The Left's Lost Voice

 

 The contemporary, radical right-wing authoritarians who were behind the rise of the MAGA movement, with their podcasters, 4Chan, AM talk radio, and OAN, have learned more from the activist left of the 1960s and 1970s, with it consciousness raising groups and direct action campaigns, than the current left has managed to retain.

The 1990s saw a massive shift on the left away from the unapologetic activism of the '60s and '70s, which we can see in the Clinton administration's sharp rightward turn in policy and in neoformalist and neoconservative movements in literature and academe. It is out of this milieu that the current crop of establishment Democratic politicians have come. It is this rightward turn and lack of institutional memory that tanked the Harris-Walz campaign in 2024.

The problem is not, as all the pundits say, that the Dems lost the working class; rather, MAGA gained it, and not because the left's message doesn't "resonate" with them. The problem is that the left is not loud enough, forceful enough, brash enough, and unapologetic enough in our messaging. We haven't done the hard work of educating the public that the authoritarian right has done over the last 40 years, a disinformation campaign that has led to literally millions voting against their own interests again and again.

This isn't to say that we don't need to address people's real concerns, but we do need to do it in a way that represents the reality of structural injustice in the present and the promise of a more equitable future. Trade unionists at the turn of the last century knew they had to educate workers in order to build class consciousness, and feminists and other civil rights activists in the mid 20th century knew they had to constantly beat the drum and to work one-on-one in order to overpower the indoctrination of literally millennia of racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia. We need to do the same now

I'm convinced that, rather than having "strongly held beliefs, as the Supreme Court might have it, few Americans have much loyalty to any particular set of beliefs. No one who had a hard time deciding between Trump and Harris could be said to be driven by ideological commitments. Their commitments are to a narrow set of interests, whether those are the so-called "kitchen table" and "pocketbook" issues or single issues that loom large for them for whatever reason (abortion, the border, crypto). To get Americans to see their situations more broadly and more deeply requires a commitment to communicating directly and constantly and with a confidence in one's message that, for those in the nation's soft political midsection, speaks much louder than words with their hard and specific meanings.

After all, if people can believe, without any real evidence, that "the concept of a plan" beats an actual plan, they'll believe the truth, too, if they hear it over and over again in a voice of certitude and determination.

And They Dug

 by Lael Ewy

The old observation about the Grand Canyon, the craggy attraction called out by all airline pilots who happen to fly over, is that it is, after all, just a big hole in the ground.

But we are enchanted by valleys of all sorts, naming housing developments for them; historical towns; our crooners from the 1950s; and America's favorite flavor, ranch dressing, which was originally marketed by Hidden Valley as a do-it-yourself mix, combining many of our favorite things in a convenient package, excepting flags and ammunition and guns.

When we're not busy admiring nature's holes-in-the-ground, we're busy making our own, striping the east with canals, the west with reservoirs, and everywhere with basements and the foundations of buildings.

A main indication that the settlers are here to stay?

They dig a well.

Between our buildings, we dig trenches for pipes carrying in fresh water and sewers carrying away foul, holes for fence posts, power poles, streetlights. In the rural area in which I was raised, to manage the waste we shat out or washed off, we'd dig a "septic lagoon," which nature, being less fussy, would promptly fill with cattails and duckweed, inviting in snapping turtles and redwing blackbirds. Rather than being disgusted with these interlopers, I've come to admire what they make of our muck.

On the subject of reservoirs, my dad helped dig one near Cheney, Kansas, which supplies the bustling metropolis of Wichita and its dependent suburbs with water. Well, my father didn't do the actual digging; he was a diesel mechanic who worked on the heavy earth-moving equipment that other men used to get the job done, the bulldozers and backhoes and front-loaders and such.

So enchanted was he with these diggers that, later, he got a bulldozer of his own, ostensibly to help dig deeper a natural pond on the 20 acres of heaven we owned east of town. But we knew better: it's just fun to dig in the dirt, to see the progress you've made as the hole expands, as the horizon rises, as the hole forms down past layers of grass and topsoil, into the deposits of sand or clay or rock below.

