Politics is mainly the deployment of lofty-sounding speeches to disguise the violent predations that are taxes and regulation. Government hasn’t gotten any kinder or more efficient in its actions in recent decades. It has fine-tuned its rhetoric, though, always willing to adopt the latest hip talk about individualism or markets to disguise the collectivist truth about how it behaves. The result is a public routinely frustrated by government’s inability to deliver on its promises.
Even TMZ is ready for revolution. The modest plan from that show’s host is to just keep voting out incumbents until (in theory) we get politicians capable of working productively with each other. If that sounds like a doomed plan, let’s revisit 10 other points on the political spectrum, from left to right, and recall how badly they’re all smooth-talking and scamming us:
The Chinese Communist Party, still totalitarian after three-quarters of a century, now peppers its five-year plans for the economy with talk of “innovation” and “disruption” suitable for U.S. corporate boardrooms, which are of course also full of hierarchy-maintaining, customer-duping B.S., albeit with fewer threats of jail time.
Social democrats in Europe and around the world were saddened by the death last week of philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who might be the most respected proponent of the idea that what really matters in politics is talk. He’s regarded as something like the intellectual father of post-World War II Europe for saying that what matters is that every participant in society feels as if she has a voice. That’s a nice, inclusive sentiment but also a convenient way to evade having to dwell on the fact that much-talked-up economic policies routinely prove disastrous for the population ostensibly being included in all that democratic discourse. Oh, and the same people who like Habermas are often the first to say true democracy requires censoring those whose talk sounds too fascistic. Discourse-based democracy isn’t for just any bigmouth slob, you see.
Somewhere in between social democrat philosophy books and grim economic reality are things like Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor of New York City in part by giving smiling-yet-fulminating speeches about creating more-affordable, government-run grocery stores—only to turn around and replace the dreamed-of stores with $70 million of taxpayer money being expended on a “feasibility study” about government grocery stores. What could be more politically mainstream than saying, “We’re doing a study about it” and getting back to the voters a few years later? But he’s also pushing a $30 minimum wage sure to drive jobs and small businesses out of the city and seizing buildings from poorly-behaved landlords, so by the time Mamdani gets back to us about his studies, there won’t be many poor people living here to want access to the hypothetical socialist grocery stores anyway.
(Manhattan is trending more in the direction of rich people willing to pay membership fees for gourmet shopping pavilions and willing to pay for the Mayor’s wife’s anti-Israeli artwork—and willing to overlook the fact that Muslim terrorists lobbed a bomb at right-wing protestors near the Mayor’s mansion and then got rewarded by comments from both CNN and the Mayor himself that implied it was the right-wingers, not the Muslim terrorists, who lobbed the bomb. CNN notoriously described the terrorists in dreamy, literary-sounding terms as if they were hapless youth arriving from out of town who got whimsically swept up in events. Meanwhile, observes columnist Karol Markowicz, New York Magazine does its part to bolster the left-radical zeitgeist by describing a woman’s Whole Foods shoplifting spree as a mere late-night “walk and dine,” the better to justify the magazine’s depiction of the store’s security guards as creepy. New York wants to be destroyed, it seems, and it’s used to getting what it wants. Agricultural radical and serial sexual assailant Cesar Chavez would likely be pleased.)
On a somewhat brighter note, I talked to a young, still relatively hopeful DSA member at a Brown alumni bar gathering in Brooklyn last week, and he surprised me by being very concerned about 20-century-style political problems such as balancing budgets and cutting waste. Just hearing someone remotely tethered to reality here is a shock now, like stumbling across a Reaganite. Let’s declare him, like many of my fellow alums, a fairly rational left-liberal, without getting our hopes up too much.
Closer to the political center and more indicative of typical modern-liberal policies, I think, are the regulators inflicting a likely slow death on wonderful, decentralized, app-based services like Grubhub and Uber in New York and similarly hyper-regimented cities, even as old-guard businesses such as Citarella become less and less functional, now seeming to accept as a matter of course that you may only receive something resembling parts of the food you ordered. Meanwhile, at La Guardia airport (named after the mayor who reminds us all that a Republican can still be a socialist), this week the National Transportation Safety Board had to beg to get their inspector through the three-hour TSA security line in order to start investigating the crash of a passenger jet into a firetruck (killing two pilots), which is surely a telling confluence of several things meant to help that were instead hurting.
Not forgetting that I’m still liberal in a broader, older, more “classical” sense, I’m in rough agreement with Michael Munger here that an Adam Smith-like skepticism about government combined with a Foucault-like skepticism about real markets (and an across the board skepticism about power in general) might be the necessary, albeit sad, route out of our right/left impasse. Of course, the increasingly vocal subset of the politically-active population who don’t care about avoiding doing harm will be unreachable by any intellectual path, and ultimately it may be necessary simply to outlive them. Even in the absence of the recent crop of outright sadists, there will remain the perennial danger that mainstream liberals—and in particular academics—priding themselves on nuanced blending of programs and moderating of policies, will fall for any money-wasting, over-regulating scheme that doesn’t deliberately present itself as shouting, aggressive “extremism.” Most of the harm done in politics is bland, which is why smiling politely and nodding through a faculty meeting or a Democrat-filled conference on “issues” will probably not save us from destruction. Polite compromise is often what death looks like.
This is not, of course, to say that I endorse the first thing traipsing along that presents itself as “capitalist.” Take A.I. (please). Economists from organizations including JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley now warn that A.I.’s boosts to the economy, sometimes credited with up to 90 percent of recent American economic growth, could be illusory—“hallucinated,” you might almost say—and thus due for a massive correction when more use reveals the programs’ deep flaws. Screw these psychotic, inept, lying robots and their supporters, you might less elegantly say—and that goes double for those among my fellow libertarians who act as if they think anything out of Silicon Valley must work well, even while an increasingly large portion of our everyday experience suggests otherwise.
I realize things could be worse—and perhaps one day will be, if the tightly-controlled corporatist future in dystopian sci-fi series such as the magnificent Alien: Earth comes to pass. Dark as it is, I think that show is the best thing done in the Alien franchise (even if you define that broadly enough to include the officially or unofficially related works of the Blade Runner and Predator franchises) since 1986’s Aliens. We have Noah Hawley, who also did the Fargo and (Marvel) Legion shows, to thank.
But remember, fascism can be even more overt than sleazy operatives from “the Corporation.” Take Markwayne Mullin—during hearings over his nomination by Trump to head the Department of Homeland Security now that the dog-killing Kristi Noem is gone—defending his past comments about sympathizing with the assailant who broke Sen. Rand Paul’s ribs, telling Paul in a less-than-reassuring fashion: “I simply addressed that I said I could understand, because of the behavior you were having, that I could understand why your neighbor did what he did.” That is utterly unacceptable coming from the man who will now, per this week’s affirmative Senate vote, be in charge of deciding when I.C.E. agents should clobber people. Perhaps forgoing the Save Act, which mandates checking that people are citizens before they vote, is worth it to stop any further DHS funding, if the Democrats insist on bundling the voting on those two measures (stunning though it is that Dems want non-citizens voting—and that they seriously argue, as a rationale, that married women who are no longer using their maiden names can’t reliably acquire and use i.d’s).
But no matter how low the nine factions above have sunk, let us never take the final step, as it often seems Trump would like to, of adding what were once obviously-fascist economic ideas such as rigid nationalism to all the culturally-fascistic ideas that’ve been percolated on the right for decades now. It increasingly seems, in a world that once knew how to weigh costs and benefits (the way sane consumers still do), our present-day political factions only know how to make everyone from every faction a net loser. Crushing people is the order of the day, and cost is no object.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey