So this essay has been a long time coming for me, as I try to figure out where I fit in on the Left. My heart is in the struggle for an egalitarian, enlightened, peaceful world. But I don’t consider leftism a religion, and the impulse of many to treat it as such – to codify and regulate the behavior of people according to its tenets – too often looks like a movement going through the motions instead of genuinely challenging the human condition. Indeed, my argument is that political correctness, far from being an expression of genuine compassion and anti-bigotry, has transformed into a cosmetic substitute for authentic radicalism legitimating authority and privilege while hampering our efforts to change our condition. The goal of this essay is to start a conversation within the Left about our means, not our ends.
The biggest problem with challenging the hegemony of political correctness is distinguishing the valid critiques from the abundance of bogus critiques. Among the bogus critiques I count the whining that comes from the Right whenever they say something insensitive and rude. This raises the question of what political correctness actually is, since it seems silly to conflate rudeness with institutional oppression.
I define political correctness as the societal and cultural side-effects of authoritarian institutions’ attempts to keep pace with accelerating social change through top-down policy. In my theory, it doesn’t matter whether politically incorrect behavior is being addressed for the right or wrong reasons. What matters is that it is a way to shore up privilege instead of abolishing it.
Consider the example of your typical right-wing bigoted talking head who says something they’d defend as merely “politically incorrect”. They’ve said something that some subsection of the population finds offensive – it could be a racial minority, an oppressed ethnic group, even a historic out-group such as homosexuals. What they generally mean when they label their comments “politically incorrect” – at least, my sense of their strongest argument – is that “the establishment” has set rigid and sweeping rules about what is an acceptable opinion. The implication is not that they are being “censored” so much as called out for offending a social norm they would claim is inorganic and artificial, created not by society at large but by its elite through its institutional force majeure.
My point is not that, therefore, they are somehow off the hook for their comments. Their claims could be incorrect – after all, while I’d hardly say anti-gay bigotry is wiped from our society, most of us live in social circles where anti-gay language would be considered rude and uncomfortable. It seems to me that claiming there’s a grand conspiracy to create a taboo on anti-gay language is a bit ridiculous (and certainly in the Right’s wheelhouse).
However, both explanations need not be mutually exclusive. These two propositions can be true simultaneously:
For these right-wing types, it’s the perfect cover – anytime somebody criticizes them for genuinely being offended, they can pretend that the real criticism arises from violating the establishment’s rules. And this is what is so insidious about political correctness: it dillutes the power of legitimate moral sanction in our society. People can credibly claim they are victims of the elite, instead of victims of their own bigotry.
Yes, saying racist shit sucks – it is hurtful to social conviviality as well as certain individuals, and it has the potential to perpetuate narratives and prejudices that hold us all back. But given that the channels of media are controlled by an elite few corporations, the piling on and blacklisting that follows such an utterance is out of proportion with what the organic social sanction would entail. While we may not care about the feelings of the bigot, we may not immediately see how the media’s use of these incidents serves their interests – programming, articles, interviews, and other opportunities for increased attention and advertising revenue – over our interersts, which involve genuine healing, understanding, and contrition.
There’s also a political danger when we allow institutions to be the arbiters of bigotry. If you can label people racist, or anti-gay, or sexist, or whatever, you have a mechanism by which you can enlist society in supporting your blacklisting, censorship, or other authoritarian act. This can be used as a back door to oppressing people who say other inconvenient things – such as politically subversive, seditious, or disruptive things.
While society might disapprove of the politically incorrect behavior and sanction it on their own without involving authorities, it would do so in an informal, decentralized, and more deliberative way. This is a perfectly legitimate means of social discipline; indeed, our society changes authentically through few other mechanisms. That’s not political correctness as I understand it; it’s merely social norms, which always exist (both good and bad ones). The problem with political correctness arises from a society so dominated by institutions with their own agendas that they can co-opt this social dynamic for their own ends.
