When I went to college, seventy-four years ago, five percent of adult Americans had four-year college degrees. This meant that aside from doctors, most lawyers, dentists, college professors, most [but not all] high school teachers, and such, virtually no adults had college degrees. I cannot recall whether universities offered MBAs. My first father-in-law made it to the rank of Vice-President of Sears, Roebuck without the benefit of a college experience, let alone a degree, and there were more private than public tertiary institutions.
America was a severely economically stratified country, although corporate presidents made twenty or thirty times the salaries of workers, not a thousand times. But because of the relative rarity of college degrees, the economic mobility of working-class American men [I will come to women and African Americans later] was less obvious.
Today, three-quarters of a century later, a third of American adults have college degrees. Sixty percent of young Americans start college, but since only 55 percent finish, the college educated portion of the population is still only at one third.
I have spent the last four months, lying in bed and watching television. During that time, I have watched hundreds of hours of commentary on the political situation. I cannot think of a single commentator who does not have a college degree. I should like to try and experiment and that has almost never been attempted. Let me ask what America looks like to one of the two thirds of the population without a college degree. To such a person, most of the good jobs are closed off. Without a college degree in America today, an ordinary American cannot be a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, a nurse, a college professor, a high school teacher, a middle school teacher, an elementary school teacher, an FBI agent, a Wal-Mart store manager, and in most large cities, a police officer, or a management trainee. It matters not how ambitious or hard working such a person is, he is simply denied those opportunities for lack of the educational credentials.
The truth is, even fifty or seventy-five years ago when the minority of workers had any real shot at the good jobs in this country but because access to such jobs did not require such credentials, it was possible to conceal that lack of access from view.
Today, there are more than 3,000 college and university campuses that offer a four-year degree. And I'm not talking about those elite institutions that virtually guarantee their graduates of the upper middle-class jobs with salaries over $100,000 a year, with pensions, benefits, paid holidays, and the like. The United States is the third largest country in the world. Only China and India, each with well over a billion residents, or larger, because the United States has so large a population, it is possible to make the mistake of supposing that the concerns of the one-third with college degrees, especially when being discussed by people who have college degrees, constitute a totality or at least the preponderance of the concerns of Americans. But even that enormous population is only one-third of all the adults in America.
The obscene character and performance of Donald Trump and his characterless followers make it easy to dominate our attention. But the real question is how such a desperate group of protofascists could command such support of virtually of half the voting population. Once we recognize the real character of America's population, the answer becomes obvious. The democratic party in the recent decades has become the party of the educated third of America. Because of the complexity of America's history with slavery, and the almost self-destructive embrace by the republican party of anti-abortion politics, the democratic party has been able to conceal from itself it's lack of commitment to the interest of the non-educated two-thirds of the population (one of the many ironies of the education of the electoral fiasco that has just played out before us is the fact that Joe Biden is the most genuine supporter of the interests of the non-college educated class). If we managed to survive the next several years, a survival that will be made more probable if Hakin Jefferies manages to gain control of the house perhaps, we will finally begin to ask whether the interests of the two-thirds of the AMerican population without college degrees should be made central to the concerns and mission of the democratic party.
(Dictated from my bed in the skilled nursing facility at Carolina Meadows with the invaluable assistance of Erika Hamlett)
212 comments:
1 – 200 of 212 Newer› Newest»Nice to hear from Prof. Wolff. I would point out that a second or two with Google indicates that the number of Americans with a bachelor's degree, per the Census Bureau's latest figures, is 37.7 percent. Presumably that doesn't count those with an associate's degree, or those w some college attendance who didn't finish.
So the post's statement that only a third of Americans have a college degree is not quite accurate, since 37.7 percent is higher than a third. (I suspect it's also not accurate to say that all the mentioned occupations, e.g., police officer, require a college degree, but I'm not sure.)
Thank you for breaking this out so clearly.
Beats the unbearable commentary of Tobias on facebook, though that’s not hard at all.
Thanks for this post, which I'm compelled to call 'beautiful'. It goes well with the points that James Wilson made about meritocracy near the end of the comments on the previous post. My personal experience (a couple of 'uneducated' decades working in the restaurant and building industries) suggests that asking elite liberals, with their individualistic, meritocratic ideologies, their narrow experience in life, and their fossilized sense of moral superiority and pearl-clutching about 'deplorables', to imagine the life of those without college degrees is the socio-political counter-part to the philosopher's question 'What is it like to be a bat?'. I'm not saying it's impossible. Consider how Elisabeth Costello in J. M. Coetzee's eponymous novel answers the latter: through reading Kafka, Rilke, and Ted Hughes, and vivid reflection the struggle of an animal to live. As Costello says, there are no limits to the sympathetic imagination. But do the Democrats' strategists care, or have they contented themselves with at least keeping the candidacy away from Sanders?
Well said. In New York I come across all types including Trump supporters- they are not evil, they just think the system is rigged and some are not too bright and when someone articulate (I mean that with slight irony) like Trump gives voice to their trials and tribulations, they flock to his side as their champion. Doormen and plumbers admire people who made it (again the irony) like Trump. If these Trump supporters went to college perhaps they'd take a philosophy class and apply the appearance/reality distinction and use it propaerly. People do bad even evil things for good intentions, they do stupid things because they know "what really is going on" and they let the abominable Trump into the citadel to slay their overlords, the college educated.
Let's hope we hold the house desperate though the hour may be.
I agree with this assessment. I would add that it's already challenging to keep working-class voters loyal in the face of constant, corporate-funded propaganda of the most tribalistic nature. When Democrats caved to special interests, it became impossible.
Let me add that the masses along with many college educated have a cartoon image of how power and the world works, a pretty lame vision which Trump exploited- they are victims but they are hardly wise even in the philosopher's sense. For Christ's sake (and I am not a Christian nor a Marxist) the French Revolution was sparked from world class suffering- just a little inflation, to bring in a goon with a silver spoon in his mouth like Trump, because of a childish notion that the President has the power because he is duh the President. Let them suffer, they deserve it, they only fooled themselves. The real issue is not true economic misery but the so-called American Dream, everyone wants to live the life. They did bad things for stupid reasons. Let them be teleported to Dickensian London, for all I care. I'll get along with them as individuals, but
First of all, Professor Wolff, it’s great to hear from you again. I’m sorry you had to rely on assistance, but I’m glad you have a good amanuensis. (I use that word just to establish my educational credentials. As to why that might be necessary, see below.)
I’d like, however, to add a little something to what you say about education, for it seems to me one ought also to take note of the nature of the education now on offer. Much has been written about the corporatisation of tertiary education in the US and elsewhere in the western world and the economic system which both contributes to the shaping of these institutions and relies on them to provide the workforce the corporations need or envisage they will soon need. Credentialisation is an element in that.
But as the noted student of education Henry Giroux recently noted in his Counterpunch essy, “Universities in dark times,” this process of corporatisation “weakens the humanities and liberal arts, stripping higher education of its capacity to serve as a democratic public sphere and robbing it of the potential to cultivate socially aware students who challenge injustices and hold power to account.” (Cavillers please note this was written after the campus demonstrations against the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza last spring.)
If these are the sorts of people who are becoming so significant in the Democratic Party—and note, I’m not blaming them, they are the creatures of their times (as I think I said in a previous comment)—impressed by their own credentials gained no doubt by quite a lot of hard work and maybe even self sacrifice, they are perhaps unlikely to face up to the nature of the political party they now cleave to and unlikely to contemplate changing it in substantial ways of the sort you advocate in your posting. Maybe it will take a few more disappointments of the sort inflicted yesterday to make them--and the rest of us--begin to examine our political fundamentals?
But back to really important matters: Get well soon! Best wishes, jw
A penetrating critique.
The question of the day is, will the Dems abandon their ideology (an ideology developed and employed to take up the space that would other be occupied by a focus on political economy) and return to the pre-1972 status quo ante?
My wager on this is … no way! I expect the Dem policy gurus (the mandarins, the Brahmins, the ideologues) to double-down and give us not just more of the same, but more of the same and “now in a new, super-concentrated formula!”
Consider this: there is more to be gained personally and materially for the professionals who run the party to make themselves into the party of morality and serve as a (well-funded) permanent opposition than there is to go back to the antediluvian concern for all those LOSERS out there in middle America. I’ll go further and submit that, material questions aside, it is psychologically impossible for all these cIever boys and girls to make this pivot, b/c doing so would call into question their own superiority.
It hurts me to say it, but if some (future) party will direct itself to the needs of most Americans I expect that to be be some splinter of the GOP.
Pillette,
How do you deal w the fact that the Biden/Harris legislative measures actually helped working-class voters? I agree that there shd be changes in rhetoric and approach, but the portrait of the Dem party here is something of a caricature. After all, the richest single person in the world was firmly in Trump's corner.
[p.s. for the record, I note that I have had in recent years (though not currently) the kind of job that requires no educational credentials whatsoever. Admittedly, I was not relying on the meager income from it to survive, but I did have it.]
Anonymous @ 7:17 p.m.
My comment was not really intended as a critique, which you might have realized were you not so intent on being sarcastic.
Nice to hear from LFC. I would point out that a second or two with Google leads to the Census Bureau website whose data indicates the 37.7% figure is for Americans age 25 or older while the professor made the claim that a third of adults (not just adults older than 25) had college degrees. The number for adults is 34.8%.
So the comment's statement that 37.7% of adults have a college degree is not quite accurate, since 34.8% is closer to a third than it is to 37.7%
T.J. @8:41 pm
Point taken. (For some reason I can't seem to do replies to comments within the sub-thread.)
In terms of delivering THE GOODS I’m afraid that’s “too little too late”. Let’s consider instead something like the Gini coefficient and where it’s traveled to over the last 50 years—we are currently in a tie with Morocco. Voters don’t sit down and chin-stroke and analyze and parse and faff around the way we do, but even the stupidest of them can see that (1) their slice of the social product has been diminishing steadily; that (2) the dems—the folks who brought you NAFTA and other delights—are clearly NOT overly concerned with what’s going on out there in all of these (formerly Democratic) districts; and (3) what the party IS concerned with and HOW they are concerned with is offensive.
See brief replies threaded below (i've now discovered how this stupid new system works).
Re number (3): aided by the Repubs spending millions on advertising designed to scare people about a fictional agenda to subject their kids to trans surgeries and other similarly nonsensical claims.
LFC @ 10:16 PM
Surely it's not just the Republicans who spend a huge amount of money trying to shape the perceptions and imaginations of other people. One of my take aways from the past few months is that we've been inundated with "rumors" of secretive women, tidal waves of women who'd be voting to save themselves from the Republicans, about that wonderful polling result from Iowa proving that there was an anti-Trump tide, etc. etc. All of it just designed either to make "us" feel good, or encouraging "us" to jump on the bandwagon, or . . . In short we were being fed a diet of lies and misrepresentaions and wishful thinking all masquerading as fact.
Hakeem Jeffries is emblematic of the very problems of which Prof Wolff writes. Jeffries is an anti-left corporate attorney.
"[P]erhaps [Jeffries'] defining in-caucus alliance is with Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, one of the most conservative Democratic congressmen, who has threatened to blow up Biden’s agenda to defend tax breaks for the wealthy. Together with Alabama’s Terri Sewell, they formed the Team Blue PAC last year to protect incumbents against primaries from their left — which doubles as a warning shot to newly elected leftists such as Summer Lee and Maxwell Frost."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/hakeem-jeffries-speaker-of-the-establishment.html
Wrt the Republicans' embrace of anti-abortion rights policies, it's noteworthy that in all the states in which the right to abortions was put to referendum in this election, more voters voted in support of abortion access than voted for Kamala Harris.
As various commentators noted on Twitter, the voters weren't necessarily opposed to some forms of progressive legislation. They just didn't necessarily want Kamala Harris to be their president.
When I last checked this morning, the numbers were
Arizona 62% for abortion rights, 49% for Harris
Colorado 61% for abortion rights, 55% for Harris
Florida 57% for abortion rights, 43% for Harris
Maryland 74% for abortion rights, 61% for Harris
Missouri 52% for abortion rights, 42% for Harris
Montana 57% for abortion rights, 36% for Harris
Nebraska 49% & 45% for abortion rights, 44% for Harris
South Dakota 40% for abortion rights, 28% for Harris
(in some of those states, such as Montana and South Dakota, however, fewer than 10% of votes had been counted when I was checking the numbers)
Lucid comments as always Professor Wolf. I think we should have two separate parties now-one for college educated to start a war with the extreme cultural right. And one mainstream to cater to political needs of the 2/3 majority. Although i wonder, if you don't have something to eat (basic, fundamental inequality) does it matter that your 'diversity' rights are not so well respected? (you are death by hunger anyway). So what should be the priority? (right also have a more integrated approach in the culture war; traditional family etc supports its vision of basic inequality, unlike the left. In a way is 'normal' as the right worked about 40-50 years to integrate these arguments, the left did not even start it)
I don't expect much from some splinter of the GOP, but I agree with Pillette about liberal Democrats.
Maybe the two party system will break down. The GOP is no longer rational and the Democrats are lost to moral grandstanding. I could see a third party alternative arising. It has in other countries and as Trump's election shows, the U.S, is a lot less "special" and "exceptional" than most Amerikans imagine.
I believe the Prof is right on. And I don't know how to solve the problem. It seems cultural to me--cultural in the sense of the outlook of those without degrees. It was the Democrats who gave us such programs as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), unemployment insurance. It was the Republicans who opposed every one of them, and who still oppose them. And they increasingly are getting the votes of those who benefit from them.
Part if the explanation, I think, is the resentment of the white working class with the decline in manufacturing. Those jobs not only paid well, they offered self-respect. In places like Upstate New York, where I grew up, manufacturing jobs have have largely disappeared. NAFTA gets most of the blame, but that's mostly a convenient, and popular, excuse: blame the foreigner. Far more jobs have been made redundant because of technology.
My father (and his father, his brother, and his brother-in-law) worked at a Remington typewriter plant. There were others all over Upstate: IBM, Royal, Smith-Corona, Underwood. Those jobs were eliminated 25 years ago by the arrival of what I'm typing on right now: a computer. Eastman Kodak was economic base of Rochester. The smart phone bankrupted the company.
Those who could find work elsewhere have left; those left behind compete for the low-paying service jobs available. The world has changed and they have been left behind. People left up there don't know what to do next. Understandable anger and resentment are wide-spread.
People in their position in the past--like in Germany of the 1930s--have been respondent to right wing demagogues who find a villain: Jews then; immigrants now.
No doubt there are other factors at work, but this is a major one.
PS--I'm with LFC. I hate this new software.
NAFTA gets most of the blame, but that's mostly a convenient, and popular, excuse: blame the foreigner. Far more jobs have been made redundant because of technology.
All the stuff in our houses and offices, all the devices we use to communicate and study with, all the clothes we wear, all the medications we take are manufactured somewhere. Almost none of these items, which used to be made almost exclusively here in the United States, are produced in the United States today. Most are manufactured in China, Vietnam, Mexico, etc. So I don't buy the argument that technological advances are the primary explanation for the relative immiseration of the American middle classes.
The Chinese have wisely used the proceeds from their sales to lift their massive population out of poverty. They have taken a number of efforts to limit the excesses of their capitalist class and spend only a tiny fraction of their nation's wealth by comparison to the US on arms and military adventurism. The priority of the Democrats (and Republicans) is to "ensure that America will always have the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world."
LFC (in response to comments in RPW's post on The Return of the Irrepressible): it would be congenial to think that moving the Dems in a more leftist -- as opposed to rightist pseudo-populist -- direction would have electoral benefits. But relatively little in U.S. political history supports that assumption.
Well, it certainly got FDR elected to four terms of the presidency.
But since then, aside from Obama, who won two terms after campaigning as a progressive (although he generally had little interest in governing as one), Democrats have run from the left.
On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence in American history that Democrats trying to out-Republican Republicans (such as proudly embracing the support of Liz and Dick Cheney) is a losing strategy.
