No triangulation on trans liberation

The Democratic Party has nothing to gain and everything to lose by compromising on trans liberation.

A lot of the Democratic Party establishment see an opportunity to do Clintonian “triangulation” by giving ground on a few policy points protecting trans people, to win over some swing voters. Usually this starts with preventing trans women athletes from competing with cis women, a point which may seem legitimate if one has not thought about it. (It isn’t.)

Dems should be much less reliant on triangulation in general, but I grant that there are contexts where it is tactically effective. If I believed it would work on this point, despite my own preferences I might accept the Dems gritting their teeth, trimming their sails, and waiting for another day to fight for better. I understand why a lot of supporters of the Dem establishment make the mistake of reflexively resisting “over-reach” by their left flank .

But triangulation on trans liberation is a very bad move. A hard line in defense of trans people is the only place to stand, morally, tactically, and strategically in the forthcoming legal, legislative, and electoral fights.

Morally, the case is crystal clear. Opponents of trans liberation are flat wrong at best, and are actively evil at worst.

Tactically, no viable soft position beneficial to Dems exists. Whatever concessions Dems make, opponents of trans liberation will lie about where Dems stand and move the goalposts to something new, confusing inattentive voters with “questions”. The Democratic Party has more to gain by standing on principle and showing some fight than it can possibly get by trying to scoop up swing voters with concessions on trans liberation. Taking a hard line on protecting trans people is not a sacrifice. It is an opportunity.

Strategically, one misreads the stakes if one takes these wedge issues as addressing the peripheral needs of a small group. The right cast themselves as responding to the trans liberation movement Finally Going Too Far, when in fact athletic competition had long been a non-issue; the right chose to re-visit and emphasize it as an invented wedge issue, a BS move the left should recognize by now. The broad left should not take the bait.

The terms of dispute are integral to the fascist character of MAGA. Transphobia performs the same function for MAGA fascism that antisemitism performed for the Nazis. We already know that we must grant fascism nothing.

More

Understanding cowardly liberals

I think some advocates for trans liberation could do better at meeting cis supporters of pols pulling this triangulation move where they are. I have seen a lot of people saying to them don’t think you can save yourselves by throwing a marginalized group under the bus, which makes a subtle mistake I am trying to avoid with this post.

Inattentive, not-very-transphobic cis people consider it at least plausible that there is a legitimate question of fairness in athletic competition, because that is a reasonable thing to think … if you have not researched it or given it significant thought. They see a question of fair athletic competition as different from a question of fundamental rights. The organization of sports leagues & divisions in general do not threaten fundamental rights, do they?

Those folks think they are being tactically savvy, keeping their powder dry to protect trans people on the important stuff. They think saying “the right are nutty about trans people in bathrooms but have a point about athletic competitions” is a move like saying “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” instead of “… and available on demand”, a concession to anxieties which may get in the way of winning the important point.

So when we say “you are throwing trans people under the bus to protect yourselves”, they feel misread. If we don’t understand them, why should they listen to what we say about anything? Why should they believe us about athletic competitions? Why should they believe us about the stakes?

This dynamic is why transphobes and the right chose this battleground.

Yes, there is low-grade transphobia in not doing the homework, in not accepting what trans people say, in the enthusiasm for trans athletes making sacrifices. Yes, there are a lot of liberals with a lot more than low-grade transphobia animating their thinking. Yes, it is unfair having to take the time to talk cis people out of this mistake.

But this is the challenge before us. We have to walk inattentive cis liberals through the reasons why the bargain they think they can strike won’t work. It’s why this post exists.

Answering the question

The world being what it is, Dem pols are going to face these questions. Here’s the kind of thing I’d like to see them say:

I just don’t see the big deal.

I guess when same-sex couples vowed to love and cherish one another and the world didn’t end, some sourpusses felt so disappointed that they decided to try to make trans people scary. What? Trans people? They’re not scary.

Nobody is trying to sneak into your bathroom. Nobody is trying to trick children into getting surgery. That’s absurd.

Let’s not examine kids’ genitals before letting them play basketball. That’s gross.

It is American to respect everyone. It is American to respect trans people. So I don’t see the big deal. Can we talk about something real?

I’m not married to this phrasing; maybe it hits the wrong note. But here are the virtues I’m trying to cultivate:

• Sounding like a human being rather than delivering anodyne Politician blather.
• Speaking from principle.
• Calling shenanigans on the right’s BS.
• The redirect to the positive vision of what Dems want to do, which means the Dems need to have one and talk about it consistently, plausibly, and persuasively.

Will the “this is as dumb as being afraid of gay people getting married” move work? I dunno. Olds remember everyone who said the sky would fall, and youngs find that dread absurd. (There are people in a different place, but Dems are never going to get them, anyway.)

Is “it is American to respect everyone; it is American to respect trans people” the right phrasing? I dunno. I am a radical egalitarian idealist and I know that most Americans are not — but they like to think they are — and threading the needle of appealing to them is hard. But some version of We Are All Americans is not just the right place to stand morally, it’s the savvy offer to make, because if our answer to fascists is that we want to purge people too — but less of them, and a bit less brutally — we surrender the premise to fascists.

Jeff Eaton

GOP influencers and politicians didn’t suddenly respond to a grassroots uprising of “trans concern.” They made it a signature issue in the same way that they made other culture war issues central pillars of their campaigns.

Reactionary conservatism is not policy-driven, it is identity-driven, and there is no reason to pretend that people who align with fellow-travelers on a fresh target for hatred will flock to Dem candidates if they “triangulate” on that hate. Dems are already The Enemy; the policy is irrelevant.

That doesn’t mean “give up on swing voters” or some shit like that. It means recognizing that you are trying to convince someone to re-align their sense of which group they should consider “theirs;” when they do that policy support follows.

This is why leftists and activists are so angry when Dem candidates throw vulnerable constituencies under the bus in hopes of shaving off a few swing votes; they are not insisting on “purity tests,” they just recognize the craven stupidity of doing the reactionary right’s work for them.

Once the trans kids or the black women or the homeless people or the asylum seekers or the gay couples or the women voters or whatever group you decide can be cut loose for Bipartisanship Points is fucked, there is no payoff. The right knows you didn’t hate them hate them, you just caved.

So they’ll move on to the next group, the next euphemism, and they’ll keep carving until there’s nobody left for you to carve off, and then there will be no reason for them to even bother with you, the responsible centrist who sees What A Complex Issue This Is, The Hating Of The Next Group To Hate.

If you give a shit—hell, if you don’t but you’re just savvy enough to see how this will play out—you have to stand and say, “No, that’s not how this works. Those people you’ve been whipped into terror of and hatred towards are Us, too, and we don’t toss people to the wolves for a percentage.”

Evan Urquhart

Also, imagining that many, most, or all Dems agree with [transphobes] is just stupid. Trans people can have all the story times, parades, bars, businesses, or sports leagues that they want. I can limit an adult from doing one thing without advocating for their total erasure from society.

I think it’s useful to unpack this. If Democrats agree with Republicans on excluding women’s sports, what’s the harm? Is it primarily harm to trans women who play sports, or is there something more to it?

