freedom and reason

Genesis, Chapter 1, God creates light. God separates the light from the darkness and calls the light “day” and the darkness “night.” That is on the first day. Then God creates the sun, the moon, and the stars to give light to the earth. This is on the fourth day. God creates the animals, including people, on the fifth and sixth days. God also creates plants for the animals to eat. Then on the seventh day, God rests because he is tired. 

In the next chapter, the reader is told that there are no plants on the earth because there is no one to work the ground. God fashions people from the ground and breathes life into them. God plants a garden and makes plants grow there. Two of the plants are the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The first tree would be unnecessary but for the second tree, which brings mortality; however, as the reader later discovers, access to the tree of life is barred eternally. 

God tells man not to eat the fruit of the second tree or man will die, but God does not bar the way to the tree.

God makes woman from man’s side. At this time, man and woman are naked and unashamed.

God creates plants for the animals to eat. However, there are no plants because there is no one to work the ground. But God makes a garden for man so man does not have to work the ground. 

In Chapter 3, the reader learns that, among the animals, there is the serpent. The serpent is cleverer than all the other animals – even man and woman!

The serpent talks the woman into eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. His argument is that the fruit will not kill her, as God has said, but that it will open her eyes and allow her to know good and evil. At this point, only divine beings possess this knowledge.

The man, who was with the woman, eats the fruit with her. 

The first consequence of the man and woman knowing good and evil is discovering their nakedness. To cover their shame, they make clothes out of fig leaves.

(Is this all a grand metaphor for sex?)

The man and woman hear God walking in the garden and hide. God asks why they are hiding. The man says because he is naked. God asked how the man knows this. The man says because the woman gave him fruit from the forbidden tree.

God then turns to the woman and questions her. The woman says the serpent tricked her into eating the fruit. God curses the serpent for this deed. God then curses the woman for listening to the serpent. God then curses man for listening to the woman.

After cursing them, God makes clothing of animal skin for them to wear and banishes them from the garden. 

God laments that man has become “like us.”

The man is fated to work the ground from which he was taken. (Now there can be plants.)

In front of the garden, God places a human-headed winged bull and a flashing sword to keep the man and woman from entering the garden and eating fruit from the tree of life. 

Chapter 3 informs the reader that the woman God made, who is named Eve, is the mother of all people. She and the man, who is named Adam, have two children: Cain and Abel. At this time, there are four people in the world.

Cain kills Abel because God tells him not to. To punish Cain, God drives him out of the land Adam, Eve, and Cain inhabit. Cain complains to God that he will be killed if he is forced to wander the earth. God reassures him that this will not happen. 

I have some questions.

If God makes light on the first day, then why does God need to make lights on the fourth day? God makes light before making any light-emitting things; but God has to make light-emitting things to give light. This sounds like a contradiction.

Why does God get tired? Why does he rest? Is he not all powerful? 

If God is the only god, why does God keep referring to “us”? Why is “gods” plural?

Why does God put the knowledge of good and evil inside fruit? Why does God put this fruit in the garden? Does it not seem that God wants the man and woman to eat the fruit? Why does God want the man and woman to become like gods? 

Why does God have to look for the man and woman in the garden? Does God not already know where they are? Why does the man tell God that he is naked when in fact he is clothed in a garment made of fig leaves? Did God not know they were naked before they ate the fruit? 

Why does God allow the serpent to talk the woman into eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Why does God punish the serpent, the woman, and the man for actions they take in a situation God created? (Is this not entrapment?)

More generally, why does God punish people for actions that God can prevent? And if God cannot prevent these actions, then how is God powerful enough to create light and light-emitting things in reverse order?

If there are only three people in the world, then why is Cain worried? Why does God not remind Cain of this fact? Why does it seem that even God is not aware of this fact? 

Cain makes love to his wife and has a child. Where does Cain find a wife? Surely it is not Eve.

Cain builds a city and names it after his son. But how can there be a city when there is only Adam, Eve, Cain, Cain’s wife, and Cain’s son? Isn’t that a tent?

Cain’s son has a son. Where does Cain’s son’s wife come from?

Adam and Eve have a third son. They name him Seth. Seth has a son.

