As of late, the following words recur in my head:
Drifting leftwards . . . .
They come in and out of my awareness like waves. Sometimes I’m making breakfast and they loll in like a prerecorded mantra; the volume fader slowly goes up and then down and then the words disappear.
Other times they resemble the ambient calls from the hallways—I live in an apartment in the city—pinging and echoing in my head like the sundry canines and babies, the hellos and the door slams I hear above and below. The words pop in, linger in the air for a bit and then slowly disappear.
Drifting leftwards . . . .
What are they doing in my brain? They don’t seem to make all that much sense; there’s little context for them, at least as I stand over the pan searing my Beyond sausages. I guess you could say that they’re vaguely nautical. That doesn’t help me understand all that much, though, since I don’t boat. Without the endemic jargon of boaters—that lexicon which I’ve never been able to quite get (“aft,” “knot,” “halyard,” et al)—the words don’t place me anywhere, at least not in the way boating terminology places me. When someone says “Stay on port tack” (I hope I’m getting that right) we are instantly there, on the sea, looking up at a sail, smelling the brine. These words, however, in their mundanity, as specific as being stopped at a light after which one turns to who knows where, don’t capture a comparable sense of environment.
Drifting leftwards . . . .
Ok, so they’re not nautical; but, for the sake of argument, let’s just say they’re of a maritime nature.
I suppose that’s as it should be. If we’re talking about being adrift, that is. Yet, despite all this murk, the drift I’m experiencing does, in fact, have a direction. No Sargasso Sea here. So the words don’t imply off the bat that my movements in the ocean are random. I do seem to be going somewhere. After all, I may be drifting, but I’m still going left.
[I should note that this post will come with the second edition of my newsletter, called, not too coincidentally—now that I think about it—The Anchor. Should I take this as some kind of synchronicity]?
You might be able to guess by this point that I’m talking about politics. Which is slightly weird since I don’t usually write about politics. I used to, though mostly on social media. And it wasn’t pretty. So, a little over a year ago, I terminated my Twitter account, an action I carried out with the conviction of a toilet flush. Since then I’ve been consuming my usual intake of news, commentary and opinion pieces, which I might rate as above average. But, though a lot has been going in, almost nothing has been going out. The only time I pontificate these days is with my girlfriend and friends. Which I’ve truly savored the way recovering alcoholics savor their meetings. Unlike with social media, I consider the face-to-face gathering of friends to discuss important current affairs as a sacred event, tantamount to a kind of civic duty. I’m not a commentator, at least not by profession, so, while I certainly can’t go a day without gabbing about D.C., actually writing about politics doesn’t naturally occur to me.
But, I’ve been confused lately, what with little imaginary logographic boats sailing into view all the time, and so I feel the need to break my fast—though of course not on Twitter but in this much safer environ. I suspect that my confusion stems from not just my political orientation “drifting” but also from the nature of this particular type of drift, which looks now as if it’s in some late stage wherein my loyalty to the Democratic Party is being cast off. And, since this for me is also a recognition that there exists no viable political party to migrate into, I’m encountering what sounds like what many veteran Independents have already remarked upon, that this process traffics in mystification. The word on the street when it comes to being an Independent is that it’s a hazardous affair, a road full of potholes and dead-ends. Though, of course, we live in strange times anyway now, which explains why this strange migration I’m writing about now, a migration I’m undertaking in a definitive way, is becoming quite common indeed.
One of the first things that occurs to me is how long this has taken, how ironclad my loyalty to the party has been. It’s been like trying to wrest myself from a plush lounge with great vibes, though, as of late, the more I make for the exit the more it feels instead like prying myself from a hungry shark. I think many Americans believe they must be in one of these parties, and that if they aren’t that they’re betraying something terribly important. Sometimes it even seems like they sin if they don’t pledge fealty either way. What’s most interesting to me is how, now that we’ve all entered the so-called subtext-as-text phase of late-stage capitalism, the battle lines are drawn so firmly, etched so concretely, it’s impossible to ignore just how conspicuous the split-screen is. They used to do it with a modicum of grace. The line between us versus them used to be drawn with a fine stencil. Now they’re using magic marker. That aisle they love saying they used to cross all the time, the lost tradition of which they now with calibrated sighs bemoan, is truly a wonder now, a border wall within our politics that has developed into its own iconic status. The word “duopoly” is on everyone’s lips. It’s impossible to ignore. It’s also no longer possible not to see the sham of it all.
