November 2018 – James Gillen

An Anti-Conceptual Mentality

This is another piece composed mostly of someone else’s quotes. The following are examples of Ayn Rand’s description of the “anti-conceptual mentality.” They are all taken from the Ayn Rand Lexicon http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anti-conceptual_mentality.html and refer to articles and books available through that site.

“The main characteristic of this mentality is a special kind of passivity: not passivity as such and not across-the-board, but passivity beyond a certain limit—i.e., passivity in regard to the process of conceptualization and, therefore, in regard to fundamental principles. It is a mentality which decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further. What does it accept as “enough”? The immediately given, directly perceivable concretes of its background…
“To grasp and deal with such concretes, a human being needs a certain degree of conceptual development, a process which the brain of an animal cannot perform. But after the initial feat of learning to speak, a child can counterfeit this process, by memorization and imitation. The anti-conceptual mentality stops on this level of development—on the first levels of abstractions, which identify perceptual material consisting predominantly of physical objects—and does not choose to take the next, crucial, fully volitional step: the higher levels of abstraction from abstractions, which cannot be learned by imitation. (See my book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology)…
“The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as “self-evident.” It treats concepts as if they were (memorized) percepts; it treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes. To such a mentality, everything is the given: the passage of time, the four seasons, the institution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.”

“[This type of mentality] has learned to speak, but has never grasped the process of conceptualization. Concepts, to him, are merely some sort of code signals employed by other people for some inexplicable reason, signals that have no relation to reality or to himself. He treats concepts as if they were percepts, and their meaning changes with any change of circumstances. Whatever he learns or happens to retain is treated, in his mind, as if it had always been there, as if it were an item of direct awareness, with no memory of how he acquired it—as a random store of unprocessed material that comes and goes at the mercy of chance … He does not seek knowledge—he “exposes himself” to “experience,” hoping, in effect, that it will push something into his mind; if nothing happens, he feels with self-righteous rancor that there is nothing he can do about it. Mental action, i.e., mental effort—any sort of processing, identifying, organizing, integrating, critical evaluation or control of his mental content—is an alien realm. ”

“This mentality is not the product of ignorance (nor is it caused by lack of intelligence): it is self-made, i.e., self-arrested.
“In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of association. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders. This works, up to a certain point—i.e., so long as such a person deals with other persons whose folders are stuffed similarly, and thus no search through the entire filing system is ever required. Within such limits, the person can be active and willing to work hard…
“A person of this mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover that his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in empty space—and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.”

“He seems able to understand a discussion or a rational argument, sometimes even on an abstract, theoretical level. He is able to participate, to agree or disagree after what appears to be a critical examination of the issue. But the next time one meets him, the conclusions he reached are gone from his mind, as if the discussion had never occurred even though he remembers it: he remembers the event, i.e., a discussion, not its intellectual content.
“It is beside the point to accuse him of hypocrisy or lying (though some part of both is necessarily involved). His problem is much worse than that: he was sincere, he meant what he said in and for that moment. But it ended with that moment. Nothing happens in his mind to an idea he accepts or rejects; there is no processing, no integration, no application to himself, his actions or his concerns; he is unable to use it or even to retain it. Ideas, i.e., abstractions, have no reality to him; abstractions involve the past and the future, as well as the present; nothing is fully real to him except the present. Concepts, in his mind, become percepts—percepts of people uttering sounds; and percepts end when the stimuli vanish. When he uses words, his mental operations are closer to those of a parrot than of a human being. In the strict sense of the word, he has not learned to speak.
“But there is one constant in his mental flux. The subconscious is an integrating mechanism; when left without conscious control, it goes on integrating on its own—and, like an automatic blender, his subconscious squeezes its clutter of trash to produce a single basic emotion: fear.”

“It is the fundamentals of philosophy (particularly, of ethics) that an anti-conceptual person dreads above all else. To understand and to apply them requires a long conceptual chain, which he has made his mind incapable of holding beyond the first, rudimentary links. If his professed beliefs—i.e., the rules and slogans of his group—are challenged, he feels his consciousness dissolving in fog. Hence, his fear of outsiders. The word “outsiders,” to him, means the whole wide world beyond the confines of his village or town or gang—the world of all those people who do not live by his “rules.” He does not know why he feels that outsiders are a deadly threat to him and why they fill him with helpless terror. The threat is not existential, but psycho-epistemological: to deal with them requires that he rise above his “rules” to the level of abstract principles. He would die rather than attempt it. (My emphasis)
“Protection from outsiders” is the benefit he seeks in clinging to his group. What the group demands in return is obedience to its rules, which he is eager to obey: those rules are his protection—from the dreaded realm of abstract thought.”

