing Grace' "
Finally, that brings us to the ultimate “web person.” The smartest, most elite, most empathetic, most cosmopolitan, most pragmatic, untouchable celebrity-superhero we know and love: the 44th president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.
Especially in the four-plus years since he left office, the Obama hagiography has solidified. In many good liberal circles, one does not criticize Barack Obama and come out alive, even more so now than in his eight years in office. During the Trump years, it appears, he was canonized. And because of the Obama-Biden connection and because of celebrity-personality politics in general, this colors how we approach Biden too, and thus how we consider or do not consider alternative paths forward.
For what it’s worth, Obama seems to be a good person, at least from what I can ascertain. He appears to be a good husband, a good father. He is a good writer, a good orator, a good eulogist, a good role model, and probably was a good law professor and community organizer. From what I see, he is witty, compassionate, and deep. I would probably enjoy a beer (summit) with him. I voted for him twice, the first time enthusiastically. The second time, when I was less enthusiastic, I still did a phone bank for him. I rooted for him and his agenda. I hated Mitch McConnell and Glen Beck for him. I had hoped that most of his campaign promises would materialize. I would have wanted him at my graduation. If I was graduating now, I’d still probably want him. And, as far as I “like”/rank presidents and as far as I indulge in “great (wo)man” history, he’s definitely top-ten for me, probably top-five. But politics is not biography, personality, or celebrity, even though that’s what we’ve been brought up to believe. (This focus on and defense of personalities would have been a problem, too, admittedly, for the much less refined and less congenial Bernie Sanders, in that outside chance he had become president.) Those attributes of and sentiments for Obama--“he was too good for us...we didn’t deserve him”--are, on one plane, relevant, even if grandiose. On that same plane, maybe it matters that Biden was nice to those Amtrak conductors on his regular trips to DC --"Character is on the ballot.” But on another plane, these notions are completely irrelevant. Unless we work for the future Obama or Biden libraries, none of us has to defend their personalities or their “legacies” (or FDR’s or Lincoln’s for that matter... or Bernie’s...or AOC’s or whoever’s). We shouldn't care about Biden's Delaware or Scranton roots unless we’re talking about “how Delaware thrives as a corporate tax haven” or how places like Scranton (or most of the rest of Delaware) suffer as a consequence. Politics is about who gets what, when, where, and how. It is the struggle among parties, propaganda, interest groups, labor unions, capital, church, military/police, and government bureaucracy itself over who gets what. Participation is not just voting, media personalities, and distant Ivy League-Rhodes Scholars managing a national issue, but it is neighbors, workers, and everyday people talking, learning, and acting together around a very local political goal. It can include repression and violence and counter-violence. It either attempts to maintain the status quo or move the ball forward (or backwards). All of this is informed by the material conditions under which people live in order to improve the material conditions under which they live.
Insofar as it illuminates alternative paths forward, we need to critique Barack Obama honestly. This does not mean just tweeting, “What about the drones?” or “Deporter-in-chief!” at him and self-satisfiedly thinking we’ve owned him. We need to have an honest critique, though, because the Obama hagiography industrial complex--and its continuities in the current Biden administration--does a very good job at maintaining the status quo and obscuring the power and sometimes violence of those presidencies--and of capital and empire, of cours. It does a very good job--more so than the man or President himself--at keeping our politics on the surface level of personal branding, right beliefs, and signaling.
To be fair, the Obama administration inherited a crumbling economy and two wars. As candidate and president, he dealt with more absurd, often racist, vitriol than probably any other modern politician has had to. Yes, after the 2010 midterms, he had to deal with an obstructionist Congress. Yes, he had to work within our anti-democratic constitutional framework. Yes, all true. But our politics requires analysis, not apologetics. At the end of the day, what matters is what his administration achieved, obstacles or none. On that measure, his was a decent presidency, I believe, but not a transformational one, like Lincoln’s or FDR’s (or Reagan’s, which was for the worse).
Team Obama did help stave off a greater recession, did establish some regulatory reforms of Wall Street, but they did not touch the underlying issues that caused the crash in the first place. Who would expect Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, or the McKinsey-ites to do so? Team Obama did expand health care coverage, but they further congealed private insurers in our healthcare system. “It was a step towards universal coverage,” they say to the left in defense. Ok, fine. Where have they been since, in the fight for that next step, in the 2016 or 2020 elections or in between? Or, especially as the pandemic has exposed, even more, the folly of employer-based health care? Yes, they passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which extends after-the-fact compensation for pay discrimination, but they let the Employee Free Choice Act die, which would have made it easier for workers to form a union and build power before the fact. Yes, they withdrew troops from Iraq and ended that war, sort of (leaving a permanent American footprint in Baghdad to be sure), but they “surged” and extended the war in Afghanistan. Yes, they normalized relations with Cuba, sort of, but they looked the other way on a coup in Honduras and recognized the illegitimate government afterwards. Yes, they brokered the Iran nuclear deal, but in Libya, “We came, we saw, he died” (no love for Qaddafi here, but they went beyond the UN mandate and helped send Libya into greater chaos). They expanded the drone war, expanded surveillance, went after whistleblowers. Yes, they tinkered where they could on climate change, but they could not stop the fossil fuel companies from dictating the terms. Yes, they acknowledged income inequality and made attempts to redistribute some income and wealth, but they attempted to fast-track TPP and further other structures that make redistribution necessary in the first place. Yes, they did not get along with Netanyahu and they “abstained” from a very mild UN rebuke of Israel in their last month, but the money kept flowing and the settlements kept growing for eight years. Yes, there were many other partial successes and victories, just like any administration’s successes (including Lincoln and FDR) are partial and imperfect. Yes, they were better than Team McCain or Team Romney would have been. Yes, they were absolutely better than Team Trump. That’s not even close. Or better than most of us could have done. But, that’s not the question or the point.
To his credit (sort of), Obama believed in consensus, despite the obvious bad faith of the Republican party. To his credit (sort of), he trusted “the process,” even though as a constitutional lawyer, he understood how backwards our particular process is. To his credit (sort of), Obama believed in “the idea of America, the promise of America” even though American realities have never matched the so-called “idea of America,” prior to and during his time. (Do other countries have as many ideas about themselves as we do?) Meanwhile, we, with our good Swedish liberal friends, were so eager for an intellectual, for the anti-Bush to come along with his ideas and promises--maybe more so than realities--that less than eight months into his term, we awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize. Which, to say the least, was a bit premature. Good liberal, though, I remember defending the decision myself: “Well the award is honoring his promise...and it could hold him accountable...and he has changed the rhetoric...and people like America again” (or something like that).
By the end of his time in office, Obama writes in A Promised Land, he had come to believe:
That [slow, painstaking reform] was all any of us could expect from democracy. . . . Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser impulses.
Which is fair. I believe he actually believes that, and I don’t think the hope/change was all a sham (even if it did win best advertisement in 2008). But in our analysis, we see that we got a lot of hope but not that much change. After the moral failings of the crash and of Iraq, what we needed was momentous change. Maybe he personally wanted it. But the team he brought in to expertly manage the crisis--all coming from the same Ivy League social class by the way--could not see beyond just technocratic tinkering. Or maybe would not, based on their class interest? This emphasis on “process,” on “consensus” also has the effect of telling the left--small and weak as it is--to back down and “get serious.” Team Obama, or team Biden, they’re the serious ones of course. Which is all fair posturing, because that is politics, too. But, it is not ideology-free just because it is more center or "moderate." And so, because “banks got bailed out and we got sold out,” Bernie did consider a primary challenge to Obama in 2012 because that is fair in politics, too. But in 2020, in our celebrity campaign media circus, Pete Buttigieg and others could seriously point to Bernie’s non-run against Obama in 2012 as an attempt to score political points, because one was not to challenge Obama then or now, supposedly. Which I guess is fair, too, because that’s also politics. It’s just very thin, that’s all. It’s in this milieu that Cornel West’s relentless Socratic criticism of Obama, to name one prominent detractor, in the media became focused on West’s idiosyncrasies (of which he has many) and his supposed feeling “left out” of team Obama. That was the media narrative, instead of on the substantive critique--a necessary critique of the most powerful man in the world, by the way, and of the leader of the most powerful empire in human history.
Team Obama tried really hard, believed really hard. It just wasn’t good enough, especially considering liberals/Democrats’ role in the social rot in the first place. Maybe then, we can read A Promised Land (which garnered a $65 million advance, by the way, far outdoing Clinton’s My Life, which only received a $15 million advance), but we don’t all have to be his memoirist ourselves.
Is this cynical? I don’t think so. Pessimistic? Perhaps But, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” (We hope.)
*
(Thus far, I have avoided the term “neoliberal” because it can be a loaded or confusing term, and I hesitate to lob it around as a pejorative. But it can be a useful, descriptive term. Today’s liberals (and conservatives and everyone) exist and operate in a hegemonic neoliberal paradigm. As most already know but just to clarify: one, the “liberal” in neoliberal refers to the classical definitions of liberalism (i.e. Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc.) and not the FDR/LBJ/Hollywood left-of-center “liberal” in today’s mainstream discourse. Two, Wendy Brown defines neoliberalism as
a governing rationality through which everything is “economized” and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm…. Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres—such as learning, dating, or exercising—in market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices. Above all, it casts people as human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.
Three, the famous neoliberals were/are Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the Ronald Reagan apparatus, to name a few. Therefore four, most of today’s “conservatives” are neoliberals. Five, it does not follow “neoliberal is to neoconservative as liberal is to conservative,” even though from an English logic standpoint, that might make sense. Six, the term neoliberal includes many neoconservatives. Seven, the neoconservatives found their particular resurgence in the George W. Bush administration, and neoconservatism tends to add an interventionist foreign policy to a neoliberal free-market fundamentalism. Eight, many of today’s liberals are neoliberals (Most? I don’t know). Nine, not all liberals are neoliberals. Ten, sociologist Stephanie Mudge believes it is important to distinguish between neoliberals and the "neoliberalized." That is, the Ronald Reagan neoliberal movement neoliberalized so hard that they created a situation where relatively conservative (economically) Bill Clinton and a generation of Democrats rose to power. Across the ocean, Thatcherites neoliberalized Labour PM Tony Blair. Mudge makes this distinction because she thinks someone like Clinton still sees himself as genuinely liberal and genuinely fighting for the working class in the New Deal-Great Society spirit. It might be helpful to keep this distinction, to give the Clintonites the benefit of the doubt, maybe, somewhat. Eleven, to be even fairer to Clinton, we must note that Jimmy Carter was the first neoliberal Democratic president, and many of these trends started under his administration, like the “Volcker shock” or deregulation of the trucking and airline industries. Twelve, scholars like Brown and Mudge have written tomes on the rise of neoliberalism and its effects, which are incredibly important, but I am interested in how this neoliberalism—and other forces and contingencies—affect the everyday thoughts and casual conversations of the liberal class.)
Lexus trumps olive tree: The limitations of a "good liberal" (Part 5: "You can't go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes")
When it comes to foreign policy, the “good liberal” story can be summarized as such: Yes we have sinned. But, we have overcome, transcended our sins. We are exceptional because we know our sins and have done/will do better. We have progressed, developed. Other regions of the world have not progressed as much. We can help them progress. Whenever they act out, it’s because they haven’t progressed as much. They should have progressed. We occasionally use force to help them progress--we’re not afraid to use it!--but only when necessary--and with surgical, tech precision--and when there is “collateral damage,” we feel bad about it. But, sometimes that is the price. Mistakes were made, yes--in Vietnam, in Iraq--but we feel bad about them, and that redeems our mistakes.
Ken Burns then writes our nonfiction version of events, while Aaron Sorkin gets to write the dramatized one. When we are feeling bad about some action, we are the compassionate President Jed Bartlett, able to quote scripture and the great books and Lincoln speeches verbatim. But we are at the same time the school-of-hard-knocks Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, telling us the hard truth, dramatically, “We had to, Mr. President.” We leave the room or stage (in the evening) head down, which indicates how bad we feel about it. “These are hard choices.” (Cue The West Wing theme). We enter the room (stage) in the morning, with our head held high.