Who is Seth’s wife?

Hillary Clinton’s email problem may be much more serious that first thought. The things that come with Clinton should concern us.

The Muslim World League, a mouthpiece for the Saudi government, which has ties to terrorist organizations and whose mission it is to spread Islamic ideas of the Wahhabist variety (they practice Da’wahism, or aggressive proselytizing), shares the same London address as the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), the business run by Huma Abedin’s family, which, among other things, publishes a journal Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs striving to promote a positive image of Islam, while presenting anti-feminist views.

The address for the IMMA is 46 Goodge Street, London, W1T 4LU, U.K., which you can see in the above attached link. To see that this is the same address for The World Muslim League, just plug it into Google and see what comes up.

The Institute for Minority Affairs was founded by Abdullah Omar Naseem, who has ties with the Muslim World League (he served as its secretary-general in the 1980s). Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton right-hand, has direct involvement in the organization.

Abedin sat on the board of directors and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, which is edited by her mother Saleha S. Mahmood. Saleha, sits on the Presidency Staff Council of the International Islamic Council for Da’wa and Relief. That group is chaired by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The Abedin family are propagandists for the project to spread Da’wahism globally.

These close relations are associated with millions of dollars following into the Clinton family’s foundation and millions of dollars in weaponry flowing out of the US into Saudi hands, authorized by the State Department, which are used, among other things, to make war in Yemen. 

In light of this, it’s troubling that Huma Abedin had access to classified information and that the emails the FBI is currently looking at, emails shared between Huma and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, could very well include classified documents.

But even if the investigation turns up none of this, the very fact of these relations, which are easily provable and should be covered in-depth by the media, is enough to tell the public that Clinton closely associates with Saudi-style Islamists.

Let’s put this in perspective. Imagine a Christian organization, let’s call it the “Christian World League,” pushing a fundamentalist vision of Christianity through aggressive proselytizing, with ties to white nationalist and right-wing groups, advocating an ideology that subordinates women to male rule. Imagine further an “Institute of Christian Minority Affairs,” which published an anti-feminist Christianist journal, propaganda dressed up in academic jargon, whose purpose it is to promote a positive image of this lethal type of Christianity.

Do we really believe that progressives would remain silent about it?

Why is it that progressives aggressively criticize the patriarchal proclivities of the Christian church but do not speak out against Islam, even in its worst varieties?

Michael Tomasky writes, in “Why No One Should Vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein,” The Daily Beast (09.29.16), “About 90,000 voters in Florida in 2000 thought they were just having their jollies. Instead, those Ralph Nader voters did end up doing their part in helping to give us George W. Bush, which in turn gave us Iraq and the Great Recession and all the rest of it.” 

To be sure, Bush gave us the Iraq War. But don’t forget Hillary Clinton’s role. Remember, she voted for the war. Without Congressional support, it would have been a lot harder for Bush to wage aggressive war against Iraq. However, Bush did not give us the “Great Recession.” Presidents aren’t really responsible for the chaos of capitalism. Recessions reflect the cyclical character of the capitalist mode of production, which may be exacerbated by many factors, for example the Clinton Administration’s financial sector deregulations and the passage and implementation of NAFTA (which occurred under Clinton). Of course, George W. Bush is responsible for a lot of terrible things. I did not support his re-election bid in 2004, because I disagreed with his policies and actions while president. It is rather snarky to say Nader voters were getting the “jollies.” (Fuck you, Michael)

Back to 2000. George Bush beat Al Gore by 543 votes in Florida. According to the official 2001 Statistics of the November 7, 2000 Florida election, every third-party candidate received enough votes to have cost Al Gore the election (this is accepting for the sake of argument the view that votes for third parties cost major parties). The Reform Party recorded 17,484 votes. The Libertarian Party recorded 16,415 votes. The Workers World, Socialist, and Social Workers parties took a combined 2,988. 

Who were Nader voters? Many of them were Independents, under 30, first-time voters, and former Perot/Reform Party supporters. Based on profile, they were not the traditional Democratic voters. In fact, nationwide, only 2% of Nader voters described themselves as “Democrat,” according to exit polling data. Claiming they would have otherwise voted for Nader is sheer speculation. 

