Hate is Hate

From Newsweek, some next level analysis of the situation in Eastern Europe this week from two familiar names: 

Steve Bannon, former advisor to ex-President Donald Trump, said Americans should support "anti-woke" Russian President Vladimir Putin because of Putin's long history of anti-LGBTQ politics.  Bannon praised Putin several hours before the Russian leader launched an invasion of Ukraine. His commendation followed accolades for Putin from Trump and other conservatives. 

"Putin ain't woke. He is anti-woke," Bannon said to private military contractor Erik Prince during the Wednesday broadcast of War Room, Bannon's show on Real America's Voice, a right-leaning media network.

"The Russian people still know which bathroom to use," Prince replied.

"They know how many, how many genders are there in Russia?" Bannon asked.

"Two," Prince answered.

"They don't have the flags, they don't have the Pride flags outside of their—" Bannon continued.

"They don't have boys swimming in girls' college swim meets," Prince responded.

"How savage. How medieval," Bannon added.

Let's divide the world into "the nice" and "the not nice."  Steve Bannon and Erik Prince are not so nice. 

The nice "play fair", they try to say what they mean and mean what they say.  They are not nihilistic and cynical.  They are sincere.  They are willing to learn and to grow and to be informed by diversity (as long as it doesn't mean they have to give anything up).  They have flaws and think bad thoughts but they do you the favor of trying to cull them from the conversation (not always successfully).  Very often they are nice because niceness is the world they want to live in-- and this does create blind spots in the most dogmatically nice (who are as a rule the least nice of "The Nice"); blind spots such as knee-jerk liberalism, extreme conventionality, a lack of questioning of authority or of the status quo.  But in discourse, they like to at least pretend to give you a modicum of respect and the benefit of the doubt on the theory that you will return the favor.  

The not nice couldn't give a shit what you think.  The nice and fair person's most carefully constructed argument, pruned of emotion and fallacies and unsupported elements as a service to you until its composition is 100% streamlined to its most coldly precise and deeply truthful form, is like a house built of graham crackers to the not nice person's brutally wielded chain saw of indifference.  The right wing pundit is the abject cynic whose single-minded motivation to win precludes any sense of shame in naked pandering to the not nice, factually indifferent, middle.

Niceness was also in scant supply on a recent Diet Soap video on the topic of whether the Left should support the Canadian trucker convoy-- actually a conversation between Ashley Frawley a contrarian Marxist academic who makes regular appearances on the UKIP friendly GB News network in Britain coming at anti-woke, anti-nannying discussions from the left-- and an expatriate Canadian trucker and twitter gadfly named (what else?) Gord.  It's an hour long but you can probably get the gist in the first ten minutes or so.  Of course, being a Diet Soap junkie, I watched the whole thing double speed.

The guest is not the interesting part of the interview.  With his rolled-up-brim straw hat, his beer, his cough and his amalgam of half-baked libertarian alt-right bro catchphrases and tics, he is a meme that gets tiresome within five double speed minutes.  His overuse of the term "thought-cancelling cliché" as a dismissive characterization of what he imagines are the criticisms of the Trucker's intentions was an apt demonstration that "thought-cancelling cliché" is the pinnacle of thought-cancelling clichés.  What kept me interested was the search for anything to glom onto about what the ostensibly leftist presenter might have wanted a skeptic to glean about her position.  Somewhere between the video player and my brain,  coherence could find no purchase.  It’s all reflexive and reactionary.  

Right wing messagers like Fox, GB News and Bannon learned long ago that if you tell people there’s nothing wrong with them for hating what they hate, they’ll follow you anywhere.  This is how they got the petit bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat-- well represented among the engine idlers on the streets of Ottawa these past few weeks.  Now they’re very successfully seducing the horseshoe left the same way.  As the video demonstrates, now the seduced are producing their own seduction.  The number of people who would prefer a better society is being consumed by the number of people who will leave you alone if you’ll leave them alone.  (You being the owners).  It’s hopeless anyway.  If you can’t beat ‘em—and apparently you can’t -- join ‘em.  The people clinging to left-right politics are just in the way.  Fortunately they can still be distracted by letting them think there are culture war battles to be fought and won.  And even if only the snowflakes can win those battles, it’s entertaining for the wisened-up freely hating masses to engage the snowflakey left in combat over them.  

I myself know what it’s like to reactively hate something that my enemies cherish and to cherish what they hate because I remember how it was back before my cerebral cortex fully formed.  I'm not a fan of the petit bourgeoisie, but I’m not against them or against the lumpenproletariat.  In fact I’m fascinated with the question of how do you motivate people who don’t have a taste for being on board with what’s good for people—who reflexively reject what could be objectively in their best interests (and work damn hard for the opposite of it-- participating in convoys, attending rallies, interrupting school board meetings, tweeting at the behest of influencers who do not have their interests at heart to impose a petty parochial concept of “freedom” on those who never asked for it, "freedom", say, for those most able to do something about it to ignore the common threat of global warming , "freedom" to restrict unflattering ideas from discussion in public school curricula or to ban behavioral precautions for the sake of public health) because it’s easier to blame their own misery on an imagined coalition of self-important coastal elites and the underclass of people darker, poorer, gayer, more foreign and more pitiful than themselves, who reject a common good because there's never been one within the memory of their lifetimes, and they don't particularly want anything in common with anyone anyway, who reject learning because their experiences with teachers and school were so bad, etc. etc.  It’s a fascinating, exhausting topic.  

Is the answer pandering (or at least acceding) to the underdeveloped tastes and interests of these people because there are so fucking many of them?  Maybe?  What kind of world do you get by doing that?  Maybe one that’s good enough for the lumpen masses even if it's ducky only for their masters.  I’m not ready to be on board with it but it holds my attention every now and then.  And anyway, it's looking less and less like I get to have a say.

~~~~~

Postscript: Three months later, I disown a lot what I've said here particularly about what I refer to as the lumpenproletariat, but I will let it stand as a monument to my own capacity in this very confusing age for reflexive reactionary rambling from time to time.