This was originally going to be more blood thirsty. Maybe it should have stayed that way; in my experience anger is a much more pleasant emotion than sadness. But I suppose I want to be honest.
I realize I write too much about my own experiences here. I do want to go beyond that but it’s hard to avoid relating things to one’s own life. In any event, this seems to me to have a greater significance, but it might not. It might just be me. It might have always just been me.
One of the colleges I work at has a shuttle system, available to students, faculty and staff. It drives you back and forth between our campus and the nearby town. I rarely use it but sometimes I catch it after having lunch in town before a late afternoon class. Pre-COVID I used to see different drivers but now, whenever I take it at least, there’s only one: a woman in her late 50s-early 60s who takes a bit of time to do anything. She and I have the exact same “conversation” every time I get on. She says “So, you just coming in from the city, right?” I always have to answer no, she looks startled and mutters something about “Thought you came in from the city” in an annoyed tone of voice, leaving me feeling as if I’ve been rude.
About two weeks ago, she discovered from my ID that I’m a professor, not a student. This seemed to delight her and she started asking questions about what I teach. The fact that it’s English seemed to please her even more. She writes poetry (I was shocked, shocked) and tried to publish a children’s book once. Awesome. She also informed me COVID isn’t really a big deal. Charming. Anyway, just yesterday I got on and, after disabusing her that I’d just come from the city, I sat down to wait for her to start the shuttle. As she moved around, she asked me a new question: “You said you teach English, right?” I was happy to be able to answer yes for a change. She snorted: “I wonder how many people today even speak English as a first language!”
I knew what was going on, but I want to come back to that later. Initially I made some blah statement about not quite understanding and hoped to just stay quiet. She immediately launched, of course, into politics: “You know AOC? She’s pretty ditzy, far as I’m concerned. Doesn’t know what she’s talking about. And you’ve got Pete Buttigieg. He’s the Secretary of Transportation [glad she cleared that up for me] He doesn’t know what he’s doing either.”
To be clear, I’ve never given this person any inkling of my views on any topic whatsoever. The sum total of my words to her consists of statements like “Good afternoon! No, actually I didn’t. Oh, that’s nice! Yes, that’s me. Thanks so much, have a great day!” And yet she felt comfortable sharing her ideological beliefs with me, in a way that demonstrated it hadn’t even crossed her mind that I wouldn’t agree with her.
On my end, it didn’t even occur to me to interrupt and inform her that I largely admire AOC (not that I’m uncritical, not happy at all about that iron dome vote) and that Pete Buttigieg is someone I have little political affinity for but for reasons having nothing to do with her views, views I find ridiculously wrong on almost every level. She did finally hit a breaking point with me, though: “You know, you’ll be lucky to live to old age before these Chinese manage to–” I got up and said I’d rather walk. She looked shocked: “Am I bothering you?” she asked. “No, but I just need to get going. Thanks,” I lied. Why didn’t I speak up sooner? Why didn’t I say “Yes, you did bother me!” I can’t say, really. I hardly ever do, and these things happen to me a lot. While I don’t believe I was ever specifically taught anything about this as a child, I picked up somewhere along the way from my mother that it’s usually not cool to make people feel uncomfortable if it is at all possible to avoid. That has become a way of life for me and, I fear, something of a hobble. Much more on that later, though.
Didn’t a part of me want to start arguing? Absolutely, but it’s just something that feels wrong to do with a stranger. A fervent socialist myself, I think this mindset can cross ideological lines and probably should. Recently I read Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 novel Stalky and Co. which concerns the high jinks of upper class young men at an elite English private school. Kipling was a high Tory, right-wing imperialist, pro-colonization and, by our standards, racist, although he’d probably dispute that last point vigorously. Yet in the book, there’s a chapter where a pompous Conservative member of parliament visits the school and literally waves the Union Jack around on stage while making a speech about patriotism. The boys, all bound for military service in India and Afghanistan, and the school’s head, a fierce patriot himself, are amused and disgusted. Behaving this way is ridiculed as immature at best and quite possibly hollow gesturing. And this is among ideological compatriots.
At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I think certain types of manners are horribly underrated today. I get the old saw about someone being polite while thinking and privately saying all sorts of awful things or whatever. The fact is though that most average people have very little to no power. Simply understanding that not everyone you encounter will have the same viewpoints might help us at least get a sense for the contexts in which we’re all forced to live.
