Game On: The Politics of Twitter and the Twittering of Politics

red states, blue states, purple states, white space, infiltrate, leave a trace etc.

I’ve been trying very hard to avoid twitter lately. I’ve found that the result of my addiction to it has been very similar to what happens in Adam Smith’s “pin factory” metaphor in his Wealth of Nations: the economic gains that come from the introduction of the division of labor in early industrial production were extremely significant, even epoch-making, but the people who bore the negative brunt of the situation were the workers themselves, whose minds became increasingly impoverished by doing a same small task over and over again, all day every day. What’s this got to do with twitter? I found myself thinking in 280 character bits, thinking that a fresh, self-contained take proved its own truth having been created, exteriorized and immortalized on the world wide web, with 4 favs from my friends putting a historical seal on my opinion’s existence, its having-taken-place. “Not words, not paint,” says Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse; these withstand the test of time and endure. To which my generation says, “not grams, not tweets.”

But alas, I recently found myself going to twitter.com and watched as my fingers, driven by a foreign but all too intimate, too me, more than me, typed in my twitter handle (podracing_champ) and my Dayna Tortorici (from n+1’s latest issue) inspired password (thisisamassivewasteofyourtime), log me back on. I mean, who could blame me? Super had Tuesday just happened. The Democratic establishment tried to pull a Star Wars Episode III style “order 66” on the movement that has given myself, and more importantly, my extremely diverse and almost universally economically precarious group of friends, who have felt the sense of historical momentousness of the Bernie Sanders campaign for a much longer time than I have. Friends who have given talks about Medicare for All with Tim Faust. Comrades who have been tirelessly pushing for the Democratic party to pivot left via podcasts and journals. Friends who have multiple service jobs who center their lives around their artistic crafts despite the fact that they’ll never be reviewed by Pitchfork. Sure, my friends and I are going to be ok no matter what, because we’ve got each other and we’re all going down the same rabbit hole. But when an entire political class pulls their wagons together like they did on and leading up to Super Tuesday, when the desperate mass of people they locked out who haven’t been inspired by any presidential candidate in their lifetimes, born into a terrible fortress they’ve never been able to get a glimpse out of, are denied the ability to engage in a battle of ideas on a level playing field, when even the New York Times, the journalistic “bastion” of credibility and “well-earned” prestige is camping out in the wagon circle, with the “Pod Save America” guys sent out to negotiate a peace treaty, shit got real, because people thought the establishment was ready to yield. But of course we were wrong, and now that they’ve played this sickening ace-in-the-hole things are as real for me as they are for my much less secure and more vulnerable friends. So yeah, I logged back on.

Over that next Wednesday (March 5), and the beginning of Thursday, nothing struck me in a way different than any other times I had been on twitter, I just got angry as I read all of the vitriolic but righteous venting, which mixed with my own swirling thoughts: Liz Warren is the one to blame, Pete Buttigieg is a disgrace to his Gramsci-translating father, Amy Bloomberg was running in the wrong primary, Obama is the Sith Lord, Order 66, Death Star, Liz Warren drops out, who will she endorse, give her time, she’s the WORST, she needs space, the media treated her unfairly, VERY SELFISH… I needed to take another step back, because re-entering this space was not helping me or anybody else.

2

To harken back to the beginning of the essay, I was similarly on a semi-podcast detox: the combined effect of twitter and podcast listening was that I felt myself continuing to have the “right” opinions, but I wasn’t able to speak intelligently or authentically about them through more than maybe 2 or 3 talking points. I was an idiot parroting the intellectual left-wing sanctioned takes. I came to the realization that it was not in my best interest to know and have an opinion about everything; I had to trust that if an issue came up, I could trust my own instincts and intelligence to form a good, convincing view, one that I could put under my belt as my own guiding belief, rather than just writing down exactly what the teacher said and wrote on the blackboard. It was better to know a few things really well, to pass over what I was understandingly ignorant about with a Tractatus-era-Wittgensteinian silence, and commit myself to the confusion of soaking in the indeterminate and infinite body of information, content, and voices around me, trusting that it would all make sense eventually.

The main podcast and bureau of information I was taking a break from was Chapo Trap House. I remember back in 2016, everyone was yas queening the actual queen Beyoncé who had released Lemonade. We were then told to transpose this profane sanctification onto Hillary Rodham Clinton (not a queen), and we were all supposed to go along with it. Of course, white men like myself could cry a fucking river, but I distinctly remember women of color in particular being particularly frustrated at this phenomenon, where we worship at the altar of Hillary and have some post-service overpriced brunch, the night after going to see Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, the 21st century’s pathetic response and social corrective to Wagner. This was not our religion, but this is the space we had to inhabit, that we were implicitly forced to inhabit. We’re on the same team here. Shape up, there’s no I in team, fall in line. And we did.