A reasonable person who doesn’t know much about trans issues could ask these questions.

Many people who follow me will already know that the biggest harm is allowing Republicans to ignore fairness and science and solidify a bonkers definition of trans people as “really” members of our birth sex.

Not going to rehash that — let’s talk instead about something no one is discussing.

I mean that literally — no one is discussing the massive loss of rights trans people have experienced throughout the country.

When Dems talk about trans women in sports, they’re not just giving ground on sports. They’re giving ground on everything, because sports bans were the big issue 3 years ago.

Trans people have been expelled from the military and punished and humiliated throughout. We’re fighting in court to retain a right to accurate US Passports. Books mentioning us are banned in classrooms in much of the country. In Florida, trans teachers are required by law to misgender themselves. In some states, as a trans man who passes for male, I’m legally banned from using a men’s restroom but practically banned from using a women’s. My choice is between breaking the law and being arrested for breaking it.

Few Democrats are talking about how much trans people have lost, and how quickly.

Trans people are rapidly losing access to healthcare. It is unobtainable for trans youth in most of the country, and adult care is also under assault by congress and the Trump administration.

The only Dems for whom this is a priority are in state office. No national Dem is talking about it.

So, when a Democrat makes their only statement on trans issues about trans women in sports, they are saying that this is their priority on trans issues — not restoring our equality under the law but joining Republicans in eroding it.

It’s unconscionable that in a time of such grave peril for a vulnerable minority, one who has borne the brunt of all Trump’s hatred and extremism in executive order after executive order (and I didn’t even scratch the surface BTW) that a single Democrat is making trans women in sports their focus.

A. R. Moxon
Fighting In The Dark

I’m aware that responsibility for this falls upon different people differently. These are ideas most applicable to people like me, upon whom the fascist threat only touches generally and glancingly. For those in groups directly targeted for fascist hatred, these may be useful ideas at times, but sometimes the goal will simply be getting to safety or staying alive another day, or putting one foot in front of the other.

Let me suggest three simple and broadly applicable precepts of differentiation.

• As much as possible, we should do things fascists cannot do.
• As much as possible, we should not do things fascists want us to do and we should do things fascists don’t want us to do.
• Never accept the fascist offer.

NYT | Masha Gessen | The Hidden Motive Behind Trump’s Attacks on Trans People

You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population, the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights, the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. (Trump spent about five minutes of his recent address to Congress specifically attacking trans people and 10 minutes attacking immigrants; the Democratic rebuttal mentioned immigrants once and trans people not at all.) Then I finish with the standard exhortation: The attacks won’t stop here. If you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you.

But I find that line of argument both distasteful and disingenuous. It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

And we know that attacks on the fundamental humanity of a group never stop with the people in that group.

The Pink News | Cis woman ‘fired after customer accused her of being trans’ says it felt like a ‘stab in the back’

Ian Rennie

So it goes without saying, but let’s say it anyway: the concentration of attacks on trans people isn’t because trans people are the only people fascists hate (although they absolutely do hate them). It’s because they’re the people they think non-fascists are least likely to defend.

If they can get you to accept their narrative on trans kids in sports, it’s easier for them to push their narrative on legal recognition of trans people. If you accept that “gender ideology” needs to be taken out of schools, you’re more likely to accept that “DEI” needs to go too. Not defending the most vulnerable groups makes everyone else more vulnerable, not less.

And just to drive a point home for the Gavin Newsoms of this world: You think that fascists give a single fuck about women’s sports? You’re finding common cause with people who are unconvinced women should be allowed to vote, and you’re taking them at their word?

‪Noah Berlatsky‬

When people argue for giving in to fascism it’s generally because they find fascism appealing. Like, when Seth Moulton says we should throw trans people under various buses, it’s framed as him saying we need to compromise to win, but in fact he doesn’t see trans people as fully human. Same with lots of Ds and immigration. they are willing to compromise with the right on immigration because they are prejudiced against immigrants.

Bigotry and prejudice are fairly pervasive. Fascist victories lead people to embrace their own inner bigot.

So, when people argue for compromise, they say it like, “this is how we can beat the fascists,” but what they really mean is, “the fascists are right and we should join them in making our country at least a little more fascist.”

This is maybe most clear in D statements about Palestinians, where they walk right up to the line of acknowledging they don’t value Palestinian lives at all. (Rs are happy to jump over that line.)

This is what the Martin Niemöller quote is about, though people don’t really understand it entirely. Like, the quote is presented as being about indifference. “First they came for … and I did not care because I was not …”. But Martin Niemöller wasn’t just indifferent. He was a conservative nationalist who voted for the Nazis over and over. He was violently opposed to socialists and communists, and was an antisemite (though he objected to Nazis persecuting converted Jews.) So Niemöller wasn’t indifferent. When he said “first they came for the communists” or “first they came for the Jews” he’s downplaying the extent to which the “they” who came for Communists and Jews was him! He hated Communists and Jews! He supported the Nazis not because he was indifferent, but because they targeted people he hated. He wanted to see Jews and Communists harmed.

He slowly came to realize that the Nazis would not stop with the groups he wanted to see them harm. And that led him to realize that wanting to harm those groups was also wrong. His change of heart was real and admirable. But also that poem is self serving in ways that have misled people about the causes of Nazi support.

The lesson people take from the poem is that you can’t look away, you have to speak up immeidately, not just when you are affected. Which isn’t wrong, but downplays the extent that Nazis gain power because they target groups that are widely despised. So the danger is not just indifference; the danger is that you may see the fascists as a chance to crush groups you don't like.

One thing I have tried to emphasize in various places is the extent to which fascism is not a binary on / off switch. We see Niemoller today as a brave opponent of the regime, and he was … except when he wasn’t. Part of the reason people are reluctant to see parallels between Trump and the Nazis is because there’s this idea that the Nazis were like Sauron or something, and that anyone supporting them was a kind of soulless orc. But … the Nazis were just people. those who supported them had a range of investments, from genocidal hatred of Jews through financial incentives and kind of everything in between.

Erin Reed
Do Not Comply: A Lesson From the Last Three Months of Anti-Trans Attacks

A lesson can be found in all of this. The most devastating damage from these executive orders hasn’t come from their direct mandates but from their vagueness. The orders are deliberately opaque and create just enough uncertainty to push institutions into overcompliance. Risk-averse legal teams, fearful of losing federal funding or becoming political targets, preemptively erase transgender people from policies, programs, and public language. The cruelty lies in the ambiguity. These orders don’t explicitly bar specific conduct but deputize decision-makers to interpret them in ways that inflict the greatest harm on disfavored communities.

Maki Ashe Pendergast
Should Trans People Flee the United States

This moment demands tangible, actionable solidarity from cisgender folks both within and outside the United States. Those within the U.S. must provide immediate practical support—housing, legal assistance, financial resources, and community defense. It is crucial to help establish secure networks that protect vulnerable trans individuals. Those abroad can actively advocate for policies supporting LGBTQ+ asylum and resettlement in their countries, provide direct support to trans people attempting to relocate, and help create international networks of solidarity and refuge. Now is the moment to leverage privilege, resources, and influence to protect trans lives tangibly and urgently.

