Fantastic debate Matt with RJ Eskow. Enjoyed your main points and the McEnroe reference too-
Recap:
1) Marcuse's position was that democracy is to be managed by a smart few and it is they who get to mow the fairways of discussion and manicure the greens of policy; and that it is necessary to take away the right of some to have a voice and self determination in their own lives for their own good.
2) He exaggerates Democratic Totalitarianism; and the notion that Freedom is non-existent - love how you combat via Master & Margarita and with the truth is often murky and unclear and not something that should wait for a small group of academics to agree upon.
**** If anyone has spent more than 10 minutes in departmental/faculty staff meeting with 25 Phd's who think they know something and want to show off for all to see, you'd know that this solution by Marcuse is doomed from the start. Might explain some of the alcoholism in academe too.
3) Marcuse's insincere solutions and analysis ("working people and their material needs being met") -- as he banked resources like a hyper-capitalist was a good point and thank fuck you brought up that Marcuse had one foot in the left when it is convenient to sell books and make money, and the other foot in authoritarianism. His "new left" is devoid of many of the best arguments of Marx and Engels.
While having little evidence and not trusting Wikipedia at all (Aaron Mate, 2021 Useful Idiots podcast) it read that he spent some post-war time with OWI (OSS) when he first emigrated to the United States.
One speculates the "New Left" , could very well be a faux construction of the Left excluding Marxism (as a condition of his emigration) and the beginning kernel of the 3rd way Pete Peterson corporate democrats (who like Marcuse started off with very few assets and by the end had amassed millions), often by selling their people out in the end.
Finally, I really enjoyed how Taibbi expresses that a small turbo-group of elite academics advocating for oppressed people on the surface, while imposing their version of progress from above has some parallels in our current cancel culture.
Matt, if it does not take the life force out of you, keep doing this kind of work. It's brilliant. Love the play by play academic discussions especially how they are being twisted and used now.
Would be interested on your take on Marx - but that is a long term project I suspect.
I am an American Jew whose families emigrated to the US from Germany and Holland in the 1840's.I aIso spent a career(42 YEARS+) teaching at a SUNY graduate center and emerged with a deep LOATHING for academia and most of my colleagues.I loved Matt's attack on that swine. Suffice to say,If it hadn't been for the power of US capitalism ,Marcuse and his buddies would have ended up in soap dishes- SOME GRATITUDE.My family fought in the civil War as well as world wars one and two not to make the world safe for the Frankfurt School.I have no sense of humor about Marcuse.
I agree with RJ regarding the definition of the left. The anti-imperialist left refers to the Democratic Party hangers on at sh*tlibs for a reason. They refer to themselves as the left while embracing the national security state and its anti-democratic leanings.
Regarding totalitarianism, a good follow up to Marcuse might be Sheldon Wolin’s “Inverted Totalitarianism.” Chris Hedges whom you have interviewed with a number of times refers to him often. I think it speaks to what Marcuse attempted clumsily to address. As long as the ruling elites are able to control the official narrative, they can allow a small marginalized group of dissenters to exist. It’s when someone like Julian Assange comes along and obliterates their cover of liberal democracy and human rights that the true nature of the beast is revealed without any pretense of the rule of law.
You are such a wonderful writer, Matt. Your sincere voice, your heart, and your intellect come out every time you touch the keyboard. I appreciate your self-reflection and your continuing this fruitful intellectual debate.
Thanks to you, I just finished reading “Repressive Tolerance,” and I must say, you're right about the seemingly insane turn it takes around the middle towards what sounds like Mao’s cultural revolution made for America, and yes, I think there’s a direct link from Marcuse’s “discriminating tolerance” to Kendi’s “anti-racist discrimination” and much of the hysterical intolerance of the Social Justice left today. BUT, this essay is a rich masterpiece of Hegelian thought, and like all Hegelian essays, that extreme moment in the essay is just that, a moment in the movement of the dialectic, the radical anti-thesis to the thesis of tolerance. You failed to note the Aufhebung in the final paragraph, where he states: “HOWEVER, the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is NOT a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy.”
Marcuse’s entire career was dedicated to preventing the rise of another repressive dictatorship out of existing democracy. Yes, he believed it was an “objective truth” (I don't like that language either) that the Nazi’s and the Right stood for repression, cruelty and autocracy and that the Left stood against repression, cruelty and autocracy, but the pragmatic question is whether any of his ideas can be used to effectively ward off the rise of another repressive dictatorship in the U.S.
