Covid-cautious socializing

My sweetheart & I are living the covid-cautious life, so that compels us to have a protocol for socializing.

Indoors

With not just covid but flu et cetera making the rounds, we don’t like to share air with folks wrestling with obvious symptoms like coughing, or who have been in big risky crowds et cetera in the last few days.

Since rapid covid tests are not so accurate these days, we pack a Metrix test kit for use before sharing indoor air … though the awkward bit is that it takes 30 minutes to run the test.

Outdoors

We have both gas & electric heaters set up for our covered patio. They aren’t strong enough to overcome the coldest times of winter, but they take the edge off enough to be cozy on a chilly day if one also dresses warmly.

We are also trying to cultivate a list of venues with covered & heated outdoor seating.

• Victoria Bar
  our favorite, with good nosh — NE Albina
• The Rambler Bar
  N Mississippi
• ¿Por Qué No?
  taqueria — SE Hawthorne
• Bar Maven, Bar Carlo, Shami Cafe, 5 & Dime Bar
  surprisingly good food (except 5&D) but none of these have heat outside — SE Foster

We are also up for an adventure to try places like …

• Mirisata Restaurant
  Sri Lankan food — SE Belmont
• Laurelhurst Market
  a world of beef — E Burnside
• Tiny Bubble Room
  taproom & grill — N Lombard
• Interurban Saloon
  N Mississippi
• The Knock Back Bar
  NE Alberta

Divination and “AI”

Contrary to what many esotericists and civilians imagine, one need not believe that the Cosmos delivers wisdom through which tarot cards or I Ching hexagrams, or runes, or astrological charts or whatever come up. Divination is a thinking process just as electrical engineering or film theory or medical diagnosis is a thinking process. It uses the cards-etc as an instrument to help convert semi- and sub-conscious understanding into a conscious form. One can conceive of this as creating an opening for the perception of subtle information from spiritual forces & entities, or one can conceive of this as an entirely psychological-materialist process. I myself embrace a radical agnosticism on where the information comes from, though in doing divination I do find it helpful to think as if the cards-etc contain a message from the Cosmos.

The random cards-etc present the reader with a big bouquet of multivalent meanings. The reader’s mind picks out elements of that stew, informed by everything the reader knows about life, the querent they are reading for, the question at hand, et cetera, including from spiritual forces if one conceives of the process that way. The reader takes what they notice and synthesizes it into a description of what they see the cards-etc “saying”. This usually informs a dialogue with the querent, who engages in a second layer of interpretation as their mind responds to the reader’s analysis and to their own perception of the cards-etc.

One can do divination solo, the querent responding to the cards-etc directly, without a reader, but this is notoriously difficult. The double cascade of interpretation supports a helpful sense that the insight comes from outside the querent’s own mind, even if one thinks of that as entirely illusory.

In summary, the reader draws cards-etc, notices patterns, stirs in a bunch of familiar classic ideas (change! growth! passion!), assembles that into a coherent-sounding story, and presents that to the querent; the meaning emerges from the querent’s experience of all that.

This sounds a lot like the way people project meaning into the output of LLM babblebots. I am an esotericist who takes divination seriously, and I am a skeptic of most LLM applications … but this makes me wonder whether the I think the Eliza Effect might make LLMs good at supporting divinatory readings for people.

Over on Bluesky, a wise esotericist I know challenged me suggesting this:

This idea is disgusting to me on principle. This only makes sense to do if you don’t think spiritual matters are real, because if they are, then the unethical and exploitative nature of the tech is surely a form of spiritual pollution you wouldn’t want touching your divination.

I share some of that reflex to reject LLMs as an instrument for spiritual work; my suggestion is an attempt to confront my own reaction by framing a question to explore.

I think my original thread implied that an LLM might do a human spiritual process, which was a mistake on my part. This challenge made me more clear that I am asking whether a robot plus cards-etc might provide a better instrument for solo divination than cards-etc alone. I truly have no idea.

Divination may require an input of spiritual insight beyond what lies within the querent — if not a human reader, Something Else, like a conscious nonhuman spirtual entity. If so, this suggestion is a dead end; an LLM ain’t gonna be able help with that at all.

The usefulness of a robot in divination depends on a couple of big ifs. Are there querents who do not need the full support of a human reader’s insight, but do need a more digestible instrument than raw cards-etc to provoke their own spiritual insight? Can an LLM do the necessary work of symbolic refinement to provide something more digestible?

Surely someone is trying the experiment?

The tale of RMS Carpathia

I’m overdue to keep a link to this great telling of one of my favorite stories: the RMS Carpathia rescuing surivors of the wreck of the Titanic.

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

Have a hanky handy. I’ve read this dozens of times and it makes me weepy every time.

Also: in case you didn’t already know, this story will show you that the Starship Enterprise is a steamship.

Clarifying common social justice praxis

Social justice is not my primary political project, so I don’t want to claim profound expertise. But having rolled with people who are serious social justice advocates for a long time, I have a developed a distinctive way of articulating some key things which some people find useful. This post is no place to start thinking about social justice, but I hope that it will help clarify what is happening in other commentaries.

• The left
• Liberal vs identity politics
• Hard vs soft identity politics
• Identity politics concepts

Criticisms

• Faux liberalism
• Anti-liberalism
• Language policing
• Absolutism
• Cancel culture

Fundamentals

Social justice

The term should be familiar. I like to name a few things explicitly.

Praxis is a portmanteu word alluding to the overlap of thought & practice.

Social justice means addressing injustices pervasively experienced by social groups: the sexism women encounter, the racism people of color encounter, et cetera.

Praxis is a portmanteu word alluding to the overlap of thought & practice.

Social justice advocacy more specifically refers to the practice of attempting to correct social injustices. There are a range of different approaches, grounded in different analyses of how social injustices work. This post is mostly an attempt at clarifying how some major approaches work.

Social justice advocacy culture is an expression I use to distinguish advocates’ driving ideologies from the social norms & practices people exercise. This can be useful, for instance, in naming that one embraces the feminist project & analysis while faulting some moves feminists tend to make … or vice versa.

Opponents of social justice include people acting from a few different principles. Some assert that American society is fundamentally just, with social justice advocates misrepresenting how the world works. Some accept that the conditions social justice advocates point to are at least partly real, but reject addressing them as impractical, or entirely impossible. Some recognize those conditions but assert either implicitly or explicitly that those conditions are right & good. I find it useful to talk about these types together while recognizing that they are not simply all the same.

The left

We should not just conflate social justice advocacy with “the left”.

We need to start with clarity about the term “left”, which can mean a few different things. (I have a long post on the subject.) To name to the range from Democratic Party moderates to Maoist revolutionaries and countless points in between, I like to refer to “the broad left”.

Leftism — or The Left — is the portion of the broad left which calls for profound institutional change replacing capitalism with some form of socialism (not just social insurance like single-payer health care, but public control of factories et cetera). Within both groups one can find many different relationships with social justice — frameworks for understanding, policy approaches, and degrees of attention.