Who where Bush voters? In his analysis (Z Magazine), Michael Eisencher found that 20% of all Democratic voters, 12% of all self-identified liberal voters, 39% of all women voters, 44% of all seniors, one-third of all voters earning under $20,000 per year and 42% of those earning $20-30,000 annually, and 31% of all voting union members voted for Bush. That last bit bears repeating: 31% of voting union members voted for Bush. An analysis out of UCLA found at least 40% of Nader voters in the key state of Florida would have voted for Bush, as opposed to Gore, had they turned out in a Nader-less election. So there is no way to prove the contention that had Nader not been in the race Bush would have lost. Why do Democrats keep making this claim?

Then there is this: 250,000 registered Democrats voted for Bush in Florida. Nader recorded 97,421 votes in Florida. Why do Democrats harp on Nader’s vote count while failing to criticize the quarter of a million fellow Democrats who voted for George Bush? Aren’t they the ones who are actually responsible for Bush winning since they voted for Bush (leaving aside voter disenfranchisement, the Supreme Court, and other shenanigans)? 

A vote for Nader is not a vote for Bush (the world doesn’t run on magic), so the criticism of Nader doesn’t make sense. Many of those who voted for Nader would not have voted at all had Nader not been in the race. Nonvoters who preferred Nader (or theoretically anybody) had precisely the same effect on the election as Nader voters. Do people really not see this? If I stay home, I do not elect anybody. Only people who vote elect people and they only elect the people they vote for if their candidate wins.

Tomasky says, “A vote is not for a person. A vote is cast for a coalition of forces and interests that have a realistic chance of moving the country and world in the direction you prefer, even when the candidate is imperfect. If you make yourself a part of that coalition, you can be a part of a movement that can influence the imperfect candidate in a better direction. That’s serious politics. Everything else just isn’t.”

There’s so much wrong with this argument. Voting does not make you part of a coalition. A coalition is an alliance for combined action, for example an alliance of political parties forming a government or nation-states going to war. There are millions of voters that show up at the polls and vote and go home and are not part of anything except a collective exercise in solidarity. Moreover, you don’t have to vote to be part of a coalition. There are people who join their groups with others groups to push for actions that move quite outside the vote. Indeed, electoral politics carries a pacifying effect; the voter has accomplished her or his civic duty and now only needs to trust the winning candidate carry out her or his agenda. Elections are often as much demobilizing as they are mobilizing moments. Elections are often as much demobilizing as they are mobilizing moments. Look at how election of Obama killed the anti-war and anti-corporatist movement. (And look at how me voting for a third party in 2008 and 2012 had no impact on the outcome of the election.) 

If reality is taken into account, Tomasky’s “serious politics” is exposed as fantasy politics, a politics that strokes the ego of the voter by leading the voter to think he/she has some grand power to affect the direction of the nation – setting up the voter who votes on conscience and principle for ridicule by those who are unhappy (but helpless to change) the outcome. This view of the vote grossly overvalues the strategic impact of a vote and fails to understand basic statistical probability. Around 5 million votes were cast in Florida (more than 100,000,000 votes were cast in the 2000 presidential election). One person’s vote carries a statistically negligible impact on the outcome of the election, somewhere in the neighborhood of winning lottery jackpot or dying in a commercial airliner crash. Yes, these things happen (they are extremely rare), but you are acting irrationally if you waste your money on the lottery or fear flying. 

Your vote is for a person – for the the person and party that reflects your values and promises to act on the principles and values you care about. That’s all your vote can be (that’s what it is meant to be).

The truth is that voting for a major party candidate in order to stop the other major party candidate from winning is a wasted vote. If you vote for the politician you don’t like because you like another politician even less, then you just threw away your vote because its significance as a strategic tool is false significance. You will have missed an opportunity to vote for who you really wanted to vote for. 

When it comes down to it, what’s the point of voting at all if you can’t stand in solidarity with the people who want to realize shared aspirations?

