freedom and reason

The United Nations Genera Assembly in A/RES/43/150 75th plenary meeting 8 December 1988, in laying out “[m]easures to be taken against Nazi, Fascist and neo-Fascist activities and all other forms of totalitarian ideologies and practices based on apartheid, racial discrimination and racism, and the systematic denial of human rights and fundamental freedoms,” contains a statement that “calls upon all Governments to pay constant attention to educating the young in the spirit of respect for international law and fundamental human rights and freedoms and against Fascist, neo-Fascist and other totalitarian ideologies and practices based on terror, hatred and violence.”

Our educational system is failing in this task. While many schools teach about the Holocaust, they do not honestly present the reasons why the Holocaust and other acts of fascist and totalitarian action occur or what can be done to prevent them (other statements in the resolution quoted in part above detail the program). Failure to present the reasons for genocide is worse that failing to dwell on one or another genocide. Focusing exclusively on the effect makes particular episodes peculiar and forgettable. Slavery fades from memory when exploitation and oppression are rationalized or ignored. We have to explain the cause and identify those who contribute to it.

The reason why educators fail the world on this matter is timidity. It is a fact that much fascist and neofascist thought draws upon religious ideologies, criticism of which draw the ire of religious fundamentalists. Parents and partisans are quick to stifle teachers who approach speaking truth to power, (hypocritically) arguing that value neutrality and nonpartisanship are values to be asserted over history and social studies that accurately identify the sources of authoritarianism. There is a fear of calling things as they are: religious ideologies are cruel, hateful, and lethal. Until people are prepared to tell the truth about things, the risk that history repeats itself remains great.

In my university course Freedom and Social Control, I read the UN directive cited above and then proceed to tell the truth about authoritarian and totalitarians ideologies and political and legal systems, including theocratic arrangements, such as Islamic states, which are essentially fascist (and I’m not using “essentialist” here as a hedge, but in its actual meaning). I see it as my duty as a member of a global society that must stand for democracy over against autocracy to teach this. Many of my students don’t know about these things. I understand why. Those of us who know better have to step up our game.

I wish to make two points about my antitheism and then reflect upon the matter. First, in addition to criticizing belief in impossible things as its own problem, my antitheism primarily concerns the problem of exclusive and oppressive ideology, especially those religious doctrines that put so-called “divine law”—which is, in fact, man-made or natural law either seeking false legitimacy by appealing to a fiction or estranged from its actual origins. Systems based on such doctrines are intrinsically totalitarian, as they are the product of the cleric who pretends to divine the wishes of an imaginary entity—that is revelation—over against law developed through considered reason and self-correcting method. Defending freedom and reason from such tyranny is necessary work for anybody who truly believes in democracy, human rights, and social justice—and the individual in which these universal values and needs inhere.

Second, there is a view that criticism of such theism must keep its aim on the idea system and leave alone those who advance or embrace this idea system. But this is a rather odd requirement, since, if nobody were advancing or embracing a given form of theism, then confrontation with its ideas would take a different form, namely the scholarly study of and popular interest in ancient mythology for which no significant number of contemporary devotees exist, for example Norse, Greek, or Egyptian mythology. Zeus is not the problem that Jesus is because very few people believe in Zeus while billions believe in Jesus. However, if, for example, Norse mythology and its ritual practices and social attitudes were to make a comeback (and there is some concern that it may), the problem we would be facing would not merely be myths and rituals, but people who were advancing and embracing terrible ideas. Vikings are fascinating historical subjects, to be sure. But the prospect that Vikings would be about, behaving in the ways Vikings behave, is a rather frightening one. We have the pleasure of romanticizing them because we don’t have to deal with them.

Consider fascism. Fascism is a detestable ideology, one that has all the characteristics of the most exclusive and oppressive religious doctrines. In fact, as I have shown in my writings, fascism is a quasi-religious doctrine, which incorporates reactionary Catholic and Protestant ideas. We are, rightly, eager to engage in criticism of fascism as a set of ideas and practices, albeit often, and wrongly, downplaying its religious features. At best, the Ku Klux Klan are “bad Christians.” But the sometimes anemic approach to identifying the religious dimension of reactionary ideologies is made up for by an eagerness to criticize those who advance and embrace fascist ideas. To be sure, those of us who are committed to free speech and expression and open society protect the right of persons to be fascists (I have sharply criticized those who confront fascists with violence), but we also don’t worry about being called “bigots” or “racists” for criticizing—even protesting—persons who advance or embrace fascist ideas and practices.

