Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election

Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election (Or Any Other Election)

I recently posted an essay declaring (somewhat exaggeratively) that there are no politics anymore in 2024. I did this by taking a rather harsh look at the current events and activities of mainstream, mass-media based politics, as exemplified by the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties. 

But of course, there is a lot more to politics in 2024 than Trump and Kamala. There is even more to national electoral politics than Trump and Kamala: personally, I plan to vote for Peter Sonski of the American Solidarity Party for President this November. Neither Trump or Kamala, though, has actually done any governing in the last four years, in a nation with massive ongoing social and economic crises and a world with numerous ongoing, extremely bloody wars. These ongoing crises and wars are still in the care of Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin, and (more hopefully) numerous governors, mayors, city councilors, and local school board members throughout the world. When we think of politics in 2024, we should think, first and foremost, of these people: and, speaking ideally, not think of Trump and Kamala at all.

Still, as I argued in the preceding essay, there is certainly less to politics in 2024 America than there has ever been before, as polling and television and the Internet alike all show very clearly: more people than there have ever been before paying rapt attention to only the latest news on the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties, and otherwise not engaging with any political issue or candidate or official at any level at all. And of course, the two trends are nearly correlatives, since the more the mass media is full of stories about Trump and Kamala, the less room there is for anything else: even discussion of the actual laws and officials doing most of the governing for most Americans.

Still, when all is said and done, I feel the need to justify myself from the charge of merely being a political opportunist declaring a plague on both the two largest houses while ignoring the rest of the village entirely--or worse, a centrist. Someone might well say to me what a critic said of Chesterton's Heretics when it was published, that he will defend his own beliefs when he has seen me defend mine. Chesterton responded to this challenge by writing probably the most widely read work of Christian apologetics in the 20th century, Orthodoxy. I can only respond by writing this blog post. 

At the outset I should say that this will not be an attempt to defend the broader, theoretical bases of my own approach to politics. I have done some of that otherwise in this blog, on many occasions and in tedious length and yet without giving what most would regard as a proper exposition of what I think and why. Perhaps I will get to that theoretical exposition one day.

Instead, this essay/blog post/manifesto will be something closer to what I would, ideally, like to see from political candidates in the 2024 election: a list of issues and broad programmes to address them that could actually be implemented politically in America today. As I declared not too long ago, I think that in a democracy political candidates ought to largely be engaged in acknowledging the pressing problems of the citizenry at large and trying to fix them. I firmly believe that all of the below issues are real, pressing issues in American life which ought to be dealt with politically--and which could in fact be meaningfully addressed by the actual American political system in 2024--and which, furthermore, are not issues that are constructed according to the symbolic binaries that presently define American political life, or which would necessarily and intrinsically appeal to only one side of the American political spectrum and alienate the other. Of course, if and when these issues became mainstream political issues, they could and would no doubt be processed in these terms, for basic structural reasons if nothing else.

Please note that the below proposals do not really cover foreign policy, which is not only arguably the most important impact America has on the world, but also is the issue that is most determined by actual Presidential elections. Foreign policy, though, is one of the issues least addressable via democratic means, which is why, even in America, it is run on a basically monarchical model; and, in any case, I have covered the basic issues of present-day American foreign policy elsewhere in this space. The below proposals also do not directly cover immigration policy, which, at least as currently debated, most boils down to more fundamental debates and structural issues with American foreign policy and economic policy. To deal with its complexities fully would take an essay of its own, however.

My own politics are radical enough that the below proposals--though far more radical than anything a major American party has proposed since the New Deal--are actually far less radical than I would ideally aim to achieve if there were no constraints at all on my decision-making (which is of course absurd). I do, however, genuinely want to implement all of the below proposals; and so might you.

Take what you can get; and what you can get here, from me, should not be taken for more than it is worth.

Column 1/30/2024: Food, Conspiracy, and the Homo Imperialis: A Theoretical Look at the Political Crises of Modernity

Food, Conspiracy, and the Homo Imperialis: A Theoretical Look at the Political Crises of Modernity

Over the last few months, years, and/or decades of my life, I have seen some interesting things, read some interesting books, and come to some conclusions about the crises of modern political life. In the last few months in particular, these conclusions have been sharpened by discussions, debates, and reading and crystallized into a few relatively simple, albeit very broad and rather tentative, theses. 

In Defense of Overly Broad Theoretical Nonsense

I fully recognize that this blog post constitutes in essence a smattering of overly broad theoretical nonsense (see above). However, I would, as a historian, defend the value for history and politics alike of extremely broad theoretical constructions of particular topics, periods, etc. While there is always a great danger that theoretical constructions will overwhelm the actual concrete complexity of different societies, situations, events, persons, etc, in fact this danger is generally less, I think, when the theoretical constructions in question are deliberately broad and explicitly theoretical. No one is likely to mistake a blog post or a Chesterton book about the economic and social problems of humanity en masse for a work of historiography; but they may well mistake an academic-historical theory of life or death or economics or religion or human nature contained in and shaping a history textbook for historiography. Academia is in fact littered with half-baked general theories, littering the footnotes and text of books and articles of esteemed historians and college freshmen alike. I have at least, I hope, had the decency to separate my grand theories out and put them elsewhere to be laughed at.

For the moment, however, I must formally ask you to trust, not only that the below theses are based on many hours and thousands of pages of reading in various historical topics and periods, but that the below theses are not designed to replace such content or such reading, but merely to (hopefully) illuminate it.

