The Cost
and the solution, or at least the start of it
Let’s put a bunch of pieces together. Here’s where we are, here’s where we’re headed, and here’s what we have to do about it.
Start with something familiar and recent, just to get oriented to the landscape: “Don’t Say Gay.” The Florida legislature passed a bill, HB 1557, that says things like this:
You can read the whole thing. It does not say that people in Florida won’t be allowed to say the word “gay” anymore. It doesn’t say anything like that. But then, instantly, we got a long round of this kind of tedious rhetorical performance:
And headlines like this, which use quotation marks without actually quoting the thing being described:
In the last week, I’ve been personally informed — in face-to-face discussion with people I know — that if you live in Florida you aren’t even allowed to say the word “gay” there, because it’s illegal. They don’t let you SAY it, Chris! It’s a CRIME!
You can tell a thousand versions of this story: invented meaning, manufactured crisis, endless Twitter signaling and garment-rending fake headlines, internalized nonsense recited by people who never think to doubt it. We go from made-up thing to made-up thing, inventing a faked-up reality and then having lots of feelings about it. But this cycle of fakery — the center of identity for the relentlessly illiberal people who currently regard themselves as Good Liberals™ — has gone from being merely tedious and pathetic to being profoundly destructive. Constantly inventing a fake world, relying for their identity and meaning on the depth of their investment in the fakery, these fucking people are killing us. Their endless traipsing through fields of symbolic-performative bullshit is becoming dangerous.
And I think we’ve reached the moment at which we need to be plain about it, often and directly. I think the time has come for sustained and aggressive rudeness (to people who will take it really badly). But more about this later.
Now, here’s the bigger piece. In a recent essay at Bari Weiss’s Substack page, the journalist Peter Savodnik describes “the emerging post-American order.” Along the way, he tries to examine these baffling Trump people, and whatever the hell people like this want. He concludes that what they want is to just destroy literally everything, running around in stupid circles and mindlessly devastating the world. Donald Trump, he explains, “went to war against the old institutions. But he had nothing to replace them with.” And so, big finish, “The new right, the identitarian left—they never say what comes after the old order, because they can’t think that far ahead, or they don’t care to. They’re just happy to watch it all burn.”
It’s remarkable to believe this in 2022. I mean, remarkable.
Consider Afghanistan. In 2001, the Taliban controlled about half of that country; but then, after 9/11, the world’s sole remaining superpower went to war there, fought the Taliban for twenty years, spent thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, and finally left in a hurry. Within a couple of weeks after the American departure, the Taliban controlled…the whole country.
So if the most powerful and expensive military in the world spends trillions of dollars and a couple of decades fighting against an army that numbers in the tens of thousands, an army without tanks or artillery or air support, the enemy being targeted by that shockingly expensive “superpower” military becomes, wait for it, more fucking powerful. We spent trillions of dollars and two decades of war making the Taliban grow.
Meanwhile, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff postured like a Swarthmore undergraduate about his desire to understand “white rage,” and the military conducted a long training stand-down to address “extremism” in the ranks, and the armed forces that can’t win any war anywhere have gone deep on the important social problem of gendered pronouns.
The American military (which I have graced with my shockingly lethal presence, by the way) cannot do the thing it exists to do, but it does a bunch of other symbolic performative signaling in place of the thing it exists to do, ‘cause it can’t do any of that real-purpose stuff. We don’t win wars, we don’t defeat enemies, we don’t — this part is the biggest disaster, at the moment — frighten enemies and deter wars, but holy shit are we rock-solid on the pronoun thing.
Or take the Sacklers. The wealthy family behind Purdue Pharma, and so behind Oxycontin, and so behind the opioid crisis and a whole lot of death and pain, just did a Zoom thing so people could be mad at them for the wave of death they unleashed on the country. Sorry ‘bout that!
But the enormity of the American opioid crisis has long roots in the increasingly obvious regulatory capture of the FDA, the really obvious credulousness of American doctors who are turning into drug marketers, and the corruption of medicine as an industry. Revisit this earlier post for more. We’re mad at the Sacklers, who inflicted a deadly and addictive drug on the world. If only we’d had some kind of intermediary who could stand in between patients and pharmaceutical companies to make sure people aren’t harmed by the drugs they take, right? The Sacklers put opioids into people, those bastards.
The DOD doesn’t win wars, the FDA doesn’t protect us from dangerous pharmaceutical products, the CDC doesn’t prevent disease, the NIH doesn’t make Americans healthier, and children in public schools have suffered devastating learning losses, but anyway, what are these Trump people so mad about? Do they just want to burn everything down?
A country and a society with failing institutions, with extremely expensive industries and organizations that DO NOT DO THE THING THEY EXIST TO DO, exclamation point double-underlining exclamation point, has a bunch of citizens who are, like, mad or something. Weird.
Anyway, nobody said waning.
LOL! YOLO! Whatevs! We said it was 95% effective, couldn’t you just laugh?
So what the angry Trump people want, to answer the question, is this:
They want institutions to work.
They want the Bureau of Widget Production to produce widgets; they want the “old order,” which journalists think they want to burn down for no reason, to do its fucking job. They want the military to win wars or deter them, they want the FDA to prevent the distribution of harmful pharmaceutical products, they want the CDC to control disease and not impose performative measures that cause more harm than they prevent. Etcetera, you motherfuckers. Why are parents angry at school boards in 2022? It must be because they’re terrorists. For no reason.
The symbolic-performative class relentlessly classifies this desire for ordinary functional competence as fascist yearning, and produces a weekly book about literally everything being literally the new literally Hitler. LITERALLY! And if you disagree that everyone who disagrees with me is just like Adolf Hitler, you must be anti-intellectual.
The kind of dolts who, in their Canadian version, declared a national emergency and started freezing bank accounts because people disagreed with them and honked their horns — these are the people who warn that we’re on the precipice of a dangerous new authoritarianism, which we can only prevent by having the government control what people are allowed to say and write.
So:
1.) People who organize their entire social and political understanding of the world around symbolic performance
2.) While leading and working in institutions that increasingly do not work, failing at all of their supposed purposes
3.) Are pretty sure that everyone who is angry at them must be fascists
A “cognitive elite,” cough cough, spread across multiple and linked status groups (academia, media, government), is increasingly disconnected from the real, increasingly unable to attain the real through the fog of its endless recourse to symbolic performance, increasingly unable to do anything useful, and increasingly certain that anyone who disagrees with them or criticizes them must just be a very bad person who’s angry for no reason and shouldn’t be allowed to speak.
The real-world pain this set of circumstances is causing is becoming much too serious for anyone to be nice about it. They have earned hate, and they should get it.
Thinking about this a couple of hours after posting it, I find myself wondering if I've been too dismissive of the claims about Florida becoming harshly anti-gay. Anyone who has ever spent time on the beach in Florida knows that the whole state is a grim and sexless theocratic hellhole, a puritanical reversion to the 16th century. Miami is, we often hear, the new Riyadh. Indeed, I'm told that there are places in Key West where you can often hear gay men moaning – presumably because they are in pain. From the repression.
Thank you for this. I used to work in D party organizing, went to grad school for public policy, and went into these academic type institutions that just fail to do anything meaningful (generally) and in the last five years.. especially the last year.
Have turned into hate manufacturing institutions… defying the very reasons and hopes I had by taking that professional path.