Easily Distracted

The terrible thing about what has happened in the Senate is this: the intellectual and institutional infrastructure of legal and political systems can confer a kind of revenant legitimacy even on claims and verdicts that destroy those systems. You can murder a democracy with democratic institutions. The Nazi Party did not come to power in a coup; it came to power in an election. When the Nazi Party finally did suspend German democracy, it did so using the institutional language of the state that the Nazis were destroying.

So while we can all see the plain insanity of Alan Dershowitz’ proposition that if a President of the United States believes his own election is in the national interest, no action that he takes to secure his own election is therefore impeachable, it still matters that it was said on the floor of the Senate with the blessing of the current Administration and that it will be incorporated into the logic of the foregone acquittal that the Republican Senators will shortly be delivering.

Institutions are a kind of railroad track into the near-term future, laid down in haste as the train approaches. If the track is laid down pointing to a yawning canyon with no bridge over it, the engineers of the train do not have the option to swerve or evade the abyss ahead.

Dershowitz–and thus the GOP–are now fully committed to single-party rule, to an assertion that if they believe themselves the only legitimate rulers of the United States then it is so and they need fear no law nor principle as a barrier to their continued hold on power. As Dershowitz renders it, Trump would be doing nothing against his oath of office if he ordered a Democratic candidate investigated by the Justice Department or detained by the FBI for no other reason than to damage their candidacy. He could legitimately order federal money withheld from the home state of a political rival or for that matter legitimately impede or interfere with elections in jurisdictions likely to vote for any opponent. It’s not hard to think of quite real actions that will shortly be given political blessing (with the likely blessing of the Roberts Court to follow), because many of them are employed in authoritarian states that hold sham elections–tampering with the vote count, intimidation of opposition voters, arrests or detention of opposition candidates, refusal of legal supervision or eyewitnessing of election procedures, and so on. Dershowitz has sanctified all of that.

It doesn’t matter if 99% of the law professors in the nation think him wrong and craven. If his views stand as the prologue to an acquittal, they will be in some sense laying down the tracks that the train cannot help but follow.

In the last two weeks, it’s been hard to miss the sudden turn among centrist punditry–the kind of people who presume to be kingmakers and political tastemakers, the viziers of the voters–towards trying to knock Bernie Sanders down before he surges his way into the nomination.

One of the most common themes in this turn (for example, in David Frum’s well-argued essay in the Atlantic) is that Sanders has yet to be tested politically, that no one has really attacked him yet in the way that the Republicans will attack him, that he is not electable because he has so many skeletons of some kind in his closet.

I think there are many assertions in these kinds of arguments that are questionable. For the most part, they seem to me to be a kind of zombie discourse rising out of the graveyard of the Cold War, that all a liberal or centrist politician needed to do to undercut a more progressive rival once was to hint darkly that the rival had ties to Communism–that they’d met approvingly with Fidel Castro or that they had said something nice once about the work of Marx or that they’d shown up to a meeting of socialists. Frequently this worked in concert with tying the candidate to some form of non-Marxist radical militancy–they’d been in a march with the Black Panthers! etc.–or to the antiwar movement (Hanoi Jane!).

It feels like a pretty OK, Boomer move now. I don’t think a lot of voters even recognize the allusive suggestions or have any real reflexive responses to the implications and nudges involved. Or even care much if someone comes right out and says, “Dude’s a Communist!” In part, as Frum notes (and most other hand-wringing centrists do not), even being a Communist affirms the degree to which Sanders seems to be about something other than just a career trajectory for a well-trained technocrat, that he is committed to an actual cause.

Let me not go too far into a tit-for-tat argument on these points, however. Let us just presume for the sake of argument that the Republican attack machine is going to go at Sanders full throttle and that he has yet to face any of the force of that assault, and that until he is thus attacked, we can say little about how well he will fare.

The more important observation at this point is that none of the Democrats have faced the full force of the contemporary Republican attack machine and none of them have demonstrated their capacity to survive it. I would argue that if Sanders seems unready, then all of his Democratic rivals are vastly more unready. And that all Democrats are now equally vulnerable to the way that the Republican Party now conducts itself politically, because the Republican Party no longer has any constraints on its behavior. Neither accuracy nor probity matters any longer. Legality is unimportant to a lawless party. The preservation of democratic norms and structures doesn’t matter to a party that no longer believes that the opposition has a right to govern if elected. The contemporary GOP and its base believe that by definition, only they have political legitmacy.