Looking back on Germany, he writes: “The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.”
The question for today is whether to tolerate Trump’s version of Hitler’s Big Lie (not “the Jews lost the war for us” but “the liberals stole the election from us”) or to be intolerant of it in whatever ways we can. The impeachment trial proved to any reasonable person that his lies incited a coup against our democracy, but he still controls the Republican party and is continuing to inspire an unprecedented hatred of “liberals" (they have no problem with black and brown people who hate liberals too). I believe we are already in a slow-motion civil war and that simple “free speech” won’t save us in this new media environment. I think we can discard Marcuse’s radical antithesis (just as he did at the end of his essay), but I’m wondering what others think should be done about what he would call the “clear and present danger” that is Trumpism. What does it mean to be “tolerant” of Trump’s aggressive, anti-democratic Big Lie? When does tolerating his intolerance, his hate speech and lies against "liberals," become a form of repression? Are his followers really just proud American individualists thinking for themselves, or are they being manipulated by lies that no American should tolerate?
The "America" that Matt waxes jingo balls about in his summation of why Marcuse-the-immigrant should have appreciated America was:
The America that was ramping up a racist imperialist war against a nation of farmers in SE Asia;
The America that was tolerant of the men who bombed churches in Alabama;
The America that denied voting rights to a huge number of citizens based on their skin color;
The America that tolerated McCarthyism cuz communists are bad;
The America that denied financial autonomy to half its citizens cuz women;
The America that had a mainly "northern European whites only" immigration policy;
In sum, the America that existed in 1964.
Matt may imagine that he would have been celebrating that America, but for those of us alive and conscious at the time it looked pretty intolerable from a left perspective. But then my understanding of "left" has to do with socialism, not elite-driven neoliberal identity politics.
I think what is most telling about post-modernists is the contention that there is no objective reality. So what? Heisenberg said as much. We can only describe reality within a realm of certainty. Said another way, George E. Box, regarded by some as the greatest statistician of the 20th century, stated: "All models are false. Some are useful." This does not mean that postmodernist "philosophy" provides any means for better modeling the universe in which we live.
Rather postmodernism is simply a form of sophistry intended to change the game by creating a new set of rules. It even provides the freedom to create new rules in the process since, after all there is no "objective reality". A not so subtle strategy which, when absent rationale arguments, one imperiously declares that rational and logical argument cannot be employed.
Since the models created by post-modernists are not subject to debate or criticism is this not the perfect example of a recursive argument? Postmodernism and Marxist theory are simply rhetorical techniques to be employed in power shifting. Their purpose is political and not scientific. They do not lead to greater knowledge but rather serve as tools for closet aristocrats to seek power and once obtained rule by diktat over the benighted masses. Those experiments have been tried and failed miserably.
“It’s what’s troubling also about the gloomy collectivism dominating today’s intellectual culture, which looks at the unreconstructed individual as the worst kind of menace, always and everywhere a potential purveyor of harm, deception, and oppression, instead of what I think he was designed to be in our culture, the first line of defense against more organized forms of misery.”
Matt, you ought to check out the new six-part BBC/Adam Curtis documentary on YouTube called “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” This is its topic and it’s absolutely riveting (a silly film critic word that actually fits here). The rare footage of Mao’s controversial wife Jiang Qing and Ukrainian-English crime boss Peter Rachman, among many other important historical figures that create the narrative, is hypnotic. These stories paint a rich portrait of events (mostly 20th century, some earlier) and the individuals whose lives help to contextualize our current state of global existential inertia. I’ve read you since 2005 and I think I can say with confidence this doc series is right up your alley. Really enjoying the debate.
I appreciate that you followed up and continued the conversation. Not enough folks do that today, your self-reflection is refreshing and so needed in today's discourse.
I think my main problem with your review is that you buried the lede a little. I was at an appropriate school to witness the flowering of deconstructionism and Straussianism and a half dozen other philosophies that engendered the mess we are in today, albeit sometimes via circuitous genealogies.
And all of them were rooted in the same sentiment: the resentment of intellectual elites at having lost their aristocratic patronage in the age of the common man. The desire to rule came first, the excuses came after. It is impossible to understand identity politics without understanding that first.
