If you're like me and wrestling with a lot of confusion and pain about how to be in this moment in time, I think it matters to pay deep attention (our highest form of currency) to those who are doing the work of navigating in the directions we want to go.
We're exposed to so many articles and ideas everyday, it can be easy to skim and sip even our most favorite people. So let me try to counter that & emphasize a few ideas from this beautiful convo between #DeathPanel and #NaomiKlein...
Klein cites Arundhati Roy's idea of the pandemic as portal: "One choice was to change and leave some of the worst of ourselves behind, or we bring it with us and we go somewhere monstrous. I think we chose the latter and we have to look at that. It’s not just back to the old normal. It’s worse.
There’s no going back to the old shore. We’re out at sea. Before we’re gonna find the other shore we have to admit we’re at sea. That’s what I’m trying to get at with this. It’s very hard to look at."
I was skeptical because it seemed like it was a whole book about being mixed up with Naomi Wolf, which seemed like the least interesting thing about her, and scant material for a book. But this podcast made me think it was more than that, and made me want to read it.
But then I flipped through a copy at the bookstore, and I saw Wolf's name over and over after all, so I got cold feet.
the mirror-world idea resonates with things we're seeing in SF: "community planting day" to barricade sidewalks against homeless people, volunteer trash pickups as a front for an org that wants to privatize street cleaning, war on drugs waged via guerrilla poster paste-ups attacking specific supposedly lenient judges
@seachanger I remember assisting on a research application in 2021 about using the pandemic as the much needed reset. This was predominantly focused on environment and looking at how can we avoid societal collapse. The academic I was working with wanted to find a mechanism for politicians of all stripes to be honest about their fears. All too often politicians run campaigns based on their hopes, not what keeps them awake at night. Only honesty about fears will bring about action.
@seachanger I was saying this just other day when trying to explain to my kids how the rules of the western world were rewritten post 9/11. It was a much more restrictive, divided and anxious world that quickly emerged compared to the one I grew up in.
Conservatives in UK + US know time in power is short and pursue a scorched earth policy to move as fast and dramatically as they can. The Left by nature is consensual and takes time to reach consensus - but time is slipping away.
"there is this real reluctance, at this stage of capitalism and with left politics itself at the speed of social media, to pick up that tradition [of self reflection] and actually say we’re not where we want to be and how did we end up here.
If we want to be somewhere better we have to be more reflective.
That requires writing from the inside not the outside, which is why my book is self-critical."
#NaomiKlein on holding up a mirror to herself & the left in her new book Doppelganger
Klein is one of the people who moved us from the Reagan/Thatcherist "dead left" of the '90s, and into the last decade's active coalitions reaching for "shared horizons" on the left - she cites examples like the green new deal, her LEAP manifesto for Canada, the Bernie campaign (for which she was a climate surrogate), etc.
And Klein is asking how this resurgent, movement-building left self-destructed & fell apart in 2021 when we most needed a shared horizon around political care & compassion
"this is the heartbreak of 2021... those coalitions fell apart. Let’s be honest. So what happened? That’s what motivated me to come back to these themes of personal branding, the way capitalism has infiltrated our movements, the way funding affects the ability to work in coalition, the way identity politics impacts it. I’m not anti-identity politics, but there are different versions of identity politics... there are some that are a bridge and there are some that are a wall..." (cont.)
"...The picture is more complicated than that [the left] doesn’t have shared horizons, it’s that we’ve learned to talk a good game around what we want, but we don’t know how to embody those values. [Our movements are] based on care, but do we know how to care about one another?
... and it’s not even that we don’t know, it's that we don’t know how to know. We don't know how to act based on these things we say we believe in. That’s how deep capitalism is in all of us."
And I have to say this is where Klein's questioning resonates so deeply with the pain & confusion & failures I experienced in movement spaces in 2020-22 and why I left twitter. In theory we were working together to push for healthcare for all people etc, but in reality we were ripping each other to shreds for clicks on social media, obsessed with humiliating coalition members, and ceding the idea of "safe space" for learning to the far right, which takes every inch of ground we abandon
@seachanger I do think some of these dynamics preceded the pandemic, by late 2019 the feminist movement here was disintegrating in its moment of triumph, but yeah, the pandemic still played a major role
The #DeathPanel hosts reminded me that Bernie's campaign was drafting practical federal covid policy that would have used the pandemic to permanently improve and strengthen public health care in the US while addressing covid as a long term medical and social crisis.
Instead we got 2 year covid plans that forced us to pretend covid was over after 2 years. Liberalism did not meet the moment. It was hypocritical in ways that flung the doors open for fascism. More of us need to think on this.
"This has been a very terrifying summer and it’s only gonna get scarier. We’re all gonna have to figure out how to live together on less land even if we do all the right things.
We either become more monstrous, more eugenicist, more fascist, or we radically change our values.
And that’s an underlined “we” when it comes to me. I can’t ask that of others if I’m not willing to ask it of myself, to fess up to my many hypocrisies and contradictions."
@seachanger
>And that’s an underlined “we” when it comes to me.
I wonder if she will change ? Off amd on, I have been calling her and her ilk (looking at you Michael Mann) out on the "do as I say not as I do bullshit" that endemic in westeen liberal environmentalists for over a decade (Stephen Fry's a recent addition to the "my mega footprint is important but we must cut back" crowd.. It's one of the reasons no one takes any of this shit seriously.
@seachanger re: Bernie... a lot of folks don't remember that in 2020 Bernie suspended his campaign and gave all his campaign funds to COVID relief.
re: Naomi... she was also on democracy now yesterday. an American hero she is.
@seachanger this is one of my favorite podcasts, I saved the episode about why mask mandates work even if they are not enforced because it’s brilliant.
@seachanger Love her! Her recent work has been so fascinating wrt movement psychology and the vulnerabilities that emerge from corrupt and unjust systems.
@seachanger Great way to put it! She's one of the rare people who give me hope these days. Because she's so authentic and unwavering, while still being flexible enough to adjust her thinking with new circumstances and information.
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