The debacle of 2016 did have one positive side effect though: Bernie Sanders was able to pave a legitimate lane on the left: the failure of Clintonist traditionalism legitimized having a split in a party whose logic had always been about unifying under one candidate and idea. This progressive lane became further legitimized with the grassroots campaigns and collective rise of “the squad” (Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Talib). The initially niche Sanders movement gained real traction and grew the kind of popularity with young voters, flyover country working class, and POC (mainly Latinx) more generally that consultants for the moderate lane literally could not buy with hundreds of millions of dollars, the kinds of voters who begrudgingly or in some cases not at all showed up to vote for Clinton in 2016, and who absolutely won’t show up to vote for Joe Biden in the general election, the collective voting bloc that literally makes Bernie not just electable, but favorable against Trump. Biden would get steamrolled; his supporters would literally vote for a sock puppet with a small radio inside of it that alternately repeated, ad infinitum, the words “covfeve” and “Russia” than go with Sanders. Bernie and his campaign earned prized voting blocs that Biden will never be able to win over, and Bernie would get them plus the Biden anti-Trump voters.

But let’s say, theoretically, that the establishment continues to reject this obvious state of affairs, or runs Biden and loses, or even, if Bernie does get the nomination and democrats and moderate voters do the requisite mental gymnastics to both convince themselves and an MSNBC’d-into-submissiveness populace that a vote for Bernie is impossible: it’s too late. The Democratic Party has either been hijacked by the progressive lane, or the Democratic Party dies. Its time has come. To deny a candidate whose voters would make the Democratic nominee viable and favorable against Trump in favor of a moderate who has no chance of appealing to them is to, by the definition of a two party system, to be in favor of the other side.

3

To pivot back to the “The Twitter Problem,” there was a specific moment which came up on my feed that, almost in real time, recorded the dialectical shift, or its premonition, from a Left in America organized by traditionally backed moderates and centrists to one driven and guided by the progressive lane. This moment made me realize that we had won, despite the fact that we’d have to wait a long time to see the benefits of this victory. It was an interaction between Will Menaker of Chapo Trap House, and Jon Lovett of Pod Save America on March 5th.

It isn’t necessary to recapitulate here who the Pod Save America folks are in total detail, but I do need to go through a bit of backstory before coming to this interaction in order to set up the required critical frame necessary for me to make the kinds of general claims I will make. Pod Save’s ideology, formed during their time working for Obama, is to the right of Warren, probably to the left of Buttigieg and Biden, and might share the same coordinates as Amy Kloubuchar, but with more nominal flexibility. Pod Save, under their banner of Crooked Media, was essentially built to be an arena for debate amongst all of the left in order to “workshop” ideas to best achieve party unity so that 2016 wouldn’t happen again. Boosted both by the fact that they worked for daddy Obama which apparently safeguards one’s political views from any sort of actual critique that would call for the negation of those views, and their desperate-to-never-change listeners’ (if the New York Times morning briefing became incarnate, with the personality of a character from Parks and Rec, you’d get a Pod Save fan) fanatical[1] support, Pod Save can get away with the proposition that they aren’t tied down to any sort of ideological coordinate. Rather, they see themselves floating above the left, without realizing that their ideological shiftiness only exists within stark limits, tethering them to a place of power that reflects the power dynamics of the establishment wing of the party. Their critical and analytical existence, like Descartes’ rational subject, isn’t hovering over and detached from the various ideological limbs of the party with the express purpose of putting them together in the most rational way possible. Rather, they are like some sort of limited, geek Greek God, that can take the form of anyone between an Elizabeth Warren and a Joe Biden, to be very generous. They can see the good in all of these candidates and full-heartedly believe it’s possible to create a unity that adequately represents everyone in the party, even those in the Sanders lane that they are literally incapable to understanding. They have no way of talking to Sanders supporters: not just because most “Bernie Bros” hate Pod Save, but because the Pod Save people and the interests they serve refuse to get up from their perch atop the party in order to have a conversation on some sort of middle ground. But at this point, it seems like they would negotiate if they could: they just simply don’t know how to exist or argue from a position off of that perch.

