During the last two years or so I’ve found it increasingly impossible to speak civilly to people about politics. I’ve never been a big fan of civility, but during this period I have often found myself insulting people who didn’t in any way deserve it. Without being more specific than that, I apologize to those people.
So about a year ago I quit commenting several on otherwise perfectly nice sites just because politics was sometimes discussed there, but too often in a way that infuriated me. I don’t hate anyone anywhere, but I just couldn’t take it any more. I continued posting on my own terms here, at Open Left, and at a few other places for awhile, but recently I’ve discontinued that too.
Trying to quit. My fans know that I’ve been relapsing a lot, like someone quitting smoking, but I’ve been sticking to the goal. I’ve now deleted all but six of my political bookmarks — though on Facebook, alas, I still end up doing a lot of politics anyway.
I’m not sure that I have any political role in the world of today, and the political future I see is dim. As far as I can tell, the best we can hope for (and it’s not a sure thing at all) is something like Rahm and Barack forever. People who like those guys will not understand what I’m saying, but there are a lot of people who will.
This has been a personal crisis for me, but it isn’t a spinoff of any other personal crisis. I’m solvent, living indoors, in good health, on good terms with the law, and not in danger of involuntary commitment. It’s possible that my pessimism is the result of a chemical imbalance in my brain, and partly for fear of that I’ve only shared it with a few people before this. But when I’m not thinking about politics, I usually feel fine.
My political ideas remain about the same, and I have all the respect in the world for those who are continuing the fight. I still frequently visit Open Left, Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald, Seeing the Forest, Dean Baker, and a couple of other sites. But in my opinion mainstream liberals and mainstream Democrats are complacent, deluded, out of touch, and often corrupt, and while they’re not the main villains by a long shot, they’re the ones I get the maddest at. And I’m not sure that anyone knows how bad things are going to get.
At Haquelebac I do culture only. Sometimes my politics peeks through, but nothing there is intended to have a political effect.
Older pieces are archived at Idiocentrism and Open Left.
Trollblog 
April 23, 2010 at 10:50 pm
“‘James, this is a harsh life, and no one can command another. Sometimes those who pass through the fire of the movement leave nothing of themselves behind but ashes. Some become so exhausted they cannot continue.'”–Brust & Bull, Freedom and Necessity.
Sympathies, John. I have appreciated your work. It is a very bad time. I have written it before: “This is the authoritarian interregnum.” If the radical right is suffering great losses, the moderate left and the center are suffering losses as well. And in our defeat we savage each other, rather than our true enemies. The interregnum will end eventually. It may be sooner rather than later: problems are being papered over, rather than resolved, and it easy to imagine that some volcano will erupt under the paper.
Be well. I’ll be reading you at Haquelebac.
April 23, 2010 at 10:50 pm
Dude, I think I understand. Some doggerel I wrote at the time:
America October 2008
I sing America, too
If you screw this up, America, screw you
“I do not need my freedom when I’m dead”
It took damned years to bake tomorrow’s bread
And a year and a half later … that was the best we could do. This is the best of all possible worlds!
But, yeah, must be a chemical imbalance in the brain of some kind. Because the civil people are completely clueless, and they think that they define what is normal.
April 24, 2010 at 12:57 am
mainstream liberals and mainstream Democrats are complacent, deluded, out of touch, and often corrupt, and while they’re not the main villains by a long shot, they’re the ones I get the maddest at. And I’m not sure that anyone knows how bad things are going to get.
not so complacent in my guess but
terrified like everybody else. otherwise
spot on. for this relief much thanks.
fuck civility.
April 24, 2010 at 11:47 am
I imagine you’re far too locally rooted to consider emigrating? Not every country’s politics are so fucking depressing.
April 24, 2010 at 11:48 am
My personal experience is that even though American politics appears just as hopeless from across the Atlantic, I don’t find myself nearly as psychologically depressed or angered by discussing it. YMMV.
April 25, 2010 at 4:39 pm
About a year ago I had a bit of a heated discussion with a local about Gitmo. The infuriating phrase “they wouldn’t be there if they weren’t guilty” was used even after I pointed out the paucity of convictions or even trials in an atmosphere not significantly different from the kangaroo court in one of my favorite Batman episodes. This was one of the local hard-ass conservatives gitting and staying tuff until the end.
