Vox Day

In case you need it, Avicenna at A Million Gods has a good review of why the repugnant Theadore “Vox Day” Beale is repugnant.

Liberals, libertarians, and conservatives

In the course of a critique of Ron Paul, David Atkins at Hullaballoo says some incisive things about the fundamental differences between liberals, libertarians, and conservatives.

Liberalism is and has always been about intervention. It is the opposite of libertarianism, and always has been. Liberals understand that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Left to their own devices, people with weapons and money will always try to exploit and dominate people without weapons and money unless they are stopped from doing so. It is not because we are taught to do so. It's just innate human nature. If this were not the case, libertarianism would work as an ideology. It does not, and never has at any point in history.

When the government steps in to stop a corporation from dumping noxious chemicals into a stream, that is intervention at the point of a gun, by a superior force against a lesser force attempting to exploit the weak and powerless. When the government steps in to enforce desegretation in schools, that is intervention at the point of a gun, by a superior force against a lesser force attempting to exploit the weak and powerless.

When Abraham Lincoln and the North decided not to allow the nation of the Confederacy—and make no mistake, it was a separate nation with separate laws and an entirely separate culture—to secede from the Union, in large part because the North had an interest in ending slavery in the South and in striking down a competing agrarian economic system, that too was intervention by a superior force against a lesser force attempting to exploit the weak and powerless. To this day, many Southerners feel that their land is being occupied by an illegitimate and invading power, and theirs a Lost Cause that will rise again.

This is what liberalism is. It is unavoidably, inescapably paternalistic in nature. It is so because it understands the inevitable tendency of human beings to be truly awful to one another unless social and legal rules are put in place—yes, by force—to prevent them from doing otherwise.

Conservatives use force of government as well, of course, but not in defense of the weak and oppressed, but rather to maintain the power of money, of patriarchy and of the established social pecking order. Where the oppressive hand of government helps them achieve that, they utilize it. Where libertarian ideology helps them keep power in the hands of the local good old boys, they use that instead.

But a liberal—a progressive, if you will—is always an interventionist, because a liberal understands that society is constantly on a path of self-perfection, in an effort to use reason and good moral judgment to prevent insofar as possible the exploitation of one person by another.

Bundy vs Occupy

A Facebook friend asks, in a discussion of Cliven Bundy:

Occupy San Francisco was permitted to illegally occupy Justin Herman Plaza for a month. Where was the liberal outrage?

This is a fair question.

There are a number of meaningful differences between Occupy and Bundy.

Occupy was an act of classical non-violent civil disobedience, violating the law while recognizing the legitimacy of the government. If and when cops would arrest Occupiers, while they did not coöperate, neither did they actively resist.

The case for civil disobedience as part of the democratic process is well-defined and well-accepted; we make kids read King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Thoreau's Civil Disobedience in school. Civil disobedience is a way of getting a democracy to change unjust laws by revealing the injustices they produce; it fundamentally respects and supports liberal democratic institutions and seeks to improve them.

Bundy and his supporters, in contrast, engaged in active armed resistance, rejecting the legitimacy of the duly-constituted and democratically elected government. When cops came for them, they drew guns and promised a fight.

The case for active armed resistance is also well-defined and well-accepted; we make kids read the Declaration of Independence in school. And it says that armed revolt is justified when a government is not a liberal democracy, when it is regarded as illegitimate by its citizens.

But the US government is regarded as legitimate by its citizens, and while its liberal democratic mechanisms are not as strong I would like them to be, they are there. Bundy's movement does not fundamentally respect the US's liberal democratic qualities; it actively rejects and attacks them through threat of violence.

There is a name for a “populist” movement by an armed minority which attacks the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions in the name of the nation's “true spirit” which must be rescued from the corrupting influence of lesser races through acts of redemptive violence. It is not “civil disobedience”. It is something else.

---

Update: Historian Rick Perlstein observes:

Here is a truth so fundamental that it should be self-evident: When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger. And yet that is exactly what happened at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch this spring: An alleged criminal defeated the cops, because the forces of lawlessness came at them with guns — then Bureau of Land Management officials further surrendered by removing the government markings from their vehicle to prevent violence against them.

Freedom

Today the news is Adam Nogourney's New York Times article A Defiant Rancher Savors the Audience That Rallied to His Side about Cliven Bundy.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here's the money quote. (And you can see it on video. And there are more quotes, of course.)

He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Update: In a follow-up interview on CNN defending this statement, he said:

You know when you talk about prejudice, we're talking about not being able to exercise what we think and our feelings. We're not freedom — we don't have freedom to say what we want. If I call — if I say “negro” or “black boy” or “slave,” I'm — If those people cannot take those kind of words and not be offensive, then Martin Luther King hasn't got his job done yet. They should be able to — I should be able to say those things and they shouldn't offend anybody.
....
I don't even know how to talk about these ethnic groups.

Interviewer: Then don't.

But I'm going to because I'm interested in those people. I think they should have freedom and liberty.

I'll leave it to others to elaborate on how unsurprising his rank, racist bigotry is ... and how comfortable he felt in expressing it ... and how that bigotry connects to the “Patriot” movement which has rallied to his side and whose language he has used, to American conservatism at large, and to the whole American project.

Instead, as someone attentive to American political language, I want to seize on the way he uses the word “freedom”. The way he says that Black slavery was freedom.

Do not lose yourself in bafflement. Do not lose yourself in disgust.

Look.

Take it as a kōan, a mystery story, a riddle on which you may meditate. Read it again and again. Remind yourself of it every day. Make it a part of you. What does the word “freedom” mean to Cliven Bundy?

Think of him every time you hear Americans talking about “freedom”.

He is not alone. He spoke those words expecting us to understand, and to accept, and to regard them as insight.

He speaks for many Americans who love America because of American “freedom”.

Learn their scent.

The San Francisco tech boom crisis

photo of MUNI bus vs Google bus by defabulous

There’s a lot of talk out there about the changes that the city of San Francisco is going through during the current tech boom. A lot of it is blather, as satirized in Joe Garofoli and Peter Hartlaub’s What Out Of Town Writers Need To Know About SF and A.I. Algorithm’s In a Constantly Changing San Francisco, Change is Constant.

Step 6: Get your adjectives straight. There are decisions to be made. What double-barreled description will you give the Mission? “Gritty and trendy”? “Seedy and hip”? “Vibrant and overpriced”? Is it populated by “Latinos and the technorati”?

These are the articles I regard as actually illuminating:

Google Invades (2013) by Rebecca Solnit is the article which gave us the Google Bus as symbol. I note that it has a much more ambivalent sense of those busses than later protestors have expressed.

Other days I think of them as the company buses by which the coal miners get deposited at the minehead, and the work schedule involved would make a pit owner feel at home. Silicon Valley has long been famous for its endless work hours, for sucking in the young for decades of sixty or seventy-hour weeks ….

Updated to add: I admire Solnit. Her book about how people respond to natural disasters, A Paradise Built In Hell, is an important work. Her touchstone memoir of mansplaining, Men Explain Things To Me, is well-circulated for good reason. She often writes beautifully about the reasons why I fell in love with San Francisco.

But I confess to growing frustration with her as a commentator on the turn San Francisco has taken. She responded to a critic of the Google Invades article the following year with Resisting Monoculture, which is instructive in many ways but rejects building housing as a way to address the city’s housing crisis.

The Brooklyn-based Adler’s proposals for “fixing” San Francisco are not apparently drawn from local knowledge—or reality. “To house more people, which is what San Francisco must do to accommodate the new tech workers and the lower-income immigrant families and artists who live there now, it must build upward.” He blames San Francisco for not being as dense as Manhattan, the densest major urban area in the country. San Francisco is actually pretty dense, more so than any other major city in the West and most cities in the US—and it’s already pretty fully developed: you can’t erase most of what’s there and start over. There’s no practical way to turn it into a land of mega-highrises anytime soon when the unparallelled transit, water, power, and other systems that run under Manhattan would also have to be developed to accommodate such a boom. Finally, a nanosecond of reflection might reveal that Manhattan is not exactly a Shangri-la of affordable housing. Most of the island is exorbitantly expensive.

And the mechanism whereby excellent new housing will be built here for lower-income families? I think it’s called socialism. I’m for it, but it’s not on the horizon, and it’s not what a corporate boom is bringing, especially not one headed by libertarians with little sympathy for the poor.

Returning to the subject in 2024 with In The Shadow Of Silicon Valley, Solnit calls shenanigans on pop narratives of “crime” in San Francisco, but is so eager to place every real ill San Francisco at the feet of the “tech” industry that the only things she has to say about housing names “tech” as the singular cause destructive both through its presence …

Levels of violent crime are actually lower in San Francisco than in many American cities. Theft is a bigger problem, but like homelessness it has been exacerbated by the tech boom, which brought an influx of well-paid workers and a steep rise in housing prices over the past three decades

… and through its absence.