This sad fact is most ironically and clearly evidenced by how eager and able the Pod Save guys are able to argue for positions of unity and same-sideism with the Right than they are with the progressive left. For example, Lovett noted on one episode that liberals and the right both agree in principle with getting Maduro out of power in Venezuela; they simply differ on how to do that. Unfortunately, the old adage isn’t “it’s not what you say or do, it’s how you do it.” It’s “actions speak louder than words,” and the result of both methods, whether the maximal T.R. style of deliberate intervention of the right or whatever devious unthinkable avant-Minimilast (“minimally invasive surgery”) CIA tactics that Lovett might be referring to, means the same thing. The left and the right should differ not in how they go about things, but in what they actually do. It’s the total aestheticization of the ruthless for optics, to make the blunt, violent reality we create less obviously evil. It’s putting a Human Rights Campaign™ sticker on an RPG. For how innovative Sanja Ivekovic’s Personal Cuts, a video in which she gradually cuts a black cloth wrapped around her face to slowly reveal the skin underneath, is for the genre of self-portraiture, it is at the end of the day a self-portrait, just like Van Gogh’s self-portraits, and selfies. The how matters of course, but it doesn’t change what it is ontologically in a world of ever-changing formal standards, the confusion inherent in the era of the “crisis of meaning,” and definitions unable to stick to their objects once and for all. The right sends a lump sum to Lockheed Martin who creates a missile, while the moderate left as exemplified by Lovitt do the same exact thing but make it more palatable and less guilt-striking, implementing ghastly formal innovations with the added on feature of, I’d imagine, workshopping the process with a diverse group of people in a boardroom, a boardroom in which they also hold the power. The diverse people should just be happy to be there, their presence legitimizing the evil happening within, just like the people of color in Buttigieg and Warren’s campaigns who spoke out against their lack of having any real say in the campaigns, and their feeling of being tokenized. We represent you on our terms, not yours.

4

The left is in a crazy position right now: essentially, the media narrative being propagated implies that Elizabeth Warren and her endorsement are the last chance for the “Left” to achieve some sort of unity. If she chooses to not endorse or endorses Biden, the left has no leverage, at least according to moderates, to lay claim to the “perch” of power. If she does endorse Bernie, then the left very clearly has leverage in a way that moderates cannot deny. But even if the latter doesn’t happen, Biden is guaranteed to lose, and if 2016 was a tragedy and a farce comes in 2020, that’s it for moderates no matter what. The Biden electability argument is a zombie right now, totally dead but still able to do terrible things in reality, but a Biden loss in 2020 would cremate it and scatter its ashes in the sea, not dissimilarly to the helicopter “disappearances” in Argentina that America was, at the very least, complicit in, a situation which repeats itself in various forms all the time, and like Nietzsche’s eternal return, Bernie has always said no and Biden has always said yeah, sure. Whether he knew anything about Argentina, or the Iraq War, doesn’t mean anything if you are complicit in its coming to fulfillment or advocating for it. Actions speak louder than words.

 So, as things stand, it is simply the case that Bernie is more electable and progressives hold the leverage in the democratic party: it’s just a matter of time before the moderates put up a peace flag, or go full black pill and become Republicans in everything but nomenclature, affirming the fact that the two sides of the supposedly “bi-polar” America they thought existed with legitimate differences were the same side of the same coin (which was so clear to me when I worked on Capitol Hill during a gap year in 2013-14), the same fascist unified machine that just has a personality disorder, not one government being run by two equal and opposite forces. It’s a sad end of history, where arguments lead to no sort of dialectical overcoming or progress, and we continue to operate under the unconscious assumption that we are at the end of history, and the questions to be answered are only those of management, of how.

5

And then there was the Menaker and Lovett feud which went down on Thursday night, March 5:

Menaker: “Elizabeth Warren and her supporters don't owe you ANYTHING right now, but those of us who fought against her, the men especially, should take a moment to appreciate the cold, brutal, long term, strategic genius of her campaign to nominate Joe Biden”

Lovett, quote-tweeting: “Can't imagine anything less helpful! At some point you guys will realize you are leaders and not just Brooklyn dummies, but seems like it will be after you personally helped set a tone that did real damage to a campaign you genuinely believe would build a better world.”

Menaker: “Would you say it did more or less damage than what you did to Warren by getting her to take that DNA test?”

“Quick follow up: who's done more damage to the Democratic party? Me, for stating what I believe to be true about it and what it represents? Or you, for convincing Beto to run for president instead of Senate?”

Lovett: “Let's take these one at a time! Give me THREE TWEETS. 1) On Warren, I asked a q in an interview. Honestly, I'd ask it differently in hindsight. But it's wild that you've actually convinced yourself that a question on an old podcast ep is what gets Elizabeth Warren to do anything.”

Menaker: “Oh so candidates don't actually make decisions based on what podcast hosts say or do, thanks for the response Jon!”

Lovett: “On your second question, didn't realize you were such a Beto for Senate fan. But it's amazing the power you think we have over presidential candidates, while refusing to see how much influence you have over the people who listen every single day and see you as a leader.”

“You can change the subject, be defensive, point out what you don't like about me, say I'm proving your point. It doesn't hurt my feelings! Because you cannot convince me we are not ultimately on the same side even if you disagree.”

