Once upon a time, there was a group of Europeans who left Europe. They didn’t really want to, but felt they had no choice. By leaving, they escaped religious persecution and were able to found a new nation that they could run along the lines of their own enlightened principles. It would be a place where they could be safe from oppression and have unlimited economic opportunity.
In this, they had some support from European powers and were granted a territory to call their own. Of course, as is so often the way of things, the land that they were to build their colony upon was not entirely unoccupied. There were a few people, of a sort, already living there. Not many, and not the kind who mattered, just non-European infidels.
Besides, they were poor, backward, and weak. In the end, they were unable to militarily defend themselves, which turns out to be relevant because many of the locals were inexplicably violent—as though they resented having their land taken from them by outsiders—and had to be beaten down. Things got messy.
Now, I don’t want to say that the colonists committed genocide, as such, but the aboriginal population had to make room for them. And whenever people are forcibly relocated en masse, there are going to be some causalities. The natives weren’t killed off entirely, just pushed aside and relegated to inferior status, where they remain.
Decades passed. More immigrants flooded in to settle this new land, crowding out the locals further. History happened. There were wars and independence and more wars. All along, there was colonial oppression and what we would call terrorism. And there was, despite the latter and because of the former, growing prosperity. At least for the people who mattered: the colonizers.
Flash forward to the present. This new nation, conceived in liberty, was wealthier and more advanced than its neighbors, but its success had been built upon a foundation of colonialism and injustice, and much of the latter was ongoing, albeit somewhat evolved. Now its special position is maintained by military power, exceptionalism, and a disregard for international norms.
That’s how we got here. The question that remains is what can we do do about it today? Or, more simply, now what?
Well, the obvious answer is to reverse history. Send the Europeans back to Europe, where they (presumably) belong, at gunpoint if need be. Confiscate their wealth and leave everything behind to the natives; or to their descendants, anyhow. Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong: this is it.
But before we move on to better alternatives, we should probably resolve some ambiguity: what nation are we even talking about? There’s an obvious answer, and it fits, but it’s not the only one. Yes, this could be the history of the United States of America, but it could also be the history of the State of Israel. In key ways, this would even fit the history of the Republic of South Africa. Colonialism happens all over and all the time, and is all much the same.
Let’s focus on Israel. The idea that it ought to exist is called Zionism, and it is not entirely uncontroversial. This controversy existed even before the country did, even among Jews. These days, there are many critics of Israeli policy, particularly regarding the civil rights of its aboriginal people; the Palestinians. Some of these critics would go so far as to call themselves anti-Zionist, but what does this really mean? Well, by definition, it is a rejection of the idea that Israel, as the Jewish state, should exist.
There are people for whom this entails a great expulsion, sending the Jews back to Europe, where they (presumably) belong. For others, the Jews would simply be deported six feet under, much as in a certain Final Solution. Really, these two plans are pretty much the same in the end: forced relocation at gunpoint means a lot of guns going off, and genocide means a lot of people fleeing to avoid being massacred by their former neighbors.
The people supporting these ideas are, to put it bluntly, crazy and evil. We are no more going to kill off or expel the European colonizers from Israel than from America or South Africa. As horrible and bloody as the history of colonization is, decolonization cannot entail genocide. What needs to be expelled is the colonialism, and the inequity it generates.
It could be argued that the Jews did not and do not deserve a state of their own, particularly one created on top of an existing state and its people, and Israel should never have been reinvented in the 20th century. It could be, but that would be a moot point. Israel exists and can either continue its current path, be destroyed, or improved. That last option is a saner sort of anti-Zionism.
This form is defined as the opposition to the notion that the Jews deserve an ethnostate of their own; a country where Jews are first-class citizens and non-Jews are second-class, and not necessarily even citizens. In other words, it is an opposition to Israeli Apartheid, which is called Hafrada (literally the same word, only in Hebrew instead of Afrikaans).
What this means is that Israel should continue to exist as a state, but not an ethnostate. It should not have the Jews (or anyone else) installed as the permanently-dominant ethnic group. It should not have a backdoor for Jews, and only Jews, to emigrate. It should separate church and state fully, instead of giving the Jewish religion power over secular matters, including marriage and immigration.
This anti-Hafrada stance is anti-Zionism for those who are not sociopaths or antisemites, but that antisemitism is the elephant conspicuously in the middle of the anti-Zionist room. Antisemites, particularly among the populists on the farleft, use criticism of Israel as a cover for their hatred of Jews.
As liberals, this puts us in the odd position where nothing we say is acceptable. When we criticize Israel for its apartheid, we are grouped together with the antisemites and their bigotry against Jews. When we criticize antisemitism, we are grouped together with the Zionists and their bigotry against Palestinians. Both of these extremes are wrong and there is a sane middle ground for liberals to occupy that consistently rejects bigotry instead of siding with one form over another.
These extremes map partially to the left/right continuum. Knee-jerk support for Israel, with a concomitant demonization of Palestinians, is endemic to the far right, even among overt antisemites, but also to the older generations of American Jews. Knee-jerk opposition to Israel, with a concomitant demonization of Jews, is endemic to the far left, even though they are nominally opposed to bigotry. It is only the moderate, liberal left that avoids these two traps by rejecting bigotry without engaging in it.
I could go on about the problem of Israel providing fuel for antisemitism by claiming to be the Jewish homeland and therefore the global representation of an ethnic group, or into the details of the many forms of anti-Zionism, some of which preceded the creation of modern Israel, or into single-state vs. two-state solutions. I could, but I won’t, because these are just details.
Instead, I will end by saying that bigotry—all bigotry, always—is wrong. No matter your political leanings, if you find yourself supporting bigotry, you have gone beyond the pale. If you love or hate a nation beyond the limits of what it earns, you are a nationalist. If you side with extremists, you become an extremist. There is a sane middle ground, and we should all stay in it, even though it means offending those extremists.
The happy family: Starfox (Eros), Thanos, Mentor (A’lars)
[In a cave on Titan, a younger Thanos speaks with a younger Mentor.
Mentorlooks much the same as we know him now, only his hair is still brown, albeit with dignified streaks of gray, and he wears a goatee with sideburns.
Thanos looks to be in his late teens, deep-voiced and generically athletic but as yet lacking the muscular bulk. His skin is somewhat less purple than we’re used to. He wears a full, carefully trimmed beard that conceals his odd chin grooves, and what appears to be a full head of dark hair styled very much like Mentor’s.
We come upon them in the middle of a convenient expository lump.]
Thanos: So, I do understand that I am both Eternal and Deviant. But what is the difference?
Mentor: My son, there really isn’t all that much, when you come to think of it. Both races were created by the all-powerful Celestials’ experimentation on humans and gifted with a touch of the power cosmic. They are two equal halves of the whole, embodying the balance between preservation and progress, constancy and evolution…
Thanos: Go on.
Mentor: Well, the key is that we… that Eternals are, well, eternal: unchanging, undying. Deviants are the very essence of change, each one unique in shape and power. Most are weaker than Eternals, but some are stronger still. And…
Thanos: And?
Mentor: They age. And die. After a while. Most of them, anyhow.
Thanos: Eternals age.
Mentor: Eternals mature over the centuries but never truly grow old, just more dignified.
Thanos: I see. Is that all? Are there any other differences?
Mentor: Well, there’s appearance. Eternals look human but have been mistaken for gods, even worshipped. Deviants usually can’t pass for human. Some can, others are too… monstrous.
Thanos: But what am I?
Mentor: You’re my son. You will always be my son.
Thanos: Ultimately, am I Eternal or Deviant? Am I a god or a monster? Am I immortal or tainted with death?
Mentor: Now, now, I wouldn’t call it a taint. It’s perfectly natural for most races—
Thanos: Am. I. Eternal?
Mentor: Well, you’re not a monster of course, but it’s complicated. You are the only one of your kind, so we don’t know yet. We’ll see. It doesn’t matter, anyhow. We still love you even if you’re mortal.
Thanos: Love does not stop Death. Nothing does.
Mentor: Uhm, I guess you could see it that way. But no matter what, you’re still family.
Thanos: Family? And what of my brother?
Mentor: Eros? He is Eternal.
Thanos: Like you.
Mentor: Like me, but we love you both equally. I love you.
Thanos: Of course. I must go now. I have much to think about.
Why talk of defunding the police only makes things worse
It is a huge mistake to support “Defund the Police“. I say this while being entirely sympathetic to the goal of ending abuses by law enforcement while actually doing something about crime. Once we understand what defunding means to those who hear it, it becomes clear why it is counterproductive to achieving these goals.
Emotionally, it refers to wanting to make radical changes to policing. This makes perfect sense, given the decades (or even centuries) of police being a threat to the law-abiding citizens they’re supposed to be protecting. These days, we are particularly sensitive to members of oppressed minorities being subject to police brutality, but there are also more class-oriented criticisms of the police reliably siding with capital, as well as more democratic concerns about them siding with fascism. The endless calls for reform have made some difference, but not enough. We want more.
Literally, it means taking public money away from the police. Practically, this is hard to distinguish from abolishing them entirely. When Republican misogynists talk about defunding Planned Parenthood, they don’t mean reform, they mean destruction. They’re not talking about shrinking; they want it to go away entirely. Let’s be blunt, though: nobody is abolishing the police. Nobody. We don’t even want to get rid of the entire institution because it serves an essential function.
Because of this, even though radical police reform ideas have broad support, the “defund” slogan is universally unpopular. You can findvariousstatistics , but it typically polls well under 30%, even among Democrats, even among Black people. It’s even more overwhelmingly unpopular among whites and Republicans, to the point that it’s a handy wedge issue to drive out the vote. All Republicans have to do is associate “defund” with Democrats and they win elections.
This isn’t something I just noticed. Obama called it a “snappy slogan” that loses “a big audience the minute you say it”. Biden blamed it for Democratic defeats in Congressional races, saying “that’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police. We’re not. We’re talking about holding them accountable.”
At this point, you might be tempted to interrupt with an explanation of how defund doesn’t mean abolish, actually. Get in line. There is a cottageindustry of articles trying to explain “defund” away, redefining it in terms of specific reforms. Not all of them are on message, though: some admit that it does mean “abolish”, undermining the rest.
As the polls show, this has not been successful. A proto-fascist leader known as the Great Communicator once said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” If your slogan immediately needs explanation, you have alreadylost.
What’s going on here? Fundamentally, “defund” is hyperbole. It’s an excessive claim being used to try to shift the frame away from “reform”, which is seen as too mild. It’s an attempt to lowball the negotiation by offering zero, but the only result is that the other side walks away from the table. It is a motte-and-bailey strategy, where the plain meaning is exciting but dumb, and the nuanced meaning is smarter but dull. It’s clickbait.
