The anti-Tesla stuff coming from the left is just stupid.
My ride is a 2024 Model Y Long Range, in whatever grey color they call it—space grey, or slate grey, or dark grey. Anyway, it’s grey. It was the cheapest locally available Model Y Long Range on the Tesla website, and with the discounts and incentives and the Federal tax credit—and including the destination charge and the 10.25% local tax—I drove it off their lot for $42,990.
A year later I’ve got 10,000 miles on it. I’ve added windshield washer fluid once, and I charge it from my house current, which is augmented by the Tesla solar roof I got in 2021. It’s a lovely driving experience, way better than other available EV models, and incomparably better than any gas vehicle I’ve ever driven.
I’m not a car person. I prefer to bicycle or take public transportation. Before I bought the Model Y, I was happy with the two 20-year-old gas vehicles I’ve been nursing for years. I needed something safe and reliable to drive my teenager and her teammates to sports tournaments (which are ridiculously car-dependent). And it’s nice to get about while minimizing my carbon footprint.
The anti-Tesla stuff coming from the left is just stupid—worse than stupid. Here’s why:
First, when you imply that people are defined by the commodities they purchase, or (reciprocally) that purchasing commodities is a meaningful social or political act, you are endorsing the worst aspect of market ideology. As individuals, we have social and political agency. We express that agency through our interactions with other people, by the way we treat them and ask to be treated in return, not by what we pick off the shelf and display as a fetish. If you want to police where I shop or what I buy, you are very much part of the problem.
Second, if you are looking for some cause to blame for the rise of fascism (there are many causes) you’d do well to start with the left’s shift, during my lifetime, from meaningful risk-taking protest to slack-jawed virtue signaling. It takes no courage and little thought to grab a symbol and point at it (as bad) or wave it around (as good). Such action is, correspondingly, politically meaningless. It is narcissistic passivity that wastes your time and the time of anyone who pays attention to you. Get a life. Go organize something. Put some mental effort into a meaningful social and political critique. Then get on a soapbox—or write it and post your ideas somewhere. Trust me, it’s hard at first, and then it feels great.
Third: You’re missing the important point.
The solution to Elon Musk is not to boycott products he’s associated with (and I don’t know how well a boycott would work with SpaceX or Starlink). It’s to constrain Musk’s political influence. And then to expropriate his wealth.
I loved seeing Marxismtargeted in the first Executive Orders. It shows the far right understands what Marxism is, in contrast with most everybody on the left, who don’t understand Marxism at all.
In this context, the point of Marxism is: The vast enduring material riches of our society, including its technology, housing, transportation, factories, land itself—all this is the product of past social labor. In the present day, it really belongs to the society as a whole. It’s held in private hands because it’s been forcibly expropriated. Because that is true, then the wealth can be un-expropriated, or better, we can expropriate the expropriators.
That’s why we’re getting fascism. The purpose of fascism is to slow or stop the inevitable trend—as people become more aware, better educated, and break down the differences and barriers that keep them apart and fighting each other—toward people demanding limits and controls on the scope of capital. Even where ownership stays in private hands, we want, through collective democratic power, to have a say in how technology and resources are going to be used, because we want them used in an intentional and organized way—focused on meeting human needs, rather than on simply expanding capital.
In the near term, incrementally, limiting the scope of capital and redirecting it to meet human needs is accomplished, as far as we can make it be, by taxation, regulations, constraints. Right now, fascism is going to push all those back. Way back.
Focusing on commodities and on name brands—and reifying our values into mere commodity fetishes—that just reinforces the illusory legitimacy of private property and the concentration of that wealth in the hands of the few.
I did order a vanity plate for my Model Y, something I’ve never done before. The DMV system wouldn’t let me select F ELON or MUKFUSK so I settled for the milder and more constructive YES2DEI.
White progressives played a part in bringing this about. We’ll be better off—individually and collectively—if we face up to that.
Sure, Kamala Harris got within 1.5% of the votes. The election could have gone the other way. She might have bested Donald Trump.
But it was a long road to get to that moment three months ago. Trump and his congressional allies were on the ballot. Their agenda was unhidden—clear as day. So was the Democrats’ agenda. Side-by-side options. Democracy at its best.
On the other hand: Something feels terribly wrong about fascism being a choice. Something went wrong on the road to November 5, and all of us, or most of us, are implicated in that wrong. Being implicated explains why the opposition—in the present moment—is lukewarm. We’ve got to fight back; we’re going to fight back. But we’ll be fighting something in ourselves, and we’d best understand that.
The Biden/Harris years, after Black Lives Matter crested and then ebbed, witnessed a strange tolerance for fascism and the fascists. In the media, it was obvious. The heroic effort to prosecute the January 2021 putschists—a last-stand defense of democracy itself— was portrayed as one side of a 2-sided political battle.
