Lair of the Lost Girl

I read and really liked Musa al-Gharbi's book We Have Never Been Woke. He discusses very eloquently a lot of stuff I have been slowly realizing about left-wing politics, particularly in the way a lot of people are reluctant to actually live their ideals-- I was particularly interested in an example he gives of someone he spoke to who seemed to want to be able to resolve a labor issue with "privilege awareness," but being aware of her privilege doesn't actually do anything about the fact that she's relying on underpaying her childcare. (It's just that doing anything else would require restructuring how she lives her life.) He makes good points about the way people who have both money and left-wing politics dominate the left-wing political conversation and talk often about how they complain of underpaid and exploited workers while still using many services reliant on underpaid and exploited workers, such as gig economy services. He also discusses the way in certain circles people are turning "having a marginalized identity" into social and political capital in a way that favors those who already have privileged backgrounds and the way a person of a particular marginalized group getting into a position that makes a lot of money is often held as a victory for everyone of that marginalized group even when it doesn't do anything for the real position of the majority of that marginalized group.

He admits at a number of points that this is an academic book which is mostly going to be read by people with money and education and left-wing sentiments... and admits that he is one of these people. But he admits it with kind of a wink-and-nod, like he is one of these people but he sees more than they do, as evidenced by his writing the book. He turns the way a lot of people disliked the book or suggested he shouldn't have called attention to the left's problems in such tumultuous times into political capital in exactly the way he describes in the book: they don't like having their flaws being pointed out; the reaction is itself proof he's onto something. (I mean, I think he is onto something, but I don't think the negative reaction is proof of why.)

And then in his most recent essay, he evinces that he is, in fact, one of the people he's complaining about, with the same focus on ideological purity above practical reality. Differently focused, but the same thing: he says he doesn't vote for anything other than ballot initiatives partially because "putting on a jersey and rooting for a team" interferes with his work (with the added comment that it does so for many social scientists, which... what?) but also because he finds the Democratic Party useless and that voting for them is not going to fix the problems with America, using the example of New York, which is under close to one-party rule in the governments of both state and city, and yet both still have massive inequality and awful segregation.

This is a terrible line of argument. I don't disagree that the Democrats lack the political will to make sweeping changes that could actually solve problems. I don't disagree that fighting this requires more than just showing up at the ballot box, or that mainstream Democrats have done bad things. But I cannot fathom how anyone could look at what's going on with Trump and say that it's possible for Trump to do these things because the Democrats started it.

Al-Gharbi's proposed solution in the linked essay seems to boil down to "If everyone would just" about the intellectual class. If "we" as a group resist the attacks on universities. If we as a group-- but apparently on an individual level, given that he's dismissed politics as an avenue of solution--just allocate our resources in such a way that we're fighting the injustice.

Everyone is not going to just. I have been offering variations on this sentiment for years, usually in the context of third political parties: everyone is not going to just. So if you take that as read, how do you solve the problems?

Politically. And no, it's not going to be quick and it's not going to be easy and it is going to involve fighting the Democratic party as much as it involves fighting the Republican party. Fixing these problems is going to be a giant mess of forcing political will onto people and it's going to be hard (and I will do a separate post on this later but y'all really should go read Michael Walzer's Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics) and take time and not magically save everyone.

Voting is harm reduction. It's not about going out and cheering for a team and the fact that people treat it like that has a lot to do with why America is the way it is at the moment. You aren't always or even often going to get someone with the political will to solve problems, but you can perfectly well get someone who doesn't make it worse, or makes it worse to a lesser degree.

There are two schools of thought about this that I've seen: "Voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil" and "voting for the lesser evil means you are creating less evil." I'm very much in that second camp. Voting for the Democrats wouldn't have fixed the major problems with our society.

But we wouldn't be facing the dissolution of Head Start either. We wouldn't be facing attempts to get rid of Medicaid. We wouldn't be facing these situations where ICE is randomly grabbing people off the street just because.

To disclaim responsibility for that by not voting on the grounds Democrats should have been better or that the Democrats have also caused harm or to lean as hard into both-sides-ism as the essay does just shows that you value intellectual purity over practical reality every bit as much as the mainstream liberals you so disdain.

(A postscript: There is something about this entire conversation that reminds me of D. Graham Burnett, who I was similarly annoyed at when I read A Trial by Jury in college. Burnett expresses the sentiment that he wanted a hung jury so that it could remain "pure," an intellectual exercise for him without any of that weight of actually deciding someone's fate. Since I had been taking legal process classes in addition to the social psych class where I read it, I was intimately aware that the end result of that would have just been a lot of time and money spent on doing it again with a different group of twelve people and the suspected murderer held in limbo a lot longer, which is very much still impacting someone's fate.)