San Francisco is said to be in a ‘doom loop’ because so much office space and so many shops have been abandoned since the pandemic. Tech layoffs drove some of the shutdown, but the industry also enabled a mass white-collar withdrawal from the workplace – employees working from home, sometimes leaving the region to work remotely. More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact.

I share Solnit’s love for the lost Arcadia of San Francisco and her critique of the worst of the “tech” industry, but leaving things there is irresponsible.

Big Tech Isn’t the Problem With Homelessness. It’s All of Us is a very good overview of the policy failures which produce the bizarre situation in the Bay Area.

The city is turning into a Brechtian horror show where young men wearing Airpods and backpacks emblazoned with the names of gig-economy apps weave e-scooters among people passed out in their own filth.

That’s not even the most frustrating part. This is: Everyone who works on homelessness agrees on the way to fix the problem. Build more homes. Not coincidentally, more places for people to live would help alleviate all sorts of other problems, from climate change to income inequality. But the kinds of housing California needs are not the kinds that get built. The reasons amount to an obstacle course built from policy mistakes, economic vicissitudes, and prejudice. “This is not something like pancreatic cancer, where thousands of scientists are striving to find a solution for a really difficult problem that we literally don’t know what to do about,” says Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UCSF who studies homelessness. “We actually know what to do. We just lack the will.”

How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained) by the reliably illuminating Kim-Mai Cutler is smart about policy and history. Follow her if you are interested in this topic.

San Francisco’s orientation towards growth control has 50 years of history behind it and more than 80 percent of the city’s housing stock is either owner-occupied or rent controlled. The city’s height limits, its rent control and its formidable permitting process are all products of tenant, environmental and preservationist movements that have arisen and fallen over decades.

A tale of two cities: how San Francisco’s tech boom is widening the gap between rich and poor by Laurie Penny does a good job of getting the flavor of the current state of the City right.

There are two things every child knows about bubbles: they are beautiful, and they burst. Time and again, I am told that San Francisco is “a bubble” — referring both to the gorgeous, insular never-neverland where workers in the city’s tech and associated industries live and play and to the localised economic boom that has fuelled the fat years.

Living in a Fool’s Paradise by Mark Hogan provides a look at the complex history and policy failures throughout the Bay Area which have produced the current situation.

Caution is warranted when considering construction projects in such a beautiful place. But the current state of permitting regulations for building and the glacial pace of infrastructure projects in San Francisco benefit very few people and risk turning it into a caricature of its former self for tourists and residents rich enough to live in a fantasy, not a living city. If there was ever a time when San Francisco needed to embrace a dynamic, expansive policy for building housing, offices and transportation, it is now.

Demolishing the California Dream: How San Francisco Planned Its Own Housing Crisis by Hunter Oatman-Stanford takes a very deep dive into the full history of zoning and housing policy in San Francisco.

In July of 1978, the San Francisco Chronicle also reported that even Rai Okamoto, director of the planning department, had reservations about downzoning the city, echoing fears that it would raise housing costs and force middle-income residents out of San Francisco.

It’s clear that many San Franciscans were well aware this rezoning would lead the city toward a housing crisis. The planning commissioners, however, were not moved. Their testimony throughout the hearings made it clear they valued maintaining the city’s predominately suburban layout over affordability. In response to a homeowner who was unhappy that his property would be downzoned to allow fewer units, commissioner Sue Bierman gave a quintessential anti-growth response—countering that San Franciscans were concerned about parking, traffic, and sunlight reaching their backyards, embracing a shift toward zoning that would preserve “more comfortable neighborhoods.” Instead of listening to those folks worried about becoming homeless, the commissioners focused on the single-family homeowners worried about shadows on their yards and parking for their cars.

What’s the Matter With San Francisco? by Eve Bachrach and Jon Christensen is smart about the mechanics of housing and income inequality. (The lead article of a whole collection of good stuff at Boom Magazine.)

Longtime San Francisco residents who fought for so long worry that the city they love is disappearing. They’re too late. That city is gone and they, in some ways, have aided its demise. Cities are like living organisms, not flies trapped in amber. Protestors long fought the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco—not wanting to see their mostly low-rise city dominated by high rises and dark urban canyons. Instead they’re getting the other kind of Manhattanization—a playground for the rich with little room for the artists and regular folk who held down the fort for so long.

Why housing costs keep rising in San Francisco from transit planner Michael Rhodes describes a few economic fundamentals that should be obvious.

• The number of employed residents in San Francisco has grown at almost twice the rate as the number of additional homes since 1990, exacerbating our housing shortage.
• As a result, the cost of renting in San Francisco has doubled since 1995, when a two-bedroom apartment cost $1,700 a month. In the 54 years since 1960, San Francisco has added about as many housing units as we used to add every 15 years, even as the city and region have seen steady job growth.
• Our current housing building boom is the result of a long backlog during the recession, and won’t be enough to catch up to demand unless it is sustained for a long period of time.
• Housing costs will only continue to rise unless we support adding new homes in San Francisco and other transit-oriented areas of the Bay Area. By building near transit, we can accommodate this growth while preserving and enhancing our region’s quality of life.

What's the Matter With San Francisco? from Gabriel Metcalfe at Citylab describes a little history of the politics of San Francisco housing policy.

It’s our own version of What’s the Matter With Kansas?—the 2005 book in which Thomas Frank tries to explain how working-class Americans came to vote for right wing politicians against their own economic self-interest. In San Francisco’s case, many tenants came to vote against new development in an attempt to show their disdain for monied interests. The problem is that this stance happens to result in very expensive rents in the long run.

As the city got more and more expensive, progressive housing policy shifted gradually to a sad, rearguard movement to protect the people already here from being displaced. No longer would San Francisco even try to remain open as a refuge for immigrants and radicals from around the world. The San Francisco Left could never come to terms with its central contradiction of being against the creation of more “places” that would give new people the chance to live in the city. Once San Francisco was no longer open to freaks and dissidents, immigrants and refugees, because it was deemed to be “full,” it could no longer fulfill its progressive values, could no longer do anything for the people who weren’t already here.

Airbnb, Proposition F And The Shared Hypocrisy Of Bay Area Housing from Kim-Mai Cutler at TechCrunch is a discussion of a particular San Francisco ballot measure which provides a lot of great background on the weird politics of housing in San Francisco and the Bay Area at large.

Why Are People Blocking Housing Development?

It varies by jurisdiction. In most of the 101 cities around the Bay Area, tenants are just outnumbered by homeowners, who don’t have a strong reason to add more homes because they’ve already got theirs. In many Californian cities like Palo Alto, there’s almost nothing you can do because you may never mathematically have the votes.

But in San Francisco, it’s different. This is a majority tenant city.

⋯

Tech founders, are, of course, frustrated. They’d like to hire thousands of engineers over the next several years, but the competition for housing is driving up rents and salary costs higher and higher.

And again, the city can’t coerce land owners into selling their property to non-profit developers. So unless the moratorium is permanent, land owners might sit it out until the end because they don’t want to sell at a discount.

Blame Zoning, Not Tech, for San Francisco’s Housing Crisis from Kriston Capps at Citylab makes some smart observations about NIMBYism and gentrification.

As Rick Jacobus explains for Shelterforce, building new housing units anywhere—whether they’re set-aside affordable units or penthouse condos—goes in the win column from a regional perspective. But when new units mean penthouse condos in a low-end neighborhood, the region may prosper at the potential expense of the neighborhood.

What happened in South of Market and parts of Brooklyn and what people fear in the Mission (and the rest of Brooklyn!) is that high-rise luxury housing was dropped into otherwise distressed neighborhoods. These luxury projects dramatically changed the perception of these neighborhoods—they sent a clear signal to the market that these places were safe—both in the sense that they were safe for wealthier residents to live in and in the sense that they were safe for more investment in residential development. However much these projects decreased rents regionally by increasing supply, they had a larger impact of increasing rents in the immediately surrounding neighborhoods by increasing demand.

Yet this signaling happens with or without the luxury condos. Prohibit new building in the high end, developers turn to the low end. Decline to build new luxury condos, buyers will turn to the existing housing stock. It is, as Jacobus describes, “the new planning dilemma: where to put the rich?”

The new wealthy are ruining everything because the old wealthy decided not to let them live anywhere near them.

Carpetbaggers is a comment on the effect the two tech booms I have seen have had on San Francisco. Forgive me linking a post of my own: as a pre-Boom San Franciscan and a tech professional, I literally embody the split.

The San Francisco I loved was raffish and queer and weird, and it attracted people like me who didn't quite fit anywhere else. But ’99ers weren't moving to San Francisco because it was San Francisco. They were moving here to get rich. And they resented that San Francisco was weird; they wanted it to be like anyplace else and they did their level best to make it that way.

Don’t Say This To A NIMBY is a little example of the weird psychology of longtime residents who want to personalize the causes of change.