“Racism is an obvious manifestation of the anti-conceptual mentality. So is xenophobia—the fear or hatred of foreigners (“outsiders”). So is any caste system, which prescribes a man’s status (i.e., assigns him to a tribe) according to his birth; a caste system is perpetuated by a special kind of snobbishness (i.e., group loyalty) not merely among the aristocrats, but, perhaps more fiercely, among the commoners or even the serfs, who like to “know their place” and to guard it jealously against the outsiders from above or from below. So is guild socialism. So is any kind of ancestor worship or of family “solidarity” (the family including uncles, aunts and third cousins). So is any criminal gang.
“Tribalism … is the best name to give to all the group manifestations of the anti-conceptual mentality.”

To review: When Ayn Rand refers to this (very Randian) term, “anti-conceptual mentality”, she is describing a self-created moron. Such a person is not of medically subnormal intelligence (what used to be called ‘retarded’) but a person of at least average intelligence who deliberately does not apply it, for whom everything is an unexamined given because examination would mean taking a risk he is not willing to pursue, and thus he is almost entirely a collection of second-hand, superficial thoughts.

To say that such a person lies is actually beside the point; for lying to be meaningful to him, he would have to have some concept of truth outside what he needs at the immediate moment.

While such a mentality is not necessarily malign, it again must be distinguished from a Forrest Gump or real person with subnormal intelligence. Forrest Gump lacked abstract reasoning powers but had an intuitive morality. He tried to do the right thing to the extent that he knew how. The anti-conceptual mentality avoids going outside his prejudices because his intuition tells him he would no longer be able to do what he wants to do. Therefore he avoids not only abstract reasoning but intuition and introspection. As the phrase goes, “if you don’t know why hitting children with tear gas is wrong, I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

It is thus almost inevitable, given a certain environment, that an anti-conceptual mentality turns to negative impulses, not only racism but various other forms of hate and negative group loyalty based on “Us vs. Them”. Indeed, Rand in her day identified a mindset that is now frequently examined by liberal commentators of the recent political scene: tribalism.

Why am I invoking this particular set of quotes?
No reason.

Food For Thought

Relevant to the current political debate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#Critique_of_human_rights

“In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt devotes a lengthy chapter (The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man) to a critical analysis of human rights, in what has been described as “the most widely read essay on refugees ever published”. Arendt is not skeptical of the notion of political rights in general, but instead defends a national or civil conception of rights. Human rights, or the Rights of Man as they were commonly called, are universal, inalienable, and possessed simply by virtue of being human. In contrast, civil rights are possessed by virtue of belonging to a political community, most commonly by being a citizen. Arendt’s primary criticism of human rights is that they are ineffectual and illusory because their enforcement is in tension with national sovereignty. She argued that since there is no political authority above that of sovereign nations, state governments have little incentive to respect human rights when such policies conflict with national interests. This can be seen most clearly by examining the treatment of refugees and other stateless people. Since the refugee has no state to secure their civil rights, the only rights they have to fall back on are human rights. In this way Arendt uses the refugee as a test case for examining human rights in isolation from civil rights.

Arendt’s analysis draws on the refugee upheavals in the first half of the twentieth century along with her own experience as a refugee fleeing Nazi Germany. She argued that as state governments began to emphasize national identity as a prerequisite for full legal status, the number of minority resident aliens increased along with the number of stateless persons whom no state was willing to recognize legally. The two potential solutions to the refugee problem, repatriation and naturalization, both proved incapable of solving the crisis. Arendt argued that repatriation failed to solve the refugee crisis because no government was willing to take them in and claim them as their own. When refugees were forcibly deported to neighboring countries, such immigration was deemed illegal by the receiving country, and so failed to change the fundamental status of the migrants as stateless. Attempts at naturalizing and assimilating refugees also had little success. This failure was primarily the result of resistance from both state governments and the majority of citizens, since both tended to see the refugees as undesirables who threatened their national identity. Resistance to naturalization also came from the refugees themselves who resisted assimilation and attempted to maintain their own ethnic and national identities. Arendt contends that neither naturalization nor the tradition of asylum was capable of handling the sheer number of refugees. Instead of accepting some refugees with legal status, the state often responded by denaturalizing minorities who shared national or ethnic ties with stateless refugees.

“Arendt argues that the consistent mistreatment of refugees, most of whom were placed in internment camps, is evidence against the existence of human rights. If the notion of human rights as universal and inalienable is to be taken seriously, the rights must be realizable given the features of the modern liberal state. She concluded “The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable–even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them–whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state”. Arendt contends that they are not realizable because they are in tension with at least one feature of the liberal state—national sovereignty. One of the primary ways in which a nation exercises sovereignty is through control over national borders. State governments consistently grant their citizens free movement to traverse national borders. In contrast, the movement of refugees is often restricted in the name of national interests. This restriction presents a dilemma for liberalism because liberal theorists typically are committed to both human rights and the existence of sovereign nations.

