Everything is not broken

Anti-vaxx, counterculture, and why populists always get it wrong

Earlier this month, Tablet Magazine editor Alana Newhouse, published a polemic called “Everything is Broken.” It begins with an anecdote about the way her doctors—described as the “best medical care in the country”—had failed to diagnose their newborn son with an injury. The awful event made her question every American institution, including her own profession of journalism.

She concluded that our infrastructural decay has been enabled by a type of cultural decadence, which she calls “flatness,” at the hands of progressive cultural hegemony, and we need to take inspiration by certain cultural visionaries of the fifties and sixties (the title itself alluding to a terrible Bob Dylan song): 

American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism

Despite its strong opening that invoked the truly social issues of healthcare, myopic journalism, austerity, and organized labor’s decline, the article ends as a superficially nostalgic list of cliche personal grievances and contradictory solutions. Among the scattershot evidence of brokenness Newhouse cites trends in urban planning, low attendance at churches, hook-up culture, the widespread acceptance of transsexuals, the emergence of the term “BIPOC,” and apologism for the Iranian regime among journalists.

The new counterculture she calls for, then, would likely be more like the grifty conservatives of the intellectual dark web than the dynamic radicalism of the beatniks. Instead of fighting neoliberalism itself, she concludes we need to “begin anew” by creating new social habits, cultural institutions, and businesses that challenge progressivism, which is austerity’s ethical smokescreen:

Build new things! Create great art!... Start a publishing house that puts out books that anger, surprise and delight people and which make them want to read. Be brave enough to make film and TV that appeals to actual audiences and not 14 people on Twitter. Establish a newspaper, one people can see themselves in and hold in their hands. Go back to a house of worship—every week. Give up on our current institutions; they already gave up on us.

How any of these will prevent the medical malpractice that befell her family is never explained—calling for something like quality medical care for everyone would stink of progressivism, perhaps. The gradual shift to shibboleths and nostalgia demonstrates the poverty of this new strain of populism, so adept at pointing out the hypocrisy of liberalism while offering little more than persistent resentment as its solution. Radical as this pundit class brands themselves, they never have anything real to offer, because they can never abandon their appeals to an imaginary past when things were better, healthcare just, journalism fair, men were men and women were women, etc.. That would mean admitting there was never an era of wholeness, and thus everything is not broken.

Immutual Aid
To pick a timely example of what I mean, let’s take a look at New York City’s vaccine rollout.

This month I was vaccinated in a public school gymnasium in Bushwick. It was the same room where I voted in November, with a similarly large crew of helpful and patient staffers. While the process of making the appointment was a total mess, cruelly favoring the mobile and online-savvy over the elderly who were meant to be given priority, the scene at the “vaccination hub” was remarkably caring, competent, and accessible.

I was greeted outside the school by a young woman with a clipboard-like tablet. She searched my name to find my appointment had not been made. Was it an error on my part, or that of NYC’s hastily assembled website? It made no difference. She led me inside to a desk in the auditorium where another woman was making sure everyone who had just been vaccinated could wait fifteen minutes in the company of a paramedic in case they had a an allergic reaction, and schedule their follow-ups for the booster shot. I told her, unsolicited, that I worked at a food pantry, which qualified me me for 1b status as a grocery worker in direct contact with the public, and offered her some evidence of this. Only interested in vaccinating everyone who showed up, she declined to see it. It was like going to a punk show, explaining I didn’t have enough cash, and the door person shrugging and stamping my hand.

I was asked to sit with about 10 other people who showed up without appointments. Most of them were elderly and/or did not speak English. One explained to a hub worker that her husband suffered from Alzheimer’s and could not use the internet. The worker used a tablet to walk her through the process of registering an email account for him, and within minutes a new appointment was made. I was then led into the gymnasium where a couple dozen tables were set up. The elderly went first. It was remarkably similar to the voting process—I was in and out in 10 minutes, only subjected to some brief and superficial pain.

I left wondering if all my cynicism for the de Blasio establishment was misplaced. Battling against the incompetence on the state and federal level (appointments for the elderly in the rest of New York State immediately filled-up until March) New York City had set up a vaccination system determined to burn through its supply as quickly as possible under the assumption more was on the way. The hub was neither an austerity-ravaged for-profit facility staffed by pissed-off bureaucrats nor a demonic New World Order microchip-implantation center, but a public building filled with patient and compassionate civil servants doing their utmost to support each other in a time of crisis, reminiscent of the voluntary mutual aid efforts that spread the city as the lockdown began.

