Centrist Democrats and Neoliberalism

The other day I listened to Sam Harris interview journalist Andrew Marantz on Youtube: the two entered into a serious clash over the issue of 'dog whistling'. Marantz alleged that Tucker Carlson had made statements that pandered to racists among his viewers and Harris bent over backwards to defend Carlson. saying that we don't have solid proof that this was what Carlson was trying to do, that we don't have access to Carlson's intentions and so can't know for sure. I think Marantz won the argument and I think Harris knew this because in the postscript to the interview he said that he found such conversations tedious, an indication of pique. In tonight's post, I want to discuss public intellectuals like Harris again, and the current conflict in the US between centrist Democrats and the Far Left.

Much of my conceptual diet consists of videos on Youtube of people connected with that strange loose conglomeration of former professors and professional pundits known as the Intellectual Dark Web, people like Harris, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Eric Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and so on. Other people occasionally float to the top of the fish tank but I can't remember the names of every single person who gets interviewed. The various podcasters and influencers that are recommended to me by Youtube have a couple of things in common. They all hate Trump. Generally, they tend to identify as Leftists, Democrats (although there are exceptions like Peterson). But they all also tend to oppose what they call the Far Left, the Woke extreme of the Democrat Party which Harris, for instance, argues has created a kind of 'cancel culture' that can be found in schools, in the academy, in companies, everywhere. Sometimes I would like to hear the Woke side of the argument but the algorithms that dictate which clips to recommend to me appear to have decided I'm a centrist Democrat and don't give me the option of sampling opposing viewpoints.

Let's consider Jordan Peterson first. An excellent piece by David Brooks in the New York Times (Jan 15 2018) suggests that Peterson could be considered the "most influential public intellectual in the world right now". Although I find some of what Peterson says thought-provoking, I also find myself very much at odds with his view of the world. Peterson appears to think masculinity is somehow threatened by the rise of feminine values, seeks to show how hierarchies (presumably with white men at the top) are inevitable, rejects the idea of 'white privilege', and rails against 'postmodern neo-Marxists' by which I think he means Lefty female academics. Peterson thinks that life consists of battles, of the domination and subjugation of others – it is ironic that he thinks this because he also accuses his Lefty interlocutors of unscrupulously borrowing from Foucault the idea that everything is about power. Peterson believes that in every interaction between men there is the possibility of it descending into violence. All of these ideas, the ideas Peterson advocates, point to some kind of gender confusion, suggest that Peterson's own sense of himself as a man is somehow fragile and must be defended. It is ironic that he became famous as a consequence of taking a conservative stance on the issue of Trans rights, because it is evident he has deep seated gender issues himself.

The reason I find Peterson at once fascinating and laughable is because I simply don't share his view of what masculinity is. Readers will of course know that I have had my issues, but despite years of mental 'illness' and the status anxiety associated with being unemployed, I have never doubted that I was and am a man. For me, men have penises and are sexually attracted to women: it's almost that simple. A long time ago in this blog I told a story about something I did while studying in Otago when I was eighteen and I'll tell it again now. Because I missed my girlfriend, who was living in Auckland, I bought a copy of Cleo, a magazine she liked; I told my best friend over whiskey that I was secure enough in my sexuality that I could buy a women's magazine without it worrying me. My friend, a Philosophy major, said, "By that logic, you could prove beyond doubt that you're straight by dressing in women's clothes." I lightheartedly accepted his challenge, put on a dress, high heels, and wig belonging to a female friend, and had our lesbian pal who lived down the hall take photos. It was a fun night. Now, readers may want to see this story as something symptomatic. But what I'm trying to show is that what I believed for most of my life is that men who try too hard to be macho, who try too hard to conform to gender stereotypes and conventions, must all be trying to compensate for something, must have doubts either about their sexuality or gender. If you suggested to Peterson that he could prove he was a man by putting on women's clothes, he would probably vomit. And then, if he did put on women's clothes, he would never take them off.

Peterson is unusual in that I don't think he is a Democrat but what he shares with other members of the Intellectual Dark Web is his antagonism towards political correctness, Woke culture. The popularity of Peterson is itself symptomatic of something else. To understand this schism in the Left, one requires a potted history lesson.

The Republican party has for a long time been and is still today the party of the wealthy, of the business owners and landlords. The Democrat party was traditionally the party of the working class, the proletariat. The problem for Republicans is that the ultra-rich make up only a small fraction of the electorate and the US is a democracy; consequently Republicans need some special plan to encourage working-class people to vote against their own economic self-interest in order for Republicans to win elections. Such a plan was put into action by Nixon in the 'seventies, and given the moniker "the Southern Strategy." Essentially, Nixon sought to woo white religious voters, Catholics in the North and Evangelicals in the South, by making religion, abortion, race relations, gay rights, and women's rights, political issues, and by taking a reactionary position on all of them. In the 'eighties another revolution swept the Western world. Under Reagan in the US, Thatcher in the UK, and Lange (as well as Roger Douglas) here in New Zealand, neoliberalism, with its tenets of deregulation, privatisation, laissez-faire capitalism, and the free movement of people and capital across borders, became the new status quo. In America, the Democrat party moved to the right on economic issues. With the acceptance by people like Bill Clinton that neoliberalism was the new norm, the Democrat party sought to define itself in opposition to the Republicans in a new way, as being the party of liberal values rather than as the party of the working class. The Democrat party became the party of cannabis legalisation, of abortion rights, of gay marriage, and in the last couple of years, Trans rights. Rather than engaging in class warfare, Democrats and Republicans have been involved in a 'culture war' – underlying economic facts, such as the stagnation of wages among working class people, declining life expectancy, and obscene and ever increasing income inequality, are all swept under the carpet.

