Category: Violence

Right Wing Sensibility

From Jonathan Coe’s 2019 novel, Middle England (NY: Alfred A. Knopf):

The speaker is an Asian Brit (born and bred in England of Sri Lankan parents), responding to two novelists who, in a panel discussion, have praised British “moderation.”

“These people don’t know what they are talking about. This so-called ‘tolerance’ . . . Every day you come face to face with people who are not tolerant at all, whether it’s someone serving you in a shop, or just someone you pass on the street. They may not say anything aggressive but you can see it in their eyes and their whole way of behaving towards you. And they want to say something. Oh, yes, they want to use one of those forbidden words on you, or just tell you to fuck off back to your own country–wherever they think that is–but they know they can’t. They know it’s not allowed. So as well as hating you, they also hate them–those faceless people who are sitting in judgment over them somewhere, legislating on what they can and can’t say out loud” (30-31).

This seems exactly right to me. It certainly (at least I think so) explains 80% of the animus against the University of North Carolina by the politicians in this state–and the minions that have placed on the university’s Board of Governors. And it also captures what I have heard Trump voters say. That he everyday drives the “liberals” nuts is the reason they love him–and willingly blink at all his obvious faults.

A bit later, another (but different) person of color discusses the fact that “there is a lot of anger out there”–and offers her explanation.

“It’s not always to do with race anyway. People like to get angry about something. A lot of the time they’re just looking for an excuse. I feel sorry for them. I think for a lot of people . . . there’s nothing much going on in their lives. Emotionally, I mean, maybe their marriages have dried up, or everything they do has become a kind of habit. I don’t know. But they don’t feel much. No emotional stimulation. We all need to feel things, don’t we? So, when something makes you angry, at least you’re feeling something. You get the emotional kick” (44-45).

I hate the condescension of this, the Thoreau-like claim of “lives of quiet desperation.” But this comment gets at the fact that there is something false about all the staged anger out there–right and left. It all dissipates so quickly and rarely connects up to action of any sort. Pure catharsis in so many instances. Anger for it’s own sake, a kind of emotional aestheticism. Partly an internet effect: the ability to grab the public stage to display your anger, plus the need to be more and more outrageous in order to garner any attention. How many hits, how many likes, can you grab? All with some awareness that the internet, like the stage, is not real; it’s a virtual space disconnected from actual interactions with others.

The right does traffic in this anger more than the left (which traffics instead in condescension.) What seems real enough in the anger–and deeply scary–is the desire to hurt other people. A kind of indignation tied to fantasies (let’s hope they stay fantasies) of violence. As long as it all remains a video game, that desire is at least somewhat contained.

Keeping Spirits Bright

I have had a number of responses to my post about the UK elections and my own dispirited despondency facing the current American scene. The responses ranged from sympathetic to chidings (mostly gentle) for letting the side down. Despair, people reminded me, is not an option. We must keep fighting or the other side wins. I don’t have counter-arguments; it’s not as if I am happy to throw in the towel. I agree it does no one any good to be defeatist, to say that the other side has already won. So I am not going to try to defend myself. Except if saying these three things counts as some kind of defense.

1. The fight itself is soul- and life-destroying. Again, we must fight against that fact, but there it is. Being consumed by the fight–and the constant effort to keep fighting–is no way to live. The daily life of this country has been warped by the ugliness and cruelty of the right wing. To step aside from it all is open to well-off people like me, and resisting that temptation to just cultivate indifference, to pursue other interests, requires an effort that is part of the warping. All around, people are tuned into careerism, consumerism, family, with seemingly nary a care for the cruelty of our society. Why do I have to care? And why do I have to agonize over the my inability–and the inability of those like me–to get them to care? That’s one way of expressing the tiredness I am feeling.

2. Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. It is hard to find the right balance between some kind of clear-eyed realism about the mess we are in and the maintenance of belief in a better future. The internal battles within the left (another, different fight) are about what is realistically possible in the current moment. I participate in those battles–and am outflanked to my left by many of my friends. I think they are deluded about what the American electorate will go for. I do not believe that Sanders would have beaten Trump in 2016. And I certainly don’t believe (as I will discuss in a future post) that some alternative to the market is on the horizon.

To be scolded for compromising with the market is a favorite rhetorical move of the “radical left”–and I find it depressing because so untethered to reality. Whether to have a market society or not is not where the true political battle of this moment in America is being waged. And the radical left is hors combat (i.e. useless) so long as it refuses to engage in any fights that don’t put the market as its stakes. To add insult to this injury, the radical left spends way too much of its time and energy scorning “liberals,” those potential allies it loves to hate. I understand that I am the pot calling the kettle black, that I am upbraiding the radical left for what seem to me to be its sins even as I tell them to stop calling out my sins. Mostly, I try to avoid that.