That last bit probably sounds like a “wokeness is killing us” screed. No doubt we’ve all seen the parade of articles and etc. about how people are gathering into woke mobs (remember when it was “political correctness”?) led by shrill 19-year olds, refusing to listen to anyone who has the slightest difference of opinion, and accusing good people of being racists and misogynists for admiring George Washington. I’m not going to deny there are such people; I have encountered them and it’s definitely not pleasant.
But it’s funny: I almost never hear this flipped around. On the rare occasions when I’ve said something to a friend going off on an anti-woke rant along the lines of “Sure, but shouldn’t centrists and conservatives listen to people they disagree with, too?” the response is invariably a kind of incredulous chortle, a roll of the eyes, and a change of subject. This strikes me as odd because, while I’ve met young wokescolds, I’ve met far more people in their 40s-70s, happy to inform me that most rape vitims are asking for it, that black people are crooks and parasites, that the homeless need to be swept up and dumped somewhere, that we really need to kill everyone in Iran and China, that we need to snipe people at the border, and that kids these days think they can identify as plastic cups and what not. It’s not even close between them and the wokescolds I’ve met. Before COVID, I would meet people like this at least a couple of times a month whereas my encounters with toxic wokeness are limited to a few times a year, maybe even less since I started making a point of not socializing with most academic colleagues.
What I’ve always found is an absolute certainty in these people that their…ideas will be favorably received. When my reaction indicates a genuine coldness on my part, the response isn’t really anger, but incomprehension and a bit of hurt. There are probably multiple explanations for this. It can be disturbing to think that most white people nod along to such filth when meeting these people, but it also seems quite probable that many just don’t want to get drawn into a fight so they “agree” till the idiot finally goes away. This is kinda/sorta what I do 9 times out of 10. I don’t outright agree, but I “Mmm” and “Ahh” till the encounter ends. OK, fair enough. Unfortunately, however, I think there’s more to the way these bigoted reactionaries specifically see me as an obvious ally, just from glancing at me or speaking to me for a couple of minutes.
This is something I’ve tried to deny for quite a while but it has been encroaching more and more on me. While it feels a bit icky to run through this, here are some “appearance stats” that seem important to the subject: I haven’t worn jeans since high school, usually wearing khakis. My clothes are usually dark in color, primarily monochromatic and always, for lack of a better word, subdued. I’ve never worn a beard or allowed my facial hair to grow out much at all. I do not think of myself as neat; actually, I’m rather slovenly and have always found formal dress uncomfortable. Honestly, I hate thinking about clothes, and appearance in general, at all. That, rather than some sort of desire to look “clean cut” is responsible for my plain presentation.
And yet that plainness, coupled no doubt with my whiteness, is what I think causes so many right-wing assholes to immediately assume I’m on their side. But here’s the thing: by the culture’s standards, maybe they should be correct. Obviously, they’re not correct at all but, painful as it is for me, it seems that’s largely my problem. Also, it seems that people whose views I’m at least closer to would also prefer these right-wingers be correct in their assumptions about me, and regard the fact that they’re not as some sort of inconvenient fluke.
Looking back at my past a little, I think the reactions of people like this dimwitted shuttle driver hold the key to my long held (and incredibly foolish) disdain for radical leftism. In college and grad school, I was pointedly hostile to what I perceived as “the left.” My reasons were almost entirely cultural; summed up, my actual views were always at least on the left flank of liberalism. But culturally, I didn’t fit in with most people who espoused these views. In fact, some of them would straight out tell me I didn’t fit in.
The plain or “normie” presentation I mentioned undoubtedly played a role there, but these people actually knew me and that didn’t seem to help either. They would know, for instance, that I loved opera and classical music (from before the 20th century; you’re allowed to like atonal classical music and still be a radical), and also have a definite antiquarian streak in my literary tastes. All of this, coupled with my appearance, added up to “loser” for many of these people. On the softer end, it spelled “naive/dumb.” And for quite a few, it meant “reactionary.” “Oh, I just assumed you were a Republican” said one creep after I lamented George W. Bush’s stealing of the 2000 election. I laughed and said something like “Oh my God! Why would you think that?” He tried to laugh, too, but his answer was just to kind of look me up and down and shrug. This was far from the only time something like that happened.
