Elf Sternberg

All right, conservatives, let’s say you get your wish and Democrats find it evermore impossible to get anyone from their party elected anywhere in the United States. Aside from a few “blue” holdouts, the country is completely controlled by conservatives.

Then what?

Do you have a plan to reduce healthcare costs? Trump didn’t. Bush didn’t. Reagan didn’t. Do you have a plan that will actually reduce crime? That will actually save trans kids from thoughts of depression and suicide? That will reduce the price of gasoline, of groceries? Do you have a plan to preserve America’s great national parks? To make our air more breathable, our water more drinkable, our food safer? Do you have any ideas about making our country smarter and healthier? Do you know how to manage our aging electrical grid? Rebuild or restore our roads and canals and rail lines? Do you have any plans for preventing corporations for controlling all our lives?

If you get your way, it will be because you cheated; you gerrymandered the states, you exploited loopholes in the Constitution that gave a patch of dirt in South Dakota more votes than a Spanish-speaking family of four in Los Angeles, and you elected election officials who disqualified Democratic votes at impossibly higher rates than Republican votes.

Over on the other side of the ocean, “Brexit” appears to be in the final throes of collapsing the United Kingdom. Twenty years of unbroken English-speaking conservative rule has led to this moment: their healthcare is collapsing. Their energy grid is collapsing. Their water quality is plummeting. This winter, it is expected that the current conservative reign will lead to people starving to death, freezing to death, dying of dysentery. Or, just in general, die from a lack of healthcare.

I mean, you’re already doing it to yourselves. Thanks to your politicization of COVID and vaccination, COVID is killing conservatives at much higher rates than liberals. You want to claim that’s all fake, but you can’t hide obituaries. You can’t hide the funerals. And you all die at 1.76 times the rate we do because of it.

Prove you have imagination, compassion, and a sense of self-preservation. Go on. Because otherwise I’m just betting that you don’t have those things, you just want to win, and you’re willing to stack human bodies a mile high if you must to claim some sort of “victory.”

And if those bodies happen to be your own, your mothers, your fathers, your childrens’, well, you’re perfectly happy to let that happen.

Prove us wrong.

The most alarming thing is how accurate it is. In an article on teaching Critical Race Theory to college kids, the writer has them read a short SF story about how space aliens show up offering to solve all our problems, but only if we let them re-enslave all Black Americans. A vote is taken, and White America agrees to the deal.

As the writer points out, every year in his class the students agree with the premise, and have agreed with it more every year. They know how many racists and powermongers there among us, among their classmates, among their family members. The students believe that if America’s White population were given a second chance to confront the evil of slavery they’d instead embrace it as a beloved long-lost cousin thought dead and buried.

We already engage in a terrifying number of unneeded blood sacrifices– our love of car culture, our acceptance of opiod addiction, our willingness to look the other way as doctors maltreat the obese people , queer people, and minorities, our helplessness in the face of the “warrior cop” mentality. What’s one more?

This week, three things happened that made me realize what the right-wing game plan really looks like. The first was Ted Cruz's proposal to declare anti-fascist activism a "terrorist activity". The second was Rod Dreher's ongoing series, *the Left™ made me a Trump voter, in which he posts emails from people who are planning to vote for Trump because thy equate equality with not just loss, but the actual threat of death. The third was more private: at a recent political event for a Democratic candidate, an attendee had to be ejected from the room because he was trying to take photographs of the sign-in sheet, which means that not just the people who give contributions had to be recorded, but every person, even those whose donations consist of time, or who just want a candidate's sign in front of their houses. While I was there, one of the attendees related a similar story about how the same thing happened at a trans-activism meet-up, where a guy stood out as "not like the others" and yes, was stopped while pulling out his phone to snap a photograph of the sign-up sheet with email addresses and contact information.

The "antifa" law, or a declaration from the DOJ that "anti-fascist activism needs to be investigated as terrorist activity," is part of a two-sided attack on leftist resources. From our currently very right-wing government, prosecutions and civil proceedings will hinder leftist activists from their core mission while they deal with the distraction. From the nastier, brown-shirted side, the threat of doxxing, midnight visits to activists home, and actual violence will cow many leftists from speaking up and speaking their minds, imprison them in their homes, and if they're going to continue, drain their financial and emotional reserves securing themselves against the threat rather than continuing in their core mission.

The word "SLAPP" stands for "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation," and Wikipedia defines it as "a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition." (I'm not sure why we needed a new term, barratry is a word that's been around forever.) That's what the conservative game plan is for 2020: menace from the ground, and SLAPPs from the sky.

The whole point of this two-pronged attack to take leftist policy, which is more popular than conservative policy, and reduce the effectiveness of any advocacy for it, thus leaving room in the public sphere only for conservative ideas, and making conservative ideas seem "inevitable" since no-one is advocating for leftist positions.