*
US power in the world is two-pronged. On one hand, we have the most powerful military in human history, the ability to economically cripple other nations through sanctions, etc., and the sophisticated lawfare to punish those not following the line and also to skirt our own culpability at the same time. On the other hand, we possess the “power of ideas” or “soft power,” which includes our liberal humanitarianism (despite the sordid record of our humanitarianism). Some liberals think that this so-called soft power stands apart from the hard power, but it goes hand in hand with the brute force, even when deployed in different locations. That is, the second prong (ideas) serves to legitimize the first prong (force). Those ideas may or may not do any actual legitimizing to the people on the other end of our drones or to bystanders watching the drones. But more importantly, they legitimize the use of force to ourselves and to enough American voters, which is what matters. Conservatives and liberals alike use both prongs. Generally speaking, liberals seem to put more emphasis on the ideas than conservatives do. Ours are more refined, at least. But when it comes to using force, liberals and conservatives are neck and neck, historically speaking. Conservatives understand empire, even though many shirk away from the term. Liberals don’t get empire, however. Despite the historical record, we have convinced ourselves that we were or are or should be or will be again “moral leaders” in the world and that other non-American people out there actually want that. This ignorance, feigned or not though, is quite effective because we end up with “empires without imperialism,” which is a very convenient material position/intellectual posture. We have convinced ourselves that we aren’t doing empire as we do it. So, maybe we do get it.
We rightly make fun of the Sarah Palin-Ronald Reagan mode of “American exceptionalism.” However, we liberals employ an exceptionalism and mythology that in practice is not that different. It is a little smoother on the edges. The rhetoric is prettier, less jingoistic:
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. (Woodrow Wilson)
Partially thanks to Black Lives Matter, we liberals now rightly reject Woodrow Wilson’s infamous domestic racism. We, however, remain hopelessly infected by the stuffy Wilsonian ethic in the foreign sphere. By that, I mean the moralizing ethic of international-coalition, rights-based, self-determination for some (i.e. European countries and approved client states) and meanwhile racist domination for and capitalist extraction from others (i.e. non-European countries), all propped up by a self-serving, self-congratulating cultivation of “ideas,” as with a “Council on Foreign Relations,” for instance. Samuel Huntington, a member of the Council and no dove, is at least honest: “The West [and now specifically the US, since 1945] won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted quite confidently in the confident 1990s, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” In the less confident 2010s, Hillary Clinton, on her way out as Secretary of State, echoed Albright, “We are the indispensable nation. We are the force for progress, prosperity, and peace.” These statements do not require history or current analysis. They are true because we have said they are true.
When questioned about sanctions on Iraq by 60 Minutes' Leslie Stahl, “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Madeleine Albright infamously answered, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.” To be fair, Albright later apologized and retracted the comment, but the fact that it was uttered in the first place, by a sitting Secretary of State, a liberal/Democratic one, a supposed feminist trailblazer is indicative of how our rhetoric can convince us of almost anything. Albright caught some hell for her comment, but for the most part neither it nor the sanctions themselves registered alarm with most Americans, including most liberal Americans. There was no lost election as a result (Clinton won again in ‘96), no unpopularity or public opinion change, no change in policy. Americans took it as normal, sane rhetoric and to the degree we were paying attention, as something we do because we have to: hard choices, hard truths that Leslie or some Seattle “flat-earther” protester out there or some child in Iraq couldn’t understand. “Get serious.”
What makes us liberals serious in our war-making is our intellectuals. Conservative intellectuals are second-rate at best, wherever they exist, and leftist intellectuals are naïve pacifists--tankies even. But, liberal intellectuals (PhD’s and non-PhD’s) have considered all the facts. Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, John Kennedy, John Kerry, Barack Obama, David Petraeus, Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power, Zbigniew Brzeziński, Ashton Carter. We have read Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Mahan, Augustine, and the ancient Greeks. Because we know the deep roots of war and know a lot about our history and our adversaries’ histories, we tell ourselves, we go into war more solemnly and soberly than the right-wing jingoists do.
And for some reason, prominent liberals seek the wisdom, the ear, and favor of the “intellectual,” the “statesman” Henry Kissinger, despite his conservative/Republican credentials and despite his war crimes. Historian Greg Grandin offers a reason why in his book Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. Kissinger is more malleable than the neocons and thus more usable to our ends.
Kissinger’s career courses through the decades like a bright red line shedding spectral light on the role that has brought us to where we now find ourselves. From the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia to the sands of the Persian Gulf…at the very least we can learn from Kissinger’s long life that the two defining concepts of American foreign policy—realism and idealism—aren’t necessarily opposing values. Rather, they reinforce each other. Idealism gets us into whatever the quagmire of the moment is. Realism keeps us there while promising to get us out, and then idealism returns anew both to justify the realism and to overcome it in the next round.
In short, Kissinger tells us what we want to hear. He and some of the other intellectuals provide the sophistry, the smoke and mirrors, that obscure the violent domination and extraction that actually occurs when we throw our weight around in the world.
We not only love the Princeton and Harvard academics, but we adore the West Point, Annapolis, and Air Force Academy products and faculty, too. The former is predictable and obvious, the latter less so. Many of us are honestly in awe of the cosmopolitan generals and admirals out there and for some of us, it also serves a psychological role. We get to prove that we’re patriotic too. It inoculates us against getting called “traitor,” “wimp,” “unserious,” or worse, like they did to us in the ‘70s, which is supposedly the reason we lost in the ‘80s. (“The Baileys” thought we had become too radical, too weak. Not anymore.) There is a service academy-worship that is akin to our Ivy League-worship and, since the academies appear less nepotistic and oligarchic and certainly less indulgent, they fit even more with our notions of the meritocracy. In the age of Trump, when our nation’s power was revealing itself (to us) as nasty and brutish, the service academies in our minds were the bastions of more heroic and refined power. Similarly under Trump, we liberals grasped for John McCain’s or Colin Powell’s or George H.W. Bush’s mantle (and flirted with George W. Bush’s). We pivoted--we were the true patriots now. We also convinced ourselves that the former generals McMaster, Mattis, or Kelly would keep Trump in line or lead the (#)resistance if things became bad enough. “See, we don’t dislike the troops. We don’t dislike all Republicans. We don’t dislike America. McCain, Powell, Dick Lugar, the elder Bush, and the younger Bush even--not as bad anymore. They are/were ‘statesmen.’ There used to be statesmen. Where have all the statesmen gone?”
If you stumble upon the Army-Navy game on tv, you will witness sports commentators and advertisers stumbling over each other to prove who loves the troops more. The cadets and mids are the ultimate selfless heroes or soon-to-be-heroes—and they are smart too! They are the heroes we materially--and psychologically and performatively--need. Since we need leaders at the front or at sea to "keep us free,” better it be the philosopher-officer who has read Aristotle and taken calculus than the enlisted dolt who joined through the backdoor draft, because he had no job prospects elsewhere.
I have nothing against the service academies. A similar, although watered-down adulation is given to ROTC mids/cadets at elite schools. I know good people who went through the academies, and the schools did them well. But like any elite university (or perhaps any college or educational institution?), only a certain type of intelligence or innovation is celebrated. Any creativity and question-asking is only allowed to go so far, not unlike the celebrated genius in Silicon Valley (as long as they don’t question the business model, right?) David Wiggins, a West Point grad and later a conscientious objector in the Persian Gulf War observed:
People are pretty intelligent there [at West Point] but they will use that intelligence as a way to justify whatever course of action you’re ordered to do. They don’t think objectively in terms of whether or not something’s right in terms of orders. They just accept the order as what’s right and then use their intelligence to kind of create some sort of argument to justify it.
Service academies--and ROTC units like the one I was in--ultimately train officers for the world’s most powerful killing machine. Generals and admirals, including the cosmopolitan anti-Trump ones, direct that machine. That machine, I would argue as Martin Luther King did in 1967, is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” You might say the killing is justified or necessary in particular places. (I believe it has been at times, historically and it can be, hypothetically, as I’m not a pacifist, but in practice it usually has not been.) At the least, name it. Let’s not sugarcoat or intellectualize it. Or confer dignity—“statesmen”—to undignified acts and actors.
*
If our nasty, brutish side reveals itself too much, we assure ourselves, “This is not who we are.” The photos leak from Abu Ghraib. “This is not who we are.” The story breaks on the My Lai massacre. “This is not who we are.” When our violence slips out of our expertly managed, mathematical orbit, we believe we can educate or discipline it back to respectable bounds. We think we can on the whole dehumanize Vietnamese or Iraqis and not expect individuals to go rogue. We think we can separate top-level, precision Tomahawk missiles and remote unmanned drone strikes from, for example, the very hands-on abuses at Bagram air base. Maybe. But as writer and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien notes, “To understand what happens to the GI among the mine fields of My Lai, you must know something about what happens in America. You must understand Fort Lewis, Washington. You must understand a thing called basic training.” Nowadays we are rightly removing Confederate names and symbols from military bases, but it is little discussed how between the Spanish-American War (1898) and Iraq (2003), Yankee Uncle Sam gladly utilized the spirit of Dixie in its violent discipline of Filipinos, Cubans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Arabs. That is, we have fed our collective Jungian shadow--of white settler colonialism, of slavery, of Jim Crow--when it has proved useful in further extraction and exploitation. It is difficult to escape, or unentangle, from our shadows, especially when we have enabled them. And we must note, My Lai was only one massacre amidst the constant low hum of US soldiers killing “anything that moves” in Southeast Asia. Abu Ghraib was only one incident amidst the low hum of continuous “extraordinary renditions” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the so-called Global War on Terror. These incidents stem from the dragons good liberals helped release, and we shouldn’t sugarcoat or intellectualize them. We certainly can’t separate them.
When the violence comes home to roost, like it did on January 6, albeit not as well organized or effective as that directed overseas, we insist also, “This is not who we are.” We heard a lot of that after the Capitol riot. Kevin Tillman, though, brother of slain NFL player/Army Ranger Pat Tillman and former Ranger himself, writes that “Our endless wars led to the Capitol insurrection.” To the sentiment “this is not who we are,” he says:
Honestly, it could only seem that way if you imagined our domestic politics as completely separate from our foreign policy. But if we’re to learn anything from that maladroit attempt at a government-toppling coup, it should be that they are anything but separate. The question isn’t whether then-President Donald Trump incited the assault on the Capitol—of course he did. It is, rather: Since when have we cared if an American president lies to incite an illegal insurrection? In all honesty, our commanders in chief have been doing so abroad for generations with complete impunity. It was only a matter of time before the moral rot finally made its way home.
Tillman lists many of the places we have invaded, directly couped, green-lit coups, materially assisted coups, or attempted to coup (“We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it!" -Elon Musk): Angola (1970s), Argentina (1976), Bolivia (1971), Brazil (1964), Cuba (1961), El Salvador (the 1980s), Grenada (1983), Guatemala (1954), Haiti (2004), Honduras (1980 and 2009), Indonesia (1967), Iran (1953), Panama (1989), Paraguay (1962), Peru (1968), Suriname (the 1980s), Uruguay (1973), Venezuela (2001), Zaire/Congo (1961). Not to mention Vietnam. Or Laos and Cambodia. Not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan. Or Somalia, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
Nancy Pelosi called January 6 “one of the darkest days of our history. The sheer scale of the violence of the day is shocking.” It was indeed dark, violent, and shocking. It was indeed a moral scandal, encouraged by the sitting President no less and his sycophants in Congress. We must condemn, investigate, and prosecute it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. But in its scale, January 6 was extremely small potatoes compared to the crime of Iraq (or Vietnam or Panama or Nicaragua or Chile). Many good liberals, shocked and awed by January 6, have never wrestled with our own complicity in Iraq. Immediately after January 6, we then sought consensus with Bushes, with Cheneys, and other pre-Trump Republicans for a return to normal. But what type of “normal” do we want? This is not to conflate, invent causality, or obfuscate January 6’s events, but our moral outrage would carry a lot more weight if we had a sense of history and our own role in that history.
After Abu Ghraib, George W. Bush remarked,
The acts were abhorrent. It's a stain on our country's honor and our country's reputation…. The actions of the people in that prison do not reflect the nature of the men and women who wear our uniforms. We've got brave souls in Iraq sacrificing so that somebody can be free, and helping the Iraqi citizens be free.... Our soldiers in uniform are honorable, decent, loving people.