That enabling was more than a failure of journalistic standards. It reflected a seeping-in of the personal core values and prejudices held by the journalists themselves, what those individuals share with the families and communities in which they live, what goes to their deepest sense of themselves.
I know this because I perceived the same thing in my own cohort, who are mostly writers and engineers and government functionaries. This failure of standards—moral standards—pervaded every aspect of upper-middle-class life. It manifested as a resigned even-handedness when it came to MAGA. An acceptance. An absence of a any fierce, uncompromising, risk-taking acts of condemnation—even among those who identify as progressive Democrats.
James Baldwin famously asked, back in the 1960s, why white people lie all the time.
I have this childhood memory of being on Franklin Street, which is the main downtown street of Chapel Hill, NC, in the late spring of 1967. I was eight years old—almost nine.
On the sidewalk, I’d been hailed by a lady who I didn’t recognize, but who recognized me. She knew who I was, and who my parents were. She had grey curly beauty-parlor hair and kind of leaned over me. I had to turn my head up to look at her, or else I’d be overwhelmed by her perfume and the pleats in her sensible skirt. She asked me the normal questions an adult might ask of a child. How did I like school? Was I excited that the Tarheels were headed for the playoffs?
Then she turned the conversation to school integration. The hair stood up on the back of my pale, skinny neck. I tried to talk plain and stay focused on the principle of the thing, which at that time—to eight-year-old me—was that people ought to be able to send their kids to any school, no matter what color they were. This was personal.
It occurred to me, there on the downtown sidewalk, that the reason she’d stopped me was not just to say hello to a child she recognized, but because my family were integrationists. My sisters and I were the first white kids to ever attend Northside Elementary, and now the Federal government was mandating that the whole school system be integrated the following fall.
“Well, I just wish we could all just get along,” she said.
I didn’t like the way she said that. It sounded like—was meant to sound like—everybody should just be Southern nice to each other. But I sensed what she really meant: Everybody should stay in their place. Was I wrong in sensing that?
No, I wasn’t wrong. She went on:
“I just think we would all get along just fine if people from outside didn’t stir up trouble.”
I knew very well what she meant by that. Kids had called me called “Yankee” from the moment my family arrived in Chapel Hill, two years before. We were outsiders, all right. “I think we would all get along just fine” was meant to ostracize. To threaten.
The lady moved on.
The rest of my family didn’t get it. My mom and my sisters, they were girls, and my dad taught at UNC and was disengaged from family life. Out on the school playground, and out on the street, I came to learn exactly what was going on.
To be sure, I was being bullied for a lot of reasons: I raised my hand in class too often. I was small; I’d been put ahead a year. I was bookish and fearful; my accent was different. I didn’t have a big brother or a dad who was around.
There was something else to it, too. I knew it whenever I heard “communist” as my head was being pushed into the dirt, or “n***-lover” as my guts were being pummeled and my eyes blackened.
“He gets into a lot of fights,” my sisters would say. “Maybe we should sign him up for a boxing gym,” my dad would offer.
I was going to have to figure out the mystery of this social landscape for myself.
“I wish we could all just get along,” the lady had said. Maybe that was the key. The phrase carries what’s called (today) virtue-signaling, while also putting up a coded, steely defense of keeping things the way they are. It deprecates anyone who protests. Shuts up anyone who makes a fuss. Shames anyone too visible as a victim. It keeps the peace.
A couple of years later, shortly after I turned eleven, I was in the school hallway, coming in from recess. A kid with a blond crew cut helped me with a clue. “Hey hippie,” he called to me. Other kids called me that—I’d grown my hair out past Beatle-length—but this kid was weirder, angrier. Something about him scared me.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I said. I was lying.
“You oughta be afraid, hippie. My dad’s in the Klan. He’ll kill you.” I turned away and headed for class. If I was going to fight anybody, I wasn’t going to fight this kid. And I wasn’t going to tell anyone what he’d said to me, either.
He’d filled in some of the mystery, though, that I’d been left with from the encounter with lady on Franklin Street. And what he said answered James Baldwin’s question, when I encountered that question years later.
American society smolders with racial injustice and with the ever-present threat of racial violence. That fact is the key to understanding most things about politics, about understanding most things that matter. It’s at the very heart of a phrase like “I wish we could all get along”— a phrase that, in the mouth of a liberal, artfully combines virtue-signaling with an implicit endorsement of white racist terror.
Until now, after the election, and perhaps even still, this was the stance most liberals had toward MAGA, at least the MAGA adherents in their workplaces, or among their neighbors, or the parents on their kids’ sports teams. Toward local shopkeepers and the local police. There has been a kind of acceptance, even as the MAGA rhetoric became more extreme and the potential of a takeover of national government emerged: Let’s all get along.
