The Nature of Belief

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).”
5. 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).”
6. 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.”

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.

I can’t bring myself to say anything nice about Robbie Robertson, who wrote The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

1969 marked the rise of a southern inflected Americana in “hip” popular culture—Dylan’s Nashville Skyline was released that same year. On the folk side, it departed from the protest music of the Phil Ochs, the Weavers, the early Dylan. On the blues side, it left behind the intense experimentation that came out of Muddy Waters and led to Hendrix.

The southern-inflected Americana was mellower than those styles, it hit savory notes of homecoming and rightful place,; it wasn’t threatening or jazzy or strident. The 60s were becoming the 70s. Hippiedom had leaked from the college campuses and artists’ ghettos; a lot of regular guys came back from ‘Nam and found they couldn’t fit in either, grew their hair out, and pretty soon you couldn’t really be sure that someone who wore long hair and beads and smoked dope was actually aligned with the values in the Port Huron Statement. Politically, they could be anywhere, and you might be rebelling against anything, or nothing.

And soon after there was country rock and southern rock and Olivia Newton John. And the revolution was postponed; it was over really, and Nixon’s men would soon be Ford’s, and then Reagan’s, and (some of them) eventually Trump’s men.

If I was charitable (or as charitable as I ever get) I could dismiss Robertson as just an ignorant Canadian, a commercial opportunist cashing in on a reactionary trend, like so many smart and ambitious people do when a nation drifts toward fascism.

Except I can’t be charitable, here, I have to be pissy and damning, because there are, out there, white folks whose need for feelings of comfort and reassurance outweigh any moral sensibility, and who will, as a result, make excuses for that song, or even for (God help us) Sweet Home Alabama, which sound the same notes as the lame excuses you’ll hear many white people make for Trump supporters (because they’re low-information or tied to the land and have economic anxiety, or something).

Those excuses reveal what “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” reveals, which is not only latent longing for a more potent and virile white supremacy, but something deeper in the souls of white folk: A craving for a fake version of authenticity that can paper over the deep-down inauthenticity that defines them.

You see, the Canadian Robertson’s latching on to Americana was a cynical cashing in, but it was much more than that, it was an ingestion and spewing out of the endless lie that is the American South itself, the lie that imbues every twangy syllable, every fatty overly salted meal, every exhausted acre of farmland. Just this week, it had to be said that no, there is no redeeming quality to the history of slavery. None. And there is no genuine authenticity to be had in any of its trappings.

No matter how you try to twist it.

There is great power in throwing it all away, in finally dismissing that fake Southern white bid for authenticity, in dismissing all of it, for what it was and is. And that power is to be allowed to seek something new, a new grit and authenticity in the American soul, one that recognizes the Southern white lie, calls it out, stamps on it, and then looks forward to something better.

(Crossposted to DailyKos, where it generated some interesting discussion.)

A friend reposted this cartoon today. It’s from the 7/1/2015 New Yorker.

Let me deconstruct the experience here. Attention is first drawn to the child, and the carefree, joyous innocence of childhood. What could possibly be wrong with a parent’s impulse to protect that innocence?

Then, in the caption, the innocence is revealed as a shameful lie: The carefree moment on the swing is steeped in—inseparable from—the injustice of racism.

It is the parent speaking, of course. These “wonderful, precious years” are not only the child’s, but the parent’s too, because the parent is experiencing (and appreciating) this carefree, joyous innocence in the context of their privileged white family. And what could be wrong with appreciating the safety, security, and uplift that one derives from family?

The cartoon illustrates how whiteness imposes inauthenticity. Innocence, joy, family, security, are conferred to us by an unfair society. When we celebrate what we have, we are must either ignore that unfairness, and thereby magnify it, or else taint our happy moment with an acknowledgement of the unfairness. This mother’s statement in the caption is performative, dour—a come down.

And inescapable.

Can we learn to appreciate our privilege—including wholeheartedly living moments like the one represented in the cartoon—and simultaneously revile our privilege? And do so without irony?

What happens inside you during these moments?

US Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos showed up in NYC, outside Donald Trump’s arraignment, on this day, April 4, which happens to be the 55^th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Here is the key fact that most people on our side—the side for democracy and against authoritarianism—will miss about the spectacle.

I could start by saying “The lying is the point,” which is to say that Trump and Greene and Santos and their supporters don’t really believe what they claim to believe. They know it’s all a lie, that Trump is a liar, and what they are defending, there on the streets, is not so much the content of the lie, it is the act of lying itself.

I believe I know this from having grown up in the 1960s south, where everything that white southerners had to say about Black people—most of it horrendously racist, of course—was not really a matter of belief, but a matter of saying, like a school song or an incantation. The act was to repeat the lies; the purpose of the act was to have the power to be gained by repeating the lies. The falsity of what was being repeated gave the act more power, not less, because it takes a commitment to tell a lie, and the power derived from telling the same lie all together is what has held their version of America together since before its founding. The point of repeating the lie is not to express a mistaken belief, nor to convince anyone that the lie is truth but—much more effectively—to entice and browbeat others to join them in repeating a lie known to be false. This is a necessary feature of a truly brutal society.

That is why the small but dedicated crowd of pro-Trumpers gathered outside the arraignment was yelling “USA! USA!” It is a contentless chant, signifying nothing, and the phrase is equally available to either side, except that in context, as it is chanted at rallies and in stadiums, this is what “USA! USA!” means: We uphold the lie of white racial supremacy, even when we know that it is a lie, because we know the lie, and this group repetition of the lie, is what maintains our political power.

By the way, this is why those who don the trappings of red-staters—such as guys who equip their pickup truck with a gun rack and confederate flag sticker and listen to country music and speak with a drawl—this is why those guys come off as authentic. Almost everything they believe is a lie, and they know that what they believe is a lie. But they are genuine in the sense that they are fully committed to upholding their lies, to the point of never showing any doubt, which is easy for them, because their deeply held emotional commitment to lying effectively crowds out any other thoughts they might have about this subject, or just about any other subject for that matter.

Compare this to the painful-to-witness inauthenticity of characters like David Brooks. Brooks knows, just as well as any gun-toting Trumper does, that the ideology of white supremacy is a lie, but instead repeating this lie in a simple and earnest way, endeavors to find some way to make it palatable—to top the lie with enough refined sugar to make it pass for the truth. For example, when the extreme right targeted “wokeness,”— known and defined by both sides as “…the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them” (to quote an aide to DeSantis)—Brooks recharacterized and redefined “woke” as a tool of elite Democrats. In this way he aims for a middle ground, neither too far left nor too far right, where he can enjoy the power of the lie and the mantle of the truth at the same time. This inauthenticity is why the so called “moderate” right has no political traction at present.

Which brings me to lessons for our side, the side for democracy and against authoritarianism. The Trumpers are making a last stand, or feel they are making a last stand, for the cause of white supremacy and against the cause of equality. Fact is, no one really knows what a post-white America will look like or be like. This uncertainty can make us falter, hedge our bets, step back when we should stand up. And I see it in my cohort, among progressives generally: a desire to return to some kind of imagined normalcy, sometimes a personal flight to safety, or a dismissal of politics or political possibilities.

But we can win only by finding truths and advancing those truths together, and with common fervor. It’s a hard job, but not impossible. Perhaps we can start by each looking at our own fears, our own individual hesitation to be bold and radical in asserting a social justice agenda, and by reassessing our strategy toward most white Americans, who continue to stand firmly for lying and for the lie of white supremacy.

It does no good to tell the truth to a knowing liar. Instead, it is necessary to convince them of the futility of continuing to repeat what they know is a lie.