Shame

From Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011):

‘[Sister Helen] Prejean’s logic rests on the hope that shame, guilt, and even simple embarrassment are still operative principles in American cultural and political life—and that such principles can fairly trump the forces of desensitization and self-justification. Such a presumption is sorely challenged by the seeming unembarrassability of the military, the government, corporate CEOs, and others repetitively caught in monstrous acts of irresponsibility and malfeasance. This unembarassability has proved difficult to contend with, as it has had a literally stunning effect on the citizenry. They ought to be ashamed of themselves! we cry over and over again, to no avail. But they are not ashamed, and they are not going to become so” (32).

I don’t have much to say to this statement—beyond noting how completely it echoes my own experience and sentiments. The administration at my university is just about completely non-accountable at this point. Which made me think that “public shaming” (as I tried to do in the newspaper editorials I wrote about their actions) was the only recourse left. But they have proved immune to shaming, might even take it as proof that they are doing their “tough jobs” of protecting the university’s interests.

It does not make me feel a sap. I realize more and more that a certain self-image of integrity is central to my own serenity. Of course, complacency about one’s self is an ever-present danger. Pharaseeism afflicts us all. But I do abide by the rule of “never say no to a student.” Whatever they ask for, they shall receive—just as the same all-inclusive indulgence is extended to my children. I have no right, given my job and my salary, to turn students down. And abiding by that rule is one way I maintain my self-respect.

So the question about the shameless is: where does their self-respect reside? Where is the line they would not cross, the action they would not permit themselves? I have always liked what I call “Kant’s rule of publicity”: basically Kant argues in one of his political essays that any action is morally dubious if the agent of that action would prefer it being kept a secret. We reveal our awareness of an action’s non-morality when we strive to keep it unknown. (Yes, there is the tradition of keeping benevolent actions a secret—a tradition mostly honored in the breach these days by our publicity-seeking philanthropists—but the existence of this sub-set of good actions needn’t detract from Kant’s larger point.) The attempt to keep things secret is an acknowledgement of shame and guilt. But it does seem Nelson is right: when malfeasance is “outed” these days, the impulse is to brave it out, to never show the weakness of admitting guilt or manifesting shame.

And there is the even more gob-smacking pride in offensive behavior, as politicians compete to see who can most vociferously endorse torture and taking food stamps away from the hungry, and CEOs boast about how far they can drive down wages and take away benefits for their workers. Oh, brave new world!

National Socialism versus Social Democracy versus National Capitalism

Sheri Berman’s The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP, 2006) has been sitting on my shelf a long time, but I only just got around to reading it, partly in response to John Quiggin’s recent declaration that he has given up on the term “social democracy.” My discussion of that decision is here and here.

One virtue of Berman’s book is that it shows how both Mussolini and Hitler were socialists—that is, both the fascists and the Nazis established strict governmental control over the economy (“the primacy of politics” over economics in Berman’s phrase). In particular, the fascists and the Nazis developed full employment programs that used public works as a last resort for the unemployed, created or enhanced social welfare and insurance programs, and established firm state control over capital flows and investment. The enthusiasm for Mussolini, in particular, that many (not just clowns like Ezra Pound) expressed in the late 1920s and early 1930s becomes much more understandable when reading Berman’s account of his regime’s fairly successful attack on the poverty and inequality capitalism wrought in post-World War I Italy. Of course, the fascists and the Nazis did not dismantle capitalism entirely; in particular, they did not threaten private ownership. But they did sharply curtail the autonomy of property; the Faustian bargain made by the capitalists was that they would accept a lesser level of profit and massive government interference in what and how they produced things in return for “order” and for a guarantee that property would not be confiscated or nationalized. But, especially, by the standards of our own dark times, Mussolini’s and even Hitler’s economic policies look “progressive.” For starters, their policies were Keynesian, depending on large public expenditure to provide employment and to jump start a depression economy back to something like prosperity.

Of course, much of that Keynesian spending was on the means for war. Both regimes can look like giant potlatches—building up vast stores of military hardware in order to destroy them all in an orgy of destruction. And the regimes had the same attitude toward citizens as they did toward tanks: they are expendable; plenty more where they came from.

The point, naturally, is not to praise Mussolini or Hitler. The Nazis, in particular, dismantled liberal democracy in incredibly short order. All other parties were outlawed by six months after Hitler’s becoming Chancellor. And the left-wing economics were yoked to right-wing nationalism, to the mythos of the fatherland and of “blood.” Violence was baked in from the start, as Walter Benjamin told the world in 1936. The only possible end game was war—and that was explicit, a feature not a bug.

