I’m a hardcore lefty. I still encounter people surprised by that. But I also often get asked how far is too far. Today I’ll paint that out for you. This will explain how far left I go—and why I don’t go further, and neither should anyone. At the same time, this is also an accounting of where “the left” goes wrong. Though it is not usually “the left” that goes wrong, but leftist extremists, and lefties on the edge thereon, who are a minority among liberals—and especially among Democrats, because contrary to conservative rhetoric, the DNC is actually center-left. If you want a party even more left than that, you are looking at the Green Party, and yet even they are not majority-extremist (though they are close).
For convenience, I’ll provide a table of contents:
- First: Context
- General Outline of Liberal Extremism
- Punching Nazis and the Heckler’s Veto
- Extremist Epistemology & Policy
- And Then: Mere Incompetence
- Conclusion
First: Context
There is no party “for me,” as in a party that locates its base where I am politically, which would be somewhere in the overlap between the most liberal Democrats and the most sensible Greens. And this is because there is no base where I am politically. Very few Americans are where I am, and thus very few votes, and thus our voice can have no independent impact on who gets into power and thus what policies get enacted—we can only impact elections (and thus policy) by allying and co-voting with larger factions (like mainstream Democrats). Which reminds me…
Before I proceed, I have to disabuse some of my readers of their false beliefs about how democracy works, and American democracy in particular. To wit:
- The very point of democracy is to accept being outvoted, and within the system you inherited. And even on changing that system, you can be outvoted. The only valid response to being outvoted is persuasion and advocacy, or negotiation and compromise. That is literally what democracy is. It is the only mechanism of peaceful conflict resolution. If you think a valid response to being outvoted is to compel your nation to do your will anyway, you do not actually believe in democracy.
- Without ranked-choice-voting (which I believe all candidate voting should be; but it isn’t), or anything resembling a parliamentary legislature (which I believe we should have; but we don’t), or fair and equal representation (one-citizen-one-vote; which, owing to the way we form the Senate and Electoral College and allow gerrymandering, America does not have), the physical dynamics of our system entail an inevitable and unavoidable equilibrium-state of the actual two-party system we have.
- This makes it literally (not just conceptually, but physically) impossible to have any substantive third party, or even to have much say in who runs for any office. We are thus always forced (and always will be forced) to vote for the least worst option. Which means every election in America is a Trolley Problem. It doesn’t have to be that way (see options above). But it is the way it is. In political science ours is called a “first past the post” system. And I am describing Duverger’s Law (after the French scientist who coined it, Maurice Duverger—hence pronounced DOO-vur-zhay).
So, I am a registered Democrat and generally always vote a straight DNC ticket, because there is no other option. The RNC is so far right now that literally every candidate it fields is a threat to democracy, human rights, and even governing. And our system ensures no one else can get elected but whom those two parties field. And I believe in reality, not fantasy—so I have no choice but to take every positive legal action to keep the RNC from power. But…
If we lived in a sensible political system (see options above), I might consider being a Green—if there was a movement of people like me to fill it and keep it grounded and more moderate than it has been in our present system, where it has defaulted as a dumping ground for voters too left or irrational to understand coalition voting. But most likely I’d join some entirely new party—because then there could actually be a party of people like me that I could join. And if I got to name it, it would be the Empirical Party, and we would be the Empiricists. Because evidence first would be our motto, and primary guiding value. After decades of study, my foundational politics are now empirical hybridism (as I explain in Revisions to Sense and Goodness without God): that means evidence-based policy (not ideology- or fantasy-based), seeking an optimal equilibrium-state of socialist capitalism (each providing checks and balances against the other).
But do not mistake this for being some kind of centrist or “Libertarian.” I agree with social Libertarianism. There should be no such thing as a vice crime, and a fair amount of human liberty is essential to the pursuit of happiness that should be facilitated rather than undermined by any political system. But the rest of Libertarianism is uneducated bollocks—most of the time its devotees literally don’t know what they are talking about (which is usually economics, and sometimes sociology, psychology, or political science, but never informed by any of those actual sciences). I have in the past called myself a moderate, but that has always been in the Aristotelian sense (“the virtues of moderation in all things,” per Sense and Goodness, p. 371, and I have since gone even further left than that), and not in the modern political sense (where it is merely a synonym for centrist; for example, the inconsequential American Moderate Party is not quite as left as I am, and barely differs from the actual DNC).
But do not mistake me for being a Marxist, either. I believe that is a largely outdated ideology the very name of which has lost all useful meaning. But I am a moderate socialist…and a moderate capitalist. Massive evidence has convinced me by now that we need both, in adequate balance, to prevent and correct for their respective excesses and failure-modes. Just as nature needs a balanced ecosystem, with diverse plants and animals and microbes and insects together (even predator and prey must be in balance—although that is a dynamic that “government” was invented to do away with). Monoculture is always bad. Hence, though Marx introduced a lot of important new insights to the discourse, I reject Marxism as a political ideology, being too out of touch with scientific reality. Yet I remain far more socialist than the most of folks in America—though not so much in Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, or Japan.
Fact is, my perseverance in adjusting my worldview in response to evidence since at least the early 90s has led to my agreement with the adage that reality strongly leans left (example, example, example, example). Conservatives are more delusional, and their beliefs are more reliant on modern mythologies. Almost (emphasis on almost) all fake news supports the conservative worldview. Which may be due to conservatives scoring higher (on average and in aggregate) on authoritarian personality: they are more prone to epistemic failure-modes like ambiguity intolerance, resistance to experience, and trust in an emotionally congruent authority. It is not that liberals can’t evince these same failure-modes; it’s that fewer do, or do less often, or to a lesser degree (or all of the above). The result is that conservative worldviews tend to accumulate false beliefs while liberal views tend to shed them.
When we look at where this process hits diminishing returns, we can see where the liberal reality bias lies: not in the center (much less anywhere to the right of it), but just to the right of maximally left. For example comparing the merely left-wing with left-wing extremists, the latter retain more false beliefs than the former, yet there are far fewer left-wing extremists than right-wing extremists—when extremism is defined with a balanced metric (i.e. counting persons with the same or greater quantity and scale of false beliefs) rather than a relative metric (like the Overton window). In other words, mere right wingers (the majority of the right) look a lot more like (or indeed even worse than) left-wing extremists (a minority of the left), such that you don’t have to look for relative right-wing extremists (fringe conservatives more extreme than the mainstream) to find a comparable scale of epistemic failure (or systemic threat, for that matter). Most conservatives are as wrong as the rare extreme liberal. Nevertheless, where the actual “reality line” falls—and liberals start to be wrong again—is what I will survey here.
But the bottom line is that there is really no position distinctively conservative that tracks reality. For example, real (as opposed to sham) fiscal conservatism is a liberal idea, not a conservative one. This is why the only administration to ever balance the United States national budget in my entire half-century life was Clinton-Gore—and why every conservative administration in my lifetime has only increased the debt and deficit. Meanwhile, the only other liberal administrations in my lifetime track to the same trend: the lowest deficits in my life were under Carter-Mondale (and that despite a struggling economy); the steepest reductions in the deficit were under Obama-Biden (and that despite inheriting an economic collapse); and even Biden-Harris started chipping away at the monstrous deficits created by Trump, and have only failed to do more because of Republicans preventing them.
In fact, Republicans are the only reason we have been increasing rather than paying down the national debt these last twenty five years. Liberals are the ones who actually believe in balanced budgets, and are the only ones capable of getting there. Republicans neither desire this nor are competent to bring it about. Instead, “fiscal conservatism” has become mere code for “cutting taxes and welfare, while deregulating the economy and funding military imperialism,” i.e. duping racists into enriching fat cats and empowering corporate predators, not “balancing the budget.” Hence actual conservative budget policy is completely divorced from reality (making everything worse); while actual liberal budget policy is empirically sound—as evinced from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations of the 1960s to now (leading to a strong economy with abundant jobs and good wages). The same happens to every policy platform. Conservatives talk “personal liberty” and “rule of law” and “equality of opportunity,” but those are all liberal positions, while what the conservatives actually mean is proposing or passing laws suppressing those things or removing state protections of them. In the same way, liberals are the only ones with an empirically sound understanding of limited government and national defense, or even how to maintain a functioning free market.
That said, I am also left-wing in all the real ways that terrify conservatives. As I wrote several years ago (and have been expanding on since):
I am a leftist.
I fully support reasonable socialism, to check and balance the excesses of an equally necessary but equally abusable capitalism. I’m left on all social values. I support taxes, and in some cases even their increase. I think big government needs checks and controls, but that it can actually accomplish a lot of things we need, and is often the best vehicle for doing so. I believe intersectional privilege exists in social systems. I believe Islamophobia and cultural appropriation actually exist as a thing (just not in every case any leftist claims they do). I think an alarming number of American police are downgrading the humanity of black people in their decisions to use force. I think illegal immigration should be treated not as an invasion but a refugee crisis. I support reasonable gun control and drug legalization and transgender rights and school lunches and welfare. I believe all sex work should be legal—and unionized! I think toxic masculinity exists and is a problem. I think prominent women really are harassed and threatened far more than men are and that that’s a problem. I’m an unrepentant feminist and a pragmatic socialist. Indeed I’m a full-on social justice warrior. I fight with words to educate people on how they can change how they think to effect a better world, by first seeing their own ignorance or prejudice, and then doing something about it—like spreading the word, the only credible path to cultural change.
Point being, I’m a card carrying lefty.
And, of course, I am a ruthless critic of the right. Besides the articles I’ll be citing below, see as well my Anatomy of Contemporary Right-Wing Delusions and Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America for general examples, and my Epistemology Test: Anthony Fauci Edition and Behold Babylon USA! for more particular examples—and A Vital Primer on Media Literacy and Money Buys Happiness? Not After You Hit Six Figures for indirect examples. So I am most definitely waaaayyyy to the left of Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. I am even to the left of Christopher Hitchens—and he was hella more left than them.
But I also critique the left when it goes too far or has bad ideas. I accept that reality is usually set in nuanced complexity; very little is black-or-white. But black-or-white fallacies will infect even liberal minds into thinking I am defending conservative positions against them, when in fact I am not; and also infect conservative minds into thinking I’m defending them, when in fact I am not. Irrationality is nonpartisan. For example, my position on abortion is actually identical to the position well-argued by the Burger court in Roe v. Wade: the government has no legitimate interest in the status of a fetus until the third trimester, when it is within its rights to outlaw abortion except in self-defense (otherwise known as medical necessity). This is in line with all first world nations, and actual (not mythological) DNC policy. And it is in line with empirical reality (before the third trimester no brain sufficient to house a person exists).
And yet some liberal extremists will chafe, and some conservatives will cheer, at my allowing bans on elective “late term” abortion, and thus both will irrationally call me a conservative, and falsely imagine that I have “undermined” or “supported” them, respectively. In fact, my position is the most widely accepted left-wing position, and not associated with majority conservative abortion policy at all. The rare few fringe liberals who actually support elective third trimester abortion are simply wrong, as a matter of both science (third trimester fetuses have brains capable of generating a person and bodies capable of sustaining them outside the womb) and values (defense of a human’s right to life begins exactly then). And they are just as wrong about that as the conservative is wrong to believe it proper to ban even necessary third trimester abortions—as if women somehow lacked the human right to self-defense (they do not).
Fact is, the “extreme left” position here is held by almost no one, whereas the extreme right position is either the most common or a very common conservative position. And liberals are correct to say this, while conservatives are incorrect to deny it (as they do, with frothingly insane rhetoric). Which remains the most salient difference between liberals and conservatives. Nevertheless, the extreme left position does exist. And sometimes an extreme left position can be shouted so loudly and persistently by its advocates that availability bias will lead people (especially conservatives, who have far more defective epistemologies) to the mistaken belief that their opinion is common or the norm. But in any event, as left-wing as I am, I reject left-wing extremism. Which leaves only the task now of defining exactly what that is.
The General Outline of Liberal Extremism
In horseshoe theory, both the “arch-conservative” and the “ultra-liberal” ends of the political spectrum overlap with “fascism.” This can be straw-manned as saying those two groups have few to no differences (which is obviously not true). But the steel-man is that those two extreme points share things in common with each other that they do not share with their compatriots on the same side of the shoe (The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline, for example). In particular, what they share in common is fascism—and/or its emotivist epistemology strongly driven by fear or anger. The word “fascism” comes from the Roman fasces, the bundle of rods and axes carried before magistrates signifying their right to beat or behead at will. The word has since evolved to reference the corresponding belief that force is an appropriate means of enacting your political will. If you believe this (whether you admit to it or not), you are a fascist.
Hence, both the right-wing and left-wing extremist want to use force (or at least, for force to be used) to effect their will—far more and more widely, and brutally, than their peers. Many in either camp endorse correlated policies like coerced censorship, and more draconian socio-political systems of punishment, and they both want to reign-in democracy with more authoritarian mechanisms of power—provided it’s theirs. This is why the fascist government depicted in 1984 is hard to peg as either liberal or conservative—Orwell deliberately meant that to be vague. The Anti-Sex League, for example, is not associated there with Christianity or “traditional values,” but ideals closer to Soviet Marxism and ultra-radical feminism. The radical left can actually come up with all the same repressive and horrific ideas as the radical right. They just frame them differently (like “why” sex is bad, or “why” black and white people should be segregated) or to different ends (like replacing “white supremacism” with “black supremacism”). That’s the lesson of the horseshoe.
Not every left-wing extremist shares every extreme liberal belief. But, for example, you will find many right-wing and left-wing extremists dreaming of worlds where their version of an enforced Doublespeak becomes real. This does not mean that “any” social policing of language is “Doublespeak” or even fascist, however—that is a conservative “rounding error,” directly analogous to the extreme left’s insistence that “everything is racist.” Which in turn does not mean nothing is racist, or that racism does not remain a pervasive social problem—thinking I mean that is a liberal rounding error. These are the outcomes of the black-or-white fallacy. And this is why conservatives tend to be wrong far more often than liberals: black-or-white thinking is a symptom of ambiguity intolerance, which strongly correlates with conservative thought (indeed, it may be a principal cause of it), and thus fewer liberals suffer from this epistemic defect, resulting in fewer liberal extremists than conservative extremists.
So how do we answer the question, “How far left is too left?” Generally, “too far” is fascism or its epistemology. I’ll treat both separately, since not all left-wing extremists are fascists, but all embrace some fascism-adjacent epistemology. Since fascism means using force to effect your political will on someone else (rather than doing so democratically and in respect of human rights), a common example that you might find in the behavior or fantasies of conservative and liberal extremists alike is literally beating someone up for writing (or publishing or promoting) a book they don’t like. And if they can’t do that physically, they might try it emotionally (with harassment campaigns or death threats) or situationally (such as by tortious interference). Which book and why is what will differ between them. But both long to do it. And that is what extremists have in common.
Hence, extremism must be distinguished from mere error. For example, conservative policies need not be fascist; conservatives in power today just happen to be fascists. Robert Kagan is an example of a reasonable conservative. Even Barry Goldwater. These are folks we could negotiate with. But everyone like them has been literally driven out of the Republican party and thus from power in America. This has not happened to the liberals: the fascist wing of the liberal electorate has not placed even a single representative in Congress, nor won any Presidential Primary in history. And it is important to correctly grasp the significance of that material reality.
Of course, neither side will admit to being fascists—they will claim they are fighting fascists—just like Putin did. But the truth lies not in words, but in deeds, and platforms. If they are recommending force be used to effect their political will, to effect censorship and public control of behavior, they are fascists—regardless of what they “claim.” By contrast, not using force to effect these things is not fascist. Thus, for example, “censorship” in the sense of personally voting-with-your-dollars-or-feet, or through mere criticism or persuasion instead of coercion, is not fascism—nor is it even censorship. But burning or trashing bookstores, or using state or community force to arrest or fine them, or in some other way “make them pay,” lest they stop selling some book or magazine, is censorship—and thus is fascism.
But that is not the only feature shared by extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. Fascism tends to come with (and perhaps even arises out of) something more fundamental: an emotivist epistemology, whereby how one feels dictates what actually is. This in turn usually pivots on fear or anger, because those are the most strongly motivating emotions outside of close personal relations, and thus are the emotions most likely to drive mass political action. Liberal extremists are afraid of a lot of things. And they feel a lot of rage and anger and hate. Just like conservative extremists. The only thing that differs is what they are afraid of or angry at. But what they have in common that makes them not merely fallibly human but actual extremists is that they allow this to overwhelm their entire epistemology—their “way of knowing,” the method they use to decide what is true or false.
The problem here is not that “facts don’t care about your feelings” (they don’t; but conservatives are as guilty of forgetting this as liberals), or that “reason should supplant emotion” (that would be absurd: emotions are the only reason we use reason at all, since emotions set the parameters of every end-state we seek to avoid or pursue; indeed, emotions are the only reason we do anything). The problem, rather, is that emotion should not supplant reason. Reason is supposed to be a check on emotion and its particular error-modes. Feelings can be evidence of something, but you have to rationally assess what they are evidence of and how reliable (or unreliable) they may be at that (see my discussion of the proper epistemic role of emotion and intuition in Sense and Goodness without God, III.9–10, “Reason vs. Intuition” and “The Nature of Emotion”).
There is also a great deal more evidence in the world than feelings—and we cannot ignore evidence when reaching conclusions. Prioritizing emotion over reason and evidence is what leads to trap beliefs that will inoculate you against reliable information and steer you away from truly testing whether your beliefs are even true. The result is delusion—from which you can never escape. And let’s be clear. It does not matter that your delusion is “political” and lacks reference to the supernatural—it is still just another religion, as reliant as ever on faith, apologetics, and mythology (as I explain in the conclusion of my lengthy demonstration That Jordan Peterson Is a Crank).
Punching Nazis and the Heckler’s Veto
Conservatives have a sad tendency to complain about anything as “coercion” or “censorship.” Criticism? That’s censorship! A company not wanting you on their grounds or platform? That’s coercion! And other nonsense. This is one of the few things the currently fascist Supreme Court got right. Not wanting to sell or buy your stuff is not censorship or coercion. Criticism and argument are not censorship or coercion. Lying and fraud could be. But that’s not usually what they are complaining about.
A recent debate among liberals on the internet struck right at this line. Punching Nazis. Cool or not cool? Well, if you are the one initiating real violence in response to mere speech, you are the fascist in the room. So, no. Punching Nazis is not cool. It’s fascist extremism. That’s going too far. If you are punching Nazis in an actual melee with them—that you didn’t start—then, sure, we’re back to self-defense and the proper restoration of order against perpetrators of violence. But that wasn’t the scenario being debated. There were liberals actually promoting just walking up to a Nazi in the street and criminally assaulting them. I suppose I’d have more respect for this if its perpetrators then immediately turned themselves into the police and confessed and accepted the statutory sentence for their crime. Because there is no valid case that this should be legal, so trying to get away with it only makes you a criminal in every moral sense of the term.
One of the inevitable outcomes of outlawing something that should be illegal—like, say, racial or gender discrimination—is that villains will try to find loop-holey ways to “get around” the law and do what they want anyway. For example, instead of openly redlining Black people out of a neighborhood, they will do it “on the DL,” knowing it will be near impossible to even discover, much less prove in court. That doesn’t make it right—it just makes you a more insidious and reprehensible criminal. Like the character Bunny Colvin in The Wire, I have more respect for openly admitted racists (which is, obviously, still not very much). An example of this is the Heckler’s Veto, whereby rather than merely counter-protesting in some legal way, or offering a counter-event or counter-speech or other response in your own venue or on your own time, you actively, physically disrupt an event so that it cannot proceed.
That is fascist.
And if you do that, you are a fascist.
The heckler’s veto is no different than trying to undo an event by issuing a bomb threat. You are coercively violating not only the free-speech rights of the presenter, but the human rights of the audience (who have a right of assembly and a right to hear what they came to), and the constitutional rights of the funders and venue (who lose money in result and thus are materially harmed by your behavior). This doesn’t make you “awesome.” It makes you a Nazi—just another scumbag violating human rights. You are choosing to use force to cause real material harm to get your way—rather than nonviolent means that respect the rights and liberties of your fellow citizens.
“But it’s not literally violence, I’m not assaulting anyone” is the same bullshit excuse the unofficial redliner gives (“But I’m just helping all parties concerned be happier”). You are just looking for a loophole that will let you get away with wanton vigilantism, usurping the role of government to effect censorship by force, bypassing the will of the electorate, just like any other autocrat. “But I’m not the government” is then no more an excuse than you can make for a lynch mob who strings up a vagrant in the town square. Both are stealing the role delegated to the state, to effect community violence, precisely because you couldn’t get the state itself to do it for you. Using force to effect your will. That’s fascism.
The conservative extremist’s “rounding error” on this is to mistake any social criticism or disapprobation or personal choice in one’s own space or with one’s own property or means as “the same thing,” when it’s not. Censure is not censorship. Yet the liberal extremist’s “rounding error” is essentially the same: to likewise regard coercive means of effecting your will as “the same” as noncoercive means, differing only in approving this equation. But it’s the same error.
Hence the conservative Robert Kagan is right about this:
Today once-privileged groups chafe at having to adjust their language and ways of thinking to the latest assimilation of once-despised groups. No doubt many early-twentieth-century American Protestants were also annoyed at having to bite their tongues before uttering a disparaging comment about the Irish Catholics and Jews in their midst.
Yes, “wokeness” can be and has been carried to excess, and there does come a point where the legitimate desire to insist on inoffensive speech and behavior conflicts with the vital liberal values of free speech and free thought. The American academy has been badly damaged by rampant ideological intolerance and by the faculties’ assaults on liberalism itself as somehow being the cause of the nation’s ills rather than the answer. When students refuse to let a dissenting or even offensive speaker speak, they are denying free speech with bullying force. At that point, “wokeness” becomes antiliberal, too.
