I've been thinking about my trips down to the Occupy Boston location, and why I've generally come away with a feeling of cynicism from the particulars, even while the generalities of the nation-wide, even globally-growing movement have inspired me on the whole. I think there's a simple answer: it's because people like myself have been exposed to so many years of misinformation and misdirection about our specific political philosophy that we've become a generation of self-hating liberals. Faced with a deluge of frivolous criticism regarding the superficial details of who we are, rather than what we believe in, we've been beaten into submission and bought into the illusion of our own humorous insignificance.
One of the oldest tricks in the books used to discredit right-thinking progressive causes since the invention of rich pricks comfortable with their entrenched power and silly dreamers who think things should be better than they are, so, since the idea of property has existed, has been to characterize the change-agents as somehow alien, or other, or outside of the norm. In fact it's the only trick we've ever come up with to convince people of anything that actually works. Yeah, but... they worship a different type of magic. Or, yeah, but... they have a different shaped cheek bones. Yeah, but... it's kind of lame how all those white college bros have dreadlocks. OK, that one is true, but you see what I mean. Actually, the fact that I'm even making a joke like that is symptomatic of the problem I'm talking about here.
Gawker, in one of the best pieces they've posted in ages (albeit it's actually reposted from The Fix) talked about the media's behavior in this regard to the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Occupy Wall Street has succeeded, for the moment, in moving the populist issue of corporate greed and economic inequality to the forefront of the political debate. But its position there has been repeatedly attacked by opponents' attempts to paint the protests as a druggy radical carnival.
When the movement began, most of the media treated it as an object of mockery. Even The New York Times was slow to cover the story. Several days into the protest, the paper finally ran a condescending article summing up the encampment as "street theater" and the protesters as rebels without a cause, focusing on a Joni Mitchell look-alike dancing at the edge of Liberty Park in her cotton underwear "[with the apparent] wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968." The subtext was obvious: If these kids aren't high, they're sure acting like it!
Why, one wonders, is even the liberal media, mocking, or at least not taking seriously, what is clearly a significant movement in American politics? It's because the people have funny clothes and habits and they probably like drugs, therefor anything they say is a joke. The piece continues...
But as Occupy Wall Street enters its second month without any signs of abating, respect is finally being paid by the media, the Democratic Party, President Obama and even some Republicans. Recent polls claim that 73% of New Yorkers support the grass-roots action. Zuccotti Park has been visited by a disparate array of advocate, celebrities and politicians. Caught off-guard by the protests growing popularity, right-wing outlets media like Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and the Fox News Network have worked hard to demonize the movement by portraying the protestors as, alternately, violent anarchists and coddled college grads. Drugs have been a reliable lightning rod for such attacks. The Occupy Wall Street protesters are criminals "lured by drugs and free food," the Post recently reported. In fact, the paper managed to locate only a single criminal among among the several hundreds of protestors massed at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan—their reporter must have worked hard to spot him. Undaunted, Fox's went further, denouncing the protesters as "a bunch of crackhead drug dealers." His guest, conservative author Margaret Hoover, then irritated him by correcting him. "They're not crackheads, Bill," she said. "There's soft drugs—marijuana, stuff that you inhale. I personally haven't smelled it. My husband has." She then added, "It's a counter-culture collective."
That type of obfuscation is a deliberate shell game that serves to distract from the substance of the issue, and usually serves to sway the malleable center into siding with the seeming standard-bearers of normalcy and comfort. When you frame an argument as an opposition between sober, reasonable businessmen, or landowners, or family-men and women versus craaazzzyyyywhackjobbbssss hopped up on drugs or false gods or evil buttsex, you can't really blame a lot of people for coming down on the side that seems more likely to have its shit together. Having your shit completely together, however, while often a worthwhile way to have your shit arranged, as opposed to splashing said shit over the place, for example, shouldn't be the only collective, or individual, aspiration of a society. Sometimes putting someone's else shit together can be nice too.
More on that in a minute. First, let's turn to the question of why liberals are so rarely in practice, at least socially, liberal about other liberals.
More on that in a minute. First, let's turn to the question of why liberals are so rarely in practice, at least socially, liberal about other liberals.