So what next? What happens when you finally cross some other aisle, the one that most people either don’t know about or, worse, don’t take seriously, that specific weird aisle reserved for the curious and strange, the soon-to-be politically homeless? This is the aisle that divides those with membership in a party from those without. Already I can hear the war drums beating in my head, warning me of doom should I cross. There are people who use their influence to frame any other aisle than that binary defined by cable news as nothing but a chimera. Or, if you press the point, they’ll insist on a certain closetedness: “you’re sounding like them over there” is what you’ll hear the moment you express the barest nuance. Which is why they’ve largely succeeded in painting the independents who reject the binary as only so many anomalous simps.
Have I, in my confusion, in my consternation, internalized this sophistry? Does my procrastination in cutting the cord with the Democratic Party indicate an abdication of free thought? Have they succeeded in a kind of coercion?
Or could it be that my confusion is not confusion at all, but merely the oh so strange sensation of real liberty?
Now that I’ve tasted this wine, I most certainly believe the latter.
And yet, still, the question persists: what to do now?
I guess what I’m describing is the experience of not having a tent, of running in between the awnings and getting stuck in the rain. The big tent I’ve been under my whole life has become intolerable, the duplicities unconscionable.
I should also note that not all Independents are created equal. Some truly have no political affiliation, are agnostic to their bones. You could call these people “winnable,” “persuadable,” or “available” for either flank of the duopoly.
But I suspect that many are like me. Many have fled their party and have seen only two exits from the tent, one to the right and one to the left, and have decided to pick a direction to go in. They haven’t just entered an escape pod into deep space, they’ve made a decision that their own party doesn’t have enough of a certain direction. I guess that, by this logic, my drift doesn’t look like drift at all, but actually something like forward momentum in a specific direction.
Though it still consoles me only a little bit. Because, now that I’ve picked a direction, I see that those two exits in this tent both have real problems.
To me, the rightward exit from the Democratic Party looks like a chaotic bazaar, like a crazy festival saturated in personality cults all centered around a Randian neoliberal hellscape that believes in running the economy like it’s a grotesque hotrod engine that should be free to ride the highways with no speed limit. So, needless to say, no can do.
But the one to the left, seems, well, like Siberia. “A Leftist in the United States” are about the loneliest words on the planet. “Anyone home?” It’s so cold on this side of the tent it’s enough to instill a desire to trick oneself into taking the snake-oil on the right. After all, bazaars are fun. That right-wing snake-oil even seems more American somehow. They love waving that flag. In a way, they’re right. They certainly have the optics. The thought over on that side of the political spectrum has metastasized over several centuries into a bunch of indelible tropes, from the snare and piccolo accompanied ostentation of Old Glory to the baked-in fetish for John Wayne individualism. It bespeaks of a hopeless ontology of right-wing sentiment in the American soul. So, to actually drift away from that, towards what is ostensibly opposite of what it means to be American, away from the bazaar of one side to the permafrost of the other, seems like a kind of masochism.
Yet: what else am I to do? I do love the woods, so I guess my direction makes sense. Though that offers little help with the vertigo.
I was eighteen when Bill Clinton won in ’92. My hot take the next day was telling my friend that “I don’t trust that guy." At the time, I knew little of politics. I only knew to parrot my father’s condemnation of all things “big D” Democratic. His politics and how he came to judge the candidates, typically, I suppose, for a certain type of Republican, was a matter of scents: one needed only to hear where they stood on gays in the military and the rest could be easily derived from a kind of intuition that was equal parts Holmesian induction and animal instinct. And so Bill with his aw-shucks smirks and his suspicious charm and his saxophone was immediately written off as a shyster. My father, unlike me, would never waver from his discontent: late-stage Bill, awash in controversy, was as offensive to my father as the early one that won the first term. Like many Americans during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, I watched Bill tell the camera live that he didn’t have relations, though, in my case, as was the case with many who had angry, right-wing parents, that broadcast was accompanied for me with an audience response (“You’re an effing liar!”).
