I stand here now without endorsements from any big-name politicians or celebrities.… My presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.
—Shirley Chisholm, presidential announcement, January 25, 1972
I was tired of trying to be what you thought I am. There’s a bad side—the stronger one and the one that dominated though I tried to hide it because of you—on that strong side I’m a cow, I’m a free horse that stamps at the ground, I’m a streetwalker, I’m a whore—and not a “woman of letters.” … I fled you, Eduardo, because you were killing me with that genius head of yours.… And now I’m going to spend six months on the farm, you don’t know where I’ll be, and every day I’ll bathe in the river mixing its mud with my own blessed clay…. You, at the core of your intellectualism, aren’t worth the life of a dog. I’m abandoning you, then. And I’m abandoning that group of pseudo-intellectuals that used to demand from me a vain and nervous constant exercise of false and hasty intelligence. You ruined my intelligence with yours.
—Clarice Lispector, “The Departure of the Train”
1
IN THE SECOND-TO-LAST year of Donald Trump’s first term in office, eighty percent of Americans reported feeling unsatisfied with “the nation’s campaign finance laws” (Gallup, January 2019), seventy-five percent reported feeling unsatisfied with “the nation’s efforts to deal with poverty and homelessness” (Gallup, January 2019), sixty-nine percent reported feeling unsatisfied with “the availability of affordable healthcare” (Gallup, January 2019), sixty-four percent reported feeling unsatisfied with “the quality of public education in the nation” (Gallup, January 2019), eighty-five percent reported believing that “elected officials return favors for those who contribute greatly to their campaigns” (Ipsos, January 2019), and seven out of ten Americans reported feeling angry “because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington” (NBC/WSJ, August 2019).
In fact a broad public consensus about the influence of “insiders with money and power” in politics had by the late 2010s crystalized into something of a platitude, even a banality. In November 2018, eighty percent of American midterm voters reported favoring bipartisan legislation that would “reduce the influence of big money in politics and require full disclosure of all money being raised and spent to influence our elections” (Issue One, November 2018), a figure comparable to the percentage of Americans who told researchers in the late 2010s that they believed “allowances teach children the value of money” (Harris, April 2016), “nurses are honest and have high ethical standards” (Gallup, December 2018), “corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes” (ITEP, April 2019), and “summer passes by too quickly” (KRC Research, June 2019).
Of course, the emergence of a broad public consensus about the existence of a defect in our democracy has long been understood to have little to no bearing on the actual comportment of our democracy—which after all proceeds not from the rule of the people, but from the rule of its hallucination. We are hallucinated first by the national media (who in addition to feeding back to us everything we believe in the form of “polling data,” also provides the evidentiary basis for almost everything we believe in the first place, what we know and need to know in order to reliably formulate “our will” and translate “our will” into the election of our public officials), and then we are hallucinated by the officials themselves. What results is an interplay of misunderstandings and misapprehensions attenuated by so many levels of remove that in the same two-week span a March 2001 Gallup poll showed that Americans favored, by a margin of 76–19, “new federal laws limiting the amount of money that any individual or group can contribute to the national political parties,” Mitch McConnell, the then-third-term Republican senator from Kentucky, could assert on the Senate floor that campaign finance reform “ranks right up there with static cling as a matter of concern to the American people.”
What results, in other words, is the “spooky action of the American democracy”: popular will, churning as it does inside the roiling waters of America as it is actually lived, as it is actually experienced by the sea swell of Americans whose lives are rippled by scarcity and disorder and whose memories of that scarcity are of interest to a more comfortable class only insofar as their disorder can be stripped for narrative parts, “moral clarity” and “symbolic freight,” the medical debts that can’t be paid, the paranoias of children inside failing schools jostling to hoist themselves into a higher class (often without any awareness that the levers of the meritocracy-lottery exist and can be pulled), the paranoias of the underclass (“It doesn’t matter who the president is—the FBI runs the show in this country, you didn’t know that Cole?” I was recently advised by a homeless man as he dove for cans inside the recycling bins outside my apartment in New Haven), condensing into the milk-white halls of the Hart Senate Office Building and the brightly lit studio floors at 1 CNN Center or 30 Rockefeller Plaza where sometimes it is captured, and sometimes it is distilled, converted into sources of electoral capital in the form of white papers, in the form of policy briefings, in the form of editorial notes and production memos—but more often than not it simply evaporates.
A certain disconnect intrudes.
We might begin, here, with the polls.
It is a curious feature of our representative democracy, a democracy we are routinely advised by our political class is the “greatest in the world,” and in whose distinction the goal of “spreading democracy abroad” becomes a legible objective, that any direct consultation with the national electorate regarding any issue of national importance—“who we are at war with and why,” “who we raise money from and why,” “who we direct money to and why,” “who we look out for and why”—is unheard of, beyond the pale, a vestige of Athenian optimism, nonexistent: direct consultation with the American public takes place entirely at the level of “who we empower to do the work of democracy for us,” such that who we empower to do the work of democracy for us has now become synonymous with the democratic ideal itself. From this ideal the overt mission of the national media (“to edify the general public”) and the underlying mission of the national media (“to facilitate the generation of ad revenue”) finds its most lyrical synthesis: burdened no longer by the unenviable task of instilling in the American public a conversancy with the pros and cons of proposed federal legislation, but the pros and cons of a cast of characters.
In this light the modern proceedings of the American democracy could be said to owe its greatest debt not to Athens but to Hollywood.
The cast of characters, once assembled out of a studio lineup of supporting players and rising stars (your senators and governors and state A.G.s and, if their credentials are in order, your small-town mayors), benefits all who might be said to have a “share” in the system: (1) benefits the political parties who, much like Paramount and Warner Bros. did as they transitioned out of the Silent Age and into the Golden Era, have figured out two things: that the appearance of high purpose plays just as well as high purpose itself, and well-pampered players do not “rock the boat”; (2) benefits the national media, whose readership and viewership rise and fall in lockstep with the electoral calendar; and (3) benefits, above all, the players themselves. “Public servants,” they are called, although this term can’t help but strike the modern reader as curiously vestigial, a throwback to a time when the ascent from obscurity into national-level politics did not come with such a rich and engaging menu of second acts attached, to be collected and cashed out upon the completion of one’s ascent into national prominence (or else one’s “service”): six-figure speaking engagements, seven-figure consulting gigs, eight-figure book advances, nine-figure Netflix deals.
To understand the institution of American democracy is to understand that a well-functioning corporation is one that cares for, first and foremost, all of its shareholders.
Each arm props up another arm: the political media prop up the political actors and the political influence industry (that constellation of lobbyists and interest groups and political action committees whose very existence is normalized and assented to by the industry that reports on them), the political influence industry props up the political media and the political actors (the amount of money spent by players of the game to influence the 2018 midterm elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’s OpenSecrets, totaled $5.7 billion—a $3.8 billion increase from 2008), and the political actors, ostensibly the means by which “public opinion” is faithfully and exactingly translated by public servants into “public policy”—why, they prop up the trusses of the circus tent, the main event, the larger-than-life spectacle of warring personalities and minute-by-minute accounts of palace intrigue that is itself, and neither the public policies nor the electorate whose opinions are said to give rise to them,
American democracy’s star attraction.
