Being Right

 If you had described to me years ago the era we would come to inhabit—I would have said it sounded awesome. Why? Because I finally got to be right about everything. 

What would have appeared to be the great advantage of our present political moment—in the eyes of my younger self—is that the Left now has all the good ideas. 

A couple decades ago, it didn't feel like that. Being on the Left in those days, it often felt like you had to lose some of the arguments. 

Back then, the Right was already too heartless in its worship of the free market—to be sure; but liberals still had to tolerate lectures from know-it-all economists about how some of our worst policy ideas "might sound good in theory," but just "wouldn't work in practice." 

Now, though—the Right has adopted all the very worst economic ideas of the Left from decades prior. All the know-it-all economists are now spending their time lecturing Trump. The Left's bad ideas hardly seem bad at all by comparison—since at least they aren't going out of their way to sabotage the global trade system and the world's reserve currency. 

Foreign policy too used to be more of a mixed bag. Back during the Bush era, I hated the strident militarism and imperialism of the neocons. But I also felt vaguely morally shamed by them. After all, they proclaimed a kind of moral universalism—and I often felt the anti-interventionist Left walked into the trap that had been prepared for them by countering it with an ugly cultural relativism or isolationism. 

But now, Trump has concentrated the worst of both worlds on one side of the partisan ledger. He has somehow managed to marry all the chauvinism and jingoism and militarism and violence and imperialism and arrogance of the neocons with an explicit disavowal of universal ideals like democracy promotion and human rights. All the worst things in one place. How convenient!

This is a fulfillment of the wildest dreams of my youth. Now, simply by being a Democrat, one can be for democracy and human rights, but against U.S. imperialism and chauvinism—and for government economic policies that promote social justice, but against the worst kinds of economic mismanagement that people warned us against two decades ago when they said our ideas were pipe dreams. 

I would have said, if my young self of two decades ago could have met my older self of today: you're so lucky! You finally get to be right about everything. All of the good arguments are on your side. Everyone who knows anything is with you. The entire intelligentsia and body of educated opinion have your back. 

But, now that I am actually living in that world—is it in fact so great? Is it so wonderful to be right about everything—if being right doesn't matter anymore? Is it so great to finally have all the experts and evidence on your side—if everyone has stopped listening to experts, and if no one cares what the evidence says, because our country is run by a sociopathic liar? 

Is it so great to be right all the time? Or are we not perhaps realizing—as Faulkner once pointed out—how little merely being right gets us. One can be "consistently and incontrovertibly right but withal tragic too," he put it, in The Wild Palms, "since in the being right there was nothing of consolation nor of peace."

This is what my younger self hadn't fully appreciated. He wanted so much merely to be right, and to have all the best arguments, that he didn't stop to ask whether it means anything to be always right but to always lose; he didn't ask how much it gets you to be right but to have no one listen; to be right if it means a kind of political martyrdom. 

As Brecht once argued in his essay, "Writing the Truth"—one of the most uncomfortable truths that must be faced in politics is that—even if you are morally right—you must have been somewhat strategically or politically wrong, if you didn't prevail: 

[I]t [...] takes courage to tell the truth about oneself, about one’s own defeat. Many of the persecuted lose their capacity for seeing their own mistakes. It seems to them that the [...] persecuted suffer because of their goodness. But this goodness has been beaten, defeated, suppressed; it was therefore a weak goodness, a bad, indefensible, unreliable goodness. 

That too may be the position of the Left at present. We have lived to inherit a world where we are seemingly right about everything. Who could deny our virtue? But that virtue hasn't managed to stop Trump and the Republicans from controlling every branch of government. The more "right" we have become, the less power we have received. The rising curve of our growing righteousness over the last decade is mirrored inversely by the declining curve of our electoral success. 

And if we are right—but can't persuade anyone we are right; if we have the evidence, but can't get anyone to look at the evidence—does that not suggest itself that we are in some way—some strategic, political way—also wrong? Is our rightness not partially wrong if it can't ever let us prevail—because then it can't ever actually help anyone who is suffering under injustice; it will only be screaming into the wind—hence it is a "bad, indefensible, unreliable" form of "goodness"? 

Oh—how much my younger self longed to be right about everything. I guess the lesson is: Be careful what you wish for. As Goethe is said to have remarked somewhere—what the child most earnestly prays for in youth always comes true in adulthood. This one came true for me with a vengeance. 

My teenage self longed for a morally black-and-white conflict with outright fascism, rather than the morally gray debates of the Bush years. I got that high-stakes, ultimate confrontation between good and evil I devoutly sought. Here it is.

And how frightening and ugly it turned out to be. How horrible it actually proved to be in practice—to see fascism triumphant. How horrible to be right but powerless, and to see the worst human beings in the world rioting in their wrongness, boasting of their wrongness, crowing about their little injustices and cruelties and bestialities, repeating obviously refutable lies and nonetheless convincing people and winning elections with them. 

Oh, my younger self ought to have prayed for more than merely being right. He should have heeded Hugh MacDiarmid's warning: that it is in fact the "curst conceit o' bein' richt / That damns the vast majority o' men."