A few days ago, this tweet made the rounds. While it's objectively funny to see a national reporter "discover" historical materialism on the fly, I don't want to rag on him because a) he's a perfectly good reporter and b) no one should ever be shamed for learning new things and coming to the largely correct conclusion. Besides, others already did this much more quickly and incisively than me:
No, what I instead want to discuss is the pushback to Jeff's tweet. Rather than bore you and myself with a definitive cataloguing of every single take, here is one small thread that conveys the overall sentiment among doubters succinctly:
This is almost perfectly indicative of the casual rejection of historical materialism that is pervasive among liberal pundits. From subtly denying that the concept even exists (he calls a 175-year philosophical tradition "Jeff's theory") to providing a flimsy case for the counterargument, it has it all. Imagine pursuing an academic end like the study of history with an academic means like "grad seminars"...the humanity! Anyway, it seems clear that this default anti-materialist position is an indirect result of decades of propaganda emphasizing the dominant ideology of American individualism. When collective action and mass mobilization are marginalized enough to be functionally ignorable by these pundits, all they're left with are individual actors and "great men." Add in that those who adhere to this position probably do so because they desperately want the things they're experts in (horse race politics, legislative procedure, reading the news) to mean something, and you have a self-replicating view of the world that naturally subsumes all dissent.
So what is the antidote to this? The obvious one is presumably what Jeff did: Study history diligently, allow yourself to consider alternative perspectives, and come to the largely correct conclusion that material circumstances are what drive the course of history. While I think this sort of education is ideal, I also understand that I can't force everyone to sit down and read books until they become a Marxist. So maybe the easier short-term path to disabuse one of this theory of contingency is to do something far more hedonistic. Specifically, everyone should watch sports.
Let's start from the end and work backwards. Consider two famous organizations represented by elephant mascots: The Republican Party and Alabama Football. Both of these outfits clearly orient their actions around specific goals. For Alabama, this goal is obvious: winning national titles. For Republicans it's less clear that there is one specific goal, so feel free to plug in "nullifying labor unions" or "ending abortion rights" or something else as you wish.
To achieve these goals, both Alabama and the Republicans have to navigate the institutions they are party to in order to pursue them, as there is not yet a "win national title" button or an "end voting rights" switch. For the Crimson Tide that process entails recruiting top-end talent, molding that talent into high-end football players, and deploying those players correctly in order to win almost all of their football games. The process for the GOP is shockingly similar — replace the recruitment of players with the recruitment of pliable and/or like-minded citizens, get them elected/appointment through "coaching" them through the process (aka shower them with money), and then consolidate power whenever possible by holding the party line in all three branches of government.
Once we synthesize these seemingly disparate processes we can start to consider football games and pieces of legislation as roughly analogous pieces of their larger systems. This allows us to challenge the contingency theory mentioned above by comparing the slog of Build Back Better/Joe Manchin/etc to an individual football game, something even a casual sports watcher might more readily comprehend. Which naturally means it's time to talk about Stephen Garcia.
Stephen Garcia was a perfectly fine college quarterback who delivered a number of reasonably good performances for a South Carolina Gamecock program at its absolute apex under Steve Spurrier. Garcia also got into trouble almost constantly and was kicked off the team partway through his senior season. But for one near-perfect Saturday in 2010 he did the unthinkable, completing 85% of his passes to help lead his team to a victory over the #1 ranked defending champion Alabama Crimson Tide. The glorious inexplicability of that game remains with me to this day, to the point that I would recommend it to any non-believer as a testament to why they should become infatuated with our nation's dumbest sport. More to the point, this game had an obvious impact on the sport as the Tide fell from the #1 ranking and eventually had to settle for a Citrus Bowl birth instead of the national title.
While this monumental upset is clearly a historical event worth remembering, it's difficult to say that it made history in any larger sense. South Carolina was good for a while longer, but once Spurrier gave up they fell into a swoon that they still haven't fully recovered from. As for Alabama, they may have missed out on winning the 2010 title, but a) they probably would have still lost to Auburn two months later and b) they turned around and won the title the very next year anyway. What's more is that the loss to South Carolina didn't inspire any real introspection on behalf of the Tide. Current Alabama teams have transitioned to a modern offensive scheme, but the 2011 team was perhaps the most old-fashioned, manball-iest team to win a title in recent history. What's even more is how Alabama then dominated the subsequent decade to such a degree that they are the standard against which all other contenders are measured. The lesson here is clear: As much as it pains me to say this, you absolutely can write the history of recent college football while completely ignoring one of its best games.
Now back to the boring stuff, aka. pending legislation whose success or failure will potentially determine the future of our country. It's certainly true that Joe Manchin is primarily responsible for the latest setback for Biden's agenda. But is he a man on whom the future depends, or will he be a mere footnote in history like Stephen Garcia? The desire to answer with the former is easy to understand as all you need is your emotions and/or what's right in front of you. But we simply know too much about how the game is played to reduce history to just the actions of an admittedly awful man. We know that an unelected bureaucrat has given cover to reluctant democrats by excluding provisions to protect immigrants. We know that certain aspects of the bill that would be game-changers for workers are likely to be excluded for similar reasons. And more generally, we know that the predominant ideology of neoliberalism isn't going to freely allow something to pass that could make enough material difference to meaningfully shift the balance of power to the people. The people who buy and pay for your senators are even more ruthless than the Alabama boosters who fund their team, and neither group is going to give up without a fight.
In closing, none of this is to say that you shouldn't know who Joe Manchin is or understand his role in all of this is. Ignoring actors like him would be as foolish as trying to be a sports fan without watching the games. But that surface-level understanding of why things happen absolutely cannot be the basis of how you understand the world at large. For if you don't understand the larger context in which events happen and the material conditions that drive those events, then you will never defeat your enemies.
No comments:
Post a Comment