A taxonomy of hatred

I realized while reading Jesus and John Wayne How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez that I have a perhaps unconventional slant on this book. The book is a meticulously researched and compassionately constructed taxonomy of the individuals and social movements which throughout my lifetime have tried to exclude me from the human family. I feel these people.

Du Mez contends:

Today, what it means to be a ‘conservative evangelical’ is as much about culture as it is about theology. This is readily apparent in the heroes they celebrate”

That would be the actor/imitation cowboy/phony warrior John Wayne, on through Oliver North of Iran-Contra notoriety, James Dobson the professional homophobe, Jerry Falwell the rightwing conservative organizer, Pat Robertson the outspoken fascist -- and probably more significant to most ordinary white evangelical Christians, a rogues gallery of charlatans making a buck on what they call "ministries" but which look from the outside like cons hidden under a light religious gloss. And all this leading to grievance and hatred of the other ...

From the start, Evangelical masculinity has been both personal and political. In learning how to be Christian men, evangelicals also learned how to think about sex, guns, war, borders, Muslims, immigrants, the military, foreign policy, and the nation itself. 

... Despite Evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, Evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than a community defined chiefly by theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it. 

... White evangelicalism has such an expansive reach in large part because of the culture it has created, the culture that it sells. Over the past half century or so, evangelicals have produced and consumed a vast quantity of religious products: Christian books and magazines, CCM (‘Christian contemporary music’), Christian radio and television, feature films, ministry conferences, blogs, T-shirts, and home décor. Many evangelicals who would be hard pressed to articulate even the most basic tenets of evangelical theology have nonetheless been immersed in this evangelical popular culture.

Oddly enough, the cast of shady characters Du Mez chronicles are probably more familiar to people who have lived intimately the political struggles for women's and LGBTQ liberation than to most Americans: the gay press, when such thrived, published voluminous research on these people. Some awareness was essential to defense against them.

This book's success is fascinating. The publisher, the Liveright division of W.W. Norton, had no great expectations for it. But DuMez's history took off: it soon sold 100,000 copies a month and when it came out in paperback leaped to No. 4 among nonfiction paperbacks.

Who are all these book buyers? This professor of history at Calvin University was offering something to millions of evangelicals who were jolted by sex scandals in their denominations and the climate of division promoted by the contemporary GOP. If many evangelicals seem impervious to well-researched critiques of white masculine hate masquerading as faith, millions of others -- many of them women -- are not. Du Mez writes forcefully yet compassionately from within their culture.

Obviously, this isn't a book for the likes of me. But I'm not sorry I picked it up. She's done a solid, painful, necessary piece of work.

Climate Woodstock

As I almost always do when the issue is climate, I need to farm out any summation of the COPS26 show to David Roberts. Unlike me, he's put his life into knowing what he's talking about when it comes to a warming planet.

And while the UN talks followed their usual, halting, incremental, unconvincing, too laggardly pattern, he takes hope from all the surrounding activity which he calls "Climate Woodstock."

Alongside every official COP is a kind of international festival where everyone who’s doing anything on climate goes to talk about it. Bi- and multi-lateral coalitions, states, cities, nonprofits, corporations — everyone gravitates to the moment when media attention will be most intense.

There was a bit of a sour taste at the festival this year, given that fossil fuels were abundantly represented and the poorest and most vulnerable were, thanks to Covid, unusually under-represented.

Nonetheless, amidst the unsavory optics came all kinds of heartening news. There was a global treaty on methane, brokered by the US and the UK, which has been signed by more than 100 countries. ...

A group of governments and private funders pledged to spend a total of $1.7 billion on Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) protecting local biodiversity. Over 100 countries pledged to stop deforestation by 2030.

A group of philanthropic and development organizations and governments called the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) pledged $10.5 billion toward helping emerging economies transition from fossil fuels. Similarly, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) pledged over $130 trillion of private capital to the energy transition.