I had either forgotten or missed this bit in Matthew, verses 50-53: “And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”

This was reportedly witnessed by many people, including the Roman centurion guarding the crucifixion.Why isn’t more made of this, that resurrection from the dead was not a unique event upon Jesus’ death? I recognize that Jesus was himself a necromancer who, among other things, raised Lazarus from the dead (as well as two others, Jairus’ daughter and Nain’s widow’s son). But this story is far more remarkable. Many living dead men walked the city, meeting with the living not yet dead (although one might imagine some were frightened to death by the appearance of walking corpses).

This event occurred three days before Jesus himself arose from his tomb.

* * *

As an aside, how did Jesus select those three individuals he resurrected? Surely there were many who had died who were precious to the living. Presumably, Jesus had the power to raise them, as well.

And why not heal all the sick and crippled and drive out all demons forever? Shouldn’t Jesus stand head and shoulders above such charlatans as Benny Hinn who only heal selectively?

To the extent that liberalism explains inequality by appealing to biological differences between individuals this ideology aligns with social Darwinism. (Liberalism also includes many virtues, such as free thought and expression and the demand for an open society, but in capitalist society it serves the purpose of rationalizing inequality by promoting the rightfulness of private ownership and minority control of the means of production.) However, the claim that biological differences explain inequality goes beyond rationalization of inequalities born of class relations. Given that the differences associated with inequality may be portrayed as grouped differences, the explanation also becomes a racist one. Put another way, if one explains inequality based on the constitutional differences between racially-grouped individuals, then the evidence will reify the fiction of race. 

Why? Blacks as a group trail whites in every significant category of life changes, which is to say that, as a group, whites achieve more than blacks in nearly every area of social and economic life—educationally, occupationally, and so on. The problem with social Darwinism is of course generalizing from individuals preordered by racist ideology. The social Darwinist doesn’t analyze the racist structures that produce group differences along racial lines. Nor does he discard the racist system of defining and ordering categories by race. Rather he uses these categories to disguise the source of the problem (and, tragically, so do progressives with their leftwing identitarian-style politics—more on that later). The social Darwinist appears to make an error in causal thinking. But the error is not a mistake. He means to misdirect his audience.

US rightwing libertarianism—to be distinguished from civil libertarianism (those of us who defend the Bill of Rights) and continental libertarianism (which is associated with anarchism)—is the more obvious expression of the racism inhering in the neoclassical liberal explanation of inequality. See, for example, F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. There Hayek makes the argument that inequality is the purpose of liberty and that the source of inequality is first and foremost the result of constitutional differences between individuals (while cleverly avoiding explicit racial categorization). But this extreme view doesn’t mean that the classist and racist attitudes are unrelated to the larger worldview supported by liberal ideology. Liberalism was social Darwinistic before the neoclassical innovation that underpins contemporary US libertarianism. Moreover, because an explanation rooting inequality in biological difference reinforces a naturalistic sense of hierarchical social ordering, social Darwinism promotes authoritarian political and legal structures designed to sustain these hierarchies, as well advances a victim-blaming ideology that functions to legitimate and rationalize human suffering. In other words, rightwing libertarianism uses the rhetoric of liberty to dissimulate the authoritarian structuring of social relations, and it derives this attitude from classical liberalism.

Social Darwinism relies on authoritarian political and legal structures because, if we view the world through the lens of science, inequality is in fact not caused natural differences among individuals, but by a class-based political-economic system that appropriates the value produced by human labor through exclusive control over the forces of production—command of land, resources, technology, and human capital. Grouped differences are not the result of a natural ordering of individuals by racial categories, but rather result from a ideological system that sorts human being into artificial categories for political and economic purposes.

Liberal ideology in bourgeois societies promote a mythology that obscures the real character of exploitative capitalist relations by elevating oppression to a virtue through the fetishism of individual liberty and thereby rationalizing its negative effects. Capitalism converts its failure to provide for everybody into the justification for its preservation. This is why most Americans, while not believing the United States should be as unequal as it is (albeit not knowing how unequal it really is), still believe it should be unequal on the grounds that inequality is the normal state of affairs in human societies. Centuries of bourgeois ideology have projected social Darwinistic logic into our cultural DNA, so to speak. This is also the reason why people will remind you that we do not live in a democracy. “It’s a republic!” they say. Yes, but it’s a democratic republic. At least it’s supposed to be. At least it should be!

