This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:
Does anyone like the American two party system? The parties are opaque, private organizations, weak institutions that are prone to capture and corruption, and gerrymandering's "safe seats" means that the real election often takes place in the party's smoke-filled rooms, when a sure-thing candidate is selected:
But there doesn't seem to be any way to fix it. For one thing, the two parties are in charge of any reform, and they're in no hurry to put themselves out of business. It's effectively impossible for a third party to gain any serious power in the USA, and that's by design. After the leftist Populists party came within a spitting distance of power in the 1890s, the Dems and Repubs got together and cooked the system, banning fusion voting and erecting other structural barriers.
The Nader and Perot campaigns were doomed from the outset, in other words. Either candidate could have been far more popular than the D and R on the ballot, and they still would have lost. It's how the deck is stacked, and to unstack it, reformers would need to take charge of at least one – and probably both – of the parties.
But that's not cause for surrender – it's a call to action. In an interview with Seymour Hersh, Thomas Frank (Listen, Liberal) sets out another locus of power, one with the potential to deliver control over the party to its base: social movements:
It's been done before. The parties are routinely transformed by power-shifts within their internal coalitions: since 1970, corporate Dems have consistently pushed the party to the right, making it the power of white-collar professionals and relying on working people showing up and marking their ballots with a D because they have "nowhere else to go."
Bill Clinton was the most successful of these corporate raiders, delivering the parts of the Reagan Revolution that Reagan himself could never have managed: dismantling tariffs and bank regulations, passing the crime bill and welfare "reform." He came within a whisper of (partially) privatizing Social Security.
This set in motion the forces that made Trumpism possible: when Dems told deindustrialized workers to "learn to code" and blamed them for the destruction of their communities, it opened a space for Make America Great Again, the (empty) workerist rhetoric of the GOP. The Dems' plan of putting "really smart people" in charge and letting them run things was a (predictable) disaster. "Really smart" isn't the same as "infallible" and really smart people can be spooked or bulled into doing the wrong thing – like Obama "foaming the runways" for the banks with the houses of mortgage holders, and leaving the bankers responsible for the Great Financial Crisis unscathed:
"Really smart people" can't get us out of this mess. Instead, we need the kind of muscular political action – the "whirlwind" – that characterized FDR's New Deal: "complete reformation of the banking industry.. just about every other industry as well. Regulation. Social Security. Public works. Antitrust. Soil conservation."
FDR got there by alienating his former classmates and refusing the go-slow entreaties of his cronies. He got there because there was a mass social movement that made him do it ("I want to do it, now make me do it"):
Every time in US history where one of the political party duopoly listened to its base, it was because of a mass social movement: the farmers' movement (1890s), labor (1930s), civil rights and antiwar (1960s). As Frank says:
Social movements succeed. They build and they change the intellectual climate and then, when the crisis comes, they make possible things like agrarian reform or the New Deal or the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s.
Today, we see the seeds of those social movements: the new union movement. Black Lives Matter. Neobrandeisians with their "hipster antitrust." These are the movements that are creating "ideas lying around": ideas that, in time of crisis, can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink:
They are setting in motion another transformation of the Democratic Party, from its top-down, "really smart people" model to a bottom-up, people-powered one, kept in check by movements, not party bosses. As Frank says, "They require the mass participation of ordinary people. Without that, I am afraid that nothing is possible."
I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:
http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
When I was a teenager, I regularly attended church youth group. We did generic Christian things. We sat around and read milquetoast bible verses and then talked about how to be good people. We occasionally volunteered at charities. We played a bunch of party games. Generic fun things.
Then one day a new youth pastor started. This was a source of consternation for our church, as our church was an ethnic church and this pastor was not a member of our ethnicity. Still, we want to be openminded and she came highly recommended, so we let her start.
She turned some heads when she gave some sermons in church that pretty directly contracted our particular denomination's theology. I forget what the points were, but I mean these distinctions are just shibboleths and don't really matter. She was an outsider, so of course she wouldn't understand these things. It's not a big deal.
But then... our youth group started getting a bit more... radical.
First, she stopped teaching us Bible stories and started teaching us about history. Specifically, the history of activism. Gandhi, Mandela, and Martin Luther King. I should mention at this point that I am Canadian, and so all references to US race relations were completely foreign to us.
