Author: Bertolt MEHcht

Reminder: Jonathan Chait Is Bad, and Marxism Is Good

So, I wake up this morning to a beautiful white blanket and a phone call from the boss-lady letting me know that work is cancelled.

I also wake up to another SUPERDUPER POLEMIC from the Master of Modern Liberalism, Jonathan Chait. The title, “Reminder: Liberalism Is Working, and Marxism Has Always Failed” is obvious clickbait, but Chait is never content to let his headline editor get all of the deserved criticism. Chait is, essentially, a neoliberal troll nowadays.

First of all, I almost want to slap him in order to get the name of Jacobin out of his mouth. There is an extent to which I believe that, if your thinking is revealed to be as sclerotic and backward as Chait’s, you shouldn’t even be allowed to look at a beautifully-designed and written Jacobin–let alone read one.

Moving on from that relatively harmless quibble I possess, Chait goes on to flatly state that “Marxism is terrible.” That’s fine; arguments are typically structured “Claim–>Warrant–>Conclusion” or “Point–>Evidence–>Analysis”, so this is really just the start of a takedown of Marxism. Right?

Not quite. Chait spends the next block of text talking about Bernie Sanders because Chait is the op-ed equivalent of a squirrel or raccoon–he forgets the occasion for this flawed premise (Obama’s Cuba visit) and decides to go back to his favorite whipping Social Democrat.

When he finally gets done with his linguistic onanism, he manages to make the same tired point that “every communist country in world history quickly turned into a repressive nightmare.” He also manages to conflate “rights” and “control of capital” in a truly mealy-mouthed (mealy-brained?) passage about Marxist conceptions of rights.

He then manages to get to his pet topic, talking about how Marxists will purge and repress any ideology they deem “reactionary.” Ah, ol’ Jonathan “Free Speech on College Campuses is Under Siege” Chait. This feels better–feels familiar.  He even manages to tie Marxism with political correctness, because of course he did. (Sidenote: if he’s allowed to do that, I am just gonna start telling people that the St. Louis Blues adopted the ideology of Nazi mysticism because both resulted in violent white guys in stupid uniforms).

But what Chait fails to realize in his “analysis” is that he’s ascribing a single, discrete political program to THE MARXISTS. If I’ve learned anything running one of the Jacobin Reading Groups (debatable), it’s that there’s no one way to be anticapitalist, no one single canonical interpretation of Karl Marx’s material. I’ll actually cop to wanting to repress ideologies and speech I find reactionary, myself. I am thoroughly illiberal, Mr. Chait, and I hope you fear what I want to do to your conception of your “free speech.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that any programmatic anticapitalist or Marxist government will settle on my answer as THE answer. Chait’s abiding fear seems to be that the Politburo, if it seizes the courts, the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, will *abridge his free speech rights*.

First of all, if that’s your abiding fear, look the fuck in the mirror and consider whether your perspective is, perhaps, just a tad privileged. Some people don’t have cushy media jobs that guarantee that they won’t starve.

Getting back to the material potential of the fear itself, Chait’s worry is nullified by a Jacobin passage that he quotes, in another flailing attempt to tar and feather a publication more vibrant and intellectually agile than he. “Sometimes a combative scrum — not the marketplace of ideas — is the face of democracy”, is the quote he pulled. He hates this and critiques this and holds his breath until his face gets blue and blah blah blah. Take a step back and read the passage. He quotes it in an attempt to fearmonger about loss of free speech; a combative scrum of ideas requires healthy fighters, people intellectually curious and quick enough to win a battle of ideology before being forced to fight a physical battle by the antagonists they’re attempting to defeat or beat back. Chait must know, on some level, that his pathetic neoliberalism will attract no champion to fight on its behalf in this arena of ideas that he’s envisioning. These dispatches in the past year are–in my estimation–the thinly-veiled diary of a man who made a living selling his intellect realizing that the market for his intellect won’t exist in a decade. It’s beautiful.

He may have served a purpose in a Bush-era America, where Liberals and The Left had to make tenuous alliances against Christian Conservatism and Neoconservatism–I’ll grant that. In an age when the distinctions between Leftism and Liberalism are being sharpened however, Chait is writing a portion of his own career obituary every time he thinks he can boot up the ol’ word processor and police the ambitions of The Left.

Trump and the Taboo

Complex hegemonic superpowers seldom collapse in spectacular supernovae. They slowly wither from within, public officials crossing metaphorical Rubicon after metaphorical Rubicon (or literal, in a single case). Eventually, after a series of small norms and taboos being violated here and there–generalizing a whole group as rapists or openly disparaging a veteran or physically threatening the press or straight up repeatedly lying or offering to pay legal fees of supporters as a literal militia is forming in your name, to list some random, unrelated examples–a rupture occurs and suddenly you’re in the Roman Imperium and not the Republic. Only difference here is that Trump seems to be the Gracchi, Marius, and Caesar all in one person. Hopefully we don’t let him get to Caligula.

On Chicago

I recall the moment the Trump candidacy stopped being funny to me; I was at work, idly half-listening to the local NPR affiliate in one earbud. Terry Gross was interviewing someone, and the word “Trump” was used in close proximity to “white nationalist” or “identitarian” (sidenote on “identitarian”: I’ve never seen a greater distance between people who use a word intended to paint public perception and the [correct] public perception of those people). I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but resolved to do a google search using those terms when I got home.

