Obligatory thoughts on Ted Lasso

I have a natural affinity for soccer, puns, and especially soccer-based puns—so it should come as no surprise that I am predisposed to like Ted Lasso. And I do: watching season one was the most fun a person can have this side of The Great British Bakeoff. Season two, though? Well, with season three of Ted Lasso on the horizon, it is about time that I offer my unsolicited opinions on season two. (It’s not even worth a spoiler alert because the season aired a year ago, and if you haven’t watched it by now, you’re not likely to suddenly purchase an Apple product solely for those free three months of Apple TV.)

My first complaint with season two is mostly a personal one. The best parts of season one are the jokes about soccer and about England, and the best parts of season two are the jokes about soccer and about England. The moment when they discuss how all the fields are different sizes at Wembley is hilarious. When Ted finds out the NHS is free and is confused about how a country could provide health care without charging an arm and a leg — comedy perfection. And my favorite line of the entire season is when Ted reads Dr Sharon’s letter to himself in front of her and his only comment is, “You spelled favorite wrong.” I giggled with delight. The premise of the show—as stupid as it sounds—is just really, really funny.

The second season of the show mostly moves beyond this premise, which is probably the correct decision to make from a writing point of view. It does seem reasonable to conclude that it is not possible to do an entire second season of a show based on a premise that basically boils down to someone mixing up “American football” with “futbol.” I acknowledge this. An idea like this really should never have made it out of any self-respecting writers’ room. But no matter how stupid the premise sounds, it is still extremely funny. When the show moves away from this premise, it loses something essential that makes it cohere.

Seriously — the only things better than the first season of Ted Lasso are the original NBC commercials introducing Ted Lasso. They never get old.

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Obligatory thoughts on Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life

As I understand it, a specter hangs over the literary world—the specter of The Great American Novel. Like the messiah (for Jews), The Great American Novel is something we have been waiting for for a long time, and, although there are plenty of prime candidates—anything written by Jonathan Franzen being perhaps the most oft-cited—it has been years since we last had a novel that captured the American zeitgeist in a profound way. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, I think, is worthy of the title. At the very least, it is a prime contender. (Warning: this piece contains spoilers.)

What this book is about is what makes a life worthwhile. The characters in the novel are, by and large, extraordinary individuals, but each of them has only their own little life, full of its own joys and terrors, highs and lows, friendships and failed relationships. Each of the four main characters goes on to be enormously successful in his respective field—Willem in acting, JB in painting, Malcolm in architecture, and Jude in law. (One critique of this book might be that it is only a portrait of success; there are no professional failures, which leads to a particularly rarified set of professional challenges. I am not making this critique, though; not all books have to speak to every little life.)

Is what makes life worthwhile based on professional success? Despite their elite educations, Jude and Willem do not seem to notice that they are successful, and even then it feels secondary to their other concerns. Malcolm is constantly worried that he will not be working at a prestigious enough firm, which causes him to turn down more appealing career opportunities. JB is the most tortured character when it comes to trying to let go of the seductive allure of success: his paintings are well-received, but somehow his colleagues have career retrospectives before he does. He is afraid of failing, but he is even more afraid of succeeding and then stagnating. There is a beautiful passage in which he describes how his friends’ careers are taking off beyond his, but leaving behind people he doesn’t fully recognize:

The thing he hadn’t realized about success was that success made people boring. Failure also made people boring, but in a different way: failing people were constantly striving for one thing—success. But successful people were also only striving to maintain their success. It was the difference between running and running in place, and although running was boring no matter what, at least the person running was moving, through different scenery and past different vistas. And yet here again, it seemed that Jude and Willem had something he didn’t, something that was protecting them from the suffocating ennui of being successful, from the tedium of waking up and realizing that you were a success and that every day you had to keep doing whatever it was that made you a success, because once you stopped, you were no longer a success, you were becoming a failure. (302)

Of the four main characters, Willem throughout is the least concerned about professional success or failure. He maintains the most earnest—perhaps childlike—attachment to a vision of worthiness that goes beyond any of the metrics that we normally associate with success. He seems happy to hold fast to the unadulterated belief that what matters most in his work is whether he is proud of it, not how audiences reacted or whether the critics gave it a thumbs up. He doesn’t seem to worry about having kids or leaving a legacy, even as his professional stature grows. All he cares about it is caring about others—a positive, pure, possibly naive vision that is either enviable or pitiable in a tragic world.