White people, including liberal upper-middle-class college-educated white people, really do want a kinder and more egalitarian society, but they aren’t entirely comfortable with the idea that Black people could be in charge of it, or parts of it, and would be making decisions. They aren’t comfortable with no longer being deferred to, with no longer having a safe bubble, with no longer enjoying special protections from the denials and penalties and danger and all the other vagaries of life under capitalism. Something in them knows that this privilege is what is really at stake. Black political power would mean those privileges would go away, quickly.
You hear this discomfort in the derogation of “identity politics,” “woke,” “wokism,” and “culture wars.” You hear it in the hyped-up fear of crime and support for tougher penalties and crackdowns—even, for example, in California voters’ recent refusal to ban forced prison labor.
You see it most clearly in the obfuscation of the racial divide in voting, in the misrepresentation of white voters as “rural” or “heartland” or “working class.” (All of these categories include Black voters, who vote reliably and overwhelmingly Democratic.) You see it in all the efforts to represent MAGA as anything other than what it is and always has been—a white supremacist ideology and program.
Most egregiously, you see it in the specious (and patronizing) claim that MAGA voters are dupes and fools, or that they didn’t intend to vote for what is happening in Washington today. There is no evidence of that, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence available to argue for the contrary: Just ask any MAGA you know how they feel about the rounding up of immigrants or the dismantling of DEI programs.
When “we all get along,” liberal white people get to have it both ways. They can support racial equality and progress while also enjoying an assured continuation of their privilege, courtesy of the ongoing presence of a source of racist terror. And this—ultimately—is why liberal white people tolerate a MAGA presence among their families, their associates, coworkers, and clients. Among their local police.
It is, to answer Baldwin’s question (in a way that would not surprise him at all), why white people lie so much.
Of course, tolerance is required, sometimes. I like to go backpacking in the mountains. Many times, I’ve emerged on a road 40 or 50 miles from where I left the car, and I’ve needed to hitchhike back on rural mountain roads. There’s a vulnerability to being picked up on the side of the road, a vulnerability that’s shared with the person offering a ride—you each don’t know each other or what you’re up to—and on a lot of occasions I’ve respected that vulnerability by keeping my mouth shut in the face of racist, right-wing rants, letting my white skin and some noncommittal phrases anonymize and protect me until I got where I was going. It’s the way it is.
But even required tolerance is still a lie. Still corrosive to principle.
During the Biden/Harris era, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, tolerance for MAGA prevailed. Red hats were allowed where white hoods were once banned. Fewk liberal Democrats would stick their finger in the face of a MAGA and tell them they are racist and they can go to hell.
This makes the present government (if you can call it a government) a group project, a consensus project. People on our side, the progressive side, might not approve of MAGA; they might have voted against it, but they also legitimized it, allowed it to be part of social reality and because of its accepted presence, allowed it to be part of political discourse. They provided an accommodation the MAGAs were only too willing to exploit, and the accommodation helped provide the space for the MAGAs to organize, win power, and dismantle the democracy that had come to threaten white privilege. For white progressives what is happening in Washington is, in the most important sense, our project as well as theirs.
Moments ago, I submitted my final paper for my philosophy class at SFSU, “Seminar in a Classical Author: Marx.” As you might expect, the class was right up my alley.
Dr. Landy suggested that, in selecting a topic, we find published work that we knew we disagreed with, but didn’t quite know why. I immediately thought of the eco-socialism of John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, and I welcomed the opportunity to read his books and develop my own critique.
Here is the summary at the end of my paper. The whole thing (.pdf) is here.
There is no reason to believe that a technologically advanced society, like a primitive society, cannot co-evolve with nature in a desirable direction. However, there are significant illusions—ideological obstacles—that must be overcome to successfully articulate and promote the idea that the working class can bring about such a society.
These illusions can be summarized as:
The reification of nature; its characterization as a “thing” to be protected and a source of ethical value (as in a right way to live), rather than as one side of the labor process by which both man and nature are transformed.
The characterization of capitalism as a force that threatens both man and nature, rather than as a transient social order and historical stage of human development.
The view that nature has inherent value (“natural capital”), rather than developing a critique that the exploitation of natural resources is appropriation of previously produced (socialized) surplus value and expansion of the scope of capital.
The view that uncontrolled growth makes capitalism a mere destructive force, rather than acknowledging that: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society (The Communist Manifesto, quoted in a footnote in Capital Vol. 1, p. 617).”
The view of environmental and social regulation as merely holding back the forward destructive power of capitalism rather than, as Marx said of the 1867 Factory Act, “By maturing the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one (Vol. 1, p. 635).”
A view of science and technology as intrinsic instruments of capital rather than as instruments of labor that have been appropriated, temporarily, for capital’s ends. That is, rather than the insight that science and technology, in their lasting essence, expand the power by which “man through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.”