I asked PTSOTL's resident "one conservative dude" Mint E Fresh, why he thought liberals have such a problem sticking together. Why, for example, someone like me, as whackadoodles lefty as they come, can go down to Occupy Boston and be turned off by the people there to the point where I'm sort of disheartened about our collective ability to ever actually enact any sort of change. Why am I instinctively turned off by some of the personality types on display, or, even worse, the aesthetics of fashion. Am I that shallow? Because let's face it, earnest people are kind of hard to be around.
Or why is it, as much as I talk about supporting the working man, and pretend to be a socialist, I still don't really like to hang out with actual living breathing blue collar people? What kind of phony am I? Isn't it weird, I asked, that liberals, at least ones like myself, don't like to spend any time around the literal proletariat?
Or why is it, as much as I talk about supporting the working man, and pretend to be a socialist, I still don't really like to hang out with actual living breathing blue collar people? What kind of phony am I? Isn't it weird, I asked, that liberals, at least ones like myself, don't like to spend any time around the literal proletariat?
"Yeah, there's something there for sure," he said. "Not to mention the lack of cosmopolitan liberal types streaming into [blue collar cities like] Lawrence or Lynn, MA, or any of the places so blessed by diversity that that diversity is literally impossible to escape. There are no hipster hot spots in which lefteros can escape the ugly but very real sort of diversity they create in places like those, rather than the insulated and superficial diversity created and propped up at a university. When liberals think of diversity they picture a quad, not Main South."
The problem with places like the Occupy protest sites then, may be how uneasy their blend of the two make me. It's like a quad at Homeless University, with all the requisite hacky-sack-pontificating, and soup-kitchen realpolitik implied.
"But I don't like just attacking liberal Democrats because it is inferred (though I do not imply it) that I must therefor support their opponents," Fresh said. "That's why I usually reserve that sort of thing to use as a response to someone who's playing that game already, of this-team-good that-team-bad."
That's what I'm doing. The other team is bad. But the problem is, they've managed to sew derision into our team. The locker room is in disarray because the other side has managed to so effectively turn us against our own teammates.
Perhaps that's how it should be, Fresh suggests, tying it in, as libertarians so often seem to be able to, to a critique of the idea of multiculturalism.
Perhaps that's how it should be, Fresh suggests, tying it in, as libertarians so often seem to be able to, to a critique of the idea of multiculturalism.
"The bigger problem with the left is that it has this idea of humanity that is literally inhuman, that resembles nothing in human history, and then they judge humanity by that inhuman standard, and find humanity lacking."
In other words, never before have so many varied cultures come together as one whole in human history, so why start now? Because it seems self-evidently just, is why. Yeah, but...he said:
"Compounding the error is the fact that they have no more objective reasons for believing in their faith-based ideal [ed: the ideal of diversity] than Muslims or Christians, yet they sneer at other faiths for being what theirs is also. Liberals have less reason, actually, because no great moral or religious tradition supports their faith. There is no more objective, rational case to be made that people have things called 'rights' but not things called 'souls.' There is no objective or rational case whatsoever for human or gender equality. That is an article of faith, and nothing more, though one made more noble by the fact that it stands in defiance of all human reason and history and science. But too many liberals sneer at other irrational faiths, and it's that sneering that makes me angry. It reflects a lack of a spirit of charity and humility, which are the things they need most to recognize the nature of their own faith, and to humanize those they scorn who are so much like them it's surreal."
So what if, then, this all-encompassing, all-embracing culture we seem to want is logically irrational? Why do you think people need to live by their idealized philosophies, I asked? I want everyone to have equal rights, opportunities etc. Must I also then act, in this sort of hands on the ground, "hippie" activist way I find distasteful personally to justify that desire? Must I subsume my inclinations to recoil from try-hards and poor people, and, god forbid, the humble downtrodden religious of the world, even though they are, or at least I seem to think that they are, my people?