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Obligatory thoughts on Don’t Look Up

If having a take on Ted Lasso was the defining feature of “being a writer” in America in the first three-quarters of 2021, having a take on Don’t Look Up was the defining feature of writerdom for at least the final four-to-five days. Here is where I show that I am a real “writer” who is “relevant” because of all of my thoughts about topics that are part of the zeitgeist.

Similar to Ted Lasso (on which I have written many thoughts; perhaps I will publish them at some point, but don’t get your hopes up that I will do so any time soon. I prefer to publish only after things become irrelevant—it’s a personal brand thing), the critical response—and the critical response to the critical response—to Don’t Look Up are more revealing and intriguing than the content itself. Most sentient viewers, from what I’ve seen, agree that Don’t Look Up is not a piece of high art by any stretch of the imagination. It is blunt, in-your-face, and heavy-handed in its satire; if the movie attempted to look up the word “subtle” in the dictionary, it would not be able to find it, even if the page was already turned to words from “submarine” to “succor.” Like a Shakespeare play, you already know the plot before it starts, and there is no chance of some hidden meaning or unexpected twist at any point in the movie.

Most critics, though, still find something to dislike in the movie. Conservatives tend to dislike it because it reeks of the condescending, smarter-than-thou liberal harping about Donald Trump and the stupidity of Americans. The movie’s parallels to Trump are, like the rest of the movie, not subtle: the chant “Don’t Look Up” mirrors the cadence of “Lock Her Up,” and the fictional president, brandishing a MAGA-like hat, makes cultural appeals to supporters (who are described as “white working class”) and claims the cosmopolitan elites (the “not cool rich”) are trying to take their country away from them. They are portrayed as rednecks who eat up the president’s rhetoric and willingly blind themselves to reality until it’s too late.

Liberal critics hate it because it is so devoid of subtlety that it does not even pretend to think that it might be “art”—and because liberals, too, are targets of unabashed satire. It is not Trump and his followers who are obviously to blame for America’s failure to prevent its own destruction; instead, liberal elites are part and parcel of the country’s collective failure. The media and the entertainment industry, in particular, are complicit. They are keen to avoid uncomfortable ideas, partisan disagreements, or anything serious, lest it hurt their profits or their access to power. Both new and old media are so caught up in self-congratulatory ladder-climbing and an insatiable need to drive clicks and generate profits that they have lost all conception of any kind of larger public good. Everything is superficial entertainment, and exposing the truth is driven by a desire for personal recognition in the halls of power than serving society.

The editors of the not-New York Times newspaper (whose font looks rather similar to that of the New York Times and which seems to command the same respect in the media world as the New York Times) seem like they are the good guys: they are ready to break a big story in the name of public interest, to hold our government accountable. Yet it soon becomes clear that all they really value are click-through rates on their stories (replete with fancy consulting presentations about what stories are getting clicks) and looking respectable with political elites. “The Daily Rip,” the hottest talk show in the DC politico world, is the movie’s highlight. The show’s tagline—”keep it light, keep it fun”—succinctly encapsulates the thin (and thinning) line between politics and entertainment. The fact that the entire media ecosystem fawns over the show and would sell their souls to get an appearance on it is indicative of what the movie’s writers think of the world of media, both old and new.

This is a far cry from a David Foster Wallace-level critique of the unstoppable allure of television or The Entertainment—but if you accept that the movie is a polemic from start to finish, it’s moderately entertaining. A comet is not a perfect metaphor for climate change, and there is really only one joke that is genuinely funny: the repeated bewilderment that a three-star general charges them for free snacks. But it is hardly a terrible movie, and anyone with even a modicum of experience in the elite world of DC media will confirm that at least some of the barbs are well-deserved.

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Bo Burnham, Herbert Marcuse, and the Transcendent Potential of Political Comedy

If some sort of higher power were designing a comedian tailored exactly to me, he/she/it would probably create something that is basically Bo Burnham. Burnham, like me, started doing comedy in high school; and his interest in comedy is paralleled by an interest in the political and social contexts of the act of doing comedy—to wit, the relationship of comedy as an art to the real politics of the world, what makes a joke pathbreaking rather than offensive, and whether all jokes need to follow the “rule of threes.” The main difference is that Bo Burnham is among the most successful comedians of his generation, and I write solipsistic essays a few times per year and post them on my blog that nobody reads for no money.