Nils Gilman has a series of tweets in which he claims that the "rise of meritocracy" has been bad for the Western World in this way:

An elite that is secure in its prerogatives has a strong incentive to focus on the care and feeding of the system. The old WASP elite felt confident and secure in their privileges. They understood that the system worked well for them, which made many of them prepared to put personal effort into maintaining that system. This wasn’t noblesse oblige or the result a wonderful “culture.” It was self-interested, but self-interested in a context where there wasn’t much distance between personal interests and societal interests as they understood them. “Good for General Motors,” QED.

Gilman goes on to say that the rage we're seeing from the oligarchal elite today is the result of them feeling "unsettled" by the prospect that others might join their ranks out of pure merit, rather than by marrying in or whatever other mechanisms one had to gradually joined the elites, one at a time, to be assimilated, rather than an entire phalanx of people reaching for the golden ring of the 1% all at the same time by dint of having skills the world needs and the elite can't provide.

I think it's possible to look back on the period between the "Robber Baron" "Golden Age" and today and realize just how much bullshit that is. Both Gilman and David Brooks (Gilman was responding to Brooks) are looking at a very short period of time in human history, one in which a combination of factors gave rise to remarkable growth in the economy of the world.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb documents in The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority, all takes is a tiny intolerant minority, refusing to act as the majority wishes for a long enough period of time in a way that avoids incapaciting obstruction of their goals, for the minority to change the culture to suit their needs. For the elite, what they cannot tolerate is the idea that they could fall out of the elite. For the elite, what they need is more. They have a voracious, unstoppable, unsatisfiable need to have everything.

Gilman goes on to say:

This elite insecurity, combined with vastly increased inequality that makes falling out of the elite a desperately bad outcome, makes it locally rational for elites to focus relentlessly on gaming the meritocratic system in order to secure their own position and that of their families.

Emphasis mine, because that's the phrase that gives the game away. Where did this vastly increased inequality come from? From the tiny minority gaming the system for the past fifty years. In 1972, after Lewis Powell (who would eventually go on to be a Supreme Court Justice) wrote The Powell Memo, that "elite [with] a strong incentive to care for the system" decided, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, to instead game the system and ensure a never-ending flow of money into their accounts. The erosion of federal controls on banking and corporate corruption followed in the wake of a sustained, intolerant campaign by the wealthiest and most powerful to consume more and more and more of everything, leaving the rest of us with nothing.

The rising tide between 1972 and 2019 may have "lifted boats" but it lifted them inequally and disproporationally, and the tide rose faster, swamping some of those boats, and the rest of us see the tidal waves coming, if not in the form of surveillance capitalism but in the real threat of real tidal waves.

Gilman's thesis is also completely undone by two historical models: Rome and Sparta. Sparta, for all the ridiculous worship that the far-right makes of the homoerotic imagery of The 300, isn't with us today because it collapsed from internal pressures: the elite did optimize for strong, beautiful men, and they changed the laws to ensure that inheritance and property rights continued only in an upward direction. They hoarded all the money and all the farmland, and Sparta ultimately collapsed because the economy came to a grinding halt. A murderous contempt for the poor and the alien combined with a decaying oligarchal elite doomed Sparta.

That should sound familiar.

The Spartans were terrible warriors anyway.. It was Athens, not Sparta, that ultimately saved Greece. This is why we run "marathons" and not "thermopylaes."

Rome is even more relevant. While Sparta reflects the desires of an ethnically-oriented state to be even more ethnocentric, ultimately to its own demise, Rome was definitely an empire, where people of all classes and races mixed together to create an even bigger and more powerful state. It had no ethnocentrism to speak of and would make deals with anyone. What it had, instead, was class warfare, codified into law. But that doesn't stop Rome from collapsing. Edward Watt's book Mortal Republic spells it out:

The story of Rome’s fall is both complicated and relatively straightforward: The state became too big and chaotic; the influence of money and private interests corrupted public institutions; and social and economic inequalities became so large that citizens lost faith in the system altogether and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues.

Watts goes on to show that, in its last century, the legislative process of Rome, which was designed to create compromise and consensus, was instead propagandized to obstruct progress and to punish anyone who threatened the status quo of the ruling elite.

As Sean Illing writes in that article, "Well, that sounds familiar."

So Gilman is basically wrong; any system designed to create consensus is vulnerable to an intolerant elite that believes that if it keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, eventually they'll get that lucky break, that last moment when all the powers of the state are vulnerable, and they'll finally, totally, and completely control the machinery.

That moment is now: Donald Trump is in the White House and Mitch McConnell is preventing any action at all that would rein him in, becaume Mitch McConnell knows that as long as he's where he sits, he can put in a generation of judges who will create a utopia for the rich and a hellscape for the "undeserving," the people like you and me. And that's the way he wants it.

Yes, America will be little more than bastions of wealth surrounded by ruins.

But they'll be his ruins.

Why I'm throwing my lot in with the Social Democrats.

"Socialism" is one of those scare words that the well-funded right-wing noise machine uses to smear their opponents and frighten their base. With it, they evoke faded memories of the Cold War among their elderly base, memories of famines, of deprivation, and of and midnight raids that "disappeared" dissenters. Which is too bad, because America is loaded with socialist programs.