The Democrats are still preparing to run in an election, while their opponents are preparing to go to war.

To get some sense of what is now involved, look at what’s happening to John Bolton. He has gone from someone who was appointed by the President and trusted to provide counsel and make policy, who was a darling of conservatives and a frequent visitor to Fox News, to “Book Deal Bolton”, trailed by viral falsehoods about his financial motivations, his conspiratorial loyalty to the “deep state”, and so on. That the President chose such a person (as he did so many others who have now left his service) casts no negative light on him among his followers, nor does their former estimation of Bolton have any remnant force in their minds. Conservatives who loved and admired John Bolton two or four or eight years ago now profess to have always hated him and regarded him as a dangerous, even treasonous, figure.

Look at Biden. Twenty years ago, if you were the President and you knew that a potential rival in the upcoming election had a ne’er-do-well son who had gotten a job that smelled like nepotism and influence, you would have held on to that until after he was nominated and then found operatives far enough away from you to leak and rumor that into national news coverage. (Of course, twenty years ago, if you’d had a swarm of nepotistic trash trailing at your heels and had been the product of nepotism, you might have thought twice about making it an issue at all.) But this President and his goons decided to go ahead and start a Constitutional crisis just to play out a single rumor.

None of the Democrats have really faced anything like this at a national scale. What is about to happen will make the treatment of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton look comparatively restrained. Our mass communications are essentially completely porous to malicious falsehoods from a wide variety of interested parties with money–I fully expect that this will be the first election where deepfake images are used in a sustained way, among many other things. Our mainstream media are mostly still easily manipulated or fooled by (or authorially involved in) the circulation of information intended to “change the frame” on candidates and issues. Almost a third of the citizenry are epistemologically barricaded against evidence that contradicts their current political commitments.

People who grew up in earlier political dispensations where “dirty tricks” meant things as quaint as getting Muskie to cry on camera or sending out anonymous circulars alleging that John McCain had a black child out of wedlock think that certain political candidates have certain kinds of vulnerabilities that they have to prepare for tactically and strategically, and that some candidates have too many vulnerabilities based on some actual past conduct and thus are “unelectable”. Wake up. We are in a new era. Against the hate machine that has been forged over the last two decades and now is armed and fully operational, all candidates have all vulnerabilities at all times. And all candidates have the potential to soar over the grinding, indiscriminate brutalization on offer: the US did elect, after all, a black President whose middle name was “Hussein”, something that the same centrist punditry that today says Sanders is unelectable then said made Obama unelectable. Much as they said Trump was unelectable.

There are two ways to cope, I think. One of them is Obama’s: to be above it all. I don’t think any of the current candidates have that available to them. It’s what O’Rourke and Booker, among others, tried.

The alternative is to go to war too. As Frum notes, that takes some of what Sanders has: advocating simple, elemental and dramatic policy ideas. It also takes not putting up with any bullshit, whether it’s media bullshit or the bullshit of the hate machine. It takes authenticity–meaning, something that comes from the candidate directly, not from a bunch of consultants and pollsters. It takes being raw rather than cooked.

If Sanders is untested in his ability to do that well against the ferocity and intensity of what’s coming, his rivals are vastly more untested. Or they’ve already failed: Biden’s meandering, vacillating confusion about what to do in the face of the attack from the White House and his clueless nostalgia for a consensus politics that was jointly murdered by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in the 1990s is a vastly greater sign of unreadiness. Is there any sign that Pete Buttigieg is remotely prepared for the homophobia that will come his way? Or probably more potently, for the absolutely brutal and sick attacks that will come on his education and career trajectory? He can barely cope with relatively polite criticism about that from the left of the Democratic Party. Is Amy Klobuchar ready for open misogyny, for a reprise of the “unlikeability” attacks on Clinton? Warren already dropped the ball on the “Pocahontas” attack; she’s been a bit more deft since on other fronts, but still.

