Easily Distracted

My own Congressman has a heart-warming analogy on his website about why a Constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget is our most important national priority right now. Yes, he’s one of those who is against raising the debt ceiling, even when his party is offered spending cuts going far beyond their wildest imaginations if only they’ll allow the collection of new revenue from the very richest Americans by allowing ‘temporary’ tax cuts to expire.

His analogy gets you right here, in your Little-House-on-the-Prairiest places: “Every day families in southeastern Pennsylvania make tough decisions in order to live within their means. Many are forced to cancel their family vacations, put off a car repair, or cut out purchases they can no longer afford. When it comes to our country’s bank account, however, both parties in Washington have not been practicing these same responsible habits.”

But why stop there? Let’s take the analogy a little further, because you know, the cuts that have been proposed by the President and rejected by his Republican opponents go a wee bit beyond cancelling your family vacation or putting off a car repair. What do families do when their incomes are cut dramatically and abruptly, say, when one or both income-earners lose their jobs, Congressman? Let’s finish your story of what happens every day.

Why, sure, first Mr. and Mrs. Smith cut everything that’s a luxury. Vacations, cable, subscriptions, leisure, eating out. They defer maintenance of cars, houses, and their own bodies. Golly! I guess that means that people who were making the things that the family used to buy are going to have a bad story of their own to tell soon! And gee, I hope the story gets better soon, because when you don’t maintain cars, houses and bodies, they break and then they’re really expensive to fix. Or you can’t get to work, you end up homeless, or you end up dead, I guess the story could go that way too!

Oh, dear. This is turning into a bad story indeed. This is a story of how people who were very well-off become people who are poor.

I guess that’s what my Congressman is saying: that if the United States of America is one of those families, it’s time for the United States of America to be poor. No more aircraft carriers, supporting education for the middle-class, encouraging corporate research and innovation, fighting the global war on terror, relieving communities after natural diasters, or providing a safety net for us, no sir! No more making sure that our elderly don’t end their lives in desperate poverty. No more investing in infrastructure or health. You got to tighten your belts and make do.

Now this is a new thing in my lifetime, I grant you: a Congressman who is going to run on the argument that it’s time for America to take its place among the poor and struggling nations of the world. I don’t have to study go to Zimbabwe any more to study Zimbabwe: my Congressman is doing his best to bring it to me. Thanks, Congressman!

Now there are other stories we could tell about the Smiths. Sometimes that family goes and gets several new jobs, none of them as good as what they had before, and brings in enough money that they only have to cut a few things, juggle their budgets. You know, they bring in new revenue. They look for jobs, they try to get back to where they were, because they’d rather be well-off than poor. But my Congressman doesn’t like that story for America!

Sometimes that family takes on more debt in the short-term and works its way out of that debt slowly rather than drastically. all the while looking for new revenue. My Congressman doesn’t like that story either!

Sometimes that family declares personal bankruptcy and keeps most of its property because the courts protect them. Yeah! That’s like not raising the debt ceiling, isn’t it? Or like a company, right, America should be more like corporations, and do a Chapter 11? Oh, dear, you mean that analogy doesn’t work? Nations don’t go out of business?

Well, maybe not until now.

I guess my Congressman also wants to see how that story ends. I don’t know that I’m in the mood for a sad story with a depressing ending at the moment, though.

Russell Arben Fox replies in comments to my rant on the politics of good-enough with a very appropriate challenge: isn’t that project itself something that calls for extraordinarily difficult and challenging kinds of tactical and strategic work, mobilizing and mass action and making coalitions? Doesn’t that mean that you can’t just opt-out of those always-difficult conversations about praxis?

Completely right. In another conversation and another forum, that might well involve the rolling up of sleeves and the commencing of a discussion of David Harvey, Giovanni Arrighi, Emmanuel Wallerstein, Giorgio Agamben, Hardt & Negri, etc. Just because I feel like I’ve done my time in those conversations and feel their diminishing returns doesn’t mean they aren’t apropros to the situation. Or it might involve other kinds of focused conversations about texts, tactics, actually-existing social situations, and so on.