In another statement, he said the people of Iraq “must understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know.” These near-apologies assume that we have honor, that we have a good reputation to begin with, and that there is some “America” that exists out there--that he knows or we know--that is separate from the bombs, the occupation, and the torture. In a very clever move, dipping into the more liberal mode of American exceptionalism, Bush explained,
We're a great country because we're a free country, and we do not tolerate these kind of abuses. The people of the Middle East must be assured that we will investigate fully, that we will find out the truth, they will know the truth just like the American citizens will know the truth, and justice will be served.
That is to say, never mind the actual abuse done. Pay attention, instead, to the freedom of speech/press and the criminal procedure/due process that will resolve and then absolve the abuse. We are such a great country because we are ashamed of this and will not sweep it under the rug. You too, dear Iraqis, will have a democratic system as good as ours one day, you’re welcome.
In our liberal reckoning with recent history, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush, yes, of course, those brutes are responsible. And Johnson, too, we’ll admit Johnson was a brute. But not Kennedy. He did not really want to do the Bay of Pigs, did you know? It was Eisenhower’s people who set it up. Kennedy felt bad about it (for the US/Cuban-exile lives lost, not the invasion of a sovereign country). He only sent “advisors” to Vietnam. If he hadn’t been killed, Vietnam wouldn’t have gotten so bad, you know? (I received a little of this Kennedy apologetics in Catholic school and Catholic circles, as we felt we had to defend, at the time, our lone Catholic president.) And if Bobby hadn’t been killed and if he had won in ‘68, he would have ended it. Carter, meanwhile: “human rights” and Camp David. Clinton: the Good Friday accords, the Dayton accords! Obama: his Cairo speech, his Nowruz greetings to the Iranians, the Nobel peace prize!
The actor Wallace Shawn attempts to disabuse us of this nostalgia for some quaint liberal world order that only existed in our minds:
Barack Obama seemed to love the old rhetoric, and he may have been despised by Trump and his followers not simply because he was the first person of color to become president, and not simply because of the elegance of his speeches and the refinement and sense of self-respect evident in his demeanor, but because the words he used somehow harked back to the ethical aspirations expressed by President Kennedy (never mind that neither he nor President Kennedy lived up to them).
Over the decades of my life, America’s morale has declined, I’d say. There was a dignity to feeling kind and good. It was enjoyable. On the other hand, the lack of connection between what we felt we were and what we actually were was dangerous and led to the death of a lot of people. Personally, I have nothing to complain about in regard to my country. America has always been good to me, and so it’s really hard for me to believe that Donald Trump’s face is the true face of America. If I look back at my own life, I’d have to say that the sunny faces of the soldiers in postwar Europe, the friendly faces of the boys who lifted me up to sit in their jeeps, seem like better representations of the way I’ve been treated, and so for me those faces really do seem like the face of my country. But for those countless others, in the cities and towns of the USA and in countries far away, to whom America has not been good, the face of America has always and forever been the face of Donald Trump
*
A tech-utopian inevitablism, not dissimilar to the inevitablism in the civilian world that tells us we will have self-driving cars and no one will have to work anymore, tells us that we have almost reached the clean war. With a little more technology and innovation, we will vanquish our enemy, gently, without vanquishing civilians. But then, we will soon vanquish war itself, especially when no one will challenge or feel the need to challenge our technical and moral superiority. Pretty soon, all war will be automated, and we will reach equilibrium. We will have reached the post-war war. The post-kill kill.
Throughout history, better military technology has typically translated into victory. It is not unusual, then, that US liberals and conservatives seek better military technology. Not only will it assure victory, we tell ourselves, but our “smart bombs” will also assure fewer collateral/civilian deaths. Liberals, who are more bookish and less brutish, really appreciate the technology. War fought by such technologies means it’s a more meritocratic war. From Robert McNamara and the RAND corporation whiz kids’ mathematical approaches in Vietnam to today’s drones and cyberwarfare though, we have placed too much faith in our technical superiority. One, it does not assure victory, as seen in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. And two, no technology, especially a war technology, exists divorced from politics.
In 2002, retired Marine general Paul Van Riper exposed the folly of our tech-inevitabalism-in-war when he wasn’t supposed to win the largest and most expensive war game in US history, as leader of the “Red” team, but did. Of the experience and the fallout, Van Riper noted that attempting to control or manage war is like saying:
“I’m going to put my canoe in a mountain stream. Not only am I going to control the canoe, I’m going to control the stream.” No. The stream has its own dynamics. War and battles have their own dynamics. And so the best you can hope to do is keep some sort of order within the chaos.
In an extended profile of Van Riper and the “Millennium Challenge” war game, Daniel Bessner concludes,
War cannot be planned, it cannot be predicted, and it cannot be made safe. Yet Americans continue to pursue the dream of clean, scientific war. What are drone strikes, if not the latest instantiation of the fiction that war could be made more efficient and precise, and therefore more humane? This fantasy of clean war reflects and empowers the fantasy of American empire, which is premised on the idea that armed primacy can force the world to become peaceful and prosperous.
*
When we diagnose what is wrong with other countries—they haven’t progressed—we handpick the smart, empathetic, elite, pragmatic (Western/global capital-friendly) leaders who will technocratically lead their people into the promised/progressed land. We look for people who can deliver hope and change to those far away places (without challenging any larger world order, of course), even if those men lack popular support or haven’t lived in their home countries for years: the respectable Mohamed ElBaradei for Egypt during the Arab Spring, for example; the less respectable Hamid Karzai for Afghanistan in 2001; the completely unrespectable Ahmed Chalabi for Iraq in 2003; or the unknown Lokman Slim in Lebanon apparently for some years. These people will have to stand in until the Arab Nelson Mandela comes along. We are waiting for the Arab Mandelas, wrote Thomas Friedman at the height of the Arab Spring:
The final thing Iraq teaches us is that while external arbiters may be necessary, they are not sufficient. We’re leaving Iraq at the end of the year. Only Iraqis can sustain their democracy after we depart. The same will be true for all the other Arab peoples hoping to make this transition to self-rule. They need to grow their own arbiters — their own Arab Nelson Mandelas. That is, Shiite, Sunni and tribal leaders who stand up and say to each other what Mandela’s character said about South African whites in the movie “Invictus”: “We have to surprise them with restraint and generosity.”
This is what the new leaders of these Arab rebellions will have to do — surprise themselves and each other with a sustained will for unity, mutual respect and democracy. The more Arab Mandelas who emerge, the more they will be able to manage their own transitions, without army generals or outsiders. Will they emerge? Let’s watch and hope. We have no other choice. The lids are coming off.
That is, when the Arab versions of the Clint Eastwood-directed, dramatized movie, Morgan Freeman version of Nelson Mandela come along, then the Middle East will be fine. In fact, that has been its problem all along according to Friedman: no Mandelas.
To be sure, there have been many gross, corrupt, murderous Arab dictators, of both secular and religious flavors. They deserve plenty of condemnation. But in Friedman’s and other liberals’ telling, no mention is made of a century of French and British colonialism in the Middle East (nor the earlier centuries of the overlapping Ottoman empire). No mention is made of Zionist settler colonialism. No mention is made of seventy years of US neocolonialism. No mention is made of the oil, rubber, tin, tungsten, cobalt, phosphates, nitrates, land, and other wealth that is vacuumed up by Western corporations and banks and their corporate native henchmen in-country. Little mention is made of how we support and play Arab (and Iranian) strong men off of each other. No mention is made of the weapons we have poured in. No context is given about our “war for the greater Middle East.” There are just bad leaders who don’t believe in democracy (or technology and free trade--there’s always a free trade angle with Friedman) and “flat-earthers” who don’t get it. In the classic Orientalist trope, there is just the irascible Arab who can’t be trusted and who just hates Jews, by the way. They only need good leaders who believe in democracy (and technology and free trade). Look at Israel, meanwhile, the “lone democracy in the Middle East.” They’re prosperous because they’re tolerant and cosmopolitan (and also they deregulated finance and allowed free trade). If only the mullahs or the imams or the dictators or other flat-earthers would get out of the way, then the Palestinians and all the other Arabs could flourish, too. They could have the Lexus and the olive tree.
Between 2006 and 2012, Tom Friedman penned no fewer than nine columns where he stated the need for an “Arab Mandela.” This pining for an Arab Mandela, predictably, ignores the actual history of Nelson Mandela and of South African apartheid. We in the US tell a version of that story where there were some bad whites over there that kept some good blacks over there down, and then this one really good black guy came along over there, and united everyone everywhere, and we good whites over here supported him and celebrated that. However, the US supported the South African apartheid regime until the very end. The US vilified Mandela and labeled him a terrorist. The US (bipartisan) government, business community, and many citizens/consumers ignored or even subverted the international boycott movement against apartheid. The notion that we were on the right side of history there is pure fantasy, mythology. At a 1990 The Koppel Report town hall, some good liberals were nervous that the Mandela they had curated and “supported” was going off-script. Ken Adelman of the Institute of Contemporary Studies asked him a question:
Those of us who share your struggle for human rights and against apartheid have been somewhat disappointed by the models of human rights that you have held up since being released from jail. You've met, over the last six months, three times with Yasser Arafat, who you have praised. You have told (Moammar) Gadhafi that you share the view and applaud him on his record of human rights and his drive for freedom and peace around the world, and you have praised Fidel Castro as a leader of human rights, and said that Cuba was one of the countries that's head and shoulders above all other countries in human rights, despite the fact that documents at the United Nations and elsewhere show that Cuba is one of the worst. I was just wondering, are these your models of leaders of human rights, and if so, would you want a Gadhafi or an Arafat or a Castro to be the future president of South Africa?
Mandela replied
One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies. That we can and we will never do. We have our own struggle, which we are conducting. We are grateful to the world for supporting our struggle, but nevertheless, we are an independent organization with its own policy, and the attitude of every country towards _ our attitude towards any country is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle. Yasser Arafat, Col. Gadhafi, Fidel Castro support our struggle to the hilt. There is no reason whatsoever why we should have any hesitation about hailing their commitment to human rights as they are being demanded in South Africa. Our attitude is based solely on the fact that they fully support the anti-apartheid struggle. They do not support it only in rhetoric. They are placing resources at our disposal, for us to win the struggle. That is the position.
To be sure, Qaddafi, Castro, and Arafat were very problematic in their respective ways, to say the least, but Mandela essentially said, paraphrased, “Thank you, good white liberal friend, for your question. What did you or your country do to materially help our struggle? Or to help the struggle in Zimbabwe, Angola, or Namibia? You can’t appreciate decolonization because you refused to see the colonization in the first place.”
According to Tom Friedman, always what we need is just the right charismatic yet technocratic leader, the right peace summit, the right truth and reconciliation committee (more reconciliation, less truth though), the right speech, the right diplomat. Or, the right protest--the Arab Spring is fun to write about when you focus on young people, the marvel of Twitter, or Thomas Jefferson’s rhetoric living on but ignore the economic/labor struggle behind much of the Arab Spring, for instance.
Friedman loves the shiny tall buildings and social freedoms (for some) in the Emirates and the free-flowing capital alongside the free-flowing white robes. The gulf fiefdoms are the models for the Arab world, especially when they make separate peace/business deals with Israel. Friedman was enamored with the well-educated, well-spoken “reformer” Mohammed bin Salman, prior to the bonesawing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, at least. “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at Last,” which of course was not only premature and shortsighted but also totally ignored how Saudi Arabia shut down its own protests in 2011 and sent troops across the bridge to help crush Bahrain’s nascent spring (Bahrain, home of the US’s fifth fleet). Not to mention how Friedman ignores the exploited labor force from “third countries” like Bangladesh or the Philippines whose hands actually build the shiny buildings or clean the wealthy homes.
We Tom Friedmans of the world take that same ahistorical, self-satisfied approach to “problem countries” and people in Latin America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and Southeast Asia as well. Or to the Balkans. In the ‘90s, Friedman did not “give two cents about Bosnia. Not two cents. The people there have brought on their own troubles.” But, “good friends are hard to find in the post-cold-war world.” And,
The Bosnians will come and go, but good friends whom we can count on for solving problems that really do involve our national interest are hard to find. You don't tell your friends that if they get stuck in the Balkan quagmire we will hold a Congressional debate about rescuing them. You tell them only one thing: "We'll help get you out. You can count on us.” Anyone who thinks that the American people wouldn't respond favorably to that kind of leadership doesn't know the American people.