In one of her most quoted passages she puts forward the concept that human rights are little more than an abstraction:

“The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”

Rules For Reactionaries

I mentioned at the end of my last post that such success that The Party of Trump has had thus far, and such strength as they still hold after the midterms, is because they are doing a better job with asymmetrical social warfare than the Left, even though in the 60s and 70s, that sort of thing was the Left’s stock in trade. But in the big picture, this shouldn’t be surprising.

If there is anything that the leftist “progressive” and right-wing reactionary have in common, it is a shared contempt for the establishment in both its classical liberal and social democrat faces, the kind of people who run things in Washington, New York, London and the EU Parliament. The all-powerful club to which nobody that we know belongs. But that club is generally more sympathetic to liberal-left concerns than social conservative or nationalist concerns. Those people feel very keenly outside the system and are more willing to work outside it or even tear it down than the “Democratic Socialists” who might get a foot in the door through conventional politics.

That explains why more AM radio talk-show hosts know Rules for Radicals than the average Antifa protestor.

You may ask, what is Rules for Radicals?

Exactly.

Rules for Radicals (ISBN 0-394-44341-1) was written by Saul Alinsky in 1971, shortly before his death. Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer (like Barack Obama…) who wanted to set down the rules he came up with for community activism.

If anything, this book seems to be more popular among the American Right than the Left. I say this because when I looked for it’s entry on the Amazon website, there was at least one right-wing answer book, like How to Trump SJWs: Using Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ Against Liberals.

It kind of makes sense. The fact that somebody on the Left actually did create a how-to handbook for cultural subversion appeals to the paranoid sensibilities of right-wingers who are convinced that everything they don’t like is a plot by George Soros or some other elitist handing down marching orders and strategies. (Even as all the leftists who act like the Koch Brothers go to monthly strategy meetings with David Duke, Montgomery Burns and Count Orlock are convinced that all THEIR ideas are completely organic.)

Now, Rules for Radicals is available for cheap on Amazon and a few other places, but I didn’t want to wait for a copy and I don’t want to subscribe to Kindle. Fortunately I discovered it is available on archive.org. https://archive.org/stream/RulesForRadicals/RulesForRadicals_djvu.txt So I’ve been looking at it.

To start, there’s the Prologue, where Alinsky says, among other things: “There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski (sic) said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude towards change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.”

Well, here we are.

Going into the first chapter, “The Purpose”, Alinsky makes his statement: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

After some discussion of morals versus dogma, this leads to the chapter “Of Means and Ends.” This goes into several rules that Alinsky defines for the ethics of means and ends, such as: “The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.”

Rules for Radicals goes on at great length on various subjects, but in terms of my point – how Alinsky’s approach is relevant to various times, and how the Right has (deliberately or otherwise) absorbed it more thoroughly than the leftists for whom Alinsky wrote the book – I want to focus on the section called “Tactics.”

Alinsky starts by saying: “Tactics means doing what you can with what you have.” As with “Of Means and Ends,” this chapter is organized by a list of rules, which I will go over in turn with regard to how they are applied by the “alt” right in general and the Trump team in particular.

Alinsky starts the list with: “Always remember the first rule of power tactics:

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

Certainly Trump didn’t have any real power before getting into politics, but more than one person has pointed out his similarity to P.T. Barnum, the difference being that the discolored circus freak he is hustling is himself. He did a great job of presenting himself as being more financially competent than he actually was, and in this country, people think that being rich means that you’re competent, whereas in Great Britain or Czarist Russia, it was commonly understood that anyone with money usually got it by being an inbred upper-class twit. And even though everyone in the press knew Trump had gone bankrupt at least six times, he still projected himself as someone who knew what was going on, and the Clinton Democrats couldn’t call him on it. Partially because of the rules that follow.

“The second rule is: Never go outside the expertise of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the expertise of the people, the result is confusion, fear and retreat. It also means a collapse of communication, as we have noted.

“The third rule is: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.”

Well, it’s not like Trump has technical expertise in, uh, anything, but he really is great at making other people act outside their expertise. That’s how he won. He ran for the Republican nomination and once he got it, he got elected because his opponents didn’t know how to react to his attitude. They still don’t. I mean, he could say “two and two is five” and you could say two and two makes four, and he would go “fake news.” How do you counter that?

(I mean, besides taking his obvious ignorance at face value and subjecting him to the same deliberate shunning and contempt that the media usually reserves for third-party candidates. But apparently nobody thought of that.)

“The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

“The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

This dynamic is one of Trump’s strongest traits. He is not a “radical” in the leftist sense, but he is outside the (generically liberal) establishment. To the extent that he had a grand strategy, it was the realization, shared by Bernie Sanders, that he didn’t stand a chance of promoting his national agenda outside the two-party system. He was an “outsider” in the sense of being outside the Republican political system, but not so much of an outsider that he was going to go third-party. And once he got the Republican nomination, the “rules” suddenly turned to his benefit since now he was representing a (once) respectable part of the system, and by two-party binary logic, anybody who didn’t like Democrats had to support him, no matter their objective qualms. That became much more a factor once he became president. Democrats and others can’t really stoop to his level if they want to preserve the system of rules and norms that they had previously lived under. This also means that as good at Trump is at applying ridicule, it’s harder to turn such tactics against him. Partially because he’s already ridiculous yet still has a support base. It is nevertheless true that however impotent his opponents may be in the political arena short-term, ridicule still serves to serves to infuriate him and throw him off.