Burnham originally got famous by singing comedy songs in his suburban bedroom—songs that very much toe the line between funny and offensive, yet also sit firmly on the side of “not punching down.” One of my early favorite songs of his was “New Math,” in which he does “math” problems by reframing them in cultural and political terms. Here’s one lyric, written when he was approximately 15 years old:

And what’s a bag of chips divided by five?
Well that’s a Nike worker’s meal
And Santa Claus multiplied by i
Well I guess that makes him real
And the square root of the NBA
Is Africa in a box
How do you trace a scatter plot?
You give the pencil to Michael J. Fox

Following this, he gives a knowing groan to the camera, acknowledging that he knows that bit is offensive, but he said it anyway. I mean, you definitely could not get away with that today, and probably for good reason, but it’s still brilliant. When I was 15, I wrote a series of Ogden Nash-style poems about foods you would find at a barbecue. I won second place in our high school poetry competition. Advantage: Burnham.

He’s now 30 and he has a new comedy special on Netflix filmed entirely during the pandemic about slowly going crazy while trying to make something create and worthwhile in the pandemic. The first song is perhaps the most directly relevant piece of artistic work aimed at me ever created in history, and it starts off by mentioning all the terrible things in the world: war, drought, protests, climate change, etc. He asks: should I be making jokes when so many terrible things are going on? He wants to do something good for the world, to be helpful, to add value, but all he knows how to do is make jokes—and he doesn’t really want to inconvenience himself. So what’s the solution? He sings:

The world is so fucked up.
Systematic oppression.
Income inequality.
The other stuff.
And there’s only one thing that I can do about it, while… while being paid, and being the center of attention.
Healing the world with comedy
Making a literal difference, metaphorically

I spent my entire college career outside of class performing comedy, thinking about comedy, writing comedy, and for much of my early life I wanted to do comedy professionally. But I also cared fundamentally about making the world a better place and contributing in some way to some kind of systemic change to make the world slightly less fucked up than it is. I have always cared about politics out of proportion with a normal human being, and doing fart jokes felt meaningless. I wanted to find a way to do comedy but also be politically relevant.

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Power and Powerlessness in the Georgia Senate Race

In the closing weeks of the Georgia Senate runoffs, Republicans charged that the Democrats would cancel Christmas, ban hamburgers, and destroy the fabric of America. Democrat and preacher Raphael Warnock would be “America’s first Marxist senator”; his fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff was compromised by the Chinese Communist Party. Now, I’m no expert on Christmas, hamburgers, or fabrics, but I am somewhat of an expert on Chinese Communism and Marxism—so I can say with some confidence that these claims are, in technical parlance, completely bonkers. 

Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, despite being incumbents, are not running for something; they are running against the impending onslaught of socialism, which, by their telling, is basically already here. (This would be news to the DSA, but nevermind.) With only rare exceptions, the Republicans’ campaign is about warding off the arrival of some sort of invasive species that feeds on the blood of innocent Americans and will overrun the state of Georgia in copies of Das Kapital and veganism. Nevermind that Loeffler is a billionaire whose husband owns the New York Stock Exchange and Perdue is a millionaire corporate executive whose policy priorities of promoting outsourcing are anathema to rural Georgians. Loeffler and Perdue (and Donald Trump) claim that they are on the side of Georgians against “people who don’t share your values.” In other words, as one of their mailers says, “Joe Biden, the Hollywood Elite, and DC Liberals Want to Steal Your Future.” 

Regardless of who ultimately wins, the fact that such bonkers claims carry such power is worth trying to understand. Why are Georgia voters, especially rural voters, receptive to these messages, and to believe wholeheartedly in the imminent death of Santa and meat-based cuisine? And why do liberals and Democrats have such trouble gaining political traction or combating these attacks? The political dynamics at play call to mind multiple episodes in John Gaventa’s excellent book Power and Powerlessness about coal miners in rural Appalachia. Rather than attribute support for exploitative local elites to condescending assertions that rural citizens have a “false consciousness,” Gaventa argues instead that understanding power requires thinking harder about powerlessness. Power corrupts the powerful and shapes their worldview; in the same way, powerlessness shapes the way that those on the outs of society come to understand the world. Similar to Gramsci’s idea of hegemony or studies of how colonized populations often end up accepting colonial ideologies, this understanding of powerlessness creates conditions in which the ideological narratives of local elites become the prevailing “common sense” of society, shaping the field of what is believable to the powerful and powerless alike.

Miners in the communities Gaventa studied in Appalachia faced terrible conditions and were completely at the whim of large mining companies, yet workers only rarely pushed back. More often, they actively supported the dominance of exploitative local elites. Multiple waves of social reformers who tried to help the miners failed miserably as local elites portrayed attempts to empower grassroots society as the work of hostile outside forces. Local citizens believed these claims, often made on the basis of cultural affinities, and fought to preserve the ideology that supported their powerlessness. 