It takes a lot of intellectual integrity to admit that one's angry first take ad a reviewer might have missed something important. I'm sure I speak for many when I applaud Matt for this willingness to go a bit deeper and to back off from some earlier positions where a lesser mind and character might have doubled down.
I have had arguments with left friends about the American political tradition and whether King's idea of the unfulfilled promise was too generous and there really isn't anything worth salvaging or building from. I'm on the side of starting with what is good in our traditions as King, and I'm hearing Matt, also agree on. The liberal tradition under capitalism has indeed turned speech freedom rights etc into gross parodies of themselves. But something in the tradition remains - and I think it is in the very freedom that Marcuse venerates, and the spirit of rebellion in the New Left that he was so closely associated with. Marcuse predicted the tradition and values could never in themselves save this country and he is in my mind correct - our rampant corruption where speech and money are interchangeable and corporations are legal individuals is a dramatic worsening of what Marcuse witnessed but he was absolutely correct in anticipating it was inevitable. It is social movements and personal and collective rebellion that can save us, not the belief that liberal values and rights in and of themselves can. The liberal tradition has proven itself too easily twisted by capital and domination. In Marcuse's time it was the Vietnam war and nuclear threat that made that obvious; today the evidence is dramatically starker.
While we can rightly question double standards on violence and virus spreading when it comes to BLM protests and we can rightly look at how the protestors become political pawns and currency in media narratives- and have made near zero impact on national politics as we elected the architect of racism Biden and the architect of racist prosecuting Harris - Marcuse is correct when he says No, just voting and assembling peacefully and writing op eds in a liberal pluralistic framework is not enough. Breaking the law, uprising, shaking up business as usual and throwing sand in the gears is a big part of what is needed. In Marcuses time the anti-protesters claimed the liberal tradition had established channels that needed to be respected, but thank god activists didn't respect them because we gained more freedom and humanity from their willingness to revolt. Without street revolt and the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement we would have nuked southeast asia ignored poverty and racism at home and be much worse as a nation and world. That was the line Marcuse stood on when critiquing the hypocrisy of a liberal tradition that would keep people off the streets during a genocidal war. In today's twisted media manipulated world the insurrection is now spectacle and often it is the right wing whatever that is that is posturing overthrow, but I think we should look more deeply at that impulse and not dismiss it. In a weird way qanon and trump are right to spit on the establishment. They do it for the wrong reasons and they promote anti-freedom and let the corporate economy off the hook, but the insurrectionary impulse today is a symptom of the established liberal tradition blocking genuine awakening, genuine realize that yes the media lie and yes politicians are corrupt and no business and usual is not the way forward. Of course the fox TV and newsmax and qanon are trash but if we offer a weak liberal tradition instead, just vote democrat and be glad we are making headway in the culture wars, we are just endorsing a status quo that needs overthrow, not functioning.
It's heartening to see one of my favorite journalists take a second more measured look after stumbling with a self acknowledged angry first pass. Matt has always had the courage to break through the tribalism and see the deeper failings, a quality the New Left and Marcuse brought at a time when the entire political spectrum was pro war and pro nuclear weapons and pro going slow on racism and poverty. Matt seems to share a real affinity with this original New Left spirit. Disagreeing on the American tradition and where it fits in is a more legitimate debate than trying to box Marcuse where he doesn't belong. Thanks Matt for stepping up and having the honesty to look more deeply and to recognize that a hot take and anger don't need to be your final word.
Yes, I watched the debate and was impressed by the substance and civility. Meanwhile, my respect for Matt as a journalist went from 10 on a scale of 10 to an 11.
“ He wrote in Repressive Tolerance about the uselessness of submitting information to “the people” in any jumble of “contesting opinions,” because doing so implies that “the people are capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.” “
I think we’re far more at the point of a majority of Americans understanding “the uselessness of submitting information to ‘the Government’ in any jumble of contesting policies, because doing so implies that “the Government is capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.”
I know that’s the conclusion I’ve reached after two decades of local-scale community organizing driven by issue research, public information campaigns, and attempts to inform local government officials about aspects of policy matters they have not considered, and have no interest in ever considering. They no longer deliberate at all, at least in public. By the time they vote, they’re almost always unanimously in support of whatever the largest financial actor in the situation wants. So the effort is useless.