It is only because the religious species of ideology has been given a privilege in society that other forms of exclusive, hateful, and oppressive ideologies do not enjoy that the public not only doesn’t grasp the necessity of opposing religion with the same vigor and in the same way as we oppose fascism and other pernicious ideologies, but finds something untoward about vigorous antitheism.

This double standard is an accident of history. Religious identity was lumped with other categories of civil rights at a time when secular consciousness was still underdeveloped. Liberals were right to marginalize religion vis-a-vis secular institutions, but they allowed the concept of religious liberty to be conflated with freedom of conscience, and liberalism’s negative conception of freedom warped the understanding of freedom to religious doctrine and institutions (seen, for example, in the failure to tax churches). Religion, unlike other hateful ideologies, was cast as universal, essential, and necessary.

And so an oppressive system became confused with an oppressed category. The homophobe became the victim in the struggle against homophobia. The sexist became the victim in the struggle against misogyny. Corporal punishment was a justified as a moral practice. Moreover, ruling elites continue to find religion advantageous to controlling mass thought and behavior, taking advantage of a deep-seated and long-standing anti-democratic development, a barrier to enlightenment, a political and moral weapon primed to undercut individualism and secular control over cultural, political, and economic systems.

Anticipating what, for some, will be subterfuge, and, for many, a persistent habit of bad thinking, countering oppressive ideologies and their advocates and devotees has nothing to do with oppressing those who wish to organize their lives around absurd and self-harming and self-limiting ideas. With reason, we strive to educate them in this regard, but we should not actively move to control them. One is free to believe in and express belief in impossible things. As Thomas Jefferson noted, government can’t reach opinion. However, extending freedom and human rights to every individual does mean confronting the harm the religious cause others by banning or restricting behaviors (such as circumcision, family and community relations, forms of education, treatment of animals, and so forth), as well as preventing political and legal attempts to undermine the secular forms of government and law that the West has established. Antitheism does not require barring entry to or expelling persons belonging to religious (or other pernicious ideological) persuasions. But it does seek integration and assimilation of all persons into Western understandings of freedom, rights, and justice.

Unfortunately, there is a movement on the left, decades old now, that works at cross-purposes with the enlightenment project to liberate human beings from oppressive thoughts, practices, and relations. It is based on the postmodern notion, represented in deep multiculturalism and notions of cultural and moral relativism, that all cultures are equal in terms of their capacity to meet the universal needs of human beings and should therefore not merely be tolerated, but embraced and allowed to shape the West. This notion often comes with a self-loathing of Western values that often suggests and sometimes asserts that Western culture is evil, racist, and colonialist, and therefore wrong to defend its institutions and practices from those seek to reorganize the West along non-Western lines – that is, raising theocratic ideals, values, and practices above secular and democratic ones. This movement tells the West that it is as undeserving of its values as those who do not presently enjoy them.

One can see this tendency in Michel Foucault’s celebration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran—not a revolution at all, but a conservative and reactionary countermovement that reversed secular progress and forced Iranians back under the veil of ignorance. It was here that the term “Islamophobia” was invented, used by the all male clerical “authority” to psychologically batter women who did not want to return to the chador. The anti-humanist Foucault confused a patriarchal, antigay, and atavistic assault on human freedom and progress with a “movement from below.” But I am being too charitable. After all, Foucault writes, “It [the Islamic Revolution] impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.” As if human beings need a spiritual dimension in the rational and compassionate governance of their affairs. Although he attempts to hide his enthusiasm for tyranny, chalking up his interests to an academic fascination with “political will,” the Nietszchean element running through left French philosophy (and previously in German national socialism), pining for heroes against the forces of science and secularism, and full of self-hatred for their own contributions to humanity, pokes through. The “will” here is not so much political in any liberating sense, but rather the will to power. The nihilist rejects the possibility that human beings can design an egalitarian and democratic system from individuals, and dreams instead of supermen and the irrational. The spiritual dimension in politics. This is the mark of totalitarian thinking. This is what Walter Benjamin warned us about.

Multiculturalism, by tolerating the subordination of the individual to irrational ideologies that absorb, redirect, and drain cognitive, emotional, and moral energy, is an elite strategy designed, or at least functioning in effect to undermine class solidarity, weaken democratic possibility, and blunt human being.

“I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1)

This is Paul. What he is telling us has him explicitly performing the same role as Muhammad in hallucinating Gabriel and Joseph Smith hallucinating Moroni. Jesus Christ is a supernatural being which Paul “experiences” through revelation, i.e. hallucination (let’s assume he’s not just lying).

Jesus is not a terrestrial figure. He is an other worldly being who appeared to Paul in a dream. He is, like Gabriel and Moroni, an angel-like being, a manifestation of supernatural personality.