At the time of the Great Depression, unrest in the coal mines attracted national attention from writers, journalists, relief organizations, and other nonprofit groups. Local elites, threatened by these rebellions and the outside attention, had to rely on a new ideology to frame these events in order to maintain their power over the miners. Gaventa writes: 

The ideology which emerged appealed to the forces of law and order, respectability, and patriotism as opposed to the forces of disorder, anti-religion, and anti-government brought in by the outsider. ‘Communism’, as interpreted to the population by ministers and government officials, meant belief in the principles of: 1) hatred of god, 2) destruction of property, 3) social and racial equality and class hatred, 4) revolutionary propaganda leading to the stirring up of class hatred, advocating of violence, strikes, riots, etc.; destruction of all forms of representative and democratic government and the rights of liberty guaranteed under the American Constitution—the right of free speech, free press, and the freedom of worship; 6) world­wide revolution overthrowing all capitalist government and the re­ establishment of the dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat, with head­quarters in Moscow and with the red flag as the only flag.

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The New York Giants or the Democratic Party?

  1. Few supporters outside of New York City
  2. Peaked in 2008, and it’s been mostly downhill since
  3. Only shows up to work one day a week, on average
  4. Is playing a defense 75% of the time
  5. Will get absolutely destroyed in 2022 
  6. Relies on the hard work of Black people to have any chance at victory, yet somehow out-of-touch older white people still call the shots
  7. Owned by rich people
  8. Frequently trips over themselves, even when no opponent is pressuring them
  9. More concerned about producing a good sound byte than actually winning
  10. Better at football than the New York Jets

BOTH: 1-9
DEMOCRATIC PARTY ONLY: 10

In Memoriam: Sherle R. Schwenninger, 1951-2020

Every weekday morning for two-and-a-half-years, I started my day the exact same way: calling Sherle, my boss, to check in. Sherle would pick up the phone from his rent-controlled studio in New York—he refused on principle to live in Washington, D.C., even though he was a co-founder of a think tank based in Washington, D.C.—and clear his throat loudly and thoroughly. Then, in the most unforgettable voice, an inimitable mix of his Nebraska roots and his adopted New York home, he would say, “HellooOOOoo,” undulating the sound of the final “o.” This routine became so drilled into my head that at times I found myself answering my own phone with a throat clear and an undulating hello; still, to this day, if I’m not paying attention, the Sherle hello, as it should be known, will sneak up on me when I pick up a call from a friend.

Sherle passed away unexpectedly last week. He was not a household name by any stretch, but he was an intellectual inspiration and quiet backer of many household names in the world of politics and ideas. Colleagues frequently referred to him the “smartest person you’ve never heard of” in the policy world, and I came to believe that this was probably true. When he spoke, his volume was almost imperceptible, and you had to lean in to catch what he was saying (and you definitely wanted to hear what he was saying, because it was far more insightful than what anyone else was saying). His preference for long, comprehensive answers to simple questions made him ill-suited for political talk shows and live interviews that marked status in the D.C. world. Instead, he made his mark from the sidelines, cultivating young thinkers, convening roundtable discussions, and writing editorials. With Sherle, you didn’t need to know his name; what mattered were his ideas and his impact on future generations.

Sherle maintained a distinct formality even in a world careening toward informality. Everything he did was thorough: thoroughly written, thoroughly edited, and thoroughly researched. Even a response to a question via email would be formatted to the fullest extent. Name, colon, two line breaks, one word, two line breaks, name. It had a palindromic appeal, of sorts, almost comforting in its structure.

Josh: 

Yes.

Sherle

I was supposed to call at “around nine am” every morning, but, being me, it became “between nine and ten,” and then “one minute before ten o’clock.” By the time I had called, Sherle had already read the day’s New York Times and Financial Times from front to back, and was waiting expectantly for my call. 

I didn’t always agree with Sherle on policy issues, and, I soon realized, he appreciated that: he’d rather have an interesting discussion than blind obedience. I doubt I ever convinced Sherle of anything, yet he would always give me room to argue my side and try to make my case. (He, on the other hand, did convince me of many things; and the time I spent working with him and Michael Lind were far more formative for my thinking about politics than my four years in college, or after.) Even when I pursued research interests of mine only tangentially related to the job I was supposed to be doing for our team, Sherle was unfailingly supportive. Like a great adviser, he encouraged me to follow my own path, while also making sure I didn’t veer too far off course. 