On the surface, this is just another twitter spat between two ideologically opposed figureheads of their respective movements. Except Lovett doesn’t have a movement that he is faithful to other than the liberal cause of maintaining party unity, bringing the party to the bare minimum left threshold in order to have a comfortable amount of support to beat Trump. Or at least that’s what I imagine is his underlying ideology no matter how cheery he seems to be. The problem is that this ideology is just patently false; Lovett’s “impartiality” in nominally “supporting” the liberal cause in general rather than any particular faction is to reduce the specific Sanders faction to another voting bloc to simply be put into place, and while Lovett isn’t necessarily the prime moving perpetrator here, he perfectly reflects and disseminates the same positions of the establishment that do precisely this. He is an unwitting treaty negotiator sent both to the left and right of what the established democratic norms are. They talk and negotiate from the position of the party establishment whether they know it or not, and they legitimate a much more pernicious ideology than Lovett claims Menaker’s to do. It’s a much more violent form of speech, I would argue: intentionally gaslighting Menaker (criticizing him for exactly what he did in the case of Warren) and dog whistling the same “Bernie Bros just want to destroy everything rather than build something together” narrative.

But the part of Lovett’s response that truly disturbed me, and then made me realize that the establishment that Lovett represents was truly dead in the water, was when he wrote, “You cannot convince me we are not ultimately on the same side even if you disagree.” I thought that Lovett here sounded eerily similar to what you’d hear in an abusive, incredibly unhealthy relationship. It reminded me of Hegel’s Phenomenology , both in the master-slave dialectic sense but also in the sense of the world spirit wanting to progress more and more such that everything other is subsumed, under the heading of self-identity, within the ever expanding world spirit. It becomes more monstrous and destructive to assimilate than to negate something entirely. It also reminds me of Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of “respecting the Other” in his Totality and Infinity. Lovett projects a totality that the establishment would like to place onto the world and everything different to it, but to do so is to reduce that genuine difference to the same, which is intractably violent, a violence that no one seems at all willing to recognize as legitimate while the media, meanwhile, is handing out tissues and lollipops to every single Warren supporter.

But there’s such an interesting dialectical moment here, which can’t be totally defined by the references to Hegel and Levinas. Staring at this sentence, to me, has been like looking at a duck-rabbit: I see a duck, then I see the rabbit, and then I see the duck again, but then finally, I realize that this is not a duck-rabbit, but rather just a site where something very clear happened. On the one hand, it has the sense of “you are never going to be rid of me,” which is something someone with the upper hand in the power dynamic might say to the other, which increases a feeling of helplessness, an inescapability from the predicament. Lovett has enough Starbucks cold brews to last as long as he needs to weather the storm to “stay on the same side” as Menaker.

But then you can read it another way: Lovett sounds desperate. In order for him and his movement to get what he wants, which is either a Biden presidency or a Trump presidency in which the establishment wing of the democratic party is not upset (which requires massive voter turnout from Sanders voters to make it anywhere near close enough to possibly justify come within a light year of being able to credibly make that argument) and the leaders of the moderate mental hegemonic apparatus get to keep their positions of influence without being challenged, he needs Menaker and the movement he knows that he represents. Lovett’s statement has the same feeling and tone of a partner holding their SO hostage by saying that if they leave them, they’ll commit suicide.

The dialectic finally reaches its climax and resolves with the end of that line: “even if you disagree.” Again, this line initially feels threatening. It is de facto made from a position of perceived power, “the perch.” Even if you exercise your agency, you don’t have a choice. It’s a trap. But people don’t make “forever” or “never” claims unless things are serious, desperate. Lovett’s choice of words signifies how much power he is trying to project at Menaker in order to stave off a threat, but simultaneously shows how distressed he is. On a different level, Lovett is making a promise and unwittingly signing his own letter of resignation, he’s lazily assuming that by locking Menaker and in turn the movement he is allied with in a room he’ll be able to contain them and “make them behave!”[2]

What Lovett can’t accept or recognize is that Menaker does disagree with him, and at the moment, the claim each side actually has to power is much more contested and up in the air than Lovett would like to admit, and is in reality almost certainly on the side of Menaker. They have the leverage, not because of the actions they inspire in others, but because Menaker is on a side that literally will not vote for Biden. The movements are so much bigger than each respective figurehead, and the puppett thinks that he’s the blameless one, whereas Menaker’s only fault is speaking his truth (speak on it! Say it!). The truth of the situation now, which became abundantly clear upon reading this quote? Let Menaker be Rorschach and Lovett “you” in the iconic prison cafeteria scene from Watchmen, when Rorschach says, “None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me!” Lovett locked himself in a room with Menaker, not knowing what he was getting into, and to keep his promise, he is going to have to play by Menaker’s rules, not his. In my view this is genuinely the situation right now between moderates and progressives, and it unfolded in this interaction, particularly in Lovett’s general tone and last sentence in particular.

6

But the story does not end here. There is an even deeper divide, a real, unabashed contradiction between these two sides.