This is why Keith Preston calls political correctness “totalitarian humanism”: it is cultural progressivism pressed into the service of the ruling class’s interests. It’s why the U.S. can justify imperial expeditions as humanitarian interventions and get away with it. It’s why things like greenwashing and token minorities on corporate boards are attempted and work so often. It’s why we get our asses beat on the street when we protest and the cops can claim it was for our own safety. It’s why kids are suspended from school for merely drawing a picture of a gun. Political correctness co-opts radical change to prop up and empower conservative institutions who only understand policy.
Indeed, while “political correctness” as a term is centuries old, it emerged in modern times as a way for New Leftists of the 60s counterculture to call out attempts to institute an orthodoxy in all sorts of liberatory movements. Orthodoxies and heresies are always thought-limiting constructs that should be hateful to academia and thinkers of all stripes. So it is rather ironic that much of the totalitarian humanist agenda was created on academic campuses, as an extension of the 60s movements success on campuses. Many activists became professors and sought to institute their progressive changes through the schools’ administrative policy apparatuses. These experiments set the stage for the implementation of this approach on a wider scale.
It should go without saying that this essay is hardly an attack on egalitarian and just social change. Rather, I attack political correctness because it subverts the organic change society is constantly engaged in. When the positive trends of society are co-opted for the benefit of institutions that are inherently unegalitarian, they tend to delay the emergence of a consensus in society that can heal old wounds of oppression and privilege.
Affirmative action is a great example of this. Nobody can deny that serious inequalities between racial minorities and whites existed at the time such policies were enacted. But the method in which they were enacted was not designed to address the deep seated psychology or cultural norms that made racism possible. No, being diverse was touted as the goal – instead of simply being merely one metric of racial justice among many.
Not only that, quotas and other rote legal requirements became ways that institutions seek to indemnify themselves against charges of inequality and discrimination. Taking affirmative action as an example, it didn’t matter that no minorities were in positions of power, or that a culture of harassment might have persisted, or that whites simply took their bigotry to lunch instead of openly proclaiming it. Most of all, the hierarchical nature of the institution which allowed it to dictate morals to its personnel in the first place was never questioned. What mattered was that the institution – the business, or government agency, or school administration – had taken some “affirmative action” towards correcting a 400 year old problem (at least).
Of course, these policies did effect some desirable ends. It’s not that hiring more minorities isn’t a good thing despite all that, just as criticizing the bigot in the previous example wasn’t a good thing in its own right. It’s that such policies are designed to serve the purposes of institutions primarily, not to help us overcome our social ills. If they serve the interests of justice, it is a secondary concern. The primary purpose is allowing the privileged to piggyback on a movement that should be working to depose them.
Hierarchical and authoritarian institutions like corporations, governments, and schools are inherently artificial and top-down. They do not have consciences and moral compasses in and of themselves. They exist in our society through legal fiat, and they simply cannot participate in the debate and consensus of civil society that drives social change (whether they’re legally considered “persons” or not). Because they are abstractions of human behavior patterns, they maintain their integrity through disciplining the people that comprise them. This is accomplished through prescriptive means like policies, charters, directives, rules, etc. to maintain their integrity as an organization. To the extent they allow people to act on their conscience, they cannot achieve the discipline necessary to coordinate personnel actions as a whole – meaning those at the top commanding those at the bottom.
In other words, institutions are conservative by their very nature – they cling to old norms and accept new norms only with some expenditure of effort. Those instances where society organically and spontaneously evolves new norms will surely catch the leaders of these organizations off guard. The changes are often subtle enough that they evade the notice of individuals, let alone the bureaucratic programs of the human resources staff. The ever accelerating trends of social justice and egalitarianism that have swept society for decades challenge their institutional legitimacy and destabilize their integrity. Therefore, institutions need a way to conform to these trends without disturbing their inherently authoritarian command structure.
I believe what we call “political correctness” results from the attempts of the institutions that so dominate our society to acknowledge changing social norms by implementing kneejerk, often draconian policies. These policies rarely in and of themselves solve the underlying problem. However, they do preserve the institution’s legitimacy and integrity, and this is their purpose.