It is of course totally appropriate to emphasize that things have gotten so bad because institutions are rotten. The online system to receive an appointment reminded of trying to get tickets from TicketMaster at 11:00 AM knowing they will be sold out by 11:05, leading to a gross disparity of those vaccinated leaning young and white, even though those worst effected by the virus are elderly people of color and immigrants. A recent CNN article framed this as if whites were greedily traveling from “outside the community” to steal the shots. In reality, these were the only slots available. This mirrors how the vaccine will be distributed on a global scale. The first world gets it first. Developing countries maybe in a few years, if ever. No one had to argue this was the best and most just way to distribute the vaccine, nor was it a malfunction. This was not a case of a broken system—it was a system designed by and for a certain social strata. “The rich get richer and poor get the picture,” as Australian rockers Midnight Oil once put it.

Human Strike When?
Newhouse isn’t calling for a serious withdrawal or attack on these institutions. Like so many, she is tired of humoring progressivism by even engaging with it, and embraced the “cultural marxism” conspiracy theory that the “kids cosplaying Communism” have won—the “Long March went from a punchline to reality.”

I cannot speak for “progressivism,” a term as useless to those who polemicize it as those who claim it, but I know those bolsheviks derided in the Newhouse piece proposed a real solution in which bourgeois institutions were smashed and rebuilt by the hands of the working class. The response to the pandemic and the vaccines’ distribution would be organized for the benefit of society as a whole. The health crisis, the production of the vaccine, and its distribution would all be managed by the most vulnerable and essential.

But by the mid-1950s it was clear that Soviet Communism was just its own despotic form of capitalism, and that it was still ordinary people, and not the Stalinist Communist Parties, that would provide liberation. The countercultures of the ‘50s and ‘60s probed the emerging conceptions of individual and collective liberation—black struggle, anti-colonialism, communalism, pacifism, new age spirituality, neo-anarchism, post-leftism, etc. While they challenged the class-character or conservatism of the institutions, there was often recognition that they are made up of people who struggle each day to be human inside the inhuman machine.

Hospitals, publications, etc. are not necessarily staffed and patronized by people who ideologically agree with the state of healthcare and news media, after all, but by people seeking wages and information in order to survive. Those journalists who today defend Iran in one way or another may not seriously wish to defend the Iranian regime, but instead seek to trip-up the constant State Department saber-rattling. The use of terms like “BIPOC” may represent a lazy avoidance of critical thinking by deferring to a false monolith, or it may be trying to reckon with race on a deeper level than the revisionist mainstream narratives of the civil rights era.

It’s certainly true that those nurses, patients, writers, readers, and activists keep the gears running as they struggle from within the machine. Mass refusal on these grounds, though, would not merely be a new cultural explosion like that of bebop, beat poetry, and modern art—but a total breakdown of the rationalities of governance and economics. It would look more like those new-left rebellions of 1968 on which populists blame all the ills of our era.

Anti-Anti-Vaxx

This sort of selectively cynicism reminds me those patriots who vote, work, pay taxes, but believe vaccines and masks are an international plot to weaken human vitality. They are right to be suspicious or critical of a health regime primarily motivated by the interests of the upper class. The coronavirus itself, whether it originated in a lab or a meat market, is the product of industrial class society, after all, and its destructive worldwide spread creates vast opportunities for that system to fortify.

But the social distancing measures and vaccines were developed by workers and tried by hundreds of thousands of medical testers in a collective noble effort to save lives. Like the noble vaccination-hub staff, they demonstrate ordinary people doing their best for society within an anti-social paradigm. If the pandemic were brought under control this year, it would be just as big a mistake to argue the institutions had proved themselves heroic as it would be to say that the whole crisis was due to their brokenness.

The false opposition between these two positions, increasingly misidentified as the left and right, respectively, is summarized by a meme I recently saw shared by various types of COVID-skeptics—anti-maskers, anti-lockdown, anti-vaxxers etc. The top of the image shows Zach de la Rocha from Rage Against the Machine beneath a caption reading Youth in the 1990s: Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me. The second is of an indignant activist reading: Youth 2020s: Fuck you, do what they tell you. A recent text by the Invisible Committee summarizes part of the logic of this joke:

Unable to produce the least affirmation in the midst of a world that is destroying itself, the left has allowed itself to believe that by combining anti-fascism, anti-racism, and anti-sexism, sometimes even anti-speciesism, along with a prudent anti-capitalism, it could miraculously produce through an accumulation of negations the positive aim that is lacking. In its sloppy dogmatism, postmodern opportunism, in the pure comfort of its idealism, it has thus occupied and banished the place of any new beginning. By dint of its claim to embody the party of the Good while proffering only slavish whining, common sense was led to deduce, by a sort of syllogism that has since spread across the globe, that to be free must mean to act like an asshole, since being good means speaking like a slave.