This actually happened and is paraphrased to the best of my memory.

Me: Thanks for creating this Facebook group about Palo Alto’s history. Since I’ve only lived here a couple of years, I feel I have a lot to catch up on. How long have you lived here?

Admin: I’ve lived here since the Seventies and it’s crazy now. Did you see this rental ad for a van? Someone actually lives in a van! What if they need a bathroom?

Me: I dunno, bedpan and use the shower at the gym? You’re right that it’s crazy. I blame voters who block development. If it wasn’t for that housing shortage, people could live in proper apartments instead of spilling out into vans, illegally-converted garages, and cardboard boxes.

Admin: It’s those tech workers, is what it is. They raise rents and make mortgages unaffordable for anyone but themselves. Thank goodness we bought our house back when this area was quiet.

Me: Did you grow up here?

Admin: No, we moved here when my husband was hired by IBM.

Me: Oh, so he’s a tech worker like my husband. The only difference is you came here forty years earlier so you lucked into an affordable market while we pay top dollar for a clapboard apartment. You’re just like us!

Admin: *kicks me out of group, blocks me on Facebook*

Me: Whoops.

Unpacking SF’s Moderate / Progressive Divide provides a good description of how housing, tech, politics politics, and cultural politics come together.

There is one policy area where the moderate/progressive divide seems to have sharpened in recent years. Nearly every academic and political insider contacted for this article highlighted housing and land use as the biggest cleavage between the two camps.

“That is the seminal issue in San Francisco that divides all politicians,” says Agnos. “It’s not the environment. It’s not healthcare. It’s not homelessness. It’s not voting rights. It’s not any of the traditional issues that we see in this country that define progressives or moderates. It is land use.”

“The moderates will look to the market more for solutions,” Agnos adds, “whereas the progressives will look to government more for solutions,” emphasizing that it’s not zero sum.

[⋯]

Housing is also where the mutual “strange bedfellows” critique emerges, making it harder to map each sides’ voting bloc. By opposing policies that would allow new housing to be built throughout the city, progressives are accused of allying with wealthy homeowners who don’t want their pristine neighborhoods to change. In their quest to make housing more abundant and, hopefully, more affordable, moderates are accused of running interference for billionaire developers and supporting gentrification.

Nobody says hi in San Francisco by Noah Smith from 2020 calls San Francisco “a great city in decline”. (A reminder that he used to be less Bad Crazy.)

I wonder — are poor transit and low density an effect of San Francisco’s culture of alienation, or a cause?

In NYC, the high and mighty of the finance and law and publishing industries ride the same subways as checkout clerks and hairdressers. The city is so dense that poor neighborhoods are shoved right up against rich ones; everyone walks past everyone on the street. There is certainly class separation and racial division in New York, but there is an inherent camaraderie to the city itself, a shared feeling that everyone is in the belly of the same vast urban beast. NYC is bigger than any of its industries, bigger than any of its neighborhoods. Its richest and most famous residents are supplicants to its glory, not the conveyers thereof.

Maybe if SF had dense housing and good trains, San Franciscans would be forced, if not to be interested in each other, than at least to recognize each other’s existence. But it’s a chicken-and-egg problem (or as econ dorks like to call it, an inefficient equilibrium). It might be that SF can’t have a sense of civic unity until it has functional urbanism, but can’t build functional urbanism without a sense of civic unity.

The Washington Somethings

Dear Washington NFL Team:

I'm not a football fan, but I've been talking with friends about you lately.

I'm afraid we've not been saying nice things. The trouble is the name of your team being offensive, for reasons that should be familiar to you. I respect your attachment to the name, I really do, but that doesn't make it okay. Ya gotta do something about it.

Now maybe you're thinking that you have no cause to listen to me, seeing how I'm not a football fan. But I think you do.

See, I've thought this was a problem for a long time, but I've not been excitable about it because there's only so many hours in the day, and your team doesn't come up much in my day-to-day conversation. But with the subject in the news again lately, I've made a little personal resolution to look for excuses to mention it.

You're going to a ’Niners game tonight? Who are they playing?

I guess there will be a few Chargers fans out rooting for them tonight, right? Rooting against the home team has gotta be rough, but I guess at least they aren't Washington fans, who aren't just rooting against the home team but rooting for a team whose name is kinda racist. What a bummer that must be.

See how easy that is? I bet I can find lots of opportunities to bring it up. And if I'm doing this and making the effort to tell you, I'm guessing there are a bunch of other folks quietly making a habit of it, with a few more joining in each day.

Drip, drip, drip.

I suppose you think that capitulating under this kind of pressure makes you look weak. Maybe it does, to some people. But this situation is only going to get progressively worse for you. The longer you wait, the more you're going to look bad, both to the people who don't want the change and to the people who do. You don't want to become America's Racists' Team. It's best to get ahead of it.

At this stage, the change is still mostly an opportunity. There must be a bunch of sports marketing people whose dream is to re-branding a first-tier sports franchise. Think of the free media you'd get, the merch you'd sell, and ... if you do it right ... the better brand you'd be able to design for when you get to the other side. Become the Rockets or the Tricorns or the Fierce Charismatic Megafaunas or whatever will sell the most jerseys. Go ahead and cash in on one last round of merchandise for the old team name when it becomes valuable collector's items with the change — it's dirty money, but take it, since guys like me will be too distracted to notice.

Heck, do a round of merch of wacky “rejected team names” and make some money that way. I, for one, would buy my first football jersey if it had a potato on it.

---

Update: More propaganda —

The perfect media franchise

Note the date on this. When I wrote it, I thought I was late to say the obvious!

---

One cannot help but notice that the mediasphere has become filled with sequels, remakes, reboots, and adaptations of old classics. It’s tempting to lament the failure of originality, but the fetish for originality is actually a modern phenomenon; for most of human history, storytelling has been story re-telling, and I have a great love of an old story re-told well. Some of the greatest writers of all time —Shakespeare, Homer, the Jawhist, Murasaki Shikibu — were mostly re-tellers.

Like it or not, we seem to be stuck with it. For a host of reasons, media companies want franchises they can milk for years of sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and crossovers. It makes things easier to create and easier to sell. A strong entry in a franchise doesn’t just sell itself, it sells the franchise as a whole.

The advantages are not only crassly commercial but artistic, as a franchise can build something real and interesting: consider how the Jason Bourne movies with Matt Damon were able to do some surprisingly interesting things with their interlocking narrative.

A while back I had a realization about what makes these things successful. Let's do a little thought experiment into what would make the perfect franchise.

A known quantity

It's best if the franchise is already known to people. It saves a lot of trouble marketing the material if people have already heard of it and have some positive associations with it.

Example: Tarzan. Everybody’s heard of him and knows his basic story. Bring him onstage, and people are already bought in.

All kinds of fans

Ideally, you want a franchise that most people vaguely know and like, many people know well and like a lot, and a few people know intimately and love passionately. Each of element of the fandom provides its own benefits to the material. The not-quite-fans give you the advantages of being a known quantity, providing a bit of a head start in selling the material. The casual fans give you the advantage of a minimum baseline of audience: unless you really screw up, they can be counted on to show up to buy in. The hardcore fans are a mixed blessing: they can be fickle, but if you do a bit of work to please them they will work hard to generate buzz for you … and buy up all the directors' cuts and collectibles and ancillary materials you can invent.

Example: Star Trek. Just about everybody has seen a bit of Trek, and most people have at least a little soft spot for it. Plus there’s a big body of people who grew up on it and have a lot of affection for it and will give any new Trek offering a try … and there’s a core fandom that is notoriously enthusiastic.

Multi-media opportunities

Ideally, you don’t want just a series of movies or just a TV show. You want to be able to make movies and a TV show and books and comics and video games and on and on.

Example: Star Wars, which has even been adapted to radio.

A range of possible scales

If you want to go multi-media, that means that you want to be able to make big blockbuster movies with lots of big budget razzle-dazzle or cheaply-produced television shows.

Example: Dracula can be done as a simple play enacted on a single set, or an elaborate costume drama with spectacular special effects.

Merchandizing opportunities

Indeed, you don’t just want stories in various media, you want to be able to sell stuff: toys and t-shirts and jewelry and mouse pads and Hallowe’en costumes and collectable Pez dispensers and on and on.

Example: Batman. You can sell the Batsymbol on anything.

Age range

Ideally you want something that doesn’t just give you variants that appeal to either children or adults, but that actually gets you both at once.

Example: The Muppets. Their multi-layered appeal reaches little kids and bigger kids and adults … and adults are now drawn in not just by their goofy charm but also by nostalgia.

Strong characters

You want a franchise anchored by characters which have a strong presence as characters … in part because you want them to have a life beyond the actors who play them. Ideally you want a built-in ensemble of several characters.

