Joe Lowndes – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

The Left Needs to Think About the Political-Economic Future in Six Months

By Joe Lowndes (March 21, 2020)

Tucker Carlson is being cheered by some liberals for calling out NC Sen. Richard Burr for insider trading.

Burr should be investigated for this, to be sure. But this is consistent with Carlson’s right-wing nationalism more generally – just as it was Pat Buchanan’s before him. However, it will matter in a new way in coming months I think – and in ways that the left should be paying close attention.

The economy is unquestionably going to continue to collapse at the top and the bottom in coming months. When the presidential campaign season begins in earnest this summer, when things may really spin out of control and suffering really increases, it is easy to imagine real pressure from below on the Biden campaign to call for greater economic reorganization that would include heavy taxation on the top brackets and more redistribution in the form of major healthcare reform, debt cancellation, relief, etc. (the return of Sandersism).

Trump will have to outflank this. As the livelihood and lives of members of his electoral base fall apart, they will need to hear him demonize some elites in their defense along with the nationalism he always draws on – more border control, more crackdown on immigrants, more hostile language about China, etc..

This will be where Carlson will be crucial. His distinct framing of politics – a combination of xenophobia, racism, authoritarianism, and full-throated defense of working-class Americans; broadcasted to his massive nightly audience – is exactly what Trump will need to beat Biden.

We should all really be thinking about what the political-economic landscape looks like in two, four and six months and how we should respond. The right surely is.

Is “OK, Boomer” a Radical Critique? Two Responses

By Chris Crass-Joe Lowndes (November 12, 2019)

Chris Crass:

I’m grateful that the first time I heard of “OK, Boomer” and was responded to with “OK, Boomer”, I was having a friendly and beautiful debate with a 13 year old member of the Democratic Socialists of America, about socialist electoral strategy. I said “Yes, we want Bernie Sanders to win the primary,” and then we debated with me saying “We have a responsibility as socialists to defeat Trump and work to elect whoever wins the Dem primary, while fighting for who we want, Bernie and/or Warren”.

It was awesome to have a brilliant, passionate 13 year old socialist, the son of friends of mine, tell me “OK, Boomer” in a debate about socialism and social change.

My inner 15 year old anarchist, smiled and said, “You use to say the same thing.”

My 46 year old self said, “Thank god for our capacity to evolve our politics and strategy, and thank god for radical youth pushing for us all to stay grounded in vision and militant action, as well as developmental strategy of what is as we work for what can be.”

Note: I know I’m not a boomer. I’m a hardcore Gen Xer who worked for years as a video store clerk and was part of building up the Gen X anarchist Left. But for some in Gen Z, me and anyone over 25 can be called a Boomer. And with the dismissive attitude of a teenager – it’s a cultural experience!

Joe Lowndes:

I’m fine with “Ok Boomer.”

I know it substitutes generation for all other forms of domination in assigning responsibility for a wrecked planet. And I know that it is ageist in a particularly American fashion.

But all slogans and memes are shortcuts by definition. And in any case I don’t read it as signaling, as some people do: a vengeful totem feast by the young.

Maybe it does however (in the exceeding mildness of its phrasing) announce a radical paradigm shift long overdue – that everything that the middle decades of the 20th-century United States thought of as constituting the good life has to be radically re-thought or rejected before it totally destroys us.

Regardless, young people have the right to express their anger, grief, and profound sense of loss for the unimaginable future they face as they figure out how they will do so. In that sense, “Ok, Boomer” as “Get the fuck out of the way” seems entirely appropriate.

We Need More Imagination in the Face of Climate Catastrophe

By Joe Lowndes (September 12, 2019)

It’s really interesting how this Franzen essay has either been affirmed as a kind of honest reckoning, or vilified as a kind of a privileged defeatism, by so many people I know and respect politically.

I don’t love the piece, but I think Franzen is getting at something productively uncomfortable by arguing that the belief that we can avoid an unutterably brutal future is an anxious wish, one that might prevent us from really acknowledging what is before us.

Against some of the eco-modernist insistence that we can preserve our current way of life, he asks, essentially: what tools do we need – culturally, ethically, politically – to live in an inescapably altered future?

But his answers are entirely inadequate to the radical questions he raises. A more civil society? Better law enforcement? Defense of “democracy?”

Here he betrays his own anxious wish for a lost world of bourgeois liberalism, as if the system he wants to defend bears no responsibility to ecological collapse we will face, and that so many are already facing. He knows that we cannot go back, but he stops short of helping us imagine how to go forward, beyond a kind of micro-politics of community self-care.