Americans Are Already Socialist (To Some Degree)

Roads are a socialist program: imagine having to pay a toll for each and every subdivision, arterial, and freeway you drove on. They don't have to imagine it in the city-state of San Pedro Sula in Honduras; private security forces protect the wealthy, collect tolls for driving through "their" part of the city, and everyone else suffers.

And no, gas taxes don't cover the costs of road maintenance, and they haven't covered the cost for over a decade.

The city parks to which you take your children are a socialist program. A massive theme park like Disney World may need ticket booths and security guards, but how would you feel if you had to swipe your credit card every time you took your kids to the neighborhood swingset?

Police are a socialist program. In theory, the police are supposed to protect everyone equally, to keep the peace, and to serve the people. Fire departments are a socialist program, and when Obion county in Tennessee allowed a for-profit scheme to take hold the results were catastrophic.

Libraries are a socialist program. Water quality and Food safety are socialist programs. Sewers are a socialist program. Schools are a socialist program. Mail service is a socialist program written directly into the Constitution.

The right complains that we shouldn't be able to "force" a "highly trained doctor" to supply socialized medicine "for free," but when your house is broken into you can demand the time and effort of a highly trained detective, and nobody thinks that's weird.

Americans Aren't Capitalist Anyway

Seriously. One-third of Americans don't own a home, and that's the largest single capital purchase any of us ever make. Slightly more than half of all Americans own any stock, which is the other form of capital. One-third of Americans are not "capitalist" in any sense of the world, and only half of us have any "capital" that we can directly influence, that is to say, "allocate efficiently in the marketplace," and most of us don't even do that. Instead, we put it into index funds, mutual funds, or workplace savings account and let other people literally "do the capitalism" for us.

And that's okay. The world is a big and complicated place, and most of us don't have the time, energy, or education to fully understand the stock and real estate markets, which is where most capital is managed. We're busy raising children, supporting communities, and having lives.

We've Never Been A Capitalist Country

Full-fledged capitalism is, as the economist Robert Nozick once observed, a kind of "universal acid" in that it eats away at every other value we have. Unregulated capitalism can sell you anything and everything: methamphetamines over the counter. Fentanyl at your 7-11. Child sex-work. It's all good, so long as everyone, including the naked seven-year-olds in the magazines, "consent" and get paid. We're not that far from that kind of horrific fantasy as a country.

And this is hardly new. In America, buying a young girl for sex was once legal, as long as she was the child of a slave. We fought a war over this, and the anti-slavery forces kinda won, although the Supreme Court at the time gave whites more authority than blacks in the years following.

We've never been a full-on capitalist country. We've seen what child labor (never mind sex work!), slavery and inescapably potent opiods do to people, and we've decided not to tolerate them. We know that when your house burns, it's likely so will your neighbors', so we fund fire departments. We don't want to die of food poisoning, so we fund food inspection programs.

In the capitalist thinking of people like Nozick and Rand, self-interest and selfishness are the highest goods. They power the economy. "I want" is the thought that makes you go out and buy a pizza, a t-shirt, a house, a motorcycle, an iPhone. Any attempt by the goverment to regulate these things is a market distortion that alters the relationship between the seller and the buyer. Capitalists argue these distortions are destructive to the only moral imperative: the consensual transaction of goods and services.

It's a fact, thought, that we also have needs: we need food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and communication. We also have wants and needs that go beyond physical items, things like community, camaraderie, friendship, and love, things that cannot be easily bought with a dollar.

Americans Are Both

We are neither a capitalist country or a socialist country. Instead, we apply our values to regulation and tolerate those market distortions that uphold our moral values. Americans argue all the time about those moral values and the resulting market distortions, but they rarely put it into such stark terms. We should.

The "taxation is theft" and "redistribution of wealth" rants of the conservative capitalist movement are inherently dishonest. Libraries, city parks, sidewalks, and so forth are public goods, held in trust by the cities and towns that own them for the people that live in them and contribute taxes to them.

We already argue about what to socialize, and to what extent. We should be honest about that. When we argue about whether or not something should be socialized or privatized, we are arguing about our values. Social goods are moral goods: education, knowledge, mobility, safety, security. Our constitution says it exists to provide for the general welfare. Our Declaration of Independence says that we are made to seek life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness; in modern parlance, these are guaranteed by healthcare, criminal justice reform, and education.

Governments are the only institutions deliberately constituted to serve everyone being governed; the only question is whether or not everyone is governed equally, equitably, and justly.

Social Democrats Ain't Soviet Communists

The Soviet Union, for all its faults, had at its core a mission: to turn industrialization into a cornucopia machine, to turn the workday into a source of extended leisure, tranquility, and pleasure for its citizens. Needless to say, they failed horrifically, leading to a corrupt state that carelessly killed its citizens. We know why they failed, and more importantly, we know better than to try that experiment again.

The experiment failed because the Soviets tried to create innovation to order. They tried to emulate America without becoming America, and so the "marketplace of ideas" was banned; instead, unqualified bureaucrats made decisions about what was to be made, invented, or innovated, and Soviet scientists struggled hard to get their ideas in front of a patron.

