The Boredom of Contemporary Politics
American Mind Capture on Both Sides
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The dumbest Orwellian phrase I’ve heard come out of the New American Left in the past decade is this one: That’s both-sides-ism. As in, when you look at an argument from more than one perspective—The One True Left Perspective—you are committing original sin. But the very definition of critical thinking is to look at objective facts, analysis, etc from all and any available angles. When you’re only allowed to look at things from One Angle, that’s when you get into religion-territory, or cultural authoritarianism.
The idea that we’re no longer “allowed” to think about ideas and events from multiple perspectives has become The New Trend in Lefty and Conservative Politics. Trumpers literally see Biden as a fascist and the leftist Woke ideology as dismantling American society, and the New Left sees Trump as the contemporary Hitler (incredibly ahistorical) and Conservatives as book-banning fascists who love Russia and hate America.
There is, of course, some truth on both sides here, and also much bullshit. The sad thing is that we’ve totally lost sight of nuance. Every argument nowadays is done in bad-faith and is aimed at “the other side” for one purpose: Mud-slinging. Each side lies and gaslights the other. The Left pretends that book-banning only started happening with the Right, when they know damn well their own side has been cancelling books and authors religiously for the past decade-plus. They don’t care about that because it’s “their” side. Suddenly when the Right starts doing it not via Twitter mobs and internal rebellions at publishing houses but through sketchy “legal” means: Then, finally, it’s terrible. (Of course it’s terrible and creates an obvious censorious environment on both sides.)
Hypocrisy.
The Left media is failing. Over the last few years NPR has lost a record, staggering 18 million listeners, dropping from 60m to 42 million just since 2020. The Washington Post lost 77 million dollars just this past year and has said goodbye to 50% of its audience. CNN and The New York Times have finally adjusted and done rational corrections in order to save themselves. Journalism over the past 20 years has morphed from a serious working-class profession to young white elite fringe leftists from the upper middleclass who have abandoned journalism for activism which 85% of Americans do not support. (Notice how they now try to walk back “Defund the police” just like Trumpers tried to walk back the building of the wall?)
Meanwhile record numbers of Black, Hispanic and Asian voters are peeling off for Trump, leaving the Democratic party in droves. And yet still, the Woke Left refuses to take responsibility, refuses to look at their own internal problems. They tell us that Biden is sharp as a tack as we see him literally stumble and speak mumbling jargon that makes no sense, naming the wrong world leaders on live TV. Just like they told us the BLM protests were “mostly peaceful” as buildings burst into flames behind reporters. Just like they denied crime as it was rising to record highs. And then they chanted “gas the Jews” and held signs literally supporting Hamas but assured us they were “just criticizing Israel.”
The effect of all of this has been to watch as places like San Francisco—full to the brim of progressive Democrats—have removed far-left ideologues like Chesa Boudine, and have dismantled the Woke Board of Education, replacing it with sane people. This is why cops have been refunded. Defunding police always harmed low-income black people the most. (Where crime is statistically higher.) This is why everyone is leaving places like San Francisco and New York City for other, safer, more rural areas.
It's been incredible to watch Progressive-Leftists roll their lying eyes and pretend that they aren’t a tiny minority who represents almost no one in America. They call Hispanics “Latin X” despite the fact that 90% of Hispanics reject this label. They claimed it was racist to wonder whether Covid accidently leaked from a Chinese lab and now that looks very possible. They tried to push Affirmative Action on Americans and it was overwhelmingly rejected, and by Blacks, Hispanics and Asians as well. They tried to deny the fact that Black men were disproportionately beating the shit out of Asians during 2020, despite the fact that many of us were there and saw the beatings with our own two damn eyes.
When you lie that often, you lose credibility, and that is what has happened with the Democratic Party.
Here’s the other “funny” (read: Psychotic) thing about all this: The lack of nuance and the [alcoholic] black-and-white thinking.
To wit: if you criticize the Left that means you must be Conservative.
Two weeks ago someone on Facebook posted some quote about free speech from Noam Chomsky. I commented something to the effect of, I find much of Chomsky’s ideas absurd but I agree with his point here. Immediately several people attacked me as being some kind of extremist Trumper.