Those who reject the ideology of social Darwinism, or are at least uncomfortable with it, often call themselves liberals, unaware that it is liberalism that is the ideology rationalizing these injustices. In my conversations with self-described liberals I discover that a lot of them are closeted socialists; they’re against inequalities based on class but are afraid to embrace the socialist label, a fear that results from a decades-long effective smear campaign against socialist politics and humanist desire. However, for many, the problem is not as simple as courage in changing labels. To the extent that their self-identification has led them to identify with organizations, parties, and causes that are liberal, their political and moral consciousness is fragmented and contradictory. They are falsely conscious of their class position and do not possess the attitudes that would align consciousness with their class position, an actual material position that comes with objectively grouped interests. Part of the reason why their consciousness is fractured is because they, too, believe the inequality lies along lines of race and not along lines of class. They don’t see that ending material inequality by abolishing exploitative economic relations at once ends inequality identifiable by the imposition of the fiction of race.

Update: I have created a podcast based on this text.

On Monday, June 2, 2014, the Toronto Star published a letter to the editor by Judy Haiven, a professor in the Department of Management at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Professor Haiven was responding to a story covered by the newspaper about a woman who was stoned to death outside a court on Mary 28^th in Pakistan.  It was reported as an “honor killing.” The story noted that, since 2013, as of the time of the story being penned, 869 women in Pakistan were victims of honor killing.

The letter, which is making the rounds on progressive social media, is a classic example of how, for some Westerners, eagerness to deflect criticism of Islam diminishes the capacity to objectively determine and assess the relevant facts concerning violence against women in Muslim-dominated countries, effectively downplaying the extent of suffering of women and girls under Islam.

Professor Haiven writes, 

Your article says that, since 2013, 869 women suffered “honor killings” in Pakistan. Compare this to the United States, where three women a day are killed by their male partners or husbands. By my count, since 2013 about 1,095 women were killed by men who think they have been dishonoured by their female partners.

Maybe the women wanted to leave the marriage, or had found a new partner, but clearly the men felt betrayed and dishonoured by their partners and killed them. The media are quick to target women murders in Muslim-dominated countries, but maybe the media should also look at the facts in the U.S. (and Canada) as well.

Of course, the media should look at the facts of violence against women in the US (and Canada). But the article in question was about violence against women in Pakistan, which is significantly worse in Pakistan than it is in North America.

Pakistan, with a population of approximately 180 million people, is roughly 56 percent of the size of the United States, which has a population of approximately 320 million people. It should have been obvious to Professor Haiven that, controlling for population size, honor killings in Pakistan are proportionately higher than in the United States even if we assume all violence against women in the latter country are analogous to honor killings. Assuming women are approximately half the population of each country, not controlling for age (which presents women with different levels of risks), the death rate for female victims of domestic violence is .68 per 100,000 in the US compared to a higher rate of .96 per 100,000 for Pakistan. The difference in rates is so significant that greater precision won’t change its significance.

Professor Haiven compares honor killings in Pakistan with all cases of female deaths from domestic violence in the United States. Honor killings are a subset of female deaths from domestic violence. It is estimated that 5,000 women are killed per year in Pakistan from domestic violence.  That’s a murder rate of 5.5 per 100,000 – a rate eight times higher than the United States. Add to this figure some 800 Pakistani women who kill themselves every year to escape an abusive relationship.

Violence against women is not generally regarded as criminal in Pakistan – even violence that ends in homicide. When attempts are made to address the epidemic of violence, such as the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act of 2015, mainstream Islamic parties, clerics, and other Islamic entities aggressively voice their opposition, declaring such laws “un-Islamic” (as are laws attempting to stop child marriages, lessen the burden of absurd evidentiary standards in cases of rape, etc.).  Even where laws are passed, they are rarely enforced as they are not seen as legitimate because they contradict Islamic law. Moreover, most victims of violence are too afraid to report crimes, and those that do are often intimidated into withdrawing complaints. 