“Politics as stagecraft.”
From this opening credo the sullen distance between the American democracy as a “point of pride” (or even national pastime, object of obsession) for the insider class—“Democracy dies in darkness,” The Washington Post theatrically rebranded itself three and a half months after Donald Trump’s election, and three and a half years after The Washington Post became the private property of Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and today the richest man in the world, in an all-cash purchase—and the curious remoteness of its operations from the actual needs and concerns of the American people naturally distends. If democracy is the means by which “public opinion” is faithfully and exactingly negotiated by public officials into “public policy,” stagecraft is the means by which a democracy is hallucinated, assured to us not by any conditions on the ground as we can discern them but by rote repetition, whisked out of its very absence into hologram life.
In hologram life the appeal of an ideality lives on.
Platforms are erected. Lawn signs go up. Million-dollar candidates running million-dollar campaigns hit the familiar notes of hope and change before either vanishing into private events with high-dollar fundraisers; or else targeting their appeals directly to the working poor (“small dollar donors”). T-shirts are donned. Impressions of where we are as a country are bandied about. Conversations with strangers evolve into friendship or devolve into enmity over a shared hallucination that what we have to say about the issues “matters” and is of consequence to the general trajectory of the country, and on Election Day, “I Voted” stickers become potent indicators of one’s participation in civic life.
In hologram life a palpable stasis settles over the tangible conditions of a national electorate whose life expectancy, according to a 2019 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, began to “diverge” from that of “comparable countries” in 1980 and had, by 2017, either stalled or declined for three straight years—our acute despairs transformed into perennial talking points by an insider class committed not to the identification and elimination of the people’s miseries, but to the identification and elevation of the people’s favorite sons and daughters: each and every campaign being first and foremost a campaign of brand identity, an exercise in character distillation. (“The politics are horrible for the Democratic Party, that’s my judgment,” said Heidi Heitkamp, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota, to The New York Times in November 2019, about the decision by certain Democratic candidates to make American healthcare a pillar issue of the 2020 election. “We’re making the issue about our plan rather than what the president has or has not done.”)
Central to the logic of hologram life—but incidental to its actual operation—is the national electorate itself, who can be said to have a “role” but not a share in the system.
Our role, of course, is to intuit ourselves as “participants,” as “members of a self-governing class,” as “stewards in the management of our country” (we are letter-writers, we are caucus-goers, we are first and foremost agreeable players of the game), all the while functioning, for all intents and purposes, as an audience (the closest we come, the vast majority of us, to a brush with power is a place in the selfies line during a campaign stop), or else as members of a deferential class (the closest we come, a sizable minority of us, to a brush with power is arrest and imprisonment), or else as passengers on a runaway train—helplessly we watch as the skies outside slur past us like a taunt, as our sea levels rise and our summers grow hotter, as our life expectancies decay and our wages stay stagnant and our prison sentences for the poor and disenfranchised necrotize into ethereal revenge fantasies, as the bodies of the homeless are found stuck frozen to bus stops while elite white-collar pay ticks up into the millions, as a distinctly twenty-first century vision of segregation coagulates across the race and class borders where a bygone vision of integration once stood, and the ethos of America as a land of neither hope nor opportunity but of capital, of permanently entrenched capital—America that immaculate arrangement, every man for himself, all sans one and one sans all—distends into its logical conclusion.
“The deaths of our loved ones … they don’t care because it’s not the family of a Washington bureaucrat,” said Jose Leal, the father of Joseph Maciel—an Army Corporal who was killed in Afghanistan just two months shy of his twenty-first birthday, and three months shy of the War in Afghanistan’s seventeenth anniversary—to Newsweek in December 2019, following the release of a report in The Washington Post that revealed “senior U.S. officials [under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump had] failed to tell the truth about the War in Afghanistan throughout the eighteen-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” “Billions of dollars of waste with our loved ones’ blood for the gaining of what?” Maciel’s father continued.
“Nobody knows.”
In hologram life a pervasive sense that something is wrong inside the back of the train settles over, and even becomes a dominant topic of discussion among, our country’s insider class—while appreciable progress toward relieving a vast array of structural disconsolations that afflict our country’s underclass remains curiously stagnant. The word stagnancy, in fact, broadly captures so many features of America in the past twenty years, from the paralysis of our legislative bodies to the dilation of the War in Afghanistan into the longest-running war in American history: and our wide-ranging perception of the many, many stagnancies that have putrefied across this country, the soaring medical debts, the failing public school system, the capture of our electoral politics by “insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington,” lends our continued participation in electoral politics—our status as a captive entity notwithstanding—its curiously strident tenor. “Elections have consequences,” we are again and again admonished. “If you don’t vote, you don’t have any right to complain,” we are again and again admonished. (That any individual ballot in almost any national election has the functional weight of a lottery ticket becomes an embargoed suspicion so at once self-evident and yet so sacrilegious that one can’t help but detect in the feverish response quasi-religious undertones.)
We are, in short, being summoned for our most profitable purpose.
“Stardom is a matter over which only audiences have any real control,” wrote legendary movie producer and Paramount Pictures co-founder Adolph Zukor in his 1953 autobiography The Public Is Never Wrong. As audience we select the stars that we want to see, and we select the performances that we wish to elevate—our role is central to the continued endurance of a machine whose relentless production of a democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people has been shown to endure just fine with or without the people’s input, were it not for a vital ingredient that only the people can provide: the imprimatur of legitimacy. Our centrality, at last, is ceremonial. “Polling data,” in this light, have above all a serene and sobering function: they are—beneath the colorless wording, obscured inside the coded responses—among the richest and most vivid artifacts of evidence to routinely and reliably reach the insider class (who, after all, rely on polling data to assess their candidates and calibrate their performances) that there are people in the back of the train screaming out for help.
These are screams structurally inhibited from gaining an audience with the insider class—people in the back of the train typically do not advertise their GoFundMe campaigns to finance their insulin supplies as the regular hosts of podcasts en vogue with the liberal elite, or recount their clashes with Section 8 administrators as the talking heads on MSNBC—and as far as political (or cultural, or social) influence goes, they rarely become the stars that the broader public aspires to elevate. These are the screams of people whose recollections of anxiety and deficit and tragedy are routinely met with incredulity by America’s media establishment, so estranged have the latter’s experiences become from the life experiences of America’s underclass, from the life experiences of Americans who lack political power because they lack economic power because they lack institutional power, genealogical power—or else of Americans who simply do not speak the metaphors, intuit the reference points, understand the rules of the game: non-participants in the land that America’s insider class has reconstituted.
Those whose lives are not on fire tend not to be preoccupied with fire.