Or something like that, which passes for expertise and analysis.
*
“How did we get this country so wrong?”
America's involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended, thirty years later, in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than to admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions, made by five American presidents, belonging to both political parties.
With that, Ken Burns opens the first episode of his 2017 ten-part The Vietnam War and, with that, he perfectly articulates the quintessential liberal non-apologia--for Vietnam or for any “blunder”--in the opening sequence. Altogether, it’s not a bad documentary series. It is compelling. Among other things, it includes interviews with anti- and pro-American Vietnamese, anti- and pro-war veterans, and anti- and pro-war civilian citizens. There is admission of some crimes: My Lai, agent orange, some of the napalm, some of the bombing, for instance. But at the outset, Burns--and thus the official historical record--set the limits to our introspection: the war was not a crime on the whole; mistakes were made; it was a tragedy; by tragedy, we mean that our good tragic heroes fell into this trap that were their and our nation’s (temporary) downfalls; it just kind of happened; there was “good faith...decent people...fateful misunderstandings.”
Fight it better. We should have fought it better. We should have stayed longer. Or, we shouldn’t have stayed as long. We should have gone in lighter. Or, we should have gone in heavier. We should have gone in sooner. Or, we should have gone in later. This is the non-reckoning we have, and yet we convince ourselves that we’ve had a reckoning. This is the tone of Robert McNamara’s non-apologies:
We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why. I truly believe that we made an error not of values and intentions, but of judgment and capabilities.
(His Retrospect was a number-one bestseller by the way.) This is the type of limited criticism allowed in the mainstream media of Iraq, too. The intel! The damn WMDs weren’t there! As if they were there, that would have justified the invasion, as if we’re the only country allowed to have WMDs. (As much as I am against WMD proliferation and don’t want any country to have them, including Iraq, this premise remains quite arrogant and hypocritical, to say the least.) The premise that regime change is ours to make meanwhile remains unchallenged. For the limited number of us in the military who were reading critical histories at the height of the Iraq war, our scope was limited. For example, some of us devoured Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. The book raises some good questions, but for the most part, limits its focus to planning and execution: e.g. Rumsfeld didn’t send the body armor! The right of the US to invade a sovereign country is mostly still presumed. The deaths of Iraqis are quite secondary compared to the deaths of US soldiers. Meanwhile, we convinced ourselves that we were good, liberally minded philosopher-officers. There we were, after all, reading a book critical of the Iraq war during the Iraq war. Isn’t that democracy? That is the extent of mainstream liberal critique of Iraq: darned quagmires we fumbled into and couldn’t get out of.
Of McNamara’s non-retrospective, Chomsky writes:
You’ve got to recognize that a crime was committed before you give a defense. McNamara can’t perceive that. Furthermore, I don’t say that as a criticism of McNamara. He is a dull, narrow technocrat who questioned nothing. He simply accepted the framework of beliefs of the people around him. And that’s their framework. That’s the Kennedy liberals. We cannot commit a crime. It’s a contradiction in terms. Anything we do is by necessity not only right, but noble. Therefore, there can’t be a crime.
If you look at his mea culpa, he’s apologizing to the American people. He sent American soldiers to fight an unwinnable war, which he thought early on was unwinnable. The cost was to the U.S. It tore the country apart. It left people disillusioned and skeptical of the government. That’s the cost. Yes, there were those three million or more Vietnamese who got killed. The Cambodians and Laotians are totally missing from his story. There were a million or so of them. There’s no apology to them.
The press on the whole was much more skeptical of and adversarial towards the US government during Vietnam, as is their job, than it has been in the wars since. There were some very good, critical investigative journalists who got surprisingly decent air/print time in the major corporate news outlets. But if you were to follow the master narratives of The New York Times or The Washington Post, you might be led to believe that they were always against the war, that they were always questioning power. They were not. When King delivered his famous “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” speech at Riverside Church, The Washington Post declared, “He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people.” The New York Times accused him of “antagonizing...recklessly comparing American military methods to those of the Nazis...slandering...whitewashing Hanoi.” His speech was “wasteful and self-defeating…. There are no simple and easy answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country. Linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion.” In short, get serious, Dr. King, you unserious “wall person.” Listen to the good “web people”: McNamara, Bundy. We know what we’re doing. It’s too complex for you to understand. Also at the same time, it’s a no-brainer.
In the Trump era, as the president went after the press regularly, Stephen Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and Tom Hanks teamed up to give us The Post, a triumphant tale celebrating the “fourth estate” during Vietnam and in particular its publishing of the leaked Pentagon Papers. The film also was an obvious, liberal clarion call to defend journalism under Trump. It is enjoyable. Trump did target journalists, and we rightly defended the press and need to continue doing so. But The Post, like most textbook sections on Vietnam (whether or not they mention the Pentagon Papers), focuses on the sin of the government lying to the American people: i.e. McNamara kept sending soldiers to Vietnam even though he knew we couldn’t win it. That is significant, yes. But, the more significant sin--our killing over four million Southeast Asians--is only a side story in the film (and in most textbooks and mainstream accounts). Tangentially, we liberals love our Watergate exposes and films, but the Watergate break-in and cover-up were extremely minor compared to our contemporaneous crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Our hands are clean with the former: we took down the bastard!...Woodward, Bernstein!...the checks and balances work! Our hands, however, are much dirtier--bloodier--in the latter.
While getting out of Vietnam, as the losing side, and realizing we committed some war crimes, the US needed a larger master narrative to save some face. One part of that narrative was the POW/MIA myth. Historian Rick Perlstein, drawing on historian H. Bruce Franklin’s work in MIA, or Mythmaking in Action, writes of the well-known flag:
It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.” During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up. He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.
This was bullshit four times over: First, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; and third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists.
And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered. (Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)
With this clever narrative shift—and with the Reagan conservative resurgence—came the really bad Rambo movies, the more critically acclaimed The Deer Hunter, and many other popular stories about our troops as the main victims in Vietnam. It was “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them,” wrote Jonathan Schell of The New Yorker. More conservative versions of this myth focus on the American people not having the resolve to really win the war and the weak-kneed media/liberals leaving the soldiers out to dry--killed in the war, left behind as POW/MIAs, or spat on when they returned. (This version of events helped funnel many Vietnam vets into the white power movement). More liberal approaches focus on the tragedy of sending our boys to fight an unwinnable war and their psychological or biological entanglements in the aftermath. But in many of these accounts, from “Goodnight Saigon” to Miss Saigon, from “Born in the USA” to Born on the Fourth of July, little attention is paid to the four million people we killed in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Paul Simon’s “American Tune” was written, in 1973, to express lament during the Vietnam war and during Watergate. It doesn’t name those events specifically, but it speaks of a lost innocence and a people that has strayed from the path. “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered/I don’t have a friend who feels at ease...When I think of the road we’re traveling on/ I wonder what went wrong.” (In 2019, Jeffrey Fleishman of The Los Angeles Times suggested it as a kindred song for the Trump years.) Six years later, in his “Crisis of Confidence” or “malaise” speech, Jimmy Carter spoke of a similar loss of innocence for the same reasons—Vietnam, Watergate—then compounded by the OPEC oil crisis, inflation, and deindustrialization. The Simon song is one of my favorites. The Carter speech is pretty good too, as far as presidential speeches go, because he told us what we didn’t want to hear—that we consume way too much and that we do not have limitless frontiers (even though not all Americans were consuming equally; even though the Carter administration was materially pursuing neoliberal policies at the same time it preached virtue, giving even freer rein to capital to consume even more; even though Carter walked back many of these sentiments after the rising Reaganites smelled blood; and even though Carter haphazardly fired six of his cabinet members right after). This particular “loss of innocence,” however, is still very self-referential. The lament is for us first, for our physical and spiritual deaths. As an artist, Paul Simon’s loss of innocence can work on the individual level and in other contexts as well, so he is off the hook. But, we could only experience such a loss of innocence, as a country, if we had been brought up to believe we were innocent in the first place.
Many liberals know Vietnam and Iraq were wrong. But, maybe because those wars’ veterans are still living or we might know some of them or because of any of the aforementioned political and social anxieties we have, we seem incapable of calling them crimes. When we grasped for John McCain’s mantle under Trump, what exactly were we grasping for? Eric Levitz probed that very question after McCain’s death, very poignantly in New York Magazine:
John McCain did not plan the Vietnam War. He didn’t lie to the American people about the nature of the conflict, the atrocities it entailed, or the probability of its success. He merely trusted the civilian leadership that did. There is no reason to doubt that McCain believed he was in Vietnam to risk his life — and then, to endure a living hell — in defense of our nation’s highest ideals…. As the senator is laid to rest, one can reasonably argue that respect for his family, and legacy, compels us to isolate his act of transcendent patriotism from the indefensible war that produced it.
But there are hazards to such myopia. McCain’s loved ones deserve to take pride in the sacrifices he made at the “Hanoi Hilton.” But we, as a nation, do not. The United States asked John McCain to risk his life — and kill other human beings — for a war built on lies. We asked him to give some of his best years on Earth — and the full use of his arms — to an illegal, unwinnable war of aggression. The story of McCain’s time as a prisoner of war should inspire national shame. It is a story about our government abusing the trust of one of its most patriotic citizens. But it’s (almost) never presented as such. Instead, in stump speeches, op-eds, and obituaries, McCain’s service is typically framed as a testament to our nation’s greatness, or an affirmation of its finest values.
This distortion invites broader misconceptions. The selfless sacrifices of American soldiers are supposed to be lamentable costs of war, burdens that can only be redeemed by the justness of the cause that demanded them. And yet, the way we remember McCain’s heroism threatens to invert this principle. In celebrating his discrete act of patriotism — while ignoring the question of what cause it served — we risk treating the selfless sacrifices of American soldiers as ends in themselves.
Furthermore, what war, “conflict,” or military intervention did McCain not support in his years afterward in Congress? And, what exactly were/are we grasping at when we sought/seek Colin Powell’s favor or endorsement? Powell sold the Iraq war to the public in that infamous UN speech in February of 2003. He has not apologized for it. It was a “blot” on his record. It was “painful.” It was a “great intelligence failure.” Sure, but those are not apologies. Inside sources say that Powell was hesitant to deliver the speech because he had his doubts. For some observers, that tidbit makes him seem more thoughtful and introspective. For me, I think that seems worse. He had doubts and still went to sell the story. Furthermore, he has not attempted to make amends. He has not spent the intervening years on his knees begging for forgiveness from Iraqis and US gold-star families (His former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, on the other hand, has apologized and has spent the last fifteen years trying to make amends.) We trusted Powell because he seemed reasonable and experienced, not ideological like the neocons that surrounded him. But what type of experience led us to trust him? His direct or indirect role in obstructing information on My Lai? His role in the invasion of Grenada? His overseeing, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the invasion of Panama or Iraq I/"Desert Storm"?
If there was a Vietnam syndrome that hung in the air and made us feel bad about ourselves, President George H.W. Bush declared it dead after a quick victory in Desert Storm: “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula.” This is the same man who, as Vice President and candidate for president, claimed, “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are. I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy,” after the USS Vincennes accidently shot down an Iranian passenger jet killing 254 civilians onboard. This is the same George H.W. Bush whose mantle during the Trump years we tried to carry. He apparently was a statesman of a bygone era. That is, refuse to learn anything substantive. Refuse to apologize. That is the statesman way.
*
The Nobel Prize committee, 2009:
Barack H. Obama, the 44th President of the United States, had been in power for less than eight months when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. Among the reasons it gave, the Nobel Committee lauded Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". Emphasis was also given to his support - in word and deed - for the vision of a world free from nuclear weapons.
Even before the election, Obama had advocated dialogue and cooperation across national, ethnic, religious and political dividing lines. As President, he called for a new start to relations between the Muslim world and the West based on common interests and mutual understanding and respect. In accordance with a promise he made during his election campaign, he set in motion a plan for the withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq. During his first year in power, President Obama showed himself to be a strong spokesman for human rights and democracy, and as a constructive supporter of the work being done to put effective measures in place to combat the climate crisis. This is in line with his appeal: "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”
Like Teddy Roosevelt, like Woodrow Wilson (both previous president winners of the prize, although not in their first years in office), maybe we can just wish or write or speak peace into being, all the while pursuing the same violent imperial policies. Like Alfred Nobel himself, who made a fortune as the inventor of dynamite, perhaps we can retroactively make peace happen by endowing a prize for it, while never taking concrete steps towards making peace. Nobel justified his inventions, saying that he wanted to create a material so explosive it could end all wars. “[T]he day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” Kind of like the war to end all wars.
