I need to start indexing typefaces I like, if only so I can find them again. This is just a start.
04 August 2025
We must use the word “genocide”
Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so a few things up front:
- the moral question is simple: Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
- the praxis is complicated: antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable
- the history is complicated: I have a survey of it which addresses many common misunderstandings on all sides
- I keep an index of resources on the subject — my posts and others’
For a long time, reasonable people of good conscience could refuse to call Israel’s brutality in Gaza “genocide”. That time has now passed.
I have referred to Israel’s attack on Gaza as “genocidal” since November of 2023. At the same time, I have respected those who have rejected the word “genocide”.
First because the term evokes eliminationist violence — wholesale mass expulsion or even mass murder of a people. I think we must register violences short of that as genocide, but other informed people fear that it dilutes the potency of the term “genocide” to apply it to anything less. In 2024 it was wrong to dismiss the brutality of Israel’s attack on Gaza, but that brutality was short of eliminationist.
Second because Palestinian liberation is a noble cause which has long attracted monstrous supporters, for obvious reasons. Since 10/7 we have seen people exercise the term “genocide” in bad faith, to persuade unsophisticated people of good conscience to embrace transparently antisemitic ideas, to implicitly justify the genocide of Israeli Jews. I respect refusing to grant those voices any ammunition.
I disagreed with those who hesitated over the word “genocide” because my unwholesome interests include attention to how genocides happen. I believe that we must recognize genocide as genocide early, because attacks on peoples as peoples modest in comparison to eliminationism — the most damningly faint praise imaginable — tend to escalate to eliminationism. A broad conception of genocide cultivates a frame of mind which moves us to preëmpt escalation from horrors to yet greater horrors.
But my disagreement has been respectful disagreement. All people of conscience have had an obligation to oppose the brutality in Gaza, but there has been room to oppose it using different language.
We have seen the Likudniks in control of Israel’s government escalate step by step since 10/7 in word and deed. One may take that as supporting either the case for using the term “genocide” early … or supporting the case for using it sparingly.
In recent months, Israel’s brutality has crossed the threshold into unmistakably eliminationist violence. One can and must oppose this in terms which avoid antisemitic demonization of Jewish Israelis. One cannot avoid the term “genocide” any longer.
This post was inspired by the Corey Robin Facebook post below, which is sympathetic to the bitterness of the word on many people’s tongues. I know that taste all too well. It is past time to accept it.
This post is not for you. I want to repeat: This post is not for you.
Many of my readers here, Jews and non-Jews, are already clear about the wrongness of what Israel is doing in Gaza. Many of my readers here are already clear that the State of Israel — as it was designed and constructed as an ethnocracy, apartheid state, Jewish supremacist state, what have you — is a historic injustice.
This post is not for you.
This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify with the Zionist project, who have supported the military actions of the Israeli government in Gaza (even if they oppose Netanyahu), people who call for a return of the hostages and a ceasefire and say no more, people who fear that anti-Israel protests on college campuses are a sign of rising antisemitism in the US, people who believe, or hope, that Israel as a Jewish state is a cause worth defending.
This post is for you.
It’s for you because, given the way algorithms go and online communities sort themselves out, you may not have seen some developments in the last few days, among people who hold or once held views similar to yours. I’m posting these statements here (with links), just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing, and that it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm.
- July 15: Omer Bartov, born in Israel in 1954, fought in the Yom Kippur War as a company commander, one of the leading international scholars on Nazism and the Holocaust, writes a piece titled, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” (A side note: According to statements from the governor of New York and chancellor of CUNY, were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation and comparison of Bartov’s Holocaust research and his claims about the war on Gaza, they could be disciplined and fired.)
- July 29: Michael Ben-Yair, former Attorney General of Israel, writes, “Jews, who went through a genocide 80 years ago, are committing genocide in Gaza.” (Side note: were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation and comparison to the Holocaust, they could be disciplined and fired.)
- August 3: Jeremy Ben-Ami, whose father fought in the Irgun, and who is head of J Street, a mainstream pro-Israel organization in the US, writes, “Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide. I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention. Based on the law as I read it, the Prime Minister and others in his government will have to answer for what they have done and will be held accountable … The stain of this abomination will forever be on the Jewish people because we have not stopped this. Far too many have been far too silent.”
- July 26: Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, former interim President of Israel, former chair of the Jewish Agency, former chair of the World Zionist Organization, writes, “Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since … The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist.” (Side note: According to statements from the governor of New York and chancellor of CUNY, were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its questioning of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, they could be disciplined and fired.)
- August 2: Lihi Ben Shitrit, Henry and Marilyn Taub Associate Professor of Israel studies at NYU and director of NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies: “As an Israeli political scientist researching Israeli and Palestinian politics, I’m regularly invited by different universities to speak about the Middle East. Inevitably, someone in the audience asks what I think about the allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. While I have been unequivocal about my opposition to the current war, I tell them that I’m not a lawyer or an expert on international law. Therefore I have no authority with which to judge on the question of genocide. This is a copout …… I think there are several reasons for many liberal Jews’ tremendous difficulty in seriously confronting the question of whether Israel is committing genocide, including a misunderstanding of what genocide can look like. None of these, however, if we are truly honest with ourselves, justify turning away from it … I am familiar with emotions of outrage and revulsion with the conduct of the Israeli government and the dissemination of Jewish supremacy, but the question of genocide, I now understand, provoked new feelings I had not encountered before — shame and guilt. As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility.”
- August 1: Dov Waxman, Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies, UCLA: “I initially rejected the genocide charge, but I have changed my mind …… It has been a long and emotionally difficult process over the past 22 months of horrific violence and heartbreaking suffering in Gaza for me to conclude that Israel is guilty of genocide. The possibility that Israel, a Jewish state legitimized by the Nazis’ genocide of Jews, could itself carry out a genocide was one that I, probably like most Jewish people, could barely countenance. I also struggled to accept the possibility that Jews, the victims of genocide, could become the perpetrators of one. Because my conception of genocide was based on the Holocaust, it was also hard for me to recognize that genocide does not have to involve the deliberate attempt to exterminate an entire people, nor does it have to be the ultimate goal. The Holocaust was significantly different from the genocide in Gaza today in many ways. However, this fact should not prevent us from recognizing that what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza amounts to the crime of genocide.”
Again, for many of you, this is old news, too little, too late. This post is not for you. It’s for those readers of mine, many of whom I know personally, who are still wrestling with these questions, and who feel that the only people who would say that this is a genocide or that Israel is in a condition of profound moral wrong, are people who are not like them. I’m trying to show that people who are like them, or once were like them, have also come to this position.