Social justice advocacy is not just the same thing as either the broad left or leftism. Social justice advocacy on the broad right is rare, but does exist. Some people on the broad left have a weak enough concern with social justice that they do not qualify as advocates. Many social justice advocates conceive themselves as leftists; many others do not. Some leftists consider social justice advocacy a distraction from economic class as the important locus of political action.

Two big social justice ideologies

Among social justice advocates in the US one finds two broad ideological schools with profound differences. The failure of social justice advocacy culture to articulate these schools clearly produces a lot of confusion. Alas, as when talking about the left, the most precise terms of art invite confusion, but we have no better alternative.

The liberal school school is more familiar to people who do not have a deep engagement with social justice advocacy culture. Not “liberal” in the sense of the policy objectives of the Democratic Party (which leftists call “lib”) but a deeper sense: the approach to governance & society which grounds political claims in democratic institutions and universal egalitarian rights. (To specify that sense, I often abbreviate liberal democracy as “libdem”.) One may summarize the liberal school of social justice as:

• calling for equal rights for all
• vigorously rejecting institutional discrimination
• exercising institutional power to counter private discrimination

The identity politics school has come to dominate US social justice advocacy culture in recent decades. Unhappily, this name for it is most often used as a bogeyman by opponents of any efforts toward social justice, but we need to be able to distinguish this framework from the liberal school, and no other term will do. “Identity politics” first appeared in print in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, and one can learn a lot about this approach to social justice by reading that early document. I summarize the identity politics school as:

• considering the universalism of the liberal school inadequate for achieving social justice; as Anatole France famously snarked, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”
• examining the particular group categories society imposes on individuals’ identities (race, gender, et cetera)
• actively countering the unequal relationships between those groups in every context (cultural, social, institutional, et cetera)

Hard vs soft identity politics

I find it not just illuminating but important to distinguish “soft” from “hard” identity politics. This distinction is my own coinage, but I find that it helps make sense of where people stand.

Soft identity politics embraces both the liberal and identity politics approaches. It sees them as complimentary, acting as counterweights to each other’s limitations.

Hard identity politics rejects any other approach to social justice as illegitimate. It sees the liberal school as nothing other than an instrument for maintaining & justifying inequities.

One cannot draw an entirely bright line between these camps. Among the soft school, people may lean more or less on liberal or identity politics frameworks, often changing their priorities in different contexts. Among the hard school people still sometimes invoke liberal language about rights et cetera despite their rejection of the liberal framework. But looking for social justice advocates’ attitudes in these terms can be very clarifying.

Identity politics concepts

To understand what the identity politics school is — and to make a lot of social justice praxis legible — I find it clarifying to reïntroduce some key vocabulary & concepts from the identity politics school’s analytical toolkit which advocates don’t always describe crisply.

The term equity directs attention to bottom-line outcomes, in contrast with liberal ideas of rights & process equality. This famous cartoon offers a metaphor:

Identity politics registers that different axes of identity (race, gender, et cetera) operate in similar ways. In particular, it refers to relative advantage as privileged positions (white people, men, etc) and refers to relative disadvantage as oppressed or marginalized positions (people of color, women, etc). “Privilege” in this context neither contrasts with rights nor denotes the particular advantages of high social class; the term stuck despite those misleading resonances because a famous 1991 commentary used it well in speaking to college-educated white feminist women.

Identity politics articulates several ways that different privileged positions operate similarly, just as different marginalizatized positions do. For example, culture tends to frame privileged positions as “normal”, while taking marginalized positions as deviation from that norm, so a privileged identity often goes unmarked while a marginalize identity is marked even when it was irrelevant — one will hear references to a “Black doctor” or a “female doctor” much more often than to a “white doctor” or “male doctor”.

Identity politics also examines the unique characteristics of each axis, and intersectionality names its body of ideas for addressing how people’s positions on mutliple axes interact in complex ways. No one is simply privileged or marginalized. A gay Black man experiences privilege along the axis of gender while experiencing marginalization on the axes of sexuality and race. Each identity complicates the others; a gay Black man experiences racism differently than a Black straight man or a Black lesbian woman does.

The identity politics school has a vocabulary for talking about different mechanisms which produce inequities — personal, interpersonal, institutional, structural, and more. This expands the scope of social justice advocacy beyond impacts of overt bigotry & discrimination, trying to overcome systemic inertia from ignorance, misunderstandings, inequities in financial & social capital, et cetera. Thus it uses “racism” to refer to everything which creates & sustains racial inequities, rather than to refer just to racial bigotry; likewise for sexism, homophobia, etc. This makes it easy to get confused about which processes we are talking about in a particular instance; I try to never deploy terms like “racism” alone, instead specifying “racist bigtory”, “systemic racism”, et cetera.

Because of this attention to systems beyond bigotry, identity politics underlines that one can participate in injustices without exercising bigotry at all — that indeed one inevitably will unless one makes deliberate efforts toward antiracist / antisexist / etc action, especially along the axes where one occupies a privileged position. The aphorism “impact, not intent” reminds us how focusing on the particulars of bigotry can become a distraction from understanding & correcting how one implicitly enables unjust processes. One practical application of that is that nouning is considered harmful — one should avoid asking whether we should indict a person as a racist or sexist et cetera, instead registering without disqualifying their whole moral character the ways they should look to better support justice. I sometimes express that by saying things like, “I don’t think you are a racist, but when you X you are doing racism, so you should change that”.

Grappling with criticisms

Reasonable people of good conscience can come to significantly different conclusions about how to understand & correct social injustices. Personally, I find the identity politics toolkit for overcoming the limits of libdem unmistakably necessary … and I am committed to taking libdem remedies as far as possible before venturing beyond them, so I stand with soft identity politics. But vigorous contention between social justice advocates about how to understand and address injustices is healthy, inherently difficult, and necessary. I find wisdom and allies from folks in both both the liberal and the hard identity politics camps; one must respect people committed to the project whom one considers mistaken but legitimate.

Problems in social justice advocacy culture are not nearly so bad as opponents of social justice suggest; criticisms offered out of misunderstanding — or bad faith — make the hard work social justice advocates must do to refine our ideas & practices much harder. I name the distinction between social justice advocacy and social justice advocacy culture in part to enable a little sympathy for people who misread the worst failings of advocate culture as the core truths of what these movements stand for.

Yes, I see advocates who need to be kept far from the levers of power. There will always be smug, noisy assholes whose voices carry when they rationalize themselves with so-called political principle. But if one lacks intimacy with a movement, one can easily misread loud voices as more significant than they are; the worst ideas and actors in social justice advocacy do not hold significant power, and will not any time soon. The biggest obstacles to a healthy culture of social justice advocacy do not come from within the movement, they come from dealing with the chaff thrown up by opponents.

That defense made, I’m including this big section about criticisms because I do think it is important to register how social justice advocacy culture does not police bad moves as well as I think it should. I have posted before about concerns. I believe we can and should do better, and that includes admitting to weaknesses — both to ourselves and to people who are not engaged.

Ceding the ground of critiquing social justice advocacy culture to opponents of social justice makes those opponents look more credible than they are. “We are the only ones talking about this.”