We know from Obama himself and other insiders that he really believed in the Palestinian cause. We know that he had reservations about bombing Libya. We know he felt he had to support the Saudis’ Yemen adventure in order to placate them enough to get the Iran deal through. Steve Coll’s very thorough Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan tells us Obama had reservations about the Afghanistan surge and doubted its long-term efficacy, but he felt domestic pressure and pressure from our handpicked (warlord) allies in Afghanistan. (I remember personally being for that surge, for the “good war” not the “dumb war" of choice. Especially with a smart, empathetic liberal in charge, I supported it, but I did so somberly, seriously.) Obama feels for the people on the other end of our missiles, be they guilty militants or innocent bystanders or that gray area in between:
I wanted somehow to save them — send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.
“Had me killing them.” Daniel Bessner again:
This statement [above] is typical of A Promised Land. On the surface, it appears rather searching: Has any other president been so open about articulating the tensions of being the head of the world’s most powerful empire? But in actuality, this soliloquy ends precisely where policymaking should begin. Obama never seriously considers how he could alter the structures of exchange and distribution, the structures of the empire he leads, that “warped and stunted” the minds of the young men in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Somalia he claims to care about. Instead, his ultimate faith in the American idea allows him to do nothing but feel bad. While he “took no joy” in targeting “terrorists,” in the end, “the work was necessary,” and that was that.
Yes, it’s hard to imagine being in his shoes. Yes, every military action his administration took probably had some pros to it on the balance sheet. Yes, the world is a dangerous place. Yes, he approached each situation seriously. And yes, he deescalated with Iran and Cuba. Yes, the Iraq (sort of) withdrawal. Yes, the Republicans. Yes, I know according to Ben Rhodes’ The World As It Is and HBO’s The Final Year, team Obama was really smart and really tried their best. They are entitled to their memoirs and their sides of the story, but that should not stand in for our analysis. Pentagon budgets remained bloated. Mass surveillance continued. The “deep state” grew in size and power (yes, of course there is a deep state, although not exactly acting how Trump/Fox imagines it is). Team Obama conducted exponentially more drone strikes than Bush had. Weapons continued to flow to Egypt, apartheid Israel, Morocco (illegally occupying Western Sahara), Jordan, Colombia, and to many other corrupt/authoritarian governments in the world. The administration used the World War I-era Espionage Act to prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers than all his predecessors combined. The US expanded its presence in Africa all while “pivoting” to Asia (even though “pivot” insinuates leaving some other part of the world). Yes, he inherited the machinery, but still Obama left office “as the first American president in history to have been at war for every day of his tenure.”
*
There is a self-prescribed limit to liberals’ empathy. Empathy shields good liberals from having to change anything of substance, in foreign affairs too. If you suggest or work toward radical change--actual or seemingly--you cross the liberal class and are no longer welcome at major newspapers, on the talk shows, on university or museum or foundation boards, the charity balls and cocktail parties, or at the big conferences. Chris Hedges, in Death of the Liberal Class (2011), ascribes much of our feckless liberalism to self-preservation:
It would be a mistake to assume that the liberal class was simply seduced by the Utopian promises of globalism. It was also seduced by careerism. Those who mouthed the right words, who did not challenge the structures being cemented into place by the corporate state, who assured the working class that the suffering was temporary and would be rectified in the new world order, were rewarded. They were given public platforms on television and in the political arena. They were held up to the wider society as experts, sages, and specialists. They became the class of wise men and women who were permitted to explain in public forums what was happening to us at home and abroad. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a cheer leader for the Iraq war and globalization, became the poster child for the new class of corporate mandarins. And although Friedman was disastrously wrong about the outcome of the occupation, as he was about the effects of globalization, he continues, with a handful of other apologists, to dominate the airwaves.
Liberalism in Israel, our client state, operates in a similar way to liberalism here. Hedges cites Norman Finkelstein, who deftly caricatures Israeli liberalism’s psychological role in This Time We Went Too Far (about the 2008-09 Gaza war):
Israeli liberalism always had a function in Israeli society…. When I talk about liberal, I mean people like A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and Amos Oz. Their function was to issue these anguished criticisms of Israel, which not only extenuated Israeli crimes but exalted Israeli crimes. “Isn’t it beautiful, the Israeli soul, how it is anguished over what it has done.” It is the classic case of having your cake and eating it. And now something happened. Along comes a Jewish liberal [Justice Richard Goldstone, of the International Criminal Court] and he says, “Spare me your tears. I am only interested in the law.”...Goldstone did not perform the role of the Jewish liberal, which is to be anguished, but no consequences. And all of a sudden Israeli liberal Jews are discovering, hey, there are consequences for committing war crimes. You don’t just get to walk into the sunset and look beautiful. They can’t believe it. They are genuinely shocked. “Aren’t our tears consequences enough? Aren’t our long eyes and broken hearts consequences enough?” “No,” he said, “you have to go to the criminal court.”
Hedges and Finkelstein (and Goldstone), respectively, became pariahs for violating the mores of the liberal class. Both still courageously try to chip away at the imperial edifice.
The peculiar case of Algeria--and of two non-native-Algerian writers--I believe, is a microcosm for our international goodwill. Liberals across the globe love our Albert Camus. (The Plague remains one of my favorite books.) Camus had a lot of good things to say against fascism and shared much wisdom on politics, resistance, love, art, and the soul. Camus made a lot of appearances in liberal journals in the Trump era and, with The Plague, under COVID. However, as a pied-noir (i.e. French settler in colonized Algeria), he had little to say about French imperialism or about the oppressed Algerians. In fact, where he did, he demeaned the Algerians and defended settlers (and demeaned the Malagaches in Madagascar and the Indochinese, that is, other parts of the French empire contemporaneously resisting). Meanwhile, fewer liberals know or read Frantz Fanon. If we do know him, he makes us nervous. We might loathe him, discredit him, or try to put him in a safe distant past. Fanon, of black African descent but from Martinique, excoriated not only the French in Algeria but the native Algerian nationalist elites--and the native nationalist elites in other newly independent African countries--for continuing the colonization after the Europeans officially left, for enriching themselves while still enabling Western extraction and exploitation. Fanon’s fierce words, especially in The Wretched of the Earth, let none of us off the hook for our complicity in European colonialism and now US-corporate-led neocolonialism, aka globalization.
In the US, we teach about the theft of Native (North) American land, rightly. We rightly commemorate Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, or the boarding schools. Canada does the same regarding its own sins against its First Nations. Some of us open meetings by acknowledging that we are standing on Lenni-Lenape or ___fill-in-the-blank___ land. However, in both the US and Canada, this history has often become the end in itself. Many liberals (let alone conservatives) will go nowhere near the Red Power movement, the Land Back movement, or the Standing Rock/No DAPL/No Keystone XL movement, for instance. We do not seriously consider any “radical” reparations or any structural adjustments of land and capital (although Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s efforts represent potential). We sometimes collaborate with--our 401(k)’s often profit from--the industries extracting from indigenous land and threatening indigenous water. We promise progress for everyone with just one more push, one more pipeline, one more fracked gas site--one more innovation--and we will finally reach that equilibrium where we will be “energy independent” and all will share in the fruits. “Get serious, [assholes],” we tell the radicals blocking the pipeline, which represents the progress. Our tears for our past misdeeds, in the meantime, are enough, we tell ourselves. “Isn’t it beautiful, the American soul, how it is anguished over what it has done?” And then, if we live long enough, we will say we were always on the right side.
Regarding Palestine, Nathan Thrall (author the very powerful New York Review of Books article “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama”) predicts:
I am confident that all right-thinking liberals and progressives will say that they were always opposed to this and that they had always been, you know, against U.S. support for a system of oppression and apartheid. But we don’t see them behaving that way right now. And so, the bare minimum we need to see is to have people just call their congresspeople and say, “I don’t want to pay for this. I do not want to be complicit in what’s happening here,” at the very least end our own complicity. Before we talk about what good the U.S. can do, let’s talk about how the U.S. can stop doing harm.
This could be said about a whole host of issues, both domestic and foreign.
“Trump has made the whole world darker”
For the first two years of Trump, the Democrats and mainstream media ascribed to Vladimir Putin powers he probably wished he had. That is, Putin was supposedly behind every Trump move and every nefarious global action. The talking/tweeting heads, in turn, lazily branded all skeptics of Russia-gate as Russian stooges or Putin apologists, when those skeptics first insisted on actual evidence/journalism or when the evidence was released and they questioned whether that was the cause of Trump’s election (after racism, of course--"their racism, not ours”). Russia’s meddling in our elections was serious and should have been investigated and prosecuted as such. But, Russia-Putin, Putin-Russia every day sucked up all the air in the room, and therefore when the reports from Mueller, etc., were made public, the actual crimes looked small compared to our inflated expectations of a bombshell. With all the focus on the Russia soap opera, the media happily neglected to cover actual policies and the deteriorating social/economic conditions of actual people’s lives. (Additionally, tangentially, as Shoshana Zuboff highlights in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Russia/Facebook meddling is not that surprising, considering how the internet is monetized and incentivized in our larger unfettered surveillance capitalist system.)
When Trump took office, we liberals began lionizing institutions and people that historically have wielded great power and violence: the CIA, the FBI, NATO, Clapper, Brennan, Mueller, Comey, the generals, the Pentagon, the NSA. We convinced ourselves that the institutions that have actually harassed and killed thousands of more people than Trump did, or could have (at least at that juncture), would save us from Trump. And for all his big talk against NATO by the way--and for all our reactionary love-fest for NATO and all our ascribing Putin-related motives to Trump’s supposed NATO hatred--Trump in the end reaffirmed every NATO commitment and supported every NATO expansion opportunity, as historian Stephen Wertheim notes in his Times column, “Sorry Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO.”
Liberals opposed almost everything Trump did, usually for good reason--so much of what he said and did was despicable--until April of his first year, however. That is, until Trump fired missiles at Syria (or was it Iraq?) while eating “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen” with Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who had been a relentless critic of Trump, stated,
I think Donald Trump became president [last night]. I think this was actually a big moment. President Trump recognized that the president of the United States does have to act to enforce international norms, does have to have this broader moral and political purpose. For the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America's role in enforcing justice in the world. It was the kind of rhetoric we have come to expect from American presidents since Harry Truman.
(In February, CNN’s Van Jones had said Trump “became president” after he honored the wife of a killed Navy SEAL. AC360 concurred with Jones.) MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of the “beautiful pictures at night... the beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments.” He quoted Leonard Cohen, “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.” Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi praised the attacks. Almost all elected Democrats refrained from criticizing the bombing. Those that did only questioned the unconstitutional/constitutional process but not the merits of bombing in the first place. From her perch, Hillary Clinton approved. Ian Bremmer tweeted, correctly (and approvingly, I presume?), “Among US political establishment, attacks on Assad the most popular action Trump has taken as president to date.” Anne-Marie Slaughter tweeted, “Donald Trump has done the right thing on Syria. Finally!! After years of useless handwringing in the face of hideous atrocities.”
Bashar al Assad is ruthless and is responsible for thousands of Syrian deaths, including through the use of chemical weapons, likely, but it’s hard to see how the US bombing Syria would have helped (or helps). Our arming of rebels by itself has had unintended consequences. Also, see Libya. Furthermore, we must acknowledge that for a time in the so-called Global War on Terror, Assad was a useful dictator to us, with our/his black sites, extraordinary renditions, and enhanced interrogation techniques. Additionally, our humanitarian overtures are not consistent, especially considering repressive Middle East regimes who happen to be our allies. See Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Israel. Finally, how would Trump, whom we were calling a fascist for months and who campaigned on more bombing and against military humanitarian missions, then be the appropriate deliverer of our humanitarian bombs? Glenn Greenwald wrote right after the bombing, as Democrats were closing ranks with Republicans:
Given all that, could American elites possibly believe [Trump] when he says that he is motivated by humanitarianism – deep-seated anger over seeing Syrian children harmed – in bombing Syria? Yes, they could, and they are. That’s because American elites always want to believe – or at least want others to believe – that the U.S. bombs countries over and over not out of aggression or dominance but out of love, freedom, democracy and humanitarian concern.