“ The core idea of Repressive Tolerance is that one can build freedom by way of unfreedom, and this strikes me as an idea that’s not just very unlikely to be correct, but deeply un-American. It’s what’s troubling also about the gloomy collectivism dominating today’s intellectual culture, which looks at the unreconstructed individual as the worst kind of menace, always and everywhere a potential purveyor of harm, deception, and oppression, instead of what I think he was designed to be in our culture, the first line of defense against more organized forms of misery.”
Great writing Matt. Elequently said. God Bless American assholeism!
Marcuse is probably right about the inability of the common man to make decisions about what is right and wrong, if his views are being properly summarized. The main issue with his thesis is: who decides what is valid opinion and what gets censored? I personally don't trust anyone to make that choice, and would rather tolerate the stupid and the demagogues that prey on them.
Back in the 90s I ran a small book typography business in New York. If you've ever run a business, you know there's three problems: 1) Getting the work, 2) Doing the work, 3) Getting paid for the work. If you've never run a business, you have no idea how hard Problem 3 can be.
I had a range of clients. Some paid like clocks. Some fought a bit. Some seemed to think paying was for little people.
The worst were the "liberals". I remember one (who I won't mention) who ran a small press built on family money and published the kind of books humanists/leftist/progressives would love. I'd work my rear off on a project and send an invoice. Nothing would happen. I'd call. Talk to the office manager. Nothing. Six months would go by. Nothing. Then somehow a check would materialize. I needed the business and the money. So I endured the cycle as best I could.
The office manager was another liberal humanist from an Eastern women's college. The cafe/literary type who reads books for a living. When she left the job after a year or so they owed her half a year of back pay. She took them to small claims court. hahah.
The business book publishers paid like clocks. There you go.
I knew a old-school Brooklyn guy who ran a small print shop downtown. He understood my payment problems. He offered to put me in touch with someone who could visit an office and rough somebody up. No kidding! He was serious.
That's life in the streets. Everybody wants justice. Everybody wants fairness. Everybody wants empathy. Everybody wants love.
But too few give it. You get a lecture instead. And when it's time to get paid, you don't even get that. If you want to change the world, start with yourself. When you've mastered that, tell us how you did it. That would be worth listening to.
Fantastic debate Matt with RJ Eskow. Enjoyed your main points and the McEnroe reference too-
Recap:
1) Marcuse's position was that democracy is to be managed by a smart few and it is they who get to mow the fairways of discussion and manicure the greens of policy; and that it is necessary to take away the right of some to have a voice and self determination in their own lives for their own good.
2) He exaggerates Democratic Totalitarianism; and the notion that Freedom is non-existent - love how you combat via Master & Margarita and with the truth is often murky and unclear and not something that should wait for a small group of academics to agree upon.
**** If anyone has spent more than 10 minutes in departmental/faculty staff meeting with 25 Phd's who think they know something and want to show off for all to see, you'd know that this solution by Marcuse is doomed from the start. Might explain some of the alcoholism in academe too.
3) Marcuse's insincere solutions and analysis ("working people and their material needs being met") -- as he banked resources like a hyper-capitalist was a good point and thank fuck you brought up that Marcuse had one foot in the left when it is convenient to sell books and make money, and the other foot in authoritarianism. His "new left" is devoid of many of the best arguments of Marx and Engels.
While having little evidence and not trusting Wikipedia at all (Aaron Mate, 2021 Useful Idiots podcast) it read that he spent some post-war time with OWI (OSS) when he first emigrated to the United States.
One speculates the "New Left" , could very well be a faux construction of the Left excluding Marxism (as a condition of his emigration) and the beginning kernel of the 3rd way Pete Peterson corporate democrats (who like Marcuse started off with very few assets and by the end had amassed millions), often by selling their people out in the end.
Finally, I really enjoyed how Taibbi expresses that a small turbo-group of elite academics advocating for oppressed people on the surface, while imposing their version of progress from above has some parallels in our current cancel culture.
Matt, if it does not take the life force out of you, keep doing this kind of work. It's brilliant. Love the play by play academic discussions especially how they are being twisted and used now.
Would be interested on your take on Marx - but that is a long term project I suspect.
Cheers!
I am an American Jew whose families emigrated to the US from Germany and Holland in the 1840's.I aIso spent a career(42 YEARS+) teaching at a SUNY graduate center and emerged with a deep LOATHING for academia and most of my colleagues.I loved Matt's attack on that swine. Suffice to say,If it hadn't been for the power of US capitalism ,Marcuse and his buddies would have ended up in soap dishes- SOME GRATITUDE.My family fought in the civil War as well as world wars one and two not to make the world safe for the Frankfurt School.I have no sense of humor about Marcuse.