What was most evident about Sherle was that he was generous. He was generous with salaries, always giving me the maximum raise possible even when he didn’t have to. He was generous with his time, giving feedback on items that didn’t interest him but were important to others. He was generous with opportunities, never treating me as a mere assistant and instead giving me assignments that should have been reserved for researchers far beyond my years. He was even generous with his clothes, gifting his old neckties to younger colleagues when he was ready to move onto new ones. (The tie that Sherle gave me is still the nicest and best-looking tie I own, and possibly ever will be.) And, of course, he was generous with his ideas, caring more that they got out into the world than that he would be the one to get credit for them.

Sherle’s commitment to substance over style made him an excellent manager and mentor, but he was always the underdog when it came to making a splash on the D.C. donor circuit. By the time he hired me, his program at the think tank he co-founded had been reduced to just four people, then three, and, eventually, it was pushed out altogether in favor of more flashy thinkers who could charm donors by telling them what they wanted to hear. Sherle would rather let the program fold than compromise what he believed in: good research in support of a policy agenda that would offer a better deal for the middle classes, a renewed social contract, fewer foreign wars, and better infrastructure. 

Whenever I think of the word infrastructure, I think of Sherle. Sherle had thought through infrastructure funding down to the last detail, and worked with politicians, financiers, and various coalitions to try to get somebody—anybody—to try to make good infrastructure policy actually happen. Sherle knew that a program for infrastructure investment could address multiple facets of American malaise at once: provide good, middle class jobs for workers of all education levels; offer a productive (and socially beneficial) target for the overabundant supply of investment capital that otherwise causes asset bubbles; and make America’s economy more productive and efficient in the long-term. He was a tireless advocate for this unsung cause, pressing his case gently even as the tides of political dysfunction swelled around him.

Infrastructure is, I think, a good metaphor for Sherle’s life. It is the solid foundation that makes the humans around it able to prosper and thrive. That was Sherle during my time working with him: he made it possible for me to grow as a researcher, thinker and editor. And his selfless generosity made me a better person as well.

I am incredibly grateful that I had the opportunity to work with and learn from Sherle for so long, and I hope that my own research and writing will be able to meet his impeccable standards. (My fashion sense and choice of neckties certainly will not.) Every time I pick up the phone and want to say a “Sherle hello,” I will remember the voice on the other end of that phone line each morning, wondering why I took so long to call, and ready to get to work to make this country a better place.

The Class Politics of Education: On Markey, Massachusetts, and the Scourge of Meritocracy

For the political left, talking about the problems of class is easier than talking about the problems of education. It is acceptable, and quite natural, to think about the wealthy as a political category that selfishly votes in their self-interest to protect their wallets from the prying hands of the state; it is harder, and certainly more discomfiting, to think of political divides in terms of education without respect to class. Education is less tangible than money, and there is nothing inherent about the idea of education that requires it to be associated with policy preferences outside of the field of education itself. And, most importantly, it is because many of us on the left are highly educated but not necessarily rich. (Hello, academia!)

The polarization of politics in our highly unequal society, however, appears increasingly along the lines of education, rather than income. The shift of more highly educated voters to liberal and left-wing parties is not a solely American phenomenon: as Thomas Piketty found, the parties on the left side of politics in France, Britain, and the United States all shifted “from the worker party to the high education party.” The left-wing parties may advocate for policies that would be more helpful for workers and the less-educated, but their actual base of support is increasingly from more educated citizens.

A decade and a half later, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? continues to rear its ugly head.

Much of the debate on the left has focused on ways to magically enlighten the masses to “realize” their self-interest without analyzing the basis of the values system that undergirds ideas of success and failure: the equation of educational attainment with success.

Nobody wants to be against education! Education, like happy hours, is something for which people who live in cosmopolitan cities seem to universally agree that more is better. But without thinking of the ways in which we have moralized educational attainment—and how we have designed policies to reward a particular vision of academic success—the left will continue to limp along, election after election, failing to make much in the way of forward progress in the United States.

In a recent op-ed and new book, Michael Sandel (whose class I taught for last year) targets squarely the mirage of education as equal opportunity, which he lumps into the idea of “meritocracy.” The idea that educational success implies that people “deserve” their success is corrupting politics, he argues. It allows the highly educated to look down on the uneducated and divides society into the winners (with a four-year college degree) and the losers (those who, ostensibly due to not working hard enough, do not). Although I have not read Freddie deBoer’s new book, The Cult of Smart, I believe he makes a similar argument.