It was not the last time under Trump that good liberals closed ranks with Republicans, including Trump Republicans, on foreign affairs. For instance, when Congresswoman Ilhan Omar grilled Elliott Abrams, the new special envoy to Venezuela, over his role in the 1980s Central American dirty wars, many of her Democratic colleagues and liberal pundits criticized her for not being polite to such an experienced “statesman.” These Democrats were already onboard for regime change in Venezuela, so it apparently was not her role to challenge this known war criminal and regime-changer. Democrats and the media closed ranks with Republicans even more swiftly when Omar and her fellow Muslim congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, criticized Israel in 2019.
From the good liberal Speaker Tip O’Neill, ostensible opposition, closing ranks with Reagan to invade Grenada in 1983 to Senator Joe Biden whipping enough Democrats to vote for the 2003 Iraq misadventure, war is too often the only consensus bipartisan issue.
While liberals closed ranks with Trump and Republicans to do the occasional bombing, they closed ranks with the traditional Republican hawks without Trump when it came to North Korea. Now, it was obvious that Trump was interested in “peace” with North Korea for his own self-aggrandizement and personal enrichment. His personal affinity for Kim Jong-un was bizarre and troubling. His mentioning of potential condos on North Korean beaches was not surprising. He did not have the attention span, good will, or work ethic to actually pursue a peace deal. This, we know. Nevertheless, it was shameful that no Democrats—the party that pursued honest negotiations with North Korea under Clinton, that is, until the W. Bush administration came in and scuttled diplomacy—attempted to involve themselves, triangulate, or provide much needed substance to the negotiations. They did not call on the (albeit, weak) peace movement or other progressives to engage. Who’s to say whether team Trump would have engaged with Democrats, liberals, or progressives on peace with North Korea? Unlikely. However, an attempt would have shown our good faith despite the bad actor president. South Korean President Moon Jae-In, to his credit, was not naïve about Trump’s motives but gave him what he needed (i.e. compliments) to try to take advantage of the opening. But, the Democrats and the whole press committed themselves to partisan attacks on Trump and the summit. I believe Congressman Ro Khanna was right when he said, “Imagine if it weren’t Donald Trump there, but if it were Barack Obama there having that kind of breakthrough. I think there would be a reaction from almost every progressive Democrat cheering that on.” Furthermore, I believe Trump was right when he said that the war games/mock invasions we conduct with South Korea, Japan, and other countries every year (I participated in “FOAL EAGLE” in 2007 myself) provoke North Korea. As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. But, we opted for the war-games, Pentagon-planner, military-industrial status quo instead.
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser wrote, beamingly, in September of 2018, “John McCain’s Funeral Was the Biggest Resistance [sic] Meeting Yet.” That is, a funeral for a Vietnam bomber (and yes, POW tortured by the Vietnamese) and relentless war hawk in Congress (who once sang “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” as presidential candidate), eulogized by two former commanders-in-chief (Obama and George W. Bush), attended by John Boehner, David Petraeus, Leon Panetta, Madeleine Albright, Paul Ryan, and other notables, was a meeting of “the Resistance.” Glasser wrote, non-ironically:
For a moment, at least, they still lived in the America where Obama and Bush and Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney could all sit in the same pew, in the same church, and sing the same words to the patriotic hymns that made them all teary-eyed at the same time. When the two Presidents were done speaking, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” blared out. This time, once again, the battle is within America. The country’s leadership, the flawed, all too human men and women who have run the place, successfully or not, for the past few decades, were all in the same room, at least for a few hours on a Saturday morning. The President of the United States, however, was not.
Our liberal #resistance narrowed in against one personality (yes, a vile and dangerous personality) but, doing so, it pledged allegiance to the larger power structures, thus rendering the term “resistance” meaningless.
“How Joe Biden Can Win a Nobel Prize” (“I honestly think we can again be our best selves, but it’s on all of us to make it happen. How so?”).
“The President-elect has the most racially diverse presidential Cabinet in the history of the US,” noted CNN in January. ABC's Martha Raddatz called Biden's appointments "deeply experienced," "humble" and "lifelong public servants." They "are not political" They are “career people." Max Boot emphasized that the cabinet is “a diverse slate of highly competent appointees with decades of relevant experience.”
“America is back,” Joe Biden declared at a speech in February at the State Department.
WestExec Advisors, the consultancy firm co-founded by now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, brings the Situation Room to the Board Room:
WestExec Advisors is a strategic advisory firm that offers unique geopolitical and policy expertise to help business leaders make the best decisions in a complex and volatile international landscape. We are an unrivaled, bipartisan team of senior national security leaders with the most recent experience and unmatched networks in defense, foreign policy, intelligence, economics, cybersecurity, data privacy, and strategic communications. We create significant advantages for our clients by providing unparalleled expertise on the external factors and relationships that affect businesses – from geopolitical trends and risks, to economic developments, to an evolving technological landscape, to changes in Washington and in other capitals around the world.
Or, if you prefer:
WestExec Advisors is an unparalleled group of this generation’s thought leaders and senior practitioners in national security and international affairs. We have deep current expertise, unique perspective, as well as broad and active networks in Washington and around the world…. With WestExec Advisors as your partner, you have regular access to a diverse group of senior practitioners who have been tested and proven in high stakes environments like the White House Situation Room. Harnessing this expertise and insight gives our clients higher confidence in their business decisions.
What is the end of such diversity, or is diversity the end in itself? The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah quipped, “Biden appointed an all-women communications team and a national security team that’s racially diverse? People around the world are are gonna be like ‘What an honor to be bombed by such a woke administration!’” What do we do with all that experience and expertise? Is all experience good experience? And, expertise doing what? Or, are experience and expertise ends in themselves too, like history has become an end to itself? Experience should matter. It will necessarily come with failures. But, should not failures make us reflect, reconsider, or change? Do we even want Max Boot’s (or Bill Kristol’s or “axis-of-evil” speech-writer David Frum’s) approval? Finally, do people in other countries want us “back”? What does “back” mean? Did we really, actually go away the past four years? Do people in our country want us “back”?
*
On domestic policy, the Biden administration has been better than I thought it would be. It is sometimes helpful to have tempered, low expectations. If Biden wants to imagine himself as LBJ and/or FDR, if he cares less about bipartisan consensus with bad faith Republicans than Obama did, then all the better. On foreign policy however, the Biden administration has not been good. Considering his expansive voting record from his years in the senate, as Jeremy Scahill did in an Intercept project “Empire Politician,” this is not surprising. The mainstream press, though, has been silent to laudatory. That also is not surprising. The role of the “blob” has been to lubricate and perpetuate endless war (but with humanitarian and intellectual posturing of course.) Also to be fair, it is difficult to imagine how a President Bernie Sanders would steer the blob/deep state/military industrial complex in a different direction or shrink its influence--it has immense inert power. Sanders’ foreign policy voting record, while better than most Democrats, is not without blemish, and his 2016 campaign was devoid of foreign policy (although his 2020 campaign included a better and more coherent foreign platform).
To his credit, President Biden has vowed to end the war in Afghanistan by September. It remains to be seen whether that will happen. It remains to be seen what type of footprint we will leave there--surely, it won’t be zero. It is up to us to hold him and Congress accountable to that withdrawal, twenty years after we entered. Presidents have reneged on promised withdrawals before, even as they knew we weren’t winning (or couldn’t win?), as The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” revealed. Meanwhile, some liberals and many conservatives are circling the wagons to stay for, presumably, another twenty years. In an apparent disagreement among the #resistance, George W. Bush recently remarked, “I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm. … I’m sad. And I spend a — Laura and I spend a lot of time with Afghan women, and they’re scared.” As if that is the reason we went to war there or stayed there, as if the non-Taliban warlords we support aren’t as misogynistic, as if women aren’t always made vulnerable in war and militarized spaces. Malalai Joy, a women’s rights activist who in 2005 became the youngest person ever elected to the Afghan Parliament (and who in 2007 was suspended for publicly denouncing the war criminals in the Afghan Parliament), calls Bush’s claim a “shameless lie.” We can have legitimate feminist concerns, but it is hard to see how our guns and bombs will deliver women's rights. It is time to cut our losses.
To his credit, Biden announced we were ending our support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, but the Saudis continue to bomb Yemen, and the US continues to service Saudi warplanes with private contractors. To his credit, Biden wants to reenter the Iran nuclear deal. However, the administration is seeking to extract more concessions out of Iran before we re-engage, as if we weren’t the rogue nation that left first and scuttled the deal. Also, we are bombing Syria, apparently retaliating against Iranian-backed militias.
Biden has yet to reverse the Trump reversal of Obama’s (semi)-normalization with Cuba. He has not yet reversed Trump’s coercive measures, many of them cruelly put in place in the middle of the pandemic. He said he “stands with the Cuban people” in their latest protests, but the punitive embargo remains (Israel and the US are the only two nations in the world that support the blockade). The US continues to seek regime change in Venezuela. Republicans, Democrats, and Hollywood have all agreed that "socialism," rather than kleptocracy, is the problem in Venezuela , and thus all overlook similar trends in non-socialist ally countries Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia. The administration declares Israel’s “right to defend itself” as it goes forward with its apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It pretends, like Thomas Friedman does, that the 1993-2000 Oslo “peace process” was a golden opportunity that Palestine threw away and that some serious (smart, innovative, Mandela-like) leader will come along to usher in the famed “two-state solution.” The Lexus and the Olive Tree and its disciples have little to say when actual Palestinian olive trees are destroyed. The Biden administration meanwhile greenlights settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and sends extra weapons to Israel as it pummels Gaza. It has heavily criticized the nonviolent BDS movement (although for now does not want to criminalize it). It chides more progressive Democrats who do not fall in line on Israel.
To his credit, Biden announced support for a TRIPS waiver for the COVID vaccine to be distributed widely in the global south. Although, he did announce that in May, and the world needs to get moving on it, yesterday. Biden aside, the fact that “intellectual property” which the US, UK, and other taxpaying publics helped finance could then be hoarded and not shared--the fact that TRIPS or no TRIPS is even a debate--is a scandal. How peculiarly, narrowly, and conveniently some people define “free trade.”
*
"Is There a War Coming between the US and China?"
In 2008, while forward deployed aboard the USS Cowpens (homeport Yokosuka, Japan), we were steaming somewhere in or near the East China Sea, in international waters. When taking the watch as “officer of the deck,” I learned that we had earlier spotted a Chinese submarine several miles away. I made note of it, which was, for us, a big deal. Some people were flipping out nervously. Some people were flipping out excitedly--this was their big moment after years of doing circles in the ocean. The watch continued uneventfully. At one point, I called down to the captain with a routine report. He asked me where the Chinese submarine was, and I told him I would call him right back with the information. Thirty seconds later, I did. The captain, however, berated me for not knowing the direction and coordinates of the submarine off the top of my head. He was right. A good officer-of-the-deck should have had that information instantaneously. But reflecting later, zoomed out, I thought to myself, “Well of course, there’s a Chinese submarine there. We’re in the East China Sea.”
Seven years earlier, during my first ROTC midshipman summer, I remember listening to a surprising number of navy people and marines who spoke almost gleefully of China as the next big threat. The China threat seemed to give them and future-me a purpose. That was ten years after the end of the Cold War (and the “end of history”) and only a couple months before 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, which would provide a new purpose for them and future-me.
*
As candidate and president, Trump engaged in much anti-Chinese rhetoric and racism. From the incessant “China is killing us on trade” to the “Kung Flu,” he stoked a latent animosity toward the Chinese government, the Chinese people, and Chinese-Americans (and all East Asian-Americans, as many white people can’t tell or care about the difference). At the same time, he developed a bizarre, troubling personal affinity for Xi Jinping.