But most of the demand for “wokeness” today—as was true a century ago, when demanded by a different set of minorities—is the unavoidable consequence of a liberal system and its accompanying egalitarian spirit. Antiliberals may complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the founders that they are really objecting to. What they seek is the overthrow of the liberal foundations of American society. What they really want…is “regime change.”
Robert Kagan, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart–Again
Which does not mean that, for example, Twitter (which has been renamed with the symbol for an anus) should be a platform for free-speech extremism. To the contrary, for both moral and financial reasons, it should be far more regulated by its owners than even before Elon Musk destroyed it (and yet not as absurdly regulated as Facebook has long been, which obsessively deletes classical nudes and trivial jokes about Europeans). And that is not the same thing as saying it should be regulated by the government. It should not (and contrary to delusional conservatives, it never has been).
Free speech extremists can and should build (not hijack) their own platforms. And they can and should be mocked, criticized, or turned down for private funding by any moral person. But trying to actively prevent merely immoral people from funding or building merely immoral things is fascism, not progressivism. Free speech already has well-justified legal limits; and though we could improve and shore those up more, the fact remains that free speech extremism is not justified even in law—much less morality, which can censure (not censor) a great deal more than is subject to the law.
Hence, once you are destroying things or physically interfering in commerce—and not just choosing and persuading—you have become a leftist extremist. But, in turn, that being wrong does not make personal advocacy and choices “censorship.” Not buying a book you dislike, and asking other people not to buy it, are exercises of basic human rights. But trying to coerce other people into not buying it is fascism. As is any effort to physically quash their ability to buy it. We the People have chosen to delegate to the government the sole power to do this. Hence we have delegated to it—and it alone—the right to censor slander, fraud, menacing, or criminal solicitation. So, beyond that, all properly legal speech should be allowed, and answered only in kind.
- So, what is legitimate lefty behavior? You get to exercise your own rights to freedom of speech, association, and commerce (whether by yourself or through the companies you legally own or control).
- And what is illegitimate leftist extremism? You do not get to take actions that physically deprive others of those rights.
Heckler’s vetoes are thus fascism, a deviant use of force in violation of human rights. Which I believe should even be outlawed under the Civil Rights Act. Because taking it all the way to punching Nazis is just another “kind” of heckler’s veto, along with burning down bookstores, vandalism, and other attempts to violate human rights to effect your will by force. But that does leave pretty much all other legal protest actions. I think liberals should sometimes be smarter about how they protest (taking more effort to avoid riots or bad optics, or otherwise turning against them the very people they are supposed to be persuading). But “the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government” or any other authority “for a redress of grievances” should always be respected—and should always be respectable. Yet it is the heckler’s veto (in all its manifestations) that is abridging that right.
Which in turn does not mean all protests are “right.” Many a protest is based on a falsehood, or in aid of a bad idea. But that doesn’t make it fascist. It simply makes it erroneous. Which gets us to…
Extremist Epistemology & Policy
The left also goes too far when it starts mounting opposition to empiricism. As I suggested already, this appears connected to its tendency toward fascism—since fascism needs a broken epistemology, and conversely, broken epistemologies can lead to fascism. I can point to examples of gone-too-far lefties who aren’t at all fascists but who’ve still failed at this metric. So it deserves a separate treatment. In some cases, we find them correlated; but in some, the epistemic failures stand on their own.
To be clear, I don’t mean here run-of-the-mill epistemic errors or failures of logic; because those are universal. Individual liberals can make fallacious arguments or screw up the evidence or ignore it just as often as individual conservatives do—as well as moderates and everyone else. What I mean here are ideologically committed failures, which stem from an epistemology shared across extremists (including the non-fascist extremists), and which are therefore paradigmatic of left-wing extremism. Though, as I already mentioned, this same broken epistemology characterizes conservative extremists as well, here I will only focus on some liberal instantiations of it.
Some of this I have discussed before, such as in How the Right and the Left Nuked Atheism Plus and Why Mythicist Milwaukee Is Right and Their Critics Wrong and The Left and Anti-Left Both Have Much Still to Learn and The Art of the Insult & The Sin of the Slur. I can include here even Katherine Cross on Tone Policing and How to Do Men’s Rights Rightly. Because left-wing extremists can “tone police” as well as anyone, and often throw the baby out with the bathwater on so-called “men’s rights” issues. And yet—don’t fall for rounding error!—l have never been an apologist for so-called “men’s rights activists,” but a ruthless critic (see my entire “men’s issues” category).
The most visceral sin here is knee-jerk emotionalism. Just like conservative extremists, who react on emotion rather than reason and decide what to believe based on feelings rather than evidence, so do liberal extremists. This becomes a platform when it is elevated into a system of epistemic principles. For example:
- “Always believe the victim.”
This principle empowers liars and exaggerators and drama-trolls and the delusional—as well as emotionally abusive agitators, and even the merely mistaken—to get away with things that a more reasonable evidence-based (and ignorance-accommodating) set of principles would better police. This is why our Constitution, and all modern treatises on justice and human rights, emphasize the need for fair investigations and trials of fact: precisely because false accusations otherwise become frequent enough to be destructive of social justice. Imagine applying “always believe the victim” to Jim Crow accusers of black men, and you’ll recognize the epistemic—and, quite frankly, moral—problem here.
This principle becomes, in the end, just a flip-side of “never believe the victim.” Both are folly. Reasonable liberals are clear about the distinction between “taking an accusation seriously” and “never questioning or testing” it. And they accept that “not being able to know what really went down” (such as when a final analysis leaves only ambiguous or conflicting evidence) does not constitute “taking someone’s side.” That is black-or-white thinking. “Someone must be guilty.” But that violates the logical Law of Excluded Middle: sometimes, you literally don’t know who is guilty. And, of course, sometimes both are guilty. Indeed, sometimes one or both is guilty to a different degree or of a different thing than alleged.
Extremists won’t accept these distinctions, even denigrate them as empowering predators. But by refusing to admit that abusers and narcissists, and the delusional and the fallible, can also claim to be victims precisely to facilitate their abuse, narcissism, delusion, or error, the extremists are simply empowering another set of predators. This is akin to responding to Jim Crow justice by letting black people randomly lynch any white person they want, thus “balancing the scales” in the name of “social justice.” In fact that would be the abandonment of social justice. The correct response to falsely accused black men is not falsely accused white men. The correct response is to treat everyone, both sides of every dispute, with the same justice-preserving, evidence-based reasoning.
These extremists will have plenty of apologetics for their position. But none will hold up to evidence or logic. And that is what links this broken epistemic principle to an entire broken epistemology that cannot do logic or attend to evidence. “But most accusations are true.” Tell that to the “merely 4%” of people we decide to execute because of false accusations. Would you ever say, “Well, we don’t need to care about them. There aren’t very many. Most people we kill are guilty. So let’s not worry too much about who might be innocent or do anything to protect them from faulty justice.” Clearly the “number” of innocent people railroaded by false accusations makes no difference here. To the contrary, those victims are precisely why we need more empirical and reliable systems of justice to peg who is guilty and who is not.
A sensible principle is what would combat the actual problem. And the problem here is that of always disbelieving a victim, by always trying to come up with some excuse for how what they are claiming can’t be true (a common feature of rape culture, which indeed exists). The problem is not “false or erroneous accusations don’t exist.” They do. Our entire modern justice system was built on the bones and tragic memories of those ground under by that very fact. We must not forget why we have the system and principles of justice that we have. Hence the correct principle is “Never assume an accuser isn’t telling the truth,” and not “Always assume an accuser is telling the truth.” The latter simply replaces one unjust principle with another. The former restores and preserves actual justice.
- “There are different truths.” / “I have my own truths.”
To conflate “my opinion” or “my belief” with “my truth” is to illegitimately elevate the reliability of your mere belief or opinion with an abuse of semantics. There is only one truth. And you can be wrong about what it is. And people can only differ in their access to it. For example, there are things that are true about what you feel or have experienced that may be inaccessible to me (or less accessible to me). In that sense you can have access to a truth I do not. But there is still only one truth (even when it’s yours).
Sound liberals don’t make that mistake. They still do recognize that lived experience matters, and that a “point of view,” which means how things seem—and indeed what can be observed and thus actually experienced and understood—from where another person or group sits, encompasses a considerable database of factual information regarding what is true. And it is a fundamental principle of all rational epistemologies that we ought not ignore pertinent evidence. Liberals are right about this (and I think recognizing it stems from another property strongly correlated with liberals: openness to experience). People’s experiences are evidence (even their emotions are evidence of something, as I already noted).
But liberal extremists can make the mistake of then concluding that there are “separate truths,” such that both your and my beliefs can be true even when they contradict each other (pro tip: they cannot). There is, rather, only one complex truth that we are all trying to get to the bottom of. And it might include some things that are independently true about you or me. And you might have a better view of it than me—or vice versa. But that’s as far as epistemic relativism can honestly get you.
- Extreme Cancel Culture
I’ve already mentioned other failure modes of “emotion first” epistemologies, such as allowing emotion to trump evidence or reason, or assuming felt facts are true facts—that emotions can never be wrong about something, or that they have some special access to information beyond your ordinary fallible senses, perceptions, and cognitions. But the one that conservatives complain the most about is what we now call “cancel culture,” as if it were new. It’s not—when conservatives invented it a hundred years ago, it was called blacklisting and boycotting.
And I already covered this before. So I won’t retreat it all here.
Most of what gets pegged as “cancel culture” is just a normal, healthy exercise of individual liberty (per Kagan’s point above). But it goes wrong when it fails epistemically (e.g. something or someone is boycotted for reasons that aren’t even true—or not adequately known to be true—i.e. no epistemic diligence is done first) or morally (e.g. what is being punished is not even a sin, or the punishment is not commensurate with the sin—like “canceling” Budweiser for marketing to the trans community, or “canceling” Richard Dawkins for merely being a typical ignorant conservative; or worse, “canceling” even his books and arguments that have nothing to do with that). But cancel culture is merely wrong when it is ill targeted (epistemically or morally). It becomes extremist when it devolves into causing actual material harm without any sound investigation of fact—which need not always be in a court of law, but any inquest or journalism to the same result should rise to a comparable standard. Otherwise, you are replacing evidence and reason with emotion, and just loopholing your way back to being a fascist again.
This is actually characteristic of abusive behavior. Emotional abusers use all available levers of power (like employing “the appropriate” liberal concepts and jargon, and processes and beliefs) to turn the tables on their victims and manipulate their communities (as pointed out here, here, and here). And the concepts, jargon, processes, and beliefs of liberal extremists can be particularly vulnerable to this exploit. Which leads to the most self-destructive folly observed of the left: eating their own.
Internet communities are most prone to this inevitable self-destruction because the internet lacks affect—resulting in an audience’s assumptions, fears, paranoias, traumas, and other emotional projections coloring anything anyone says, without regard for the actual emotions or intentions that went into it. Which is exacerbated by bad actors exploiting this fact to use ambiguity to try and “get away” with bad behavior like racism or harassment, which only makes their targets more paranoid. The internet also builds only shallow alliances and friendships relative to IRL communities, and its hives are therefore easily collapsed. But even IRL all these things can happen. Any disagreement can become a banishing offense, dramas and grudges become vendettas, behaviors or positions become exaggerated, and all of these are “protected” as sacrosanct by rounding error (legitimate villainy is conflated with just anything you dislike, and thus anyone who does or says anything you dislike gets treated like a genuine villain).
This phenomenon has been described by countless liberal insiders. I link to over a dozen in Why Mythicist Milwaukee Is Right and Their Critics Wrong. So we know of what we speak. This is another example of the left going too far. Its corollary on the right is banishment and demonization. Because conservatives prefer to maintain the narrative or illusion that they are unified, they turn the targets of its divisive abuse into outsiders rather than admit to the existence of insider conflict. But it’s all the same thing.
- Extreme Policy Outcomes
This defective epistemology in turn leads to extreme left policies that defy facts and logic.
For example, PETA is an extremist organization. Read everything in that link. Whatever you thought it’s purpose or reputation was, what its leadership has actually said and espoused exceeds the ridiculous. As a rational liberal I support animal rights in the form of humane animal farming and necessary animal testing, and I support even more stringent laws to those ends than we have; and I support private citizens working within the law to keep farmers and experimenters honest and lawful. To instead advocate for the outlawing of meat (and essential science as well as more ridiculous things PETA fights for—like outlawing even the training of animals, and humane animal labor, even beefarming) is simply going too far. That’s illogical and unempirical. They also lie a lot. For where I actually stand on all this and why, see Should Science Be Experimenting on Animals? A Debate with Paul Bali and Meat Not Bad.
The same thing happens with environmental policy: overall, mainstream liberals are right about this; but we also have extremists pushing unempirical or illogical environmental policies, and who will egregiously (and self-defeatingly) lie to further that agenda (see We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming). And the same thing happens with nuclear policy (see The Shocking Reasons Why We Should Go Nuclear) and gun policy (see Gun Control That’s Science-Based & Constitutional). Many liberals share my cautious support of nuclear power and limited gun rights. Yet I remain very left wing on both those issues, as with animal rights. But there is clearly a too far left here, on every one of these issues.
Whether it’s the treatment of animals, the building and maintaining of nuclear power plants, regulating guns, or anything else on the usual liberal bucket list, it is rational to distrust government and individuals and corporations when they promise to “do it right” or make “safety first.” But it is not rational to oppose even those governments, people, and companies who make good on those promises. Distrust of a company or regulatory agency should be channelled into making that company or agency more accountable and reliable—just as with meat safety, agricultural safety, water safety, work safety, fair wages, and literally anything else. Yes, many regulations are really bogus mechanisms for profiteering and abuse, or are badly written or implemented. But regulations can be created and improved without becoming needlessly expensive or burdensome or serving only the privileged—they just have to be sensible, which means: logical, evidence-based, and tied to objective outcome measures. The solution to bad government is not no government, but better government (see Sic Semper Regulationes).
Which all of course relates to the extremist’s inability to understand that reality is complicated. Hamas and the current government of Israel can both be evil at the same time; Hamas is not Gaza (almost no Gazans voted for them; because most weren’t of age at the last election), and Israel is not Israelis (a great many of whom oppose their nation’s war crimes), much less “the Jews” (since worldwide Jews—surprise!—don’t control even Israel much less the world); and American financing of Israel is not so different from our financing of its Islamic neighbors Egypt and Jordan, which together receive roughly the same funding (so you won’t understand why we fund Israel until you understand why we fund Egypt and Jordan); and there is a difference between funding Israel at all, and how much we fund it—or what we ask for in return. Reality is complicated, and can rarely be reduced to simple wish-lists.
Even so, I do believe BDS is a valid policy goal (it’s how we defeated apartheid before, when the criminal was South Africa) and that the nation of Israel should be convicted of all its war crimes (which are not new, but a terrible norm: see Why I Don’t Always Trust Israel) and compelled to pay reparations for them. But I also believe Hamas is a terrorist organization and that a more lawful tactical action against them is warranted, and that Israelis should be allowed to live where they are now, with equal rights and franchise with their Palestinian and Gazan neighbors as fellow citizens. The solution to Slavery and then Jim Crow was not the exile or genocide of Southern Whites. It was bringing the people they were oppressing into equal rights and franchise (and I still think we have yet more to do even there). This puts me pretty far left. But still not with leftist extremists, who fail at nuance and complexity, and thus can’t thread the needle of reality.
And Then: Mere Incompetence
Of course not all liberal extremists are the same. Not all are fascists, not all agree with PETA, not all are obsessively against nuclear power, and so on. There isn’t a single profile for “left-wing extremist.” There are just lefties who go too far on this or that metric, and some on more metrics than others. At the same time, not all follies are the sole province of liberal extremists in the first place. Ordinary liberals have one common fault I also will criticize: crap framing; a.k.a., sucking at messaging and communication. Which is ironic because liberals gravitate more to the humanities, and thus should be better at this. This is literally what that supposedly useless degree in “English” or “Communications” is supposed to help you with. But alas. The conservatives are the masters of this. And that is a source of no end of my disappointment and frustration with my fellow lefties.
Honestly. Come on, people. You can do better than this.
Consider “defund the police,” for example; or “from the river to the sea.” How do these differ from other dogwhistle slogans like “welfare queen” or “kill the Jews”? The problem with these slogans is not what they were originally coined to represent—which were reasonable policy goals—but how they were readily coopted into something else.
Consider the “defund the police”:
- Not having armed police doing mental health care and social services, not militarizing neighborhoods, and segregating tactical from citation or service functions, are all reasonable ideas, and are in fact closer to the norm in most countries, which actually have effective social services and safety nets, and thus (I’m sorry to say) enjoy a more moral populace in result. It’s the U.S., again, that’s irrationally weird about how it enculturates, deploys, and over-empowers its police forces, and that’s especially a problem because of how racist we are compared to most other countries (and yes, Actually, Fryer Proved Systemic Racism in American Policing).
- But that doesn’t have to look like what “defund the police” advocates imagine. We should combine, instead, empirical lessons from more successful nations like Sweden, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. But the conversation is needed, and that was what the “defund the police” movement originally was calling for. It’s just that the slogan sounds like “disbanding” and many radical extremists even started selling it that way. Which killed the entire project. Liberals thus shot themselves in the foot with bad framing, and completely failed to accomplish any meaningful police or societal reforms.
- Advocates would have done better with a slogan like “Reorganize the Police” which doesn’t sound like anything bad and thus compels anyone who hears it to look into what it means, rather than assuming what it means from how it sounds. But “Defund the Police” was latched onto because of its emotional resonance with liberals, who thus put emotions first and didn’t think rationally about its effectiveness at accomplishing any goal.
Likewise, consider “from the river to the sea”:
- That was originally just a slogan for a one-state solution to Israeli apartheid. Which is, indeed, an entirely reasonable policy goal. It’s not radical. It has moral and geopolitical arguments in its favor. And it’s how the exact same situation has been solved before (such as in apartheid South Africa).
- To understand what is needed requires being well acquainted with the sides in conflict, how they got there, what they want, and with any pertinent precedents in history. But the one-state solution has strong precedent and best coheres with empirically established principles of political science. Peace through consent of the governed has proven to work, and requires enfranchising the governed; whereas a two-state solution is unlikely to change the status quo of perpetual violent conflict. Because, so far, the only known way to end violent conflict is to convert it into peaceful (hence democratic) conflict (look at South Africa, Ireland, India, even the enfranchisement of African and Native Americans; even the British Commonwealth and African Union).
- But the slogan was picked up by opponents, and by extremists (such as Hamas), to mean the destruction of Israel and driving or wiping out of the region’s Jewish occupants. After all, it can too easily be “read” that way by Jews, Israelis, and outsiders. It’s a terrible slogan for that very reason—bad framing that only makes the situation worse, rather than accomplishing any of the goals it was meant to. A better slogan since developed is, “Not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Israel’s crimes.” That forces a conversation about what is actually happening and why we are funding it. And even then, the end result need not be defunding Israel, but negotiating a lawful relationship between Israel and Palestine that would restore a moral basis for funding them both.
Another example is “Black lives matter,” with which advocates could have shot reactionaries in their foot instead of their own if they simply added one word: “Black lives matter too.” Yes, that was already meant. But the issue is not that the conservative response to this slogan was valid (it wasn’t; it was specious and dumb). Rather, the issue is that it empowered conservatives to rhetorically win the argument—without having to actually win the argument. It was self-defeating. A bad idea. A smarter idea would have been to foresee this maneuver and preemptively disarm it by making what was assumed explicit—and at no cost, since adding “too” does no harm to the intended psyop.
Liberals need to think of these things if they actually want to win arguments and effect change, rather than just rile up their base to no meaningful outcome.
I did not discover this. It’s been pointed out at least since George Lakoff published Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate–The Essential Guide for Progressives. But that bad framing is a problem should not be mistaken, in turn, for endorsing centrism. The machine-politics fear that genuinely liberal candidates can’t get elected is false—it is a classic cognitive error of risk aversion, and resembles Hollywood producers’ fallacious decision-making, where they conclude that any movie with a female lead that doesn’t do well means audiences don’t want movies with female leads, or that if everyone is doing a talking sandwich from space movie, they all need to do a talking sandwich from space movie. Or how every military keeps trying to win the last war rather the one they’re facing. Very liberal goals are all sellable to the public. You just have to get public, and argue down the oppo rhetoric. You have to win the psyop. And you do it with empiricism, humor, and the dismantling of the opposition’s lies and bad logic. You have to actually argue your case. Not just shout slogans or complain in your silos.
Which gets us to the extreme left’s final folly: an utter lack of pragmatism. Some will polemicize this in terms of “purity tests,” whereby an extreme liberal will “never” vote or work with a politician who does not entirely align with their views on literally every conceivable policy. That is profoundly irrational because it is entirely self-defeating. To accomplish any progress—even to walk across a room—requires incremental steps of advance. You therefore can only get what you want by supporting politicians who only want to step a little in that direction. Because then you can get the next one to move a little, and the next a little more. That’s how all progress is made. In short, if you can’t vote for someone you disagree with, you will never accomplish anything. If you can’t make deals, and give a little while getting a little (horse-trading, compromise, negotiating), you will never accomplish anything. It is the extreme liberals who cannot grasp this—they even seem emotionally incapable of grasping it.