Daphne Lawless
SWERF and TERF: The Red-Brown alliance in Policing Gender

Analysing TERF politics as a variety of fascist ideology might seem shocking or over-the-top; particularly because to do so would require us to categorize many veteran socialists in Aotearoa / New Zealand to have slipped over into the “Red-Brown” camp. But defining fascism as a movement in defence of the threatened privilege of the downwardly mobile middle class seems to make the parallel unavoidable. As does the habit of TERF ideologues of suggesting that trans people are part of some kind of conspiracy of “elites”, as in the tweet reproduced below: TERF conspiracy theories on Twitter about “elites backing the trans movement” are not dissimilar to fascist ones.

Laurie Penny
TERF Island: the embarassing truth about Britain’s Trans Panic.

When I travel overseas, I’m constantly asked why British culture has become so openly transphobic. How our moderate, liberal society could have allowed this ugliness. Even bloody Americans bloody ask me this, and when I try to explain they look at me with the same pity and confusion I feel when they start talking about, say, gun control. Around the world, transgender people are being made scapegoats for every sort of social ill — but almost everywhere else, transphobia is the territory of religious crackpots and right-wing cranks. In fact, since Donald Trump stomped back into the White House, moderates who might once have been on the fence are now actively rallying to protect the trans community.

Only in Britain has the anti-trans moral panic taken over the liberal mainstream. In recent years, we’ve joined Hungary and the United States in pumping out petty regulations targeting trans and non-binary people. British schools are now explicitly required to discriminate against transgender students. Anyone who doesn’t make their birth sex clear to a partner, even by accident, can now be charged with rape. And just yesterday, in response to the Supreme Court, the Equality and Human Rights Council rushed out guidance that goes much further. Schools, workplaces, public institutions and even community clubs must now take steps to ensure that trans people are clearly segregated.

To be clear, there’s no precedent for this crackdown. Before this, trans women had been using the women’s facilities for decades without much issue — but now? Now every single trans person in the UK will face a humiliating choice between outing themselves multiple times a day on the way to the bathroom or breaking the law. Because all trans people are henceforth to be treated, first and foremost, as potential predators — identified and excluded for the comfort of normal people everywhere.

Tracy Slater
How Trump’s Anti-Trans Policies Mirror the WWII Persecution of Japanese Americans

This obsession linking biology, morality, and public safely, reached its apex with the U.S. government’s Mixed Blood Policy in the camps for Japanese Americans. This policy mandated which families of mixed ethnicity could be freed and under what conditions. The smaller the percentage of “Japanese blood,” the less menace a citizen was assumed to pose. Beyond “blood percentage,” camp administrators promoted incarcerees’ request for release based on attempts to read biological markers. One official supported release of two mixed-race brothers by noting they were “definitely Caucasian in appearance.” In backing the release of a native Japanese woman married to a white American man, another official—defying logic—wrote, “Her appearance is that of Chinese,” adding for good measure, “her mannerism is more Americanized.”

Simon, King of the Witches

A while back I stumbled across the almost-forgotten 1971 “horror” film Simon, King of the Witches. The film is much better than the title suggests, with a compelling performance by the lead actor playing Simon … and a surprisingly thoughtful depiction of 20^th century “ceremonial magick” practice.

Doing a little internet digging, trying to make sense of how the heck the film got made, I stumbled across an astonishing Amazon review full of lore about the world from which it emerged. I must capture it here:

An Insider’s Look at the insider’s look: Hollywood Occult Scene, 1970
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2008

This film has several levels of meaning. Superficially it appears to be a stylish excursion through the Southern California psychedelic pop-culture era of self-styled warlocks and witches circa 1970. This was a time when magick was in the air and even the mundane world had a mysterious shimmer and sparkle. There will never be a time quite like it again — And for those of us caught in the spell of that bygone era, Southern California was the Land of Oz.

You can recapture the flavor and mystery of that now-ancient time and faraway place with the excellent DVD reissue of the 1971 film Simon, King of The Witches. How do I know this? Because according to urban myth, I was the real-life (if any of our lives at that time could be called “real”) model for the character of Simon Sinistari, the Hollywood warlock in the film.

Now that requires some qualification: I never lived in a storm drain, I never performed an 11^th degree operation (gay sex magick), and I never killed anybody, but other than that, how many black bearded, cigar smoking, wine drinking, witch-bashing, self-proclaimed mighty wizards were there prowling the streets of Hollywood during the 1969-70 years? I ask this question because, in the excellent commentaries included in this reissue, both the actor Andrew Prine and the director Bruce Kessler state that screen writer Robert Phippeny was himself “a warlock” and the model for his own character. If this is true I will be more than happy to concede Simon’s tarnished crown to Phippeny — but I would like to know where he was while we were “doing his thing.”

The general consensus among the “old guard” (some of us did survive!) is that Robert Phippeny was at least a first-hand observer and a student of “The Black Arts.” He kept a low profile, whereas I did not. He may have used another name on the street. Many of us did. He had obviously read Aleister Crowley and Franz Bardon (putting him light years ahead of most witches in the magick department). The “magick” depicted in Simon comes closer to actual practice than anything previously shown on the screen — or subsequently for that matter. But just to be picky we should point out that there is no such thing as an “effluvial condenser” although effluvium is an appropriate ingredient for certain “fluid” condensers which could be charged sexually but would then have to be applied to the magick mirror, not hung over it as in the film. However this error may have been intentional in order to achieve a more dramatic effect. Phippeny’s knowledge of Bardon on sex magick is apparent in the colors of Simon's and Linda’s ceremonial robes: Simon wears blue and Linda wears red, reversing the polarities to create a dynamic interchange (see Initiation into Hermetics page 247 or 308 in the 2^nd edition).

But we still want to know just what astrological aspect Simon was trying to exploit in his major magical working set for 1:33 p.m.?

Robert Phippeny certainly did his homework, but don’t try to use Simon as a training film anymore than you would use Saving Private Ryan as a guide to actually saving Private Ryan.

Beyond all the technical expertise demonstrated in the film we have what I consider a very good story — perhaps too good, and certainly too deep for the market the distributors appealed to. Director Bruce Kessler laments this in his commentary. The screen play is witty, sharp and well-crafted, although it gets a bit confusing in the end, obviously due to budget and time constraints. With all the limitations and the brief production time, Kessler and as his crew were really trying to make a meaningful film. Along that line I should point out that the novelized version of Simon, King of the Witches (Dell 1971) is an excuse for hack pornography by “Baldwin Hills” (name taken from a Southern California community) and serves only to remind the aspiring screen writer never to permit any novelized version of his work over which he has no control.

So, if Robert Phippeny is still out there somewhere, here’s a five-star review from “the old guard.” Let’s hear from you. Same goes for Andrew Prine and Bruce Kessler. You gave us a terrific memorial to our personal, funky, trippy, long-gone Land of Oz.

But perhaps the biggest unsolved mystery in Simon, King of the Witches are the identities of its stars? I always thought Andrew Prine and Brenda Scott had top billing. Who are Allyson Ames and Norman Burton?

Who has the swagger to claim to be the “real” Simon? He signed it:

Poke Runyon
Writer-Producer: Beyond Lemuria

Whoa.

Fonts

I need to start indexing typefaces I like, if only so I can find them again. This is just a start.

• Indices
• Faces
  • Big free families
  • Workhorses
  • For sketches
  • Interesting
  • Font tools for games
• Mac tools
• About type

Indices

Type foundry directory

Extensive!

Linotype Pilgrim’s list

Well-curated

Blambot

A foundry making faces for stuff like comics with other applications

Fonts for wireframing

A short index doing what it says on the tin

Free Font Alternatives

A useful list of free fonts to do the job of some spendy classics

Faces

Big free families

Deja Vu

A huge family

Noto

Created by the Google Fonts team

IBM Plex

Has just a hint of the Future Of The Past

Workhorses

Verdana

The sans serif which is always there for you

Georgia

The serif’d face for use on screens which is always there for you

Monaspace

A versatile & nifty family of monospaced fonts

Input

A sophisticated family of fonts for coding

Futura

The perennial face for people who have graduated from Helvetica

Volkhorn

A “bread-and-butter” serif’d face

For sketches

I use these in UX design wireframes to underline that they are sketchy

Squiggles instead of text

Redacted (Google Fonts)

Turns text into squiggles or blocks suggestive of words; includes a range of weights

Fillr

Turns text into rougher squiggles suggestive of words

Flow Rounded

Turns text into plain strokes

BLOKK

Turns text into chunky blocks

Handwriting-ish faces suggesting sketchiness

Pulp Fiction

A serif’d face for comics which has both bold and italics for when one needs to show examples of real copy while still hinting at sketchiness

Winky Sans

A slightly whimsical face which implies a neat but unfinished sketch

Comic Neue

A less janky descendent of Comic Sans, for that “do not take this seriously” feeling

Interesting

Doves Type

A facsimile of an elegant early 20^th century face. Evidently they fished the original typeset out of the Thames.

Bureausign

A nifty wayfinding font influenced by science fiction movies.

Piazzolla

A serif face with a lot of weights and a distinctive chunky character

Atkinson hyperlegible next

A sans serif face designed for accessibility

Bastaleur

A fancy pseudo-arcane face I like to use in game materials.

Gentium

A serif’d face with just a bit of character

Sylexiad

An eccentric face designed to support dyslexics

Skribblugh

A deliberately janky-unto-scary face which is surprisingly readable which I used for character sheets for a TTRPG about insomniacs

Noteworthy

A very legible face which resembles handrwriting

Science Gothic

A blocky face evocative of science fiction movies

Analog Digits

A family of numerals that look like segmented displays and nixie tubes

Font tools for games

Dicier

Useful icons

Prompt font

Useful icons

Hexpaper pro

An easy way to make hex grids

Raygun Rockets

An easy way to draw rayguns & rockets

Aetherships

An easy way to draw zepplins and steampunk spaceships

Fate Core

A few key glyphs for the TTRPG

Mac tools

PopChar

A tool for handling fonts’ special characters

Typeface

A tool for surveying & organizing one’s fonts; included with a SetApp subscription, which I recommend to all Mac users

About type

Severance’s evil type design

An article about the show’s production design with an interesting word about how no, that is not Helvetica.

Type.Method

A game-like tool for exercising kerning skill

Keming Revisited

A fun collection of commentaries & resources about the joke term “keming” to refer to bad kerning.

We must use the word “genocide”

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

For a long time, reasonable people of good conscience could refuse to call Israel’s brutality in Gaza “genocide”. That time has now passed.

I have referred to Israel’s attack on Gaza as “genocidal” since a week after 10/7.

At the same time, I have respected those who have rejected the word “genocide”.

First because the term evokes eliminationist violence — wholesale mass expulsion or even mass murder of a people. I think we must register violences short of that as genocide, but other informed people fear that it dilutes the potency of the term “genocide” to apply it to anything less. In 2024 it was wrong to dismiss the brutality of Israel’s attack on Gaza, but that brutality was short of eliminationist.

Second because Palestinian liberation is a noble cause which has long attracted monstrous supporters, for obvious reasons. Since 10/7 we have seen people exercise the term “genocide” in bad faith, to persuade unsophisticated people of good conscience to embrace transparently antisemitic ideas, to implicitly justify the genocide of Israeli Jews. I respect refusing to grant those voices any ammunition.

I disagreed with those who hesitated over the word “genocide” because my unwholesome interests include attention to how genocides happen. I believe that we must recognize genocide as genocide early, because attacks on peoples as peoples modest in comparison to eliminationism — the most damningly faint praise imaginable — tend to escalate to eliminationism. A broad conception of genocide cultivates a frame of mind which moves us to preëmpt escalation from horrors to yet greater horrors. But my disagreement has been respectful disagreement. All people of conscience have had an obligation to oppose the brutality in Gaza, but there has been room to oppose it using different language.

We have seen the Likudniks in control of Israel’s government escalate step by step since 10/7 in word and deed. One may take that as supporting either the case for using the term “genocide” early … or supporting the case for using it sparingly.

In recent months, Israel’s brutality has crossed the threshold into unmistakably eliminationist violence. One can and must oppose this in terms which avoid antisemitic demonization of Jewish Israelis. One cannot avoid the term “genocide” any longer.

This post was inspired by the Corey Robin Facebook post below, which is sympathetic to the bitterness of the word on many people’s tongues. I know that taste all too well. It is past time to accept it.

This post is not for you. I want to repeat: This post is not for you.

Many of my readers here, Jews and non-Jews, are already clear about the wrongness of what Israel is doing in Gaza. Many of my readers here are already clear that the State of Israel — as it was designed and constructed as an ethnocracy, apartheid state, Jewish supremacist state, what have you — is a historic injustice.

This post is not for you.

This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify with the Zionist project, who have supported the military actions of the Israeli government in Gaza (even if they oppose Netanyahu), people who call for a return of the hostages and a ceasefire and say no more, people who fear that anti-Israel protests on college campuses are a sign of rising antisemitism in the US, people who believe, or hope, that Israel as a Jewish state is a cause worth defending.

This post is for you.

It’s for you because, given the way algorithms go and online communities sort themselves out, you may not have seen some developments in the last few days, among people who hold or once held views similar to yours. I’m posting these statements here (with links), just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing, and that it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm.