But Berman’s work led me to a rather different dark thought. What does it mean to say that the only successful assaults on capitalism in the 20^th century were accompanied by the destruction of democracy? We might be able to dismiss Lenin and Stalin’s madness quickly by saying that the economics were impossible even apart from political crimes. But what happens if we say that Mussolini’s Italy came pretty close to achieving an economic realm that most social democrats can recognize as their aspiration? In short: can we get to social democratic heaven if we hold resolutely to the democratic part? Does democracy—the rule of law, elections, legislative bodies, civil liberties along with property rights—afford capitalists too many tools for withstanding any and all attempts to gain political control over capitalist practices? The impatience with liberal democracy everywhere evident in the 1930s reflected the inability of democracies to act quickly and decisively. The post-2008 actions of the EU, especially, with its ongoing (even now, ten years later) constant kicking of the can down the road, appear to confirm the claim that democracies find it hard to act. (The exception, always noted, is the US response to World War II; slow to get going, the historians say, but what a behemoth once roused; but it took a war for the US to end its depression, with precisely the kinds of Keynesian spending and government intervention into the economy that even the New Deal could never install.)

So here’s the horrible thought: only a non-democratic regime, one that steps on the “rights” of property owners and the many ways that the rich can control elections and elected officials, will be able to break the stranglehold that capitalism has on modern political communities. Capitalism both strives to escape political (democratic) accountability wherever possible—and uses all the intricacies of democratic procedures to its advantage in holding off change. Well-intentioned liberals and leftists, who play by the rules, are played by the business barons. We are getting a demonstration of that dynamic now. We had the corruption free, good governance folks who were the Obama administration; the absolute epitome of high-minded liberals. And now we are seeing the kinds of ethics that prevail among the pocket-lining hacks of the right, who could care less if the agencies they preside over actually function.

It has become clear—if it wasn’t in the past—that the Milton Friedman insistence that capitalism and democracy went hand-in-hand is simply wrong. Capitalism hates democracy, as the US support of right-wing dictators throughout the world should have made clear. But the more worrying thought is that democracy does not pose an existential threat to capitalism, just an annoyance, a low-grade fever, that capitalism has learned how to keep under control. Capitalism can tolerate low-grade democracy, just as it can tolerate gay marriage, antagonistic art works, and academic freedom, confident in its ability to not let such things get out of hand. True, the right is always hysterically claiming that chaos is nigh—if not already here. But such fulminations on Fox don’t register in the corporate boardrooms, not the ways that tax and regulation evasion strategies do.

In short: for social democracy to work, the left has to get the democracy part in order first. This is Berman’s “primacy of politics.” Without a very firm democratic mandate, establishing the economic policies of social democracy would seem a non-starter. But there are so many structural obstacles to establishing that mandate that stand in the way—even if the needed majority existed. (Thus, something like gun control offers an object lesson in all the ways majority opinion can be thwarted in the scheloric American political system.) With the democratic hill so high to climb, hope for the economic transformation wanes. We know what needs doing: higher taxes, public housing, fully funded public education and public transit, universal health coverage, etc. etc. But the ability of our political system to deliver any of these things is very doubtful.

And (again it is very odd to say this) the fascists and Nazis look good in comparison to the current political landscape. They mobilized nationalism to authorize the state’s taking control of the economy—and molded that economy in ways that, to a fairly large extent, benefited the majority. (Another horrible thought: you can only mobilize people by providing them with an enemy to fear and hate; the Carl Schmidt notion. So you couldn’t really form the democratic majority that would take control over capitalism unless you identified a “class enemy” or a “non-national” enemy. Someone has to be “not us” and a legitimate target of rage and mistreatment. You can only benefit the majority by persecuting the minority.)

But how do the fascists and Nazis look good? Because at least they were using the poison of nationalism and the powers of the state to rein in capitalism. Today’s right wing aims to serve capitalism, not control it. They mobilize the state to augment capitalism’s power. National capitalism instead of national socialism. Singapore, China, the UK, and the US. Different degrees of assaults of civil liberties; different degrees of direct state subsidies to corporations. But the same basic model based on the same nationalistic principle: the nation’s glory resides in its wealth, along with the fraudulent promise that the prosperity at the top will generate (trickle down) prosperity for those below them. Perversely, this vocabulary of national greatness is accompanied by a dismantling of all public services or any notion of public goods. Capitalism will provide all that is needed; market failures do not exist, just as externalities are not admitted. The state exists to smooth capitalism’s path—and to beat the nationalistic drum.

I understand that these dark musings are the voice of despair speaking. Our world has become so cruel, the hypocrisies of the right so all encompassing, and the use of democracy’s trappings to forestall any change in a leftist direction so pervasive, that fears such as those expressed here seem inevitable. It is simply not clear that our political system can deliver the changes needed. Its inability to do something as simple as ban assault weapons feeds that fear. There’s plenty of overt oppression—from mass incarceration to the unfreedoms experienced everyday at the workplace by most employees—just as there is plenty of overt corruption (all those politicians on the billionaire’s dole). But there is also the general grinding of the gears in the Circumlocution Office, which keeps enthralled, obsessed people like me (there are so many of us!) reading the newspaper every day to monitor the drip, drip, drip, as if something this time, against all our prior experience, is going to come of it. But nothing ever does come of it—and some days it seems that that perpetual inaction is precisely the point.

What Kind of Institutions Does the Left Need?

I have put this off long enough. I have lots of backlogged thoughts about things I am reading, but need to forego those to write the promised post about institutions.

I have gotten some help from Rom Coles’s Visionary Pragmatism (Duke UP, 2016). Rom, for six years at Northern Arizona University, led a complex operation that paired students and faculty with off-campus groups in what were called Action Research Teams (ART). The idea was to get university folks involved in collaborating with local groups to 1) acquire the knowledge needed to develop action agendas on topics of local concern and 2) actually begin to put those agendas into practice.

Rom is eloquent on the need to combine “visionary” aspirations and spectacular, energy-raising one-off events (demonstrations, teach-ins, even civil disobedience) with the “pragmatic” quotidian work (lots of meetings and talk, the securing of money and other resources) that is the daily grind of democracy in action. The work is sometimes directed toward government—pressuring it to act—but more often a question of taking matters into the group’s own hands, building organizations that can address local concerns about the environment, cultural preservation, literacy, a living wage, elderly care etc.

For any reader of Tocqueville or John Dewey, this is not surprising stuff. Democracy is vibrant, a lived reality, when citizens take power into their own hands, when they feel entitled to do things for themselves, and when they organize themselves to both decide what needs to be done and to do the things they decide should be done. Tocqueville’s “voluntary associations” and Dewey’s “associated democracy.” The goal could be said to be attainment of that “public happiness” that Arendt extols as the best thing about politics.

As I approach retirement, my aspiration is to find such a voluntary association, one that is effectively doing good work in relation to an issue that I care about. But can I also register my impatience with meetings, with long and fairly fruitless, airings of pet grievances and crotchets? I admire (perhaps above all) Rom’s patience, his willingness to put in the time to hammer out, in a large group, an action plan. I want to join a group that is already acting and that puts its pedal to the medal. I have no patience at all to fretting over the details.

Which makes me sometimes wonder if, temperamentally, I am a democrat at all.

But let’s put that aside for the moment. Rom’s model leverages the resources of the university (even a relatively poor state university like Northern Arizona is resource-rich compared to the surrounding community)—with its resources counted in manpower (all those students), time (the ability to devote attention to research and to meetings), and knowledge (experts who know stuff and a culture that encourages learning stuff) as well as (even more than) money. The university, in other words, is an already constituted institution and Rom is very attuned to the ways it can be put to use to advance a democratic agenda even as neoliberal forces are working to turn the university into a servant of its social vision.

Already existing institutions (the state is another prime example) are, then, sites of contestation. Precisely because such institutions have power and resources, it is important to attempt to turn them toward the issues the left wants to address, to the transformations the left wishes to enact. Others, with different agendas, will also be trying to capture the institution, to turn it toward advancing their vision.

So Rom offers one model: the locally focused model that favors face-to-face interactions (meetings), deliberation in common, and action in concert. It is only in these small-scale instances that people can experience democracy in action and overcome the alienation from politics engendered by the TV spectacle of electoral campaigns that culminate in the terribly abstract act of voting and the installation of unresponsive, distant legislative bodies.

To abandon the national, long-distance politics of elections is, however, a disaster. So we are brought back to “the party,” that problematic institution that is the bane of modern politics and yet, apparently, absolutely necessary to any effective access to national power. That parties are a disaster was the strong conviction of the American Founders, but there adoption of the British “first past the post” election model made parties inevitable. Add the Leninist vision of the party as whipping the benighted masses into action—and any democrat wants to run for the hills.

