Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears

Establishing a party line for the left, the apolitical Oscars, Lilith Fair rankings, and more.

Mar 15, 2021

The left, it is often said by people who think they’re on the left but aren’t, is a circular firing squad: The reason it never makes any progress is because it can’t unify behind a single ideology, position, or project and follow through behind it to achieve any kind of mass success. This is supposed to stand in stark contrast to the purported unity and conviction of the right, which ‘knows how to win’ and ‘gives its voters what they want’.

Let’s dispose of the latter half of this nonsense to start with: The political right, in America at least, does not know how to win. It knows how to cheat, certainly, and perhaps more importantly, it knows how to discipline its elected officials. But most of its recent victories are due more to the paralyzing incompetence of the Democrats than the savvy political maneuverings of the Republicans. Donald Trump was a world-historical embarrassment, George W. Bush was a disposable legacy hire, and Mitch McConnell has one trick and one goal that our system is broken enough to allow him to use and achieve, respectively, over and over again. The last people with an identifiable ideology and an effective understanding of politics in the G.O.P. were the ones who worked on crafting Ronald Reagan’s advertising campaigns.

The primary similarity between the parties today is that their shared success is not in serving their constituencies, but in rewarding their donors, who, for both, tend to be the same people representing the same interests. The primary distinction between them is that the Republicans are fairly successful in achieving their one major policy goal (further enriching the wealthy) while at least paying lip service to their popular agenda (agitating various permutations of reactionary culture war. Democrats, conversely, are only modestly effective in achieving their one major policy goal (acting as a job placement service for fellow alums) and absolutely awful at even pretending to formulate, let alone articulate, any kind of ideology at all, let alone an oppositional one.

While both of them place small bets when the national sentiment indulges in a round of populism, serving the people they represent is pretty low on their lists. This is how you end up with a situation where Democrats drop vital protections and monetary aid from a relief bill by negotiating solely with themselves, while Republicans attempt to posture themselves as champions of the working man by universally opposing any relief bill whatsoever. There is no ‘circular firing squad’ on the left preventing them from exercising power in government, because there is no left in government: There are just a center-right party and a far-right party digging the trenches they built ever deeper, and succeeding or failing based on the current temperature of laziness and hostility in the electorate.

Meanwhile, back on the actual left, there are vast differences in ideology, based on the fact that leftists do not think of ideology as frivolous or alienating but rather a central feature of doing politics. Most leftists do not think of ‘populism’ as a dirty word because they perceive the masses of their fellow citizens not as savages to be feared (the most common liberal response) or morons to be duped (the conservative perspective); leftists, or at least the ones worth the name, think of the people as both the subject and the object of political change, for whom we organize and without whom we cannot win. The baseline Marxist perspective is that we do not valorize the working classes because of the goodness of their souls or the depth of their suffering, but because they alone represent the power base by which we can fight back against entrenched power and money.

Within that basic framework of materialist ideology, however, it is true that there are endless variations. The populist tendencies of democratic socialists struggle against the vanguardist leanings of Marxist-Leninists; the pure collectivism of Maoists clash with the extreme individualism of anarchists; council communists and syndicalists warn against any communism that tends towards centralized power or ‘state capitalism’. Disputes over the role of violence, the necessity of revolution, the nature and utility of electoralism, the role of race and gender, the shape and scope of the state, and even the very nature of where authority should lie are nearly constant in leftist spaces and have been since the concept of the political left was born.

And this is all good! Debate is good, disagreement is good, and it is a crucial exercise for any leftist to learn how to articulate what the future they’re organizing for actually looks like. Uniformity of thought leads to stupor and inaction, and more than one revolution has failed because, lacking a clear vision of the world they wanted to win, they started using the system the old regime left behind, and, inertia setting in, ended up making the same mistakes as the people they overthrew. Ideology is essential, not disposable.

But where does that leave the left? What is the promontory on which we can stand, unified and unbroken, displaying the famous solidarity we’re always singing about? How, if we have so many genuine ideological differences, can we identify the baseline position from which we say “This is where we begin”, the signal dividing line between socialism and liberalism? The fine points of all these political differences must, to some extent, wait their turn to guide us after we win; in the meantime, we need to establish a rallying point from which we can win.

It’s really not that hard, and it’s the reason we tend to use boring old dead white male Karl “Charley” Marx as our alpha, if not our omega: The workers must control the means of production. The proletariat must be the linchpin of our struggle. Profit must subsume itself to utility. Private property and rent-seeking must be abolished. Competition must subordinate to cooperation. If we can agree on just that, as the bare minimum starting position, as the party line within which our firing squad can finally aim its rifles in the right direction – and if we can also agree that the battle takes place on the streets and not on our laptops and phones – then we can learn to win a war by tactics beyond mere enemy incompetence.

Speaking of taking politics out of things, the 2021 Oscar nominations are out, and they’re even grimmer than usual, as suits the Year Movies Stopped Happening. It’s been an exciting year of not going to theaters, paying $20 for a movie you wouldn’t have watched at a dollar theater two years ago, and having to speculate about what kind of CGI explosions the most recent Marvel movie would have ended with had it ever been released.

But the most exciting thing has been watching studios take fiercely, explicitly political source material and dilute them into feel-good films about identity and aesthetics. I’ve talked here before about the bizarre decision to strip the otherwise excellent Nomadland of its fiery anticapitalist thesis, robbing the actual people in the book of their vehement hatred of Amazon and instead making it about a fictional protagonists who just wants her ‘freedom’; Judas and the Black Messiah, too, didn’t completely vaporize Fred Hampton’s intense socialist rhetoric, but it did decide that his story was less compelling than that of the misguided junkie snitch who betrayed him. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is merely the latest installment of an ongoing effort to portray Aaron Sorkin as America’s most relevant political artist rather than a predictable, almost entirely apolitical hack. Even Hillbilly Elegy managed to redact most of its source’s (conservative) politics, rendering it even more dull. (Only one nominated film – the Borat sequel – took took a political position and stuck with it, and even that position was the relatively uncontroversial one that rich and powerful people are buffoons.)

As usual, the tell is in the omissions rather than the inclusions: First Cow, by almost any measure the best American film of the year, was nominated for nothing, because Kelly Reichardt makes films that are not only expressly political, but which concern themselves with normal working-class people – anathema to modern Hollywood. I Care a Lot was perhaps too pointed a critique of corporate capitalism, and Kajillionaire’s quirkiness and structure hid the brutal social analysis at its core. It’s not a case of movies needing to be apolitical because we need a form of escape; it’s more a case of deciding who’s going to deliver the sermon you paid for.

Meanwhile, the preferred political expressions of Hollywood (and, by extension, the largely liberal millionaires who make up its filmmaking caste) are on full display this year. Those have nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with representation; with the whole of the commentariat and the lion’s share of critics spending as much time as possible counting up the numbers of people belonging to underrepresented demographics who have shown up in the nominations (and as little time as possible analyzing the context). Who needs politics in your entertainment, anyway, when you can ‘fix’ all the problems by just diversifying the people acting out the same old conflicts? I Spit on Your Grave may have had the same DNA as Promising Young Woman, but it never got its own hashtag. We’re making movies for the Biden Era now, and that means movies that look like America, even if they never, ever act like America.

The Ludic Log

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