Now that Biden is in, we have cut out the “kung flu” and overt racism and jingoism. We have returned, instead, to the Obama-inspired “pivot.” In March, US officials had a tense meeting with Chinese officials in Alaska, where sharp but “constructive” words were exchanged. In June, the Senate, which can hardly get fifty Democratic votes for investment in our own public institutions or for voting protections, passed the Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 with bipartisan support. The bill would put nearly $250 billion into “science” and “technology,” designed to counter China’s rise in those sectors. $200 billion would funnel into grants, scholarships and other channels, and another emergency $52 billion would boost semiconductor production in the US. Chuck Schumer, co-sponsoring it, declared, “If we do nothing, our days as the dominant superpower may be ending. We don't mean to let those days end on our watch. We don't mean to see America becoming a middling nation in this century. We mean for America to lead it.”
Who will benefit from this investment? Who will own the intellectual property on these publicly funded semiconductors? Will cheap Chinese labor continue to assemble the parts for US capital so that it can outdo Chinese capital? Just a little more tech, more science, some more STEM education, more grants, some better semiconductors--we are almost there. We will vanquish poverty, inequality, war, and China!
The media blob, in turn, repackages White House/State Department/Pentagon talking points with no criticism. Meanwhile, no matter how hawkish the Democrats are towards China, traditional Republican hawks say Biden is “rolling over.” We are, at least for this post-Trump moment, back to our familiar pre-Trump Democratic-Republican “debates” over China and other foreign policy.
Yes, Xi, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese state present many problems and issues. We on the left do not need to--and should not--defend the Chinese government or take up Chinese nationalism in reaction to US policy and US nationalism. For instance, we should absolutely condemn the repression in Hong Kong, the occupation of Tibet, and most pressingly, the concentration camps and ethnic cleansing of Uighurs. Historically speaking, we certainly should not lionize or iconize Mao, with his fatal repression and famine blunders, for instance. (Likewise, we need not defend the Cuban, Venezuelan, or Iranian governments as we rightly decry US imperialism toward those countries and as we rightly remain skeptical of our government’s “human rights concerns.”) In a world of what seems to be just competing nationalisms, it is difficult to conceive of an international, trans-national solidarity with Chinese people, but that is our best hope to combat the Chinese government's and Chinese capital’s repression--and the US government and US capital’s repression. That is our best chance to avoid cold war, or hot war, and to salvage parts of the planet from climate change. (In my cursory experience, I have actually found the socialist/Marxian left more morally consistent than other parts of the left, who minimize Chinese or Cuban government repression, for instance. Solidarity means solidarity with all people. To hell with all nationalisms.)
Chinese capital is a rival to US capital (yes in its particular form, China is a capitalist country). Or put another way, Chinese capital looks to compete with US capital--is not capitalism supposedly about competition? China’s quest for regional superiority threatens, slightly, US global hegemony. We should not be naïve nor should we wholly welcome the rise of Chinese state power, most especially in its relation to its internal constituencies such as those already named (e.g. the Uighurs). But, China is not an existential threat to the US. For some perspective--for us and for the USS Cowpens steaming there in the East China Sea surprised to find a Chinese submarine--between 1820 and 1949, the US intervened in China no fewer than thirty times with “dollar diplomacy,” “gunboat diplomacy,” small invasions, and other military incursions, to defend US "interests." In 1949, Mao and the communists finally won the protracted civil war, in what we would call “the loss of China” (presumably ours to lose in the first place). Between 1958 and 1974, the CIA Tibetan Program trained thousands of Tibetan Chinese at Camp Hale in Colorado to wage war against the Chinese government, but it was unsuccessful. While we should not lionize or iconize Mao (or Castro or Ho Chi Minh), it is necessary to see how US imperialism helped create all of those independence/revolutionary figures. Interestingly, many years earlier, Ho Chi Minh and Mao, along with Gandhi, Egypt’s Saad Zaghloul, and the Puerto Rican Pedro Albizu Campos all believed or wanted to believe that Woodrow Wilson’s beautiful fourteen points of self-determination weren’t just for white European countries. They were let down.
Since détente in the 1970s, China has been a useful tool for both Democrats and Republicans, depending on what the situation has called for. With its gradual market liberalization beginning in the ‘80s, it became a convenient place of markets and materials, a place for US capital to invest in. When the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in 1989, President George H.W. Bush and Congress issued condemnations, but they were tepid enough to not disrupt the growing economic relationship between the two countries. US mouthpieces had to talk the tightrope of praising China's economically liberalizing trends yet criticizing China's politically hardening trends, without disturbing our new partner. I believe many US lawmakers were/are honestly concerned about human rights violations, but as many of those lawmakers--both Democratic and Republican--are beholden to capital, human rights concerns are secondary to them. As Elizabeth Bruenig reminded us, “Capital is unfaithful.” Be it US or Chinese, it seeks profits. Everything else is incidental. During the 90s, that golden age of globalization and the internet, we told ourselves that market liberalization would lead to political liberalization in China. We convinced ourselves that we cared about human rights abuses, while of course overlooking our own and our client-states' human rights abuses. With “most favored nation” status conferred and admission to the WTO sealed, we realized, with few exceptions, we didn’t care about human rights abuses. As more jobs were offshored to China, we cared less because that meant cheaper consumer goods for us, especially with bigger and bigger container ships doing the lifting, and as long as it wasn’t our job offshored. We had to do it this way to "remain competitive." Meanwhile, “Go learn how to code,” or “Go back to finish your degree,” we told American workers. Depending on the specific mouthpiece, the enemy has been the Chinese worker or the Chinese government or “automation” or now Chinese capital, but never the slippery, very pliable US capital, which in the name of profits, can play all angles at once. And so, the latest is that we are following through with the pivot, and this spells continued profits for the defense industry.
In the end, we might decide that this new cold war rhetoric and continued spending is helpful. Some thoughtful international relations scholars believe there must always be a global hegemon and that Chinese hegemony will necessarily replace US hegemony and it will be more brutal. Some of those scholars even take note of US brutality. I do not, however, believe a new cold war will benefit Americans or anyone other than US investors and their sponsored politicians. I am for what Robert Wright calls “progressive realism.” In progressive realism, “cognitive empathy” (not to be confused with emotional empathy) is crucial to avoiding war. We don’t have to agree with how an adversary views us and the world, but we should understand how/why China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, or Venezuela views us and the world the way they do. While there is often good domestic reporting from the major newspapers, they are less rigorous when it comes to foreign affairs, and they contribute to this saber-rattling. Perhaps we still think we should be the reigning hegemon--that this time around, we’ll be more noble, more humanitarian. Let us at least be honest, however, with our own military history against China, our own number of global military bases, our own military spending (which makes China’s look miniscule), our own duplicitous and cynical charges of human rights abuses, and our own role, in the end, in depressing both Chinese and US workers.
*
Therefore, the problem is not just Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, or the recently departed Donald Rumsfeld. The problem is not just Henry Kissinger. Christopher Hitchens wrote The Trial of Henry Kissinger in 2001, which focused on the singularity of Kissinger’s supposed evil and influence. Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow, however, attempts to show how the man’s ideas have influenced the entire spectrum--how he was fed by the political milieu of his upbringing and how feeds the current milieu. Grandin, in The Nation, draws a contrast between his book and Hitchens’:
Hitchens’s polemic, which is a good example of what the great historian Charles Beard, in 1936, dismissed as the “devil theory of war”—placing the blame for militarism on a single, isolable cause: a “wicked man.” To really understand the sources of conflict, Beard argued, you had to look at the big picture, to consider the way “war is our own work,” emerging out of “the total military and economic situation.”
In 2003, Hitchens succumbed to that evil he had singled out. He became an important liberal cheerleader for the Iraq war.
The problem is not just Hitchens or Thomas Friedman or CNN. The problem is not just the Clintons or Obama/Biden either. Singular blame misses the point. As the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and as so many other elders teach us, war is the ultimate sin, and we, swimming in militarized water, are all guilty.
Lexus trumps olive tree: The limitations of a "good liberal" (Part 6/Conclusion: And just look up at Mars, and think of the mind-set that got us there, and you’ll know what needs to change.")
“The pandemic is a portal,” wrote Arundhati Roy in April of 2020:
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
Some of us are emerging from COVID life. Although, with people in the US refusing vaccines, people in poorer countries not having access to vaccines, and delta variants, the picture is complicated. Still, in the past year, many of us have pontificated how, despite lockdowns and some people getting sick and others dying, there have been some silver linings. Working from home can be nice. We haven’t had to commute, and therefore we are saving money on gas. We can have lunch with our kids or walk our dogs during the work day. Getting groceries and other items delivered to our doors very much beats the hassle of going to the store. With zoom, we can even work from a mountain or ocean Airbnb. We have cut down on lunch take-out spending and maybe have eaten healthier meals. It has given us more time in parks and green spaces, especially as we couldn’t be inside with people not in our bubbles. At least for some professions, where hands-on in-person work isn’t always necessary, maybe we can apply some of these lessons for the post-COVID world. Maybe we can work from home part-time, at least. Tech saved us this past year, and after the initial hiccups, tech gave us a lot of flexibility. Maybe tech can save or help us in the years to come. That is, maybe we can work this way and do these things but this time without having to worry about quarantine periods or virtual/home-schooling (presuming the kids are back in school).
There is good will and some insight in these sentiments. On the aggregate, we Americans spend way too much time working, driving to and from, and otherwise away from family, friends, and recreation. Americans in particular are not a very happy people. Maybe new flexible work habits can lead to more happiness. However, who will be able to enjoy such a post-COVID working lifestyle? And, who will have to continue to grind in person to support that lifestyle? Who are the workers--from mega-farms to mega-warehouses, intentionally out of our view--that will enable our work from home and our relatively handsome income/wealth intake? While I found virtual teaching to be trying and less than ideal, I was grateful that I could work from home and remain relatively safe. There were some benefits, in addition to not commuting. On my off-period from teaching, where in person I would have had 250 sixth-graders with cafeteria duty, I got to spend time with my (one) daughter. But, what about the custodians, the secretarial staff, the food service staff, or the security guards? They could not work from home. They all had to go in, at least part of the time. In some school districts and in other non-education professions, many of those workers--"support staff”--lost their jobs. Ours did not, in part because they are unionized.
This is where Andrew Yang, Thomas Friedman, and Silicon Valley tech utopians come in with their promise of social entrepreneurship, universal basic income, and fully automated/liberated lifestyles. We need not worry about people left behind, we are told. They will be retrained, redeployed, and eventually set up into their UBI nest-egg. Trust the process. But in the meantime, maybe learn how to code, just in case. Become innovators yourselves. A little more STEM ed, just a little more loosening of capital, and we’re almost there, at the Lexus and the olive tree, and all will be carbon neutral, by the way.
But, these confidence-men and their punditry obscure the age-old questions--and injustices--of power, ownership, capital, and labor. Without any fundamental or radical restructuring, this “new world” we imagine will be a lot like the old one but with even greater inequalities. The utopia they imagine for themselves will mean further dystopia for the masses. Who owns the algorithms owns the world. If we knew the history and political economy of technology, capitalism, and globalization, we would understand that “tech [by itself] won’t save us." And recall, the problem isn’t technology per se. Or, as ludicrous as the billionaire space race is, the problem isn’t space exploration. The problem is the power differential. The problem is inequality, extraction, exploitation, and the disposability of human beings and natural resources. Jeff Bezos was cruel yet honest when he said, “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.” The press mostly lapped it up. Good liberals were too shocked and awed, too mesmerized by the space wizards to ask any probing questions. Even though we will never go, Bezos, etc., want us to be distracted with dreams of space as they meanwhile wreck human beings and our actual home planet on their path to space.
As we imagine the post-COVID world, Arundhati Roy cautions us, sharply:
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality….
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
*
“Want to get Trump re-elected?”
Who will determine how we fight for another world?
On the domestic front, Thomas Friedman and company are offering their well-paid, unsolicited advice. They are setting the scope of our debate, as they gear up for the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential pre-debate countdown shows already. Skirting over statistics and substantive arguments, Friedman tells us that attempting to defund the police, for instance, will cost Democrats the House, the Senate, and eventually the White House. One can see him “paging Michael Bloomberg” again, already. Hamilton Nolan however, in In These Times, replies to Friedman et al.:
This utterly pedestrian idea — that armed police officers are not the optimal enforcement method for everything from traffic stops to school safety to mental health crises, and that some of what we spend on police could be shifted into programs that better address those areas, in order to produce better results for the public — is the essence of the call to “defund the police.” It is about the sort of measured shift in funding priorities that governments at all levels do every single year. No matter where anyone stands on the merit of defunding the police, the nature of it is a thoroughly common sense debate over the wisest allocation of public resources. When crime rates have plummeted for decades and we face a national crisis of millions of people whose lives have been destroyed by being imprisoned, all while social services remain inadequate to meet demand even as police funding has steadily risen, any honest technocrat can see that reallocating money from police to other areas should be an obvious move….