For example, there are pragmatic pathways to gradual and rational gun control; yet wanting it all at once won’t get you even the first step, much less ever to the last. The same goes for the Gaza war specifically or the Palestine crisis altogether. Or anything else you want. I want universal basic income and nationalized healthcare. But I know that’s not going to happen overnight and has to happen incrementally. Moreover, I am rational enough to understand that “not voting” for someone because they “don’t support” those things is only going to undermine my ever achieving them, by selling power out to someone who wants to make things worse (like making healthcare even less accessible and more expensive, or even reducing the minimum wage). Extremists suck at Trolley Problems. They also suck at foresight. They cannot reason more than two steps ahead, such as to understand that even a liberal candidate they hate will make far less destructive appointments to the Supreme Court—which decides the fate of democracy and human rights.
Consider, again, animal rights, where we also see this lack of pragmatism that typifies liberal extremists. The only thing that will ever actually improve the conditions of farmed animals is if you eat them—and then only eat the most humanely treated of them, thereby economically compelling the industry to compete on that metric. If you just “don’t eat them,” then your dollars are not “gettable,” and consequently the industry has no reason to care about your humane treatment goals. You will therefore never accomplish them. Animals go on suffering because you are a fool.
The same happens if you advocate outlawing the eating of animals: you will simply never have the votes to make that ever happen, ever, in the entire history of the human race. And so their conditions won’t improve at all. You have just failed the Trolley Problem, guaranteeing animals suffer more for yet another century than they would have if you “pulled the switch” and did something that would actually improve their welfare. Likewise, rather than arguing over whether PETA should “endorse” or “tolerate” lab-grown meat (and eggs and milk and honey, BTW, which should be even easier to develop), PETA should be fundraising to accelerate and support that entire industry—for the same reason that anyone who actually wants to reduce the number of abortions in America should be funding free universal IUDs and science-based sex education.
Pragmatism is a necessary tool of political accomplishment. What typifies extreme liberals is a failure to understand this. And even mainstream liberals can fail at pragmatic messaging.
Conclusion
The left can go too far. But most of the left isn’t doing that. In fact, I think most of the left is too conservative. Hence conservative complaints that most of the left agrees with its extremist fringe is as bogus and delusional as most everything else conservatives maintain. The actual metric for “too far” is the same for the left as for the right: fascism (endorsing actual coercion rather than sticking to criticism and persuasion) and “emotivism” (replacing reason and evidence with feelings and emotions). And these metrics can be used to find the line in any particular. Some “cancel culture” is legitimate; some is not. Some methods of protest are legitimate; some are not. Some versions of a policy are sound; some are not.
Reasonable liberalism requires a strong adherence to evidence-based belief and policy, and a genuine commitment to non-coercive methods of getting what you want. It means questioning your own emotions and community and sources as much as you do the government or any other institution of power—while still having reasonable thresholds for trusting them. Liberalism means the reasonable pursuit and defense of human freedoms, while abandoning wasteful or self-defeating rules or traditions. It means admitting many of our current beliefs and systems are dysfunctional or obsolete, and making real, incremental, and empirically-defensible steps towards fixing them. It thus means embracing progress (and thus change) as a positive social good—but doing that on a basis of evidence and reason.
-:-
In comments, I welcome questions about how I would apply these same principles to any specific policies not here mentioned (regarding what would be too conservative or too liberal). But please remember to adhere to my comments policy. And remember I believe in evidence-based policy, so any speculation I answer with here is subject to being tested against the evidence before being certain. And please cite sources for any example you mention. In other words, avoid hypotheticals. Only ask about an actual policy or proposal—and link to a source documenting an actual person or entity proposing or enacting it. Because both context and particulars matter. Forgetting that is the first step towards distorting reality and losing the plot—the beginning of delusion.
Then you are only slightly to the right of Friedrich Engels?
The dividing line is “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. How do you get from Capitalism to Socialism. A step-by-step approach is universally agreed to be unworkable. A dictatorship was proposed in the manifesto as a transition period. This was such a bad idea that it has sabotaged socialism ever since.
So, the open question is how we promote socialist ideals without letting the authoritarians take over? This problem is now doubly complicated by our climate crisis and the rise of AI.
“For what we are about to receive, may we truly be thankful,” Hornblower.
Engels’ politics is hundreds of years removed from us. It can’t even be placed on the modern political spectrum. The knowledge we have now is vastly greater; and the state of play in global politics and socioeconomics is entirely changed. So he isn’t of any use as a comparand.
So I won’t even bother fact-checking whether Engels “actually” promoted a transitional dictatorship. If he did, that’s just another ignorance among his already abundant ignorance. But I do know Marx never did. Marx called for worker democracy and for corporations to be coops. Soviet Marxism was nothing like what he proposed. That’s Leninism or (eventually) Stalinism or Maoism; not Marxism.
But Marx is also obsolete, as I already explain in the article you are commenting on.
As for the rest, there is no “getting to” socialism “from” capitalism. My position, as stated and linked, is hybridism: you need both as checks and balances against each other, in equilibrium. And incremental pathways toward that state, while maintaining a rights-based democracy, have been proven across the entire first world for almost a century now (the U.S. is behind the curve on this). Even further advances rest on empirical evidence of their inevitable success (follow my links where I discuss this in other articles), one simply has to follow the empirically established processes (pro tip: electing Republicans is not one of them).
So we already solved this. We know how it’s done. And we know what the outcomes are. American voters are just not aware; indeed, most don’t care about science and evidence anyway, which is, really, the actual problem, as I quoted the conservative commentator Robert Kagen pointing out (and indeed his whole book is about this and well worth reading; even if you don’t agree with everything he says, as I don’t, his perspective remains relevant, and he is right about quite a lot).
Tom:
To paraphrase Michael Albert in his destruction of David Horowitz, saying that a tent doesn’t work doesn’t mean a skyscraper won’t.
All we have tested are authoritarian solutions, primarily in China and Russia, that deliberately emulate accelerated state capitalism with authoritarian political components because they had the Marxist ideology that you have to move through stages of social systems and that they had jumped the gun and needed the advanced West to go socialist first. (One would think that this would instead have been a clue that Marx was wrong about fixed stages of development and a uniform direction to history that could be intuited with the kind of data he had, but Marxists had become a cult at this point).
Bakunin warned of the “red bureaucracy” long before the Soviets. (And there are Marxists who argue that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” line has been deeply misunderstood, and I think their argument is at least reasonable).
Anarchist solutions, like parecon, libertarian municipalism, etc. have only been tried at smaller levels, like South End Press, Mondragon, etc. They have worked just fine. You do not need a dictatorship of the proletariat. And until we actually try all possible alternative to capitalism, especially left-libertarian ones, you are just proclaiming you know all of human history without doing the experiment.
I strongly suggest checking out parecon. You may think it’s non-viable, but you’ll notice that it’s not authoritarian in structure and that nowhere do Albert or Hahnel or Shalom need to call for a transitional dictatorship to achieve it.
I have to tip one to the other side here, though:
All actual tests of parecon and like solves are not real tests of them as governments, because they always ride on an existing infrastructure of a militarized justice system protecting them against internal violence (like gangs) and external predation (like war).
It’s similar to how it is not possible to confirm disembodied minds exist by showing that you can model (imagine) them with embodied minds. It’s still “embodied minds required” (my point in The God Impossible, for example).
The function of government is the regulation of power (without which it’s just Road Warrior—and even that world had to try and form governments). And power always encompasses violence (systems of power can abuse power in cascading ways that aren’t explicitly violent, but still do always end in the threat of it, e.g. as soon as one starts flouting the law and evading police, you’re at violence now).
And that’s not as simple to control and regulate. It’s why we had to settle for multi-branch representative governments enacting balances of power, and creating multiple electoral checks on all that; and these always have to be representative (civilizations are too large and complex for direct democracy to work, which is why legislatures and parliaments and executives and judges are all necessary components of any effective regulatory system).
The difference between fascist and non-fascist regulation of power is that one of those has a democratic rights-respecting structure regulating the use of power (whether that power is some form of “violence” or otherwise), and the other bypasses all or most of that to simply enact individual or minority will (and sometimes majority will, when direct democracy becomes fascist and bypasses any sense of constitutional or human rights, as killed Socrates and drove the Trail of Tears and enacted Jim Crow).
You categorized both “legitimate” and “fascist” ways of protest and/or political participation. Which label on this continuum would you attribute to the different forms/degrees of civil disobedience (from not willing to ‘disperse’ to something like ‘glueing to streets’)?
The issue with this definition of fascism is that either status quo enforcement of law and enactment of policy counts as fascism if enforced, or fascism itself disappears when it attains the heretofore legitimate levers of power. Every state is clearly willing to use force to enact its political will on its own citizens. But historically, some state use of force has been denoted as “fascist” and some has not.
If fascism only exists as the extralegal use of coercion for policy goals, it’s not a very useful term. If we stick to your definition, We get to have fun conversations about how past regimes are now no longer fascist but the resistance movements that illegally acted against them, now, suddenly are.
You made a mistake here. The same one Rune M. made (see my other comment).
I did not say “any” use of force is fascism. I said uses of force that usurp the will of a rights-based electorate is fascism (“usurping the role of government”; “bypassing the will of the electorate”; ignoring “well-justified legal limits”; “fascism” is “a deviant use of force in violation of human rights”).
You need to read more carefully when I write sentences like fascism is “stealing the role delegated to the state, to effect community violence, precisely because you couldn’t get the state itself to do it for you. Using force to effect your will. That’s fascism.” It is the opposite, I said, of when “We the People have chosen to delegate to the government the sole power to” use force in protection human rights (“the human rights of the audience”; “a Nazi [is] just another scumbag violating human rights”; “fascism” is “a deviant use of force in violation of human rights”).
For more on this mistake you made, again, see see my comment to Rune.
Please don’t hallucinate away the very words I apply to my definitions. Fix your epistemology.
Good question. I cut a section on that for space, since it’s really not a left/right issue, but an issue of both (as either side can engage in “forms/degrees of civil disobedience”), and it was too long and complicated a digression, and has too many edge cases, to the point that I can’t even lay out a general rule.
I left a hint in, though, in the line, “I suppose I’d have more respect for this if its perpetrators then immediately turned themselves into the police and confessed and accepted the statutory sentence for their crime.”
The tl;dr is “it’s complicated.” There is no one rule fits all. There are many factors that affect assessment, such as:
(1) To what degree a law being subverted is morally legitimate (e.g. outlawing abortion is itself a deprivation of human rights, so I support “criminals” ignoring or aiding the subverting of those laws, and would support jury nullification for them) or already unconstitutional (e.g. orders to disperse can be the actual violation of the law, rather than the other way around).
Resistance against illegal state actions is morally valid (as long as it adheres to the same principles being fought for, e.g. proportional response, following the same rules of engagement you would want the state to, and so on). Indeed the American Revolution was founded on that principle. But “morally valid” and “wise/productive” are not identical circles in the Venn diagram; though they do overlap (Stonewall, for example).
(2) To what degree a law is, instead, actually obeyed. Because actually civil, i.e. peaceful, disobedience typically entails accepting the legal consequences, i.e. surrendering, confessing, and doing the time and/or accepting liability: the cost of which is precisely what gives the protester moral authority, and ensures the protestors’ convictions are substantial (thus limiting when and for what it is done), and thus undermines their status as merely a criminal (as MLK said, the question is not why he is in jail, but why those who claimed to support his cause weren’t gladly in there with him).
(3) And, of course, as ever, the epistemic question. All disobedient protest is invalid that is epistemically ill-founded (i.e. its cause is not even factually correct, much less actually just). This is why a revolution for human rights is not morally (or indeed even legally) comparable to a revolution against human rights; or why a revolution against a non-existent crime is criminal in a way a revolution against an actual crime might not be.
(4) And then on top of all that, the assessment won’t always be black-or-white. Most cases are mixed—not entirely right or correctly done, but neither entirely wrong or incorrectly done, and there is a whole spectrum between the two where a specific case can land. And they can be evaluated differently on different metrics (was that rational, was that legal, was that moral, was that commensurate, was that admirable or censurable, was that productive or counter-productive, etc.).
Since the issue is multi-axial and nonbinary on every axis, a single rule is impossible to develop, and any specific example will entail a very complex analysis and not land exactly in the same place on any axis. The only general rule I can set is: evaluations should be evidence-based (you need a correct account of what actually happened, for example) and rational (your conclusions must follow from your premises without fallacy). But that’s just true of everything.
“ But do not mistake me for being a Marxist, either. I believe that is a largely outdated ideology the very name of which has lost all useful meaning.”
— You haven’t read much about Marx, I see.
I actually have studied Marx quite a lot. Indeed, I was a full-blown Marxist for a couple of years—and then, in reaction, a full-blown Randroid for a couple years more. That was the early 90s. I’ve realized both systems of thought are antiquated and out of touch.
Marx was no more informed or right than Adam Smith. Like everyone in the 19th century, they turned out to be very naive, and either wrong or ignorant about almost everything—emphasis on almost. But that Marx was right about some things (provided you interpret them with a very charitable hindsight) does not rescue “Marxism,” which wasn’t even a very coherent system of thought, much less a scientifically empirical one.
Dr. Carrier! We have eyes! I’ve tried very hard to look for anything you’ve ever said about Marx or Marxism aside from this usual narrative and have come up empty-handed so far! Even CS Lewis would occasionally talk about how it felt to be an atheist or whatever! I’m not saying you had to have been a Marxist to criticize Marxism, but you’re the one who keeps saying that you used to be a Marxist like it’s supposed to mean something to us when that’s the ONLY thing you ever say about it! BTW, the difference between Marx and Smith isn’t that Marx was a more specialer boy or whatever! The difference is that Marx had class consciousness! He had dialectical materialism! He had decades of reports from the factory inspectors! Also, they certainly don’t think Marxism is outdated in Vietnam! The spirit of the Tet Offensive is alive and well, Dr. Carrier!
Fascism is a very specific political ideology, that ruined the European continent for decades, and using it in the way used in this article is not only wrong, it is harmful.
It is also a Libertarian talking point, made by people who think that all government action is done at the point of a gun.
You’ll have to explain how your conclusions follow from your premises here.
Fascism is an individual or power-minority usurping by force the established authority of a rights-based electorate. It is not possible to argue that it therefore “includes” authority delegated by a rights-based electorate. That’s a contradiction in terms.
Granted, Libertarians are not very good at logic in my experience; even worse at evidence. But since Libertarians agree with me here (force must be the sole reserve of the state at the will of the governed), they can be excused from your own poor logic in this case.
Obviously the entire point of government is the regulation of the use of power, i.e. regulation of force. That is a fact within all political ideologies (from Marxism or any random hippie commune to Libertarianism and any so-called “free market”).
So I cannot fathom how it is “dangerous” to denounce “usurping by force the authority of a rights-based electorate,” the very thing that caused that “European” evil you mention (which is not just a thing in Europe: fascism goes literally back to the Roman and prior Empires, and thus has been a plague across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia for thousands of years—even Mesoamerican Empires make the list).
Your logic escapes me.
But it sounds like you are one of those liberals engaging in that rounding error I warned about in this article, and fallaciously thinking I must be a Libertarian because I criticize leftist extremism. In fact, I am a far-left politico, and nowhere near a Libertarian. To the contrary, I eat Libertarians for breakfast.
To be fair to Rune, I suspect what she is saying is that fascism, likely in the sense of palingenetic ultranationalism especially in the European context, is a pretty unique, and specifically right-wing, phenomenon.
However, it’s clear that in this context you are describing “fascism” not as the specific ideological movement but as a kind of authoritarianism that includes vigilantism and enforcement outside of the state, which is actually a pretty critical defining feature of fascists: That they don’t just passively advocate for authoritarianism but bring it about by their own extralegal violence until they can change norms.
So I think this is just pedantry. And anyone who is serious, even if they object to the term being used this way, should recognize that “Well, we’re not fascist because we’re not palingenetic right-wing ultranationalists” is missing the point and failing to see that your argument is that we’re not different enough if we resort to overtly anti-democratic, dehumanizing tactics that the fascists use for our instrumental goals. And that is inarguable.
Well put.
A good example is homelessness. When I lived in Oakland, CA from 2011-21, I saw homelessness explode there, along with the typical encampments and the squalor and crime that attend them. The reason absolutely nothing of consequence was done about them is because an extreme leftist ideology had taken root in the city.
This ideology framed sleeping in tents and doorways as a legitimate choice and that trying to enforce basic health and safety measures was therefore a violation of their freedom. It was exactly the kind of black and white thinking that you outlined—either people have the freedom to live however they wish in public spaces or else they are victims of state violence. This made it impossible to enact any kind of solution and the situation got worse and worse.
And because of this, the right was given an honest critique of leftist policy by pointing out that homelessness explodes under liberal governance. Of course they aren’t honest about homelessness or the systemic causes of it, and no conservative is advocating for more public housing or mental health services. But none of that matters—as an emotional attack, it’s hard to beat, especially when you can just show pictures of homeless encampments. So it’s also an example of leftist extremists ultimately empowering the right.
This is not exactly an accurate narrative.
Maybe there were some “leftists” who argued solely that; I never met any. But I lived in the East Bay myself for years. Every leftist homeless activist I know actually wants the homeless housed. The idea that, if they won’t be housed, then they must be allowed to live somewhere, is not the liberal wishlist item, but the “least worst” option left over by a society that won’t do what the liberals insist it should actually be doing.
So I fail to see any liberal policy here that “made it impossible to enact any kind of solution and the situation got worse and worse.” It’s causally the other way around: conservative society rejected the liberal solution, creating a crisis that then had to be “managed,” such as by allowing homeless people somewhere to sleep. If society won’t make it a home, if all it leaves over are doorways, then that is on society, not the liberal activist. The activist is just pointing out the completely illogical position of their society and the need of a real solution and not that one.
In other words, it is conservative society that “made it impossible to enact any kind of solution and the situation got worse and worse.” Not the liberals. The liberals are just managing the disaster left to them by an illiberal society.
That you bought the false conservative narrative about this is one of the reasons we need to insist on evidence-based beliefs. Because you can’t solve problems by believing false conservative narratives.
P.S. I should also point out that this is an example of a standard play in the conservative playbook: in almost every issue, their strategy is to “break” anything that works; then complain about how it doesn’t work in order to get rid of it. This is what the RNC does to legislation all the time.
A classic example is how they borrow from the social security trust fund, then complain at how little money it has, as an argument to convince everyone we should get rid of it. What they won’t tell you is that a very large part of the nation’s debt is owed to itself: owed, literally, to the social security trust fund (almost a fourth of our national debt), which would be entirely solvent had conservatives not nerfed it this way. (BTW, when all money owed to itself is counted, about a third of the national debt is the government owing money to itself.)
This is also how they convince you that opposing or cutting services is necessary by running up outrageous budgets, as if you won’t notice that any competent company would raise revenues to meet outlays instead. Conservatives nerfed the national debt in order to manipulate you into cutting or opposing programs—like real solutions to homelessness—that actually cost little relative to the national budget and aren’t the reason the debt is exploding.
We need an electorate that stops falling for this.
Of course, Universal Healthcare (that included mental healthcare) and Universal Basic Income would solve the homelessness problem entire (among a lot else). So the real issue is a society unwilling to acknowledge that deregulated capitalism is contrary to the universal human good. It is the actual problem.
Yeah, Ash, as a fellow Northern Californian, this is a strawman of the left. Yes, they said all those things in isolation: “Don’t beat the shit out of the homeless, let them find the solutions they can”. But not only were they creating affinity organizations like CityTeam, Alliance for Housing, etc., so the goal was (as the left often has to do because of feckless conservatives and some center-right “liberals”) to solve the problem from a community perspective that has organic control, the call was to make real housing solutions (like, say, use all those excess houses that we as taxpayers paid for to bail out the banks ) and to also use treatment-oriented solutions. I am wholly confident that you talked to essentially no one at the time whose actual position was “No, don’t give the homeless a house!”
The Democratic Party is not leftist in any way. Its endless wars destroy any chance of national health care and will eventually destroy Social Security. Genocide Joe could care less about anyone’s rights what with he did to Julian Asaunge and his censorship of Russian journalists and writers. The loss of these wars and the failed endless sanctions will isolate the USA as a pariah state causing the collapse of the Dollar and the collapse of the military and its eight hundred bases around the world as well as Social Security and all related programs turning the USA into the third world toilet that it is striving to become. If the Democrats really were leftists they would have codified R v Wade back in the seventies. AOC, Nancy and the Squad are all on the take, have their investments in Rayethon and could care less for the lower classes. They love their blue state suburban lifestyle.
You are engaging in the very illogical reasoning I warned against. The DNC is most certainly center-left. It supports a lot of polices well left of center. So only a black-or-white fallacy can get you from that to “therefore they are not leftist in any way,” as if you are hallucinating-away the word “center” in the phrase “center-left.”
The DNC is obviously left in many ways (not in “no” ways). It just isn’t as far left as I am (or as you appear to be).
And in terms of pragmatism (which I suspect you also lack in addition to logic), it is the only party actually physically capable of continuing to move our system further left by gradual stepwise accomplishment.
If you fail to recognize either of these things, then you are a victim of that broken epistemology of leftist extremists that my article spends a lot of time warning you against.
Fix that. Stat.
Meanwhile, please also start being an empiricist. You need to start with true and accurate facts in your premises. For example, the DNC has tried several times to codify Roe (and are trying again even now). It is not the DNC that has been preventing this. So it’s not anyone’s “blue sate suburban lifestyle” getting in the way here.
You need to start with correct facts, before you can form any correct conclusions or beliefs.
Learn it. Live it.