Instead, Sandel argues, the Democratic party (or, in deBoer’s framing, the political left) should move away from the false promise of “equality of opportunity” based on academic credentialism and instead focus on what he calls the “dignity of work.” Work should be valued based on its contribution to society rather than on the educational credentials required to get hired to do so. This idea, Sandel points out, “runs from Aristotle to MLK to Catholic social teaching” and is a good reminder that we should value essential workers on the frontlines more than the highly paid financiers raking in billions on speculation from the comfort of their second homes. In my own conversations, I have argued for a cruder conception: wages should be set by a worker’s proximity to dealing with human shit; or, in other words, that janitors and bathroom cleaners should be making the highest wages, followed by nursing home staff, and, at the very bottom, anybody in a white collar job. (Hello, academia!)

I agree wholeheartedly with this basic argument: the way that modern society values work needs to be turned on its head, and we are long overdue for some kind of radical overhaul that reduces the economic premium we place on fancy academic credentials and, at the very least, ensures that all people can earn enough money to live with dignity. It is a familiar but important argument; see, for example, Sandel’s student Elizabeth Anderson on the point of equality.

I want this argument to be true. I desperately, truly, sincerely want this to be true, because it offers a clear path forward for how to save American politics and achieve some semblance of justice in a country plagued by unnecessary cruelty toward workers and the poor. If the Democratic party could just authentically focus on the “dignity of work,” the theory goes, they might be able to recapture the disgruntled (white) workers who, bristling at elite condescension, have embraced the crass anti-establishment populism of Donald Trump. Thomas Frank would nod his head, and so would I.

My concern, however, is that it might not be so easy. Take Massachusetts—where both Professor Sandel and I voted in the Democratic party primary last week. Or, at least, I hope he voted. I supported Ed Markey’s campaign; I volunteered as an organizer, reaching out to every single person I could think of possibly knowing in Massachusetts to vote for Markey. I took my duties seriously, which is why my ex-girlfriend’s mother received an email for me about why she should vote for Markey. (She did not reply, but I think she voted Markey).

Markey ran as a progressive champion of the working class—the son of a milkman who drive an ice cream truck to pay for college. “Ice Cream Eddie” was just a guy from the working-class town of Malden; in sharp contrast to his opponent, Joe Kennedy, the elite-educated scion of the country’s most famous political dynasty. Yet Markey’s base of support came from the highly educated bastions of the state: Cambridge, home to Harvard and MIT, voted nearly 4-1 for Markey, and he did even better in Amherst. Kennedy’s strongest showings, by contrast, were in working-class towns. Ed Markey dominated among educated voters precisely by running as a working class guy who understood the dignity of work; Kennedy did better with less-educated voters by running as a dynastic elite.

Such an outcome echoes that of the presidential primary a few months prior: for as much as I wanted Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to win—the candidates who offered a genuine alternative to the farce of “equal opportunity”—they performed better among educated voters than among uneducated voters. Exit polls showed that 44 percent of Democratic primary voters in Massachusetts that never attended college preferred Biden, compared to 31 percent and 16 percent for Bernie and Warren, respectively.

Markey ran on the exact type of platform that emphasized the dignity of work, and his most famous endorsement was from Congresswoman, ex-bartender, and working-class champion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The more Markey emphasized the dignity of work, the more he appealed to people like me—highly educated progressives. Paradoxically, it seems, the more the Democrats run as the party of the working class (unions, antitrust, wage boards), the more they attract cosmopolitan liberals, not the workers themselves.

Appealing to the working class is the right thing to do morally, because, as Sandel cogently explains, we have erroneously moralized academic success and stigmatized those who do not thrive in the classroom. The moral policy platform would be one that universally provides social supports so as to ensure that all working people (and even those that don’t!) can enjoy a dignified life and not suffer from the unnecessary pain of economic insecurity. It would also be one that actively curbs wealth, rejects hereditary aristocracy, and redistributes vast quantities of resources. These policies are the right thing to do, and I hope someone who understands the dignity of both mental and manual labor promotes them.

I’m sure that my progressive friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts will be on board. But that might be as far as it gets.

The Paradox of Bureaucracy and the Politics of the Left

Nobody likes talking about bureaucracy anymore. (Ok, there are some people, but they never get invited to fun parties.) Talking about bureaucracy is passé; the main studies of bureaucracy in America were all written at least thirty years ago. The marketization and privatization of everything, and the subsequent dismantling of the administrative state over the last forty years, has made bureaucracy seem irrelevant.

David Graeber thinks we’re doing it all wrong. In Utopia of Rules, he argues that we have entered an era of “total bureaucratization”: rather than disappear, the political foundations of bureaucracy have metastasized into all aspects of life. Privatization has not defeated bureaucratization but rather joined forces with it “in a way that public and private bureaucracies finally merged together in a mass of paperwork designed to facilitate the direct extraction of wealth.” Bureaucracy is more important than ever; we just don’t even realize it.

Graeber’s critique is particularly provocative when it comes to the relationship between bureaucracy and left-wing politics. We often think of the political Left in America as defenders of a benevolent bureaucracy, protecting welfare state programs against the predations of right-wing politicians hellbent on shrinking the government. Yet Graeber suggests instead that the fundamental assumptions of Left politics make it incompatible with bureaucracy. 

“The social movements of the sixties were, on the whole, left-wing in inspiration, but they were also rebellions against bureaucracy, or, to put it more accurately, rebellions against the bureaucratic mindset, against the soul-destroying conformity of the postwar welfare states,” he writes. That “the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state,” is indicative of how American politics has lost its way.

Bureaucracies are arrangements of rules, a particular arrangement of social order that prioritizes predictability, stability, and order. “Cold, impersonal, bureaucratic relations are much like cash transactions, and both offer similar advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand they are soulless. On the other, they are simple, predictable, and—-within certain parameters, at least—-treat everyone more or less the same,” he writes. Bureaucracies, then, can be highly effective in certain circumstances—-but they are so only by removing as much humanness as possible.

The departure from human impulses is what makes bureaucracy incompatible with foundational elements of a left political project, he argues, which must be grounded in the idea of imagination. In those youth rebellions of the 1960s, bureaucratic authority represented the fundamental stifling of the human spirit, of creativity and conviviality. The bureaucratic mindset is the rejection of human imagination; a revulsion toward the fetters of bureaucracy is inextricable from the core energy of what motivates a true egalitarian. “The Left, in its essence, is a critique of bureaucracy, even if it’s one that has, again and again, been forced to accommodate in practice to the very bureaucratic structures and mindset it originally arose to oppose.”

Graeber invokes Marx to promote an idea of the political imagination as the inherent human capability of envisioning a better world. In Marx’s terminology, Graeber says, this is production: the ability to envision things, and then bring them into being, unconstrained by the notion that we are limited by what the world currently is.

Imagination does not—-and should not—-be relegated to utopian fantasizing and attempts to use force to impose visions of society from above. It should be a bottom-up project, grounded in the basic creativity of regular individuals. The ability to imagine is not something that is reserved for the prodigies or high-powered elites, while the masses labor purely with their hands and without their minds. Rather, the imagination he speaks of is “the practical common sense imagination of ordinary cooks, nurses, mechanics, and gardeners.”

The combination of the bureaucratic mindset plus the neoliberal belief in markets and individualism creates an environment that seeks to limit the human imagination as much as possible. Graeber’s focus on the importance of political imagination and his sharp critiques of the elite managerial classes echo the more radical writings of George Orwell: “The ultimate imperative of those running the world is choking off the possibility of any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that will be fundamentally different than the world today.”

Even the most benevolent bureaucracies are really just taking the highly schematized, minimal, blinkered perspectives typical of the powerful, turning them into ways of limiting that power or ameliorating its most pernicious effects. Surely, bureaucratic interventions along these lines have done an enormous amount of good in the world…But at the same time, in taking forms of willful blindness typical of the powerful and giving them the prestige of science—for instance, by adopting a whole series of assumptions about the meaning of work, family, neighborhood, knowledge, health, happiness, or success that had almost nothing to do with how poor or working-class people actually lived their lives, let alone what they found meaningful in them—it set itself up for a fall. 

In many arenas, most notably academia, radical critics of the status quo often cling to the strictures of bureaucracy to root out existing networks that favor the well-connected and the closed-off, patronage benefits they promote. Bureaucracy is juxtaposed with a feudal system and arbitrary personal authority. Yet, Graeber notes, the comfortable embrace of bureaucracy is dangerous: it adds more rules and limits creativity, but it doesn’t necessarily upset the order of authority. Channeling his anarchist forebears like James Scott, he argues that bureaucratization 

had to take what had always been a subtle, nuanced form of procedures and turn them into an explicit set of rules. In effect, they had to turn custom into a kind of board game….Such reforms may aim to eliminate arbitrary personal authority, but of course they never actually do. Personal authority just jumps up a level, and becomes the ability to set the rules aside in specific cases.

The tension between Left politics and bureaucracy was perhaps most apparent in Maoist China. The antithesis to true mass politics was bureaucracy and its associated diseased ideologies was “bureaucratism” and “formalism”—when bureaucrats become too distant from ordinary people and enslave themselves to rules rather than what people need. Bureaucracy won out in the post-Mao era, and the contemporary Chinese bureaucratic state is beset by the key feature that Graeber attributes to the bureaucratic mindset: a fear of arbitrariness, and, thus, an embrace of power that is deeply wary of uninhibited human creativity.