We dug as kids, with trowels or Tonka trucks, with garden hoses, blasting snake holes into the ground until our mom came out and told us to stop.

But she dug, too, and still does: holes for flowers or shrubs, neither hobby exactly nor compulsion; it's just what you do, grow things, and it always involves some movement of the soil, some disruption necessitated by production.

Dad had an acre set aside for a garden of his own, vegetables, of course, and he dug long, shallow trenches for sweet corn, deeper holes for sweet potatoes and tomatoes—the last his personal favorite, the starts going in by April, each delicate plant protected by a half a plastic milk jug against the likely event of frost. We'd often have fresh fruit by June, by early July, a precociousness I've never had it together enough to maintain.

On the reservoir project, dad met many professional diggers, men schooled in holes and the vagaries of their creation. Many of these men had worked as wildcatters and pipefitters in the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, and they had colorful stories, were earthy people with an earthy set of sensibilities.

On a hot day, one of them might say "Hell's only about six-inches deep out there!" as if, with a spade, damnation might be surfaced via one, quick cut.

Other stories cut deeper. One of my dad's favorites was from an oil well worker who accidentally dropped a hammer down the hole they were drilling, potentially damaging the rig. It took many hours of work to retrieve, halting progress and costing the operation untold dollars.

When the worker had retrieved his lost hammer, the foreman said, "Great. Now, you're fired."

To this, the man, thinking quickly and with admirable presence of mind replied, "Well, I guess I won't be needing this anymore," and promptly dropped the hammer back down the hole.

My dad also tells one on himself, about almost getting fired for using one bulldozer to put the one he was working on on its side in order to access the parts he needed to repair.

But these are really stories about how management should properly treat their workers, about how they need to understand their situations and to give them the tools they need to do their work properly, ideas he took with him when he later took an executive track.

From Black English, we have the term "dig" to indicate understanding in a deep way, with the depth of our feelings, our thoughts, our souls aligned all the way down. Even today, as the kids have swirled down with "skibidi" and "rizz" rotting holes in their brains, if you ask them if they dig it, they still do.

We come by it honestly, this digging: notably, the kids continue to go down rabbit holes, something we've all learned from Lewis Carroll, and indicative of the safety many animals have always found underground: rabbits, moles, foxes, badgers, worms and grubs (of course), and even a species of owl or two. The occasional wasp or spider digs or moves in after the fact. Dens and burrows harbor the bigger digging animals; ants collectively create entire underground cities, their intricacy shaming even the complex earthworks undergirding a Paris, a New York, a Rome.

I've so far avoided the fact that when we stay in one place we put down roots, figuratively, but when a plant grows it does so literally, digging by pure force of whatever passes for a plant's will, sucking out the goodness of the very earth itself for its vibrant, verdant display.

I've avoided, too, a philosophical matter: the fact that a hole is a thing only in the absence of all that surrounds it, a thing we build only through negation. For every hole we want, there is material displaced. A pile of dirt develops, a berm, a mound, perhaps a place to play, a set of whoops over which a dirt bike might fly.

A hole is an act of mass selection.

We dig when we die, too, of course, or rather a hole is dug for us. We trust the embrace of that good earth with the remains of our most beloved, knowing that the dirt has both the power to forever remember and the heft to help us forget. It is only within this solidity that the quick may be separated from the "silent majority," a term Safire cribbed from Milton, the memento mori that there, by God's grace, dig I.

On American Values

 

by EW Wilder

Despite our protestations otherwise, most Americans have few, if any, "sincerely held beliefs." We have a very weak system of values—really, no "system" at all—and a very fluid, if not utterly arbitrary, moral code. Instead of values, we cleave to a handful of rules or, more commonly, to slogans: "family values," "pro-life." Or we rally behind abstractions like "freedom" or "liberty" without much of a concrete sense of what those things mean in the real world.

Decades of messaging from right-wing media and thinks tanks have associated being against abortion as being "pro life," an idea that, thanks to the same outlets, fails to expand beyond birth, into adulthood, or across the nation's borders. It doesn't strike the average American as a contradiction that being against abortion but in favor of the death penalty is in any way problematic; it would never occur to an American as counter to being "pro life" to support killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza in the name of avenging 1200 Israelis, or, indeed, that it might conflict with a "pro life" stance for the US military to cause the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis for no apparent reason at all.