When I studied my way out of Christianity in 2018 at age 58, I began to explore platforms for “atheists” on social media sites for support and learning from others who have left the faith. I immediately noticed that a primary topic was current politics which was a turnoff for me. I wanted to explore a whole new spectrum of nature and life, not one’s political positions. After several months of thought I realized that my lifelong middle right political positions have not changed just because I became an atheist.
I initially would respond on social media sites that had political opinions with my perspective on a certain political topic and I would get vehemently criticized for not falling in line with full bore liberal ideology. A lot of childish name calling and “get out of our group!” which was actually amusing. Fast forward to 2024 and I’m still middle right. I don’t engage in too much political banter on social media but when I see something that makes my BS radar go up, I’ll investigate the claim and respond. Objectivity is the key. Both sides resort to chaotic hysteria, but you must go on a fact-finding mission and to do it correctly, it may take time. Anyway, I’m in a minority, a Republican atheist is like Jumbo Shrimp. WTF is that?
I can’t speak to conversations I did not observe. So maybe this is how it went. But my experience has always been that these are not entirely reliable narratives. Though leftist jerks and nutheads exist, I find just as often that conservatives deserve their critiques, and exaggerate their injustice. This is a documented feature of conservative personalities. And it has happened so many times right in front of me (even as a passive observer) that the priors favoring your narrative are low.
So I would warn against making assumptions about whether you were simply mistreated and consider whether, in fact, you were getting exactly the reaction deserved by repeatedly asserting things that are contrary to the actual evidence or sound logic. There are just too many cases of conservatives barging into liberal spaces making tons of assertions that betray a failure to even get rudimentarily informed first, which is justifiably annoying to a community, and accordingly you will receive their frustration. The correct response is to school yourself up; not to replace knowledge with grievance.
Criticism can also be not just of your errors of fact and logic, but your entire epistemology in response to being schooled. This is why I had to write my Media Primer: I have most typically found in my experience that conservatives have broken epistemologies, and thus make bad decisions about what evidence and logic to trust or not, and then react badly when people react understandably to evidence and logic being ignored or dismissed. In other words, you may have been called out for your mistakes—justifiably—and then all patience was lost when you never learned from feedback.
Please do take this into consideration.
On censorship and force: I recognize the immense danger of books that promote directly hateful ideologies that will translate to actual harm on the ground. The world would be better off without the existence of those lies. There is also the countervailing need to recognize the humanity of those who write such a thing (and that, as many liberals forget, includes recognizing the banal evil in their humanity, as that too is part of it) and to maintain an environment of maximal freedom. One such thing is to make sure such things can only be self-published and so lack reach and organizational mandate. And, yes, maintaining public pressure on the person who is putting out these ideas, not to the point of harassment or intrusion but with shame, is perfectly acceptable.
On force and political will: All politics includes a calculus of force. We use cops, we use militaries. Of course there is a critical gap between the fascist value system you identify and the way it uses force on the one hand and general use of force on the other, but I think when it comes to the left-wing extremist that gap is much murkier than the right-wing extremist because what they have identified as problems are overwhelmingly more likely to be actual problems that deserve some response. And I think reasonable people can disagree about the precise edges of the marginal cases where we begin to use force.
What I do think one can identify is an eagerness to use force, not as a last resort but as a first, and that is a clear diagnostic marker.
I am a pareconist anarchist. This means I want to fundamentally change the state and the economy. But I am not eager for a violent revolution to accomplish that. If ongoing injustices and force to try to prevent the attempt persist, then it may be necessary. But I’m not eager for such a thing, and I see that a lot of folks on the very far left get so sucked into the idea of singing the Marseillese and getting into a fight that it makes them at danger of this fascist approach… and then of actual fascism as they end up identifying with, say, Putin.
On punching Nazis: The problem is that, when talking about an actual true Nazi (and the identification here must be very narrow), they are never actually not a threat. Not just because their policy proposals are criminal violence but also because, as you noted, If There Is A Nazi, They Are A Liar. Spencer overtly hung out with vicious criminals but would pretend to be peaceful until the time came to bring in the thugs. The very existence of a Spencer is an immediate threat to the safety of all marginalized folks around him.
Nazis play games to look like they are innocent and not violent. They effectively create the dynamics of a gang war. If the state will not stop them and prevent those dynamics, asking marginalized people to never “initiate” violence (read: fight a war that has been declared), then insisting that they not use preemptive violence is to insist they unilaterally disarm to maintain civilizational norms that are currently failing them .
And making the issue ugly empirically makes people less excited to fight. They may grouse, but they go back to their side. Spencer admitted that it was much less fun after he got punched. At some point, marginalized people fighting back against what is objectively violence against them happens and causes results. Steinberg found that the race riots of the 60s very heavily and positively impacted later policies.
If one recognizes all that and still opposes it, I respect that stance. And there should be a very high bar put up for any use of the initiation of force, and someone merely having odious views is not remotely sufficient. But I also recognize that, if we do not manage to defang the alt-right sufficiently, there will come a time where many will need to be beaten back physically.
And while I too prefer honest racists, honest racists are also greater immediate dangers, and if they can exist publicly, then the blase racism has reached such a point that it has infected the law to the point of it being useless to protect marginalized people. The fact that folks like Sargon, Alex Jones, Richard Spence, etc. all can exist, create (with direct involvement) organized harassment campaigns, engage in libel, and get protected by force, is a failing of the law. Jones should have been held to account far before Sandy Hook.
Kagan’s quote is also disingenuous. It’s one thing to let someone speak. It’s another thing to let someone speak at your campus that you pay to go to when their arrival will be dangerous for the campus. People do not deserve any platform. I don’t get to just take over FOX News or Stefan Molyneux’s channel because I get to talk. Milo and Coulter should be invited to no campus, anywhere, and any time they or others like them are, there should be protest against their very presence. That is not a heckler’s veto. It’s demanding that your institution not be complicit with fascism and not threaten the physical safety of marginalized people on campus. The fact that folks like Kagan never mention that risk is why a lot of folks on the left don’t pay much attention. If someone’s calculus doesn’t include that very real risk, they are again playing games with the lives of other people for the sake of their comfortable system that works for them and not the people they are moralizing to.
Just as with Twitter, so too with campuses.
Now, if Milo wants to speak at a private venue he paid for? Great. And one will notice that such events, which happen all the time, almost never get efforts to deplatform. They get counter-protests.
On “always believe the victim”: The problem with any slogan is like this is that you can’t actually follow it literally, but you have to follow it in spirit, because it’s a corrective, as you note.
When someone says that they have been victimized, that simple fact should be almost always accepted immediately. Yes, even from a pathological liar or someone with extreme mental illness. Those are, after all, vulnerable people by that very dint.
Where increasing levels of skepticism come into play is on details, times, and, most importantly, who has been claimed to be the perpetrator . “I was victimized” is one thing. “He [or she] victimized me” is quite another.
And, of course, there’s a distinction between the law and how we behave. There are times where we will find someone was lying (and I have never met even the most extreme feminist who did not then concede that, yes, that was a false accusation). But there will be other far more frequent times when a victim’s story has holes but that it is still very likely that something happened to them from someone
“Always believe the victim” isn’t just about the fact of it, either, but believing the danger they are and the mental state that has been caused.
The same applies to “Believe women”, despite the dishonesty of those saying otherwise. The point was to correct for automatic sexism as to claims women make, not to say all women are always fully honest. Rather, the point is “Believe women exactly as much as you would believe men in the same positon”.
On PETA: PETA sucks. Unfortunately, a lot of their supporters don’t look more deeply and are taken in by some of their nicer rhetoric. Animal rights really needs a group that is as effective as them and as strident on the important stuff without being vicious puppy killers.
On Israel: The real big challenge is coming up with a solution that works for Palestinians. I personally think that an actual independent state that is built from the ground up to be heavily integrated with Israel as a partner alongside Israel relaxing its status as an ethno-state to also guarantee citizenship to Palestinians who want it could be the best of both worlds, but it’s hard to swing in the present international system.
On slogans: Conservatives have lots of bad slogans too and yet they seem to do just fine, and indeed keep regurgitating them. I agree that “defund the police” and “from the river to the sea” are poorly chosen, but slogans aren’t picked by marketing geniuses, often activists on the ground need to pick them, and the most important thing early on is that the slogan gets people marching. Rational people shouldn’t be paying attention to slogans anyways: Only policy slates really should be assessed seriously.
So for Black Lives Matter, the strength of it is that no reasonable person should struggle to be saying it. Saying “too” would have mollified essentially no conservatives because they don’t believe that either (seriously, many folks have tried to get them to say even just that, and they simply won’t). Conservatives hate what BLM wants. That’s the fundamental issue.
Objectively, BLM has formed into a quite successful movement, and it’s a memorable slogan.
And “Too” would have let “White Lives Matter Too” exist, and be harder to fight, and “Blue Lives Matter Too”, and be harder to fight.
So I just don’t think these are clear errors. And none of this should matter. The fact that it does means that our political system is irrational. If people want to spend money making sure that every grassroots movement can get a team of marketing experts to workshop slogans, that’d be great, but until then, we have to take what activists come up with that works in their context.
If anything, I think this is a condemnation of center-left folks. Center-left people can add on their slogans and their support and their framing. They just so often seem not to.
As for getting liberals elected: Could easily happen if we got people who don’t usually vote voting. The problem with this kind of focus on trying to convince entrenched centrists who have fundamentally conservative worldviews is that we could win without them if we took marginalized people seriously. I think the Alt-Right Playbook is firmly correct on this.
This isn’t to say to ignore trying to peel some conservatives off. And I think the left does fail at creating the kind of rhetoric that will properly communicate how evil their ideas are but also create the opportunity for them to jump ship. That we have to get much better at.
The much bigger problem is the Stickiness Problem, as Michael Albert coined it. If all the people from the 60s on in various social justice movements stuck around, we’d be Norway right now. The left needs to build institutions to stop burnout, create rewards, and make better signaling. That would solve a ton of the problems identified.
BRUV! Israel literally did that! In the 1940s and 50s, Israel offered automatic citizenship to any Arab who wanted it, but instead, a number of Arabs chose to side with the Mufti and the imams who prophesized the death of all Israelis (regardless of faith) and so, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, were left looking like morons once Israel pushed them back during the succeeding wars. Arabs have become Israeli citizens and, as I mentioned above, even serve in the IDF and Knesset! That-is-not-possible-in-an-apartheid-state. In racist America, a black man did not serve on the Supreme Court until Thurgood Marshall in 1967. Israel promoted a racial and religious minority to its highest court in a far shorter time than America did.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/the-philistines-in-jordan/
“Jewish security in the Diaspora is inextricable intertwined with the survival of Israel as a sovereign state; Jews will neither feel nor be safe in a world which acquiesces in the destruction of the Jewish state, either all at once or piece by piece. In its assault on Israel’s right to exist, the Radical Left engages in what is perhaps the ultimate anti-Semitism.” – The New Antisemitism (Forster and Epstein. 1974, p.152).
Not surprisingly Spain, where Jews were expelled en masse in 1492, sides with the “Palestinians”.
It would be rather hilarious to suggest that Putin is in the right because he offered Ukrainians Russian citizenship, so Ukrainians are to blame for the present hostilities.
Bil, your epistemology is broken. Fix it.
Bill:
Because you cut out the entire quote, you are ignoring all of the context.
Palestinians deserve a state of their own. It is criminal that, for the crimes of Nazis, a lot of Semitic Arabs had to suffer and have their homeland taken away. So I made clear that at this point almost certainly a two-state solution is necessary, if only because we sort of forced the point with Oslo.
Moreover, even a “one-state solution” as actually discussed by Palestinians (that isn’t just “No Israel” of course which is and always has been a minority position) still means more than just “Hey, people who we displaced, have some citizenship, with no guarantees of equal treatment and no guarantees of citizenship going forward”. We’d need something like, well, what the Chinese did and then abandoned: Actual ethnic sub-rule and protection.
So my proposal here, aside from being to do that now in a totally different time and context, is in addition to a two-state solution.
Chomsky and Achcar’s Perilous Power is a really good book to see actual left discussions on the Palestine situation. They do a deep dive on the various possibilities for state solutions, all of which need Palestinian autonomy and decisions, not just a one-size-fits-all offer by conquerors.
There are many things wrong with that.
Putin supports Hamas
Putin supports Islamic jihadist groups in general when they target Israel.
Islamic jihadists, including in Ohio, have expressed support for Putin.
4.I know Ukrainians who support Israel.
5.The Arabs refused citizenship, as I mentioned, because they believed their mullahs who said Allah would destroy Israel. That is absolutely nothing like what Putin would do in a situation where he would offer citizenship to Ukrainians and the Ukrainians wouldn’t refuse by saying “Allah will destroy you and all other non-Muslims”.
Mobs of Arabs have attacked Jews in Russia over the past year, with no consequences.
Russia, unlike Ukraine (which only has one major confirmed case of antisemitism from the early 20th century), has a deep history of antisemitism and disallowing Jews from going to Israel, even during periods of persecution in Russia.
None of that is relevant to my point.
Which means you totally failed to get my point.
On fascism:
All that is true, but it remains the case:
The only thing that isn’t inherently fascist is a rights-based democracy (by definition; the UN Charter on Human Rights is right about this). So the only use of force that is legitimate is (a) that which is delegated by the electorate (b) in respect of defending human rights.
Once you decide to resolve conflicts with violence that could have been resolved by peaceful process (such as persuasion, negotiation, and democracy), you’ve become a fascist. This does not include uses of force delegated by a rights-respecting electorate, because that has had its peaceful process, so once you are at that point, it is no longer the case that it “could have been resolved by peaceful process.” Hence it is ignoring the electorate and human rights that is fascist. “I can’t convince a rights-respecting electorate to beat up this guy, so I will” is thus fascism; whereas subduing a violent criminal resisting arrest is not.
The rest is not an issue of fascism but epistemology:
Remember, the problem here is epistemic. That the statement is assuming guilt before proof (that there is a victim) is where the process has already failed. Intentions are not so magical that they can fix this. It’s simply the wrong response to the problem. That does not mean the problem does not still exist.
Likewise with slogans:
I disagree that BLMT would make answering Blue Lives/White Lives harder. To the contrary, it is precisely what would disarm that rhetoric from the start. It would make defeating the nonsense easier. And this is, really, just a basic principle of communication science: you should never straw man yourself.
I’d be curious what you think are analogous “bad slogans” among conservatives (from a communications POV, not an epistemic one; i.e., measuring success by influence on undecideds and actual legislative impact, and not by whether the message was true or the goal good).
And on Israel:
A two-state solution (which probably would have to be at pre-1967 borders) is a reasonable proposal to consider, and is worth debating. I can only say for myself that after sufficient study of the facts and history (and pertinent laws and precedents in political science), I see no way it would change anything (much less any way it could be accomplished now, because Israel has deliberately, and criminally, nerfed that option for precisely this reason). Once again, empiricism nixes this option.
If Palestinians have no say in what Israel does, and Israelis have no stake in what happens to Palestinians, then Israel will keep doing what it does, and respond to the fringe criminals in Palestine by “going to war with and occupying Palestine” and we’re back where we started. I cannot see a two state solution working, even if we could produce it (and I see no way we can). Palestinians and Israelis must have a shared electoral stake in their mutual enterprise and must be continuously sitting at the same table of negotiation called a legislature, and must have equal rights with respect to each other. I cannot think of any pertinently analogous conflict that has ever been resolved any other way.
And on getting real liberals in office:
Yes, a central problem with liberal advance is the successful sloganeering of conservatives that has convinced them voting is pointless, with all their “both sides are the same” rhetoric, all their lies about liberals and the DNC, their race and gender baiting, and so on; e.g. conservatives don’t treat AOC the way they do merely because they are sexists and racists, but also because they know it convinces soft liberals who are just racist and sexist enough to believe them. This has been a very successful conservative communications plan, and it has disenfranchised millions of liberal voters who fall for it. Many of them are center-left. But a lot are, ironically, extreme left, and are letting conservative talking points convince them to insist on impossible purity standards before voting. Some of them are right here in this comments section, illustrating the problem.
Taking marginalized people seriously will thus not be enough. Though it is a necessary step, conservatives have already anticipated and disarmed it by winning the propaganda war against every mechanism for how to do that. And it is liberals and their epistemic failures that have allowed that to happen. Hence the fix has to start with mass epistemology.
If that’s fascism, then even self-defense against immediate murder is fascist. Yes, the law will have carved that out, but not as a delegative duty. I think that this is a wholly too-restrictive limit on force. It’s reasonable to say that this is the general rule on operationalized force as a tactic or political behavior , though even then the democracy in question also needs to be protecting minority rights sufficiently or else we’re just discussing mob rule.
The context of a lot of antifa action is historical. Fascist gangs in the post-WWI period, in places like Christie Pits, would show up violently to intimidate and harass. Antifascist resisters were responding to that context. Sometimes that looks in an individual instance like the initiation of force, but it’s part of what is functionally a gang war.
So I agree that if there are other alternatives available, that is fascist… but the very argument being made is that there aren’t, aside from the trivial “Let it happen until maybe we can deal with different instantiations of the problem later”. Just like the Black Panthers were absolutely justified to arm themselves and prepare to protect their towns until racist vigilantism and overt state violence stopped, so too is “If someone is an immediate threat to people in literal proximity, we will act in self-defense”.
Of course this doesn’t cover all “Punch Nazis” situations. I agree that a Nazi just existing shouldn’t be punched. And the left does themselves no favors by not articulating this. But I think the archetypal example remains Spencer:: An overt dangerous thug.
No, the statement “Always believe the victim” doesn’t actually, properly interpreted, say that there is no proof. It is actually precisely to say that the testimony of a person is proof . And, indeed, it is. Since most people do not falsely report crimes (intentionally or innocently), from a Bayesian perspective when someone claims they were victimized they usually are. (That is a much higher rate than the rate of them successfully identifying the perpetrator). The point was to recalibrate the epistemic failure of putting precisely zero weight on the word of a victim, especially victims who are making perfectly reasonable and plausible claims. Yes, testimony is weak proof, and so when evidence to the contrary (like, say, an incredibly good alibi, or indication of someone being a repeated false accuser, or malice against the accused along with a refusal to admit that it could be anyone else and combined with an indication that that malice is irrational and preceded the events) comes up, that should be noticed… but in the vast majority of cases, even public cases, that isn’t going to happen.
So I don’t know, besides “Believe women”, what slogan would communicate the seriousness of recalibrating the broken epistemology sexism already has us had and the likelihood that someone claiming to admit to a humiliating and traumatizing incident really did go through it. (And “Believe women” gets criticism too).
Of course, it’s also critical that people who offer the slogan also be able to educate on what is meant when someone is actually interested, and this is where I do see flaws. There needs to be explainers that go into detail, saying, “No one is saying every claim made by every person about a crime is true, we’re saying that if you would believe a man in that situation if they claimed they were robbed, you should believe a woman (or a man) who claimed they were raped”.
It’s almost certainly also necessary that people just have better training in general empirical reasoning, because then everyone would steelman “Always believe victims” as “Almost always believe victims” or “Always believe victims until contradictory evidence arises”. The problem is precisely that both bias and ignorance means that if you say those two things the dominant culture will not calibrate enough because they will think “She wore a skimpy dress” is good enough reason to think they weren’t raped.
On BLMT: I’m curious if there is data either way on this one. I can only answer from my experience, that appending the “Too” does nothing. BLM empirically got a lot of white folks paying attention to race as they did. And my experience has been that softer slogans don’t actually generate interest. Stronger slogans get people talking, and that’s step one of any messaging. Just like we can look at countless ads that are silly and cringeworthy but worked to create memorable brand associations.
On Israel: Your argument here is precisely a critical one made by the one-state folks. The thing is that under present circumstances I don’t see Israelis being willing to do that either. If we’re going to use the politics of the immediately achievable, then the Palestinians are just hosed, and indeed that’s been what has happened. And I don’t see any inherent reason to think, a priori, that getting Israel to stop using illegal force and interference with Palestine (just as it shouldn’t be with Lebanon and other neighbors) is actually any harder than getting them to integrate a group that they want to Bantustanize, especially given that Oslo legally pushes us the other way. But these are things that have to be worked out on the ground, and people outside the region should only have the standard “Whatever we can get done and that both sides can live with works”.
To be clear, I am not necessarily in favor of a two-state solution either. It has a sense of justice to it, but as an anarchist I lean toward federation as a solution, and it really does seem that would balance everyone’s needs the best here. The norm that every people need a nation-state to represent their interests is fundamentally unsustainable and dangerous.
Regarding liberals: Yes, but conservatives have also mined all the other paths to success with the same propaganda. Appealing directly to marginalized voters is the only long-term Democratic plan that works. There, the messaging is just “Hey, voting actually does stuff” rather than “Hey, I’m actually not a baby-eating cannibal Communist”, which is much easier to do.
It would require the Dems to do that, though, and commit to policies that improve things on the ground.
It is a delagated duty. It’s a legislated regulation of power, answerable to the electorate, pursuant to enacting a constitutional right (fifth amendment for individuals; second amendment for communities).
It is no different in that respect from citizen arrest: delegated by the electorate, and regulated by the electorate, in pursuance of human and civil rights.
And yes, in extreme scenarios (just another kind of life boat scenario), when electoral power has broken down or was already fascist, taking up arms is valid again (as I noted, that literally describes the American Revolution itself; but does not honestly describe, for example, the Whiskey Rebellion).
But that is not what was being debated. They were not asking, “if Nazis are beating people up, do we get to beat those guys back?”
Incorrect. With the phrase as-worded you have already declared them a victim, and thus have pre-judged guilt (and thus granted power to people to automatically convict someone unilaterally without investigation or trial).
