time passages - my political journey and lessons for the future

[freepcrusher]

I was basically apolitical until junior high or so. Even after I became political, I was never really pro-anything as much as I was anti-something. The end goal of my worldview was that there would be a productive and prosperous society where levels of happiness and social harmony were at its highest. Both political parties would be pretty moderate and political strife would be a rarity. My view is that the one thing holding it back were groups like Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, the Claremont wing of conservatism, and the homeschooler family with ten kids. If those people could be (gently of course) banned from politics, this society would be achievable. I had these views circa 2005 or so and this was before social media was really a thing. Nonetheless, in my ideal society, freedom of speech would be one of the highest values of society and the idea of anyone getting banned would be unheard of.

But hold on a second. Didn’t you say that some conservative groups would be excluded from political participation? Well, yes. My view then was that there is always a Schmittian “state of exception” and that every society has it. The idea was that it would be done with the least amount of damage and the people falling under a state of exception would be as small as possible. Renunciation of those views would also earn a full pardon and reentry into society.

Now let’s fast forward to 2009 when I graduated from high school. Being on my own at college and having more access to the internet, I started coming across websites like Democratic Underground where I realized the left was far more hysterical and irrational than I thought. I got banned a lot of times by saying that they were their own worst enemy and not to stoop to the level of the hard right. We needed to prove that we were truly emblematic of what it meant to be American and that “mom and apple pie” were our values too. As long as we did that - there would be no way the regressive right could ever gain power.

Throughout the 2010s, I watched the radical deconstructionist and/or postmodern left gain more power and I distanced myself from the left. Even then I knew that neither a majority of elected Republicans nor a majority of people who vote Republican were part of this “regressive right”. Nonetheless I believed the Republican Party in power would allow these people a foot in the door and that that can’t happen. It’s kind of like how moderate and conservative Democrats were voted out of power in 2010 to punish Pelosi. I did vote for Trump in 2016 but that was because I viewed him as not part of that wing of the Republican Party. That was Ted Cruz. In 2018 or so I turned pretty hard against Trump and became addicted to social media and cable news. My worldview changed towards “we need to keep the more radical elements of the Democrats in line” to “maybe these people are useful and that after we win, we can turn the switch off”.

I started watching Tucker around this time. I felt his show was kind of a chicken little of all the stuff the radical left was doing or planning to do. Listening to his doom posting gave me hope that they might actually cause something so bad to happen with their fanaticism that they would permanently end the chances of the “regressive right” (which I define as the type of groups I listed in the first paragraph) taking power. Even so I was shocked at just how much hotter the political temperature had gotten. I think then as I do now that Elie Mystal, Mark Joseph Stern or Ian Milhiser are ideological fanatics but that maybe the extreme things they were saying on TV or on Twitter would actually cause some whacko/lone wolf to do something. Then once that thing happened, they could be sidelined and people like me could portray ourselves as the mediators standing between the lunatic left and everyone else. We could be the ones who tell them to, in the words of Third Eye Blind, step off that ledge. 

So my view in 2019 was that maybe some big world historical event would happen that would end once and for all the threat of the regressive right having power. You could maybe call it political millenarianism. I was pretty excited in 2020 thinking that the time had come and that the twin events of COVID-19 and BLM were “it”. COVID would cause massive unemployment and send Trump out of office and if not, that the toxic rhetoric of BLM could end up forcing Trump to abdicate and some provisional government would be formed. I was disappointed after the 2020 elections that the Democrats didn’t get as big of a majority as I wanted. Nonetheless, I hoped HR1 was the last chance to close the door on the regressive right from taking power.

Sometime in the summer of 2021 when I realized that TPTB still wouldn’t let go of COVID - my views changed. I viewed that the biggest obstacle to a normal society was not the “regressive right” but the Black Rock/WEF/Pfizer people who wanted this panic over the virus to continue. What scared/scares me is that these people are even more powerful than “Alliance Defending Freedom” or the “Ethics and Public Policy Center”. So it’s like my worldview changed from “remove Clarence Thomas from the court and an enlightened society will happen” to “confiscate Larry Fink’s money and an enlightened society will happen”. 