Americans pride themselves on being "values voters," and our media are happy to use the term, yet getting those same Americans to articulate those values clearly and in detail is next to impossible. We're happy to discuss "the ideological divide," but we're rarely confronted with the notion that an ideology is a coherent system with internal consistency, one applicable across a variety of social and political situations. Note how many of the same Americans who insist upon strict biblical literalism in issues of sexuality happily sport tattoos, wear their hair however they want, eat pork and shellfish and cheeseburgers as well, dress immodestly . . . . When those who dare to identify as leftists point out this hypocrisy, it does not compute; the leftist expects a system where only a rule exists, a principle where there's only a position.

American "values," then, don't exist outside of the individual and the individual's opinions, which, while a fittingly American attitude, makes it hard to thereafter claim divine providence for them. This fact merely makes the American proclaim them more loudly, often accompanied by the threat of extreme violence.

We believe in the divinity of our opinions not because we have much evidence for that, other than a few out-of-context bible passages, but because the opinions are ours, and we believe ourselves to be a Godly people. Because we believe we're Godly, our opinions are sanctified, not the other way around.

This is why people like Donald Trump can so successfully sway so many Americans: he embodies the idea that something is good and right when the individual thinks it or does it and bad and wrong when someone else does it or thinks it, even if it's exactly the same thing. So Joe Biden's justice system (even though, in point of fact, it is independent) prosecuting Donald Trump is bad, but Donald Trump promising to weaponize the justice system against Joe Biden is good.

This is the morality of children who haven't been taught right from wrong, as we used to say at a time when that phrase was associated with actual systems of values, which underscores my point: large numbers of Americans simply don't have a moral/ethical education of any worth.

To suggest a sense of the problem, I'll note how hard it can be to teach Toulmin-style argumentation in my second-semester composition classes. Stephen Toulmin's basic idea is that for every claim we make about the world, we have a warrant that we apply to the data we gather or receive, whether through formal research or sets of informal experiences. The problem is the warrant, the reason we think the claim fits the data.

I often use a very simple exercise in which I look at the price of a gallon of gasoline from, by turns, the perspective of a consumer (a position my students would be familiar with), an economist, and an environmentalist, asking whether or not the price is too high, too low, or just right. Thus one piece of data, the price of a gallon of gas, can lead to three different claims depending on the warrant we apply.

The problem I run into is that many of my students, generally the ones who claim to be conservatives, just don't get it. They either can't move beyond the perspective of a consumer, or, as likely, they simply don't see what the warrant has to do with anything, what weird magic would lead to different claims about a single point of data.

This brief essay is not to call for any sort of "traditional values," another vague term wielded by the authoritarian right. Traditional systems are patriarchal, racist, sexist, and unjust. Rather, it's to say that the American system of governance gives us an opportunity to be explicit and intentional about discussing and implementing systems of values, and we've squandered that opportunity for the sake of gaining and maintaining political power.

So not only do we need deep study of American doctrine—not only the actual text of the US Constitution but what it means and why it was written—but of other political and ethical values systems as well, within contexts in which it is OK to question and critique them in real and practical terms.

Yes, this is "critical thinking," and it may even involve "critical race theory" and other ideas with real weight. And that is exactly the point: if we are to be a nation of laws, or even if we aspire to be a lawful people, we need to understand values and principles, the systems in which they are embedded, and how they are applied in the real world.

America and the Cult of the Gun

 

by Lael Ewy

In the United States, our attitude toward firearms is not governed by reason or by practicality: it is a matter of faith. I do not mean this figuratively; I mean it literally. Guns, as much as the LDS church or transcendentalism, form a distinctively American system of belief.

Each era of American history is demarcated by firearms of choice:

The revolutionary era had its muskets, giving us a founding myth in "the shot heard 'round the world."

The repeating rifle and the Colt revolver we associate with westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, with "how the west was won," with what brought "the law" to "the wild west." The Colt single-action six-gun became known as the "peacemaker"; American transvaluation of values begins early and continues anon.