It also undermines social justice advocates’ ability to develop our praxis. Every friendly critique has to waste a lot of energy underlining its support for the project of social justice rather than addressing its point, as you can see above. When we cannot sustain an internal dialogue about a problem, new critiques cannot build on past efforts or address those efforts’ limitations, re-starting from Square One, reïnventing the wheel. I find it particularly galling that social justice advocacy culture has let our opposition repeatedly coöpt our terms of art for self-reflection, including not just “identity politics” but also “political correctness”, “social justice warrior”, “woke”, and others.

Below I try to name some common troubles in social justice praxis which I find it helpful to articulate for people unfamiliar with the particulars of advocacy culture. Not naming this stuff trips people up; naming it can defuse mis- or over-reading the implications.

Faux liberalism

A lot of criticism of social justice advocacy which exercises libdem language is either deceit or wank rationalizing inaction which leaves inequities in place. One can see this fundamental problem in one of critics’ classic moves: demanding that we demonstrate to their satisfaction that an inequity emerges directly from bigotry severe enough that acting to correct it is possible and morally necessary.

Social justice advocates often reject that move from bitter experience with such critics refusing to ever accept that we have proved that case. I consider it useful also challenge an assumption lurking within that demand. The burden of proof should fall on their suggestion that an inequity may be fair, not on social justice advocates’ assertions that inequities are unjust.

Consider people framing their objections to antiracist policies as standing for “equality of opportunity, not opportunity of outcome”. How do they account for every metric one can find revealing white people better off than Black people? It is trivial to see how in 1950 this reflected inequality of opportunity. Today’s inequities pointing in the same direction as past differences in opportunity is a very suspicious coïncidence. If American society changed to provide equal opportunity, when exactly did that happen? 1975? 2008? What evidence supports that claim? If Black people get lesser outcomes from equal opportunity, is that not a claim that Black people are somehow inferior? If one is not a bigot, isn’t it more parimonious to attribute inequity to lingering unfairness in the system? If that unfairness does not emerge from direct discrimination, why would that make it OK? Even if bigotry were entirely erased from American society — which we know it has not been — we would expect it to leave a lingering systemic legacy, like a traffic jam persisting after cars wrecked in an accident have been cleared. Why wouldn’t we do whatever we can to correct those echoes from past wrongs?

Reflexive anti-liberalism

I respect how the kind of people I describe above inspire impatience with liberal arguments skeptical of the analysis and remedies offered by the identity politics school. The culture of identity politics advocacy sometimes presumes that all support for the liberal school of social justice must therefore reflect nothing other than disingenuous opposition to social justice. In my personal experience people offering skepticism framed in shallow liberal terms sometimes turn out to be more goodhearted than they appear, having embraced a misreading of liberal principle because they have given these questions very little thought. I would never demand that any social justice advocate spend the time and energy it takes to walk people out of that thinking, but they should not oppose other people making the attempt.

Some hard identity politics folks extend that reading yet further. One rarely sees social justice advocates draw the distinction I do between the liberal and identity politics schools because a lot of people committed to identity politics resist recognizing it as a social justice ideology, because they think of it as the only real form of social justice advocacy. This denial of the legitimacy of the the liberal framework often extends to implying that no real liberal tradition in social justice advocacy has ever existed, which would come as a surprise to the people who put the word “rights” in the middle of the name of the Civil Rights Movement.

Language policing

Most social justice advocates consider cultural change as important as institutional change. I have sympathy for this feeling like nitpicking sometimes … though the shock of encountering casual racism, sexism, homophobia, and other bad cultural politics in media just a few decades old makes a strong case that the nitpicking efforts which changed our norms were well worth it. Taking care with language is a big way social justice advocates do this cultural work. But the practice can have messy unintended consequences.

Sometimes preferred language is just an arbitrary signal that one pays attention to social justice. One cannot deduce from antiracist principle that one should say “person of color” rather than “colored person”, one has to just know. It does not make the language hollow — signaling that one pays attention to social justice is a good thing to do! We should be forthright about that. In that particular example, objecting to someone saying “colored person” is fair because the rule is well-known. But in other cases, social justice advocates take offense based on language norms which they presume are better-known than they are. Esoteric language can drive away people with their hearts in the right place who don’t know where to start in getting more engaged with social justice advocacy culture, and can reïnforce social class gatekeeping by presenting a greater challenge to people who have not been exposed to that langauge through a college education or other professional-class spaces.

Social justice advocacy culture responding to people who don’t use the word “racism” the way it does presents a particularly fraught example. Advocates often tell people that they are “wrong” to think that “racism” means racial bigotry because the “real” definition of “racism” understands it as a system. Trying to assert the “correct” meaning of “racism” is like trying to identify the “correct” meaning of “God” — the ideas the word represents are too contested. Most dictionaries offer racial bigotry as their first definition of “racism”; and many do not reference racism as a system at all. Countering people talking about racism in terms of bigotry with an assertion about the definition of the word turns the discussion away from the substance of language to the semantics.

At its worst, this becomes a lazy attempt to force people to accept a whole way of thinking about social justice without bothering with the argument for it. I find it both more honest and more effective to say, “Because looking only bigotry does not reveal enough about how things work, a lot of social justice include everything which produces racial inequities when they use the word ‘racism’ — stuff like honest ignorance, social & financial capital, et cetera. Since different people use the words ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ differently, I try never to use them by themselves. I say ‘racist bigotry’ or ‘institutional racism’ or whatever, in order to be precise.” People often object that the way advocates use the word is weird, but they can accept a description of the usage of the word is accurate, and talk about the substance of what I am trying to say, without spiralling into unanswerable questions about what the word “really” means.

It further undermines attempts to assert an “accurate” definition of “racism” when social justice advocates are not actually precise with their usage of the word. Advocates commonly slip between using “racism” to mean The Big System Of Injustice and using it to mean bigotry. That sloppy language makes advocacy look like sloppy thinking. In those cases, it is slopping thinking, implying that systemic inequities prove the presence of bigotry without presenting an argument, which falls into the trap I described of faux-liberal skepticism setting by insisting on proof of bigtory.

Social justice advocacy culture needs to do better at delivering the care with language in practice which it calls for in principle.

Absolutism

Sometimes social justice advocates over-read tendencies as absolutes.

Understanding from lived experience

For example, standpoint theory registers that one’s identity positions have an inescapably profound impact on one’s encounter of the world, which makes it good praxis to value lived experience: people in a marginalized position have a generally more sophisticated read of the inequities along that axis, and the mechanics of how those inequities work, than people in a privileged position do. Women understand sexism better than men, et cetera. We can recognize that while also understanding that sometimes a man may happen to have an insight into sexism which a woman does not.

But this sometimes does stiffen into an abolute form. I have been told that a particular fact I have offered about the history of feminism which a woman did not happen to know could not possibly be correct, because men must never tell women how sexism works. I have seen social justice advocates insist that the lived experience of queer people are the only ground for understanding homophobia, which may make us dismiss a useful insight from a straight historian because it differs from queer cultural memory. This can produce maddening paradoxes, calling on people in privileged positions to speak out against injustices but then scolding them when they do.