The end – for this hard-ass at least – came a couple of months later when the cops found some kiddie porn on his computer at home. Apparently he’d been turned in by someone he knew. He’s in jail now and will probably be there for a long time. I wouldn’t have turned him in, and I certainly don’t agree with the draconian measures visited on people who’ve done nothing beyond obtain and look at questionable pictures. And I’m fairly certain that the chap in question would have been screaming for the death penalty if it had been someone else, especially a political “enemy.”
It was just about then that I became convinced that the political schism deliberately fomented and exacerbated starting around 1980 – as a reaction to the proles obtaining a little real freedom in the previous decade or so – was permanently cemented into the psyche of enough people to make further political discussions meaningless beyond scoring vituperative aesthetic points. It’s basically become a theater of the absurd, and I mostly treat it that way, at least when I can suppress the lizard-brain the professional manipulators find so very useful for their purposes.
I agree with John that we’re in a political stasis that’s not going to change short of revolution, which also isn’t going to happen since any nascent form will immediately be commodified and turned into a reality show. But then again, I’m finding these same sorts of things expressed in the political literature of the 1800s, so it may just be an inherent limitation of the hairless ape.
If John and we his fellow-travelers are fated to jesters on the political landscape, I find some comfort in the fact that court jesters were not fools but rather clever chaps once employed by kings to keep them from taking themselves too seriously. Although, in the spirit of my present sanity retention guidelines, I’m not even going to take that very seriously.
http://books.google.com/books?id=f99AAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA162&dq=jester+fool%5D&lr=&as_brr=1&ei=om_US4uePI-AzQSH79HsCQ&cd=23#v=onepage&q=jester%20fool%5D&f=false
April 25, 2010 at 5:28 pm
I’ve been meaning to finish reading Lagerkvist’s “The Dwarf”. The lead character is a jester who seems to be a version of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and Nietzsche’s Superman interpreted via Twentieth Century political history.
Or not, because I’ve only read maybe 10% so far.
April 25, 2010 at 7:20 pm
All you’re doing is the Stoic maneuver: Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle’s political efforts led to ludicrous disaster. Socrates was executed, Aristotle got threatened with imprisonment, Xenophon went into exile and Plato’s adventure in Syracuse was a pathetic farce. So, what do you do, since politics cannot be fixed? The ancient answer was Stoicism.
But, and here’s an important point: there always will be political opportunities in the future. Sometimes, Xenophon is elected general or Cicero becomes consul or Marcus Aurelius becomes caesar or Nicole Oresme becomes an advisor to the king of France. Though rare, these opportunities do exist from time to time.
April 25, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Marcus Aurelius’s Stoicism is amusing, since the pains he faced were the nuisance of telling everyone else what to do, plus the inevitable pains suffered by all mortals.
http://www.idiocentrism.com/aurelius.htm
April 26, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Hey, it’s good to know everything in your offline life is all right. You’re generally missed at Unfogged, and I, personally, miss you over there, but I do understand your reasons for wanting to back away from politics.
April 26, 2010 at 4:26 pm
I’d be a happier person if politics didn’t fascinate and concern me so much. It’s a puzzle how one ought to integrate one’s political awareness with daily life.
I know a lot of your frustration arises from the futility of these conversations. You’re motivated to participate in them because you want to have an impact. That’s a burden that, luckily for me, I don’t share – or, at least, I’m sufficiently gratified by the small impact I have on refining the ideas of the specific people I’m conversing with.
If it’s any consolation, I think you’re a very influential Internet person. Certainly I’m indebted to you for a lot of my own thinking on the shape and size of the Current Predicament, and I know I’m not alone in this.
I think it’s wise here not to be too specific. You’d just end up having to differentiate between the times you got a little carried away and the times when the fuckers had it coming.
April 26, 2010 at 4:46 pm
“Marcus Aurelius’s Stoicism is amusing, since the pains he faced were the nuisance of telling everyone else what to do, plus the inevitable pains suffered by all mortals.”
I’m not versed in Aurelius, but the inevitable pains suffered by all mortals are also simultaneously the central problems of politics. The nuisance of telling everyone else what to do is a very real problem: if you want to exercise political power, there’s a lot of trivia you need to do very well – sit in long council meetings, make friends with powerful people, celebrate the traditional religious rites, visit the provinces and praise their agriculture, and so on. These take up a great deal of time and effort!