While I don’t believe Lovett knows of what he is guilty, ignorance does not excuse complicity, a complicity which serves as a wd-40 for manufacturing consent. The progressive camp and the moderates seem to be operating in two different temporal realms, one trying to accomplish the future, the other to restore the recent past which was in actuality, in all spheres, less than below mediocre at best (except for the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA Title). Then there are ideological differences on how to accomplish certain policies, which in the end are ontologically meaningless. There are plenty of fundamental disagreements between the Lovetts and Menakers of the world, or even the Warrens and Sanders of the world, even if Warren is, supposedly, as far left as one can get within the traditional technocratic meritocratic capitalist political machine by playing their game.

We could extend this disagreement to the juxtaposition of harnessing a mass sense of real desire and channeling it toward real but also not currently material or objectifiable goals: it’s a dream, and that’s why having broad popularity and appealing to peoples’ dreams and aspirations is more compelling than “we have plans to actually do those things.” They don’t understand that the size of the yearning is directly proportional, or even helps to create, the desired object or goal. These goals are different than “the same policy goals” Warrenites have said incessantly this week. Harnessing mass momentum authentically and letting that energy guide a movement and campaign through an organizational apparatus that never loses touch with its base is different than straight up offering people policies.

I would argue that the failure of Warren and success of Sanders highlights a major but overlooked difference between the Sanders progressives as a whole, as well as Menaker specifically, and the various manifestations of the moderate side of the party in the political, economic, and media spheres, is they each have a different conception of truth.

7

There is a major difference between something “being true” and “ringing true,” and I’d argue that with the dialectic of enlightenment, in categorizing, naming, and defining, having beaten the game and subsequently played it another billion times and completed every single side quest, and in time, playing each possible variation of the game an infinite number of times, something “being true” has much more of an emphasis in our culture than something ringing true.

Something being true usually means that a statement is true within the internal logic of the limited system of knowledge and possibilities that a person is able to or willing to imagine. For the most part, on an individual level, we tend to try and limit this scope so that we don’t have to make sense of everything, so that things can have their proper place and we can sleep at night. Things are true to the extent that they don’t contradict our own system of understanding, and the smaller that personal system is, the more we can tolerate ambiguity. I can admit that something is true without having to verify it; few things have to be verified by my own experience in order to be true. So this truth becomes, essentially, a variable within a scientific system that has nothing to do with my own personal understanding. There is an interplay between the small scope of understanding and the vast body of empirical knowledge and data accumulated through the process of the dialectic of enlightenment: we already know everything, let science take over, the best you can do is conform your thinking to this intellectual totality. One day, you will have to take a billion page long multiple choice test, so stay vigilant everyone! And the art (content) you consume? It has nothing to say about this world, don’t worry! Just sit back and enjoy, but make sure you pay attention, since you never know what they’ll ask you at trivia night.

Of course, this “infinite system” I’m talking about is by default finite: Levinas writes extensively on this phenomenon, where a totality (in this case, of knowledge) could theoretically hold an infinite amount of facts, while it being the case that there is space stretching out infinitely in infinite directions outside of any totality, including the totality inaugurated with the obscene experiments and logic of the concentration camps in mid 20th century, the thread eventually running through globalization, and finally to the development of the internet and technology. This development led to a situation that placed power, space, law, knowledge, and time onto one single plane, where everyone has their assigned place and norms that they must conform to. You have unlimited freedom within the limits inscribed.

The ideological upshot of this theory of knowledge, which as I allude to, becomes a theory of politics, reality and, well, everything, is that there is no outside the system. Things are only recognized as being true and legitimate, and therefore the only things recognized for their truth value are those that can be told in a calm tone, since the truth of the proposition should speak for itself. Please speak quietly in the library.This theory of truth is that of the establishment, which proclaims, as Milan Kundera notes in his brilliant essay “Art of the Novel,” that things could not exist in any other way, which benefits those who hold an interest in reality remaining exactly as it is. But reality is far too unruly to ever completely subsume itself to enlightenment, or any theory.

But if that theory of truth was true, if it rang true, then we wouldn’t be in a situation where every president we elect appeals to pathos just as much or more as logos, or finds a way to speak what we know to be true from all of the experiments and research we’ve done, and the data we’ve collected, without serving some other sort of legitimizing purpose, such as speaking what is true in order to further define the boundaries between what can and can’t be true. One not trapped on the single unified plane can take a particular truth and judge its relevance for the moment by pairing it with the kind of speech and tone that the moment calls for. Facts can “ring” true or false depending on the occasion for which they are brought up.

Something “ringing” true isn’t necessarily a falsifiable “fact.” Something can be true in the sense that I can listen to a really skilled jazz guitarist and say “this girl is the truth.” There’s certainly an element of the “authentic” in it; it’s true because it’s real and affects me in a unique way. In Kundera fashion, we can also say that fiction can be true in this sense, whether for historical purposes or relaying some aspect of experience that can’t be written down and quantified. Fiction, or the fictive character, breaks through the overarching force-fed myth of there being only one world order. A truth that “rings true” is true to the extent that it breaks up the façade of infinite empty communication and codes, the myth that we are all immediately categorizable and knowable to one another with the right technological augmentations, which have already arrived and are continually improved. Truth that rings relies on a quality it gets from being actively false within the realm the establishment props up. It breaks in from the Levinasian outside precisely because it is true. Its foreignness, its otherness, constitutes its truth.