She started dropping these breadcrumbs, pointing out how all of these activists and movements only succeeded because of the power of the youth. About how we are the people with real power in the world to change things, if only we wanted to. You kids want real power, don't you?
I should mention now as well that my particular denomination of Christianity put an extremely high value on pacifism. Both pacifism as in a disavowal of violence, and pacifism as in a disavowal of activism. They believed in a very strict separation of church and state/politics, out of a fear that politics would taint the church.
Then, she started doing this weird new prayer technique. Previously, we would engage in silent, private prayers, as the church believed that each person's relationship with God was their own personal, private relationship, and it's none of anybody elses business. But now, what she had us doing, was that we would sit in a circle, she would turn off the lights, light some candles, put on some emotional ambient music, and encourage us to pray publicly. Prayers were encouraged to involve bearing our souls to God, talking about our sins and our fears.
In hindsight, I recognize this dynamic as being extremely similar to a Marxist struggle session. And, for the record, my referent for "Marxist struggle session" comes from a 60 year old friend who grew up in the Soviet Union, who was too smart and autistic for his own good, and who was on the receiving end of many such sessions. Told to me over beers straight from his mouth.
Finally, she started staging full on activist training in youth group. She taught us chants and we would practice protest chants while watching video of youth protests. She taught us techniques for engaging in 'non-violent protest' which included things like teaching us how to lie in front of stuff to block things off while making our bodies into deadweight, and getting into peoples face while shouting passive-aggressive things that were intimidating while being plausibly deniable.
It was at about this time that I had a mini freakout and stopped attending youth group. Not over any of the above, but rather because i was an aspergic kid with an overly literal understanding of the Bible and couldn't reconcile some dumb random doctrinal thing she said with my understanding of things.
A few weeks (months?) after I stopped attending, she was fired. Nobody ever talked about why.
In hindsight this is obvious: an honest to god Marxist activist tried to infiltrate our church and subvert the youth. She slowly turned our youth group from a glorified daycare/chaperoned hangout (which, despite being a church youth group, I would not characterize as 'indoctrination' at all; insofar as there was any religious content at all, most of the youth thought it was stupid, and to my knowledge every single person who attended those meetups are atheists now), to an activist indoctrination session. It happened slowly, so that it took a while for people to notice what was happening, and she did it to children (ages 12-16), who were not world-wise enough to understand what was going on. To be honest, to us it felt like she was rescuing us from the same boring old basic bitch party games and giving us some actual excitement.
Ever since realizing what happened there and reflecting on it, I've used this as my main point of reference regarding radicalization and indoctrination. This gives me a decent framework to compare generic 'teaching' of values (which I am ok with, regardless of what those values are) vs 'indoctrination', which causes knee-jerk horror for me. It's given me a reference to differentiate teaching vs indoctrination even between churches (there are definitely some scary churches out there engaging in indoctrination). It's also given me the ability to be able to look at non-religious groups, such as progressive youth clubs, to identify which of these are engaging in frightening indoctrination, and to be confident in my judgement calls.
I’ve been pondering whether to write this post for the better part of a week. I’d been hearing rumbling from traditionally published authors about a contract clause that is as evil̵…
I’ve been pondering whether to write this post for the better part of a week. I’d been hearing rumbling from traditionally published authors about a contract clause that is as evil–their words and I agree–as the rights grabbing clauses that have become common in publishing contracts. But then, several days ago, an op-ed piece appeared in the NYT and I knew what I needed to write. The clause? A morality clause. Yes, you read that right. More and more traditional publishers are now including a morality clause in their contracts.
…
Even though Shulevitz “guesses” that’s reasonable, I beg to differ. This clause can be used if a tweet or an image from years ago–decades ago–comes to light that the publisher believes is “inconsistent” with the author’s reputation. Then there’s the question of who determines what the reputation happens to be. Then there’s the whole question of what”sustained, widespread public condemnation. . . that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work” means.
With the way publishers are trying to hold onto a work for the life of the copyright, this should scare all of us. It basically means as long as they continue to hold your rights, you have to worry. “Past or future conduct” is limited. You could suddenly find yourself in a Kevin Hart situation like the comic had with the Academy Awards this year. Hell, you could find yourself in an Ellen situation where she defended Hart this past week and championed him being host for the awards show, only to find herself under attack from the perpetually butt-hurt for accepting his apology for jokes Hart made years ago.