I agree with RJ regarding the definition of the left. The anti-imperialist left refers to the Democratic Party hangers on at sh*tlibs for a reason. They refer to themselves as the left while embracing the national security state and its anti-democratic leanings.
Regarding totalitarianism, a good follow up to Marcuse might be Sheldon Wolin’s “Inverted Totalitarianism.” Chris Hedges whom you have interviewed with a number of times refers to him often. I think it speaks to what Marcuse attempted clumsily to address. As long as the ruling elites are able to control the official narrative, they can allow a small marginalized group of dissenters to exist. It’s when someone like Julian Assange comes along and obliterates their cover of liberal democracy and human rights that the true nature of the beast is revealed without any pretense of the rule of law.
You are such a wonderful writer, Matt. Your sincere voice, your heart, and your intellect come out every time you touch the keyboard. I appreciate your self-reflection and your continuing this fruitful intellectual debate.
Thanks to you, I just finished reading “Repressive Tolerance,” and I must say, you're right about the seemingly insane turn it takes around the middle towards what sounds like Mao’s cultural revolution made for America, and yes, I think there’s a direct link from Marcuse’s “discriminating tolerance” to Kendi’s “anti-racist discrimination” and much of the hysterical intolerance of the Social Justice left today. BUT, this essay is a rich masterpiece of Hegelian thought, and like all Hegelian essays, that extreme moment in the essay is just that, a moment in the movement of the dialectic, the radical anti-thesis to the thesis of tolerance. You failed to note the Aufhebung in the final paragraph, where he states: “HOWEVER, the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is NOT a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy.”
Marcuse’s entire career was dedicated to preventing the rise of another repressive dictatorship out of existing democracy. Yes, he believed it was an “objective truth” (I don't like that language either) that the Nazi’s and the Right stood for repression, cruelty and autocracy and that the Left stood against repression, cruelty and autocracy, but the pragmatic question is whether any of his ideas can be used to effectively ward off the rise of another repressive dictatorship in the U.S.
Looking back on Germany, he writes: “The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.”
The question for today is whether to tolerate Trump’s version of Hitler’s Big Lie (not “the Jews lost the war for us” but “the liberals stole the election from us”) or to be intolerant of it in whatever ways we can. The impeachment trial proved to any reasonable person that his lies incited a coup against our democracy, but he still controls the Republican party and is continuing to inspire an unprecedented hatred of “liberals" (they have no problem with black and brown people who hate liberals too). I believe we are already in a slow-motion civil war and that simple “free speech” won’t save us in this new media environment. I think we can discard Marcuse’s radical antithesis (just as he did at the end of his essay), but I’m wondering what others think should be done about what he would call the “clear and present danger” that is Trumpism. What does it mean to be “tolerant” of Trump’s aggressive, anti-democratic Big Lie? When does tolerating his intolerance, his hate speech and lies against "liberals," become a form of repression? Are his followers really just proud American individualists thinking for themselves, or are they being manipulated by lies that no American should tolerate?
The "America" that Matt waxes jingo balls about in his summation of why Marcuse-the-immigrant should have appreciated America was:
The America that was ramping up a racist imperialist war against a nation of farmers in SE Asia;
The America that was tolerant of the men who bombed churches in Alabama;
The America that denied voting rights to a huge number of citizens based on their skin color;
The America that tolerated McCarthyism cuz communists are bad;
The America that denied financial autonomy to half its citizens cuz women;
The America that had a mainly "northern European whites only" immigration policy;
In sum, the America that existed in 1964.
Matt may imagine that he would have been celebrating that America, but for those of us alive and conscious at the time it looked pretty intolerable from a left perspective. But then my understanding of "left" has to do with socialism, not elite-driven neoliberal identity politics.
Marcuse was a leftist, Matt. So am I.
So sue us. Or do a hit job.
I think what is most telling about post-modernists is the contention that there is no objective reality. So what? Heisenberg said as much. We can only describe reality within a realm of certainty. Said another way, George E. Box, regarded by some as the greatest statistician of the 20th century, stated: "All models are false. Some are useful." This does not mean that postmodernist "philosophy" provides any means for better modeling the universe in which we live.