And these are all predictable vectors of attack, in that older political sense of ‘vulnerability’ and electability. But I don’t think any of them are ready for open falsehoods to be circulating straight from the President and elected members of the House and Senate, for the floodgates of hate unrestrained by shame or truth. The only way to be ready is to show that you understand that this is how politics is now, and to show the determination to win in order to save democracy itself. That urgency and intensity of purpose has yet to show itself on the Democratic side, for the most part–and if anyone has shown it, it’s Sanders and Warren, the candidates that the conventional wisdoms holds to be most unelectably unready.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one orange-faced man to dissolve the legal restrictions which he finds incovenient and to assume among the powers of the earth, the permanently dominant station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitles the orange-faced man and his political party, an indecent indifference to the opinions of mankind requires that they should incoherently tweet the causes which impel them to ignore, trifle with or mock the law.

We hold these lies to be self-evident, that billionaires are entitled to pay no taxes and the Russians are good guys who the United States should generally obey, that MAGA-hat wearing white men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are protection of Mediocrity, Things Being Just the Way They Want Them and A Life Free From Dealing With Brown People, Women and Others They Do Not Like. That to secure these rights, Governments are corrupt among Men, deriving their unjust powers from the inattention of a tweeting scumbag, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes threatening of these ends, it is the Right of the MAGAs and billionaires to ignore it or corrupt it, and to let Government wheeze out its last breaths in some miserable alleyway, undercutting its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Downfall and Misery along with everyone else even though they don’t think it’s going to be a problem for them.

A lack of prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should be let decay and degenerate for short-term greed and fear; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are less disposed to suffer when they take the trouble to have good governments, while evils are accumulable by abolishing the governments which have suppressed them. But when a long train of reasonable regulations and social reforms, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to actually make the world better, it is their right, it is their duty, to sabotage and derogate such Government, and to remove all Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of this independent Nation; and such is now the necessity which constrains the MAGA and billionaires to shit all over their former Systems of Government. The history of the first black President is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations due to his highly moral character, generally intelligent approach to governance and centrist moderation, all having in direct object the maintenance of incremental social reform and some degree of constitutional liberty. To mock this, let fake bullshit be submitted to a simultaneously horrified and bemused world.

The former black president has given his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has urged his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, but has also negotiated and offered deals till his Assent should be obtained; and when ignored by do-nothing Republicans, he has mostly accepted the impasse with mild frustration and hope for eventual agreement.

The former black president has refused to pass other Laws for the exclusive accommodation of white men and billionaires, unless those people would accept the right of Representation in the Legislature of everyone else, a right inestimable to them because it is common to tyrants and white supremacists only.

The former black president has called together legislative bodies at places normal and close to the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of reluctantly accepting their lack of compliance with his recommendations and plans.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most arrogant and obstructionist terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated patience and attempts to understand what is motivating us to be such assholes. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Democratic ruler of a constitutional republic, is unfit to be the ruler of MAGA-hat wearing white men and billionaires.

Nor have We been wanting in attention to our Russian brethren. We have welcomed from time to time in attempts by their dictator to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us and our elections. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our desire to build hotels there and of moving on her like a bitch. We have appealed to their kindred greed and lack of interest in freedom or human rights, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common intolerances to totally encourage these usurpations, which would inevitably strengthen our connections and correspondence. They have been totally delighted hear to the voice of injustice and of consanguinity, partly because they used a bunch of trolling operations to make it speak out. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which announces our Subjugation, and hold them, as we hold other countries with dictators, Totally Great Friends With Whom We Have Perfect Conversations, and Hereby Abandon All That Shit About Having Our Own Country with a Constitution.

We hearby unseriously and incoherently tweet and ramble that these United States of America are basically over and Committed to Doing Whatever Putin Wants and Hey Whatever Other Dictators Ask For During Phone Calls.

What we commonly call “concern trolling” in online discussion has far deeper rhetorical roots in the public sphere. In many ways, it’s a style that was honed to near-perfection by centrist liberal intellectuals and academics in the 1960s, the sort that were brilliantly vivisected by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. These were the men and women (mostly men) who were in their own view outside of and beyond ideology. They might favor a particular policy or course of action, but most of them claimed to be making a series of serially independent reasoned judgments, taking each issue on its merits, according to its facts. This was not just a personal preference. They argued that this approach was the essence of academic professionalism, of expert participation in public debate, and even the only right way to be a proper citizen in democratic and community deliberation. Journalists (in the U.S., not so much elsewhere) also commonly adopted this basic posture, that they were obliged to have no priors or assumptions, to treat everything they covered in a neutral, dispassionate manner that deferred to the facts of a given event or issue.