Look: Like most intellectuals, I liked Chomsky in an age-appropriate manner: When I was a young, angry guy in my early twenties who was post-punk and “hated” America. These people said that my criticism of Chomsky showed how stupid and slow I am. He’s no doubt a very intelligent thinker, I responded, but he’s also clearly an extremist. Aka: He presents one—in my opinion very skewed and one-note—very particular perspective on global politics and history. But intelligence doesn’t always mean you’re right. Here again was the new fallacy of: My side good, your side bad.
I have never in my life voted for a Republican. My parents were/are both Centrist Democrats. I voted for Obama twice, then Bernie, then Hillary, then Biden. Trump is a complete narcissistic jackass, in my view, and represents no one but himself. But, given the shift over the past decade in the Democratic Party, from rational and centrist to extremist and fringe left, I cannot with any conscience or sense of integrity or self-respect call myself a Democrat. Nor a Republican. What am I? I honestly don’t know. I guess, like tens of millions of others in this dark chasm of time we live in: I feel “politically homeless.” If I were forced to label myself something, and a gun were pointed to my head, I suppose I’d call myself some sort of Left-Libertarian.
I am:
Pro-choice
Pro-gun-control
Pro-rule-of-law
Pro-police
Pro-free-speech (for all people and for all topics, including critiques of race, gender, religion)
Pro-free-market
Pro-democracy
Pro-voting
Pro-school-choice
Anti-war but understanding that war is sometimes necessary (Ukraine; Israel support)
Pro-education (unmuzzled by fringe-left or fringe-right loyalty oaths)
Against book-banning of any kind, whether culturally or internally from the Left, or legally via the Right.
Against-government colluding with social media Big Tech to censor certain voices
Etc.
I think Obama was one of our smartest, most eloquent presidents and speakers; I think Bush (junior) and Trump were some of our worst. I view myself essentially steeped in “old school” classical liberalism based on Enlightenment principles beginning with Descartes and later, Kant, Thomas Paine, [John Stuart] Mill, and up to today. I think the only way to combat bad speech is by using smart, wise, nuanced counter-speech. Stupidity breeds stupidity breeds stupidity, ad infinitum. We need thinkers from the far left to the far right and everyone in-between to be collectively in conversation, not wagging fingers at each other and hurling invectives and ad hominems.
The saddest reality about today’s political landscape, I think, is the fact that people no longer agree on fundamental basic facts. Is Hamas a terrorist group? Are Black Americans progressive? (No.) Is biology true (are there really only two sexes?). Is gender a social construct? Should “trans” kids be affirmed by doctors no matter what? Is Israel a genocidal authoritarian state? Is any criticism of Islam Islamophobia? And if so: Are you then now not allowed to criticize Islam about anything for any reason? Should any one group ever be above criticism? Should professors be required to sign DEI loyalty oaths? Is free speech still intact if a person is deplatformed, cancelled, not included in panels, etc? Are Fox News on one hand, MSNBC on the other fair and neutral media networks? Does contemporary media represent what most Americans want to see and hear? Is America a terrible or a wonderful place? Is there any nuance between these two poles?
When I was a young elite white kid growing up upper-middleclass (like a lot of these Woke kids and journalists today), playing the punk rock game and rebelling against my parents, my school, “the system” and “the bourgeoisie,” I read Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent, anyone?) and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, as well as books critical of the U.S. by writers like Gore Vidal and, later, Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me is a brilliant read). I was young, angry and fierce. I was determined to reject everything my happy, successful Baby Boomer parents offered me, which was freedom, a beautiful home with a pool and jacuzzi, ease and comfort.
I felt somehow disgusted with America, though I knew very little about it. (You can read all about this in my fast-paced short punk novel, The Crew.) Thing is: I was young. Naïve. Insecure. Inexperienced. Just a kid. After high school—which I barely made it out of—I decided to forego four-year-college and instead worked and took some community college classes. I read voraciously, books like 1984, Brave New World, The Catcher in the Rye, everything by Bukowski and Kerouac and Ginsberg and James Baldwin. In my twenties I hopped freight trains and thumbed around America. I saw, met, felt and experienced many people and things outside of my little world growing up in Ojai and Ventura, north of L.A.