Rather postmodernism is simply a form of sophistry intended to change the game by creating a new set of rules. It even provides the freedom to create new rules in the process since, after all there is no "objective reality". A not so subtle strategy which, when absent rationale arguments, one imperiously declares that rational and logical argument cannot be employed.
Since the models created by post-modernists are not subject to debate or criticism is this not the perfect example of a recursive argument? Postmodernism and Marxist theory are simply rhetorical techniques to be employed in power shifting. Their purpose is political and not scientific. They do not lead to greater knowledge but rather serve as tools for closet aristocrats to seek power and once obtained rule by diktat over the benighted masses. Those experiments have been tried and failed miserably.
“It’s what’s troubling also about the gloomy collectivism dominating today’s intellectual culture, which looks at the unreconstructed individual as the worst kind of menace, always and everywhere a potential purveyor of harm, deception, and oppression, instead of what I think he was designed to be in our culture, the first line of defense against more organized forms of misery.”
Matt, you ought to check out the new six-part BBC/Adam Curtis documentary on YouTube called “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” This is its topic and it’s absolutely riveting (a silly film critic word that actually fits here). The rare footage of Mao’s controversial wife Jiang Qing and Ukrainian-English crime boss Peter Rachman, among many other important historical figures that create the narrative, is hypnotic. These stories paint a rich portrait of events (mostly 20th century, some earlier) and the individuals whose lives help to contextualize our current state of global existential inertia. I’ve read you since 2005 and I think I can say with confidence this doc series is right up your alley. Really enjoying the debate.
https://youtu.be/MHFrhIAj0ME
I appreciate that you followed up and continued the conversation. Not enough folks do that today, your self-reflection is refreshing and so needed in today's discourse.
I think my main problem with your review is that you buried the lede a little. I was at an appropriate school to witness the flowering of deconstructionism and Straussianism and a half dozen other philosophies that engendered the mess we are in today, albeit sometimes via circuitous genealogies.
And all of them were rooted in the same sentiment: the resentment of intellectual elites at having lost their aristocratic patronage in the age of the common man. The desire to rule came first, the excuses came after. It is impossible to understand identity politics without understanding that first.
It takes a lot of intellectual integrity to admit that one's angry first take ad a reviewer might have missed something important. I'm sure I speak for many when I applaud Matt for this willingness to go a bit deeper and to back off from some earlier positions where a lesser mind and character might have doubled down.
I have had arguments with left friends about the American political tradition and whether King's idea of the unfulfilled promise was too generous and there really isn't anything worth salvaging or building from. I'm on the side of starting with what is good in our traditions as King, and I'm hearing Matt, also agree on. The liberal tradition under capitalism has indeed turned speech freedom rights etc into gross parodies of themselves. But something in the tradition remains - and I think it is in the very freedom that Marcuse venerates, and the spirit of rebellion in the New Left that he was so closely associated with. Marcuse predicted the tradition and values could never in themselves save this country and he is in my mind correct - our rampant corruption where speech and money are interchangeable and corporations are legal individuals is a dramatic worsening of what Marcuse witnessed but he was absolutely correct in anticipating it was inevitable. It is social movements and personal and collective rebellion that can save us, not the belief that liberal values and rights in and of themselves can. The liberal tradition has proven itself too easily twisted by capital and domination. In Marcuse's time it was the Vietnam war and nuclear threat that made that obvious; today the evidence is dramatically starker.
While we can rightly question double standards on violence and virus spreading when it comes to BLM protests and we can rightly look at how the protestors become political pawns and currency in media narratives- and have made near zero impact on national politics as we elected the architect of racism Biden and the architect of racist prosecuting Harris - Marcuse is correct when he says No, just voting and assembling peacefully and writing op eds in a liberal pluralistic framework is not enough. Breaking the law, uprising, shaking up business as usual and throwing sand in the gears is a big part of what is needed. In Marcuses time the anti-protesters claimed the liberal tradition had established channels that needed to be respected, but thank god activists didn't respect them because we gained more freedom and humanity from their willingness to revolt. Without street revolt and the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement we would have nuked southeast asia ignored poverty and racism at home and be much worse as a nation and world. That was the line Marcuse stood on when critiquing the hypocrisy of a liberal tradition that would keep people off the streets during a genocidal war. In today's twisted media manipulated world the insurrection is now spectacle and often it is the right wing whatever that is that is posturing overthrow, but I think we should look more deeply at that impulse and not dismiss it. In a weird way qanon and trump are right to spit on the establishment. They do it for the wrong reasons and they promote anti-freedom and let the corporate economy off the hook, but the insurrectionary impulse today is a symptom of the established liberal tradition blocking genuine awakening, genuine realize that yes the media lie and yes politicians are corrupt and no business and usual is not the way forward. Of course the fox TV and newsmax and qanon are trash but if we offer a weak liberal tradition instead, just vote democrat and be glad we are making headway in the culture wars, we are just endorsing a status quo that needs overthrow, not functioning.