In the United States, government sponsorship of innovation allowed for variation and failure. US funding to research universities accept that never every experiment will be a success, and US funding helps bridge the gap between research and commercialization. Last year, the FDA approved seven major drugs for wide-scale human-stage trials; four of those drugs were discovered by university students in government-funded programs.

Capitalists point to the Solyndra scandal as proof the government shouldn't be "picking winners and losers." But the goverment does this regularly, and for all the money lost on Solyndra, the goverment has more than made back its initial funding into renewable energies. That's what responsible investment is about. The US, rather than try to pick that one technology, funds many, and reaps rewards from the ones that play out.

(Corporations Are. (Soviet Communists, I mean.))

On the other hand, if you've ever been in a company of any size, you know that they don't play the game this way. Companies pick individual technologies and then run with them. If an initiative is a failure, those responsible sometimes get fired. Negative results are not tolerated. The workers rarely, if ever, get a vote of any kind in the course of corporate decision making. Supplies are bought and resources are distributed "From each according to his ability, to each according to the corporation's needs," with the caveat that if your ability doesn't meet the corporation's needs then you're out, on the street, left to fend for yourself.

Corporations are basically small communist states: the board owns the means of production, implements centralized production planning, and you're just a member of the proletariat. Welcome to your cubicle, comrade.

We're Not Capitalist Enough

America prides itself on being a capitalist country, but what we've learned is that it's just not capitalist enough. It doesn't free people up to be the best themselves they could be. David Frum (whom the left seem to adore these days) once wrote that he liked how American capitalism repressed Americans: "Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk disciplines people and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won't try to vault over the big top. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do now." Remember: that's praise. It's fantastic that we're terrified that at any moment forces much larger than ourselves could come in and crush us like bugs, and those entrusted to govern and oversee our lives, via our votes, think that's wonderful.

If you're a libertarian, you ought to be absolutely outraged at this depiction of capitalism as a force to break your will, beat you until you're unwilling to assert yourself and your individualism. American capitalism as it currently is, is a lottery: millions stay subservient, a few thousand take risks, and maybe one or two get rewarded before they get subsumed. That doesn't sound like freedom to me.

The truth is that without risk, innovation becomes the domain only of corporations big enough to sustain a few failures (if not the people who made them), and the little guy doesn't have a chance. Europeans innovate more than us these days because they're not afraid to. American corporations are afraid of that term they all claim to admire, "disruption," and so they've made sure that it doesn't happen. We're not a capitalist country, we don't encourage innovation. We are a merchantlist country ruled by large corporations and the extremely wealthy, who dispatch lobbyists and pay for the elite educations of minions who dutifully take up regulatory positions in our governments to steer America away from taking care of ordinary people without that kind of patronage.

We are a country of shortages and rationing. We're the Soviet Union, only our central planners are Google and General Electric.

The Socialist Democrats ain't your grandfather's politburo

As Brad Delong said earlier this week, socialists like AOC aren't the kind of "socialists" America was screaming about back in the 1950s. Francis Spufford's vignette-driven account of why the Soviet economies failed is the most-accessible way to understand what happened, but it comes down to this: centralized demand for specific innovations in a system that required patronage led to alternatives being discarded. There was no "market of ideas," and no way to encourage innovation positively. Even people led by their passions for math, science, and cybernetics lived in constant fear. (A good, longer summary is Cosma Shalizi's In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You.)

The "Socialists" of today have learned their lessons, and socialism today is more innovative, more creative, more flexible, and more sophisticated than American capitalism. Public goods aren't directed from the central office; they're held in public trusts and directed by communities rather than "shareholders."

Robert Heinlein once summarized the different spheres of government thusly:

1. Private where Private Belongs


2. Public where it is needed


3. Circumstances alter cases

In America, we have a lot of socialized goods. I listed some of them above: the police, the fire department, and so forth. The question is: why do we socialize some and not others?

Well, what kind of country are you?

There are three kinds of countries: Militarized, Enlightened, or Failed. A militarized country is one in which the military is the only true objective; everyone is subservient to the needs of the country to expand outwards and conquer others. In such a country, everything is directed toward that support: healthcare, education, and infrastructure are all dedicated to creating strong, healthy soldiers capable of carrying on the effort.

An enlightened country is one which is not actively seeking to conquer its neighbors. It has a defense force, but it doesn't have to be three times as large as the neighbor's, and it doesn't have to be as large as the next seven largest militaries combined. It just has to be big enough to convince a militarize country that if they come in, they're gonna get hurt badly enough to make the effort not worthwhile. In the meantime, these people fight with economics: their healthcare is dedicated to making every citizen as capable of production and innovation as possible. Their education is dedicated to make every possible citizen capable of working the levers of a complex, technologically advanced society.

A failed country is neither. It might look like either, but in reality it is being hollowed out by both economic and militarized forces as its leadership drains it of money. The citizens of a failed country are getting sicker and dying younger. Their education is left by the wayside. The leadership is so eager to ravage those who can't fight back that it wrecks the landscape, because hey, they're not gonna need it; they'll all just get on their yachts and go someplace nice while the population crashes and maybe the environment recovers... a little.

