I mean, whatever else it was OWS was a class-first framing - the 99% was the 99% of the income distribution. Now progressives have a class-never framing and think talking about class issues is inherently racist. So, yeah, not great.
Yeah, I think this is one of our major points of agreement: Class is extremely important. And progressives these days often use race as a proxy for class, which is kind of...off.
Hey, Jeff. I'm a big fan of your writing, thanks for sharing your work. To the extent you're willing to take advice from randos in your comment section, I have one request for you: it's ok to be funny and smart, don't back down into the "I'm just a sarcastic joke-maker" when your ideas challenged. Your analysis is high quality and incisive and your jokes are engaging. Some other people I find smart and funny are too quick to retreat into "I'm just a clown, not a real news person" when they get it wrong. Joe Rogan and maybe John Stewart fall into this camp. If your ideas are correct, stand by them; if your ideas are wrong, fix them, but don't try to laugh it all away.
I'm offering this advice not because I've seen you indulge in this behavior, but because my view of the world is largely similar to yours and you seem like an especially talented advocate for moving society in a positive direction. P.S I loved your podcast with Andrew Heaton, who I also find smart and funny.
First: Thanks very much for the kind words! I will assume they weren't meant sarcastically.
And: Wow, massive credit to you for foreseeing this problem. I am not famous enough to have had to defend my arguments at any scale, but when I think of things I would say in my defense, it is VERY tempting to retreat to the "I'm just a comedian" safe zone. It's especially tempting because there's some truth to it, in that I'm a generalist; I'm not an expert on any single topic. Also, it's worth noting that any comic billing themselves as an important truth-teller would be insufferable. But you're absolutely right that when the going gets tough, I can always say "whoa, I'm just a comic!", thus implying that the OTHER person is the asshole for taking me seriously. All while trying to influence the conversation (and, yes, I am trying to influence the conversation). It's a shitty two-step and I will try to avoid it.
Hang on to this comment for when I inevitably do it anyway.
As a leftist, I find it depressing that our side is the one less interested in outcomes (unless you consider symbolism and language to be meaningful outcomes). I suppose it’s because what liberals want can sometimes be accomplished, while the material outcomes desired by the left almost never happen.
I identify with the left in terms of what I want to happen, but find myself disagreeing constantly that it’s more important to demand everything than to accomplish something that can be observed in reality.
I don't want to say that ALL leftists are uninterested in outcomes; that would be painting with too broad of a brush. I would say that the people at Zuccotti Park (as described by the two books I read, which perhaps weren't representative of what was an amorphous movement) were not very interested in outcomes. But to be fair to leftists: The "prickly" relationships with unions that I alluded to basically revolved around leftist unions wanting to make things immediately actionable (as opposed to waiting around for "everyone's human needs are met"), so there are you have some leftists who are very much about results.
Which, BTW, is an age-old split: Working class, union Marxists vs. upper-middle-class (or upper-upper class) intellectual Marxists. But that's an awkward marriage for another day!
So I'm a dirty lib like you, but I started going to Zuccotti Park from pretty early on in the movement. I think income inequality was (and continues to be) a good theme for the American left to build around - and unfortunately one that we've pivoted from almost entirely in the last year as the identity stuff took over. I had a lot of issues with the implementation details, but it seemed worth it to show up - the point of a protest is to get attention, and this one was certainly getting attention. It was also kinda fun.
A few scattered thoughts:
a. The lack of message control helped increase the number of people who were there because anyone who wanted to show up at the park with a sign could do it. But it also was a really ridiculous situation in practice. I remember seeing a guy's sign which was basically a resume - he was trying to get another Wall St job after losing his Wall St job. Perhaps more than anyone else there, he really just did want to occupy Wall St. If the same thing happened today half the people there would have 'buy Dogecoin' signs.
b. The anarchist stuff is cute in small groups but obviously absurdist at scale, so everything just got worse and worse as it got bigger and bigger. Also - a lot of the important meetings happened in the middle of workdays, which nobody in charge seemed to find to be a problem because they were all full time occupiers, but it definitely prevented the normies with jobs from ever having too much influence into the process.
c. By the end of things the park looked and felt like a homeless encampment and it was getting colder. Bloomberg clearing out the park before someone died was a favor.
The "message control" thing is a endemic (and kinda-funny) element of protests. I remember being at a protest for DC Statehood, and at one point I saw a guy with a sign that said "legalize LSD" (this is like 15 years ago). And I just thought: "Not today, buddy."