And so on. What this shows is an immense amount of will in the world to address this problem, struggling to organize. There’s so much going on.

... national governments are often going to be in the caboose of this train — civic groups, the private sector, and subnational governments are leading the way. That’s distributed all over the world, less easy to see and sum up, but it shows that the caution and intransigence of national governments are not the whole story.

COP26 was a snapshot of a world — agonizingly slowly but with gathering speed — moving to address a crisis. There’s no reason for anyone to stop pushing, but there’s also nothing wrong with acknowledging and celebrating the progress that’s been achieved by all the pushing so far.

Things are moving!

Check out Roberts' Substack. 

We better hope he is right -- and all do our bits as we can wherever we are located.

A 9/11 wars after-action assessment and more

In the Washington Post, Carlos Lozada, the highly regarded non-fiction book reviewer, has written an insightful survey of some of the literature of the War on Terror: 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.

Some telling excerpts; I highly recommend the whole:

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. ... 

...  In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized. It was an emergency, yes, that’s understood. But that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism. 

... The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism. Worrying about procedural niceties is passe in a 9/11 world, an annoying impediment to the essential work of ass-kicking.

Lozada has chosen a valuable catalogue of horrors to highlight -- but I can't help mourning what's missing from it. In addition to these book-length journalistic critiques -- "just the facts" deeply reported if morally informed -- the "War on Terror" has left us with a vast literature in a number of genres.

• There was the deeply disillusioned, essentially conservative, military take from retired colonel Andrew Bacevich in America's War for the Greater Middle East. 

• The grunts on the ground have tried to explain what the war meant in their lives. In What It's Like to Go to War,  Karl Marlantes compares his war -- Vietnam -- with the experiences of another generation of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

• Joshua E.S. Phillips tells the story of U.S. soldiers and torture in a painful, caring little volume, None of Us Were Like This Before. This one deserved more visibility than it seemed to get. 

• National Book Award judges did take notice of a truly successful fictional portrait an enlisted man's mindset: Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk. Highly recommended, especially for football fans. 

Union Square, New York City, September 22, 2001.

I don't think we have yet a broad, thoughtful, book-length account of the citizen peace movement in this country against the War on Terror and its permutations. There were always nay-sayers from the first moments after 9/11, while the Towers site still smoldered. Those masks date from 2001.

In early 2008, I assembled a five part series on the peace movement for a conference of Historians Against the War. Looking these posts over more than 10 years later, they still provide a decent survey in what turned out to be still early days.

Part One: Trying to find the ground under our feet: 2001-2002  

Part Two: Afghanistan and the Iraq invasion; the antiwar movement builds some infrastructure and tries some initiatives: 2002-2003  

Part Three: Liberal elites get the bad news: U.S. has "lost" Iraq war; Presidential election subsumes activism: 2004-2005  

Part Four: Peace movement finds causes to support; Insurgent new Democrats and a counterculture emerge: 2005-2008  

Part Five: Lessons: 2001-2008

The grouplet that called itself Historians against the War now calls itself Historians for Peace and Democracy. This seems on point twenty years after 9/11.

A San Francisco treat

Tom Ammiano has given us a memoir -- titled, of course, Kiss My Gay Ass. It's perfectly wonderful; you should read it; and as far as I can figure out, the only way to obtain a copy is through that link.

Ammiano is the flaming queen who carried assassinated Supervisor Harvey Milk's gay liberation cause right up through the stuffy auditoriums of the San Francisco School Board (1990-1993), on to the Beaux-Arts corridors of San Francisco City Hall (1994-2008), and finally into the corrupt precincts of the California State Assembly (2008-2014). And never has he retreated from his allegiance to class-conscious equality for people of all races, sexual inclinations, and gender identities.