But let me propose instead a metaphor that I find more congenial for understanding the architecture of the political moment.

Let’s say you’re a player for a perpetually losing sports team in a league where there’s two or three teams that always dominate the competition year after year. Everyone but the die-hard fans have deserted you. Some of your former fans have just given up watching the sport altogether, some watch the winning teams diffidently from afar.

It’s a familiar scenario from a zillion sports films and even occasionally resembles the real-life narratives that emerge out of sports and games.

As a member of the always-losing team, you have a few explanatory options, which then suggest a few possible ways to act:

1) Your team always loses because it has a losing attitude, lacks spirit, has given up. What you need is to believe in yourselves again, will your way to victory, commit your heart and soul to it. In left politics, this is pretty much the story that the populist, big-tent mobilizer tells. All the team needs is for everyone to pitch in, stop acting like losers, call upon their willpower, and stop sniping at each other. In both sports stories and progressive politics, the villains in this version are the rivals on your team who just can’t stop tearing each other down. In sports stories, eventually the rivals achieve mutual respect and the underdogs go on to win the championship.

2) Your team always loses because you’ve got some slackers and burnouts on your roster that you can’t replace or get rid of, and maybe also some sell-outs who just play for the money and don’t care about winning. In political mobilizing, this is pretty much the narrative that generates leftward hatred of liberals: liberals become the alibi or explanation for why left organizing isn’t succeeding, because there are people on the team dragging it down. Equally, it is the narrative that sustains liberal efforts to be taken seriously by what they perceive to be the arbiters of consensus: that liberal politics would succeed if only it could shake off the taint of a leftist past, its dead weights. In this kind of sports story, the only way that the underdogs manage to win is if they get rid of their dead weight through trades, firings, or managerial tongue-lashings that finally awake the competitive spirit in the slackers and sell-outs and convert them. The focus in this kind of story is always on the bad apples: they’re the only thing that’s keeping the team from winning.

3) Your team always loses because you have no money and the winning teams have all the money in the world. They can buy top players, top equipment, the best facilities, and you have to play with holes in your shoes, cast-off players, and one outdoor shower that only has cold water. This kind of story can go a couple of ways in a sports film. Your team can end the story still being losers, but you can be loveable and the other team hateful. The audience is with you, you’re the moral victor because you play hard and really want it. You’re the winner in everything but the playing field, and maybe therefore make the playing field irrelevant. Or this can quickly become an entry to story #1: you can overcome massive disadvantages in resources with the right alignment of spirit. Two other ways to tell the story: as a version of Moneyball. You get a new manager or owner who leverages resources in an entirely new way and suddenly your team has enough money to compete. The owner finds a new revenue stream. The owner of your team wins a bet with the fatcat owners of the winners. The manager finds a loophole in the recruiting rules. The owner develops a better, more efficient way to scout players to compose a winner roster. The final way to spin the story: you get a ringer. You’re still underpaid, underresourced, but for some reason the greatest player in the game takes a shine to your team and dedicates himself to your cause forever and ever. Maybe she’s a humble kid from your hometown. Maybe he isn’t motivated by money but instead by a competitive challenge. Maybe she really likes the loveable losers on your team. However it happens, the greatest player in the game is with you and is so much better than anything the winning teams have that you’re the world champions.

In left politics, this last is pretty much the story of “if we can just get that demographic/constituency/social class on our team, we’ll win”. This becomes a narrative of persuasion: what will get that player on the team? And a story of in-fighting when team members become convinced that there’s one manager or player who is keeping the greatest player from joining the roster. “Latinos would be with us if only you’d be more culturally conservative and respectful of religion!” “Workers would be with us if only you’d be more pro-union!” “Middle managers would be with us if only you’d stop talking like a socialist!” In the Moneyball version, it’s the story that activists like to tell wherein if only they’d organize in some novel way, move money around in a new fashion, network better, they’d leverage limited resources into politically powerful forms that could challenge dominant interests. And the loveable losers who win off the field is certainly a favorite of both leftists and liberals (who then often accuse each other of being the unloveable jerks who are costing them the adoration of the fans.)