And regarding income inequality: Though I don't generally frame things in terms of inequality (a system in which things remain unequal but we make large investments in people so that everyone has a decent standard of living would be fine with me), I definitely do back a program that I crudely summed up as "downward distribution of resources". And obviously, there's some immediately relevance: The reconciliation bill is, in it's crudest summary, a downward distribution of resources. I think some liberals might be surprised by the scale of the spending we find ourselves backing, and some leftists might be surprised by the methods being used to do the redistribution. I'd say we're influencing each other.
What I take away from this is an image of a guy wearing an ironic paddy cap, clinging to a broom and going limp as cops (one of whom has just hit someone with their scooter) drag him to the ground. He has a beatific smile on his face. Meanwhile a guy in an expensive suit drinks his Starbucks as he walks into work--a hedge fund, obvi. He is unmoved
I am an old white free market guy . . . or was. But as I have come to understand that the U.S. has a large and irremediable number of people with lower than 85 IQ, I also understand in today's economy there are not going to be enough jobs for those of our citizens who can only, at best, do repetitive low-IQ work. So what to do with those who not just will not work . . . but cannot? I have come to some sort of leftist conclusion--just going to have to give them money (and then figure out how not to inflate away its value). But that still leaves the old deserving/undeserving poor quandary: how to encourage those who can contribute to the economy while not starving and making feel subhuman those who just cannot. I believe MLK was right, there can be dignity in being the best street sweeper one can be . . . but when even street sweepers are not needed, what then?
I am much more sympathetic to "just give people cash" policies than I used to be. The reason is simplicity; I still think that TARGETING money is good, and broad-brush policies that are giveaways to the upper-middle-class (like forgiving ALL college debt) seem like a waste of money. But Matt Bruenig et al have convinced me that SOMETIMES a policy that just gives people money (like the child tax credit) can work pretty well because the administrative costs are virtually zero.
The simplicity vs. accuracy divide in social spending will probably get a post of its own some day.
> Liberals consider ourselves aligned with past protest movements; our heroes include the civil rights protesters of the ‘60s, the suffragettes, and various other non-violent leaders
It's interesting because, at the time liberals absolutely hated these movements, often citing much of the same reasons they find themselves to be critical of leftists today and hybrid left-liberal movements like BLM. Nelson Mandela is seen as a hero today but employed many violent tactics that would be hated by liberals today even in the most dire circumstances, just like they were back then.
The other interesting thing is your framing of the liberals as concerning themselves with concrete outcomes of OWS, but just like their adoption of 60's protests today, it is pure opportunism and aesthetics. On the other hand, you frame some leftists as the ones just looking to protest for its own sake. I think this comes from the fact that leftists want different things and have a different relationship with government. Some don't want to employ legislative frameworks at all, they wanted to abolish them. Others just wanted rent prices to drop. They did have concrete demands, but half of leftists didn't agree and most liberals thought those demands were too silly to even be demands, so they claim they weren't concrete.
So we have a few arguments here for the liberal method of political ceremony. Because they only frame things in terms of how popular they can be in an election or a bill, they can't see any political action outside of this framework as valid or concrete. Then they reject any moral argument, because what is most important is winning votes, and hey, most of the country thinks this way, so you have to pander to them, not to what's right, right? And finally, you can convince anybody you actually did support these movements all along if you just say you wanted to see something concrete, even though anyone who has 1 hour on their hands can go into the news articles of old and see the exact same arguments made against Martin Luther King, being made against new leftist movements emerging today.
I think the reason OWS looks so wishy washy today is that liberals effectively destroyed any political organising outside of elections by consistently convincing half of leftists that they are on their side. You are not. It's not just that I don't want you to be, it's that your actions are only fractionally-aligned with leftism, and you use that small fraction as a carrot on a stick
I laughed at: most leftists hate liberals. So about 3 years ago, a co-worker, a card carrying member of the DSA, calmly explained to me why liberals like me are basically sell outs to Neo-liberalism, and we might as well be republicans. I didn't agree then or now, but I didn't hold it against her either.
That most leftists hate liberals is something that never really crystalized for me (a liberal) until this essay. I'm always trying to persuade leftists (until now I thought I was one) that things like electing HRC over Trump (and hence preventing the rise of KGB*) was FAR more important to the causes they claim to care about than any principled stand against lesser evil. I've consistently failed, and I've sadly come to the conclusion that leftists don't really care about the stuff they claim to care about. It's all about the performance and inner feelings (like, I'm a good person because I don't support lesser evil).
Oh well. Better luck in the next branch of the wave function.
Have you ever considered the fact that it was the neoliberals *nominating* an extremely unlikable war hawk like HRC that caused the rise of KGB? You can try to blame the left for Trump all you like, but the actual reality is that Trump vastly crossover votes from *moderate* and *right-wing* Dems than Jill Stein or whomever it is that the neoliberals think all the leftists voted for.
I voted for Hillary in the general for pragmatic reasons, but she was an absolutely awful candidate who chose horrific campaign advisors and used a disastrous strategy - boosting the populist GOP candidate during the primaries thinking she would easily wipe him out, wasted resources in states she had zero chance of winning (Georgia, Arizona, and Texas) thinking she would be able to claim a historic landslide, and ignored the upper midwest and ended up losing all of it except for Minnesota - and thus the presidency (for four years) and the SCOTUS (for forty) She *deserved* to lose. She *hand picked* her opponent, a clownish, pompous, probably mentally incapacitated c-list celebrity game show host and serial rapist, the least popular major primary candidate in all of history - and then proceeded to lose to him through sheer incompetence. Stop trying to blame the left for your failure, Liberals. This is on you.
Maybe next time you shouldn't nominate the lady who laughs about mass-murdering brown people and who went to pedophile island and pedophile ranch in New Mexico along with her (undeniably) pedophile husband all those times.
You are not wrong sir. You are not wrong. There's a difference between holding your nose and voting for the lesser of two evils and just being dishonest about what actually happened and I think you nailed it on the head. ANY republican would have beaten HRC. ANY ONE. A sack of potatoes with the word republican on it would have beaten HRC. The issue wasn't voting for the lesser of two evils the issue was that voters on the left let HRC even approach that position. You'd have thought they would have learned their lesson when Obama thoroughly came out of nowhere, jumped the line, and thoroughly trounced her. At a certain point sure. I guess the left had to vote for Clinton because they let it get to that point.
But that's ignoring the fact that they utterly IGNORED her unpopularity for decades and just pretended she must be unpopular because she's a woman. NO, she's unpopular for all the reasons you stated.
When you're okay holding someone down and forcing them to take their medicine(HRC) You can't get mad because they start throwing punches. You shouldn't have been holding them down in the first place.
I mean, whatever else it was OWS was a class-first framing - the 99% was the 99% of the income distribution. Now progressives have a class-never framing and think talking about class issues is inherently racist. So, yeah, not great.
Yeah, I think this is one of our major points of agreement: Class is extremely important. And progressives these days often use race as a proxy for class, which is kind of...off.
Hey, Jeff. I'm a big fan of your writing, thanks for sharing your work. To the extent you're willing to take advice from randos in your comment section, I have one request for you: it's ok to be funny and smart, don't back down into the "I'm just a sarcastic joke-maker" when your ideas challenged. Your analysis is high quality and incisive and your jokes are engaging. Some other people I find smart and funny are too quick to retreat into "I'm just a clown, not a real news person" when they get it wrong. Joe Rogan and maybe John Stewart fall into this camp. If your ideas are correct, stand by them; if your ideas are wrong, fix them, but don't try to laugh it all away.
I'm offering this advice not because I've seen you indulge in this behavior, but because my view of the world is largely similar to yours and you seem like an especially talented advocate for moving society in a positive direction. P.S I loved your podcast with Andrew Heaton, who I also find smart and funny.
First: Thanks very much for the kind words! I will assume they weren't meant sarcastically.
And: Wow, massive credit to you for foreseeing this problem. I am not famous enough to have had to defend my arguments at any scale, but when I think of things I would say in my defense, it is VERY tempting to retreat to the "I'm just a comedian" safe zone. It's especially tempting because there's some truth to it, in that I'm a generalist; I'm not an expert on any single topic. Also, it's worth noting that any comic billing themselves as an important truth-teller would be insufferable. But you're absolutely right that when the going gets tough, I can always say "whoa, I'm just a comic!", thus implying that the OTHER person is the asshole for taking me seriously. All while trying to influence the conversation (and, yes, I am trying to influence the conversation). It's a shitty two-step and I will try to avoid it.
Hang on to this comment for when I inevitably do it anyway.
As a leftist, I find it depressing that our side is the one less interested in outcomes (unless you consider symbolism and language to be meaningful outcomes). I suppose it’s because what liberals want can sometimes be accomplished, while the material outcomes desired by the left almost never happen.
I identify with the left in terms of what I want to happen, but find myself disagreeing constantly that it’s more important to demand everything than to accomplish something that can be observed in reality.