This is tricky to navigate! My fact about feminist history was not all that important; on balance, relying too much on queer cultural memory may still deliver a better understanding of how homophobia works than being too credulous with straight historians. People in privileged positions tend to over-read the marginalized as making bad moves, which is one reason why the privileged need to cultivate skepticism about their own reactions. So correcting such errors at the margins is not always worth the effort. And in decisions where stakes are higher for the oppressed than for the marginalized, the marginalized have a compelling moral claim that they should be the ones to make a call about what to do.

Campism

The privilege–marginalization framework inherits a lot from the anticolonial work of Franz Fanon, who underlined the importance of always checking one’s politics against whether or not it supports the oppressed in overcoming their oppression at the bottom line, summarized in the famous aphorism that the oppressed have a right to overthrow their oppression by any means necessary.

If one actually reads Fanon, he cautions about the dangers in reducing that analysis to a campism which justifies any brutality the oppressed might commit. He supported liberation by any means necessary, not by any means possible. I have encountered people fall into the trap he warns about, claim a moral impunity for frightening ruthlessness, in a creepy parallel with Carl Schmitt’s fascist “friend-enemy distinction”. That kind of vulgar Fanon-ism should give us the cold spooky.

Oppression Olympics

If the only ground for understanding is the experience of the marginalized … how do we discern who resolve whose marginalization is legitimate and relevant in context? Some “feminists” claim that trans women are really men, and accepting their account of transphobia illegitimately favors privileged men over marginalized women; trans women call this a demand that we favor privileged cis people over marginalized trans people. I know where I stand — transphobes are liars — but “defer to the marginalized” in itself does not give us the ability to resolve that question. People can fall into an oppression Olympics of arguing over who is most marginalized … and intersectionality names the importance of not doing that, because the dynamics are always complex and entangled.

Cancel culture

I have another post directly addressing this. There is no better example of a real challenge which opponents of social justice grossly exaggerate. Two key points:

the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Manifestos for a new America

We have no choice but to think big.

The ongoing reälignment of American politics which produced the Trump regime is already at least as profound as the emergence of the New Deal administrative state. Given the course I imagine for the Trump regime, we will need a reconstruction as profound as the unfinished reconstruction after the Civil War. Not just policy. Not even just governance or an economic system. A full new social vision with its own ethos.

I’m starting to see manifestos, so I’m going to index them here.

Working On Our Ism

Timothy Burke has not so much a manifesto as a manifesto-for-a-manifesto.

We are against Trump and Farage and LePen and Orban and Weidel, but what are we for? What do we call it, if “socialism” is either hopelessly abstract or tied to references that don’t translate into the present? Could we give a positive, e.g., not defined by negation, description of what electoral majorities want other than fascism or ethnonationalism, and from that granular description, coin a new ism?

[⋯]

What I think we need is something like a list of propositions that many of us agree with deep in the bone, that we feel, without any attempt to specify implementations, laws or policies. If we do this right, I think we can find some basic ideas that a very substantial majority agree on, even including some people who might right now be voting for authoritarian or ethnonationalist parties.

[⋯]

But somewhere in all of that is not so much an anti-capitalism, defined by negation, but a vision of shared social life that is other than capitalism. Something other than liberal modernity or mass society. To give whatever that it is a name of its own and a pathway to concretization I think involves more conversations about these ideas before we try to make parties or movements or policies.

Liberal Currents | Reforging America

A word from Samantha Hancox-Li of Liberal Currents, where people are thinking about the muscular, radical liberalism I yearn for.

The mainspring of governance

1. Congress must be revitalized internally
2. Congress must reassert itself vis-a-vis the other branches
3. Most importantly, the link between the Congress and the people must be reforged

A world of abundance

1. We must clear out regulations that serve only to create artificial scarcity
2. We must run a hotter economy than the neoliberals allowed
3. We should invest in basic public goods
4. We should re-found the world trade system

America for all

1. We must invest in public and higher education
2. We must finally arrive at a new settlement on immigration
3. We must prosecute all the criminals of Trump II.
4. We must rebuild our public sphere

The UnPopulist | The Reconstruction Agenda

The Reconstruction Agenda, a new project of The UnPopulist, will take this problem seriously, building on its Fireproofing the Presidency series. Its Executive Watch project is diligently documenting the copious abuses of the office emanating from this White House. The Reconstruction Agenda will propose fixes and mechanisms to avoid such a scenario from transpiring ever again. Through written analysis from myself and outside experts, along with regular in-depth interviews on The Reconstruction podcast, it will examine how American democracy became so brittle and how it might be rebuilt. The goal is to value genuine expertise and make it accessible to any thoughtful reader. You’re smart people and you deserve smart answers, not clickbait and ill-informed punditry, nor nihilistic doomerism. The task before us is restoring the capacity for freedom and self-government, not simply lamenting its decline.

Wank

Iris Meredeth offers “wank” as a useful term of art:

Our society clearly has an issue with a whole family of bad-faith speech acts: outright lying is an obvious problem and bullshit, as defined in Harry Frankfurt’s text on the matter is a pressing concern in our political climate. However, none of them quite capture what’s going on here, which can perhaps be described as speech that aims to bolster someone's self-image or let them feel good about themselves, but that is disguised as something else: a political statement, an objective statement of fact or a form of artistic expression. This essay aims to define this form of speech, and given its observed properties, we could do worse than to call it wank.

[⋯]

⋯ Our working definition might therefore be as follows:

Wank is a speech act directed first and foremost at helping the speaker feel better about themselves, stated as an objective claim about the state of the world, that we are expected in discussion to treat with the epistemic authority of a claim about identity, but the content of the actual claim.

The end of the Social Justice Détente

After the wrenching fights over social justice from the ’60s through the early ’70s, American society made an implicit bargain I like to call The Social Justice Détente:

• no big new government policy moves to correct injustices
• no public expressions of overt bigotry

Advocates for social justice today tend to think of the emergence of The Détente as simply the bigots winning, but it did not seem that way at the time. Before The Détente, American public culture had allowed a measure of bigotry hard to imagine even if one is old enough to remember it. Changing that was not trivial.

Part of the logic of The Détente was that in the ’70s & ’80s, social justice advocates in our pop media engaged in a pervasive propaganda campaign to overcome bigotry. In an episode of Mork & Mindy, Young Robin Williams faced down the local chapter of the Klan! In an episode of The Partridge Family, Danny became an honorary Black Panther! Norman All In The Family Lear was the king of this sort of thing, but it was everywhere. When young social justice advocates grumble about white liberals’ earnest, maddening misunderstandings, half the time they are confronting ideas inherited from this propaganda campaign, which feels dangerously tepid & naïve to contemporary viewers but reflected a powerful challenge in its time, supported by sophisticated social justice advocates.

The broad left hoped that these egalitarian parables and a public sphere purged of overt bigotry would produce a new American generation free of the bigoted attitudes of the past. Arresting policy progress was a pause, not a surrender; the next generation would would pick up the baton and take the next steps toward a more just society.

Obviously that did not happen. American culture still has plenty of bigotry. The wave of political support for new policy comparable to the anti-racist (and anti-sexist) reforms of the Civil Rights Era did not come. To understand our current condition, we need to understand both those failings and the successes we did get.