That these people fancied themselves radicals and nonconformists made me stupidly associate radical politics and economics with, to some extent, their aesthetic preferences and certainly with their whole vibe. The fact that a lot of them were condescending, rude and, if not exactly sexist and homophobic, certainly (in the male of the species) pointedly masculinist tended to put me off most of what they seemed to like. The overwhelming experience I had of people who proclaimed themselves anticapitalist, leftist, radical, or whatever term was in that day, were these kinds of people, people who looked down their noses at me and thought I was a silly little gay boy, sweet but irrelevant. Thus I formed my sense of radicalism/leftism; it didn’t care about people, or even about being right. It just cared about being cool.
I now realize what I was seeing was an aestheticization of the concept of radicalism. This is a process whereby people use certain symbols and mannerisms to compensate for a lack of any genuine commitment to changing society. (It’s very similar to the way certain religious zealots will declare their ritual-practicing makes them holy, and permits them to treat others brutally without any fear of divine retribution.) When it comes to this faux-radicalism, it is a deeply academic tendency and, even when not directly connected to higher education, always takes its cues from professional academics. Within academia (at least the humanities part of it), this tendency serves a vital function for the establishment: it allows anxious, guilt-ridden intellectuals to feed off debt-ridden students, underpaid adjuncts, and exploited, overworked staff while reassuring them that they’re not sellouts. Moving beyond academia, I think it’s slightly less pernicious but comes from the same emphasis on posturing, and an iron-clad belief that, rather than any commitment to overturning society’s unjust hierarchies (above all of class, but also of race, gender, sexuality and etc.), it is one’s appearance and taste that prove one “dances to the beat of a different drummer.”
This started to dawn on me as I watched a number of people who used to sneer (or more kindly shake their heads) at my tastes and connect them to some sort of “conformity” evolve politically into “blue no matter who”-loyal Democrats. The Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 really opened my eyes, and my own turn away from liberalism was a result, partially of that campaign itself, but really much more the reaction to the campaign. I watched numerous people, people who had been prattling for years about the need for some kind of ill-defined “change” treat the first realistic chance for radical reform in a generation with indifference at best and furious hostility at worst. Within higher education, this is in part related to the fact that a genuinely socialist movement gaining power might threaten the sinecures and status of the academic aristocracy.
Still, not all these suddenly centrism-preaching radicals are academics and, in all cases, I think something much deeper is going on and it took me a long time to put my finger on it. The people claiming Medicare for All is racist/sexist/homophobic but who somehow don’t mind the records of the Clintons and Joe Biden on matters of race and gender can be laughed away pretty quickly. I think the real answer is to be found in the more lackadaisical former “nonconformists,” the ones who say “Yeah, it’s great…I guess” and seem to view the tentative revival of left politics in the US with wry detachment. What’s bothering this crowd only started to become clear to me recently but I think I have it, and it answers a lot of questions. Put quite bluntly, there are too many people showing up. Remember, for these types, radicalism/nonconformism and etc. are about appearance, they’re about an image. Part of that image requires that the circle of “radicals” be small and select; otherwise, it can’t possibly be cool. The 2015-2020 left of Bernie, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and etc. brought out too big a crowd for coolness or hipness to apply. With that many people around, there might be those who watched soap operas and listened to bubblegum pop songs; there might be all kinds of people, far too many kinds. To some of us, of course, this was thrilling. I recall a Democratic Socialists of America website image on a page trying to explain who socialism was for that captured this feeling beautifully: it depicted little cartoons of people, smiling and standing together. There were men and women, all colors and ages. Some looked like students, some wore overalls and hardhats, others were in wheelchairs. Some had unusual haircuts, and some wore suits and ties. Karl Marx stood inconspicuously in a corner.
The message of that image is inspiring to me: it tells me that people, regardless of their differences, can and should come together because they share the same interests, the interests of the toiling many against the exploiting few. In short, it says what matters is the liberty and welfare of the people, all of them, whatever they’re like and whatever they’re into. But for the faux radicals, what matters is aesthetics, and the revived left has an aesthetic they can never get behind. Far too many geeks and losers around.