So having discussed my evolution in political thinking over a seventeen-year period, I feel that I can further discuss the thought processes I had. I guess you could say that I had a sort of “moderate Maoism” or “centrist Stalinism” as my worldview. It had the same thought processes of those two but that the end result was not some crackpot/utopian society but a normal one. The other difference between Mao and Stalin was that my society probably wouldn’t require atrocities to happen like it did for them. But then again, did Mao or Stalin plan initially on doing the things they did? It’s possible that they initially thought that people would naturally like their worldview and that no major violence would be needed. What if Stalin thought he was being centrist? Maybe to him, the kulaks/wreckers were the regressive ones that prevented societal flourishing. From the vantage point of it being ninety years in the past and a continent away, we can see things from a more objective angle and realize that what they did to Ukraine is easily top five worst European atrocities.

Getting back to what I discussed above, one could argue that the “state of exception” or the “Karl Popper” school of thought has a major blind spot. Like I remember my brother saying that Milo being bullied out of giving a speech at Berkeley was good because he thought Milo was a fascist. Fascists, as he put it, will always use the Trojan horse of free speech to deny free speech to everyone else. Ensuring free speech for the many requires banning free speech for the few (the fascists). I remember telling him that isn’t it possible that people could make the same argument towards communists or socialists and ban them from speaking? At that point, isn’t it basically a return to a pre-enlightenment world where all the niceties and rhetorical manipulations are gone and you’re left with various clans fighting each other (Saxon, Moors, Normans etc)? The difference now would be that the clans would be less ethnically based and more an ideological/lifestyle construct.   

I was never as much into the victim group politics we see now but at the same time I understood them. It wasn’t so much that I disagreed with their approach but that I felt their targets were petty and inconsequential. Why whine about someone accidentally culturally appropriating something and why not whine instead about Democratic controlled senates giving Republicans 12 SC nominees from 1955-1991 and Republicans not having done that since 1895. I also understood the power that being a “shamer” gives and that being shamed sucks where you have to be the one to apologize. I would get yelled at by my parents (as most kids do) and learned the basic things such as not arguing back. If you did do something wrong you would obviously need to own up and do what you had to do (admit the full truth, show sincere contrition).

I always hoped that I would get to be in a situation where I would be in the role of Mom or Dad and someone else would be me. That way I could be super understanding of them and be seen as the person who can discipline/penalize people with a purpose and that I was the “cool authority person”. That’s actually a common theme in movies like the cool parent who would get booze for their teenaged son/daughter or the RA in college who allows the kids to smoke weed. But there was also a sense I had in that if I was super nice to the person I had authority over, they would feel shame in calling me out whenever the shoe was on the other foot.

I should mention that circa 2014-2018 I was a major watcher of true crime shows. I still watch true crime, but I haven’t done it nearly as much as I used to. The themes get repetitive and you need a crazier story to be impressed. One of the things I thought of was the victim impact statements given at sentencing. I always thought that if you were the person being sentenced, listening to the victim impact statements would be a very painful experience. It’s basically your two minutes of hate although sometimes, depending on how brutal the crime committed, is deserved. I sometimes wondered what would happen if I was the one who lost someone to a crime and had to give a victim impact statement. Would I show myself as being above the fray and say something unusually compassionate?

Around 2019, I imagined myself giving an impact statement. It would allow me to say the Bill Hicks “If you’re gonna kill somebody, have some f---in’ taste” comment and how it should have been (insert someone who pissed me off). Being the person who was wronged means you have a sympathy ATM card. Your victim impact statement might also be live streamed or on TV. I could actually normalize something happening to someone. Maybe my statement or idea would go viral. If everyone was agreeing with me – then it would de-stigmatize the idea. Here’s the thing – isn’t it possible that the thing that would cause someone to say the usual “you monster” at a sentencing hearing is still there in me? The difference is that it isn’t the usual criminal like it is for everyone else but a politician or political figure. I know smolty is our resident Russian here and I kind of wonder if this was the thing that happened in ideological countries like the USSR. By that I mean where people’s minds are wired more towards hating people who wronged you politically than someone who committed a crime against you or a loved one. 