Yet . . . the party, like the university, is an already constituted institution that the left abandons only at its own peril. Because the numbers of voters on either side of the left/right divide is so even in the US, I think it is folly of the highest order for leftists to abandon the Democratic party for more leftist alternatives–be those alternatives a “third party” or an independent candidacy for president. (I guess, as a rule of thumb, I can safely say that I will not support a non-Democratic candidate for president until he or she runs at the top of a full slate of candidates. In other words, give me a robust and fully formed party of the left because you get my vote.) In the meantime, I honor those leftists trying to capture the Democratic party, to drag it to the left in ways that mirror how conservatives have (already) captured the Republican party.

Does sticking with the Democrats entail a whole series of distasteful compromises? Yes. That’s why a conflicted loyalty to that party needs to be combined with political action apart from electoral politics if one is to avoid becoming completely disheartened.

The favored alternative on the left to electoral politics, apparently, is a “movement,” which aspires to national scale but to action (citizens in the street) as opposed to the passivity of voting and watching C-Span. What Rom helpfully shows us is that the movement need not be concerned solely or primarily on influencing the national agenda/program, but can act to change things on the local level. It is one of the great paradoxes of American politics that we (especially the left) are obsessed with a national politics that we have very little chance of influencing, while we neglect all the local possibilities for transformation. It’s as if we are either 1) waiting for a permission (that will never arrive) to act or 2) think of ourselves as hiring a set of servants (the politicians) to do the work for us (despite ample evidence that those politicians are never going to be up to the job).

The conclusion: the left needs to build institutions (organizations; call them what you will) where people want to dwell, where they want to spend time, because of the pleasures the interactions (and association) with these other people bring, and because of a sense of actually getting something done. Meaning-full, purposive, effective action. That’s the ticket. All the quotidian banality of democracy is bearable (maybe even much more than bearable) if there is something to show for it—and one of the tings to show is comradeship. Everyone knows (it is a great cliché) that soldiers and team-mates “bond” and that the pleasures of bondage (pun intended) are intense. People keep coming back for more, even to strenuous and dangerous work, if cathected to a collective effort.

To adopt neoliberal speak for a moment, to maintain that cathexis requires “benchmarks,” or, to use the current humanities piety, a “story” (a narrative arc). There must be a plan that lays out various steps on a path, and a narrative momentum that carries people along a story of getting somewhere. This is what Occupy lacked. It was the same damn thing one day after another—and so, of course, it petered out. Saturday afternoon demonstrations share that fault. They don’t go anywhere; they don’t have a next step. (This was Brecht’s worry about the theater.)

There is no lack of problems to address out there. The beauty of Rom’s model is that it gathers people to identify the problems—and then challenges them to think of ways to alleviate/eliminate the problem. Don’t just sit there; do something! And it turns out that there are all kinds of things “we” can do—and that some of our fellows citizens are going to prove, once their input is solicited, incredibly creative when it comes to devising action plans.

So the institutions I think the left needs are the ones that can sustain a group of people over the long haul enactment of an action plan. It can be a small-scale local institution/organization or a large-scale national campaign for gun control, against the sexual harassment of women, or against the police violence directed at people of color. The key is to move beyond “protest,” beyond the public airing of grievances, to action that aims at righting the identified wrong.

Such organizations exist. Belonging to and contributing to them takes time. They are a challenge to what Adrienne Rich called “checkbook activism”—placating one’s conscience by sending money to various leftist causes. Such organizations, I am more and more convinced, are the only site of real social change. Even highly publicized campaigns like “me too” and “black lives matter”—for all their rhetorical power—seem inadequate to me. They are great occasions for self-righteous finger pointing, but do nothing to change the on-the-ground conditions that enable sexual and racial violence. With the flood of words that is now the public sphere—cable TV, the internet, advertisements, tweets and the rest—I have a hard time believing in the efficacy of words. Strange no doubt to have a literary guy say that, but I can’t help believing that 90% of Americans are now like me: inured to the endless palaver, letting it all wash over them without making much of a dent. The effort so many people are so desperately making to grab—for just this day’s news cycle—the public’s attention does not seem to me worth the effort. It leads to nothing—and nothing comes of nothing. So I want a left that begins to turn its back on the media circus, on getting the message out, and devotes its attention instead to doing things.

Conviviality

Music may be the best thing in American daily life. I guess I could try to expand that to the arts generally. But I am not sure that any of the other arts have as wide an appeal or generate such idyllic communal scenes.

Last week I went on a Tuesday night with some friends to the BlueNote in Durham. It was open mic night, with bands of four to six being formed from the people who sign up to play. Mostly the blues, with the music ranging from passable to surprisingly good. About sixty people in the audience, of all ages and races. Lots of dancing, plenty of beer drunk, and enthusiastic cheering for the musicians. Lots of people out having a good time—with good cheer all around.