That is the sort of condemnation a publisher could use to not only cancel your contract but demand your advance back.
Yes, you read that right.
But those of you who write for magazines are facing even worse morality clauses. Although, to be honest, I expect the Big Five and other publishers to follow. After all, they do seem to move in packs when it comes to how they treat their writers.
…
You don’t have to do anything wrong. All you have to do is become the target of the mob because you suffer from wrong think. Now think about the attacks people associated with Sad Puppies have undergone. If such a contract clause had been in effect in their contracts, and if the publishers had been brave enough to go up against the ILOH, Larry, Brad, Sarah and others would have found themselves out on their ears. Of course, the mob of angry fans would have been something to watch as they marched on the bastions of traditional publishing.
…
As the NYT piece notes, terms like “public condemnation” are so vague we, as authors, should run from the contract without hesitation. Such clauses are an out for publishers. It gives them reason to cancel a contract without real cause. Your sales can be meeting the contractual level to keep your book in print but, for whatever reason, they want to be done with you. Then you write a blog post that gets some negative Twitter attention. Or you say something on Twitter that has a handful of people reacting negatively. That is enough, under such vague language, for the publisher to cancel the contract.
…
I hear some of you telling me I’m overreacting. After all, contracts can be negotiated. That means you can negotiate this clause. Right? Wrong. At least not unless you have enough clout, a big enough name, to make the publisher’s blink.
…
I don’t know about you, but I want more than a nebulous, “you must be good, and we’ll decide what that means–but we don’t have to tell you–or we will cancel your contract and demand our money back.”
Here is a key:
Times change; norms change with them. Morality clauses hand the power to censor to publishers, not the government, so they don’t violate the constitutional right to free speech. But that power is still dangerous.
It gives the power of censorship to the publishers. Think about it. When they say they want to be the gatekeepers, it isn’t the gatekeepers of quality. It is the gatekeepers of point of view on issues, on what is the right way to think about things, etc. They want to “educate” us to be “better”.
The basics of Reaction need to be stated, and they need to be stated in a way that excludes our enemies, because we are seeing a whole lot of people saying “Hail fellow reactionary”, who are clearly hostile to us, and not hostile the media/academic/judicial elite that we seek to overthrow, blaming various groups that tend to be allied or sympathetic to reaction for the problems caused by our holier than thou elite, urging reactionaries that the real enemy is group X, where X is anyone who is plausibly an ally or likely to become one. They want us to ingroup our enemies, ingroup those that outgroup us, and outgroup each other.
So, starting with the concepts most likely to offend: The reactionary red pill on women. Which are also concepts that have practical application even while our enemies rule. Next articles in the Reaction 101 series will be more directly political and have less individual application in daily life.
…
Men and women very much want to form families and want those families to last into their old age. My wife was eighteen in my eyes all her years, except near to the very end, and even though I sometimes have some pleasant youthful female companionship, I still sometimes find myself shaking and weeping when I remember my wife.
If you look at any successful family, no one is equal. Dad is in charge, mum picks up the socks. In principle, it is possible to form families in a society where men and women are equal, by freely contracting out of equality, but in practice, it is hard, and I see how hard it is for my sons. We have prisoners dilemma with few iterations, so the natural equilibrium between men and women is defect/defect.
…
The family law and family institutions dictated in Deuteronomy and depicted in the Book of Proverbs lasted for thousands of years. Our current social order is extremely recent. Within living memory, within my memory, it has changed radically in ways that are horrifying, tragic, and terrifying, and everyone is acting like this is normal and nothing is wrong.
Modernity is for me like one of those horror movies where one character sees monsters and another character does not, and you wonder if the monsters are real or just delusion, until you see someone get eaten by a monster. And I see people getting eaten by monsters, in the sense of transparently false rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, sexual harassment et cetera charges, and I also see people who tell me men have nothing to fear, because women never lie, while women have much to fear because they so very very much dislike rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, and sexual harassment. But I also see these men acting terrified, while I am bolder than any of those men who supposedly believe that men have nothing to fear. In part of their minds they must see what I see, because I see their fear, and in part of their minds, the part that speaks and constructs a narrative, they do not see what I see, even though it is right in front of them.
A political tactic by which an organisation or state encourages its members or agents to infiltrate another organisation in an attempt to gain recruits or take over entirely.
