Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
Hello everyone and welcome to the penultimate edition of the reading list for 2024! It’s hard to believe we’re so close to the end of the year.
Lately I’ve been reading social accounts, both of the world and of social justice movements. That’s reflected in the list below. And, of course, I can’t pass on a good dystopia.
Analytic and Continental philosophers aren’t friendly with one another.
With depressingly few exceptions, they ignore one another’s work. They create parallel conferences, journals, publishing houses, and even philosophy departments at colleges. While we can find examples of philosophers who engage meaningfully across traditions, even many of those philosophers engage mostly to heap scorn on the other side.
Anyone who made it through grad school in philosophy knows all the stereotypes. Analytics are pedantic, black and white thinking logic choppers. Continentals are pretentious charlatans more interested in literary theory than in getting at core philosophical notions like reality and truth.
Recently I read Lee Braver’s book A Thing of This World, which makes an attempt at a fruitful intervention into this state of affairs. Having read it, I regret to say the book sat on my shelf for more than a decade before I picked it up.
It’s a great read.
After Trump won the 2016 election, the mainstream media – and even many leftists! – promoted a certain falsehood. They claimed Trump won on the strength of a working-class voter base.
The reality was much different.
In fact, Trump’s base looked similar to the typical GOP base. It differed only in degree. Trump won on the strength of voters who combined a high income with a low education. Most of these voters were a part of what Marxists call the ‘petty bourgeois’ class, and many of them were just regular wealthy people. I covered this more extensively in a 2018 post and a later Medium article.
The ‘one weird trick’ Trump pulled led to all the confusion. It’s a specific rhetorical trick. In short, Trump speaks about one audience, but to another. He often expresses the hopes and fears of working-class people, but he targets wealthier voters with the message. The press conflates the subject audience with the target audience. Readers can review that argument here.
But we’re not here to talk about 2016 or 2020. Trump won again in 2024, and the mainstream media – and even many leftists! – make the same claim.
So, how about this time? Surely Trump attracted a working-class target base in 2024, right?
Complaining aside, there’s a lot to like about politics in Iowa City. We have little in the way of genuine right wing politics, for one. Sometimes we even hold elections where all candidates genuinely want to use government to solve problems.
That’s nice.
But on the flip side, white liberal guilt is one of our biggest vices, as one might expect in a place so dominated by highly educated, mostly white progressives. White liberal guilt causes lots of problems for us.
It forms a serious barrier to our leftist political scene, a barrier we rarely notice. Our activist scene is large enough that we fill our orgs with the ‘usual suspects,’ i.e., people already integrated into one of Iowa City’s activist subcultures. These communities are predominantly white, well educated, LGBTQ heavy, and constantly concerned about their lack of non-white members.
And while I focused in the last paragraph on activists, the same point applies to liberal and progressive politics more generally.
It’s not a problem that Iowa City progressives and leftists worry about their lack of black members. Indeed, they should worry about it. Unfortunately, the white liberal guilt they carry blocks them from addressing the issue in a satisfying way.
Here’s the quick story. In a place with a critical mass of white, well educated, wealthy progressives, those local progressives turn inward. They talk only to each other, disconnected from the realities of working-class life.
Many working in the Marxist tradition would call this an ‘ultra-left’ tendency. I prefer to call it ‘ultra-progressive,’ as most people in this camp don’t actually hold leftist views. But no matter what one calls it, it blocks real orgs from recruiting across racial lines.
And that’s bad.
As with Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, his somewhat less surprising – though still jarring – win in 2024 has set off a flurry of failed explanations for how and why he pulled it off.
Let’s try to cut through the fog and get at why this happened (again).
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