Against Neo-Pessimism: George Orwell on James Burnham

The political ideas of James Burnham lodged themselves in George Orwell’s mind, horrifying and challenging him, refusing to let go until Orwell could refute them with sufficient authority to declare them fully vanquished. Orwell dedicated three long essays to Burnham’s works, each one painstakingly unpacking the myriad ways in which Orwell saw Burnham’s theories as flawed. In his writing about Burnham, Orwell explains why he rejects what he calls “neo-pessimism”—a line of thinking about global politics that dismisses any possibility of positive change.

Burnham argues that capitalism is a failed system of the past and socialism is unworkable; instead, the world is lurching inevitably toward a new ruling class of the managerial elite. In Orwell’s reconstruction, Burnham believes that “this new ruling class expropriates the capitalists, crushes the working class movements and sets up a totalitarian society governed by the concept of efficiency.”

Burnham’s arguments contain many trenchant insights. Orwell writes in “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” that Burnham has correctly identified some trends underway: 

For quite fifty years past the general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy. The ever-increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and the growth of the new ‘managerial’ class of scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats; the weakness of the proletariat against the centralized state; the increasing helplessness of small countries against big ones; the decay of representative institutions and the appearance of one-party régimes based on police terrorism, faked plebiscites, etc.: all these things seem to point in the same direction. 

Yet Burnham’s ideas, Orwell argues, are based on a fundamental error: he believes that the way things are is the way they will always have to be. He uses the animal kingdom to highlight Burnham’s pessimistic and short-sighted obsession with the status quo. “Burnham sees the trend and assumes that it is irresistible, rather as a rabbit fascinated by a boa constrictor might assume that a boa constrictor is the strongest thing in the world.” 

The neo-pessimist claims that a belief in a better future is an act of self-delusion, an exercise in utopian fantasy. He identifies two sources of this flawed line of thinking: the notion that politics must be the same at all times, and that political behavior is the same as any other type of human behavior. In The Machiavellians, Burnham’s follow-up to The Managerial Revolution, Orwell points out the gaping hole in Burnham’s inevitability thesis. “The argument implied all the way through the book is that a peaceful and prosperous society cannot exist in the future because it has never existed in the past. By the same argument one could have proved the impossibility of aeroplanes in 1900.”

To Orwell, the assumption that politics must be the same in all ages ignores the importance of economics—namely, the power of scarcity. What is particularly galling about modern society is that it is, for perhaps the first time, humans existed in a world of relative abundance: it is now technically possible to guarantee a baseline quality of life for all people. Politics in the absence of the fear of poverty must be different from that of the past. “The justifications for class distinctions, if there is a justification, is no longer the same, because there is no mechanical reason why the average human being should continue to be a drudge.”

Orwell rejects the “realism” of neo-pessimism on the grounds that it leaves no room for genuine human decency. If all behavior can and should be reduced to machinations for power, and there are no other forces besides those of power, politics becomes devoid of any sense of humanity and is thus pointless as a human exercise. The realist rejects any positive vision for politics to create a better society; intellectuals strutting around the halls of high society believe it not because it is true, but because it seems “smart.”

Any theory which is obviously dishonest and immoral (“realistic” is the favorite word at this moment) will find adherents who accept it just for that reason. Whether the theory works, whether it attains the result aimed at will hardly be questioned. The mere fact that it throws ordinary decency overboard will be accepted as proof of its grown-upness and consequently of its efficacy.

Orwell is obsessed with Burnham’s ideas because he sees the neo-pessimist school as deeply dangerous. In a separate essay, he associates the power of neo-pessimist thinking, and its misguidedness, to the allure of its temporality. It resonates with those who can only think in the shortest of terms and want to flaunt their superiority.

The danger of ignoring the neo-pessimists lies in the fact that up to a point they are right. So long as one thinks in short periods it is wise not to be hopeful about the future. Plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck, and the pessimist has many more opportunities of saying ‘I told you so’ than the optimist. By and large the prophets of doom have been righter than those who imagined that a real step forward would be achieved by universal education, female suffrage, the League of Nations, or what not.

The neo-pessimist position is incompatible with Orwell’s view of a more equal, more just, and more decent society—socialism, as he saw it. For the socialist project to have any chance, it would have to overcome the deceptive allure of the neo-pessimists.