Today would be a good day to take a long walk, if you can. Get out in nature. Do it alone, or in the company of a close friend. Start a new self-care routine. Exercise and eat well.
Last night, after I’d satisfied myself that the bad news was indeed bad news and was not going to be reversed by some miracle—this was about 8:00 San Francisco time—I turned out the light and lay in the dark and waited for sleep. It’s important to let yourself feel grief, to feel it fully. That’s not easy for me, as it isn’t for many of us, but when I manage it, I always find some healing wisdom in it.
What came to me, as I lay quietly, was the memory of a conversation I had some years ago with a friend of a friend. Barry’s a few years older than me. He’s practiced meditation lifelong. We were sharing a dinner I’d prepared. Barry told me a story from his life—something about his father—and after a while came around to some advice for me. “Let your misfortunes humble you,” he said. “Let them wear down your edges.”
Losing is humbling. It’s all the more humbling when you know you’re in the right and you thought you’d win. For now, I’m not going to shake my fist and vow to fight another day. I’m letting myself feel the loss.
For now, that will be enough. I do expect to get something from it, to carry me forward. Humility, when it’s genuinely felt, opens up compassion, and if you accompany that feeling, if you go with yourself on a journey inwardly, you’ll find that in time the same feeling turns outward, inexorably. I intend to extend more kindness to those close to me, and to reach out to others who I meet who need or offer kindness. This will be the expression of my grief.
For me, this is the right preparation for resistance. The time for that will come soon enough. By resistance I’m thinking not only of political resistance. Fascism is a totality. Cruelty and indifference—those human failings—come in countless forms. They seep into every aspect of life and social relationships. For this reason, cruelty and indifference can be resisted in everywhere, in art, and music, in building social connections, in every aspect of one’s behavior toward oneself and others. In every moment.
To resist, however, requires having one’s feet planted firmly on moral ground. There is good news here. When I think of the campaign just ended—Kamala Harris’ campaign, a welcome expression of one woman’s personality—I think of the people who supported it, joined it, worked for it, and how what we did together was a high expression of social ideals, of social cohesion, of a mass movement toward a better society on a healthier planet. What strikes me most about our country’s division is not the grab-bag of policy differences, as important as those are. It is the stark difference between a spirit of inclusion and social trust on our side vs. the countervailing idea, on the other side, that society (and politics) are transactional.
The latter idea, along with its cynical illusion of what human beings are, is an expression of the capitalist epoch. The former ideal of inclusion and social trust has been expressed in all epochs but can only come to realization through our long and painful transformation to a society organized through the conscious intentionality of its participants.
So I’m grieving the loss of my child’s future, of the planet, of democracy. Perhaps most of all I’m grieving the loss of my illusion of where this country was at, when taken in total. We are more sick and more self-destructive than I’d feared in my worst moments.
In resisting, I’m preparing to give the fascists no quarter. Our side, with all its divisions and differences, has the main part right: It’s about inclusion, and trust, and being secure and vulnerable enough to reach out toward a common destiny. When we talk of unity, it is on this basis only: Everybody in, nobody out.
As to their side—and “they” are every person who, for whatever reason, endorsed or worked for or voted for fascism, and especially the cynics who pretend to be neutral but provide moral cover for fascists—our invitation is always there, in each and every moment, for any one of them to change their mind and join the human race. However, as long as I live (and I intend to go on living) I will fight their cruelty and indifference with everything I have, including, when I can muster it, my love and compassion for you, my comrade in arms.
What happens next, after the convention? This is an historic showdown. It’s been brewing since 1964. Maybe since 1865.
Through the Republican Party, this country’s owners—the elite who control financial power—have knowingly and deliberately allied themselves with white privilege and white racism. Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Reagan’s carefully crafted nods to the KKK. Trump’s out-and-out race baiting.
This isn’t just prejudice, or bias, or bigotry. Business leaders pursued a cynical electoral alliance with white people who want, consciously or unconsciously, institutionally or violently, to defend the free passes they get up and down the class ladder.
That alliance is finally going down to defeat, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act the following year.
Don’t decry the country’s polarization. It’s a good thing.
That continued all the way through the ensuing decades. Remember Jimmy Carter’s comment about “preserving ethnic purity”? Or Bill Clinton’s attack on welfare and hyping of crime? To get elected then, Democratic politicians had to give a nod to white racism.
But that opposition to Black political power became concentrated as white-flight suburbs became integrated, and turned blue, and the exurbs and rural areas, to which the angriest and most fearful whites retreated (or holed up in) turned more and more red.
Now we’re down to a handful of swing states, and victory depends mostly on turning out the base. We’re going to do it, with all this love and enthusiasm.
Then what?