4) Your team always loses because the other team cheats, manipulates the rules, has the league administration in its back pocket, has an owner who is stupid and/or hates the team, or is otherwise the victim of malicious conspiracy. Something about your team provokes the powers-that-be in the league to deliberately sabotage you: maybe your fans or your hometown is the object of ethnic or class hatred. Maybe your owner is a naive idiot who gets outmaneuvered by slick operators who own the winning teams. Maybe there’s a vendetta towards specific players on your team. In sports movies like this, sometimes the losers stay losers, and the story is essentially a tragedy or an expose. Sometimes your team finds a way to be so good, so full of spirit, that they manage to win even with all the deck stacked against them. Sometimes the losers find a way to cheat even more effectively than the cheaters, to con the con men. Sometimes the victimized team finds an outside power or white knight that brings justice to the sport. In politics, this is a classic left-liberal schism point. The liberals go to look for an outside power or white knight, because they’re heavily invested in the legitimacy of the game itself. The left wants to find a way to cheat more effectively than the cheaters: if it’s a corrupt game, don’t be a chump and play fair. The populist wants to find enough spirit in a unified team to win even against the fixed odds.

5) Your team usually loses for some combination of the above reasons but a sudden opportunity presents itself because the winners have fucked up badly or have a serious problem of their own making. Maybe they’ve got a new owner who is an idiot or a vulgarian who makes terrible trades or demoralizes the players. Maybe their equivalent of Murderers’ Row all got injured and will be out until next season. Maybe a crony of the owner has taken over as the incompetent but unfireable manager. If your team can only get its act together for just this one season, you can win the big game, and if you win the big game, you can get a better TV contract and have more pride and get the fans back in the seats, success will rise from success. In left politics, this is pretty much what bloggish or party-meeting debating and bickering is all about: are we at a conjuncture where the dominant interests have left themselves vulnerable because of a tactical miscalculation? Is this at last the final crisis of capitalist accumulation where mobilization can succeed? Has something changed so that this year will really be the year to win?

6) Your team loses even though you could win just because you’re missing that tipping point, that one distinction, and it just takes an imaginative player or coach coming along and finding that magic little extra thing that’s a part of the game itself. Maybe you find a new play that’s legal but no one has ever tried before and make it the cornerstone of your offense. You get a smart guy to redesign the racket or bat or shoes or helmets in a way that’s legal but that no one else believes will work until suddenly there you are in the championship and everyone else is trying to discover the secret, too late. In left politics, this is pretty much the Wikileaks-supporter or digerati’s argument: that there’s some novel technosocial possibility out there that will change the game forever, and for whatever reason, only the loser teams are positioned to make use of it. The leftist skeptic points out that the powers-that-be will just rule the new tactic illegal, that it’s not powerful enough to make the difference by itself, or that next season everyone will have a bigger racket or have learned out to steal bases and you’ll probably just lose again once that happens.

7) Everyone involved in the game, including the fans, comes to the simultaneous recognition that perpetually uneven competition is boring, and that boring sports don’t survive, and works together to change the rules, structure and nature of competition so that the game itself is fairer and more compelling. Next season, the perpetual losers have a real chance because collective rationality has won out and made the game better for everybody. Or maybe alternatively, a stern authoritarian commissioner manages through force of will to impose such a reform on the unwilling winners, meeting with general popular approval and the renewed loyalty of audiences, to the point that even the owners of the winners concede that reform was necessary. In left-liberal politics, this is pretty much the neoliberal’s dream, that the game can be saved because isn’t obvious that a more competitive, more rationally-designed game is better for everyone? Equally, this is the story that the left is profoundly certain can never happen, that even what look like reforms to the rules or structure of the game will end up being subverted by the teams that already dominate the league, or are intended just to bamboozle audiences into believing that the game is fair.