"You don't have to act," Fresh said, "but you must justify forcing that anomalous philosophy, the one under-girding the ideas of equal rights and opportunities, on people who don't want it, like anyone would have to. It is fine that you want to create a new and strange thing in the world, a utopia where men and women and Africans and Eskimos are equal and interchangeable and indistinguishable. I would congratulate you if you ever had enough like-minded people to establish it. But what right do you have to force your utopia on people who like their human societies, with their human loyalties and loves of family and country, and their old gods and temples and kings? At the very least you owe them a justification, and one that cannot be easily discredited using the exact methods liberals used to discredit traditional ideals and systems."
I have faith, then, in the righteousness of this cause, that people do not deserve to be made wage slaves to an overclass. But who's to say where that faith comes from. And I am hypocrite for even thinking so? And further to the point, is that grain of doubt about my logical strength of position creeping into my subconsciousness when I myself, or people like me, are easily swayed to turn against the people we would agree with otherwise?
Hard to answer, but I think all of this is important for even the leftward-inclined, but still skeptical among us, and I know a lot of people like that, to keep in mind next time we start to joke about how the Occupy movement is comprised of a bunch of lazy, pot-smoking hippies. I mean, it is comprised of that in large part, but every progressive movement from here on in is going to have these folks aboard. To quote that extreme stereotype from the other side, Donnie Rumsfeld, you go to war with the army that you have. The hippies and the homeless, and the put-upon and generally shitty-seeming people you see on a lot of LOOK AT THESE LULZY LIBERAL PUSSIES segments on the news may be tempting to sneer at, but they are our people, even while they are our own extreme stereotypes.
It doesn't mean we all have to all be exactly alike, or that we even need to enforce standards of melting-pot agreeableness. In fact isn't the whole point that we are not all alike on the surface, aside from our basic humanity, which illogic aside, we all take as self-evident, that which brings us together in the first place?
And even more importantly, as silly and frivolous and easily lampooned as our liberal stereotypes may be, when you contrast them to the side we're up against, where the stereotype isn't some harmless dreamer who's into dank bud, but rather a real, destructive, predatory-capitalistic carnivore who actively seeks to do you harm, well, being kind of disorganized doofus doesn't seem like such a bad thing to be in comparison. Joke if you will, but don't let it poison the morale. It's too easy to turn on one another as it is. You goddamned hippies.
And even more importantly, as silly and frivolous and easily lampooned as our liberal stereotypes may be, when you contrast them to the side we're up against, where the stereotype isn't some harmless dreamer who's into dank bud, but rather a real, destructive, predatory-capitalistic carnivore who actively seeks to do you harm, well, being kind of disorganized doofus doesn't seem like such a bad thing to be in comparison. Joke if you will, but don't let it poison the morale. It's too easy to turn on one another as it is. You goddamned hippies.
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23 comments:
Agreed. Went down to Occupy Wall Street while visiting NYC a few weeks ago and couldn't help but note both the crustiness on display, and the fact that I'm a pessimistic, jaded cynical prick.
Yeah, but I don't WANT TO BE jaded.
"It is fine that you want to create a new and strange thing in the world, a utopia where men and women and Africans and Eskimos are equal and interchangeable and indistinguishable. I would congratulate you if you ever had enough like-minded people to establish it. But what right do you have to force your utopia on people who like their human societies, with their human loyalties and loves of family and country, and their old gods and temples and kings?"
Huh? Who's operating outside of human society? What's he conflating here? Because for someone who's arguing on the side of faith, he comes dangerously close to implying that faith and an easy fatalism that excludes the possibility of socioeconomic justice are linked. (Of course, one of those "old gods" felt otherwise.)
It is easy to be anti-hippie, but they are usually right. It is time to give up on the hippie-punching. I am happy that 73% of americans support them and that they have successfully changed the national conversation. WTF was Obama et al. worried about the deficit when there is 10% unemployment.
Sometimes being too logical can end up not seeming like logic, I think Ruth.
I agree joe, but there's territory between punching hippies and wanting to hang out with them,you know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9zkQcLi4Yo&list=FLTJKGr3vKx0VL0IoM8SLW6g&index=1&feature=plpp_video
only vaguely connected to what you are sayiing, but still good post.
thanks. i kind of liked that guy for a minute, but then i had to bail.
great discussion of a sentiment i totally relate to. now get back to reporting on the overfilled ashtray that is the internet and making me L0luz.
Nothing to do with this post, but the Howie Spira piece at Deadspin was top-notch. Great work there.
thanks! that was a cheap knockoff though
Fantastic, I've never been more proud to be a disorganized doofus
Join the club.
http://warmingglow.uproxx.com/2011/11/oh-so-this-is-why-some-people-hate-occupy-wall-street
This story, as well as the accompanying comments are exactly what you're talking about.
Yes indeed. Thanks for the head's up.
Huh? Who's operating outside of human society? What's he conflating here? Because for someone who's arguing on the side of faith, he comes dangerously close to implying that faith and an easy fatalism that excludes the possibility of socioeconomic justice are linked. (Of course, one of those "old gods" felt otherwise.
Hi Ruth. I like to check back in and answer questions weeks after they're asked, when I know no one will see the answers, so that it's a nice waste of all of our time.
I don't believe I'm conflating anything. I'm saying the society which (and excuse me for speaking in generalities) contemporary zeitgeister progressives wish to see come about - the endpoint of all this "progress" - will be a literally inhuman one. This is because the progressive idea of humanity itself (as a collection of atomized, autonomous, rights-bearing individuals who are interchangeable and "equal" in all capacities) is itself inhuman and utterly alien. Because that is not what humanity is, which is to say because progressivism does not take into account mankind as it is but rather only mankind as progressives wish it were, no progressive diagnosis of societal ills can be legitimate, and no progressive course of corrective action can be correct, except coincidentally.
Also, I do not argue on the side of faith. I merely note that progressives who claim to argue against (religious) "faith" are themselves promoting a quasi-religious faith, and one based no less on magical thinking than Evangelical Christianity. The idea that man inherently possesses an immortal soul is precisely and exactly as reasonable and verifiable as is the idea that man inherently possesses things called "rights". The idea that all humans are "fallen from grace" via original sin is precisely and exactly as reasonable and verifiable as is the idea that all men are "equal" and interchangeable by nature. These are irrational faiths, and to sneer at someone else's irrationality because that irrationality seems irrational according to one's own outrageously irrational worldview is, to say the least, irrational.
As for the possibility of "socioeconomic justice", it does not exist, and cannot exist, except as something forced upon human society by the iron hand of authoritarian government. Like all progressive notions, it is based on the irrational magical thinking addressed above.
Lastly, the idea that Jesus of Nazareth (the place, not the awesome band) was a socioeconomic progressive does not really stand up to more than a moment's serious contemplation. Christ exhorted people to give charity, not to advocate the redistribution of wealth via central government as a way of engendering a warm feeling of moral superiority on the part of the advocators.
Anyway, people say late is better than never but I'm doing my damnedest to prove them wrong.
I think the difference between arguing for the existence of "faith"-based concepts such as equality, as in the case of progressives, is different from arguing from a position of religious faith in that the former is something that we all agree is a metaphoric concept that we've invented to make our time here on earth more equitable for as many people as possible while the latter, as its core, is the belief in literal magic beings.
Does that make sense? In other words, people like me know that we're speaking in the abstract, whereas the religious faithful, when they're actually adhering to what "faith" means, are speaking of something that (most likely) doesn't exist as if it were real.
No, it ABSOLUTELY makes sense. But A. not all (I don't even know if most) progressives are speaking in the abstract, and many DO believe in literal equality and in the actual existence of 'rights'. More importantly, B. the policy prescriptions of progressives are based on those abstractions being realities. A progressive says "If America were just, half the math professors in America would be women, twelve percent of them would be black, 2 percent Jewish, 20 percent Hispanic (all would be represented proportionate to their numbers in society) etc." This is based on the idea that all people have equal capacity for all things in reality, not merely as an abstraction.
And when those numbers - because all people do not have equal potential and ability - do not come about, progressives blame the system or society for not reflecting their ideological abstraction.
There's a difference between the type of specific ability equality you're talking about there and the general idea of opportunity/rights equality.
Its like saying yes we invented God but it's a worthwhile invention
The opposite of blaming the system is blaming the class of people for the inequality, which is why arguments like yours are rightly called racist.
I don't have problem with them. I think that they are fighting for something that they believe in.
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