My Complicity: Thesis #1 On the Left in the Age of Trump
Jack Marsh·Wednesday, November 16, 2016
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Here we are. Shaken, the Left has understandably taken to mutual blame as we process the Trump catastrophe. There is of course plenty of blame to be had, but if it is to educate instead of further destroy, the blame must start with me. Complicity must be my own if sense is to be made of this, and if a helpful diagnosis is to be mounted. What follows is my first stab at sorting through this disaster. Since liberals and Marxists love to scapegoat identity politics, I have been thinking a lot about those fronts first. What follows is my modest, fragile, and probably too obvious take.
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Thesis #1: Identity politics cannot be abandoned, but it can evolve.
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Some tactics are helping reproduce the very beasts we are fighting. Too frequent and indiscriminate use of shaming has now rendered naming and lighting up racist, sexist, etc. injustice that much more difficult. For this reason alone, we should take stock. Nietzsche says much that is relevant for sifting our motivations, and for how our motivations potentially affect tactical and rhetorical choices. His analysis of the origin of justice is of course performatively self-defeating, but he is unparalleled as a psychologist of resentment. As Levinas knew, shame is an ethical phenomenon. Shame only does real political work if its target is concretely shown (i) how they might get things right, (ii) solidarity and care as they change, and (iii) that we hold ourselves accountable to the same norms we put to others. If a person is subject to repeated shaming without these three bits, they are in effect branded an enemy in their very person, and will respond accordingly. As is especially clear today, too easy and indiscriminate use of shame immunizes those it is intended to affect. Rather than occasioning moral transformation, it generates aggrieved and unwieldy monsters that imperil the very gains that have been made; and that destroy the very ground from which more gains can be won.
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Without a doubt: racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. have a structural dimension. That dimension has been rendered more invisible and harder to vindicate thanks to overstating it’s function and power. To open a window into the moral psychology in play, I’ll use myself as an example here. I do so with trepidation, because at least one of the two people who read this will weaponize my story against me. Alas, here goes:
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My (Familiar) Story:
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As with many white, male, heterosexual, working-class kids of my generation, I was formed in a quite traditioned context. Thankfully, my parents were religiously serious, and they and my church helped form in me a life-affirming and sincere ethical and spiritual sensibility. There was Jesus, but there were also background cultural expectations of what it means to be a “man.” I very concretely lived out those tensions. I moreover lived out the complex tensions of living in multi-racial, working class neighborhoods and schools. I became sensitized to injustice in part by suffering traumas rooted in pathologies working families often suffer. My first taste of generational identity and revolt of course occurred by breaking taboos. Central for me: secreting Metallica, NWA, The Cure, etc. to my community’s occasional dismay. Music became the way I found my way forward: forging my religious and artistic selves into a whole that integrated the best in what I received with the best of what was then new. My first forays in the project of self-making still retained sexist and racist elements I had environmentally absorbed, but it also retained the moral and aesthetic foundations that empowered my ongoing journey of moral transformation. Long before I attended university, at roughly 19 years old:
Jesus and Ani Difranco shattered my patriarchal captivity. In what was for me a quite dramatic event: on a first hearing, Letter to a John hit me like an religious experience, because it was a religious experience. The ethics of Jesus and the witness of Ani shamed me. It disclosed to me the true character of the machismo I was then still flirting with and tolerating. Yet the shame was not destructive or sanctimonious, but rather creative, redeeming, and affirmative. It called forth and constituted a collaborative moral power in me: to recognize the harm done to women and my complicity in it; to take responsibility for this, to contend against the domination in me and in society, and to do so in solidarity with other’s suffering by resolutely standing with and for my sisters.