“The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.

(Corollary) “The seventh rule: A tactic that goes on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.”

This is pretty clearly demonstrated in the playful, unserious dynamic of Trump with the audience he has at his various rallies. He says various stupid and belligerent things, which in the short term at least serve only to tweak liberals and other eggheads, which both he and the audience enjoy. This can indeed go on too long, but boredom with a tactic assumes both a capacity for imagination and a capacity to realize that it has gone on too long with no practical reward, and that is hard to do if you, like both Trump and his stereotypical fan, have the attention span of a fruit fly.

“The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”

This goes along with the general principle of changing things up so that the opponent cannot adapt. Trump, as seen, is very good at this. The non-Trumpers are not so good at this. And as Trump continues in his official role, he and his marginally more professional staff are beginning to adapt to the methods of the establishment so that they can prevail, as they eventually did in crafting a “Muslim ban” that the Supreme Court could live with. This also means that the only way of countering this dynamic is for the opposition to learn its use against Trump. That should be easier now that Democrats have a House majority that they can use to start official investigations of Trump malfeasance, but it’s clear that they don’t have much appetite for pressure tactics even when they have the resources to apply them.

“The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”

Where Trump is concerned, this is usually simple bullying. It’s how he’s gotten most Republicans and even establishment Democrats to go along with him. But it works both ways. According to recent reports, Trump had wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI head James Comey but his White House attorney Don McGahn persuaded him otherwise, on the grounds that he could suffer “a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.” The upside to dealing with such a negative personality is that he makes his own weaknesses obvious.

“The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results from the reaction of the opposition that are essential to the success of the campaign. It should be remembered not only that the action is in the reaction but that that action is itself the consequence of reaction and reaction to the reaction, ad infinitum. The pressure produces the reaction, and constant pressure sustains action.”

“The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard enough it will break through to its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.”

In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky gave an example from his own history where one corporation that he organized against took the step of breaking into his house and obtaining keys from that home to burglarize Alinsky’s place of business. Nothing of monetary value was taken in either burglary, only records applying to the corporation. As Alinsky put it, “the corporation might just as well have left its fingerprints all over the place.” That being the case, Alinsky told them that they would be confronted with that crime and others before a US Senate Subcommittee. “In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”

It should be obvious how this principle applies to Trump. He wins by being so obviously negative and shameless about it that it’s redundant to call it out. The problem with “pushing the negative hard enough” is that in his case the fan club is consistently devoted, but the less devoted are dropping out. We are seeing the results in the Democratic turnout for the midterms.

“The twelfth rule is: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying ‘You’re right – we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”

As I’ve been saying, this has been the issue with the Republican Party, not just Trump, all along. For all their attacks on the Democratic establishment, the Republican Party outside Trump has utterly failed to provide a constructive alternative, and the result was that when the pressure campaign ultimately achieved the desired result – a Republican takeover of government – they failed to deliver on their promises. The result was what we got with the midterms. The problem with not having a constructive alternative is reduced somewhat with the Trumpniks, because they never cared about constructive alternatives. They are in fact so “radicalized” against the establishment in both major parties that they’ve gone all the way to nihilism. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi put it in this week’s analysis, “Will (Trump’s policies) accomplish anything except chaos? Hell, no. But chaos is what Trump voters asked for.The press has steadfastly refused to understand this aspect of Trump’s pitch. The subtext of his run wasn’t about making America great again. It was, Let’s fuck shit up. If Obama voters understood “change” as a genuine call to idealism, Trump voters understood it as a chair through a plate-glass window, the start of a riot. In a time of extreme cynicism and existential gloom, Trump is a doomsday cult, giving voters permission to unleash their inner monster. What makes this dangerous is that the appeal isn’t limited to racists. It extends to anyone who’s pissed off about anything. Trump is the match to burn it all down.”

The flip side, as Taibbi’s statement implies, is that not everybody who voted for Trump was a racist. But neither were all of them nihilists. Some of them actually expected a constructive alternative and didn’t get it. As I said in the last post, the conditions of statewide Senate races are such that the culture-war appeals of the Trumpniks are more likely to work than in Congressional District races where politics actually is local. That’s why those tactics still worked for maintaining the Senate lead but failed to hold the House.

Or, as I keep saying, the lesson of the 2016 election for the Democrats was that if making liberals cry was the only thing that mattered, then Trump would have won the popular vote. Some of them seem to have figured that out by now. But what Republicans still haven’t figured out is that Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote, because the rest of the country knew that making liberals cry wasn’t the only thing that mattered.