Later, in order to gain greater legitimacy for the Christian cult (competition was fierce), Jesus was written into history (euhemerized), and a local history was invented around him. As a “real person” appearing before numerous “real witnesses”–none of whom wrote anything down nor can be verified as having even existed–and imagining an earthly setting (apart from all the things we know are impossible, such as raising the dead), the myth makers sought to manufacture the illusion of real world events among a superstitious population.

This is what is presented in the Gospels. They are obvious works of fiction. Christmas time is an opportunity to tell the truth about Jesus. There is no evidence that Jesus was a real person, and all the evidence we do have points to Jesus being a myth. And certainly the things he is said to have done–the miracles, for example–are false. People do not levitate without advanced technology based on science. And since there is zero evidence of supernatural power, and no logical necessity for its existence, even if we were to assume Jesus were an historical figure, we would have to admit, in addition to knowing nothing about him, that any appeal to his supernatural character is irrational.

And this is just as well, because the message of the Gospels is not the way forward if we believe in justice for real people in the present world.

“Now we command you, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone’s bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you. This was not because we do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.” (2 Thessalonians 3)

Yes, open to interpretation. And that’s the problem. People who advocate social justice should really stop appealing to the Bible. Do I think people who can work should work? Yes, in a system where they receive the value of the labors, where they do not labor under the illusion of the promise of eternal life, or in order to give the church money, but instead labor alongside their brothers and sisters in the here-and-now and on the promise of social provision on the basis of need—guaranteed and not dependent on the whim of charity. As long as illusion prevails—as long as people prefer painkillers to changing structures—we’re stuck.

I don’t agree that Jesus was a social justice advocate. He doesn’t advocate for overthrowing unjust social structures. Instead, he threatens people who don’t believe him with Hell and Hell’s angels (argumentum ad baculum—fitting for the son of the god of the Bible). He tells people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. He tricked people with conjurer tricks. He told the poor, sick, and downtrodden that their reward was not of this earth but of the life hereafter—as long as they worshipped his father. Those are the words of a charlatan., not a social justice advocate.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” — First Amendment to the United States Constitution (adopted 1791).

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted in 1777, introduced into the Virginia General Assembly in 1779 by Thomas Jefferson, enacted into state law on January 16, 1786, disestablished the Church of England in Virginia and guaranteed freedom of religion. Here are the crucial points annotated:

1. “[O]ur civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.” In his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Church, President Jefferson noted that the government cannot reach opinion but only actions. Emphasis on opinion. Freedom of opinion does not give you the right to act in any manner you wish. “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”
2. “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.” Opinions and beliefs. You cannot be punished or constrained on account of these. You are free to profess your religious opinions and beliefs with due recognition of time and place constraints. You cannot stand in a physics or geometry classroom and profess your Christian faith or through your expression of faith disrupt the teaching of physics and geometry. You are free in the public square and in your places of worship free to express these opinions and practice these beliefs—as long as they do not interfere with the liberties of other persons.
3. “The impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others.” A whereas clearly intended to delegitimize the supposed power of religious entrepreneurs in their endeavor to impose their religious opinions on others and compel other’s beliefs.
4. “To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own.” This is a nice statement of the principle that freedom of religion requires freedom from religion. I cannot be free to hold an opinion concerning a religion or the absence thereof if I am forced to suffer the religious opinions of others. Simply put, your profession of faith can dictate neither my consciousness nor my liberty.
5. “Even forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind.” That we have come to a place where churches are excused from the burdens of paying for government in light of this reveals a profound betrayal of the founding principles of religious liberty.

I just contacted my senator (Ron Johnson) and told him to vote no on this reckless tax cut. There is no evidence supporting the claim that lower top income tax rates grow the economy. There is no evidence supporting the claim that higher top income tax rates stifle economic growth. Indeed, high top marginal income tax rates—rates exceeding 90 percent—are historically associated with sustained economic growth and shallower business contractions. In contrast, lower top marginal income tax rates—rates set at levels we are moving to with the present tax bill—have historically been associated with erratic economic behavior and deeper business contractions with anemic periods of expansion. Lower tax rates are moreover associated with larger budget deficits, which are then used to justify cuts in public and social investments, investments (education, infrastructure, etc) that are associated with sustained economic development and more widely shared prosperity, as well as providing social support for the needy among us—the elderly, children, and the disabled.

The theory that tax cuts produce growth misunderstands the role effective demand plays in economic development. When there is effective demand the rich invest to meet demand, and they do this with other people’s money, not with tax savings. Cutting top income rates only make rich people richer. And while they may consume more, they are a small portion of the population consumption and cannot represent sufficient demand to drive investment. Effective demand is a mass phenomenon and is had when the masses are consuming at a level sufficient to trigger investment in production.