That someone can give testimony to something does not prove a crime has occurred. It is evidence that can be presented for a crime. But the vast numbers of falsely accused and convicted people shows that testimony does not entail a crime, because human beings are not compelled by any law pf physics to tell the truth—and lying isn’t the only scientifically documented risk here; false memory and error are woefully common as well.
So it has to be “Do not assume they aren’t telling the truth,” not “Always assume they are telling the truth.” There is no other morally or epistemically correct approach.
Unfortunately that is an invalid test because it came too late. We lost the propaganda war by then, and no longer controlled the narrative. Trying to “fix” it after the fact will have no impact at all. As was demonstrated by the fact that even outright explaining what the slogan meant did nothing; because we lost the minds of the public (who are not responding rationally, which is why we need to be more careful with communications and not assume the public will respond to reason). If we had gone in from day one already trouncing their response in the slogan, the outcome would most certainly have been different. It’s a lot harder to hide a word right there in front of everyone, than an elaborate explanation in some silo somewhere.
Note that that cannot be an objection to any policy because it is true of all policies. It therefore cannot be a peculiar defect of any of them.
Moreover, that this is true is precisely my point. If Israel won’t do one-state, that already tells us they won’t “do” two-state, either. As in, maybe we can get them to recognize Palestine on paper, but nothing will change on the ground. The very same state of affairs needed to make a two state work will also make a one state work. Hence the very reason a one state won’t work is why a two state won’t either. It’s the same problem all the way down.
Indeed. And to illustrate this with an example: DNC messaging to rural America has been atrociously bad. Though that’s largely because it is centrist and real solutions there have to be genuinely liberal, but the DNC is too center to stand up and actually defend those policies to rural populations; but in part that itself is because they don’t understand them or their problems (or their delusions, either, which have been stoked by massive corporate propaganda machines), and they make no substantial effort to—but even that is because the DNC is centrist and not genuinely leftist.
Hence, what I argue, is that the problem is not as the DNC would tell you that “such messaging won’t work; we won’t get elected.” The problem is that the DNC isn’t even ideologically in a place to be willing to do what it takes to actually effectively run that messaging—and contrary to its false belief, if they did, it would work. It would take time (nothing flips overnight, especially when you have been so trounced in the race you have a lot of building and catch-up to do to even play even with conservatives here, much less get an inch over them). But it will work. And we have examples in other countries to prove it.
Hence you are right that the DNC needs to change. Which is my point as well.
I already showed evidence that “Palestinians” are not of 100% semitic background: they have something like 30% Greek DNA if not more! Plus, the name “Palestine” is Greek, not Hebrew or Arabic. The Philistines settled, as I mentioned, not just in Gaza but also what is now the “West Bank” and parts of Jordan. I emailed something like five faculty members at universities in the West Bank asking them for DNA evidence or archeological evidence to confirm a solid semitic background for the “Palestinian” people and they never replied. If I emailed a bunch of university professors in England asking them for evidence that Norman French DNA isn’t in every single Englishman today, I would have to assume at least one of them would point me to a study showing that not all English, today, have Norman French ancestry. Also, you do not know anything about this issue if you think for a moment that Arabs had nothing to do with the Nazis: the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem gave the HH salute and is photographed doing so! Arabs, for over a hundred years, have distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which you can still buy in every single Arab country, in addition to the West Bank and non-Arab Islamic countries like Iran! No Israeli or Jew ever wrote anything similar about Arabs or Iranians. Jordan illegally occupied East Jerusalem and prevented Jews from even walking in the general direction of the Wailing Wall until Israel FINALLY took it back in 1967 after about two thousand years. Hamas members and sympathizers in OHIO have been documented giving the Nazi salute, so your claim that Arabs have nothing to do with Nazism is manifestly false.
None of that racialist nonsense is relevant here, Bil.
Except it is relevant because unless you demonstrate what specifically a “Palestinian” is, there’s no ground to stand on for criticizing Israel. If “Palestinians” aren’t even real semites, then they have no apriori or ancestral claim to the land at all and are the equivalent of white settlers in North America. It’s not nonsense. I provided the link in the comments showing that the Philistines not only settled in modern day Gaza strip but also in modern “West Bank” and Jordan. They can’t even use a genuine semitic name for themselves, keeping the name the Roman Empire gave two thousand years ago to disenfranchise the actual indigenous inhabitants from the land, who weren’t even allowed in Jerusalem and who were physically prevented from having full access to the Western Wall until 1967 after defeating several Arab countries, despite Israel being smaller than the state of Colorado!
You evidently don’t understand what the word “relevant” means.
Rather a long read Richard.
I’m aligned with your principles, your philosophical mix of socialism, capitalism and democracy. BUT, the practice of ‘democracy’ in the US is a MILLION miles from being democratic.
If anyone with your ideas looked like they would win the Democratic nomination, then the DNC would stamp on them.
Biden doesn’t give a damn about inclusion, green issues, health care. It’s all just a show. It’s all corrupted by the military industrial complex. Politicians and generals going through revolving doors with arms companies, big pharma, big tech.
I already make your first point in the article. It’s literally the first section of the article after the preamble.
But your second point is an epistemic failure—the very one I take to task in the last half of my article.
It is simply not true that “Biden doesn’t give a damn about inclusion, green issues, health care.” He actually does. His solutions are center-left. And he is hamstrung by an obstructionist congress. Hence the outcomes.
By contrast, Biden has very few connections to “the military industrial complex.” Those people are in congress, and are mostly republican, and not a majority of democrats (metric, metric, metric).
There are democrats who are part of this problem. But Biden is neither a part of the problem or the solution. He’s simply a place-holder. His ambitions were to reduce the military budget, but he can’t politically—since he has to choose his battles and he can’t win this one, he conceded to Congress with maneuvering that would actually pull back on spending but allow him to claim he isn’t, so he can have it both ways, and appeal to centrist voters.
This is how reality works. And leftists who don’t recognize how reality works are a part of the problem. The only way to dial back military spending is to control congress, not the Presidency. And the only way to do that is to get more non-centrist liberals in, and more republicans and centrist liberals out. And that in turn requires mounting a better, smarter, better funded, and more pragmatic campaign to target primaries (not general elections) with smart and accurate messaging about the issue—for example, mollifying fears in the electorate driving support for military buildup while gaining support against corporate scams and waste and narrowing our military ambitions abroad to genuine humanitarian work and not playing security guard to oil companies and manufacturers.
Meanwhile, one must also remember a current factoid:
Biden is actually a wartime President. Putin is actually waging war against Europe, and China is threatening to wage war against the Pacific, and Yemenis are actually at war with international shipping, and the Israelis are at war with everyone. Some money needs to be spent.
These cannot be dismissed as mere security for corporations. International hunger is literally at issue, for example; as is a looming danger of World War—which conceding the Pacific would begin, as China would move into the vacuum, prompting war with its neighbors; and conceding to Putin would begin, because he has already signaled moves in preparation to invade other European nations, from Latvia to Poland.
Reality is hard.
You can’t win it with slogans and black-or-white fallacies.
The same falls out for “big pharma” and “big tech”: Biden did what he felt he could against them, given his limited means and center-left mandate; it is republicans who are endeavoring to stymie him.
Yes, we could do more, if we had a more left-wing legislature and less centrist President. So…let’s get on that. It won’t happen over night. It can only happen stepwise over many years.
If you can’t play the long game, you have already lost.
This has been said before but should be said here: Israel is nothing like an apartheid state: 20% of all Israelis are Arabs, mostly Muslim but some Arab Christians. An Arab Muslim sits on the highest court, the Knesset, which is literally unthinkable in an actual apartheid state like South Africa was. Almost every Islamic country in the world, by contrast, qualifies as an apartheid state given how non-Muslims are routinely murdered by the State. Even in “modern” UAE it is punishable by death to be either gay or to leave Islam. Likewise Malaysia, et al. Israel is the only country from Morrocco to Burma where it is not illegal to leave Islam, further, where leaving Islam will not result in a state execution. Jordan in fact illegally occupied East Jerusalem until 1967 when Jews FINALLY took back the Western Wall. They discovered hordes of Nazi propaganda left by the Jordanian army, including in classrooms.
“That was originally just a slogan for a one-state solution to Israeli apartheid. Which is, indeed, an entirely reasonable policy goal. It’s not radical. It has moral and geopolitical arguments in its favor. And it’s how the exact same situation has been solved before (such as in apartheid South Africa).”
South Africa could not have been more different than Israel in every single respect. For one thing, Israel does not prohibit Muslim men and women from sitting next to each other at university, unlike in the West Bank and Gaza. South Africa was a legitimate racialized society, unlike Israel where you have every shade of brown and white under the sun, including those of Latina and Chinese descent, as well as Desi and Iranian, in addition to Yemeni, et al. It is therefore IMPOSSIBLE to call modern Israel anything remotely like an apartheid state. I have challenged multiple critics of Israel to differentiate between a Greek-American woman and an Israeli woman via showing them a picture: none dared take up the challenge. Though to be fair, I am almost certain nobody in the West Bank or Gaza who self-identifies as a “Palestinian” has 100% Levantine ancestry rather than mixed ancestry from the Philistines who, contrary to popular belief, were not solely confined to the Gaza strip but extended into modern Jordan. No academic has successfully argued that those in the West Bank and Gaza lack any Greek or Philistine DNA. Israel also includes Samaritans and Druze, who, somehow, are never, in my line of vision, ever included in this conversation. CNN, academic journals, “peaceful rallies”, not one of them has of yet included a Samaritan or Druze on the speaker’s platform.
Finally, only 20% of Israelis have any Eastern European ancestry. The MYTH that Israeli Jews all somehow moved in droves to Israel in 1948 is even more absurd than the census in Luke.
An anecdote: I was at a bar a while back and was talking to a girl who claimed to be a first gen American from Gaza. She said that “Palestine” was mentioned in the Bible. She did not give chapter and verse but insisted it was in there. I told her that the name first appears in Herodotus and has no true semitic equivalent. She turned out to be a business student, not a world history major, so I can’t blame her too much. Also, I have to remind the reader: atheists are killed in cold blood in Gaza and the West Bank. These areas aren’t San Fransisco or NYC where one can openly disparage religion or the Koran and, depending on whose around, get away with it. Israel is the most anti-colonial state in world history. It is the only state to revive a “dead” language (as we know, Hebrew existed as a spoken language during the time of Jesus among the priests and, to an extent, the Essenes), reclaim the ancestral name of the land, etc. Even the Soviets supported Israel until 1967.
I also want to point out that white people in the UK and Ireland who chant “from the river…” are obviously ignorant of their countries’ histories of antisemitism. The blood libel in Europe originated in England and Ireland has almost as bad of a history of antisemitism (Denis Fahey, et al). I also want to point out, even though as far as I can see it did not come up, that the only reason the Nation of Islam and Black Hebrew Israelites oppose Israel is because they consider themselves the “real” semites. Israel, unlike the twenty-two Arab countries, is actually livable. There are no religious police beating people for not praying in public (as a friend from Medinah, Saudi Arabia, told me). There are no public lashings for drinking beer in public (which occurs in even non-Arab Islamic countries like Malaysia). In Pakistan, a boy was almost killed by both the state and, later, a mob for being accused of urinating near a mosque. Nothing like that has ever happened in modern Israel.
These are irrelevant metrics. What makes it apartheid is not inside Israel’s claimed borders. What makes it apartheid is its subjugation of its neighbors in continuous military occupation and blockade.
I think you are confusing criminal states with apartheid states. There are plenty of criminal regimes that are not apartheid regimes. Many have no Muslims in power (Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, China, Uganda, North Korea).
The UAE is not an apartheid state because it has no significant disenfranchised population. It is thus not in a conflict-state with a mass of its inhabitants. You can say that, hypothetically, if a million Christians suddenly teleported, houses and all, into the middle of the UAE, that then, maybe, the UAE would initiate a response to that that would become an apartheid state. But that hasn’t happened so the speculation is moot.
You have to operate with a functional epistemology. And that requires getting facts and distinctions empirically and logically correct. Instead, you are trading in fallacies (such as engaging an equivocation fallacy with the word “apartheid”) and falsehoods (ignoring the entire disenfranchised populace that makes Israel an apartheid state by every pertinent standard in political science).
You commit all the same errors of fact and logic in your bogus attempt to remove South Africa as a pertinent analogy, trading on irrelevant distinctions and ignoring relevant facts and even making false statements (like that anti-Israel lefties “are obviously ignorant of their countries’ histories of antisemitism” which is the most ridiculous false claim in your entire comment).
You have a broken epistemology. Fix it.
I want these anti-Israeli leftists to tell Iranian sympathizers to Israel, to their faces, that they, white anglo saxon college students in America and Ireland, know more about this issue than those who were told since they were practically infants that Allah wants them to kill Israelis and Israeli sympathizers. Actually, I don’t want that, since they already have apparently in Chicago and of course the Iranians who are Pro-Israel never get much airtime on American MSM. There is not a single Arab country (out of twenty-two) where non-Muslims, let alone Jews, are allowed to openly convert Muslims to their religion without any fear of retaliation from the State or mobs. A person in Tel Aviv can leave Judaism without fear of being beheaded or worse. Even UAE, supposedly a “modern” Arab country, persecutes apostates from Islam and LGBT tourists. South Africa did not have Africans on their highest court. That is a good reason to see the two countries as dissimilar.
Of course Tibetans, who actually have been under occupation, do not bomb the Olympics or school buses or threaten people overseas. The blood libel, in Europe, originated in England and it something clearly not acknowledged by white sympathizers of “Palestine” in the UK. The Irish also seem ignorant of decades long antisemitism that existed in their country, an antisemitism that also spread via the Irish diaspora in the US via Catholic priests like Charles Coughlin. Italians, at least, remember who Edgardo Mortara was and readily admit that Pius IX was an antisemite.
Sure, Dubai has a Hindu temple, but that is pretty much off limits for Arab Muslims unless there’s an award ceremony. I have done a lot of research on this. I found out that just about every single “anti-colonial” scholar in the West Bank was educated in the UK or some other western country. The ones educated in the West Bank who teach there seem to only teach engineering. That cannot be a coincidence. If every single professor in Arab countries and territories were a Randian atheist, maybe I would be less suspicious of their intentions when they criticize Israel. I have no Jewish ancestry so I am not defending Israel based on some thousand year ancestry on my part.
Given how the Jews were considered to be 90% of the communist leaders in the world, the very least leftists can do is support Israel.
“Yet we cannot deny the preponderant role that the Jews play in this movement, both among the Polish communists and among the Russians where-with the exception of Lenin-all the Bolshevik leaders are either Polish Jews or Lithuanian Jews.”-the future Pope Pius XI
I fail to see the relevance of any of this to anything we are discussing here, Bil.
Israel, like South Africa, retains and controls a state, including being able to take its money , that it claims is independent. The South Africans called them Bantustans. The only difference is that the world recognizes this Bantustan.
And over sixty-five laws discriminate against Palestinians in various ways. An Arab MP doesn’t change this. Maybe that’s not literally South Africa, though frankly I think “There are some Israeli Arabs” (which misunderstands who the discrimination is aimed at but also ignores their situation – you didn’t even try to say their situation was any good) and “There is one Arab Muslim on the Knesset” (which ignores the issue of citizenship, the very core problem at hand) doesn’t even rise to that level. There were blacks on the voter rolls in South Africa, after all.
I have always considered myself to be a centrist (composed of being socially liberal while fiscally conservative). This article has nudged the liberal part of me a little further to the left.
That’s my story as well.
Though my political swings went from ignoramus to Marxist to Objectivist to centrist to…where I am now. And even that has evolved as I gained more knowledge, hence I was center left when I wrote Sense and Goodness and have moved left on almost every issue since as my understanding of the facts (and deconstructing cultural rhetoric) has advanced.
My hindsight advice to everyone is: really commit to empiricism.
On any single issue, really fact-check both sides of the argument, really test the logic of their arguments (can they be steel-manned, or not?), really learn how things got the way they are and what we already empirically know about how they could be different (e.g. actually study places where they are different, and actually look for pertinent science, and so on).
My linked articles here show that pathway I underwent on many standard political issues, and how it was evidence that changed my mind—and how it is evidence that too many people don’t even think to look for before deciding what to believe.
Empiricism really is the universal acid here.
I have a question regarding transgender rights policies: Do you think there’s a too left position regarding these policies?
They are (alongside gender fluidity in general and abortion) the main target of conservatives accusations of liberals going far left in the last decade. The most contentious points are usually medical interventions (hormonal and surgical) on minors, trans women participation in sports and their usage of traditionally separate women facilities especially bathrooms and changing rooms.
Note to other readers: I expect that this article will receive a lot of comments so just to spare myself the liberal attacks I want to make it clear that I am a leftist myself (and actually quite left socially but only center left fiscally) so I am not transphobic.
So the issue with all of these is that the evidence is actually at worst wholly lacking for the right and typically vastly on the side of the left.
The sports one is the most complex one so it’s best to start there. It’s important to say that sports are going to have different standards than the rest of society. However, participation in sports is a human right, and so the bar must be high. With weight classes, the evidence is good enough to justify discriminating by size and weight, which is something that people can only somewhat control. But with trans people in sports, in many places they’ve been allowed and there has not been a decisive takeover by trans folks. And you’ll notice that the right almost never offers evidence: They just state it as obvious. So that one is a simple matter. “Find some distinct evidence that trans women actually have some measurable performance advantage that actually translates to an unfair level of success and then we’ll talk”. And, of course, as everyone points out, there are cis-gender women who are hormonally abnormal, so how do you discriminate against trans women fairly without discriminating against them? I recommend looking at HJ Hornbeck’s analysis on this front, I think he’s pretty decisive that the jury is at best still out.
The bathroom one is just so childish. You have no inherent right to clutch your pearls. Making bathrooms gender neutral is a simple and easy change. You should never be “checking out” someone in the bathroom. And public bathrooms just aren’t that common of places for assault anyways, and when they are it’s cisgender men. Again, the data as to who is at risk here is really clear, and again, the right just doesn’t have any to contradict it. They can barely even find actual anecdotes. In particular, what prevents a man from wearing a dress and going into a women’s bathroom now? Bathrooms do not have magical forcefields. If they’re going into there to commit a crime, whatever additional penalties won’t deter them… and those penalties barely exist now, being on a state-by-state basis! The right had to “discover” this problem even though it would have been happening before: Trans people didn’t spring into being in 2016.
Medical interventions on minors is sort of in the middle ground. The evidence for it is extremely good. But people do not necessarily automatically adopt an evidence-based worldview. They need to have the evidence and the reason for it explained. The fact is that children have been allowed since at least the 1990s in the US and for similar periods of time elsewhere to make some of their own medical decisions. Again, this was not a catastrophic problem until trans kids started to gain attention. And when you listen to what the wrong puberty does to people, like when Abigail Thorne discusses it, it’s quite clear. So the conservative position is based on just not caring to just go and listen to trans people. It’s another version of a conservative belief in the absolute authority of the parent…, well, unless the parent wants to take their kids to a drag show, or engage in gender-affirming care, or let their kid be gay, or anything else they don’t like.
The medical guidelines are already there, but the medical establishment should make a show of listening to transphobes and parents with concerns, and then issue guidelines.
Essentially, on all of these issues, liberals and leftists are the only people bothering to look at the evidence.
Frederic, Riley Gaines is all the “anecdote” or “hard evidence” you need for the sports issue. Thomas was like bottom of the male division before switching to the female division. I’ve yet to see a transman get top place in the male division yet transwomen dominate the female division.
BRUV, go to a swim meet or MMA contest where a transwoman competes against a biological woman and see the difference. You are not making “liberals and leftists” look good here. If anything, it is the polar opposite. I don’t see Riley Gaines sending rape and death threats to random transwomen and “allies” all across the country.
Bil, calling people condescendingly “BRUV” in all caps is not civil discourse.
I’m starting to see the true narrative now. It’s just as I predicted: you are the cause of all the disapprobation against you that you have complained about. You have thus committed yourself to an ideology of complaining rather than an ideology of learning. Please fix that. Stat.
Case in point:
Logical failure: Where is the “decisive takeover by trans folks” in either MMA or swimming? You claim you rebutted that, but none of your claims are even capable of rebutting that statement, the only pertinent statement Fred made on that point.
Empirical failure: There are only two transwomen in MMA (which is too small a sample size to draw statistically reliable conclusions from), and neither has a stellar record of success (McLaughlin is 1-0-0; Fox is only 5-1; Cyborg, a ciswoman, is 27-2). And in swimming, no transwoman to date has broken any record times earned by ciswomen.
You’ll need more data than that to make a case.
That said, empirically examining this question is a real thing in these sports—and based on those found facts, there are medical standards transwomen must meet to compete, which takes into account any risk of unfair advantage. There is debate around the exact parameters of these conditions (e.g. whether a competitor must prove absence of male hormones for 1, 2, or 3 years), but that debate remains empirical. It will not be decided by armchair amateurs like you. It will be decided by informed scientific experts. As it should.
And that’s only relevant for transwomen prevented from transitioning at puberty anyway. Transwomen who transition at puberty (and thus never develop under a male hormone regime) have entirely female-sexed bodies in every respect relevant to sports (they are in fact medically and developmentally identical to natural AIS ciswomen, who have the same XY chromosomes as typical cismen; see my discussion in Attack of the Lycanthropic Transsexuals!).
For further discussion, see my extended comment years ago below my article Some Philosophy of Homo- and Transphobia, Supreme Court Style (already cited here).
This subject is best moved to there anyway.