His own liberation movement put Ammiano on track to storm the halls of power -- but his memoir makes clear that performing stand-up comedy might have been his true love. The quick quip was his defense while growing up in a very hostile world for a gay man -- he writes that he "weaponized it to protect me from bullies." Later he honed his comedy as as school teacher and in comedy clubs. Whatever his credentials, the San Francisco establishment of the 1980s would have recoiled at the prospect of a gay teacher running for school board, but his comedy career was a particular target of scorn from the newspapers.

"... comedy was used against me as a weapon. But I felt like, without really articulating it, there was no reason I could not do both those things: comedy and politics. I really loved comedy. Who wrote the rules that say you have to choose?"

As a legislator, Ammiano assembled a majority of the Supervisors (that legislative body would be a city council if the City were not a county) to pass Healthy San Francisco which extended health coverage to all residents in 2007. He led passage of protections for LGBT+ civil rights in both San Francisco and Sacramento. He fought for legalizing marijuana before that notion was cool. He repeatedly sought to revise California's tax-limiting measure Prop. 13 so that big business had to pay its fair share. (That one is coming back at us this November as Prop. 15.) Ammiano has been there for every progressive effort of his generation.

Gay people of Ammiano's generation, with rare upper class exceptions, never trusted that the policeman was our friend. Calling the cops after a gay bashing might just get the victim bashed again. So when Ammiano won his seat among the city Supervisors who have some say over the police department, he found himself in a contradictory position.

"Ironically, the Police Officers Association had endorsed me in my race for Supervisor! All they asked me about was my support for unions issues and I was strongly pro-union. They didn't ask anything about policing rules or independent investigations of police shootings.

"... There was a lot of shit I had to deal with about the police. A lot of the officers were white cops who didn't live in San Francisco. ... There were a lot of raids of gay bars. They would say "you're overcrowded" as an excuse, shit like that.

"... Soon after I was elected, there were a number of police shootings in the black community. I remember going out to the community and standing and holding hands with black ministers about the shooting of some kid by the police. ... Then the cops raided an AIDS fundraiser. ... When they raided it, the cops covered their name tags so they could beat people, that was common practice.

"... I took fixing the Office of Citizen Complaints up as my cause ..."

For all Ammiano's efforts, although the SFPD may have achieved some hiring "diversity," its union still seems committed to viewing law enforcement as an occupying army restraining uppity dark skinned people and other transgressives. The struggle goes on.

Ammiano thinks of himself as a "lefty." I might substitute "radical" in this summation of what's he's learned about keeping the faith inside the halls of power:

"... It has always been [a] struggle to come from the lefty point of view in any movement. There will always be moderate people. There will always be people who sell out. There will always be people on the fence. Then there will be people who push the envelope because it's more than about just one issue or one thing -- it's about a movement."

Movement makers are precious people. Ammiano is a San Francisco gem.

Full disclosure: yes, he's a friend. A guy like this is a lot of people's friend.

Bye-bye, 2019!

Obviously the scholar of anti-democratic populism Yascha Mounk isn't seeing what's overwhelming my email. He worries that

... the fear and anger that propelled such big protests in the first months of 2017 seem to have dissipated.

Perhaps -- or perhaps what was once an anguished inchoate #resistance has institutionalized. It's thrown up local protest groups, legal efforts, immigrant assistance projects -- and candidates galore. They all want year end donations, but there's no way to give to all of them. They clamor. That's what a maturing social movement looks like.

He's certainly right to be frightened by the prospect of a second Trump/Republican/white supremacist election. But that evil outcome hasn't happened yet and there's more than enough to get involved with to prevent it....Meanwhile, New Yorker journalist Robin Wright has her eyes on the true big story of 2019: popular rebellions are breaking out everywhere.

When historians look back at 2019, the story of the year will not be the turmoil surrounding Donald Trump. It will instead be the tsunami of protests that swept across six continents and engulfed both liberal democracies and ruthless autocracies.