The most realistic scenario for the House is that we’ll win it narrowly. Hakeem Jefferies becomes speaker. The most realistic scenario for the Senate is that it stays the same, except Justice replaces Manchin in West Virginia and Gallego beats Lake and replaces Sinema in Arizona. Casey, Tester, and Brown keep their seats. Then the Senate is 50-50, with Tim Walz presiding and breaking tie votes.
And then: Schumer moves to bust the filibuster, which he would have done successfully in 2021-2022 if it weren’t for Manchin and Sinema. And then the House and Senate move the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and an updated Freedom to Vote Act and send it to Harris to sign. And follow up, quite possibly, with statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.
(If the Democrats win the trifecta and leadership doesn’t do this, we should pillory them. Right wing fascism has always been part of our politics, since before Joe McCarthy, and Nixon, and Goldwater. Voting rights and enfranchisement for DC residents and Puerto Ricans means permanent marginalization of the fascists. And it means Democratic politicians will no longer need to make that nod to white racism.)
Great, right? But it sets up a bigger showdown.
While big business has continued to back the racist, right-wing Republican Party as it drifted further and further into MAGA, Democrats built their coalition based on an ever-more social-democratic economic appeal—higher taxes on the rich, consumer protections, public investment, public schools, affordable health care. That’s been the Joe Biden/Nancy Pelosi formula for victory.
So now—if Democrats win the trifecta, and bust the filibuster, and pass voting rights legislation, and add two new states—they can win and exert Federal power without a nod to white racism, and also without fealty to big business and its neoliberal ideology and vision.
So big business is freaking out. And they are trying to figure out how to strike back. That’s what’s behind their pundits’ misrepresentation and panning of Harris’ anti-price-gouging proposal. That proposal is an indication of what could come: a pro-labor Harris administration that has proved its economic chops, following up on Biden’s industrial policy (the CHIPs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and more). More pro-labor policies (card check, anyone?) and pro-consumer policies (Elizabeth Warren and the CFPB unleashed) are sure to follow.
So what’s coming? In the next 77 days, big business is going to strike back at Harris, and strike back at Democratic House and Senate candidates. They might recognize that Trump is not viable, and that the chaos he brings is ultimately bad for profits. What big business really wants is an administration brought to heel—preferably a divided government that they can influence and bend to support their profit-making.
I think they are too late, and too wrong-footed, to be effective. I think that on November 5, we’ll win that most realistic scenario and get the trifecta.
That outcome would set up 2025-2026 to be interesting times. The Democratic administration will be primed, with high expectations from the base (us), to make major changes in the US economy—even greater changes than were made during the Democratic trifectas of 1993-94, 2009-2010, and 2021-2022. This time Democratic politicians needn’t be held back by the threat that business will help juice the GOP’s midterm white backlash, as happened in 1994 and 2010 (and 2022, but less potently)—because the dam will have been broken on voting rights and statehood, and our majority will be permanent.
Big business’ remaining option will be to negotiate with a Democratic administration empowered by an enduring electoral majority that is united around a solidly center-left, social democratic economic agenda.
I signed on to the call last night and was bumped to the YouTube stream. I sent money and watched for 40 minutes—a long enough time, I figured, to be counted.
On the subject of organizing and taking action as a group of white dudes, it wasn’t terrible—I never cringed—but it was lacking.
This is fraught territory.
From the New York Times:
Before Monday’s call, Ross Morales Rocketto, a Democratic organizer who helped start the group, acknowledged the discomfort some might feel about the group’s name.
“I don’t blame them,” he said in an interview. “Throughout American history, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that when white men organize, it’s often with pointy hats on, and it doesn’t end well.”
“What we are really trying to do is engage a group of people that the left has largely ignored for the last few years,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “There’s a silent majority of white men who aren’t MAGA Republicans, and we haven’t done anything to try to capture those votes.”
This is not terrible, but it isn’t revealing or insightful, either. Rocketto acknowledges the underlying discomfort, but the words he uses to assuage that discomfort are inaccurate and not completely honest.
Take any left venue—say, Daily Kos. Are white men largely ignored? Hardly. In politics, white men are the object of political persuasion, disproportionate to their actual numbers, the same way white men are disproportionately the object of any other kind of messaging, just about anywhere. That’s how dominance works.
That acknowledgement a good place to start.
The next step, I think, is to investigate what special political roles and responsibilities accrue to those of us who, by chance of birth, are on the dominant side.
The first lesson of being a white dude leftist is to step back, to be aware that one is holding a louder megaphone, and free up space for others to step forward. But that’s not what we’re getting at with a “White Dudes for Harris” group. This is a space, in fact, to step forward.
To what end?
I think that doesn’t have a fair answer, a complete enough answer, without acknowledging the social construction, the unreality, of our whiteness—and even, for that matter, our maleness as we know it. Our ultimate objective is to annihilate our white, male identity. That’s a radical concept for most people, but without it, I’m going to continue to be uncomfortable being a “White Dude for…” anything.