For opponents of the State of Israel, many of whom are my readers, this may seem like a fool’s errand. I do not think it is.
In my lifetime, I’ve undergone some profound changes of belief in position. As many friends of mine from graduate school will tell you, when I arrived at Yale, I was staunchly opposed to the effort to unionize graduate students. Staunchly. Spoke against it repeatedly. I wound up leading the union and leading it on strike.
On the question of Israel, I was raised in a very Zionist household. My family and I went to Israel in 1977 on a trip sponsored by our temple. I continued to support the State of Israel through my years in college. But a combination of factors, between the ages of 20 and 26, changed my mind. It took me a long time to come to that position. It was painful. It often has involved bitter, emotional arguments with people I love very much, including my mother. So while I understand that for many readers here I am in one camp, and perhaps can’t even be trusted on this question, I do have a very clear memory and sense of where a lot of people who disagree with me on this issue are coming from. And I understand, I think, how uneasy and uncertain one can be, not knowing whom to trust, fearing that antisemitism underlies or accompanies every criticism. I get it. I’m hoping some of these other voices here can provide a path, I hope closer to my own position, but even if not, at least to some understanding.
01 August 2025
Against “centrist” Dem anti-leftism
I have now had decades of dumb arguments with Grumbling Liberals kvetching about the “purity politics” of Very Noisy Leftists refusing to vote for Democratic Party candidates. These days, GLs have escalated to blaming The Left for producing the Trump regime.
I share GLs’ exasperation with VNLs crowing about “holding the Democratic Party to account” by refusing to vote. I have had decades of arguments with VNLs about how that doesn’t work, how in our first-past-the-post system, the savvy voter casts a ballot for their preferred candidate in primaries then for the lesser evil in the general election.
But the rest of the GL rap is bizarre.
The VNLs assert that they speak for a bloc of leftist voters both big enough to sway elections and coherent enough to have meaningful political interests. But GLs kvetching about VNLs draw a bunch of bizarre conclusions from that premise.
- Why focus so much interest on the foolishness of VNLs in particular? Why not grumble about the much bigger bloc of non-leftist non-voters? Or, y’know, Republican voters?
- Why fault the VNLs, rather than fault the Democratic Party for refusing to address VNL’s interests? Even if those interests are dumb, isn’t the Democratic establishment being at least as foolish leaving those votes on the table?
- Why fault the VNLs — and the handful of progressive back-bench electeds they like — who have not held actual power? Shouldn’t we fault the people who did have power? The movement-conservative-neoliberals who controlled the Republicans 1980-2015? The Clintonian-neoliberals who have controlled the Dems since 1992?
All that said, I do not believe that GLs accept VNLs’ premise about a leftist voting bloc.
They have been telling me for decades that they do not believe in that bloc. They told me that there are too few to be worth pursuing. They have told me that non-voting leftists are too fickle and won’t show up at the polls even if Dems try to get them.
More importantly, the VNLs’ premise is wrong. The evidence has overwhelmingly demonstrated that the VNLs (and netroots progressives of the ’00s like me) were wrong. The VNL bloc is neither big nor coherent, much less both. It’s a non-issue.
Those VNLs don’t know what to do to win political power back from the fascist regime in power. Neither do I!
But I do know that the current Democratic Party establishment cannot do it. If they could, we would not be here. GLs’ talking about how VNLs need to get with the Dem establishment’s program are wasting time and energy. It ain’t gonna happen.
I finally spat out this post because of a discussion where my interlocutor wanted to tell the Left “you are the reason we can’t have the things we both want”, saying that an untapped left voting bloc could swing elections. If I am wrong and that does exist, it is both dumb and offensive to imagine that hectoring them more about how All This is their fault will deliver their votes to Dems.
Vote Blue No Matter Who is right both on the merits and in pursuit of leftists own interests, and I have not been shy about telling my left comrades that any other strategy is foolish and irresponible. The fantasy that leftists withholding our votes will compel the Democratic Party to reach left is one of VNLs’ persistent delusions — along with the significance of our voter bloc, the ease of enacting our policy agenda, the appeal of that agenda to the public, and the relevance of the Dem establishment’s moves against us in the big picture. But it as rude as it is logically absurd for the Dem establishment to punch left to keep us out of power for two generations … and then fault the Left for the results, rather faulting actual power players.
Aside from alienating the Left, this nonsense lets the Dem establishment lazily avoid a strategic reckoning they damm well need to do.
I grant good reasons to think that Clintonian triangulation was the best possible strategy in the 1990s to counter the capture of the Republican Party by movement conservatism, as demonstrated by Actual Bill Clinton.
That case gets weaker looking at the ’00s & ’10s. Obama campaigned to the left of his actual governance, and made countless moves which compromised the strength of progressive organizing. Are lefties like me right to suspect that this squandered an opportunity to break the neoliberal consensus? Only a fool would feel confident that they understand the political dynamics better than BHO.
But I am certain that at this point we have nothing to learn from the dynamics of the 1990s. We face a MAGA fascist Republican Party, not movement conservatism. We face fragmentation of the entire information environment, not Fox News rivaling mainstream political journalism.
I have my own informed guesses about what the Democratic Party should do, which I consider better than many proposals the VNL offer which I would like to believe, but I’m open to alternatives. I am certain that the Clintonian playbook will not work. HRC’s candidacy in 2016 would have crushed a movement conservative candidate like a bug, and her failure shows how that playbook fails in our current environment.
Advocates for a Democratic Party agenda of Restoration — “return to stability and normalcy” — point to Biden’s victory in 2020 as their template, but 2020 was a unique moment. The course of Biden’s administration and the collapse of voter enthusiasm for him which undercut Kamala Harris’ candidacy in 2024 demonstrates that Just Be Normal cannnot win elections; they do not see that as either possible or desirable for the Republic. We face a national institutional crisis at least comparable to the moment which gave us the New Deal, if we are lucky; if not so lucky, Fort Sumpter.
To save the Republic, we need a popular front uniting the liberal establishment with leftists. The Democratic party has the obligation and opportunity to reach out for one.
Sibling post: against dumb anti-liberal leftist antifascism.
27 July 2025
Against the Political Compass
If one spends any time talking about politics on the internet, one encounters the “Political Compass”. It can be fun for stuff like political jokes.
But it is not a useful framework for understanding politics.
It is comprable to other toy categorization schemes like astrological Sun signs, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or the Dungeons & Dragons moral alignment system — fun, and maybe a little illuminating when used as a loose vocabulary, but not substantive. D&D complicating Good vs. Evil with an axis for Law vs. Chaos allows cute observations like naming a way that Darth Vader (“bringing order to the galaxy” because he is lawful evil) is different from The Joker (chaotic evil); I have done it myself. But it breaks down if you think about it for long. Heck, nerds will tell ya how it breaks down for Batman. D&D alignments cannot bear real weight because they emerge out of a weird history of fantasy fiction and D&D designer Gary Gygax’s peculiar Christian morality, not any serious moral philosophy.
