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New piece by Judith Butler: Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed:
Now, in one sense, her basic point is entirely correct. There clearly is a sadistic element to right-wing politics, plainly. Beyond formal concerns about limited government and the rule of law, Trump's followers have a libidinal investment in seeing illegal migrants be deported, and in seeing the "leeches" among the federal bureaucrats be exposed for their indolence. (This is not their only motivation of course, which is where the leftist analysis starts to go wrong -- people are complex, their motivations can be multifaceted and overdetermined -- but it is a motivation). To be clear, I am a follower of Trump, and part of my evidence for the thesis advanced here comes from introspection on my own psychology. It feels good to define yourself and your own as Inside, and others as Outside, and to apportion to each what is rightly due. Not many people give a rat's ass about fairness in women's sports qua fairness in women's sports; but lots of people give a rat's ass about maintaining the purity of a symbolic space which has been constructed for a distinguished population, and punishing those who would attempt to transgress these symbolic boundaries.
Fox News recently broadcast a "helicopter ride-along" to the southern border, where they accompanied border agents at night as they scanned the riverbanks for intruders. The searchlights trained on a man who was attempting to lay low in the brush; he made a run for it, but was inevitably captured. The camera lingered as he was handcuffed and put in the patrol truck, to ensure that the viewers at home got a good look at their hard-won trophy. Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself, there was something slightly nauseating about how brazenly exploitative the whole ordeal was. Your moments of desperation, packaged and commodified by a foreign mega-conglomerate and sold as entertainment.
Now, the narrative that the left constructs for themselves is that they're somehow above all this. This is false. There is plainly a sadistic element to left-wing politics as well (and, we may as well drop the qualifiers, a sadistic element to politics as such, and ultimately to life itself -- "nature is exploitation"). They too have their Inside and Outside, and they derive just as much libidinal satisfaction from exercising such distinctions; they simply use different terminology and establish the groupings using different criteria. "Legitimate targets" are pursued with an uninterestingly human amount of sadistic glee - not a diminished amount, nor an excessive amount, but simply as much as one would expect. Who could believe that they (and I include Ms. Butler here) don't enjoy the thought of deplatforming, debanking, and de-home-ing the reactionaries, neo-Nazis, and bigots? Even after the final revolution, if there is a shortage of actual reactionaries, they will simply be fabricated and the definition of "reactionary" will be expanded to include a new outgroup, as the libidinal machine demands to be fed with an unceasing series of new targets (North Korea's appropriately named "Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law" initiated a harsh crackdown on TV shows, movies, and music from South Korea -- I guess K-pop stans are all reactionaries now.)
I disagree with Ozy's old post (and, I suppose by extension, Haidt's conclusions as well) about the differences in the moral foundations of leftism and rightism. Leftists are actually operating on all the same moral dimensions that rightists are. They, too, have ingroup loyalty -- they simply define their ingroup as "BIPOC", or "allies", or "the oppressed", rather than in terms of (their own) race, (their own) religion, or (their own) nation. And they're certainly no strangers to purity either -- racial slurs become shamanic totems, anything that could be perceived as right-wing propaganda must be aggressively purged and cleansed lest it contaminate the space. I am not, of course, advancing a facile version of horseshoe theory. Plainly there are fundamental moral disagreements between right and left, otherwise there would be no impetus to distinguish between them in the first place. But some of the particular narratives that people like to tell themselves about what distinguishes them from the other side leave something to be desired.
There is an important point regarding judging Haidt, which is that Haidt's research for the most part predates SJ. A fairly-popular bulverism of SJ is that SJWs are the result of attempting to cram counterculture liberalism down the throats of six-foundationers who would previously have been conservatives; because they are not three-foundation liberals, they fleshed superficial features of CcL out to fill the three missing foundations and in so doing built an incoherent ideology.
Interesting! Mayhaps the Alt-Right (2016-2020) was three-foundationers who left the Left because they were getting too six-foundation Holier Than Thou? This would be a fantastic look at the Culture War in a longer write-up.
This is the thesis statement of "right is the new left", and beyond Scott's writeup of it, I'm pretty sure every liberal on the Motte has penned at least one comment on this subject. The people who are on the right because they are traditionalists tend not to speak so much about this, for reasons that tend to be embarrassing to them; in 50 years, the people who are progressives right now will, hopefully, speak of us in the same way, for the same reasons.