“The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

At this point in his book, Alinsky goes into a great deal of elaboration. But in terms of how the point applies to the alt-Right, let alone the radical Left, it’s arguably the first rule that applies, not the last.

Alinsky admits that in a complex society, it is difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama think in terms of a complex society. But Clinton never won any national races (and lost her first attempt at the Democratic nomination) and Obama’s record in addressing America’s long-term issues is in retrospect mixed. Whereas if you single out a target that people can personalize and identify – like Bernie Sanders did with “the billionaire class” or Trump does with whoever put a hair up his ass this week – you have much greater results. In Alinsky’s critique, which remember was meant to be applied by the Left, “all issues must be polarized if action is to follow.” There is no room for middle ground. The fact that reality is not actually all black-and-white doesn’t help the struggle. For reasons of both emotional commitment and intellectual focus, the conflict must be simplified, even by those who know better.

This is how both Sanders and Trump were able to cast themselves primarily as enemies of each party’s establishment at least as much as enemies to the opposing party. It didn’t hurt that both of them actually were a bigger threat to each party’s establishment than they were to the opposing party.

Again, in the broader sense, Trump wins insofar as he can reduce everything down to culture war. He loses when Democrats can turn public attention to other matters. But here’s how old-time leftist radicalism flips around to inspire its reactionary opposite.

I’ve been looking at a few “conservative” sites and the general theme of the bloggers and commenters is that they’re under siege from the PC Left, “Cultural Marxists” and Islamists, who they must know are not all the same thing, but they all seem to be threatening the American Way of Life. (Remember, bringing up complex reality mucks up a good narrative.) But some of the more reflective bloggers, like Rod Dreher, are making the point that the Left, especially at colleges, are that much more prone to black-and-white morality than any Ayn Rand fan. The reason that this country could survive with Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims all in one mix is that legally we weren’t supposed to let religion intrude on civic policy, and in turn that situation allowed everyone to coexist. Now (again, in these conservatives’ minds) leftists are trying to enforce a situation where people with “traditional” beliefs are unwelcome, passed aside for job promotions, shouted over when they speak at universities, and so on. And a lot of the Left’s success in the social arena, particularly the tactic of “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it” can be traced to the thoughts of Saul Alinsky and his peers, even if not everyone on the Left has a deep grasp of the intellectual heritage. It’s not enough to say that the opposition is wrong or mistaken in their premises. They have to be Objectively EVIL. Alinsky is in fact explicit about this:

“The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: “He that is not with me is against me” (Luke 1 1:23). He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation which is 52 per cent positive and 48 per cent negative, but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 per cent positive and the opposition 100 per cent negative. He can’t toss forever in limbo, and avoid decision. He can’t weigh arguments or reflect endlessly — he must decide and act.”

So if you’re not on the Left, and you see these guys kicking your ass in the social arena over and over again, and you already feel yourself to be in a “minority-majority country” (because not even all white people agree with you), you start looking for how this came to be and you consider the tactics that the Left used to switch from being the “Have-Nots” to the “Haves.” You recognize that despite all your money, power and White Privilege (TM) you are on the outside where it counts, and you do what the original merry pranksters did- use the enemy’s rules against them, and break their script, because then they won’t know how to react. And this really all comes together when the guy who, despite his money, fame and privilege is definitely an outsider in the Cool Kids’ Club, Donald Trump, shows up. And then everybody is on board with the same polarized strategy: Fight back and make liberals cry.

But the Right, in being so scared of the subversive Cultural Marxists that they were willing to sell their souls to beat them at their own game, didn’t just prostitute themselves to the Bizarro-Ray version of Bill Clinton for the sake of winning elections. They decided that winning elections and grasping political power was more important than all that stuff they wanted to gain power to preserve, like Christian morality. Or the Constitution. And now it’s starting to slip away, because some people are finally starting to pay attention.

It is of course the fault of the Right if they want to take all the wrong lessons from other people’s example, but it was the Left that gave them the intellectual tools to shift the terrain.

If you guys on the Left are still wondering how the Right keeps beating you, it’s because they’ve been stealing your material since at least Mussolini, and you still haven’t caught on.

If This Is What Democracy Looks Like, It Needs A Makeover

Well, if there was a Blue Wave in the midterm elections, it crashed right up against a red wave, as it turned out that the huge increase in midterm votes, including early voting, accrued to both major parties. So while at one point before Republicans got themselves all hot and bothered over Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats thought they might get the Senate back in addition to the House, they ended up losing seats there, even though at least two races in Arizona and Florida are still up for grabs, but late returns are also projecting that Democrats will pick up at least 38 seats. Still, despite things going largely their way, Democrats complain about the Senate results because the states where the contests occurred had roughly 12.5 million more Democratic than Republican votes.

