Bonus: Digital Soldiers, Purity Tests, & Word Magic
As more of the world has gained access to mobile internet, populism, and the perception (rightly or wrongly) of government, corruption has steadily increased. But what is “populism?” How do populist ideas on both the Right and Left identify “the people” and their enemies? With the size of the online megaphone and Balkanized social media audiences, what role does the word magic of emotionally-manipulative language play in perpetuating division, even when claiming to do otherwise?Show NotesVox Eu on mobile internet, populism and government confidenceSteve Bannon’s far right “school of gladiators“ for young populists in ItalyPopulism is Morphing in Insidious Ways via The AtlanticColeman Hughes review of “How To Be An Anti-Racist” and open letter To Ibrahim X. KendiJohn McWhorter’s review of White FragilityIn Defense of Looting —one author’s controversial opinion via NPR
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Today is November 13th, 2020, and you may have noticed that yesterday, Supreme Court Justice Alito gave an ultra-partisan speech to the Federalist Society, in which he spoke about reproductive freedoms, same-sex marriage, and the unconstitutional nature of quarantine measures, and listening to experts.
This is almost too on the nose of what I want to talk about today.
Since 2016, behind the scenes, all of our current presidents' distracting and erratic attention-grabbing behavior, groups like the Federalist Society have calmly been enacting an actual conservative quiet revolution, the most recent gambit of which, of groups like the Federalist Society have calmly been enacting an actual conservative quiet revolution, the most recent gambit of which, of course,
Part 1: The Information Age I'm thinking this week about the difficulties of communication and how we live neck-deep in the information age, yet find ourselves less well-informed and more prone to being misinformed than at any time I can remember. yet find ourselves less well-informed and more prone to being
Some of this is due to the by now familiar argument that our social media feeds, including Facebook and YouTube, use algorithms designed to show us what we already like or are hooked by, so as to feed us more ads by keeping us online for longer.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm no Luddite alarmist about the dangers of technology in general, and I actually really enjoy being online and even social media.
But I was looking at a report this week on VoxEU about the widespread availability of 3G technology increasing between 2007 and 2018 from 4% to 69% of the world's population.
Now, why is 3G important, right?
All the fuss has been about 5G this year.
Well, it's not because 3G lays the groundwork for susceptibility to COVID.
Or connectivity to Bill Gates' mind-control vaccine-delivered microchips.
That's not it.
But when we get to 3G, mobile internet consumption, meaning on cell phones, becomes the norm.
And this Vox EU report cites studies showing that the more a region gains access to 3G, the more trust in government goes down and perception that the government is corrupt increases.
Of course, in some cases, there actually is government corruption.
And in these countries, there may in fact be a real censored media.
So, access to uncensored internet actually helps to uncover the truth.
But politically, mobile internet trends, much like the resurgence of Flat Earth conspiracy theories alongside anti-vax activism and increased ability for low-percentage interest groups to find one another in a global community where their collective numbers are higher,
These may include, say, furries who enjoy dressing up as favorite comic book animal characters, or those who believe they've been abducted by aliens, or that they can have quasi-orgasmic sensory experiences from listening to an array of soft sounds like the whispering or hair brushing of ASMR.
All of these groups find ways of connecting through increased internet technology.
But how does this translate to politics?
Well, the increased access to a curated, disorienting deluge of content, false claims, manipulative arguments, and conspiracy theories like the QAnon fantasy spread so successfully by digital soldiers over the last two years pushes the needle just enough toward populism.
Populism, which science fiction legend William Gibson has called the Nightmare State.
Of democracy.
But more about populism in a moment.
Part two.
No.
The election.
How do we wrap our minds around the fact that very close to half of this country, in record-breaking voter turnout, still find Donald Trump appealing?
His complete unscrupulousness and reactive, self-aggrandizing, hyperbolic, habitual dishonesty, combined with an absence of any imaginable virtue, from curiosity to insight to compassion, humility or tact, is simply staggering.
Upon coming across a villain like him in a work of fiction, many may find it hard to suspend their disbelief.
What a grotesque caricature he is of all that could go wrong in the development of a human being.
How does anyone watch him stand there on the night of the election and completely subvert the nature of our democracy with one lie after another while doing the very thing he's trying to accuse Democrats of doing?
Rig the vote.
And then go on to try to stop the count in places he is trending to lose and keep the count going in places where he's hoping he might still pull ahead.
How does anyone watch that and not become viscerally disgusted?
Do they believe him?
Or is it that they just think everyone lies and being transparent about winning at all costs by lying is somehow more honest?
Or just feels more authentic to them?
What seems doubly strange about him is his posturing as a populist figure.
Somehow the fortunate son from the New York City, from New York City, excuse me, no less, a real estate developer with a knack for losing money and stiffing his workers, somehow this guy became revered in the American heartland as a down-to-earth good Christian man of the people who tells it like it is.
Now author Sam Harris recently shared that his latest insight into Trump's appeal, after at least four years of baffled incredulity, is that perhaps the secret is that Trump offers a truly safe space for hypocrisy, a total expiation of shame, a kind of spiritual balm for those deemed deplorables who feel judged and inadequate.
Trump's patent inability to feel shame or express remorse or to be humble in the presence of experts seeking to advise him and his frank, ugly pronouncements of bigotry, misogyny, and reactive aggression led Sam Harris to refer to him as a kind of grab-them-by-the-pussy Jesus or go-back-to-your-shithole-country Jesus.
Now look, I know I'm not saying anything remotely earth-shattering, especially to our audience, but there's more.
Trump represents the re-emergence of right-wing populism in this country, so let's finally define populism and how its rise around the world relates to where we find ourselves in the waning weeks of a presidency that will live in infamy if our democracy survives it, which means if we're lucky.
In essence, populism is a worldview that posits a central conflict between the common people and the elites.
Populist leaders are usually charismatic figures and seek to be seen as the voice of the people.
In his book, What is Populism?, Jan Werner Muller, actually probably pronounced Jan Werner Muller, Says this, the people are an imagined community, a mythical and constructed subset of the whole population.
The real people, the silent majority who only the populist leader can truly speak for.
In the words of Turkish autocrat Erdogan, we are the people, who are you?
In opposition, the populists see the party in power as corrupt elites, and when they are in power, they perceive no legitimate opposition.
Populism is a form of exclusionary identity politics that threatens democracy itself.
Again, that's from What Is Populism by Jan-Werner Muller.
We live in a time when this flavor of politics is on the rise around the world.
It's a trend in recent years from India, to Brazil, to Italy, France, Austria, Poland, the Philippines, Indonesia, and yes, even these United States.
Some would argue that the more authoritarian styles of government that exist in places like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, China, North Korea, Cuba, many countries in Africa and most of the Middle East, are what populism from the left or the right can push democracies toward becoming.
Populist leaders reject career public servants and experts.
Trump, as we know, likes to label these people as representing the deep state establishment.
And they will portray their own lack of experience in government as a virtue, while their followers often see qualities like aggression, reactivity, hypocrisy, or expressions of bigotry that might be evidence of a lack of character or decency in other candidates as evidence of the populist leader's authenticity.
The style is usually to frame oneself as a strong man of the people who will solve the problems, all of which are identified as coming from whichever elite group is chosen as the scapegoat.
He's an outsider to the corrupt establishment who has simple answers that render the complexities of the world manageable and promise to reclaim the country for the citizens, the patriots, the common people with traditional values.
For the right-wing populist, the country's woes stem from immigrants.
Establishment elites, loss of national identity, too much regulation of industry in the name of environmentalism, and too many alliances with foreign countries.
They also promised to restore pride in national identity.
This identitarian, patriotic, and militant piece has shown up during the Trump presidency
And in the time that preceded it, as the rise of constitutional militias, groups like the Proud Boys, and the newly prominent faces of open white supremacy, including Richard Spencer, who you may remember is the neo-Nazi who coined the term alt-right, and Steve Bannon, Trump's one-time campaign manager and Breitbart News founder, who he described Breitbart as being the platform for the alt-right.
Bannon was in recent years involved with a legal battle to establish a school for populist leaders in Italy and was supporting overtly fascist political figures there before being arrested in the U.S.
just this past August for money laundering and mail fraud around the We Build the Wall campaign.
But if, as many have said, Trump has given what I continue to contend are a minority of racists, homophobes, anti-Semites, and misogynists permission to fly their true colors in public, then the question is, why do so many who then the question is, why do so many who surely don't share those views continue to support him?
Part 3 Woke Moralism.
The answer may have to do with left-wing populism.
Now let's be clear.
If populism on the right vilifies elites, experts, immigrants, and liberals as enemies of the true people, Populism on the left vilifies corporate capitalism, unjust power, the military, the police, and can at times frame society's ills as, in democracies, all stemming from an invisible power structure that exploits and oppresses the true people.
And in America, this worldview is paradoxically dominant on most uber-privileged college campuses.
This is a specific, intersectional, anti-racist, paradoxically academic form of left-wing populism that rubs most middle Americans wrong in the worst way by conveying and evoking both intense emotional reactivity and, to them, an unintelligible jargon that feels like elitist mindfuckery.
As described earlier, this tone may push them further toward right-wing populist leaders in reaction to the elitist academic jargon and the intense sense of moral superiority.
This is the exact opposite of what Sam Harris referred to as the safe space free of shame for those labeled
As deplorables, few things feel less persuasive or safe than the vertigo induced by language games or word magic of the jargon-laden moral discourse that insists on redefining terms and sometimes recklessly throwing around accusations and ultimatums whilst in a kind of intoxicated revolutionary fugue state that draws definitive us-and-them lines
But remains ominously vague about what happens after the misogynistic, cisheteronormative white supremacist patriarchy has been exposed and torn down.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that middle America has a similar reaction to this mode of political communication as we on the podcast have to hearing Sasha Stone incite violence against a supposed satanic Medusa of liberal politics.
We, nonetheless, know there is a world of difference between the literalized mythology of a Q fever dream collision with militia mentality and the valid aims of social justice.
Okay, hold up.
Hold up.
Because I know that many listeners will be ready to shout at their digital device that it is not our job to cater to the feelings of the most privileged people in the country.
In its more vociferous version, this shout becomes, why should we center white men?
They've been centered, they've been catered to, excuse me, for centuries and need to sit down, shut up, and grow a pair.
While I can imagine how satisfying it is to say things like that, and even to create spaces and groups, workshops, even academic experiences that experiment with intersectional rules of engagement in illuminating ways, I do think that we on the left have a responsibility to make better distinctions between what happens in those contained spaces,
And how we then communicate a political message that appeals to reason and moral empathy when outside of those spaces, more so than expecting our opponents to buy into the most radical versions of evolving intersectional analysis in order not to be deemed white supremacist misogynists.
And look, I know I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but this is the moral and intellectual superiority that erodes historical ties on the left with blue-collar unions, as well as with a lot of black, brown, and especially immigrant people who don't identify with woke rhetoric and may resent the implication that it speaks for them.
Some of whom, like Africans or Middle Easterners or Cubans in Miami, for example, came here because of their belief in the American dream.
These folks might find revolutionary, anti-capitalist overtones a big turnoff because they've seen some of where that goes.
Likewise, books like the one recently featured on many liberal news outlets called In Defense of Looting Make social justice discourse incredibly easy to stereotype as radical, extreme, or Marxist.
It also makes it easy to then frame the Democratic Party as socialist, this word of course intended by them as a synonym for communist.
I don't want to mistakenly create a false equivalency here.
You know, the notion that both sides are as bad as the other, or that the reasonable truth and path forward lies somewhere in the middle.
The middle ground between so many polarized points of view is simply not reasonable or true.
Quite often, simply not reasonable or true.
Quick examples that come to mind are creationism versus evolution, climate science versus climate denial, vaccines versus some imagined natural organic immunity, or imprisoning gays versus being in favor of gay marriage with equal rights under the law.
The dangers of right-wing populism and the excesses of social justice on the left are quite obviously not equivalent.
What I am suggesting, though, is that the angle taken by liberal darlings, especially since this year's protests like Robin DiAngelo and Ibrahim X. Kendi, a kind of psychoanalytic mystification, an almost cultish indoctrination or thought reform, is spectacularly ineffective.
The unsettling thing about their approach is that they claim to know the mind of the reader better than the reader does or can, and resistance to this claim and everything that follows only proves that it's true.
What is it that they know?
Why that if you are white, you are always, deep down, a racist.
Deny it as you might.
The choice is to either be a racist, whether you admit it or not, or be an anti-racist.
By swallowing whole whatever Kendi says.
And if you find any of that objectionable, why, it's just your white fragility per D'Angelo.
There is no way to argue against anything that they say.
This gospel is one that only a very small percentage of the population is susceptible to prostrating before.
And that percentage were probably mostly college-educated Democrat voters already or further to the left.
Even more than not actually being a way of continuing to reach the exact voters Democrats need in the very swing states Biden narrowly won, it may actively turn them off.
We need ground under our feet at the beginning of this new presidency and a rebuilding of our structures as we recover from the unnatural disaster of Hurricane Trump.
I worry that the revolutionary rhetoric of dismantling or burning down the system is not good medicine right now.
I remain confident, though, that progress can be made on social justice, but not via measures that seem counterproductive.
Part 4 Part 4 Language Games.
I'm also thinking about language games, language manipulation, and the ways social media provides the biggest megaphone ever, so that not only can a lie go halfway around the world before the truth has put on its pants, but the insidious influence of propagandistic language can be injected into how the whole demographics interpret the world.
Fake news.
Gun rights.
Pro-life.
Rigged election, white pride, drain the swamp.
In all of these cases, what the language does is stake out territory that creates a feeling of righteousness around a false or oppressive principle.
In spiritual circles, the idea that intention, accountability, Integrity, alignment, downloads, energy, or channeling are all sources of or pathways to ultimate revelatory truth that, as we point out, every week easily becomes a kind of blank slate upon which any number
of false, oppressive, delusional, or dangerous claims can be projected and elevated to enlightened status without any real process of evaluation.
Being convinced that essential oils will protect you because they are natural, that having a healthy immune system will mean that you don't need to succumb to the indignity of Western medicine.
Being pro-vaccine choice and claiming a right to spiritual sovereignty.
Seeing public health measures as muzzling or totalitarian.
All of this then starts to overlap.
With right-wing militia language that gins up anti-government sentiment, and as we have seen, bleeds over into folks like Sasha Stone and Christiane Northrup, parroting the language games of those who tried to kidnap Governor Whitmer, and who may well have some shenanigans planned before the year is over.
Look, we can argue the academic and historical basis, for example, of how words like white supremacy and racism are used, and the nuanced meaning of slogans like defund the police, and whether or not activist defenses of riots and looting have some kind of valid moral calculus, especially through a historical lens.
But again, I have a hunch that when most blue-collar voters in the middle of the country Are told that the only way to move forward and redeem themselves is to confess to and confront their internalized racism and white supremacy and start doing the deep and difficult inner work to dismantle it?
And that having any questions or objections or failing to admit it openly can only ever be evidence of white fragility?
That the police need to be defunded while their neighborhood is on fire?
None of this is likely to move them to the left politically.
Likewise, of course, we have the problem in this country of so many buying into absolutely dishonest ways of using words like socialism as a pejorative, while referring actually to basic social safety net measures present in most other capitalist democracies for decades, as if this was somehow a representation of a Kim Jong-un-style dictatorship.
I guess I just want to say by way of concluding that I think language really matters.
I think that language being amplified by social media has a powerful magic about it, a hypnotic quality if you will.
I think that being more careful and precise in our language can be a really powerful practice Especially, say, in the domain of yoga, meditation, somatics, practices that are under the umbrella of healing and experiential awareness.
Personally, I want to keep making a stand for how the way one uses language to talk about meaning, experience, values, and emotions can be filled with experiential richness while still being in realistic relationship to our existential condition.
To epistemology, or how we claim knowledge, which of course for me is always the heart of the matter, and of course to science as a way of knowing the natural world.
I find the natural world the most meaningful reference point for the sacred.
If we get the foundations right, this practice of taking language seriously Can support approaching the trickiest topics around culture, politics, history, and how we move forward with a more functional framework and tool set.