It kind of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning with the state of exception. I think most functional societies have a state of exception and that usually there is an attempt to depoliticize/depersonify them. So when society was less divided (like America circa 1975) the state of exception was anyone who breaks the law in some way shape or form and not personified in someone like Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. When you create an “Emmanuel Goldstein”, you have to be careful that things don’t get out of control.

Lastly, I think I want to end this essay by saying that all my worldview has been shaped, unfortunately, by the internet. This kind of reminds me of what Baudrillard called “hyper reality”. Like I’ve shaped my politics by the type of people in movies and how I relate them to modern politics. I’m probably not the only one. While movies have been around for a long time, would I feel the way I do if I was born a few decades prior? Maybe the great challenge of society is dealing with a generation of people who know nothing but the internet. It’s possible an act of technological hubris will solve the technology issue. Maybe it happens in the form of a deep fake video causing massive civil unrest or maybe the global technocrats attempt to end climate change causes a return to a pre-technological society. It’ll be just like starting over.

It’s interesting how a need to want to “detox from politics” is similar to the feelings I’ve had when I wanted to “detox from the internet”. In the case of politics, it was fun when it was a hobby horse but the events of the last few years would make anyone want to check out of things. The problem with me is I hate going out in public since even though I live in a fairly free state, seeing people in masks gives me the creeps. It’s like sometimes you want to live in a normal society where you can have a normal apolitical conversation (and I think that’s the end goal expressed in paragraph one to some extent). But being in public can be a reminder of the political situation in the U.S. and much of the globe. Being at home is like a safe haven from that stuff – but entertaining yourself with the internet can cause the catastrophizing hamster wheel to spin some more. Of course the very use of the word catastrophizing is hypocritical since I’ve written about all the catastrophe plans I’ve dreamed of. I guess the difference was that the fantasies I had were of catastrophes on TV or somewhere else. It was all abstract and something to eat popcorn over. The catastrophes I’ve thought about more recently (live in ze pod, eat ze bugs) are stuff I worry about being forced to encounter. Anyways, I hope you guys liked this essay and any comment, even if critical, is welcome.

[T'Chenka]

[Hammy]

This goes in forum community, not USGD. There's already enough spam here.

[freepcrusher]

This goes in forum community, not USGD. There's already enough spam here.

can you move this to USGD for me then?

[rhg2052]

Honestly, reading this makes me think that it would be very healthy for you to disconnect from online political discourse for a while. Go touch some trees, find a hobby you enjoy, consider starting therapy if you're not currently in it.

[PSOL]

Sir, this is an Arby’s.

[Hammy]

This goes in forum community, not USGD. There's already enough spam here.

can you move this to USGD for me then?

I'm not a mod, just making an observation

[smoltchanov]

Well, interesting parallels. I wouldn't call Stalin a "centrist" in any meaningful sense, but he was surely more "cautious" and even "conservative" (especially - in personal habits) then many other members of Soviet leadership (especially - his constant nemesis Trotsky). Concerning your question about hate of politicians in USSR - well, it existed, and, if such was a case,  in very passionate form. Probably - stronger then towards "ordinary criminals" (though may be less intense then to some atrocious serial killers), especially because of the reason you mentioned - political decisions in strongly ideologized countries (like USSR) usually had substantially bigger consequences for day to day life of "ordinary persons" then in (at least - until recently) less ideologized West with relatively independent judicial system. In some(and - not so rare)  cases - political decisions meant literally life or death for that "ordinary person", so - it's a rarity when people have "normal feelings" toward a politician: usually it's either a complete adoration or intense hate...