What I found was Evan Osnos’ increasingly (and increasingly, and increasingly) essential piece in The New Yorker: “The Fearful and the Frustrated”. Since late August, I’ve been chewing on the HUGE amount of chewable material that Osnos presented in his piece, but one topic in particular keeps getting stuck in my craw.

Upon my third or fourth attempt to explain the import of his piece, a deadening thought occurred to me: people didn’t fully understand that while some of us were witnessing the early stages of a fascist movement, others had no historical or political context for understanding–let alone confronting–fascism. They didn’t understand the stakes, they didn’t understand the antecedents, and they didn’t understand (or accept) the base, Sinclair Lewis-intoned truth: “It CAN happen here.” The final conclusion I reached from these conversations is that, without a legitimate Left, there is no recourse for confrontation of fascism.

This, admittedly, is a super-bleak thought. I cannot help myself, however. I think back to every time that a potentially or materially brutal fascism has been killed in the crib (or at least prevented from militarily developing a country to the point of becoming a worldwide threat), and the single common uniting factor is the existence of legitimate Leftist critiques to confront the fascists–rhetorically and sometimes physically. Oswald Mosely couldn’t build the working class constituency he wanted to take from Labour, the Republicans in Spain so wounded their enemy that Franco couldn’t add another continental European nation to the ranks of the Axis nations, and Golden Dawn had to deal with the black balaclava-clad anarchists who wouldn’t allow them to inflict a police riot on Athenian students opposing externally-imposed austerity. Even in the one domestic occasion before now where fascism seemed on the rise, Father Charles Coughlin and the business interests who literally sought to depose FDR had to contend with the high water mark– at least in terms of population and political influence–of the Communist Party of the USA.

The point is that, in nearly all cases of fascism being confronted and defeated (or at least gravely wounded), there was a legitimate, organized, intellectually-coherent, and relatively sizable Left.

A separate, but related issue, is the lacking philosophical vocabulary of the Amerian liberal establishment when it comes to denouncing and confronting fascism. The GOP’s handling of Trump has been downright shameful, but when the so-called “progressive who gets things done” is sending out “gotta hear both sides”-level press releases the morning after we all may well have witnessed the first chink in the armor of American democracy exploited by an orange buffoon, I worry that we just don’t have the critical mass of Leftists to–as we are sometimes forced to do in America–drag our erstwhile liberal friends to the left with us.

The unique and horrifying things about the United States in this situation are twofold: 1) we have never had a political party specifically designed to represent the interests of industrial and post-industrial Labor AND 2) the Two Party system, while generally providing a failsafe for the USA against prior European styles of radicalism, can also prove to be a “dead man’s hand” style trigger if the social, economic, and political conditions are such that a normally unacceptable primary candidate manages to receive the nomination of one of the two major parties.

Each of these points will most likely be expanded in to larger pieces–after all, explaining the rise of Trump is basically a big juicy cartoon t-bone to an internet Marxist who wants to take gutshots at the Democratic party. But for now, the morning after the incident in Chicago–so many wondering “what is to be done?”–I just needed to write this down. Even if I think writing for catharsis is necessarily narcissistic, I worry that not enough people are thinking about the Trump phenomenon with the full toolbox of historical specificity, philosophical background, and analytical capacity.

The Purpose of This Here Blog aka “Mission Statement”

Skipping a great deal of boring biography, I was radicalized by my four years in the brackish hellswamp of Foggy Bottom–taken from being a near-nihilist, near-libertarian cuss of a late teenager at 18 to a full-on Trot in less than four years. To be sure, a lot of my antipathy toward Washington DC can be attributed to the mere culture shock of a Coloradan moving to a (bad) East Coast metropolis. But there is something evil about that humid taint of a city. I believe this. I am affirmed in my faith and shall not be shaken; Washington DC is the sweaty gooch of America and our capital is more or less a big marble sculpture of the Founding Fathers laughing at the foolish modern mortals who believed their forebears so infallible that, when they decided to build the NATION’S CAPITAL in a motherfucking swamp, nor was their faith shaken. A humid August day in DC is argument enough against originalism. Anyway.

Point is, I went to college with a very specific goal of doing something in the realm of politics. That lasted about three months. Unfortunately, however, I remained–as horrible beltway trollgoons like to say in tones of self-mockery that suggest more self-confidence than they possess–a political junkie. The political junkie portion of my brain is, unfortunately, hardwired in. That said, I’m not some navelgazing Nate Silver, trying to reduce reality to algorithms (even if I believe, in principle, in our capacity to do so). I just relish the rush of returns and trying to figure out who my elected officials will be from the torrent of data that pours in on election night. I get that most elections are bourgeois concerns. Sue me.

It is that side of me, mixed with the person who more or less self-radicalized in college, who needs to have this blog. This was the time to start it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a guy calling himself a Socialist is running a nationwide campaign, and he’s doing shockingly* well. This singular historical moment may have been the event that provided me with the reason to finally jump off that cliff and get a blog. I mean, if I just transcribed my own ultimately psychologically-troubling arguments with myself, I would have a great deal of content. But, before this moment (and the media’s utter inability to deal with it), I had no reason to chime in. Now, though? I’m all in. The levels of media malpractice and sophomoric analysis in the liberal intelligentsia when weighed against the particular historical import of the moment demand that people use their voices in whatever fashion they can. And I went to a fancy city-slicker school, so it’s time to put that book-learnin’ to use.

*Eventually, I’ll work up a post on just how not-shocking-at-all Sanders’ “shocking” relative success is. That was one of the burning topics that necessitated the creation of this here blog, anyway.