My anti-racist awareness is a more complex story. I was raised to regard racism an evil, and Dr. King was held up as a moral exemplar. Once again, it took Jesus, King, hip-hop, and Spike Lee to further open my eyes. Lee’s Malcolm X hit me like thunderbolt. Lee’s artistic witness, Denzel’s uncanny performance, and the spiritual elan that formed me coalesced into another ground-shaking moment: I saw my own complicity, and in a way that called forth my agency in taking responsibility for it. My psychic life thereafter proceeded with a renewed and active sensitivity, with an always-operative monitoring of my own spontaneous thoughts, reactions, and attitudes; in governing what I allowed myself to assume about people, in rejecting offending thoughts and reactions as a wrong to be fought in me and in society; and by showing an extra and eager willingness to listen to and stand-with Black struggle.
Thanks to Jesus, art, and the good moral work of anti-racist and feminist struggle, I arrived at university years later largely prepared to hear and digest more refined analyses. It took university for me to fully awaken to class and other forms of struggle, but I’m happy to say that long years of ethical work bore at least some good fruit. I no longer suffer spontaneous racist and sexist thoughts or attitudes, even as I continue on in the hard work of listening, of considering criticism, of standing with comrades in struggle, and even as I sustain the ethical integrity that empowers this life-long work. My journey is testimony that moral change is possible, and that is why I speak up for identity politics and defend the necessity of continued struggle. My story is not particularly remarkable, indeed: it is probably a cliché. But it gives a lens for assessing at least part of what is and has happened.
The Political and Moral Cost of Sanctimony
Sanctimony is not “radical.” We’ve radicalized it, and have helped breath new life into the very beast we are fighting. The call-out culture we’ve helped create will continue to do what it has already done: turn potential friends into enemies, re-empower genuine enemies, and keep us divided into small cliques of Pyrrhic “safety.” As we are increasingly seeing: when necessary and fully justified call-outs need to be made, few can hear through the deafening clamor. More tragically, what we intend as expressions of strength show themselves to be gestures of fear, a fear partly premised in the wildly general negative categorizations we too frequently and indiscriminately deploy. Those not privy to the nuance of our rationalizations – everyday working folks – feel targeted by generalizations in their person, and hence react with fear and aggrievement. They push back by calling bullshit, and the whole thing unfolds as a tragic, mutually reinforcing, and destructive cycle of fear, sanctimony, and re-victimization. If the cycle is to be halted and transformed, much needs to happen. A few suggestions to consider:
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Structural vs. Agential “Guilt.”
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We are fighting an asymmetric structure by asymmetrically targeting agents. That asymmetric targeting is motivating our targets to defend the very structure that must be overcome and dismantled. When we confuse the structural and agential by too blunt rhetoric and categories, those blunt instruments do violence to those sincerely trying, it dissuades those who might be willing to hear and try, and it sends folks scurrying to ideologies to protect themselves. If voting patterns and the blogosphere are any indicator, we are losing a chunk of a whole generation to conservatism and libertarianism thanks to a needless and weaponized sanctimony. The only way to defeat racist and sexist structures is by living out and embodying a logic of universal democratic solidarity. That solidarity need not make structural injustice or singular witness disappear; indeed, it rather adds power and enhanced legitimacy to our claims, and it makes singular witness shine forth all the brighter. On the other hand, clearly: sanctimony destroys the normative grounds for our criticism, and it tactically enlivens the beast to be dismantled.
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Solidarity in the midst of criticism signals to the people we criticize that they have moral worth and moral power, that they can join the fight, that they’re own ethical struggle matters too, and that we ourselves can be held accountable to the same norms we judge them by. Indeed, democratic solidarity is what makes historic victims shine in living color, instead of collapsing into a chaotic mass of indistinct and clamoring static. Democratic universality grounds and enhances, rather than negates, claims to injustice, and it does so courageously by living out anticipatory liberation, in calling forth that liberation in the enemy in the very midst of the fight, in visibly enacting a living alternative that is better than other options on offer. If we fail to show the enemy we can potentially be counted a trustworthy friend in our actual words and behavior, they will do what has now been done.