I took Amtrak trains half a dozen times across America, back and forth. I hitchhiked across the nation. I drove several times across the country. In 2006—age 23—I went to New York City for the first time, and, incredibly, caught one of the last punk shows ever at the infamous CBGBs in the Bowery before it closed down later that year. (The Adolescents headlined.) I worked various fulltime dead-end jobs (mostly retail, but I also worked for a moving company, worked cutting surfboards for a shaper, worked driving a van around the Bay Area picking up and dropping off medical uniforms, worked as a busser and server at various restaurants, worked at the front desk of a prestigious hotel, worked as an apprentice tiler, survived for a while on Unemployment Insurance and Food Stamps, couch-surfed, etc.
The point is: I had experiences; I grew up. I made mistakes. I hit bottom and got sober. I changed. My mind began to be more open to other thinkers, authors and ideas, even as in 2004 I crept along with black-bandana-clad anarchists in marches along Market Street in San Francisco protesting George W. Bush and his terrible war.
Fast-forward to today and I have both a rigid and yet also a fluid mind. I have many strongly fixed ideas, and I read an incredible amount (there is never a time when I am not reading), yet I am always open to having my mind adjusted or changed. This is why I listen to podcasts like Sam Harris—now writing on Substack!!!—and The 5th Column and The Free Press. I agree with much of what is written and said on these podcasts…but definitely not everything. Because, shockingly, I don’t need to agree with everything and everyone around me in order for me to respect them. We’re people, complex, nuanced human beings who aren’t all the same. Some on the Left say, Now is not the time for nuance. Trump is a fascist dictator, a serious threat to American democracy. Now is the time for getting Biden elected.
No.
This is ass-backwards. It’s never the time for full, complete ideological capture. The problem is explained in Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm. Basically, if the “oppressed” get the chance to rise up, chances are they will then become the New Oppressors. Look at the fringe Left and the fringe Right. Both have done and said incredibly noxious things over the past five years. What do you think the fringe Left would do if it actually got its hands onto serious power in government? We already know what the fringe Right would do: Trump was already in power for four years, and those were anxious, angering, scary years indeed. And if you listen to what the fringe Left has been repeatedly saying these last ten years, we know what they’d do.
The solution is a return to sanity, a return to commonsense, a return to a basic agreement on facts and reality, a putting away of the swords of gaslighting, lying and mud-slinging. Free speech has been assaulted by both sides, one doing it stealthily, often pre-publication or even at the literary agent level, while the other side has used state courts. Both perspectives are profoundly illiberal and undemocratic. Journalism on the Left—if it can be called that anymore—has become so biased and so rigidly ideological as to be unlistenable, hence the gross mass loss of listeners and readers at places like NPR, The Washington Post, and adjustments by The New York Times and CNN.
Politics in America has become boring, predictable and totally, absolutely partisan. Both sides have lost contact with the working-class in America, their meagre messages drowning instead inside a desperate, elite soup of identity politics and race-essentialism.
The solution is listening to one another again, seeing one another as fellow human beings. In the name of DEI—“diversity, equity and inclusion”—the Left has excluded everyone who doesn’t agree with their views 100% on absolutely every issue. When they say “diversity” what they really mean is more rich people who happen to be Black. When they say equity what they mean is forcing minority non-white groups into roles previously taken largely by white and Asian people, to make things “more fair” (fair for who, exactly?). And when they say “inclusion” what they mean is religious political orthodoxy as if Christianity has been replaced by Identitarianism.
Most people understood the so-called “racial reckoning” in 2020. But, like my younger self reading Chomsky as an angry, confused young man, we need to grow up. It’s time for real change. Not fake change, like the fringe sides on both corners want, all rhetorical bullshit, but real change.
And this change only comes from giving up the ego, the pride and the rage which both sides are captured by. Let’s talk to each other again.
Doesn’t that sound so humane and rational?
Aren’t you ready for that?