Thus, in my book on liberalism, I devote a scant five pages to outlining my differences from the left. The real enemy–the frighteningly potent enemy–are the conservatives. But let me confess that it drives me nuts to read various self-appointed leftists talk of Antonin Scalia as a liberal, or to claim that current-day American liberals and conservatives as all members of the same “neo-liberal” club. It’s a time-honored leftist tradition, and one that is as silly today as it was in 1932, to assert that there is no significant difference between the two political parties in the US. Since the radical left is such a negligible force in American politics, they can be mostly left to their dreams of utter transformation. But can I register that they are, as my daughter would say, “annoying”?

3. The problem, I guess, is that politics is difficult, and that progress is so very slow, and that even the battles one thinks are won (getting blacks the right to vote) are never fully won, but have to be fought for over and over again, constantly. The other side is so relentless, so resistant to ever giving an inch.

The self-righteousness with which privilege defends itself has always amazed me. In fact, self-righteousness is too weak a descriptor. Fury seems more apt. The right (the defenders of privilege, of inequality) are always outraged by assaults (perceived or real) on the prevailing hierarchies and rarely hesitant to use violence to maintain those hierarchies. The use of violence is almost completely taboo on the left these days, but remains part of the common sense of the right. They resort to violence without an iota of uneasiness or guilt. And, as readers of this blog know, I can never decide if the left’s refusal of violence is its shining glory or its fatal weakness. I do know that I cannot imagine being violent myself, that I must put my faith in the ballot box, in the normal political processes of democracy, to effect political and societal change. But that faith can seem a mug’s game when the other side cares a rat’s ass for democracy–and do everything in their power to short-circuit democratic processes. So, as usual, I have written myself into another corner, making it awfully difficult to keep my spirit bright.

Evil

Like many liberals, I find it hard to believe in evil simpliciter. There has to be an explanation, some set of enabling conditions. It is not only insufficient, but also wrong, to point to something rotten in human nature–and to leave it at that. Appeals to human nature are like appeals to the “dormative power” lurking within a sleeping pill. Such appeals simply rename the cause and locate it at a different level than the behavior that cause is meant to explain.

In London, I taught a class on the Blitz. I don’t think I ever quite managed to convey to the students–or even to take in myself–its full horror. The romance of the Blitz, along with its mythic resignification as proof of British pluckiness and resolve, has obscured the simple fact of terror rained from the skies. Please don’t give me the pieties of “indiscriminate” terror and “civilian” populations. The evil of the mass slaughter of citizen armies is no less; its victims are as fully “innocent,” as fully entitled to exemption from such violence, as the denizens of a city. But it is the sheer fact of violence that I and my students never fully (it seems to me) grasped. The mind always slides away from the bald fact of killing to adjoining images, stories, facts, and consoling myths.

In my various readings to teach this course, I read J. B. Pristley’s BBC broadcasts, which ran from 5 June 1940 to 20 October 1940. Priestley was forced off the air because his forthright–and repeated–calls for a post-war socialist Britain to proved some recompense for the war-time suffering of its population offended the powers-that-be.

The broadcasts also show Priestley struggling to understand Nazi evil–which rhymes with my current perplexity in trying to understand conservatives (who often claim to be Christians) who put children in cages, deny food stamps to the hungry, are outraged by the extension of medical insurance to the less well-off, suppress voter participation, and wink at sexual and financial malfeasance. Why would anyone ever sign on to that agenda? Except for the tax cuts, there is not direct benefit to them of treating others so terribly. Only some kind of pleasure derived from cruelty fits the bill.

Priestley has no better explanations for such evil (and how can we call it be any other, more euphemistic, name?) than most leftists. But his characterization of the Nazi mindset and the dangers it poses to simple decency resonate with me.

From the broadcast of 23 June 1940:

“Every nation has two faces–a bright face and a dark face. I had always been ready to love the bright face of Germany which speaks to us of beautiful music, profound philosophy, Gothic romance, young men and maidens wandering through the enchanted forests. I had been to Germany before the last war, walking from one little inn to another in the Rhineland. After the war I went back and wrote in praise of the noble Rhine, the wet lilac and the rust-coloured Castle of Heidelberg, the carpets of flowers and the ice-green torrents of the Bavarian Alps. But after the Nazis came, I went no more. The bright face had gone, and in its place was the vast dark face with its broken promises and endless deceit, its swaggering Storm Troopers and dreaded Gestapo, its bloodstained basements where youths were hardened by the torture of decent elderly folk–the terror and the shame, not just their shame, but our shame, the shame of the whole watching world, of the concentration camps.