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With sad irony, much of what passes for “radical” and “strong” in today’s rhetoric and activism is transparent expressions of reactive weakness, and the fault for this lies more with educators than the activists and students who follow their lead. Instead of cower and lash out in the face of the enemy, the battle should be fought in calm and unwavering courage that preserves the ground of meaningful dissent. If calm moral strength is the norm and the baseline of our engagement, when the time comes to speak loudly or show our fists: it will actually mean something, and no longer appear to quizzical spectators to be merely theatrical and overwrought attention seeking. This stings, but something like this is actually happening. And because we do not formulate functional, well-argued proposals, administrators and a watching public are forced to manage us like children. They are forced to reshape our demands into a form that preserves the very bases that makes the university what it is, and that makes democratic life possible. If our brains and energies no longer select merely for attention seeking shock, but rather also for potential and functional levers of institutional transformation, then we become truly dangerous. Truly dangerous because we will have found levers for change the preserves the grounds of the university, and hence able to potentially defeat the enemy on his own ground, to make our democracy better. By successfully doing this, we might actually force structural transformation, instead of incessantly holding forth impossible demands that must be reshaped into appeasing tokens by the eye-rolling adults in the room.
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The Future
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Truthfully, I write this for the next generation and for sympathetic observers of today. I’m skeptical voluntarily movement on this is possible right now, thanks to the ruling conventions we embrace. Trump radically warrants uncompromising and unflinching resistance. My plea is that we learn from this catastrophe, and resist in a way that keeps alive the potential for morally transforming the enemy, in a way that binds people and voters together, and hence actually might harbor potential for real change. Bright lights in our history are instructive here: Martin and Malcolm are the two hands of advancing prophetic struggle. With Malcolm, we courageously name the past for what it is, and remain willing to use our fists in defense of ourselves and the vulnerable; with Martin, we courageously envision a different future, and remain willing to take a blow in living that future here and now, in the flesh and blood our attitudes and practice. Only both hands working in concert has the moral and potential political power to win, and win in such a way that the victory doesn’t negate what we’re fighting for, and in such a way that the new order doesn’t reproduce past injustice.
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Today, we’ve valorized fists at the expense of vision, valorized the past at the expense of actually realizing a better future, one step at a time. The passion and courage of BLM, Occupy, etc. must be expanded and aimed to seize actual, functioning institutions, to win elections and public debate debate. The marginalized will win the struggle by becoming exemplary democratic lights for all citizens, and not only for particular tribes. To do this, they will prove worthy of trust, and will exceed the wisdom of their professors. Examples of this spirit today are evidenced in many outside of “radical” academic conferences and campus offices. Among politicos, folks like Liz Warren, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders carry this light. Among activists, folks like William Barber and groups like Human Rights Campaign carry this light. They are many, but are ignored by paper radicals as too ‘reformist.’ In the curious conventions of our time, “revolution” has come to mean scolding with inordinate vitriol and destroying the potential for the tranformative power of the masses. It’s time we shift our glance and our feet away from weak peddlers of death and their weakness to those creative lights among us that call forth our best and unite us.
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To win, we’ll have to do more than imagine ourselves would-be Che Guevaras, but instead bind ourselves into a living whole where each voice, wound, gesture, history, and creation take its turn at the mic and in the limelight. The alternative seems to be yet another round in the recriminative cycle of fear, weakness, chaos, and death; yet another round of defeat by elites who exploit our divisions to rule uncontested. We are better than that. We live. And defeating Trump’s unfolding death will not happen without calling forth the creative moral life in our enemy, in the very midst of the fight. Such a proposal is not new and its not particularly sexy. Though it will be ridiculed by peddlers of death , it is the same legacy and spirit that won the New Deal and Black Civil Right, and it supplied a model that has won quite meaningful gains for feminist and LGBTQ struggle. This legacy and its vision must be renewed and lived out today, and I believe it will be the marginal who will lead and shine in the fight: with the courage, creation, grace, and moral strength that is our common, human, democratic, and global horizon, and if we would: our destiny.
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