In addition to propping up unegalitarian institutions, there is another, perhaps worse aspect of political correctness: it subverts the narrative of the social change in question. When the institutions of society proclaim a particular policy or law or rule as a response to this change, people tend to consider the matter settled. Changing the law, such as passing the Civil Rights Act, becomes the whole point of the struggle instead of (at best) one side-effect of the people’s rising up or (at worst) a way to pacify the people. These responses tend to bookend, rather than promote, the momentum for social change and make us more dependent on the mediation of elites rather than seeing their intrusion as part of the problem.
If this stunted view of bigotry stayed safely in these institutions – if we only had to deal with it when we were at school, or work, or reading the newspaper – then perhaps it would not be so bad. When these dynamics leak out into the consciousnesses of ordinary people, however, it becomes truly nefarious. Real damage is done when we internalize these rigid, superficial rules and reproduce them in our interactions with others. The honest dialogue necessary to address privilege through bottom-up means gets tangled up in these rules, and people become fearful to open up.
Civil society functions because it allows people to establish trust and human connections on their own terms. Mass society would be an even more horrible, alienated place without those opportunities we have to connect with individuals. We need the rich particularism and frankness of our relationships on a small scale; it’s just primate psychology. It’s the place where we can be ourselves and integrate feedback on a conscious and subliminal level.
To the extent that institutional society forces us to obey arbitrary rules and stifles our “unacceptable” thoughts, it hampers our sense of self and our ability to grow that sense. If we then take these rules and mindsets and reproduce them in our relationships, or screen new relationships through this orthodox filter of politically correct ideas, we experience a much less rich and more alienated human condition. Such a condition will not be as likely to allow the cause of anti-privilege – or any cause – to draw upon our need for freedom and dignity.
Indeed, we will be more likely to reflexively critique each other when we inevitably step outside the strict confines of political correctness. Instead of seeking to understand one another, we will identify with the rules and play up our sense of offense when the rules are broken. Instead of delving into aspects of privilege and oppression and learning to heal ourselves and each other of the wounds we inflict and sustain, we will focus on code words and symbolism as proxies for the authentic dialogue needed. Substance must be banished because it cannot conform to the narrow boundaries of political correctness.
When the parameters for dialogue are so utterly narrow, thoughtful persuasion becomes less likely to occur. If you cannot abide certain kinds of disagreement without responding with outrage, you cannot effectively argue your point of view. You’re more likely to scold than persuade. Political correctness weakens our ability to address competiting ideas. And without the practice of challenging our views, we become more dogmatic in promulgating them instead of more thoughtful.
This dynamic is especially apparent in the radical activist community, where shallow outrage has been elevated to a place of predominance. Being in our movement becomes a matter of articulating matters with the proper taste, instead of with the necessary frankness. We cannot be strategic if we have become unable to emotionally handle competing values and visions. We cannot prefigure a society without privilege if the effect of our work is merely to set arbitrary rules for conduct, since that encourages the totalitarian mindset of privilege and reproduces authoritarian organizational structures within our movement.
My point is not that it is always and ever wrong to feel outrage. It’s a human emotion that we feel when personal boundaries are overstepped, and we’re going to have some boundaries. Rather, the culture of political correctness urges conformity to a degree where, on the margins, those boundaries are more likely to be rigid and unable to tolerate heterodoxy. Instead of understanding why we maintain these boundaries, we are encouraged simply to enforce them. So our mentality becomes one of policing one another for heterodox ideas, and in such a situation we are deterred from forming more honest and intimate relations with one another.
If that ongoing dialogue is part of civil society, part of the way in which society advances morally towards more egalitarianism and less bigotry, then politically correct behaviors cripple the bottom-up society. Not only are we conforming to institutional dictates that hamper our personal growth, but that translates to less pressure on the institutions that promulgate authoritarianism and hierarchy in our society. The entire feedback mechanism becomes poisoned, and people worry more about being orthodox than being real.
This is exceedingly unfortunate, because the historic bigotries of mankind inevitable require more thought, debate, and attention, as destabilizing as this can be for the powers that be. These politically correct institutional responses are almost universally superficial, failing to address the deep-seatedness of bigotry in our psyche and culture. By stigmatizing the bigotries beyond the normal social sanction, these responses actually work against the kind of tough social intercourse that could promote progress towards a better, more balanced condition for everybody.