Likewise, the Political Compass is a toy that emerges from “libertarian” propaganda. It developed from the Nolan Chart, which was explicitly libertarian propaganda.
Libertarians often try to dignify their fringe position by arguing that if one really understands politics there are three basic ideologies — left, right, and … of course … libertarian. (Never mind the distinction from “libs” that leftists insist on!)
Those who value civilization are called conservatives. For them the enemy is barbarism.
Those who value equality are called liberals. For them the enemy is exploitation, that is, the abuse of the free market by the rich or by the many to oppress the poor or the few.
Those who value liberty are called libertarians. For them the enemy is slavery, that is, the abuse of the authority of the sovereign to oppress the citizen.
The Compass goes so far as to give libertarians as much space as liberalism and conservatism put together, despite being a fringe ideology. This enables stuff like surveys that reveal to people “Surprise! You’re really a libertarian!” Propaganda.
The big four categorizations of the Compass are not useful enough, which is why political scientists don’t use it. The axes just don’t bear scrutiny.
When one examines at what Compass boosters mean by its authoritarian-libertarian axis, one finds the fingerprints of the libertarian tendency to collapse all other political ideologies into “statism”, because libertarians dread the coercive power of the state … and ignore different state policies, structurally disparate state institutions, and all other forms of coercion.
Sociologists & political scientists understand authoritarianism very differently from Amount Of State Power. I join them in finidng it important to conceive authoritianism in terms of unencumbered power, without rules, process, accountability, or other institutional limits getting in the way of its exercise. Unencumbered power is the useful parallel which one sees in authoritarian governments, religions, families, and more. It is how the capricious commissars of tsarist Russia, the capricious commissars of Stalinist Russia, and capricious oligarchs of Putinist Russia all resemble one another. It makes the supposedly-minarchist fantasies of many weird far right movements like neoreaction authoritarian: if the “CEO of the country” allows more “economic freedom” but can just singlehandedly issue whatever decrees they want, that is authoritarian. It is what makes the absolute monarchies of the feudal era more authoritarian than modern liberal democracies with greater state capacity: the king could capriciously exercise the power of life and death over subjects at a whim. The antithesis of authoritarianism is not “libertarianism” but limits like institutionalism, proceduralism, and a circumscribed scope to power, as in the rule of law and rights protections of liberal democracy.
Similarly, where the Compass conceives of the “left” and “right” as an “economic” axis, what the heck does it mean? The vibes are socialist-ish and capitalist-ish but mushy. What about that predicts the preferences of shaggy anarchist left-libertarians and hyper-capitalist right-libertarians?
This obscures the the meaning of “left” and “right”. They are a subtle, contested vocabulary, but one can summarize the distinction as reflecting egalitarian versus heirarchical social relations, rather than economic structures — unsurprising since the terms originated before the emergence of either capitalism or socialism! With that framework, one can examine different visions of equality and different heirarchies, making the left-right spectrum is the best simple model of political tendencies available, if one exercises it thoughtfully.
25 July 2025
A dialogue about social justice praxis
In a discussion on a private forum about my post Social Justice Praxis Dreams, I got a reply from a social justice advocate with whom I have had decades of fraught conversations.
I find after the many years we’ve been wrestling with the deeper foundations of this conversation, that my current position is that Western liberal philosophy has a white supremacy problem baked into it, and that we need to restart from a place of de-emphasizing European historic philosophy and finding ways of valuing other folkways … because a lot of the toxicity is originating in the choice of source materials.
I replied:
After the many years we’ve been wrestling with the deeper foundations of this conversation, I have lost patience with your inability to articulate what the fuck you actually want me to do.
These points [from the original post] are for you:
- … which does not enable narcissistic abuse. e.g.: If someone has stepped wrong, they can expect clear feedback about how to correct the error, and if they make the correction we consider the matter closed.
- … which understands the liberal school and identity politics school as counterweights to each other’s limitations.
- … very enthusiastic about addressing clearly & specifically what individuals in privilege can & should do.
- … with a sophisticated ethos for dialogue between the privileged and the marginalized.
so the problem is “clear feedback” because “well tell me exactly how to fix it” when the problem is “assuming the supremacy of Western liberal philosophy” and that there isn’t a monolithic homogeneity in the non-Western source materials (and also that centuries of Western imperialism have destroyed the access to non-Western materials) … we then have a problem.
That is a non-answer. Tell me what the fuck you want me to actually do.
you’re judging this based on the idea that there should be a rigidly (and safely, if adhered to) laid out set of instructions, when the flip side is actually “learn to detach from the idea that orthropraxy is protective from error”
You have accused me of demanding a perfect error-free orthopraxy before. I recognize the familiar pattern of privileged deflection which leads to that objection, the people who demand an explanation but will never find anything adequate because they are just resisting having to change.
But no, that is not what I am calling for. I am calling for good-enough principles plus practices for pursuing improvement when those principles are not enough. As I have discussed with you literally for decades.
I do not accept your refusal to name a praxis. I think you are demonstrating one of the worst dysfunctions of social justice advocacy culture.
I have had too damm many encounters — many of them with you — in which I have said …
I believe that I stepped wrong and I stand ready to address the harms for which I am responsible. But I do not understand what my error was, so I am stuck unable to make proper apology or amends, unable to avoid the error in the future. I want to do better, so I would appreciate help.… and then got responses along the lines of …
- “it is not my job to educate you”
- “I already told you but you are just not listening”
- “it is your responsibility to figure that out, not mine”
- “let go of white norms”
… and I hesitate to grumble about it, because that puts me in very bad company.
There are good reasons for those responses! Pragmatically, sometimes people just don’t have capacity at the moment of truth; injustice is fatiguing. Morally, responsibility for correcting injustice rests entirely on the privileged; the marginalized shouldn’t have to lift a finger.
But.
I have experienced social justice advocacy culture going from rightly supporting the pragmatic limits of delivering “clarity” to the stubborn privileged … to absurdly casting refusal to engage as a positive good. I know someone who had a paid antiracist trainer tell them “it is not my job to educate you”.
This is ineffective.
This is ideologically paradoxical. One cannot maintain both that the privileged are blind to the mechanics of injustice and that the privileged have to dismantle those mechanics on their own.
This is, at its worst, poisonous. Saying “you harmed me, and it was your responsibility to understand my needs without me naming them, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to satisfy me without me saying how” is a narcissistic abuse pattern.