1. July 15: Omer Bartov, born in Israel in 1954, fought in the Yom Kippur War as a company commander, one of the leading international scholars on Nazism and the Holocaust, writes a piece titled, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” (A side note: According to statements from the governor of New York and chancellor of CUNY, were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation and comparison of Bartov’s Holocaust research and his claims about the war on Gaza, they could be disciplined and fired.)
2. July 29: Michael Ben-Yair, former Attorney General of Israel, writes, “Jews, who went through a genocide 80 years ago, are committing genocide in Gaza.” (Side note: were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation and comparison to the Holocaust, they could be disciplined and fired.)
3. August 3: Jeremy Ben-Ami, whose father fought in the Irgun, and who is head of J Street, a mainstream pro-Israel organization in the US, writes, “Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide. I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention. Based on the law as I read it, the Prime Minister and others in his government will have to answer for what they have done and will be held accountable … The stain of this abomination will forever be on the Jewish people because we have not stopped this. Far too many have been far too silent.”
4. July 26: Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, former interim President of Israel, former chair of the Jewish Agency, former chair of the World Zionist Organization, writes, “Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since … The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist.” (Side note: According to statements from the governor of New York and chancellor of CUNY, were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its questioning of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, they could be disciplined and fired.)
5. August 2: Lihi Ben Shitrit, Henry and Marilyn Taub Associate Professor of Israel studies at NYU and director of NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies: “As an Israeli political scientist researching Israeli and Palestinian politics, I’m regularly invited by different universities to speak about the Middle East. Inevitably, someone in the audience asks what I think about the allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. While I have been unequivocal about my opposition to the current war, I tell them that I’m not a lawyer or an expert on international law. Therefore I have no authority with which to judge on the question of genocide. This is a copout …… I think there are several reasons for many liberal Jews’ tremendous difficulty in seriously confronting the question of whether Israel is committing genocide, including a misunderstanding of what genocide can look like. None of these, however, if we are truly honest with ourselves, justify turning away from it … I am familiar with emotions of outrage and revulsion with the conduct of the Israeli government and the dissemination of Jewish supremacy, but the question of genocide, I now understand, provoked new feelings I had not encountered before — shame and guilt. As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility.”
6. August 1: Dov Waxman, Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies, UCLA: “I initially rejected the genocide charge, but I have changed my mind …… It has been a long and emotionally difficult process over the past 22 months of horrific violence and heartbreaking suffering in Gaza for me to conclude that Israel is guilty of genocide. The possibility that Israel, a Jewish state legitimized by the Nazis’ genocide of Jews, could itself carry out a genocide was one that I, probably like most Jewish people, could barely countenance. I also struggled to accept the possibility that Jews, the victims of genocide, could become the perpetrators of one. Because my conception of genocide was based on the Holocaust, it was also hard for me to recognize that genocide does not have to involve the deliberate attempt to exterminate an entire people, nor does it have to be the ultimate goal. The Holocaust was significantly different from the genocide in Gaza today in many ways. However, this fact should not prevent us from recognizing that what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza amounts to the crime of genocide.”

Again, for many of you, this is old news, too little, too late. This post is not for you. It’s for those readers of mine, many of whom I know personally, who are still wrestling with these questions, and who feel that the only people who would say that this is a genocide or that Israel is in a condition of profound moral wrong, are people who are not like them. I’m trying to show that people who are like them, or once were like them, have also come to this position.

For opponents of the State of Israel, many of whom are my readers, this may seem like a fool’s errand. I do not think it is.

In my lifetime, I’ve undergone some profound changes of belief in position. As many friends of mine from graduate school will tell you, when I arrived at Yale, I was staunchly opposed to the effort to unionize graduate students. Staunchly. Spoke against it repeatedly. I wound up leading the union and leading it on strike.

On the question of Israel, I was raised in a very Zionist household. My family and I went to Israel in 1977 on a trip sponsored by our temple. I continued to support the State of Israel through my years in college. But a combination of factors, between the ages of 20 and 26, changed my mind. It took me a long time to come to that position. It was painful. It often has involved bitter, emotional arguments with people I love very much, including my mother. So while I understand that for many readers here I am in one camp, and perhaps can’t even be trusted on this question, I do have a very clear memory and sense of where a lot of people who disagree with me on this issue are coming from. And I understand, I think, how uneasy and uncertain one can be, not knowing whom to trust, fearing that antisemitism underlies or accompanies every criticism. I get it. I’m hoping some of these other voices here can provide a path, I hope closer to my own position, but even if not, at least to some understanding.

Against “centrist” Dem anti-leftism

I have now had decades of dumb arguments with grumpy liberals kvetching about the “purity politics” of loudmouth leftists refusing to vote for Democratic Party candidates. These days, grumplibs have escalated to blaming The Left for producing the Trump regime.

I share grumplibs’ exasperation with loudlefties’ crowing about “holding the Democratic Party to account” by refusing to vote. I have had decades of arguments with loudlefties about how that doesn’t work, how in our first-past-the-post system, the savvy voter casts a ballot for their preferred candidate in primaries then for the lesser evil in the general election.

But the rest of the grumplib rap is bizarre.

The loudlefties assert that they speak for a bloc of leftist voters both big enough to sway elections and coherent enough to have addressible political interests. But grumplibs kvetching about loudlefties draw a bunch of bizarre conclusions from that premise.

• Why focus so much interest on the foolishness of loudlefties in particular? Why not grumble about the much bigger bloc of non-leftist non-voters? Or, y’know, Republican voters?
• Why fault the loudlefties, rather than fault the Democratic Party for refusing to address loudlefties’ interests? Even if those interests are dumb, isn’t the Democratic establishment being at least as foolish leaving those votes on the table?
• Why fault the loudlefties — and the handful of progressive back-bench electeds they like — who have not held actual power? Shouldn’t we fault the people who did have power? The movement-conservative-neoliberals who controlled the Republicans 1980-2015? The Clintonian-neoliberals who have controlled the Dems since 1992?

All that said, I do not believe that grumplibs accept loudlefties’ premise about a leftist voting bloc.

They have been telling me for decades that they do not believe in that bloc. They told me that there are too few to be worth pursuing. They have told me that non-voting leftists are too fickle and won’t show up at the polls even if Dems try to get them.

More importantly, the loudlefties’ premise is wrong. The evidence has overwhelmingly demonstrated that the loudlefties (and netroots progressives of the ’00s like me) were wrong. The loudlefty bloc is neither big nor coherent, much less both. It’s a non-issue.

Loudlefties don’t know what to do to win political power back from the fascist regime in power, or they would have done it. Fair enough; I don’t have answers either.

I do know that the current Democratic Party establishment cannot do it. If they could, we would not be here. Grumplibs’ talking about how loudlefties need to get with the Dem establishment’s program are wasting time and energy. It ain’t gonna happen.

What is to be done?

I finally spat out this post because of yet another discussion in which my interlocutor wanted to tell the Left “you are the reason we can’t have the things we both want”, saying that an untapped left voting bloc could swing elections. If I am wrong and that does exist, it is both dumb and offensive to imagine that hectoring them more about how All This is their fault will deliver their votes to Dems.

Vote Blue No Matter Who is right both on the merits and in pursuit of leftists’ own interests, and I have not been shy about telling my left comrades that any other strategy is foolish and irresponible. The fantasy that leftists withholding our votes will compel the Democratic Party to reach left is one of loudlefties’ persistent delusions — along with the significance of our voter bloc, the ease of enacting our policy agenda, the appeal of that agenda to the public, and the relevance of the Dem establishment’s moves against us in the big picture. But it is as logically absurd as it is rude for the Dem establishment to punch left to keep lefties out of power for two generations … and then fault the Left for the results, rather faulting actual power players of the Dem establishment.

Aside from alienating the Left, this nonsense lets the Dem establishment lazily avoid a strategic reckoning they damm well need to do.