Someone offered this on Twitter:
"If you are someone who was able to overlook the genocide and cast a vote for Kamala Harris, then you already understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump's extremism to vote for him."
https://x.com/megindurti/status/1854291214595768557
billionaires everywhere--https://jacobin.com/2024/11/election-2024-how-billionaires-torpedoed-democracy
Not sure the FDR case proves all that you want it to. The New Deal started out farther left than it ended up. (See Alan Brinkley, _The End of Reform_.) As a separate pt, FDR's coalition included segregationist Southern Dems. Still, that period does stand out as one where a leftward movement in certain policies was linked to electoral success. I am only cautioning against assuming that that is the magic wand that will solve all the Dems' problems. I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primaries and perhaps he cd have won the general election. If that had happened, we wd obvs be in a different place now.
I think one shd try to avoid monocausal analysis of Trumpism and why the Dems were not able to prevent his return to office. The most obvs, though not only, factor in this current outcome is that the economic situation (inflation) produced a strong anti-incumbent sentiment.
P.s. a sentiment that transferred to Harris as a representative of the incumbent party.
Not sure why people assume, which they seem to do, that there is a democratic future in the US. There will be new elections, sure, but they will be the leader's lap dog: certainly not free and equal, designed only to a clout of democratic legitimacy. Surely, this is what Trump and co will attempt to achieve, no one can blame any of them to be big advocates of democracy. You grab power democratically, then you keep undemocratically. Straight from the autocrat's playbook.
Eric asserts that the Dems run “from the left”. But what does this mean? In common parlance, being on the “left” now means subscribing to a host of cultural and moral issues—it no longer means having an orientation that is grounded in questions of political economy, and for that reason the (soi-disant) “left” is unable to think or act strategically. Because moral positions cannot be compromised they exist outside of politics, in the transcendental melodramatic realm of good and evil.
Being on this sort of “left” is also compatible with the stupidity of nationalism—chanting, shouting, marching, waving flags—provided that it is the nationalism of your favorite nation and directed against your disfavored nation. The funny thing about this is the complete failure to see that nationalism (dressing for resistance and engaging in LARPy street “action”) goes both ways.
I do not believe that the “left” as it currently exists is a “left” as that term was formerly understood.
@ John Pillette The left as we know it is a social movement and it is the variety that seeks no compromise. That much is clear. They express this by being sanctimonious and superior. This turns voters off. Nobody wants to be lectured to. The right is a social movement called MAGA founded on lies and will do anything for power. The Republicans were like that before Trump, who brought that maximal approach to a new level. People apparently prefer lies and having a piece of Trump's power, and being used to any semblance of good government and being lectured to and condescended to. That is a big part of what we're facing in America today. So I agree with you. We`have to be ready for anything. Trump's rule will be the equivalent to a war, much more harmful than 9/11 I'd say
Also Trump is like (correct me if I have the wrong play and character) Richard III, who forces marriage on Anne after mudrering her husband, I believe it is the opening scene. Trump forced the big lie and all his other lies on the public, in much the same violent way. He is worse than a demagogue and has the darkest of charisma and I'll be happy to read all about his horrible misdeeds when he is gone.
It may be fair to say that MAGAism is based on lies, but I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s based on “Bullshit”—good ole, All-American, Grade A, P.T. Barnum, Reality TV Show, Elmer Gantry, Panem-et-Circenses Bullshit. The GOP convention could have been an out-take from “Idiocracy” (2006, Dir. Mike Judge). The Panem may be missing, but the OTT quality of the Circenses more than makes up for it.
I'm willing to accept that change of a word; but take the lie about 'stop the steal' That is more than bullshit; can you cram bullshit down a country's throat? It is like the Shaeksepearean quote (see above) too violent for bullshit. There is the carnivalesque aspect to the MAGA tent, then there is the out and out malicious
Oh and thank you for your thoughtful reply
I pretty much agree with you, JP, on the vacuity of the term "left" as it is now so widely used. As I think I suggested on a previous thread, there was once a link between social progressivism and economic justice. But the various movements which once combined these objectives have in the course of time deteriorated into advocacy that "those of my identity" ought to be able to advance as far as other sorts of people within the system that exists. As a result, "some of my identity" will benefit, maybe even enormously, while the "majority of my identity" will continue to suffer the sorts of miseries and indignities which are part and parcel of the system we inhabit. Ergo Trump. Not that that will bring any relief. But it might in the longer term help a more genuinely "left" alternative arise--no doubt over the political bodies of those who see nothing deeply problematical in today's Democratic Party or in "actually existing US democracy."
What got FDR elected was the luck of the stock market crashing in late 1929, Hoover being locked into the Progressive notion of volunteerism, Treasury headed by a liquidationist (btw, ditto Musk), and MacArthur crushing desperate veterans. That led to the five of the seven years in the past century when social democratic things were a possibility. Of course, having Eleanor, Perkins, etc. around as opposed to folks like Geithner, Summers, and Emanuel helped.
Ohio is interesting. The common clay chose a former auto dealer (who now owns a blockchain company) over Sherrod Brown. I checked the pre-market late Tuesday evening and bitcoin was up over $5,400.
Currently private prison companies are doing quite well over the prospect of mass deportations. The economy was heading into recession (manufacturing was already there) when COVID hit. Overall Trump dodged a bullet. Folks on the left pondering the working class and young males in general should factor in that you can't fix stupid (I assume Dems had internal polling that led to the reach for Reps).
My impression is that too often a high school diploma is basically a certificate of attendance and too many HS graduates have what would have been a grade school education back in the day.
LFC, all military officers and most senior enlisted have degrees, LAPD start just south and CHP start well north of 100K. Applying with just a HS diploma isn't likely competitive.
What does running from the left mean? An example is Kamala Harris refusing to campaign with Bernie Sanders, campaigning instead with Liz Cheney, inviting a slew of Republicans to speak at the DNC, promising to put a Republican in her cabinet, and saying that Trump supporters will always have a seat at the table when she is making policy--while she/her campaign & surrogates relentlessly attack Green Party candidates and use lawsuits to get them kicked off the ballots in several states.
I used the term "the left" in response to LFC's comment about moving 'in a more leftist direction.'
John Pillette asserts that there is a common meaning of "left" today in "common parlance." I disagree. There is not one meaning of "left," but several, or at least two. There is on the one hand the (so-called) identity-politics left, which is what james wilson refers to, and then there is the left that is more concerned with issues of political economy and class. Adolph Reed Jr., for example, is in this second category. So too, I presume, is Bhaskar Sunkara. The list of names could be extended, quite a lot. There are also organizations with this general focus. Perhaps the two emphases are somewhat reconcilable, but that would be a longer discussion.
The Senate filibuster keeps the Congress from helping the working class in one of the few ways possible--raising the minimum wage.
Since the 1970s, college students have been disproportionately female. Ergo the non-college population is disproportionately male. For the past decade at least, the Democratic Party has been dominated by the idea that helping a disproportionately male demographic is, essentially by definition, "anti-women". Completely re-orienting around a disproportionately male demographic is an absolute non-starter.
LFC @3:10 PM
You’re right that I was referring to the “identity politics left.” But I did so only to repudiate the notion that in its contemporary manifestations it constitutes any sort of left at all. Taking “left” to properly mean rejection of the systemic status quo, I also hoped my comment would be seen as calling for a recognition of the sort of left advocated by Adolph Reed and others. I therefore see the two as irreconcilable. Maybe “identity” could recover its lost aspects and become again an instrument for critically deconstructing the miserable reality so many of us now inhabit. But to repeat, I’m not holding my breath.
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I am trying to understand what those who criticize the 'identity politics left' here are calling for. Are you saying (as some have in other spaces) that Democrats lose elections because they cave in to demands of 'special interest groups' on issues like support for state recognition of same-sex marriage, protections for transgender workers and athletes, and affirmative action for racial minorities in college admissions and hiring? And that in the face of the fascist threat posed by the right, and the hostility to these stances of a large proportion of the reliable voters, these 'special interest groups' should put their aspirations on hold and instead allow for the progressive movement to coalesce around class issues/redistribution of wealth, which affect the whole of the working class rather than individual groups?
This doesn't follow. As was pointed out time and again, the election wasn't a referendum on Harris. It was a choice between her and Trump. So the analogy in that tweet would only apply if anyone thought Trump would somehow be better for the Gazans than Harris -- which is of course absurd. (Trump will soon be president again -- that'll show Netanyahu!)
Or maybe we can construe the tweet as saying "Look, we often overlook terrible things politicians do because they promise us something else we want, which outweighs that terrible thing -- and that's just the calculation that Trump voters were making." But this still makes no sense in the curent context. If what we want is a world where the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza hadn't taken place (and won't continue to take place), then that's precisely what Trump *doesn't* promise.
Or maybe we can construe these Trump voters as saying that he was and will be such a good steward of the economy, that his promised extremism is worth the cost. But that strikes me as just wrong, factually and morally, and is bad strategy as far as voting your interests are concerned.
Sadly, Eric, that is exactly what critics of "identity politics left' (critics of those pesky woke folks) are saying--- ignore the gays, the trans, the minorities....
One of the remarkable features of Harris's candidacy was her assiduous avoidance of 'identity politics'. Unlike Hillary, she never mentioned her sex or that she'd be the first woman president, and she didn't rise to the bait when Trump went all racist on her. Add to that her leaning into her record as a prosecutor, and it seemed like the Harris campaign was doing everything it could to run as far away from 'wokeness' as possible.
Still, it wasn't enough. Why not? I don't think gay marriage is a salient issue anymore (witness J.D. Vance appealing to "the normal gays"). And SCOTUS has rendered affirmative action a moot point. So it really does all come down to the trans stuff. The GOP has successfully been able to frame the issue as one of systemic child abuse, what with tales of elementary school children routinely "getting healthy body parts cut off" -- though as far as I know, surgical intervention for trans minors is virtually non-existent. Plus there's scaremongering about men in women's bathrooms, men beating up women in sports, etc.
I really don't know how the party will deal with this, though they'd better come up with something fast. Thankfully it seems that most people have a baseline sympathy for trans people, even as they want compromise on some of these more hot button issues. So that could be a start. (I read somewhere that during the month of October, fully 40 percent of GOP ads in the swing states were aimed at the trans issue, and that polls showed they were effective.)
Aside from that, it does seem like the language of identity politics is by now too embedded in the culture -- and too much associated with the Democratic Party -- for Harris to have overcome it with a single haphazard campaign. It's everywhere. Take for example the recent flare-up caused by the actress Cynthia Erivo, where some random and perfectly innocous piece of fan art caused her to complain that she was being "erased." This is the idiom of identity politics run amok -- invoked by a rich and privileged celebrity to stoke victimhood. Which is not to say, of course, that Ms. Erivo has never been an actual victim of racism. But it's this sort of thing that penetrates with voters.
And at the same time, there's been an backlash to woke that's coalesced in the so-called "manosphere" online, where Howard-Stern-style racism and misogyny has reconstituted itself, only unlike Stern, these guys are leaning fully into politics. The featuring of Tony "Puerto Rico is an island of floating trash" Hinchcliff at a Trump rally, and Joe Rogan's endorsement ofTrump, can be seen as the consumption of this movement. I find all this depressing beyond belief.
Allow me to suggest that following Rapko’s suggestion and doing some imaginative work is not only illuminating but fun. Recall if you will the 2008 primaries. Remember how pointing out that Hillary Clinton was an unappealing candidate got you labeled as a misogynist? But what does HRC resemble? Does she not look and sound like Management? Is she not the very personification of the Professional Agent of the Corporation, the pants-suited HR director of your nightmares? And did she not serve as outside counsel for one of America’s worst employers, Tyson Foods?
If the answer to these questions is “no”, then you are probably a member of this managerial caste. And while we’re on the subject lets be aware that the rich (the really rich) regard the managers who work for them with an haut-en-bas contempt, as the humorless, unimaginative drones that they are. They get the hate from both sides, from Labor and Ownership! (And I have to say they deserve all of it).
But if the mass of the electorate didn’t like HRC, so much the worse for them, those deplorable misogynist troglodytes! As for the women who didn’t like her either, it was their internalized self-hatred! Or something. Anyway, the only thing wrong with the Dem approach is that not enough people like it. Is this a problem for a political party?
'If we managed to survive the next several years, a survival that will be made more probable if Hakin Jefferies manages to gain control of the house perhaps, we will finally begin to ask whether the interests of the two-thirds of the AMerican population without college degrees should be made central to the concerns and mission of the democratic party.'
As for this diagnosis that Democrats are becoming a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, there is of course a point here that among working-class voters, there was a significant decline. The party only won among those who make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. Sure, I mock weakly populist ads targeted to swing states, though it’s true that inflation has hurt incumbents across the world. However, what drove Harris’s selection as vice-president to begin with? An emphasis on anti-discrimination. The idea that the Democrats as a whole are associated with this is what I ponder, while I mention the prominence of efforts like White Women: Answer the Call and Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders for Kamala. So yeah, a party increasingly divorced from workers. So yeah, a staggering shift in working-class support across demographics.
John Pillette,
The problem with scoffing at charges of misogyny vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton is that you're dismissing what too many people know to be simply true.
"The pants-suited HR director of your nightmares" -- I do detect some sexism in that phrase, not because I deny that regular folk are generally put off by corporate managerial drones, but because experience has taught me that many men (and some women) reserve a special kind of vitriol for women in positions of authority. You can't deny what I've seen with my own eyes. One common charge against Hillary was that she seemed to "try too hard" (too much smiling, too much cheeriness) -- to which I say...well, yeah, ambitious women often have to try very hard to forestall the sexist backlash they've come to expect -- and when they're less than successful at doing so, somehow that only seems to invite more gender-coded resentment.
So yes, misogyny, internalized or not, is real.
As always in politics, there's a tension between what's true and what we have to do to sell people on the truth. Regarding the former: I don't fault the masses for "not liking" Hillary Clinton; I fault them for not realizing that despite all her unappealing traits (and I mean genuinely unappealing), she was obviously far better than that grotesquerie with whom we're still saddled. In that sense, I do consider them troglodytes.
But of course we have to meet people where they are, and politics is showbiz which means 'likeabilty' is everything. I agree we need a candidate who doesn't come off like they're only here to represent bougie interests -- and better yet, we should want one who *actually* doesn't represent those interests. Unfortunately, after this week's debacle, it's unlikely that any future such candidate will be a woman.
Assuming, arguendo, that this “misogyny” (in whatever form) may be real … so what? A political party complaining about the wrongthink of their electorate is like a fisherman complaining about hungry fish that you can SEE swimming around but (perversely!) aren’t biting: “What the hell is wrong with them? Guess I’ll have to change the way these fish think!”
But that’s why it’s called “fishing” and not simply “harvesting”. Politics deals in the real, not the ideal. It would be …ideal … were it nothing but women’s studies majors out there in Pennsylvania and Michigan (and God willing that will be the case someday!). But for now, this population of awful wrong-thinking people are what actually exist.
W/r/t the accusation of sexism on my part, you will be glad to know that I hate all managers regardless of sex (or race). As do most employees. Part of the managerial mindset (the HILARIOUS part, for which see David Brent) is the delusional belief that everybody LIKES them!
Surely Vaughn is right that, beyond the bungling of 'Mama Warbucks', there was an element of misogyny is Hillary Clinton's defeat. But how large an element? Is there any non-impressionistic way of determining it? Ages 0-18, I lived in Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Virginia, Hawaii, and California (with Japan thrown in for perspective); if someone had asked me at age 18 whether it would be more likely that a (so-called) Black man or a (so-called) White woman would become U.S. president in my lifetime, I'm pretty sure I would have said the latter, as I'd encountered rather a lot more of virulently racist remarks than virulently misogynistic ones. Of course, this biographical tidbit does not count as any kind of serious evidence. But what does? Is there/might there be any evidence with regard to Harris?--John Pillette's point about the poor managerial class getting hated on from both sides reminds me of a particularly unpleasant dinner party about 5 years ago. I was excoriated for so much as bringing up for conversation Albert Murray's claim in The Omni-Americans that all Americans and their culture are "part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro". Driving around the next day and reflecting on the incident, I coined the wisecrack "If liberals were self-hating, it would be unanimous".--Just as a reminder of how repellent Clinton was, here's the clip of her chortling about the torture-killing of Gaddafi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DXDU48RHLU
John Rapko,
Don't you think you're being a bit pearl-clutchy posting that video of Clinton? Gaddafi was a perfectly revolting human, so delighting in his death, while a bit tacky perhaps, hardly seems repellent. When Trump or Putin finally leave this earth, I may not crack a joke, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of my friends did. (Also, the description makes clear that the footage captures Clinton's reaction to unconfirmed reports about Gaddafi's death, so she couldn't have known it was a torture-killing, I'd imagine.)
Of course, someone will immediately want to say that HRC herself oversaw plenty of war crimes; and if that's the case, then I'd also have no problem with one of her victims delighting in her demise.
John Pillette,
We are in agreement. See the final two paragraphs of my last reply.
Dinner parties ARE a problem. Two glasses of wine and my disguise of liberal rectitude gets sloughed off like a callinectes sapidus in molt. My misogyny is there for all to see … I remember this one party where I got just (justly!) reamed out for not liking Leni Riefenstahl. So I feel ya!
since managers seem to be personae non grata here, it may be fair to cite a German term for stress: Managerkrankheit. Also, I noticed a solecism today in philosophy website in reference to JD Vance: Zieg heil. The Z should be S, but an amusing interpretation of Zieg heil would be hail goat!
Perhaps I’m being much too self-important and sensitive to think that certain comments were prompted by things I wrote, so:
No, David @ 9:46 AM, I’m not saying ignore the gays, etc. I am quite aware of the burdens and the indignities they have suffered and still suffer in everyday life. I sympathise with them and I even sympathise with their aspirations to be able to seek the things and the opportunities this society makes available to them.
But, Eric @ 8:52 AM, I thought I was quite clear—which wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been mistaken on that score—that my criticisms of identity politics rested on my perception that for the most part those pursuing the things and opportunities this society makes available to them are quite uncritical of the nature of this society except insofar as it affects their particular identity predicaments. In short, while I would not presume to tell them what to aspire to, I would reserve the right to argue that some of what some of them aspire to comes at the cost of imposing injuries upon others including upon some of their fellow indentitarians.
That said, I’d also accept, more generally, that whenever it is necessary to pursue a lesser-of-two-evils, united front approach, it still remains necessary to raise questions concerning what that lesser evilism may result in. (OOOps, Marx said something like that in the Manifesto, didn’t he, when he was writing about alliances with those who saw the world a bit differently. Sorry.)
I’ll also offer that it’s a mistake to assume that those of Identity X, or Y, or Z, don’t have a great many other aspects which determine their political choices—witness, it seems from some post-election analysis, that women voted on the basis of a number of factors besides a concern to be able to make decisions over whether or not to bear a child, or elevating one of their own sex to the White House, etc. Ditto for those of other Identities. In other words, don't we do all these people a great injustice when we see them only through the lens of their identity?
Anyway I’d appreciate not being Identity-baited, for that’s what it feels like. To make it crystal clear: David, I’m not saying ignore X, or Y, or Z. And, Eric, I’m definitely not claiming that the Democrats lost because they caved to ’special interest groups,’ other, perhaps, than to that interest group we for a time identified as the “1 percent.”
Best wishes to all, j.
What gets me is that this rebellion of the working classes over a little inflation, maybe stressfull and significant but not like the economic turmoil in places like Weimar Germany and the France of the Ancien Regime, this rebellion by voting Trump in to demolish the system is so out of whack with the reality on the ground: this may be due to the Fantasy Land thesis of Anderson, or the feeling of lost status, or the feeling they want to have the American Dream and feel like if they can't live like a millionaire than fuck it. The fact that it snuck up on us is that aside from Trump's rallies it was a virtual mob- no parades through the streets of New York or Chicago or LA. I think we're in for it though with no overwhelming certainty, just a survival instinct.
If you think it's just "over a little inflation," I think you're not seeing the long-term onslaught on working people extending over at least a couple of generations since the "post-War dream", as Pink Floyd referred to it, began to collapse. And the Democrats and Republicans were both party to that. Trump did in the Republican perpetrators and now it looks like he's doing in the Democratic perpetrators too.
But Trump IS one of the perpetrators.
When you use the word "onslaught" I assume you mean the working class is exploited? Meaning other people have what they desreve and they lose status. The best case you can make is that people feel insecure and have to work their asses off- first, many of the victims made that social contract by buying into the system; second, that is how historically life has always been for most of us; third, they are making themselves less secure by voting in Trump; finally "onslaught" is an emotional, subjective term that a demagogue whether on the left and right would use. There is something to be said about "standing up for oneslef" but there is also something to be said about being thankful for what you have and not being so materialistic. I suspect that when you talk about exploitation you really mean something like "other people taking advantage of me" That is a matter of status, and not having what others do, that is materialism. People in other times and places had it far worse and lived through it. Why did Bernie lose? Surely some of the working class who now voted for Trump voted for Palin or put Republicans in the Senate to fight to the last against Obama's health care plan, so part of the working class is partially complicit in their own oppression- they didn't need the Trump revolution, they, you, we had the votes.
With the usual hesitations, but because it speaks so directly to the professor’s post, I’ll post an account of a conversation among ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’ I was in a couple of hours ago, by far the most interesting I’ve heard about the election. There was a great deal of use (not mention) of what educated folks called the ‘n-word’. I’ll leave it out, except where I’m quoting or giving something close to an exact quote. Here it is, re-constructed and highly condensed:
Returning from Doe Library and lugging UC Berkeley’s precious copy of Aquinas’s commentary on De Anima, I stopped at the local al fresco chess spot on Telegraph Avenue. I watched for a minute as two gentlemen were pondering their dynamically balanced middlegame position, then a conversation erupted about The Election. Gentleman #1, missing a front tooth and perhaps 35 years old, was playing white. Gentleman #2, perhaps 45 years old and presenting an immensely attractive air of mixed elegance and serenity, played black. Gentleman #3, perhaps late 40s, was also watching. All three gentlemen were African-American. I’m not certain, but I think it likely that by the professor’s criterion G#1 and #2 are ‘uneducated’, and G#3 is ‘educated’, and very likely I was the only participant especially afflicted, i.e. with a Phd.
G1: I voted for Trump
G2: You're kidding me, aren’t you, N? You used to be a Panther, and now you’re voting for a fascist?
G1: Look here, N, I would have voted for that N-woman in the 1970s.
G3 and Me: You mean Shirley Chisholm?
G1: Yeah.
G2: Then why didn’t you, a Panther, vote for Harris?
G1: That N put me and a lot of other Ns in prison.
G2: But why vote for Trump? You could have just not voted.
G1: Because there was a lot of social progress under Trump.
Me: Can you give an example?
G1: Before Trump a woman could make you pay child support just by saying you’re the father. Now they have to have a DNA test.
Me and G3: Well, I suppose that’s progress.
G2: How old are you, N? Don’t you remember what it was like under Trump? Don’t you remember Covid?
G1: Covid wasn’t Trump’s fault. It was just a cough and a sneeze. If you want to see a real epidemic and response, look at Ebola and how it was handled.
G2: What are you . . .
G3: Let the brother speak.
G2: Don’t you know that a million people died here from Covid?
G1: I don’t know anybody who died. [Addressing me:] Did you get vaccinated?
Me: Yeah, four times.
G1: I’m not vaccinated. I never got it, and I worked with crowds of homeless people.
G2: The world’s coming to an end.
G3: No, the world’s not coming to an end. We’re going to survive. The question is: What do we do next?
I had to get back to De Anima, so at that point I shook everyone’s hand and thanked them for the most interesting conversation I’d heard about the election.
One picks up the instruments available to one. "I'll have [him] but I will not keep [him] long"
As always, I made a mistake in the previous post. Please switch 'G2' and 'G3' in the attributed statements.
No, I didn’t necessarily mean exploitation, though I won’t run away from the term. I simply meant that over several generations, since roughly the mid-1970s, we’ve seen wages remain relatively stagnant despite the enormous increase in productivity and the enormous increase in prices. The consequences of that are all about us.
As to people making the social contract that treats them so, that’s —sorry— laughable. Whoever, apart from some mythical beings in liberal political theory, ever had any choice in the matter.
As to being materialistic, is it more commendable to accept that the children are going hungry, that there’s no affordable place to live, etc. etc.?
You’re right, in a sense, that we have the votes. But just look at the processes that block these votes from ever coming together in an effective way. Vote for the capitalist of your choice, I suppose.
There have to be multiple “reasons” for this disaster. And one of them has to be the omnipresence and effectiveness of propaganda. It works, and it’s only going to get more sophisticated and manipulative. Here is an example I culled from a local newspaper about a girl who explains why she’s voting for Trump:
“SIDNEY – A steady stream of voters trekked in and out of the James H. Bean School on Middle Road on Tuesday, where 185 people had cast ballots by 9:15 a.m.
“First-time voter Haileigh Miller, 19, received applause as she registered. Later, she said she voted for Donald Trump.
“’He aligns with my morals,’ Miller said.”
Where did she get this idea? Clocks strike 13, and a lot of people, like this one, don’t notice.
When I was born, the Democratic party was the party of labor, and of segregation. It ceased to be the party of segregation in '64 and lost the South shortly after. It then ceased to be the party of labor in '92, when Bill Clinton perceived that it was more important to court bankers and their money than to listen to workers (where were they going to go, anyway?). Highly-educated party leaders keep waiting for a largely uneducated voting public to develop class-consciousness.
JR, shame on you. You’re an educator, how could you pass up such a teachable moment? These guys needed to learn about their male privilege! I’m sure they would have thanked you.
But back to the professor’s post: it brings to mind learning a bit of history, way way back in junior high it must have been … Specifically, learning of the existence of two institutions: (1) the Negro Leagues and (2) the New Model Army. W/r/t the first, I was astonished to learn about this. I literally could NOT believe that this used to be the arrangement … No Willie Mays, No Hank Aaron … No REGGIE JACKSON? I mean, WTF?!? It made no SENSE at all. Ditto the New Model Army.
Radically limiting your group’s effectiveness by making membership a matter of heredity is obviously stupid and bound for failure, is it not? But of course, for the people inside the favored group (be they creaky-limbed ball players, nitwit aristos, or Robby Mook types) it makes all the sense in the world.
Fritz, I agree with you about propaganda. You know, tell a lie over and over, and people start to believe it as true. I am not sure it's the same as Ideology as critique of the system, but the total dominance of Trump and his rallies, full of unreal stupid garbage but the many maga folks latched on to it cause yes many are hurting and many hate the liberals, and many are racist, homophobes, who hold to the belief that white male christian nationalist are the superior form of human being. How can so many be so wrong about Political reality that their desires overwhelm their use of better sensibility?
What is it you don't understand about my New Model Army?
I’ll be more explicit. The Negro League and the Cavalier military (the “Old Model Army” if you will) made perfect sense (to the people in charge, anyway) in their time and place—i.e., Jim Crow America and unreformed England. But they vanished immediately when the context changed. And which change nobody saw coming. So the “New Democrat” ideology made perfect sense to “everybody” (everybody in charge of ideology, that is) in 1975.
Remember? The New Deal was now Old Hat—no need for securities regulation, and all those factory workers were going to become some much more groovy new kind of worker. I can’t remember how many NYT articles I read about the historic inevitability and the wisdom of this approach, culminating in the pseudo-Hegelian nonsense of Frank Fukuyama.
But 50 years on? The present situation reminds me of Wyle E. Coyote suspended in midair, just before he drops 1000’.
I take your point, but I'm sorry you don't allow for the fact of my agency, John. "The context changed" you say. But why? In the case of my New Model Army, under my direction, several things made it a powerful instrument of war and politics.
1. Officers did not need to be gentlemen. They needed to understand tactics and adhere to them and obey my orders;
2. In battle, groups should stick together and maintain their coherence—no galloping stupidly about in pursuit of an enemy which had already been discombobulated and no silly displays of horsemanship;
3. The Levellers were not allowed to mislead them. They were to limit their aspirations. They were to defend property not seize it—though some few were permitted to seize it from the Royalists.
4. If they kept Burford in mind, they’d see the wisdom of behaving as I wished them to behave.
Well thank God you and your agency are back. Now get to work and fix things so that henceforth Dem strategists will no longer have to be ersatz “gentlemen” (i.e., Ivy League grads). We’ll all benefit from the new thinking this would allow.
Don’t let it be said that all I do is carp about the Dems (as much fun as that is). Here’s an actual policy idea w/r/t healthcare.
It may come as a surprise to most, but the federal government does in fact already operate a system of socialized medicine—it’s called the VA and it is the largest healthcare system in America.
As an agency the VA is entirely under the control of the executive. With the stroke of a pen the president can do pretty much what she likes with it. Harris could have gone rogue three weeks ago and promised to open up the system to everybody: free healthcare! I’m sure that that would have flipped everybody over to our side.
Yeah yeah yeah, it would have generated a giant admin law dispute, but all of that is further down the road and those sorts would be clearly legitimately seen as TRYING TO KILL GRANDMA. And sure, she would have been assassinated before New Years … but she would have WON the election.
Late to the funeral, but here's where I am, sorry for the word count... (Not that I'm confident it's the right place to be, but w/e.)
My immediate emotions here most likely don't line up with reality, which is probably merciful in a way, or at least a testament to the strength of whatever subconscious defense mechanisms... I don't feel that the return of Trump is as doom-heralding as it was the first time around. I'm feeling fearful and dejected, of course, but not utterly hopeless, and the fear and dejection are somehow kind of muffled and easier to compartmentalize this time. But in trying to convince myself that my reflexes aren't totally skewed - or, at minimum, to make some sense of WTF happened - here's where I happen to be:
To me the most reasonable-sounding reactions say roughly this: What probably helped conservatives most (and not just in the US) was the expensiveness of groceries/gas/housing and the like. ("Are you better off now than you were four years ago?") Democrats and their supporters inadvertently salted the wounds by defending Biden's economic accomplishments (however accurately); with things in general being more expensive, without clear relief in sight, this often felt like "gaslighting" on the part of "out-of-touch elites." The incumbent party is probably highly disadvantaged in this scenario, no matter what - it's not as though the clearly better strategy is not to defend Biden's accomplishments! Still, Harris might've been less disadvantaged if her campaign had stronger, more consistent emphasis on taxing billionaires, attacking price-gouging, etc. (Leiter's "post-mortem" links a Jacobin piece that has interesting evidence for this.)
Other obvious things that seemed to help the Republicans: hysterics over "illegals," Trump's "martyr" image, resentment against the "sanctimonious woke" (LGBT allies, anti-racists, etc.) - I'd guess these were the main ones, and I'd also guess that these by themselves wouldn't quite suffice to ensure Republican victory. All else being equal, perhaps the Democrats would've gotten the votes they needed if things had just been easier on people's wallets. On a weakly consoling note: If this is right, and if (as seems likely - I'm sure there are good arguments) the financial hardships of the non-wealthy will tangibly worsen over the next four years, then it might make sense to expect the Republicans to lose much of their advantage.
We've also been talking about trying to understand the concerns and the mindset of the non-college educated majority. All I can offer from my experience is: Leiter might be very right to point to "correlation = causation" as a particularly alluring fallacy. ("Prices have been higher with Biden in office, compared to Trump" = "Biden's policies are responsible for worsening my financial burdens" = "Another Trump presidency would surely lighten these burdens.")
I think it's also pretty natural to confuse anecdotal evidence with representative, statistically meaningful samples. Hence: "I see lots of news stories about Black men committing violent crimes in certain parts of town," etc., can feel suggestive of, "Black people are generally more dangerous than the rest of the population"; and so, hearing a more educated person object to the latter on the grounds of, say, "the cyclical, intergenerational effects of systemic racism and poverty, amply documented by research" - again, the feeling may be that of being gaslit and condescended to.
"But it might instead be the case that my beliefs really are the product of faulty reasoning or inadequate information. I should at least pause, put my ego aside, and reconsider": I think it's rare for anyone, though a bit less rare for a college-educated person, to say this sort of thing.
WaPo has a piece today about the Trump campaign's very conscious online strategy to reach young men whose "information" (the quotation marks are v. necessary) comes from video clips, memes, podcasts etc. on certain online platforms. Un-paywalled link:
https://wapo.st/4fx8g4Y
An optimistic, revolutionary communist take on the processes that are at play here: https://marxist.com/usa-democrats-tossed-out-defeat-trumpism-with-communism.htm
'Just as a reminder of how repellent Clinton was, here's the clip of her chortling about the torture-killing of Gaddafi:'
Not precisely what she is chortling about, though we know of her forceful support of U.S. intervention in Liba. Whether this was an obviously short-sighted intervention, I recall how the whole pretext for the intervention was ostensibly to stop a "slaughter" of civilians. Maybe some Libyans say life was better under dictatorship, it's just that when it comes to what Hillary Clinton was caught pumping her fists about. Also, she exclaimed "We came. We saw. He died!"
This strikes a chord. I joined the army because I had most other avenues closed to me. And now I'm racing against my contract clock to get a degree on the armys dime so I can get a good enough job after to support my growing family. The army has been my social welfare program, and it has never been more obvious that unless I can get a degree, I'm stuck doing infantry stuff, or other low paying jobs.
Just like how the Krazycouponclub helps people find deals and stretch their budgets, these housing solutions make quality living more accessible for everyone. Thank you for sharing these insights and possibilities for the future!
Thank you to Erika Hamlett for typing out the wonderful comment of RPW's.
Makes me wonder how real the movie October Sky was in reality? Also Yeager, that great test pilot, didn't have any college and yet he ended up a pilot in WW2 & later on a 4 star general never getting a college degree. Richard Marcinko, the famous Seal, was helped out by a military mentor to gain his officer rank by studying to get his High School diploma.
Nowadays there are Chief Master Sargents in the armed forces with PhDs. There are Special Forces Combat Divers in the Army who are NCOs but they have J.D.'s & M.D.'s. More kudos to them.
I guess the Prophet Daniel was right at the end of his book when he said that later on "knowledge will increase, & people will run to and fro."
But to be fair to Chuck Yeager he did attend the Air Command and Staff College in 1952 and the Air War College in 1961.
I've been trying, and failing, to avoid election talk. And I've had to 'unfollow' almost all of my news outlets to avoid seeing pictures of people like Stephen Miller (is there anyone who looks more deserving of 24/7 police surveillance?).--On the perennial topic of lesser-evilism: In the past few days I've run into several people who claim either to have self-censored by not criticizing Harris or (like myself) were told to shut up about St. Kamala. This morning I read a short thing in CounterPunch from the Kierkegaardian philosopher M. G. Piety (her real name) about the abuse she got for OPENLY voting for Jill Stein. [Side note: Raymond Geuss says that Robert Paul Wolff gave great class lectures on Kierkegaard back in the 1960s. I would give a lot for a transcript. I recently re-read Repetition and was reminded of Wittgenstein's remark that Kierkegaard was by far the greatest philosopher of the 19th century.] "I was viciously attacked by someone I love simply for daring to do what I felt was right, even when it made no difference to the outcome of the election. Toeing the Democratic [Party] line which used to be justified as a means to the end of winning an election, has now become an end in itself — and anyone who fails to recognize it as such is viciously attacked." https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/13/the-one-thing-needful-some-post-election-reflections/
John Rapko, it's not the best moment to question progressive orthodoxy. progressives are very upset and do not react pensively to contrarians or heretics, even if the contrarians and/or heretics are basically coming from a left or progressive posture. several family members would have stoned me if I had been within range.
Professor Piety uses the phrase (in her 2012 piece on the same subject) “wasting” one’s vote. She sees voting as a moral exercise, such that holding one’s nose and voting Dem (as a lot of us have been doing for quite a while now) is a vote wasted on a morally undeserving candidate.
This is a familiar position to take, and one that seems more prevalent on the “left” (or at least the non-right). But why is voting for one of two candidates an endorsement of that candidate as a person in her entirety? Do you ask your plumber about his political affiliations before you pay him to fix your toilet? It is hard (well, impossible) for me to see the position of POTUS as one that is primarily moral as opposed to ministerial. Even the position of Archbishop of Canterbury is primarily ministerial. Confusing the essential nature of the two offices must be a vestige of our puritan history.
This approach seems to me to be related to a similar phenomenon in the world of literature—that of the fear of contagion. The vocal majority of readers and critics, it seems, are incapable of separating the work of art from the artist, and so the work of morally dubious artists are banished. To judge by what I’ve read Celine, Pound, Wyndham Lewis … even Nabokov have all been sent to sit in the corner, and reading and enjoying them can earn you some stink-eye.
On the right itself, they seemingly have no problem voting for candidates that are clearly amoral, but who have promised to give them the material gains they want. The right votes strategically, while strategic voting is considered suspect on the left. I’d be interested to know if this non-strategic approach is huit-tarded (that is, a legacy of 1968).
I think we can all agree that this is at least an interesting state of affairs. I’m a born materialist, so it seems to me that Prof. Piety is confusing two realms, the earthly and the celestial, but I suspect that my opinion is a minority one.
Materialists are surely made, not born? But be that as it may, John P., aren’t you suggesting that the votee is a complex creature, as is the writer, and that the voter/reader ought to take that into account? But isn’t the voter/reader also a complex creature? And isn’t the decision to vote/not vote, read/not read the outcome of a complex collision between these two complex creatures?
I don’t claim to be very complex myself (hence, no doubt, my intellectual confusion on the points you made J.P.), but I do know that for a time I enjoyed reading Kingsley Amis. But then I happened to read with great anticipation one of his novels, I can’t remember which, which left me feeling somehow sullied, and I could never read him—or his son, as it happens—again. Lucky me!
In relation to s. wallerstein’s response to John Rapko: I thought it had been suggested somewhere up-thread that the notion of progressivism needed to be analysed because it seemingly assumed that the notion contained several disharmonious elements which “progressives” have tended to disregard? Presumably Piety’s—and Rapko’s—remarks are part of an already ongoing effort to hasten such a critical analysis along. And that I take to be one of the few politically healthy things we can do at the present moment since “progressivism” as it is currently understood has clearly been found wanting.
I voted Harris, but perspectives like that of Prof. Piety do have a way of pricking my conscience. (As does just about everything, to be fair. Catholic upbringing here, various kinds of mental illness in the family, etc.)
I think the basic idea comes across in a sort of thought experiment: Is there anything you can substitute for X, such that the statement, ‘I shouldn’t support someone who participates in X, no matter how much the world otherwise benefits when that person is sufficiently empowered (no matter that their being sufficiently empowered is *not* determined by my personal support),’ comes out as true?
(Sorry that’s a terribly written sentence.)
For example, we’ve seen Eric in these discussions substitute ‘genocide’ for X.
Like, to what extent do ‘lesser-evil’ Democratic voters compare to (IIRC) Roy Moore’s voters, who evidently live in a world (however ludicrous, but set that aside) where voting non-Republican is more objectionable than voting for a child molester?
Anyway, this seems to me like a sort of moral fork-in-the-road, having to do with the status of consequentialism itself: ‘the lesser evil’ versus ‘justice though the heavens fall.’ In an idealized case (i.e., involving perfectly rational and informed actors, each without mixed motives or conflicting ideas, but having opposite ‘ground-level’ principles; sort of the ‘frictionless plane’ of moral deliberation), I can’t picture what either position could possibly have to persuade the other.
It strikes home for me whenever I make sketchy choices as a consumer as well. The world would (if only for economic reasons) be a better, more just and humane place if no one consumed animal products beyond the dictates of medical/nutritional necessity. At any rate, I believe this, and I also believe that my individual consumption choices don’t affect the system at large. In practice, that’s how I ‘rationalize’ my cheese addiction (that, and not wanting to inconvenience friends when we share meals, not wanting to get weird looks). This would not impress the likes of Kant or Sartre, and I don’t think those guys are simply nuts, or somehow less perceptive than me (surely it’s the opposite!).
A long while ago, I saw someone (random philosophy student) claim that ‘being ethical is impossible.’ I figured that was an exaggeration for effect, but part of me also wishes I could’ve heard the guy elaborate on this; maybe he was onto something. A little later, I saw Sigwick’s despairing remark in his later years that he ‘didn’t know the ABCs of morality.’
But as always, it’s Hume at the end of the day. Forget about it, play some billiards, etc.
Michael,
Adorno: Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
Having read Piety's piece in Counterpunch, it seems to me sufficient attention isn't being paid here to the fact that what she was really writing about wasn't so much about voting one's conscience as it was about the over the top reaction of one of her friends who called her a Nazi because of how she voted, an inconsequential vote at that, and because she suggested that Trump might actually not follow through on some his more outrageous "promises." She was drawing attention, I thought, to the unfortunately now widespread tendency regard anyone who doesn't thoroughly and completely align themselves with you in thought and deed as the most horrible enemy.
Further investigation reveals that Prof. Piety is indeed a pious Christian, a member of the (echt-Protestant) sect of “Friends”. Voting your conscience does make sense under these circumstances, i.e., where you believe that you will ultimately have to face that celestial bureaucrat, St. Peter (See Revelations 21:21). You don’t want him running his index finger down the ledger, stopping at 11/05/24, frowning and reaching for that big black Sharpie of Damnation.
I am ignorant, among other things, of what the "left" is and what the left means by "progressive." I am, I gather, dismissed for being a "liberal." I would describe myself as a "New Deal Liberal." Bernie Sanders says that he is a socialist, but that he does not advocate government ownership of the means of production. He simply wants the rewards of that production to be more equally distributed--and he has offered specific programs for doing exactly that. Sounds like a New Deal Liberal to me.
What specific policies do progressives advocate that liberals do not? What do progressives do to sell those policies to the larger electorate, a majority of whom (in a democracy) need to agree before those policies will enacted in law. Most people have not read Marx and never will. What do progressives do, in this somewhat semi democracy, to obtain their support?
This is an unfair description of Piety's (totally reasonable) position, if you read her earlier (2012) article on wasting your vote. She doesn't speak of "voting your conscience" in this sense; she explicitly separates what she's doing from seeking to maintain self-respect or some moral status. Her point is more pragmatic than that, just from a longer-term point of view. Her argument is that voting for the lesser of two evils has contributed to the rightward move of the perceived "center" of American politics, and that the only way to stop this process is to vote for candidates who are members of the genuine left, knowing full well that in the short term this will entail some political losses, but having faith that in the long term people will join you. It is optimistic, but it's not an abandonment of all political strategy or something.
According to the one (and ONLY one) story I can be bothered to read on the subject (in Al Jazeera, make of that what you will) Stein siphoned off enough votes in each swing state to hand the election to Trump. I leave it to the moral philosophers in the audience to turn this into a trolley system diagram.
I don’t think I’m being unfair to Prof. Piety. It was Fuerbach’s great insight to see that He is really a projection of you, and that by voting your “conscience” you can achieve a two-fer: you can grovel before Him, and you can God-up yourself. You can also lord it over the rest of us … I’m speaking as a corrupt Catholic here, but there’s something characteristically Protestant about public declarations of piety, with their mixture of masochism and self-regard.
As for whether or not Jill Stein and the Greens are genuinely “left”, that’s a good question.
Well feel free to ignore this if you're not genuinely interested in the subject, but...
-I don't see how mentioning Feuerbach's projection theory of the Christian religion settles anything about what Piety is talking about. Of course it's true that this is one possible justification someone MIGHT have for voting third party. But it's not the only possible motivation, and it's not Piety's (unless we're just disregarding everything she says).
-I think the argument works whether or not Stein is a real leftist. (I have my doubts about Stein myself.) The point is only that if you think a third party candidate is speaking to what you think are good solutions to our actual problems, you should vote for them even if they don't have a chance of winning this election. Your vote should express your real preference, since if you give that up you're easy prey for someone trying to convince you to go against those preferences for what they try to portray to you as "strategic" reasons that never really pay off.
Well that's he first I've heard, that Jill Stein cost the Democrats the Presidency. Last I looked, her totals were inconsequential to the outcomes. It maybe should also be mentioned that overall she and RFK Jr. each got about 700,000 votes.
As to what is or is not "left"--or "right" or "progressive" or etc.--something David P. also seems to find confusing, I'd suggest it makes sense to view them ass as 'essentially contested concepts,' meaning that they're all subject to debate, a debate which will never give rise to a final definitive answer.
David P. @7:20 p.m.
As some of the discussion in this thread indicates, there are no universally accepted definitions of "left," "progressive," "liberal" (in the contemporary political sense of that word), etc. That said, it is not hard to find differences -- on policy and even more in terms of general emphasis -- between, say, Sanders's campaigns for the Dem nomination and those of some of his primary opponents. Sanders was for single-payer health care, for instance, and H. Clinton, if I recall correctly, was not. There were probably other policy differences too. (Proposals like a universal basic income count as "pre-distribution" rather than as re-distribution in the tax-and-transfer sense; I forget whether Sanders proposed this or not.)
The more immediate problems now relate, istm, to trying to keep the amount of damage Trump will do within some kind of bounds. The Dem governors of Illinois and Colorado have formed a new group that sounds like a good idea at the practical level of resisting certain foreseeable and dubiously legal moves by the Trump 2.0 administration. Most of Trump's appointments that have recently been announced are stunningly bad. Tulsi Gabbard as director of natl intelligence? Pete Hegseth (whom I'm not sure I had ever heard of, not having watched Fox) as sec of defense? Matt Gaetz as attorney general!?! One hopes the Senate, even though w a Repub majority, will draw some lines, but my guess is that "let him have whom he wants" will prevail, unfortunately. The exact role that RFK Jr. will have has not yet been announced, afaik.
Correction, the Al Jazeera article shows Stein spoiling Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin, not “all” of the swing states: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/5/us-election-2024-could-jill-stein-determine-whether-trump-or-harris-wins
Piety is a tenured professor at Drexel, so I’m assuming she’s a Pennsylvania voter, but she could live across the river in New Jersey. Given this, and given the proposed cabinet (Gaetz for AG! Fox News in charge of the Pentagon! Etc!) I think it’s understandable that her colleagues might be just a little ticked off with her.
BTW, she maintains her own website and a quick breeze through that reveals her deep-seated religious motivations. Reading two Counterpunch pieces while ignoring this context seems lazy, but as further context let’s recall that one of Counterpunch’s major hate figures has always been … Bernie Sanders!
LFC
What is it that progressives see as so abhorrent about liberals? It certainly stems from more than advocating something other than not supporting a single payer health system.
Bernie is probably the most effect progressive (left liberal?). Instead of going the 3rd party route, he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. He didn't get it, but his strength was such that he extracted concessions from Biden.
Bernie doesn't (at least publicly) scorn liberals to the right of him. He argues with them about policy, and he convinces enough voters that he's right, with the result that he has a positive impact on what actually gets done, even though, at the end of the day, he has lost the nomination to Hillary and Biden.
He doesn't just scorn and condemn. He argues on the merits to the public. Apart from AOC, I find it hard to think of any other person of the left who does that.
Anon wrote referring Prof. Piety: "...but it's not an abandonment of all political strategy or something."
Hope without considering actual conditions and understanding structure isn't a strategy. There was debate of sorts in the conservative movement over third party vs. working within the Republican Party. William Rusher wrote a book advocating the former in the 1970s while Reagan held to the later position.
This is from her CP article on wasting ones vote: "If you vote for a candidate whose farther right than you would prefer, well, then you’re shifting the political “center” to the right." I guess she would have voted for Norman Thomas or William Z. Foster had she been voting in 1932.
I assume Trump's nominations are part of the aspiring authoritarian's standard humiliation/submission routine and reflects a certain learning curve.
BTW, I see that H5N1 (bird flu) is persisting and all we need is a mutation that allows for human to human transmission. Be ironic if Trump is presented with the opportunity to kill off another million or so (also rumor that T will be nominating RFK jr for HHS) - oops, just announced on CNBC so it's a thing. Putin is laughing and we are doomed.
David Palmeter, I don't see Bernie Sanders as a liberal, even a left liberal. He's a leftist or radical, who has become politically pragmatic with age and experience, but he belongs to the left tribe, the same tribe as Chomsky and me, not the liberal tribe, the tribe of the Clintons and the New York Times.
The two tribes don't like each other. I've received shit from the liberals since high school when I criticized JFK and the Bay of Pigs invasion and since then I've never felt much desire to hold hands with them or to read their mainstream media.
Politics is tribal. I didn't invent that.
Tribes may make alliances with one another, but they represent different cultures, different mindsets and the difference in culture is not simply political. They probably represent different personality types too: Jonathan Haidt goes into that in his book The Righteous Mind.
David Palmeter,
I don't share your sense that a lot of self-identified progressives or leftists scorn those who call themselves liberals. There's some of that, but I wouldn't exaggerate its extent.
Nor do I particularly share S. Wallerstein's sense that there are two different "tribes." I think s.w.'s view is heavily influenced by when he grew up and whom he encountered. As the phenomenon known as "Cold War liberalism" came under stress and criticism with the Vietnam War, and as the Cold War foreign policy elite fractured over it, the kinds of divisions that so influenced s.w. when he was in high school became less marked and less salient. By the time McGovern was the Dem nominee in '72, these labels (progressive vs. liberal) had ceased to matter as much. Carter in '76 was deliberately vague about his ideology, which was a mishmash of different things. Only w Bill Clinton in '92 do the faultlines in the party start to re-emerge in a quite significant way. In short, there are different tendencies and viewpoints, but I think also a realization, esp now, that the common opponent is more important and that one has to work on ways of ensuring that Trumpism is a time-limited phenomenon. Perhaps there is an element of wishful thinking in this, but we'll see.
Talk is that Trump plans to eliminate the tax credit for electric vehicles. That Trump (and Musk) favored this was well known before the election. I got curious and checked how the vote went in McLean County, Ill where Rivian has its plant. Trump carried the county. You can't fix stupid.
The few thousand votes that Stein garnered this cycle probably did not swing any Electoral votes. What is much harder to quantify is her impact dishearteningly potential voters or validating their proclivity to not vote at all
I just pulled my head up from reading De Anima in Greek for the first time (now up to Book 3.2), and now catch up and find pretty much all of the recent (post-M.G. Piety post) comments very interesting and thought-provoking. As usual I don't have anything original to add to discussion of the liberal/'progressive'/left distinctions (or non-distinctions), but that won't stop me from making a couple of comments. One can only agree with LFC that terms like 'liberal' and 'left' shift semantically; and that historical contextualization is, if not the beginning of wisdom, at least the beginning of saying anything intelligible. (As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology, we know no science (Wissenschaft) but the science of history.) But one might also add that such terms exhibit to a high degree semantic indeterminacy, and so are routinely used in ways that are at least partially stipulative. Still, s. wallerstein's remarks about 'tribes' made me wonder about a kind of durable liberal sensibility. Alasdair MacIntyre in the late 1940s-early 1950s, Raymond Geuss in the late 1950s, and even a plodder like myself by the late 1970's had 'seen through' liberalism in its bog varieties. What's so dismaying about the liberal sensibility? Well, as MacIntyre and/or Geuss have put it for the past 70 years, it's the individualism, the sanctimoniousness, the moralising, the attack on community, the lack of political imagination, the lack of a sense of the future, the lack of a sense of irony, the lack of a sense of humor, the fundamentalist multiplying of 'rights', the comfort with the capitalist market, the incessant prattle about 'values', and/or the incoherent elevation of 'tolerance' to the sole cardinal virtue. And add to all of these durable features the recent appropriation of the label 'progressive' by the liberal Crow Jim racialist identitarians. At least it's been cheering in the past few years to start seeing books with titles like Susan Neiman's Left is Not Woke and Musa al-Garbi's We Have Never Been Woke.--Back to De Anima.
Postscript to my comment @5:33 p.m.
To be clear, we're all influenced by when (and where) we grew up, so my remark on that score w.r.t. s.w. was not intended as a criticism. Nor did I mean to deny the obvious point that there are differences between leftists and liberals (however those words are defined); I just think that there are also some significant commonalities.
Years ago I was talking with a former teacher of mine, pretty much the only one from college I'd been close to or kept in touch with, and praising (as I recall) a particular book written by a political philosopher who would accurately be called leftist. I don't remember the details of the conversation but I do remember at one point he gave me a look that's hard to describe precisely (direct? skeptical?) and said: "I think you're a liberal." If I were retrospectively to identify a moment at which I stopped being esp. concerned about these labels (as they apply to myself), it might be that one. Still, I prefer to call myself a left-liberal -- the word "liberal" standing completely alone still makes me somewhat uncomfortable, for reasons that may not be v. good ones but whatever. (Earlier I was happy with the label 'democratic socialist' except I became increasingly unsure what it meant and increasingly disenchanted with some of the things that DSA, for instance, was saying. I haven't been a DSA member for quite a while, though I know people who still are.)
I apologize for the navel-gazing. (Again, whatever.)
I’m in perfect agreement with JR as to what in particular is so dismaying about our lib pals’ sensibility. But why do we find it so dismaying? I submit that it dismays us because it functions, culturally, as a sort of vast wet blanket.
It’s like an atmospheric inversion … there it is, lying just on top of us, frustrating every natural impulse to soar into (or simply gaze at) the blue sky. Drive down the Tejon Pass and you can see, covering the entirety of the Central Valley, a thick brown layer of brown dirt that has been thrown up there and remains suspended as an aerosol. How beautiful the scene would be without this blanket of dirt …!
Alas, just as we need the fruits of mechanized agriculture and so are stuck with the pollution, so it seems we are stuck with our liberal erstwhile allies.
One could argue, on the other side, that the liberal emphasis on individual rights and the protection of individual conscience has been historically an instrument of liberation. I doubt that many here would like to go back to the (internecine, in some cases) religious wars of 16th-cent. Europe or be transplanted to, say, contemporary Iran or Afghanistan.
That JR and JP and anyone else can freely attack liberalism in public without fear of persecution of any kind (putting whatever may happen under Trump 2.0 aside) is itself a consequence and legacy of liberalism. In the rush to indict "the liberal sensibility" for its "attack on community," it would be well, I'd suggest, to remember that "community" can sometimes be oppressive.
The "liberal sensibility" trusts that individuals can retain some autonomy even in the face of social pressures and forces, and that one should strive for a world in which the distorting effects of money and economic inequality are removed as much as possible from the arena of political debate, so that different voices and views can compete on something like an even footing -- a situation that certainly does not obtain today. These are pretty bog-standard "liberal egalitarian" positions that, far from being a cultural "wet blanket," allow JR to spend his time reading De Anima in Greek (or Geuss or whoever) and JP to find some less polluted bit of California -- there must be a few spots left -- where he can do whatever he wants as long as it doesn't actively harm someone else, recognizing at the same time that there are "collective" responsibilities that have to underpin, reinforce, and mitigate the negative externalities of "individualism."
When I for one criticize liberals here, my target is not John Stuart Mill or the enlightenment. I realize Geuss puts down Mill, but my role model for radical leftism is Chomsky, who is very pro-enlightenment and has no problems with Mill.
I use the word "liberal" not in the philosophical sense, but as it is used in the U.S. media to refer to people like the Clintons, the Obamas, Biden and Harris. Generally, quite hawkish, quite into American exceptionalism and the belief, stated or not, that the U.S. owns the world (as Chomsky puts it), with ties to corporate interests (I know Biden once walked a picket line: big fucking deal!!!),
contempuous of the "deplorables", folks represented by the NY Times and CNN.
I ask you: has Chomsky, widely admired throughout Latin America as a public intellectual, ever gotten space in the NY Times or CNN?
There is liberalism per se (Mill et al), and liberalism as it appears today: it has devolved into mere “sensibility”. And one annoying aspect of the latter is its hostility to critique. Observing, delineating (and even disliking) certain aspects of of our modern (“liberal”) condition does not automatically make you into a member of the bedsheet brigade. In any event, the liberal version of “love it or leave it” is all the more ridiculous … because what are you gonna do? Put a note in my employment file?
Just to keep the pot boiling:
“At present, liberalism is not so much a political philosophy as a chronic form of cognitive dissonance.”
“Liberalism was not always the solipsistic orthodoxy it is today, but it is doubtful whether the current generation of liberals can recover the capacity for self-criticism. Still, something will be learned. As they rail against a cruel world, they will discover what it means to be dumped like rubbish on the wrong side of history. “
These are the views of John Gray: https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2024/11/donald-trump-triumph-of-illiberal-democracy .
The first five paragraphs (which is all I've read) of the John Gray piece contain some v. sweeping statements that seem to me premature at best, as well as the statement that Trump's victory was "a landslide," which, as D. Nexon among others has pointed out, is not right:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/11/defining-landslides-down
Civic Americanus Sum, they had the privilge of being white Americans, they did not sign a deal with the Devil, but they were along for the ride and many voted against their "true" self-interest- stop being a social worker for the salt of the earth and kick with reality
Nexon's piece (I read the whole thing!), like several others that have been sent my way, seems to be aimed at making those on the losing side in the recent election not feel so bad about the electoral disaster. For some reason the word "gaslighting" (a notion I barely understand, but which in the present context seems to mean that you're going to encounter a critical explanation you shouldn't pay any attention to because you should never attend to things that go against your prejudices) crops up in many of these 'feel good' admonitions.
I'm actually quite convinced that much of the back and forth is part of the contest to direct the Democratic party into the future. That is something I imagine John Gray has little interest in trying to do since he's an outside observer who, as best I understand him, doesn't think positively about any of the options Americans might pursue--though he may be relishing the collapse of American political smugness.
There’s nothing wrong with “sweeping statements” … sweeping statements are great! The only people who don’t like sweeping statements are no fun! Qualifications are for nerds!
Seriously, a big problem with the rules of “the discourse” as they have been laid down and are enforced inside our liberal fishbowl is the requirement to ring-fence every statement with qualifications, provisos, apologies, euphemisms, and what-not, in order to deny free play to our thoughts, to keep them from bolting and going where they will.
This approach obscures any message. If there is one … if there is no real message, all the verbiage will disguise that as well. Add this approach to written, spoken, and non-verbal communication to to the (growing!) list of things to hate about liberals.
Here’s an idea: may we not characterize what’s wrong with the liberal ethos as being overwhelmingly anti-libidinal? (Maybe that should be “underwhelmingly” but you get the idea.)
Thinking about it, I realize what I cannot stand about liberals (and I mean once again those who are called "liberals" in the U.S. media, not followers of J.S. Mill) is their Amerikan exceptionalism, their 100% support for Amerikan militarism with the incredible hypocrisy of how they justify it with "humanitarian interventions", "human rights", "democracy", "women's rights in Afghanistan or whatever country is the victim du jour of their imperialism, their current support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, their current love affair with the Cheneys, and this is nothing new. One of my first political memories is watching the 1960 presidential debate between JFK and Nixon: JFK was more hawkish than Nixon, fanatically anti-communist, with all the bullshit hypocrisy about "killing for peace" , "killing in the name of democracy", "with God on our side".
Otherwise, liberals, the Clintons, the Obamas, Biden, Harris, Pelosi and their ilk are cynical bastards, but I have nothing against cynical bastards in politics: that's what politics is about.
Read Machiavelli.
The hypocrisy and the American exceptionalism, always coupled with an incredibly provincialism, is too much for me. I'm out, chao, hasta luego, adieu.
S.W.
For me you're overstating your case. To the extent nations differ from each other, they are all "exceptional." There's no other country like Switzerland, or Chile or Japan or Canada or the US, or any other. The term is, I agree, used by many in the US to mean superior. But many, if not most, people think their country is exceptional for some unstated reason. To me that's just boiler plate and doesn't mean anything. Nevertheless, we were "exceptional" in the positive sense when the country was formed. With all of its flaws, with slavery, it was at one time the largest (except for a couple of city states) democracy in the world. It did inspire people in Europe. That's why they came here. We still draw more immigrants than Trump wants. China and Russia, to name just two, don't have an immigrant problem.
As to "stated or not, that the U.S. owns the world (as Chomsky puts it), with ties to corporate interests," what's wrong with corporate interests? They provide jobs and goods for many people. US companies have foreign facilities. The reverse is also true: many foreign companies own facilities here: A couple of large British companies own many US book publishing companies. One of the largest, if not the largest, exporters of cars from the US is the BMW plant in South Carolina. The VW plant in Tennessee recently voted to join the UAW.
I don't think the US "owns the world," and don't anyone who does. We do have interests around the world, but so do most countries. You can see them trying to further their interests by watching the UN General Assembly.
Getting back to my earlier question about the distinction between liberal and progressive has to do with capitalism vs. socialism. I don't favor government ownership of the means of production. Is that what makes me a liberal and you a progressive?
Nixon's defeat of McGovern in '72 was a landslide. So was LBJ's victory over Goldwater in '64. So, arguably, were a few other elections in U.S. political history in relatively recent decades.
Trump's margins were simply not of landslide proportions, under any reasonable definition of the word "landslide."
In my opinion, this has little or nothing to do with "feel good" admonitions. The point is rather to push back against those who would exaggerate the scale of the Trump win in order to further their self-serving, dubious narrative that this is a "realignment" election that portends a long swing in the Repubs' favor.
Now maybe there will be a long electoral swing in the Repubs' favor, but I think that is not a prediction that can easily be read off (or read into) the results of this election. Yes, it was a very significant defeat, but fully acknowledging that reality does not require acquiescing in the false and language-distorting narrative of those who, like John Gray (no leftist btw), are either unfamiliar with the meaning of the word "landslide" or, more likely, are pretending to be unfamiliar with its meaning in order to cow, browbeat, and mislead people into thinking that a decisive electoral defeat was even more decisive than it actually was.
Come on, David, get real. You know very well what “American exceptionalism” means—the “indispensable nation” and all that sort of stuff. And as to who owns what, do you really not know who for the most part owns what? As to what’s wrong with corporate interests, I can’t believe you’re unaware of the links between corporate power and political power—in fact, I believe I’ve encountered quite a lot of people complaining (as I believe they should) about the inordinate influence of billionaires such as Musk.
As to where you stand politically, I’d say, on the basis of how you describe your own views, that you’re actually quite conservative.
"'We lost all the swing states. We lost in every county in America,' Li said [Lindy Li, a member of the DNC finance committee who raised millions for Harris]. 'This is just astounding. This is not some like blip. This is an avalanche.... This wasn’t a loss. This was a shellacking'"
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/dnc-democrat-debt-harris/
s.wallerstein: David Palmeter, I don't see Bernie Sanders as a liberal, even a left liberal. He's a leftist or radical, who has become politically pragmatic with age and experience, but he belongs to the left tribe, the same tribe as Chomsky and me, not the liberal tribe, the tribe of the Clintons and the New York Times.
Bernie Sanders a radical? LOL
Sanders is a social democrat capitalist. And in terms of foreign policy he is an imperialist, or an apologist for imperialism. He is hardly radical, his past rhetoric notwithstanding.
What you call "pragmatism" seems to me more like opportunism.
You're quite right about politics being tribal and seeing leftists and liberals as being in different tribes, though.
R McD,
You're right. Many people do believe that we are the indispensable nation. And for a long time that was true. It's less so now, and will continue to erode as other countries, e.g. China and India, develop. But who cares what they believe? I agree also that corporations and wealthy people like Musk have too much power. But that doesn't have to be the case. We once had strong antitrust laws before the Reagan administration, with the Supreme Court's assistance, watered them down to almost nothing. And it was the Supreme Court that demolished money in politics with its Citizens United decision. Most, if not all, of that doesn't have to be the case. They don't have much to do with issues like single payer health insurance--except, of course, the insurance industry.
