I read many pieces on creeping authoritarianism this week. Most of them captured the (rather depressing) state of the world accurately enough but they didn’t suggest a path forward. Lack of a path forward is why none made my ‘recommended reading’ list for the week. That stated, there are four essays at the top of my list: one which addresses in big picture historical terms how we got here and three which suggest how we might engage constructively with others in order to find common ground or, at a minimum, de-escalate conflict. We need common ground if we’re to create a better path forward. The three essays which speak to resolving conflict and finding common ground:
- Jay Caspian King, ‘People of Color’ Do Not Belong to the Democratic Party
- Jessica Bennett, What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In?
- Molly Fischer, Sarah Schulman’s Good Conflict
and the one which paints a picture of how we got here and the challenges we face going forward:
- Rana Dasgupta, The Silenced Majority
Excerpts from each as well as a few others worth reading follow below.Jay Caspian King, ‘People of Color’ Do Not Belong to the Democratic Party
In the wake of the election, there has been a concerted call to stop treating Latinos and, to a lesser extent, Asian-Americans as a monolith. Such a reckoning is long overdue and certainly necessary. It’s fundamentally true that a Cuban-American in South Florida shares very little in common with a Guatemalan fishery worker in New Bedford, Mass. — who, in turn, does not identify in any real way with fifth-generation Texans along the Rio Grande Valley.
Similarly, former Vietnamese refugees in Orange County, Calif., will have a different level of sensitivity toward charges of “Communism” than a second-generation Ivy League-educated Indian-American just up the freeway in suburban Los Angeles. Though the full picture of the electorate is not yet clear, it shouldn’t be surprising that some of these populations ended up ignoring or even championing the xenophobia of the first Trump administration while others found it abhorrent and against their particular interests….
This should be fairly obvious — different people from different parts of the world think differently, especially across generations — but the quintessentially American idea of the immigrant’s debt flattens all immigrants down into fixed categories. Those categories might help organize data, but they do not capture any meaningful insights into why people are voting the way they are.
Jessica Bennett, What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In?
“I am challenging the call-out culture,” [Smith College Professor Loretta] Ross said… “I think you can understand how calling out is toxic. It really does alienate people, and makes them fearful of speaking up.”…
At Smith College, Professor Ross teaches courses called White Supremacy in the Age of Trump, of which the “calling in” module is part, and Reproductive Justice. Yet she tells students when they enroll: “If you need a trigger warning or a safe space, I urge you to drop this class.”
“I think we overuse that word ‘trigger’ when really we mean discomfort,” she said. “And we should be able to have uncomfortable conversations.”
She doesn’t believe people should be publicly shamed for accidentally misgendering a classmate, which she once did, leading to a Title IX complaint that was later dismissed; for sending a stupid tweet they now regret; or for, say, admitting they once liked a piece of pop culture now viewed in a different light, such as “The Cosby Show.”…
“I think this is also related to something I just discovered called doom scrolling,” Professor Ross told the students. “I think we actually sabotage our own happiness with this unrestrained anger. And I have to honestly ask: Why are you making choices to make the world crueler than it needs to be…
Molly Fischer, Sarah Schulman’s Good Conflict
Sarah Schulman is a playwright, an author, and a queer activist. She is also a professor of creative writing, and once, a number of years ago, she learned that a male graduate student maintained a blog where he wrote about his crush on her. He wrote that he was in love with her; he wrote that he wanted to fuck her; he wrote about her appearance in a way that made her feel bad. She told her colleagues what was happening, and their response was unanimous: He was “stalking” her. They advised Schulman to report him to a supervisor.
She considered this. She was uncomfortable with what was happening, and she wanted it to stop. But she was also uncomfortable with her colleagues’ advice. “I realized that the more I saw myself as being victimized by this person, the more support I had from my colleagues,” Schulman told me. “They would wrap me in the comfort of their protection. And I found this very disturbing. Because no one said to me, ‘Why don’t you ask him what he thinks is going on?’ ”…
Schulman’s analysis scrambles familiar ideological lines. She looks askance at trigger warnings; she also looks askance at Zionism. She considers the way accusations of sexual threat have been used against Black and queer people and then uses that understanding to extend empathy to those accused of sexual harassment. She tries to dissect the internal logic of police brutality and domestic abuse. Her ideas’ appeal lies in offering a new way to consider seemingly intractable problems and in drawing lines between our political ideals and the way we behave in daily life. (“There are a lot of progressive people who are very petty,” Schulman told me. “So what kind of progressive world can they build?”) They’re complicated ideas, and the book takes them in directions sure to give every reader something to disagree with. But — at least within the realm of personal relationships — they also come down to an almost kindergartenishly simple dictum: Talk, listen, work things out.