With growing redundancy in an increasingly mechanized and automated and globalized society, effective demand is hamstrung even with investment in production and, therefore, public spending is needed more than ever to make up effective demand—to plug the hole in the circuit of production.

What the tax cut will achieve in the current context of late capitalism is a shrinking economy which will be used to further reduce government activity in the very sectors that are actually associated with growth and shared prosperity. It will spur calls to further privatize public services. It will feed the downward spiral into third world conditions in the first world.

I am being charitable in my analysis, assuming that those who support this policy don’t understand the mistake they’re making. That is certainly true for many of them. I have friends who run small businesses who are hoodwinked by this talk of lower taxes, which, if this bill is passed into law, will actually squeeze them and pull their wealth upward—while leaving them behind.

However, the people pushing this policy understand the consequences of the bill. At least in terms of the immediate future. This is yet another phase in the class war to curtail democracy and personal liberty by destroying those pieces of the republican machinery and social democratic legacy won by previous generations that empower working people, i.e., the great majority of Americans, those who get up everyday and either go to work or look for work, fight the wars, and buy the goods and services, mostly by going into debt, that feed the bankers and business peoplers who are the only ones who will gain anything if this bill becomes law.

But the gains are in the end unsustainable. The fact that the rich will benefit in the present and near future will not stop the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system if these policies continue. However smart they are, in the end, the tax cutters only think they are clever. Just as they have been with our environment, their recklessness here represents a boomerang. Unfortunately, we are all in the boomerang’s path.

I recently presented a paper as a professional conference in which I argued that criticism of Islam—what is often referred to as “Islamophobia”—is not racist because Islam is not a race (obviously). However, I find compelling Maajid Nawaz’s argument that the denial of the human rights of individual Muslims that manifests itself as the left-wing practice of shutting down criticism of Islam with accusations of bigotry carries within it a racist impulse. The assumption that individuals in Muslim-majority countries and communities, because they are members of racialized minority groups (black and brown people), are on-board with the homophobic and patriarchal character of fundamentalist Islam—that, while it is no good for white Western Europeans to be saddled with Christian fundamentalism and to be told that is it bigotry to criticize the Judeo-Christian tradition (that’s the march of liberal secularism, after all), it’s not only okay for black and brown peoples living in Muslims communities to be so saddled and so told, but that it is bigotry to speak out against their suffering (homosexuals, women, free thinkers).

Those on the left who fetishize Islamic dress, attitudes, and practices reduce Individuals to a stereotype of what it means to be an authentic Muslim, while at the same time fail to acknowledge the coercive and cultural forces that compel individuals to appear certain ways, and in so doing fail the reformers across the Muslim world, thus lending tacit support to the Islamic fundamentalists. Imagine struggling under the yoke of fundamentalist Christianity and those outside that community accepting as representative of the individuals in that culture the claims made by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and other fundamentalist Christian leaders. Imagine hearing that criticisms of the homophobic and patriarchal values in Christian scripture and advanced by such fundamentalist leaders as Mike Pence was anti-Christian bigotry, in a word, “Christophobia.” It’s not hard for me to imagine the sinking feeling I would have as an atheist living in the Bible Belt to hear such arguments against my liberty. Because I have felt it.

The reality of oppressive structures does not depend on whether those who are oppressed see or struggle against their oppressors. Oppression is an objective matter. It exists when individuals do not have equal rights, when they are not treated as persons before the law, when their bodies and labors are exploited. When we hear that we cannot speak for oppressed people because we are not oppressed or that those who are do not believe they are, and we fall into silence, we betray the individual. Identity politics becomes a thought-stopping tactic, designed to selectively muzzle critique. But man, science, and human rights are universal. These should form the basis of our politics, not ideology.

Pictures are surfacing of white men, hunters and fishers, wearing the clothes of the card-carrying-NRA right-wing conservative, deploying their aluminum boats to rescue flood victims. They’re rescuing people of all ages, ethnicities, and races. They are Christians. Trump-supporters.
 
There is an opportunity here for the media to promote white Christian nationalism as a compassionate and charitable force in the world, to say that, while there are admittedly some (only a few) white nationalists who are violent, there are others who work tirelessly to help the victims of natural disasters. And in a very direct and personal way. They aren’t donating money. They are risking their safety to help in the most immediate and intimate way. They aren’t using it for public relations to promote their ideology. At least they seem pretty humble. 
 