Throughout the year, movements have emerged overnight, out of nowhere, unleashing public fury on a global scale—from Paris and La Paz to Prague and Port-au-Prince, Beirut to Bogota and Berlin, Catalonia to Cairo, and in Hong Kong, Harare, Santiago, Sydney, Seoul, Quito, Jakarta, Tehran, Algiers, Baghdad, Budapest, London, New Delhi, Manila, and even Moscow. Taken together, the protests reflect unprecedented political mobilization. The global consequences dwarf the turmoil of the Trump year and his rippling impact beyond America’s borders.

... Leaderless movements are not designed to govern, but they often generate momentum among politicians who take up or exploit their causes.

She has interviewed "experts" and doesn't know in what direction these eruptions are taking us. That remains to be seen. But people are refusing to be silent.

But we do seem to be living in 1848, and 1968, and 1989 again. On to 2020.

To be afraid is appropriate, not crazy

Friends online, seeking to contextualize the El Paso massacre, pointed to this PBS documentary. (I snagged it from Netflix, but it is readily available in many outlets.)

It's a good, thorough, narrative of the sequence of events -- the ATF storming of Ruby Ridge, the incineration of the Waco Branch Davidians -- that formed the 1990s catalogue of government offenses that right wingers used to justify organizing in violent militias and, eventually, the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma's federal building. That domestic terrorist act killed 168 people, of whom about 100 were low level government employees and many of the others children in a daycare center. The film asks an all too contemporary question.

How could somebody get to that state in their life where they would be so angry and upset they would do something like this?

Joe Hersley, FBI agent

The perpetrator, Tim McVeigh, wanted to start the "next American revolution." A disgruntled failed soldier who loved guns, he drifted into neo-Nazi circles and became convinced that "the only way government is going to get the message is with a body count ..."

In the film, that indefatigable researcher of the right-wing, Leonard Zeskind, answers what we are now asking about El Paso suspect Patrick Crusius: was McVeigh some kind of sick sociopath, or did he come out of an identifiable right wing milieu?

There was no massive conspiracy, that much is true, but the idea that Timothy McVeigh was a lone killer, that is wrong headed. because it absolves the movement from which it all sprang. Timothy McVeigh was not on his own, he was the creation fo the white supremacist movement. He carried the Turner Diaries around and read it to people. He lived at the gun shows. He met neo-Nazis ... and the idea that there was no connection between the white supremacist movement and the events in Oklahoma City is patently false. There was a strong connection ...

And now we have a president who vibes with white nationalists ...

From the perspective of 1968, they asked "now what?"

My dear friend Max Elbaum's thoughtful and exhaustive chronicle of how some of the 1960's best and brightest US leftist radicals charged off down a Leninist party-building rabbit hole for a couple of decades -- Revolution in the Air with a new foreword by Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter -- has come out in paperback. This history of well-intended struggle and idealism losing touch with the realities of its own society is well worth preserving; Max's comprehensive account of the New Communist Movement ensures that experience won't be entirely inaccessible to new generations of activists.

The social and student movements of the 1960s in this country and throughout the world, the civil rights and Black freedom struggles, mushrooming resistance to the imperial US war in Vietnam, and more, all reached a zenith in 1968 -- and that explosion of energy left a lot of young people wondering where to go from here. Max's subject (of which he was a leader) is the direction a devoted subset of those young people came up with.

... a portion of those who participated developed a long term commitment to political activism. Many of them -- seeing how intransigent "the establishment" was in resisting racial equality and defending imperial prerogatives -- decided that "the system" could not be reformed. ... Within the Third World Marxist ranks, a determined contingent set out to build tight-knit cadre organizations. ... Deciding that the real problem was that the Communist Party USA wasn't Leninist enough, they set out to build a new vanguard of their own. From 1968 through the mid-1970s, the resulting New Communist Movement grew faster than any other current on the US left. ....