The quality of the debate we are having on this issue is absolute trash. This is not really because of Fox News and Republicans, who can be expected to mischaracterize the entire thing and turn it into a wild smear, but instead because of the mainstream political media, which has completely acquiesced to using a crude caricature of “defund the police” as its go-to version. This happens because the political media exists not to cover the substance of issues, but to cover politics as sports. At its core, our mass media is able only to talk about which side is winning in the political arena. The actual wisdom of policy choices is considered a second-order question that is not the business of the media to answer. The smear version of the real issue, therefore, has more utility to the political media than the more honest version, because the smear version is what is being wielded in the political fight.
One year after the biggest protest movement in American history demanded police reform, we now find ourselves in the ludicrous position of being told by all of the shallowest professional political savants that defunding the police is a toxic position that is poison to Democrats. From Axios to Thomas Friedman, almost the entire centrist pundit class has coalesced around the analysis that because crime rates rose during the pandemic year, defunding the police is a bad idea, electorally speaking. Do they attempt to engage with the fact that crime rates rose in cities across the nation that have not actually defunded the police? No. Do they attempt to engage with the question of whether cities’ enormous spending on police relative to other civic priorities is justified by the results? No. Those are policy choices with profound consequences on human lives, and would probably require a lot of research, and are therefore not something that Tom Friedman or Axios would ever bother with. The pundit all-stars are interested only in the question of whether the misleading, kindergarten-level connection between the mere words “defund the police” and the fearmongering crime propaganda being featured constantly on Fox News will translate into a political liability for Democrats. By focusing exclusively on this frame, they facilitate it becoming a reality.
The Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder--and which to some extent contributed to November Democrat electoral surges in places like Philadelphia, Georgia, Detroit, and Milwaukee--had one major material demand, aside from the firing and trying of Derek Chauvin: defund the police and use that money to refund other community needs. Removing statues, while not unimportant, is relatively easy, compared to desegregating schools and equalizing school funding. Renaming streets and neighborhoods is also not unimportant, but it’s relatively easy too, compared to desegregating housing and fixing the racial-capitalist incentives that segregate housing in the first place. It’s easier to rename Boston’s Dudley Square--named after Thomas Dudley, the Massachusetts governor in the 1600s who legalized slavery-- to “Nubian Square” than to tackle the racialized gentrifying trends in that neighborhood. It’s relatively easy for corporations to make their BLM hashtags and conduct diversity sessions with employees, compared to raising wages or allowing unionization, especially in sectors where workers are disproportionately of color. On the defund/refund question, BLM activists, other black leaders, civil rights groups, and community organizations do not all agree. There are disagreements on principle and of degree. True, “defund the police” is not politically popular in especially Fox/Republican circles, where it is predictably smeared and caricatured. And yes, the policy discussion has many levels and more nuance that is not captured by that three-word phrase coming off the streets. However, as Nolan wrote above, “It is a thoroughly common sense debate over the wisest allocation of public resources.” (Analogously, greatly defunding the Pentagon/military in order to fund health care and other human needs is a thoroughly common sense debate, too. The image of the multibillion dollar USS Theodore Roosevelt trying to come into port last spring because some of its sailors had contracted COVID, one of whom died, let alone the 600,000 people who died across the nation, highlights for me the absurdity of placing “national security” above every other concern. What about human security?) But, it appears that the Tom Friedmans of the world--i.e. the people who said it was “racism” that gave us Trump, a racism that is somehow not connected to class or capital or other structures--in the end don’t want us to do anything about that racism, other than say, “Those people (not us in our segregated neighborhoods and schools) need to be educated.” In his “Want to Get Trump Re-elected? Dismantle the Police” column, Friedman references the city council in his hometown of Minneapolis defunding the police and the resultant crime upticks. For the record however, Minneapolis hasn’t defunded the police yet, although local BLM groups are still leading the fight.
The bad faith Tucker Carlsons out there are paid handsomely to stoke outrage. They are beyond the pale. We must find a way to make Fox less profitable and therefore less influential. There is a special place in hell for Rupert Murdoch, especially as he doesn’t believe much of what is disseminated by his media empire but just knows that it makes money. For some reason though, we think we should still listen to the Thomas Friedmans and Maureen Dowds out there, who want us to be, like them, distracted by the latest microchip or celebrity, until the situation--any situation--goes back to normal--a normal that costs them nothing and in which nothing has fundamentally changed. Chomsky:
I don’t bother writing about Fox News. It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, “Look how courageous I am.” But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.
*
"Webbed off walls? Walled off webs?"
After Trump’s election in 2016, in my less angry and more grandiose moments, I felt that I needed to listen to Trump voters, to understand where they were coming from, to feel their pain, and to maybe convince them that voting for Trump was/is not a good idea. To understand “Trump country,” I read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and parts of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. But then, I would come across Trump’s actual voice at a press conference or a Trump supporter’s comment on Facebook, and those grand ideas would quickly evaporate: I can’t... F--- him, F--- them...why would I...why should I? After Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, these feelings hardened in our liberal circles, not without good reason. Jamie Davis Smith wrote, "No, I will not be 'reaching out' to Trump voters.":
Before any attempt at “unity” can be made, there needs to be a reckoning, an acknowledgment that so many of Trump’s actions have been unconscionable and do not align with societal ideals that claim to value all life. Building bridges with people who share Trump’s views sends a clear message that you are willing to keep the peace at the expense of the dignity and well-being of those with less power and privilege.
Rebecca Solnit wrote on the importance of “not meeting Nazis halfway.” I myself am not interested in any false unity. I do think those who voted for Trump need to have a reckoning. I don’t think we should meet Nazis halfway either, where the Nazis exist (which is not everywhere, for the record). These feelings have, of course, hardened even more after January 6.
Trump, Trumpism, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, the politics of spectacle, the dangerous conspiracies, kleptocracy, and fascism must be defeated. At the same time, however, I think we good liberals need to have a reckoning ourselves. I have attempted to scratch that surface in the preceding pages. To what degree have we contributed to the social rot, and how can we radically transform our society into something more just?
Our path forward will include voting. It will require electoral work. It will require fighting for voting rights. It will include legislating and lobbying. It will require advocacy, activism, and civil disobedience. It will involve reporting, podcasting, and broadcasting. It will for the time being, unfortunately, mean contesting ideas on Twitter and on the talk shows. It will necessitate political and history education—and science education, too. And, it will require talking to Trump supporters.
Yes, I know. But, it doesn’t have to be about Trump. We need not mention his name at all. We do not have to have a beer (summit) or a CNN town hall with them where we gingerly “agree to disagree” at the end and pat ourselves on the back for having “civil discourse.” Instead, our work should be around the material, the immediate, the local: health care, air quality, snow removal, rent, child care, or utilities, for instance; or working conditions, hours, and pay. Iraq war vet and community organizer Vincent Emanuele provides some grounded perspective:
Anyone who is actively organizing is likely already speaking and working with Trump supporters…. For instance, let’s say you’re organizing a tenant’s union, which might include a rent strike. Depending on where you live, there’s a very good chance that you will encounter people who voted for Donald Trump.
Of course, you can choose not to work with them, but in some parts of the U.S., that means not working with 40–60% of the population. In other parts of the country, where support for Trump is very strong, you’d be ignoring anywhere from 60–80% of the population.
Organizers understand that you can’t win big campaigns, big reforms, with only 20–40% support, no matter the context, which means if you’re serious about winning campaigns that will make a material difference in peoples’ lives, perhaps our only chance at bringing some of Trump’s supporters to our side, you’ll work with them. No one is arguing that it’s easy, but it must be done (if we’re interested in winning).
If what you’re saying is the left shouldn’t spend any time in the towns, counties, regions, and states that Trump overwhelmingly won, how do you expect to structurally change the political system in this country? Are you arguing that chaotic street protests will do the trick? Are you arguing that a violent insurrection is on the horizon, or ideal? Be clear about what you’re saying because hiding behind vague statements about resistance or revolution isn’t helpful, especially right now….
If you don’t plan on organizing Trump supporters in the context of a housing-rights campaign, what about workplace organizing? What’s more important, your coworkers’ cultural habits and offensive language, or your shared economic interests? Hey, so-called woke Marxists (or anarchists), I’m talking to you.
If you think you’re gonna successfully conduct a workplace organizing campaign without speaking to people who voted for Trump, without speaking to people who might say sexist or racist things, you’re lacking experience, living in a social bubble, or completely unserious.
And to that space between the liberals and the leftists, Emanuele gives another good kick in the rear:
If you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Well, I live in Chicago/New York/Los Angeles/Detroit/Atlanta, so I don’t have to think about this” guess again: your MSNBC-watching, Obama-loving neighbors, coworkers, and family members aren’t necessarily budding revolutionaries. Are we not organizing them either? If not, who, exactly, are we organizing? Only the people who agree with us? That’s activism, not organizing.
Writing “In Defense of Politics” for Boston Review , Michael Gecan shares stories of community groups coming together across the political spectrum to talk about—and win—broadband access in rural Ohio or criminal justice reform in urban/suburban New Jersey. They did not talk about Trump.
None of this is to say that the local should supplant the national. It can’t, especially with the national purse strings or, for one, the national warmaking. But, the shinier, sexier national scene has far too long supplanted the local. Also, none of this is to say that we don’t have to talk about Trump. We do. As Wallace Shawn wrote, collectively, we are the face of Donald Trump as much as we are the prettier faces of Kennedy and Obama. But, Trump need not dominate our discourse. We cannot let him get in the way of the deeper politics required.
Daniel Denvir is the host of the very academic and yet very accessible and engaging podcast The Dig, which introduced me to a lot of the scholars and practitioners I have referenced. He also is a socialist organizer. In a very good conversation about the so-called “cancel culture,” Denvir concluded:
One way to think about it perhaps is that some things about the discourse on Twitter are bad. It's certainly not the existential threat that either centrist liberals or so many figures now on the right frame it as.... But people on the left certainly shouldn't confuse dunking or hating on their enemies on Twitter with actually meaningful substantive politics. And I'm not saying all politics is canvassing, but canvassing is always an amazing gut check and reality check 'cause what you're doing on the doors when you're interacting with median American voters or neighbors or whoever you're talking to, why ever you're talking to them, they are typically coming from a place that is rather different from you. They typically have some, often have, some views that you might find offensive, and your goal is the exact opposite of what is incentivized by the discourse on Twitter. It is not to own them. It is to meet them where they're at, not because where they're at is good but precisely because you want to bring them from where they're at closer to where you are at. And that is politics.
The path forward will take courage, faith, hope, love. It must “turn on affection.” It will require humility, as none of us can be certain what it will look like, as we should be skeptical of anyone who claims to have all the answers, and as Wendell Berry’s mad farmer admits, “It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way.”
*
The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Owning up to Iraq, not doing that again, not trusting the intel, bringing the troops home, ending the Afghanistan war, owning up to the 2008 crash, reversing financialization, regulating instead of deregulating, bringing Wall Street and Silicon Valley to heel, empowering workers, taxing the rich, making health care universal, desegregating schools and neighborhoods, defunding the police and refunding community needs, moving to renewables, creating green jobs. None of this inoculates us against a Trump return, or a smarter demagogue’s rise, or a January 6-type event of greater scale and violence. “It could happen here.” “It,” though, is not inevitable. Nothing is. We should empower workers, tax the rich, keep the faith, etc., or die trying because those are the right things to do. Filibusters, Republicans, Senate representation, gerrymandering, voter suppression, reactionary Supreme Courts, campaigns awash with cash, Fox and friends all stand in the way, yes, absolutely. But, how are we good liberals standing in the way, too? We must relentlessly hold all power to account.
British Labour MP Tony Benn’s words are very sobering and yet appropriately encouraging: “There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So, toughen up, bloody toughen up.”
No comments:
Post a Comment