Effortless Wealth

I have recently read two long novels, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas. That I got through both of them is testament to their ability to grab a reader since, in my cranky old age, I now abandon novels sixty, eight, even a hundred twenty pages in, if I lose interest.

One striking thing in both novels is that the characters become wealthy way past ordinary dreams. A thirteen year old son in the Wolas novel starts a software company that makes him a billionaire by the age of twenty-two, while his mother, the Joan Ashby of the title, just has to have her fiction submitted anonymously to a literary agent to secure million dollar advances and two million dollar movie deals. In A Little Life the climb to fame and fortune takes a little bit longer (one of the novel’s strengths is its portrayal of young artists on the make in New York City), but the four friends at the core of the novel each succeed in ways denied to 99% of humanity, becoming a famous movie star, an acclaimed painter, a highly successful architect, and a top corporate lawyer respectively. And they have the multiple houses and fabulous vacations to show for their virtue-gotten wealth.

Yanagihara is shrewd about the moment of the “turn,” the moment when her protagonists realize that they have “made it,” that they have stepped across the line into success. But the shrewdness doesn’t extend to a realization that the “turn” happens to very few. Most people slug along, with successes here and there, but without ever crossing that line, without even securing permanent fame or security. They have “good enough” careers that are always a struggle, always retain the possibility of collapsing, don’t ever “make it” once and for all. Just like very few people attain the levels of wealth that allow all money worries to disappear entirely. Both novels do suggest that for people under forty these days, especially if your life is centered in New York City, it is obvious that being a millionaire doesn’t cut it. Only hundreds of millions reaching toward a billion register in today’s economy—or today’s dreamscape.

Does this matter? In one way, no. If an author wants to take money and career anxieties off the table in order to focus on other things, that’s OK. But in another way it does raise the question of the “realistic” novel. Both of these novels tell stories about people presented as our contemporaries. Both aspire to psychological depth and complexity. They do aspire to be reports to readers about our current physical, mental, and spiritual condition. So I can’t help but think that their wet dream visions of fame and wealth are telling in and of themselves. It seems to suggest that what the two authors truly want is fame and fortune. Even if they, F. Scott Fitzgerald fashion, must rely on sheer magic to get to that promised land. The rest be damned.

Wolas’s novel comes very, very close to making that point its main theme. Her heroine, Joan Ashby, deeply regrets having sacrificed her art to family life. Her “resurrection” comes with abandoning that family and, especially, her responsibilities as a mother. Of course, she is rewarded by writing a best-selling novel and meeting a dreamy new lover. Naturally, the new man is not just a hunk, but also a world-famous photographer. When we occupy such a blatant script of wish fulfillment, it’s hard to know how to credit the “truths” the novel clearly aspires to convey to us.

Even more confusing is the fact that the central event of the novel makes no sense at all. Joan Ashby’s son (the other one, not the computer genius) steals an unpublished novel of hers and has it published under a pseudonym. Somehow this is meant to assuage his horror at being the untalented one of the family. But how? Since the book is published under a pseudonym and he must refuse all in-person interviews or book signings in order to keep his nefarious deed a secret, what exactly did he expect to get out of this?

His mother, upon finding out, doesn’t confront him and ask why he has done this, but flees instead to India in hopes of meeting the Dalai Lama, who will bring her enlightenment. But she also nurses a sense of deep grievance. Her son has stolen her soul by stealing her novel, committing a sin that is irreparable. But the remedy lies directly to hand. Just announce to the world that the book was published under a pseudonym, but is actually the work of Joan Ashby. There are plenty of hints, although never a direct statement, that Joan craves the attention and acclaim that comes with successful authorship. It is that which the son has stolen from her since, after all, she has all the rest: the satisfaction of having written a well-received novel, the knowledge of having gained many readers, and all the money the book has earned. Yet—and this is the kicker—the novel clearly expects us to sympathize entirely with Joan, to feel as outraged as her with what has transpired, and to see her flight (and refusal to deal with either her son or her husband) as not only understandable, but as heroic and noble. The lack of any dissenting perspectives on Joan robs the book of the very depth to which it aspires. Chasing fame and fortune trumps all else—and it is just assumed that, of course, readers will agree. We will root for Joan and be thrilled when, in the end, she gets to have it all.