Intellectuals, scholars, experts, pundits or journalists who had strong or distinctive points of view were either bracketed off as a splinter movement (“New Journalism”) or disparaged as ideologues who approached issues and problems with a prior politics that led to a selective, biased understanding of the issues at hand and the facts of the matter. Intellectual and cultural historians, literary scholars and others who study the history of public debate in the United States with a long view are aware of just how different the resulting structure of public discourse in American life was after 1960 from the period between 1880 and 1950. It really was a shift: in the prior era of high modernism, intellectuals and experts didn’t hesitate to advocate policies and programs directly, for the most part–for good and ill.

Despite the supposed rejection of “objectivity” as a goal or evaluative marker in the social sciences, many experts and scholars have held on to the performative affect of the no-ideology intellectual continuously since the 1970s. In public writing, that increasingly meant that intellectuals and pundits only advocated ideas and proposals that came from someone else, from research or data or pilot programs etc. that resulted from the direct agency of some other expert, some other civic or institutional leader. Somewhere else and someone else. The pundit became a window to some distant light, transparent to its illumination but having no direct responsibility for incandescence. And increasingly, the light was directed towards those the pundit considered in darkness, in a gesture of olympian magnaminity. “Were I you,” he (almost always a he, almost always white) says, “I would look seriously at this finding, this study, this other expert, this situation. For were I you, I would act differently than you do, once I saw this finding, this study, this other expertise. Indeed, if you only will live in the light I cast in your direction, you might in fact be lucky enough to be me. That’s what I would be, were I you: I’d be me. Unbiased, generous, unhampered by ideology, just making up my own mind about everything rationally and without any priors right until the moment I come across it.”

Once upon a time, that noxious, phony performance was substantially confined to the op-ed pages of the New York Times and other major dailies, to the televisual punditry, to a small sector of public-facing academic social science, to a very particular subset of civic organizations. Bit by bit, however, it slipped into the wild, and now it infects our everyday public discourse across social media, public culture, civic institutions and conventional mainstream journalism.

In practice? Some examples of what this dissemination of deferral means:

1) Most of the public conversation between educated elites about electoral preferences studiously avoids the responsibility of actually having electoral preferences of one’s own that arise out of one’s own values and commitments. Instead, arguments about various candidates and issues are deferred onto some other “them” who have actual preferences who need to be appeased, mobilized or enlisted. So, for example, few people in these public conversations directly advocate for Joe Biden’s candidacy because they really like his positions or his specific qualities as a leader, but instead argue that Biden must be favored because he is the favored candidate of social groups who are not present in the conversation. Their (alleged) reasons for favoring him cannot be debated or discussed, only described, because they are not there to speak to them, and even if they were there, are presumed to not be willing to discuss their reasoning.

2) Much of the leadership within civic and academic institutions and often businesses as well advocates for particular policies or changes not because the leadership directly believe in or support such policies, but because the policies are “best practices” or “shared norms” that originated somewhere else. There is a quality of immaculate conception in these kinds of explanations, in fact: the policies adopted often have no specific place of birth and no initial author, but seem instead to have been adopted everywhere at once but nowhere also, with no sense that they are rivalrous to or critical of the norms they are set to displace.

3) Technocratic politicians and Silicon Valley companies (mostly) cleave to policies and products that have been produced almost through a competitive bidding process: they describe a problem they have identified and that they seek to provide some some of ameliorating solution for. The advocated solution doesn’t arise out of the political values or philosophy of the leader and their staff: the root value is to solve problems, what Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism”. The solution is framed as neutral, as containing no values or agenda. (And hence, opposing the solution is held to be a corrupt investment in the continuation of the initial problem, because why else would you stand in the way of fixing a problem?) Once again, the people responsible for implementing or selling solutions are placed a sanitary step away from the conceptualization of and advocacy for a solution.