I mean, not long ago, Democrats were complaining that they couldn’t win a majority due to the Electoral College, and they were complaining they couldn’t win House seats because of gerrymandering, and now they’ve gotten a better win percentage with House seats than with Senate seats (where neither gerrymandering nor the Electoral College come into play) and they complain that’s un-democratic too.

If you’re a Democrat, you look for excuses for why you can’t win elections. It’s what you do.

The thing is, I don’t really think the Democrats did anything wrong.

They were told not to make everything about Trump, and to focus on the kitchen-table issues. And that’s what they did. Most of the Democrats who won talked about how they emphasized health care and how Republicans had tried to undermine it. Andrew Gillum (Florida governor candidate) and Beto O’Rourke (Texas candidate for US Senate) made much of the media attention they were given and emphasized running positive, substance-based campaigns.

Trump is the one who made the election All About Trump. Partially because that’s what he does, and also because with that mostly empty gumball machine he calls a brain, he knows it works. But the end result just confirms the conventional wisdom about the results: He exacerbated the process by which Democrats regained the House and lost more seats in the Senate. And the reason for that dynamic is that you have local House races where the constituencies are more cosmopolitan (i.e. Not Trumpnik) whereas statewide Senate contests where rural counties are in play are more prone to the Trumpnik rhetoric of “We’re the Cowboys and They’re the Redskins” (choice of team metaphor is completely intentional).

There’s also the point that where one house has 435 seats and the other has only 100, maybe a third of which are in contest during any election, each individual Senate contest is more consequential and small numbers of losses are harder to recover from.

So the fact that results ended up as most experts predicted means that any pundit (either left-wing or right-wing) who wants to draw some moral lesson from all of this is confounded by the workings of a federal system that doesn’t correspond to the way most people think politics works. “We shoulda won the Senate cause we got more votes! We have a fascist moron as president when Hillary got more votes!” Well then, you need to look at how things work and do something about that. Indeed, the very fact that most midterm elections don’t have anything like this year’s level of turnout implies that a lot of voters weren’t aware of these factors.

In observation of results, I do think some things need to be done on various levels. First, the process of voting itself needs a severe overhaul. And unfortunately, I believe that the only way that can happen is to federalize the process in the same way that the Post Office and various other “local” institutions are actually federal. And the most obvious reason for this is that the various state bureaucracies that are in charge of delivering sample ballots, compiling ballots, making sure that electronic voting machines are plugged in, et cetera, are the same bureaucracies that are themselves under election, and in one case, one of the candidates who benefits from a dysfunctional voting system is not only running for higher office but is the official in charge of running the election system. Given that we’ve already had several constitutional amendments and legal precedents establishing that there IS a right to vote, and that the federal government can step in to protect it, we need to address the point that there is not an equal right to vote when one constituency has state of the art voting machines in an easily available polling place and the other one has old-time machines run out of Uncle Zeke’s General Store and Town Hall.

But if your real complaint with the election is that it doesn’t do enough to reverse the dominance of Donald Trump, that requires a broader approach, dare I say a meta-political approach. This is a matter I’d been discussing with people on social media.

To address the subject of Trump’s success, I theorized: Why is Trump winning? Partially because he has the initiative. Why does he have the initiative? Because he sets the agenda. Why is he able to set the agenda? Because he doesn’t just accept the political given. For example, with the recent immigration/caravan/birthright citizenship controversy (which of course has evaporated now that he confirmed the Senate), do you think it matters to Trump that he can’t just wave a magic wand and say “I have repealed the 14^th Amendment because I am the President and only I get double scoops of ice cream”? No. The point is to make it a subject of discussion. The point is to make the unthinkable thinkable. Because we have seen a pattern where Trump will spew some Dadaist nonsense and his various Republican enablers will feel obliged to translate it into real legislation. Because that is, after all, what a legislature does: It exists to translate political initiatives into working legislation.

This Thursday, conservative Ramesh Ponnuru was on one of the talking-head shows on MSDNC, and he pointed out that Trump and the Republicans have engaged in a fairly successful media strategy to demonize and delegitimize the Mueller investigation, because with the actual process of any House impeachment and Senate trial being a matter of political consensus and collective will, they have to put the matter in the court of public opinion in order to shrink even the concept of impeachment. Similar to how the “Dream Team” did with OJ Simpson, they put the prosecution on trial instead of the defendant. Well, maybe we should put the actual defendant on trial. That doesn’t mean you have any legislators initiate an impeachment, at first. You’ll notice that apart from the likes of Devin Nunes, there wasn’t an organized Republican push to kill the Mueller investigation even though there were some trial balloon opinions on the subject. The point was that the various whisper campaigns in friendly media were undermining the legitimacy of the investigation in the public’s eyes, at least with that substantial plurality that is loyal to Trump, such that people who would otherwise support a lawful investigation feel compelled to oppose it out of team loyalty.