I knew that wherever these over-ambitious, ruthless, neurotic men took their power, security and peace and happiness would vanish. Unhappy themselves–for what they are can be read in their faces, and plainly heard in their barking or screaming voices–they wish to spread their unhappiness everywhere. And I believed then–and am convinced now–that if the world had not been half-rotten, over-cynical, despairing, it would have risen at once in its wrath before the great terror machine was completed, and sent these evil men and their young bullies back to their obscure corners, the back rooms of beer houses, and cellars, out of which they crept to try and bring the whole world down to their own dreary back-room gangster level.

Many people are mystified by the existence of so many ‘fifth columnists’ who are ready to work for Nazi-ism outside Germany; but, you see, Nazi-ism is not really a political philosophy, but an attitude of mind–the expression in political life of a certain very unpleasant temperament–of the man who hates Democracy, reasonable argument, tolerance, patience and humorous equality–the man who loves bluster and swagger, uniforms and bodyguards and fast cars, plotting in back rooms, shouting and bullying, taking it out of all the people who have made him feel inferior. It’s not really a balanced, grown-up attitude of mind at all: it belongs to people who can’t find their way out of adolescence, who remain overgrown, tormenting, cruel schoolboys–middle-aged ‘dead-end kids.’ That’s why the gang spirit is so marked among these Nazis; and it explains, too, why there has always seemed something unhealthy, abnormal, perverted, crawlingly corrupt, about them and all their activities.

And any country that allows itself to be dominated by the Nazis will not only have the German Gestapo crawling everywhere, but will also find itself in the power of all its most unpleasant types–the very people who, for years, have been rotten with unsatisfied vanity, gnawing envy, and haunted by dreams of cruel power.”

To the academic sophisticate (i.e. me), there is much that grates in this passage. (Those cavorting maidens; the simplistic Manichean notion of a bright and a dark face–although that does suggest that “good” is just as mysterious, just as difficult to explain, as “evil.”)

But I do want to hold onto two things (even as I also admire Priestley’s ability to speak passionately and vividly to his wide audience): first, that there is much to love–and that I love–in the United States; it would be foolish indeed to let despair over the current triumph of what is worst in American culture to wipe out a recognition of the resources for a better way. The hopefulness of MLK (balanced as it was with his deep discouragement at times) is exemplary here.

Second, Priestley reminds us, in no uncertain terms, that the Trumps, McConnells, and Kavanaughs of the world are bullying frauds driven by envy of their moral betters; they cannot acknowledge their own depravity, but reveal their self-hatred again and again. Not that we should pity them, but that we should fully understand their lust for power is the mask of deficiency. That lust should never be accorded a minute of respect.

Inequality and Violence (Final)

To sum up the previous posts. Scheidel offers three reasons to think that violence leads to decreased inequality of both wealth and income.

The sheer destruction of wealth by violence. Since the wealthy have more to lose, if you destroy a lot of wealth, the gap between those with a lot and those with a little will be closed to some extent. Even the 2008 financial collapse led to a short-term diminution of the percentage of US total wealth owned by the top 10%. The decrease was not huge, and the lessening of the gap was only temporary (lasting about 18 months), but there was a dip. The more prolonged and extreme destruction of wealth of the world wars, especially of World War II, was an equalizer (again, only to a certain degree, but of a degree unseen in the West over the past four hundred years).
Income disparities are lessened when labor becomes relatively scarce and can, thus, command larger wages. Total warfare of the 20^th century variety renders labor scarce. There is more work to be done than hands to do it—and thus incomes rise for those lower down the ladder.

Total war also has, to some extent, a “moral” effect—or perhaps it is only a prudential one—in that the wider distribution of economic benefits (accompanied by a sense that all should also share in necessary sacrifices such as rationing and the provision of sons to the military) is seen as “fair” and as conducive to patriotic solidarity for the duration. The programs put in place to achieve that wider distribution take a fairly long time to dismantle—if we can generalize from the experience of the post-World War II years.

There seems to me a fourth way to account for (at least in the 20^th century context) the connection between total war and greater economic equality. War seems the only pretext for confiscation of wealth and for sharply progressive income taxes that serves to bring modern democracies to enact those measures. If capitalism tends toward growing accumulations of wealth in the hands of the few and to sharp differentials in incomes, then only confiscation of wealth can undo accumulation and only progressive income taxes can lessen the effects of widely unequal wages. Again, Scandinavia may offer the exception here, a place where the need to finance a generous welfare state was enough to put high taxes on both wealth and income into place. But Scandinavia aside, the US and the UK only had high tax rates in the 1950s and 1960s as left-overs from the war effort. Nations will confiscate wealth to pay for war–and not for other goals.