I grant good reasons to think that Clintonian triangulation was the best possible strategy in the 1990s to counter the capture of the Republican Party by movement conservatism, as demonstrated by Actual Bill Clinton.

That case gets weaker looking at the ’00s & ’10s. Obama campaigned to the left of his actual governance, and made countless moves which compromised the strength of progressive organizing. Are lefties like me right to suspect that this squandered an opportunity to break the neoliberal consensus? Only a fool would feel confident that they understand the political dynamics better than BHO.

But I am certain that at this point we have nothing to learn from the dynamics of the 1990s. We face a MAGA fascist Republican Party, not movement conservatism. We face fragmentation of the entire information environment, not Fox News rivaling mainstream political journalism. Triangulation is very bad under these conditions.

I have my own informed guesses about what the Democratic Party should do. I’m open to alternatives. I am certain that the Clintonian playbook will not work. HRC’s candidacy in 2016 would have crushed a movement conservative candidate like a bug, and her failure shows how that playbook fails in our current environment. I would like to find loudlefties’ proposals more persuasive than I do; I support a lot of them on the merits.

Advocates for a Democratic Party agenda of Restoration — “return to stability and normalcy” — point to Biden’s victory in 2020 as their template, but 2020 was a unique moment. The course of Biden’s administration and the collapse of voter enthusiasm for him which undercut Kamala Harris’ candidacy in 2024 demonstrates that Just Be Normal cannnot win elections; voters do not see that as either possible or desirable for the Republic. We face a national institutional crisis at least comparable to the moment which gave us the New Deal if we are lucky. (If not so lucky, Fort Sumpter.)

To save the Republic, we need a popular front uniting the liberal establishment with leftists. The Democratic party has the obligation and opportunity to reach out for one.

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Sibling post: against dumb anti-liberal leftist antifascism.

Against the Political Compass

If one spends any time talking about politics on the internet, one encounters the “Political Compass”. It can be fun for stuff like political jokes.

But it is not a useful framework for understanding politics.

It is comprable to other toy categorization schemes like astrological Sun signs, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or the Dungeons & Dragons moral alignment system — fun, and maybe a little illuminating when used as a loose vocabulary, but not substantive. D&D complicating Good vs. Evil with an axis for Law vs. Chaos allows cute observations like naming a way that Darth Vader (“bringing order to the galaxy” because he is lawful evil) is different from The Joker (chaotic evil); I have done it myself. But it breaks down if you think about it for long. Heck, nerds will tell ya how it breaks down for Batman. D&D alignments cannot bear real weight because they emerge out of a weird history of fantasy fiction and D&D designer Gary Gygax’s peculiar Christian morality, not any serious moral philosophy.

Likewise, the Political Compass is a toy that emerges from “libertarian” propaganda. It developed from the Nolan Chart, which was explicitly libertarian propaganda.

Libertarians often try to dignify their fringe position by arguing that if one really understands politics there are three basic ideologies — left, right, and … of course … libertarian. (Never mind the distinction from “libs” that leftists insist on!)

Those who value civilization are called conservatives. For them the enemy is barbarism.

Those who value equality are called liberals. For them the enemy is exploitation, that is, the abuse of the free market by the rich or by the many to oppress the poor or the few.

Those who value liberty are called libertarians. For them the enemy is slavery, that is, the abuse of the authority of the sovereign to oppress the citizen.

The Compass goes so far as to give libertarians as much space as liberalism and conservatism put together, despite being a fringe ideology. This enables stuff like surveys that reveal to people “Surprise! You’re really a libertarian!”

Propaganda.

The big four categorizations of the Compass are not useful enough, which is why political scientists don’t use it. The axes just don’t bear scrutiny.

When one examines at what Compass boosters mean by its authoritarian-libertarian axis, one finds the fingerprints of the libertarian tendency to collapse all other political ideologies into “statism”, because libertarians dread the coercive power of the state … and ignore different state policies, structurally disparate state institutions, and all other forms of coercion.

Sociologists & political scientists understand authoritarianism very differently from Amount Of State Power. I join them in finidng it important to conceive authoritianism in terms of unencumbered power, without rules, process, accountability, or other institutional limits getting in the way of its exercise. Unencumbered power is the useful parallel which one sees in authoritarian governments, religions, families, and more. It is how the capricious commissars of tsarist Russia, the capricious commissars of Stalinist Russia, and capricious oligarchs of Putinist Russia all resemble one another. It makes the supposedly-minarchist fantasies of many weird far right movements like neoreaction authoritarian: if the “CEO of the country” allows more “economic freedom” but can just singlehandedly issue whatever decrees they want, that is authoritarian. It is what makes the absolute monarchies of the feudal era more authoritarian than modern liberal democracies with greater state capacity: the king could capriciously exercise the power of life and death over subjects at a whim. The antithesis of authoritarianism is not “libertarianism” but limits like institutionalism, proceduralism, and a circumscribed scope to power, as in the rule of law and rights protections of liberal democracy.

Similarly, where the Compass conceives of the “left” and “right” as an “economic” axis, what the heck does it mean? The vibes are socialist-ish and capitalist-ish but mushy. What about that predicts the preferences of shaggy anarchist left-libertarians and hyper-capitalist right-libertarians?

This obscures the the meaning of “left” and “right”. They are a subtle, contested vocabulary, but one can summarize the distinction as reflecting egalitarian versus heirarchical social relations, rather than economic structures — unsurprising since the terms originated before the emergence of either capitalism or socialism! With that framework, one can examine different visions of equality and different heirarchies, making the left-right spectrum is the best simple model of political tendencies available, if one exercises it thoughtfully.

A dialogue about social justice praxis

In a discussion on a private forum about my post Social Justice Praxis Dreams, I got a reply from a social justice advocate with whom I have had decades of fraught conversations.

I find after the many years we’ve been wrestling with the deeper foundations of this conversation, that my current position is that Western liberal philosophy has a white supremacy problem baked into it, and that we need to restart from a place of de-emphasizing European historic philosophy and finding ways of valuing other folkways … because a lot of the toxicity is originating in the choice of source materials.

I replied:

After the many years we’ve been wrestling with the deeper foundations of this conversation, I have lost patience with your inability to articulate what the fuck you actually want me to do.

These points [from the original post] are for you:

• … which does not enable narcissistic abuse. e.g.: If someone has stepped wrong, they can expect clear feedback about how to correct the error, and if they make the correction we consider the matter closed.
• … which understands the liberal school and identity politics school as counterweights to each other’s limitations.
• … very enthusiastic about addressing clearly & specifically what individuals in privilege can & should do.
• … with a sophisticated ethos for dialogue between the privileged and the marginalized.

so the problem is “clear feedback” because “well tell me exactly how to fix it” when the problem is “assuming the supremacy of Western liberal philosophy” and that there isn’t a monolithic homogeneity in the non-Western source materials (and also that centuries of Western imperialism have destroyed the access to non-Western materials) … we then have a problem.

That is a non-answer. Tell me what the fuck you want me to actually do.