Several scholars have pointed out that impeachment is really more of a political process than a legal process. There has to be a real consensus behind it, and that consensus is what neds to be built up before the work is done. Currently any Democrats and non-Republicans who push impeachment have the burden against the Republican Senate consensus that will surely block them. The goal, before any actual impeachment is drawn up, is to put the burden on those senators and make their defense of Trump politically unfeasible. The fact that it can’t happen now is irrelevant. Do you think that Republicans cared that all the repeals of Obamacare they passed were going to be vetoed by Obama? No. The point was to keep the issue out there until they got the president they wanted. Of course the problem in that case was that once the Republicans got the president they wanted they couldn’t even pass an Obamacare replacement that they could agree on, but that’s because they’re incompetent morons. Whereas Democrats are often politically incompetent, but they’re not morons.

But part of what I mean when I say that Democrats are politically incompetent is precisely that they don’t understand this principle. They only operate in terms of the existing political landscape where Republicans seek to change the terrain. Democrats wait for a consensus for action instead of forming the consensus and then taking action. If you’re going to say, “well, there’s no point in talking impeachment because we’ll never get enough votes in the Senate” then it will never get done. That doesn’t mean you barrel through without a consensus. You get the consensus and THEN get it done.

In that regard, there’s another idea that I’d like the press to try. I know they won’t, for the same reason that TV networks won’t stop playing Christmas ads WHEN IT’S STILL MORE THAN A WEEK FROM THANKSGIVING. But the idea is: Boycott Donald Trump. That doesn’t mean that they don’t cover the various scandals that he and his crew have created for themselves. On the contrary. Focus on those scandals but refuse to talk to him.

None of these press scrums where the reporters and Sister Mary Elephant Sarah Sanders play “you pretend to tell us the truth and we pretend to believe you.” Nobody interviewing Trump on the lawn on the way to the helicopter. Nobody at Trump’s rallies roped off for him to point at, so the redcap audience can jeer at them like a staff of Court Jews.

Seriously, from their perspective, most administrations (not just Trump’s) are in an adversarial relationship with press corps “gatekeepers”, and Trump took to Twitter early, so he’s already got a means of communicating directly without their medium.

Supposedly, in the wake of Trump yanking Jim Acosta’s press credentials, this has already been debated by some but networks are afraid of making themselves the issue. “Don’t give him ammunition?” Like he isn’t going to make an issue of it anyway. That’s why he baits the press in the first place. If, as some concern trolls insist, “(Jim Acosta) and Trump almost need each other to sustain a mutual narcissism”, then the more responsible party needs to break the cycle.

Go ahead. Go ahead and let the little baby whine and stamp his feet. Go ahead and let him piss in the corner and cry. It’s not an election year any more, what’s he gonna do?

I’m pretty sure Fox News wouldn’t go along with it, but then the purpose of Fox News is to appeal to those whose minds are already made up.

(Side joke: What’s the difference between Fox News Channel and Pornhub? Pornhub has fewer blowjobs.)

This is part of the larger goal in reversing what Trump has done. What Trump has done is to legitimize his approach to the world. And the press was enabling him all the way. At first because he was a reality TV star. Then because he was the Republican nominee. Now because he’s the president. In any case, if we were dealing with somebody who didn’t have Trump’s reputation and fame, if he announced a presidential campaign by stating that Mexicans were rapists and drug smugglers, the press would have treated him like a mutant retard unworthy of their attention. You know, what they do to Libertarians. What we need to do is treat him like that. Not withstanding the fact that he actually is the most important man in the world now, the point is to make it clear that he does not hold his position legitimately. In my opinion, Trump won the election fairly (by the terms of the Electoral College) but since then has done everything he could to invalidate his status, and the only reason he hasn’t been impeached is because no other president (including Nixon) has abused the privilege this much.

And when you’re dealing with someone who’s that much of a solipsist, removing media attention takes away his validation. In a certain respect, it may make Trump doubt his own existence. Trump doesn’t mind being in an adversarial relationship with the media, it’s what he lives for. But to have no relationship with them at all? How long could he go cold turkey?

Shift the terrain. Gaslight the gaslighter. Take his mic. That’s how you start fighting back.

Overall, it occurs to me that Trump and the alternative-to-being-right are doing a much better job of asymmetrical social warfare than the media leftists who are supposed to be good at it. In fact, I find a lot of parallels to what’s happening in a certain bit of radical text. I’ll get to this in my next post.

REVIEW: Bohemian Rhapsody

Freddie Mercury could have been played by Borat.

At one point in the star-crossed production of the Queen movie, which would eventually become Bohemian Rhapsody, producers had cast Sacha Baron Cohen, the provocateur behind Borat and other characters, to play Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury, but he has told more than one interviewer that the project fell apart when “someone” in the band told him that the middle of the story would be the point of Freddie’s death, and the remainder would be the rest of the band preserving their legacy. And Cohen told that person that no one would pay to see that. Which is too bad, because Cohen would have had some advantages in the role: he is at least as tall as Freddie Mercury, has a natural overbite, can actually sing, and shares Mercury’s fondness for disturbingly tight underwear.