8 ) Almost everybody decides that bear-baiting, cock-fighting, stickball, polo, marbles or whatever was a stupid, bad, materially obsolete or immoral game in the first place and it becomes a subcultural or underground thing taking place at the social margins, even it still exists at all. So the story is just about nostalgic regret for the past we’ve lost or triumphant whiggishness about the past we overcame. Your losing team is either history or you play in obscure places and illegal gatherings for a small if fervant audience. This is not particularly a story that left or liberal interests like to tell about themselves, but it’s sometimes the story that gets told about them.

9) The losing team just quits because the game itself is so loathsome, stupid, irrelevant, dirty or dangerous that there’s no point to ever trying to win. Maybe if they can they do their best to destroy the game itself in one last moment. Think Rollerball, The Running Man or The Hunger Games for examples. Certainly there are left-liberal contexts where this is the preferred story: stop playing the game of politics in any form, even mass action or mobilization, just withdraw and build separate communities, let the whole thing fall apart by itself.

Note a key thing: in none of these stories does the opposing always-winning team matter at all except as a dramatic device, as inevitable antagonists. About the only time that their agency enters the picture at all is in stories of cheating (when it is taken for granted that they will, because they’re just that way), in stories when they’ve made a terrible miscalculation and opened an opportunity, or in the rare stories of consensus reform where everyone acts together to save the game. Most of the time the drama of the story rests with the usually-losing team: will they find spirit? Will they get rid of their dead weight? Will they find a ringer? Will they manage to cheat even better than the cheaters? Will they recognize the hidden potential of base-stealing or of a graphite racket? And so it is in left-liberal arguments: most of the time, the main point of agreement is that somehow progressives themselves are responsible for their own losses, and that there is something, some story, some turn, that will provide a way out.

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In real life sports and competition, as well as cliched sports movies, teams that have habitually lost do sometimes find a way to win the big game in ways that resemble these narratives or some combination of them. Sometimes they even find a way to become permanent winners. Sometimes also real leagues or entire sports really do reform everything about their game, fail and fade away, or retain commercial viability even though some teams always win and other teams always lose.

So in the end this metaphor informs how I’d reply to Russell’s challenge. How do you get a politics of “good enough” to take hold, which I’d like to think of as a populist or big-tent story–it isn’t just the American elite that clings to the hope of being the boss, grabbing the brass ring, being the top dog, but also much of the American working-class? I think you have to see what the season ahead looks like. When a team that often loses suddenly manages to put together a championship season, it’s often because of the unpredictable alignment of a lot of events and initiatives: the coach with an idea, the owner with a shrewd way of finding affordable talent, the developing star who sticks with the team despite big-money offers, falling ticket sales because of disgust at the cheats or lopsided competition that force league-wide changes, the discovery of a clever tactic that stretches the rules a bit.

Most importantly, team chemistry isn’t something you can force and it isn’t something you can fake, but it clearly is a real thing that can take hold and become self-sustaining at the most unpredictable moments. Some seasons you’re just going to bicker, some seasons cheaters are gonna win and haters are gonna hate, some seasons you really are going to carry some dead weight on your roster while privately believing that you could win the game by yourself if only coach would put you in more often.

Of all the distressing things about this global moment, the most distressing of all is the seeming resignation of national, local and world publics about the parade of woes confronting them. I’m not offering this as the stereotypical complaint of a self-anointed activist against the apathy of others. I feel the same sense of resignation and passivity.

There is so much going wrong, and so much wrong-doing, in political, economic and institutional life at all scales. Some of the evidence of error and malfeasance is overwhelming. The managers of major U.S.-based financial corporations and their partners within the U.S. government (across multiple administrations) made catastrophic errors of judgment repeatedly over more than a decade while favoring their own short-term interest and caused a global economic crisis that looks to have been the straw that permanently broke the back of the existing system. They ignored or slighted a variety of long-standing prudential warnings from critics, most of whom still get little respect or acknowledgement from the powers-that-be. This isn’t a deep, dark secret that requires a careful inquest. The more details we get, the worse it looks for the people who were responsible for making decisions. All that changes is that the circle of guilt widens and deepens. Not only have the responsible parties gotten off scot-free, the central dicta of market capitalism about the necessary relationship between risk, consequence and reward have been thoroughly trashed by bipartisan consensus among the political elite. If I could play poker with other people’s money, you can bet I’d never leave the table.