I don't want to say that ALL leftists are uninterested in outcomes; that would be painting with too broad of a brush. I would say that the people at Zuccotti Park (as described by the two books I read, which perhaps weren't representative of what was an amorphous movement) were not very interested in outcomes. But to be fair to leftists: The "prickly" relationships with unions that I alluded to basically revolved around leftist unions wanting to make things immediately actionable (as opposed to waiting around for "everyone's human needs are met"), so there are you have some leftists who are very much about results.
Which, BTW, is an age-old split: Working class, union Marxists vs. upper-middle-class (or upper-upper class) intellectual Marxists. But that's an awkward marriage for another day!
So I'm a dirty lib like you, but I started going to Zuccotti Park from pretty early on in the movement. I think income inequality was (and continues to be) a good theme for the American left to build around - and unfortunately one that we've pivoted from almost entirely in the last year as the identity stuff took over. I had a lot of issues with the implementation details, but it seemed worth it to show up - the point of a protest is to get attention, and this one was certainly getting attention. It was also kinda fun.
A few scattered thoughts:
a. The lack of message control helped increase the number of people who were there because anyone who wanted to show up at the park with a sign could do it. But it also was a really ridiculous situation in practice. I remember seeing a guy's sign which was basically a resume - he was trying to get another Wall St job after losing his Wall St job. Perhaps more than anyone else there, he really just did want to occupy Wall St. If the same thing happened today half the people there would have 'buy Dogecoin' signs.
b. The anarchist stuff is cute in small groups but obviously absurdist at scale, so everything just got worse and worse as it got bigger and bigger. Also - a lot of the important meetings happened in the middle of workdays, which nobody in charge seemed to find to be a problem because they were all full time occupiers, but it definitely prevented the normies with jobs from ever having too much influence into the process.
c. By the end of things the park looked and felt like a homeless encampment and it was getting colder. Bloomberg clearing out the park before someone died was a favor.
The "message control" thing is a endemic (and kinda-funny) element of protests. I remember being at a protest for DC Statehood, and at one point I saw a guy with a sign that said "legalize LSD" (this is like 15 years ago). And I just thought: "Not today, buddy."
And regarding income inequality: Though I don't generally frame things in terms of inequality (a system in which things remain unequal but we make large investments in people so that everyone has a decent standard of living would be fine with me), I definitely do back a program that I crudely summed up as "downward distribution of resources". And obviously, there's some immediately relevance: The reconciliation bill is, in it's crudest summary, a downward distribution of resources. I think some liberals might be surprised by the scale of the spending we find ourselves backing, and some leftists might be surprised by the methods being used to do the redistribution. I'd say we're influencing each other.
What I take away from this is an image of a guy wearing an ironic paddy cap, clinging to a broom and going limp as cops (one of whom has just hit someone with their scooter) drag him to the ground. He has a beatific smile on his face. Meanwhile a guy in an expensive suit drinks his Starbucks as he walks into work--a hedge fund, obvi. He is unmoved
I am an old white free market guy . . . or was. But as I have come to understand that the U.S. has a large and irremediable number of people with lower than 85 IQ, I also understand in today's economy there are not going to be enough jobs for those of our citizens who can only, at best, do repetitive low-IQ work. So what to do with those who not just will not work . . . but cannot? I have come to some sort of leftist conclusion--just going to have to give them money (and then figure out how not to inflate away its value). But that still leaves the old deserving/undeserving poor quandary: how to encourage those who can contribute to the economy while not starving and making feel subhuman those who just cannot. I believe MLK was right, there can be dignity in being the best street sweeper one can be . . . but when even street sweepers are not needed, what then?
I am much more sympathetic to "just give people cash" policies than I used to be. The reason is simplicity; I still think that TARGETING money is good, and broad-brush policies that are giveaways to the upper-middle-class (like forgiving ALL college debt) seem like a waste of money. But Matt Bruenig et al have convinced me that SOMETIMES a policy that just gives people money (like the child tax credit) can work pretty well because the administrative costs are virtually zero.
The simplicity vs. accuracy divide in social spending will probably get a post of its own some day.
> Liberals consider ourselves aligned with past protest movements; our heroes include the civil rights protesters of the ‘60s, the suffragettes, and various other non-violent leaders
It's interesting because, at the time liberals absolutely hated these movements, often citing much of the same reasons they find themselves to be critical of leftists today and hybrid left-liberal movements like BLM. Nelson Mandela is seen as a hero today but employed many violent tactics that would be hated by liberals today even in the most dire circumstances, just like they were back then.