I think that, as a general praxis, we need to turn back the dial a few notches.
And very particularly, with you, after all this time, I will not permit you to keep doing it. Stop.
literally I have noted that step one is to give up on the idea of the superiority of Western canon and that there can be a singular correct praxis
The fact that this leaves you bereft because you want a praxis to replace the previous one is … simply what is, and not an indictment of the need for dismantling a desire for One Superior Correct Praxis.
I am not demanding One Superior Correct Praxis. Read what I actually said:
I am calling for good-enough principles plus practices for pursuing improvement when those principles are not enough.For decades you have told me that I am thinking wrong and acting wrong, and then refusing to name something better. I cannot come up with a charitable theory of what you are trying to achieve.
They did not reply, but shortly after that exchange, they did post this to their own space:
There’s a conversation I’ve been having for years with many different people, where well-meaning individuals of demographic privilege truly want to “do better” and ardently wish for specific instruction sets or checklists so that they can “do better”.
…the problem is that this is doomed to failure, except in very specific contexts where there’s actually an assessor with authority who is committed to only using the agreed-upon checklist.
[It can be noted here that there are indeed specific contexts like this, with what are supposed to be agreed-upon checklists, and it’s the violation of those parameters that we pursue with lawsuits and petitions]
But the thing is, every single time any attempt at an instruction set is presented, people of privilege will start arguing with the instructions and parameters, and trying to game the system. Because that’s what is trained in through generations of success and survival in this kind of system. There are entire cultural traditions that involve training people to look for the loopholes.
And we’re supposed to — “in the West” — live in a system of “rule of law” and fairly and evenly applied checklists. That’s the promise.
… except we know that’s not reality, and most cynically the checklist is loudly declaimed while the violation of the checklist is clearly visible to everyone observing. Because the checklist is mainly an emotional shield for the people designated as protected under systemic oppression. It provides a rationale for “as long as [anyone] follows the rules…” and promises that the only people brutalized are those who break rules.
And it encourages the protected to think of “rules” as electrified fences that they dare not breach. (And thus to want new rules imposed with proof of safety before the previous set are ever flouted.)
There are other ways to organize the world, with different flaws. Asking for the current system to remain in place until a flawless replacement is available sounds philosophically appropriate until you notice that this results in maintaining the current pattern of protecting certain groups by feeding the blood of others into the machine.
Transparently a comment on our exchange, reframing it … without pointing to what I actually said.
I have seen this many times before in social justice advocacy culture: offering a criticism of a pattern, person, commentary, or event which is not quite an outright lie, but does evoke an image very different from the reality. This is a form of the motte-and-bailey move “in which someone switches between a ‘motte’ (an easier-to-defend and sometimes common-sense statement) and a ‘bailey’ (a harder-to-defend and more controversial statement)”.
Distaste for this pattern is one reason why my post about social media shitstorms says:
Shitstorms sow confusion. Resist this. Everything one says every time one engages must pursue clarity — especially about what actually happened. Return as much as possible to the known specifics of what people said and did. Push back against the telephone game effect.
This sort of thing does not compromise the righteousness of the project of social justice, or my commitment to working for it. It does complicate my engagement with the culture of social justice advocacy, which is the pits because I recognize that as an individual one must work in alliance with movements which never fully align with one’s preferences. But I sure don’t like that I have learned that I cannot trust second-hand accounts of events from my comrades in the movement.
24 July 2025
Social justice praxis dreams
Over on Bluesky discussion of “Woke 2.0” like this from William B. Fuckley …
… inspired Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li to ask:I think that specific activist language is probably dead, the next round is going to sound more like labor organizing than a college class. Woke 2 will have somewhat more limited aims and also be far more ruthless about political power.Yeah, my predictions are that Woke 2 will be more successful, but much more limited. A reclamation rather than a revolution.
Less “Folx” and more “no, gay people do get to exist in public actually, fuck you”.
I do think a lot of the stuff that generated so much sound and fury last time was kind of based on an assumption that 2020 was the worst society could get and that flawed liberal democracy was the floor. A kind activist version of ZIRP. I don’t think anyone will be under that illusion in a few years.
alright why not. woke 2 takes. let’s have ’em people
I fell into a little rant-thread which did not quite answer the question but seemed worth capturing:
Bitter experience teaches me not to make predictions beyond “I will not get the things that I want” but since you ask, these are some things I want and therefore expect to Not Get. I confess to the inclinations of my own privileged position affecting my center of gravity; I am who I am.
I want social justice praxis …
- … which understands the liberal school and identity politics school as counterweights to each other’s limitations. “The law in its majestic equality …”
- … which recognizes that tendencies are not absolutes. e.g.: “This person stands in a position of privilege so they miss a lot, but they do have a point about this particular thing, which that marginalized person did not happen to know.”
- … which recognizes that its terms of art are terms of art and says so. e.g.: “When we use the word ‘privilege’, we are not using it the ordinary way …”
- … which does not enable narcissistic abuse. e.g.: If someone has stepped wrong, they can expect clear feedback about how to correct the error, and if they make the correction we consider the matter closed.
- … liberal enough to reject diffuse, unaccountable processes … and leftist enough to reject depriving people of their livelihoods.
- … enthusiastic about creating clear write-ups of what the heck happened.
- … enthusiastic about digging in to imperfect efforts e.g.: “Without forgiving ABC for the error XYZ we can appreciate that ABC is good enough to be worth criticizing deeply, and then look closely at the problems with XYZ …”
- … which talks as frequently and profoundly about class as it does about race.
- … equipped to recognize that racism is a single-edged blade which cuts PoCs deeply and white people not at all, while sexism is a double-edged blade much sharper on one side that cuts men pretty damm deeply even though it cuts women far worse.
- … liberal enough to prefer universalist policy solutions but smart enough to know that universalist policy is rarely enough by itself.
- … very enthusiastic about addressing clearly & specifically what individuals in privilege can & should do.
- … which actually understands what the word “systemic” means. e.g.: “There is plenty of bigotry to address … and without structural interventions inequities will reproduce themselves even without bigotry.”
- … which understands the difference between punishing bad actors and depriving them of power, and vigorously prefers the latter.
- … with a sophisticated ethos for dialogue between the privileged and the marginalized.
16 July 2025
Linda Hamilton
Talking to a friend, I was reminded of how Linda Hamilton deserved a better career. In the original The Terminator, her line reading of “move it, Reese; on your feet, soldier” sells the entire damm movie. Good actors are the best special effect.