Instead, the role went to Mr. Robot star Rami Malek, and the movie did indeed become focused around the life and death of Freddie Mercury. It works because Malek almost single-handedly carries the movie, projecting not only soulfulness and vulnerability but the cheeky, ambitious personality of Freddie Mercury the rock star. I say “almost” because Malek plays off a great cast including Gwilym Lee as a dead ringer for guitarist Brian May and Lucy Boynton as Mercury’s longtime girlfriend Mary Austin.

The overall problem at the core of this movie is that it’s very obviously “Hollywood biography” and is too obvious in linking the accidents of history into a dramatic theme. For instance, it explains Mercury’s signature stage trick of wielding a half mic stand by saying that at his first gig with the band, the microphone stand was adjusted for the height of the previous lead singer, and Mercury broke the stand trying to shorten it. (In truth, Mercury was somewhat taller than Rami Malek.) Mercury’s relationship with his dad is a stereotype of Conservative Immigrant Father versus Westernized Son, and the fact that the family dynamic is resolved when, on the day of the Live Aid concert, Freddie finally looks up Jim Hutton (whom he hasn’t seen in years) and then takes him to meet his parents (whom he also hasn’t seen in years) to introduce him as his boyfriend, just before putting on the greatest rock concert in history, is a bit too pat.

This didactic approach also extends to the necessary matter of Mercury’s final illness and its causes. I have no problem with saying that Mercury’s lifestyle led to him getting AIDS, just as most people get lung cancer or type II diabetes from their lifestyle choices. (Indeed, given what the ’70s were like, it’s amazing that David Bowie and Lou Reed lived as long as they did, or that Iggy Pop is still ALIVE.) Bohemian Rhapsody depicts a certain tragedy in Mercury’s life in that he was very much in love with Mary, but she realized probably before he did that he was truly gay, not bisexual. And while the movie makes clear that Mercury didn’t need any encouragement to pursue men on the road, the central conflict is set up with the introduction of Queen’s assistant manager and Freddie’s eventual boyfriend, Paul Prenter (the unfortunately named Allen Leech) who pushes Mary out of Freddie’s life and manipulates him into firing Queen’s first manager and eventually leaving the band. (This is another rewrite of history, since Mercury did do two solo albums but did not leave Queen either officially or behind the scenes.) And the disco-influenced “Another One Bites The Dust” (which was actually written by John Deacon) is turned into the backdrop for a montage where Mercury and Prenter tour London’s gay leather underworld, and when the song abruptly ends, Mercury has started to develop a cough.

The thing is, this didactic approach is also what makes this movie work, when it works. There are several scenes where characters are trying to make a pitch to other characters and in the process they involve the audience. Like when Brian May is telling the other band members how he wants to write a song – “We Will Rock You” – that turns the crowd into part of the band. Or how the band is trying to explain to a record executive how their use of opera will expand the horizons of rock music. Or how they tell their first manager that what makes Queen special is “four misfits who don’t belong together playing for other misfits who don’t belong anywhere.” Even Prenter gets a sympathetic moment when he confesses to Freddie that growing up in Belfast as both gay and Catholic, he never felt like he belonged anywhere. Almost as if gay people and straight rock fans had that much in common.

But that again gets to the matter of presenting Mercury’s decline, which is unnecessarily confused by making the Live Aid concert the framing device for the story. Historically, Live Aid was an event held in July 1985, but Freddie Mercury didn’t get tested for HIV until April 1987. But in the movie, Freddie gets his diagnosis just after hearing that the Live Aid/Ethiopian famine relief project was a thing, and it sets up the premise that the whole thing is an attempt to make his life right by patching up the rift with his bandmates (which again, is either simply exaggerated or just bullshit) and then confessing to them during rehearsal that he’s dying of AIDS. Now given that Roger Taylor and Brian May were consultants on this movie (John Deacon has refused to be involved with the ongoing Queen projects), and given that there are facts on record that can be looked up, I am disappointed that the band would allow Mercury’s story to be presented in such a manner. Even in the script, Freddie tells his bandmates that he doesn’t want to be “a poster boy or a cautionary tale.”

So when gay journalist Kevin Fallon referred to Bohemian Rhapsody as an “insult” that “borders on character assassination” I may not share his anger, but I can understand it.

And yet: The acting is great. The script shows the camaraderie within the band. And it’s QUEEN. Bohemian Rhapsody shows what was so great about this music in the first place and the winning performances show why anyone would care about these people, all leading up to the Live Aid sequence where the larger-than-life presentation is finally in accordance with history.

So my otherwise wholehearted endorsement of this movie is tempered by the point that as a biography of Freddie Mercury, it’s simplistic and misleading. But it’s an awesome show.

I suspect that to Freddie, that’s all that would have mattered.