Not going to respond point by point here. But the “evidence” for medical transitioning minors definitely isn’t strong. Cass Report (UK health service) surveyed the evidence and found it so lacking that the NHS now no longer covers any kind of medical transitioning of minors. If anything, Western Europe seems to be moving toward a more skeptical view regarding so called gender-affirming care.
I also generally think the left’s epistemology on the trans issue is really bad. Their ever changing definitions of gender, sex, man, woman, all seem really tortured and incoherent. Many activists don’t appear to be able to agree among themselves on what the terms mean. Some groups think gender is purely self-ID; some think it’s a determination made by the 3rd party observer; some think sex is immutable; others think it’s a spectrum. Some think sex and gender are discrete; others think they’re the same thing and fluid. Who the hell knows. It’s not clear what empirical methodology they’re employing to reach descriptions for any of these terms. As a lay observer, the field seems completely impenetrable to me.
Re bathrooms. People don’t want carte blanche open spaces where adult biological males can urinate and defecate next to girls and women. It’s largely a safety issue. Maybe there isn’t hard data to back this up, but I don’t think most people will get past the optics. The vast majority of sex assaults are male on female. Women fought for their own spaces and many are understandably upset at changing that dynamic, especially when all a man has to do now is self ID as a woman to gain access to such spaces.
Re sports. Haven’t looked at it closely. But a 5’6 160 biological male who’s gone through puberty is definitely stronger than a 5’6 160 female assuming similar age and training. Weight classes don’t account for this. Leftists are suddenly anti-science on this point too apparently (testosterone, skeletal frame, grip strength suddenly don’t matter?)
David, you are committing the error my article warned against: you are looking for amateurs not understanding things, and then inferring all liberals, even policy experts and formal organizations, are the same as internet randos. That’s simply not the case. Maybe randos on the internet are not well informed or confused. But everyone who knows what they are talking about—and has any role in actually producing trans-forward policy—are well-informed and not confused.
You also seem to be mistaking “complexity” for confusion. That someone explains how complex an issue is, is not them “being confused.” It’s you being confused—by complexity. You seem very uninformed here, and even committed to remaining uninformed (“Who the hell knows”? There are quite a lot of people who know, frankly; you should try reading them instead—the actual people who know what they are talking about).
You also aren’t checking your facts well.
For example, you have not correctly described even the Cass Report. It’s conclusion was “there should be a ‘clear clinical rationale’ for the prescription of hormone therapy under 18,” not that it should be abandoned or not supported. And we all agree with that assessment. Indeed, it found that this is better than using the hormone-blockers-until-adult approach, i.e. that should not be resorted to unless there is a ‘clear clinical rationale’ for doing that instead of simply providing the desired hormone therapy. Exactly as I argued here in other comments.
As another example, there is no empirically documented safety issue regarding bathroom policy. For example, it has no observed impact on assault rates. That is largely because bathrooms don’t have force fields preventing criminals from entering them even when it is illegal to—the whole point of a criminal is that they don’t follow the law, so “outlawing” their entering bathrooms to prevent assaults will have no statistically measurable effect on the rate of assaults. And policy must follow from the evidence, not false beliefs and mythologies.
As yet another example: your reasoning about sports is armchair even by your own admission; evincing a really terrible epistemology. The issue requires a more serious evidence-based approach. The results of which are complicated (not “confused”) and don’t align quite with what you think. See my previous remark and the linked discussions therein.
Bil:
By that “reasoning”, we should ban all athletes with scoliosis because Usain Bolt may have used it for advantage. The very point of anecdotal evidence is that it isn’t. One data point tells you nothing. And Gaines is an example of someone who engages in pearl-clutching, including thinking that the “Last Supper” thing at the Olympics was that rather than a reference to a painting of Dionysus, so what you’ve identified is a cis woman with a perfectly successful career. You actually identified no examples of a single trans woman dominating a field. And there are dominant athletes, Bill. Jon Jones and Mighty Mouse are two that immediately come to mind. (And one of them was clearly frequently on some kind of enhancement drugs as well as conventional drugs!) The fact that you tried this weak nonsense tells me how firmly correct I was. You couldn’t even clear a hurdle that would still fail to make the point.
So let’s try an actual example, shall we? Fallon Fox freaked people out. But she’s 5-1 (her defeat being to the perfectly cis-gender Ashlee Evans-Smith, herself hardly a top-level fighter) and none of those are in the UFC. She isn’t even undefeated in top level competition. Her armbar against Heather Bassett was in the second round. She isn’t just destroying every woman in the division in twenty seconds. Again, Jon Jones makes these records look laughable, as did Rousey in her prime.
The fact that this is what convinces people tells me what I need to know about the merits of the position. It has none. You listened to the whining of a disingenuous conservative and your own feelings over trans people. It’s shameful.
Thanks for your reply Frederic, I always find your comments valuable and thought provoking.
I am currently very busy (with work and planning my semi-annual visit to my parents in Egypt in August) but as soon as I can I will read/watch the material you and Dr. Carrier provided and will probably follow up with some questions.
Bil and David (and other future right-wing leaning people on this issue): I will refrain from engaging with your comments here.
It’s not that I don’t think that they are relevant, it’s just that I hate engaging in debates especially online ones and when I ask questions here I am usually trying to clarify some issues for myself and benefit from Dr. Carrier’s (and other readers’) knowledge.
I am well aware of the conservative arguments on this issue as I was a fundamentalist Muslim less than two years ago so I won’t discuss these arguments further. You can of course engage with Dr. Carrier and Frederic if they want to.
What exactly is “left socially”? I know plenty of commies who are pro 2nd amendment and homosexuality was illegal in the USSR. The very first feminists were pro-life and Sanger was pro-eugenics yet she is hailed by some on the “Left” as a beacon of liberalism.
Note that left/right means liberal/conservative, and a conservative policy is be definition conservative, i.e. not progressive.
Hence the Soviet Union was not left socially. It was actually quite conservative.
And as my article pointed out, it is not the case that everyone is “either” a full conservative or a full liberal; lots of people trend center, and thus mix conservative and liberal positions; and not every leftist shares every leftist viewpoint. I literally said this, multiple times, in the article you are commenting on. I warned you, multiple times, against the fallacy you just here repeated.
So please abandon your broken epistemology and get back with logical reality. Please. Sincerely.
Bill:
I might as well call you a monarchist because that’s what huge swaths of conservatives were and are.
You cannot respond to an intellectual movement today by exemplars from a century ago or in a radically different context.
Everything you’ve offered here is a bad faith response that doesn’t deal with the current cleavages we have.
Bil:
I mean “quite left socially” as that term would be understood today in 2024, that’s very liberal and progressive on social issues. In the US context that you use I think the closest politicians I would identify with on these issues are probably Bernie Sanders and AOC for example.
Regarding your specific examples: I want very strict gun control and I am grateful that the UK where I live enforce that (I had to search Google for what the 2nd amendment is). I believe that homosexuals should have completely equal rights with heterosexuals including legal marriage, reproductive options, adoption ..etc.
I don’t care for the USSR and never viewed it as left socially.
I am pro-choice and support women’s right to freely have an abortion in the first and second trimesters and for medical reasons only in the third trimester (I also support access to birth control and reproductive technologies like IVF ..etc.).
I didn’t know who Sanger is (as the only Sanger I am familiar with is the legendary British biochemist Frederick Sanger) and had to search to know that you mean Margaret Sanger who I haven’t heard of before but in case I need to explicitly say that I totally oppose eugenics : )
I also support ethical non-monogamous relationships including open marriages and polyamorous relationships for example. I have no problem with pornography or sex work as long as they are practiced safely and regulated to provide labor rights and prevent the abuse of the people working in these industries.
I deliberately provided this long list of examples to show that “quite left socially” when said in 2024 is easily understood by anyone, you could have easily guessed my position on each one of these points and on other points as well.
I won’t debate or defend these positions here.
I asked about transgender rights here because it’s nearly the only issue (together with the specifics of gender identity and gender fluidity in general) that I am not sure of my position on. However, even on these I totally stand for transgender people rights and what I care for is for them to have the best life possible and that we don’t tragically lose them to suicide as teens or young adults so I want to form an opinion on how to best accomplish that while minimizing unnecessary health side effects and balancing that with women’s rights. I don’t care what some set of mythology, Abrahamic or non-Abrahamic, think about them.
As you might start to notice, Islam, it is almost impossible to learn anything from a conservative because they have divorced themselves so far from scientific reality that all you get from them is mythology and non sequiturs, the architecture of a delusional worldview.
This is, as I noted in my article, one of the things that led me to be so left-wing now: my realizing over the last three decades (and especially the last two) that conservatives are delusional, their worldview divorced from reality reflecting only dim shadows of it, and they can’t do logic.
Although I can find liberals who are the same, unlike conservatives I can find many liberals who are neither. Which is how it becomes clear that reality leans left—pretty far left by American standards.
I’ll add the qualifier that there are some exceptions among conservatives, but they are exceedingly hard to find, and rarely spend much time on the internet (as examples, Fred mentioned Brooks; I’ve mentioned Kagan).
Good question.
For other readers who need background, see the article I linked to here already, Some Philosophy of Homo- and Transphobia, Supreme Court Style, where a conservative analysis actually correctly centers left-wing policy.
But as to your queries:
Always apply the same principles.
First, epistemology.
We have to get the facts right (don’t just “believe” claims made by either side). And then from those actual particulars, only then build abstractions and general principles (from the particulars now established empirically and not just someone’s mythology).
Second, seriously ask which policy then protects, and which subverts, human rights.
So, for example…
First, this conflates two very different things (a rhetorical trick we need to arm ourselves against): “hormonal and surgical.”
So decouple them and treat them separately.
Surgical Intervention:
There aren’t really many real suggestions of “surgical” interventions on transgender minors. And fringe cases don’t make a trend.
Society is already hypocritical about this anyway. Circumcision is routinely performed on literal babies; genital surgery fixing an assigned gender on a baby’s ambiguous genitalia is the norm; cosmetic surgery and body alteration in minors (including piercing, tattoos, cosmetic dental and breast surgery) has been practiced for decades—as long as it is in line with cultural norms, e.g. there are more cisgirls getting breast implants than transgirls. And then there is legitimate reconstructive surgery on minors—correcting disabilities, and cosmetic mutations and injuries and the effects of diseases, e.g. breast implants after a cisgirl’s rare case of breast cancer caused the necessary surgical removal of her natural breasts.
So, society can’t even consistently answer the question of whether minors should be surgically altered. It needs to get its shit together on that before it can claim to have advice or policy for transgirls or transboys.
But for myself, I think we infantilize children too much, to the detriment of their rights as human beings. Competence is not a magical switch that goes “ding” on a specific birthday. Whether a teen is competent to make the same decisions for themselves as any other autonomous person is something that has to be assessed case-by-case, and should be respected when found.
However, the rest falls to the same medical ethical standard as applies to adults, which is not to just willy nilly do any surgery anyone who walks in asks for (except for piercings and tattoos, I guess). There is a careful process that has been well developed and tested. It should apply. And one of its tenets is to examine opportunity cost—why can’t they wait a couple years? Usually there is no good answer to that.
So I think the end result of any sound legal process will simply be almost no relevant surgeries will happen in minors. Which corresponds to reality already. But perhaps legislation could make all of this explicit (rather than simply “banning” things that are arbitrarily chosen by cultural assumptions, legalize everything on the same standard, which will be sufficiently limiting to thwart the usual “bad case” scenarios fearmongers go on about).
Hormonal Intervention:
Unlike surgery, this has minimal costs. If temporary it does no major harm, and is reversible. So why be against it?
The most common “standard of care” now for gender dysphoria in minors is to suspend puberty with blockers until the state “allows” them to decide because they are “officially” adults. There is no valid basis for prohibiting puberty blocking in teens who ask for it of their own considered free will. And once they are adults, the state can fuck off, and they can decide which puberty to initiate for themselves, female or male.
That’s an okay standard. But it is a standard that is quite arbitrary; not at all empirical. Hence I think youth who test as competent should not have to “wait” this way merely to meet an arbitrarily legislated cultural standard (though they could choose to wait this way because they are undecided).
This would actually solve other cascading conflicts, e.g. all the handwringing over transwomen in sports is entirely the result of not controlling puberty development—if a transgirl was allowed to never go through male puberty, and initiate female puberty instead, her physiology would be entirely female sexed in every way pertinent to sports. The issue with “unfair advantage,” when it exists, is because of certain irreversibles of male puberty and subsequent hormonal development. So it is hypocritical of transphobes to complain about that while simultaneously opposing its solution.
Meanwhile, “bathrooms and changing rooms” are trivial issues. Those are actually increasingly unisex already (you will rarely find a “mass changing room” in a clothing store these days; they aim for individual privacy, and that should be the metric going forward; likewise genderless bathrooms). But even when they aren’t, any standard regarding them has to be consistent, and it simply is never the case (and has never been the case) that anyone’s genitals have to be inspected before entering a bathroom (and they aren’t actually bandied about that much in a public bathroom anyway—privacy stalls are already the universal norm).
Meanwhile, you might see a penis in a mass female changing room, but that has long been fine before (actors and dancers have been changing in front of each other for centuries without crisis), so why fret about it now? If there were a sincere concern about this, the rule could be changed from gender to genitalia, and rooms segregated by presence or absence of a penis, regardless of gender. But I think the reason no one suggests that is that it exposes how irrational their concerns really are, and would undermine their actual goal—which is to compel conformity on the populace to their own preferred cultural norm, rather than allowing human beings to be free of arbitrary norms. The same thing is solved by retrofitting all changing rooms into unisex privacy stalls—a simple solution also avoided for the same reasons. Which tends to reveal the insincerity of most transphobic panic propaganda.
Thanks for the reply Dr. Carrier.
I am currently very busy (with work and planning my semi-annual visit to my parents in Egypt in August) but as soon as I can I will read the material you directed me to or mentioned in this thread and will probably follow up with some questions.
Please feel free to direct me to ask my follow-up questions on another article if you think they are off topic here.
Richard, I always greatly appreciate the lucidity, intelligence, information and logic in your arguments, and you have excelled yourself with this post. Key themes that it raises for my views are around the ethics of outcome and principle, and the need for an incremental evolutionary approach to politics.
Your approach is highly outcome-focused or consequentialist, setting evidence and logic as supreme moral principles. The contrasting more conservative ethical stance, known as deontology, argues for following principles as duty, because the difficulty and risk of properly predicting consequences is so great that it is better to apply consistent principles than to flexibly assess each situation on its merits.
I particularly liked your analysis of the failure of extremism to apply an incremental approach. My main interest is climate policy. The problem here is that carbon policy action with any temperature effect would be extreme, and therefore lacks incremental realism. This is a key justification for sunlight reflection methods as an incremental policy tool to cool the Earth and prevent dangerous climate tipping points, seeking to gradually evolve our current economy to a sustainable path, rather than insisting on the revolutionary scope of action that would be needed to achieve effective cooling through greenhouse gas emission reduction and removal. For example, the United Nations has called for a near halving of world emissions by 2030, an absurdly unrealistic suggestion at a time when the increase of the CO2 level is still accelerating. Stringent realism is absolutely essential in climate policy given the existential stakes. We need actions that can nudge our complex systems in adaptive directions, something that needs much more analysis of the likely consequences of different strategies.
I don’t actually see much deontology in conservative politics. It is all consequentialist—albeit, based on mythology rather than reality (so the consequences it claims for policies tend to be false), but consequentialist all the same.
Whereas liberals might even be more often deontological. You can find plenty of liberals who think violating human rights is just wrong, regardless of outcome. This was most evident in the torture debate from the Bush era. It was the conservatives arguing consequentialism (“But what if a nuclear bomb is about to go off!?”); the liberals arguing deontology (“We cannot corrupt the soul of our nation!”).
You can easily find the converse, but when the conservatives take the deontological position in this debate, it’s the liberal position. And when the liberal takes the consequentialist position, it’s the same position, only based on factual reality rather than mythology (there is no nuclear bomb about to go off; torture sucks as a method; it makes our global political situation worse; etc.).
So the difference, really, remains as I identified: epistemological.
The deontology/consequentialist divide tracks nothing on the political spectrum here so far as I can tell (which I suspect is because those are actually the same thing in the end).
That’s not true.
See my discussion in We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming.
I agree that conservatives are rarely deontological. I encounter some, but they’re pretty much dinosaurs in today’s fascist climate.
What causes the confusion is that conservatives routinely espouse directly contradictory maxims at full volume and wax poetical about how much they believe those values without ever getting specific. “Small government!” and “Law and order!” are both yelled equally loudly. But this is because of the sloppy epistemology that lets them believe mutually exclusive things simultaneously (which if corrected alone would defang huge swaths of conservativism and make many conservatives at most center-right) and because they need to delude themselves that they do not have a fundamentally bigoted, non-universalist worldview. They actually believe in “small government” for me and “law and order” for thee. But hypocrisy and open embrace of moral rules that are wholly subordinate to metaphysical human hierarchies aren’t popular anymore because they’re so overtly fascist.
Conservatives with actual principles that resemble deontological ethics, guys like David Brooks, are on NPR these days because the Republican Party has no home for them.
Good point. I haven’t deep dived this, but it may be that the conservatives I find to be the most trustworthy citizens are the deontological ones, yet they are the ones almost gone (it is a literal struggle to find one). It used to be that it was hard to find them because so many conservatives pretended to be deontological but never were in practice; but now they don’t even pretend. They are openly (even brazenly) consequentialist now, to the point that deontological liberals are easier to find.
Let’s keep this simple. Conservatism and liberalism are both frameworks. They’re just the right and left wings of classical liberalism. Modern liberalism is still built on a lot of the same assumptions as classical liberalism, which are a bunch of abstractions! Liberalism is based on “liberty,” which is an abstract concept. Need, on the other hand, can always be concretized! You have a purpose: to keep yourself alive! Liberalism expects us to keep ourselves alive by becoming liberal subjects! In practice, this has translated to “kill the Indian, save the man”! In practice, it translates to money = freedom and freedom = money. It flattens all the dimensions of freedom by doing that! In practice, I have less freedom because I have less money! But that’s only because of the fact that money has been identified with freedom and the entire sphere of human interaction has been flattened into revolving around money-transactions! Relations between humans have been abstracted to relations between things! In practice, I have less freedom because I’d rather be an “Indian” than a “man”! In practice, that’s less freedom! The ultimate reality is human NEED! No one ever NEEDED to be a Nazi! They became Nazis because their phobia of difference overtook their trust of their fellow human being! People aren’t after abstract power! There are two kinds of power! Power over others and power from within! The latter is how I rode my bicycle to San Antonio from Austin! The former is what my uncle used when he drove me back in his land barge in which he uses his fog horn as a turn signal while breaking the speed limit on the freeway. But according to him, this is a “republic, not a democracy” because we live under “rule of law, not mob rule.” That’s just another abstraction! He certainly doesn’t care too much about freeway laws! My uncle doesn’t need to be a Republican! What he needs to do is figure out what he needs! I figured out what I needed when I was in bed for three months after my hip injury! And what I needed more than anything else was to love myself! I hadn’t truly been doing that before! The Nazis can’t be distinguished by the “heckler’s veto”! I certainly wasn’t “more of a Nazi” than the comic at the open mic 5 years ago when he was saying that “people with a Y-chromosome shouldn’t use the women’s restroom” or whatever, and I threw my empty beer cans in his direction, but people still think I’m more of a “Nazi” (or whatever) than him for that… Nazis can be distinguished by whether they insist I be a “man” instead of an “Indian” and are willing to kill me if I don’t comply!
Dr. Carrier! The gnostics were right that there is a “Demiurge”! The Demiurge is the zero sum logic that supplanted the older positive sum logic when the Patriarchy did their hostile takeover of the matriarchy some 10kya! The Patriarchy is what invented this fucked up “real” world of social constructs! But social constructs aren’t more real than human need! And when they get in the way of fulfilling human need, like when they’re designed to exploit labor for profit, for example, it’s time to replace them! The Patriarchal Demiurge is what created the exploitation of labor out of the division of labor! It’s what created the absolute rule model of leadership out of the “first among equals” or “team captain” models of leadership! It’s what created hierarchy from difference! It’s not nature! We need to stop treating it like nature! I can’t “convince” a Nazi that I need to be an “Indian” instead of a “man” by arguing points with them! I shouldn’t HAVE TO convince anyone of that! The fact that I’m expected to just means that the Nazis are in charge and they’re just waiting for the next in their infinite series of final solutions! Getting rid of Nazis, on the other hand, isn’t about killing them! It’s about getting them to see the positive sum logic! You can’t do that by arguing from their framework! But leaving their framework is what triggers the phobia response! But a lot of people have phobias about leaving their frameworks! How far into this comment did you get before you felt the phobia from my not sticking to your lib framework? 😛
How can I get you to see the positive sum logic? How many potential Einsteins have to die in fields and sweatshops? Those aren’t rhetorical questions! We can’t lib our way out of the fields and sweatshops thing. We only have those fields and sweatshops (organized in that way) because products are made for exchange instead of need! For example, we can figure out how much chocolate we “need” when we truly figure out how much suffering a person has to go through to produce it! Then we can figure out how comfortable we’d be paying the real price! This currently seems far outside the bounds of the Overton window! That means, whether we want to be or not, we are, in effect, doing King Leopold shit (it’s like Hitler shit, but with Africans)! This doesn’t seem like something the current frameworks are prepared to deal with! Could it be time for a new framework, perhaps? One that’s not so outdated, perhaps?
Mario:
I think it’s pretty silly to try to reduce all politics to immediate pressing survival need. By that reasoning, even pretty poor people in the West should have no politics. In practice, people “need” not just to not be literally immediately starving or homeless but also to have psychological environments that aren’t toxic or destructive, environments which are physically safe for them in the long term, social systems which let them grow and express themselves, etc.