Because what I really want to say to fellow white dudes, whether they are my fellow progressives, or the legions of the uninformed and uninvolved, or the nutty MAGA types, is this:
The old world was built around the white patriarchy, around imperialist domination, sexual domination, exploitation and destruction of nature. Now that old world has to die, because as long as power accrues on that basis, the horrors of inequality and war will go on, right up until the time the planet becomes completely uninhabitable. We have to change.
But more than that. When we white dudes give up our white, male identity and the privileges that go with it, in part or in whole, individually or collectively… whenever we do that, even a little bit, we make ourselves individually more free, and we make our fellow white dudes more free, and we make everyone else more free.
I don’t pretend that is easy, or that it’s obvious how to do it or when to do it in each aspect of our political lives and our everyday lives. Sometimes its difficult to defend one’s humanity—to set boundaries and to pursue aspirations that every human being deserves to keep and to have—without invoking the identity that has been given to us. But we can try to be aware of the differences between our universal rights on the one hand and our special privileges on the other.
What I do know is that when I do it—when I do yield and fold under my special status as a white dude—I feel more empowered, not less. I feel more able—not less—to provide, to protect, to guide, to watch over. I am more of a man for it.
And maybe working to make a Black woman President can be part of that experience.
And I know that I want to spread the word about that.
It was painful to watch Joe Biden last night, as he read from the teleprompter, as he struggled to speak with cadence, to find pauses, to use his voice to emphasis where emphasis belonged. His face was mostly frozen, masked; there was no warm smile, no cocking of the head, no basking in the limelight, only the words spilling out, wonderful words, historic words, uplifting words that were delivered as if from within a deep vault weighed down with a heavy lid.
I felt badly for him, and for us.
Joe Biden, whose whole schtick was warmth, touch, empathic looks, an ease with children, caring and compassion for the disabled—Joe Biden had always been a real man who carried his insides on his outsides and his emotions on his sleeve. Where is that man now?
I’m sure he’s still there, inside; that Dr. Jill can see him, and all those close to him can see him given some time and patience and a quiet room. On the TV last night, that Joe Biden was hard to see.
There’s some irony in that, because Joe Biden is a man who lived and worked through this whole television era, the era you can say began with the Nixon-Kennedy debate, in 1960, the first televised Presidential debate, when Joe Biden was just 17. As time went on, public life became more and more about communicating an ineffable sense of being genuine, of being real and integrated, to the camera and the airwaves and to make that ineffable thing come through, via pixelated rendering, to people’s living rooms. Joe Biden had it mastered; when he said the ACA was big fuckin’ deal, you knew he believed it was a big fuckin’ deal, and when he told that boy not to worry about his own stutter, you knew Joe was bringing forward oodles of love and encouragement from somewhere deep in his heart.
There’s more irony. We’re living in a time where words matter a lot less than they used to, especially the words of politicians, because nobody believes what anybody says anymore; anything anybody says has to be filtered by the way they say it. “That’s so real,” kids will say—as if they are aware that most of what they hear, day in and day out, is not real.
Which it isn’t.
The real is our weapon, our ace in the hole, because the other side—the Republicans, Republican politicians, and dyed-in-the-wool regular Republican people, whether they are the kind of Republicans who brag that they walked their high school graduation when they actually didn’t, I mean rural drug users like my neighbors, or whether they are the other kind of Republicans, well-coiffed polyester-clad old people driving their Lincolns—those people on the other side don’t have access to real, because their own real (the real they have deep inside them) is encrusted in an impenetrable shell of white privilege, which is so impenetrable they’ve never experienced their own real themselves. So when these Republicans cheer each other on, and cheer on Trump, the whole noisy business of it resounds with fake, fake, fake, and it’s the same— boring and predictable—regardless of whether it’s Representative TalkingHead on CNN or somebody being interviewed at the town diner and acting like they seriously had a real opinion, which they don’t, or somebody’s drunk uncle riding shotgun in the pickup truck with his head hanging out the window. Fake.
Real is, in fact, our ace in the hole because so-called swing voters are people who are inured to logic or anything that involved parsing words, anything that would require thinking through propositions such as: Are Nazis bad? Or: Should hungry kids should be fed lunch? and who live as if any and all facts can simply be dismissed with shrug and a redirection of their attention to the immediate needs of the day. And these people respond—if they respond at all—to that feeling of real, the feeling that cuts through the words, and decide whether they like Candidate A or Candidate B based on that feeling, regardless of whether Candidate A is a felon who wants to inject them with bleach vs. Candidate B who has spent their whole life trying to protect vulnerable people from felons armed with hypodermics. The swing voters don’t believe anything either way, and they don’t really care about anything either, but they know who how they feel and who gives them that warm feeling of connection, of mutual identification. Joe could give them that, but he can’t anymore, because he has a progressive neurological disease that’s only going to get worse, even as he has good days and bad days.
