Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
Now that we’re fully into the fall and the postseason is going, let’s look at yet more baseball for this month’s reading list! For this month, I’m pairing the baseball with some politics and a TV show.
Hope you enjoy, and let me know what you’re reading!
I want to start with two competing visions for how to put together a leftist electoral coalition. The first one says you put together a multiracial working-class coalition by laying out policies in people’s interest and then advertising those policies. The second says you start by connecting with people on their own terms and by using prior relationships to build personal ties with the candidate and campaign.
The second works better than the first. Or at least Chuck Rocha argues as much in his book, Tío Bernie, about his work with Latinx and immigrant voters on the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign.
From time to time, people note that I don’t seem very impressed by progressivism, both the ideology and its political practice.
What’s going on here?
So, I recently read W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous 1935 history of the Civil War era, Black Reconstruction in America. Like most leftists, I’ve read a million excerpts from the book over the years. Not to mention many other Du Bois texts – Dusk of Dawn is a personal favorite. But I hadn’t read Black Reconstruction until now. Let’s say a word or two about it.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post laying out two limits to the phrase ‘impact over intent.’ In short, people tend to use the phrase ironically to subvert the very reasons activists invented it in the first place. To that list, I’d like to briefly add a third limit.
What’s the third limit? In short, people simply discard the phrase when they find it inconvenient.
When a person an activist doesn’t like deflects from the impact of something they’ve said or done by appealing to their intentions, the activist will point this out and use it against them. But when someone they do like pulls the same move, they’ll join with them and defend the behavior.
And so, hardly anyone applies ‘impact over intent’ consistently.
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