In an attempt to arrest people’s ability to do or say offensive things, these policies end up arresting their ability to learn from legitimate social feedback. By encouraging outrage and scolding rather than dialogue and persuasion, biases and bigotries tend to be sublimated instead of challenged. The less conscious we are of these biases and bigotries, the harder they will be to face and correct. We should expect the struggle against these dynamics in our condition to be painful, disruptive, and difficult. Privileged people must listen to the stories of marginalized people in order to understand how the systems we all exist in actually behave holistically. But if the only effect of the struggle is to flip the tables on out-groups, so that now those who disrespect the former out-group become themselves the new out-group, then genuine healing cannot occur. We simply have a superficial change in the social taboos, and those taboos still take energy to maintain – energy we could put into more thoughtful and engaging dialogue among individuals that can bring out the best in everybody. The kind of pro-forma egalitarianism engendered by replacing old stereotypes and generalizations with new ones is shallow and unsatisfying whether it occurs within institutions or in the greater civil society.
Take gender equality policies for example. The norms that promoted patriarchal, discriminatory behavior against women are not merely some matter of misunderstanding or meanness. These are biases that have existed deeply embedded in our culture for millennia. To expect us to sweep them away through some crafty rule changes is more than disingenuous; it smacks of outright bait-and-switch. We need reflection, discourse, and compassion to work through these issues – not the implementation of a new, reciprocal bias to correct the old bias. Kneejerk rejection to bigotry often leads to new political alliances and the mere shifting of institutional power structures rather than a decomposition of net power in society. It doesn’t promote the individual’s evolution of conscience to create new rules to mechanically follow.
When I say that genuine social change comes from the bottom up, that means it comes from individuals – from each person’s sincere and trying process of searching his or her heart and arriving at a different configuration of morals and ethics than the one previously held. It is an exercise in vulnerability to challenge deep-seated beliefs and identities. This intimate and delicate journey only becomes socially noticeable when it reaches a critical mass of individuals.
Institutions cannot participate in this uniquely human process. They are naturally hostile to the self-consciousness and enlightenment that it can promote. When we adhere to institutions’ prescriptive and proscriptive policies, we frustrate that personal, individual process and make the journey lonely and anti-social – if it occurs at all, because simply toeing the line is safer and less vulnerable.
It is the height of elitism and thoroughly anti-egalitarian to believe that people must be bullied into enlightenment. Institutions hold this mindset because they gain their existence from organizational discipline, but in reality society at large leads them in positive directions, not the other way around. It is crucial, therefore, that we maintain an open society where people are free to hold hateful and bigoted ideas, because to suppress this behavior through authoritarian means only ensures it will pop up again in some worse, more dangerous or perverted form. A dialogue that effectively calls out these ideas can only exist if the ideas themselves can be apprehended without self-censorship.
Privilege needs honest dialogue to identify, for it is quite deeply buried in our minds and hearts. Dictating that people shall no longer exercise their privilege simply cannot work because it does not address the root causes. Empowering institutions to execute such a strategy does more for the institutions, and the privileged people who control them, than it does for the oppressed – at least in the long run. Privilege must be addressed, not simply sublimated.
I suggest that the Left begin to orient themselves and their activism towards anti-institutional ends for this very reason. To the extent the Left has accepted institutional remedies to social ills, they have acclimated themselves to hierarchy, privilege, and elitism. This is the sliver of truth in the right wing’s denouncement of the “liberal elite”. If anti-privilege is just going to be used to justify more privilege, why would you be convinced to support it?
We need an approach to privilege and oppression that can both call its perpetuators out while providing them with alternative approaches to adopt. Hostility to bigotry is natural, but simply acting on that hostility is not judicious. Instead of making fun of, or outright attacking, people whose ideas offend us, we would do our cause better to go in a more contemplative route of sharing stories. The model of the truth and reconcillation commission is a good example of this, as well as the active listening techniques for conflict resolution. In Occupy Richmond, workshops were used to simultaneously deescalate hostilities while promoting listening, and I’ve witnessed the power of this approach firsthand. However, all of these approaches require us to discipline our emotions and avoid simply lashing out at injustice, suggesting perhaps that we have a project within ourselves to which to attend, one that can complement our project in the world at large.