I think this is all tied to the much more abstract, multivalent erosion of 19th and 20th Century conceptions of publics and citizenship in the direction of the constellation of ideas and practices that we often call “neoliberalism”. The advantages of this deferral of direct responsibility for advocacy are obvious for individuals and institutions. David Brooks or Bret Stephens can throw up their hands and say that they’re not responsible for gross errors of fact or tendentious constructions of argument, because they’re only serving as a messenger for what is said and claimed by others that they believe their readers should know about. Institutions can shield themselves against risk and liability if they are only conforming to or compliant with decisions and practices adopted elsewhere. The failure of solutions can be blamed on the subcontractor that supplied them or simply on the intractability of the problem itself without putting any values or beliefs in danger.

The costs I think are also plain. Chief among them is that this deepens the isolation of elites from a wider civic culture, because all of these moves position elites and their institutions as the chess players on a board populated by other groups, other people, other communities but bearing no responsibility for either setting the rules of the game nor for the outcomes of play. We can scarcely begin to think successfully about what other worlds are possible when we absent ourselves and the direct power we actually have from the world we actually inhabit.

Let’s stop talking about guns and gun control.

Guns and gun control in America function as an intensifying signifier of cultural division. They amplify the idea that this historical moment is a division of rural white ‘traditional’ communities vs. urban diverse educated communities. For every responsible rural gun owner who has a rifle as a tool, for every home owner who keeps a gun out of a belief in self-protection, for every collector who is just interested in guns, using the gun itself as the totemic object that we believe is causing these shootings is a confirmation of an antagonism, of a sociocultural distance, of an us and them. The more we understand, accurately, the cultural depth of America’s attraction to guns, the more helpless we feel–because deep cultural formations are exceptionally hard to instrumentally change from above.

Yes, gun ownership in this country is a fetish; yes, strictly controlling the availability of weapons that are intended to kill many people as fast as possible would be transformative. Yes, guns in the home lead to many tragedies, from toddlers shooting family members by accident to depressed men committing suicide because of the availability of a convenient means for doing it. Yes, we need sane gun laws–licensing and permits, mandatory training, restrictions on manufacture, sale and ownership, and so on.
But guns are a distraction from what’s really going on.

What’s really going on is a slow-motion uprising by white men who feel lost, enraged and confused by the gradual ebbing of their unchallenged social, political and economic power. Most of the men who’ve joined this uprising and committed terrorist acts in its name don’t even quite know or reflexively understand their deeper sources of their rage and alienation. They’ve nearly invariably beaten or hurt women in their lives, they’ve felt confused or wounded by the world around them. They’ve sometimes understood themselves to be mentally unhealthy or lost. They’ve cut themselves off from social ties or never been able to make them in the first place.

But most of them are not mentally ill as we commonly understand it, any more than an alienated young man from London or Berlin or Detroit or Istanbul or Kano who goes to join ISIS or Boko Haram. Those insurgents are leaving because they feel there is nothing for them where they are, because they feel powerless or lost, because they want to make a new world that is also somehow an old and sanctified world where they are the powerful ones. They often know almost nothing about the Qu’ran or Islam.

So it is with America’s mass shooters: virtually all of them white and male, sensing that the safety of a world where mediocre, ordinary white men could still count on being bosses, on being in charge, is fading away.

This goes all the way back to James Huberty in San Ysidro in 1984. We are not in a fight with guns, any more than other societies trying to cope with insurgencies are in a fight with guns. The guns are a necessary but not sufficient condition of those insurgencies, but ordinary people don’t get blown up by an IED while travelling by bus because there are IEDs. They get blown up because insurgents and terrorists are mining the roadways. The IEDs are what allow buses to be blown up and many people to die: if insurgents just had butter knives, they’d kill very few people. But here, in some sense, the mantra of the gun owner is almost right: without the terrorist, the gun sits on the shelf, the IED never gets made.

Ordinary Americans don’t get shot because there are guns, and they don’t get shot because somehow we have the world’s worst mental health crisis. They get shot because there is a decentralized, distributed movement of white men who want their supremacy back. It’s always been visible to us but it is more apparent than ever now because there are open terrorist sympathizers in the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, in governors’ mansions and state legislatures. It is time to call them what they are and to understand truthfully that we the people are under attack.