A Flood of Waters Upon the Earth

Ribosomechomsky
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

It’s become apparent that liberalism in its modern iteration is so comprehensively cleaved from any analysis of class or power that even when liberals recognize injustice (e.g. Republican policies), they’re precluded from any coherent assignment of blame. The desire to punish someone is there because they realize what’s happening is morally unacceptable, but because their political frame of reference just doesn’t include any concept of structural or collective power or responsibility, their wrath falls on the most visible, most easily recognizable targets: individual Republican voters, red states, anything that can be pointed to as a symbol of the other team. Because that’s what liberalism does: it individualizes and atomizes, until every political moment is seen as reflective of the personal integrity or culpability of singular human beings.

This is the same impulse that leads to the conclusion that people in the seemingly distant past who collaborated with authoritarian regimes like Nazi Germany or upheld institutions like the Jim Crow South were simply all lacking in individual virtue – a kind of virtue that the passage of time and our own recognizance has somehow imbued us with now to make us immune to authoritarianism. This is the single greatest weakness of liberalism and why it’s so inherently susceptible to collapse in the face of fascism: it views the tendency towards authoritarianism and injustice solely as a personal moral failing that just happens to inflict whole swaths of people at a time, rather than as a structural force that has to be comprehensively dismantled and perpetually guarded against as a collective society.

All of this isn’t to say that individuals or voting blocs are exempt from criticism or blame, of course. Racist, right-wing policies are enacted by racist, right-wing politicians, voted in largely by racist, right-wing voters. But a political program that focuses only on the individual leaves no hope for emancipation from such a regime. If the states of Alabama and Texas and the like are simply unsalvageable because their populations contain too high a percentage of people who are just fundamentally wicked, then there’s no point in undertaking the arduous work of attempting to take apart the ruling structures of inequality. There is, in fact, little work to be done at all, except to wash one’s hands of the people who would not be saved and bask in the utopia of the blue state, whose own authoritarian devices are better hidden behind a veneer of decency. For a political ideology that prides itself on a dedication to secularism, this impulse in liberalism is oddly Calvinist in its predisposition for sweeping condemnations. It should be less surprising then, I suppose, that it so often seems to manifest itself as it did with Texas in the past few days, with calls for a flood.

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    Ribosomechomsky

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    “Since darkness waits for me, then all the more, / Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore.” -Sara Teasdale, “Since There Is No Escape”