Yet, by not dwelling on these acts of charity, the news media has avoided promoting white Christian nationalism. Perhaps because of the violence associated with it? Except that the media have, despite the waves of terrorists attacks across Europe and the United States, despite widespread misogyny and homophobia in its ranks, chosen to promote Islam as a compassionate and charitable force in the world by writing stories about Muslim charity surrounding the Texas flood. Muslims, we are told, are good Samaritans.
 
There is a double standard at work here. But more importantly, it is misguided to believe that charitable work gives anybody a reason to feel good about an ideology and its adherents. White nationalists and Muslims helping flood victims by risking their safety or by donating money tells us nothing about whether white nationalism or Islam are good or bad things. The KKK cleans up trash by the roadside. It’s a big deal for them, in fact. They adopt highways in order to repair them. Does that make the Klan and its ideas desirable and their members good?

My criticisms of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (and George Bush and Bill Clinton before them) treat these politicians as personifications of the establishment, which, theorized in greater detail below, is the prevailing network of elites and offices managing global capitalism. Capitalist globalization is the great evil of our day. It is the primary cause of resource depletion, environmental destruction, falling standards of living, and failing welfare states, and plays a major role in the spread of Islam, an ideology destructive to democracy and human rights. Skeptical of multiculturalism, immigration, transnational trade and blocs, and interventionist foreign policy, the presidency of Donald Trump is a disruptive, albeit probably steerable element in the globalist project. Anxiety among elites helps motivate public hostility towards the Trump presidency, concerns disguised as popular appeal and effectively conveyed to the masses through the corporate media, a mechanism the success of which rests on a broad-based conditioned response.

These points are not an endorsement of the Trump presidency. Although not the fascist many would liken the public to believe, Trump is authoritarian (a result of his business style, and, in this way, he is no different than most business leaders), a nationalist, racially prejudiced, and a sexist. To be sure, his conservatism is moderated by some long-held liberal opinions, but opportunism makes liberal attitudes expendable. He is loathsome person and far from an ideal political figure, or even a practical one, for those committed to left-wing politics. The points I make here aim to elucidate the underpinnings of the culture of outrage that has grown up around Trump and explain why impeaching Trump, aligning the Trump administration with establishment goals, or electing the next Democratic Party nominee are not paths to a lesser evil, but, on the contrary, serve to further entrench and legitimize the establishment project. Instead of seeing the Trump phenomenon as an opportunity to reinforce the hegemony of the two-party system, it should be seen as a moment to theorize the problem of global capitalism and build a mass-based alternative to the status quo, one that eschews identitarianism and puts class politics central to the struggle for justice and liberation. The future of humanity depends on an effective anti-capitalist movement. Anti-Trumpism does not in itself advance the cause of the democratic socialist project (not to be confused with the politics peddled by Bernie Sanders).

The interpretation of establishment behavior presented here is informed by several theoretical insights, primarily Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, which elaborates Marx’s observation that “the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class.” Gramsci conceptualizes hegemony not merely as an exercise in the coercive control of the opposition, but the perpetual manufacture of consent and cultural management of the masses, supporters, and opponents. In Gramsci’s view, the state, in its stable form, is not reducible to government, but is an apparatus that incorporates elements of “political society” – i.e. legislative, executive (bureaucracy), and judicial powers – and “civil society,” or what has traditionally been defined as that network of private institutions, with economic structures, the prevailing mode of production, constituting the network’s foundation. In modern capitalist states, consensus is manufactured primarily in the civil societal region, which distinguishes it from historical (and a handful of present-day) state-managed propaganda systems. Crucially, a Gramscian analysis resists the reification of political economic reality that the analytical distinction between political and civil society risks; which is to say that, in the concrete, political and civil societal dynamics converge and must be analyzed in terms of their intrinsic relations and activities carried out to secure and advance these arrangements. This includes corporate management of political activities (hence the two-party system in the United States).

What the ruling class under capitalism has long recognized is that efficient and comprehensive management of populations requires the manufacturing of the consent of the masses, obtained by permitting limited sharing of the social surplus and participation in political decisions sufficient to convince the majority that they have a stake in conformity and perform a substantive role in the political life of modern bourgeois society.

In theorizing hegemonic power in Western capitalist states, world systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein reminds us that liberalism and democracy are not twins, but opposites, with liberal democracy facilitating capitalist hegemony by simultaneously extending and managing popular participation in decision making. In an essay published in Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy (1994), he writes that “democracy and liberalism are not twins, but for the most part opposites.  Liberalism was invented to counter democracy  The problem that gave birth to liberalism was how to contain the dangerous classes.” He explains: “The liberal solution was to grant limited access to political power and limited sharing of the economic surplus-value, both at levels that would not threaten the process of the ceaseless accumulation of capital and the state-system that sustains it.”