Baseline common bigotry on the broad left today mortifies people attentive to social justice, but it is far less than the bigotry common even on the broad left prior to The Détente. Even the fact that we have a hard time remembering how bad bigtory used to be constitutes a major victory.

The broad right today is twistier.

The right started worse, and changed a lot less. But they are sincerely offended by a lot of things their great-grandparents would have said casually … which they think means they are not bigots at all.

Bigots never think they are bigots; they think their attitudes are just obvious common sense. So people on the right assume that most people on the left privately understand and agree with their attitudes. They imagine that we just differ from them in working harder to maintain the hypocritical performance of public norms which conflict with common sense. Surely in our most private circles we let ourselves admit the truth.

People on the right have learned not to express themselves “honestly” without subtly checking first whether everyone in earshot is “cool”. It is easy for folks on the left to underestimate the gulf between the attitudes people on the right have and routinely express in private versus what they say when measuring their words in our presence. When people on the right grumble about the “far left” exercising “totalitarian” control and “dominating” culture with “lies”, it is absurd, but they are sincerely describing what they experience.

Compounding that, the broad right feel that the broad left have violated the terms of The Détente. We didn’t accept The Détente as a satisfactory endpoint. We don’t admit that “real” racism & sexism have been obviously defeated. Indeed, we greedily demand more. The scope of what we permit in public keeps narrowing. And we have extended the power of the state to support the disgusting queers.

All this is of course a big part of why they find Trump refreshing and forthright. And they remain frustrated because even Trump does not get to say everything they say in private. I think it’s dangerously simpleminded to understand MAGA as just about bigotry, but it is a lot about bigotry.

Related

I was prompted to finally write this post because of a recent story about leaked chats among Young Republicans which I think even most people on the broad right would find repulsively bigoted and fascist. The bigots-among-the-bigots use the skills they learned in stepping carefully in mixed company to watch what they say even among ordinary folks on the broad right. Even more than regular people on the broad right, they find it cathartic to speak “plainly” among themselves, and yearn for a world in which they can be “honest”.

Vice President Vance dismissing concern over the leak by saying “I refuse to join the pearl clutching” demonstrates how MAGA as a manifestation of our ongoing massive social reälignment rejects both aspects of The Détente: they will roll back the social justice policies implemented in the ’60s & early ’70s and change our public culture to permit bigotry.

Liberal Currents
The Present Crisis and the End of the Long ’90s

A racial and sexual hypocrisy

The Long ’90s was also a cultural settlement. The cultural settlement was not embodied in any single law or policy, but rather shaped the basic assumptions of Americans about our country — and, most especially, who was a full citizen. Surprisingly, the consensus can be expressed quite simply. On the one hand, explicit racial or sexual discrimination would end. On the other, America would remain de facto a white man’s republic.

From the perspective of 1982, this seems like a good bargain for all concerned. The bruising unrest of the 60’s and 70’s — including the violent terrorism the New Left had degenerated into, including the violent terrorism of Jim Crow or COINTELPRO — all that would end. The insurgents — the feminists, the civil rights activists — would get a major improvement on the status quo. And the status quo — the white patriarchy — would in practice get to keep most of its privileges and power.

The compromise broke down with the election of Barack Obama. After forty years, the “insurgents” were no longer the children of Jim Crow and white-picket-fence patriarchy. They were the children of the Long ’90s, who had been promised the world. We told all America’s children — men, women, and otherwise, black and white and otherwise — that they could be anything they wanted to be. Unsurprisingly, they believed us.

Meanwhile, the old guard of the white man’s republic — men and women both, it turns out — were shocked and appalled at the possibility of a black man being president—of black people demanding an end to routine police brutality — of women demanding an end to routine sexual assault. Both MeToo and Black Lives Matter were shocks to the conservative psyche it has not yet recovered from.

The Trump II theory of the case is bizarre and conspiratorial. Trump II appears to believe that this sea change in American culture — the belief that America is not a white man’s republic, but a republic in which all men and women are endowed with certain inalienable rights — was a result of a cabal of Marxist professors and other elites, the “Cathedral,” which brainwashed the youth of America, and if they can simply find the Cathedral’s funding and cut it off, Americans will go back to loving the boot. They just need to kill the woke mind virus. The demand that Harvard accept a group of political commissars to ensure “viewpoint diversity” (aka affirmative action for rightwing incompetents) embodies this.

Romney bitterness

Over on Bluesky, a bunch of lefties piled on to a post expressing a common sentiment from the right.

The media smeared Mitt Romney as Hitler. Then Republicans thought, well we might as well run Hitler.

We have been hearing this for years, and lefties mostly respond by calling shenanigans on this as disingenuous. This classic cartoon from lefty satirist Matt Bors sums up the point:

That critique of the right claiming that the left drives them right has a lot of truth to it, but I think there is some extra dimension to folks on the right feeling raw about Romney in particular.

To many folks on the broad right who may not even be MAGAs, supporting Romney’s presidential bid reflected something paralleling what Clintonian triangulation represents to the broad left. “He is obviously sharp. He is fundamentally competent. He doesn’t say inflammatory stuff that freaks out the other side which some other potential candidates from our side might. We are tacking toward the center rather than toward what we want most, to be less vulnerable to criticism.” There was even the inversion of Dems’ grumble, “How can the Republicans object to the Affordable Care Act when it is essentially the same plan Romney implemented in Massachusetts?” He was not a candidate who excited them, he was a candidate they hoped would repel their opponents less, win over a few votes, and enable reaching across the aisle in Congress.

I’m not saying Romney was that person; he was more a creature of longstanding Republican movement conservatism than they remember. But a lot of Republicans sincerely understood him that way. Folks on the broad left should be familiar with how it feels to see that fail.

There’s also a thing that fascinates me about Mitt Romney’s screen presence. He looks like the actor one might cast in a movie which has just one scene in the Oval Office, and thus needs a guy who is obviously meant to be the president without anyone having to be told. It’s a characteristic which feels very comforting to Republicans in a way they would assume extends to Dems. They don’t understand that it opens the question of why they don’t feel the same comfort with Obama in the Oval, with its obvious ugly answer.

Dems of course did not attack Romney as Practically Hitler. But we did sharply criticize him (for very good reasons), which felt so unfair because they were Trying To Be So Nice in picking him.

Fine, then. They’ll pick a candidate who does excite them. Not because Trump is a fascist — obviously that is a “leftist” fantasy! But they get to enjoy the schadenfreude from the left frantic over that “fantasy”. Why not? Being nice by picking Romney got them nowhere.

“Cancel culture” and criticism

I keep bouncing off of my attempts to say something sophisticated about the challenges in constructively criticizing social justice advocacy culture. It’s a huge subject and I get lost in nuance.

One must start from the recognition that 95% of criticism of social justice advocacy culture is disingenuous reactionary bullshit from opponents of social justice … and that 95% is not 100%. There are legitimate criticisms which are not simply attacks on the project of social justice itself. There are roadblocks deterring worthy criticisms which emerge organically from social justice advocacy culture itself, but I try to keep from focusing on my grumbles because most of the frictions preventing the culture from facing its own failings have their roots in necessary adaptations to dealing with opponents of social justice.