It is widely recognized among human rights observers that there is an epidemic of violence against women in Pakistan. Women by the several thousands are burned, strangled, dismembered, and driven to suicide every year in this Muslim-dominated country. Thousands more maimed in brutal beatings, disfigured with acid, and raped with little recourse (they need four male witnesses to testify to the rape before authorities will even consider trying the case, and then the victim’s life is in mortal danger). Children are married off to adult men.  And along side these horrors, women are routinely subject to less-than-debilitating beatings by their husbands and male relatives, leaving deep emotional scars. This violence is in significant measure rooted in the misogynistic character of real world Islam. 

To suggest that Western media is “quick to target women murders in Muslim-dominated countries,” not subtly implying that taking up the matter of the crisis of violence against women in Pakistan issues from anti-Muslim bias, and, furthermore, that placing the blame where it belongs (to a significant degree on Islamic belief), is an outrageous act of denying the suffering of Pakistani women and the ideology that cause that suffering.

I think we need to be frank with people. Most of us are atheists not merely because theists haven’t met their burden of proof. We are atheists because we think theism is a bad idea and we would like to see it go away.

Of course, we should be honest and admit that not all theisms are created equal. Some are more oppressive and acutely dangerous than others (the Abrahamic traditions fall in this camp—yet even here there are different intensities). At the same time, they are—all of them—at the very least pernicious.

However, many atheists want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to be personally free from religious sentiment without rattling their religious brothers and sisters. Humans need company (atheists are a minority, after all). So they have that ecumenical spirit. I get it. Most of my friends and relatives are religious, too.

But atheists should know what that term really means and where it takes us. Because it doesn’t just take you there. It takes me there, too. I don’t think we can have both of those things. That’s why I’m a militant atheist. At the same time, I’m well rehearsed in the art of accommodation. You learn that skill when you are in a minority.

I regret that this attitude makes me seem obnoxious to some people. Please know that I love you and I have no interest in personally confronting you about your beliefs in casual or professional interactions. In the end, I wish to leave you free to believe what you want to believe. For those who are suspicious of my assurances, it should come as some comfort that I don’t have any power.

But I will be over here in my corner of the room making arguments all the same.

Donald Trump is not the cause of racism and xenophobia. Progressives and liberals who want to overcome racism and xenophobia must be careful not deceive themselves by symbolically loading up Trump with the enduring problems of US society and then boasting that they made these problems go away by casting a vote against Trump or pushing for his impeachment. Without fundamental change, those who flocked to Trump because of their white nationalism will remain, their ranks will multiply, and the sentiments that moved them will continue to metastasize.

Every generation confronts the legacy of the past. How each new generation confronts this past shapes the future. Figures like Trump can appear because too few people who claim to stand against racism and xenophobia practice a politics that addresses the undying dynamics generating these cancers, a politics grounded in the struggle for social justice and economic security. Indeed, most Americans across the ideological spectrum practice a politics that unwittingly perpetuates injustice and insecurity by reproducing the prevailing ideological hegemony and elite power structure.

This politics, rooted in fear, personality, and identity, and often reinforced by an almost reflexive impulse, is not merely an inadequate substitute for a politics based on scientific understanding of shared material interests and common humanity; a politics based on these things – defensive, irrational, reactive, superficial, unfocused – fragments consciousness and derails the collective struggle for equality, security, and well-being.

Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” writes that

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

Fascism is not the only politics that can fulfill the need of the capitalist class to manage the population. Providing personalities over whom the masses can fawn, preselecting the means through which masses can find personally satisfying expression, conditioning the masses to act habitually by sensitizing them to symbolic cues – all these things are features of mainstream corporate party programming. In inverted totalitarianism (see Sheldon Wolin), the strategy of fascism is superseded by dissimulated and efficient versions of parallel techniques of manipulation, techniques that even come with a progressive veneer. The corporate elite deftly produces highly sellable political commodities. Fascism is old school in comparison.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the partisan political means Americans have for decades found comforting to use and convenient to engage are designed to perpetuate the corporate status quo (exploitation, war, and environmental devastation) and that they function to prepare the ground for divisive and reactionary politics. The strongly unfavorable assessment of the leading corporate candidate in the 2016 presidential election (Hillary Clinton) is one indication of the rapidly eroding legitimacy of the hegemonic order of things.