What to socialize, and why

We socialize the police because we believe that every American deserves to live in a community without anxiety or tragedy, and that the rich shouldn't have special privileges before the law. We socialize the police because if someone breaks into your house, it's likely they'll break into someone else's as well. Without it, we don't have a country with the peace of mind necessary to pursue our future goals.

We socialize the fire department because we know that, even if you can't afford to pay taxes, if your house catches fire it's likely your neighbor's will as well. We socialize the fire department because it's a form of insurance: no one knows if or when we will need it, but if we do, we'll need the full force of it. Without it, we don't have property we can feel secure about.

We socialize education because we don't know, and we can't know, what future employers, and our future country, will need except that we'll need people who have been trained to think clearly and work well. Socialized education is an investment in our collective future as a country. Without it, we don't have a future.

We ought to socialize baseline healthcare and catastrophic healthcare treatment, because human beings don't "consume" healthcare, and we need a healthy workforce to produce the next generation of miracles, and we cannot say with any assurance who among us will produce those miracles. Without socialized healthcare, your unlucky illness is someone else's profit center, and if that seems moral and right to you, well, then we don't have a future.

None of this excludes private supplementation

I'm fine with wealthy people hiring extra security guards, buying above and beyond the usual building code requirements for fire safety, buying into private schools and willingly throwing as much money as they want on boutique medical services like cosmetic surgery or a new and innovative medical treatment. (More than a third of which are discovered by, yes, publicly funded projects.)

I'm not fine when the wealthy become convinced that those are the only services that matter, and the rest of us should be, at best, "allowed" to live out our lives with polluted air and water, a wrecked climate, the genetic luck of the draw about our health, with standard sub-standard education, and vague disinterest from the police and the courts about the well-being of our communities.

So, yeah: Let's give the socialists a chance.

I mean, they haven't wrecked many of the European countries in which it works. Or we could look to Bolivia, which hasn't done too badly for itself.

We live in a complicated society entirely driven by a desperate need to secure our futures. I'm all for streamlining the complications and alleviating the desperation. Insurance companies are impossible to deal with because it's not in their best interests to be reasonable. You have to pay to have your taxes done because tax preparation companies lobby every four years to prevent the IRS from using knowledge it already has to do your taxes for you.

And every regulation of the market is a kind of friction. But we already agree that some friction is necessary: we don't let people star their children in porn films, we don't let people buy fentanyl over the counter, we don't let people buy grenade launchers. All of these are wants someone has (or there wouldn't be underground markets for them). We also agree that some socialism is necessary, or we wouldn't have police, fire departments, and neighborhood parks.

It's clear to me that we've gone so far into letting the capitalists control things that we've edged into Failed State territory. It's time to unwind this situation and do something different. Actually Lived Capitalism, American Style has overreached, and led us to a place where the majority of Americans are miserable, angry, and sickly.

I don't want that. You don't want that. And the answer is not "work harder for our corporate masters." It's work together to build a community where we're actually, you know, a community and not an atomized collection of individuals all looking for the opening we'll use to stab our neighbor in the back just to secure a couple more bucks for a couple more days.

Let's do better.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AKA AOC) made a big splash yesterday with a line of questioning to Michael Cohen that established, from a congressional witness, that Donald Trump likely committed tax fraud and used properties in her congressional district to facilitate that crime, laid out a case for determining the truth of the witness's claims that required access to Trump's legendarily hidden tax returns, and determined that Donald Trump's accountant, Allen Weisselberg, would be a key witness from whom testimony would be required.

She did this in five minutes. It was a remarkable performance.

AOC had one other moment this week that caused the usual kerfuffle from the usual suspects: she announced that she was restructuring her congressional staff's pay schedule. Her chief-of-staff would max out at $80K a year, half of what other congressional CoS's make, but her bottom-rung staffers would get paid $52K a year, the minimum needed, according to official estimates, to afford an apartment within a one-hour commute of her offices.

These two are related.

I once had lunch with my congressman at the time, the now-retired Jim McDermott, and I asked him how he voted on issues that required a lot of technical knowledge. He said that there are people in Congress who are specialists at pretty much everything, and he goes to them. Often those people are staffers, and sometimes those people issue explainers with different degrees of wonkiness. The objective is to herd the representatives who barely understand the one-page bullet-points (about genetic engineering, climate change, nuclear policy, internet security, whatever) to appreciate that those who know more feel strongly on an issue and to vote accordingly.

Because of her pay schedule choice, AOC's staff isn't made up of trust fund kids whose parents will cover the apartment costs, nor is it made up of high-aspiring in-party activists looking for a high-paying job that sets their base going rate higher. Instead, her staff is made up of people who (a) are from her district and know it's issues, and (b) are motivated to be there. AOC has literally said she's going to hit the "I'll pay you enough to take money worries off the table while you work for me" point, which is where you find the passionate wonks and technicals. AOC's staff is middle class: making enough money to spend their days concentrating on their jobs rather than spending all their cognitive resources worrying about money, but not so much that having empathy weakens their effectiveness.

