Note: As I recover from COVID-19, I find that my symptoms have been coming and going, probably in no small part because of all the DayQuil and NyQuil I’ve been taking. I’ll have a headache, then I’ll be tired and achy, then feel pretty good for while, then have a runny nose, then a coughing fit, and so on.
Honestly, it’s not the worst I’ve ever felt (I’ve had some Saturday and Sunday mornings in which I felt much closer to certain death than in any time over these past few days) but I don’t recommend it to anyone. Had I not been vaxxed and boosted, it likely would have been much worse. Get vaccinated, folks.
Anyway, this one might ramble a bit, so keep that in mind.
People sometimes say partisan politics is becoming a substitute for religion. And according to Freddie deBoer, in politics as in actual religion, the true believers hate the heretics even more than the nonbelievers:
It’s hard to write about this without sound pious, but probably the most elementary political ideal I have is that principle has to come before affiliation. Politics is about taking moral intuitions and reasoning and using them to craft an ideology from which you derive specific policy positions and arguments. In order to put those into practice you will have to form coalitions, so affiliation is important. But it’s very easy for your group identity to obliterate your principles, as the desire to belong overwhelms your organic beliefs. And I think we’re at a space, in 2022, where the default political identity is almost purely affiliatory. I understand that claiming we’re in a tribal period is not novel, but almost every day I’m reminded of how bad things have gotten.
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To be clear, I have absolutely no attachment to civility or even-handedness or respectful exchange for their own sake. My problem is that politics without principle is nothing, literally Yooks and Zooks. You might as well be arguing Yankees and Red Sox. The whole enterprise collapses into meaninglessness.
I’ve said this before, but when I have antagonistic interactions with leftists in real life I always challenge them to name actual issues on which we disagree. They rarely can; we usually agree on most everything of substance. Their antipathy towards me is fundamentally social in nature, not political. But they don’t understand that distinction, as the line between the social and the political has been completely obliterated. And when I do try to advance a particular perspective on issues of substance that have become controversial, like continuing to point out that civil liberties have been a core element of radical left politics for generations, they don’t bother to listen to my arguments because I have been preemptively sorted into the bad column by those who say I should not be invited to the party. Affiliation doesn't just replace principle, it preempts the possibility of principle.
And everybody feels the squeeze. I'll take a minor example, only because it's a good microcosm of how this all works. On the dissident right, the online journal Quilette has recently found itself attracting heated criticism from former supporters due to their embrace of Covid-19 vaccines. Objectively, a small niche web-only magazine like that plays no role in the development of national Covid protocols like masking or lockdowns. But by standing against their closest analogs on an issue of immense emotional valence, they have become traitors, and a traitor is worse than the other side. Plus, the enemy of my enemy is rarely my friend in these scenarios; liberals who act as the natural antagonists to the anti-Covid restriction right are not about to race to Quilette’s defense. So they find themselves with few friends. And this is the trouble with opposing the politics of affiliation: doing so makes you a betrayer to whatever group you might most naturally belong to without attracting any new supporters. You quickly end up, well, like me, a political orphan. I’m a decently well-read and well-informed socialist and I’ve been organizing in some capacity or another for over 20 years, and perhaps you might think that would rule in terms of who sees me as a fellow traveler. But in the day-to-day prosecution of politics, who you’re personally cool with feels more visceral and more reliable than actual beliefs. Which is how you get so many people who contribute nothing to socialism but shitty jokes clogging the space, and how you have an attendant lack of direction for the socialist tendency.
The maniacal fixation on Greenwald, on Michael Tracey, on the Red Scare girls, on Silver and Yglesias, and for the right on Quilette or David French…. Enemies who sit comfortably in the other camp aren’t actually hated, as in doing so they bring order and balance to the world. Those who must be destroyed are those who trod the lines, who trouble the distinction between in and out. And so the politics of affiliation will rule, until one side loses hard and often enough to compete for the other voters again, or until the unexpected happens and chaos reigns, and we can perhaps again experience a political space of possibility. For a little while.
DeBoer is mainly talking about how the very online set seems to despise people who are on their side when it comes to most issues, but have been voted off the island because they dissented on a major issue or because they just don’t like them.