The other interesting thing is your framing of the liberals as concerning themselves with concrete outcomes of OWS, but just like their adoption of 60's protests today, it is pure opportunism and aesthetics. On the other hand, you frame some leftists as the ones just looking to protest for its own sake. I think this comes from the fact that leftists want different things and have a different relationship with government. Some don't want to employ legislative frameworks at all, they wanted to abolish them. Others just wanted rent prices to drop. They did have concrete demands, but half of leftists didn't agree and most liberals thought those demands were too silly to even be demands, so they claim they weren't concrete.
So we have a few arguments here for the liberal method of political ceremony. Because they only frame things in terms of how popular they can be in an election or a bill, they can't see any political action outside of this framework as valid or concrete. Then they reject any moral argument, because what is most important is winning votes, and hey, most of the country thinks this way, so you have to pander to them, not to what's right, right? And finally, you can convince anybody you actually did support these movements all along if you just say you wanted to see something concrete, even though anyone who has 1 hour on their hands can go into the news articles of old and see the exact same arguments made against Martin Luther King, being made against new leftist movements emerging today.
I think the reason OWS looks so wishy washy today is that liberals effectively destroyed any political organising outside of elections by consistently convincing half of leftists that they are on their side. You are not. It's not just that I don't want you to be, it's that your actions are only fractionally-aligned with leftism, and you use that small fraction as a carrot on a stick
I laughed at: most leftists hate liberals. So about 3 years ago, a co-worker, a card carrying member of the DSA, calmly explained to me why liberals like me are basically sell outs to Neo-liberalism, and we might as well be republicans. I didn't agree then or now, but I didn't hold it against her either.
That most leftists hate liberals is something that never really crystalized for me (a liberal) until this essay. I'm always trying to persuade leftists (until now I thought I was one) that things like electing HRC over Trump (and hence preventing the rise of KGB*) was FAR more important to the causes they claim to care about than any principled stand against lesser evil. I've consistently failed, and I've sadly come to the conclusion that leftists don't really care about the stuff they claim to care about. It's all about the performance and inner feelings (like, I'm a good person because I don't support lesser evil).
Oh well. Better luck in the next branch of the wave function.
*Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Barrett
Have you ever considered the fact that it was the neoliberals *nominating* an extremely unlikable war hawk like HRC that caused the rise of KGB? You can try to blame the left for Trump all you like, but the actual reality is that Trump vastly crossover votes from *moderate* and *right-wing* Dems than Jill Stein or whomever it is that the neoliberals think all the leftists voted for.
I voted for Hillary in the general for pragmatic reasons, but she was an absolutely awful candidate who chose horrific campaign advisors and used a disastrous strategy - boosting the populist GOP candidate during the primaries thinking she would easily wipe him out, wasted resources in states she had zero chance of winning (Georgia, Arizona, and Texas) thinking she would be able to claim a historic landslide, and ignored the upper midwest and ended up losing all of it except for Minnesota - and thus the presidency (for four years) and the SCOTUS (for forty) She *deserved* to lose. She *hand picked* her opponent, a clownish, pompous, probably mentally incapacitated c-list celebrity game show host and serial rapist, the least popular major primary candidate in all of history - and then proceeded to lose to him through sheer incompetence. Stop trying to blame the left for your failure, Liberals. This is on you.
Maybe next time you shouldn't nominate the lady who laughs about mass-murdering brown people and who went to pedophile island and pedophile ranch in New Mexico along with her (undeniably) pedophile husband all those times.
You are not wrong sir. You are not wrong. There's a difference between holding your nose and voting for the lesser of two evils and just being dishonest about what actually happened and I think you nailed it on the head. ANY republican would have beaten HRC. ANY ONE. A sack of potatoes with the word republican on it would have beaten HRC. The issue wasn't voting for the lesser of two evils the issue was that voters on the left let HRC even approach that position. You'd have thought they would have learned their lesson when Obama thoroughly came out of nowhere, jumped the line, and thoroughly trounced her. At a certain point sure. I guess the left had to vote for Clinton because they let it get to that point.
But that's ignoring the fact that they utterly IGNORED her unpopularity for decades and just pretended she must be unpopular because she's a woman. NO, she's unpopular for all the reasons you stated.
When you're okay holding someone down and forcing them to take their medicine(HRC) You can't get mad because they start throwing punches. You shouldn't have been holding them down in the first place.