Example: Robin Hood. Any dashing, handsome actor can play him. (Heck, these days you could cast an actress as Robin Hood and it would be even better. Somebody should get on that, actually.) And he comes with a whole supporting cast of cool and familiar characters, including some great villains.

Appealing roles for actors

For those movies and TV shows, you want good actors to take the roles, which makes it help if the roles are ones that actors want to play.

Example: James Bond. Who doesn’t want to play him … or better yet, to ham it up as a Bond villain? Plus there are legions of sexy actresses — both good actors or just good-looking ones — who will line up to boost their careers or have some fun with a role.

Appealing material for backstage creators

Material that writers and artists and directors love have an inherent advantage in attracting the talent to make the next entry in the franchise a success.

Example: Star Wars again. The world is full of filmmakers, animators, sculptors, painters, and countless other artists who were inspired to take up their art by seeing Star Wars as kids, and would kill to get a chance to contribute to it as adults.

A tested framework

Re-telling a familiar story gives you the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of other tellings, borrowing from those experiments into what worked and what didn’t.

Example: Superman. There have been 75 years of writers trying all kinds of crazy stuff with Superman. We know a lot about what you can and cannot do with a Superman story.

A range of possible stories

Many franchises are committed to a single tone, but some franchises are a big stage on which there’s the opportunity to tell all kinds of stories.

Example: Star Trek again. Part of what was crafty about the original series was that each week the show went to a new planet that could be anything, making it possible to deliver a horror story about a monster one week, a military drama about submarine warfare the next, a political allegory the next. The original series even included a comedy about Chicago gangsters.

A big backlog

It helps if you have a lot of material already done in one medium that you can adapt to another medium.

Example: Tolkien. When Peter Jackson went to adapt The Lord of the Rings to film, the biggest challenge was trimming it down to a trilogy of long films. And when it came time to go back to the well, it was easy to create another overstuffed trilogy. And there’s plenty more where that came from.

A big, interesting universe

Setting can be as much a character as the characters; a sufficiently interesting setting can in fact be more interesting than the story itself. Experiencing and exploring a setting can be a driver in and of itself, and creates a lot of opportunities for fun ancillary stuff in the franchise.

Example: Harry Potter. The Hogwarts School alone is a treasure trove of an interesting setting, but the Harry Potter world as a whole is expansive and delightful, with magic to learn about, creatures to encounter, and endless interesting people, places, and institutions.

---

I'm going somewhere with this.

The examples of franchises I’ve pointed to all have some of those virtues, but of course none have all of them. James Bond is fun and actor-friendly and offers a lot of opportunity for spectacle, but there’s a narrow range of kinds of stories to tell. Star Trek lets you tell a lot of stories, and has a great relationship with fans, but frankly other than Spock and Data, the characters are not that interesting. Robin Hood gives you a great ensemble of characters, and there are literally centuries of retellings refining how to use them so we really know what works, but the Robin Hood universe is small, and there's only so many stories to tell.

But there’s one franchise that has it all. Plus a couple of magic ingredients.

Magic ingredient ^#1: Superheroes

I read a screenwriter saying once that Hollywood had figured out that love stories are the cheese topping of storytelling. You can take almost anything and make it better by stirring in a love story. Cowboys & romance. Spies & romance. Corporate intrigue & romance.

It turns out that superheroes are the same way. Tired of those old WWII movies? Mix in Captain America and all those old tropes are fresh and fun again! Never want to see another movie about a middle-aged guy wrestling with his mortality and his drinking problem? You do if he’s also Iron Man! Bored of brothers fighting each other over who will inherit the throne? Give one of ’em a red cape and a magic hammer!

Superheroes are silly, but they’re fun, and they go with anything. Which brings us to ....

Magic ingredient ^#2: The Marvel Universe

Everything that Marvel publishes takes place in the same universe. They’ve been publishing dozens of comics a month for decades, making it the biggest fictional universe ever created, with more named characters than Balzac and more stories than anyone could read in a lifetime. When I was a teenager, they took their in-house index that they used to keep track and started publishing an encyclopedia that ran to well over a thousand entries.

Along the way they’ve figured out how to make a gonzo everything-including-the-kitchen-sink sensibility work. The Avengers film — in which you have a Norse god, Howard Hughes in a flying robot suit, a spy femme fatale, Robin Hood in sunglasses, a WWII soldier, and Dr. Jeckll transformed into a big green version of Mr. Hyde fight off an alien invasion — is only scratching the surface of what the Marvel sensibility can do. There are sorcerers fighting off demons from Hell, vast empires of space aliens at war with each other, vampires and vampire hunters, cowboys and detectives and mad scientists, giant monsters from deep beneath the Earth, secret kingdoms in every corner of the globe, powerful cosmic entities from before time meddling in human evolution, and much, much more. And you can mix them together to make all kinds of wacky cocktails: when I was a teenager the X-Men fought off a goblin invasion of New York City with a little help from the Ghostbusters.

It’s goofy and fun and a huge canvas, and now they’ve built the brand to bring it all before a general audience. How many people saw the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy with its jokey style, weird space aliens, and a gun-toting raccoon and thought what the heck? … and then saw the Marvel logo and thought, “Okay, maybe that sounds like fun”? The only other folks who have earned that kind of trust with strange ideas is Pixar … and they don’t have a vast back-catalogue of stories to tell that they’ve already tried.

So when I saw the other day that Marvel Studios has plans for a decade’s worth of movie releases, I was not at all surprised. It’s been evident for a while that they are playing a very long game. They still have a lot to work with.

Updates

Revisiting this in 2025, I think it’s fair to say that I was right in seeing glories ahead for Marvel. After the Infinity films they lost momentum. I’m frankly nervous about plans for Avengers: Doomsday slipping wildly out of control and becoming a Heaven’s Gate for the studio … but I’m still optimistic in the long run. They still have good cards to play.

Don't panic

At this moment, one of the communities in which I have an investment is going through a wrenching conversation on the internet about some awful news. Long-unspoken troubles are being voiced, old wounds are being re-opened, and hard questions are being asked, and there's anger and pain all around.

Commenting on it, Crystal Blanton made a plea for patience and compassion that any community would do well to remember when the internet firestorm comes.

I have seen people acting out their pain, and their past, all over the internet after this news came out. We see this all the time in other ways, I was just really hoping not to see it in the […] community. I know that we are a microcosm of the macro society that we live in, but I was hoping we would be able to bypass some of the pain that we project outward when we are holding so much pain inside.

I find that when incidents like this happen in society it can be a catalyst to tear one another apart, or a bridge that we use in order to learn. The reality is that we need to to work through the pain and challenges so that we can build a future that works for us all. The […] community is no different than the struggles within the macro of society, and the work required takes just as much time and effort to effect change.

After coming home the other day, I wrote a facebook status about things I feel it is important for us to remember while we are going through this road from shock to healing, and then to action. I will re-post what I wrote, in hopes that it is something that will help us all in these moments.

“So…. while we are all dealing with this whole crazy stuff that we were alerted to today, I want to ask for a couple things from all my […] folk. At least to consider.

• Let us be gentle with each other. We are not the enemy here….
• When people are in a state of shock, we don’t always process things clearly in the moment.
• When people feel betrayed, the response is often anger or sadness coupled with anger.
• Those closest to said person […] are going through their own process to reconcile who they thought they knew and what they are being told. This is a hard process, and sometimes can sound like being an apologist…. but isn’t exactly.
• Let’s be careful not to assume anyone is an apologist…. this shit is confusing.
• Many, many, many people are triggered by this. When we are triggered, we often react instead of respond.
• So many people are hurt when things like this happen. Varying degrees of hurt…. and all hurt is important.
• Mudslinging covers up what is underneath. This isn’t the time to mud-sling… this is a time to be gentle with one another.
• We all miscommunicate, speak before thinking, react before filtering sometimes. It is a chance to be understanding and to be understood.
• Community counts when the shit hits the fan, not just when it is all roses.
• We don’t all have to think the same…. it is not a reason to bring in the machete.
• Did I mention to be gentle with each other?

Holding space for all the grieving, triggering, confusion, and chaos might make it workable for us to recover. We just have to learn to be present in the hardest of times, when we are all trying to make sense of things that do not make sense. We all deserve the chance to do that.

Donna Haraway on duality

One of my favorite paragraphs ever. From A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.

The evidence is building of a need for a theory of “difference” whose geometries, paradigms, and logics break out of binaries, dialectics, and nature/culture models of any kind. Otherwise, threes will always reduce to twos, which quickly become lonely ones in the vanguard. And no one learns to count to four. These things matter politically.

Free speech

Ellen Willis on how free speech can be rough on the oppressed, but also liberating.