Which brings me to the unreality—by which I mean a lack of empathetic understanding—that characterized most Democrats’ reaction to poor Joe’s condition. Most Democrats didn’t see the man and his suffering; they saw only his role with regard to the election, like he wasn’t a human being at all, like he should continue, for everyone else’s benefit, to play the role of the candidate we needed even as it was clear he couldn’t do it anymore, which was something that he didn’t want to admit and those closest to him didn’t want to admit (they’d lose their jobs, or their power, or both) and that most of us minor players didn’t want to admit either. Finally, Joe had to admit it to himself, although he couldn’t admit it in the speech last night, because then he’d have to resign the Presidency too, so he said something about passing the torch, a pat phrase which served adequately, even if it wasn’t really believable and wasn’t really real.
Last night I found myself wishing he didn’t have to do that, and that we all didn’t have do that. Wishing that we could all just share our appreciation and love with him and with each other, as in Joe, what a great job you’ve done, and we’re sorry to see what’s happening to you, but it is happening; we see it, and you know what? You rest and take care, and we’ll be fine. Joe’s embarking on a new part of life’s journey; he’s going to learn things about himself and when he learns them he’ll wish he’d known them all along, because that’s what happens when the flesh weakens and the cacophony of thoughts slows. I’m getting old, and I’m experiencing it myself. It’s not bad.
I’m wishing we all didn’t have to do that—the posturing and pretending that most everybody here at dKos demanded we all do, the whole time from June 27 to last Sunday—because when you allow yourself to feel the real, to see the human there, in each of us, see, you get a little of that superpower Joe had, or maybe still has but can’t express so well anymore, and that Kamala Harris has—god love her and keep her safe—that superpower to change somebody. Not to change their mind, but to change their feelings, so that they can change their own mind.
And that, in significant part, is how we’re going to win this election.
Biden should resign the Presidency now and allow Kamala Harris to be sworn in. Then he should release his delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
If Biden can’t campaign effectively, then he can’t govern effectively either. Being President is at least as challenging as running for President, and the stakes are just as high. If Joe Biden can’t go toe-to-toe with our own wannabe dictator, how well will he do in ongoing confrontations with our nation’s adversaries?
Did Biden have “a bad debate,” “a bad night”? That’s a weak argument. Being able to self-regulate, think, and act under pressure, and do so consistently, are key qualifications for the Presidency, as for any high-level management job. You can’t go create a disaster on Thursday and make up for it the following week. Nor is it convincing to say he can run on his record. That was then, before what we all saw July 27. This is now.
This situation is why we elected Kamala Harris to be Vice President. To step in if Joe Biden is unable to serve. Kamala should serve he remaining four months of Biden’s term while running for re-election as the incumbent President.
If Biden resigns as President now, Democrats will unite behind Kamala Harris at the August convention. Sure, there are plenty of ambitious egos out there, but you can bet they’ll all fall in line rather than challenge an incumbent President Harris for the nomination.
Harris will make a fine President. We already decided that four years ago. And, as the incumbent, she’ll make a fine 2024 candidate.
She can take full credit for this administration’s accomplishments, because she was part of the team that won them.
Her youth and vigor change the perceived dynamic of the race. It will no longer be between two old, white men.
She represents change, and can run against “more of the same.”
She appeals to core Democratic constituencies. A solid Black vote will keep Georgia and North Carolina in play. Compared to Biden, she isn’t as compromised with Arab-Americans. And she has an advantage with Asian-American voters.
Of all potential candidates, she is best-suited to focus the election narrative on abortion rights.
She’s got a law-enforcement background, as a big-city District Attorney and state Attorney General.
She has a stellar resume, having won repeatedly won statewide office in a big, diverse state, served in the Senate and then as Biden’s VP candidate and VP. She’s exceptionally qualified to run for President and to be President.
Most of all, we’ve seen that Kamala can take it to Trump, relentlessly calling out his corruption and lies—and do so energetically and articulately. She can rally opposition to what most of the country agrees is an existential threat to democracy. Matched against hypothetical Democrats, she holds her own, but that’s not what’s at stake here. Head-to-head against Trump, she can make the contrast clear—responsible, sane, and knowledgeable vs. off-the-rails narcissistic, demented, and above all, old.
Does Kamala have negatives? Of course. Her approval/disapproval ratings are only a little bit better than Biden’s or Trump’s. Every candidate has negatives. But not every candidate is sitting VP and can be made the incumbent President and presumptive nominee instantly, by the action of one person—Joe Biden. Kamala can. Joe should act now.
This morning, as Zoe was headed for another week of 9th grade, she said she still liked school, but what she didn’t like was being in school for eight hours to get two hours of learning.