AOC's success has as much to do with how she, as a former bartender, developed an ear for hearing bullshit, and has weeded out the bullshitters, and the staff she hired is made up of highly motivated people who don't fear the masses, don't fear for their financial futures, and don't fear their boss. She does her homework, and they work with her, and for her, in a way the trust-fund babies and party-ambitious apparatchiks never will.

Together, they gamed out the line of questioning she would use on Cohen. They rehearsed possible answers, and worked hard to make it all fit in her five-minute schedule.

It's not just her blue-collar background, and it's not just her internet savvy, and it's not just her sense of what constitutes fairness in a pay schedule. Those three things combined act as multipliers to bring her another multiplier, a highly competent, technically proficient, and morally united staff. She is herself talented and witty and Internet-capable on her own, but having a staff she trusts and who will do the work with her is what makes her devastating.

One of the recurring themes in progressive politics today is the question of empathy, and the constant asking, "If the GOP is allied with The Christian religion, as is often claimed, why doesn't the GOP have any empathy toward the suffering?"

In an article weirdly titled "Election results in Georgia and Florida prompt soul-searching for African Americans," the reporter quotes a white woman who didn't like Trump's "tone" and wanted to send a message, but ultimately voted for the white Republican over the black Democrat:

But she ended up voting for DeSantis, partially because she wanted to see an end to racial divisions. In Cooper’s eyes, tensions between races in Madison only worsened after Obama’s election in 2008. Black neighbors just started seeing everything differently, she said. They seemed consumed with Obama as the first black president and less concerned about how he was affecting the economy in Florida.

“That trickled down to everything,” Cooper said. “Now everyone is so worried about the other race.” She said she felt that a vote for Gillum, who had accused DeSantis of using a racist slur after he warned Florida voters on TV not to “monkey up” the state, would worsen those tensions

This in an example of empathy. This woman suddenly saw her black peers having feelings, being able to express themselves. She saw that they could, in fact, be more than just useful people-shaped devices that did things white people normally wouldn't be bothered to do.

Fred Clark has a wonderful post, "When we flinch at empathy, it curdles into fear and resentment," and the little anecdote shows exactly that. Suddenly forced to think about black people as human beings, suddenly putting them into her world as people with agency, she empathized with their plight just enough to be afraid of what they would do if they were in her place.

The difference between "nice" and "kind" is straightforward: "kindness" has a cost, in time, in energy, in emotion, and even in cash. "Niceness" doesn't. "Niceness" is what you pull out to put on a neutral face in order to navigate the world without having to endure a cost. "Kindness" is when you take an active role in making someone else's life a little better, even for a moment.

I'm sure Mrs. Cooper is a nice woman. When the time came to be kind, however, she realized that, had she been in the shoes of the black men and women of Florida, she'd have enjoyed the power and privilege of the governorship, she wouldn't have been forgiving or merciful. She had plenty of empathy, but it's not her reserve of empathy that failed her. It was her reserve of love.

So, a few years ago when Omaha was doing a lot of political things, one of the more prominent members of the Democratic Party asked her if she ever intended to run for public office. Omaha said no, she hadn't, because she feared she had too much historical baggage, starting with putting herself through university as a stripper (AKA sex worker), and followed through by ending up as Washington State Ms. Leather in 1997. In the current atmosphere, a background like that could be a serious detriment. Around that time, someone asked me if I thought Omaha's history, since she's completely unapologetic about it all, would be a problem. At the time, I hemmed and hawed because I wasn't sure. I've finally figured out what to say:

Have you been to a professional or political conference in the past few years? Did it have a Code of Conduct? Did you read it?

Every conference code of conduct you've ever read started with one written by a kinky person. In the late 1990s and very early 2000s the internet started to give women an outlet to complain about all the creepy, awful crap they put up with whenever they go to professional events. Men getting drunk and handsy, groping and even assaulting women who came to teach and learn, not be leered at or mistreated.

At some meeting where event organizers discuss these things, someone said, "This is awful. Women will stop coming if we don't get this under control. Our reputation is at stake." And someone else said, "I have some experience with this. Let me gather some documents and we can discuss this at the next meeting."

That person went home and found the Code of Conduct for their local BDSM dungeon, typed it in, cleaned it up so that it didn't mention all the sexy stuff, and presented it as the starting point of the conversation. Every Code of Conduct you've read since descended from that document.

Kinky people have been dealing with this issue for thirty five years. Ever since Pat Califia published the S&M Safety Manual in 1982, we have discussed and experimented and studied how to manage when creepy guys invade a public space where deeply intimate and possibly dangerous things are happening. If we can do it, then so can professional events where not so intimate or physically risky things are going on.

The whole MeToo thing, the conversations about consent and negotiation and using your words and learning to be unafraid to talk about what you want and need in an intimate setting— that vocabulary came from kink, and it belongs to kink, and we give it to you as a gift, because you vanilla folk need it. How to deal with creeps, and event codes of conduct, and explicit rules about keeping your hands to yourself, is also ours, and we need you to have it, because it's the only way to move forward in a world where health care and birth control mean women aren't shackled to their beds for the first 20 years of their adult lives trying to have babies.