What, if not liberal democracy?

you’re judging this based on the idea that there should be a rigidly (and safely, if adhered to) laid out set of instructions, when the flip side is actually “learn to detach from the idea that orthropraxy is protective from error”

You have accused me of demanding a perfect error-free orthopraxy before. I recognize the familiar pattern of privileged deflection which leads to that objection, the people who demand an explanation but will never find anything adequate because they are just resisting having to change.

But no, that is not what I am calling for. I am calling for good-enough principles plus practices for pursuing improvement when those principles are not enough. As I have discussed with you literally for decades.

I do not accept your refusal to name a praxis. I think you are demonstrating one of the worst dysfunctions of social justice advocacy culture.

I have had too damm many encounters — many of them with you — in which I have said …

I believe that I stepped wrong and I stand ready to address the harms for which I am responsible. But I do not understand what my error was, so I am stuck unable to make proper apology or amends, unable to avoid the error in the future. I want to do better, so I would appreciate help.

… and then got responses along the lines of …

• “it is not my job to educate you”
• “I already told you but you are just not listening”
• “it is your responsibility to figure that out, not mine”
• “let go of white norms”

… and I hesitate to grumble about it, because that puts me in very bad company.

There are good reasons for those responses! Pragmatically, sometimes people just don’t have capacity at the moment of truth; injustice is fatiguing. Morally, responsibility for correcting injustice rests entirely on the privileged; the marginalized shouldn’t have to lift a finger.

But.

I have experienced social justice advocacy culture going from rightly supporting the pragmatic limits of delivering “clarity” to the stubborn privileged … to absurdly casting refusal to engage as a positive good. I know someone who had a paid antiracist trainer tell them “it is not my job to educate you”.

This is ineffective.

This is ideologically paradoxical. One cannot maintain both that the privileged are blind to the mechanics of injustice and that the privileged have to dismantle those mechanics on their own.

This is, at its worst, poisonous. Saying “you harmed me, and it was your responsibility to understand my needs without me naming them, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to satisfy me without me saying how” is a narcissistic abuse pattern.

I think that, as a general praxis, we need to turn back the dial a few notches.

And very particularly, with you, after all this time, I will not permit you to keep doing it. Stop.

literally I have noted that step one is to give up on the idea of the superiority of Western canon and that there can be a singular correct praxis

The fact that this leaves you bereft because you want a praxis to replace the previous one is … simply what is, and not an indictment of the need for dismantling a desire for One Superior Correct Praxis.

I am not demanding One Superior Correct Praxis. Read what I actually said:

I am calling for good-enough principles plus practices for pursuing improvement when those principles are not enough.

For decades you have told me that I am thinking wrong and acting wrong, and then refusing to name something better. I cannot come up with a charitable theory of what you are trying to achieve.

They did not reply, but shortly after that exchange, they did post this to their own space:

There’s a conversation I’ve been having for years with many different people, where well-meaning individuals of demographic privilege truly want to “do better” and ardently wish for specific instruction sets or checklists so that they can “do better”.

…the problem is that this is doomed to failure, except in very specific contexts where there’s actually an assessor with authority who is committed to only using the agreed-upon checklist.

[It can be noted here that there are indeed specific contexts like this, with what are supposed to be agreed-upon checklists, and it’s the violation of those parameters that we pursue with lawsuits and petitions]

But the thing is, every single time any attempt at an instruction set is presented, people of privilege will start arguing with the instructions and parameters, and trying to game the system. Because that’s what is trained in through generations of success and survival in this kind of system. There are entire cultural traditions that involve training people to look for the loopholes.

And we’re supposed to — “in the West” — live in a system of “rule of law” and fairly and evenly applied checklists. That’s the promise.

… except we know that’s not reality, and most cynically the checklist is loudly declaimed while the violation of the checklist is clearly visible to everyone observing. Because the checklist is mainly an emotional shield for the people designated as protected under systemic oppression. It provides a rationale for “as long as [anyone] follows the rules…” and promises that the only people brutalized are those who break rules.

And it encourages the protected to think of “rules” as electrified fences that they dare not breach. (And thus to want new rules imposed with proof of safety before the previous set are ever flouted.)

There are other ways to organize the world, with different flaws. Asking for the current system to remain in place until a flawless replacement is available sounds philosophically appropriate until you notice that this results in maintaining the current pattern of protecting certain groups by feeding the blood of others into the machine.

Transparently a comment on our exchange, reframing it … without pointing to what I actually said.

I have seen this many times before in social justice advocacy culture: offering a criticism of a pattern, person, commentary, or event which is not quite an outright lie, but does evoke an image very different from the reality. This is a form of the motte-and-bailey move “in which someone switches between a ‘motte’ (an easier-to-defend and sometimes common-sense statement) and a ‘bailey’ (a harder-to-defend and more controversial statement)”.

Distaste for this pattern is one reason why my post about social media shitstorms says:

Shitstorms sow confusion. Resist this. Everything one says every time one engages must pursue clarity — especially about what actually happened. Return as much as possible to the known specifics of what people said and did. Push back against the telephone game effect.

This sort of thing does not compromise the righteousness of the project of social justice, or my commitment to working for it. It does complicate my engagement with the culture of social justice advocacy, which is the pits because I recognize that as an individual one must work in alliance with movements which never fully align with one’s preferences. But I sure don’t like that I have learned that I cannot trust second-hand accounts of events from my comrades in the movement.

Social justice praxis dreams

Over on Bluesky discussion of “Woke 2.0” like this from William B. Fuckley …

I think that specific activist language is probably dead, the next round is going to sound more like labor organizing than a college class. Woke 2 will have somewhat more limited aims and also be far more ruthless about political power.

Yeah, my predictions are that Woke 2 will be more successful, but much more limited. A reclamation rather than a revolution.

Less “Folx” and more “no, gay people do get to exist in public actually, fuck you”.

I do think a lot of the stuff that generated so much sound and fury last time was kind of based on an assumption that 2020 was the worst society could get and that flawed liberal democracy was the floor. A kind activist version of ZIRP. I don’t think anyone will be under that illusion in a few years.

… inspired Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li to ask:

alright why not. woke 2 takes. let’s have ’em people

I fell into a little rant-thread which did not quite answer the question but seemed worth capturing:

Bitter experience teaches me not to make predictions beyond “I will not get the things that I want” but since you ask, these are some things I want and therefore expect to Not Get. I confess to the inclinations of my own privileged position affecting my center of gravity; I am who I am.

I want social justice praxis …

• … which understands the liberal school and identity politics school as counterweights to each other’s limitations. “The law in its majestic equality …”
• … which recognizes that tendencies are not absolutes. e.g.:
  “This person stands in a position of privilege so they miss a lot, but they do have a point about this particular thing, which that marginalized person did not happen to know.”
• … which recognizes that its terms of art are terms of art and says so. e.g.:
  “When we use the word ‘privilege’, we are not using it the ordinary way …”
• … which does not enable narcissistic abuse. e.g.:
  If someone has stepped wrong, they can expect clear feedback about how to correct the error, and if they make the correction we consider the matter closed.
• … liberal enough to reject diffuse, unaccountable processes … and leftist enough to reject depriving people of their livelihoods.
• … enthusiastic about creating clear write-ups of what the heck happened.
• … enthusiastic about digging in to imperfect efforts e.g.:
  “Without forgiving ABC for the error XYZ we can appreciate that ABC is good enough to be worth criticizing deeply, and then look closely at the problems with XYZ …”
• … which talks as frequently and profoundly about class as it does about race.
• … equipped to recognize that racism is a single-edged blade which cuts PoCs deeply and white people not at all, while sexism is a double-edged blade much sharper on one side that cuts men pretty damm deeply even though it cuts women far worse.
• … liberal enough to prefer universalist policy solutions but smart enough to know that universalist policy is rarely enough by itself.
• … very enthusiastic about addressing clearly & specifically what individuals in privilege can & should do.
• … which actually understands what the word “systemic” means. e.g.:
  “There is plenty of bigotry to address … and without structural interventions inequities will reproduce themselves even without bigotry.”
• … which understands the difference between punishing bad actors and depriving them of power, and vigorously prefers the latter.
• … with a sophisticated ethos for dialogue between the privileged and the marginalized.

Related

A fraught dialogue inspired by this post.

Linda Hamilton

Talking to a friend, I was reminded of how Linda Hamilton deserved a better career. In the original The Terminator, her line reading of “move it, Reese; on your feet, soldier” sells the entire damm movie. Good actors are the best special effect.

I once read an interview with director James Cameron about making Terminator 2: Judgment Day where he told a story I have not been able to source, but remember vividly. He resisted making a Terminator sequel for years — did you see my movie? it ends pretty definitively — but Carolco finally came him with such a huge budget that he just could not say No. So he told them, “Okay … if I can get both Schwarzenegger & Hamilton to come back.”

When he talked to Arnold, the conversation took all of ten seconds. “You made me a star. Of course I’m in. Whatever you want to do.”

With Linda Hamilton, he laid out his whole idea. Sarah Connor is no longer the befuddled waitress, she has learned all this Army stuff. And she starts out in a mental hospital, because she has been ranting about killer robots from the future.

Linda Hamilton replies, “I have one question and one condition.”

As I remember it, Cameron said that he thought this is gonna be good.

“You say you want me to go to boot camp and to the gym. How far will you let me take that?”

I like to imagine Cameron’s grin. “As far as you want.”

“Good.”

This is 1991. Schwarzenegger is on the A-list, but women in movies are not buff.

“What’s your condition?”

“So first they have to break Sarah out of the mental hospital. Cool. But also: she really is crazy.”

And Cameron realizes, oh, that’s better.

Good actors are the best special effect. Give Hamilton a retroactive Oscar just for her line reading of, “How’s the knee?”

And she’s still got it. Look at how much she does in just a few dozen words.

Against politics without politics

The dangerous temptation of anti-politics

Politics is a bummer. People have incompatible visions of a good society. There are hard trade-offs — in priorities, in limited resources, in irreconcilable interests. Industrial society tends toward institutional infrastructure full of politics — legislation & regulation, bureaucracies to implement those, et cetera.

Mid-20^th liberal political philosophers like Isaiah Berlin & Karl Popper looked at the totalitarian movements of the new century and concluded that many of them emerged paradoxically from a dream of escaping from the politics of politics, somehow creating a world without political processes and political strife.

We could all live together in peace, harmony, and prosperity if we just …

… eliminate the state

… smash capitalism

… give this brilliant leader total power

… all embrace the One True Religion

     et cetera

Those liberals insisted that there was no getting away from the grubbiness of politics, that anti-politics was doomed to disaster. They framed liberalism as, in large part, reflecting a commitment to engaging in political process and an effort to make it as just and effective as possible despite a deep pessimism about the impossibility of perfect process, outcomes, or justice.

My own commitment to liberal democracy rests largely on that analysis.

On the left

That I am a liberal in that libdem Isaiah Berlin sense is not to say that I am a “liberal” in the sense that many leftists use the term to object to positions lacking political imagination any further left than the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. I am a leftist. My deepest political dreams are unmistakably radical. Socialism. Institutional changes that ultimately require re-writing the US Constitution. Dignified universal basic income. Transformative cultural politics.

Despite my fundamental alliance, I often feel uneasy among leftists. Partly this reflects a common rejection of “liberalism” which unnecessarily throws out the rights & rule-of-law baby with the capitalism bathwater, partly it reflects too little skepticism about the authoritarianism embedded in left ideologies downstream of Lenin, but aside from those ideological objections which one can confront directly, there is the slipperier problem of too many of my comrades frighteningly tempted by anti-politics fantasies. Even many strains of left-anarchism — inherently resilient against authoritarianism — are comparably scary in assuming that simply eliminating the state automatically eliminates coercion and politics.

Anti-politics is not at all universal on the left, even among radicals, but it is worryingly common.

On the right

Anti-politics is a distinct problem from the right’s opposition to equality which always emerges as opposition to liberal democracy among their radicals. Not everyone on the right suffers from the anti-politics fantasy, even among the radicals. The maniacs who both understand the feudal social / political order and yearn for its revival dream of more politics in their politics. But anti-politics is common, and it is currently ascendent.

Fascism exemplifies the problem of anti-politics, asserting that if we can purge the nation of the people who corrupt its essence, politics and policy challenges will just evaporate. This creates a fascist slide toward totalitarianism as they scramble for control in response to the failures of their nonsensical plans.

It is important to understand how anti-politics paradoxically rationalizes fascism’s authoritarian essence as anti-authoritarian in the minds of true believers. Fash read the liberal order (as in liberal democracy) and liberal order (as in an imagined dominance by “leftists”) as “authoritarian” (or even “totalitarian”) because these step outside of what they see as the correct role of government, by enfranchising & materially supporting the undeserving. In the US fash often frame themselves as not merely anti-authoritarian but anti-government, perverting our democratic civil language to cast “We The People” (real Americans) in opposition to the government. Among savvy fash leadership this is deliberate bad faith kayfabe, but many fash followers take it at face value.

No horseshoe

This post emerged from an online discussion with friends. One of them read these objections to anti-politics (and other problems in radical movements) as an embrace of the horseshoe theory that the far left & right wrap around to meet each other. It is not.

Dumb radicals on the left & right resemble each other in being dumb.

Likewise, anti-politics resembles anti-politics. There are radicals on both sides who do not indulge in anti-politics; there are moderates on both sides who do. Democratic Party stalwarts who say “had we won I would be enjoying brunch instead of thinking about politics” drift into anti-politics. Smart moderate conservatives turn out to have anti-politics baked into their thinking.

My friend who saw a horseshoe in my thinking is the kind of Dem many leftists disdain as a “lib”, and he returns their disdain, finding the left all dangerously unrealistic. I deeply disagree with him about the project of the left, but he is correct in seeing us aligned in dreading anti-politics. I will take informed libdem pragmatism like his over the anti-political fantasies of many of my comrades seven days a week and twice on Sundays.

Action movie dreams

On the one hand, I am radically opposed to violence, and my cishet masculinity is more than a little askew.

On the other hand, there is a part of me which desperately wants my life to be like this: