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Notes -
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.
Judith Butler is putting an unbounded demand for empathy as default and defining everything else as cruelty. You can't get it with me anymore. I can see the transparent attempt at manipulation. I didn't want to be a cruel person, but if I want anything for myself I have to be. Empathy requires reciprocal return. Why should I care for people who hate me and want to see me destroyed?
Everyone pushing defect ends poorly. Beyond utility, there is virtue.
Well said. At the end of the day, acting virtuously is good in and of itself. The fact that many people don't understand this any more is a key cause of decay in our society.
I think there is a trap for the Republicans: being virtuous losers. Upstanding polite candidates like Romney are smeared as misogynistic "vulture capitalists" "who are going to put black people back in chains" and bear it with dignity. Then he loses and presumably is comforted by knowing he went high when they went low.
Rather than being virtuous, maybe the Republicans should win even if that means ratfucking the Democrats. The term "ratfucking" being invented to describe what you should do to win.
But what if an upstanding and polite civil society is the very thing I want to preserve? Ratfucking the Democrats simply means joining them in tearing it down. If I want to preserve traditional Western morality and institutions, I don't see how surrendering my political movement to a libertine billionaire with autocratic tendencies is going to help me win that fight, however skilled he may be at winning elections. In the short term it might improve a few issues because he will give some political quid pro quo pandering to actual conservatives, but I find it hard to believe surrendering a political movement to a figurehead who is hostile to its very principles is the winning play to bring about those principles.
Then the left needs to learn that their ratfucking has eroded civil society and they will suffer for it as well. Perhaps then they will want to rebuilt it.
How can you preserve something that no longer exists? Morality and institutions have to be rebuilt.
The problem is that the left has gotten addicted to hatred and oppression, and even if the right would put forth a Gandhi, he would be treated like a Hitler.
Trump's willingness to burn down institutions is a necessary harsh lesson to the left that the right won't let themselves be put into the reservation. Either the left makes institutions that the right is a part of and that they can support, or the right will keep attempting to burn them down.
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