For Bernie and his surrogates, this truth often takes the form of a Samuel L. Jackson from-Pulp Fiction-style “furious anger” that’s almost biblical, coming from a place of profound dismay and frustration. The righteous fury of Sanders isn’t recorded within the mainstream system of truth because he doesn’t use his indoor voice, His followers tend to shy away debates that are reduced to a pure, impartial and rational process of assessing the merits shortcomings of ideas in relation to each other. Sanders supporters tend to express their truth in different ways

The unwittingly or wittingly literary types, or just curmudgeons generally, are like a collective embodiment of a 21st century American Thomas Bernhard, while the more theory-minded side of his support are provide a practically updated version of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and a Derridean deconstruction applied to media and the world as a text. And as we know, Derrida was not one for “truth” or “Truth,” for that matter, especially in the way it is limitedly imagined and reinforced. Bernhard, meanwhile, had a particular sense of truth that isn’t about checking for critical or factual accuracy or some property like that: his truth flows from getting on a certain wavelength and broadcasting a looping criticism of everything under the sun (and his nose) in a formally true manner (in terms of accurately mirroring what our minds are going through when we rant). Bernhard made an art out of the diatribe, a tradition that can be stretched at least as far back to Karl Kraus

If we are in an era where the work of art is, in many cases, replaced by the exhibition, the festival, the “tri-ennial” itself, we could argue that the modern presidential campaign, at least in Sanders’ case, relies on an almost art-like quality insofar as it relies on recognizing previously un-legitimized anger and, indeed, energy from outside of the system as such and as allowed, as well as the fictive element of imagining and fighting for a new world. The campaign becomes the staging and revealing of its own truth, which rests on a site of power that isn’t just intentionally unrecognized by moderates, but itself literally cannot identify with moderates and their agenda. The latter is due to necessity, the former is due to sheer bad consciences and willful ignorance.

The establishment mode of running for office, where there’s an interplay between serving special interests (the hand that feeds) on the one hand and the people just enough to be and stay elected on the other hand. They are still operating under the illusion of a guiding and uniquely American political myth: that America and its unruly masses needs to be guided by intelligent elites. But they continue this farce in the internet era, where people have more access to information than any other time in human history. Sanders and his movement’s new type of politics renders this process kitsch, and as such, out of date.

The aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art aren’t categorially restricted to the phenomenon of propaganda and Brechtian art, respectively, of the early to mid 20th century: it’s happening in a new way today and it’s not an insult at all to equate politics with art. This conception of truth is going to form the new norm for political movements going forward; the cost of Menaker lowering his voice is that the Jon Lovetts of the world are going to have to find something genuinely worth raising their voices for, because that conception of truth is in the process of imposing a new normative conception of truth that will not allow previous structures to stand without us simultaneously acknowledging and affirming their own contingency.

8

Obviously, journalism and the media are concerned with and concern truth as well, but media companies are now blatantly proficient in taking some sort of fact or event of the day and making it say something that serves their own interest as an institution. It feels like the New York Times just stopped trying to hide what purposes their stories, headlines, and time of publication are made to serve. Their takeaways and emphases are based on a partial view of the facts, and when we look at the whole situation, your average thinking person would come away with a completely different take than what’s now being shoveled into their mouths. It’s a shame, because I used to associate spin and the phenomena of echo chambers with Fox News (which was on my family room tv every day growing up), and the liberalism of the NY Times with intellectual seriousness and a sense of journalistic integrity.

This is obviously not the case these days. Obviously the editorial board is its own uniquely embarrassing joke, but most recently, I saw on Friday morning (an article on the Times front page, written by their Moscow Correspondent Anton Troianovski titled, “As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity,” sub-headed, “Previously unseen documents from a Soviet archive show how hard Mr. Sanders worked to find a sister city in Russia when he was a mayor in the 1980s. Moscow saw a chance for propaganda.” I almost feel bad for the writer, who was probably asked to do some classic red-baiting, with the only new angle available being documents in a small soviet village archive about how Bernie, anti-war and wanting to push toward a real end to an outrageous armed conflict that equally saw the consolidation of world power coalesce around two lucky countries, wanted to find a sister city for Burlington out of sense of solidarity and responsibility.