To oppose political correctness means to uphold genuinely liberal principles like freedom of speech, assembly, and press – especially when they are uncomfortable. The key is not to defend KKK rallies, or bigoted jokes, or offensive behavior of any kind, but to understand that they cannot be combatted through countervailing oppression, as expedient as that may at first seem. Rather, they can only be genuinely addressed through those mechanisms readily available to us that require neither authority nor privilege. As the saying goes, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.
However, let’s be clear: this new, new Left would have to be truly anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchy. It is to be found most purely not in modern liberalism but in the anarchist movement. Anarchists can be some of the most politically correct because their radical sensibilities can lead to dogmatic behavior, but they also have a long and powerful tradition to draw upon that can inform their path back to consistent egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism. Indeed, when political correctness is understood for what it is, it will finally be abandoned in favor of something more radical, more effective, and more human.
The words of my hero Robert Anton Wilson seem to capture best why the politically correct orthodoxy of insitutional society is inherently a dead end for radicals:
I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
Let’s fight privilege, not by creating a new taboo and a reformed ruling class, but by promoting a more honest dialogue and reflective society.
]]>So the revelation that C4SS staff member Stacy Litz served as a police informant for months comes as quite a shock to all of us. She is responsible for snitching on several of her fellow libertarians to escape jail time. The extent to which she attempted to mitigate the harm of her actions is unclear. None of us know for certain what we would do in her situation, and we can all have compassion for the horrible dilemna in which this person was placed – even as we regret and condemn what she chose to do.
The Center released a statement reflecting the decision to non-judgmentally but resolutely remove Stacy from her position. The debate that brought about that decision was very contentious. Some members pushed to keep her, arguing that cutting anybody the state flips sends two messages: (A) if you make a mistake, you cannot rehabilitate yourself, and (B) the state has only to flip people to break our movement. Theories were advanced that we somehow throw this back in the government’s face and turn it into some kind of PR coup. We’re not going to let the state tell us who we can and can’t work with!
Several members, including me, felt that this position did not incorporate our interests as local activists. We work with radical left organizations that have very material experiences with informants and police harrassment. Seeing friends from these groups go to jail is not unheard of. William Gillis’s friend is getting railroaded. Here in Richmond we have a guy who was framed by the police because they got sick of his work with CopWatch. Occupy Richmond has been surrendering cell phones before entering planning meetings because local activists have been raided under suspicious conditions lately that imply surveillance is occurring. Security culture is on everybody’s lips – especially with Occupy raising stakes.
While I don’t want to speculate too obscenely, I’d say there are also people in C4SS who come from more of an LP or philosophical libertarian background (I’m one of them). While many of them understand the above concerns, others refused to take them seriously. I think that’s because this fight isn’t on the ground, shoulder to shoulder, in the streets for them. Instead, it’s abstract; it’s theoretical. For some of them, debating the libertarian ethics of this – was she really coerced? OK, let’s have a pedantic debate about coercion! – is the most material concern. That’s because they’re not wondering whether their activism will send the cops knocking down their door. This is all on the internet and is therefore inescapably ephemeral, as is the vaguely articulated strategy to turn this scenario around and use it against the government.
What people in the latter group need to realize is that the people in the former group have a lot at stake. When we are asked to abide a snitch in an organization that we promote to our activist friends – many of whom are skeptical of us, not because of who we are so much as the label we attach to ourselves in solidarity with other left libertarians – we can’t help but wonder if, at the end of the day, the Center for a Stateless Society is another bourgeoisie, privileged libertarian group that only uses the rhetoric of the Left to appeal to it, not to join forces with it in common cause.
If the Center wants to incorporate itself into the larger leftist activist movement resisting corporate capitalism, the police state, etc. then it must consider the gravity of the struggle that’s local and on the ground. It can’t ask members who are working in their local communities to compromise themselves. What I found really troubling was not that people disagreed with me on how to handle Stacy, but that those local interests that matter to activists like me were so easily dismissed. It implies that this disconnect I’ve experienced for years between my politics online and my life offline has not been resolved. It implies that this is still abstract and theoretical for some of my friends at the Center.