Then I spent four days at Merlefest, the huge music festival held each year in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. No alcohol allowed, although the festival is just about totally unpoliced. I saw two security personnel on Sunday, the last day, and realized I had not seen any security or police the first three days. Lots of volunteers, in their bright yellow vests, and some announcement of the rules from the stages, but no one, as far as I could see, was stopped from doing anything. We snuck in some alcohol—and I am sure we were not the only ones. But no visible drunkenness that I could see, while everyone is almost sickeningly polite, and (once again) enthusiastic about the music and about the good time we are all having together. Over 10,000 people there on Saturday and good cheer all around, with the unwritten rules about seats and places at the various stages universally respected. And then there are all those 20 something musicians who are bringing back the traditional music even as they are creating new music. Plus an astoundingly knowledgeable core audience—people who also know and love this music and its history and its old standards.

My rose-colored view does need to be qualified. We ended up at the ER on Saturday around noon (a false alarm, luckily) and the staff there told us how they hated Merlefest because they were fated to see lots of drug overdoses and some alcohol poisonings over the weekend. Back at the festival, I tried to see the signs of these problems–but did not.

Also, the crowd was all white, a mixture of white professionals and Trump voters. (So my wife–who wasn’t there–said, “there’s the harmony. Easy for people to behave well among all their own kind.” Please read that statement with the proper sarcastic tone.) The culture gap was revealed dramatically on two occasions. Friday night the headliner was a country singer named Jimmy Johnson (or some such; I had never heard of him), who has a beard down to his navel, and a beer gut that should not adorn a thirty-something body, singing formulaic Nashville songs that sounded like every country record of the past thirty years. After two numbers, my friends and I were done; but as we walked out, we saw that the reserved seats were about half full while the unreserved seats were completely and totally packed. This guy was a big star, a must see, for a large audience that obviously lives in a different universe than I do.

Then on Sunday morning we were treated to a Christian rock star named Paul Thorn. Had never heard of him either, or really known about the world of Christian rock. And again a huge crowd, much larger than any of the crowds for the banjo meisters Bela Fleck or Allison Brown. Exactly the kind of music I most dislike—chord thumping, drum driven, banging as opposed to note picking—was what really drew in the crowds. And the slick, smarmy Christian preacher, with his little homilies in between his Christian rock numbers, had them in the palm of his hand. Looked him up on google, and he just started out as a rock musician wannabe; the Christian stuff came later, which only heightens my prejudicial conviction that he’s a fraud.

One of my friends was offended by my distaste for Paul Thorn. She thought him a sincere Christian, disliked my immediate suspicion that these Christians are inevitably exploiters of the proles. But it is hard for me to feel charitable toward Christians these days, not when their unflagging support for Donald Trump shows them up in all their mean-spirited bigotry.

But I didn’t sit down at the typewriter to bash Christians. I sat down to reflect (yet again) on the conviviality that characterizes American daily life. My son lives in a DC neighborhood that is 85% African-American and was 100% black five years ago. The street vibe is very friendly—in stark contrast to the street vibe in DC when I first lived there in the 1970s. I don’t fully understand it; if I were black, I would be pissed off all the time. When the police (who are usually black) have any dealings with someone on the street in the neighborhood, there are always five to ten people standing around videoing the encounter on their phones. Gentrification is slowly moving up H Street from Union Station toward my son’s house, two miles further east. It will probably reach his block in 3 to 5 years. Yet everyone on the street—and in the local stores—smiles and says Hello and is invariably polite.

I have the same experience in New York City, where I grew up. When I asked an old friend a few years ago “when did everyone in New York become so nice,” she instantly replied, “isn’t it disgusting?” She knew exactly what I was talking about. A certain kind of macho swagger has lost its cool for large swathes of the population.

And yet . . . We have all the sexual harassment (and worse) even as crime rates are going down. And we have the immigrant hatred and black bashing. Just like in 1968, we want to say that’s just the old folks; that kind of stuff is going to die out. But the kids of 1968 are the old folks now. Our politics is worse than ever; our society’s neglect of large swathes of the citizenry and the rhetorical justifications offered for the state’s and the corporation’s cruelty are more bald-faced than ever. The bile pouring out of the TV and over the internet just doesn’t connect up with the conviviality of face-to-face daily life.

I don’t understand this world I now live in, where life on the streets is so much less mean than I expect, while our public discourse is so hateful that I can’t believe people think that way—or would dare to utter such thoughts in public. I want to run and hide in the music, where a good life beckons.