The Yanagihara novel is more complex. It is, as its many readers and reviewers have noted, a melodrama. Characters come in only two shades: black and white. The one exception is the painter J.B., who drops out of the novel about half-way through. But what the reviews I have read did not mention is how class-bound the melodrama is. There is a wild America out there, the America of what we now think of as Trumpland. It is a violent place, made up of sexual perverts and violent sadists. It has no redeeming qualities and can only treat an innocent like Jude (the novel’s victim) with endless abuse. But if you can sail from that hell into a liberal arts college and get taken up by the members and scions of the professional upper middle class, all will be well. These people are so well-behaved, so well-meaning, so nice. Except for one bad encounter with a violent lover, Jude is only surrounded by supportive, loving, non-violent people once he gets to college at age sixteen. Niceness can’t overcome the traumas of Jude’s horrible childhood—which is why the New Yorker review found the novel so bracing. Here was a writer brave enough to forego redemption or recovery for its victimized protagonist. But that’s not really how it happens. Jude is saved by Willhelm’s love. The author has to kill Willhelm off in a car accident to get Jude to the desired end: his suicide. Daniel Medelsohn in the New York Review of Books thus proclaims the author the true sadist of this tale—and wonders why readers have loved a book that tortures its main character over hundreds of pages.

The lesson in Wolas’s novel seems pretty clear: money and a love of art will get you through. Neither alone is enough, but if you have both, then you can survive this rough world. There is more than that to Yanagihara’s tale. What makes A Little Life such a moving novel (it is a very, very powerful melodrama, with the full Dickensian ability to make you cry) is its insistence that the real key—even though money and satisfying, well received work are essential—is friendship. Neither novel believes (if that is the right word) in romantic love. For Wolas, such love is a trap. For Yanagihara, such love is only valuable the more it resembles, shades into, friendship. Companionship is at the heart of A Little Life and the source of its emotional richness. A disdain of companionship as weakness is what finally marks the airlessness of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby.

Protest in an Unjust Society

Not just Micah White’s The End of Protest, but also the essays of Martin Luther King, to which I have been sent by a wonderful essay by Alex Livingston, a political theorist at Cornell, and Livingston’s own book on William James [Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (Oxford UP, 2016)], have pushed me to this question: if the mechanisms of democratic accountability are broken, then what forms should protest take?

Let’s frame this question in Martin Luther King’s terms. “The American racial revolution has been a revolution to ‘get in’ rather than to overthrow. We want a share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. This goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent. If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down the factory. . . . The nonviolent strategy has been to dramatize the evils of our society in such a way that pressure is brought to bear against those evils by the forces of good will in the community and change is produced” (“Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom [1966].)

But what is the appeal to “the forces of good will” does not work? Even King realizes that things seldom happen because that is the right, the moral, the non-evil, thing to do. He is quite realistic that other pressures—especially economic pressures through boycotts and political pressure through disruptive non-cooperation—must also be applied. The bigger point, it would seem, is that these other pressures cannot be effective if the moral high ground is lost. The social movement must be on the side of justice, must be seen as appealing to the community’s best self, in order for its other tactics to bear fruit.

Success in the rhetorical battle over right and wrong is, thus, necessary for success, but not sufficient. At issue right now is what other ingredients are needed to complete the circle, to give us the magical combination that is gives us the necessary and the sufficient.

A big obstacle here is a fundamental asymmetry. Protestors almost always lose the high ground if they resort to violence. The use of violence is also tantamount (it would seem; I am on shaky ground here) to seeing overthrow of the existing power and social relations as the movement’s goal. If you want in (as King puts it), if the goal is fuller inclusion—and inclusion along more egalitarian lines–, then it seems as if violence is ruled out.

Yet—and here is the asymmetry—the forces opposing change get to use violence without undermining their cause. This is not a blanket statement. There are many ways the state—and other established power centers—can lose legitimacy and popular support by resorting to violence. But there are also many cases where state violence is not condemned, or is even applauded. Thus, incarceration of those deemed criminals rarely generates any dissent. Similarly, police actions against “rioters” are most often applauded and almost universally tolerated. The present of gun-toting policeman on the streets of our cities and villages is taken for granted.

Similarly, various forms of surveillance of employees is mostly accepted and the summary firing of employees deemed trouble-makers is also immune from protest or legal redress.

In short, we have a double standard. Violence—both direct and indirect—establishes inequality and differential treatment of citizens—and is used to uphold that unequal state of affairs. Such violence is often unremarked, and is seldom condemned, and even more seldom openly contested. But if those who would contest this “maintenance violence” (to coin a phrase) resort to violence, they jeopardize their whole cause. But in a battle so unequally joined, how can the contenders, the protestors, ever hope to win.

There are, by now, both historical examples and theoretical accounts, of non-violence winning this apparently hopeless contest between established violence/inequality and those who would hope to transform prevailing conditions. SO: never say never.

One way the civil rights movement did win some successes was by pitting some laws against other laws. The legal system—especially on the federal level—did provide some protection against, and even the ability to annul or override, injustices legally established at the state level. Even if democratically elected politicians were unresponsive to the protest movements, the courts were another site of possible progress. And, of course, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the1965 Voting Rights Act, even the politicians were responsive.