For my part, when I was eighteen, I barely understood the difference between the two parties. I knew only of certain optics, that there’d been twelve years of Republican rule and that it had come in two forms, in the persons of two scions of elite moralism. First, in the person of Reagan, with his Californian scrupulousness and throwback to old-timey Hollywood—with all of the American exceptionalism coded in. And second, in what followed for another four years, another term of Republican rule in the form of upstanding CIA-style technocracy, in the person of the elder Bush—though H.W. also mixed it with some of the can-do Calvinism of New England WASPS (brilliant).
And then along come a hammer to bash all of this Comstockery into smithereens with some Dionysian fun from the South, a devil from the Bayou in the person of Slick Willy, a good ol’ boy from Arkansas with a thick drawl that spoke of marshes and barbecue sauce. It was like for twelve years we’d been attending some Heritage Foundation conference, complete with $500 tables (or, more likely $5,000) and suddenly some greasy libertine who souped-up his neighbor’s cars for a living had now crashed the event and taken over the microphone (never mind the cleverness of Bill’s working class disguise, which lopped over and around his tenure as a Rhodes scholar like a Laudian vestment in reverse).
I’ll never forget the smile on election night, which seemed to already telegraph how much of the tenor, if not the substance, of the times were about to change. Indeed Bill’s own face, the one which that night would induce my skepticism, was a hallmark of the coming era. Unlike those of his 80s Republican forebears, whose narrow features made them a little more difficult to lampoon, Bill’s was a face made for the comic strip. Along with that smile there was the symmetry of those gigantic cheeks, and of course that nose, a proboscis which over the years would so often turn red and sometimes seemed even to grow. He was to become both Rudolph and Pinocchio, at once the odd one out and the liar.
After the steady drip of my father’s nativism throughout my childhood, really the entirety of my conscious years up to that point—I was six when Reagan was elected—I was only now beginning to figure out where I stood. It was becoming clear to me that I was not to follow in his bigoted boots. Which made Election ’92 something of a political inception point, something that ushered in the very drift I’m experiencing right now, thirty years later. It was the first time I became conscious of a swing, of the possibility of this central aisle in American politics. I could feel the change. I wasn’t completely free of the nationalism and xenophobia I grew up with, still prone to repeating my father’s propaganda about white countries (he was a big Pat Buchanan guy). But Bill Clinton’s election had triggered the first stirrings of honest political consciousness on my part. In the 90s, I became aware of myself and my peers as being defined not only by the music we listened to but in our belief in Bill and the Democratic Party. And it was to be a long haul: I was already back in New York at NYU when he was reelected four years later, by that point well on my way in my effort at ditching my working class affects and seeking entry into the rarified climes of the so-called liberal coastal elite.
But what’s as important as having ultimately shed my father’s atavism was having begun my long drift, the one towards the leftward exit from the big tent which I’m finally taking now.
By the time of Clinton’s tome of an autobiography, My Life, which I read cover to cover during the later neocon thicket of the Dubya era, Bill hadn’t been Slick Willy to me for a long time. He’d been a hero. He’d become ensconced into the storybook of past warriors, much the way Obama is looked upon now, as the de facto leader of the party. And just as the memory of the good warrior Obama functioned during the Trump administration, as a carefully placed reminder to hold the party ticket line, to make way for the future good king that shall save us from the present bad one, so too did the memory of Bill furnish that necessary coercive maneuver on the part of the elites seeking to shore up the liberal vote and keep it in line for the next election. In the face of Dubya’s psychotic Middle Eastern rampage, Bill’s face was soothing, especially on the cover of his book, proboscis and all. It was a reminder that we’d only been a couple of hanging chads’ worth away from victory and that we best hold on, never mind that the road to Baghdad had been paved long before Dubya, by Bill’s minions in the CIA. I, of course, fell for it all, hook, line and sinker.
