Blind to the Blindingly Obvious

Photo: Paul R. Kane

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

— George Orwell

In a recent column in the New York Times (free article), Michelle Goldberg pondered why so many “erstwhile leftists [are] decamping to the right.” From Goldberg’s perspective, everyone from shameless bohemian Russell Brand, to Wall Street’s Enemy Number One Matt Taibbi, to pot smoking shroom munching dude-bro Joe Rogan, to “environmentalist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” seems to have slipped from “familiar” to “unrecognizable.”

Goldberg considers various explanations for these transformations. Some of the slippage, she argues, is motivated by wanting to distance from accusations of misbehavior coming from the left, causing these folks to “lurch right after a cancellation or public humiliation.” Recent attacks on Brand’s and Taibbi’s sexual behavior from decades ago, for example, or the accusations of casual racism that dogged Rogan for a few weeks (until several prominent Black voices silenced those cheap shots) have made these “former progressives” feel unwelcome among those who agree that mushrooms, abortions, and pot should be legal, but also that pronouns are sacred, burritos shouldn’t be made by white people, and that biology has nothing to do with being a man or a woman.

Sometimes, Portland is a bridge too far.

And as the left has gotten ever scoldier, Goldberg writes that the right’s embrace seems to have grown warmer, even “love-bombing recruits.” She quotes Edwin Aponte, one of the founders of the conservative magazine Compact, saying, “People go where people accept them, or are nice to them, and away from people who are mean to them.”

But Goldberg’s ultimate conclusion is that beyond being expelled by the left and embraced by the right, the real reason former progressives are jumping ship is that the left has no “compelling view of the future.” The right doesn’t need one, she argues, since their organizing idea is to keep things as they are or, even better, make them as they were in the good old days.

I think Goldberg is right about the absence of any compelling vision of the future being offered by the left, but she doesn’t seem to be aware of her own role in aborting any such vision.

Describing people who “contest conventional monikers of left and right” as “diagonalists,” Goldberg quotes scholars William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, who explain that “Diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.” “Public power,” they write, “cannot be legitimate … because the process of choosing governments is itself controlled by the powerful and is de facto illegitimate.”

Goldberg thinks this is absurd, scoffing that “such conspiratorial politics have rarely if ever led to anything but catastrophe,” but unfortunately, “that doesn’t lessen their emotional pull.” That’s a lot of disdain packed into just one sentence! First, she dismisses the very notion that the powerful control the process of choosing governments as “conspiratorial politics.” Then she blames such thinking for somehow causing catastrophe (as opposed to being a description of catastrophe already in progress), and finally, she pats us on the head with the acknowledgment that such wayward thinking has “emotional pull.”

Part of the reason the left has no hopeful vision to offer is that people like Goldberg are unable or unwilling to see the severity of the situation we face. The statement that she rejects as “conspiratorial,” catastrophe-inducing, and “emotional” is, in fact, utterly and obviously true. “The process of choosing governments is itself controlled by the powerful.”

Of course it is. Power perpetuates itself. Is this not “Politics 101”-level stuff?

An electoral process awash in dark money amounting to billions of untraced dollars coming from corporations, wealthy individuals, and foreign interests is invisible to Goldberg? Is she unaware of how the DNC sabotaged the Sanders campaign, resorting to absurdities like vague “tabulation fiasco” by “Shadow, Inc.” keeping him from getting the headlines (and momentum) his victory deserved? Is this columnist for the most powerful paper in the country ignorant as to how gerrymandering works, where incumbents (the powerful) draw absurdly distorted maps so there is virtually no chance of them losing their positions and they can therefore take ever more extreme positions without fear of common-sense repercussions from voters? Does she not see the paucity of polling places in poor neighborhoods, resulting in all-day lines of people waiting to vote while more affluent areas see no waiting at all? Is she unaware of how corporations fund the media (including her employer), and thus shape what gets reported and how? Did she somehow miss the idiocy of holding elections on work days, so people who can’t afford to take the day off are less likely to vote? Does she not know how easily wealthy entities capture the votes of senators from sparsely populated states, where a few million dollars is all it takes to sway an election and put a politician in your pocket?

George Orwell famously noted that, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Goldberg seems to be losing that struggle. Of course the process of choosing governments is controlled by the powerful. This is — perhaps literally in Goldberg’s case — blindingly obvious.

As Frank Zappa put it years ago, “Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.”

The denial of the structural impediments to serious change may be itself the greatest impediment to change. When so-called “progressives” and “elites” insist on not acknowledging what is apparent to the rest of us, they lose control of the narrative. That’s what’s happening now, much to the chagrin of people like Goldberg, whose job it is to shape that narrative.

Of what value is a vision in the land of the blind?