Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! It’s been a hell of a week here. My birthday party, Peterfest, is happening tomorrow, and that takes coordinating. I’m also in the middle of taking care of some other stuff I’ll maybe write about next week. Plus my day job… I did manage to write some reviews in my off time, but won’t have my discography until next week. Oh well! There’s also a picture of that nice cat. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
David Neiwert, Red Pill, Blue Pill
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Lagniappe
The Lovely Miss Mithra
REVIEWS
David Neiwert, “Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us” (2020) - Dave Neiwert has a possibly unique reputation in antifascist circles- he’s a liberal, a “lib” who is skeptical of militant antifascism, but all the serious antifascists I know admit, without any grudging, that he knows his shit. He’s been following the far right for years, does good research, and doesn’t go beyond the research (for instance, into having a great many opinions about antifascism that he expounds upon, as many liberals do with less basis).
His new book is about conspiracy theories and there’s good reason why. It’s goddamned everywhere and anyone my age or older has had the creepy experience of watching conspiracy theory migrate from the drolly amusing margins of life to the center. It’s especially hard on liberals, who put so many chips on the idea that a rational, informed public can steer public life without much in the way of dangerous mucking about with power structures. The rise of Trump and QAnon is like a zombie movie turned real to them. Hell, I’ll admit, I’m not so far from liberalism — or maybe just the idea that the sort of irrationality and fanaticism you now see cropping up in the Trumpist/QAnon/antivaxx/CRT-panic formations is a “those people” thing, something for the South or abroad, not a thing that would affect New Englanders or people who remind me of New Englanders — to be unable to relate.
Among other things, Neiwert makes an interesting point- conspiracy believers have undertaken virtually every mass casualty attack in western countries for the last twenty years. Incels, “white replacement” Nazis, he doesn’t mention them but ISIS guys usually believe conspiracies, too. That’s a relevant fact, but Neiwert doesn’t push it too hard- after all, more and more people have been drawn into the world of conspiracy theory (not talking about thinking something is fishy with the Warren Report or that Epstein didn’t kill himself, but hardcore world-organizing conspiracy theory) and most of them don’t do any violence. We could also point out that when you leave the twenty-year cutoff, mass shootings seem orthogonal to conspiracy thinking- I’ve never heard that the Columbine killers or other school shooters of that era were particularly into conspiracies, for instance.
Mass shooters are the tip of the iceberg. Since conspiracy theory lurched towards the center of right-wing politics, conspiracy theory can do even greater damage when it winds up behind the wheel of policy. Immigration, climate change, the basic administration of justice and basic governing functioning… as the Republican Party enters into a dynamic where it needs to feed its conspiracy-mad base more and more red meat, who's to say how much can get thrown into a cocked hat by conspiracy-inflected thinking?
And this is where Neiwert slips up, and where his liberalism, no impediment to seeing the problems of the right, trips him up. Advice on trying to deprogram your conspiracy-minded family and friends dominated the last part of the book. It’s fairly sensible stuff about being empathetic but firm, giving them alternative stuff to believe, dealing with underlying hurts, etc. You can see why people whose relatives have been stolen from them by Fox News and Infowars would want that advice. But it isn’t a meaningful political solution. Neiwert even grants that it’s dicey enough as an individual solution. But it seems to be what liberalism offers.
Not to be a broken record, but I’ll stake a claim: it’s about power. What will break the grip of conspiracy? Maybe stuffing every Fox News casualty’s mouth with gold could do it, reassure their anxieties, but A. certainly not for all of them and probably not for enough of them and B. The pricks they vote in won’t let us do that until we have enough power to actually overthrow them. Really, I think, especially given the linkages between conspiracism, authoritarian politics, and authoritarian cultural strains (there’s also an “authoritarian personality” supposedly, and I can believe it, but that’s not my field), there needs to be an alternative pole of power that can command allegiance, respect, or failing those, silence. It doesn’t have to be the silence of the censor: the sullen silence of knowing you’ll be laughed at for your challenge will do it, at least keep the conspiracists on the margins where they belong. And if you have that kind of power, you don’t need to worry that your whole setup can be knocked down by a senile ex-game show host and his febrile fans. That’s what we need- to the extent nice conversations with your chud relatives can help build that, good. To the extent they can’t, well, we know where to drive the old cart and plough. ****
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (1988) - 2021 probably wasn’t the ideal time to finally get around to this classic of its time and place on the American left. That’s not to say that “Manufacturing Consent” is a bad book, or irrelevant. It’s neither, though it is a little bit dated, as in it's a book about the media written before Tim Berners-Lee did his thing and invented the World Wide Web.
I guess it would have been interesting to have read this A. before I developed as much media savvy as I’d eventually collect (not saying I’m super-savvy, just that I have the standard awareness of media manipulation of any millennial) and B. before Noam Chomsky (do people talk much about Ed Herman? He’s first on the bill on this title, for what it’s worth) became the elder statesman/whited sepulchre of the anglosphere left he’s been for some time. I guess he’s been in that role for long enough that I’d have needed to pick this up when I was a teenager, but that would not have been impossible- teenagers do it. As it stands, it’s kinda weird reading this and realizing how central to the left this sort of criticism — that the institutions in power are hypocritical and don’t follow their own stated purposes — would become, how ineffective it would be, and how long it would take to try another game plan.
That’s not really to blame Chomsky, or this book (though some of his public pronouncements over the years have been less than helpful). Chomsky did his bit. He’s a linguist, and a highly influential one, and his social science background shows, in this book and elsewhere. He proceeds in a very orderly fashion, insists that calling mainstream media “propaganda” represents a social scientific “model” to be used like other such constructs, and his fervor, when he lets it show, is the fervor of a man of reason and order confronted with the ways that power wreaks hell on both, both in the world at large and in the discursive sphere, where truth is supposed to emerge. None of these are necessarily unreasonable stances to have in the world. But there’s an extent to which they constituted bringing a legal writ to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. It’s not even a words-versus-actions thing- his words, to the extent they’re calculated to inspire action, would cause actions that aren’t super helpful, and this became more and more evident as time went on.
But, hey, he’s a scholar, and he did his thing, and it’s all stuff worth knowing. Did you know that the media raises hell about about a Solidarity-aligned Polish priest getting killed by the cops (all of whom were tried, convicted, and imprisoned) but had relatively little to say when American-backed death squads murdered the Archbishop of San Salvador, tortured, raped, and murdered nuns (including Americans), and killed numerous priests (and no one was punished for any of this)? Well, now you do! And on and on the book goes. It feels quaint now, the way you had to manipulate a few elite institutions (ironically, there’s fewer of them now with corporate consolidation, but many more small players with relevant impacts because of the Internet) to get over, when he talks about TV networks preferring to air documentaries about birds and the Italian Renaissance over hard hitting political news. It’s a whole new world, but many of the rules apply- money talks, so does access, and slant is probably more most journalists’ job than anything like “straight” reportage. If anything, the changes in the thirty-plus years since this book came out reinforce his points about propaganda. It’s almost as though most of those changes just happened to benefit people with money and power! ****
Robert Nozick, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” (1974) - Yeah, ok, other than eventually getting to von Mises, I’m done trying to read these libertarian hacks for the time being. I read right-wing writing (Nozick would probably object to the classification but fuck him) for a number of reasons: the “know your enemy” thing, the ways in which their writings can illuminate certain historical dynamics, the insights they sometimes contain, sometimes they just turn out to be enjoyable. I suppose the closest Nozick gets to any of those is the “historical dynamic” bit. Namely, between him and Rothbard and, one gets the feeling, many of their liberal interlocutors as the midcentury Consensus era cracked up and we enter the hungover last third of the twentieth century, you get a general impression that a white guy with a degree could just say anything, any words out of his mouth, and get a publishing deal, tenure, and loads and loads of attention.
Because that’s all any of this is. It doesn’t help that it’s technically “analytical” philosophy. At its best, analytical philosophy tries to get to the root of truth as rigorously as possible. I don’t get a lot out of it, even at its best, but I get what they’re trying to do. But applying it to politics is a dicey proposition, and when a hack trying to leap over his old friend (who also did analytical political philosophy) to make a plutocrat-friendly version of objective political truth… just no. Nozick was friends with liberal godfather John Rawls and wrote “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” specifically to counter Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice.” I don’t know if they exactly became blood enemies as a consequence — neither seems like the kind, and also apparently white middle class people just thought personal betrayal was cool in the seventies? — but there it is.
“Anarchy, State, and Utopia” isn’t even an especially elegant construction (Rawls, no prose artist, has his old pal beat by miles there). The closest thing to a through line is the Lockean state of nature. “Let’s just do that again!” Nozick insists. There’s a bit more to it- he opposes the state of nature to Rawls’s “original position,” where if you don’t know how you’re going to be born, you’d prefer to be born into a society that is relatively just, equal, and humane. But what of our RIGHTS, Nozick insists, specifically our property rights, that Locke somehow divined from… somewhere? The state of nature stuff was fatuous enough when it was happening, between Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, whichever other cosseted Enlightenment guy dreaming up the natural man in his cozy study. How is anyone going to do that post-Darwin? How is anyone going to look at nature and be like “yeah, there’s a human-based normative order here, let’s just do that!”
(And don’t at me about indigenous societies or social darwinism. Indigenous societies often managed (still do manage, where colonial capitalism hasn’t dispossessed them) natural resources very well (not exactly batting a thousand but pretty good), but my understanding is that most of them, pre-contact anyway, didn’t understand “nature” as separate from their societies in the Enlightenment/romantic way Europeans came to do. And social darwinists romanticize nature as much as anyone. They just do it in a nasty, adolescent boy way. They look for norms that aren’t there, too.)
Nozick also tries to dispense with Marx by smugly proving that Marx and Marxists understand value via market valuations- a granddaddy of the “you criticize capitalism yet you buy products, interesting” gambit. What kind of an own is that? For one, it completely ignores the concepts of use value and exchange value, which should not be obscure to someone taking on this subject in the seventies, it’s not some “young Marx” marginalia, it’s right there in Capital. For another… so what? The idea isn’t that markets are always wrong informationally, or even necessarily morally/existentially. The idea is that it’s a rigged fucking game because of historical structures and always will be until those structures are overthrown. Somehow Nozick bridges this into “proving” that workers aren’t exploited by their employers profit-taking? Fuck knows. Fuck this. It’s one of “The Sopranos” better jokes that they have a lame snitch reading this book. *
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: The Lovely Miss Mithra
It’s just a nice picture of my beautiful cat! That’s it!