So, no, no one “needed” to be a Nazi, but it’s not just fear and bigotry that leads that way. It’s a sense of one’s self-interest that we can see is irrational but that they quite sincerely believe in. This is why Du Bois was right about the “psychological wages of whiteness”. Tim Wise I think has compellingly argued that whites perceive a different kind of self-interest than class self-interest.
This is why Nazi movements tend to emerge during periods of perceived crisis and humiliation. Even though individual fascists may often be relatively well off (though there are also always working class fascists), like with Trumpist fascism, the underlying reality of an unhealthy economy or state produces a reaction that, through the lens of the fascist, is a solution to the problem. The Marxist is right that they are mistaken about it and even that it’s a form of “false consciousness”, but it’s not a form you can just wag your finger at and correct by saying “This is not in your self-interest!”
In particular, the left in America is in the unfortunate position of asking whites, men, etc. to identify with a loser identity, their class identity, rather than a winner identity. But this is very hard to do, and a lot of people won’t voluntarily do it. Because, again, politics is empirically about a lot more than just immediate pressing need.
Agreed that you have to change the mind of some Nazis, but really the best move is to make sure they can’t win in the first place, because in reality not everyone in a society will ever be a Nazi, not least because some of them will see that they will be on the chopping block. In any case, you can actually physically beat and disempower them as a temporary solution. Conservatives and reactionaries in general don’t actually need to be fully convinced to be leftists. You can do a ton just by shifting the Overton window by shifting the facts on the ground and making their ideas impossible. Social Security has survived despite huge anti-welfare attitudes in America because, once properly implemented, changing it became unthinkable. The Civil Rights Act is similarly not in any immediate danger.
And the problem with “positive sum logic” is that it requires that I actually give a shit that I win and that you do. But the very fascist poison is that they don’t. They will burn their country down just to make sure Jews and degenerates die in the flame. You have to change their fundamentally broken emotional framework, not just their minds. I have had countless Nazis admit to me that I am probably right that they would be materially better off not being a Nazi, and they claim it as a point of pride: They are sacrificing for the great white race.
I agree with most of what you’re saying. Yes, the reason Nazis hate the world is that, subconsciously, they hate themselves! Jung wasn’t right about everything, but he was right that the subconscious is as deep as the ocean! The good news is that, when you do finally learn to recognize it, when you take a million steps back, the positive sum logic becomes brighter than the sun! It becomes undeniable! That’s when the fascists start killing the “leftists”! I’ll I’m saying is let’s get ready for the series of Kobayashi Maru tests coming down the pike! My point about needs was that when life scrapes you down to the bone, that’s when you find out what you really need! I don’t care quite so much how my needs are met. The point is always that one of these “needs” will always be my own personal autonomy! Another point is that when you find out what it really takes to meet your own needs, that’s when you find out what your “politics” really are! Ultimately, power from within is stronger than power over others, because “might makes right” is a law of man, but cooperation and the indomitable human spirit are “forces” of nature! We just have to recognize the tools we already have to access these “forces”!
That isn’t in my article.
The reason Nazis hate the world is because they have false beliefs about it owing to a broken epistemology that prioritizes emotion over reason.
And their resulting delusional system of belief is actually self-engineered to avoid admitting that they have become the very things they loathe, because they conceal that reality beneath a whole foundation of false beliefs about themselves and the world.
As for autonomy being a need, yes, but it is a conditional need—absolute autonomy is lawless autocracy. Fascists, for example, are characterized by claiming more autonomy than they need or even ought to have, an autonomy even over the law and reason and the human rights of others.
Any cooperative society must surrender some degree of autonomy for its members. Which is the purpose of negotiation, democracy, and rights-based limits thereon.
I don’t know if it’s literally self-hate, though it is remarkable how little they do seem to think of themselves and you definitely see it in a lot of them. I realized that when I interacted with one Nazi for a long time who refused to abandon discrimination and resented affirmative action. I pointed out to him that, if he really thought he was the master race, he wouldn’t be afraid to compete fairly.
I think it’s rooted in deep fear and insecurity. (Check out Chill Goblin’s video on H.P. Lovecraft and the reactionary mind). They need crutches. The hate, the need to rig the game, the need to have an enemy to attack… it all comes from there.
People deny undeniable things all the time, Mario. They deny that Biden won the election, that the sun isn’t a hologram, and that the Earth is flat. Obviously you’re right that the Nazi detects on some level that they’re incorrect, but they attack everyone regardless of correctness or actual danger to them.
Agreed that politics is heavily about autonomy but, again, just like for us socialists that manifests in a want for a highly social and collaborative form of autonomy, for the fascist it manifests in a perverse nationalism.
And agreed on the power within, though, to paraphrase Stalin, how many columns does it have? Sometimes you do need some measure of physical or political power as well.
Ok, well, look. It took me getting into college and meeting openly gay people to realize that homophobia was, at best, silly (and at worst, you know, Nazi shit), and then, later, I realized that I had always known gay people! Some of the kids I went to school with later came out as gay! And I knew that it wasn’t like anything had “turned them gay,” that’s just who they always were! Just like nothing “turned me” autistic! See, that takes effort! It takes getting to know people! But I don’t think it’s as hard as everyone makes it out to be! I know my arc has a form a little like the plot of “American History X,” and you might think that story might not scale, but I think my story can scale, because, when I was a kid, no one understood autism! Everyone just thought I was weird! Sorta like they thought gay people were “crazy” up until, like, the 70s! The ideological descendents of classical liberalism still contain the phobia of the “Indian”! If liberals (and conservatives) could get rid of this phobia (through exposure therapy — is there any other way?), then I feel like they could get rid of the phobias concerning, you know, queer, autistic, Muslim (etc) people AND their phobias concerning queerness, autism, Islam (etc), BUT the phobia underlying the classical liberal phobia of the “Indian” is really the phobia of nature and of women. Look at the garden of eden story. “God” is just a reimagining of the first dude who drew imaginary lines on mother earth to keep his fellow humans out and enslaved those fellow humans to till his soil! That’s why the gnostics identified him with the Demiurge! “God” didn’t plant the garden of eden! Nature did! “God” kicked the humans out of the garden and blamed it on women (Eve) and nature (the serpent)! That’s what the patriarchy does! The Patriarchy takes credit for everything mother earth gave us, and then blames mother earth for everything she “takes” from us (but she doesn’t “take” like the patriarchy does! She only takes BACK!) by emphasizing the Hobbesian rather than the Rousseauian, even though both of those “forces” exist in nature, and like Kropotkin and Dawkins have said, cooperation is the stronger “force” than competition!
The Patriarchy even did it to Uncle Ted! And Uncle Ted was definitely not “too left”! (he was too… Something else!). I imagine Uncle Ted complaining about corporations encroaching further into nature, and their telling him, “that’s just nature.” No! Ted is the one who lived in nature! The encroachment was the work of the Demiurge! But even Uncle Ted still blamed a lot of society’s problems on “leftists.” sigh
OK. Final point. The thing about power from within is that the scalability potential is unlimited! For example, people don’t just make movies for money! The fact that it’s heading in that direction is what’s draining movies of their creativity! The main reason people make movies is that everyone “believes in” the project! They put a piece of themselves in it! One manifestation of this scalability is that people are learning that they’d rather have, for example, a living daughter than a dead son. Elon Musk is becoming less the rule and more the exception! And it’s not that “we don’t have to do anything.” We have to put ourselves out there! And more and more of us are doing it! The fact that tradcons are freaking out about it is a sign that it’s working! 😀
That isn’t quite it. From your logical perspective, it’s broken, but from their illogical perspective, it’s working just fine, so you can’t just say it’s broken, you have to look under the hood, and when I look under the hood, I see phobia. The phobia comes from indoctrination, which is just repeated exposure to the same pattern (which entails prevention from being exposed to different patterns). The bigoted beliefs are just the conscious expression (or “manifestation” or whatever) of the subconscious phobia! What “protects” the phobia from being “overcome” by its “victim” are all the things that keep the victim’s “nose on the wall,” so to speak; the things that keep the victim from “taking a look around” or “taking a step back.” when any of us says, “that couldn’t happen to me,” that should be a red flag to ourselves.
That’s what broken means.
Which you then didn’t do.
Please follow your own advice going forward.
But as to your history lesson, it is either trivial (e.g. all sides have some beliefs about the world in common) or false (e.g. “liberty is an abstract concept,” tell that to people in Chinese prison labor camps, or international sex slaves, or a Ukrainian soldier on the front lines—or indeed, all those people in sweatshops you mentioned yourself).
This is precisely the kind of broken epistemology I am warning us all to abandon.
As to the correct way to frame and analyze material reality, my article above on that very point remains unrebutted.
Come on! Think about it! Your abstract freedom to buy chocolate in the neoliberal capitalist economy, and especially your concrete freedom to purchase a bar of nestle crunch at a gas station, is tied to what nestle argues is their “freedom” to make a profit, which is tied to what they call their “freedom” to pay the lowest price for their “supplies,” which, eventually, we’re talking about kids in Africa practically enslaved in illegal cacao farming operations! We stopped talking about real “freedom” when nestle entered the picture! We can’t even get the supreme court to do anything about it ’cause they bipartisanly drank the neoliberal kool-aid too! On the other hand, in the time since my injury, when I had to laser focus on keeping myself alive, I learned exactly how much “freedom” I needed! It’s how I really learned to distinguish between power from within and power over others! There’s no teacher like personal experience! It keeps looking like you’re accusing me of throwing out points I haven’t fully considered, but when I say something, it’s because I’ve gone through the whole process required to say it! I’ve connected the ingredients and the preparation method to the cake! You can give my cake a zero-star review, but you can’t say it’s not a fkn cake! 😛
I don’t think you understand what the words “abstract” and “concrete” mean.
And this is spinning you off the road so far you aren’t even talking about anything in the same universe as the rest of us here.
It’s super easy for you not to listen to me when “nothing” I say is relevant, isn’t it? I’m always talking about real sht, Dr. Carrier! That’s how I make arguments! EVERYTHING that happens under the sun is relevant to me if it has anything to do with the exploitation of labor! It’s called class solidarity! If your politics has not love, it’s nothing but a clanging gong! Where’s the love for the exploited laborers of the world who make all the products Americans buy!? “Voting with your dollars”? Is that what you call “love”!? I mean, sometimes it’s the best we can do, but it’s not “love”! The supreme court bipartisanly threw out a case against Nestlé and Cargill in 2021, over some of the King Leopold sht they’re doing, and sided with process over justice! Because they’re, in effect, in this case, at least, fascist cowards who love capital more than justice! How do we “vote” our way out of that problem, Dr. Carrier!? If you really do think voting is a trolley problem, shouldn’t you be spending the other 364 days of the year untying people from the tracks!? I would greatly appreciate it if you stopped reading what I write like Crissy and Kipp read what you write! I don’t think I’m asking for too much! https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/06/justices-scuttle-lawsuit-against-nestle-cargill-for-allegedly-aiding-child-slavery-abroad/amp/
I fail to comprehend any sensible statement in that paragraph. Mario, you aren’t making sense.
Once again, you have spun off the rails into unintelligible ranting about ancillary subjects we weren’t discussing. I have called you out for this before. Your inability to stay on subject and instead constantly change the subject makes communication with you impossible.
That’s your problem. You need to fix. I have done all I can here.
Dear Richard,
Love your stuff. Magic.
As a project manager, of big building sites in London, I make men. From the teenager on a shovel, to the brat out of university, I make men. How ?,, through the philosophy of stoicism and unbridled masculinity. I take men like you, who could write a thousand words,,, but with wisdom, advice and scolding, then manage to get twice as much from a tenth of the effort.
I was lucky to be one of the chosen few. To have worked with the greats. The older men of wisdom. Steelfixing, carpentry, applied geophysics, from labourer to professor, I listened to them all.
My advice, to you, for what it’s worth ..
The only thing you have left to prove, is to prove something to yourself. That’s the bit that’s missing.
That’s the part of you that radiates to everybody else around you.
Should you ever come to Central London, you have a friend here in me.
I love your work. You helped this Irishman out, during my time of great tragedy.
And I would love to return the favour.
Be lucky.
Yours
Diarmuid Gaffney.
Thank you.
Great post Rick. I never thought of the Left in fascist terms- always struck
Only the extreme left—and that means left even of me, and I would be called extreme left by conservatives today (disingenuously but still).
Great, thought-provoking blog Rick. I never thought of the extreme Left as fascist- but makes total sense. “Wing nuts” whether on the Left or Right obviously do more harm than good in a thriving Democracy. The extreme left position gives the Right an ample opportunity to pigeonhole us lefties as “radical” when clearly that is just not the case, and we represent a far more moderate and adept alternative. If the Radical Right get back in office, I suspect I will move back to New Zealand. Project 2025 sounds Right out of the playbook of Mussolini.
To be fair, I do not think liberal extremists are the “cause” of conservative lying about the majority liberal platform. As there will always be weirdos, outliers, and extremists, the fault lies entirely with conservatives for exploiting that in their rhetoric—and with anyone (left or right) who falls for that rhetoric.
But yes, Project 2025, almost the entirety of the current RNC and Republican legislators, and the current candidates for President and Vice President, are all to the right of even Mussolini. They are the new blackshirts.
I would like to make a couple of observations on this blog. One post at a time. According to Richards definition of fascism using power and violence to force their will, every US president must be a fascist with the rich history of overthrowing govts throughout the world covertly and overtly
No, Adamski. You failed to pay attention when reading my article. It does not say that. It says the opposite of that.
See my comments below to Rune M. and Kevin R.
This is a common failure mode. Please do not repeat it.
Actually read the article before commenting on it, and actually make sure you understand what it is saying (such as about the proper use of force) before responding.
Please. As a courtesy.
Nevertheless, to further forestall this error, I have now emended the article to repeat this same point even more times than it already did, by expanding “Since fascism means using force to effect your political will on someone else” to “Since fascism means using force to effect your political will on someone else (rather than doing so democratically and in respect of human rights).” That’s already said multiple times in the article. But now it’s multiple times plus one.
I don’t know any other way to say this, but to properly analyze a structure of authority, you have to look under the hood of the “political will” it’s “trying” to bring about. Because fascism isn’t just about methods! It’s also about what the goal of the “will” is! Because if that “will” involves protecting the structures that exploit labor, that is one of the key features of fascism! Remember the distinction between power from within and power over others! If I have a boss who’s trying to exert power over me and my fellow co-workers, I only want enough power to prevent him from being able to do that. But all his power “over” me in the first place comes from a society that imposed this monetary system on me to where all my social interactions and all the ways I meet my needs have to be meditated by money! At a certain point, it stops facilitating human freedom and starts becoming an imposition! I might even say it starts to look a lot like “force”! It starts to look “undemocratic”It would take more than simple argumentation to get my boss to see things from my perspective! He’d have to start questioning his assumptions about our respective roles in society!
I fail to see the relevance of your point to anything we are discussing here.
The reason you continue to fail to see the relevance of what I’m saying is that you’re stuck on propositional logic and not availing yourself to metaphorical logic! That’s what Lakoff has been trying to tell us this whole time! Metaphors are a kind of “logic”! They use positive sum logic! Just like in quantum “mechanics,” game theory, Bayes’ Theorem, and (Mendelian) genetics! Ok, fine, so it’s also the logic of schizophrenia! So what? You can work around that as long as you don’t have a phobia about it! Randian “A = A” logic doesn’t help you deal with politics as you scale up because politics is always dynamic! What fascism was in the 30s isn’t exactly what it was today, but, just like with everything else, the current platform is built on top of and out of what came before! And the core of fascism is a zero sum logic that says “this planet’s not big enough for me and my enemy,” where this “enemy” is only a threat in the fascist’s mind! Fascists are, OTOH, a very big threat (eventually) to everyone who’s not a fascist! The power of the bosses over labor IS a form of political power! Power is never just power! Will is never just will! Liberalism doesn’t mean “the right to swing your fist ends at my face” if, metaphorically, in a situation where I’m your employee, “your fist” is your “right” to profit off my labor. Are we still talking about rights when we’re talking about bosses? Isn’t that like parents rights or states rights? My boss already has rights as a citizen! Isn’t any more than that just the government giving him special treatment?
In the European nomenclature, what historically distinguished the Left from the Far Left is the revolutionary project & hostility to representative democracy of the latter. Anarchists and Communists had a deep hatred of Radsoc/Socdem because of reformism/legalism. In France, there are two parties which incarnated this tendency (NPA, Lutte Ouvrière)
If you don’t advocate a violent dismantling of “bourgeois” parliamentarism and the overthrowing of working relations, you are not “Far Left”
Ergo the label “Far Left” completely lost its meaning today, because Conservatives apply it to unrelated or irrelevant stuff like LGBT/border/drug/crime stuff (all these things can be reformed by Liberal or Centrist politicans, it is not genetically “Far Left”)
Thank you for that information and perspective. Well put.
Macrobia:
I’d only question “violent”.
I’d say that folks like Dellinger, actual pacifists, who are still revolutionary in aspiration, are firmly far left.
To me, the dividing line is fundamental change of underlying institutions .
Generally, even progressives in the modern sense tend to stop at proposing fundamentally changing the state or capitalism. They often do try to fundamentally change gender and racial norms, which is actually firmly revolutionary in those fields (since I think “revolutionary” being defined as “fundamental change in underlying institutions” is more useful as it captures non-violent revolutions, several of which have happened).
In the European context, that was probably much less relevant, but in America the 60s left had lots of pacifists and people who did not believe in violent revolution but had system-transforming aspirations.
As a European I would refer to pretty much everything in the article as mainstream liberal (= right wing! 🙂 positions or close to it. As a random example, “defunding the police” is just how we do police. Except we called it things like reorganizing the police and funding social work in the police back in the ’80s and ’90s. Up to and including UBI, which was nearly on the liberal agenda in the ’90s, but was forgotten after the economy picked back up.
By which I don’t mean to say that the words being used a bit differently is a very interesting topic — it’s not, but it does probably say something rather bad about the two party system that so many disparate things are enveloped in the concepts of left and right. Abortion and euthanasia are bugbears of conservative Christian socialists just like they are for the American right.
That’s well observed, Frans. I concur.
My second observation
Mussolini was a socialist he says . So was he also a fascist at the same time ? What does “too left” actually mean? The reader again is left second guessing.
Third observation
Carrier says fascism is the use of force to impose your will and then goes on to give the “heckler” as its example multiplied by the quote not all protest are “right” ( right in what way Richard? Right for who Richard?).
So then lets cut to the chase .
Where the protests against netti ‘s appearance in congress last week fascism?
Is direct action in climate activism such as blocking roads, pressuring universities to stop taking FF money, occupying public spaces, disrupting coal shipments – fascism ???
Was MLK a fascist with his civil right movement that evolved into a anticapitalist critique ?
How about Mandela ? A fascist for fighting against the will of the people who supported apartheid?
Are animal rights activists fascists when they break into slaughterhouses and film the violence?
Was occupy wall street practising fascism when it tried to shutdown wall street?
Are antiwar protesters fascists ??
Sorry, Adamski, I can’t tell if you are being disingenuous or sarcastic.
I wasn’t the one who said Mussolini was a socialist. But if you are confused, see my comment on that.
On the spectrum of protest actions and what would be “fascist,” see my reply to Jens. I will reference that hereafter as “my other comment.”
Hence on your specific (sometimes vague) queries:
Which ones? Most were legal, nonviolent, nondestructive. The rest, depends. See other comment.
Depends. See other comment.
MLK never engaged in violence or property destruction. And he willingly accepted arrest and jail when the state went after him anyway.
So, no fascism there.
South Africa at the time was an illegal fascist ethno-state. Fighting fascists actively trying to kill or imprison you is not fascism. I actually made this distinction in my article. Punching a Nazi who is trying to punch you is legit. But that isn’t the issue that was being debated.
If they do the time or pay the civil penalty for nonviolent trespass. Or do it legally. But even if it remains trespass and they accept the penalty in exchange for getting the data to the public, it’s still nonviolent, and thus not fascism. No one is being forced to do anything here to effect a political will bypassing the electorate.
They legally occupied public property, which is property that belongs to the people and thus to them. Which was part of the point. Nothing illegal or violent occurred. No one’s rights were violated. So it can’t be fascism, right?
This is too nonspecific to answer. There can be legal, peaceful war protests. There can be illegal, violent war protests. One is never fascist. The other can be. I think you need to re-read my article to get a grip on what fascism actually is (and isn’t). Then you could answer all these questions yourself.
Dr. Carrier! The founding fathers were practically liberal jihadis! “Give me liberty or give me death”? Who would you have said was “too far left” back then? Lol
So I’ll just point out what Richard almost certainly is going to himself: The Founding Fathers were responding to monarchist oppression, which is always illegitimate. It’s a fascist punching and robbing you, in the sense that there is an unelected authoritarian whose Parliament is only legally advisory in capacity and who doesn’t authentically represent the people anywhere in any colonized area anyways.
If you’ve seen Radical Reviewer on Common Sense by Thomas Paine, RR argues that everything T. Paine says about monarchs could be said about bosses! https://youtu.be/cn21wGrbg4U?si=VsIWK_yWEwsyV0sy
There is no boss in America with any of the pertinent powers of a king. Bosses are not deciding what human rights you have, and are not writing legislation that authorizes or limits uses of force against you. To the contrary, they are constrained by a democratically elected government and democratically drafted and ratified constitution in what they can and cannot do to you or with you. You can also unilaterally dismiss your boss and go find another one. Unlike kings.