Symbolic expression, however forceful, leaves a space between communicator and recipient, a space for contesting, fighting back with one’s own words and images, organizing to oppose whatever action the abhorred speech may incite. Though speech may, and often does, support the structure of domination, whether by lending aid and comfort to the powerful or frightening and discouraging their targets, in leaving room for opposition it falls short of enforcing submission. For this reason the unrestrained clash of ideas, emotions, visions provides a relatively safe model — one workable even in a society marked by serious imbalances of power — of how to handle social conflict, with its attendant fear, anger, and urges to repress, through argument, persuasion, and negotiation (or at worst grim forbearance) rather than coercion. In the annals of human history, even this modest exercise in freedom is a revolutionary development; for the radical democrat it prefigures the extension of freedom to other areas of social life.

Hat tip to Corey Robin for the find.

Noah

I have been joking that Darren Aronofsky's forthcoming film Noah is a film for which I may be the only audience. I'm ethnically Jewish, a former atheist, and a Modern Pagan, with a fascination with the whole range of religions and myth. I love the Torah stories, though I read them with an idiosyncratic cocktail of Jewish, Pagan, literary, and comparative-myth sensibilities. I'm also a cinephile with a taste for eccentric films about mythic stories and religious experience: The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, Baraka, Jesus of Montreal, and so forth; I'm the kind of guy who asks “why would you make the Illiad without the gods and Achilles and Patroclus as Just Good Friends? (a.k.a. Troy)” On top of that, I'm a bit of a fan of Darren Aronofsky: I've seen all of his films in the theaters during their original runs (including π!) and though I think one has to admit that his work is as interesting for its flaws as for the way it works, he and I seem to be cut from similar cloth and so I like his filmmaking sensibility.

One of the challenges in thinking about the stories of the Bible is how the stories are woven so deeply into our culture that we have a hard time seeing them with fresh eyes. But we have many different versions of these stories living in our collective imagination. When I spent some time hanging around with Evangelical Christians in college, back when I was an atheist, I was struck by the Bible storybooks they gave to their kids, which were so radically different from austere Jewish Bible storybooks I had grown up with. And even if you're not a religious person, there's a kind of pop Bible of our shared culture, with cartoon versions of Adam & Eve with the apple, Noah in his big boat with giraffe heads sticking out a window, and so forth.

When I read the stories of the Torah, there's an aspect they present of being the stories of Iron Age desert people retelling the stories of their Bronze Age ancestors, set in a world of shepherds and rivalrous tribes and weary travelers stopping at wells and terrifying angels and so forth. But to see it, you have to look past the parts of the stories we are prone to retell and focus more on the forgotten weird details. There's not just the Tree Of Knowledge in Eden, there's the Tree Of Life. There's not just Lot's wife, there's his daughters. There's not just Noah's dove, there's also his raven. I love that stuff. And Aronofsky has talked a lot about including as much of it as he can in Noah.

That Biblical world — grubby and strange and rich in mystery, but still alive with recognizable human passion — is fascinating to me, and most Biblical movies are too reverential and tidy to show it to us. I'm excited to see Aronofsky's attempt to depict it, and what themes it can convey.

Jedi

They are a democratically unaccountable sect of warrior monks who use mind control ... kidnap children to be trained as janissaries ... support a galactic hegemonic order which includes slavery ... and lie to their students.

When one of them stands before their best friend who is dismembered and on fire — by their own hand! — they do not have the compassion to deliver the mercy blow.

They even use their telekinetic powers to cheat at dice.

Not “good guys”.

---

And as for Yoda's alleged “wisdom”, has he ever been known to say anything that wasn't a lie, or bad judgment, or both?

---

Update: Cracked agrees in both text and video, I find a description of “The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi's Path To Jihad”, and “The Case Against The Jedi Order” reads the Jedi as exemplifying a toxic masculinity of emotional detachment.

Anti-vax

For future reference: that comic strip explaining the spurious origins of the “research” supposedly demonstrating that the measles vaccine causes autism.

The Secret Of Comedy

Tweets from <@dys_morphia> last night:

Saw “Talkies” at the basement of Lost Weekend Video tonight, a mix of stand up and sketch comedy, really fucking good.

Some of the pieces were better than others, as is always the case.

At their best the sketch pieces were transcendent. I mean they took their concept, explored it, pushed it to its edge, and went past it.

Commitment was the word of the day. Commitment to the comedic concept, to the awkward moment, to social critique, to being fully present.

This is what I was talking yesterday about with what The Pizza Underground lacked.

The Pizza Underground
a Brief Review

1^st you may have heard that the Pizza Underground sing Velvet Underground songs but about pizza.

Not really true.

The Pizza Underground sing song medlies of Velvet Underground songs but about pizza.

So if you go in, like me, hoping to hear a full version of one of the songs they tantalizingly use in their online promos, you won’t.

Perhaps pizza is not a rich enough thematic element to sustain through the length of an entire Velvet Underground song.

Which is fair enough. I don’t really want to hear a true to length 17 minute pizza based Parody of “Sister Ray”. But why not “Venus in Furs”?

The Pizza Underground didn’t try to go beyond verisimilitude, humor, and fan service. It is just a technically able parody band.

I know I sound a bit like a hater, but any art done all the way, pushed to its edges, can transcend its form. Even a Velvet Underground pizza themed band.

This Velvet Underground pizza themed novelty band does not transcend its form. I wasn’t really expecting it to, but I always have hope.

This is what I was talking yesterday about with what The Pizza Underground lacked.

My favorite pieces were Scott Vermeer’s “Sensuous Jazz” and the Imaginary Radio’s brother reconciliation piece.

Both pieces dealt with authority, masculine vulnerability, uncomfortable sexual interactions, and heteronormative expectations.

Obviously without those actual words, but that’s what was happening. I laughed so hard my cheeks hurt and my stomach hurt.

This is how comedy can be when it’s good. This is why I have little patience for comedy that relies on bigoted tropes to be funny.

Comedy can tear apart reality and spill its strange guts then paint jokes on the wall with its rainbow blood.

This reminds me of a story.

I took my mother to see Teatro Zinzani, which is a terrific circus arts dinner theatre thing we have in San Francisco.

There was a bit where the “chef” came out and did a clown act with food. He’s throwing eggs and knives around, et cetera, dressed like a chef. He takes whole loaves of Wonder bread and squishes them into balls and juggles them. He juggles raw cornish game hens, their wings wiggling comically.

For the end of the act, he asks if anyone in the audience can juggle. Of course some poor guy gets volunteered by the other folks at his table. So the chef teaches him how to juggle raw chickens. This is going to lead to an understanding of the Secret Of Comedy, he promises. To make it extra funny, you bounce the chicken off your forehead. Wiggle wiggle wiggle go the wings and legs. Everybody is laughing. Then the chef teaches the volunteer how to make a Wonder bread ball. Then he breaks out some tubs of butter and they scoop out big balls of butter and juggle those. Then they’re juggling all three: chicken, butter, bread.

The chef gets them bouncing the chicken off their foreheads when the chicken is in the air. He says that this has prepared them to reveal the Secret Of Comedy. He throws the bread, whoosh. He throws the butter, glop. He throws the chicken, wiggle-bounce-wiggle. Whoosh, glop, wiggle-bounce-wiggle, whoosh, glop, wiggle-bounce-wiggle, whoosh, glop, wiggle-bounce-wiggle, whoosh ...

glop “Are you” wiggle-bounce-wiggle “ready to” whoosh “learn the” glop “secret of” wiggle-bounce-wiggle “comedy?” whoosh

“Yes!”

glop-splat! The chef “accidentally” bounces the ball of butter off of his forehead. It doesn’t bounce, it just sticks there.

“Commitment,” says the chef. The audience is whooping and laughing.

The volunteer doesn’t do it. The audience boos.

The chef gives the volunteer a look. The audience laughs.

The volunteer still doesn’t do it. The audience boos.

The chef shrugs in disappointment. The audience laughs.

The volunteer puts down the bread, butter, and chicken. The audience boos.

The chef says, again, “Commitment.”

The audience laughs.

Lesson learned.

Litany for a consultant

Written for a colleague sweating work left undone.

The scope of the project is never more than what you can do in the time available.

If you deliver a perfect document free of typos, you have prioritized the use of your time incorrectly.

The scope of a project is equal to what you can do in the time the client paid for. You offered them a more comprehensive project; the client chose not to buy that project.

Part of the profession is knowing which problems aren't worth taking the time it would take to fix them.

The scope of the project is not what the client needs, it's what the client bought. You already pitched them what they need.

Things will go wrong whatever you do. Skill is choosing which problems are best to risk.

The client counts on your sense of professionalism to get you to do more work than they paid for. Don't fall in love with the john.

Always tell the client the truth. When they don't want you to tell them the truth, remind them that telling them the truth they don't want to hear is what they pay you to do.

That includes telling the truth about what they chose to buy from you.

The scope of the project is equal to the best you can do in the time you agreed to.