I once read an interview with director James Cameron about making Terminator 2: Judgment Day where he told a story I have not been able to source, but remember vividly. He resisted making a Terminator sequel for years — did you see my movie? it ends pretty definitively — but Carolco finally came him with such a huge budget that he just could not say No. So he told them, “Okay … if I can get both Schwarzenegger & Hamilton to come back.”
When he talked to Arnold, the conversation took all of ten seconds. “You made me a star. Of course I’m in. Whatever you want to do.”
With Linda Hamilton, he laid out his whole idea. Sarah Connor is no longer the befuddled waitress, she has learned all this Army stuff. And she starts out in a mental hospital, because she has been ranting about killer robots from the future.
Linda Hamilton replies, “I have one question and one condition.”
As I remember it, Cameron said that he thought this is gonna be good.
“You say you want me to go to boot camp and to the gym. How far will you let me take that?”
I like to imagine Cameron’s grin. “As far as you want.”
“Good.”
This is 1991. Schwarzenegger is on the A-list, but women in movies are not buff.
“What’s your condition?”
“So first they have to break Sarah out of the mental hospital. Cool. But also: she really is crazy.”
And Cameron realizes, oh, that’s better.
Good actors are the best special effect. Give Hamilton a retroactive Oscar just for her line reading of, “How’s the knee?”
And she’s still got it. Look at how much she does in just a few dozen words.
09 July 2025
Against politics without politics
The dangerous temptation of anti-politics
Politics is a bummer. People have incompatible visions of a good society. There are hard trade-offs — in priorities, in limited resources, in irreconcilable interests. Industrial society tends toward institutional infrastructure full of politics — legislation & regulation, bureaucracies to implement those, et cetera.
Mid-20th liberal political philosophers like Isaiah Berlin & Karl Popper looked at the totalitarian movements of the new century and concluded that many of them emerged paradoxically from a dream of escaping from the politics of politics, somehow creating a world without political processes and political strife.
We could all live together in peace, harmony, and prosperity if we just …
… eliminate the state
… smash capitalism
… give this brilliant leader total power
… all embrace the One True Religion
et cetera
Those liberals insisted that there was no getting away from the grubbiness of politics, that anti-politics was doomed to disaster. They framed liberalism as, in large part, reflecting a commitment to engaging in political process and an effort to make it as just and effective as possible despite a deep pessimism about the impossibility of perfect process, outcomes, or justice.
My own commitment to liberal democracy rests largely on that analysis.
On the left
That I am a liberal in that libdem Isaiah Berlin sense is not to say that I am a “liberal” in the sense that many leftists use the term to object to positions lacking political imagination any further left than the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. I am a leftist. My deepest political dreams are unmistakably radical. Socialism. Institutional changes that ultimately require re-writing the US Constitution. Dignified universal basic income. Transformative cultural politics.
Despite my fundamental alliance, I often feel uneasy among leftists. Partly this reflects a common rejection of “liberalism” which unnecessarily throws out the rights & rule-of-law baby with the capitalism bathwater, partly it reflects too little skepticism about the authoritarianism embedded in left ideologies downstream of Lenin, but aside from those ideological objections which one can confront directly, there is the slipperier problem of too many of my comrades frighteningly tempted by anti-politics fantasies. Even many strains of left-anarchism — inherently resilient against authoritarianism — are comparably scary in assuming that simply eliminating the state automatically eliminates coercion and politics.
Anti-politics is not at all universal on the left, even among radicals, but it is worryingly common.
On the right
Anti-politics is a distinct problem from the right’s opposition to equality which always emerges as opposition to liberal democracy among their radicals. Not everyone on the right suffers from the anti-politics fantasy, even among the radicals. The maniacs who both understand the feudal social / political order and yearn for its revival dream of more politics in their politics. But anti-politics is common, and it is currently ascendent.
Fascism exemplifies the problem of anti-politics, asserting that if we can purge the nation of the people who corrupt its essence, politics and policy challenges will just evaporate. This creates a fascist slide toward totalitarianism as they scramble for control in response to the failures of their nonsensical plans.
It is important to understand how anti-politics paradoxically rationalizes fascism’s authoritarian essence as anti-authoritarian in the minds of true believers. Fash read the liberal order (as in liberal democracy) and liberal order (as in an imagined dominance by “leftists”) as “authoritarian” (or even “totalitarian”) because these step outside of what they see as the correct role of government, by enfranchising & materially supporting the undeserving. In the US fash often frame themselves as not merely anti-authoritarian but anti-government, perverting our democratic civil language to cast “We The People” (real Americans) in opposition to the government. Among savvy fash leadership this is deliberate bad faith kayfabe, but many fash followers take it at face value.
No horseshoe
This post emerged from an online discussion with friends. One of them read these objections to anti-politics (and other problems in radical movements) as an embrace of the horseshoe theory that the far left & right wrap around to meet each other. It is not.
Dumb radicals on the left & right resemble each other in being dumb.
Likewise, anti-politics resembles anti-politics. There are radicals on both sides who do not indulge in anti-politics; there are moderates on both sides who do. Democratic Party stalwarts who say “had we won I would be enjoying brunch instead of thinking about politics” drift into anti-politics. Smart moderate conservatives turn out to have anti-politics baked into their thinking.
My friend who saw a horseshoe in my thinking is the kind of Dem many leftists disdain as a “lib”, and he returns their disdain, finding the left all dangerously unrealistic. I deeply disagree with him about the project of the left, but he is correct in seeing us aligned in dreading anti-politics. I will take informed libdem pragmatism like his over the anti-political fantasies of many of my comrades seven days a week and twice on Sundays.
03 July 2025
30 June 2025
As bad as the Holocaust?
This keeps coming up. People say, “X is as bad as the Holocaust”.
The Holocaust was not uniquely evil. There are many comparable horrors. But it was extraordinary enough that one should make comparisons judiciously.
Often I answer, “X is indeed very very bad. But I don’t think you understand the Holocaust. Can you explain why they fed the inmates at Auschwitz?”
“What?”
“You have seen the photos of the gaunt people at Auschwitz. They were starving. But the place was a murder factory, so why feed them at all? Why have gas chambers?”
“Huh. It doesn’t make sense.”
“But it does. The bottleneck was disposing of dead bodies. Where do you put them? Someone had to sit down with a pencil and paper and figure out the exact minimum they could feed people, in order to warehouse them before killing them. The only reason that anyone survived was that the Nazis could not solve the logistics of killing faster.”
More commentaries
This post started as a Bluesky thread inspired by a thread by Nome Da Barbarian:
Rebel Against Hate says:
Trump originally thought there would be one single day when all of his authority would be brought to bear and all of [the] “undesirables” would be removed.
