I used to say, closer to the election, that if you tear up the Republican carpet, you’re left with the floorboards made of white nativism, racism, xenophobia, nationalism, etc. I never connected that idea with one of my favorite quotes, from Don DeLillo in the last pages of Underworld: “Capital burns the nuance off society.”
I think the latter has led to the former to some degree. Maybe a large degree. It’s the fact that as money has become the primary (only remaining) guidepost in American society, its acquisition and distribution and just apportionment have become the most essential debate around. And there’s not really much common ground when you’re talking about the proper place for money to be spent; it’s either me or you who gets it. I wonder if that accounts for the lack of common ground between political ideologies.
And yeah, they are drifting apart largely on the axis of greed. Leftists are basically just greedy on behalf of the people—which isn’t to suggest it's not pointing in the direction of moral good or technocratic prudence—and conservatives are either corporatists overtly all about money or rubes trying to just keep strangers from getting their welfare and resources. We’ve just gotten really greedy.
Totally, capital has totally burned the nuance off society. We talk a lot about how the Democrats have nothing in the cupboard, but the Republicans really don’t either. They just seem like they do because they have one thing: white supremacy. The Democrats have zero things. But both are bankrupt.
I don’t trust the Left to maintain any kind of energy over the long term, despite their pleas to be allowed to determine the course of the party, because I don’t think they have sustainable solutions to any problems. Yes, we need more equitable wealth, but is a labor movement really the way to do it? There isn’t going to be any labor pretty soon.
I want someone to think of a post-resources politics. Something not built around this Ayn Rand vs. Eugene Debs economics we’re trapped in, but on humanism.
You know, the other day I was thinking through a problem that’s been bugging me. One of my old saws the last few years has been the insistence that “capitalism” doesn’t mean just the macro-scale ideology that demands profit be maximized at every level. But rather that “capitalism” is an inert description of a system that chooses to permit behavior (selfish) that is innate at the micro level. I'd define it as something like "the authorization for priorities to be self-centered."
I still believe that. Mostly my insistence in the inertness, the smallness, of capitalism, is born of not wanting to embrace any system that fights the current of human nature at the first possible junction and thereby ensures its own failure. But I was struggling to differentiate the micro from the macro. What I think I came up with was the idea that we live in a society that simply doesn’t have anything sitting above capitalism to counteract it. That yes, the self-interested acquisition of finite resources—which is really how I think of capitalism—is something that animals do as well as humans, and that’s how innate (and immutable) it is. But “capitalism” can also refer to what is essentially the absence of any alternative priority sitting above it.
You need to set societal priorities at a macro scale or else the micro behaviors filter up to run on a society-wide level. There has to be a point at which the macro conflicts with the micro, and that’s basically something like asking for taxes to be contributed or unproductive people to be subsidized or long-term, cloudy investments to be made.
It’s wise to have a system that allows the micro to be naturally self-interested. Don’t fight nature. But you do need to collectively decide on higher-level priorities, and that’s the thing that’s lost. That’s what capital burned off. The money just got big enough that giving some to your brother man—especially after a decades-long run of not believing the legitimacy of either the concept of brotherhood or the purported members of it—have taken a toll on your pro-social zeal.
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