Today I fell into a rant about “cancel culture” on Bluesky, so it seemed worth capturing (and slightly refining) that here.

What are we even talking about?

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About Cancel Culture reflects this knotty challenge. Because opponents of social justice often make absurd claims about “cancel culture” or “call-out culture”, advocates for social justice often claim there is no such thing. But there is a thing, it is a feature of social justice advocacy culture, and as the Bluesky thread which inspired this post observes …

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

I have captured that thread below. This post started from me expanding on the point: the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion. Memorable real examples include:

• A woman followed by a handful of friends on Twitter ironically takes the voice of a bigot to make a bad joke about AIDS in Africa, gets on a plane, and when she gets off she is infamous and unemployed. She deserved criticism, sure, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
• A couple of guys at a tech conference joke to each other about the funny technical term “dongle” and by the end of the day they are infamous and one of them is unemployed. They deserved criticism, maybe, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
• A trans woman writes a raw, personal story attempting to subvert a transphobic trope, the publisher faces so much criticism of it being “obviously” transphobic that they withdraw it, and the writer ends up so shaken by the pushback from her own community that she never attempts to get anything published again. A tragedy.

We all have said bad things that landed with people as even worse than they were, then found ourselves unable to set things right despite our sincere efforts. Dreading the possibility — however distant — that such an episode could seriously damage our careers or standing in community is natural and justified.

Moves people in social justice advocacy culture make to dismiss these concerns — like saying “‘cancel culture’ just means ‘consequences’” or “people should be more careful what they say” — implicitly endorse the capriciousness and disproportionate stakes.

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About “Cancel Culture” is turbo-charged by online social media shitstorm dynamics but it is such a distinct phenomenon in social justice advocacy culture that Jo Freeman referred to it as “trashing” in a famous essay about feminist organizing in 1976.

The acid test, however, comes when one tries to defend a person under attack, especially when she’s not there, If such a defense is taken seriously, and some concern expressed for hearing all sides and gathering all evidence, trashing is probably not occurring. But if your defense is dismissed with an oft-hand “How can you defend her?”; if you become tainted with suspicion by attempting such a defense; if she is in fact indefensible, you should take a closer look at those making the accusations. There is more going on than simple disagreement.

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Again, most criticisms of “cancel culture” are disingenuous BS from bad actors trying to rationalize their desire to say bad things in public without consequence. But they are leveraging a real thing which presents substantive problems. Dismissing that real thing and those problems helps the bad actors and weakens the effectiveness of our advocacy.

That social justice advocates all too often snap — either retreating from public advocacy or even joining the opposition — is bad for everyone. I submit that many people we push out from social justice advocacy culture were just flawed in an ordinary, human way, just trying to figure things out, just making honest mistakes. On principle, social justice advocacy culture should help people where they stumble, not attack them. Yet the Driving People Out thing in social justice advocacy is another pattern which pre-dates the era of the identity politics framework and social media. Yes, some of those folks were charlatans all along, but is rooting out charlatans as vigorously as possible worth the cost? The right don’t think so; they support their charlatans and it sure pays off for their cause.

Many of us are too eager to read dissenters as having been Charlatans All Along; the psychological pressures of people facing a shitstorm of criticism will screw up even the most level-headed person. F’rinstance, I am fascinated by the tragedy of Warren Farrell. In the 1960s & ’70s he was a deeply committed feminist advocate. He turned the feminist analytical toolkit on what we now call toxic masculinity; I read his 1993 book The Myth Of Male Power, which has a fascinating mix of insight and bad ideas. Had feminist culture engaged with what he wanted to address rather than rejected him, our understanding of toxic masculinity would have gotten decades of head start. Instead, the pushback he got from feminist women drove him mad, and eventually he became a thoroughly evil MRA.

As I say in a longer word on grappling with criticisms of advocacy culture …

Preventing social justice loyalists from making good faith critiques of advocacy culture is not just bad on the liberal-values merits, it has been bad for achieving social justice. We can and should do better.

Commentaries

Aelkus on Bluesky

Not exactly my read, but illuminating, and it inspired the thread which became this post.

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

because that was what CC was for the vast majority of people actually impacted by it.

at its peak, it really was essentially a free for all driven by platform dynamics and a ritualized system of aggression

Venkatesh Rao described a good part of here: The Internet of Beefs

there's a saying “not even wrong” to describe bad theories — they’re so bad that they’re impossible to be shown wrong. you might coin an analogue: “not even a mob with pitchforks.” all of the insanity of a crowd stoning someone to death, but none of the lasting social effects

i don’t think it makes sense to make an analytical separation, anyway, between “online harassment” and “cancel culture” as phenomena. they were both symptoms of the same underlying generating mechanisms in the 2010s

we do so largely because they are still ideologically loaded terms rather than neutral ways of describing “large masses of people concentrating negative energy on the internet towards a single target”

similarly, little of the discussions of “surveillance capitalism” in the 2010s acknowledged that social media was always built around peer to peer surveillance

the end result was fairly predictable. lots of random furries in discords got their social identities obliterated by other random furries in discords. however those with significant offline social status not only weathered the storm but became proficient at controlling platforms to use as tools of aggression. the quasi-feudal system Rao described in the post I linked died, and was replaced by what X represents today. A fully operational battle station controlled by a single nutty person

the fact that the system that produced this progression is now filled with nostalgia speaks to the enduring delusions its participants have about its true nature

Frances Lee | Excommunicate Me From The Church Of Social Justice

This memoir of familiar frustrations with social justice advocacy culture has a telling comment about the topic of this post:

Scrolling through my news feed sometimes feels Iike sliding into a pew to be blasted by a fragmented, frenzied sermon. I know that much of the media posted there means to discipline me to be a better activist and community member. But when dictates aren’t followed, a common procedure of punishment ensues. Punishments for saying / doing /b elieving the wrong thing include shaming, scolding, calling out, isolating, or eviscerating someone’s social standing. Discipline and punishment has been used for all of history to control and destroy people. Why is it being used in movements meant to liberate all of us?

Offbeat Empire | Liberal bullying: Privilege-checking and semantics-scolding as internet sport

Common call-out culture trends:

• Focus on very public complaints. I can think of exactly one time when someone emailed their concern about problematic language. These complaints seem to be always intended for an audience.
• Lack of interest in a dialogue. These complaints aren’t questions or invitations to discuss the issue. They’re harshly-worded accusations and scoldings (which I’ve written about before).
• Lack of consideration for the context or intent. The focus is on this isolated incident (this one post, this one word, this one time), with de-emphasis on the author’s background, experience, or the context of the website on which the post appears.
• And on a more stylistic note, these complaints are often prefaced with phrases like “Um,” and other condescending affectations.