He said this multiple times. He wanted a show of force that would have, had it materialized, been the beginning of the Second Civil War.The right craves “The Day of the Rope”, and have for years — because they fantasize about having power, not any of the work that using it even for evil ends by definition requires.
Part of their fantasy is that problems are simple, and that wielding power is easy.
They buy their own myth — the myth, for instance, of “German Efficiency” turning the German economy around, as opposed to slave labor, taking loans they never intended to pay back from countries they were going to annex, and putting everyone on amphetamines.
The fascists have never “made the trains run on time,” because trains are a complex system that requires expertise, compromise, and concession — with reality if nothing else; no matter how competent you are as an administrator, you can't simply order that there will be no delays.
Systems take work.
Vance put out a tweet recently about “what process is due,” and part of that was suggesting that in order for “due process” to be valid, we’d have to deport “a few million” people per year.
Our entire federal court system doesn’t see a million cases filed in a year. Filed, mind you — not heard.
The bane of anyone with a disability, “why don’t you just—” is the whole mindset. You must assume:
- Problems have solutions
- These solutions are easy to implement
- These solutions will not create their own problems
- Reality will cooperate
- Nobody until you has thought of these solutions
When Hitler began programs of mass death, the Nazis immediately ran into problems of implementation.
It took years to build the infrastructure, and they only started once they realized that they physically could not just shoot every person they wanted dead.
Even if they had enough bullets, even if they had enough executioners, even if every single person went to their death without a fight, the industrial scale of the murder involved was outside of human capacity.
They tried. And they ran into hard limits of the bodies and minds of their executioners.
That’s the problem with reality — it tells you no, sometimes.
Fascists aren’t good at hearing that word. If they were, they wouldn’t be fascists.
It makes them furious, that anything or anyone would defy their will. Cnute’s advisors, sure that their king can give orders to the tide.
But that’s the whole point of the Cnute story, after all — the point they miss. He knows, and is demonstrating as if for children, that there are thing outside of his control. He is making a point to his court.
Because he was an actual king. A ruler, who did the work of ruling.
You may know that I hate the concept of time zones. I’ve shitposted about that before, but my hate is genuine. I think it’s a bad system, made with 19th century technology to solve a 19th century problem, and that it persists only due to inertia, causing constant problems.
It’s bad. I hate it.
I will never sincerely advocate that we should change it — that we should abolish time zones, and run the world off of UTC — because the implementation of that is a nightmare of logistics beyond the scope of mortal understanding.
I don’t even know how to get the US on Metric, for fuck’s sakes.
But as long as we’re talking about impossible systems we should implement, how about this one:
You can’t be a dictator unless you manage to have a D&D group of six adults successfully meet once a week for a year.
I live with my D&D group, and we haven’t played since at least November.
Clear that hurdle, and maybe we have you manage a local non-profit that relies on volunteers.
Work your way up the administrative ladder.
Much like “everyone should work a service industry job,” doing the actual work of managing a system more complex than a household leisure activity (without the power or money to avoid ever hearing the word “no”) will disabuse you of the thought that you can order the tides to stop.
God save us all from “Idea Guys.”
My little thread inspired a telling little thread by Pashawasha:
In her memoir about her time in Auschwitz Dr. Gisella Perl writes about how incomprehensible it is that an entire block of pre-teen and teen boys were made to do calisthenics every day until they dropped from exhaustion, injury, and weakness. Guards said it was to make them “beautiful” but one day the entire block was sent to the crematory while their mothers in the neighboring block watched and screamed. Dr. Perl wonders why the guards had done all this and I have two thoughts.
- To maximize the cruelty.
- The leaner the bodies are the faster and more completely they burn.
Nazis were good at exactly one thing and that was turning every stumbling block and every victory into a chance to inflict the most cruelty they possibly could on the people they were exterminating.
The inventiveness of Nazi cruelty is another way in which they were notably extraordinary, though not unique.
Which brings us to another thread, by Sunny Moraine:
Yeah, like … speaking as someone who did a doctoral dissertation heavily focused on extermination / death camps, those are highly specific things and moral clarity is not served by muddying the waters.
This isn’t even saying “well some things aren’t so bad”, it’s literally just “words have meaning”.
I think it’s also not pedantry, although it can be that.
When a state transitions from things like slave labor camps and concentration camps to camps that exist solely and entirely to kill people it’s in a new phase and it’s worth being clear about that.
And again, this is not to say that “well as long as they aren’t building death camps we’re okay”, because I don’t trust people on here to not fucking read that even though I did not say it.
Once you’re building concentration camps, death camps aren’t that big a leap. It’s already very bad.
Which is to say that we as a county have always been much closer to death camps than any of us would like to realize.
(A crucial component to this is the government establishing zones of statelessness within those spaces, which would in fact be something new in this context and which the regime would clearly like to do. Dr. Timothy Snyder writes about this in his book Black Earth and it’s worth a read.)
Why this came up
Moraine’s thread has one more post:
CECOT is the test case for this, a place over which the regime undeniably has massive influence but where it claims anyone it sends there is in that kind of stateless condition.
Dr. Snyder’s essay State Terror addresses this directly.
A simple way to escape from law is to move people bodily into a physical zone of exception in which the law (it is claimed) does not apply. Other methods take more time. It is possible to pass laws that deprive people of their rights in their own country. It is possible to carve out spaces on one's own territory where the law does not function. These spaces are concentration camps. In the end, authorities can choose, as in Nazi Germany, to physically remove their citizens into zones beyond their own countries in which they can simply declare that the law does not matter.
CECOT is a concentration camp, not a death camp.
A cruelty factory, rather than a murder factory.
But.
It is the kind of emphatically dehumanizing concentration camp that becomes a death camp. Like the Nazis built outside Germany to avoid the complications of German law. It is easy to recognize.
The day after I posted this, we also got pictures of Trump visiting “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida. I wouldn’t choose Alcatraz as the metaphor which starts with A.
18 June 2025
Against Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism
A friend shared a social media post to me:
Liberalism is not anti-fascist as it is coupled with an economic system (capitalism) that leads to fascism. Dems are certainly not anti-fascist as they are half of the corporate government. Liberals can become anti-fascist if they are willing to ideologically develop beyond liberalism.
For a stronger and more thorough version of that argument, I like Liberalism and Fascism: Partners in Crime, which points to some chilling real history of capitalist “liberals” aligning with fascists which has unhappy parallels in our present moment. (Though I will eventually get to a key critique of its telling of history.)
To summarize the Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism thesis — DALA for short —
- The core of liberalism is capitalism, private ownership of the means of production. The high-minded claims of liberalism are ultimately rationalizations, evasions, or supports for the injustices emergent from capitalism.