Apparently a couple of low-level officials saw this earnestness as being potentially advantageous in the context of the endless number of proxies during the Cold War. The reader is ramrodded over the head with the dual takeaways of “Bernie likes Russia and socialism” and “Bernie would be a weak commander and chief because of how he got played, even though the clear takeaway from a piece like this is that it’s extremely charming that Bernie was trying to make a positive foreign policy impact despite being the mayor of a city in Vermont, and the underscoring of his consistent commitment to his ideals over time.

My friend angrily texted me that morning:

“Fucking look at the front page today, it’s a whole trove of articles about how Bernie went to Yaroslavl in 1988 to establish a sister city program and some low ranking political operatives from the Soviet Union thought it’d be useful to them. It’s the dumbest shit ever. Trump is literally an FSB plant.

It also seems just completely unlikely to make anyone care, except possibly some Fox clowns who will say ‘look it’s not Donald it’s Bernie who’s a Russian operative’. I can’t imagine anyone else in the world even remembers the Soviet Union, let alone considers advocating thawing relations during the late 80s to be a problem.”

Indeed, the use of this information to make these particular points felt so equally stupid and blatantly dishonest. Taking this fun real life event and giving it this spin led to the article having a disgusting, ominous, metaphorical stench, like that of the priest’s corpse near the beginning of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. This story, this historical fact, didn’t belong in this article, this context, being used in this way. It stinks.

9

I talked with a guy sitting next to me the Thursday night prior at the rock climbing gym I frequent in South East London. He happened to be a philosophy lecturer at King’s College London, and with my love for the kind of philosophy I’m sure I’d discover he hated (fortunately I was wrong!), but affinity for philosophy nonetheless, I thought it was a sign that we would hit it off. He was from California and voted for Warren, but as we talked about various things, including politics, I was able to get him to understand in a rational way on establishment terms why Bernie is electable, even favourable, against Trump and why Biden is unelectable.

Our mutual disillusionment at how the NY Times could become what it has become was also a topic of discussion. It was particularly amusing to hear my new friend, who has never heard of Chapo Trap House or Red Scare (Lord save those of us who do) absolutely lose it ranting about the meaningless of David Brooks’ writing. “What fucking myth, dude? Fuck off.” I enjoyed seeing the good-humored hate flow from him. I could in real time see myself forming a real bond and friendship with someone who exists across an ideological gap with me. He told me about his forays into the study of endangered languages. I told him about K. David Harrison, a professor at the school where I did part of my undergraduate degree, who is the leading authority on the topic in academia. I told my new friend that I knew a lot about a lot of things but didn’t know much about those things. He laughed. I don’t think he had met a “Bernie Bro” like me, even though most of us seem to be sweethearts whose major fault is trying too hard to be cool.

I finished up editing a piece for the journal I run, a review of Peter Sloterdijk’s Stress and Fear (the only book I’ve read by him is You Must Change Your Life, which I read at a time when I was stressed and fearful, and found this book to be an appropriately cool replacement for the Jordan B. Peterson craze I was sitting out). I then put my laptop away, exchanged email addresses and phone numbers with the guy, put on my rock climbing shoes and went downstairs to get a workout in. Therapy. I figured I would text him later, maybe meet up for a godawful “pint.”

He came down to the gym floor to say bye to me on his way out half an hour later. He introduced me to a friend he had briefly mentioned upstairs, who had gone to Deep Springs College (I wondered if Epstein might have had any connections to the school, in hindsight). He introduced him with his full academic title, and I was taken aback, quite intimated, until he complimented the Tottenham Hotspur jersey I was wearing. He asked what I was doing in London and I shittily answered the question for the millionth time, and embarrassingly blurted out a question along the lines of “do you know William T. Vollmann?” He said he didn’t, and I was like ok. I said good bye, and I got back on the wall.

10

I hope that I was sneaky enough for it to not be a bomb drop to reveal that my friend who texted me about the “Sister City” article was the same guy I met and became friends with at the rock gym, someone who I anticipate to become better friends with as time goes on. And I don’t think I would’ve met him, or been able to talk with him the way I did if I hadn’t taken a significant break from Twitter.

On the one hand, my break from Twitter made me realize that I had to be much more present, both bodily and mentally, and more available within my immediate surroundings. This meant being ok with going short to medium periods of time without compulsively checking my phone, being comfortable with some level of nothingness. This nothingness has been a great boon for my thinking, and for using my time in much more creative, fulfilling, and productive ways.

One thing I realized was that I should probably stop going to the rock gym with my headphones in. The first time I went to the gym without my headphones was on Thursday, and I met my new friend, after months of feeling isolated almost entirely because of my own anti-sociality and because of a deep sense of me not being able to find people like me. Social media reflects such a particular and perfect ego-ideal back to us that to have there be people like us is an affront to our unique, newly minted commodity character. It’s a trap I had to break out of.

The fact that I had been off twitter allowed me to be myself a bit more: my views were my own, rather than just parroting what the sanctioned leftist accounts said. I had already been comfortable for awhile with my new vulnerability; it was actually my new strength.

