Reactionary Futurology In the Democratic Party

As I declared a couple of days ago in what I thought was a throwaway tweet, I personally worry much Much MUCH more about Democratic credulity and seduction with Silicon Valley ideology than with Wall Street ideology.

For the reasons why I say so, you might like to re-visit a post from five years ago: Against the Seduction of the Left by Reactionary Futurology. In a nutshell, the vulnerability of leaders in the Democratic Party, the only party that really can matter to progressives in the United States, to reactionary futurological formulations -- whether of "artificial intelligence" as rationalization for unaccountability,  of "accelerating change" as rationalization for status-quo amplification, of "culture fit" as rationalization for discriminatory practices, of "global development" as rationalization for corporate-military exploitation, of "digitization" as rationalization for fraud, of "disruption" as rationalization for deregulation, of "efficiency" as rationalization for looting public goods, of "enhancement" as rationalization for eugenics, of "flexibility" as rationalization for precarity, of "geo-engineering" as rationalization for pollution, of "innovation" as rationalization for plutocratic upward failure, of "resilience" as rationalization for insecurity, of "sharing" as rationalization for feudalism, of "technocracy" as rationalization for plutocracy -- derives I think from recent partisan polarization on questions of science-based policy (Republican repudiations of climate science, Keynesian macroeconomics, harm-reduction policy models on questions of sex education, gun safety regulation, drug prohibition, healthcare access, benefits of basic research funding, coming on the heels of longstanding anti-evolutionary dogmatism and christianist nationalism, and so on) in which the Democrats come to think themselves the "fact-based" party even if their grasp on the relevant facts is not always that much better than that of Republicans and come to associate progressive politics with the long-prevalent techno-reductionist understanding of progress as an accumulating pile of toys rather than an ongoing social struggle over the equitable distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change to the diversity of its stakeholders.

Given America's longstanding self-congratulatory anti-intellectualism and the bubble of privilege and insulation from consequence that nurtures it... given our susceptibility to instrumental over political rationality in our parochially preferred narratives of progress and freedom... given our history of eager willingness to treat native Americans, enslaved African-Americans, waves of American immigrants and undocumented workers as if they were robots existing to enable our own robotic conspicuous consumption... given our toxic masculinist rugged individualism and the cyborg shells of guns and cars and snake-oil we apply to keep that dream alive until we die... given our postwar dependency on an economy fluffed by military industrialism and stealthily planned (despite an ideology committed to market spontaneity) under the exception of "Defense"... given our widespread technoscientific illiteracy and our media devoted to wish-fulfillment fantasies, disasterbatory drama, and advertorial content over education... given all this and so much more it is little wonder that even well-meaning Democrats would be vulnerable in their progressivism and pragmatism to the facile scientisms, reductionisms, determinisms, triumphalisms, and techno-transcendentalisms of futurological discourse, however reactionary in substance their aspirations and assumptions turn out to be upon even the least critical scrutiny. That so many leaders in the Democratic Party -- also true, and if anything more so, of leaders of other parties -- occupy social and cultural positions of privilege that ally them to the conspicuous beneficiaries of plutocratic futurological frames is also, obviously, an important part of this story.

Those I have enraged for more than a year by now with my strong support of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders (and certainly over the utterly execrable Donald Trump, and useless also-rans like the embarrassing Jill Stein and warmed-over Republican doofus Gary Johnson) may be surprised to see the specific application of my "futurology as reactionary point of entry for partisan Democratic neoliberalism" thesis in this brief excoriation of Clintonian futurological formulations. Never forget, Al Gore has actually written at least one book that is unquestionably a work of outright futurism (arguably more than one). Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both make recourse to futurological tech-talk nonsense, peddling accelerationalism and ed-tech pieties, uncritically crowing about innovation and efficiencies and change in ways which conduce to the dismantling of public goods they would and do, mostly, otherwise rightly decry.

(WARNING: Sanders supporters may want to skip the rest of this post) I didn't forget or change my mind about any of that stuff in choosing to support Hillary Clinton, of course. As a democratic eco-socialist feminist multiculturalist queer vegetarian atheist aesthete supporting a candidate for president is always, in part, a matter of choosing which sociopath to my right I will be protesting for the next four years.

Partisan politics are utterly inadequate but absolutely indispensable to making and maintaining progress -- education, agitation, organization, imagination, expression, protest around ideal outcomes outside of, in spite of, in conversation with partisan stakeholder politics is also absolutely indispensable (and also utterly inadequate) to change the terrain of the possible and the important in which reform plays out in its compromised heartbreaking way.

Politics requires no small amount of walking and chewing gum at the same time. In choosing to support Hillary Clinton I simply chose -- as I always have done and always will do -- the best and most electable Democratic candidate among those actually on offer, the one with the best published policy positions and what seemed to me the greatest intelligence, competence, and character both to take make ongoing decisions to solve urgent shared problems in real time and to mobilize  constituencies and coalitions to implement reforms that protect and make further progressive accomplishments in the direction of sustainable equity-in-diversity. As I have repeatedly insisted, such accomplishments seem to me much more a matter of doing relentless thankless work than agreeing with me about ideal outcomes. Election campaigns, properly so-called, are job interviews for real jobs, not occasions for indulging in escapist fantasies about dream-dates or dream-parents.

If anything, the suffusion of public discourse with the deceptive and hyperbolic norms and forms of advertising discourse that I decry when I declare futurology the quintessential discourse of neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarism seems to me quite as palpable in the insistent anti-pragmatism and insubstantial celebrity fandom and symbolic political indulgences and Purity Cabaret of both Sanders and Trump movements, and as a student of revolutionary history and champion for Revolutions of Conscience advocated by the best and most radical democratic trajectory of nonviolent politics I am pretty much equally disgusted by fauxvolutionary appropriations of radicalism on the part of tech-talkers peddling status quo amplification and consumer acquiescence as "revolution" and on the part of those who would treat a party primary contest for a minor candidate or the subsequent creation by that loser of a dysfunctional PAC as "revolution."

Whatever you think of revolution, those aren't.