Do I think Omaha's past is a problem? Hell no. I think it's a benefit. Aside from all her other passions about the environment, about quality of life issues in urban spaces, alleviating impoverishment, invisibile disabilities, or transportation issues, when it comes to talking about issues like workplace harassment or teaching students consent, Omaha has more experience with the debate, and more familiarity with the solutions, than any other candidate you could name.

It's totally l'esprit de l'escalier and theoretical at this point, but it's useful to have this idea in my head.

John Carlson and his associate had a lovely talk this morning on Carlson's radio show, and the other fellow (whose name I didn't get) was reading an editorial about violent video games, and said he basically agreed with the premise that, as the games get more and more realistic, "there has to be some de-sensitizing going on there."

Carlson replied, "You want to hear my profound observation? My profound observation is that there's no disturbance going on in there if the kid isn't already disturbed."

Here's my equally profound observation: Australia, Germany, France, England, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands have access to the exact same video games. It's an international industry. And yet they don't have the violence we do. They don't have kids killing each other the way we do.

Now, why is that, John?

(Title Explained: Not Now, John, by Pink Floyd)

Matt Purple, writing at The American Conservative, wrote an article entitled #MeToo Becomes a Revolution, which starts out alarmingly enough with a stock photo of a man and a woman, their backs turned, their stances tense with anger, the sun setting behind them. He then asks

Is it okay to proposition a woman for sex after drinks? To initiate a workplace romance? To behave like a Casanova and bed as many partners as possible under the catchall excuse that you’re just “playing the field”?

Purple wants to portray the #MeToo movement as one in which the "inherent contradictions of leftism" are now tearing The Leftist Sexual Agenda™ apart. He gleefully quotes Christine Emba's Washington Post article, Let's Rethink Sex, in which Emba writes,

We need to reintroduce virtues such as prudence, temperance, respect and even love. We might pursue the theory that sex possibly has a deeper significance than just recreation and that ‘consent’—that thin and gameable[sic] boundary—might not be the only moral sensibility we need respect

To which I respond:

Welcome to the Queering of America.

In a conversation with Andrew Sullivan at the New York Public Library five years ago, Dan Savage correctly hit on what's happening:

Everything that straight people do now in their twenties and their early thirties is what was condemned thirty years ago by right-wing religious conservatives as the gay lifestyle. You renamed everything. Gay people had tricks, you people have hookups, gay people had fuck buddies, you people have friends with benefits, but the whole moving to the city, living in an urban area, having an apartment, fucking a lot of people, dating around, and then settling down in your thirties, that period of straight life, post-college, pre-marriage, the way we do it in the blue states, where it works, is the gay lifestyle.

But there's more to in than just this. There's the other side of the issue.

Sex between two people of the same sex lacks the gender dynamic of sex between two people of the opposite sex. There's no culturally embedded expectation of a power differential between two men, or between two women. It's hard to be a misogynist when you're a woman. It's hard to be a misandrist when you're a man. Men expect other men to bring the same feelings, the same power, the same desires to bed; the same is true of women. There have been a handful of reports of gay men in positions of power harassing other men, but there have been no reports of gay men harassing other men when they're peers, but plenty of reports of men harassing women peers because men expect to get away with it and women have been socialized to accept it.

(I don't want to paint the gay sex scene as idyllic; it's just as full of jerks and monsters as the straight scene. Differentials of race and, especially, class play a huge role, since wealthier gay men can afford PReP while the poorer ones, as everywhere else, are struggling to eat and keep the lights on. The interactions between those who have been reconciled to coming out and those who haven't can be fraught with unstated agenda. But the single largest conflict in our culture, that between men and women, simply doesn't exist.)

The conflict here is between those who want that power between men and women to be equal, and those who don't. And conversations about power lead us not to the queering of America, but something else:

Welcome to the Kinking of America.

If you've been to a professional conference in the past ten years, you may have been asked to read a Code of Conduct, which specifies the expectations of people at professional events to, well, be professional, and describes the social and professional, if not legal, consequences of exceeding the terms specified. I've read over twenty of these things and I've come away with one distinct feeling every time: whoever writes a Code of Conduct should send a thank-you note to Pat Califia.

Thirty-five years ago, Pat Califia wrote one of the most important books in the history of human sexuality: The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. A slim volume, little more than a chapbook, was the first to lay out in explicit, concrete terms the notions of power differential and consent that we're grappling with today. She took the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and made it intimate: how we as intimate individuals have a right to feel safe in our own skins and in the presence of others, even when the power differential between them is vast, even when what the two people want out of an intimate encounter is a violent, physically demanding role-playing of the existing power struggle or its inversion.

Every modern Code of Conduct descends from The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. The earliest ones are almost verbatim copies of the guidelines for kinky events; later ones refine the CoC with more professional language. It's almost as if, when the time came to write it, a volunteer stepped forward with "I have significant experience on this," without going into detail what experience she had.