If we can’t reconcile our polemics with our actions then we cannot be effective and credible. I know my life has become much richer by working in my community and testing those ideas I have been exposed to by many of my online comrades. Let’s ensure that the Center does not make itself irrelevant to our struggles and allies at home while it continues to do very fine work in the media.
]]>Your revolution succeeds. Through whatever means you think it possible, your fellow ____s have defeated the authoritarian/fascist/totalitarian forces and are ascendant. You, of course, know that your side will not rule in the same ruthless manner your enemy did.
Now what do you do with all these enemies whom you haven’t killed or converted yet? The same beliefs that motivated them to oppose you in the past are likely not to be simply cast aside. After all, you didn’t cast yours aside when you were out of power. As somebody experienced with dissidence, you know all too well that such people can take a long term view of their agenda and undermine the society you want to build in countless subtle ways.
Well, if you’re Lenin, you kill as many as you can and install a ruthless regime of your own to deter revolt of the rest. If you’re Washington, you expel as many “loyalists” to the enemy side as possible and, oh yeah, if anybody doesn’t like it you lead the army against them. If you’re Hitler, you kind of just kill them all. If you’re Mao, you kind of just kill them all.
See where I’m heading with this? We’re so used to being dissidents that we don’t even have a plan for success. Not only have we built the assumptions of marginality and defeatism into our politics, but we leave ourselves with a giant, gaping hole in the middle of our view of the world we seek to change. And if we don’t address this hole in the middle of our strategy, our revolution is likely to bring about the same kind of reactionary despotism we sought to overthrow, because there’s always going to be some asshole who’s willing to be the “serious, pragmatic” son-of-a-bitch to get shit done.
The only honest anarchists I know recognize that violent revolution is likely to come only after a large majority of people have rejected the establishment, and that any outward revolution will be, at most, a lagging indicator of the shift in public opinion, not the cause. These activists stress education and outreach. On the face of it, I think this is admirable for reasons I explained in my last post. But what about people who, even in the face of arguments you find compelling, simply do not agree with you? How do you deal with them? You can neither ignore the problem nor resolve to just kill them all, because the latter undermines the legitimacy of your victory and the former just invites somebody in your camp to do the same.
Let me pose a possible solution: yes, outreach and education as much as possible. But not just printing pamphlets and screeching at people; genuine dialogue with people who make you uncomfortable; dialogue that allows you to uncover peacefully what the ill-planned, knee-jerk revolution will uncover violently. You need to understand the strains of belief among your fellow man and not just call them bigoted or evil or stupid, but genuinely address them. We need to reach the hearts of people and not just change the label they attach to themselves, and that is harder work than most people consider when they advocate for propaganda (nothing wrong with propaganda, just that it’s not the end-all-be-all of the task).
But we need a back-up plan, and here’s my suggestion: anarcho-pluralism. Because people hold beliefs that are rigid and often unshakeable in the face of majority or forceful opposition, we need to be able to go our separate ways if we cannot resolve our differences. Of course, every attempt should be made to have as good of a relationship as possible with these people, but we must be ready for their rejection of premises and values we find compelling. If that means the theocrats or the fascists or the racists get their own little territories to be autocrats, well, what’s the alternative? Killing them? Imprisoning them?
Here’s the upside: by not marginalizing them within a majority society they find alien and intolerable, but instead letting them have their own sphere of influence - no matter how despicable we might find its exercise, we keep the door open that someday they will come around of their own accord. The kind of counter-revolutions that darken the history of initially pure revolutions around the world always happen because what was the ruling ideology becomes an insurgent ideology. People can feel like they are victimized and oppressed, even if they were previously oppressors, because their views are not realized - similarly to how we feel now. But by letting them build their own societies and live their own lives:
At the core of this approach is the understanding that none of us have a monopoly on the truth. If we desire freedom in order to express ourselves and our conception of truth better, we must allow others equal freedom - in spite of how distasteful it may seem to us. Finally, if we truly believe in the principles of egalitarianism and liberty, we should expect that the less regimented and controlled the world is, the more likely our ideas are to emerge spontaneously. And nothing will undermine the fascists, the theocrats, the bigots, the petty dictators, and other assholes like having to abandon minority politics and actually govern according to their sad principles.