The contrast to the anti-Vietnam war movement is instructive here. There was never any avenue of legal redress to pursue. Swaying politicians was the only way to get the government to change course. And that never happened. The New Left could not win enough elections to advance its cause; it couldn’t even scare enough politicians in the ways that the conservative movement since 1980 has been able to do. (The “no new taxes” pledge is one example of frightening politicians into compliance; enforced attitudes toward legal abortion and gun control are another example.) The only thing the anti-war movement accomplished was the end of the draft. The politicians decided they could wage war so long as they didn’t force any citizen to actually fight in those wars.

As matters currently stand, conservatives—through wealthy donors and strong single issue groups—can influence politicians to a degree that the left cannot. Although, it must be said, the conservative control only works for negative action: no gun control, no new taxes, no expansion of legal abortion rights. Conservatives are not able to accomplish anything positive. And now—with the failure to repeal ObamaCare and the probable failure to pass new tax cuts—their ability to do anything at all in Congress is in serious doubt. The Trump administration, of course, can do considerable damage on its own, starting with the sabotage of ObamaCare and moving on to destructive dismantling of environmental and financial industry regulations.

More troubling is that we have now have minority government—and that minority is doing everything it can to retain its hold on power. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, and allowing big money to dominate politics are all designed to keep a Republican Party that gets a minority of votes in power. The dysfunctional rules of the electoral game in America are being exploited in a straight-forwardly undemocratic fashion.

Most troubling is that this Republican gaming of the system has extended to a quite deliberate—and frighteningly successful—take-over of the judiciary at every level. The cherished path of using legal recourse to undermine the system’s inequities and injustices is being taken off the table. In other words, where violence was, legality is about to rein. The Republicans have done nothing illegal—as they love to keep shouting from the mountaintops, even as they gerrymander, and refuse to ratify court appointments that are put forward by Democrats. They are, they insist, playing by the rules—even as, naturally, they use the rules to further their own interests. That’s what winning is. You play the game to win. Both sides do. And you don’t cheat.

The upshot is that an undemocratic political system and an increasingly unequal economic system is now being fully legalized. Recourse within the system is now deeply endangered because even winning a majority of votes in an election does not give you any leverage over government, while the legal system is packed with judges who will not countenance any challenges to the electoral system or to the rights of corporations.

So: what is a protest movement to do? I am fully willing to believe (even though I think leftists are often deluded on this score) that a majority of our fellow citizens in these united states of America do not want what our current government is delivering. But—and this seems to me the crux—I also believe that a vast majority of those citizens are not willing to step outside the bounds of legality to challenge what is going down. Either things have just not gotten bad enough—or do not touch them personally enough—or there is a deep in-grown habit of legality. Whatever the explanation, this is where asymmetry hurts. A social movement that acts outside the bounds of legality will lose any chance of mass support. Yet the structures of legality are tightening to the point where action within their limits has less and less chance of being effective.

Massive civil disobedience is one possibility. The classic tactic of non-cooperation. But no suitable target immediately offers itself. The rush to airports after the first Muslim ban was the most hopeful—and useful—response to the Trump administration to date. The problem here is the site of noncooperation. Civil rights activists had two obvious sites: segregated public places and voting registration offices. In each place, they could dramatically stage their attempts to overcome unjust laws.

No such obvious sites are on offer right now. Occupy went to Wall Street, which makes sense. But they didn’t actually confront the financiers who were responsible for the mortgage crisis. And they didn’t have any rhetorically effective way to force such a confrontation.

I am going to stop here. But the search for answers will continue—not that I have any on the tip of my tongue. Subsequent posts will keep worrying this topic. I don’t promise any solutions.

Micah White’s The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution

Micah White was one of the people who inspired (?)/initiated(?) Occupy Wall Street. He certainly can’t be said to have organized it since he did nothing beyond publicizing the idea and setting a date for its occurrence. He never visited the site and made no effort to direct how it unfolded or what it demanded. He thinks the Occupy movement was a “constructive failure.”

I was drawn to his book The End of Protest (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2016) because White is adamant that “change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy. Protests [especially marches and other mass demonstrations] have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens” (27). That last statement is a little odd, but is explained (somewhat) a bit further on.

“We have been acting as if people have sovereignty over their governments when they act collectively. Now it is clear that the people’s sovereignty has been lost. We were wrong to believe that bigger and bigger street protests could force prime ministers and presidents to heed the wishes of the people. . . . [T]ese ritualized spectacles of tens of thousands in the streets are only effective when applied against autocratic regimes that are vulnerable to international pressure. It seems that popular protest functions only when it is aligned with the pre-existing Western geopolitical agenda” (36). We must recognize that we live a “precarious historical moment of broken democracy and the rule of the wealthy” (43) Having lost “faith in the legitimacy of representative democracy” (38), an entirely new set of tactics must be developed to ferment change in our plutocratic and oligarchic condition.