- Fascism is also capitalism, stripped of the mitigations offered by liberalism.
- Liberalism faced with the crises inherent in the capitalist order — loss of popular support, which tends to produce a leftist challenge to the political & economic order — cultivates fascist movements as a way to secure the place of capitalism with theatre and violence.
- In those moments of crisis, liberals reliably align with fascists rather than than leftists.
I reject that analysis as dangerously confused about liberalism, about fascism, about capitalism, and about the relation between the three. This post originated as a capture & refinement of my rant-y text conversation with the friend who offered me that post, and it has grown and evolved since, because this keeps coming up.
Liberalism ≠ capitalism
To understand the problems of DALA, we have to face how broad American political discourse understands neither liberalism nor the Left.
Anyone serious about political ideas recognizes how slippery the terms “left” and “liberal” get. Each has a few distinct meanings, and each of those meanings are hard to describe crisply.
Most Americans use the term “left” and “liberal” interchangibly in a simple reduction of politics to a spectrum of positions on a single spectrum from very “liberal” on the left to very “conservative” on the right. While anyone with any sophistication registers the inadequacy of trying to describe all possible political positions by placing them on a single linear scale, the left-right spectrum is the best simple model available, a very powerful instrument if used carefully. Here’s a summary diagram from the post I just linked:
Thus unsophisticated Americans tend to think of the Democratic Party as “the left”, but less left than the “radical” left. On that diagram, Dems occupy the positions between the “hard” and “moderate” left. And to a first cut, there is value in placing different political ideologies on one side or the other; when necessary I will roll everything into two huge categories of the “broad left” and “broad right”.
But that diagram also registers a phase shift in relationships with institutional politics, which in the US includes a presumptive commitment to capitalism. The Democratic Party is institutional and therefore capitalist; the radical and far left want profound institutional change including the overthrow of capitalism.
That portion of the broad left which rejects capitalism is confusingly called … the Left. The capitalization is common but not universal; I like it as a signal that one is not talking about the broad left, and sometimes further emphasize it with my idiosyncratic expression “the proper Left”. People referring to “the left” may referring to the broad left or the proper Left, which is very confusing.
It is differently confusing that — unless one is on the right and either ignorant or deceitful — “leftists” never refers to all people on the broad left, it means only people on the proper Left. Leftists use the term “liberals” or “libs” to describe people on the broad left who are not leftists — the “hard” to “moderate” range reflected in the Democratic Party, and political science types generally accept that as a legitimate usage. So:
- liberals or libs want policy victories toward greater equality, but do not want institutional change at the level that would overthrow capitalism
- leftists of the Left see such a profound need for institutional change — including the overthrow of capitalism — that they consider liberals’ attention to policy within existing institutions as practically pointless
That political spectrum post I linked above has a lengthy section further exploring the lib-leftist distinction. So in this sense, DALA is correct to say “liberalism is committed to capitalism”, though it should already be apparent that liberalism is defined by a lot more than just capitalism.
One can also see that the things we talk about when we talk about positions on that spectrum are mostly policy questions. F’rinstance, in the US considering healthcare policy:
- the moderate left favors retaining of the existing system of private insurance, hospitals, et cetera, with government regulation and a bouquet of government programs funding some people’s medical insurance, though they may want a number of particular refinements to the system
- the left wing does not want to completely change the existing system, but does want much stronger government interventions in regulating and funding healthcare in order to deliver better care to more people
- the hard left wants significant change to the existing system, with government provisioning health insurance for everyone — perhaps by simply making everyone eligible for the existing funding system of Medicare — but not transforming everything, such that there might still be privately-owned hospitals and pharmaceutical companies et cetera
- the radical and far left rejects any privately-held healthcare institutions — hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, et cetera (though that does not necessarily mean direct state control, it could mean things like hospitals owned by their workers, or other arrangements)
Notice that this exemplifies how moving further left can imply stronger state control, but contrary to the claims of the right it is the vigor of efforts to ensure equity rather than state power which defines how far to the left one stands.
(For what it’s worth, on those terms I am pretty much a radical leftist … though I find I cannot completely let go of progressive engagement with the cut-and-thrust of politics within existing institutions.)
We must contrast “liberal” as a cluster of policy positions from a very different sense of “liberal”, naming an ideology of society & governance, summarized in a familiar way in the Declaration Of Independence:
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
That is not the policy agenda of the Democratic Party! It is a complex vision of universal rights, democratic institutions, rule of law, reason, et cetera. For clarity I often refer to “liberalism” in this sense as “liberalism as in Isaiah Berlin” or “liberalism as in liberal democracy” or just “libdem” for convenience. Libdem does not contrast with ideologies addressing policy like movement conservatism, it contrasts with ideologies addressing the social & political order like feudalism; movement conservatives are (or at least pretend to be) committed to libdem.
Looking at the history of libdem raises hard questions about how well it delivers justice & equity in practice. The Declaration articulating libdem principles was hypocritically an instrument of people securing an order of brutal racist colonial exploitation. Libdem’s emergence as a challenge to monarchism in the West was deeply entangled with capitalism’s emergence as a challenge to feudalism & mercantilism in the West. The “liberal democracies” — nation-states grounded in libdem principles — have capitalist economic orders.
Leftists commonly assert that in light of that history, capitalism is at least integral to “liberalism”, if not liberalism’s true singular defining characteristic, as we see integral to the DALA analysis; that often implicitly conflates the two different senses of “liberal”, as if the cluster of policy positions and the governance ideology were just the same thing.
This is just plain wrong. Not only can we distinguish liberalism from capitalism, we must in order to understand either one. When the Declaration was written, industrial capitalism had not yet been invented. Ideological commitment to the governance order of democratic institutions, universal rights, due process of law, et cetera is orthogonal to the economic order — one can have liberal governance without capitalism and capitalism without liberal governance.
Fascism ≠ liberalism laid bare
When DALA takes fascism as what we get when the capitalist core of “liberalism” sheds its false pretenses, worse than misunderstanding liberalism, that misunderstands fascism. I have given the nature of fascism a lot of thought and study, and DALA is dangerously confused about the relationship between the two, offering misleading half-truths.
- Yeah, capitalism can lead to fascism … but as a stupid reaction to capitalism’s failings. Fascism is an anti-capitalism of fools with right-leaning sensibilities, not-coïncidentally paralleling how “antisemitism is the socialism of fools”.
- Yeah, democracy can lead to fascism … but as authoritarians’ praxis for undermining democracy.
- Yeah, libdem can lead to fascism … but as an expression of authoritarians’ disgust at libdem valueslike equality, rights, even reason.
Fascism is emphatically opposed to libdem. 20th century fascists said so explicitly.
