We Elected You and You Sold Out
Democracy, John Brown, the kids today, and more.
Let’s talk about voting!
After all, there is a presidential election coming, and that means two things: first, people urging you to vote for president while assuring you that they know and understand that voting for president isn’t that meaningful; and second, those same people insisting that you have to vote for their candidate because this is a unique and unprecedented election like none other that has come before it and the stakes are nothing less than the future of democracy.
A funny word, that ‘democracy’. If you’re a communist or a socialist, you’ve gotten used to having to defend yourself against accusations of authoritarianism, as if you’re responsible for Stalin in a way no capitalist is responsible for the excesses of that system’s most tarnished icons; even if you are, say, a member of an explicitly democratic socialist organization – one that everyone should join as soon as possible if you’re really interested in salvaging what remains of the future of America – you have to constantly contend with the accusation of being anti-democratic. This goes triple if you have ever expressed the belief that voting for president is not all that crucial, in our frequent contests between bad and worse.
But what is democracy? Not to get all “Webster’s dictionary defines”, but it is literally rule by the people. Even if you resort to the old American cliché that we are a republic and not a democracy, you are left with your res should be publica. And I hate to break it to you, but that means it’s your job to run the country, not someone else’s – not even the people you elect to do it. Because America has always been more about capitalism than about democracy, and has become even more so as time goes on despite the Cold War-era propaganda that tried to conflate ‘capitalism’ and ‘freedom’, we tend to think of public servants as employees, and of the president as sort of their supervisor. In fact, elected officials are meant to be our proxies, the people who act on our behalf to pass legislation that we want to see enacted in our interests! Laying that responsibility at the feet of the president, or the party, or anyone other than ourselves, is a far worse abdication of duty than simply refusing to vote.
We are not taught to think of things this way. At a time of extreme political polarization, the slow draining of ideology out of politics by a neoliberal worldview that shifts everything to market solutions, deeply ingrained cynicism about government, and rampant self-absorption and individualism, the idea that we need to do much more, not less, to involve ourselves in the affairs of state has not found a very receptive audience. And that’s too bad, because what is wanted, especially in an ideal socialist state where the laboring class is responsible for setting its own political agenda rather than being ruled by the rich, is more participation in civil affairs. Unfortunately, we have come to think even of voting—a method whose effectiveness can easily be understood by simply looking around at the functioning of the state—as too onerous a burden, and the biggest advocates for voting are often the same people who, when their party wins, immediately disengage from politics, assume that its leaders are acting in their best interests, and then look around four years later and wonder why everything is more fucked up than ever.
Properly, all of us should be engaged in politics all of the time. We should be the ones running for office, holding positions of responsibility in our communities, pressuring our party leaders to live up to their responsibilities, and organizing to win the victories we need. Politics is no different than any other form of organization: greed and ego and vanity and lust for power all play their part, but the deadliest temptations are inertia and the status quo. If the people are not there, constantly engaging with their government officials, someone will step in to do that work for them, and that someone is likely to be a person who embodies those bad qualities and has the time and resources and money to make sure they’re being listened to. Money doesn’t just dominate the American political system because we prioritize capitalism over all; it dominates because there is not a strong democratic counterforce to crowd it out of the room.
Look, I get it. It’s hard enough just voting, just being informed, just showing up every four years to do the bare minimum the system allows you to do. All of us, even people who spend most of our time doing political organizing, have lives, jobs, families, friends, health issues, school, and a million other things pulling us in every possible direction. Politics is an ugly, frustrating process where you lose more often than you win, and victories can sometimes be counted in pennies. And we are discouraged, by both circumstance and design, from participating in it more than we already do. But there is only one path to victory, and that is the mass organization of the working class. That means doing more politics, not less; it means studying every tactic that will get you closer to your strategic goals, not just the ones that the people in power allow you to have; and it means never taking time off from holding your elected officials responsible for doing what you demand that they do. Your job doesn’t end with voting; it begins with voting. What we are told is our most important duty is in fact one of our least, and it is only the start of how we make a better world.
Voting is a tool. It can be a good tool, especially on a hyper-local level, and it can be a clumsy blunt instrument, especially in American presidential politics. But it is only one tool. The ‘progress’ that some evangelists for the Democratic Party claim is the result of voting only in the most peripheral, tangential way; it is really the result of local organizing, mass mobilization, and the kind of thankless, tireless, constant work that is largely invisible and is barely acknowledged by the time an issue finally gets to the ballot box (if it does at all) despite decades of effort. Politics, as the management of the many and varied needs of human beings, should properly be the primary work of everyone. That sucks! Nobody wants to be told they have to take even more of an interest in the sewer that is our system. But the alternative is to pick just one tool from the toolbox, and to use it clumsily again and again only when someone tells you to while all the other ones gather dust. When all you have is a vote, everything starts to look like an election.
John Brown, the radical abolitionist who translated the high-minded words of the anti-slavery movement into action and kick-started the Civil War, had a lot of problems. He was an ineffectual leader who failed to attract enough people to achieve his goals; he refused to compromise on anything, even at the cost of the lives of his family and the slaves he was fighting for; he was a religious fanatic, a brutal killer who ordered the bloody execution of children, and very possibly a madman. He is also one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, and if we had a hundred people like him today, the country would be an infinitely better place.
Given how controversial he still is today – odd, that, since his whole thing was that he was willing to fight to free his fellow human beings from the most violent and awful conditions imaginable, something that shouldn’t be controversial at all even in a country as lazy as this one – it’s not a surprise that we don’t have a lot of good stories about him. (Someday, someday, we’re going to get the biopic of Nat Turner we deserve, if anyone ever has the good sense to buy the rights to Kyle Baker’s electrifying comic about his life.) Enter The Good Lord Bird, a Showtime mini-series based on the surprising and successful novel by James McBride, whose book about James Brown, Kill ‘Em and Leave, is a favorite of mine.
As shocking as the book’s success was – it won a National Book Award – the show is perhaps even more surprising. It was shepherded into existence by Jason Blum, whose runaway Blumhouse production company previously has specialized in horror flicks, and Ethan Hawke, who plays the old man himself. This could easily have turned into a vanity project to satisfy the ego of the person writing the checks (see: Brad Pitt in 12 Years a Slave), but Hawke is stunning: alternating between crippling doubt and pure certainty, gentle contemplation and righteous anger, an utter fool and a glorious hero all rolled up into a tower of contradictions. He gets right to the heart of who John Brown is, and what makes him such a compelling yet exasperating figure. It’s one of the best performances on television.
But it would be short-sighted to lay this all at Hawke’s feet, even though he’s gotten kind of a raw deal from critics. (He spent a lot of the 2000s being excoriated for a personality he doesn’t actually possess, and his choice of roles isn’t nearly as bad as his reputation might suggest.) One of the best choices of the book (and the show) is to not make Brown, a man who is essentially a myth, the central character; that role goes to Joshua Caleb Johnson, who plays Onion, a young slave ‘rescued’ by Brown, who also carelessly caused his father’s death. Whenever Brown gets to be too much, which is often, the show shifts focus to Onion, wisely giving us a wider view of life in antebellum America; the second episode, with its unsparing look at the divisiveness slavery encouraged amongst the slaves themselves, leaves Brown out altogether until the very end. It’s a smart decision that only makes Hawke’s performance more impressive.
There’s still five episodes to come, and I’m dreading the appearance of Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglas a bit. But so far, The Good Lord Bird has been terrific; it looks great (it’s good to see Albert Hughes behind the camera again), the script is well-paced and curiously funny; and the performances—not just from the leads, but from some excellent newcomers like Hubert Point-du-Jour as the dubious slave Bob and Beau Knapp as Brown’s eldest son Owen – have been consistently great. The picaresque nature of the story seems like an unlikely one to effectively tell the story of a figure as legendary as John Brown, but it’s proven quite apropos so far. There’s no better time than now to remind people of who he was and why we needed him, and the series is a curious but fitting vehicle.
One of the exciting things about getting old is being freed from the obligation to pretend that you know anything or care at all about what the kids are into. As far as I’m concerned, music stopped happening sometime around 2011, and I’m fine with that; I am intellectually aware that there are still people out there making music and scoring ‘hits’ (or whatever they have now), but it is not any of my business, and neither I nor the kids are missing out on anything by my disengagement from that aspect of the culture.
By the same token, I am vaguely cognizant that there is something called Instagram, and that while for me it is just a means by which I can see my friends’ pets or take a look at what people who have more money than I do are eating, I understand that for other people, it is – somehow – a means of generating an income. I don’t really get how this is; as far as I know, Instagram (like Google, Uber, YouTube, TikTok, and pretty much every other big tech company) has a business model that is best described as “get everyone to pay attention to you and somehow revenue will happen”.
But apparently, there is an entire ecosystem of people who produce ‘content’ on the internet, and, despite not being businesses or having any apparent product or service or business model, receive payment for doing so. This is where, I learned this week, the contestants (Participants? Subjects? I don’t even know what words mean anymore) on reality shows come from, and to which they return. By some eldritch process, they convert ‘briefly being on television’ into ‘somehow making money as an influencer’. It is one of the many things, including if we are honest ‘reality show’ itself, around which we must throw ironic quotes for the sake of our sanity.
I still don’t know exactly how this works, or what a “TikTok house” is other than a euphemism for eternal damnation, or what the process of ‘washing out as the 9th-place runner up on Love Island’ converts to ‘getting $10,000 to mention a CBD-for-dogs brand in a three-second Instagram story that vanishes after an hour’, but I’m going to chalk it up to something the young people are doing now and therefore none of my business.
This week’s links: selfie pioneer Mike Mandel; a bad review of a bad comic; a journalist calls every number in Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book; an absolutely bonkers political scandal in Anchorage, Alaska; and a piece I wrote for Jacobin about the working-class nature of film noir.