This thought occurred to me as I watched a group of undecided voters talk about their reactions to the recent presidential debate, as part of a focus group led by Frank Luntz, a veteran political pollster and a prototypical Washington insider if there ever was one (“Frank Luntz does not want the buffet. We are on the top floor of the Capitol Hill Club, the members-only Republican hangout a block from the Capitol…” was how a 2014 profile of Luntz in The Atlantic began)—as I listened to an undecided voter whose words were the mirror image of the words I had heard uttered again and again by the homeless and hungry out here in downtown New Haven. “I’m forty-five years old, and I was born a few weeks after Nixon resigned so my whole life has been post-Watergate, and there has not been a day—week—month—year where anybody, at any level of government, has done anything that has had a positive effect on my life. So when Senator Klobuchar and a lot of them get up there and act as though they have accomplished a great deal for us—it kind of rings hollow. I mean, what has Senator Klobuchar, what has really any of them done that has had a… I—I have friends who are Trump supporters and Bernie supporters, all across the spectrum, and I ask them all: ‘What has actually happened that has made your life any better?’ And nobody can come up with anything. Trump supporters can’t come up with anything that’s gotten any better. Nothing.”
“Obamacare,” a few members of the well-dressed focus group point out.
“Let’s go to the other one—” Luntz tries to move on, but the man presses his point.
“I work three jobs and have no health insurance, and I have a heart problem. And I have a special needs sister and seventy-year-old parents who aren’t going to live forever. This isn’t a game to me. You know—I buried a friend this week. I’ve buried so many people over the last few years. There’s good odds that somebody in this room isn’t going to live to the next election. I’m tired of the horserace—I’m tired of the ‘who’s up, who’s down’ while people die. This is supposed to be a great country. It’s not. Not anymore.” I was struck by the poetry of this encounter, by the poignancy of this man’s intrusion into a house that was not built for him, this voter whose very presence in a focus group led by Frank Luntz—a veteran political pollster who in 2016, according to The Hollywood Reporter, completed a “seven-year, multimillion-dollar renovation” to convert one of the rooms in his six-bedroom, 14,000-square-foot home into an exact replica of the Lincoln Bedroom, and an adjoining room into an exact replica of the Oval Office—suggested some residual faith in the system, some fundamental optimism in the face of impotence that somebody out there, up there, might be meaningfully shifted by his words, might be moved to listen, might be moved to care, might come alive to the fire—and I was struck, above all, by the poetry of Luntz’s response:
“And that, does—what—for who you support?”
2
I don’t want government to have a single thing on its mind other than the reduction of human suffering.
3
“Personnel is policy.”
We heard that a lot during the most recent primaries, heard it most explicitly as an object lesson in what to do about the metastasis of the administrative state (“Presidents don’t control most day-to-day enforcement decisions,” Elizabeth Warren wrote in 2016, “but they do nominate the heads of all the agencies, and these choices make all the difference”), but also implicitly in the appointments of Steve Mnuchin (Goldman alum, Secretary of the Treasury), Gary Cohn (Goldman alum, Director of the National Economic Council), Wilbur Ross (banking billionaire, Secretary of Commerce), Anthony Scaramucci (Goldman alum, White House Communications Director), and Steve Bannon (Goldman alum, White House Chief Strategist) into principal roles in the Trump administration, and the curious juxtaposition of these appointments against the populist rhetoric of Trump’s presidential campaign (“I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him [Ted Cruz]. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton,” and captured most memorably in the slogan: “Drain the swamp”) and the stridently anti-populist policies that followed.
So, yes: personnel is policy. Personnel create policy.
But who created our personnel?
It occurred to me over the course of writing this piece that what I really want to talk about is the meritocracy, and the psychology of a certain type of person who prospers in the meritocracy, and the fundamental innocence of the human soul. I revert again and again to an image of the human newborn, sobbing and blood-soaked and oblivious to her fate, oblivious to her family or lack thereof, oblivious to the conditions to which she would soon be assigned (the delivery room a clean one, the lights L.E.D.): this, and not death—not when every aspect of death, when we die and how we die, is mediated by in-game conditions—is the great equalizer, and what we all have in common. What I believe most ardently is that we are all anti-corporatists at birth. We didn’t know it, of course, we didn’t have the words to say it, but what we did have, every last one of us, was this: hearts that were pure, souls that were gentle, and spirits that were free.
I know I’m being a bit childish now, but that is the point, that is precisely the point: I am reserving my right to be a child. What has been well-documented by now is the spread of the artifacts. What has been well-documented by now is the spread of the outcomes, are the objects of excavatory interest for the archaeologists who will one day survey the fall of this country, the fall of this civilization, “in the ashes of climate change,” “in the ashes of monopoly,” in the ashes of unbridled monopolization and unbridled corporatization: of monopolies that raise wage slaves who praise as benefactors their monopoly-overseers, and corporations so idolized that public opposition to them disperses immediately into cognitive dissonance, of “corporate interest deductions” and “capital loss deductions” and “favorable tax treatments of pass-through entities,” of favorable tax treatments everywhere, of governmental provisions that err unerringly toward the generation of private revenue, and legislative priorities that err unerringly toward the degeneration of public government, of power that errs unerringly toward the side of those who already have it—what has been well-documented by now is the spread of these tumors throughout the body-politic of this country, are the immunoglobulins that have risen up and stormed the bloodstream only to find that they can’t make any indent in the pathophysiology at all, are the bulbous lymph nodes.
What has not been well-documented is the culture that gave rise to these artifacts.
What has not been well-documented are the in-game conditions that transform the infant child’s untroubled psyche into an adulthood psyche untouched by the troubles of others. I come from the perspective that what we incentivize and do not incentivize in this country matters, and what we emphasize and do not emphasize in this culture matters. The transformation of education from a tool for the refinement of one’s own skeptical faculties into a tool for self-elevation; the reflexive idolization of power in this country (powerful celebrities, powerful corporations and the thought-suppressing diversions they produce, powerful brands of high distinction that we can affix to our nametags and call our own); and, above all, the instinct for self-elevation bred by our culture in the very victors who, by virtue of their climb to the top, should have nurtured in themselves an instinct for self-suspicion all along—as it turns out, it all mattered.
Every last push and pull mattered.
4
I was not always a swamp creature of the meritocracy.
Climbing up this country was the last thing I had in mind as a child—the dreams that now smatter my upward gaze when I close my eyes were not there. The demons I have inside me today of self-ascension and self-elevation, more, higher, harder, better, faster, stronger, were not there.
Instead I mostly kept my words to myself and my gaze on the world outside, lingering my deepest sense of kinship with the weak, the soft, the slow and the small: this was my mother’s influence, first and foremost. Every adult who walks past a homeless man today without giving him a second glance was once a child rendered thunderstruck by the cruelty of God’s humor: in my case, I was nine or ten years old and in my father’s car, outraged to see my father not acknowledge a homeless man standing outside our door in the searing Houston heat and begging him to roll down the window. But he did not roll down the window—homelessness was a feature of the world that children simply didn’t have the tools to understand, my father explained to me that afternoon. When I grew up I’d know better. And he was right: by high school I no longer made eye contact with the homeless men and women I drove past on my way to school or the mall.
I was a C student in high school, and the rarest adolescent subtype of all—an extrovert who had no friends. My own incipient version of self-elevation in those days could perhaps more charitably be called self-protection (and maybe this is how all instincts toward self-elevation begin—as self-preservation): after three years of trying and failing to make a single friend in middle school, I inured myself to my fate by being something of an enfant terrible in high school, shouting out wrong answers on purpose in class, measuring my classroom performance by how many books I could get away with not reading and measuring my weekends by how many older men I could sleep with, steal away to Galveston or Montrose or a cabin in New Braunfels with.