Consent is necessary but not sufficient.

When Emba writes that consent is "that thin and gameable boundary," she's making a category error that kinky people don't make— and our world is the one that's been thinking about consent longer than anyone else. When a friend visits and you offer them a drink, if they don't consent, you know not to shove it down their throat, not matter how much you may like alcohol. In every other category of life, we understand consent implicitly. It's only in sex that we artificially thin out and game the boundary, mostly because the cads in power want it that way. All we're asking is that the rest of the world adopt our ideas on the inviolability of the other person's body, humanity and dignity as we expect it of our own, and to do so without assumption as to how the other person defines those terms.

We ask that you ask.

The school district where I live has an excellent three-week sex-ed course for middle school students that includes a brilliant section on consent. It, too, reads a lot like the Safety Manual, only it adds years of sociological research into conversational interaction and provides a pretty good formula for asking for consent: set ground, then ask. "I like when you do X. Could you do it more?"; "I don't like when you do X. Would you be willing to do something else?"

Because consent is necessary to an ethical sexual encounter, but it is not sufficient. The two participants must talk about it. They must explicitly raise the issue of existing power differentials, and they should agree that even in the presence of those differentials, the forms of intimacy they're considering would most likely work out for the best. In short, when Emba says, and Purple endorses, that sex must include "temperance, prudence, and respect," she's claiming that the consent movement needs to start talking about, well, the stuff we've been talking about for thirty-five years!

The consent movement assumes that people have temperance, prudence and respect for each other, and has for all that time that we've been talking about it, and has always said that if you don't have those things you shouldn't be out there.

Answering the questions.

So, to answer Purple's snarky introduction:

"Is it okay to proposition a woman for sex after drinks?" The answer is: it depends on the context. Are you co-workers? Then no, it is not okay. There are power relationships going on around you that can skew your relationship badly: you cannot guarantee that your sense of duty will not be compromised by a request from your partner or your employer. Are you at a professional conference or event? Maybe, if neither of you is a presenter; otherwise, one of you has power the other does not. Are you friends? Again, maybe.

"Is it okay to initiate a workplace romance?" Under almost all circumstances: no. Maybe, if you were in wildly different divisions, with different chains of command, that had no working relationship. But you could never ethically date within the company if you or the other person was an executive, or a member of human resources, as again the power differential is a great risk.

"Is it okay to behave like a Casanova and bed as many partners as possible under the catchall excuse that you’re just 'playing the field?'" Yes, as long as every one of your partners understands that's what's going on, and that you both still go through the essential conversation about whether or not it'll be good for you both.

There exist, and have existed for decades, contexts which men and women visit for the explicit purpose of meeting, pairing up, and having sex. There are bars, there are "singles events" at square dances, small theatres, garden clubs, and kite-flying at the park. There have always been gay bars and kinky dungeons, too. These days there are websites and Tindr and Grindr and a host of others. In another context, all we ask is that you have respect, decency, and an awareness that that context may not be one suitable to a come-on.

Women are, in general, physically smaller and less strong than men. Men have created a world in which women learn from a very young age that this makes them vulnerable, and men have crafted a social and legal system that gives them every advantage over women; the society we live in teaches that women aren't to be trusted, believed, or even understood. A recent and utterly brilliant take on this is Kristen Roupenian's Cat Person, a short story from a woman's point of view about meeting and dating a man, and how her picture of him is constantly changing, because she's constantly on guard against the threat men represent to her from the simple, constant, leering attacks on her dignity all the way to threats of violence; from her point of view, and from the point of view of most women, men have a lot of work to do until they're understood, believed, and trusted.

Which is a bit of a shame. As I learned long ago, women actually like sex more than men do, but can rarely let loose the way they'd like because they're too busy burning mental cycles trying to figure out if the guy they're with is a threat and, having determined that he's not a threat, if he's any damn good at all in bed. Most men can name more parts of a gun, an automobile engine, or a computer mainboard than they can a vulva.

To claim that, twenty years ago, Purple's list of caddish activities would be met with a "resounding Yes!" is to miss the point of the #metoo revolution. Lots of men have been jerks. Women are tired of doing all the work while "great men" get the credit, and women are tired of constantly having to fend off the unwanted advances of men, the constant distraction of low-level sexual harassment while they're just trying to get their jobs done. The Internet has given them a tool with which to rally, and we should all be thankful for it.

It's hard to take Purple seriously. When he says that twenty years ago being a cad was, well, maybe not the best thing in the world but Christians had learned to live in a world full of cads, the funny thing is that the kinky community was saying that a world full of cads is a terrible thing and we can, and should, do better.

The queer and kinky communities have always been a bit utopian: after all, they both started as reviled communities, and both wished for a better world not just for themselves but for everyone. They first started to surface in the 1960s, the same time as Stewart Brand's New Games movement, and the motto of that last is still the best one we've ever had. We wish, and we teach, people to bring it into the bedroom:

Play hard. Play fair. Nobody hurt.