Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, September 03, 2010

Where Is the Reality Based Community?

Everybody knows the Right's Base is committed to completely erroneous climate-change denialism, to disastrously failed swinging-dick guns-blazing approaches to foreign affairs, and to a host of market fundamentalist tenets amounting to straightforward economic illiteracy. Meanwhile, their discourse is suffused with terrorizing insecurities displaced into frankly murderous hostility to the "threat" of uncontrolled female sexuality and the "threat" of brown people treated remotely as equals. There are some on the Right who know better and are not quite so insane, but who cynically cater to these falsehoods and pathologies nonetheless for positional advantage in daily political skirmishing or to provide distractions in the service of maintaining the superwealthy in their unjustifiable positions of privilege over the longer term, a deceptiveness and madness all its own.

The Left's Base does not share the Right's climate-change denialism, war-mongering, or market fundamentalism. However, the post-war left shifted its primary interest onto cultural and subcultural concerns. This originated in righteous New Left critiques and activism, but then got caught up in the disastrous hyper-individualist storm churn of Randroid Reaganism. It took the center-right Democratic Clinton, after all, to consummate the Reagan Revolution.

Too many people denigrate the crucial accomplishments of the Left's shifted focus on cultural and subcultural concerns. We won the Culture Wars after all, and they were worth winning. But it is also true that in this shift the Left disastrously relinquished -- as it absolutely did not have to do and certainly should not have done -- the indispensable defense of scientifically necessary regulation of collective human endeavor and of the ethically necessary equitable redistribution of collective human wealth by means of responsible and responsive good government.

It bears repeating, and repeating and repeating and repeating, that government of, by, and for the people is the sole site in which human solidarity can be respected, equity-in-diversity championed, the scene of informed nonduressed consent facilitated, legitimate nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes maintained. That it fails so often to do this does not diminish that such government alone can do so, that government is rendered especially vulnerable to corruption and tyranny precisely in its indispensability does not diminish that indispensability as such.

And this disastrous relinquishment of the full-throated struggle for good government by an American Left stymied by the moneyed-elite and popular-racist resistances to the New Deal and Great Society in our country and also disillusioned by the dismal record of communist experiments elsewhere, left market fundamentalist ideology almost entirely uncontested despite its immediately and ever more glaring conceptual problems and bad results.

A multi-generational drive of privatization and looting of both material and normative infrastructure, deregulation, slashing of social programs, imposing of regressive taxes, de-materialization via outsourcing, digitization, and financialization of the economy were all driven by this market fundamentalist orthodoxy which prevailed utterly -- but never "purely" enough to satisfy the revolutionary fervor of its advocates, or to give them the least pause in the face of bad results.

Now, despite the fact that there are plenty of detractors by now of global corporatist neoliberalism (underwritten by imperial militarist neoconservatism) market ideology remains prevalent among incumbent-elites, in the face of failure and perhaps due to little more than inertia and the desperate discipline of its few beneficiaries.

I should add that the Left's shifted interest into the cultural diverted enormous amounts of environmentalist energies into superficial even celebratory personal-consumer advocacy that amounted to a kind of climate change denialism in the mode of disavowal rather than deception. This green subcultural lifestyle politics amounts in effect to an acquiescence to consumption that ultimately necessitates the ongoing exploitative neoliberal global developmentalism which in turn ultimately necessitates, as all actually imperial projects finally do, the very war-mongering most greens -- indeed most of the Left -- continues officially to disapprove.

Sure, there are plenty of photogenic activists and policy wonks who warned against all this and who know better now -- just as there are on the Right -- but most of these on the Left spent more than a generation trying and failing to game good outcomes from a system hopelessly constrained and corrupted by prevalent market fundamentalism, and, predictably enough, to almost no effect, while the bodies of the Planetary Precariat endlessly continued to pile up in the droughts, wars, pandemics, genocides, neglected diseases, and dislocations of neoliberal developmentalism and anthropogenic climate catastrophe.

And while that tide really does seem to me to be turning now (largely due to the insurgent appearance via the netroots of a more articulate and better organized constellation of left-of-center energies demanding global governments beholden to actual climate science and actual Keynesian insights) it is starting to feel as though the turn of the tide is nonetheless too little and too late.

Obama may simply be too centrist to be equal to the challenge of the moment (I still think he is more progressive than I thought America was capable of placing into the Presidency, something like our best hope, but it sometimes happens that our best hope isn't good enough), and he may simply have been too timid in his demands (I still reject those who ascribe this timidity to ideology more than to a recognition of the actually-existing constraints of getting legislation through a Senate majority in name only struggling against a literally unprecedented level of irresponsible obstructionism in the midst of almost unprecedented crises on many fronts, economic, military, civic, and so on).

Meanwhile, a decisively large portion of the center-to-left electorate truly seems unenthusiastic about mid-term elections despite the fact that the right's extreme radicalization portends absolute disaster in every way and on every issue that actually matters to them.

Of course, depressed economies always depress turnout for the party in power, of course those inspired by the poetry of campaigns are often disillusioned by the prose of legislation, of course mud-slinging of the kind the Right has indulged through Palin and Fox and Friends turns many people off "politics" altogether, depressing turnout among the sensible, and of course the actually unpopular Republican agenda tends to fare better when fewer people vote in general.

All of that is play at the moment, of course, and plenty of other things besides, but the fact remains that the conspicuous, proudly affirmed, often straightforwardly batshit crazy radicalism of so many of the likely Republican victors in upcoming elections frankly should have the effect of energizing left and center-left voters whatever their economic distress, disillusionment at unexpected compromises, disgust with the ridiculous spectacle.

The falsehoods and pathologies that suffuse the Right have inspired the Left gallantly to assume the mantle, to the contrary, of the "fact-based" and "reality-based" community. But the widespread indifference to consequences exhibited in their lack of concern for right-wing radicalization, especially to the extent that it is fed by punitive resentment at the slowness and insufficiency of change for the better in two exhausting years of imperfect effort in the midst of extraordinary distress, suggests to me that there are falsehoods and pathologies aplenty in play across the board.

Ultimately it is our longstanding insulation from the consequences of our wasteful and irresponsible decisions -- as Americans in a resource-rich land largely immune to sustained military invasion -- that has facilitated both our accidental blessings (for which we eagerly accept personal credit) and our myriad crimes (for which we never accept personal responsibility). The planetary nature of both the present environmental and financial crises expose us to the sorts of actual consequences from which Americans have always hitherto been insulated. An Obama Administration supported by Democratic majorities represented the last best chance for Americans to overcome through re-regulation and public investment the brunt of the catastrophes of which we were primary authors in a way that left our civilization relatively intact. Apparently, we are too pampered and impatient across the board, Right, Left, and Center, Whatever, to take this chance we were offered but which, after all, few of us can properly be said to have deserved. Those who are the worst among us will suffer the least, but we are all of us guilty and almost all of us are going to pay much more than we probably imagine, and much sooner than we probably suspect, in the years ahead. I for one mean to keep on fighting in my own poor way for equity-in-diversity and for sustainability, but I'm not feeling a lot of hope today about any of our chances.

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