I knew just what she meant. By her age, I’d been feeling that way for a couple of years already. Eighth grade was as far as I got in any kind of conventional schooling. I couldn’t stand the idea that I was being trained in the indispensable skill of being bored. It feels like a deliberate crushing of your spirit. It makes you employable.
We’ve been saying “post-industrial” since the 1970s, even before the Reagan-era watchwords “automation,” “offshoring,” and “rustbelt.” Fifty years on–and with my retirement from engineering to focus on writing–I’m getting visions of what post-industrial life it might really be like.
One day in 1985, in my senior year studying civil engineering, I took the subway downtown to a job interview. The firm was in a converted loft building, in the garment district. The sewing machines had been supplanted by carrel desks, in melamine rows, where white-shirted men sat, many of them with copies of the American Institute of Steel Construction manual. I recognized the red leatherette cover, the way each man had hedgehogged his copy with paper clips marking pages with the key tables, so he could look up the entries to his calculations. They were sizing girders and beams and braces for bridges and skyscrapers, writing the calculations on paper sheets, formatting the calculations to allow ready checking and review.
The first IBM PCs had already arrived in that office. Those men’s jobs were about to evaporate, in favor of better calculation methods (finite element analysis) that can analyze structural designs more beautiful and elegant than what came before.
At its best, engineering education instills a mental closeness to material properties. This closeness is akin to what is required for, say, baking or leatherwork, but at the higher, more abstract level made possible when the material properties are made consistent by quality control in manufacturing. The engineer’s confidence in a design–confidence that the bridge or building will stand up and not fall down–is derived from confidence in the mathematical representation of how the steel compresses or stretches or bends, rather than direct observation. But it is still, in some sense, still felt, and as such, it is still craft.
As the post-industrial future comes into focus, I’m feeling that the transition in the daily experience of work–its phenomenology–is away from the rote and regimented, away from looking things up, away from rule-based judgements. Those are all things computers, and artificial “intelligence,” can do faster, better, cheaper than human beings. No one needs to sit in rows, in carrels, doing a job.
We do need to practice craft, though, and more of it. We are swamped in commodities but have a deficit of value–and value comes from the application of human skill to material substance. Being able to practice craft requires discipline, grit, and the capacity to tolerate discomfort. But it doesn’t require–I don’t think–practice at boredom.
I envision a world, not within my own lifetime but possibly within Zoe’s, where work as we now know it is mostly replaced, not by leisure but by craft. Where human engagement in production of things, of commodities, is bit by bit replaced by the everyday application of feeling, creativity, and mastery to unique problems. And the output of that engagement is beauty, or service, or caring, or glory. But not money.
There is a lot of speculation as to why this city was abandoned after thriving for 1000 years.
I’m looking at the quality of the construction–the dressing of the stones, how carefully and masterfully they are laid up–and I’m wondering about the way these beautiful spaces were used. I’m thinking about what energy, what organization, it must have taken to build the city, to continually add on to it, to maintain it.
It must have taken an enormous division of labor–meaning an enormous exploitation of, and ranking among, the people who lived here.
One possible explanation of what happened is that the people who were doing the labor, who embodied the craft, decided they no longer needed to be exploited in that way. Maybe they just decided to stop building, maintaining, and serving. And once they decided to stop being exploited, there was no way the city could continue.
Cahal Pech
I continue my walk around the plaza. I look at the monuments.
Why is that possible explanation–that a refusal by laborers and craftspeople, a social evolution toward equality, brought down this city–why is this explanation not offered up? Why is it left unsaid?
Why not suggest, to today’s visitors, the idea that when the whole edifice of a civilization depends on social division and exploitation, the civilization itself is vulnerable to the eventuality that people will decide they don’t need to put up with that social division and exploitation anymore, and absent a solution for it, will let the city and the civilization decay into ruins.
Looking down on a plaza at Cahal Pech
I walk under the arches, stand on a wall and look down at an open plaza.
Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe the laborers and craftspeople and elites lived in this city, worshipped here, maintained it, and after 1000 years everybody got so good at building and maintaining it that they just didn’t need the ranking and the exploitation as much. Maybe the conscious experience of being one of the laborers and craftspeople who built, maintained, and served–maybe the character of that conscious experience changed.
And maybe the ruling elite, sensing the change in that experience, tried to ensure the social ranking nonetheless stayed more or less the same by giving the workers technical training, promised them the imminent return of manufacturing jobs, promised to maintain for them the secure feeling of a familiar social order in the face of advancing skills, knowledge, technology.
And maybe that didn’t work, couldn’t work. because the real glory of the civilization they had built wasn’t in the technology, wasn’t in the achievement of building the city, the glory was in human imagination and human ability to dream and to manifest dreams.
And the dreams of the people who had been workers were larger than the city itself, those dreams rose above figuring out better and faster ways to replicate and expand the existing order.