There is a lot here to unpack—and I will be doing that work over the next few posts. But, today, I just want to hone in on White’s commitment to revolution. “[R]evolution’s chief characteristic,” he tells us, is “the transfer of sovereignty and the establishment of a new legal regime” (60). But those two things are not the same at all. “Revolutionary activism,” he asserts, “is any attempt to make the illegal legal or the legal illegal” (60). I like that claim a lot. I have nothing at stake as to whether one instance of political activism is deemed revolutionary while another is not. Worrying about whether something is reformist or revolutionary does not interest me.

But I do think it very useful to focus in on this question of legality. Segregation was legal, was the law, in the Jim Crow South. The civil rights movement worked to change that. Domestic abuse was not specifically illegal, and was almost entirely deemed outside the law’s purview, until feminism changed laws and attitudes toward violence in the home. We know, of course, that reforming the law is only half the battle; cultural change—a change in attitudes—is also required to have fully successful social transformation. But pinpointing the legal change that is desired gives social movements a focused goal, a clear message, and a benchmark for progress, even for success.

Hypothesis #1: Where social movements do not have an unjust law to focus upon, they have much more trouble gaining traction.

The second point for today is to think about transfer of sovereignty. Only very fringe social movements in today’s US imagine overthrowing the government. So it is not clear to me what a “transfer of sovereignty” means in our context right now. It is absolutely true that power has been concentrated in the hands of the few—and that it strains credulity to call the US a functioning democracy at the present moment. But the concentration of power is very different than the legal apparatus of sovereignty. It does not appear that anyone is interested in undoing that legal apparatus. Instead, as White himself says, “activists may use one law to overturn another” (61). The prevailing strategy is to work through the legal means afforded by the system to alter, rewrite, or abolish the laws and practices that undermine our democracy, that keep it from truly representing the will of the people. (Let me get away with that solecism for the moment. White has a very bad tendency to believe in Rousseau’s “general will.” Let’s just note for the moment that, when it comes to gun control and the tax code, the legal and governmental status quo is demonstrably not in aligned with the view of the majority.)

But, and this is where I will end today and resume tomorrow, what if we no longer have any faith that the current legal and institutional system afford any possibility of reforming it back into the direction of making government responsive to the people? In other words, if we accept that we no live in an oligarchy, what alternatives do we have for fighting that reality. I fully agree with White that marches and petitions are not going to get the job done. They are ignored with impunity. So what should we be doing?

The Script for Dismantling Protest Sites, or Fool Me Once . . .

In late August of this year, students at UNC, Chapel Hill initiated and maintained a round-the-clock vigil at Silent Sam, the Confederate monument on campus. The vigil, which never had tents–but did have tables, sleeping pads, and folding chairs–was left unmolested by campus authorities for eight days. Then the students were informed on Thursday, August 31^st that they had to vacate the spot and that anything they did not remove would be confiscated by the police at 6AM on Friday morning, the first. It did not seem coincidental that the first football game of the season would be played in Chapel Hill on Saturday the 2^nd. The administration did not want football fans to be distracted with thoughts of the legacies of slavery.

I cycled over to campus at 5:30 that Friday morning in order to witness—and to video on my phone—the arrival of the police. About fifteen students were there. Most of the vigil’s paraphernalia had been removed. The students did not intend to resist the police incursion or to get themselves arrested, but did plan to chant various slogans throughout the police action.

I hung around until 8:45 or so, chatting with students and colleagues on the scene. The police did not show up. Later that day, I learned that the police arrived around 9:00 am and did just what they had informed students they would do: dismantle the site of the vigil and threaten any students who refused to leave the site with arrest.

Now, some two months later, I discover, while reading Micah White’s The End of Protest (of which more in subsequent posts) that the Chapel Hill action followed a script devised for the dismantling of Occupy sites around the country in late 2011 and early 2012.

“The eviction in Lower Manhattan was effective, and it was no coincidence that evictions spread immediately. Five days before Zuccotti [the Occupy Wall Street site] was dismantled, police coordinated nation-wide conference calls with mayors from eighteen cities. An eviction script was developed to counter the tactics of Occupy. Mayors learned to announce an impending eviction, to give Occupiers a firm deadline so that the people would gather to defend the encampment. Authorities would then let the deadline expire so that protestors were exhausted by the state of tension and readiness. Many protestors would return home believing the crisis had passed. At that point, the police would strike and complete the eviction using maximum force. The counter-revolutionary tactics developed by Bloomberg and others were quickly deployed in city after city” (The End of Protest, 30-31).

“Maximum force” was not used in Chapel Hill, nor was it needed given the students’ resigned acquiescence in the eviction. But I was gulled by a trick used five years earlier because I didn’t know of its existence.