The huge problem with the culture war is that it doesn't touch issues like corporate consolidation and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority. Studies have shown that once a person passes a certain threshold in terms of income, a little bit more money makes no difference in terms of happiness. If you're already a billionaire, another billion isn't going to result in any significant improvement in terms of the quality of your life (except perhaps that it might encourage you to think about buying a slightly bigger super yacht). Nevertheless, a small but extremely powerful economic elite not only controls much of the world but is determined to maximise their profits as much as they can. These people don't care about abortion, or racism, or homophobia. All they are concerned about is chasing bigger profits. Corporations will, for instance, jump on the Woke bandwagon if doing so counts as good advertising. (This happened during the Roseanne Barr/Ambien scandal.) I don't know if John Stankey, the CEO of WarnerMedia, or Jeff Zucker, who indirectly runs CNN, are good people or bad people, but I think it possible that so long as the Democrat party defines itself in terms of fringe issues, so long as Democrats don't suddenly start advocating a massive increase in taxes on the biggest corporations, the executives will be willing to support them if this means making a buck. It well may be that Zucker is perfectly happy to employ a gay, black man like Don Lemon to front a flagship show on CNN – but only so long as Lemon sticks to Identity Politics talking points and doesn't turn on his bosses by suddenly saying that WarnerMedia should pay a higher share in taxes or should be broken up.

It is difficult to characterise all of the Intellectual Dark Web, to lump them all in together, but it sometimes seems to me that most of them implicitly subscribe to the neoliberal agenda (although exceptions that can be found on Youtube include Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek). I think Harris, for instance, identifies as a Democrat mainly because the Republican Party is the party of the religious-right and the Democrat Party the party of free thinkers. I heard a pod-cast a little while ago in which Harris and a couple of guests invoked the word 'neo-liberalism' and all agreed that they thought the word meaningless – Sam, you simply need to look the word up on Wikipedia to know that the term has a meaning. It is only because neo-liberalism has been the consensus for close to forty years that it seems invisible to you. Another case in point is Bill Maher. I have mixed feelings about Maher; sometimes he says good things and sometimes he doesn't. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, he did an excellent 'new rules' segment about price gouging. But Maher is really a soldier in the culture wars, a man who supports the Democrats because he supports drug decriminalisation and gay rights and opposes religion. He is a soldier in the culture wars who got left behind when the frontline advanced. On his show, for example, he and his guests often seem to agree that Elizabeth Warren's proposal of medicare-for-all is a step too far, that the American public wouldn't support it. I think many people would vote for it if the American media could give a balanced and clear account of her plan and point out that similar systems are the norm in every other developed country. It is not that the general American public doesn't want Warren's scheme – rather it is the media corporations and the pharmaceutical companies that buy advertising time on Fox and CNN and HBO who don't want it.

However, there is a little light in the room. Both Warren and Bernie Sanders are polling very highly. Neither is really running as a 'Woke' candidate, it seems to me, but rather as old fashioned Democrats with economic agendas. In a previous post, I tentatively declared my support for Pete Buttigieg – I would now like to change my mind and support Warren. The reasons I am picking Warren over Sanders is that, first, she is a woman, and I think it time America appointed a woman as President, and, second, that she is younger than Sanders and so better equipped to handle two terms as President. I believe either could beat Trump, so long as they are treated fairly and reasonably by the media.

The debate in the Democrat party is not really between two factions but three factions. On the one hand, we have centrist Democrats who implicitly subscribe to the neoliberal agenda but who support the Democrat party out of a kind of tribal affiliation while finding themselves very uncomfortable with political correctness and the Woke culture of the Far Left. On the other hand, we have the Far Left, who are prepared to destroy people if they deviate in the slightest from a politically correct ideology, but who completely fail to register that the fundamental problem is with contemporary capitalism itself. And then (on the third hand?) we have old-fashioned New Deal type Democrats like Warren and Sanders who correctly diagnose the current malaise as resulting from neoliberalism and are presenting solutions. The issue at the heart of the debate is whether the world is improving or deteriorating. The centrists recommended to me by Youtube, people like Steven Pinker, Peterson, and others, argue that the world is continuously getting better for everyone – the subtext to such arguments being that the neoliberal revolution was a good thing and that we shouldn't rock the boat. Personally, I am not at all convinced that the world is indeed getting better but this is an emotional reaction to what I see happening and I can't prove it.

Before finishing with the Intellectual Dark Web, I would like to make one small but important point. I believe in anthropogenic climate change but have not made a big deal about this in the blog because it is so obviously a fact that there is no need for me to bang on about it. All three factions of the Democrat party believe that global warming is real and that something should be done about it. This is another light in the dark.

What I am trying to suggest in this post is that the fight between centrist Democrats and the Woke Left is a distraction from the real issues. It is these real issues, such as the feeling among the working class that economic development has left many of them behind and that Washington is ruled by an 'out of touch elite', that got Trump elected. I suspect that it is these real issues that also explain the popularity of Jordan Peterson. Peterson casts his adversaries as 'postmodern neo-Marxists', a position that attracts Republican voters unwilling to recognise that it is the ideology of the Republican Party itself, and the monied elite, that is the real enemy.  Rereading this post, I wonder if I was unnecessarily harsh on Peterson. What I feel sure of, though, is that Peterson is part of a backlash that, at its roots, is really a backlash against neo-liberalism. And people on the Left should stop fighting among themselves about political correctness and engage with the real problems. Hopefully it is these real issues that will be the subject of the conversation in next year's election. One can only hope.