Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
It’s an older term, but it checks out. ‘Slacktivists.’ Those of us who used the Internet in the 1990s know it as a term for the kids who signed online petitions and then…did nothing. That’s it. They didn’t follow up or take part in any other political actions.
And then along came social media. Maybe slacktivists still sign online petitions. I can’t tell. At least we know they went all-in on the Facebook likes and shares.
I live in Iowa City. Among other things, it’s (by far) the most liberal part of a purple state. Look, Iowa’s a lot more red than it used to be. But I grew up in Indiana. We’re still doing better here in Iowa than over there. And we’re doing better in Iowa City than anywhere else in Iowa.
Living in a liberal oasis of sorts affects our local politics. For one, the GOP is basically a non-entity. All serious politics at the city level takes place within a political space we might describe as ‘to the left of Joe Manchin.’ Within that broad space, we have all flavors of Democratic, leftist, independent, and even libertarian factions.
So, many of us already know that the concept of ‘generations’ is just something marketing agencies cooked up to better sell products and services. Companies needed to understand broad trends. Trends tend to vary by age. Then, toss in some science and buzzwords. Stir. Out comes ‘Baby Boomers,’ ‘Millennials,’ and so on.
But companies also use this wicked troll to sell business ideology. And they do it through creating those fun little listicles. Here’s a link to one that I’ll use as my starting point for this one.
Let’s suppose you’re a manager of Millennial workers, and they’re catching on to your bullshit. What can you do about it?
In a review of the 2020 Thomas Frank book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, Erik Baker lays out a basic progressive theory of the electorate. I’ll set aside, for the moment, the tension between that and the title of this post. Many leftists, after all, still identify as progressives.
It so happens I recently wrote a post that touched on this idea, in part. Here I’ll briefly sketch out Baker’s critique of Frank and why it’s so important for leftist electoral projects.
So, before I lived in Iowa City, I lived in Bloomington, Indiana. I wandered that way from rural southern Indiana, and it became a very important six years of my life (from age 18 to 24). It’s where I, in some sense, grew up, decided on philosophy as a major and life focus, and first learned how to be an adult. It’s where I did all sorts of new things.
In college, when I took philosophy as a major, I also got very interested in the work of ordinary language philosophy, especially that of J.L. Austin. I recently had the chance to return to some of these topics.
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