This gets slippery in the US, because fascists lay claim to representing the essence of the nation and libdem rhetoric is so integral to our national myths and political discourse. But one can easily see how American fascists pervert libdem rhetoric with a mix of irrationalist confusion about what words like “freedom” mean together with deliberate bad faith lies.
Fascism ≠ capitalism
DALA also misunderstands the relationship between fascism & capitalism. Even if one misunderstands libdem as nothing other than capitalism with a thin candy coating, fascism is not capitalism’s true nature stripped of deception because fascism is not capitalist. Yes, historically fascism has found its way to power in an alliance with the owners of the means of production. But the agents of capitalism do not create fascist movements, they emerge as organic popular movements discontented with libdem and the consequences of capitalism. Fascists are confused about the “elites” that animate their rage, not pretending. The rich see fascists’ popular support and disdain for libdem institutions, then arrogantly assume that they can support fascist movements to use them as pawns who will destroy the libdem institutions which act as a brake on the rich exercising power. But history shows that fascists bloodily betray many of their rich sponsors whenever they actually seize power.
It is worth noting here that people often point to Mussolini supposedly defining fascism as support for capitalist corporations. They are wrong about Mussolini and the nature of fascism on several scores. Actual fascist regimes produce weirdly mismanaged mixed economies because fascists have no investment in capitalism and no loyalty to their rich sponsors. Fascism is defined by a fantasy of violently purging the nation of corruption; fascists assume that boring nerd stuff like economics will just sort itself out once they do.
Antifascism
Liberal antifascism
Understanding fascism and liberalism clearly demonstrates that both libdem and liberalism-as-in-the-Dems are fundamentally anti-fascist … but bad at it. That is how fascism happens. Libdem always inspires fascism as a form of opposition. Fascism gains traction when liberal policy & libdem ideology are weak: in the face of crisis, when libdem institutions break down, when the public does not understand the case for libdem. We are having a moment of reälignment in American politics, which gives MAGA fascism the opening to seize power.
The institutionalism of the Democratic Party makes them fundamentally opposed to the revolutionary transformation of society which fascism pursues, but actual Dems are bad at both kinds of liberalism, which makes them bad at anti-fascism. Libdem outside of the Democratic Party in the US is also bad at anti-fascism because it is simply weak: the long-windedness of this post emerges from how few Americans understand what libdem is at all, much less know how to fight for it.
This weakness of libdem in the US is part of why DALA imagines that liberal antifascism is a contradiction in terms and cannot recognize libdem antifascism when it does appear.
Left antifascism
DALA assumes that leftism is inherently effective antifascism and that antifascism is necessarily leftist. I would love to believe that, since I am a leftist antifascist, with leftism & antifascism entwined in my heart. But I do not share DALA’s confidence.
To explain the Left’s current weaknesses in combatting fascism I have to put my hand in the lion’s mouth and point something which merits a much more sophisticated analysis than I can fit into this already-rambling post. We need to understand two elements of the contemporary Left: opposition to capitalism and advocacy for social justice.
Anti-capitalism ≠ antifascism
DALA casts the anti-capitalist aspect of the Left as the only legitimate ground for opposing fascism by a sort of transitive property math:
- leftism = anti-capitalism
- fascism = capitalism
- liberalism = capitalism
- therefore liberalism = fascism
- therefore Left opposition to liberalism = opposition to fascism
- therefore leftism is the only legitimate antifascist position
But points 2 & 3 are wrong.
I hope that the anti-capitalist aspect of leftism proves antifascist in the long view because people living in fully automated gay space communism would be too happy to turn to fascism. But we don’t have that to work with. There is no reason to think that a movement which has failed to overthrow capitalism has compelling power over fascism. Indeed, since fascists have no investment in capitalism, take protean policy positions in pursuit of power, and love to take a pseudo-populist stance for the “real” people against corrupt “elites”, leftist anti-capitalism is vulnerable to fascist appropriation and entryism.
Anti-liberal social justice ≠ antifascism
At the most fundamental level, any form of social justice advocacy is inherently antifascist, since fascism finds egalitarianism disgusting. But the dominance of the identity politics school of social justice in contemporary leftist culture complicates this. Identity politics rightly faults libdem as unable to deliver true equity — “the law in its majestic equality” — which deters alliances between leftist antifascists and libdem antifascists.
“Soft” identity politics embraces libdem commitments to equal rights et cetera as good, but considers them incomplete in creating equity and demands counterweights to those failings. “Hard” identity politics opposes libdem as nothing other than an instrument which sustains injustice, often marrying with leftist misunderstanding of libdem as nothing other than a defense of capitalist injustice. The hard school therefore hesitates to ally with libdem for any purpose … and can even cede ground to fascists in rejecting the libdem toolkit of rights, institutionalism, proceeduralism, reasoned argument, et cetera.
A popular front
All this presents a bitter irony. Up at the top of this essay, I registered how leftist antifascists argue that history shows that when the chips are down, liberals refuse to join a popular front with leftists against fascists, siding instead with the fascists against leftists. We know from the 20th century that this can happen … and we also know from the 20th century that it can cut the other way. The Counterpunch article I linked at the top of this post as a good articulation of the DALA argument inverts the story of how the Nazis seized power in Germany, claiming that “Social Democrat leaders [⋯] refused to form an eleventh-hour coalition with the communists against Nazism”, when even many leftists recognize in fact the leftist KPD called liberals of the SPD “social fascists” and refused to work with them. When leftists tried to take on both fascists and liberals in the Spanish Civil War, they lost catastrophically, resulting in generations of authoritarian rule.
So no, liberals (in either sense) do not need to “develop beyond” liberalism to be antifascist. Leftists who insist that they must are the ones refusing solidarity, making the exact mistake history teaches us to avoid. This is a three way fight. I think the Left must always prioritize opposing fascism as the greater threat, and certainly must set that priority now.
In this moment in the US, what do DALAs expect to gain from dismiss the possibility of liberal antifascism? Leftists are weak in the US. Do they plan to convert all of the liberals into leftists first, and then defeat fascism? The wolf is at the door.
I’m a leftist on the merits. And to fight fascism, I think the Left is the best place to stand. But I sure do want to stand with gormless Democrats in antifascism. I even want to stand with conservative antifascists. Leftists need to get our heads straight … and y sibling post against “centrist” Dem anti-leftism argues that the liberal establishment has an even greater obligation and opportunity to get over themselves and reach left.
One more question
Fascism aside, I ask leftists who reject not just liberal policy, not just capitalism, but also the whole libdem governance ideology of rights, rule of law, et cetera — what do you propose instead? The 20th century does not just teach us to dread authoritarianism from the right.
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