It’s challenging for me because the values motivating these complaints are completely in-line with both my personal politics as well as my professional passion for catering to niche markets and semi-marginalized cultures …

Lydia Laurenson | Cancelled Left and Right

A memoir with Laurenson’s characteristically thoughtful ambivalences. A taste:

What bothered me most was that there seemed to be no grace, no possibility for a canceled person to recover or make amends — not even anything resembling a “fair hearing” that a person could request once targeted by the cancel mob. Additionally, the cancellation process seemed unfairly harsh for any but very serious crimes. In other words, cancellation struck me as a punishment that didn’t fit most crimes it was used for. Moreover, even when applied to bad cases, the process seemed counterproductive for the community using it; most people who’d been canceled shifted away from social justice norms or left the movement entirely, and sometimes took their friends with them. All these effects seemed destructive and wrong, but saying anything publicly was clearly dangerous for one’s reputation and sanity.

[⋯]

Worse, the club benefited from cancellation. It helped them stay at the top. That was the thing that disgusted me so much that ultimately I could not bring myself to publicly rejoin the movement. “The club” let newcomers run into the cancellation buzzsaw while watching to see if they survived, and if the newbies didn’t? Well, then there was less competition for the women in that room! Supporting a canceled feminist was a calculation made afterwards, based on whether she made it through the experience.

Everyday Feminism | Maisha Z. Johnson | 6 Signs Your Call-Out Isn’t Actually About Accountability

An insider’s review of types of misfires.

In many ways, holding each other accountable has come to mean punishing each other. Sometimes it feels like we’re all competing on a hardcore game show, trying to knock each other down to be crowned the movement’s Best Activist.

[⋯]

1. You’re Not Focused on the Outcome
2. You’re Not Choosing Your Battles Based on What’s Best for the Community Involved
3. You’re Using the Same Strategy for Every Situation
4. You’re Centering Yourself on Behalf of Another Group
5. You’re Engaging in Respectability Politics to Police Other People’s Behavior
6. You’re Trying to Force Someone to Be Accountable

Adrienne Maree Brown | Unthinkable Thoughts: Call-out Culture in the Age of Covid-19

Too subtle and poetically rich to usefully quote; this taste is meant as an enticement to read it.

the kind of callouts we are currently engaging in do not necessarily think about movements’ needs as a whole. movements need to grow and deepen, we need to ‘transform ourselves to transform the world’, to ‘be transformed in the service of the work’. movements need to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. we need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths. not already free, but practicing freedom every day. not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, and ending those cycles in ourselves and our communities.

Contrapoints | Canceling

A long video-essay. I should note that, as usual, Natalie Wynn inspires a lot of criticisms, and I have my own … and as usual I admire her brave, deeply-considered, astringent efforts to face hard questions. There’s a transcript if one needs it.

The Ballads of Malcolm Reynolds

Over on Bluesky, Sean Kelly says:

Malcolm Reynolds starting off as an abusive prick who all the women love anyway because deep down, he’s a good person is such a case of Joss Whedon telling on himself.

Kelly is smart about this sort of thing. I see why he says this. As someone who watched — twice — all of Whedon’s perverse masterwork Dollhouse, I recognize him frequently revealing his misogyny, narcissism, and abusiveness in his storytelling. I see plenty of those problems in Firefly.

But on this point I see something else going on, because we know quite a bit about what Whedon wanted to do with Firefly and with Malcolm Reynolds. A few years back, I posted a quote from Whedon on this very subject:

Mal is somebody that I knew, as I created him, I would not get along with. I don’t think we have the same politics. But that’s sort of the point.

The series offers Mal to us as a noble scoundrel loved by all of the women aboard the Serenity, but not because Whedon wanted to tell that story, quite. Whedon created that under protest, as an adaptation to Fox’s insistence that the central character of the ensemble could not be the utter bastard he wanted to examine. Whedon filed down Mal’s rough edges — still an abusive prick, but less so — and made the whole ensemble less fractious, more loving. That paradoxically meant that the story did less work to justify the sympathy for Mal it asked for, creating a dissonance which made Kelly itch.

We can glimpse the different Malcolm Reynolds Whedon wanted to give us in the pilot which the studio rejected. The first sequence introduces Mal as a callously violent soldier smugly fighting for the Space Confederacy. In the second sequence, we see that losing the war broke something in him, turning him into an utter shit. He is insulting and disrespectful toward a sincere priest and a self-possessed prostitute! Had Whedon been able to figure out a way to justify including a dog in the scene, Mal would have kicked it.

In that pilot, yes, Kaylee does love Mal. Whedon has said that in writing the show “when Kaylee says it, we believe it” because she is a pure soul, wise enough to fall in love with the real hero of the Serenity crew before his heroism became apparent. But her love for Mal is the only thing in the pilot telling us that this asshole is worth caring about. Even Mal himself tells us otherwise.

In that pilot, River does not love Mal. Well, she doesn’t get to say much. In the second first episode, River says in one of her fugues of holy madness, “Mal. Bad … in the Latin.” The show uses River’s inhuman insight to tell us things, much as Whedon says it uses Kaylee, so that is stark. River comes to love Mal as the whole crew do, but along the way River — who is a scary murder-monster — often fears Mal.

In that pilot, Zoe does not love Mal. She is utterly loyal to him, and she trusts him. The show hints that she feels indebted to him for something he did in the war. But that is not love. In the Serenity film, Whedon tells us very clearly that Zoe only loves only one person in the ’verse, and it ain’t Mal. In the pilot it seems that Zoe does not even like him, though maybe she hopes to someday get back a better Mal she knew before the war broke him.

In that pilot, Inara does not love Mal, despite genre savvy telling us that Inara & Mal have romantic tension. What keeps them apart? Mal being terrible. Inara finds Mal attractive but dislikes him, for good reasons. (In this do see a different accidental confession from Whedon, resentment that women like Inara often feel attracted to men like Mal, an ugly note which shows up many times in his work.)

The changes in charactization after the pilot are significant but not jarring because Whedon and his team are crafty, largely just fast-forwarding to a state Whedon had meant to work hard to earn over a few seasons of storytelling.

He did a similar trick in wrapping as much as he could of several TV seasons’ worth of storylines in the feature film Serenity, including an abbreviation of Malcolm Reynolds’ arc. The series gave us Mal living by a code of honor which emphasized total dedication to his crew. In the film, he realizes that caring for a small circle of people is not good enough. He has to care about everyone. His moral obligation to the ’verse outweighs his own life and even the lives of the people dear to him.

Had Whedon gotten to make the Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds he originally imagined, I doubt that many people would love it the way they love the cozier Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds we got. I wish I could reach into a parallel timeline to watch the story we lost; it would have been a hell of a thing.

Luke Skywalker

I don’t entirely love Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi — it works for me, though I recognize that it is messy — but I consider its capstone to Luke Skywalker’s story not just the best thing in John Williams’ opera cycle but even so good that it retroactively improves Luke’s story in the original IV-VI trilogy. Rescuing some thoughts from X/Twitter and elsewhere:

For one thing, it keeps the promise made by that last moment in VII: The Force Awakens —

— Luke is now ready to truly understand Kenobi, though it takes Luke until the end of VIII: TLJ for him to fully register Kenobi’s final lesson to him and stop wallowing in his own bullshit. It is the fitting end both for Luke and for the “saga”.

