Philocrites’ recent post on the possibility of impending US fascism has got me thinking. Are we headed down that road? Are the Bush Administration’s recent (and coming) stumbles a dead end for that development?
Perhaps so on both accounts. But I don’t think we can stop the rise of “political fundamentalism” just by winning the next election on account of Bush screwing up. Maybe stall, but not stop.
What will we need to do to fully reverse the trend? Without a vision, the people perish. Without a compelling progressive vision for US and the world, liberals can’t expect to make any headway. We need a vision that will entice all the independent swing voters away from the lure of political fundamentalism, not because it’s wrong or bad, but because our vision is that much more alluring.
The primary thing keeping us from crafting a compelling vision is our many, many causisms. Just a quick aside to illustrate:
Recently, my county started up curbside recycling. (Finally.) And it’s fairly easy to do too. All the paper and cardboard that hasn’t directly touched food goes into the big blue bin. All the glass and tin and plastic goes into the big blue bag.
But I have to rinse all the cans and bottles first. I know there are good reasons for this: it cuts down on costs, making the program more affordable to implement. But here’s the deal: I don’t like to wash trash.
Nobody likes to wash trash. And if you perchance do, I’m going to guess it’s for one of two reasons: either you have something like obsessive-compulsive personality disorder or you get off on washing it because you are a causist.
What is a causist? A causist is someone who has “a cause,” one that they think everyone else should support, one which they’ll speak about constantly and earnestly in basic violation of human relationship. Want to know if you’re a causist? The next time or two you speak about your cause, do your friends cringe as if to say, “Oh god, here he goes again…”? (If you’ve got it really bad, though, you’ll be too possessed by your pontificating to notice the other people in the room. And make sure you try this with friends who aren’t already a part of your cause—if you have any.)
Why do causists behave like this? Oddly enough, Davidson Loehr, (whose article on fascism inspired Philocrites’ post) lays it all out quite nicely:
1. Liberals select a few token groups among the many possible: blacks, women, gays and lesbians, etc. (In Marxist terms, these are our token proletariat groups.)
2. They define these groups as “victims†(rather than, say, survivors or warriors).
3. In return, they give special attention to these token “victims†within their small circles of influence.
4. The “victims†are presumed to feel grateful for this …
5. … and the liberals feel virtuous.
(I also quoted this earlier in this post here.)
Think about some of the objections to my not wanting to wash trash. The first will likely be something like, “You’d rather not wash trash than save the environment??” Notice that we have a Victim in play here: the environment. The remaining three steps quickly follow. (Remember getting off on washing trash? That’s step number five.)
There’s another point in this objection, one that brings up the secondary reason we don’t develop a clear, compelling vision. I’m thinking here of “you’d rather not wash trash than…”
This misses the point entirely. It’s not that I’d rather not wash trash than… It’s that I’d rather not wash trash at all. Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but most other red blooded Americans don’t want to wash trash at all either.
My county’s new recycling program would be that much more successful if people didn’t have to wash their trash. As I said earlier, the program is already delightfully easy. I happen to know one of the architects of the program, and I think they’ve done an excellent job setting it up. (The paper bin even has wheels and a pull cord.) And it costs money to recycle unwashed bottles and cans, money that the county probably doesn’t have to waste, so I understand the “why” of the washing.
And yet, still, the program would be that much more successful if people wouldn’t have to wash their trash. Imagine a recycling neighbor telling a non-recycling neighbor about the program. “Yeah, you just put the paper in here and the rest of it in the bags. Oh, yeah, and you have to wash out the bottles and stuff first.” If the non-recycling neighbor was only vaguely interested in the first place, that will be just enough to put them off from shelling out the $55 bucks to start the program. It was already a push to get them to separate their trash.
“But they’re wrong!” you might say. Now we find the secondary reason we don’t have a compelling vision: we would rather be right than win. We would rather berate people for being too lazy to wash their trash (and in the process bask in our own righteousness) than go out of our way to win over the red blooded Americans next door.
In fact, we probably secretly despise those red blooded Americans next door. Not nearly righteous enough. Probably a little dim too. Don’t they understand?? Would somebody please think about the children??
Now who, in their right mind, would vote for a movement that despises you, that tells you you’re wrong and lazy and not righteous enough? Or one that tells you you’re a either a victim, a victim-hurter, or a victim-saver?