These theses, I think, have at least something to say about the disasters unfolding around us, and what to possibly do about them. So here they are.

Column 05/17/2023: Varieties of Leftism

Varieties of Leftism

I recently finished a book on the French Syndicalist movement; around the same time, I have been reading "Distributist" columns from G.K. Chesterton as well as newspaper columns from the founder of so-called "Guild Socialism," A.J. Penty. All of this reflects a longstanding interest in what I would call the "non-Marxist Left"--or rather more precisely the "non-Marxist-Leninist Left," or even more precisely the history of various labor and anti-capitalist movements in the 19th and early 20th century, especially those that either preceded or avoided the final reduction of Leftism into Fabian-style democratic socialism and Soviet state socialism.

There are a lot of reasons I find these movements interesting: but the main one is that I think that there are many useful things to be learned from them about modernity, modern economics and society, and where to go from here. If the tendency of the Cold War was to reduce political and economic issues into an ideological, militarist, institutional binary, the tendency of the contemporary Internet age is to reduce those same issues to an ever-proliferating array of binary, absolute symbolic conflicts. As Chesterton argued, this is the real danger of competition, war, and conflict in human life: that they tend to make human life far more uniform than its need to be. After all, as Rene Girard pointed out, most conflicts are created precisely because two people are aiming at the same end, seeking the same desirable object. Fundamentally, conflict or competition is always and inevitably destructive of alternatives and diversity and complexity and fundamentally difference itself.

There is hardly a better example of this than Soviet Communism and American Capitalism. Before the Cold War, before the World Wars, the Left or labor and anti-capitalist movement was a vast, complex, feuding array of different fundamental beliefs and tactics: anarchists and syndicalists and distributists and "non-political" unionists and positivists and guild socialists and Fabians arguing against each other and against capitalists alike. Likewise, the European radical Right was a large and feuding array of Catholics and Calvinists and aristocrats and anti-aristocrat populists and monarchists and radical democrats and Nietzscheans and localists and agrarians and anarchists that overlapped significantly with the Left. Thanks to the Cold War, however, practically all these groups were suppressed, not by force, but simply by pressure, subsumed into the single ideological alternatives of "Communism" and "Capitalism." 

When the Cold War ended, alas, and that simple binary itself faded into the mist, Western political life was left as a very limited and very shallow debate among a few different interest groups that agreed with each on other on more or less 99% of political and economic questions, at least 50% of which would been absolutely astounding and shocking to any other society in history. And then that consensus itself fell to pieces, and we find ourselves in our current uncertain times.

Here, though, is the fundamental lesson that historical conflicts about the shape and tenor society have to teach us. As Chesterton argued, human social, political, and economic arrangements are first and foremost a matter of collective human intellect and will and effort: works of ingenuity and craft and creativity that we shape to serve certain purposes and embody certain values. And the truth that human history demonstrates beyond all doubt is that a vast number of possible arrangements are possible and have been considered desirable by different groups of people throughout time--and many, many more are possible in theory, and could be enacted in practice given sufficient will and desire. We are not trapped into a tiny range of political or economic alternatives by "natural" "scientific" forces; we simply find ourselves, for a variety of reasons, in one highly particular social or economic arrangement among many; and if we wished, we could change it. If we have made our bed badly, we can make it over again. 

All of this is another unnecessarily long intro. What I really wanted to do in this post was to offer a sort of syllabus or personality test of Leftism, presenting the main divisions within the tradition over which anti-capitalists once feuded. As I said earlier, "Leftism" is here a terribly imprecise term: the original Left-Right binary was a division created by and centered on the French Revolution and defined with reference to a few particular French institutions. It has since given way to an American political spectrum that is largely a matter of memes on the Internet. As will become clear, many of the fundamental questions involved in historical "Leftism" are as related if not more to questions on the political "Right," and indeed it is extremely difficult to clearly rule out historical "Right-wing" groups from this discourse. I myself prefer the term "anti-capitalist" and/or "radical" for my own beliefs; I have used "Leftism" here simply because it is a more commonly-used and so straightforward term for most people today.

Fundamentally, all the social and intellectual movements of the historical Left were united by some sort of unhappiness with 19th-20th century Western society, and a desire to alter it "radically," that is, in its roots and foundations. They were also united by a discomfort with "capitalism," or that legal and social order in which absolute private ownership over the means of production--land and factories and machines and workers--is allotted largely or entirely on the basis of the possession and use of liquid capital, in such a manner that society is clearly divided between a tiny minority of "owners" and a large mass of "proletariat," workers who sell their labor in exchange for a wage and who labor with the capital-owner's tools and means of production for the profit of the capital-owner. Historically, the emergence of this social order, in tandem with rapid technological change and industrialization, caused over the 19th and 20th centuries without a doubt the largest series of social and communal disruptions in the history of the human race. As the result of these disruptions, numerous groups were brought to fundamentally question their society, its powers, rulers, and underlying principles. 

That being said, this system and society can and could be opposed from any number of angles. And that is what I would like to chronicle here.

In doing so, I have attempted to lay out these divisions deliberately in terms of conflicts between paired positions. It should be noted, however, that these represent not so much binaries as polarities, and do not involve absolute logical contradiction: in most cases, then, there are not simply two binary extremes, but a great deal of potential positions in the middle.