It's heartening to see one of my favorite journalists take a second more measured look after stumbling with a self acknowledged angry first pass. Matt has always had the courage to break through the tribalism and see the deeper failings, a quality the New Left and Marcuse brought at a time when the entire political spectrum was pro war and pro nuclear weapons and pro going slow on racism and poverty. Matt seems to share a real affinity with this original New Left spirit. Disagreeing on the American tradition and where it fits in is a more legitimate debate than trying to box Marcuse where he doesn't belong. Thanks Matt for stepping up and having the honesty to look more deeply and to recognize that a hot take and anger don't need to be your final word.
The Critical Theorists just wanted Americans to enjoy all the same freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of the Soviet Union and Maoist China.
Yes, I watched the debate and was impressed by the substance and civility. Meanwhile, my respect for Matt as a journalist went from 10 on a scale of 10 to an 11.
“ He wrote in Repressive Tolerance about the uselessness of submitting information to “the people” in any jumble of “contesting opinions,” because doing so implies that “the people are capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.” “
I think we’re far more at the point of a majority of Americans understanding “the uselessness of submitting information to ‘the Government’ in any jumble of contesting policies, because doing so implies that “the Government is capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge.”
I know that’s the conclusion I’ve reached after two decades of local-scale community organizing driven by issue research, public information campaigns, and attempts to inform local government officials about aspects of policy matters they have not considered, and have no interest in ever considering. They no longer deliberate at all, at least in public. By the time they vote, they’re almost always unanimously in support of whatever the largest financial actor in the situation wants. So the effort is useless.
“ The core idea of Repressive Tolerance is that one can build freedom by way of unfreedom, and this strikes me as an idea that’s not just very unlikely to be correct, but deeply un-American. It’s what’s troubling also about the gloomy collectivism dominating today’s intellectual culture, which looks at the unreconstructed individual as the worst kind of menace, always and everywhere a potential purveyor of harm, deception, and oppression, instead of what I think he was designed to be in our culture, the first line of defense against more organized forms of misery.”
Great writing Matt. Elequently said. God Bless American assholeism!
Marcuse is probably right about the inability of the common man to make decisions about what is right and wrong, if his views are being properly summarized. The main issue with his thesis is: who decides what is valid opinion and what gets censored? I personally don't trust anyone to make that choice, and would rather tolerate the stupid and the demagogues that prey on them.
Back in the 90s I ran a small book typography business in New York. If you've ever run a business, you know there's three problems: 1) Getting the work, 2) Doing the work, 3) Getting paid for the work. If you've never run a business, you have no idea how hard Problem 3 can be.
I had a range of clients. Some paid like clocks. Some fought a bit. Some seemed to think paying was for little people.
The worst were the "liberals". I remember one (who I won't mention) who ran a small press built on family money and published the kind of books humanists/leftist/progressives would love. I'd work my rear off on a project and send an invoice. Nothing would happen. I'd call. Talk to the office manager. Nothing. Six months would go by. Nothing. Then somehow a check would materialize. I needed the business and the money. So I endured the cycle as best I could.
The office manager was another liberal humanist from an Eastern women's college. The cafe/literary type who reads books for a living. When she left the job after a year or so they owed her half a year of back pay. She took them to small claims court. hahah.
The business book publishers paid like clocks. There you go.
I knew a old-school Brooklyn guy who ran a small print shop downtown. He understood my payment problems. He offered to put me in touch with someone who could visit an office and rough somebody up. No kidding! He was serious.
That's life in the streets. Everybody wants justice. Everybody wants fairness. Everybody wants empathy. Everybody wants love.
But too few give it. You get a lecture instead. And when it's time to get paid, you don't even get that. If you want to change the world, start with yourself. When you've mastered that, tell us how you did it. That would be worth listening to.