... the New Communist Movement can be understood as one more in a century-long series of (so far) unsuccessful efforts to make socialism a significant force in US politics. This movement's consensus was that a breakthrough could finally be made if top priority was given to tackling three longstanding dilemmas of US radicalism: How can the US working class movement be put on a firm internationalist, anti-imperialist basis? What strategy can mobilize a successful fight against racism? And how can revolutionary cadre be developed and united into an organization capable of mobilizing workers and the oppressed to seize power?

Although at this remove the third element of that triad (seizing power) seems batshit crazy, in that super-heated moment, "revolution" was in the air. And the other two priorities -- figuring out how leftists in the belly of capitalist empire should relate to the rest of the world, while struggling to overcome the multi-faceted, ingrained racism(s) of their society -- remain central tasks for all in the US who care for human beings and the planet.

Max recounts the New Communists' intricate twists, turns and permutations and is unflinching about their failures.

History's trick on the generation of 1968 was that -- despite appearances --the odds were stacked against building a revolutionary movement in the 1970s. ... [T]he realities of US politics did offer prospects for the consolidation of an energetic radical trend, numbering in the thousands, anchored in anti-racism and anti-imperialism, with institutional stability at the capacity to galvanize stronger popular resistance to the rising right wing. The essential failure of the New Communist Movement is that it ultimately dissipated rather than coalesced the forces that could have accomplished that task.

... the backward US two-party system, the winner-take-all electoral system erects tremendous barriers to revolutionary forces translating gains made in periods of exceptional upheaval into a lasting base among the country's exploited and dispossessed. Navigating this difficult terrain requires tremendous flexibility; the pulls toward surrendering revolutionary politics in order to gain temporary influence on the one hand, or remaining pure but marginalized on the other, are immense. ... the New Communist Movement did not even put this essential problem at the center of its deliberations. ...

... for all the movement's audacious plans for social revolution, in a sense its failure was not due to thinking too expansively. Rather, it was because the movement shunned the true broad mindedness and flexibility displayed by successful revolutionaries in favor of a narrow and mechanical perspective that this book dubs "miniaturized Leninism."

... this book has been written partly to identify the markers on [the] slippery slope to sectarian irrelevance ...

The book includes a chapter on what this slice of US radicals did with the their lives after their little lefty formations imploded. Some dropped out of collective activism, but many -- gradually -- found new opportunities to plug into the justice struggles of new times. After all, they got into this to struggle for human liberation, even if they lost their way for a season. ***Max Elbaum will be doing a bit of a book launch tour for this new edition, beginning on Saturday, April 21 from 4-6pm at the First Congregational Church of Oakland. A full national schedule of events is available. Max is not only an historian -- he's a wise observer of contemporary events, always worth listening to when the opportunity offers.***The decade of the 1970s has also become the proper subject of history, yet unlike the explosive '60s and the reactionary Reaganite '80s, it lacks a distinctive image, even among those of us who lived through it. Anyone seeking background about the 1970s could do worse than look at a couple of histories I've discussed here: Judith Stein's Pivotal Decade and Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive.

Democratic renewal in a season of loneliness

Ned Resnikoff of Think Progress has been pondering the toxic stew of historic white supremacy, fears both rational and irrational, and alienation that has gifted us with the aspiring autocrat in the White House. His nuanced argument reaches the conclusion that a democratic (small "d") renewal is possible, if we choose to make it. Do read it all. Here's a teaser:

... resistance to Trump is not enough. To eliminate the conditions that would lead to another Trump — or worse — the United States needs to undergo a process of democratic renewal. The countrywide network of formal institutions, informal communal bonds, and overlapping belief systems that hold a republic together is in dire need of repair. Patching it back together will require both widespread social movement activism and sweeping public policy changes at every level of government.

The point of all this activity, as trite as it may sound, would be to make people feel less lonely — to make them feel connected to their neighbors, to public institutions, and to something like an integrated national community. Activists and policymakers alike must apply themselves directly to the problem of alienation and meaninglessness.