This is why I use "traditional-[classic] liberal-progressive" and not "liberal-conservative", because the latter has always kind of been a lie that basically everyone on the political spectrum has, outside of the last 15 years or so, told if not outright believed. It's also why I find Haidt's Six Foundations to be useless at describing the differences between these people; while it's still informative, it's harmful to one's understanding of the problem[1].
The seismic shift happening right now is one where liberals turn away from progressivism because they've stopped being a net positive to support. Granted, the writing was on the wall for this since the late '70s (which was, objectively, the high water mark of liberal power in the Western world[2]), though the temporary resurgence of the traditionalists in the '80s, and then the economic boom from 1992 through 2008, covered up the forming schism for a while. But now the social issues that germinated in the 1920s and 30s have all come back, all at once.
It's probably worth noting that of {care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation}, the first three have a lot to do with exercising short-term unsustainable power over reality, and the last three have a lot to do with exercising long-term sustainable power over other human beings. Therefore, combined with the kinds of people who fit into the former and latter categories, we should expect liberals to care more about the first three, and it's why traditionalists/progressives care more about the last three. Liberals are the "annoying aspie kid asking why not 5000 times a day" political philosophy writ large; traditionalists are "angry dad", progressives are "angry mom" [3].
[1] Haidt's own methodology betrays this: caremaxxing is natural for one who serves "caring" as a God. If there were a moral foundation for "atheist/Christian", and you polled the Moral Majoritarians/traditionalists of the 1980s, it's natural they would have maxed out the Jesus-meter.
[2] Free love as iconoclasm, powering society with unlimited amounts of
nuclear powerHell Energy, a general cultural attitude of shocking the squares, rejecting the country's justification for war halfway around the world, miscegenation, actual pedophilia, etc.- all gone by the mid-80s. The cultural power of those with the {loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation} moral frameworks was completely helpless in the face of all this, and it's something today's traditionalists are still butthurt about, and still insist is true of the progressives even though progressive thought inherently rejects all of those things in much the same ways (covered up by the universally-accepted untruth that liberal and progressive are synonyms).[3] Given equality, traditionalist strategy is centered around subjugating young women, progressive strategy is centered around subjugating young men, and liberal strategy is centered around devaluing the contributions of the old. It's a natural consequence of how they work.
Now you have me wondering if LSD had something to do with this. (#people who've ever used LSD) would have had a meteoric rise in the 60s and then a slow decline from then on, and we know it has permanent effects in the right direction.
Maybe- the people into LSD in the 60s would be 70-80 now, which means that they're rapidly walking out of power into their graves now, and replaced by those who were instead high on the Righteous Anger of the 1980s.
I still don't understand why the average person would take that stuff, though; the equivalent of having weird geometric CRT burn-in on my field of vision and risking breaking the pattern-matching machinery inside my head is just not something I'm interested in.
I've never taken LSD myself, and am not interested in doing so. I'm just noticing this, particularly since it implies that if one wants liberalism, "re-legalise LSD" is an unusually-important issue.
Replying to some of your points upthread:
I'm not sure I've parsed this correctly; are you identifying as a traditionalist and saying that progressives of today will think of resurgent traditionalism as "what happens when you shove alt-right liberalism down the throats of six-foundations who'd [now] have become progressives"?
This seems non-obvious to me. Certainly, care/harm and fairness/cheating are reality-based and loyalty/betrayal and authority/subversion are socially-based, but I'd put liberty/oppression as "socially-based" and sanctity/degradation as "reality-based", and am not sure what you're pointing at with "sustainable"/"unsustainable". Mind elucidating?
No.
With any luck, yes.
Let's say I'm a young man and have the ability to work for a few years and be set for life by answering a particular question. Of the set of things that could prevent me from doing that:
From the perspective of the question-answerers (or people who believe themselves temporarily-embarrassed
millionairesquestion-answerers), the last three are a damping force- a conservative force, if you will. They tend to be frustrated by damping forces simply by being someone who fancies themselves able to be correct more often than the average person, and from that perspective that'sthefttaxationparasitism.As your mindset drifts further and further away from zero-sum it becomes easier and easier to see those people that way; as your mindset drifts closer to zero-sum, enforcing those last three things are what will make sure you get yours.
The trick is that parasitism is a valid evolutionary strategy- in the eyes of the unproductive, it's no less inherently wrong or right than productivity in terms of "mechanisms that mean I won't starve to death". And people can switch from productive to unproductive in the blink of an eye, too- you can be automated into uselessness, you can lose a limb, changing conditions of reality can destroy your niche- so... how many social taxes do you think is the correct amount?
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