Left-wingers hate right-wingers, but probably not as much as they hate Jesse Singal, a left-of-center commentator who has raised some concerns about treatment of children who might be transgender, which has unfairly led to him being deemed a “transphobe” and proponent of “conversion therapy” and an acceptable target for harassment.
Meanwhile, I doubt that even members of The Squadᵀᴹ get as much hatred and vitriol directed at them from MAGAworld as does David French, a devout Christian social conservative who has litigated some key religious-freedom cases, but actually believes in liberal-democratic principles instead of whining that any system in which his side doesn’t always win is illegitimate. And, of course, he refused to bend the knee to the Orange God-King.
But deBoer also got me thinking about something else: why is it that, if you support a major political party’s position on one key issue, you therefore must support that party’s position on every other issue?
The French just had a Presidential election in which the winning candidate was often described as “centrist” or “neoliberal,” while the loser was deemed “far-right” and “extreme right.”
If you’re Canadian or American, you’d probably assume that the right-winger supports reduced government spending and intervention in the economy along with her demands for lower immigration, while the “centrist” is the one who wanted to use the hand of government to level the economic playing field. And you’d be wrong: it was Macron who has carried out some necessary (IMO) but disruptive economic reforms, while Marine Le Pen was basically promising everyone in France a pony.
(Well, not everyone in France, just the actual French people, wink wink. But you get my drift.)
The US has a two-party system, so both parties are big tents to an extent, but by and large the Democrats are the socially liberal and pro-government-intervention party and the Republicans are the socially conservative, free-market party. (I practice I know both have actually governed very differently, but I’m talking about popular perception here.)
It’s a little different in Canada and Britain, where you have some smaller but nevertheless viable parties that can shake things up, but it’s generally assumed that the Liberal Party of Canada/Labour Party will be socially liberal tax-and-spenders, while the Conservative Party in each country will be more resistant to social change while cutting taxes and government spending.
I’m sure the hardest of the hardcore partisans will say there’s a legitimate reason for all of this and that it comes down to the other team wanting to enslave and/or punish you. But I still don’t really understand why, for example, supporting universal health care must therefore mean you also support “open borders,” or why anyone who wants to cut taxes must by definition also want to restrict access to abortion.
And it wasn’t always this way. “Rockefeller Republicans” and “Blue Dog Democrats,” who often took positions at odds with the political parties to which they belonged, used to very common. I’m not someone who glorifies a nonexistent political “golden age” in which everyone held hands and sang, but American politics definitely wasn’t as downright sectarian as it is today.
The last few Senators you might consider “bipartisan” are Sinema, Manchin, Murkowski and Collins, and the first three are absolutely despised by the rank and file of their own political parties. I’ve seen Democrats seriously argue that it’s better for Manchin’s seat to go to a Republican than for Manchin to keep it. Murkowski, of course, hasn’t shown sufficient deference to you-know-who and must therefore be excommunicated. (Collins, strangely enough, has managed to be quietly tolerated by Republicans despite some occasional irritants.)
Now there’s a party platform which to which you must commit in its entirety, or you’re the enemy. (In the case of the GOP, that platform is literally “do what Trump says.”) There’s no such thing as a 90% ally. It’s all or nothing.
And this is where the Burger King/McDonald’s thing comes in.
The “Business Wars” podcast had an interesting series about the rivalry between these two iconic fast food chains, and the different philosophies each applies to selling similar food.
McDonald’s emphasized efficiency and found that it could gets meals out of the kitchen much more quickly if every hamburger was identical. Burger King leaned into a “have it your way” model, in which the customer is given more choice in what burger toppings they want, even if takes a little bit longer to get it ready.
To use an imperfect, probably COVID-addled analogy, politics used to be more like Burger King, where you could take the basic meal and make a few variations here and there. Now it’s more like McDonald’s: you’ll take this and you’ll like it.
Actually, the more I think about it (maybe the DayQuil is kicking in) the analogy might be more flawed than I thought. Imagine if you said you didn’t want onions on your Quarter Pounder, and McDonald’s replied by kicking you out of the restaurant and then siccing its most rabid Twitter followers on you.
That’s basically how political discourse works in 2022. Also, the McFlurry machine is always broken, and depending on the franchisee, you’re a beta cuck or an irredeemable racist if you complain about it.