Resnikoff's essay called to mind the two photos accompanying this post; they catch mundane features from my San Francisco environment that I might easily fail to note. Both come from big, conventional institutions which choose to use their megaphones to affirm social solidarity. I think it is fair to say that, in this geographical island of resistance, even plodding institutions instinctively grasp that what we value can best be preserved by what we share, by the connections we forge between isolated individuals.

Signs on walls seem a tiny gesture -- and they are. But a decent society and a viable community is made up of tiny gestures and it behooves us in bad times to foster every one of them. Where have you seen this happening? It matters.

Resistance reminiscence

Vietnam-era draft refuser David Harris has shared what he learned from struggling to end the U.S. war whose horrors shaped my generation. For refusing to be drafted into the army, and organizing others to do the same, Harris served two years in prison, including tough time in solitary.

I am now 71 and the war that defined my coming of age is deep in my rearview mirror, but the question it raised, “What do I do when my country is wrong?” lives on.

For those looking for an answer today, here are some lessons I learned:

We are all responsible for what our country does. Doing nothing is picking a side.

We are never powerless. Under the worst of circumstances, we control our own behavior.

We are never isolated. We all have a constituency of friends and family who watch us. That is where politics begins.

Reality is made by what we do, not what we talk about. Values that are not embodied in behavior do not exist.

People can change, if we provide them the opportunity to do so. Movements thrive by engaging all comers, not by calling people names, breaking windows or making threats.

Whatever the risks, we cannot lose by standing up for what is right. That’s what allows us to be the people we want to be.

Harris' movement called itself the Resistance. The war and the movement against it engulfed a generation.

By the time the feds let Harris loose in 1971, the U.S. Army itself was falling apart as young citizens simply stopped playing by the rules, however they could. I was trained in "draft counseling" (advising young men about their legal options to avoid the draft) in that year. But in truth what we were doing after years of unpopular war was often trying to help unwilling soldiers who had gone AWOL stateside to figure out what options they could find. Often, the army didn't seem to want to find them. Other men served and fought in Vietnam for a cause they seldom fully affirmed. I know vets who completed high school, were drafted into the army, and quickly became addicted to the plentiful cheap heroin that Saigon supplied. Some even sabotaged the U.S. war effort from inside, so alienated were they from a war they felt was immoral and wasteful of lives, including theirs. Many had a very bumpy return to civilian life. By the 1980s, Vietnam vets were a huge proportion of the homeless population that ballooned on city streets in that decade. Believe it or not, U.S. cities weren't home to large, visible populations of homeless people before the Reagan recession of 1982.

Not surprisingly, the last thing both political elites and the military would want today is a broad compulsory citizen draft. Unwilling and unenthusiastic draftees can ruin an army. Our rulers know they must fight their wars with some mix of high tech armament and professional soldiers. This doesn't seem to much constrain them.

I think Harris's points remain germane to our current circumstances.

Building our political imaginations

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, (discussed here) offered her wisdom for surviving and overcoming the Trump regime at the Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco yesterday.

She had no truck with a blanket condemnation of Trump's white voters as simply racist. They, like most people of color, simply aren't getting hope or change from business-as-usual, rapacious, unfettered capitalism.

Our hardships are not all the same, but they often have the same source.

Along with her hearers, she discussed where we go from here. For me the most important suggestions went back to the phrase I've used as a headline, above. We're not yet at a moment for detailed tactics and strategies.

People in the Bay Area can catch Taylor in Oakland at 7:30 pm at Impact Hub today, December 5.

We're going to miss this guy

Ban Ki-Moon is completing almost ten years in his impossible U.N. job, shepherding recalcitrant great powers that have all the guns and money in the direction of humane policies. He leaves with a blast.

“In too many places, we see leaders rewriting constitutions, manipulating elections and taking other desperate steps to cling to power,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said. “My message to all is clear: serve your people. Do not subvert democracy; do not pilfer your country’s resources; do not imprison and torture your critics.”

... Ban excoriated the outside powers that have supported the warring parties on [all] sides of the [Syrian] conflict. While Ban didn’t name names the list of regional or global powers — from Russia and Iran to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, France and the United States — that supported the combatants — is long. “Powerful patrons that keep feeding the war machine also have blood on their hands,” he said. “Present in this hall today are representatives of governments that have ignored, facilitated, funded, participated in or even planned and carried out atrocities inflicted by all side.”

What hope there is for the world resides among peoples who refuse to put up with crap and leaders who, however imperfect and without power, strive to build institutions that serve the common good of humanity.

An expectations game: right, center, and left

Sometimes economists are just dopey. Apparently they've long been arguing about why cab drivers (and other contingent workers who can set their own hours and thereby earn variable pay) sometimes decide to "call it a day" when they might maximize their earnings by choosing a longer work day.

In one camp is a group of so-called behavioral economists who have found evidence that many taxi drivers work longer hours on days when business is slow and shorter hours when business is brisk — the opposite of what economic rationality, to say nothing of common sense, would seem to dictate.

In another camp is a group of more orthodox economists who argue that this perverse habit is largely an illusion in the eyes of certain researchers. Once you consult more precise numbers, they argue, you find that drivers typically work longer hours when it is in their financial interest to do so.

Academics who find it "perverse" or contrary to "common sense" that workers might choose how much to work based on how much they feel is enough for a day's work, apparently have never depended on an alienating job to put food on the table. Most people work most jobs in order not to have to work any more than they must. They have better things to do, above a certain minimum, than to increase the profits of the owners. This characteristic of life in a capitalist society is apparently invisible to economists, especially to those whose notion of human society begins and ends with fealty to rational maximization of economic life. What a sad and empty universe they inhabit!

It was interesting to read this article in juxtaposition with a big New York Times piece that discusses why younger African Americans (so-called "Obama surge voters") are failing to warm to Hillary Clinton or even see her as much preferable to the Donald, based on some leaked campaign focus group research.

The research is mildly interesting and well presented, intended to convince the Clinton campaign to approach these voters with a more positive argument. What it comes down to is that young African Americans, like many (even most?) younger voters, want someone to vote for, not to be told there is someone they must vote against. They want inspiring plans and aspirations, not another tired lesser evil.

Many of the 18-35 set are at their core more hopeful than their elders. Since they are also the generation whose outrage is driving the Movement for Black Lives, that underlying hopefulness is probably not the first characteristic that comes to mind in observing their culture of demand and protests. But at least for now, these are optimistic young people. Pollsters and sharp observers know this. Politicians will need to learn. They won't make any headway among them by preaching pragmatism, incrementalism, and "mature" choices. This is the same false picture of the human person that grips the rational choice economists. We are bigger than their cramped visions.

My friend Steve Williams wrestles with the implications for aspiring revolutionaries of holding fast to a broad hope for people and society:

... with the defeat of the socialist experiments of the 20th century, two generations of organizers and activists have now come of age politically with few visible and viable alternatives to imperialism and neoliberalism. The fight against the enemy, as trying as it has been, has been no more difficult than our internal struggle with the troubling idea that noble, doomed resistance may be all that is left to us. I’ve spent too many sleepless hours haunted by the fear that victory may be nothing more than an unattainable dream.

The danger in this insidious notion is profound. Without a clear conviction that another world is indeed possible, we resign ourselves all too easily to the idea that simply “putting up a good fight” is enough. We absolve ourselves of the responsibility of finding ways forward. We forgive our own shoddy, sloppy practice, just as we forgive our comrades’. We quickly lose all incentive for rigorous reflection on and evaluation of our work. We stop striving for improvement and excellence. The doubt takes control: what’s the point, anyway?

Black Lives Matter activists directly address the need to preserve an informed hope in the face of violence and oppression when they teach Assata Shakur's declaration of Black revolutionary faith:

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

The right is never likely to "get it", but both center and left (no, not together but in parallel) can hope to ride rising expectations, if they will dare.