What to do about it? There isn’t any mainstream political alternative. In the U.S. you can choose between a party that favors whatever small incremental reforms that the banker class will grudgingly permit and a party that wants to accelerate the complete handover of all economic matters to the financial elite while propitiating their populist wing with some auto-da-fe of the moment. In the E.U. you can choose between the parties that got you into this mess and the parties that have no idea how to get you out of it, between two sides of a long-standing collusion. In much of the developing world, where publics have some say either through voting or mass politics, the choice is often between yesterday’s cronies and parasites and tomorrow’s. Maybe you can even trade a distant authoritarian’s exploitation for some home-town exploitation instead, as just happened in South Sudan.

Even institutions and individuals who can see what a disastrous situation we’re in can’t really afford to challenge it. Non-profit organizations, local governments, union-defended pension funds are all hopelessly in bondage to the current architecture of asset capitalism. If the banker class puts a gun to the head of the stock market and threatens to blow the S&P to smithereens in retaliation for prosecutions and regulations, they’re threatening to take universities, soup kitchens, parks, libraries and retirements along with them, wounding even the folks who don’t have 401ks or skills with continuing value in the 21st Century economy. About the only people who might stand aloof are small-business owners whose entire investment is in their own operation, and even they need customers.

This is conventionally the moment where old-style progressives or leftists leap into the breach and offer social movements and mass action as the obvious alternative. But seriously, is there any kind of comprehensive vision available to light that path forward? There’s a whole bunch of a la carte positions and ideas that can appeal, gain support and fuel a movement for a year or a decade, only to be appropriated and buried deep in a procedural morass within the Beltway or the Hague. That’s pretty much what the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the U.S. or activism in the E.U. amount to: a constellation of often sensible or exciting ideas and visions that sometimes, but not always, share some loose propositional or conceptual connection. There are just as many particular movements and campaigns of that type that are really just another elite-in-the-making looking to substitute (or restore) their own ticket to a gravy train for those who are presently taking the ride to the Reading Railroad and passing Go repeatedly.

There are only a few overarching ideas that strike me as plausible enough that it’s possible to see how to support them politically, concrete enough that they could be implemented under something like our current dispensation, and powerful enough that they could change the nature of the game to almost everyone’s benefit. Comprehensive transparency in government, business and institutional life is one of those ideas that could arguably be just as important to the Tea Party as it might be to progressives, but only if it applies evenly to everything and everyone, which would take activists on all sides agreeing not to be pawns on the chessboard of the political elite.

I’m thinking about this particular issue right now because of the News Corporation scandal in the United Kingdom. What makes it such an interesting moment is that for once, a public as well as political leaders seem not only performatively outraged by a series of revelations about misconduct but are genuinely angry enough to do something about both the specific charges and the larger problem. What I’m wondering is whether this is a case that shows that there are still very strong possibilities for consensus in contemporary democratic publics, values which if trespassed against will rouse people across the political spectrum to demand serious change.

Alternatively, more glumly, I wonder if the only reason that Murdoch and his colleagues are momentarily exposed to real consequences is simply that they overplayed their hand within the private world of the UK (and global) political elite, made too many enemies with gambits and threats that would have seemed too crude and obvious even for Citizen Kane. There’s a big difference between serious reforms pursued because the alternative is political destruction at the hands of an outraged, mobilized electorate and viscerally knifing a Caesar after he’s gotten too big for his britches and accumulated too many enemies, too many scores that need settling.

If it’s the former, that’s a sign of hope. Maybe we’re only one misstep or revelation away from a similar public consensus about other open wounds and pressing crises, one precious alignment away from change as a real possibility rather than an empty slogan. If it’s the latter, well, watching Murdoch & Co. get what’s coming to them is a pretty fair popcorn moment as far as it goes, but there’s only so many circuses left before Rome really starts to burn.

