life during wartime, cont'd
I suppose there is beauty in clarity, in finally perceiving how things really are. The smiling, nosy cleaning lady at my mom's building just blithely saying to the neighbor across the hall - "those Democrats, they just want to give benefits to illegal aliens, can you believe that?" - yes, the people you thought had some sort of kindliness or affection now show their brain worms to the world openly, smilingly, without shame. Of course the brain worms were always there; only now do we take them seriously, perceive the roiling blackness that covers everything. And by the time we had figured this out, I mean really figured it out, it was already too late.
The irony is that this is a time of the most amazing self-discovery for almost everyone I know. Demons being faced, adventures undertaken, true selves being uncovered. Again. I'm no exception. I will find a way to write about it, soon, but I have a lot of percolating to do.
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I am always a little bit susceptible to Theories of Everything because, like all Americans, I like a good conspiracy theory. I am a gnostic, or perhaps more kindly, a structuralist: there is an unseen order that determines everything, and the key to understanding is to figure out how it works. On the other hand, the historian's training in me tells me to be skeptical of such things. And I try to balance these competing worldviews.
That said, Jonathan Rodden's book Why Cities Lose gives such an elegant, deeply researched argument that I can't help but feel it unlocks a lot of what is going on now. The title doesn't do justice to the argument, which everyone really needs to take to heart. It's deceptively simple: the organization of Left parties around cities puts them at a perpetual electoral disadvantage in political systems with first-past-the-post, district elections.
There is simply an astonishing mathematical regularity to this. You find it 100 years ago, you find it in every state legislature in the US, and you find it in every country in the world with the same electoral system as ours. It is a product of the inexorable logic of partisan clustering and the fact that the system of electoral districts produces wasted Left votes. In the US, Democratic votes spread out along 19th century railroad lines and depots and decline rapidly once you move away from there. And amazingly, this is fractal: the relationship holds at different levels of voting, from states down to precincts - the more urban -> the more Democratic. Over and over again, and around the world: polarization and minoritarian rule are the corollaries of a geographically based system of governent.
Once you have wrapped your mind around this, a lot of what passes for political argument and debate just sort of melts away. It's not that people don't believe the values they have, it's that they become convinced of things because of the organization of society around them.
Let's take a typical liberal talking point: "it's horrific to put migrant kids in cages." To you and me, that is an undeniable fact so real that someone who denies it lacks decency, empathy, and intelligence. But Trumpsters always have a response: "you don't care about unborn babies [so therefore you don't really care about kids]." Always tu quoque, tu quoque, tu quoque. But instead of being galled by the mindlessness of it, you now can understand what it is: the defensive, instinctive reaction of a tribe of hillbillies trying to maintain their semiotic bubble. In that way, it's a thing of terrible beauty: the capacity of the human mind to deceive itself in the name of what it sees as the greater good. As the SubGenius put it: pull the wool over your own eyes.
The other profound aspect of Rodden's book is appreciating how our electoral system creates cleavages within the Left. This exact same fucking argument about purity vs. pragmatism that we have today has been happening for 100 years, longer in other countries. It is the necessary corollary of the fact that Left voters are concentrated in cities, inefficiently wasting votes, and thus disadvantaged by geographically based electoral systems that promote minority rule. The more that you appeal to and rally the urban faithful, the harder it is to make alliances with the rural yokels who would get you out of the electoral vice. In fact there's an inverse correlation between standing for something and losing elections. And so we have this eternal argument over winning with a watered-down centrism or losing with our principles intact. It is as old as the modern Left itself, it is the same argument everywhere, and it will intensify as minority rule becomes worse and worse.
Rodden points out that the Left in most other countries noticed this in the early 20th century and demanded proportional representation to get out of the vice. In the US, the UK, and Canda the existing Left parties felt like they were doing well enough at the time when these decisions were being made not to have to bother with PR. But politics have changed since then everywhere, as the forces that drive urban economic growth and rural economic loss are accelerating and global. So this turned out to be a losing hand.
When you read this book you become conscious of the awesome divide that exists between us - how it is so deeply rooted and defiant of change. In a certain sense it relieves me. The cleaning lady's beliefs are like any other false consciousness, the product of a system that ruins her mind. But it also makes me aware that what we are up against is much deeper and more profound than Trump or even conservatism. It cannot be defeated; it is the "antithesis" within the dialectic of modernity, the sum of the misery and ressentiment of those who feel they are losing. Our political system, set up before cities really even existed, gives it the power to win elections without votes. It is never going away and it will never lose in a permanent way.
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What do you do with this awful knowledge, once you have it? The question of our time.
Everyone knows who Trumpers are; they are pink-faced white people who wear little red hats. It's so absurd and gross, so gaudy and unaware, and yet that's what wins elections, people. I have been thinking about what a counter-consciousness would look like, a self-awareness that strings together all the people in the Left archipelago. It is coming into view, although it is so riven between factions and infighting. In the 19th century there was a term of art among commentators, to refer to the Democratic Party as "the Democracy." I like the simplicity of that, and the way it hearkens to discourse, to a process of creation and becoming. We are all building it together in this terrible time, and we will be very proud of having done so someday - if we survive to tell the tale.