It seems increasingly clear that – while doing all we can now to stay the worst outcomes of climate catastrophe – we will be eventually be forced to choose between authoritarian and violent forms of resource-hoarding and rule; or new (or perhaps very old) forms of mutual aid, care, and collective self-organization.

Franzen is right to ask us to move past our frozen state of melancholia, to be alive to the horror of collapse as a way to make living meaningful. But perhaps ironically for a novelist, his imagination fails us.

We Shouldn’t Assume Birthright Citizenship is Safe

By Joe Lowndes (October 31, 2018)

I’m unsure whether the question of whether Trump has the Constitutional authority to revoke birthright citizenship is the right one.

Almost all legal scholars from left to right appear to agree that he doesn’t. But it also seems like whistling past the graveyard to say that this is merely a ploy to rally the base for the midterms. The speed and velocity with which proto-fascism has entered mainstream politics, fully commandeering one of the two major parties, should give us pause in thinking that anything is off the table, particularly with regard to immigration. We have repeatedly watched the previously unimaginable become imaginable, and the imaginable become concrete reality.

Trump, through the militarized panic he is creating at the southern border, has already provoked violence and death. He now uses it to elevate Michael Anton’s bad interpretation of the 14th Amendment and make it sound like common sense to his base. In doing so he has likely moved the public discussion of birthright citizenship decisively rightward. Yes, it is about the midterms, but remember Trump as a populist-turned-fascist is a permanent campaigner.

We don’t really know how the Supreme Court would respond to an actual executive order, but we shouldn’t be sanguine about it given that the ground beneath our feet is slipping all the time these days. In any case, there are many ways to strip people of citizenship socially, culturally, and legally in an increasingly authoritarian society. For that reason, the question of birthright citizenship ultimately seems more like a political question – subject to the play of forces – than a safely sequestered Constitutional one. We shouldn’t assume that the institution will protect anyone here. We will have to defeat Trumpism in toto to defeat this latest attack, just like all the others.

Eco-Catastrophe Threatens Authoritarian Politics in the Long Run

By Joe Lowndes (October 10, 2018)

The Trump administration went from denying climate change to predicting a 7 degree fahrenheit increase over the next century. People have pointed this out as a contradiction, but there is good reason for them to now endorse this second position. It makes much more sense for the proto-fascism of this regime.

Accepting eco-catastrophe as a fait accompli allows them to ratchet up their cherished extraction industries and roll back environmental regulations in the short run, and prepare for the brutalities of authoritarian rule in the long run.

Imagine the kinds of violence, repression and control that can be justified by increased food and water scarcity, the abandonment of coastal and desert cities, mass cross-border migrations, growing internal refugee populations, and a collapsing economy.

The Left Needs to be Critical on Russiagate

By Joe Lowndes (February 26, 2018)

I have not posted much on Russiagate out of my own ambivalence. On one hand, I am wary of the liberal investment in both fantasies of deliverance and nightmares of foreign control, as well as the uncritical trust placed in the FBI and CIA. But on the other hand, I DO think that we have to take seriously Russia’s promotion of racist, ultranationalist, and fascist political formations around the globe.

Yet, what began as a charge of collusion by Trump and the far right has now been turned on anyone to the left of Clinton (which, I suppose, should have been pretty easy to predict in retrospect). It is exactly the kind of demonology the late political theorist Michael Rogin described – a paranoid style that will always more easily be focused on the left in US politics. It is not only Sanders who is loudly being called treasonous on the basis of almost no evidence. An article in Raw Story last week blamed Al Franken’s fall not on his own well-documented history of sexual harassment, but on Russian bots.

What then happens to any movement that challenges the political center?

Will Black Lives Matter be delegitimized as a polarizing force authorized by the Kremlin? What about when high school students go after Democrats who get money from the NRA? Liberals who are drawn into this particular form of melodrama and uncritically accept this framing of the political landscape in the US will lose allies they need in battling Trump and the far right, and worse, destroy the possibility of any real political vision that can contest our dismal present. It is possible to see Russia as an imperial power with an interest in promoting polarization and supporting neo-fascist movements without believing that it has omnipotent power over domestic politics in the US.

Don’t Let Them Dull Our Political Sensibilities Against Fascism in the US

By Joe Lowndes (August 12, 2017)

People are rightly outraged by Trump’s equivocation in condemning “the violence on many sides.” But his comments in no way differ from those of many prominent liberals, like Peter Beinart in The Atlantic last week, who have continually depicted antifascists as thugs and criminals.

Be ready: when the shock of the grisly image of a white supremacist plowing into a crowd of protesters wears off, we will be hearing more and more stories in the media about the antiracist violence and provocation that contributed to the death of one demonstrator and the serious injury of others.

This collective dulling of our moral and, perhaps more important, our political sensibilities weakens our ability to confront a rapidly expanding fascist movement in this country.

Trump has plainly stated where he stands. Sessions has long since directed federal agencies to leave klan, nazi, and militia groups alone. And we saw today as in many other recent instances that local law enforcement only intervenes to protect them.

If we don’t stand with the courageous activists who are daily risking their lives, like the IWW member who was killed today, who will we stand with?

White Nationalism is the Core of Trump Administration

By Joe Lowndes (August 3, 2017)

Over the last week the White House appeared to be in a kind of free fall, marked by palace intrigue, organizational chaos, and of course, the rise and fall of the Mooch. In contrast this commedia dell-arte however, we now get two proposals that advance a clear domestic agenda: the proposed immigration “merit system” and a planned assault on affirmative action in college admissions.

Since the beginning, the white nationalists in the Trump administration have been depicted as fanatics and political outsiders who would ultimately get sidelined by the everyday imperatives of governing. Today, they look more like what they always have been – the most clear-eyed representatives of Trumpism as it was presented to voters on the campaign trail. Indeed, if anything rescues this presidency it will be a steady, focused agenda that continues to target black and brown people through various forms of policy, legislation and law enforcement (federal and local).

To the degree that other avenues are closed off to the Trump administration, it can exercise power in areas where it is relatively unconstrained. This is particularly true in regard to the DOJ which can and has bolstered and given freer reign to ICE and border patrol, has let local law enforcement agencies off the leash, and is now using its civil rights division on take on affirmative action – all the while turning a blind eye toward, (and in some cases actively collaborating with) militias, neo-nazi groups etc.. This is of course why so many on the right have been hell-bent on keeping Sessions in place.

Bannon has been given to elaborate flourishes and the occasional mention of a European fascist thinker here or there. Stephen Miller sounds like a race-crazed zealot whenever he opens his mouth (like nearly shouting at CNN reporter Jim Acosta because of his “shocking cosmopolitanism” today). And the Alt Right in all its forms is thrilling to both White House announcements. But that doesn’t mean that the white nationalists in the White House represent some kind of political exoticism unmindful of the need to govern soberly. Rather they are the steadfast stewards of Trumpism – ignoring the noise and drama of personalities in conflict and delivering to his broad electoral coalition exactly what the boss promised they would. This is the Middle America they aim to hold onto for the next election cycle.

Should We Care About Comey?

By Joe Lowndes (May 11, 2017)

The Comey firing puts the left in a bind. On the one hand, he was the head of the most powerfully repressive institution within the US. The chief enemy of all struggles for liberation, the damage it has done to people, organizations, and movements over the last century is incalculable.

Under Comey, the FBI has been no different. It has harassed and intimidated antiwar activists, manipulated fragile individuals to ensnare organizations with terrorism charges, surveilled Muslim students, menaced ecology movements, coordinated the national crackdown on Occupy, and did the same with Black Lives Matter. And this is only what we DO know.

On the other hand, firing Comey during an investigation of Trump’s Russia connection is an obviously authoritarian move to keep himself and his administration above scrutiny, one which seems to expand autocratic power in the executive office.

Comparisons to Nixon abound, and they are apt as far as they go. But there are differences. Nixon acted when he was truly cornered, when mounting evidence pointed directly at him – which the White House tapes would reveal, he knew. And firing Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was, it was ruled, illegal. Trump, on the other hand, is well within his authority to fire the head of the FBI before his ten-year term is up. There are no statutory conditions attached to his power to do this.

What’s more, there is nothing Trump can do to prevent a Congressional select committee from carrying on a thorough investigation of Russiagate. Should they fail to do this, it is not evidence of Trump’s executive authoritarianism as much as the GOP’s congressional collusion, which is a different issue. And in any case, if there is really a smoking gun here, there is nothing to prevent Comey or other FBI agents from coming forward now, particularly if they sense that there is in danger of their institutional autonomy being destroyed.

At some other level, where Nixon acted with increasing paranoia, fearing loss of control, Trump seems to revel in the humiliating the FBI director, as Edmund Fong suggested. Sending a courier to blindside Comey at a speech to the FBI in Los Angeles was theatrical and sadistic, not a fearful, cagey attempt to shield his own actions. Roger Stone, the old Nixon dirty trickster and current Trump confidante, buoyantly told Politico Tuesday night that he enjoyed a fine cigar after hearing of Comey’s dismissal. It all feels somehow more like masterful trolling than damage control.

With all this in mind, I’m not sure that we should be putting efforts into demanding impeachment (which will never happen anyway), or defending the institutional role of the FBI. If Comey’s firing is a failure of democracy, it will have been a systemic failure of an increasingly decaying Constitutional frame, not merely one of Trump’s own authoritarian desires.

The dangers of Trumpism are very real and very serious, and I think we have to combat them. But those dangers are plain to see: mass detainment and deportation, the DOJ’s greenlighting of local police attacks on people of color, and the very rapid growth of fascist formations in communities across the country among them. it seems to me that these are far more egregious than dubious claims of foreign control of the executive branch.

To Understand Bannon, Think Hollywood

By Joe Lowndes (January 29, 2017)

As Steve Bannon’s central role in the White house becomes increasingly clear, we are struck by panic about who he is and how to understand his power. I increasingly think the source of it is to be found neither in his Huntingtonian worldview nor his self-described Leninist orientation toward power, but rather Hollywood.

Screenwriter/producer was only one of Bannon’s previous careers, but it is the one most on display right now. The WH directives he has been responsible for over the last week have been neither careful nor coordinated. They have made the new administration look chaotic in many cases, and forced endless explanations and walk-backs from various players.

But Bannon’s moves have been very bold and dramatic – cinematic really. Beginning with Trump’s inaugural address and text on the revamped official White House website, followed by the mix of Executive Actions and Executive Orders, have thrown opponents back on their heels repeatedly – regardless of their ultimate enforceability – and have drawn millions of us into the streets. Bannon’s new position on the NSC promises to reproduce these epic battles internationally as well.

Bannon’s provocative style was further honed at Breitbart News, where opening the door to neo-nazis, conspiracy obsessives, and a new form of social media sadists he was able to frame politics as epic manichean struggles for glory in novel ways.

But this Hollywood orientation is also the source of Bannon’s greatest vulnerability. He can stage conflicts and invite the backlash they create, but there is no guarantee that he can win. Indeed, the more he attacks, the more energetically we respond.

As Thom Mount, the former president of Universal Pictures, told the L.A.Times about his time in the film industry:

“He was constantly telling stories about great warriors of the past, like Attila the Hun, people who had slain empires. It’s one thing to be interested in the triumphs of military history, it’s another thing to obsess over them. Victory at all costs is a dangerous way to look at the world.”

Bannon can make Trump into Bane from the ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, but he does not realize that broad political transformation is not dictated by superheroes and supervillains duking it out while we watch from our seats, but by hegemonic struggle. That’s where we come in.

This is a Full Counterrevolution of the Right

By Joe Lowndes (January 26, 2017)

Unable to sleep last night, I thought at least how relieved I was not to be teaching introduction to US politics and government again this quarter. I would have no idea how to do so.

Institutions are always undergoing slow transformations, and everything – the presidency, congress, the bureaucracy, parties, media, etc, must always be examined in broad developmental perspective. But now each lecture would have to start with “Up until last week…”

Between Trump’s assumption of total control of executive agencies (and their apparent Twitter rebellions); the crushing speed, number and force of executive orders; and now this – the mass exodus of longtime senior civil servants in the state department, we appear to be in a nearly revolutionary situation (but not one of our choosing).

Some of this was a long time coming, or at least the conditions for it have been steadily growing. The dramatic expansion of presidential power begun under George W. Bush after 9/11 (guided philosophically by the neo-Hamiltonian unitary executive theory) and solidified under Obama has gone along with a concomitant atrophy of the institutions that historically contained it – specifically congress, the court, executive agencies, and the press.

But this takeover is orchestrated by a Breitbart ideology of racial/civilizational and corporate supremacy at home and abroad, joined with a clear idea of how to use executive power that is part Jackson, part Lenin, and part Cheney. It is exactly what Steve Bannon has described as his own view of the world and of the uses of political power.

Much is made of Trump’s own insecurity, rage, and impulsivity. But his public infantilism is not worth our consideration. He may tantrum and tweet on a daily basis, but as he does so his administration continues a steady enactment of a maximalist agenda – aimed at women, immigrants, Muslims, indigenous people, workers, and the planet itself.

I don’t think the executive branch (and everything it touches) has undergone this radical a transformation since the New Deal. This time it is a full counterrevolution of the right.