In contrast to limited democracy, or republicanism, popular democracy, to use C. Wright Mills’ conceptualization, exists when every person has a meaningful say in the decisions that affect them. “Democracy means the power and the freedom of those controlled by the law to change the law, according to agreed-upon rules—and even to change those rules,” writes Mills in The Sociological Imagination; “but more than that, it means some kind of collective self-control over the structural mechanics of history itself.” “In essence,” he continues, “democracy implies that those vitally affected by any decision men make have an effective voice in that decision.”

Capitalism depends on this never being the prevailing state of affairs and thus its agents emphasize the republican problematic (see the Federalist Papers). When the democratic element begins to disrupt the capitalist imperative, the state becomes more restrictive, a condition marked, in part, by an increase of surveillance and police powers. To convey this dynamic, Gramsci famously used the metaphor of an iron fist in a velvet glove: when the soft touch doesn’t work, the gloves come off. Fascism and Nazism are the most extreme forms of the capitalism with its gloves off. It is crucial to recognize that the presidency of Donald Trump does not represent a moment where the gloves have come off. The gloves came off a long time ago with the expansion and militarization of the police, mass incarceration, and the surveillance state that emerged from the 1960s. However, capitalist states also, and more frequently, disempower opposition through reformism (with obvious benefits to the working class and the poor) and control over labor through segmentation of work and scientific management (Gramsci spends considerable time analyzing Fordism and Taylorism as effective strategies for controlling, and more efficiently exploiting workers).

The other methods of control are propaganda and ideology. In late capitalism, the corporate media plays the major role in engineering consent around establishment ambition. The propaganda apparatus legitimizes capitalist hegemony by, in the United States for example, drawing the political gaze to the two major parties and marginalizing alternatives that may represent the interests of working people (the Green Party, for example). Another approach focuses on organizing what French Situationist Guy DeBord calls the “Society of the Spectacle” or, to borrow language from the Frankfurt School and critical theory, the “Culture Industry.” The Culture Industry keeps the masses occupied with virtual reality activities and away from class consciousness and serious political work, hence the emphasis on the politics of entertainment, consumerism, and debt. The industry atomizes the working class at a new level of alienation and cooptation. The ideology of capitalism obscures the problems caused by the system by attributing them to the moral failings and poor choices of individuals. Poverty, street crime, and interpersonal violence are portrayed as the work of the poor and minorities, not the result of a exploitative system that impoverishes a significant portion of the population and pits individuals against each other under conditions of artificial scarcity and status seeking. In this way the prison-industrial complex and the welfare state do the ideological work of blaming the victims of capitalism.

For whom and for what is consent being engineered? C. Wright Mills usefully labels the US establishment “the Power Elite.” The Power Elite is the intersection of corporate, executive, and military power, embodied in what Mills calls the military-industrial complex. Cold War liberalism reigned in Mills’ time. The prevailing ideology advancing the interests of the Power Elite today is neoliberalism and neoconservativsm, marked by the progressive privatization of the social democratic apparatus, or what Gramsci called the “regulated society” and capitalist power projection globally justified by a rearticulated Cold War liberalism. Neoliberalism represents a new enclosure movement, incorporating public functions in the private sphere, extracting public wealth for private benefit without significant weakening of their control function, deepening Adorno’s “administered world.” Neoliberalism is the private capture of public revenue streams while maintaining the outward appearance of a commitment to public services. Abroad, the ideology of the dominant capitalist class fraction takes the form of advocating permanent war-time footing marked by aggressive military interventionism and adventurism around the world. These alignment of both major parties with these approaches mark the existence of what Gramsci called a “historic bloc.”

The Power Elite remains relatively stable despite occupants of executive and legislative offices. Stability is achieved through ideological consistency, shared class position/sensibilities, elite grooming of personnel, and the existence of the “deep state,” an enduring network of government employees pursuing long-range goals of the capitalist state independent of democratically-elected officials. Mike Lofgren is largely responsible for putting the concept of the deep state into the mainstream. In an essay distributed by Bill Moyers, Lofgren writes,

There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.

The deep state is the network of national security, including the defense and intelligence services, both private and public, most obviously the Pentagon, the NSA, and the CIA; law enforcement agencies, primarily the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security; and Commerce and Treasury, with its linkages to the Federal Reserve and other financial institutions, public, quasi-public/private, and private. It is through the financial and military apparatus that the deep state connects to the transnational system of global capitalism.