Identifying faults is easy. But knowing how to correct them is not. The system doesn't need complaints. It needs people who can propose solutions and convince the people of the their merits.
SW,
I agree Bernie is a capitalist, or at least believes that capitalism is something we're stuck with. I'm not aware of his imperialism, but that's just my ignorance. Can you give some examples?
On economics, am I correct in concluding that you are a socialist, i.e., you would advocate government ownership of the means of production?
An example of what I consider pragmatism is Obama Care. It is far, far from perfect. But it is better than what we had before. Millions of people who did not have health insurance now have it. Politically, the votes were not there for more. So Bernie and others took it as better than the only alternative on the table. It's "get what you can while you can, and then come back for more." What's opportunistic about that?
Well, we agree on one thing, LFC, John Gray is no leftist despite his British working class origins, though I don’t know anyone who was claiming that he was.
But as to all the criticism that he was out “to cow, browbeat, and mislead people into thinking that a decisive electoral defeat was even more decisive than it actually was,” it seems to me you’re reading him as if he was an American with a narrow American set of concerns respecting Trump’s election, someone with whom you believe yourself to be ideologically engaged over primarily domestic American outcomes. Hence, your passion?
It seems to me, however, that he has to be read as someone with a non-American set of concerns—though maybe he’s narrowly British or narrowly European—who is writing for an audience which in his estimation, I’d guess, he wants to warn that the relationships which have governed their way of life for at least a couple of generations (in the British case since World War Two) are no longer likely to pertain. Even should the Democrats of some stripe return to power in four or eight years, no one elsewhere is any longer likely to trust that that will be an enduring condition. From that point of view, however little the outcome of the election may affect things in the US in the longer term, it seems that others elsewhere are most unlikely to put their trust and their fates in the hands of whichever ‘tribe’ of Americans is governing the USA. The American ‘liberal internationalists’ are surely not going to be able to play again the Russia/Ukraine card like they did when they replaced Trump the first time.
Admittedly, and I doubt any Briton or any European imagines it will be easy to do so, there’s no agreement about what to do or how it might be done. But that I think is part of the task Gray has taken upon himself: ‘we British’ or ‘we Europeans’ need to figure out how to take care of 'ourselves.' Hence the thrust of his remarks—the USA isn’t coming back from its current political imbroglio insofar as that has international dimensions. The Pax Americana, that “rules based order” we hear so much about, may not yet be as dead as the Pax Britannica, but it’s certainly seriously ailing, and the US’s satellites are unlikely to return to the fold. Will they try to link with the BRICS alternative? Who knows. But it’s now a topsy-turvy world, and all bets are off, or so it seems to me.
It’s not just Americans who would be advised to reflect very seriously on the future (should we all have one). Maybe I’m way off the mark, but, to repeat myself, that is what I think Gray was out to encourage among non-Americans—an maybe those relatively few Americans who do regularly try to look beyond their “homeland.”
“Bernie Sanders, Imperialist Stooge” isn’t a phrase you hear every day, but I like the way it sounds … takes me back to the good old days, back before soapboxes were made out of flimsy cardboard, and a man could or-RATE when he felt the need. Remember those salad days, when it was just you and your comrades, getting yourselves high on rhetoric and the smell of mimeograph sheets? It’s good to know that the tradition is being kept alive somewhere.
For everyone here who helped Kamala Harris & Tim Walz raise an estimated $1.6 billion to lose to Trump, you can still help the team! They need more money for ballot recounts, and to retire their tens of millions of dollars in debts.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/11/kamala-harris-fundraiser-donations-election-recount/76195287007/
"One senior campaign official called the practice of asking supporters for more money after losing decisively and having taken in so much money as 'appalling' and another described it as 'disgusting.' A third person who was flooded with complaints from donors questioned how Democrats could save their credibility moving forward...."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/kamala-harris/clashes-confusion-secrecy-consume-harris-campaign-finances-rcna179654
Of course the system needs complaints. Complaints indicate problems and shortcomings. No complaints no change, or at least no meaningful change.
As to whether those complaining are required ot offer solutions, I expected one of the regulars here to point out that Raymond Geuss has a philosophical takedown of that frequently trundled out assertion.
It’s also interesting to see the implication, from the examples you mention, that the fault for the US’s current problems lies entirely with that other, presently winning capitalist political party. The other side is so virtuous?
This is interesting:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcYIdZXXIAAxM-o?format=png&name=900x900
True that this election ends an era but taking the U.S. out of the imperialist mix still leaves Russia and the PRC - not sure that's an improvement.
Aaall, you disappoint me. Dontcha know, a “post-hegemonic” future lies just around the corner, and we’ll get there as soon as we vanquish white-cis-het domination? Or something … The details are a little vague, but once this type of wickedness passes from the scene, the virtuous peoples “of color” will establish an entirely new kind of rainbow-hued world order and happiness will reign supreme ... I’m serious! Don’t take it from me, you can read it for yourself online!
Maybe I'm mistaken, but maybe the following is relevant to John Pillette's comment at 12:02 PM;
Nancy Fraser, “Progressive neoliberalism versus reactionary populism: a Hobson's choice,” @ http://sarkoups.free.fr/fraser17.pdf
It has to do with how some admirable impulses were corrupted by the dominant awfulness.
TLDR! (For now, anyway.) My beef is with the “progressive” part of prog neo lib, which I submit isn’t progressive in any real way. It’s like going to your local Humanities Chain Store (“The Derrida Depot”? The “Gayatri Garage”?), buying a 5 gal tub of “theory”, plastering it all over your wretched, half-assed, crooked, jury-rigged carpentry, and then declaring that anyone who doesn’t admire your handiwork just doesn’t UNDERSTAND what he’s looking at …
TLDR???
It seems to me you’re in danger of throwing the baby out . . .
Anyway, it seems to me that there have been and still are some collective injuries and injustices that should be acknowledged and addressed. But the dominant awfulness too often has resulted in transforming the effort to achieve collective justice into a sort of “jobs for the boys/girls/. . .” venture. Capitalist meritocracy strikes again. And it’s this transformed pseudo-justice that too many of the aspirants and most of the “progressives” accept/celebrate as an achievement.
JP, help me out. All I did was reference the preferences of low/no information voters and the likely end of what's left of the post-1945 pax Americana. Not sure what cis-het rainbows have to do with that.
Oops, s/b aaall just north.
I was referring to the use (esp among the Brooklyn left) of the phrase “post-hegemonic” w/r/t the future … used (mostly) in a political context. That is, once we get rid of the big bad American Empire we can all enjoy some kind of groovy future. They also mean something like “all hegemonies must go”, because that’s what they learned in Comp Lit.
W/r/t the first, there is a failure to understand the nature of hegemony in the international political context. For which please see Thucydides … once the American Hegemony is over, there will be another H right behind it. W/r/t the second, hegemony is as hegemony does … it’s a useful concept in that it’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
I know I’m just a cranky old, but I think it’s more than mere correlation that comp lit “theory” came to the fore during the neoliberal moment. And speaking of hegemony, is it not hegemonic (in all of its various manifestations, including esp identitarianism) inside the culture industry, broadly construed? Which industry includes the “news” media. In other words, base-superstructure, blahblahblah …
Synchronicity! …
Just now I’ve happened on a rant against the jargon-ridden “Liberalese” used by all the clever Democrat boys and girls in Washington, DC (Weekend FT, Life & Arts p.20): “an attempt to give things a scientific and even medical veneer by people who mostly studied comparative literature.”
HA!
It's getting more than a little tedious to read all of these Anonymouses. Why not at least go with pseudonyms or initials? On the other hand it's not altogether surprising that someone might not want even to put a pseudonym to some of this stuff. Is it really necessary to read another criticism of 'Theory'? That's been done up the wazoo. I don't know what the weekend Financial Times is smoking, but "all the clever Democrat boys and girls in Washington DC" are more likely to have studied something other than Comp Lit or even 'pomo' political theory and philosophy. But by all means do carry on making these weak jokes about going to the Derrida Depot, the Gayatri Garage, and how about throwing in the Rancière Range and the Deleuze Destination for good measure?
Back to Professor Wolff’s post: the Dems have indeed become the party of “the Educated”. That may sound like a good thing, but then we need to examine what this education consists of, who it is for, and what it results in. If we do this, we can see that it tends less to enlighten than to obscure.
Call it “theory”, call it something else, but it is a sort of pseudo-philosophy agglomerated from bad history and bad social science, and it has slouched out of English and Comp Lit departments to eat not just the brains of the Democratic Party leadership but also the brains of its proxies in the fields of journalism and culture. See, e.g. the “1619 project”.
The doctrine of identitarianism posits that the world is best understood in terms of identity groups, which exist in a kind of prehistoric tribal state where questions of political economy never arise … an amazing discovery! All of that late 19th to early 20th century materialist jazz about class struggle, exploitation, and the rest … just a blind alley!
As noted by the FT Columnist, “Liberals speak a different language”. Moreover, they are only interested in talking to each other; but most of all, they are UNBEARABLE to listen to. I can’t stand listening to them, and I’m one of these people. This is a serious problem for a political party that wants to ATTRACT and not repel voters.
(This new format seems to drive erroneously “anon” comments. The anons above are mine, if that makes any difference)
To give LFC’s wazoo some relief, let’s consider a more concrete example. Remember how, way back in the election year of 2016, the liberal intelligentsia had picked as the burning issue of the day that of … transgender bathrooms?
I can’t have been the only person to think to myself, “this issue seems like a loser”. I also noted that anyone who stated this out loud was quickly labeled as a “transphobe” … and this prompted the further thought: how could a chunk of esoteric academia like gender studies rise in 25 short years (from 1990’s “Gender Trouble”) to take over and completely displace the materialist concerns of the party of FDR?
Part of the answer is, the people running the party needed to displace the party’s materialist concerns, and Judith Butler was what was available.
I’m glad to see the point I made on November 6 at 6:40 PM being reiterated. Thanks, John.
As to this concern with “Anonymous,” that’s something that’s been discussed at this site so often. I’ll admit to being puzzled as to the ire that seems to inspire. To be sure, it’s nice to imagine that one is encountering a unique persona when a label is attached. But I’d like to point out that when we meet up with, say, LFC, there’s no guarantee that several people may not be employing the same label in one and the same thread. It’s also possible that, say, “James Wilson” and “John Pillette” (sorry, John) are actually labels being used by a single person. Indeed, it’s possible to imagine that everyone contributing to a thread, or even a site, is only one person commenting in different guises.
Just think. Some of the great debates which have graced this site, as, e.g., the correct interpretation of the sun of York, may in fact have been the product of a single, playful mind.
It’s particularly fun to imagine that the entire site is peopled by Robert Paul Wolff and his invented personae. His imagination may well be capable of producing such a work of literary-philosophical art. But while I can imagine the possibility, constructing such a thing is beyond me.
Anyway, back to my own vain quest for recognition: I’m glad to see the point I made on November 6 at 6:40 PM being reiterated. Thanks, John. (If there really is a distinct John Pillette.)
PS. Thanks, John, for your criticism of the hostile labelling some of us have been subjected to. Sadly, I expect that now that “the working class” is suddenly being rediscovered some of us will be similarly castigated for not talking about it—or even ourselves—in the correct fashion.
"Take over and completely displace" - surely there's something to this, but I wonder if this is a little exaggerated. I'm not denying that "the left" (or, whatever alternative we may still have to the GOP, even if it's merely less terrible than the GOP) should focus its message a lot more on class politics than on identity politics, or on economic issues than on cultural issues, or however this should be phrased. But is this really such an odd or outlandish thing to say? I'm not sure, I can only speak from my experience, but it's not as though the class-politics perspectives are exceptionally hard to come by (granted, I happen to be a frequent visitor to the blogs of Profs. Wolff and Leiter); it might be that they appear vastly outnumbered because the identity-politics voices are "louder," are easier to notice and vilify (partly because they seem younger, more active online, more self-promoting or image-insecure), therefore easier to exploit by conservative media and others looking for ways to cheaply discredit their opponents.
Richard Rorty had a memorable description of the academic left ("philosophically correct, but politically silly") as distinct from conservatives in general ("philosophically wrong, and politically dangerous"). Hopefully more people find a workable medium, needless to say.
Put another way, I wouldn't deny that a perfectly just society would (e.g.) have government-funded gender-affirming surgery made available to prisoners. But I also agree this is obviously a "losing issue" in the sense that it shouldn't be anywhere near the heart of anyone's campaign - not in today's climate, anyway. If I were seeking public office now, I'm sure (even as someone with basically zero political talent) that after reading the room, I'd probably want to file this issue away under distant-future utopian speculation, not worth the risk of alienating today's voters by calling attention to it; and try to speak more directly to daily economic pains instead. Straighten out those things first and foremost, and after a while, the atmosphere might gradually become more hospitable to advancing the more "social-justice" causes.
I imagine therapists have a similar way of prioritizing their patients' psychological issues. There are more and less effective ways to gradually heal a patient in the grip of a vast, tangled complex of unhealthy beliefs - so, isolate the main ones, proceed in manageable chunks, don't overwhelm them by trying to tackle everything at once.
Here’s another example—this doesn’t concern “theory” so much as the nascent form of Cheryl Sandberg’s brand of lean-in feminism. I know LFC lives in DC, so he’ll appreciate this one.
Remember 1992 … the “year of the woman”? The triumph of Bill Clinton’s Dems? (Enabled by Ross Perot splitting the GOP vote, but pay no attention to that). I was back in DC and I had my eye on a girl I had met, a pretty, blonde "Hill rat"; I was at a party with her and a bunch of other rats on the Hill when the subject of Zoe Baird came up ... high fives all around! A victory for all women! etc.!
Because I’ve always been THAT GUY (and because I’d had a few) I had to open my big fat mouth and say, this is a victory for ALL women? It’s a victory for Zoe Baird, and it’s a victory for Aetna Corp., getting in on health care reform (remember that?) … but how is this going to do anything for the average woman?
If I was smart, I would have just nodded along, but somehow I felt the need to out myself as a hopelessly out of date 1930’s-style evolutionary throwback. It was as if I were ordering all of them to take off their shoes and get in the kitchen. Needless to say, the object of my lust went home with someone else that evening.
It was small consolation when—the very next day!—it was duly revealed that Zoe Baird had been underpaying her household immigrant labor (who were promptly disappeared back to wherever those kind of women came from). Baird herself was punished by having to spend the rest of her career being overpaid and underworked, so justice was served.
So let’s reflect on why the Dems have saddled themselves with one weak candidate after another. Harris was picked as VP because she was the intersectional unicorn the party was looking for … Female, Asian, AND Black! The trifecta! Sure, she can’t think on her feet and so can’t stump to save her life, but why should that matter? And anyway, pointing this out would be triply gauche, so the elephant in the room (that the political candidate was in fact anti-political) was never even seen, much less addressed.
In the campaign that just ended, it was not the Dems and Harris, but rather Trump and the Repubs who put the trans issues front and center, by running (or being content to have "independent," e.g. Musk-funded groups) run ridiculous ads that apparently claimed that children would go off to school in the morning as one gender and come home surgically altered to another -- an utterly absurd claim since this kind of treatment is not given to children, and even in the case of adults is not something, I think, done cavalierly.
Harris had faults as a candidate, to be sure, but she did well in the debate w. Trump; the claim that she can't "think on her feet" is exaggerated. Meanwhile Trump distinguished himself by commenting publicly on the late golfer Arnold Palmer's genitals and by swaying silently in front of a crowd for an extended length of time while Pavarotti's rendition of 'Ave Maria' played in the background.
J. Pillette appears to be on a quasi-crusade here and is increasingly tilting at windmills. Have to run so I'll leave it at that.
In the days leading up to the election, many, many, Democrats were very confident and full of praise for Harris and the campaign she ran. Now we're hearing "she should have done this, she should have done that." Where were they in the weeks before the election? I may be wrong on this, but I had the impression that James Carville was predicting she'd win. Now he seems to have a laundry list of what she did wrong.
I don’t think J.P. is far off the mark when he derisively points out the sort of fashionable strategizing that the Democratic Party often engages in. It is the product of the Party’s recent composition—the interests it embodies, the poltical careerists who have made it their home, etc. So when Trump said obnoxious things about some of the interest groups in the Democratic Party, it wasn’t intended to make Democrats feel good. It was intended to make others, including some who were not fashionable liberal Democrats, take an unfriendly critical look at a Party that has fallen over backwards to validate some things but not others even when these others were crying out to be recognized. There’s surely no need to point out at this late date what these things were/are?
So, no, J.P. isn’t tilting at windmills. I’d guess he’s hoping against hope that the Democratic Party will become the sort of party he can support with less reluctance in the future. Pointing out its present failings might just help make that possible. There are of course others who are on a quasi-crusade to block what I’m guessing he aspires to.
Since LFC isn’t here I guess I’ll have to talk about him behind his back. The “trans issue[s]” was a slow pitch over center plate. We can’t shout “no fair” when the other side whacks it over the center field fence.
Nor is the issue as simple as LFC likes to think. I was just talking to my niece about her ultra-liberal (and ultra-expensive) Brooklyn Heights preschool. It seems that for every little kid who comes out as “trans” they throw a big party, with cake and streamers and presents … now would this encourage the average three year old to think in a certain way about his or her (still latent) sexuality? To think that changing from one gender to the other is to be rewarded, while remaining as you are is tacitly discouraged? When she pointed out that the school was obviously putting a thumb on the scale with this policy, they looked at her like she was a member of Jonesboro Baptist Church.
As for women's sports, I think the gross unfairness of it is plain for all to see ... provided YOU'VE PLAYED SPORTS, which your archetypal policy weenie has not.
As for Harris not thinking on her feet, didn’t she come in dead last when she had to compete against other candidates in the primaries? Look, I voted for her but that doesn’t mean that I was required also to block my ears and pretend that she had charisma. As for the weeks leading up to the election, I was trying not to think about it; if I had been thinking about it, I’m sure I would have been whistling past the graveyard along with James Carville.
And while we’re on the subject of the ridiculous, carnival-esque atmosphere of Trumpism, it’s worth recalling that politics on our side used to have some of that. People want to be entertained. Trump has nothing BUT charisma—it’s charisma of a bizarre sort, but it is charisma nonetheless.
John Pillette, your niece is very bright. tell her to watch out or she'll end up drinking hemlock.
I also have a Brooklyn niece, who coincidentally decided before entering kindergarten that she was a boy. Everybody was very accepting (as am I), although after a year or so they changed back to being a girl.
R McD,
I'm for the Dems giving more emphasis to class/inequality etc. To that extent I agree w probably most others here. I don't think however that it's necessarily an either-or thing, that one has to choose between the newer movements and the older (New Deal-ish, social democratic, labor-oriented etc.) focus. The balance has to be restruck, sure, and the Dems' continuing and increasing connection to certain élites is a problem. Emphasis on "identity" can be a problem when, as j. wilson suggested, it becomes a matter of elevating or co-opting only a privileged slice of certain identity or minority groups into the status quo. But that's not the only way to think about "identity" and again, I don't see these questions as an either-or choice. The party is and will remain a coalition of groups w somewhat different interests.
J.P. wants to put the blame on 'Theory' and feminism etc. That's what I meant by tilting at windmills (perhaps not the best phrase). In sum, I'm fine w pointing out the Dems' failings, but I think we should focus on real failings.
J.P.
I actually agree w/ you that the issue of trans women participating in women's sports raises real issues in certain cases.
I don't have children and I don't know much of anything about gender dysphoria (other than that I believe that it is in some cases a real phenomenon) so I'm not going to comment on Brooklyn pre-schools, etc.
But did Harris make trans issues a main part of her campaign? Talk about them much if at all on the stump? My impression is that the answer is no. She talked a lot about abortion and reproductive rights, but that's different.
Here’s yet another example. (I’ve got plenty.) The Dems have known for at least 8 years that latinos in the border states and elsewhere are NOT pro-immigration. I know that they know because I read it in the papers. But why? It’s because they have internalized white supremacy, of course!
At least that’s the official reason, and that’s the official reason because that is the reason that fits with the official ideology of identitarianism.
Now if you’re the kind of weirdo who reads Marx and haunts the comments sections of obscure websites, you might be tempted to think this out as follows. Well, let’s say I was a guy on a drywall crew in Texas, what would I think … “if there were all of a sudden a whole bunch of guys who could do my job for much less, would that tend to drive my wages down? … probably … in fact, it’s almost as if these newcomers formed some kind of labor pool … that they were like a … a RESERVE ARMY of … of … LABOR!”
But of course nobody thinks like that! Nobody pays attention to grossly material things like wages before group affinity!
LFC:
Since you were kind enough to acknowledge an earlier comment of mine in which I was at least trying to suggest that identitarianism existed within a class society mediated by meritocracy so that some identitarians managed to make it into relatively but usually not highly privileged political, economic, social and cultural positions where and when they often enough think well of themselves and turn their backs on whence they came, I hope you don’t mind me raising an issue with the way you seem to pose an alternative.
You write, “I'm for the Dems giving more emphasis to class/inequality etc.” Perhaps you didn’t mean it the way I read it, but it seems to me you’re at least implicitly intimating that class is just another identity to be acknowledged by those in the politically privileged position of being able to validate, or not, an identity.
I think the contrary position would not look for such acknowledgement but would instead explore and expose how class permeated the entire system including its politics and its political parties. In other words, something more fundamental is required. The small—the very small—comfort I derive from the Trump win is that I see it and the accompanying emergence of class as a topic of discussion as at least cracking open very slightly a door that has been kept tightly shut by the Democratic Party among others. I’ll add that I don’t imagine for one minute that Trump intended that; he’ll close it again if he can. But he has, it seems, been picked up as a tool by those who needed something very different from the status quo ante. I'm under no illusion that an outcome of the sort I'd take to be positive will be forthcoming.
Another relevant view:
Janice Fine and Benjmin Schlesinger, “Where did the labor vote go?” Boston Review (November 18, 2024), accessed at
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/where-did-the-labor-vote-go/
—an important part of their argument:
“The Biden-Harris administration saw in unions what unions would like to see in themselves: a broad and powerful organization of the working class that could reshape American society and partner with them to end the neoliberal era. The problem with that vision is that it isn’t true. When only 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, unions are no longer a legitimate stand-in for the working class. Most working-class Americans have no experience with unions in their daily lives. If they did, it would make a difference in how they see the world. Unions have historically been schools of democracy for their members. What has always set them apart from volunteer organizations is that unions don’t choose their members—meaning that they need to engage disparate groups of workers in ways that build solidarity across difference. As the old saying goes, class is knowing which side of the fence you are on; class consciousness is knowing who is there with you. When unions were strong and growing, Democratic campaign efforts were buoyed by pro-union messaging and turnout operations that meant something to much of the American public. Today, far from ennobling a candidate in the minds of all working Americans, a union’s presidential endorsement can at best hope to shore up the vote from workers lucky enough to count themselves in a union’s ranks.”
John Pillette: Remember how, way back in the election year of 2016, the liberal intelligentsia had picked as the burning issue of the day that of … transgender bathrooms?
No, I don't remember that at all.
I do recall that in 2007 a half-dozen Democratic presidential primary candidates met at a forum hosted by the Human Rights Campaign Fund and LGBT-oriented cable tv network LOGO to discuss their positions on LGBT civil rights.
What was your view of that at the time? Did you think the issue of same-sex marriage was "a loser" for presidential aspirants? Should the Democrats have avoided any discussions of same-sex marriage, civil unions, and gay adoption, focusing instead on how their economic proposals would be better than the other candidates' for American workers?
John Pillette: As for women's sports, I think the gross unfairness of it is plain for all to see ... provided YOU'VE PLAYED SPORTS, which your archetypal policy weenie has not.
Well, I have played sports. And I am not convinced that it is grossly unfair for transgender athletes to participate in sports with non-transgender athletes.
Is it unfair for an athlete who is 6 feet 6 inches tall or taller to compete in basketball with athletes who are under 6 feet 2 inches? Is it unfair for an athlete who has hyperextensible joints to compete in gymnastics against athletes with normal joint laxity? Is it unfair for athletes who have asthma that is controlled by medication to compete with athletes who are not using those medications, some of which may enhance the user's performance in certain circumstances?
Those who don't keep up with the goings-on in social media spaces may not be aware that one of Elon Musk's 12 children, Vivian Jenna Wilson, is transgender. Wilson and Musk have had a very strained relationship, with some of the tensions displayed in social media. Musk has become one of the more prominent anti-trans voices of late.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender-daughter-vivian-wilson-interview-rcna163665
Eric is right, what i should have said was this is plain to see for all who are not ideologically committed to not seeing it.
I can’t say that I admire your ideological commitment to various positions that I find silly, but of course you aren’t looking for my admiration. But the issue is whether the Dems should abandon certain unpopular positions in light of political failure.
The women’s sports issue is at bottom an aesthetic one. I find men competing against women ugly. I think it’s distastefully unsportsmanlike, and I find all of the arguments meant to dispel this sentiment ridiculous, juvenile, but most of all philistine.
I realize that sportsmanship itself may be an outmoded concept. And further, I realize that making an aesthetic claim (say, “Constable is a better painter than Thomas Kincaid”) functions mostly on the “left” as an invitation for people like you to say jump up and say “you can’t PROVE that!” And thereafter think they’ve scored some kind of a point.
But these aren’t matters of proof.
John Pillette: I find men competing against women ugly.
The issue is transgender participation in sports and that is your reaction? And you wonder why someone would call a person with such a viewpoint transphobic?
John Pillette: the issue is whether the Dems should abandon certain unpopular positions in light of political failure
I brought up the 2008 election because following that forum discussing the unpopular topic of LGBT civil rights, the Democratic presidential nominee still won 10 million more votes than the Republican.
Whoever imagined one would run across a headline like this in a leading American foreign policy journal?
"Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right
The writer’s new argument for left-wing foreign policy has earned a mainstream hearing."
https://foreignpolicy.com/author/stephen-m-walt/
As I said, name-calling is not argument, it’s what juveniles do in lieu of argument. Some of them eventually learn the difference between the two … others go on to join the DSA! (JUST KIDDING!) That said, it’s pretty effective, given that most people can’t tell the difference. Especially with liberals who live in mortal fear of being called a bad name. But it doesn’t work at all with people who don’t share your moral prejudices. Your position is consensus gentium in Brooklyn, Cambridge, Berkeley, and Portland, Oregon but it’s not going to convince anyone who doesn’t live outside of those locales.
Meantime, here's a view on what's been going on in the lower reaches of the system:
https://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2024-11-01/article/50899?headline=Bad-News-from-the-Blue-Backwoods--Don-Macleay
Dysphoria is a very odd thing. When trying to think about it I always find myself going back to this case:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11465695/
Anonymous,
You've linked to a paper about something called body integrity dysphoria. Apart from the word "dysphoria," it appears to have little or no connection to gender dysphoria, at least not to a layperson reading the abstract...
P.s. I find it rather easier to imagine someone wanting to be a different gender than to imagine someone wanting a limb amputated. The latter is presumably v. rare?
The point was, LFC, had you persevered a little you'd have discovered that people feel they're in the "wrong body" for all sorts of reasons and will undertake quite radical action to try to align themselves with who they think they really are.
You say you find it easier to imagine someone wanting to be a different gender. But that's surely because you now live in a society which validates that a whole lot more than they validate, e.g., getting perfectly good limbs cut off. Had you been female and lived among the Amazons, you might well have found other sorts of removals quite easy to contemplate. I also think it's useful to try to contemplate dysphoria related amputations because it perhaps helps us understand how some others feel--and I mean feel--about other dysphoria related actions. In other words, it's asking you to conduct a certain sort of thought experiment.
PS., LFC, gender dysphoria also is--or at least until recently--rather rare.
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It isn’t a trend, if you have noticed more trans folks are out now than when you were a kid. It's invisible. The basic math works out to even the lower end number (taken from people with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria) being significantly higher than winning the lottery and a lot of people win the lottery every year.
Quite a large percentage of people experience significant discomfort with aspects of their body that medical practitioners, at least, regard as normal (consistent with good health). In dermatology clinics in the West, for example, approximately 1 in 10 patients are estimated to be so affected. I suspect that the percentage of people in the general population who feel some degree of distress with their bodies but never seek treatment is probably much higher than that, but as far as I am aware, this has not been studied.
Only a very tiny percentage of people are so distressed that they would be willing to "undertake radical action," such as seeking amputation of a limb or part of a limb, for relief.
But while it is interesting to speculate about why people experience any of the various forms of sense of incongruence with their bodies, it's kind of beside the point.
One of the cool things about basic rights is that, in theory at least, their exercise is not supposed to depend on how we feel about the person claiming a right, or on how large the community of those claiming the right is. The rights of a Sikh or a Jew to worship as they choose is no less deserving of respect and the protection of law than those of a Catholic or an Evangelical Christian. The right of a man to form a partnership in life with another man and to have their marriage recognized by the state in the same way that a marriage between a man and a woman is is not supposed to be depend on whether the thought of a man being sexually intimate with another man makes some of us feel icky.
While I agree with what you say, Eric, it surely also has to be acknowledged that various people experience as “icky” various things that other people say/do. And while it’s OK for some to reprimand those feeling icky for feeling so, it’s surely impossible to stop people from feeling icky and from responding in various ways because they feel that way. I have a basic necessity to relieve myself, but I have no right to defecate wherever and whenever I choose (though in some times and places it may be otherwise?).
That it all becomes politicised is likely inevitable, though sometimes not. After which, the law may step in and stop people from acting in various public ways against those doing things that make them feel icky. But the law may also step in and say stop doing those particular things that arouse a feeling of ickiness in others. And if not the law explicitly, the same results may come about through some quasi-policial cultural processes. But I think these cultural shifts often end up receiving some sort of legal form. In other words, there are no eternal public standards, no universally acknowledged "basic rights," governing such matters, since such standards are basically constructed and reconstructed by publics along the way, as time passes.
Raymond Geuss has an interesting essay, “Shamelessness,” which begins: “Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in the fourth century B.C., was in the habit of masturbating in the middle of the Athenian marketplace. . .[W]e know that the Athenians objected to his mode of life in general and to this form of behavior in particular. . . Why, exactly, was this action offensive?” Geuss goes on to discuss several reasons. But it would take too much space to summarise them. [As a concluding aside, I’m pretty sure there are people who are now made to feel “icky” by Geuss’s use of “B.C.” Doesn’t he know he’s now supposed to use “B.C.E.”?]
The whole trans … thing? Brouhaha? Revolution? Whatever you want to call it, demonstrates, inter alia, the near-total irrelevance of philosophy to current events. When it first became a big enough thing to gain popular notice (when was that? A dozen years ago?) I thought we would all enjoy shortly a robust and interesting discussion about all of the grand old philosophically classic issues it raised: Descartes for starters and so on from there … I figured this was shaping up to be great fun! I mean, how often in history does an entirely new phenomenon appear? And when in history have there been so many professional philosophers around? I assumed, naively, that they would all be eager to sharpen their knives and forks and sit down for the grand bouffe of a lifetime. What we got instead was an ideological meta-phenomenon. Interesting in itself as sociology, but standing aside from the core issues. I have yet to read any real discussion of those.
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What two people may do in private is in no way comparable to what someone does in public. There's a basic right to do consensually in private whatever you want. That's not necessarily an eternal standard that exists by virtue of some natural law (though one could argue along those lines); rather it can be viewed as the outcome of a long period of cultural development, for lack of a better word. It's not universally recognized in the sense that not every government, for example, recognizes it, but that's neither here nor there. Btw there is now a v. widespread, albeit not completely universal, consensus that people have basic rights to be free from torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, the kind of gang rule and violence that is currently destroying Haiti, etc., and also a growing consensus (embodied to some extent in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) on more "positive" rights, such as the right to subsistence and an adequate diet and health care, to at least free primary education, etc. I think one could argue that some rights more directly relevant to this discussion can and should also be placed in this category. I'm not talking about a (putative) right to use a particular restroom or participate in a particular sport but to a more basic right of bodily autonomy that I think is implicated in the decision to change one's gender, or to decide to do without a gender classification altogether (although the latter is v. difficult in a society where official forms etc. of various kinds require one to indicate a gender).
I'm sure Anonymous will have a comeback to this, and maybe I should let Anon. have the last word. (Though whether I will remains to be seen.)
From the article Michael mentioned:
"Trans accountable scholarship by and large shares one fundamental commitment: that transness is not a psychiatric illness. As such, trans experiences should not be pathologized and gender dysphoria (previously gender identity disorder) should be removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Transness is a natural, healthy expression of human diversity."
I have a non-binary grandson. He sometimes wears women's clothes, he's gay, but he takes no hormones and he's not going to undergo surgery. That seems very sensible to me: in my experience no surgery ever turns out exactly as the doctors promise and drugs always have side-effects.
Besides, are we ever "really" somethin? I don't think of myself as a man nor as a woman. People identify me as a man and I don't argue about that, but deep down inside it's not an issue for me.
I recall Sartre's example in Being and Nothingness of the waiter who believes that he is really a waiter and how Sartre explains that we are constantly choosing ourselves, we are never something in the way a rock is a rock.
If someone with male genitals wants me to address them as a woman, fine, no problem. But I insist that no one is something, except on their driving license and passport. We are chaos inside. All of us.
SW, I’m glad you brought up this subject, because I suffer from the same confusion. And since we are in the same boat here I know you won’t take it personally when I say that you are the ugliest woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.
W/r/t your grandson, in our modern liberal state one is allowed to conceive of oneself pretty much however one chooses. Whether this is an entirely good thing, I’m not so sure, but arguendo let’s say it is.
So I may, if i so choose (or if i feel so compelled, to avoid the “born this way” debate) see myself as non-binary, whatever that actually means at the moment. But the real issue is whether I may compel others to see me that way. If women persist in believing that there are only two sexes and that they have a legal and moral right to (inter alia) sports teams and bathrooms excluding the opposite sex, should those women be told by “progressives” to quit complaining and get with the program?
Trans persons in sports mean to and do BEAT women. Literally! Doesn’t this seem like per se misogyny?
JP, In another philosophy blog I asked the regular participants, all so-called CIS males, if they had an inner sensation of being a man, whether being a man was an important part of their basic sense of who they are, and they all answered "no".
I came for the 'theory' bashing, but for aid in reflecting on trans issues I've found that almost anything by Sophie Grace Chappell is the beginning of wisdom, and I've repeatedly returned to her exploratory essay on the adoptive parent analogy (https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/07/20/trans-women-men-and-adoptive-parents-an-analogy/). The only sports I follow closely anymore are cycling and chess; with the latter it's not an issue (that I'm aware of), but there has been some turbulence in cycling (though nothing like (I vaguely gather) that in boxing, wrestling, and running). One suggestion in cycling is that there be two general categories: those born biologically male and everybody else, (of course, there would be instances where 'being born biologically male' is disputed), AND any person who wishes may compete in the biologically male category. Despite the non-intuitive categories and the inevitability of disputes, I can't think of a different binary classification that would be more likely in practice to respect the dignity and sense of fairness for everyone involved.--On 'theory': I agree with LFC that, despite the sheer fun of theory-bashing, it's been done and done and done. But I recently came across some maxims of René Girard, which seem to tend to push for a heterdox and not obviously appealing version of Christianity, that included the following fun bits: 'The word 'theory' has been so fashionable in recent years that, in the near future, it will sound horribly dated and ridiculous.' 'So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent upon it.' 'On the human sciences and academia: I cannot see in this anything more than a huge unionization of failure. We must perpetuate at any cost the interminable discourse that earns us a living.' 'There is no need to refute modern thought because, as each new trend one-ups its predecessors, it's liquidating itself at high speed.' Bonus pessimisms include: 'Our world produces and saves more victims than any other. The two things are true at once. There is more good and more evil than ever before.' 'History is a test. Mankind is failing it.'
Your thought experiment is fatally incomplete. It’s not enough to simply reflect on this inner experience; you need to do it in front of a mirror. Then the result will be: “I am having an inner experience; this experience is happening inside a male body; therefore what I am having is (by definition) a male inner experience.”
Nietzsche somewhere (Beyond Good and Evil?) excoriates the tendency among philosophers to become “despisers of the body”. This is a perfect example of what he was attacking.
JP, I'm trying to understand the trans people who look at the mirror, see a "male" body and say "I'm a female". They claim that they have an inner sense of female identity. I'm saying that I find that strange because I don't have an inner sense of male identity nor did other participants in a philosophy blog. My sense of male identity does not come so much from the mirror as from how others treat me and have treated me all my life.
MIT philosopher Alex Byrne published a book, Trouble With Gender, earlier this year that rationally discusses some of the issues brought up in the comments here. The book is just under two hundred pages in length, not counting 97 pages of endnotes and bibliography. I read it last week and found most of it interesting, and all of it closely reasoned.
Byrne's book has gotten a certain amount of attention (e.g. at Leiter's blog). It was originally contracted w/ Oxford Univ. Press but ended up being published by Polity Press. The circumstances under which Oxford UP declined to publish it were somewhat controversial. I've read a distillation that Byrne published online, not the book itself. I've also read a fairly long (and favorable) review of the book. On that basis my guess is that you (Eric) wouldn't share Byrne's general perspective. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't read the book, of course.
P.s. I would also be interested in hearing f. poebel's takeaway. My layperson's view is that there are two discrete biological sexes (though a small number of people are born w physical characteristics that straddle the biological lines). I'm also inclined to think there is such a thing as gender identity (because I have an "intuitive" sense of my own) and therefore I'm inclined to accept as genuine the notion that someone could feel they are in the "wrongly gendered" body. I'm not sure Byrne agrees w this second statement, but maybe poebel, since he's read the book, can shed light on that.
What I’m saying is, If I reflect on my inner experience alone, of course I can’t classify it one way or the other. In order to do that I would need to access someone else’s inner experience and thereafter return to my own experience. Trying to classify your experience without reference to the one and only body you happen to inhabit is an impossibility.
John Pillette: Trans persons in sports mean to and do BEAT women. Literally! Doesn’t this seem like per se misogyny?
Hard to tell when Pillette is being serious and when he is taking the piss.
For the sake of argument, let's assume he is serious.
(1) "Baeth [Anna Baeth, director of research at Athlete Ally, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ equality in sports] estimates fewer than 40 of the NCAA’s more than 500,000 athletes are known to be transgender."
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/12/sport/naia-ncaa-transgender-ban-sports/index.html
(2) "Transgender youth are a small part of the overall population in schools, and only about half of trans youth identify as girls (opponents don’t seem as interested in trans boys, who they assume will not be able to compete with cisgender boys - a sexist assumption [my emphasis])"
https://www.hrc.org/resources/get-the-facts-about-transgender-non-binary-athletes
(3) In 1976, Bruce Jenner won the Olympic gold in the male decathalon, arguably earning the title of world's greatest male athlete. Jenner had felt inner turmoil related to gender identity since childhood. Decades later she publicly revealed that she is transgender. Was Jenner's trouncing all the male athletes in the 1970s per se misandry?
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/bruce-jenner/story?id=30570567
(4) The fastest-ever run by a (cis-)woman in the San Francisco Marathon was 2 hours 42 minutes 26 seconds (or roughly 162 minutes. That's a far faster time than the vast majority of (cis-)men running that marathon ever achieved in 2008-2021. And in fact, although the median completion times for male marathoners are shorter than the median for female marathoners, there are still several hundred female marathoners who outperform thousands of male marathoners in that race.
https://debarghyadas.com/writes/sanfrancisco-marathon-data/
(5) Returning to my questions posed on Nov 19 about "unfair" advantages--one of the sports I used to participate in was competitive swimming. In high school I was somewhat muscular and had very little body fat. When I got in the water, I sank like a stone unless I used a lot of energy to keep moving. I also probably had exercise-induced asthma (undiagnosed at the time). Did the swimmers who had more body fat and normal lung function have an unfair advantage over someone like me?
Did Victor Wembanyama, standing at 7 feet 3 inches, and with a mother who is/was a basketball coach, have an unfair advantage playing basketball in high school?
Did Serena and Venus Williams have an unfair advantage competing against other youngsters in tennis?
"[Their father, Richard] Williams took tennis lessons from a man known as 'Old Whiskey' and decided his future daughters would be tennis professionals after seeing Virginia Ruzici playing on television. Williams said that he wrote up an 85-page plan and started giving lessons to Venus and Serena when they were four and a half.... In 1995, Williams withdrew his daughters from a tennis academy and coached them himself. Within a few years, they were winning grand slam tournaments."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Williams_(tennis_coach)
I keep meaning to order Byrne’s book but keep forgetting. A few years ago I read and enjoyed an exchange he had with another philosopher (Robin Dembroff) on the subject of “Are Women Adult Human Females”.
After reading all of that, I’m pretty sure that women are, in fact, adult human females … but if Yale (or the DLC) wants to give me a fat enough stipend I’m prepared to go the other way on this issue.
Reading Byrne v. Dembroff inspired me to at the time to check a reference book I happened to have, “Medical Physiology, 12th Ed.” (1968), which subsection on Reproduction (Endocrine Glands) at pp. 992-1029 does not seem to regard any of this as any kind of a mystery. According to that author at least, women are adult human females. Or they were up until 1968.
This raises the question of whether the fundamentals of human biology have changed in the last 50 years, or whether there has been some kind of ideological shift such that formerly well-understood biological processes are now to be regarded as shrouded in mystery. I submit that because we inhabit an intellectual world that is divided in the manner pointed out by C.P. Snow, and because the majority of people are scientifically illiterate, it is possible for purely ideological notions to defeat scientific ones.
It’s funny that JR should mention cycling, because I used to follow that sport as well. A few years back one of the female track racing categories was won by a transgender person, and this was treated (as would be expected) as an historic “first”; a victory for all, and so on.
The interesting bit is that this person also happened to be a philosopher specializing in trans issues and almost immediately after I had read about the cycling championship I was reading about this person’s shenanigans on Brian Leiter’s blog. And I can say with complete confidence that this person appeared to be completely deranged. So maybe not the victory everybody thought it was.
The one really remarkable thing that struck me at the time was that the women who were relegated to second (and third and fourth and so on) places were expected to regard this development as being wonderful. They were interviewed and all professed to be happy with the result.
If that had been me I would have not been happy … I would have called bullshit. Much more recently, an elite swimmer named Riley Gaines did just this after being relegated a position by the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. Gaines was pissed off, and said so … and it turns out that a lot of other female athletes are also pissed off. It turns out that they’ve been muttering “e pur se muove” under their breath.
To bring us full circle, Ms. Gaines was inspired by this episode to become a Republican activist …
As a non-philosopher, I think it's somewhat unfortunate that the debate among philosophers has centered so much on the "are women adult human females?" question. Contrary to what some philosophers (and also J. Pillette) seem to think, how one answers that question does not, it seems to me, tell you how to answer the other contested questions here, including "policy" ones.
For example, I can agree w JP that women are adult human females but disagree w his view that no self-identified trans women should be allowed to participate in women's sports. One reason is that while biological men (i.e. people born male) are, on average, bigger and stronger than biological women (i.e., people born female), that does not always apply in particular cases. One has to look at this question on an individualized rather than a categorical basis, I would think. That's frustrating for people who want a clear-cut general rule, but I think such a rule wd not be in the interests of fairness. YMMV.
p.s. What little I know (or knew) about the biology of these matters comes mostly from the discussion in J.S. Goldstein's book War and Gender. Although Goldstein is a political scientist, his parents were biologists and he paid a lot of attention in that book to the natural-scientific as well as the social-scientific literature.
(Disclosure: Goldstein was my advisor in grad school. My diss. had nothing to do w/ gender.)
I don’t have access to my computer. I am using somebody’s I pad, which reminds me of slide rule days before calculators came along. I have to use a stylus to enter letters one at a time, and l am not going to do a lot of this. Suffice it to say that Byrne’s book ought to make John Pillette happy, if anything makes him happy. When I get back to where I have my computer, I can write up more on the book. One big point in the book is that sex is indeed binary. Another is that the word gender is a superfluous and misleading synonym for sex (maybe I am overstating Byrne here, but that’s what I think he was saying).
So I think we are all finally in agreement. The Democratic party’s positions on these issues are all objectively correct, and if the polity doesn’t agree so much the worse for them. I for one would rather be correct than hold political power.
Intellectual forays with committed Democrats are less like an actual journey to a real destination than a 150-yard drive into (but not out of) a suburban cul-de-sac. Thereafter you need to get out and WALK because the person behind the wheel refuses to engage reverse gear (“because that would imply some mistake on my part”) …
John Pillette citing a medical text from 1968?? Again, hard to tell when Pillette is being serious vs when he is just trolling.
Would you take medical advice from a doctor who was practicing according to the norms of a half-century ago?
LFC: I can agree w JP that women are adult human females but disagree w his view that no self-identified trans women should be allowed to participate in women's sports. One reason is that while biological men (i.e. people born male) are, on average, bigger and stronger than biological women (i.e., people born female), that does not always apply in particular cases. One has to look at this question on an individualized rather than a categorical basis, I would think.
As I noted above, many individual women outperform the majority men in running the marathon, although on average, men tend to outperform women in that sport.
One of the arguments common among some critics of trans-women being included in women's sports is that the larger, more muscular bodies of (some) trans-women poses a risk for injury of their non-trans competitors. In sports like wrestling and boxing, male competitors are routinely segregated based on weight and age--it seems to me that if risk of injury is a real concern in certain sports, the same kind of approach could be used in women's sports.
Excellent point, Eric. I’m not a biologist, so I don’t really know what a woman is. (I am ready for the Supreme Court, however.)
While we’re on the subject of epistemic discontinuity, I suppose this also explains one particularly glaring asymmetry: nobody seems mystified as to how to define a man.
As one would expect, this is a trend across the anglophone world. My favorite example is the new PM … in 2021 he castigated the Labour MP for Canterbury for saying (out loud!) that only women have cervixes (she was wrong and bad) … then last year he said that “of course” 99.9% of women don’t have penises (not quite certain) … and now (once in office) he has apparently come back around to the old-fashioned definitions. What’s going on here? I happen to know (don’t ask me how) that the Med. Physiology book in the library at No. 10 dates from …1963! (Between the Chatterly Ban and the Beatles First LP).
In any event it is of course totally UNFAIR for those on the other side to make fun of all this. And that includes YOU Eric! I’m on to you now … you’re doing a US version of Titania McGrath, aren’t you?
I think most would agree that biology may give some (or even many, depending on the situation) trans-women advantages over cis-women in athletic competitions. The issue that I keep returning to and that no one here has addressed is why those advantages are unfair. And if they are unfair, how it is not hypocritical to designate that kind of unfairness as intolerable while other kinds of advantages (whether biological or not), such as being very tall or unusually muscular, are accepted as entirely fair game, and in many cases even a source of envy?
That article by Sophie Grace Chappell that John Rapko recommended is very much worth a read. A very, very usedul perspective.
Back to Theory Bashing for a mo: the “Women’s Rights” issue was supposed to win this election for us. Did NO ONE think that having an official policy of not being able to say, definitively, what a “woman” actually IS maybe undermined this stance? Maybe just a little? Or maybe even to the point of negation?
Istm one could argue that all physical advantages are in a sense unfair and aim to keep them to a minimum. The argument would be that by allowing all trans-women to participate in women's sports, one is introducing additional sources of unfair advantage, i.e., in addition to the advantages that a particular cis-woman athlete might have over another one. I can see reasonable arguments on both sides of the question. Not sure where I would end up on it. Fortunately it's not a decision I have to make (or one that will personally affect me when made by others).
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