Donald Trump should be an entirely unsympathetic figure to those who care about justice and equality; one should feel hard pressed to stow the revulsion that can function to diminish the capacity to reason. He is meant to produce a visceral response in persons with sufficient levels of empathy. Nonetheless, obsessive focusing on Trump is an act of scapegoating that serves to reproduce the conditions of human misery he is said to represent – not just at home, but across the planet. These conditions of misery are capitalism and imperialism.

Remarkable bluster and egoism aside, Trump is a rather ordinary liberal New York business man cast in the role of the obvious fascist by a corporate order desperately trying to distract the public from the neoliberal devolution of republic institutions and rollback of the democratic gains that our predecessors fought to bring into existence. This observation is not intended to convey an opinion that Trump is a neutral figure or blank canvas. He holds repugnant views. I am making a point about function.

Reading Adolph Reed, Jr.’s Common Dreams essay of August 18, Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It’s Important, in which he advocates for a Clinton presidency while going after Stein and the Greens, made me feel like I was reading an article in the People’s World Weekly (except the sort I occasionally write for them). Take a look at paragraph eleven:

Jill Stein and Greens typically proceed from a quite different view of electoral politics, one that has much more in common with bearing witness or taking a personal stand on principle than with seeing it as an essentially instrumental activity. The Greens’ approach generally, and Stein has shown that she is no exception, is that all that is necessary to make a substantial electoral impact is to have a strong and coherent progressive program and to lay it out in public. That view is fundamentally anti-political; it seeks to provide voters an opportunity to be righteous rather than to try to build deep alliances or even short-term coalitions. It’s naïve in the sense that its notion of organizing support reduces in effect to saying “It’s simple: if we all would just…” without stopping to consider why the simple solutions haven’t already been adopted. This is a politics that appeals to the technicistic inclinations of the professional-managerial strata, a politics, that is, in which class and other contradictions and their entailments disappear into what seems to be the universally smart program, and it has little prospect for reaching more broadly into the society. And Stein and her followers have demonstrated that this sort of politics is tone-deaf to what a Trump victory would mean, the many ways it could seriously deepen the hole we are already in. I get the point that Clinton and Trump are both evil, but voting isn’t about determining who goes to Heaven or choosing between good people and bad people. Indeed, that personalistic, ultimately soap-operatic take on electoral politics is what set so many people up to be suckered by Obama. (And does anyone really believe that a President Trump, who routinely spews multiple, contradictory lies in a single compound sentence, would actually block the Trans Pacific Partnership or retract the imperialist war machine?)

If one takes the time to learn about the actual impact a vote has on determining the outcome of an election, he will surely find it difficult to claim with any sincerity that a vote is an “instrumental activity” (essential or otherwise). I understand that my fear of flying is irrational. Believing that your vote can be used strategically is to wildly exaggerate its power and therefore to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of voting in an election in which literally tens of millions of votes will be cast out of habitual party loyalty.

Voting really is about personally expressing one’s politics – her principles, values, aspirations, and so forth. Voting is one of the actions a person makes that indicates her politics in a society that allows for such an action to occur. In that sense it is an expression of solidarity with everybody participating in democratic action. She is even allowed to keep her act secret so she can express her choice without fear. 

Stein and the Greens have not only considered why the simple solutions haven’t already been adopted, but lay out a detailed critique of the matter. One of the biggest reasons is the strategy Reed lays out, the prevailing logic of voting in America: lesser evilism. There are other reasons, such as corporate financing of major party politics. But Reed knows all those other reasons so why rehearse them here? The point is that his characterization of the Green Party is a straw man, which is reduced to spitting by the last paragraph. 

The notion that supporters of the Green Party are not social activists is also a straw man. What would Reed suggest that a strong and coherent progressive program is unimportant? Or that it should be kept secret from the public? Does he think we should or should not have a conversation about our future? Because the purpose of this sort of essay is really a call for the closing of minds. This bit about “the technicistic inclinations of the professional-managerial strata….” Because the professional-managerial strata is dominated by young indebted Americans and community activists? What is the evidence for that? 

As for Heaven and good and bad people – not people, but principles, ideas, and values. But what would a Trump victory mean over against what a Clinton victory would mean? If one is going to shill for the Clinton campaign, shouldn’t he spend some time laying out what a Clinton victory would mean? Anything that would make her look, crude rhetoric aside, significantly better than Trump?

Reed said in 2014 that we are left with a choice “between two neoliberal parties, one of which distinguishes itself by being actively in favor of multiculturalism and diversity and the other of which distinguishes itself as being actively opposed to multiculturalism and diversity. But on 80 percent of the issues on which 80 percent of the population is concerned 80 percent of the time there is no real difference between them.” Can Reed take some time to elaborate the gap so we can know how Clinton will benefit us? And, frankly, twenty percent is rather generous.

So Obama wasn’t the lesser evil I should have voted for instead of Stein in 2012? How did we go from a soap-operative vote for Stein to beliefs that Trump will block the TPP or retract the imperialist war machine? We know Clinton won’t. That’s what gets my attention. “Elections are much more likely to be effective as vehicles for consolidating victories won on the plane of social movement organizing than as shortcuts or catalysts to jumpstart movements.” Like the electoral history that followed the Civil Rights movement? You know, mass incarceration and police militarization and violence?

For political and economic elites in a capitalist society, that is, from their perspective, democracy is not, or at least shouldn’t be, a process whereby people organize and vote for political leaders that represent their organic class or other interests. Democracy practiced this way does not serve their interests. It would mean that power was somewhere else, and that would mean they couldn’t have what they always want: everything.

For capitalist elites, democracy is an exercise in legitimation, the engineering of popular consent around their broad agenda, which is, in most respects, the antithesis of the public interest. By dissimulating class power through ideological and practical hegemonic control techniques, elites rule society by convincing a majority that elite interests are popular interests.

It therefore behooves elites to dissuade citizens who would organize voters on the basis of organic interests and deter those who would be alternatively organized and vote on the basis of their material situation. Elites accomplish this through control over the political process (the key advantage here is established property arrangements), ideological command (patriotism, militarism, religion, racism, etc.), and production and distribution of information (as well as disinformation). Fear mongering is a obvious part of this strategy, with imagined threat sources to be “found” in both domestic and foreign spheres.

Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, published in 2010, identifies another source of misdirection of popular consciousness in the American system. “Inverted totalitarianism [his characterization of the American system], although at times capable of harassing or discrediting critics, has instead cultivated a loyal intelligentsia of its own,” He writes. “Through a combination of governmental contracts, corporate and foundation fronts, joint projects involving university and corporate researchers, and wealthy individual donors, universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamless integrated into the system.” He concludes: “The Academy has become self-pacifying.” This conclusion echoes conclusions in Paul Diesing’s 1992 How Does Social Science Work?

Noam Chomsky anticipated this interpretation by observing that the target of sophisticated propaganda campaign is not the eighty percent of the population that is apathetic, marginalized, or terrified into either non-participation or participating in a prescriptive way out of habit or ignorance, but rather it is the twenty percent of society that is relatively affluent and reasonably well-educated that draws the most attention from elites. This stratum must be specially cultivated, Chomsky contends, since it serves as a network of functionaries charged with keeping the rest of the population occupied with apparent-popular opinion (one of these opinions being that it is elitist to be told what’s going on). These are the so-called experts who claim authority in various fields of knowledge. (That Chomsky has, from a capitalist point of view, carried out this function admirably does not obviate the point he is making.)

As Chomsky puts it in the documentary Manufacturing Consent (released in 1992):

We can get into more detail, but at the first level of approximation, there’s two targets for propaganda. One is what is sometimes called the political class. There’s maybe 20 per cent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate. They’ll play some kind of role in decision making. They’re supposed to sort of participate in social life, either as managers, or cultural managers, like, say, teachers, and writers, and so on. They’re supposed to vote. They’re supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now, their consent is crucial. That’s one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there’s maybe 80 per cent of the population whose main function is to follow orders, and not to think, you know. Not to pay attention to anything. And they’re the ones who usually pay the costs.