It’s also fundamentally missing the point. The problem with police isn’t that they’re too expensive, although they often are. It’s that they are bad. Bad at doing the job we want them to do. Bad at avoiding abuses in the process. When something is bad, you need to fix it, and that’s not likely to be cheap. Reducing funding will not improve policing.
That’s because this is not about the money. Yes, there is a finite pool of resources and every dollar spent on paramilitary extravagances like tacticool police tanks is a dollar that could have gone to social programs that make people’s lives better and potentially reduce crime through its causes rather than punishing it after it happens. To the extent that, over the long term, we improve policing and address the sources of crime, we will likely be able to spend less on policing. Right now, though, we need to retrain the police, and that will cost more, not less.
If we reduce funding and change nothing else, we should expect policing to get worse. There is already a serious problem with the police being focused, not on public safety, but on bringing in revenue through everything from tickets and fines to civil forfeiture. The police are our hunting dogs, and keeping them hungry makes them more of a danger to us than to our prey. We need to provide for them while reining them in.
Of course, there will always be some truly idealistic and naïve people who imagine that the police can be gotten rid of entirely. In their defense, we can—to some limited extent—supplement the police by shifting tasks that they’re bad at to more appropriate resources. But social workers aren’t going to stop bank robbers. You don’t bring a pencil to a gunfight.
Others insist that the police are corrupt to the core and must be replaced with something else. This “something else” invariably turns out to be… police, albeit under some other name, which is simply misleading. The problem with the police isn’t what they’re called, it’s what they do, so this would amount to PR of the most shallow sort.
“Good news! We’ve replaced police brutality with peace officer brutality.” Nothing would fundamentally change with the label.
Consider Camden, NJ, where they disbanded the entire police force, only to immediately create a new one. This was mostly a way to bust the union, but the new police force was in some ways better. Yet neighboring Newark, NJ made successful reforms without ever disbanding. Obviously, you can’t get rid of the police and it’s not at all clear that abolishing and recreating them is either necessary or effective.
I could easily fill pages with a detailed discussion of the legitimate proposals for police reform, but it would be a digression. The point of this rant is to show that, if you’re serious about fixing the policing problem, you are doing the cause no favors by clinging to a toxic slogan that appeals to edgelords, not voters.
Defund appeals to the populist left, not liberals, much less the rest of the political spectrum. It is so politically harmful that talk of defunding the police only serves to perpetuate police abuses by keeping Democrats out of power.
If you actually want to solve our policing problem, you will join the DNC in rejecting this “defund” rhetoric, not only eliminating it from your own vocabulary but pushing back on it wherever you find it.
When we speak of whitewashing, we usually mean it in the metaphorical sense of covering up or glossing over embarrassing or incriminating facts, but in the classic American novel, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer“, the eponymous protagonist encounters a type that is more literal but no less undesirable.
As the story goes, Tom is punished by being forced to spend his Saturday morning covering a fence with whitewash, a type of cheap, thin paint made from lime. He tries to avoid the hard, messy work by getting some of the other boys in town to help him, but cannot initially persuade any because he has nothing to offerthat they desire.
Tom first tries to swap chores, then talks up the benefits of having a painted fence, and finally even shows off his sore toe. He would bribe them with knickknacks if only he had enough, but he doesn’t. And he certainly can’t bully them all into compliance, so he’s out of options.
It is at this low point that inspiration strikes the clever young man with a cunning strategy that would impress even fellow fictional tricksters like Loki, Anansi, and Bugs Bunny. Instead of looking at the problem in terms of his own needs and then trying to compel others to do his bidding, he reframeshis goal in terms of what’s good for them.
Tom convinces them that he’s having fun painting the fence and that his punishment is actually an honor. This gets the boys to bribe him with knickknacks for the privilege of taking a turn at whitewashing.
It’s an amusingtrick, but not an entirely mean one. The boys actually do have fun and feel good about themselves, each proudly working hard until they tire out, only to be replaced by the next expectant customer. And the fence does get whitewashed in short order.
Clemens calls the insight behind this approach a “great law of human action”: that you must convince a person to want to do a thing, rather than try to push them to do what they don’t. We are more authentically and thoroughly motivated by internal influences such as pride and personal enjoyment than by outside incentives such as money or threats. The corollary is that these intrinsic motivations, despite seeming soft, can overcome the power of extrinsic ones. Eager volunteers work with more enthusiasm and contentment than paid, much less forced, labor.
That is particularly relevant because thehardest thing in the world to do is to convince a person to act against what they see as their own interests. No payment is high enough, no punishment severe enough; they will work grudgingly and resentfully at best, and then only so long as they are watched. They will do the work as shoddily as they can get away with, and will themselves try to get away at the first opportunity, using any method or excuse available.
Tom avoided this trap by instead framing the goal in terms of them helping themselves, not him. In doing so, he aligned their interests with his own, leaving them enthusiastic about helping. So clever was Tom that he metaphorically whitewashed literal whitewashing.
There is a lesson in this, but it’s not about literally painting fences so much as metaphorically mending them. Consider that the success of anti-bigotry depends upon getting members of the dominant group to champion, or at least acquiesce to, the wholesale destruction of their own systemic superiority through the removal of their unfair advantages over subordinate groups, and even the application of restorative justice.
This is, unsurprisingly, a tough sell. To quote Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” The key to our advances has been in reframing the issue so that anti-bigotry cannot be misunderstood as the dominant group perversely working against its own interests.
Instead of making this about white vs. Black or men vs. women or straights vs. gays, we focus on justice vs. injustice. We link the individual battles for the equality of each group into the fronts of a single war for the equality of all people. And, by envisioning the conflict at its full scope, we rise above partisanship and make room for them to join us. Here is our invitation:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
These words are as powerful as they are beautiful; they are deeply persuasive. So long as the dominant group evaluates policies against bigotry in terms of fighting injustice, they will put aside their narrow interests to make room for their broader ones. They will find common cause with those they once oppressed, abandoning non-bigotry, or even bigotry, to embrace anti-bigotry.
This works. The greatest accomplishments we’ve made against bigotry have come from sensitizing straight, white men into instinctively recoiling at even the hint of discrimination by making equality a public virtue, prejudice a public vice. Bigotry must be socially unacceptable before it can become politically, and therefore legally, unacceptable.
Yet this tentative success is neither universal nor particularly resilient. Plenty of people refuse to let go of the us vs. them framing of partisanship, and thus remain bigots. Plenty more are reluctantly on board, for now, but shockingly susceptible to falling right back into white supremacy if they can be given any reason to believe that the fight against injustice was never real and they are simply being taken advantage of.
Plenty of the former are eager to convince the latter to rejoin them, and are picking through our missteps for opportunities. Sometimes, we make it easy for them. The bigots look for cases where our efforts at anti-bigotry trigger the same sensitive sensibilities that we’ve worked so hard to instill, twisting their sense of fairness against fairness.
When they see their opening, they pounce, working to whitewash white supremacy by using junk science and false meritocracy to poke at their sense of pride and prop up white-grievance politics. Even when the bigots fail to fully convert them back to bigotry, they are often able to diminish the extent of their support for anti-bigotry, and to mingle among them for protective coloration.
From what I’ve seen, for every anti-bigot who expresses genuine concerns about our efforts going too far and crossing the line into its own form of discrimination, there are two shameless bigots making similar-sounding arguments entirely in bad faith and using them to excuse continued discrimination. This muddies the waters and gives white supremacy a place to hide in plain sight as concern trolls, while acting as a wedge.
These educated pseudo-intellectual white supremacists can lay in wait, picking off ideologically vulnerable people with plausible-seeming, idealistic arguments couched in terms of individualism, colorblindness, and equality of opportunity (but not outcome). Of course, these abstractions only “work” when isolated from historical context, maintained in a fact-free vacuum, but they are rhetorically effective because they offer permission for narrowly self-interested behavior.
To this we add motivationwhen we are baited into reacting to earnest objections as though they were coming from a camouflaged bigot, thus insulting these supporters and lending credence to their suspicion that it was all just partisanship all along. Their concealment helps the white supremacists turn us against each other, cracking our already-brittle unity at its edges.
At this point, you might be tempted to object that these bigots are wrong and MLK was right: anti-bigotry is not partisan. You would be correct, of course, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that, to the extent that we provide fodder for the partisan narrative, we reject our partners, turning them into opponents. In doing so, we increase the amount of bigotry in society instead of decreasing it, effectively shooting ourselves in the foot.
You might also harshly judge and disparage anyone who has to be coddled into supporting anti-bigotry, considering them morally weak. Once again, you would be correct, but it doesn’t matter. Our goal is not ideological purity, it is political victory; we seek supporters, not saints.
Better to have two people as lukewarm supporters than just one who backs us wholeheartedly while the other opposes us bitterly. Democracy favors broad coalitions. We need to warm a bathtub, not boil a tea kettle, lest each supporter we burn becomes an enemy we must then overcome. Overheating a few fanatics does our cause little good, because it leaves the persuadable middle cold.
You might even insist that actions taken in the name of anti-bigotry, by definition, can never be bigoted, due to such things as “historical contingencies” and “institutional power”. Putting aside, for the moment, whether that is correct, it doesn’t matter. It hurts us regardless because optics count.
Even the appearance of impropriety is harmful to our cause because it breeds resentmentand feeds bigotry. Even if activists like Wise are right and minorities, lacking power, are capable only of insult but not injury, it is self-injurious to needlessly insult those who would otherwise be on our side.
Even if all that’s being hurt is their pride—and it’s not—we’re attacking one of the most powerful intrinsic motivators, which is currently protecting them from falling for the ongoing efforts of white supremacists to expand their base at our expense. We do not have the luxury of spurning members of the dominant group who are willing to join our side by treating these volunteers as servants. Moreover, Wise is wrong.
You might argue that all this shouldn’t be the case, that their commitment to anti-bigotry should be principled and unconditional, and you would be correct, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how you think things should be, only how they are. And only by recognizing how they are can we begin to change them to be how they should. To mold reality, we must acknowledge—but never accept—it and we must plan accordingly.
This starts with reading the room and being pragmatic, not idealistic. This results in choosing defensible policies that are moderate, not extremist; eschewing what avoidably alienates our own supporters. We have to go to war with the soldiers we have, not the ones we want, so blunders here lead to unforced errors that only benefit white supremacy.
Case in point, what initially motivated this rant was an insightful but tone-deaf essayopenly arguing in favor of reverse discrimination under the medical-sounding euphemism of “evidence-based”. What it gets right is that truly colorblind policies perpetuate inequality and are therefore insufficient for anti-bigotry. What it gets wrong is that its solution demands a double standard, where discrimination is seen as acceptable so long as it counts as “punching up” against white supremacy.
They justify this by saying that “we are always discriminating”, so why not do it in our favor? In fact, they explain this at conspicuous length, complete with hiring matrix charts and two kinds of bullet lists, while excusing the decision to overlook more-qualified candidates by putting the blame on the preferences and comfort of the community, and parents, and students, as well as by invoking economic and public relations interests.
These are literally the same arguments long used by white supremacists to justify segregation. The bigots say that their customers or clients would prefer to do business with a straight white man. They talk of how it would look if they had “those people” living next to them or working alongside them. They insist that students or employees would be more comfortable, and therefore productive, around their own kind. They describe their actions in terms of following the will of the shareholders or families.
There is an endless litany of mealy-mouthed excuses for discrimination based on satisfying the unanalyzed, bigoted preferences of stakeholders. “I’m not bigoted”, they protest, “I’m just trying to give these people what they want, which just so happens to be bigoted. Don’t look at me!”
Even if you overlook these fatal problems and conclude that their argument is intellectually valid, it is not politically compelling. It’s a rhetorical failure because “when you’re explaining, you’re losing” and this tries too hard to explain away what would otherwise be summarily rejected.
It seems that the old “trust me, I’m a doctor” line doesn’t work so well when your doctorate is in sociology, because the field is seen as politicized. As a result, if they have to explicate the many, subtle, nuance-tinged reasons why, in context, it’s ok for us to do something indistinguishable from what we’ve been arguing against all along, they have already lost. It wouldn’t matter even if they were right (and they’re not).
That essay, however well-thought-out, well-written, and well-meaning, is part of a cottage industry of professional apologetics, defending bigotry committed in the name of anti-bigotry, and I’ve argued against this many times before. I will continue to argue against it, and I insist that I am correct in doing so, but it doesn’t matter. The harsh lesson history beats into us is that being right is not enough; it is never enough. It is necessary, but insufficient.
This is a practical matter, not a merely academic one. We must put aside the temptation to treat bigotry as a philosophical issue for abstract debate and instead apply Realpolitik because the stakes are too high to do otherwise. Gone are the days when straight, white men could think themselves safe, up in their ivory tower, exercising the unearned luxury of contemplating bigotry on a wholly theoretical basis because it doesn’t affect them.
MLK was prescient back when he referred to it as “a threat to justice everywhere“. An interminable term of Trump, blighted by detention camps for children and hundreds of thousands of avoidabledeaths, and punctuated by an attempted coup, has made it painfully clear that white supremacy is not just a threat to Black folks and other minorities, but to democracy itself. While Trump is gone, Trumpism remains and the RNC is now the party of QAnon.
Anything that aids and enables Trumpism, no matter how high-minded and pure its motivations or abstract its ideals, is unacceptable. This is not a battle between white bigots and the minorities they hate, with everyone else watching from the sidelines. It never was, but it’s especially not anymore. We who oppose bigotry are in this together and we are under fire.
Just because some of us would be lined up against the wall a bit sooner than others doesn’t mean that this is their battle alone. We are in a war defending liberalism from fascism, defending ourselves from ruin and death. While it was never right to demand that sympathetic members of the dominant group play a subservient role and dutifully accept verbal abuse and more, now what was morally wrong is revealed to be strategically suicidal, fomenting the very bigotry it seeks to defeat. It’s not complicated:
Bigotry is wrong.
That is the simple, self-evident truth that we must center on. We must never deviate from this, our moral high ground, no matter the temptation, no matter the reasoning, no matter the explanations. As much as our enemies have shown that they have no principles, we must stick to ours, not just because it’s right, but because it is necessary; because it is our shield and our sword. Without it, this becomes a battle of naked self-interest, leading to a purely partisan fight of force against force, which we lose. The bigots have already hit rock bottom, so if we go low when they go low, we wind up six feet under.
Am I practicing respectability politics by holding us to a higher standard than our opponents hold themselves? I will respond to this criticism with the same words I used on the most recent occasion during which I was accused of this: fuck you. Do you want to win or lose? Do you want a QAnon presidency in 2024? Do you want democracy in America to end? Do you want an American Holocaust? That’s what’s at stake. If suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t be our own worst enemy is “respectability politics”, then so be it and fuck you.
White supremacy has been entrenched in America since before there was an America; the very notion of whiteness was invented to unite European colonialists—invaders, really—against the natives and the enslaved, and to justifyatrocities. It became a form of false consciousness, useful for its ability to get white people to stick together, with their economic oppressors, against their natural allies. They were recompensed for their genteel white-trash poverty with the cheap coin of white pride.
White supremacy succeeded, and continues to, because it plays the long game. Our progress against it has likewise come from playing the long game. We are taught the story of Rosa Parks, an unassuming, middle-aged Black woman who simply had enough one day and refused to move to the back of the bus. This would be inspirational on its own, but the truth is even more inspirational, and more educational. Her brave action—at the time, bus drivers could carry guns—was the intentional first step in a boycott.
It was planned, organized, considered. It was not a reflexive, kneejerk reaction. It went past immediate effects and took into account the eventual ones. Even so, she wound up being hounded with death threats until she was forced to move out of the region, yet she never gave up, she never stopped being an activist. We have to do what Parks and the rest of the Alabama NAACP did: work together and anticipate the consequences of our choices. We have to act with forethought.
There are tempting shortcuts in redressing social inequalities, direct actions such as using ostensiblytemporary discrimination to compensate for historical discrimination and its ongoing consequences. But these actions have inevitable consequences of their own, and the long-term costs outweigh the short-term benefits. We lose the moral high ground, we lose our support, we lose the war.
There are betterways to get much the same result without paying that price, without helping our oppressors oppress us. If we are to win—and we must—then we have to outthink our enemy, not stumble blindly into their traps. It is not enough to be righteous, we must be right. Our goal is correct; our path also must be.
The path that leads to equality is paved with equality. Any pleasure derived from getting revenge by (supposedly) punching up is ephemeral compared to the pain of undermining our own cause. And undermining our cause has consequences that we will not, all of us, survive.
For every action we consider, we must anticipate the reactions, and then the reactions to those reactions. We have to play the long game and we have to play to win. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.
Making an equitable world is as easy as riding a bike, only the bike’s on fire, and the road’s on fire, and you’re on fire, because you’re in Hell. The world is not inherently fair and it’s an uphill battle to try to make it so. Justice exists, but only because we create and nurture it, and then only to the extent that we do and keep on doing so. It’s as if it came with a “Some Assembly Required” sticker that grossly underestimates how much work is needed.
In a world where anything can happen to anyone at any time, it makes sense for us to stick together, to shield each other from the worst of adversities through a form of mutual insurance at the national level: the social safety net. There are fundamental needs—food, housing, medical care—that we can provide for ourselves only so long as we are fortunate enough to be economically successful.
Even then, when disaster strikes, our ability to self-insure can prove insufficient, especially when we’re living hand to mouth even in the best of times. Few people have the cash on hand to pay for advanced medical treatments such as surgical intervention or chemotherapy. In America, medical debt accounts for two thirds of bankruptcies, while 1 in 9 struggle with food insecurity, and over half a million are homeless on any given night.
America prides itself on its exceptionalism, on being the best in the world, yet when it comes to helping its own when they’re in need, it falls short. So why is our welfare state so inadequate as compared to what countries like Sweden have? Why are the people unable or unwilling to sustain the political will to make America more just? Why are we fine with funding the greatest military force on the planet, but balk at paying for welfare programs? Why guns, but not butter?
This is the question that sociologist Roderick Graham touches on in an interview on Anglerphish. I’ll just wait here while you listen to it for the next hour or so.
Graham answers in terms of the myth of meritocracy, which claims that success naturally comes to those who have the aptitude and put in the effort. What makes it mythical is that, rather than meritocracy being seen as something for us to aspire to—a fair system that rewards, and thereby motivates, our best—it is claimed that we have already achieved it.
This version of meritocracy insists that, while a class structure exists, you have effectively-unlimited upward mobility. Moreover, it claims that this mobility is not impaired by systemic discrimination, thus justifying a color blindapproach. How convenient!
That we live in a meritocracy now is nonsense on stilts. It’s not just false, it’s absurd, and malicious in that it pretends that those who succeed are always deserving while blaming the victims of societal inequity for their own failure. So why is it so popular? Why is it ubiquitous and endemic in our politics?
Simply put, because it feels good. This doctrine of non-aspirational meritocracy feeds into the just-world hypothesis, a cognitive bias towards seeing justice where none exists. In this fairy-tale world, success comes to the worthy, and this is reassuring because everyone believes that they fundamentally are.
So long as you’re a good person—and who isn’t?—you’ll be safe. When someone stumbles, it’s their own fault, so don’t worry about being next. Nobody is a victim of the system. Nobody is poor, we’re all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
The problem for just-worlders is explaining away that embarrassment. It’s not a new problem: organized religion has long struggled with the need to justify why, in a world created by an all-powerful, all-good entity, bad things happen to good people. This has even spawned a branch of apologetics called theodicy, whose purpose is to make excuses for the problem of evil.
The central tactic is to explain it away with free will, implying that those who are sick or poor or unhappy chose to be that way. This is victim-blaming, parallel to the rugged individualism ideal in American politics. A complementary solution to the problem of evil is to personify it in a malicious entity that counters the good that would otherwise happen. However, this approach requires someone to demonize.
In American secular theodicy, the fall guy is obvious: we have long blamed the victims of colonialism for their own misery, whether it’s the Native Americans whose lands we stole or the Africans we kidnapped and used as slaves. In the modern version, these historically-oppressed groups (aka “minorities”) are why honest (white) folk are suffering.
The only reason you’re not already a millionaire, they say, is that your money is being taken away by the evils of taxation and used to help the undeserving. The curiously anodyne term for this vicious doctrine is “economic conservatism“.
White Americans have historically been more than willing to go against their own economic interests so long as they believe that they are hurting Black people more. They would benefit from these social programs themselves, but that would entail allowing the disadvantaged and “unworthy” to benefit more, closing the already-shrinking gap between white trash and BIPOC.
Another way to look at this is that the self-interested wealthy can reliably use the existence of Black people to keep poorer white people from demanding economic equality. Even when we made progress, such as through FDR’s New Deal, which created the welfare state, this was only made possible at the expense of racist policies which threw Black people under the bus.
In Sweden, who plays the role of this outgroup that gets blamed? For a long time, nobody, which is why Sweden was able to install a social safety net worthy of the name, while America could not. But this is changing. Sweden was effectively a monoculture, but as immigration by visibly-foreign refugees has provided a convenient target, right-wing populist nationalism has been on the rise. The paradox is that white supremacy opposes multiculturalism but requires the threat of it in order to justify its own existence.
The defining conceit of populism is that there exists such a thing as The People, a monolithic, homogeneous group whose interests it represents. Multiculturalism denies this, which is why it is an inevitable target. This is perhaps more visible on the populist right, with its blatant bigotry, but the populist left is also fond of denigrating equal rights as “identity politics“.
So why aren’t we Sweden? Fundamentally, because our roots in colonialism ensure that we always have minorities to blame for our problems. What can we do about it? That question does not allow a simple answer, but the solution starts with understanding the problem and frankly addressing it.
Ultimately, any successful policy that helps the disadvantaged and the oppressed has to be seen as also helping white people, else it will never be implemented. We have to undermine the narrative of the blessed monoculture, anticipate the willingness of white people to sabotage the good of all, and counter that framing at the policy level. And this entails opposing populism in all its forms.
When is a democracy not a democracy? When it serves The People instead of the people.
In this, the season of Festivus, let us air our grievances about the politics of grievance. Let us consider how a movement of the people, by the people, and for the people can somehow omit all the people who disagree with them, or just look different. Let us discuss how left and right don’t seem to matter nearly as much as democracy and its alternative. But, first, let us begin at the beginning:
The core principle of representative democracy is that our government rules with the consent of the people. It is not an outside entity that imposes its will upon us. Rather, it is created and legitimized by our will.
Even when the government is chosen by the narrowest majority, or a mere plurality, it must serve the good of all. Given this, it should be no surprise that politicians describe themselves as representing the people. That is literally their job, so emphasizing it is an obvious bit of campaign rhetoric.
In small doses, this appeal to populism is just that; rhetoric. Everyone does it and it doesn’t mean much. In heavy doses, it becomes something else. It is no longer a flavoring added to spiceup boring politics as usual but instead turns into a tongue-searingdish of its own, where the main ingredient is grievance, and serving the good of all is no longer on the menu.
Populism is the ideological framework that contrasts The People, who are inherently good, against the corrupt elite. The central conceit is of a Manichean battle that the righteous are destined to win yet are unjustly, albeit temporarily, deprived of their due sovereignty by the crooked establishment and their “rigged” system. They deserve to be in charge because their hearts are pure and their cause is just, so anything that stands in their way isn’t merely political opposition, it is evil.
When populists speak of The People, they never mean all the people, just the clean ones, the pure ones, the Herrenvolk. They’re the extraordinarily ordinary folks who actually matter. They’re the salt of the earth from the heartland, not coastal elites; neither overwashed nor overeducated. They aren’t pretentious; they work for their money and just know what’s right without overthinking it.
You’ll recognize them easily because they look just like you, not like the others; the outsiders who need hyphens to distinguish them from the norm, such as African-Americans. No, they’re the Unhyphenated-Americans; the real Americans. They’re the default that Central Casting provides when you don’t specify an ethnic.
Populism favors this dominant group, believing that it’s not quite dominant enough, not like it should be, not like in the good old days, when “those people” knew their place and life was easy if you were lucky enough to be born into the right station. In America, this means that it is invariably white-centered, if not necessarily white supremacist. It is anti-anti-racist, if not always racist. Except when it’s just plain white supremacist and racist, which is often.
Populism is white grievance politics with an anti-establishment bent, so The People they mean are white people, particularly the ones whose whiteness is unimpaired by the lack of a penis or the presence of an uncommon sexual orientation or identity. No matter what their rhetoricsays, no matter how loudly or frequently they say otherwise, no matter what their spokesmodels look like, the actions of populists do not oppose systemic bigotry.
(More precisely, populism supports the locally-dominant identity group. In places like America and Europe, this means white people. In other places, it means other groups, but never the ones on the receiving end of systemic bigotry. For example, Erdoğan’s right-populist regime in Turkey is centered on ethnic Turks while while oppressing groups like the Kurds and gays.)
Populist leaders portray themselves as no ordinary politicians, but rather the authentic outsiders who speak with the Voice of The People, unlike everyone else. Strangely enough, they are typically from a rather different background than The People they claim to represent, one more privileged and elite.
This is immediately forgiven because a cult of personality forms around them, fueled by their willingness to promise (albeit not actually deliver) what nobody else can. And promise they do: they pander like any other demagogue, catering to the desires of their followers without feeling constrained by honesty.
They promise revolution, not evolution, rejecting incrementalism as insufficient. They represent only the interests of their loyal supporters, not their entire constituency, much less society at large. After all, The People matter more than everyone else does and they deserve to be (back) on top. What’s good for them is what’s good for America; or at least the part that’s real.
Rather than attempting to serve the common good, policy is seen as purely transactional: a bribe. Populists don’t ask what’s right for all concerned but what’s initforthem and how it hurts the enemy. Debates are viewed as auctions held by the citizens: a bidding war in which their votes are won by the politician who can offer the largest payment. When populists say policy, they mean pandering, and nobody can out-pander a populist.
They win by bluffing, since you’ll never get to cash that check. Regular politicians, in their unwillingness to promise the moon, lose immediately and are portrayed as forever betraying The People to corrupt “special interests”, which is a blanket category that encompasses everyone who’s seen as not being on the side of The People. Only populism cares about you, only populism can fix what troubles you; everyone else is trash.
Populism is based on a greedy ingroup mentality, a foundation of short-sighted, unenlightened self-interest that views the world as a zero-sum game. The People, they believe, can only succeed at the expense of everyone else. This leads directly to nationalism, xenophobia, nativism, and isolationism. It likewise rejects patriotism, pluralism, internationalism, and globalism.
Populists don’t actually believe in foreign policy, as such, because they fundamentally don’t care about anyone but their own faction of their own nation, much less the rest of the world. Their motto: America First, and fuck everyone else!
War is to be avoided, not because of its inherent evils, but because nobody else is worth dying for and it’s not like we’re the ones being invaded. War would be ok if it served our interests, though. Populists are not pacifists, just isolationists, and they’re very, very selective about which wars matter.
Foreigners don’t matter either way, but they’re fine unless they become immigrants or—especially—refugees, in which case they’re corrupting our national character and must be blocked at the border. Naturally, free trade is bad, protectionism is good.
Fundamentally, populism is a purity cult, fixated on separating the clean from the unclean. Populist policies aren’t just empty promises, they’re litmus tests to trap the unwary. If you’re a sensible, honest politician who refuses to overpromise, you fail. If you’re a reasonable, moderate person who values making things better over making them perfect, you fail. If you fail, you’re the enemy; not just wrong, but less than human.
All opposition to populism is demonized and delegitimized. Because populism is rooted in the politics of exclusion and rejects compromise and cooperation as signs of impurity and weakness, it struggles to attain the sort of numerical majority that a democracy requires for victory. Populism, ironically, is not popular, even though it necessarily insists that it is.
When it loses, as it often does in a healthy democracy, instead of this being accepted as a not-so-subtle hint that they lack a mandate, it is written off as proof that the system is “rigged“. After all, how could they legitimately fail when they, and only they, speak for The People? Inconceivable! No, it must be democracy itself that is broken, unfairly allowing the votes of the “wrongpeople” to count.
In fact, democracy itself is “rigged” against populism in that voting favors broad alliances among people with common, or at least compatible, goals. Populism works by boiling a tea kettle instead of warming the bathtub. It overheats its captive audience by pandering to them relentlessly while leaving everyone else cold. So populism must reject the legitimacy of democracy and support anti-democratic and typically racist practices and policies in order to remain viable.
It is always extremist, regardless of which extreme, since it rejects compromise and demands massive, immediate change. Its motto here amounts to “go big or go home”, which translates to “fake it until you make it”. This not only includes the neverending triumphalism and pandering, but various forms of cheating. These are justified because the system is “unfair” anyhow and any action is acceptable in the service of The People because their cause is righteous.
The perceived enemies of populism, however varied, are characterized as a homogeneous elite establishment led by all those boring wonks who are so “corrupted” by experience, competence, and expertise that they can’t be trusted to put ideology above facts. What makes them so terrible is that they do not serve the interests of The People, the deserving ingroup, but instead favor outgroups comprised of those who are not first-class people.
The list varies somewhat, but targets typically include the educated and expert (and their unwanted facts), the government (especially the non-political careers that constitute the dreaded “Deep State”), corporations (the bigger the better), immigrants (who can’t pass as white), foreigners (ditto), the usual oppressed groups (with permanent tans), and especially the undeserving rich (but not the deserving rich, naturally). The only way to get out of the line of fire is to emphatically endorse the correct flavor of populism, in which case you get a free pass, no matter what.
Expertise itself is suspect; only loyalty matters. Valuing expertise is “elitist” and any politician qualified for the job is unworthy of it. The irony is that a populist who actually wins political office is at great risk of being rejected by the very people who put them there, because it’s hard to maintain the appearance of purity while being part of the system, especially if you want to actually get anything done. Yet when you don’t get anything done, that’s hard to reconcile with what you overpromised in the first place, which makes you a sellout. You just can’t win here, except by lying shamelessly.
Truth, being objective and therefore unmoved by political beliefs, can be inconvenient, so the populists avoid it. They reject the scientific community, academia, and mainstream media, and instead hold themselves firmly inside an ideological bubble, getting their information only from trusted sources. These sources are trusted because, like their populist leaders, they pander to their beliefs, telling them what they want to hear and engaging in conspiratorialthinking. They are politically correct, which is the only kind of correctness that counts.
Even better, these partisan propaganda mills encourage tribalism by ruthlessly attacking the enemy in badfaith while giving their own a free pass no matterwhat. When your leader makes a gaffe, they’re just blunt and honest and we need to understand it in its full context. When your enemy says something that sounds bad when taken out of context and willfully misinterpreted, repeat it endlessly.
In an amazing feat of projection, populism characterizes the enemy as self-interested and unscrupulous, and campaigns on rooting out this corruption. When it wins, it is always corrupt, even more so than what it replaces. It drains the messy but productive swamp only to fill it with raw sewage. This hypocrisy is the inevitable result of raising the bar so high that nobody could possibly pass it, and then making exceptions for themselves. The rejection of expertise in itselfpermits corruption, because appointments are made on the basis of loyalty and ideological commitment, even when that ideology is incompatible with the requirements of the job.
Declaring all politicians (except for the pure outsiders of your populist faction) to be corrupt insiders means never having to invest in the time and effort of sorting the good from the mediocre from the bad. It takes no thought or research to extol unjustified distrust of our institutions. Declaring that only your wildest demands are acceptable for consideration as policy avoids the need to carefully analyze alternatives and consider compromises. It takes no thought or effort to make demands that cannot realistically be fulfilled. Being a populist means never having to think too hard.
This anti-intellectualism is not a defect, but a selling point. Populism offers lazy, simplistic solutions, painted with the broadest of brushes. It is high-concept politics for low-information voters, catering to the sort of apathetic cynicism of those who don’t want to put in the effort to learn the gritty details. Because The People who matter are supposedly uniform in their wholesome interests and goals, there is no need to consider how policies could hurt some while helping others, and especially not how oppressed groups are skipped over or stepped on.
The establishment and its experts can’t be trusted, but the common sense of The People is more powerful than all that ivory-tower nonsense, anyhow, they say. Non-populist politics are dismissed as slow-moving, out of touch, and unpopular with those who count. Reasons why change takes time are treated as excuses. Risks from rapid change are ignored.
Despite some interesting differences, all of the above applies to both left-wing and right-wing populists. They may be on opposite extremes of the left/right continuum, but they form a horseshoe by bending in the expert/populist dimension. When they meet there, what most unites them is their shared hatred of liberalism and democracy.
Whether it manifests as fascism or socialism, populism has no room for what actually makes America great. Its laser-focused dedication to The People is incompatible with the needs of the people, especially the ones who are already disadvantaged. It cannot sustain a stable, competent government, cannot maintain our nation’s place in the world, and ultimately leads to tragedy.
Populism arises in response to crises, whether real or perceived, and then proceeds to make things even worse. This engenders disaster politics, where you break things so that the voters cling to you in despair when you tell them that only you can fix it. The natural end of all populism is sadopopulism, a self-perpetuating positive-feedback loop that destroys what it touches and touches everything.
The solution begins with awareness. We have to recognize that the populist factions of the major parties are distinct. Left-populists aresimplynotliberals. Right-populists are simply not conservatives. We cannot allow them to hide in our midst and undermine us. Blocking these populist extremists politically allows us to restore prosperity, under which populism cannot thrive.
In the longer term, the fight for liberal democracy and against populism requires education and legislation, but it all starts with breaking the cycle of destruction. And that starts with understanding what populism is and why it must be stopped. We can have a government that works, but only if we can keep it out of the hands of those who benefit from its failure: the vulture populists.
Like all right-thinking, left-leaning people during this festive season, my mind turns to pie: how to bake it, how to eat it, but mostly, how to divide it up. That’s really the hard problem. We are a wealthy country but that wealth is not distributed to each according to their need. It’s not distributed nearly enough; it pools towards the top, like the blood in a person who’s hanging upside down going to their head and causing dizziness.
Inequality is as American as, well, apple pie. We are a country founded on colonialism and slavery and we continue to intergenerationally segregate the haves from the have-nots through a caste system whose existence we would prefer to overlook. These colonial origins, as well as the ubiquitous sexism of the time, lead to strong ties between identity groups and wealth distribution, but there is a political faction trying to shift our focus away from this.
The socialist populists—from Bernie Sanders to AOC—take a Marxist, class-reductionist view of issues. They rail against the 1%, insist that only they truly speak for the working class, and tell us not to pay attention to race or other identity groups, which they consider to be distractions from class warfare’s goal of eating the rich (by which they mean the older).
This has brought the topic of economic class back into the public eye, so while I reject their exclusivist framing and socialist overcommitment to economic determinism, it benefits us to understand what’s being discussed. The first thing to understand about class is what it’s not.
Class is not income, although they’re related. Sure, a poor person has low income, by definition, but your paycheck doesn’t directly determine your class. An experienced plumber might make more per hour than a school teacher, but he’s blue-collar and she’s white-collar; two distinct classes. She has steady work in a safe, quiet office while he gets paid only when he’s on the clock, and his work involves such tasks as sticking his hands into raw sewage at a noisy, dangerous construction site.
Class is also not wealth. The youth of any class have more relative debt (meaning a higher debt-to-asset ratio) and less overall wealth than the older members of their own class. They often lack assets—no house, no car, no financial investments—and have taken on significant debt—not only college loans but credit cards and other arrangements. The elder may well have debt, but that mortgage is offset by the house it’s on, they actually own their car instead of leasing it, and have accumulated IRA’s, 401(k) plans, and other investments. The age-related wealth differences within a class often exceed the differences between adjacent classes.
Still, class is more closely associated with wealth than income, because wealth can accumulate through generations and give higher-class people a safe base to retreat to if their own efforts fail. When your dad owns a huge company, you have the luxury of working as an unpaid intern to get experience, or “borrowing” some money from him to start up your own company, content that you’ll have a place to live even if it fails and won’t ever have to pay that “loan” back, regardless. And, of course, daddy can also give you a job, which directly grants you income.
Ultimately, class is defined in terms of education, employment, and wealth accumulation. While there is mobility in both directions, classes vary in terms of resilience and opportunity, where resilience is the ability to avoid falling into a lower class when things get bad, and opportunity is the ability to improve your situation; to move on up and finally get your piece of the pie.
Finally, class is familial, not personal. A stay-at-home mom could be rich or poor, depending on the rest of her family. The working members of a family often have jobs that are typical of different classes, but the family as a whole is of a single class, usually rounded upwards. Young children’s class is determined solely by their parents’. And two people with an identical income from identical jobs could be of very different classes because one of them comes from wealth and can live off their trust fund indefinitely.
A typical sociological model of the basic class structure of America is broken up into four categories, each with lower and upper subdivisions. Really, it’s three classes and an underclass:
Lower class (15% to 20%)
Working class (30% to 40%)
Middle class (40% to 50%)
Upper class (1% to 3%)
The lower class consists of the trulypoor. They typically lack a high school education, stable employment, a reliable food supply, or secure housing. This is a bad place to be, yet tens of millions are stuck here. It is a category that should not exist in the richest country in the world, and could go away tomorrow if we decided to make it so, saving us money in the process. We simply lack the political will to get rid of poverty, as that would require admitting that it’s undeserved.
The lower lower class is destitute: effectively, if not always literally, homeless and cashless. Even the upper lower class is dirt poor and just one bad week away from hitting rock bottom. They make money for a while, but not much, and not for long, and never enough to get them out of the hole. They may share cramped public housing with extended family or camp out in their beat-up old car, but are forced to move around often, and they’re rarely comfortable and safe.
Wealth does not accumulate because there’s little income, which is immediately spent on needs, and family structure can be quite unstable. One contributing factor to this is the risk of incarceration; the poor are over-policed. They cannot defend themselves from prosecution for crimes of desperation, and are particularly vulnerable to over-prosecution and over-sentencing for victimless drug-related offenses. Lack of access to medical services, including birth control, is also a factor.
The working class consists of families whose jobs typically require no more than a high school degree and involve unglamorous manual labor. Their income is from wages; it is paid by the hour, hence limited by how many hours they can get. They’re the ones who clock in and clock out, and fight for overtime hours.
The lower working class is unskilled labor, also known as the working poor. This includes minimum-wage service jobs such as cashier or waitress or janitor, with low pay and little opportunity for advancement. They might do grunt labor or stay on their feet all day, fetching and carrying. This hard work gets them just enough money to avoid being lower class, but they’re still poor in any reasonable sense of the word. In particular, they have little ability to accumulate savings and are therefore vulnerable to becoming fully poor after any crisis.
The upper working class is skilled labor, known as blue collar jobs. This includes typical construction work, like plumbing and carpentry, as well as factory jobs. While they can pay moderately well, they’re physically taxing and somewhat dangerous. As alluded to above, people in this category may well have more income than those in the lower middle class; an example of class not being just money.
Note that “white working class” literally means whites who lack a college degree. Politically, they’re white trash who lean towards ignorant racism. These are Trump’s people and the left cannot appeal to them unless we throw Black folks and other oppressed groups under the bus, which is precisely what the populists hope to do with their anti-anti-racism. But, despite the rhetoric, socialist-populist demands, such as blanket college loan forgiveness, do not actually focus on the working class, for whom higher education is not a high concern.
The middle class consists of families of educated workers with white collar jobs. Their employment typically requires a college degree, or even advanced degrees. They get paid a salary, and while that can entail unpaid overtime, it also means greater stability and flexibility, as well as the opportunity for bonuses.
The lower middle class includes typical office jobs, like secretaries, line managers, and small business owners. The pay can be good but probably not great, yet it’s reliable and safe, and there is some room for advancement. They’re not rich, but definitely not poor, and not all that likely to become poor, even when things go badly. The money is enough to provide for their family and send their kids to a cheap college, which they’ll need in order to remain in the middle class.
The upper middle class consists of professionals, like doctors and C-level executives. Their advanced degrees and valuable skills grant them a high income, although often paired with strict requirements. A lawyer, for example, has a fiduciary duty to their clients and can be disbarred for violating the code of ethics. While the work is less likely to be literally backbreaking, the hours can still be daunting and the pressure is high. That lawyer’s career lives or dies on billable hours worked. There is also the mountain of debt accumulated in the process of attaining that career, and it needs to be paid down.
The upper middle class is, if not quite rich, pretty close to it in any conventional sense. They make lots of money, quickly accumulate wealth, and have excellent opportunities for advancement. They still have to work, and work hard, to maintain their standard of living, so they’re not the idle rich by any means. Still, it’s a pretty high standard of living, and while they can’t spend all day lounging at a beachfront resort, they do get to vacation at a nice one every winter. And when they talk to their kids about college plans, the topic is “which”, not “whether”.
The middle class is, by any measure, the largest class. There are more middle class people than working class; almost as many as the working and lower classes combined. They form the societal baseline of the country, the norm against which others are compared, and none of them can be reasonably described as poor.
The upper class is just plain rich. They control about a quarter of the total wealth and don’t actually need to work; a defining characteristic of their class. When they do work, it’s in positions of influence and power, whether as captains of industry or political leadership. The bulk of their income is in the form of equity; options, dividends, and share value growth. These are often obtained as a bonus, and some take only a token salary. Aside from what their optional job provides, they have relatively passive income from investments, including the ownership of businesses and real estate.
The lower upper class is new money; they actually earned it, more or less. The upper upper class is inherited wealth; it was accumulated by their ancestors and passed down to them, however undeserving or even disappointing they might be. Jeff Bezos is lower-upper; George W. Bush is upper-upper (and very much undeserving and disappointing). The latter group has more prestige and power, especially politically, even though the former can have more wealth.
I’m tempted to add more commentary and analysis, especially on the interplay between class and immutable identity categories, such as gender, race, and ethnicity. It should be clear that employment is gendered, with women often taking jobs from a class lower than comparable men, leading to the pattern of families with a husband in an upper middle class job while the wife works in a lower middle class one. It should also be clear that low class correlates strongly with distance from whiteness in an intersectional way.
It should be clear, so I don’t think I need to rant about it, at least not here and now. I believe that this blog entry works better as a monograph on what class is than as a failed attempt at something more exhaustive. I should also mention that there are various other ways to divide society up, and the summary I offer is a typicalone from sociology.
The big problem is that class and identity are inextricably bound up, and trying to isolate one from the other serves neither. The white working class bigots reliably vote against their economic interests because racism promises to increase the gap between them and the “undeserving” minorities, even though the same policies impoverish them both.
So while we should understand class and be able to speak in terms of it, we should also understand that there’s more to it than that. The path to economic equality cannot ignore bigotry.
The Justice Democrats are the left–populist PAC that is responsible for AOC and her skinfolk squad. Their stated goal is to be the “Tea Party of the Left”: to take over the DNC the way the Teabaggers took over the RNC. Their method, likewise, is to attack complacent moderates in safe districts at the primary level. Their end game is for the entire DNC to be purged of liberals, who are to be replaced with populist pod people.
These actions are frequently defended as “pulling the DNC to the left” and “demanding a voice”, but this is a false narrative. To understand why, just consider the alternative.
Imagine if a group of people—people who reliably vote Democratic but are underrepresented in its leadership and policy focus—decide that they want their seat at the table. They insist upon more substantive representation from the party, which is to say the promotion of politicians who support their interests, whether or not they look like them.
Notably, they do not demand the replacement of the “establishment” with their own partisans. They do not insist that only their own agenda should be followed and everyone else has to wait their turn. They do not threaten to throw away their votes in protest if they don’t get their way.
Actually, this doesn’t take any imagination: it already happened. Black people put their foot down and insisted upon Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They have, quite successfully, pulled the focus of the party back towards the restoration of equal rights, both civil and human, and have not done so at the expense of other groups.
In contrast, the left-populists are not content with influence in line with their numbers and degree of support, they want full ownership. They brag that they will destroy the DNC as we know it and turn it into another dysfunctional, extremist-controlled party, exactly like the RNC.
The populists don’t want compromise, they want every one of their slogans, like M4A and GND and Free College, enacted into law immediately. They want their eat-the-rich agenda to crowd out the core liberal goals of equal rights. And their own goals are selfish to the point of being anti-social. Their platform of intergenerational economic cannibalism is good for them, at least in the short term, at the exclusion of everyone else.
Let’s be serious: if the left-populists knocked on the flap of the Big Tent of the DNC and wanted a seat, they’d get it. But they’d have to be content to sit in it, not stand on the table and try to bully us into submission. They’d have to reliably vote Democratic and accept that their influence on policy would be proportionate, not absolute. In short, they’d have to be completely different from how they are today.
As it stands, the left-populists, are not a faction of the DNC, they are a hostile party trying to destroy it. They are the enemy within; inside our borders but loyal only to themselves. This war is not infighting for the simple reason that they are not Democrats; they’re invaders who don’t even see themselves as Democrats.
We live in interesting times. The left-populists, having exhausted all other options, are finally getting on board with us against Trump, however belatedly and half-heartedly. But we must not forget who they are—what they are—after Trump is deposed and they come around demanding payment for their 11th-hour support.
Remember, these people didn’t join us until after it looked like we were going to win. They’re rats leaving a sinking ship and jumping onto our bandwagon with the intent of turning it into their new breeding ground. They’re not here to join the party, but to take it over.
They are here to colonize us; to consume us from within and live in our skin. But even if they succeeded in their coup, they would never be Democrats because they do not share our values and are not committed to liberalism. Left-populism is just white grievance politics with a Marxist bent. It’s angry young white men impatient with their rich grandparents refusing to die immediately and leave them an inheritance.
They’re not the reason for our upcoming victory over Trump; they’re why we had Trump in the first place. They stabbed us in the back in 2016 and they will gladly do it again in 2020 by continuing their war against the Democratic Party while we are distracted by the job of putting out Trump’s fires and Building Back Better.
They will insist that we owe them everything, but we owe them nothing. All we can offer them, and then only in return for a lasting ceasefire, is the limited influence that some of them claim is all they demand.
Over 150,000 dead so far, and this will only increase.
Short walks down long piers.
As you jog down the pier, early in the morning, you see someone in the water, flailing to stay afloat. They’re drowning and there’s nobody around but you. Fortunately, there’s a floatation device—aptly called a lifesaver—nearby, attached to a rope on a reel. All you have to do is trigger the control to lower it into the water and rescue them.
Do you pull the lever to save them or do you walk away?
Many pages have been filled by philosophers debating scenarios akin to this one, but sophisticated analysis is wasted on so simple a case. It’s open and shut. Whether they arrive at the obvious conclusion through tedious reasoning from first principles about deontology, virtues, the veil of ignorance, utilitarianism, or some other idea, no system of ethics deserving of the name will contradict what common sense and empathy make plain: You have a moral obligation to save the person who’s drowning.
There are people who would deny this. Some are simply evil; there’s not much to say about them. Others are evil in more complicated ways, such as by insisting that you can never have a positive obligation to do anything without explicit prior agreement. This is nonsense in general, but it’s bigger nonsense in specific because we’re not saying you should risk your life by jumping in the water; all you have to do is pull a lever. How hard is that?
It is literally the least you could do as a decent human being.
But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Fact: Donald Trump is an incompetent, bigoted, corrupt traitor.
There are actually people who would deny this. Perhaps they don’t consider his mishandling of COVID-19 to be gross incompetence. Perhaps they don’t recognize the bigotry of calling Mexicans rapists. Perhaps they don’t see the corruption in funneling taxpayer money into his golf courses. Perhaps they don’t acknowledge the treason in seeking foreign aid to win re-election. Perhaps they’re oblivious to all the many examples of these failings, not to mention others.
Or perhaps—and this is far more likely—they see it all but are either happy about it because they share his worst traits or are blithely willing to overlook these “minor” faults because they’re convinced he will pander to their white grievance politics by making America great for straight white Christian men again.
If you’re one of these people who’s happy to vote for Trump, you might as well stop reading now. Sociopaths are incorrigible. There is literally nothing I could say that would convince you to do otherwise, much less feel a hint of remorse. You are a deplorable person in a basket with others just as deplorable. Reconsider your life.
Still here? If you’re one of the many who recognize what a horror show Trump is and will be pulling the lever for Biden, then there’s nothing more for me to say, other than to encourage you to vote no matter what obstacles and distractions the Republicans throw in our way. This essay’s not directed at you, but you might benefit from reading it.
If you understand that Trump is terrible but aren’t planning on voting for Biden, read on. It contains some facts that are highly relevant.
There can be only one.
Fact: The only vote that increases the chances of Trump losing is one cast for Biden.
There are other voting systems under which this would not be the case. All sorts of parliamentary and preferential and hybrid voting systems exist that would let you vote non-strategically. You could just express your preference and trust the system to pick the person who best represents the will of the people.
Not in America, though; our system sucks. We have first-past-the-post voting, so Duverger’s law ensures that we wind up with a de facto two-party system. The winner will be a candidate from one of the two major parties, so a vote for a minor-party candidate has the same impact on the results as not having voted at all.
A protest vote amounts to a protest, not a vote.
Have no fear, Underdog is here!
Fact: A minor party will not win.
Nothing stops the voters from spontaneously deciding to go with a minor-party candidate. That’s true, but only in the same sense that nothing stops all the molecules of air in the room from spontaneously going off in one corner, leaving behind a vacuum.
Polls are imperfect, but they do tell us what’s likely, and what’s statistically possible. In 2020, no polls suggest that either major party is so weak that a minor party stands a chance. For context, the best a minor-party candidate has done in modern times was Ross Perot in 1996, with less than 20% of the vote.
Currently, all of the minor parties combined are well under 10%. It’s almost as though the minor parties are called that because they’re minor. Here’s a tip: when you see “minor”, think “numerical minority”, as in the electoral losers.
Does this mean that we’re stuck with Republicans and Democrats forever? No, but if either should fall, we’d quickly restabilize with another pair of major parties. And long before such a dramatic event occurs, we’ll have plenty of warning from the polls. Until then, no minor-party candidate is viable.
If you vote for a minor-party candidate in the hope that they will win, you’re just kidding yourself.
Spoiler Alert.
Fact: You only get one vote, so where you spend it matters.
Just because a minor-party candidate can’t win doesn’t mean that they can’t help another candidate lose. Worse, it’s usually the wrong candidate.
When you have a clear preference between the two viable candidates, throwing your vote away on a non-viable one—simply because they’re closer to your ideal—means hurting your preferred candidate. The best is the enemy of the good; your ideal candidate acts as a spoiler for your preferred one, helping the one you oppose.
Given that you recognize that Trump must be stopped, a vote for a minor-party candidate is a spoiler for Biden, and therefore helps Trump. Those who “vote their conscience” are just voting their privilege, revealing their lack of a conscience.
Paying it forward.
Fact: The goal is to stop Trump.
Some respond by insisting that they don’t “owe” Biden their vote. This is not so much wrong as entirely missing the point.
It’s not about helping Biden, it’s about ousting Trump. If Biden was replaced by another Democrat, then voting for them would instead be the only option that gets rid of Trump. What you owe, to yourself and to those around you who are less privileged, is to make the decision that saves us from another term of Trump.
This is not about debt to Biden; he’s just the means to an end. It’s all about paying forward your debt to society by doing the right thing for everyone.
Be my inspiration.
Fact: The DNC does not negotiate with terrorists.
Doing the right thing is intrinsically moral; it is its own reward. However, some are unsatisfied with that.
They respond to the call of civic duty by reacting like greedy corporations, or lovelorn poets, or murderous terrorists. They insist that they want more for their vote than Biden is offering. He has to persuade them, inspire them, fill them with love. Or, more simply, bribe them with their VP of choice and promises of radical policies and free stuff. The other side of this is that, if we don’t bend the knee, they’ll kill the hostages. And, under Trump, we are all hostages.
As the passerby who rescued the drowning person, you might receive heartfelt thanks, or public admiration, or even a fat wad of cash. Or you might not. It doesn’t matter because you didn’t become a Good Samaritan for some extrinsic reward. You didn’t do it for selfish reasons; you did it because you knew you ought to, because your moral compass rejected the alternatives as perverse. Any reward is nice, and perhaps well-deserved, but unnecessary.
Now imagine if you were the one drowning and they stood above with one hand on that lever, haggling with you over how you’d compensate them for their assistance. Consider what you would think of them for attempting to take advantage of your desperate situation. This is what it’s like for them to insist on more from Biden in return for acting to stop Trump; they’re lowering themselves morally by demanding payment for doing what they should have done in the first place.
There is also a very pragmatic reason why this is wrong. If you were drowning, you might even promise them whatever they demanded, just to survive, but a commitment made under duress is not binding. A SWAT team will promise the bank robbers anything to free those hostages, but the moment their rooftop snipers have a clear shot, they’ll take it.
Maybe they could force Biden to promise them something politically infeasible, but there’s no way to hold him to it. Even if he tried to make good on it, he’d fail because he needs the support of the rest of the party, including Congress. Realistically, Biden wouldn’t promise such a thing in the first place, not only because he knows it would be a lie, but because publicly endorsing a doomed policy would hurt him with more voters than it would help.
Biden’s job is to win so that he can do his job. In return for a few fickle people whose votes he still can’t count on, he’d lose the support of moderates who are desperately looking for any excuse not to vote for Trump but are allergic to socialism. It would even drive non-voters to turn out for Trump. We learned this lesson the hard way in 2016: giving in to the populist left’s demands is a losing proposition. (More on that later.)
Ultimately, holding out for perfection in politics is as self-defeating as it is selfish. Voting isn’t marriage, it’s public transport. You’re not waiting for “the one” who’s absolutely perfect, just the next bus that will take you where you need to go. And you’re not going to get far by trying to hold the bus hostage.
Message in a bottle.
Fact: A vote is not like holding up a sign at a protest; it matters.
Voting for a spoiler certainly does send a message. Unfortunately, that message is, “I don’t care”.
They don’t care whether Trump wins. They value their ideological purity above the very real consequences to very real people, including the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who will needlessly die under a second term.
Some of them don’t seem to understand what voting is for. Voting is for selecting who wins public office. That’s it. If you want to send a message, try email. A vote is not a popularity contest with a cardboard crown as the prize. The prize is power over our lives, including the power to kill us all in a global thermonuclear war.
The loser does not get a participation trophy; they are relegated to the dustbin of history, stuck on the sidelines without the power to do anything but watch as it all falls apart, as our historical experiment with democracy comes to an end and our people die.
Voting is not a survey about what your ideal preference would be if all things were equal. Nobody cares. If you’re not voting strategically—with the goal of ensuring that your preferred candidate wins—then you’ve missed the point entirely. A vote that is earnest but ineffective is a lost chance to make a difference. It is impotent.
Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing, and voting is how you win. It is how we influence the path our country takes, not an opportunity for harmless personal expression. That’s what t-shirts are for, so buy a Che shirt with a matching COVID-19 mask and then vote for Biden to get rid of Trump.
Apples to oranges to turpentine.
Fact: There’s a best, a worst, and a lot in between these extremes.
If you support a spoiler candidate, then neither of the viable candidates matches your ideal. In the same way, neither apple juice nor turpentine is orange juice. While they’re not what you ordered, only one of them will kill you.
If all you judge drinks on is whether they’re orange juice, you can equate apple juice with turpentine; they’re both the “same” in that neither one is orange juice. But if you judge them as you should—on which one is poison—the turpentine sticks out.
Trump is turpentine. He’s a Nazi and he will kill us all. However much you’d prefer someone other than Biden, you cannot seriously lump him in with Trump. Given how much practical and ideological distance there is between that fascist and any liberal, this is the most absurd sort of false equivalence. It’s insultingly dishonest and I can’t believe anyone actually believes it; they just use it as an excuse.
Biden will restore rule of law, beginning the process of healing the wounds that Trump has inflicted. He will choose the replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who will safeguard our most fundamental rights for the rest of their life. And, perhaps most importantly, he will preside over the punishment of the traitors who tried to destroy us, setting a precedent for future would-be dictators.
In contrast, Trump would not only continue dragging us down the path to ruin, but finish undermining the safeguards that keep him—and his less senile, more vicious successors—from just doing whatever they want to us. The SCOTUS will be fully packed, our civil rights will go out the window, and we will never have free elections again. There will be genocide, famine, plague, and nuclear war.
But, hey, with Biden, you might have to opt in to Medicare instead of it being the only option. That’s basically the same as the end of the world, amirite? Who are you kidding?!
It’s easy to say that, since neither viable candidate matches your ideal, they’re both bad, but this completely ignores the difference between bad and worse. The lesser of evils is, unsurprisingly, less evil, hence relatively good. And throwing your vote away is truly evil because it only helps the very worst of evils: Trump.
Moreover, Biden is not the lesser evil because he’s not evil; he is the choice for the greater good.
Swiss marshmallows.
Fact: Marshmallows are for roasting, votes are for making a difference.
Probably the weakest of the common defenses for not voting for Biden is the idea that, by voting for neither, they are remaining neutral, not helping or harming either. Desmond Tutu rebutted this handily with: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
Since we have a moral obligation to get rid of Trump, there’s just no parallel, no equivalence. You were never going to vote for Trump, anyhow, so failing to vote does not hurt him. Since you must vote for Biden to stop Trump, failing to vote only helps Trump.
The most charitable interpretation is that they’re saying that throwing their vote away helps Trump less than voting for him would. That’s technically true, but a low bar. It doesn’t do any more to stop him than staying home and binge-watching Game of Thrones while drinking Swiss Miss Marshmallow Hot Cocoa would. It’s like bragging that, hey, at least you didn’t throw any bricks at the bobbing head of that person as you watched them slowly drown. Some hero!
Apathy is not a virtue; people are dying out there. This really isn’t very complicated; the whole argument collapses the moment we acknowledge our obligation to stop Trump. We are not Switzerland; there can be no neutrality in what is ultimately a binary decision, and roasting marshmallows won’t save America.
Sour grapes.
Fact: Your vote matters.
Perhaps the strangest, most self-defeating argument against voting for Biden is the claim that their vote doesn’t count because they’re not in a swing state.
To be clear, claiming their vote doesn’t matter is an obvious case of sour grapes. Since they can’t get their candidate, they won’t lift a finger to help us remove Trump. It’s as childish as taking the ball home because your team is losing.
Ironically, if it was true that their votes don’t matter, then although they insist that we should care what they want and therefore cater to them, they have nothing to offer us. They want us to drag the entire platform off to one side, alienating the base and depressing turnout, without replacing the votes we lose in the process. That would be political suicide, which only helps Trump.
Perhaps fortunately, it’s not true: all votes matter. This is a strange election and traditionally safe states are in play. Texas, for example, might go blue, so no red state can be written off entirely. On the flip side, we have good reason to expect truly unprecedented levels of Republican cheating. The attempt to destroy the Post Office, just as the plague has shifted voting to mail, is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no safe blue anymore.
Republican ratfucking is largely focused on two categories: foreign propaganda, like the Russian Wikileaks email attacks, and voter suppression, which includes everything from gerrymandering, to purging the rolls, to the USPS slowdown mentioned above.
The commonality is that these dirty tricks all amount to placing a thumb on the scale, not simply ignoring what the scale reads. They can block votes but not change them. It’s incremental, and each increment costs them in terms of both money and risk of getting caught. The more they have to spread themselves thin to combat democracy, the fewer resources they have available to do so. As such, every bit we do helps.
To win, it won’t be enough to have a plurality of votes, like we did in 2016: we really have to run up the score. We need a blue wave, like in 2018, that sweeps the Republicans out of office. Their cheating might overcome a 5% gap, but not 10%, and that’s where we’re heading. We just have to turn out the vote everywhere.
Even winning is not enough. We can’t just get rid of Trump, we need to demonstrate that we have an overwhelming popular-vote mandate to repudiate Trumpism itself. We need to restore democracy and hasten the natural end of the RNC as the demographic shift overcomes it, by wresting control of all three branches and purging the corruption. Once we get our country back, we can quibble about details such as which form of universal healthcare we want.
Incidentally, the need to win overwhelmingly also refutes the notion that voting for a minor party will put it above some magical percentage and make it viable. Not only is this simply false, due to Duverger’s Law, but we don’t have the luxury of votes that don’t do anything to stop Trump. There is too much on the line to get distracted by mere party politics.
Volunteers only.
Fact: There is what we must do, and then there’s everything else.
Pulling the lever to save a drowning person is morally obligatory, but there are also morally good things that are not required, and are instead supererogatory. For example, you could also buy the rescued person some lunch, or offer them a hot shower at your house, or literally give them the shirt off your back.
These laudable actions go above and beyond, so if you can do them and wish to, then you are encouraged to, but it’s not like you have to. And while they’re nice, they’re not life-saving, so they’re just not as important. You are the best judge of what you can afford to offer, and nobody can blame you for drawing that line where you see fit, so long as you’ve fulfilled your obligations.
Everyone can vote, so if you understand how terrible Trump is, you have a moral obligation to pull the lever for Biden. Filling in some circles and dropping an envelope off is not too much to ask of you. If you can do more, great, but it’s not required.
If you can spare the money and would like to donate to his campaign, feel free. If you have more time than money and feel comfortable making cold calls, there are phone banks that will hook you up. (Before Trump’s plague, volunteers would even canvass in person, going door to door.) And there are many more ways to volunteer to help Biden, from lawn signs to full-time campaign jobs, but all of them are just that: voluntary.
The reason this even needs to be mentioned is that some people respond to a direct question about whether they’re voting for Biden by asking why we’re not phone-banking for him. This is more of a diversion than any sort of argument, and it doesn’t hold up to even casual inspection.
Phone-banking is supererogatory—above and beyond—while voting is obligatory. It also misses the fact that, by arguing in favor of Biden, we’re doing exactly what we would have by phone-banking. And, of course, it arbitrarily chooses one voluntary action above all others and holds it up as some sort of standard.
Even as dishonest tricks go, this is pretty weak, but it’s a trope that these people frequently fall into. It makes sense rhetorically and emotionally, but not logically.
Rhetorically, it’s a way to dodge the question and try to refocus on something irrelevant, flavored with a bit of false equivalence between the bare minimum and the entirely optional.
Emotionally, it’s just a way for a NeverBiden left-populist to say “go fuck yourself”. This lets them shore up their hurt pride at losing their bid for control of the party by playing impossible to get. They’re just pouting.
Logically, it’s like asking whether they’re willing to pull a lever to save a drowning person and instead being criticized for not offering the shirt off your back.
Rhyming history.
Fact: Protest votes gave us Trump.
In 2016, about a quarter of the people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary ignored their moral obligation to vote for Clinton so as to stop Trump.
Of those, about half actually voted for Trump. The rest threw their vote away, whether on spoiler candidates or simply by sitting the election out. This is despite Clinton and the rest of the party bending over backwards not to offend the Berners and even giving in to as many of their demands for platform changes as possible.
It is incontrovertible that this, in itself, made enough of a difference to propel Trump into office, despite his falling short of Clinton by millions of votes. Democracy failed because the Bernie-or-Busters went bust and failed democracy. They did not simply betray the party they claim as their own, but the nation and the world.
History, they say, doesn’t repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. The way to silence it is to learn from our past mistakes. Protest votes broke democracy. Voting for Biden to get rid of Trump is the first step towards healing it.
It is the bare minimum requirement, akin to rescuing that drowning person by throwing them a lifeline. All you have to do to save the world is pull a lever or ink in a circle. What’s your excuse?
The bottom line.
Fact: There is no excuse for throwing your vote away.
Nothing I say can convince you to vote for Biden if you truly believe that Trump is at least as good a choice, but you no longer have any excuse otherwise. If you know that Trump is the worst—and you do—you must vote for Biden.
It is the only action that will get rid of Trump, so if you fall short of that low bar, you’re a Trumper in denial. Only now you know it, and so do we all.
Substantive representation, descriptive representation, and bigotry
It’s only a precision instrument until you lean on it
If you’ve been around the deli for any period of time, you know how important it is to ensure that what you’re buying is accurately measured. It is all too easy for the store to cheat by having someone put their thumb on the scale, skewing it in their favor. After the first time you take home what’s labeled as a pound of cold cuts and find that it only comes to 13 oz. on your own scale, you learn to be more cautious and less trusting.
Skewed measurement is also a fundamental problem in politics, where the public weighs in through voting. The core principle of democracy is that the legitimacy of the government is rooted in the consent of the people. Our leaders are not emperors but representatives of our will; they follow us. This is the ideal that we aspire to but all too often fall short of.
The fundamental measure of the success of a democracy is to what extent officials, particularly elected ones, act to further the goals and interests of their constituency. Distortions such as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and outright cheating leave “our” leaders free to follow an agenda hostile to those they act in the name of. They undermine the checks and balances intended to prevent them from going rogue.
When they take the power we grant them and abuse it for their own gain, this is the essence of corruption. What we instead want is a match between citizens and government on matters of policy: this is called substantive representation.
However, when you hear “representation” invoked today, it is often in a related but distinct meaning. Hashtag slogans like #representationmatters refer, instead, to the diversity of identities. That version of representation is invoked to justify voting for people on the basis of how closely they mirror the appearance of those who elected them: this is called descriptive representation.
There’s no conflict between the two, and in a fair system—one free from discrimination—we would expect that our leadership naturally exhibits demographics in line with those of the voters, just as their policies would match those of the voters. Any disparity would itself be an indicator of discrimination.
So, for example, the fact that women make up a quarter of Congress despite being half the population is a bad sign. It is indicative of systemic bigotry. But is it a symptom or the cause? How do we tease out the reason why?
In the end, there are really only two explanations for such ongoing disparity. Either the oppressed group continues to be oppressed or its members really are (as the bigots claim) inherently inferior. So if someone denies that the underrepresentation is caused by discrimination, they are necessarily bigoted. But, given that a lack of descriptive representation reveals bigotry, does increasing such representation counter it?
Well, to the extent that being a member of a group leads to representing its interests, yes, having a more descriptively representative leadership would entail having a more substantively representative one. So, for example, if women could be counted upon to support women’s issues, then having more female representatives would help women be more equally treated. But to what extent is this true?
The situation seems mixed at best. It is, unfortunately, not difficult to find examples of officials whose policies do not further the interests of the disadvantaged identity groups that they themselves are members of. For example, there are any number of women in politics who oppose women’s rights, especially reproductive rights, despite being women.
I could also offer examples such as Ben Carson, a Black man who works for an overtly racist president, denies that systemic racism still exists, and insists that it is the liberals who are actually racist. I could point to Ted Cruz, a Hispanic who supports xenophobic, racist anti-immigration policies against Hispanics. I could go on and on with examples of these identity group traitors, and I will mention a few more before I’m done, but I want to also look at the patterns.
The first women to gain entry into a boys’ club have to work extra hard to be seen as “one of the boys”. From this, you can expect that early examples of descriptive representation might fall short of substantive representation, particularly if they’re under the banner of a party opposing equality. If anything, they’d have to show themselves to be huge identity traitors in order to succeed.
Since the RNC has been the party of bigotry since Nixon, we can look to them for examples. The first Black Supreme Court Justice appointed by the RNC is Clarence Thomas and their first female VP candidate was Sarah Palin. Contrast this with Thurgood Marshall and Geraldine Ferraro, respectively, and you can see that descriptive representation can be entirely compatible with bigotry. Moreover, having a token on their side is a great way to silence criticism of their bigoted policies; the political version of “but I have a Black friend”.
Even if we limit our consideration to those who support equality, it is not clear that, say, a female advocate for women’s rights is a better choice than a male one. We might hope that a woman would care more about these issues, prioritizing them more highly, and that may well be the case. However, as was just pointed out, it is frequently not. Being a woman is neither necessary nor sufficient for supporting equal rights for women.
It might also be counterproductive. In terms of appearances and impact, when a woman speaks in favor of her own rights, it’s easy for bigots to dismiss it as mere partisanship. When a man does, that removes one counter. You have more credibility arguing for the sake of a group that you are not a member of, because it cannot be interpreted as mere self-interest. Bigots are more likely to take you seriously simply because you look like them as opposed to the people they’re bigoted against. And while it’s nice to preach to the choir, we make progress by persuading, or at least silencing, our opposition.
There’s also the problem of losing. Discrimination against a group makes it harder for members of that group to gain positions of political power so they can then fight against this discrimination. Consider that Hillary Clinton, a strong champion for women’s rights, faced rampant sexism in her presidential run precisely because she is a woman. Her husband, whose views closely mirror her own, got elected despite them because he has a penis. So, for example, the goal of equal rights for women may be better served by choosing a man, if the man can win and the woman can’t.
Even when a candidate from a disadvantaged group overcomes this disadvantage and wins, the reaction against that victory can cause harm. Blowback can be deadly. Our first Black president, merely by his existence, united the far right against him, leading to the election of Trump. The presence of a Black man in the White House enraged the racists, propelling the Tea Party into dominion over the RNC, and buoying Trump’s own foray into politics through anti-Obama Birtherism.
Trump has since made it his mission to undo all of the good that his predecessor managed to accomplish and drive us back into the days of Jim Crow, if not a post-apocalyptic Stone Age. Given all this, an argument could be made that, not only would Black people in America be better off today if we had never had a Black president, we all would.
So far, the examples I’ve given are of people who clearly do or don’t support policies that represent the interests of their own identity groups: Hillary Clinton vs. Ted Cruz. But there’s a third case that is uniquely terrible: cosplay representation.
Consider that the populist left is ostensibly in favor of equal rights, but cares only about the battle for economic equality while disparaging the rest of the war for equality as mere “identity politics“. You might think this would mean that they’d follow a color-blind approach by running the best candidates to support their policies, regardless of what they look like, but that would not be slimy or hypocritical enough.
Instead, through the so-called Justice Democrats, the left-populists have made a point of cynically playing identity politics by choosing candidates who are some combination of non-male, non-white, and non-straight. But they’re just infiltrators; definitely not substantive representation.
Just as these anti-Democrats are running against Democrats while pretending to be Democrats, they are anti-anti-bigots who are embracing the very same notions of identity politics that they disparage, using it as a tool to undermine anti-bigots while pretending to be anti-bigots themselves. And once these “minority” politicians get elected, they pursue Marxist policies that do not address bigotry. They are stealth identity traitors.
The disparity between how people look and what they do has has long been recognized, as shown by the saying, “skinfolk ain’t always kinfolk”. In other words, just because they share the color of your skin doesn’t mean they’re family: they do not have your interests at heart. Their representation is descriptive, not substantive. In the end, policy is more than skin deep, so we voters need to look deeper, too.
There’s another way that descriptive representation can go wrong, which is that it can lead to voters refusing to accept excellent candidates who do not happen to look like them. We’ve seen this lately in the case of white women who supported Elizabeth Warren attacking Kamala Harris because she’s Black. We’ve even seen a few Black people swearing they won’t vote for Joe Biden unless he chooses a VP who’s Black. This is both discriminatory and self-defeating, but it’s a natural outcome of a push for descriptive representation.
A key requirement for any official is competence. Here, the disadvantaged strangely have a leg up. Due to systemic discrimination against them, they have to “have to work twice as hard for half as much”. On that basis, we should expect the only Black woman in the Senate to be well above average, and she is. Likewise, the first woman nominated for the presidency by a major party was simply overqualified. So, all things being equal, the call for representation could lead to better candidates.
Even so, due to that discrimination, they can expect to be held to a higher standard, and treated harshly and unfairly for any real or perceived failings. Hillary is the poster child for that, with “but her email” and a host of other baseless attacks, and Harris’ “she’s a cop” is par for that course. And when one of them is legitimately incompetent, this is used to harm the political aspirations of everyone who looks like them for years.
Identity politics, when used as a slur, refers to supporting someone purely due to shared identity; for descriptive representation. This sort of tokenism does still exist and can work; witness the modest success of AOC and her skinfolk squad in leveraging their identity, both to gain votes and to defend against accusations of bigotry.
Of course, the elephant in the middle of the room when it comes to identity politics in the most negative sense is white men voting for white men. It is by far the largest-scale example, and the most harmful because they already had equality and then some, so what they sought was further supremacy. This demonstrates how the line between descriptive representation and bigotry can be blurry, or nonexistent.
Fundamentally, the problem with pushing for descriptive representation is that it doesn’t reliably yield substantive representation, and can even backfire in a variety of ways, as outlined above. The deep reason for the failure is that you can’t just fake it until you make it.
Equality of opportunity leads to equality of representation, but it doesn’t necessarily work the other way around. Pushing for appearances is voodoo politics, reversing causality. It is the tail trying to wag the dog, never addressing the root cause of inequality, only covering it up.
It also interferes with achieving the goal of equality because of Goodhart’s law, which can be phrased as “when you use a metric as a lever, it ceases to work as a metric”. In order for descriptive representation to be a useful measure of substantive representation, we can’t also use descriptive representation as the lever by which to achieve it. It would be like increasing what the scale reads by pushing on it directly with our thumbs instead of adding a few more slices of cold cuts. It’s cheating, but only cheating ourselves.
Not only does seeking appearance over substance fail to move us toward our goals, it obscures how far we’ve fallen short, and leaves us vulnerable to cynical manipulation, whether it’s by a Palin or an AOC. Moreover, it can be indistinguishable from the sort of bigoted discrimination that has kept the identity hierarchy in place for all these years. You cannot attain equality as a result without being dedicated to equality in your methods.
Does this mean that we should always or never vote on the basis of identity? It’s not that simple. We should vote for the best candidates, the ones who will succeed, both in gaining power and in exercising it for the good of all. Sometimes the best candidate also stretches the envelope of representation, and that has positive consequences in itself. Sometimes the candidate is best regardless of their identity groups, or even despite them. But if we focus on descriptive representation, we undermine our own efforts and help the bigots win.