Media representation, racism, and competence

Arthur Chu, the guy who got flak on the internet for being too good at the TV game show Jeopardy!, has some astute words about the logic of racist media representation:

That said, stereotypes aren’t so much about people totally projecting things that completely aren’t there but about people having a framework with which they interpret things that actually are there. It’s not that racism causes people to see (for example) belligerent teenage boys where there are none, but that a white belligerent teenage boy is just seen as himself while a black belligerent teenage boy is part of a pattern, a script, and when people blindly follow the scripts in their head that leads to discrimination and prejudice.

So yeah, it is a fact, I think, that I was a bit off-putting in my Jeopardy! appearance — hyper-focused on the game, had an intense stare, clicked madly on the buzzer, spat out answers super-fast, wasn’t too charming in the interviews, etc.

But this may have taken root in people’s heads because I’m an Asian and the “Asian mastermind” is a meme in people’s heads that it wouldn’t have otherwise. Look, we all know that there’s a trope in the movies where someone of a minority race is flattened out into just being “good at X” and that the white protagonist is the one we root for because unlike the guy who’s just “good at X” the protagonist has human depth, human relationships, a human point of view — and this somehow makes him more worthy of success than the antagonist who seems to exist just to be good at X.

So we root for Rocky against black guys who, by all appearances, really are better boxers than he is, because unlike them Rocky isn’t JUST a boxer, he has a girlfriend, he has hopes, he has dreams, etc. This comes up over and over again in movies where the athletic black competitor is set up as the “heel” — look at the black chick in Million Dollar Baby and how much we’re pushed to hate her. Look at all this “Great White Hope” stuff, historically, with Joe Louis.

So is it any surprise that this trope comes into play with Asians? That the Asian character in the movie is the robotic, heartless, genius mastermind who is only pure intellect and whom we’re crying out to be defeated by some white guy who may not be as brainy but has more pluck, more heart, more humanity? It’s not just Flash Gordon vs. Ming the Merciless, it’s stuff like how in the pilot episode of Girls Hannah gets fired in favor of an overachieving Asian girl who’s genuinely better at her job than she is (the Asian girl knows Photoshop and she doesn’t) and we’re supposed to sympathize with Hannah.

Okay, here’s one more comment from the Internet that kind of encapsulates it. The kind of un-self-awareness of what someone is saying when they say they’d prefer I not win because I try too hard at the game, work too hard at it, care too much about it, and that they’d prefer that a “likable average Joe” win.

This is disturbing because it amounts to basically an attack on competence, a desire to bust people who work very hard and have very strong natural gifts down in favor of “likable average Joes” — and it’s disturbing because the subtext is frequently that to be “likable” and “average” you have to have other traits that are comforting and appealing to an “average Joe” audience, like white skin and an American accent.

A taxonomy of the political spectrum

Big caveat — just a few years after I originally posted this essay, dramatic shifts in the structure of the political right in the US left many of its references to some particulars outdated. As things have progressed, it has only made the structure of the right even harder to describe on these terms. I modified the diagram in 2025 to start to account for that, but at that point the structure of the right remains in motion and confusing.

• The intention of this post
• Left vs right
• Points on the spectrum
• Neighboring points and their relationships
• More terms on the right
• More terms on the left
• Liberals vs leftists
• Libertarians
• Mad magazine!

The intention of this post

As someone with a weakness for political discussion, I am often frustrated by people who have a very confused vocabulary for talking about the range of political views from left to right. Conservatives who referred to Barack Obama as a “radical leftist” inspired me to write up this essay, but such sloppy rhetoric is nearly as common coming from liberals, and perhaps even more common among eccentrics who like to style themselves as off the conventional spectrum altogether.

Language for describing the political spectrum is necessarily a bit mushy. The spectrum itself is a blunt tool for organizing categories of political thought: one dimension is of course insufficient to describe the universe of possible political stances. But the left-right axis has its uses — I consider it the best simple model available, in practice better than other attempts like the political compass — and of course it turns up in discussions all of the time, so if we are to use it we need as much clarity in it as we can muster.

When I want to talk about one whole side of the spectrum I will usually say “the broad left” or “broad right”. But that is not enough.

So I have tried to cultivate as much rigor and consistency as I can in the language I use in talking about where in the range one might place the philosophy which an individual or a movement expresses. What marks the difference between moderates and radicals? Between the hard right and the extreme right? Between liberals and leftists? These distinctions have an inherent slipperiness, of course. But reading people from a range of viewpoints whom I regard as sophisticated, I find good enough consensus that I can identify a taxonomy which is clear enough to use.

Though this essay references specific examples from American politics, I think this language can serve in other contexts as well.

Left vs right?

Fully addressing the defining distinction of the spectrum is itself a subtle and contentious subject which many people have examined at length. It admits no simple resolution into a clear right answer. I find the diagram’s one-word (over) simplifications that the broad left is egalitarian while the broad right is heirarchical clarifying, but reasonable people may differ.

I keep a collection of links to my favorite pieces on this hard question, and have one of my own. I will not attempt to recapitulate all of that here … though if you believe the canard that the key distinction is How Much Government one favors, I recommend following those links and doing some homework.

For the purposes of this essay, I intend to frame the vocabulary of positions along the axis such that they will still be useful if one rejects my Egalitarian vs Heirarchical thesis entirely. It suffices that we know the left and right when we see them.

Points on the spectrum

The mainstream

These positions care about working for the policy they want within existing social & political institutions; in the US at a grand scale, that means capitalism and liberal democracy delivered through the Constitutional order.

Moderate

“we need to work together with the other side”

Moderates are committed to one side or the other, but not perfectly consistently, such that they support some policies from the other side. In principle, politicians tend to be moderates (though back when I wrote this, the Republican Party had driven a lot of their moderates out of Congress, and in 2025 moderates are almost completely absent from the Republican establishment). A Dem who opposes gun control or a Republican who opposes the war on drugs may be described as a “moderate”. People further to the right like to describe moderate conservatives as RINOs (“Republicans in name only”), while Democrats call their moderates “Blue Dog Democrats”. I sometimes use “centrist” with the scare quotes in place to reference how folks further from the center tend to refer to these folks. Occasionally one used to hear “liberal Republican” and “conservative Democrat”, to refer to people’s place on the mini-spectrum within the party, but that usage has become vanishingly rare.

Wing

“we need big policy victories”

The Wing, as in “the left wing of the Democratic Party”, are fully committed to the philosophy of their axis and believe in focusing their political energies entirely within existing institutions. They want to win a decisive advantage in mainstream politics so that government can implement their policies without needing to compromise significantly with the other side.

On the right from the 1980s through the mid-2010s, these folks were generally movement conservatives; these days, I tend to refer to them as “non-MAGA conservatives”.

On the left, these folks are generally just called “liberals”. To distinguish “liberal” in this sense from liberal-as-in-liberal-democracy, I sometimes refer to the position on the axis as “libs” and the deeper ideology as “libdem”. (Much more on that below.)

Hard

“we need both policy change and institutional change”

The Hard left and right believe in trying to win policy victories through participation in conventional political institutions (like elections, government, and the two major parties) but also believe in the importance of working to change those institutions themselves if their philosophy is to be fully enacted.

The hard left are generally called “progressives”; they may want a Constitutional Amendment to counter the Citizens United decision on free speech and corporate campaign donations, or to dismantle most of the military-industrial complex.

Someone on the hard right may want a dramatic re-interpretation of the First Amendment, or even a new Constitutional Amendment, to recognize that the United States is a Christian nation. There is not a ready term of art for talking about the hard right generally. When I first wrote this post, the hard right included most of the “Tea Party” (remember them?), the “religious right”, some “libertarians” (more on them below), and many movement conservatives. These days, the MAGA movement includes people ranging from Hard to Extreme; I like to distinguish “soft” from “hard” MAGAs to account for that range (more on that below) so often I refer to people & positions on the hard right as “soft MAGA”.

“Far”

When people talk about the “far” left & right, they are talking about movements & ideologies which disdain participation in existing major “mainstream” social & political institutions — including electoral politics — because they see the range of political possibilities within them as meaningless in comparison to the need to change those institutions. Critics of the “far” left & right fault them for embracing of political violence and authoritarianism — and yes, that becomes more common at the “far” ends — but they are neither definitional nor universal. The defining thing is the focus on stuctural change.

Radical

“only institutional change matters”

“Radical” literally means “striking at the root”.

The radical left are generally called “leftists” or “The Left”. They want to dismantle capitalism. (More on the distinction from “libs” below.)

The radical right are commonly referred to as “reactionaries” or “the Right” (from which we get the “Alt Right”, remember them?) though to be fussy “reactionary” refers to a particular type of far right movement. The radical right are fundamentally skeptical of democracy, though in the US they may not say so overtly. Radical right projects include structural changes like dissolving seperation of Church & State, or dismantling the Federal government’s power over the States to dramatically strengthen the independence of county government. Radical right movements include Christian Dominionists, “Patriots”, and MAGA.