My trip to California took a bit of a downward turn a bit more than a week ago when I began to develop a fever and associated symptoms (headache, dizziness, fatigue, sleeplessness) while in the southern Sierra Nevada. After a third day of steady worsening of my condition, with my temperature spiking to 102.5 F/39.2 C, we decided to head for San Francisco, our next scheduled stop, a bit early, and to stop in Fresno the night before so that I could seek medical treatment.

I had my wife drop me at the ER just before 8pm. I was quickly processed through to see a triage nurse, which was the last quick thing that evening. My fever was a bit lower, around 100.5 F, but it had been spiking up and down all day without much relationship to the ibuprofen I had taken. As I reported my symptoms and stressed that I was travelling and lived on the East Coast, that I had interrupted a trip to seek medical care and felt very abnormally worse than I would in an ordinary ‘flu’, it was already clear to me that the triage nurse was uninterested in any of the specifics. I peeked at my information sheet. He wrote one thing: fever.

If my wife had looked at the odd rash and bump on the back of my leg that had worried us the night before, I would have been able to be considerably more specific. Later that night when she saw it, it had resolved into a clear bulls-eye, which to people living in the mid-Atlantic or New England means one thing: Lyme disease.

Probably the staff in Fresno would have spotted it too, but they never got the chance to see it.

It was the kind of ER that was very obviously used by many patients as their primary-care physician, the specific circumstance that has been so much in contention in debates over health-care legislation in the last decade. I would not call it overly crowded: there were perhaps twenty patients plus families or friends in the waiting room, about as many as I see in the main hospital of my health-care system at home.

After waiting two and a half hours, I began to get the picture. The nurse on duty repeatedly called patients who were not present, who had checked in and then left later on. At first I thought it odd that they kept calling and calling for almost thirty minutes for people who were very obviously not there while not calling cases of people who were present. Every once in a while, someone who was there was called and seen, though in a few of those cases, the nurse on duty simply took vitals again and sent them back to the waiting room. At the limits of my endurance, I finally went up to ask how long I might expect to wait. “We’re still seeing cases that checked in between one or two p.m. today,” I was told. Meaning it might be four in the morning before I was seen, I asked, stunned? Yes, that’s very possible, said the nurse. I gave up at that point: infection, disease, whatever it was, if I was going to continue to worsen overnight, I’d damn well go back and do it in my hotel room and hope for better in San Francisco. (Which I found, thanks in part to my Facebook friends.)

This was a Tuesday night. There was no city-wide crisis or emergency. Or perhaps there was: not a fire or earthquake or epidemic, just a localized case of national decline.

It became clear to me that as a matter of policy, the hospital was coping with a large number of local patients using its ER for ordinary medical care by passive-aggressive neglect. Unless you walked in with an immediately and obviously life-threatening condition, time would be your triage, not a medical professional. If you could endure waiting eight to nine hours, that was proof that your condition was sufficiently serious that you might need urgent care. The staff there don’t spend much time working up a more nuanced picture on initial evaluation because they don’t want one. They don’t efficiently discard the cases of people who’ve left the facility because they’re stalling the remainder deliberately.

The basic problem faced by this hospital and many others is structurally serious and requires a strong nationally consistent solution. Given that one political party struggled to formulate a fussy, detail-strangled series of half-measures to address the problem and the other party apparently thinks there isn’t any issue in the first place, I’m resigned to this situation happening again to me, my loved ones, my friends, my fellow citizens, for the rest of my life.

This is where we are at now. Decline is not something we need to fear or forestall, it has already happened. America is not in decline, it has declined. A nine-hour wait at a well-built, well-staffed, well-resourced medical center for treatment of a serious condition is decline. As a traveller seeking urgent care, I’ve been seen more quickly in similar facilities in both Africa and Europe.

However, even within the limits of the structural and systemic failure of the American present, I think individual institutions can do better by making smarter choices about ethical and professional responsibilities. My home hospital has some of the same demographic burdens as the hospital in Fresno, but it hasn’t chosen to show the same indiscriminate hostility towards any patient in its emergency room.

The challenge of the American present will be how to deal creatively and humanely with limits while continuing to sharply challenge the leaders who got us to this point with such indifference and disdain–all the while exempting a small fraction from having to join us on the journey.