This approach also forces us to come to terms with the true significance of our agenda. It’s not just about the workers or the productive class or the people rising up; it’s about starting to genuinely address the dark sides of our world, instead of just overcoming it in some outburst of eschatological exuberance. If this causes us to be more careful in how we revolt, well, we should be careful.
Finally, what about the people who would suffer under these other totalitarian societies through no fault of their own? Here we have to be practical: ridding the world of human suffering cannot be our political goal. In any society, even ours, people will suffer. Look at our rich, flush society and how much even privileged people cause themselves grief and heartache. The real question is: do you want to fight a fucking war over it, or do you want to start healing that suffering in the nuanced and personal manner that is required?
Again, we have to face the fact that mere military victory doesn’t solve anything, and that it is a patient, thoughtful, engaging people that truly changes minds. If we are really caring and open-hearted, we will not fool ourselves into thinking evil can be simply vanquished by some faux-end-times conception of revolution. We will remain sympathetic to suffering, willing to continue the unending work of reaching out. Anarcho-pluralism allows the revolution, the transformation to continue even after we win.
Idealists and realists are always juxtaposed as if they represent two unreconcilable approaches. But in looking at these two camps with respect to revolutionary politics, perhaps this is only the case because they both go about their tasks in such a totalitarian manner. Idealists consider the revolution successful only if the ideals are adopted by 100% of the people. On the other hand, pragmatists consider themselves successful if they are able to rule with 100% of the power.
True transformation of society must be more subtle and thoughtful, and anarcho-pluralism provides a framework for ongoing transformation in just this manner. You can be idealistic and realistic by simply living and letting live; all you have to give up is the desire for the shallow smugness of instant moral satisfaction in exchange for a genuine, long-term commitment to your ideals. If these beliefs are worth fighting for, aren’t they worth continuing to work for after the peace accord? Or are you only in it for a final triumph of good over evil?
]]>When FOX reports on the Tea Party protests, liberals complain that they are manufacturing a movement. FOX is lying.
But when FOX shows footage of these protesters as stupid, inarticulate, crude, violent, white trash rednecks, suddenly FOX news is totally credible.
Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe FOX is appealing to what they consider their demographic (kind of like pop country does). Maybe liberals, who for so long have warned us against kneejerk xenophobic rejection of “the other” in society, have their own snobbish exclusivity to own up to. Maybe stereotyping those with whom you disagree isn’t the easiest way to find common ground in solving a problem everybody recognizes regardless of ideology.
If it was a myth that all those who opposed Bush’s policies had a nose ring, an abortion, a hankerin’ for jihad, or a gay lover, perhaps - just perhaps - not everybody who opposes Obama’s policies is a white, racist, inbred, dumb-shit country bumpkin. Indeed, just as there were conservatives who rejected Bush’s agenda, there are people on the Left who reject Obama’s. Maybe if people who supported Obama’s healthcare plan would talk to people without placing them in superficial categories, they’d have gotten a better and/or more widely supported bill. At the very least, such magnanimity would have reinforced the dirty tricks and negativity they’ve decried on the neocon side over the last decade.
So far, many vocal liberals have merely shown they can be just as petty and shallow as the conservatives during the Bush years. If neocons could justify their behavior by appealing to nationalism and jingoism, liberals have one-upped them on smarminess. In their goo-goo ga-ga fairy tale they play a snarky Robin Hood who robs the middle class to give to the rich - but, oh yes, let me not forget! Poor people can now gather crumbs dropped from the table of the corporatist drug, insurance, and medical care lobbies who get millions of new serfs to pay tribute under penalty of imprisonment, so yay.
After eight years of largely common cause with liberal statists on U.S. foreign policy, it’s abundantly clear that they are the other side of the same fuckin’ arrogant-ass, murder-supporting, authoritarian-loving coin.
]]>