Rana Dasgupta’s The Silenced Majority is long and may be behind a paywall (I’m a subscriber so I can’t tell) but it’s a tour de force. It’s well worth your time:
Democracy—in its twentieth-century Western guise—is not compatible with just any economic arrangement. Eighteenth-century Europe could neither afford nor tolerate it, and democratic talk was sternly forbidden. A delicate and unusual set of circumstances brought democratic change. But those circumstances did not occur much outside the West. And now they are disappearing here too.
Instead of seeking lessons from twentieth-century Germany, we should look back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the Anglo-American complex. That will remind us that most of the phenomena we label fascist—nationalist fictions of ethnic supremacy, mass disenfranchisement, censorship—are fully compatible with free-market capitalism….
Silicon Valley will not simply destroy the jobs on which the industrious society was built. It will corrode and negate the principle of labor. It will do this in part by establishing unpaid, uncontracted labor as a social norm…. For Silicon Valley, work is a form of tribute paid by individuals to quasi-aristocratic property owners, and there are no privileges granted in return. Quite the opposite: tributaries surrender their claim to their own information and privacy, and open themselves up to ever-greater corporate surveillance and manipulation. This social norm is spreading: the U.S. Department of Labor recently relaxed restrictions on unpaid work, while the frequent talk of a universal basic income concedes that work can no longer provide the basis for social participation. The principle of labor is ebbing fast.
Eighteenth-century Britain could not afford democracy. Today, as the economy reverts to a similar structure, America is encountering the same problem. It is difficult to carry out a mass economic expulsion, after all, while everyone has a vote. And it will not be possible indefinitely to suppress those left-wing voices demanding that the state abandon its raison d’être and serve, not property and empire, but American citizens themselves….
The real political battle in America today is not between a “liberal” left and a “fascist” right. It is between the people and a grandiose private system of social, economic, and political management that has the power to bring to an end the democratic certainties on which Americans have come to rely. If we wish to preserve those certainties, we will have to do a lot more than remove Donald Trump.
A few other pieces also worth your time
Eduardo Porter, How the G.O.P. Became the Party of the Left Behind
Dayton, Ohio, typifies the forces that have pushed those hurt by economic change toward the Republicans, while affluent places become more Democratic… The Republican share of the vote has increased across the nation’s most economically disadvantaged counties, while the most successful counties have moved toward the Democrats… Lela Klein, a former union activist who runs Co-op Dayton, a community development group, contrasts Dayton with Columbus, a relatively prosperous college town some 70 miles east. “We haven’t recovered from 2007, and they have,” she said. “We have become redder, and they have become bluer.”
Titus Techera, Harold Ramis, Unlikely Prophet of Trump
There was a prophet of Trump in Hollywood in the 1980s. He was Harold Ramis, the most successful writer-director of comedy in his time. You might know him as the man who made Groundhog Day or Animal House. But it’s in Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, and Back To School that Ramis gave us a Trumpian attack on corrupt elites, and protagonists that would be SNL caricatures of Trump if SNL did comedy anymore.
These movies provide strong evidence that we should take our better artists seriously. American art is essentially middlebrow: It brings the high powers of drama to bear on everyday concerns. It offers us a great way to understand ourselves.
Nobody stopped to think these were not just comedies, but also stories about a coming class conflict in America. Everyone thought it was hilarious when Rodney Dangerfield stuck it to the country club snobs and Bill Murray embarrassed the city and federal politicians. Ramis’s themes prefigure our politics and his protagonists foreshadow Trump’s personal political style. Now we’re enacting the politics of those movies, and I don’t see too many people laughing.
Ending on a positive note
Bruce Gellerman, Farms Will Harvest Food And The Sun, As Mass. Pioneers ‘Dual-Use’ Solar
Paul Knowlton owns 300 acres of land in Grafton, and farms about 50. The farm has been in his family for five generation, ever since Knowlton’s great-great-grandfather settled in the Blackstone Valley in 1872…. Fickle weather and fluctuating prices make farming a risky business, so five years ago, Knowlton installed a new cash crop: solar energy. He turned 19 acres into two solar energy fields. “Doing the solar was very beneficial,” he says. “In the wintertime there is no revenue for a farm. It’s a tough game.”
Today, Knowlton’s 18,000 solar panels provide a steady income and enough renewable electricity to power nearly 1,200 homes…. Solar energy produces about 14% of Massachusetts’ electricity. That’s enough to power about half a million homes, and solar is growing rapidly — helping the commonwealth meet its clean energy goals.
Finally, just for fun:
