A Journey to Nowhere
Political fatalism, "The Lady and the Dale", and more.
It is the easiest thing in the world to be a pessimist. All one has to do is wake up in the morning.
Pessimism, though, as the great Gramsci articulated, leaves only the intellect in charge and ignores the will. Don’t just describe the world, change it; society was made by man to be a certain way and could just as easily make it something different: choose your aphorism. The point is still that pessimism means inertia, and inertia means surrender, and surrender means misery.
Recently, with a number of people in the Democratic Socialists of America updating and articulating Peter Camejo’s essential essay on the differences between liberalism, ultra-leftism, and mass action, it is useful to remind ourselves of the limits of pessimism. No one needs to utterly abandon the kind of cynicism that America teaches you; just watching our government work on a daily basis is a good enough reminder to always be skeptical of its intentions and wary of its lies. And goodness knows I have cautioned younger leftists enough times to get used to failure, because it will be a much more familiar companion to you in a lifetime of struggle than will success. But it is also important to remember that an outlook based solely on pessimism is not an ideology, but rather a dead end.
We’re at a particularly tempting time to give in to this temptation. All of us are living through something no American has ever experienced: the dying days of empire. With the number of people who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War dwindling, most living citizens of the United States have grown up during a period when our global hegemony was unquestioned; few of us know what it’s like to live through a decline and fall, and even fewer of us care to ask people from nations who have seen it happen what it’s like.
But this is the reality we face, and even those who never wanted an American empire – even those who actively fought against it – are on terra incognita as the seams start to show and the whole thing starts to come apart. Black Americans had to learn the terrifying lesson that no matter how many of them gained wealth and power, up to and including the presidency, the system of white supremacy that upholds American capitalism would go largely unchallenged. The heroes they fought so hard for, once they attained their own glory, discovered that system worked out just fine for them, and saw no pressing need to pull their brothers and sisters up with them.
Many young radicals of all different races learned a similar lesson. Once they discovered what everyone does around that age – that the system devours all forms of resistance, that government is corrupt, that representation is often decorative rather than transformative, that organized struggle is prey to territorialism and infighting, and that victories are uncertain, hard to achieve, and rarely permanent – some of them gave up. A number of these, usually the ones who are extremely online and unused to activism that takes place in masses of other people, have invented a new category for themselves: the “post-left”.
It is not just that they have chosen to give up rather than to understand that the thicker the walls, the more force is required to bring them down. It is not just that they have forsaken learning the lessons of history, and that they are unaware that third-position nonsense of this sort has always been adjacent to good old-fashioned fascism. It is that they believe they are the opposite numbers of the “idpol” phonies they despise, when in fact, they are simply their mirror image. The post-left, in most respects, is simply Afro-Pessimism for white people.
The role that the white man and his history of violent white supremacy, the poisoned well that has leached all the vitality out of America and sickened the American experiment since before it even began, plays in the Afro-Pessimist movement is the identical role that electoralism, mass organization, and whatever combination of anti-racism, feminism, and general human decency they choose to call “wokeness” plays for the post-left. In both cases, there is a figure who reached the greatest heights only to disappoint (Barack Obama or AOC/Bernie Sanders/the Squad), thus proving the futility of trying. In both cases, the opposition is an opaque monolith that can never be changed. In both cases, the enemy is simply too strong and too powerful to ever be overcome, so why bother trying? And in both cases, the history of the future is already written, and human beings are just fuel for a deadly machine, distinguished only by how eloquently they describe their despair.
If you are not one of the lucky few who is able to spin a best-selling book, a tenured position, or an outsized reputation into a material reward by forwarding this form of capitulations (for which there is always an eager audience; telling people they can do nothing but give in to misery is almost as profitable as telling people they can do nothing to aid the miserable), then you are just a body whose fate is to be lamented but never altered. Your role is not to resist, oppose, or organize; your role is simply to suffer, providing them with material evidence of their view that resistance, opposition, and organization are all wastes of time that just add an element of false hope to a hopeless situation.
Maybe you think that this sounds suspiciously collaborationist. Maybe you think these views are ultimately fatalistic and play right into the hands of people in power, who are forever telling you that the system cannot be fought. Maybe you think that if your ideas do nothing but reinforce the narrative that nothing works, there are no victories, and evil wins whether or not good people do something, then you’re basically on the side of the bosses no matter how much you claim to hate them.
And you might be right, in thinking that. You might be exactly right.
Speaking of Barack Obama, one could argue that the greatest triumph for any oppressed group is when one of its members achieves a station of high enough attainment that the world can see how bad that person sucks. (See also the recent fate of Neera Tanden.) The Lady and the Dale, a well-meaning but spectacularly incoherent documentary series from HBO, is certainly proof of this concept.
