Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
As I wrote earlier, traffic declines during the summer? Why? I don’t know. Maybe everyone’s on vacation or just enjoying the sun. I hope you had a good time, but that’s not the point.
The point is you might be wondering what you missed? Well, I’m here to let you know. Here are some summer highlights.
The Democratic Socialists of America recently held its 2019 National Convention, and I wrote earlier about its preconvention event in Chicago. You probably know the DSA grew from maybe 6,000 members to about 55,000 members around and after the 2016 US presidential election. Over the course of that time, the group moved significantly to the left. I’ll say more about this later in a post on the DSA itself, but it transitioned from an organization of liberals and progressives to one of social democrats-to-socialists. It endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and BDS in 2017. You know, that kind of change. The DSA Caucuses make up much of the group’s politics.
Some of you might not know much about the DSA Caucuses, especially those of you who aren’t part of the largest chapters or social networks. Here in Iowa, our DSA Chapters build working class and tenant power via tenants unions. As well as other local and regional projects. By contrast, the DSA Caucuses mostly focus on national issues or national structure. They’re not obviously relevant to our work. As a result, many of us don’t know much about them.
In a similar boat? This post is for all of you.
People talk about ‘authentic food’ or ‘authenticity’ during discussions of cultural appropriation. That’s a frequent site of disagreement. But I think it’s worth talking about those phrases in their own right. Not that I don’t have any thoughts on cultural appropriation. Maybe I’ll write about that later. For now, check out Briahna Joy Gray’s article in Current Affairs as a starting point.
‘Authenticity’, in general, and ‘authentic food’, in particular, raise their own issues.
The fact is, ‘authentic food’ is all the rage. Diners and reviewers alike demand it. When you turn on Food Network, you see celebrity chef Aarón Sánchez judging Chopped contestants on it. And when the show goes to commercial break, you listen to him tell you to ‘go auténtico’.
And it’s not only reviewers and diners. There’s a broad consensus on this. Plenty of left-leaning critics of cultural appropriation, particularly ones found on social media, also uphold the virtues of authentic food. Along with it, they extol the virtues of broader notions of authenticity.
What should we make of all this? A few leading questions: What do people mean when they talk about ‘authentic food’? The same thing? What kind of a word is ‘authentic’? Where do broader cultural practices enter the picture?
Earlier this year, William Davies published a book called Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason. The book’s about a number of things, but I want to focus on one of them. That’s the declining trust in democratic institutions among Americans. But this declining trust isn’t consistent across institutions. It’s unevenly distributed.
So which ones do Americans trust and distrust? We see declining trust in the media and in elected representatives above all. And we see the least declining trust in doctors, nurses, the military, and (perhaps) the police.
Let’s speculate a bit about all this.
About ten years ago, Alain de Botton wrote a book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. It’s a perfectly fine book, not a great book. From the great tradition of writing about working, I far prefer the live interviews of Studs Terkel. And so, I’d greatly recommend his book Working.
But there’s something I do find admirable about de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Especially insofar as it says something about working in a corporate office.
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