Not this cookie.
Here, here! (or something). I wholeheartedly agree with you. Liberals really, really want to be right, even if it means being impractical, ineffectual, disrespectful or intolerant.
Funny, I would say it’s the other way around–Conservatives (IMHO) really want to be right, even if it means being impractical, ineffectual, disrespectful or intolerant.
Does it really have to be one or the other?
And I’m happy to let them be as impractical, ineffectual, disrespectful, or otherwise as they want. As long as they lose. ;-)
Yeah, I would say HUMANS really want to be right, even if it means being impractical, ineffectual, disrespectful or intolerant.
Ok, so does anyone have any solutions?
That’s weird. I wash the trash for a third reason: because that’s what I was told I needed to do. I want to recycle, therefore, I rinse out the plastic and glass.
Is that a liberal or conservative response?
Sounds like a pretty compliantly liberal response. I don’t think most Americans would wash trash just because they’re told someone thinks they need to though. They need more convincing, and “you’re hurting Mother Earth” won’t do it for them.
I don’t know … the whole thing seems childish to me. If I want to do something that I feel is beneficial to myself or other people, why would I dig my heels in and stubbornly refuse to because someone says I should? It’s like not cleaning your room because your mom nags you to. Maybe mom shouldn’t nag, but maybe you should clean your room. You might actually stop losing your homework and being late for school and have clean clothes to wear if you cleaned your room. Ultimately, by not cleaning one’s room BECAUSE you’re annoyed at mom for nagging at you, you’re just cutting off your nose to spite your face.
It disturbs me that people would be so personal and petty about things that are really quite simple (but important).
If I want to do something that I feel is beneficial to myself or other people, why would I dig my heels in and stubbornly refuse to because someone says I should?
No, you should do whatever you want. The trouble is that there are tons of un-liberals who don’t see the need for recycling (and what not), and we need to be able to persuade them. Right now, they don’t think liberal programs (and what not) are important, and they find us to be a bit of a nag. So, yes, it might be childish of them, but we still need to get their votes.
I like to think of myself as a liberal fundamentalist. I’ve been quoting Nick Cohen’s column on the Iranian feminist Maryam Namazie in The Guardian on the conflict between Liberal Fundamentalists and Liberal Relativists,
Namazie is on the right side of the great intellectual struggle of our time between incompatible versions of liberalism. One follows the fine and necessary principle of tolerance, but ends up having to tolerate the oppression of women, say, or gays in foreign cultures while opposing misogyny and homophobia in its own. (Or ‘liberalism for the liberals and cannibalism for the cannibals!’ as philosopher Martin Hollis elegantly described the hypocrisy of the manoeuvre.) The alternative is to support universal human rights and believe that if the oppression of women is wrong, it is wrong everywhere.
There are fundamental and universal human rights. Oddly these days, it’s the Fundamentalist Right more inclined to defend them.
[…] 6) Washing out liberal trash. I hate washing my recycling. Which provides me an occasion to expound on why liberals suck. […]
washing trash …haha…
you have the following problems with this –
washing trash increases water use (and thats bad)
increases water waste going to the water treatment plant (and thats also bad).
no wonder california had adopted this so well. it consumes even more water that they dont have.
one step forward, two steps back… thats the liberal way.
Wow! Great post! I know I’m late to this party but I just wanted to say that I think you have successfully articulated something I’ve struggled to explain for quite some time. And “washing the trash”….what a perfect metaphor for the relationship between upper classes and lower classes! I don’t really see this as a problem of liberals so much as a problem of class anxiety: people trying to control the behavior of social classes with lesser status than their own. It’s really the same as “legislating morality.” Conservatives do it too with stupid laws that make it harder for working class people to vote or get driver’s licenses or travel or find housing or keep their children or for targeted groups to have full civil rights. The difference is that the conservatives, by being downright hateful, come off as less hypocritical and sanctimonious than liberals. Regardless of conservative or liberal, what happens is that the lower classes end up having to “wash the trash,” to ease the anxieties of the upper classes by performing costly, annoying, and/or onerous tasks that do little to acheive the stated objective. But it’s all gravy for the classes with power, who can now justify to themselves that they have done something about Problem X without having to make any difficult changes in their own lives or addressing infrastructure issues which might impact their dividends. All the trash is washed, nice and sparkly, but it is still trash.