While the rights’ various projections are well exposed here, and it is by no means difficult to find leftists who fit this description (they are likely the same few wishing for a China-style pandemic panopticon or cheering the spectacular repression of the viral figures among the January 6th Capitol Siege), I’m skeptical this is any more an accurate caricature of the leftist than the memetic SJW. One would have to be intentionally ignorant to believe the left lacks any propositions for “new beginnings”, however implausible. Whether these proposals have any cultural or tactical power is debatable, but all the contradiction, insufficiency, bad takes, and sabotaging delusion of this revolutionary left are no worse than any other political milieu.

For example, just as those few liberal antifascists see Anti-Vaxxers, QAnon, and other Trumpists as modern freikorps and pogromists who should be repressed out of relevance one way or another, there are many populists who interpret them, almost sentimentally, as potential allies.

Amber A’Lee Frost and Daniel Bessner’s sketch of QAnon in Jacobin is a good example of this. They argue that QAnon is a cult whose popularity originates from the “illegitimacies” of “the financial collapse of 2008–9, the pointless imperialist wars, the ever-more grotesque inequality between the wealthy and everyone else, bad trade deals and globalization, and a feeling of impotence in a political system that was supposed to be a democracy.” The piece ends by encouraging those who know believers to not shun or shame them, but instead listen, probe for cracks of skepticism, and build alternatives for their rage. Socialists are better equipped to do this than the anons behind Q, they conclude,  because “we have explanations and a political program that addresses QAnon-ers’ legitimate concerns.”

The trouble is their legitimate concerns are not as important as their illegitimate ones—their certainty that the global elite is organized around cannibalism and Satanic ritual abuse, for instance. Even were Sanders to have beaten Biden in the primaries, or even if Frost’s DSA expands to the point of enacting its program, the Tea Party and QAnon core will remain oppositional, either through their bourgeois self-interest or their ideological attachment to reaction. Here the populists could once again get sentimental—they too despise progressivism!


Remember the Permabanned, Fight Like Hell for Those Still Posting
In Everything is Broken Newhouse cites Michael Lind, a founding fellow at the New America think tank and former director at the Heritage Foundation, as “explaining better than anyone else” how the “economic ground” beneath what made America great in the ‘50s and ‘60s came apart through schemes pushed by right-libertarians and neoliberals and provided ideological cover by new-leftists. In America’s New Corporate Tyranny Lind argues that work is today centered in Silicon Valley:

During and after the New Deal, essential industries were tamed and regulated under our political constitution. Today you do not fear that your water or electricity or gas will be turned off because the local providers do not like your political views. Both publicly owned and privately owned water, electricity, and gas firms are regulated by public utility commissions that set their rates and rules.

Never mind the dubiousness of the claim that those regulations had ever brought functional justice (the authors and champions of the 1951 appeal We Charge Genocide would beg to differ), the argument that social media is a new public sphere and “sharing economy” apps are public utilities has become incredibly common. Rarely, however, is the “public sphere” explained beyond a liberal ideal alongside free speech and a free press. Believing that someone could be reasonably banned from Twitter thus becomes illiberal, leading to a conviction among many that the Democrats are Stalinist fascists and Silicon Valley tech “overlords” are their willing henchmen.

It's true the Democrats and media corporations are tyrants. They exist to maintain a social system that exploits the majority of the population to expand the already vast wealth of a few. And to the extent that conspiracy theories, incitements to violence, or radical calls to action challenge that order, the political and ruling classes will push back through the cultural institutions they control. Likewise, those who in any way challenge the system directly at their jobs, except in some instances narrowly protected by labor law, can be fired. Those who challenge the system directly outside their jobs can be brutalized by police, imprisoned, and, in many places, also fired. Just as public utilities have always served the upper classes first and best, free speech has always been, at best, an equality among unequals.

Some saw a double standard in the hundreds of arrests and thousands of accounts deplatformed after the Capitol siege. Why hadn’t the same occurred during the riots of the George Floyd uprising? In a way, it is forgivable that this rings true, because the intense repression and heavy charges have received little attention and the arrestees little support, perhaps because many believe anyone charged in the riots are secretly cops or Nazis or white anarchists agitators who deserve it. (To quote Midnight Oil again, for some reason: “Nothing ever happens, nothing ever matters.”)

Such political prisoners never trouble populists like Newhouse and Lind because they have constructed a complex conspiracy of their own in which those who struggle against the institutions (of police and prisons, for instance) are actually, literally or effectively, agents of the neoliberal corporatism, just as anti-vaxxers believe the scientists who developed the vaccines and the nurses who inject it are shock troops of the New World Order.

This is backwards again. Even as the media class becomes precarious, forcing them to confront the reality of the majority, these pundits still perceive proletarian demands for peace, equality, and freedom as bigger threats than the capitalist death machine. Those that struggle to remain human (by destroying what destroys black lives or patiently jumping through red tape to get everyone vaccinated, for example) are those who are really countering an otherwise hermetic system of a chaotic, but thoroughly managed, decline. When the system breaks, it will be they who break it.