There actually was one meaningful difference between Bill and Obama, though. Contrary to his Democratic heir, Bill had served as an exemplar of a certain type of liberalism—free-thinking, sexually liberated, compassionate—which Obama would slightly temper. It was the kind that had been fought for during the Civil Rights Era and Vietnam War, one which, whether I consciously knew it or not, had informed my every move during my previous adulthood. Indeed, every nascent lesson had come to me under the wing of the Pax Clintonia. Every experience, every benchmark of post-adolescent growth, from high school graduation to moving out of the house to going back to school to moving back to New York, from my first love to my first car accident to my first mosh pit to my first sexual experiment, all were undertaken under the bright aegis of Clintonian liberalism. Bill, our first baby boomer POTUS, had ushered in a countercultural victory—what with his cheeky failures at inhalation—and so far my life was headed in the exact direction of that particular mandate, one that was so carefully balanced within, if not outrightly epitomized by, the winking insouciance of the lothario whose love for Third Way policy was matched only by his lust for workplace sex. And with the dawning of the new millennium just up ahead every decision I made and every milestone I achieved in those early years of adulthood smacked of a last-minute bargain during the End of Days. Only, owing to post-Cold War optimism, it was in reverse. The promised land of liberation from cultural strangleholds had come early, and we were to partake of the harvest freely. We were Generation “Move On.” And, like many during the dark ages before Generation MeToo, before belated conversations about power relations and patriarchy would pose a meaningful challenge to the prerogatives of the counterculture, I had been proud of being a part of it.
That I’m now making for the exit from the big Clintonian tent is actually not the saddest part of this story of disenchantment. That’s merely bittersweet, since I know that I now see the truth, my soon-to-be political homelessness notwithstanding. The scales have fallen from my eyes, as it were. “. . . [W]hereas I was blind, now I see” [Saint Paul].
No, what’s saddest isn’t unregistering from the Democratic Party, but, rather, thinking back to my blindness during the Clintonian era, along with the nauseating pendulum swing to the War on Terror that came fast on its heels. It’s humbling now to see how much darkness had in fact surrounded me and how little I knew of it, like a straggler in the woods at night mistaking the moon for the sun. What today I see as the plain truth, that this New Democrat-Third Way is actually a cleverly disguised dead end, something that is almost consciously tailored by oligarchic forces to forestall economic justice, the very same economic justice that the Democratic Party claims as one of its ideological pillars, was obscured during the Dubya era by something rather maudlin stirring within me, which I feel chagrin even thinking about today. It was the man from Hope’s smile on the cover of his book. I used to look at it longingly after reading passages of his autobiography, all of the studiously reproduced details of his administration, no doubt culled from endless minutes and meeting transcripts, of his intervention in Sarajevo, of his steadfastness during the government shutdown, of his long, post-Monica affinity for sleeping on the living room couch. It was thrilling, like reading about what the Kingdom of Earth was like up in the castle during my very first years as an adult. I’d finish a long passage and close the book and look at his face on the cover. My brain would be addled by the ubiquitous “Hail to the Chimp” renderings circulating the media of then present-day POTUS. I would look into that smile, the one that had fostered such visceral distrust back in ’92, and instead see a bright glimmer of hope during a time of war. I would think, “Save us from the chimp.”
I need to have sympathy for myself in thinking back to the bamboozlement of all of this. The con job’s a tough one to crack. I could not have known how intoxicated I was back then while I was so entranced by Bill’s face; I could not have known how much this movement was scripted, how my consent was so maneuvered, the puppeteering of it all. In the same way that a mother props up a stuffed toy on her lap and animates it with her hand and tricks her newborn into gleeful smiles, so the duopoly had successfully manipulated my own credulity around this figure of Bill the Savior, the previous good-guy whose book we should now read to keep the home fire burning during times of darkness when the bad guy is the king. Keep it burning, they say, for the good king shall rise again, just you wait. Only, of course, another bad king shall rise in his wake as assuredly as this current bad king lives and breathes. And onward and so on and so forth into the horizon like a flock of sheep.
What’s really scandalous to me is thinking back to how I’d read Bill’s book and incanted this ritual at thirty thousand feet, in business class, with the loud background roar of jet turbines constantly reminding me that I was a “Somebody-Headed-Somewhere.” This was when I played with the band Interpol, when I very busy touring and performing across the globe. I was making a lot of very popular music, making a lot of money and making a lot of appearances.