John Williams knows the score, if you will pardon the pun. The first time we hear the Force theme is seeing Luke restless in IV: A New Hope …

… and Williams teases us by leaving the theme uncompleted. As he will again and again, either letting is fade away or interrupting it with something else. Until, at long last, he does complete the theme — gently, not triumphantly — with Luke’s death at the end of VIII: The Last Jedi when we know that Luke has in his last moment come to peace with himself, because he finally learned the lesson Kenobi needed him to understand.

A word about violence

It is a pity that the choreography of the fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the end of III: Revenge Of The Sith is so bad because the core idea is brilliant: Obi-Wan keeps falling back and falling back and falling back, desperately hoping that Anakin will make a mistake.

Obi-Wan’s error in succumbing to settling things with Anakin through violence and trying to set his own terms for it should give poignance to his duel with Vader decades later in IV: A New Hope, showing he has learned and matured. In Obi-Wan’s last duel, he finally accepts that he cannot — and should not — defeat Vader through violence. He does not try to set the terms of the fight, or try to “win”.

Wisdom.

This takes us to Luke — who we met and came to love as a young hothead — finally learning what Obi-Wan was trying to teach him, stepping up yet refusing violence, completing the work.

Moviebob

So Uncivilized

Luke is not a generic hero, he is a repudiation of the generic hero.

Jesse McLaren

So Luke Skywalker force projected across the galaxy to distract a Sith blinded by anger that he didn’t even realize he wasn’t a fighting a physical person, allowing the next generation of heroes to escape and then he gloriously faded into the sunset and you didn’t like that?!

And it was revealed Rey isnt from a famous family she’s just an ordinary person who has the power to take on the forces of evil and you were mad she’s not a nepo baby?!YOU WERE MAD SHE’S NOT A NEPO BABY?!

Jonathan McIntosh

A handful of The Last Jedi haters in my mentions are offering up a fascinating misreading of the final showdown between Luke and Vader in V: Return of the Jedi. I think it’s worth taking a moment to discuss because it may help explain why these guys hate Luke’s character so much in Episode VIII.

The misreading: Luke Skywalker uses his great warrior skills to defeat Darth Vader. Once he’s proven himself in combat and stands victorious, Luke does the honorable thing by showing mercy and sparing his enemy. Thereby saving himself from corruption and redeeming his father.

What really happened: Luke tries to avoid fighting but gives into anger. As he bests Vader in combat, Luke realizes his great mistake, winning this fight means losing his soul to the Dark Side. The battle itself is corrupting him, understanding this Luke throws away his weapon.

Notice that the misreading (above) reframes Luke as a badass warrior and reframes his refusal to kill Vader as an act of mercy stemming from a position of power. This is significant because Luke beating Vader in combat is explicitly depicted as a moment of weakness not strength.

The desire of some fans to re-imagine Luke as a powerful warrior who spares the bad guy out of benevolence is consistent with the way male heroes are often represented. It’s the way Batman is framed when he doesn't kill The Joker. But Luke Skywalker isn’t the typical action hero.

Luke’s arc in the original trilogy ends with him not only refusing to kill the bad guy, but refusing to even fight a worse villain. This is why Luke’s force projection standoff with Kylo in The Last Jedi is so perfect. It's the ultimate expression of everything Luke has learned.

The fact that an iconic figure like Luke Skywalker was explicitly framed as weak for fighting a murderous villain like Darth Vader is a pretty subversive message, especially for a male hero in Hollywood. And it’s something that, 35 years later, some fans still refuse to accept.

Max Gladstone

Responding to a comment lost to the sands of time, affirming my own disdain for the Jedi.

I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t buy it. Admittedly, in part because I have no difficulty either rejecting prequels or considering them as schlocky historical dramas produced in the period between VI and VII. That said, you’re spot on with respect to Luke’s moral issues in VII and VIII being natural outgrowths of his character in IV-VI. On bias I think the evidence of the prequels is that the Jedi were terrible Jedi. Which kicked me in the feels the way I think some feel kicked by the Luke thing.

The whole plot of the Prequel Trilogy (I-III) rests on the Jedi being so bad at the most basic of human interactions that they don’t recognize fascism and Palpatine’s general skeeviness staring them in the face, and never think through the underpinnings of the civil war. If we sort of go with the prequel trilogy where it seems to lead us, here’s the story as I see it:

• I-III: The Jedi are an ossified order so devoted to strength and self-righteousness that they forget their role and allow a great crime to take place.
• IV-VI: Luke learns the Force but resists exactly the old Jedi bullshit that got the galaxy into this mess. (In this light, walking out on Yoda turns out to be one of the wisest things he does in the whole trilogy …)

This tacking into personal connection ends up saving the galaxy from the Emperor: Luke going to save Han and Leia leads to him reconnecting with Vader (traumatic as that is), and reaching out to Vader leads to the Dark Side eating itself. But, we get to the New Trilogy (VII-IX): Luke’s rudderless when he encounters the limits of his philosophy, and petrified precisely because his iconoclastic mysticism has left him so alone. And he’s aware enough to see himself recapitulate old Jedi mistakes. That leads to his breakdown, and I think that’s the root of his recovery at the end of VIII. At least that’s how I see it.

Brendan Hodges

This week taught me loads of people think the Jedi in the prequels were Good Guys who did everything right, instead of inhuman militarized priests whose hypocritical arrogance directly contributed to the fall of The Republic. The Jedi steal children from their parents, never let them talk to their parents again, generally act like inhuman robots and “training” is forcing kids to play party games seeing if they guess a speeder or a cup is on their iPad. What could go wrong!

When Anakin goes to Yoda for spiritual support, mortified Padme might die, Yoda responds: “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” If Yoda had a more nurturing & accepting hand, Anakin never would’ve become Darth Vader. Instead, it’s a culture of Catholic Guilt. Brendan Hodges

It’s significant the only Jedi to stand up to the Council in all 3 prequels is Qui-Gon Jinn, the first Jedi to learn to become a Force Ghost. Lucas is demonstrating knowledge and wisdom go deeper than fundamentalist attitudes and over-reliance on arbitrary dogma.

The Jedi think they’re “keepers of the peace, not soldiers,” only using the force for “knowledge and defense.” Yet, from the opening of I: The Phantom Menace, Jedi are deployed as armed enforcers for The Republic, shaking down CEOs of trade companies. They live by none of their values. II: Attack of the Clones is especially damning. Yoda and Mace are anguished their “ability to use the force has diminished.” Ultimately, they cover up their failure from the Senate, the same toxic attitude of cover-ups with the police & the Church, an image of power above all else.

When Luke ultimately realizes the cycle of violence and fundamentalist hypocrisy must end, he’s right.

“Now that they are extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris.” Luke hides on Ahch-To out of guilt, but also in fierce ideological opposition to propagating a toxic religion. Until Rey, he doesn’t see a way of reconciling the virtues of the Jedi with a new outlook (syncretism). IX: The Rise of Skywalker should have deepened these ideas, but alas.

While the Star Wars Prequels (I-III) may fail as entertainment or drama, they persevere as rich, rewarding and sadly relevant texts by a very strange man, George Lucas. And Rian Johnson is the only post-Lucas storyteller to meaningfully reckon with them. They’re a magnificent work of art.