What I was most afraid of, I realize now, is what most Warren voters are terrified of: I am in a very fortuitous position in every single way, but I want to be allied with the right cause. I want to see the left be an authentic movement for the people in the states, but I was afraid that my actual political views, separated from my twitter stream, would be moderate or conservative, at least in comparison to the Sanders movement. I felt like a fraud at times, my best friend in Cleveland having an “eat the rich” tattoo on his forearm. Was I just playing house? Was I actually a radical?

What I’ve learned is that, through my own experiences and because of my friends, who I’m going to back up not matter what, is that my conservative tendencies from my family (both sides), my Warren stripes (I have an insatiable desire for institutionally sanctioned prestige), and my Sanders stripes all come together into some weird whole that exists in the Sanders lane, but can freely communicate with people across ideologies, and I guess that’s just me now. That ability to speak Warren-ese and conservative-ese is a great strength of mine, albeit one born from my position of privilege. In the end, there was nothing to fear.

But again, what really got me to the point now where I was considering flying home to canvas for the Ohio Primary next week (I was supported with this pursuit by my conservative parents, but vetoed by the coronavirus epidemic), was seeing the establishment pull an absolutely evil trick before the whistle even blew on Super Tuesday. That was literally a declaration of war against most of my friends. Pete Buttigieg, who has had every chance in the world to get it, will never understand what this kind of war means, and what it’s like to be the constant victim of potshots from both political parties, and looked down on with utter contempt because their decision to get an MFA led to them being a bartender instead of working at McKinsey. I guess we should all join the army, then we’ll be allowed, given permission to be content. The problem is that the mind games that the Democratic establishment play with their own people has largely precipitated what me and my friend, who sings in the enormously popular Cleveland band Mourning [A] BLKstar, feel to be a constant state of living through what we have colloquially dubbed the “mental” World War III, which has been happening for a long time now and is still not over. Mental gymnastics, shame, cognitive dissonance, learned helplessness, depression, energy with no outlet: this is where we’re at.

I had heard from friends that a major issue with Warren supporters was a particular form of cognitive dissonance: generally, Warren had support from upper-middle class white liberals who were more left than what the establishment offered them. However, their position with the upper-middle class paired with the mental soma afforded them by their “rightful position of power” within what they believed to be a functioning meritocracy makes it very difficult for them to realize that if they want to fully be a part of the progressive lane, they have to recognize that what they believed to be a meritocracy was in many ways entirely arbitrary, an arbitrarcracy, that also depended on coming from relative positions of privileged. To paraphrase the words of the British political and cultural documentarian Adam Curtis on an episode of Chapo, liberals who genuinely want a new world, one that can defeat not just Trump but the institutional supports and economic realities that created and sustain him, have to understand that they stand to personally lose a lot if that’s the route they choose. I’ve chosen my path, but most of my high school classmates are comfortably supporting Republicans back in Northeast Ohio, probably married and watching the big game as I write this. It doesn’t sound that awful to be fair. But here I am, and this is where I need to be. If the left is going to be a “Band of Brothers” (except gender neutral, I’m just referring to the TV series), then we all have to get on the helicopter together and line up next to each other as we jump off. You can’t be half in half out.

11

The other awesome upshot of being on twitter a lot less is that I’ve watched so many good movies lately. I just finished watching Mike Leigh’s Naked. The main character, Johnny, is an extremely smart street philosopher and unbearable sweet talker, musing on Nietzsche and the Odyssey while walking around East London. This movie was doing the high culture/low culture schtick in the most authentic way before it became unbearable. The main antagonist of the film is a rapist landlord who preys in particular on working class women. Like in all of Leigh’s films, particularly done in reaction to London under Thatcher’s austerity, it’s really heartbreaking and angering for me to see how the incredibly kind-hearted, intelligent people happen to be put on a track toward being spit up and left on the side of the road, and either boring or just blatantly evil people end up in enviable positions.

As I finished watching the film, I wondered why I wasn’t sleeping on the streets.

[1] Which comes both due to their policy views being reflected back to them, the fact that its Obama boys sanctioning those views and their dissonance with material reality, the “inclusive” ideology of liberalism ensuring that their views never had to shift any further left than they were in,  2012, and that the identity of initially progressive white Obama voters created a sense of winning, paired with being on the right side of history and the self-given clout that comes alongside the feeling of the former two attributes provide

[2] Bloomberg reference: when he acted in a weird rendition of Mary Poppins as mayor of NYC in the late aughts and let it slip that this is how he viewed politics at its core, revealing his contempt for ordinary people nakedly.

This piece’s first draft was finished on Thursday, March 6th.

This review is part of our Theory and Society Series. The Theory and Society Series is meant to bridge the gap between academic critical theory’s mode of social analysis and everyday social criticism, creating a totally new discourse in the process.