Nothing about my life in those years strikes me now as even remotely sanity-bound, let alone college-bound. The rules of the game were all but imperceptible to me: the all-important S.A.T. score, the all-important high school transcript, the all-important after-school activities—I had not even at that point understood that a college professor was not merely a teacher who taught high school at the college level, and my own high school transcript was littered with Bs, Cs, and Ds, although I did get an A in driver’s ed. My own plan after high school was to do just that: drive, and drift—drift out of my father’s apartment, first and foremost, and from then on—drift from the arms of one job to another—drift from the cocoon of one lover to another. This is what a vision of adult life looks like from a post outside the meritocracy.
The closest I came to having an after-school activity worth manicuring into a line on the résumé was cross-country. My teammates kept their distance from me, so to speak, and my coach found me irritating, perhaps because I was truculent about preserving for myself the one extravagance that made all those long afternoon runs in the hot Houston sun worth it: music. Every afternoon I would trail behind my teammates and lose myself to what was back then considered yet another sign of my eccentricity: Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie by Alanis Morissette, my favorite C.D. at the time, whose lyrics and worldview (“You will learn to lose everything / We are temporary arrangements”) were among the only artifacts I had access to in high school that kept me in touch with the feeling that I still had a soul. From time to time the image of my father would loom too large in my mind, the weightlessness of what awaited me in the horizon after high school would grow too pungent to bear and I would abandon the run altogether, steal away onto a side street of Chimney Rock and nurse a cigarette while staring into the opaque brown waters of Brays Bayou.
To be a member of the meritocracy is to be, first and foremost, the marketing executive of your own small business—the marketing executive of your professional ambitions, the marketing executive of your institutional trajectory (from Penn State to Penn Med, from the County Board of Education to Congress), the marketing executive of where you’ve been and who you know and where the people “who you know” think you might be going. We’re all little acronyms on a stock ticker that way, and I can still remember the day my stock for the first time in my life began to rally—my mother was in the kitchen making dinner, the telephone was ringing, and I was on the computer in the living room “checking the results of something.”
Within the next hour, my mother would be struck in the face by two pieces of information that would radically amend her expectations from the next ten years of her life: her beloved father had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and her C-student son had just gotten a 1600 on the S.A.T. My father, predictably, used this score as an opportunity to beat me, hounding me that night until I collapsed into tears about how much potential I had squandered by doing so poorly in school—but the next day at school, I took my first taste of a bull market out for a test drive, ramming headlong into a conversation I’d overheard among my teammates at cross-country who were all white and wealthy and who never said a word to me and who had all gotten their S.A.T. scores back the night before. “No you did not,” I can still remember Coach Hervat saying when I told him the news. “I’ll bet you twenty dollars that you’re lying.” I never did get my twenty dollars, but what I did get that day after pulling up my College Board account on Coach Hervat’s laptop—Coach Hervat who was also my physics teacher, one of the classes I had gotten a D in—would be my first whiff of a marketing victory in the hypercompetition that is America’s “if you’ve got it, flaunt it” way of life: Coach Hervat smiled and shook his head, handed me two t-shirts from the cabinet where he kept all our team’s athletic gear, and told me he was proud of me.
If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
And I did—and I did.
Ever since then the rest of my life has been a succession of marketing victories—this essay, too, by virtue of the fact I’ve put my name on it, is first and foremost a marketing victory. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it” is the ethical anthem of America in late-stage meritocracy, and what disturbs me about this anecdote is how inoffensive it sounds, this offensive succession of events: the suggestion that one’s aptitude in anything other than pro-social behavior can reasonably be transformed from an object of personal pride into an object of public elevation and emphasis (“Tell us more,” all the colleges I applied to wanted to know, “about what a bright and shining star you are”), the cascading feedback loop created when one’s preoccupation with one’s own rise to the top is compounded by the elevation of those preoccupations away from the concerns of an underclass now further and further beneath him (“I can almost see it,” I used to think to myself in college all the time, “I can almost see what life looks like up there at the top, and my god—it’s more beautiful than I ever imagined…”), and above all, the deranged relationship this anecdote suggests about our country’s attachment to the concept of just deserts: that because I was already in possession of something shiny, it was reasonable for me to want more time in the sun, it was reasonable for me to want more light, more shine, brighter, higher, bigger, longer.
“Homelessness is a condition that the homeless bring upon themselves,” my father would tell me again and again over the years. In this light my father beating me after I had gotten a perfect score on the S.A.T. strikes me in retrospect as the sanest part of this anecdote: my father’s diseased conception of what should be celebrated and what should be punished in America targeted at last at somebody who—for the first time in his life—was no longer weaker than him.
5
Every public figure you look up to is an emotional stand-in for some less attractive person you’ve never heard of with the same personal qualities, minus the ability to see a spotlight shining onto the ground and running over to it. I’m not sure if this was always the case, but it has no choice but to be the case in America today, the America of blue checkmarks, the America of Vox and LinkedIn and content engagement metrics and “So—tell me about your platform,”
the America of late-stage meritocracy.
I include myself in this analysis.
What enabled me to publish this book was first and foremost my willingness to sand down the edges: my responsiveness to spotlights, my eagerness to participate in every last rite of self-elevation demanded of me by the gatekeepers of this industry who had the authority to elevate me (“Establishing an outstanding critical reputation is far and away the most important first step in how I intend to…” was how the first paragraph of my book proposal began)—superior writers to me with more interesting viewpoints and more original things to say will never make it past the Great Filters if they also happen to have a purer heart than me.
And they do—so they don’t. I’ve met them, and I understand why they either gave up, dropped out of the running, or never had an instinct to run at all. It is the very people we claim we wish to elevate—in popular culture, the thoughtful and the sincere; in academia and journalism, meticulous observers who are fastidious and take risks but think outside the bounds of what is likely to secure tenure; and in politics, anyone preoccupied with anything other than their own self-elevation—that the Great Filters of the Meritocracy (Hollywood, Harvard, the Hill) are calibrated and fine-tuned to smother and subdue, suppress from contention. The victors who are left are incubated by waters incubated by nothing but their own victories—and then we are all left to wonder how it all got so stagnant.
My own soul was forged inside those rancid waters.
I remember all the things I had to do in college in order to gleam and glow into a résumé at full mast by the time I reached the finish line: the caution and groupthink I internalized before taking a single step in any direction (“I had nothing to say in this paper and I just won a departmental award,” I remember saying in disbelief to a much brighter friend who, by virtue of her brilliance, her penchant for wonder and reverence with no attention paid to what she could show for it, would never qualify for academia). The fear of looking foolish that prevented me from following through with every last curiosity that wasn’t state-sanctioned, every last instinct that wasn’t state-approved (the “state” in this case being omnipresent all around us in the form of other people’s assessments, both formal and informal), and the attendant suppression of my own self-doubt and self-suspicion (“What is impostor syndrome and how can you stop it?” was my favorite TED Talk in college). The rewards I reaped for staying on message, for internalizing the fashionable critiques and cultivating the fashionable interests and for not asking any disreputable questions (“Regurgitate and get an A,” Phi Beta Kappa really ought to update its mission statement to read, I remember thinking at the ceremony).
We speak in this country about “the best person for the job” as if this phrase denotes a sound foundational premise, as if the “job” were in each instance a static position with static objectives that demand a static set of attributes, all quantifiable, and as if the “best person” for it would in each instance be the person who intuits every feature of the world as either an asset or a distraction, to be plundered for extractable resources or else discarded—people who have known since the age of fifteen or sixteen or twenty-one “how to play the game to win” at school. If an education is the means by which an unruly and undisciplined mind can be tamed and refined by the tools of empirical observation, orderly exposition, and cogent analysis toward the cultivation of reflexive inquiry and reflexive skepticism, reflexive hunger—then a meritocracy is the means by which educations can be systematically hallucinated throughout the body-politic of a country, nowhere to be found except as patches of knowledge held together by self-esteem (“The first thing I had to learn at Harvard was how to trust my own instincts,” was how the TED Talk began) and guided first and foremost by the principles of social advancement and self-elevation.
In late-stage meritocracy the imagery of education is fetishized unironically: the iron-wrought emblems of courage, strength, and national unity under fascism become, in late-stage meritocracy, the Helvetica-family poshlost of bloated author bios on the inner flaps of book covers, thought-provoking headlines on websites en vogue with the educated elite (“Is Democracy Dying?”), cable news chyrons that identify a speaker on screen for six seconds as a professor at Duke, and data-driven journalism. Ideologies are disseminated throughout the body-politic not by intellectual self-selection but by brute force: groupthink and in-group and out-group shaming (“Did you see that thing in Vox today…”)—a condition exacerbated in the twenty-first century by all the projects we’ve yet to finish at work and all the shows we’ve yet to wrap up on Netflix, the outsourcing of intellectual labor to esteemed third parties (for some, the M.I.T. economist—for others, QAnon) the understandable reaction of Americans too overwhelmed by the demands of school or work to think too long and hard about anything. Groupthink becomes at once a source of shame and de rigueur. Tweets are read. Tweets are shared. Ideas are internalized and ingested to be recited rather than understood. Systems are not questioned until it becomes fashionable to question them, at which point they are questioned hysterically to the point of self-parody.
When we talk about stagnancy we can talk about the artifacts, we can talk about careerism or the metastasis of box-checking across every level of government or the curious alignment of “the art of the possible” with a reflexive supplication to the contours drawn for us by those already in power—or we can go to the headwaters. The formalization by the meritocracy of a high-contrast social hierarchy (high-status and low-status “jobs” that translate into high-status and low-status “social positions,” high-status and low-status “net worths,” high-status and low-status neighborhoods, high-status and low-status pockets of America) create incentives and disincentives that move us away from an underclass we are all so furiously trying to escape, and toward the direction of an upper class we are all so furiously trying to impress—assimilating us into a society in which appearance reigns supreme and individual expression is at all times calibrated for winsomeness (“Hey, take a look at this cover letter will you?”), and estranging us from the original aims of education (something about curiosity was it? or self-suspicion maybe? self-refinement, perhaps?), so irrelevant are those aims to the fundamental aim of climbing up the hierarchy.
That fundamental aim, as it turns out, casts quite a long shadow, and I can still see its sullen monochrome in the way my antenna quivers at the thought of this essay being well-received, at the thought of this book’s “positive reception”: we are addicted to positive receptions, us A students, you know—we are addicted to platitudes, we are addicted to adopting into our worldviews the worldviews of the fashionably enlightened, we are addicted to assimilating ourselves into the contours of what the parameters of power have allotted to its aspirants, we are addicted to self-elevation. We pay attention to power—what power demands, what power abhors, what power keeps its distance from, what power aspires to elevate. We follow the trends, and rise with the tides, and have a gut instinct for which way the winds blow and where they blow from and when and how they shift.
And most of all: we let the wind be wind.
When we talk about stagnancy we are talking about a landscape in which the winds of power, everywhere, at all points along this unnatural topography demented and deformed by high altitude and high contrast, forever blow. Self-elevation is the instinct to pay attention to power only insofar as we look forward to being carried by it, nourished by it, lifted up by it and into places we’d more prefer to be—reputations and self-understandings we’d more prefer to boast, institutional affiliations and social positions we’d more prefer to have. What the meritocracy works tirelessly and unyieldingly to produce, then, is a uniform product in this country: the resource-minded soul. Every virtue of human life—our intellectual virtues, our moral virtues—we the resource-minded are taught from an early age to intuit as raw goods, to be extracted and refined and leveraged toward their truest and highest purpose: social and professional and reputational advancement.
Free thinkers pose a hazard for the meritocracy by virtue of their propensity to veer off program.
Free spirits tend not to play the game at all.
What the aspirants who remain in the water all have in common, then, is neither the high intelligence nor the high moral purpose so reputed to distinguish us from our less ambitious peers—but ambition itself, an interest in high status, and all the psychic deformations that tend to accompany the introduction of highly ambitious people into highly competitive social environments. Incentives, as it turns out, take a toll on the human psyche and over the course of many years and decades come not only to shape a trial-balloon generation, but all the generations that come after. “Let me be clear that this pressure comes from the media … and from the self-imposed pressure created by compensation packages that provide enormous potential rewards for directors and managers if [their] stock prices go up,” Margaret Blair, an economist and legal scholar at Vanderbilt, told Congress in 2008, during testimony that called into question the widely repeated platitude that American corporations have a legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value.
We are now several decades into an era of American history in which almost all of our public figures were selected not for their high intelligence or their high moral purpose, but for their facility at “finding the spotlight”—sieved through those same Great Filters, incubated by those same hopeful waters. What personnel is, then, is not just policy: it is a topography, psychic in character, a cognitive landscape diverse in temperament and disposition and ideology but uniformly deformed by a single common denominator, a single fundamental impulse—nurtured over the course of decades—to let power be power, and to let wind be wind. In God we trust and in platitudes we hide: in the powerful’s preferred rhetoric we conceal ourselves as the winds of power lift us higher and higher toward more reputable ground (“Of course social media reduces complicated objections into their most desiccated formulations,” we post to Twitter, “#LetsDoBetter #DemandMoreFromOurselves”).
Platitudes are the means by which we the meritocrats catch the wind, our pollen uplifted—“Look at him go,” was what college admissions officers once said about our college applications, and what our ideological compatriots will one day say about our ideological self-presentation: “Look at him, saying the right things, saying all the right things, look at him go…”—they are the means by which we can disclaim our interest in high status and influence at the same time as we embody it (“I’m just saying what I think is true,” I shrug with an aw-shucks smile, and meanwhile the world out there continues to burn). Listen to that howling wind—those Harvard lights—that good ol’ meritocratic zeal which deadens and deadens everything. How are the stagnancies of this country and the platitudes of our society mutually assured?
One answer might be this: there is no greater advertisement in the world than a flattering mirror.
Be suspicious of all that assures the ascendancy of the self.
And forgive me that I don’t have a better explanation.
Forgive me that I don’t have a better way of going about this. Forgive me that I don’t yet know—even as I write this essay—how to stop being a hypocrite, how to stop looking for spotlights, how to stop climbing upwards.
I’m still trying to climb out of something.
6
People whose lives are not on fire are structurally incentivized to not see fire.
7
When the history of the 2020 election is written—and it will be written, inevitably, by members of this country’s comfortable class, by journalists and media professionals and pollsters like Frank Luntz, by the urban and well-educated (and well-compensated, and well-situated)—the nascent conflict between corporatist and anti-corporatist Democrats during the Democratic primaries will be misremembered, its most ardent contours suppressed by people who, broadly speaking, are not incentivized to “see the fires.” Complicating this observation, however, is the remarkable extent to which people who are comfortable and well-situated have in fact been incentivized to see at least certain fires, have in fact come to find themselves in environments and social circumstances in which moral power is foundational to reputational power—and therefore a valued and cherished currency for the perpetuation of one’s own social power. From this sublime entanglement of self-interest and brotherly love the comfortable class has unconsciously evolved its own guardrails, preventing the train that it controls from skidding unambiguously into a preoccupation with self-elevation too obscene to be tenable; discretion and misdirection being, since feudal times, the name of the aristocrat’s game.
Egos are formed this way, out of ids that once roamed mad and wild and free out there in the open pasture.
The moral ego of the twenty-first-century American aristocrat tends unfailingly toward liberal-mindedness, toward progressivism, toward brotherly love. “I’ve said that we would not be getting married until everyone in this country had the right to get married,” actor Brad Pitt told comedian Ellen DeGeneres in 2011, referring to a commitment he and his then-girlfriend actress Angelina Jolie had made in solidarity with same-sex couples in America, whose relationships would not be legally recognized in all fifty states until 2015. (Pitt and Jolie later tied the knot at a château in France in 2014.) This was a “fire,” of course, the inability for Americans of my sexual orientation to marry the girlfriends and boyfriends of our choosing—and I still remember the relief and gratitude I felt the day this fire was finally put out (“‘EQUAL DIGNITY’: 5–4 Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide,” the Times’s front page blared on June 27, 2015), as well as the relief and gratitude I had felt for so many years before when I realized that so many of my friends and countrymen untouched by this particular fire nonetheless still recognized it as such.
Solidarity.
Paying attention to where and why and how suffering has burrowed itself into the human species—because suffering, like power, is insidious, is a shapeshifter, knows better than anyone how to bore itself into a stagnancy and cloak itself as an inevitability so that it can no longer be dislodged.
Human suffering is everywhere inside this species, inside this country, taken for granted as an inevitability both when it can be traced back to the misguided decisions of an individual or else the cruelty of God’s humor (homelessness, healthcare bankruptcy, voluntary deployments that end in tragedy, childhood traumas that end in solitary confinement and suicide), and when its genealogy is so generalizable across a class or racial demographic as to be demonstrably structural (homelessness, healthcare bankruptcy, voluntary deployments that end in tragedy, childhood traumas that end in solitary confinement and suicide).
Outside the gates of America’s comfortable class, America is broadly, demonstrably, and unambiguously on fire—and yet a curious thing happens when the burden of seeing these fires falls upon the shoulders of this country’s comfortable class: Certain fissures become apparent. Certain limitations intrude. Certain fires become all the rage to talk about, and all the rage to put out. So many egalitarian victories in America in the early twenty-first century can be explained this way, and so many glaring and flamboyant oversights—who we let into the castle, who we let into our fields of vision, who we let into our fields of empathy, who we let into our conceptions of what does and does not add up to a dignified life. Who we keep out there will continue to be anomalous, passed over, unspoken for, “out there”—the mid-2010s was when I, no longer the ever-resourceful and wide-eyed teenager, first began to perceive each barrier rescinded, each glass ceiling shattered as less an intrusion into the palace than an encroachment upon some final exhaustion of the palace’s good humor. Because palaces do strike back. People do get tired. The comfortable do grow bashful about chipping away at their own comforts to redistribute them downstream to someone else, and palaces do strike back—even limousine liberals have their breaking points.
And yet the redeeming thing about breaking points is how easy they can be to conceal: the many rabid efforts by the powerful on behalf of the disinherited has given the whole entire decade a hopeful cast—I, too, remember all the protests I laid on the ground for, all the open letters I signed at Yale. Which is all well and good so long as we remember just what, exactly, all these solemn efforts and good intentions and brave white banners truly amount to. If they are aligned around the suffering of others, then yes, good: hope still springs eternal. On the other hand: if the pursuit of these efforts revolves around the bright burning star of one’s own moral ego, set into orbit by the emotional demand by the comfortable to see themselves first and foremost as good people (a demand that requires more and more emotional pruning and tending to the more and more one’s comforts proliferate)—then what will continue to persist will be this curious ecological stasis:
The underclass will continue to burn.
And the comfortable will continue to cloak themselves in the self-actualizing warmth generated by the benevolent glow of their political and moral worldviews.
8
The way to keep anything in the world going is to cloak it in its opposite.
This thought occurred to me as I thought about Adolph Zukor and Jose Leal and that anonymous man in Frank Luntz’s focus group, about the screams rising up from the back of the train and the liberal-minded professionals who now make up the leadership and backbone of today’s Democratic Party—aristocracy fine-tunes itself over the course of centuries. To the extent that these screams can be heard at all, they are heard only to the extent that they can be captured, absorbed, and reconstituted by communications professionals into “perennial talking points”—moral clarity and symbolic freight. The anti-corporatist voices that have achieved national prominence in the past decade (Bernie Sanders, most famously, but also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, and in the 2020 Democratic primaries, Bill de Blasio and Julian Castro in more minor tones, Tulsi Gabbard, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang in more vibrant ones) are among the lone bulwarks to resist the otherwise near-total capture of the Democratic Party by the professional class (the list is a Who’s Who: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo)—in their name attainments are fetishized, experience is fawned over, and the fundamental sanity of a system that hinges one’s ability to survive on one’s professional and educational credentials is again and again affirmed.
And here we arrive at the final capture.
It is the meritocratic elite that finally determines who among us will have a fighting chance at an audience with the American people—who among us will be indulged with attention and showered with airtime, rendered first into supporting players and then into rising stars and at last into household names. “My ‘strategy’ is not a strategy. My ‘strategy’ is that I seek to speak as deeply, articulately, and passionately as I can [about] what I see to be the deeper truths confronting our nation, challenging our nation to live up to them.… This is not ‘strategy’—the whole strategic mind is part of the corruption of the political system. I’m not trying to figure out what to say to get people to vote for me.… I’m inviting the American people to get deep with me.”
This invitation was issued by author and activist Marianne Williamson on January 31, 2019, three days after Williamson announced her candidacy to be president of the United States, in response to a question posed to her by CNN’s John Berman about what she saw as her “path to victory here for the Democratic nomination,” and the transformation of Williamson’s invitation into its perfect opposite—the transformation of Williamson’s candidacy into a prolonged object of mockery, humiliation, and disdain by the professional class (“Why does she want to run? It’s a little tough to say. She writes on her website, ‘My campaign for the presidency is dedicated to this search for higher wisdom,’” wrote The Atlantic in December 2019, omitting from its reporting the twenty-nine policy pages—“The Anti-Poverty Plan,” “The Reparations Plan,” “Mass Incarceration”—whose comprehensive position papers make up the bulk of her website; by contrast, Joe Biden’s policy page offers fifteen sentences and twelve expandable paragraphs) is among the most poignant suppressions of a political campaign by the national media that I have seen in my lifetime.
In contrast to so many of her rival candidates who appeared to view the American presidency as the culmination of their professional self-actualization, the reasons that Williamson has cited for “why she wants to run” have in fact been obvious from the beginning: were obvious in 2011 when Williamson took the stage at an Occupy Wall Street rally to decry, among other things, the capture of our electoral politics by the “military-industrial complex,” by “corporate subsidies,” and by “tax cuts for the very rich”; were obvious in 2004, when Williamson led a national grassroots campaign to establish a cabinet-level Department of Peace during the height of the Iraq War; were obvious in 1997, when Williamson first articulated her support of economic reparations for the descendants of American slavery; and were certainly obvious by January 28, 2019, the day Williamson announced her run for the presidency: “It’s like when you look at television shows these days and you see these stories about some young person who ‘escaped’ poverty—she used to live in a car, she used to live in a homeless shelter, and now she’s going to an Ivy League school.… We are American and we need to ask ourselves, ‘Why are there so many millions of children who have to escape?’”
To examine with any depth or rigor Williamson’s decades-long exhortations against the transformation of American democracy into what she calls a “veiled aristocracy”—to examine her speeches and writings and interviews where she decries “the rise of an authoritarian corporatism that threatens to erode our country’s democracy,” or the two books she’s written on American history and politics, the first in 1997 and the second in 2019—is to encounter again and again one of the most forceful and evocative responses to the question “What do anti-corporatists want?” that I have heard in my lifetime. “This orgy of deregulation began with Ronald Reagan, it began in 1980, but no Democrat since has too much to brag about, because the truth of the matter is, while in some cases—not all, unfortunately—the Democratic Party has slowed down the orgy of deregulation, it has never made a serious effort to stop it.” This was Williamson in 2011, at the height of Occupy Wall Street. “The undue influence of money on our politics is like a cancer underlying other cancers, the issue underlying all other issues.” This was Williamson in 2014, during her unsuccessful run as an independent for Henry Waxman’s seat in California’s 33rd congressional district, now held by Ted Lieu. “Class warfare in this country is what already has been and is being waged against the middle-class and poor among us, and the prevailing system feels it has the upper hand in that war because our prison system is large enough to handle the expression of rage that inevitably arise among our most disadvantaged citizens.”
And this was Williamson in 1997.
Far from being the “vanity project” that vast segments of the American public appraised it to be after encountering depictions of Williamson in the national media, Williamson’s candidacy was in fact a natural terminus, the logical culmination of a life and career—spent outside the gates of Harvard, insulated from the many, many years behind closed doors shaking the right hands and warming up to the right donors—that, by virtue of her humanitarian résumé, has been thoroughly incentivized to “see the fires.” More so than the stability of her political commitments or the richness of her historical vision, it is Williamson’s work as a direct service provider to HIV/AIDS patients as the founder of the Los Angeles Center for Living and later Project Angel Food—her demonstrated allegiance to seeing and paying attention to and at last trying to alleviate the miseries of an otherwise underseen and underserved underclass—that lent Williamson’s candidacy its singular credibility among 2020’s crowded field of presidential candidates.
In this light: the absence of conventional artifacts of self-elevation was a “feature” rendered again and again into a “bug” by a credentials-minded national media that had no real interest in examining Williamson’s candidacy at all beyond luxuriating in its gall, its anti-intellectualism, the embarrassment of it all. It would finally be neither Williamson’s political message nor her humanitarian résumé but her career as the author of multiple spiritual self-help books that would be examined, dissected, and harvested for parts by a political media eager to produce—by way of decontextualized quotations from Williamson’s books and Twitter feed—the most sensationalized portrait of who this candidate was and what she stood for, culminating in a hazy and finally spurious account of Williamson as not only “anti-vaccine” and “anti-science” but a bona fide danger to America’s mentally ill and disabled, and even to the very HIV/AIDS patients who Williamson once served.
Despite the frequent intimations otherwise (“Oprah’s spiritual advisor” was among the early diminutives lobbed at her), Williamson’s isolation from the insider class was so total as to render not only her anti-corporatist message—but the very fact that she had a message at all—impenetrable to the American public. “Her style toggles from chummy to authoritative,” wrote Los Angeles Magazine about Williamson’s 2014 congressional run, in an early presage of how Williamson’s political ambitions would again and again be narrativized by the national media. “‘We’re doing fine. We’re cool,’ Williamson says of the American people. ‘It’s the U.S. government that is bringing us down,’ she adds. Five minutes later she raises her fist and her voice to exclaim, ‘It’s time for us to repudiate an aristocratic system!”
That the message of anti-corporatism is not a message taken seriously by either the national media or the political class is not a revelation particular to Williamson’s candidacy. And yet the arresting totality with which Williamson’s name and reputation would be obliterated by the national media—first through scorn and then through alarmism and at last through outrage (her vulnerability in this case being her affiliation with “spiritualism,” a disfavored community)—was a potent warning shot, an instructive reminder that hive minds are not to be rankled, meritocrats are there to be listened to, and palaces do strike back. “I’ll—I’ll tell you this,” The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah told Williamson in August 2019 after her closing remarks on his show was met with twelve seconds of uninterrupted applause:
“You sound a lot more sane when you’re given more than a minute to speak.”
9
Williamson’s message, of course, was never the problem.
To talk about what our government would look like rooted in its love for its people and in its love for humanity was never the problem.
To talk about what our politics would look like centered around what Shirley Chisholm called in 1972 “the needs of man’s nature”—and in particular the needs of the American underclass—was never the problem. “You know the political establishment and a lot of the media establishment fulfill the same aristocratic archetype that’s at work everywhere else in America,” Williamson said on New Hampshire Public Radio in April 2019. “It’s the idea of a small club who seems to think they’re ‘entitled,’ who seems to think they’re the ones who ‘know,’ and they’re the only ones worthy of our trust going forward.”
I thought about these words as I thought about the homeless men and women I had met in New Haven and their children—the hypercompetition that already epitomizes the meritocracy-lottery with so many people excluded from competition, and how many people the competition must continue to exclude in order for those same opportunities to be open to us, and open to our children.
It was lost on nobody I met at Yale that, as Joan Didion put it in 1991, “the condition of being rich [is] predicated upon the continued neediness of a working class.”
That the privileges we enjoyed derived principally from the logic of “outsourcing”—the outsourcing of responsibilities we’d prefer not to have (military service, for instance), labor we’d prefer not to do (cleaning toilets, for instance), and salaries we’d prefer not to take home onto the backs and shoulders of an underclass who we go on to imagine as preferring to have them. “It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous, wrong,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his landmark 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience.” But “if I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations,” Thoreau continued, “I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders.”