Operating with this theory in mind, the culture of outrage that has developed around Donald Trump, a television personality who is himself a spectacular product of the Culture Industry, can be understood as a moment in the control of popular consciousness, an exercise in reestablishing the limits of the politically possible after several years of alternative, albeit politically immature action threatening to break through the partisan ideological barricades into the popular mainstream, counterhegemonic action unfortunately deformed by impoverished and distorted understanding of the nature and state of late capitalism (e.g. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter). The Trump phenomenon represents an unpredictable element in modern bourgeois politics, his popular support part of a series of disruptive waves across the surface of mass control. Thus one may not wish to see Trump as president, but at the same time recognize the establishment is committed to delegitimizing his presidency for reasons that serve the desire of the Power Elite over against the interests of the working class.

To understand why the establishment seeks to delegitimize Trump, consider three things that the president has done that those sharing to popular democratic values should in principle applaud:

• Pulling the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and revisiting the North American Free Trade Agreement. Capitalist globalization has harmed US workers, disrupted the ways of life for billions of people around the planet, stifled democratic social movements, especially in the capitalist core, and harmed the natural environment. In addition to questioning the trade agreements that enable the entrenchment of globalization, Trump sympathizes with Brexit and the dismantling of the European Union, which will weaken transnational capital and global finance. Successful socialist revolutions occurred in the context of interstate capitalism (and were undermined by globalization). Because of the mobility of capital and cooperation of states under transnational capitalist arrangements, globalization is disruptive to proletarian movements. Marx and Engels write in The Community Manifesto, “the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.” Capitalist globalization at once means the unification of the world’s bourgeoisie and the fracturing of the world’s proletariat. Thus the world has witnessed the balkanization of national communities with the expansion and entrenchment of globalization. Multiculturalism, discussed next, further enhances proletarian fracturing through the spread of identitarian politics.
• Raising consciousness concerning the threat of Islamic terrorism by giving permission to people to accurately describe the danger of Islam without having charges of “Islamophobia” taken as seriously as they have been in recent years. By calling on elites to call it what it is, Trump has struck a blow to the multiculturalist campaign to sell Islam as a harmless cultural difference that Western society should embrace. As Christopher Hitchens and others emphasize, Islam is a totalitarian patriarchal movement that threatens the secular arrangements of the West, arrangements essential for preserving individual liberty and rights and an open society that are in turn essential for moving the democratic project forward. However much one may disagree with the specifics of the executive order restricting immigration from a handful of Muslim-majority countries, without an aggressive program to assimilate Muslims into Western society, reduction of Muslims immigration into the United States allows the country to avoid many of the problems Europe is experiencing. The positive situation in the United States is, in turn, emboldening efforts in Europe to restrict immigration and do something about the burden placed on the welfare state, the fragmenting of community, and crime and violence. Understanding the benefits of suppressing Islamization requires understanding multiculturalism in light of the hegemonic needs of the ruling class (more on this in a moment).
• Rethinking US permanent war footing. Trump has made it clear that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was wrong and that US action in Syria is misguided. Indeed, his constant attack on Bush’s foreign policy during the Republican primary debates served to weaken not only the consensus manufactured around that policy, and not only harm the party identified with the policy, but by extension weaken the appeal of Democrats, who carried the policy forward. Trump has sought to ratchet down tensions with Russia, a nuclear power, possibly pulling the United States back from the brink of a new cold war. To be sure, Trump’s foreign policy has been inconsistent where he has acted to please the establishment (his actions in Syria, for example), but this brings us to the reasons why the establishment is so aggressive in the campaign to delegitimize Trump.

Each of these accomplishments/directions is antithetical to the goals of the globalists. The so-called “free trade” systems are designed to reap bigger profits by reducing labor costs in the West (never mind the contradiction that leads to realization crises as these amount to moments of creative destruction). Trump wants to reconfigure global trade, shifting from integration of national economies driven by maximizing profits among transnational corporations to (primarily) bilateral negotiations based on national economic interests. Globalists desire multiculturalism and open borders because it functions to weaken the working class and increase access to cheap pools of labor. Muslim immigration is particularly beneficial to elite ends; Muslims are encouraged by dogma to proselytize while resisting assimilation with the West, and many on the identitarian left consider Muslims to be a persecuted minority thus choosing “protecting” them over defending and advancing working class interests. Characterizing resistance to immigration as “bigotry” and “xenophobia” facilitates the maintenance of a super-exploitable labor supply and the undermining of popular community by ordering authorities and shaming workers into silence. Permanent war footing intends to keep the world safe for corporations. Military spending compels subsidies from taxpayers, as well as mops up redundant workers (approximately 2.5 million in the US, matching the approximate number of redundant workers in the prison-industrial complex), guaranteeing profits to corporations while controlling populations at home and abroad. Islamic terrorism is functional to the maintenance of a vast surveillance and police apparatus (as well as a ready force for destabilizing Third World governments). Ostensively designed as an apparatus to defend against terrorism, the surveillance state is used to monitor the range of left-wing groups struggling to advance working class economic interests, weaken the imperialist war machine, and defend the biosphere.

