Small differences

The New York Times ran a story yesterday in the run-up to the Nevada caucuses. It seems that the rampaging online Committee of Public Safety known as Bernie Sanders supporters (is there not a reason their flagship publication is dubbed - without apparent self-criticism intended - Jacobin?) have found another victim. In this case, she is the elected head of Nevada's largest union, representing culinary workers in the state's vast apparatus of hotels and casinos. Her crime was to come out in opposition to Sanders' Medicare-for-All plan, due to the union's fears of losing the quality private health insurance plan they won through long and difficult contract negotiations.

Is it ironic to see the self-appointed most-left, most-pro-labor, most-pro-working-class wing of the Democratic Party lining up to denounce a union leader who is trying to do right by her members? And not only denouncing her, but - apparently - sharing her home address online, sending her death threats, calling her home phone to leave threatening messages? (Bernie himself, let it be noted, has not encouraged this behavior; here as elsewhere, the Senator is a far more decent man than his declared admirers; but his response to the incident was decidedly weak.)

Is it not remarkable to see so-called fellow progressives pouncing on a minor deviation from their health care line, when we face nearly insuperable barriers to achieving progressive legislative change of any kind - barriers that we will only be able to overcome if we build coalitions with one another across our minor differences?  It would be remarkable, if this were not the sort of thing that happens every day on the left.

Every election cycle, and every time the left seems to enjoy some sort of cultural or political resurgence, we briefly start to crow about how this time there's plainly going to be enough of us to really make a difference. We say: friends, comrades, couldn't we put aside for the present our quest for purity? Couldn't we learn to work together, so that the Trumps of the world don't win? And then, days later - maybe just hours - we collapse into sectarian infighting again.

The amount of vitriol and vituperation the left ends up expending on its own comrades is always enough to eclipse any outrage it might direct toward those outside its ranks. Those with whom we differ ideologically by nearly 100%, those with whom we share absolutely no starting premises in common, are simply beyond argument. We do not even bother to reproach them. Often, we forget they are there. But those who believe 99% of what we believe, and merely differ from us in that one small hundredth that remains - they become the vessels of all our unrelenting fury.

And so it is that the German communists, on the eve of Hitler's rise, were devoting most of their time to denouncing social democrats, rather than forming an electoral coalition with them that would have easily granted them a decisive numerical advantage over the fascists. So it is that the Bolsheviks, in their frenzied waves of political terror, spent most of time chasing down and exiling Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, the heirs of the naroniks and nihilists and bomb-throwers of previous generations, and other radicals who were just as - or more - anathema to the departed czarist state as the partisans of Lenin.

So it is that most of Marx's works were devoted to combatting - not capitalists or conservatives - but other German Left Hegelians with slightly varying interpretations of the master, and other people whom he took to be the wrong type of socialist.

And so it is, at last, that we have Bernardians harassing and threatening with death a labor leader for differing with them about a hypothetical health care plan that does not have a prayer of becoming law in the remotely near future in any case. Is this why the labor movement passed through persecution, imprisonment, assassination, and terror at the hands of moneyed power and the state - so that its leaders could be bullied and stalked by online predators calling themselves the true socialists, the true defenders of the working class? Was it for this? as Yeats would ask - For this that all that blood was shed?

It is indeed a sad spectacle. But again - not an uncommon one. It is thus with nearly all the bizarre and dread moments of "cancel culture" in our social media age. The people on whom the mysterious and unforeseeable sentence falls - like so many anonymous denunciations stuffed into the lions' mouths of the Doge's Palace - are very often progressives themselves, even former leaders of online left-wing culture. They often share most of the same beliefs and travel in the same social circles as the people who are attacking them- yet they are the ones who are condemned.

To paraphrase from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (the words will vary by translation): we can protect ourselves from our enemies, but from our friends heaven preserve us!

Meanwhile, Trump himself takes to those same social media platforms, and faces no consequences or accountability day after day for uttering hate-filled racist falsehoods and bullying inanities.

We live in an age in which out-and-out white nationalism is once again a major force in U.S. politics and indeed has captured the White House, where the core elements of the civil rights revolution, of the asylum system, and of the Great Society are being dismantled. And yet, this is the same age in which people can lose their communities and livelihoods for passing transgressions against a leftist piety. How can both of those things be true at once, of the same culture?

We know why: because people spend far more time and energy attacking the people who are most like them, rather than those from whom they differ radically. But where is the wisdom in such a policy? Where is the justice, where is the humanity, in forever persecuting our friends and allowing our enemies to get away with murder?

Waking up in my usual morning fog today, it occurred to me vaguely that there is an established term for this phenomenon in the literature. A few minutes later, with the help of that great public aide-mémoire, Google, it came to me - of course! Freud's "narcissism of minor differences." And here on display, in the behavior of the Bernie bros, is this psychological quirk of human perversity in full flower.

It works like this: Take a person, let's say a Bernie bro, who has achieved his sense of personal excellence and distinction from defining himself as the ultimate leftist. He is the most progressive, the most in favor of radical legislation to expropriate the expropriators, and no one can touch him.

Such a person will not get particularly exercised about Trump or other far-right Republicans. In fact, he will rather appreciate them, in an unconscious way. After all, they give him something against which to define himself. They play their appointed role of being forever in the wrong; so that he can always be in the right. And Trump and the far-right Republicans really are - every time, unfailingly, with a near-genius for it - completely morally wrong every time. So far so good.

Such a person will, however, feel deeply threatened by someone who is also a leftist, who is also highly progressive, who is right - by their lights - around 99% of the time. This rival is plainly competing for the same turf. She runs a half-way decent chance of displacing them from the pinnacle of leftist purity they have attained. Therefore, that 1% difference becomes a major zone of contention. This small deviation from ourselves becomes something to seize upon and use against the person who is otherwise so very much like ourselves -- too much alike, for they threaten to take away our claim to uniqueness and special election.

So it is that we can always tolerate vast differences and disparities between ourselves and others. For in such circumstances, there is no real competition. It is those closest to us - the members of our own social circles, our own social classes, our own political coalitions - that we fear might overtake us, and whom we therefore strive to beat back. Thus: "No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbor lifted[,]" remarks Stefan Zweig in Beware of Pity; "petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth rather than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom." (Blewitt trans.)

So it is that we have most to fear from the people who have the most in common with us, and who share both our own virtues and limitations. They are the ones most likely to wish for our continued subjection and viciousness, so that they will not be forced to reproach themselves. The aptly-named John Self reflects, in Martin Amis' 1984 novel Money, after learning that a friend of his has found himself in trouble with the law: "I felt a gulp of innocent, bright-eyed pleasure that my best and oldest pal was in such serious trouble. Mm, it's so nice when one of your peers goes down. [...] Now [he] can't get away, he can't escape, translate, burst clear. He can't go up there, with them. He must stay down here, with me."

Such is the ugly side of the nature of humankind. But what then is to be done about it? It seems a prescription impossible to follow to ask people to abandon entirely the quest for private distinction. The desire to be special and marked out from one's peers is probably innate and inescapable. But we have some freedom of choice in deciding how we wish to distinguish ourselves, and I suspect there may be no human being quite so dangerous as the one who tries to claim for their special province - who believes that the one key way in which they are different from and better than all the others - is in the realm of virtue.

The one who believes that their claim to the world's attention is that they are the purest of heart - such a person will always prioritize the preservation of this identity above any of the messiness that may be required to accomplish real positive change in the world, or to defend the common good. In the end, they would rather attack and run down a friend, they would rather save themselves from the curse of political victory, which might actually place them for a change in the role of someone who has authority, and who therefore has responsibilities, and who therefore might one day be guilty of something... that is the person so innocent as to be among the wickedest of humans.

A person of this sort will always choose, in the end, to favor persecuting and bullying their comrades over working with them to achieve something. Often because their reason for being involved in progressive politics in the first place is not because they have anything at stake, or because they have any deep acquaintance with social injustice, but because they have chosen to define themselves by that social role, and will tolerate no rival claimants to the throne.

There is a reason such people accomplish so little of value in the world, and do so much harm. Let not, as Louis MacNeice writes, the man who thinks he is God come near me. Let us rather take heed of E.M. Forster's anti-totalitarian wisdom, when he urged that in the choice between loyalty to a principle or loyalty to a friend, he hopes that he would opt for the friend. May we go and do likewise.