And therein lies the rub. We need certain fires to stay the way they are so that we can pursue the lives and careers and retirement accounts we dreamed of at Harvard. We need certain fires to stay the way they are so that we can pass down a “fighting shot at getting ahead” to our children. Stagnancy has its losers, of course, but it’s created a blazing skyful of winners—and we the winners understand what the world looks like down there, unclothed and unsheltered.
We’d prefer not to come down.
And so we imagine away the shoulders.
Do not intuit so many fires that you yourself go up in flames.
From this pragmatic and finally very human first principle talking points are written, solidarities are affirmed (“I love that,” DeGeneres had said after Brad Pitt reaffirmed his anti-marriage commitment to thunderous applause—“I love that”), and fires are hallucinated so that the biggest fires that rage across this country are never the ones that have anything to do with the screams and shoulders that hold up the sky.
What do anti-corporatists want?
We want the miseries and suffering that has burrowed itself into the stagnancies of this country—every last misery, every last stagnancy—to be recognized as such.
We want a national media that is alive and awake and attentive to the scarcities and disorders that rage across the life experiences of the most voiceless and invisible among us.
And we want elected officials who—by virtue of their support (who are they empowered by and why?), by virtue of their motivations for seeking power, by virtue of the constituencies and platitudes they do and do not cater to—have been thoroughly incentivized to see the fires.
And when that day comes: no stagnancy will crumble, no hallucination will come undone overnight, but we’ll at last have some empirical basis for our demand that hope still spring eternal. Because I, too, still insist for myself upon that childish demand—I, too, remember the hope I had felt when I read about the candidate nominated by her little brother to run for Congress in 2018 with the aid of Brand New Congress, an organization founded in the mid-2010s to recruit nontraditional candidates who would run, The New Yorker reported, “non-corporate, ‘small dollar’ campaigns.”
The candidate, The New Yorker continued, “smiled and recalled that her brother had asked her if he could send in the form and, on a lark, said O.K.”
I remember understanding that for many observers this candidate’s less than fully cutthroat rejoinder to the prospect of career elevation (“But I was also working in a restaurant! I mean, it’s one of these things where it was, like, ‘Eff it. Sure. Whatever’”) would be interpreted as a “bug,” a kink to be smoothed over and worked out by her defenders before it could be used against her by her detractors.
I remember that, for me, it was the feature.
“I’m not running ‘from the left,’” the candidate would post to Twitter on July 3, 2018.
I’m running from the bottom.
I’m running in fierce advocacy of working class Americans.
That’s my North Star.
Always has been.
Always will be.
One week earlier the candidate—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who prior to her congressional run, The Guardian reported, worked “as a waitress and bartender to help her mother, a housecleaner, fight foreclosure after her father, a small business owner, died of cancer”—had defeated Joe Crowley, a ten-term incumbent and then the fourth-highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, to become the Democratic nominee for New York’s 14th congressional district.
I don’t know how else to say it, so I’ll be a little childish again.
It gave me hope.
10
What do anti-corporatists want?
“Anti-corporatism” is a misnomer, but a necessary one.
To speak of anti-corporatism is to speak of a constellation of syndromes whose full name would be too cumbersome to say.
It is in part a recognition that the distribution of power—economic power, political power, cultural power—is now arranged aristocratically in this country. Popular culture bonds to money bonds to D.C. to produce a near-unanimous tendency to comfort the already comfortable—who are celebrities anyway, if not a thousand or so aristocrats who have managed to earn the goodwill and sympathy of the masses, whose presence in our lives bond us closer to the human family, and whose weddings and funerals routinely outshine the deaths of a thousand children in Yemen?
A pandemic of nihilism, ennui, and depression has given rise to a culture of celebrity idolization whose only consequence is to sedate the lonely and propagandize the aristocracy.
The national media—far from being a megaphone of the people—is now a megaphone of the comfortable, by the comfortable, and for the comfortable. Their bread is buttered by the elevation of stories about the already powerful—the culturally powerful, the politically powerful, the ideologically powerful—and their loudest voices are now themselves stars. Our emotional investment in pop culture—like our material investment in the stock market—is both too ubiquitous to disrupt and too obscure to contemplate, concealed by many layers of intermediaries.
The interests of the comfortable and the interests of the disinherited, existentially, are not aligned.
And yet these two investments mutually ensure that the interests of the comfortable and the interests of the disinherited will be forever intertwined, rising and falling as one.
Cultural power, political power, and economic power are now controlled by a single entity in America: the comfortable class. Divided ostensibly amongst itself into two political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, they are in fact a single organism, bonded by a common ideology: “Let’s not linger for too long on the broken. Let’s not linger for too long on the disinherited. Let’s not linger for too long on other people’s despairs.” Not lingering for too long on other people’s despairs helps us only to see our own despairs all the more clearly—so clearly that they’ll eventually become the only despairs we can recognize. (For the bourgeois left, White Fragility. For the bourgeois right, The Road to Serfdom.)
The injustices acknowledged by the comfortable class are now the only injustices that exist in the world.
The fixations of our preferred media outlets become our preferred fixations, too—and it only gets worse for the disinherited from there. Corporate consolidation of the media and corporate consolidation elsewhere together ensure that both cultural power and economic power will be forever out of reach of the underclass. The meritocracy plucks from the underclass only those plucky voices demonstrably susceptible to being conditioned into the values of the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile the two-party system in America strangles the last remaining source of power nominally available to the underclass—the Democratic Party, once the party of labor, is now the party of a multiracial, multiethnic bourgeois elite.
American culture is now held hostage by, to the point that it’s become synonymous with, an entertainment-industrial complex that thrives off the pleasures it gives to the masses—this is how all aristocracies have historically worked, on “give and take,” on “you get yours and we get ours,” on what was back then, even in the age of aristocracy, “a free and fair trade.” The American aristocracy is nourished into life by pop culture and the national media, which is itself now more consolidated than ever—who watches the news? Politically aroused people who want to stagnate inside their views. Market forces incentivize media outlets to realign, producing more stagnation. Of course we all know this.
Why is any of this a problem?
And here’s where the despair sets in.
Corporations down the line favor public policies that favor the interests of management over the interests of labor and the interests of the disinherited—let alone the interests of the environment, let alone the interests of non-participants. There is now a near-total capture of the American democracy by the comfortable class—but because so many in the American media are themselves members of the comfortable class, the American media fails to intuit the breadth of the despair. And because politicians now enjoy star treatment (a national-level politician is transformed instantly into a celebrity, and thereby instantly into a member of the elite), their interests are almost entirely—with the sole exception of those politicians who have staked their names and reputations on identifying with this diagnosis, on identifying with anti-corporatism—aligned with elite interests.
The human cost to all this?
In addition to overlooking the underclass in our own country, aristocratic interests prop up a global war machine—the defense industry resembles the financial industry in how well its preferences are represented by the preferences of the federal government, while the troops on the ground remain largely drawn from the underclass. “Corporatism” is the name of the culture that all of the above represents, and “anti-corporatism” is the name for the movement that, in the past two decades,
has come alive to stop it.