I guess it only makes sense, then, how I failed so spectacularly to see what is plainly evident today, how Clinton’s Democrats were not all very different from Reagan’s, nor, for that matter, from Republicans in general. It makes sense to me now how I stayed in the dark, how that smile, as I gazed longingly at Bill on the cover of his book, could offer me such misplaced hope. The chief difference between Bill and George was that the former’s vision of America made room for cherished liberal ideals, specific ones, though, the ones that made for good news and party enlistment, ideals centered around racial equality and the right to choose. Beyond that, there was very little. Let’s not be obtuse. Sure, it’s pretty likely Gore wouldn’t have brought us to Iraq, though I think we can now see that something just as troubling as, say, Obama’s drones would’ve arisen. After all, they always, Republican or Democrat, find a way to appease the brass. This is to say nothing of the gutting of American manufacturing, of course, nor anything else regarding the working class.
There was still relative prosperity for many back then, so we still weren’t at a time for rallies around minimum wage and healthcare to be viable seat fillers. At the end of the day, only the specter of “the other side” gaining power satisfied the political consumer’s appetite for bread and circuses. That’s still a problem today, but it was believed in much more prevalently back then. Obviously, there were plenty of people at the time who could see past the propaganda, like I only have gotten around to at this relatively late juncture. There were no doubt many Lefties to go around. But, pre-Bernie, they were living in an even more profound darkness than today. I certainly didn’t even know they existed. I didn’t even know what a Lefty was.
I was too drunk on the Clintonian-countercultural promise, the rise of the enlightened liberal outlook, the world of Move-On where the sexual advances, and even abuses, of a lecherous boss should before anything be understood as honest desire and that to litigate it is the worst—read, most Republican—offense any good liberal could ever hope to make. It was an attractive carrot to hold in front of the libs, back during less complicated moments for sexual liberation. But that promise should’ve always been qualified, heavily, since its noble valence of a world free of intrusive oversight, sexual domination and gendered coercion, without the necessary correlate of economic justice, easily curdles into its more cynical variant of a consumer-driven hedonic paradise. There are still problems with a party that leads with the counterculture even in the best case, since all of that Berkeley campus gusto did very little to address the growing income inequality. For my part, the bargain was as conspicuous as it was reductive. It amounted to a basic fact around heteronormativity, hormones and rising social capital, all realities that proved themselves to be in my case—somewhat embarrassingly in hindsight—worthy of electability ipso facto.
I can see pretty clearly now that the buy-in to the duopoly, forever toggling between good and bad kings, politics as cinematic kayfabe, was deeply aligned with my class interests at the time. At the end of the day, the Admirals Club really only votes in one direction, even when they cast their vote for the “good guy.” They think that they’re voting to help the little guys when they vote-blue-no-matter-who. If you spend enough time on cable news or reading literary journals like The New York Times, then, yes, of course, you will believe that these are the good guys. And speaking for myself as an erstwhile member, I had completely drunk the New Democrat Kool-Aid. How could I not have? I grew up during its regime. And my moral vanity was now benefitting from its dibs. I had failed to make the connection, that, for people with my class interests, the difference between a Democrat and a Republican in office is merely a matter of window dressing. We well-off liberals are made to endure periods of four or eight years wherein some group of people we don’t like have put up curtains that we find tacky. But in terms of the structure of the house, its foundation, its plumbing, its electricity, there is no real difference. The lights stay on regardless. And in order to evade having to look squarely in the face of this “inconvenient truth” we buy in wholesale into the kayfabe and convince ourselves that the scripted professional wrestling is actually a real match. And so, rather disingenuously, we believe that we are voting for the little guy when we vote-blue-no-matter-who but in fact we are only voting for ourselves and our class interests. That middle aisle that everyone always seems to think is so very wide, such a giant chasm, is actually quite narrow, not much wider than the one I knew so well up above in the airplane in business class, only about as wide, in fact, as the opening of an unfolded wallet.