There is the revolutionary alternative. The Russian and Chinese Revolutions did confiscate accumulated wealth. But doing so required massive violence—either through the outright murder of those who held the confiscated property or by driving the wealthy into exile with much of their wealth left behind. As Machiavelli already suggested, the wealthy will in most (although not all) cases fight to the death to maintain their wealth—although it is also fair to say that in Russia and especially China the revolutionary regimes preemptively assumed the rich would fight for their wealth and put them to death before they had much chance to take up arms. American slavery appears another similar case. Confiscation of the wealth represented by slaves could only be effected through violence. And if we want to be really brutal about it, we could say that the American Civil War (a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight) left the old slave-owners in place and thus did not effect the social revolution required to actually place the enslaved on any kind of equal footing with the slave-owners even after emancipation. The point: it is not clear that you can confiscate wealth on a large scale and still actually retain the formerly wealthy as citizens in your new regime. They are very unlikely to come over to your side, becoming instead the reactionaries of the equalizer’s nightmares.

The challenge, then, today is to get enough political support—and, perhaps more importantly, enough political power—to enact the kind of wealth and income taxes that the experts (including Thomas Piketty) say would be needed to reverse the increasing economic inequality in the West. Opinion polls seem to suggest that a majority of Americans favor higher taxes on the top 15%, but the majority doesn’t hold the power (currently) in the US to put such aspirations into law or practice. Lots of reasons for that lack of power, but capital flight (in all its varied forms) is not the least among them. Democracy (political power) is currently subservient to economic power.

I want to make two further points to bring this thread to a conclusion. Violence is connected with the lessening of inequality, because that lessening (it seems) always requires bringing the wealthy down. This, of course, is the cry of conservatives, who attribute the project of equality to “envy” and see that project as always about making some people worse off without ever doing anything to make others better off.

The leftist utopia, on the other hand, depends on not shrinking the overall pie, but of distributing its pieces more equitably. Here we get into the territory of Rawls max/min—how much inequality should we tolerate in order to maximize the overall (national) wealth, the amount that can be distributed. Conservatives, of course, like to insist that the only things holding back even greater production of wealth are high (disincentivizing) taxes and excessive regulations. Take off those restraints—and we’d see the market really take off, to the benefit of all. (And like my colleague on rural electrification, the conservative will say that inequality doesn’t matter at all. It is just the raising of the floor, the availability of various benefits of prosperity to all that matters. Even if the rising tide makes the rich richer, it will also make the poor better off.)

But liberals can also have their own versions of models that see economic growth as a cure for our ills. We could lessen the pain (and conflict) of confiscation if somewhat more progressive taxes were joined to economic growth managed in such a way that the gains went mostly to those at the bottom.

This is where Piketty’s work becomes important. Straightforwardly, he tells us that you can’t grow your way into greater economic equality unless the rate of return on capital is less than the economic growth. So long as R>G (i.e. return on capital is greater than growth), all growth will only increase inequality. And Piketty’s lesson is that it is just about completely impossible to make R<G in the absence of high taxes that undo what the market will do of itself—which is increase inequality. You have to confiscate market-derived income and wealth to counteract the market dynamics that always (except in periods of massive catastrophe like the world wars and the great depression) lead to ever larger concentrations of wealth. On that, Piketty in telling us, Marx was right.

Scheidel—and this is my second (and last) point—wonders if Marx was right about the dynamic that pushes wages ever lower and lower. Absent catastrophes, are there any governors that would keep us from returning to the conditions in 1840 Manchester and 1890 East London? Scheidel attacks this question by pondering what is the maximum inequality that a society could reach before failing to reproduce itself. In other words, how high a rate of inequality is sustainable. His answer is: quite high. The current US GINI coefficient is about 48, as is China’s. Norway is 27, France 30, Brazil 49, Columbia 54, and South Africa 63. Through a series of mathematical calculations that I admit are beyond my ability to follow, Scheidel believes that a GINI coefficient of 60 is very close to “the level of inequality at which current levels of output could no longer be attained” (453). At the other end of the scale, he also concludes that “in market economies, disposable income inequality needs to be significantly above zero in order to sustain his levels of per capita output” (456). He suggests that a GINI coefficient of 10 designates a floor (where, we should recall, a GINI coefficient of zero represents total equality). Thus, modern economies operate within an “inequality possibility space” between 10 and 60 on the GINI scale. The US has moved from a GINI of 35 in 1979 to one of 48 in 2017. So, apparently, [if Scheidel is right about the upper limit] we have room to continue the accumulation of wealth and income in the upper echelons that has characterized the last forty years.

As with climate change, the question is whether there are any political forces organized and powerful enough to reverse current trends. Or are we doomed to keep traveling in the direction that we have been going?