The early-to-mid 20th century celebrated the .45 caliber automatic, the Tommy gun, the .50 caliber machine gun. Here, the associations are both with lawmen and with gangsters. Notably, the means they used to enforce their wills were the same: the gun justifies and sanctifies the action.

Since the last half of the 20th century to the present, which "side" you are on has been determined by your firearm of choice: M-16 vs. AK-47. This split characterized the Cold War, and, not ironically, came to characterize the militarized police force versus the increasingly up-armed street gangs, with cops wielding army-surplus M-16s against the AK-equipped "thugs" in the War on Drugs. These fights were venerated via cop shows like Miami Vice and through gangsta rap.

The AR-15, the "civilian" version of the army's M-16, now wielded in many mass shootings, is also worn in silhouette as a lapel pin by members of congress, as with an American flag pin and a cross, in order to signal their piety to the cult of the gun. This inter-marrying of an ancient faith and a newer religion is nothing new: witness the pagan rituals in current Christianity. Rather than being a contradiction, this is how religion has always operated throughout time, intermixing signs and symbols to suit the beliefs of the current population. Contradictions in theology or ideology are easily papered over or, as often, simply ignored.

This, then, is what we as Americans believe: guns solve problems. It defines who we are.

The US has written the right to bear arms into the Constitution, after all, not because it makes any sense to do so but because those who wrote the Constitution also genuinely believed this as well. It runs counter to reality, of course, but that only underscores my contention: evidence, proof, is immaterial in matters of faith. We believe it because we believe it.

Many of my other liberal friends have argued in our discussions on social media that the NRA has colluded with right-wing politicians to gerrymander congressional districts, assuring that pro-gun politicians remain in power. I have no reason to believe this is not true. But the existence of the NRA as a political entity is as much an effect of cult of the gun as it is a social phenomenon reinforcing its values and power. It exists in no small part because millions of Americans are its loyal supporters, tithing to fund its operations and accepting without question its "grading" system for politicians. All of those people remain free agents in the voting booth; they vote in a way that aligns with their beliefs. And for as much as polling may indicate that the majority of Americans think this or that gun restriction is a good idea, collectively, we act in a different way.

It's sort of like asking Christians if they think there ought to be restrictions on when churches can ring their bells. Many would agree there should be, but all would also agree that there are times when church bells should ring out strong and clear.

At this point, a reasonable person might be thinking "Yeah, but church bells don't kill people."

But despite—or maybe because of—our public acts of grief when there's a mass shooting, we still believe the basic tenant of the cult of the gun: guns solve problems.

It's not that we believe that guns solve problems that makes our belief a matter of faith; it's how we believe it. The self-same logic that drives the mass shooter drives those entrusted to stop mass shooters: that guns solve problems, that their ethereal noises bring forth in their wielders godlike properties. By the logic of the cult of the gun, by its values and principles, possessing a gun gives its possessor not merely the power over life and death but the right to choose who lives or who dies. It is specifically that right that is enshrined in the 2nd Amendment, that right that gun cultists insist is theirs.

When the NRA's Wayne LaPierre said that "the only thing that stops bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," nobody on the left or the right, no reporter or pundit or pol, called him out for the statement's obvious lack of logic. And that is because this statement, while noted for its extremism, aligns with our cultural values, our true faith. It fits our images of ourselves: the white-hatted gunslinger facing down the black-hatted gunslinger, the revolutionary irregular facing down the redcoat, the bandanna-ed Rambo facing down the entire Vietnamese army, the "good" cop who ruthlessly murders the "bad" criminal.

Scroll through the cable channels, the broadcast channels, the streaming services and see how often these images, or some variation of them, are repeated throughout. They form an entire genre of video games. I am not arguing that these images cause us to believe that guns cause problems, though they may reify the idea. Rather, they proliferate in our media for the same reason believers display crosses on their walls, for the same reason men spent their entire lives building cathedrals, the completion of which they would never see.

Faith systems need not make sense, after all, and humans have often promoted wars, mass murders, even genocide in their honor.

Human sacrifice didn't end with the with the beginning of written history; it merely changed forms, acquired a different set of justifications. The cult of the gun is one of ours.