April 26, 2010 at 5:01 pm
I’m starting to feel sorry for poor Marcus. If there were only something I could do for him!
I liked MA much better than I expected to, but I refuse to take what he says about adversity seriously at all. The doctrine he regurgutated was OK, but he should have been a little bit more self-aware about how that stuff sounded coming from him.
May 9, 2010 at 11:30 pm
“Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.”
Rah
May 9, 2010 at 11:30 pm
+w, dangit.
May 10, 2010 at 3:40 am
Fixed!
June 14, 2010 at 1:52 pm
“As far as I can tell, the best we can hope for (and it’s not a sure thing at all) is something like Rahm and Barack forever.”
I follow you up to here. Saying “Obama is the best we can do” is more or less the same as saying “McCain is the best we can do,” or “Romney is the best we can do.” It’s technically correct, but it doesn’t mean anything given that it’s also correct to say he’s the worst we can do.
Electoral politics is fucked; our mistake was to look there for answers in the first place. The only power elections give us is the power to select our choice of corporate figureheads. If you still feel the need to be active to some degree in politics, then volunteer for an organization that provides a concrete service you believe in – Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, a local homeless shelter, whatever – because as minor as the impact may be at least you’ll be contributing a positive good, which is more than can be said about the average Daily Kos diarist bugging someone to donate to some hack candidate. If you want to withdraw in disgust, that’s a perfectly legitimate response, too, and no one can blame you.
June 16, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Well, unfortunately, I can imagine someone worse than Obama, or as far as that goes, worse than McCain or Romney.
The options I’ve come down to are #1, local and piecemeal politics, about what you suggested, which to me has always seemed unpolitical; #2, personal survival with as meny friends as possible, #3, educational work within a multi-century long-term frame (like the first anti-slavery people), and #4, going into pure denunciation mode without really trying to convince anyone. Temperamentally I’m #4 all the way, but it’s very, very wearing and I’m not sure it’s the best choice.
June 17, 2010 at 1:39 pm
“Well, unfortunately, I can imagine someone worse than Obama, or as far as that goes, worse than McCain or Romney.”
There’s always someone worse – whoever comes next is always worse, because it’s the job of whoever comes next to extend and expand the crimes of his predecessor. Obama has been worse than Bush, and whoever comes after Obama will likely be worse than Obama. It’s the nature of the job. Trying to decide who’d make the “best” president is kind of like picking between different torturers – do you go for the big hairy thug with the swollen hands, or the little guy with the sad eyes who’s working his way through Proust? They’re both there to torture you.
“Temperamentally I’m #4 all the way, but it’s very, very wearing and I’m not sure it’s the best choice.”
I completely understand this impulse, although I burnt out on that a year ago or more – I don’t have the energy to sustain that absent some kind of support network of likeminded fellow doomers. So I’ve been trying to put my energy into other things. At the same time I really, really don’t want to end up like my various mealy-mouthed liberal friends who, every time an unpleasant piece of news comes up, says something like, “oh, I don’t want to think about that, that’s depressing.”
June 17, 2010 at 11:21 pm
I’ve also thought of #5, producing testimony about the times and leaving a record. I’m not sure I’m fact-oriented and temperate enough to do that well, though.
Obama isn’t exactly worse than Bush, but things are worse now than when Obama came in, since he’s ratified many of Bush’s worst excesses, neutered the Democratic Party and many of the advocacy groups, and stupefied a new generation of non-Republicans.
March 2, 2011 at 6:45 am
My $.02 late in the game. I wish politics was actually like how Homer (the cartoon one) answered Bart when he was asked if he was worried about the choice he was supposed to make on a ballot referendum.
“Of course not, boy. That’s what we pay politicians for.”
May 13, 2012 at 5:33 am
“But then again, I’m finding these same sorts of things expressed in the political literature of the 1800s, so it may just be an inherent limitation of the hairless ape.”
Indeed. I don’t think timing can be predicted, but the current mess is a historically unstable phenomenon, and so we’re very definitely going to get a different mess, within 20 years. Probably something better, in the sense that the French preferred Napoleon to Louis XVI. The current sort of hopeless leaders aren’t gonna be around forever, just as the robber barons of the 1880s weren’t around forever. (And they were more competent.)