If you want to talk about criminal bosses running, say, a clandestine illegal slave operation, then we get an analogy. But that is why we elect governments to hunt down and dismantle such things. Your boss at McDonalds or Google is not such a person.
Noam Chomsky himself says pretty much the same thing about bosses as you just said about monarchs! https://youtu.be/FVt7U2YIgZs?si=9WD8kjwtRdP1qVs_
If he did, he’s an idiot. But I suspect you simply aren’t grasping his actual point.
Dr. Carrier! The bosses have something called class solidarity! They have the chamber of commerce! They have the American Legislative Exchange Council! They have lobbyists! That’s more than enough influence for them to write our laws! Aside from that, they have a stranglehold on the culture! Why do you think there’s so much propaganda against anyone who would like a change to the status quo!? Why do you think there’s so much fear and hatred of the homeless in this country!? Why do we consider ownership of something a “job” even when it requires no real work? Are these problems we can fix at the ballot box?
Mario, you are trading on a false analogy. Not all power dynamics are monarchy. Simply listing ways employers can exercise power in a social system is not making any relevant point here. As long as their mechanisms of power are peaceful, approved by the electorate, and in accord with human rights, it’s democracy, not monarchy. That doesn’t mean you have to like it. Democracies can make bad decisions too; that still doesn’t make them “the same” as a monarchy. That our system of laws can be improved does not make them monarchist. That’s a non sequitur.
Mario:
You had a discussion with Dr. Carrier about Marxism the other day. It is in the comments under this post. (https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/28853)
Dialectical materialism and its problems were also discussed in comments under this post (https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/28853). As someone who was not engaged in that conversation it feels like you keep repeating the same point without taking into the account the thoughtful criticism from Dr. Carrier and Fred.
Developed countries operate under the framework of “everything which is not forbidden is allowed”. In the absence of laws to the contrary, the boss doesn’t need a special permission to make profits, just as I don’t need a special government permission that says “you may eat 2 chilli peppers this month”. It is not forbidden, so I can do it. But even if we set that aside, when you sign a contract you are basically agreeing to your employer’s terms and conditions.
Depending on your definition of propaganda, there is a lot of propaganda on almost every political issue. Russian invasion, Israel/Palestine, etc.
Here we need to distinguish between 3 kinds of fear: rational (fear of touching a hot stove), pseudo-rational (fear of all vaccines) and irrational (fear of getting eaten by a dragon). Which category does the fear of homeless people belong to? 2nd. Some people may fear getting assaulted by homeless people, which could potentially translate into 3rd category fear (all homeless people want to assault me). As such, it is a problem of rationality.
Do we? I don’t think we colloquially say that people who own houses (but do not sell or rent them) have a job related to the house.
Like almost always in the real world, we can’t 100% fix the problem. But we can make it better. And the real question here is what is the path to the best outcome (even if it is not ideal).
Ravenkeeper, thank you. I concur. And I appreciate your carrying some of the water here.
Mario, Ravenkeeper and I probably both agree there can be issues regarding the just distribution of power in respect to the fact that “when you sign a contract you are basically agreeing to your employer’s terms and conditions.”
Capitalist systems do tend toward manipulation of the system to create various kinds of soft coercion specifically to make contract choices less free for employees than they would in a more just system. And Marxist systems suffer the same failure mode (that’s how we ended up with de facto labor slavery in every self-declared Marxist and Maoist nation to date).
But soft coercion is not the same as hard (there aren’t really guns being pointed at you for refusing a contract; we actually have labor laws; etc.) and that the system we have is in some degree unjust and can be improved does not allow “rounding error” all the way to asserting that our rights-based democracy “is the same” as a monarchy or any other fascist or stalinist state. It’s nowhere near the same. And that is why it is better. But better does not mean best. It just means better. It can be even better. But that’s neither here nor there.
Mario:
The Supreme Court sided with the law. Here is an explanation of their actions:
1) “The Supreme Court held that it cannot create a cause of action that would allow the alleged former child slaves to sue Nestlé and Cargill because, under the principle of separation of powers, that responsibility belongs to Congress not the Federal Judiciary. One of the reasons the Court gave in reaching this conclusion is that judicial creation of a cause of action under the ATS inherently raises foreign policy concerns.”
2) “The court ruled the claim could not be brought under the Alien Tort Statute, which lets non-U.S. citizens seek damages in American courts in certain instances, because the plaintiffs did not show that any of the relevant conduct took place within the United States.”
If Supreme Court acted on impulse, then before you know it, the major companies would leave the US and the Us would lose a significant influence over humane conduct, which in turn might mean more suffering. There are pragmatic reasons for upholding the law.
We aren’t voting 364 days a year. But besides that, what would even “untying people from the tracks” mean in this context. People tied on the tracks are our problems (homelessness, poverty, etc.). So untying people from the tracks would be eliminating poverty and huger… but that’s just realistically out of Richard’s power. What he is doing instead is writing a very helpful article about the problems of left wing extremism, which might’ve inspired some people to abandon left wing extremism. We are all doing what we can. Gradually. Incrementally.
Thank you, Ravenkeeper. I welcome the engagement.
But I have to point out the elephant in the room…
It is more to the point that none of what Mario is ranting about now has anything to do with what we were talking about. That the Supreme Court is ideologically corrupt and fallible simply has nothing to do with whether we live (now, already) in a fascist state void of human rights or democracy.
Mario is engaging the black-or-white fallacy that a free democratic nation must be absolutely entirely perfect in every possible way, or else it is a fascist monarchy devoid of freedom or democracy.
And that’s just absurd. It really requires no further response or engagement. All Mario’s rigmarole about Cargill is just irrelevant handwaving.
P.S. Not pertinent to your point, but illustrative of Mario’s hyperbolic mode of discourse, we often are voting more than one day of the year.
Most of us have multiple elections in a given year (I’ve voted in three just this year in Georgia, with one or two more to come). Also, democracy is not just voting, it’s speech (persuading the public; funding enterprises that persuade the public) and “petitioning the government for a redress of grievances,” i.e. attending protest marches and funding lobbying groups and writing your legislators and city council and other elected representatives. And most of the relevant voting is representative: we elect persons to vote for legislation; they then do a lot more voting for us than just one time a year. That is the point of civilization: the division and delegation of labor.
And if we spin off topic yet further, the questions at hand in Cargill relate to what laws we should have, which can be resolved peacefully (the only way to do which is democracy) or violently (a.k.a. fascism). That one dislikes the Cargill outcome has nothing to do with that distinction. The whole point of democracy is that you can be outvoted. That Americans are okay with depending on foreign slave labor is a defect of Americans. Not of democracy. There are only two ways to change that: peacefully (persuasion, voting, marching, petitioning) or violently (join an armed coup for an autocrat who pinky swears to crush global slavery). That is what we are supposed to be talking about—and once we get back to the point, the answer here is as I put it from the beginning. So we just ran around in a circle to where we all started.
You’re looking at America like countries have a “right to exist”! That’s not how I look at it! I see the rights of human beings, including the right not to be enslaved, as real rights! People have the right to self-governance! Don’t you see the difference between that and “states have the right to exist”? Same with corporations! Do corporations have a “right to exist”? Or do people have a right not to be slaves? The violence is already built into the slavery! I don’t wring my hands when people fight violence with violence! I’m not talking about the old revolutions (though they’re all slandered by the toadies of capital!)! The greater class struggle is the struggle within! It’s the struggle against the part of yourself that wrings its hands about slavery instead of demanding its abolition at every opportunity! Instead of celebrating the “violence” of resistance! There’s still plenty of state violence against dissidents in this country! I’ve seen it first hand! I’m sure you’ve heard of “cop city”! They murdered an activist named Tortuguita and blamed it on them! I think it’s violence that we withhold healthcare from people, and that a lot of Americans die every year because of it. Yeah, we’re gonna get frustrated when we’re told that the only thing we can do about this violence is voting or talking! Anyway, when you complete this struggle, that’s when you’ll be on my side! But it IS a struggle! I don’t see the world in black and white! I see all the colors of the rainbow! And all shades in between!
BTW, Ravenkeeper, don’t think I didn’t notice your “if we don’t do it, who will?” argument! That’s always an argument that protects the powerful! It’s an argument that trusts power more than it trusts human beings! It’s very similar to the argument churches use to protect the abusers in their ranks! I’ll be dammed if I don’t call it out when it’s being used to “defend America”! If you think this is a “black and white” argument, could you give me a counterexample? I mean, what really separates this argument from something they’d say in “Team America: World Police”? You’re effectively saying, “if western capital doesn’t oversee this slavery, who will?” well the whole reason the slavery exists is connected to the fact that commodities are produced for exchange-value instead of use-value in this capitalist world of ours! Even socialist countries exist in the capitalist world! There’s no “socialist world” these countries can escape to! There’s also propaganda that this slavery is better for us! I’m sorry, but I’d rather have no slavery than be in charge of the slavery! Slavery is not a law of the universe! It’s only a law of the patriarchy! That’s all I’m trying to do! Reveal the true face of the patriarchy! Go ahead and keep voting, but, aside from state and domestic and stochastic violence, the patriarchy only has the power we give to it in our minds either by submitting to it or by buying in! And I’m not doing either! I’m gonna keep fighting it! I’m even gonna keep voting, but I don’t see my vote as that big a part of my fight!
You can’t physically have rights without a social system democratically elected to defend them. That is called a nation. No nations = no rights. End of line.
Yes! That’s correct (in the present “reality”) but, like ol’ TJ said, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” self-governance is a skill that can be developed! We need to stop seeking protection from our abusers! We need to build new institutions! Surely you’ve heard of “dual power”! When We The People learn to govern ourselves, we’ll only need “government” to do the bean-counting for the non-profit public industries! And maybe the distribution of funds for the non-profit public sector health and disability care industries! (I only say “industry” in terms of scale, not in terms of personability). Like I’ve been saying, we can get everyone on board with the positive sum game of world/human development when we get conservatives and liberals to get over their phobias of The Other through exposure therapy! If you say this isn’t practical, you’re not being part of the solution! You can keep doing everything else you’re doing! But you have to buy into the Kropotkinian positive sum logic of mutual aid! That’s not the same thing as charity! It’s stuff like joining a union! It’s stuff like joining a communist party (it’s not like they won’t let you vote for democrats! Bourgeois parties will be redundant after the self-governance revolution! No one will care enough about “horse races”)! It’s stuff like “food not bombs” (which is practically illegal, btw)! It’s stuff like co-ops (though they have their own problems)! From my perspective, if you’re not doing that stuff, you’re not doing all the politics you could be doing, not that, say, school board and city council meetings aren’t important too! I don’t really do any of that stuff, which is why I actually don’t go around saying that I’m doing anything political! My ranting on your site is NOT me “doing politics”!
Self-governance isn’t that hard either! I mean it’s not impossible! It’s stuff like feeling your feelings (rather than eating or drinking them, for example! I’m not trying to shame anyone, but I can’t say I was truly “governing” myself until I learned to feel all my feelings as they were happening)! It’s stuff like loving yourself as much as the person who loved you the most in life (for most people, that would be your mom, but I don’t wanna make any assumptions)! We ARE addicted to comfort in this country, but not in the way most conservatives think! They’re the ones who are most addicted to comfort in the nation, tbh! (they can’t even handle the discomfort of seeing a trans person!) The Gordian Knot was not just a myth! It represents what humanity thought it had to “cut” to “level up” to “kinghood”! But now we need the rope to get us out of the minotaur labyrinth the ruling class has gotten us into! And I can already see us stitching it back together! I can already see us rediscovering our indomitable human spirit! 😀
Mario, I don’t even know what you think you mean by “self-governance” here. Or what relevance that has to what we were discussing.
If you mean that society would work fine without governments, that’s simply so divorced from empirical reality that you are living in so fantastical a mythical universe now that conversation with you will be, again, impossible.
The indomitable human spirit is what I discovered when I “became” “Dr. Saigon” in April while taking your naturalism class, when I conquered the Cartesian Demon of zero (and below) sum logic through the power of lachrymology! 😛
Irrelevant statement.
I cry just thinking about what countries in Africa and South America have when they are/could have if they were allowed to develop their own mineral resources! Even “total psychos” like Qaddafi and Saddam did manage to get big public works projects built! We didn’t have to blow all that up! :'(
Irrelevant statement.
Look! I got nothing against voting, ok? I always try to vote at least once every election! “Vote early, vote often”! That’s what I always say!
Irrelevant statement.
Ok, look, all kidding aside, can you really call my “once a year” estimate “hyperbolic” when it’s undoubtedly ridiculously generous for the median voter!?
Irrelevant statement.
I’ll have you know that accusing people of hyperbole for saying something reasonable in what looks like an attempt to soothe one’s own phobias is a tactic Matt Dillahunty has been recently employing on the site currently known as “Twitter” and on YouTube! Do with that information what you will!
Irrelevant statement.
The indomitable human spirit is very relevant to politics, Dr. Carrier! It’s also very relevant that I didn’t discover it until April! It’s also very relevant that other people are discovering it only right now! You can see it if you’re paying attention! Was it Cassandra’s fault that no one listened to her? The fact that I was able to discover my indomitable human spirit is entirely due to the fact that I followed the empiricism where it led in my own life! Empiricism is what brought me to the conclusion that I needed to stop drinking! Empiricism is how I concluded there’s no God! Empiricism IS how I “govern myself”! Uncle Ted knew a thing or two about self-governance! He also knew a thing or two about the indomitable human spirit! His problem was that he had a PHOBIA that technology would break the human spirit! His problem was that his PHOBIA was stronger than his LOVE! That’s why he made his “doomsday devices”! We can follow empiricism until we’re blue in the face, but if our phobia is stronger than our love, we’re going to be TOO FUCKING AFRAID to follow empiricism to where it truly leads! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you this whole fkng time!
When we’re “arguing” with phobia sufferers, it’s like we’re trying to argue with them about the shapes of the shadows on the walls of their “trans-platonic cave”! We need to get them to walk out of the cave and into the sunlight! The only cure for phobia is exposure therapy! We don’t have to go around curing people of, say, trypophobia, but when it comes to, say, homophobia or Islamophobia, yeah, we can’t call this a society if we’re letting people just walk around with phobias like that! I’m not saying to burn it down! I’m saying to fix it! We have the tools!
No one can benefit from therapy who does not admit to needing it.
This is the first rule of psychotherapeutics. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.
So there is no “policy” we can recommend that will solve societal homophobia and transphobia via medical care.
We’ve been through this before with racism, where we went from slavery to Jim Crow to Willie Horton to MAGA, an evolution on a graph that shows progress, just frustratingly slow. And the empirically demonstrated solution, which has moved this dot on the graph, is democratically pressuring our government to defend human rights, so that the insane (the victims of homophobia transphobia) cannot silo themselves and are forced into exposure therapy (they have to work with gay and trans people, they have to see them on TV, they have to see their public events and parades, they will have to deal with gay and trans family members).
There will be resistors: those who take extreme measures to silo themselves; either directly, like the Amish or banning gay or trans family and avoiding all unfriendly media, or indirectly, such as those trying to coopt the government to reverse this course and help them build their silos and reify their phobias into fascist action (hence, MAGA). But history shows that slowly, gradually, those people start to shrink in number (and indeed that is why they are so loud, desperate, and violent now: the last throes of a movement that is losing the culture war), and society starts to improve little by little. Slavery to Jim Crow to Willie Horton to MAGA to…the eventual future of generations Z and alpha.
And this war can be fought on multiple fronts. A major comorbidity with these phobias is religion (particularly when manifesting as a harmful clinical delusion), so toppling religion through counter-disinformation will accelerate the decline of these phobias.
Mario:
I will attempt to address what you said, but I wanted to preface by saying that it is indeed hard to sometimes fully understand what you mean, because you are speaking in a very poetic language (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
Generally the word “rights” refers to a specific entitlement. At least that is how I (and I suspect Richard) use it. To give you an example, according to the UN we have a right to not be tortured. That’s what I refer to when I say “right”. Let’s take another another. I want to water my plants. That’s not a right. Nobody made a declaration which said “humans have an absolute right to water plants”. But I can still water my plants. So it’s not a right, but I can still do it. In the same way, the US exists (in whatever sense countries may exist). It doesn’t need a right to exist. Just as I don’t need a special right or a permission to water my plants.
Why not both? Having a voluntary job in a corporation is not slavery by any real legal definition.
All sorts of nefarious actors will get frustrated when not allowed to enact their will. They would LOVE to be able to take up the arms and capture the power to themselves. They will cite all possible flaws of the democratic system, as a pretext for installing a tyranny.
Imagine if I was a revolutionary and I started a rebellion and took away all healthcare, all welfare and all resources to myself. Would you feel that’s fair? If not, then that’s what you are risking with a dictatorship. Not to mention, that if the dictator is smart, he will actually promise all sort of good things (like universal healthcare, UBI, etc). And then he will take power and not deliver on his promises (much more than your average democratic politician).
That’s an absolutely valid argument in this context. Which dictator exactly are we going to entrust with protecting human rights? Khamenei? Maduro? Kim Jong Un? So it’s the age old question of idealism vs pragmatism. And pragmatism wins, because ideas won’t feed you.
What we are saying is that the West and Western-adjacent democracies are some of our best options for keeping the conduct more conduct. Is it 100% humane? No, almost nothing is 100% in the real world. The question we should be asking is whether it is better than the alternatives.
Great, let’s build them. You just need to convince 50% of the population that your idea is worthwhile. If you want to bypass the will of the people in the pursuit of a greater good, than I am not sure if I can trust your ideas to not end up tyrannical.
You do realize how this sounds, right? What if this idea is just not that practical? That’s certainly a possibility, right?
After this “self-governance revolution” voting itself might become redundant. That’s what happened in Venezuela. Their strongman was also campaigning on “sovereignty and independence”.
From my perspective, if you’re doing that stuff, you’re doing the politics wrong. From my perspective, everything that is not democratic is wrong.
Wow! You libs really think you have the market cornered on democracy and liberty, don’t you!? Well, you’re correct that we’re not operating from the same framework. I always work from a specific dialectical framework! But don’t worry! Lakoff and associates have given us all the tools we need to translate my metaphors into your propositions! Not unlike how Carrier compiled and organized many of the tools we needed to translate the Jesus of the gospels back into the “original” mythical Jesus! And it took him 6 years and two books to do it, so don’t expect a total explanation of it from me in a series of a few website comments! 😀
Great text! I live in Brazil, where there is an intense dispute between left and right. I quote below some criticisms and accusations that the Brazilian right usually makes towards the left:
The left defends or sympathizes with socialism, a model that has only generated misery and dictatorial governments;
The left longs for a fantasy equality;
The left opposes capitalism, the system that brought the most progress, freedom and opportunity;
The left relies on pseudoscience to defend agendas linked to homosexuals, feminism and the right to abortion. – The left is the enemy of individual freedoms.
South America has been borrowing the American conservative playbook for sure (see An Anatomy of Contemporary Right-Wing Delusions, in respect to Chile but the infection is similar).
It is of course all bogus.
They deliberately conflate socialism with communism (indeed, not just communism, but Stalinism), and thus “forget” the existence of the entire first world outside of the U.S. (which is all successfully socialist).
They deliberately confuse equality of rights and opportunities, with equality of outcomes or desert, and thus straw man into non-existence the actual arguments of the left they are trying to make not exist.
They deliberately confuse opposition to the corruption of capitalism with opposition to all capitalism whatever (and then “forget” all the capitalist “misery” and “dictatorial governments,” including the ones they themselves are striving to implement).
They deliberately ignore all actual science, which supports everything the left is saying about sexuality and gender, and then claim they are the ones following science, by “forgetting” all the science that is against them.
And, of course, these lies all stumble them into embarrassing ironies like opposing abortion (and many other freedoms of power-minorities like women and gay people) while insisting “they” are the ones defending individual freedoms (they are not; it’s the other way around).
Denying reality and insisting it is exactly the opposite of what it actually is now defines conservativism. Because human knowledge has progressed to the point that there is no other way to advance the fascist dreams of conservatives today.
Hi Richard. Bit random but with everything going on surrounding the election and based on what you’ve said in this article and others, I just wanted to ask: what’s your opinion on Tim Walz as a VP option and as a politician in general?
Strategically brilliant selection.
I’d be happy with alternatives (from Buttigieg to Booker; even the ones on her consideration list all have their merits). But Walz was a smart choice tactically. He disarms almost every GOP polemic and creates a stark contrast to Vance.
But, of course, these opinions relate to pragmatics (what will prevent fascists coming to power, which is how reasonable liberals think; not “what will instantly transform America into a utopian society,” which is how extremists think).
As far as details, I don’t have any strong opinions about Walz as a politician. He’s clearly successful and competent. And as a person, he’s great.
So far everything they have tried to dig up about him as a negative has been weak tea (or even just outright lies), so by that light you’d think he was the perfect politician (alternatively, the Republicans have simply become really bad at this). But I haven’t deep-dived his entire career so as to know whether there is any substantial disagreement I’d have with him. But so far there are clearly no disagreements about policy or management that would matter to my vote.
As an example, I already tore up GOP lying about his military service on Facebook (which per my Guide to My Social Media is where to keep up with my occasional thoughts about such things and others); and Adam Kinzinger one-upped me making many more points than I did and brilliantly expressing his own outrage as a veteran at J.D. Vance’s dishonorable attacks. And in general, if you have to lie (not spin or err or exaggerate, but outright lie) to turn people off a political opponent, then you’ve just admitted you have no actually bad thing to say about him. But the GOP has gotten so used to lying, I worry they have actually forgotten how to even do genuine oppo research.