Today, I became an Independent. I sent in the form. I do not say this jubilantly. It’s a statement of a kind of homelessness, of a drifting into the woods. The value of growing up during Clinton’s time, of having a more compassionate politics than that of my parents, had certainly been accomplished. But like any tutelage under the wing of a corporate Democrat, it came with a price tag, one that today I can no longer afford. There is no party for me, at least for now. So there’s no chance of setting myself down firmly at a table. Maybe I’ll go Green. I tend to be skeptical of third parties, but that could change. My drift continues.
I know I’m not reinventing the wheel with this decision. I know that Independents have been growing ever since Reagan began the decades-long, successful luring of the working class away from the Democrats. I also know that my own class interests are very different from these people. So I’m not looking to gain credit by making a play to join their ranks. I don’t have that ability since, for a while now and for all intents and purposes, I've been a member of the managerial class.
But from this point forward I intend to hold solidarity with their class interests, not mine. Because I’m not the one suffering. They are. It sucks it took me this long to leave this tacky, tired party, this party that has sold out this class of people over and over again for decades, and which continues to do so. But better late than never, I suppose.
The real reason I’ve written this post, though, is not to litigate my various disappointments over the years. I’m sure it has sounded that way. But I can only trust that I went into a historical account to serve its necessary expositional role. This has been a long journey. One that began during a very different time.
The real reason I’ve written all of this down is to address the curious feeling I’ve had since I’ve made this decision. I’ve crossed some other aisle I never knew existed, the one between the people with political addresses and those without them. I’m beginning to sense that there is some other affiliation here, one that puts me with strange bedfellows, people with some views that I can never support, but whose realities and experiences I somehow sympathize with. What unites me with these people is our missing political addresses. Within the bifurcated panopticon of Red/Blue politics there seems to be no other valence than the digital toggle, the on/off switch between the two parties. I ask, then: where’s the dimmer? I long for shades of colors. At the very least, irrespective of our views on religion, sex, racism, patriarchy and so on, I have one very important point of solidarity with all of these latter-day strange bedfellows: a rejection of the binary. Or at least, a rejection of that binary.
It feels way different. Even almost like a betrayal. I have come to believe so forthrightly in progress and in all of the forms of justice that our country sorely lacks, racial and otherwise. Naturally, this won’t change for me, but it still feels almost verboten to go the economic justice route, because I’ve believed that the other forms of justice should come first before anything else. I have brothers and sisters to think of, fellow humans that I care about with whom I wish never to waver in my solidarity. It’s just that now I’ve come to believe that the best way to fortify that pact is through a labor union. And, sadly, we don’t live in a particularly union-heavy universe, which means needing to take this torch, the torch of the working class, up first.
Drifting leftwards . . . .
Yes, very strange times indeed. I think it’s why those words keep wafting into my field of attention, when I’m walking the dog or decorating the tree. The drift is gradual. It’s not that I’m kicking myself out into the street after an eviction. It’s a slow process of untethering, of slackening the leash until I’m out there in the wilderness. It feels as though I’ve just now taken a very important step in that process, kind of like the feeling of the car dropping you off at the trailhead with nothing but a backpack on and no one around.
There’ll be rallies in the future, sure. There’ll be chances to break bread with fellow travelers. But the likelihood that any of these efforts will result in real power, real change and real meaning is very low. Interestingly, I almost wrote just now that the reason for this absence of potential is that we don’t have the numbers, but that’s actually not true. All of these policies poll extremely well. They are prima facie net goods. No one says no to a government check. There are so many sleepy would-be socialists out across this great land. We do have the numbers. We just don’t have a working class with class consciousness. They are not permitted to, not under the current system. And so long as the working class sleeps, nothing will ever change. Power concedes nothing.
This is a dark vision, yes. But the acknowledgment of surrounding darkness is itself a form of light. Because it induces you to light a candle, a tiny little light of truth that you can use to light your way as you amble through the catacombs. I can’t say that I’m happy that I’m going to spend the rest of my days in the wilderness. But I will enjoy it greatly when I begin to see another faint light in the distance, another candle lit for someone else’s path, and draw closer to it so that when the twain shall meet, bread will be broken, stories will be told, feelings will be exchanged and, with this nourishment in the belly, the two shall separate again and drift on until the next time.