Directed by Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker and co-produced by the Duplass Brothers (who are making a big splash in crime documentaries of late), it tells the story of Elizabeth Carmichael, the founder of 21st Century Motors, and her attempt to bring to market the Dale, a three-wheeled vehicle that, with its innovative design and allegedly spectacular gas mileage, would challenge the big Detroit auto makers and disrupt the entire automotive industry.
The reason you haven’t heard of the Dale, not surprisingly, is that it was a total fraud. It never worked, and never would have worked. Carmichael heard about it when she was working for one of the ubiquitous companies that make a profit swindling entrepreneurial inventors and other cockroach capitalists, and she financed it with mob money and cash grifted from hopeful working-class people off of promises she knew she couldn’t keep. Her claims for the Dale were completely outlandish from the very beginning, she repeatedly violated court orders to stop selling pre-orders for it, and not a single working model was ever produced. So far, so good: Everyone loves a great American con job.
Where The Lady and the Dale gets weird is when they discuss the fact that Carmichael was a trans woman. Born Jerry Michael, she began living as a woman after abandoning three marriages and five children as well as jumping bail after engaging in check-kiting and other financial scams. Again, nothing particularly out of true here, except for in the last two of the four episodes, when a narrative begins to build that Carmichael was not what she obviously was – a self-deluding, remorseless, egomaniacal fraud who drifted from one racket to another with no sympathy for the people she robbed – but rather some kind of unsung hero of the trans movement.
Much of this heavy lifting is done by trans attorney Mia Yamamoto and trans scholar Susan Stryker (the latter of whom has a production credit on The Lady and the Dale). And it’s hard to fault them for trying; certainly, it is true that trans people have been discriminated against and fallen victim to unjust applications of the law for centuries, as they take pains to point out. It is also undeniable that Carmichael’s status as a trans woman probably played more of a role in her ultimate trial and conviction when the 21st Century Hustle fell apart than the actual crimes she committed (essentially stealing over $3 million from trusting customers). Her treatment in prison was pretty shameful, although she had fled justice before ever finding that out. And instrumental in exposing her con game was an L.A. reporter – Tucker Carlson’s father, as it turns out – who is undeniably obnoxious, creepy, and ridiculously transphobic.
But what rankles is the attempt to rehabilitate Carmichael as a victim rather than a perpetrator of misery. Yamamoto and Stryker tell the stories of plenty of other trans people who suffered unjustly at the hands of the law, but the key word here is unjustly. The difference between Carmichael and other trans people namedropped in the documentary, including Christine Jorgensen and Renée Richards is that they didn’t defraud millions of dollars from people under flagrantly false pretenses, and if what was wanted was a documentary about miscarriages of justice involving trans people, the filmmakers had literally hundreds of such stories to choose from without having to sugar-coat the toxic behavior of a career criminal.
By the time the final episode rolls around, the series has fully embraced the idea that Carmichael was a largely blameless woman, an innocent victim of transphobia whose only crime was dreaming too big. Her children are trotted out to impress on the audience how, to her, family was the most important thing; never mind the fact that she abandoned three previous wives and left five children without a father or a penny. A panel of experts places her in the firmament (illustrated awkwardly, as is the rest of the series, in a jarring kind of cut-out animation) of trans icons of the past and present; never mind the fact that she was a criminal fleeing the law before she ever began identifying as trans, and that her literal first act after being released from prison was to start another scam business exploiting a labor force of desperate homeless people.
The Lady and the Dale is a lively enough series on its own merits; the odd animation aside, it tells a watchable story about a little-known but audacious fraud and the curious woman behind it. But it’s trying to be two movies: a true-crime documentary about a relentless huckster drunk on capitalism, fat on the teachings of Ayn Rand, and filled with contempt for the poor suckers she bilked on the one hand, and a documentary with good intentions that tries to salvage that same unsalvageable person by clumsily jamming her into the pantheon of brave victims of bigotry rather than admitting she was just a crook who happened to share an identity with them. True freedom means the freedom to be imperfect and even wicked; it does trans people no favors to deny Carmichael that freedom.
This week in links:
In These Times discusses the possibility of a federal jobs guarantee; Godspeed You Black Emperor! announce a new album and an anti-imperialist demand; the NBA gets in on the digital content trading game; the White House lets Mohammed bin-Salman off the hook for a brutal murder; and the right-wing Victims of Communism Foundation decides that COVID-19 is the fault of the Reds.