Extreme

“only revolutionary change matters”

Extremists have eccentric philosophies, directed not just to altering political institutions but to revolutionary change throughout society. There is a wide range of different extremisms, as there are a wide range of visions of the post-revolutionary world. Though “horseshoe theory” claiming that the extreme left and right ultimately converge is more misleading than helpful, departure from ordinary political discourse can make it hard to place these folks on the left-right axis at first glance.

Left extremism includes Maoism, anarchism, pacificism, lesbian seperatism, and much more.

Right extremism of course includes fascism, but “fascism” is not just synonymous with right extremism — there are many very different movements including monarchism (really), neoreaction, green primitivism, and much more.

Neighbors

One reason why I like my taxonomy and its breakpoints is how it reveals a pattern in people’s views of other positions. Across the spectrum, people read their neighbors in strikingly similar ways:

People take the folks directly next to them as allies whom they can work with because they they have their hearts (mostly) in the right place, while considering those allies compromised by confused priorities and misunderstandings of how the world works.

People have an especially passionate disgust at the positions two notches away from them, seeing those people as rivals whose agenda presents special dangers greater than those presented by people at positions further away.

hard | wing | moderate | moderate | wing

Moderates think their own Wing has good ideas, but consider that Wing naïve about how one gets governance done because of the Wing’s refusal to reach across the aisle to the Moderates on the other side.

Moderates look at their Moderate counterparts on the other side as wrongheaded about their policy preferences but respect them as reasonable people one can work with …

… unlike the Wing one step further to the other side, whom they hate for making things harder for those reasonable Moderate counterparts.

Moderates consider their own Hards narrowminded ideologues who must be kept away from any power, lest they break every effective institution.

radical | hard | wing | moderate | moderate

The Wing admire their Hards’ ideas and idealism, but see themselves as smarter than those Hards, who waste too much energy on impossible dreams.

The Wing returns the friendly frustration of their neighboring Moderates, whom they see as allies vulnerable to manipulation by the supposed Moderates on the opposite side.

Thus the Wing regards the Moderates of the other side as both tactially and morally dangerous for their ability to seduce Moderates of their own side with feigned “reasonableness”. People further out on the opposing side “are at least honest” in contrast to the disingenuous of the opposing Moderates.

To the Wing, heaven forbid the Radicals on their side get their hands on power; the Radicals claim to stand for the same things but their dangerous plans would destroy the necessary foundations of society.

extreme | radical | hard | wing | moderate

Hards share most of their Radicals’ long-term goals, but they do not want to abandon the fights within existing institutions to people who do not share those ideals, so they see their role as a bridge between the Radicals’ aims and their allies in the Wing.

Hards hope to ignite the ideals of their side’s Wing as a way to drive the Wing to wring as much as they can out of existing institutions.

Hards hate their side’s Extremists as scary lunatics almost indistinguishable from the Extremists of the other side, discrediting their entire side and threatening to seduce the Radicals they admire.

Hards suspect that their side’s Moderates do not really believe in anything because of how often they prioritize appeasing the Moderates on the other side over supporting their Wing.

extreme | extreme | radical | hard | wing

Radicals have a loving pity for both of their neighbors, whom they see as sharing their dreams. They expect the Hards to eventually end up heartbroken after wasting their energies on hopeless institutions, while they read most Extremists on their side as tragic products of heartbreak, their legitimate moral urgency boiling over into an understandable but counterproductive zealotry.

Radicals feel contempt for the Wing on their side; to Radicals, their Wing paradoxically supports the very institutions which create the problems which they claim to want to fix.

I am wary of supporting the Horseshoe Theory that the extreme left & right wrap around to be “the same” — they do not — but something like it is useful in this narrow context. When Radicals look at the Extremists on the other side they are terrified to see the passion of their side’s Extremists — often aroused by similar wrongs — dedicated to morally perverse ideals.

radical | extreme | extreme | radical | hard

Extremists return the feelings of their neighboring Radicals on their side: they see folks who want the right things, so come the Revolution they expect their Radicals to step up belatedly, after having wasted their time for so long with refusal to Do What’s Necessary.

Extremists also return their Hards’ hatred: to them their Hards sap the energy of people who see The Problem, softening the way people talk about it, making people complacent with the world which must be overthrown.

Extremists have ambivalence about the Extremists of the other side, whom they see as sharing their understanding of the profundity of change the world needs, but half-right and half-wrong in their reading of The Problem. To an Extremist, opposing Extremists have terrible ideas about the world they want to build after The Revolution — but they will fight for The Revolution and thus can serve as allies, either to be flipped to join their side … or at least employed as useful idiots on key issues until the current order has been overthrown, at which point they must be prevented from holding any power.

Extremists see the Radicals on the other side as the worst monsters of all, determined to build the world of their nightmares. This looks to Extremists like a revealation of the horrifying impulses which animate the entire other side, suggesting that the Radicals on the other side must be the secret masters of the world they seek to fix through revolutionary change.

More terms on the right

Revisting this post in early 2025, the taxonomy of positions on the right is very hard to pin down, as we are in a moment of radical reälignment of our political dynamics, with churn on the right driving that change.

I sometimes still reference “movement conservatism”, a term of art for the dominant ideology of the Republican Party from 1980-2015: a marriage of quasi-libertarian economic policy (low regulation & taxation), military “strength”, and “social conservatism” courting white Evangelicals. Movement conservatism ranged between right-wing and hard right, with its most ambitious manifestations pursuing big institutional change in dismantling the policy order emergent from the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. Donald Trump’s successful challenge to that agenda has almost entirely broken the power of this strain of conservatism. The rise of MAGA demonstrates how few movement conservatives were true believers. But a large handful of them have become Never Trump Conservatives.

Fascism is not simply synonymous with authoritarianism or the far right; it is a distinctive extreme right ideology.

I think scholar David Griffin provides the most useful single thesis, summarizing fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism”: a dream of violent, transformative national rebirth. He and other scholars find a host of characteristics common among fascist movements, but his description of that dream as the “core” of fascism helps see through confusion created by the ways in which fascist movements vary dramatically.

I have my own distillation of Griffin’s and others’ theories, describing fascism as a myth combined with a method ⋯

Neoreaction is a different extreme right authoritarian idology significant in this moment: “rationalist” in contrast to fascism’s irrationalism, enthusiastic about the fragmentation of the Westphalian order in contrast to fascism’s reification of the Westphalian order with “nationalism”.

In the course of a post about Trump voters, I name a taxonomy useful here:

Though with precious few exceptions MAGAs refuse to recognize themselves as fascists, that is what both types are. Fascists are driven by bigotry, drawn to the absurdities of fascist rhetoric which free them not just from moral responsibility but from having to think rationally at all.

Hard MAGAs have bloodlust. They do in fact dream of gunning down millions of people they hate et cetera. They know Haitian immigrants are not eating pet cats, but since Those People are inhuman monsters, they love the lie for getting at the “essential truth” that the suffering & death of Those People is a positive good in itself.

Soft MAGAs have doublethink. Horseshit to rationalize horrors — as good, as necessary, or as not actually horrible — works better the more preposterous it is because it distracts from facing the centrality of their bigotry. They “believe” that Haitian immigrants eating pet cats must be “true”: it “makes sense”, it justifies the fantasy they have of Getting Rid Of Those People. They don’t think about what that will require, and when the bloodshed does appear before them, these kinds of “beliefs” will justify their schadenfreude at the suffering & death.

Non-MAGA Trump voters do not think like fascists. They are bigots but it is not their central motivation in the same way. They prefer to look away from their own bigotry; the shame they feel about it compels them to deny they have it rather than to correct it as they should. They dislike the absurdities of MAGA, but see aligning with MAGA as “necessary” in the face of the Greater Evil of the nightmarish “radical left” Democratic Party. They have selected an information bubble which protects them from hearing the story about Haitian immigrants eating cats; Trump’s nonsense is irrelevant, they just have a thirdhand impression that he cares about the Important Problems facing Real Americans. If MAGA fascism guns down millions of people, they will deny that they knew and it will be half-true because they go out of their way to not know.

More terms on the left

I added this long-overdue section in early 2025, though I used these terms for many years before that point.

I often use “lefties” and “the broad left” to mean the entire left side of the range.

Usage of “progressives” out there gets slippery, but I think one can get close enough to what most people mean if one understands it as a term for the hard left in the US — folks interested in both institutional change and policy change within existing instutions. This makes progressives the leftmost edge of the Democratic Party coalition. One can count Senator Elizabeth Warren among elected “progressives”, together with the clear examples of Sanders & AOC. Chris Hayes & Jamelle Bouie stand among the few progressive voices in mainstream political media; there is also a robust ecosystem of explicitly progressive political commentary, including old “netroots” internet commentators like Digby who influenced this blog.

Though progressives have more high positions in elected office and political media in 2025 than when I first created this post in 2014, they still hold very little institutional power. IMHO, this fails to represent the progressive bloc among US voters as strongly as they deserve … but progressive voters fall far short of the major voting bloc which they tend to imagine they have.