This condescending connection between taste and social/political allegiance, roughly but firmly proclaiming that “dissent” meant “cool” was something that was made more explicit to me in graduate school. Previously the connection was mostly tonal; I “looked,” “sounded,” or “acted” like a Republican but little was asked about what I believed. In grad school, however, specific ideological loyalty was expected. I say “ideological” but not “political” because, looking back, it’s quite remarkable how little was said about politics. In those classrooms, during the height of the Iraq War, where everyone nodded along to favorable references to Marx and it was not unusual to see Che Guevara shirts, the few and far between political discussions amounted to declarations that George W. Bush was an idiot and that Democrats had to be tougher in standing up to such a dolt. I don’t recall anything being said about human suffering. (To be fair, I wasn’t much different politically at this point, but I was different in other ways, about which more shortly.) No, the ideological loyalty I mentioned had to do with literary theory. The slightest doubt in the vital importance of deconstructing texts and doing away with the “intentionalist fallacy” could quickly get one ostracized. And the fact that I had some doubt in this area was what set me apart, marked me, once again, as some kind of quasi-reactionary, and got me dismissive glances and subtle (or so they thought) put downs. It wasn’t politics; in politics, almost all of us were, in practice at the very least, plain vanilla normie Democrats.
Looking back, this strange mixture of a sort of hyper-political, or rather hyper-politicalesque tone with an almost apolitical action makes a great deal more sense to me. It was the ultimate aesthetisizing of politics. Being radical meant one’s theoretical approach to literature, not what one actually believed (let alone did) politically or materially. Thus my proudly “left wing” professor who griped about her maid not taking proper care of the house during the family’s trip to Paris. (You can slam this as anecdotal all you want; I swear it happened.) Somehow, by a process never explained, the political would be taken care of by the theoretical approach and, therefore, that approach could stand in for one’s politics. When specific material politics actually came up, they could be breezed through fairly quickly: “It’s just about being good, man. We need smart people in charge. Now back to Foucault!”
Another element to the “radicalism equals literary theory” mindset I found myself unable to swallow was that the theorists proudly proclaimed themselves rebels, and that was indeed their posture. But what they were rebelling against was rather hazy and, while I get rebelling without a specific cause (great movie), it’s a little hard to establish how one rebels without any form of authority. One of the few professors who would talk to me about this agreed that a lot of it was posturing but she said something like “But try to understand; this way of thinking was once really new.” This is undeniably true, but as she added with a chuckle, the last time theory was genuinely new, and the last time a conservative, traditionalist approach to literature was truly dominant was probably the 1970s.
And that was what rubbed me the wrong way: the literary theorists practiced a kind of eternal revolt against an authority they had long ago defeated. In fact, the theorists now were the authority themselves, and they were not a very liberal one. The small number of people who had any doubts about theory got made fun of, or went about in hushed tones. (One professor was once described to me, as if a very dark secret was being imparted, with the whispered words: “He’s anti theory!”) To be clear, for me it wasn’t even so much that I hated all elements of theory. Some of them are great, others seem kind of pointless, and a few I do outright disagree with. But this was not a conversation many were willing to have. You recognized the glory of theory, and how it was engaged in a liberatory struggle or you were an idiot at best, and probably worse. Theory was almost always presented, despite the iconoclastic tone, as an orthodoxy, as the sole proper way to discuss art and literature, dissent from which marked one out as a reactionary. I couldn’t help finding this hypocritical and inane, and I still feel that way.
Because, again, what exactly does one’s views on the way to interpret novels have to do with the dignity and suffering of one’s fellow human beings? As someone who loves art and spends most of my time thinking about it, I don’t consider it a comment on the importance of aesthetic matters to answer “Little to nothing.” Art and aesthetic taste are things intrinsic to being human, so they’re definitely important and worth talking about. Art’s connection to politics, to the actual and material reality of people’s lives, is a very different matter. It’s not that I believe they’re entirely disconnected, but I do consider the notion that taste or style can tell us about someone’s politics, or vice versa, to be absurd. This was particularly well put by architectural historian Henry Hope Reed in his 1959 book, The Golden City. Reed was a staunch advocate of classical architecture, and he despised modern (and postmodern; Reed wouldn’t have seen much of a difference) architectural techniques and theories. I don’t know Reed’s politics but I suspect they were reactionary or at least conservative. However, The Golden City does not declare a political persuasion and in the second chapter, titled “The Superstition of the Modern,” Reed makes a devastating point:
“Fixed in our rebel’s mind was the illusion that Modern architecture would change the world, and some declared that the ‘revolution’ in architecture would forestall political revolution, which had been so much a part of World War I. The reform aspect of the Modern is still very much with us, although its use as a counterweight to political revolution is not altogether clear.”
One does not have to share Reed’s tastes (I broadly do although he was awfully stuffy) and one certainly does not have to share what were likely his politics to admit he nailed it here. It takes a superstitious belief or, more kindly, a kind of religious faith to believe that certain types of buildings (or music, or literature, or movies, or clothing) are what will cause, prevent, mitigate or combat the conditions of human society and the power dynamics that underpin them.
To return to what all this means to me personally and, by extension, anyone without any actual power over all of this, I should note that I speculated on Reed’s politics earlier. Based on my previously expressed grievances, I shouldn’t have and I own that. I will say that my assumptions about Reed aren’t based entirely on his architectural tastes. From the obituaries and memorials that appeared after his death in 2013, it seems he consorted with conservatives and seemed to be primarily appreciated by them. There may be more to his story that I’m unaware of. In any event, it strikes me as at least possible that he didn’t care much about politics, or that his politics were determined by the kind of reception he got from different quarters. The fact is, if you strongly prefer the architecture of Grand Central Terminal to the Guggenheim Museum (and Reed did, and I do), you’re going to get a much friendlier reception in reactionary circles than what you will find in “rebellious” circles. Some people will find that bewitching.
And fuck them for falling for that. They’re doing the same thing as the faux rebels: allowing aesthetics to dictate their beliefs about the conditions of their fellow human beings. However, while the faux rebels are largely useless politically, they’re generally well-meaning and harmless, while the “I’m a reactionary because people trash talk classical music” assholes often end up going to a much darker and more dangerous place. But recognizing that travelling down this path is wrong, while true and necessary, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. I recall one of the few friends I made in grad school. He and I bonded over our shared annoyance about the pomposity of the literary theorists. “They suck the joy out of everything,” is something I remember him saying, as we both laughed with grateful recognition. But we didn’t stay friends very long. The first clue was something he said about rape. I don’t remember all the details but I didn’t like it. I tried to shrug it off; maybe he was just in a bad mood that day. Then eventually, probably inevitably, he started on minorities expecting handouts. Around that time, I had taken a cab somewhere and, while I was paying the driver, a black police officer, not initially noticing that it was a cab and that the driver was making change, somewhat rudely ordered the car to move on. When the cop left after recognizing his mistake, the driver started screaming the N-word and, of course, looked shocked when I bolted in anger. Was my “Why should they get handouts?” friend the same? Well, he was a cultured, well-read, thoughtful guy but, in my view, far too close to that cab driver for my comfort. I didn’t react to him the way I did to the driver; I wanted to preserve the friendship because I was lonely, so terribly lonely. But I couldn’t agree and I reluctantly let it be known I didn’t and never, ever would. He was startled, hurt even, we drifted apart, and I felt even lonelier.
And much of that loneliness stubbornly persists to this day. It’s for a variety of reasons, don’t get me wrong. But after that abortive shuttle ride, it did occur to me again how much easier it would be for me to be a reactionary, of some sort at least. It’s what a lot of people just seem to expect and I think some doors would open for me. They are doors, however, to disgusting, evil places, and no amount of lovely Roman columns or rousing performances of Mozart will ever make me see those places as anything other than the vile pits that they are. But that doesn’t change how much I like Roman columns or Mozart, and it shouldn’t have to. This may sound like an obvious point, but it really isn’t for some people: you don’t make the world better by quoting “Of Grammatology,” appreciating Brutalism, or rolling your own joints; if those things make you happy, that’s great but neither they, nor my Roman columns and Mozart, are how you change the world for the better. You change the world by fighting for it to be a kinder and juster place for everyone, and by trying hard to care about everyone, even if you wouldn’t have much to talk to them about.
BABOUK FOREVER! 