The Very Heart Of Denial

In a recent Salon column Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies, Glenn Greenwald goes after his own people in a most satisfying way. Before he gets into it, Greenwald has to defend himself against charges of being a traitor. (I can't quote the whole thing, so look at the original.)

Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match....

So potent is this [partisan] poison that no inoculation against it exists. No matter how expressly you repudiate the distortions in advance, they will freely flow. Hence: I’m about to discuss the candidacies of Barack Obama and Ron Paul, and no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite. But since it’s always inadvisable to refrain from expressing ideas in deference to the confusion and deceit of the lowest elements, I’m going to proceed to make a couple of important points about both candidacies even knowing in advance how wildly they will be distorted.

And then Glenn talks about the virtues of Ron Paul and the confusion his candidacy has engendered. All emphasis is Glenn's.

The Ron Paul candidacy, for so many reasons, spawns pervasive political confusion — both unintended and deliberate. Yesterday, The Nation‘s long-time liberal publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, wrote this on Twitter:

That’s fairly remarkable: here’s the Publisher of The Nation praising Ron Paul not on ancillary political topics but central ones (“ending preemptive wars & challenging bipartisan elite consensus” on foreign policy), and going even further and expressing general happiness that he’s in the presidential race. Despite this observation, Katrina vanden Heuvel — needless to say — does not support and will never vote for Ron Paul (indeed, in subsequent tweets, she condemned his newsletters as “despicable”). But the point that she’s making is important, if not too subtle for the with-us-or-against-us ethos that dominates the protracted presidential campaign: even though I don’t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits.

Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

As Matt Stoller argued in a genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough: “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.” Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

Greenwald is on to something profound here, but I'm not sure he understands just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Therefore I will try explain it to you.

Despite my equal-time evisceration of both political parties, I sometimes get the treatment Glenn Greenwald feels the need to defend himself against in advance. Liberals (progressives) think I'm a liberal when I write about wealth and income inequality. Conservatives think I'm a conservative when I write about government debt. I'm neither.

Almost all of us are operating within some vast destructive machine which we might label the Capitalist Economic Growth Engine for lack of a better term. Almost all of us are participants in this system, even if only incidentally or passively. There's hardly any escape from it unless you're a survivalist living off the grid in some isolated locale. Even those people fancy that they can isolate themselves from the general context which is Western Civilization. That's a fantasy. Humans are big, mobile predators—with guns advanced weaponry.

Now consider "good" causes. Bluefin tuna is being overfished, but that's because of the great demand for tuna. If nobody ate tuna, there would be no threat of extinction for this magnificent fish. Environmentalists shout "No Fracking!" and then go home and turn the lights on. Or perhaps they heat their homes with propane, which is a product of natural gas liquids production (fracking). You can't have it both ways. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't fix the economic growth system here and there in a piecemeal fashion. It's everywhere. It's all-encompassing.

All partisan left/right political discussions take place within this hopeless growth paradigm. If markets and those participating in them are evil, and you want to shut down this one or that one, or all of them, the economy will slow down or stop. Is that what you want? Of course not! For Humans, The Economy Is Everything. Don't pretend you can live without a functioning economy.

People want—are compelled—to divide the world up into "good" people and "bad" people. Who is "good" and who is "bad" depends on your point of view. And there are "bad" people—evil people—we should all keep an eye on, though most people can not spot them.

At yet another level of the Human Animal, people like to divide themselves into groups and then square off. The humans love a good fight. Oh, joy! (These are the Manicheans Glenn Greenwald is talking about.) The creation of opposing groups (factions) turns out to be the very essence of Democracy, starting with the Greeks and continuing right up to the present day. We have a faux Democracy, of course, not a real one, but it makes no real difference in this discussion.

These essential dualisms are the universally chosen, time-honored methods of avoiding a serious discussion about the Human Condition in general and what we're doing to this planet. Dualism is the quintessential human defense mechanism, the very heart of denial. One faction (the self-declared "good" people) can always say it is the other faction (the "bad" people) who are to blame. Therefore, everybody is off the hook!

At a more general, more objective level, there are no "good" people. There are no "bad" people. By and large, there are just clueless people   Among economists, Paul Kruguman (liberal) and Greg Mankiw (conservative) are equally foolish within this larger context, which is always the level of discourse here on DOTE.

Other issues, like the distribution of the income and wealth, fall under the Human Condition as well. We might support those with a moral sense who would like to see the playing field leveled, and oppose those who suck up to the rich. And that's fine, I myself take that position. But it is that moral sense itself that I am endorsing or trying to cultivate, not some political party or economic framework. You are your brother's keeper, the Golden Rule, and so on.

If I argue, usually indirectly with sarcasm, that the wealth should be redistributed, it doesn't mean I'm a cookie-cutter, run-of-the-mill liberal as some readers assume. Their wanting to put me in their chosen category—is Dave a "good" person? Or is Dave I a "bad" person?—says far more about them than it does about me.

Speaking personally, it pisses me off when people attempt to subsume me inside their puny cognitive world. It shouldn't, I know, but it does. There are people I no longer speak to because they did that. When I quoted Ron Paul one time on government debt, a number of (most likely former) readers were alarmed. Was I a closet libertarian? Do you know what I want to say to people like that? Fuck-off.

People would be well within their rights to say Dave, you fuck-off. We are who we are, leave us alone. Fair enough, but nobody is forcing you to read DOTE, and I don't charge you money to be a member of some exclusive doomer club (like others I could name). And I'm not positing collapse and then resurrecting (selling) hope as some others do.

I do sympathize with people (believe it or not). I probably couldn't be this way if I'd had children. By and large, people with children are unlikely to give up on the human situation in the 21st century as I have. (There are exceptions, of course.) Yet, these loving parents do their children no favors by being good little liberals or conservatives, or radical idealists of any stripe.

The same tired dualisms will not change likely outcomes in the 21st century. If the liberals/environmentalists get their way, we're still going down the tubes. The outcome remains the same, mutatis mutandis, if the conservatives /free marketers get their way. And if these same people are putting their faith in some Indo-European Sky-God like the deities of the Old or New Testaments, they are especially hopeless.

When Glenn Greenwald had the temerity to endorse Ron Paul's stance on some of the issues, he probably did not realize just how deep these destructive dualisms run. Not that anything will change, but I thought somebody should point out what's really going on here. So I did.

Comments

[russell1200]

Your instincts seem to lean toward a leftword-style. Thus the confusion. If you talk about balancing outcomes, people assume there will be a surplus to balance.

I would say the Arch-Druid's approach (as I understand it) is closer to where the people (like myself) with children might go. A lower input future with hope.

I, like you, am skeptical of the "hope" part. Not because I don't think there is potential for hope. I just don't think we are likely to move in that direction. I am waiting for contrary evidence.

The various selling of Doom methods arguably are trying to get people to spend today's surplus toward a future safety net: metaphysical and/or physical. Given the relatively small amount of money involved, you get exactly what you expect, a few individual flashes of inspiration and a whole lot of bland.