“Leftists” and “the Left” mean people focused on institutional change, particularly in ending the capitalist order. This is not perfectly distinct from progressives; some leftists dismiss electoral politics but others do engage with it. Leftists are noisy on the internet but their numbers are small in the US, and they hold practically zero institutional power in the US. I have a lot more on the distinction between “liberals” and “leftists” below.

I use “the Dem establishment” to mean the constellation of players shaping the Democratic Party: that includes not just folks in the Party organzation but also allied organizations, some voices in political commentary, major financial backers, and others. Many folks exaggerate the coherence of the Dem establishment — progressives & leftists often imagine that the DNC hold far more leverage than they do — but the constellation is coherent enough and powerful enough to be worth referencing. The Dem establishment almost entirely excludes progressives.

It is sometimes useful to use “neolib Dems” to describe the more centrist wing of the Dem coalition. One must tread carefully with that, since progressives & leftists too often villify neoliberalism on oversimplified terms. But neoliberalism is a real thing and it has dominated both the Republican Party from 1981-2016 and the Democratic Party from 1992-2020.

Liberals vs leftists

Even people on the broad left often get confused about the distinction between liberals and The Left.

Partly this reflects how both “left” and “liberal” are a multivalent terms. Even people seriously engaged in politics tend to get confused, tangling up the different layers of meanings, with commentators in both camps and on the broad right tending to muddy these waters.

As I say above, there is a deep layer of political philosophy which aspires to an egalitarian society, where we can meaningfully include everyone from moderate Democrats to Maoists in a “broad left”.

At a comparably deep level, we can understand “liberalism” as a differently broad constellation of social & political ideas — the stuff which distinguishes most real-world democratic societies from simple tyranny-of-the-majority direct democracy: universal rights, rule of law, structural limitations on government power, and so forth — a governance ideology, a vision of norms & institutions: how government (and to a degree society) should operate, how we set policies. We reference liberalism in that sense in calling movement conservatism, exemplified by Reagan, “neoliberal”. Some libertarians invoke liberalism in this sense by calling themselves “‘classical’ liberals”. We invoke liberalism in this sense which we call some leftist movements like Maoism “illiberal”. I sometimes refer to this deep liberalism-as-in-Isaiah-Berlin-and-liberal-democracy as “libdem” for brevity and clarity; I argue that many strains of socialism can and even should understand themselves as liberal in that sense.

When we contrast “liberals” with “the Left”, we are talking about “liberal” and “left” in narrower senses, as not governance ideologies but policy positions, programs of particular things they want government to do: projects to undertake, rules to enforce, an approach to the economy, and so forth. We can locate these well enough on the left-right spectrum. “Liberals” — as in neither-conservatives-nor-leftists — sit closer to center, mainly at the the location I refer to as the wing while “leftists” stand further out, mainly at the location I refer to as radical. For convenience I sometimes use the leftist convention of refering to liberals in this sense as “libs”.

That said, to truly understand the split between libs and leftists, we do need to think about another question more profound than just policy. Political positions ranging from hard left to hard right — including liberals in this sense we are talking about but also many others — do not directly challenge fundamental institutions, which includes both libdem as a governance ideology and capitalism as an economic ideology.

• Capitalism is when capital (the factories, land, patents, and so forth which make it possible to create the goods & services which people want & need) is privately held. These means of production are owned by particular people, either directly or through indirect institutions like a stock market.
• Socialism is when capital is publicly controlled. There are a wide range of possible arrangements for public control: it can mean government control, but could also mean any number of alternatives, like corporations where each worker owns an equal share and the workers choose their own corporate leadership in elections.

Looking at examples in the world, one cannot draw a bright line separating capitalist from socialist societies. A “socialist” country may have small privately-owned cottage industries like corner stores. A “capitalist” country may have utilities like electric power plants owned by the state. Though socialism rejects markets in capital — people cannot buy or sell factories — it may or may not embrace markets for goods & services in general, or for specific things in particular. A socialist might advocate corner store shopkeepers choosing their own stock and setting their own prices in a market … while opposing a market for housing, calling for the state to act as landlord for everyone without charging rents.

All this gives us the equipment to understand contrasting leftists with libs without getting tangled up in other meanings of “liberal”.

Libs embrace both libdem & capitalism as a given, and advocate policy which they believe will deliver greater equity under both. They frame these policy objectives in libdem terms: protecting rights, electing representatives who will pass legislation enforced by the state, building democratically-accountable institutions which tax & regulate privately-held corporations, and so forth. They support policies of universal social insurance like retirement pensions or healthcare provision funded through taxation. Some of these social insurance policies may even give government socialistic ownership of particular elements of the economy (like schools and hospitals) but they do not pursue a general disruption of capitalism.

Leftists reject capitalism. They hold that it is unjust for individuals to own capital, because that produces a dramatic inequity in wealth and power over people who do not own capital, that the structure of capitalism inevitably creates inequities which no liberal policy under capitalism could adquately correct. They advocate replacing capitalism with socialist economic institutions which they believe will enable greater equity than capitalism will allow. Different leftists can vary enormously in the particular institutional forms they advocate as an alternatives.

Leftists have a range of relationships with libdem. They may support libdem norms & institutions as worth retaining while criticizing the limitations in the equity libdem delivers — “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread” — arguing that society must also enact other social & political governance institutions beyond only libdem. For example, leftists commonly say that libdem universalism which forbids overt discrimination based on race or sex or other characteristics is insufficient to correct inequities which linger from past discrimination, so society must make a positive effort toward cultural, institutional, and material supports for the populations who inherit those legacies, extending beyond the universalism of libdem mechanisms to incorporate unequal treatment of different groups which can correct the inequities between those groups. Other leftists reject libdem entirely, again on a range of different terms. Marxist-informed leftists may say that because libdem and capitalism spring from the same historical and political processes, we cannot disentangle them; a different form of state governance must displace libdem in order to overcome capitalism. Leftist anarchists reject the state itself as exercising power which inevitably produces inequities, and see libdem principle as inseperable from the logics of the state.

For more on this, including a bunch more vocabulary, I like a pair of posts by Sophia Lewis and Nathan Allebach. (Allenbech’s index of The Most Influential Political Identities From Left To Right explores some distinctions which get lost when one only thinks in terms of the one-dimensional left-right spectrum.) For more about the meanings of “liberalism” in the US, Jamelle Bouie has a brisk video. For more on current intra-leftist tensions, I like Ben Gidley’s & Daniel Mang’s Left Renewal in an Age of Waiting. For more on approaches to social justice, I have an attempt at clarifying common social justice praxis.

Libertarians

We need a quick word on libertarians, as they often claim that libertarianism is a third, distinct peer to liberalism and conservatism, or hold that a Liberty vs Authority axis is a peer to Left vs Right, or protest the common presumption that libertarianism is a species of conservatism by pointing to the left-libertarian tradition.

These folks have a bit of a point. The smartest and most principled libertarians end up with policy preferences which resist facile placement on the spectrum. But I submit that one can place even the most eccentrically thoughtful libertarians on the spectrum if one has a real understanding of what the broad left and right represent.

And frankly, in the US, the term “libertarian” emerges from rationalizations of conservatism, and one can see it in how most folks who call themselves “libertarians” prove to be firmly on the right if one examines their positions and their implications closely.

Mad magazine!

They covered this question back in 1970 with a set of satires of liberals, leftists, conservatives, reactionaries, right-wing militants, and new left extremists. I would say “just for fun” but it remains surprisingly familiar, and maps to many of the same waypoints I point to here, so I consider it a ratification of my taxonomy.

Ongoing revisions

I have made several clarifying changes and expansions from the original version of this essay over the years. Aside from many tweaks to phrasing and formatting, key changes include:

• Adding the groupings “broad left/right”, “mainstream”, and “far left/right” to the diagram. That last reflects a subtle change in nomenclature. I had long used “far” and “extreme” interchangably, but this revision makes “far” into a term which includes both “extreme” and “radical”.
• Softening the description of the Extreme position from saying “only violent revolution matters” to saying “only revolutionary change matters”. Advocacy for, or acceptance of, political violence is common at the far edges, but it is not universal.
• The original exemplars of different positions on the right became frustratingly dated, but hard to pin down in new forms. DJT’s impact has scrambled the structure of the broad right in the US. One can find the Trumpist slogan Make America Great Again used from the right wing to the far right; I’ve tried to use “hard” and “soft” MAGA with increasing precision. Clear examples in each position will have to wait for things to settle.
• The original post only had a small hint about what the section about neighbors now describes in detail.
• I added the explication of the relationship between liberals and The Left, and exploring more common terms for different points on the left side, long after the original post.

A more generic diagram

In case one needs it, this variant diagram strips out the specific examples of where to locate particular ideologies: