Civic Involvement for Curmudgeons and Misanthropes
i.e. writers
To continue a thought from a few posts ago: so it’s a scary moment and we’re all trying to figure out how to make ourselves useful.
The Democrats as a party are not. They’re in a panicked sauve qui peut frenzy, and you’re seeing Dems who should know better entertain the idea of “working with Elon Musk to combat waste” (cool, I’m going to work with Jeffrey Epstein to fight child trafficking) or of backing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in his efforts to help us forge a new and more nuanced twenty-first-century position on the issue of babies getting polio. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is trying to fill the leadership vacuum and is being treated by the rest of her party, as usual, like Maoist Barbie1 . There is already a great blueprint for what the party could do (it’s also the blueprint that organizations to the left of the Democrats could have followed post-2016, and should have), and it’s been described perfectly well by decent and stalwart fellows like Pete Davis and Ned Resnikoff. It’s basically this: The Democrats should spend some of their money actually reinvigorating civic life. Rather than just saying “Elect me and I’ll rebuild civic life,” they should start doing that now, already, in whatever modest ways they can find to do, and then maybe people will want to vote for them, because even the biggest victims of dopamine culture are more often going to believe their experience of “That nice guy I go bowling with” than they’re going to believe some YouTube ad claiming that the nice guy they go bowling with is a ((((lizard person)))).
After 2016, when the DSA grew by thousands of people almost overnight, people made basically the same suggestion about DSA, that it become a wraparound organization that not only tried to make our politics better but that directly make members’ lives better. Others thought that it was important for the organization to devote all its energy to making sure Bernie Sanders became President in 2020. Probably the organization’s explosive post-2016 growth still wasn’t enough to render it able to do both these jobs well at the same time, but whatever was possible then, I think DSA could have accomplished more than it eventually did by adopting a more — stop your ears, children, I’m about to use a swear word — anarchist5 approach. Let the people who want to fix broken taillights and throw big, raucous, inclusive parties do those things. Let the people who want to elect Bernie Sanders work to elect Bernie Sanders. Most importantly, let these two broad tendencies not get in each other’s way by constantly fighting. Too often, at every level, people felt that they had to get everyone on the same page, because their pathway is the foretold Marxist pathway, and I think the results the organization now has to show for it may well be less than it would have gotten by letting people do what they’re personally good at and personally called to, but, you know, Socialistly.
I don’t know what organization is best equipped to do this. DSA has the vision, the Democrats have the money, I have unqualified faith in nobody at this point. But somebody is going to have to do it. For the overall political trajectory of this country to change, I think something like this will have to happen in some form. Someone will have to do it. I don’t think there is a “progressive,” let alone “left,” version of Ready Player One world, where we all live in material squalor and eat garbage, but it’s OK because we spend half our time in solipsistic online fantasy. I don’t think we can bend that world to our purposes, because that is already a world where a few incredibly creepy, loveless adults oversee billions of people they control. Sounds like Peter Thiel’s world to me! That’s high-tech feudalism. I’m not saying “It’s bad for a progressive politician to stream themselves playing Fortnite ” or whatever, you’ve gotta start where you are and you don’t get anywhere by being a hyper-disciplined prig who nobody can relate to, but there is no version of Marxism, anarchism, democratic socialism, social democracy, or just democracy that lets us all be, in effect, emotional children who work 20 hours a day. To put it in literary terms, I think democracy2 takes place in realist mode,3 and you either have to figure out how to invite a large-enough mass of people to love and enjoy realist mode at least some of the time4 or you have to give up on democracy. Even the most radical democracy — no billionaires, no millionaires, no private ownership of the means of production, women have autonomy, people are free to change their gender as they take a mind to, everything is negotiated between workers’ councils, whatever — it all still takes place in the mode of temporary victories, temporary alliances, savorable or indigestible ironies, kludges, entropy: not the world of happy-ever-after, and-the-king-ruled-wisely-for-a-thousand-years, and-the-good-people-beat-the-bad-people, and-darkness-lost-to-light. Realism world. That’s not the only world there is5 — but I only say that because I am a Christian with a bit of a Neoplatonic kink to boot. It’s almost the only world we can see. It is only when we really think about the implications of this world’s existence in the first place6 that we get any hint of any other ones.
So yeah. Either an organization like DSA does this, as The Democrats have not yet seen the wisdom of these proposals, or lots of people in lots of places under lots of banners (and no banners at all) do it. For the moment, all the leadership will have to come from below.
Now, potentially, if that leadership comes from below, and is followed, this could be a good thing for the country. You can imagine an improving little fable along these lines: The people who want to use government to prevent or check evil rather than amplify it, totally frustrated (for now) at the national level, will use the conservative-coded but no longer meaningfully Republican disciplines of self-reliance, self-discipline, local knowledge, subsidiarity to resist Trump’s worst policies, to help their communities deal with the disasters he causes, and years of much better politics and mass prosperity follow as a result. I wouldn’t bet on it, if I were a betting man. But, in a William Jamesian sense, I absolutely am betting on it. I trying to figure out how to vote for it in the way I live my life.
I found a lot to relate to in this post by John Ganz about his attempts to be a better citizen, for reasons similar to the ones I’ve outlined above, in the wake of Trump’s first victory. He tells a funny and very believable story in which both his own personal limitations (irritability, ego) and the genuine, undeniable lameness of civic life conspire to force him to the sidelines of political activity. I bet a lot of my readers saw that post already, and that we saw ourselves in it. And it made me think about my own strengths and weaknesses, and how these have affected my attempts to be politically or civically active in the past.
I am not sure that I am, in my heart, much less grumpy or misanthropic than Ganz. I know him basically only via his writing, but he does a lot of writing, so I have some evidence to go on there. The only comparative statement I feel confident making is that I like fighting less than he does. He likes fighting with people and is good at it; it’s the main thing people know about him besides his books. I hate fighting, verbally or physically. If I lose it feels awful; I feel as though I’ve let down the side and disgraced myself. If I win, I feel like a dick. To fight someone, I have to a) see them attack one of my friends or b) see them behave in a way that makes me think they’re just, at least at this moment, really evil, smug, or stupid. Luckily lots of people do one of these two things, and so I fight just often enough that at least one or two people I’ve met regard me as a blunt firebrand. I wish this were true!7
I deal with social annoyances the way Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus dealt with everything: through silence, exile, and cunning. I love silence, exile, and cunning so much. I could write a lifehacking book with that title. If I suspect that I’m going to be misunderstood or misapprehended, no matter what I do; if I think my time is going to be wasted; if I think it’s useless to try to make myself understood, I withdraw, first emotionally, and then physically. Sometimes this is the right thing to do and sometimes it isn’t.