“My Republican friends” could have a phony, even sarcastic, ring. But here it is meant. I have true friends on a dramatically different track from mine: people I care for whose political choices both baffle and trouble me. In these notes, I make no attempt to change minds, a fool’s errand. Opinions have never much interested me, except for the values and beliefs they reveal. Nor am I looking to promote positions (on abortion, gun laws, immigration, etc.). They are important, but I have nothing useful to add: at this point, almost everything that can be said, has been. I’d prefer in these notes to slip beneath the surface and touch those points where I believe we lose sight of each other. I will try to look at structural fundamentals, not legislative agendas.
1. CONVICTION
I’ve written about this elsewhere, but I will briefly repeat that certainty holds its own seductions and blinds us to its underlying constituents: tribal affinities, narrative convenience, anxiety reduction, and the self-reinforcing loop of “feeling right.” Almost none of our certainties come from first-hand experience, therefore who we believe generally trumps what we believe. Because of these hazards, I try to adopt certain principles of mental hygiene: a lively sense of my own ignorance; instinctive distrust of “strong” voices; active avoidance of tribal loyalties; respect for knowledge competition and a culture of critique, evidence testing and professional discipline. None of these hygiene practices guarantees truth, of course: but they do offer a minimal defense against the wilderness of wishful thinking, where “truth” shrivels to the status of personal preference.
2. ELITES
We live in a drastically unbalanced society, where some sectors hold far more wealth and influence than others. I’m told that 26 people own as much wealth as 4 billion others (half the world’s population). Money is never just money: it is also power. Needless to say, this imbalance affects the fields of knowledge and information we depend on. Here we are probably all agreed. However, the structure of power is not monolithic: it is highly complex, with multiple forces both coalescing and competing in an ever-changing dynamic. A simple category, “the elites,” is frankly childish in its simplicity. It implies a level of global coordination that human beings are incapable of. Even those 26 billionaires can’t agree! The so-called “elites” are fractured and fractious. The category is especially tenuous when applied to ideology (as in “the liberal elites”), a field of everlasting conflict. A more convincing concept of “elites” would be economic, specifically the largest transnational corporations. These material elites share an agenda to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at any cost to the planet and its population. But of course they are not unified either: they compete with each other. Regrettably, this latter category of elites is one that the populist right has not been willing to confront: it is easier to denounce university professors and journalists, with their miniscule power, than to go head-to-head with the corporate boardrooms. In fact, the populist right has historically proved itself a servant of corporate power (vide Mussolini). It’s an elite worth addressing, but the only realistic antidote to corporate power is democratic government. This is why the cry for “less government” or “less regulation” is a silent cry for more corporate power.
3. SOCIALISM
Socialism is perhaps the most radically misunderstood and misused term in current political debate. Socialism refers to the public ownership of the means of production: literally the nationalization of large industries. I’ve lived under (partial) socialism in England of the 1950s and 1960s, when the government owned the coal industry, the gas industry, the railways, the telephone system and the entire broadcasting system. Central ownership can lead to certain benefits in protecting the populace from corporate avarice, but it places too much power in government hands and chills the benevolent aspects of capitalism, competitive entrepreneurship. Confusion sets in when socialism is equated with government regulation of capitalist activity. Regulation is a normal aspect of capitalism itself: there have never been wholly unregulated markets in an advanced society, and no one would seriously want them. Our air, water, food, and drugs would be irreparably poisoned, planes would fall out of the sky, and the financial markets would turn into a crime festival. The question of regulation is a question of degree, not a binary choice. Some want more, some want less, but everyone implicitly accepts its necessity. A second confusion is to equate socialism with the provision of government services, such as education or healthcare. Such services are obviously compatible with competitive enterprise and have lived side-by-side with it since the poor laws of the sixteenth century. Again, the provision of public services is a question of degree, not a binary choice. Socialism is literally government ownership of industry, a concept so obviously fraught with problems it is no longer a realistic goal for anyone except at the fringes of political debate. In the American context, the term is simply not worth using.
4. THE COMMONS
In medieval England, “the commons” referred to land that everyone had access to for grazing of livestock. The original commons progressively shrank, through a process of enclosure that took this land and distributed it to private owners. The concept of “the commons” is still useful today to reference shared resources. The commons tend to be assets that are not well protected or provided for by private ownership. This is where one of the primary conflicts between left and right appears. Generally speaking, the right is constantly seeking to shrink the commons and distribute it to private owners. The left is constantly seeking to at least protect, if not expand, the remaining commons. What constitutes the commons in America today? Air (but not water); the roads; the oceans; local and national parks; the public school system; libraries; and not much else. Our largest and most obvious common asset is the planet itself. This is why climate change has become a political battleground. The only way to address the environment is to understand it as something we need to manage collectively, as a species. Climate refuses to be contained in national boundaries or private allotments: it demands a shared response. The climate crisis implies some concept of the commons, and this is what provokes the right’s hostility to environmental action. Unfortunately, the hostility poses an existential threat.
5. GENDER
How strange and revealing that gender has moved to the center of American political discourse. In his epic book of 1933, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich attributed Hitler’s success to his instinctive activation of sexual undercurrents that the left never even noticed. In America today, the right has discovered that focus on gender produces a galvanizing effect that may help sweep them to power. Transgender sports, gay marriage, who uses which toilet… this is where emotions run hottest, even though the issues have negligible impact on most of the people worked up about them. Or rather, the impacts are emotional, not practical. The current gender storm is a reminder that politics is always an intersection between social problems and private vexations. Politics is the ultimate field of psychological projection: “a public shelter for homeless emotions.” There’s no easy fix to this. None of us, left or right, is exempt from blind emotion and unconscious projection. The least we can do is to require ourselves to keep looking within while we engage the political landscape, alert to the play of our personal injuries and resentments.
6. FREEDOM
Oh sadly abused term! Today in the name of “freedom” books are banned, women are forced through unwanted pregnancies, school teachers are harassed online, and marriages are threatened. Paradoxically, the mistake begins with an over-estimation of personal autonomy. America’s strength and weakness is its cult of the individual. The strength is real: this dimension of American ideology releases huge reserves of courage and creativity, and is one (not the only) source of the country’s greatness. The weakness is also real, and enormously dangerous. The weakness is delusion, a flat denial of reality. The fact is, the human species is social by design. We depend on each other as much as bees do. There is no “self-made man.” We make each other. Every step we take, every day, draws on the activity of thousands if not millions of others. You only have to turn on the faucet to see this. Individuality is an emergent property: it arises from the social fabric, just as a child develops autonomy in the embrace of a family. What does this mean for freedom? That freedom is always relational. There is no absolute freedom. I can claim my rights to agency, but I can never disavow my entanglement in the lives of others. Failure to recognize this has led to an upside down logic: “freedom” has been turned into an angry slogan, a cudgel to beat others with and control their lives. The champions of “freedom” end up beholden to autocrats and dictators, and this is the current drift.
7. VIOLENCE
America is drifting towards a violent resolution of its political conflicts. “Resolution” is a misnomer, of course, because violence itself will resolve nothing. It will generate a new wave of problems that will need to be tackled through painful and costly sacrifice. Nevertheless, the sight of armed vigilantes hanging around ballot boxes is a desolate indication of what may come. January 6th was significant in showing that violence has now been embraced as a viable form of political currency, not in the spontaneous eruption of street rage, but as a planned and deliberate tactic. The careful cultivation by the far right of military and police personnel creates an increasing resemblance between North and South America. I find this among current trends the most troubling, and the one that threatens my friendships with people on the right. It’s a choice I can’t sit easy with. Apart from the suffering that violence invites (spreading its ripples far beyond the individual victims of death or injury), this one choice implies an irrevocable abandonment of democracy in any form. When opponents are so demonized that they become acceptable targets for physical harm, we close the door on conversation of any kind. Power becomes identical with force. The fantasy that somehow this can lead back to democracy in a cleansed or revitalized form is just that, a fantasy. Where political violence most often leads is tyranny: this has been demonstrated time and again by the left and the right. A non-negotiable refusal of violence — and I understand it can sometimes be hard — is the prerequisite of civilized politics. Without that simple, shared agreement, we are lost to each other.
8. SPIRIT
I don’t mean belief: in my experience, belief has little to do with spirit. I mean something more ordinary and more profound: the spirit in which we do things, the spirit in which we live, the spirit in which we choose our politics. Here’s what I look for. Where is compassion? We don’t always have the physical or emotional resources to act on our compassion, but if it goes missing we go missing. Spiritually, compassion is the core. In politics, either compassion is in the driving seat or something dark is. Where is truth? Here comes a lot of confusion. Truth is not a possession. Truth is a quest. We’ll never get there, but we should always be striving. People who care for truth are endlessly questioning, probing, testing, arguing. Truth is hard work. Science is not the only source of truth, but it’s the best model we have for the spirit of truth: science sets a standard for us to think by. Where is nature? This is not about the “environment” as a policy agenda. It’s about our orientation to life itself. We inhabit a fragile planet that we depend on and that increasingly depends on us. This planet requires our love, and that love needs to be expressed in action. Where is justice? Again, forget the sides-taking. It’s the spirit of the thing that matters: a fundamental feeling for fairness, an abhorrence of one person or group abusing or stealing from another, not just for “my tribe” but for anyone, anywhere on the planet. Where is freedom? Let’s go back to this. Freedom means freedom for those I most disagree with, or it means nothing at all.
In these notes I’ve tried to escape the addiction of political opinions. I’ve probably failed, but I hope you can understand what I’m trying to look at, standing side by side with you, observing these brief minutes we share of human existence.
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You might also like to read: The Sanctity of (Pure) Life