Thus we see in Trump over against Clinton and her ilk the personification of the fractional division in the class and social structure of the United States resulting from the transnationalization of not only economics but of law and politics and control. The incorporation of the United States in an integrated global economic system has differentiated the bourgeoisie into nationally-oriented elites, who have traditionally emphasized economic policies benefitting domestic firms, and globally-oriented elites, who push for deeper transnational integration of government, law, and economics, which benefit transnational corporations. These differences entail different political rhetorics, with nationally-oriented elites emphasizing nationalism, patriotism, and protectionism, while the transnational elites emphasize internationalism, multiculturalism, and free trade. Trump is representative of nationally-oriented elites, which is why he speaks about reawakening industrialization, limiting immigration, realigning foreign policy in a more traditional international system over against transnationalism. Although nationalist rhetoric is not the end socialists seek, it is nonetheless disruptive to the transnational project, thus creating an opening – a disjunctural moment, if you will – for alternative politics. However distasteful one finds nationally-oriented sentiments, opposition to them in a manner that advances the globalist agenda is detrimental to democratic socialist politics.

The establishment wanted Clinton to be the Democratic Party nominee and president of the United States because of her vocal support for neoconservative policy and desire to ramp up tensions with Russia. They also wanted her because of her support for a Grand Bargain on entitlements. Despite his support for war, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy commitments are too uncertain, and he is too staunch a defender or social democracy, so the elite engineered the Democratic primary to put forward a Clinton candidacy. The Power Elite sought a continuation of the Obama Administration, whose function was to entrench the globalist order by projecting a multi-racialist/multi-cultural personality onto US imperialism. Clinton allowed elite planners to leverage identity politics to advance the globalist agenda. Her campaign was built on identitarian (“I’m with her”) and anti-Trump sentiment. Clinton was the perfect politician for the globalist order.

Trump is an imperfect politician for the globalist order. He was never groomed for leadership and potentially threatens the stability of capitalist hegemony. Indeed, his campaign and presidency, despite his unpopularity, have already troubled establishment aims. Trump’s bombing of Syria is a case in point. The establishment has been worried since the campaign that he would not take up the neoconservative approach to the Middle East and Central Asia. To be sure, when Trump was pressured into “doing something about Assad,” he was immediately praised for his behavior. And there were other scattered moves that caused the press to announce that “Trump became president today” – words of encouragement. But he has been stubborn on the question of Russia. The establishment’s attempt to make Trump appear as a puppet of Russian leader Vladimir Putin has harmed its credibility.

The US presidential election of 2016 was never as simple as Clinton being an imperfect candidate, Trump’s obnoxious rhetoric, hyperbole about fascism, the persona of the Republican Party, or the lesser of two evils. To be sure, Trump’s tone unsettles, but given everything that has transpired so far, it is far from clear that Trump is the greater evil. Politics depend on a theory of prevailing macro-social, political, and cultural dynamics. Clinton ran on advancing the agenda of transnational elites, whose methods are extending capitalist logic into every human system and creating a seamless system of mass control. Clinton was the choice of the establishment. The effect of false and fragmented consciousness about establishment goals means that popular protests against Trump undermine resistance to globalism by either expressing a desire to see Trump align with globalist goals or effectively seeking his replacement with career politician Mike Pence, a man with no independent thoughts, ready and eager to do the bidding of the establishment.

What the left should be doing is withdrawing consent from the two-party system and building a unified socialist politics against the prevailing hegemony. The effort requires resisting spectacular politics and developing a sense of political realism. That means, among other things, trading the world of outrage over offensive tweets, awkward handshakes, and boorish comments for serious political engagement. This is why my approach to the daily outrage over something Trump said or did is to mock it. Avoiding the freak-out is not a defense of Trump, but a recognition of the fact that the reason we’re supposed to be outraged is to get the masses in line with the establishment agenda. My refusal to freak-out is a refusal to get in line. I hope you don’t get in line, either.

Note 9.13.2018: Since writing this, the Trump administration has aligned with establishment goals in Syria, Russia, and North Korea. It has been revealed that those around him are deceiving him in order to shape decisions that advance the establishment agenda. What was a disruptive force is being reduced to a distracting twitter feed, under the cover of which the United States working class is being fleeced.