Episode 195: David Leonhard and the Elite Consensus Manufacturing Machine.
The quote (from Jacob Bacharach) goes: Yeah, one of the effects, it’s to transform the news from being a precursor to political action into being merely social commodity, which is to say that what strikes me about these newsletters for the majority of their consumers is that what I think they’re really designed to do is to turn current events into a kind of social currency that can be used for conversation, that can be used to position oneself as sort of being in the know, understanding what’s going on, being relatively savvy about, you know, what’s happening within politics. But by reinforcing the sense that politics is a distinct and professional domain of politicians and maybe some media people that is sort of, like, separate from life/work management, personal economy, etc. And so one of the things that it does is it takes that sort of that self-flattering, centrist self-image of a lot of the people who consume these products, and it says politics is a profession. It is a thing that exists siloed from the rest of society, and those who attempt to act politically, outside of the professionalized realm of politics, and outside of occasionally, you know, voting, I guess, are disrupting a sort of natural order of things like why can’t they just take their ration of news that they get each morning and do what normal people do with it, which is exchange it with other people over dinner at a restaurant.
I feel like this is a sort of Baader-Meinhof syndrome situation where now that I have this as a lens I can’t not see it. It’s like a Rosetta Stone of liberalism.
I recall during a Cushvlog that Matt said his need to consume history, political theory, news, etc, was to have a sense of agency in a world where agency is limited to a person’s economic consumer choices rather than that of a free political agent within politically engaged communities.
In other words, knowing theory and analyzing current events provide a sense of solace and cope for exploitation and oppression.
Going back to quotes from communists or radicals like Malcolm X, MLK, etc, they’ll point out that moderates/liberals all object to radical action and would rather have political action be done by consensus building, civility, and civil engagement even as the stakes are life or death.
Perhaps there is a coping mechanism to it too. We were far removed from significant political, labor, and social action for decades until the advent of Occupy, BLM, and the Floyd protests, and despite those recent developments those traditions of direct action are relics of our grandparents/great grandparents era. Direct action is an alien concept they’d read from a history book. In fact, it is feared because it is alien, it is feared because there is no memory for leaders to draw upon to wield the power of the masses. So you get Jan 6th. You get police station burning. You get a lot of chaos and not a lot of articulation on how to build, sustain, and spread a movement.
What else is there but to lament the state of the world where there is no prophetic vision on how to escape, transcend, and revolutionize society? Wielding the power of the state through ritual; through voting, through scolding on the internet. Through civil lawsuits, through the legal and political system. Through anarchic organizing and protests, and perhaps localized and sporadic direct action. All chaotic and divided efforts that do not bring forth class consciousness and revolutionary kinesis. Only revolutionary potential, and locked in a state of inertia.
Leftists seek comfort in theory but no modern political philosophers and theorists ever expand or contribute a course of action in the way Marx said it needed to be: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
We can only interpret and cope because there is a lack of articulation on how to proceed.
The king is bedridden and a council of regents rule. Let us believe that the populace, the workers, the peasants, the small burghers, career-stunted professional managers of the state and of private sector, the willing traitors to the ruling class within the ruling class, are dissatisfied with the status quo. The problem is no one knows or has plans of what week 1 of a post revolutionary society would operate. There’s no imagination.