Populist Falacies

Part of what OWS and her sister movements are suggesting is that we rethink the superficiality with which we approach our world. An opportunity to re-imagine how our world should ideally work is not something that comes along every day and should be embraced with hunger, curiosity and maybe a little trepidation. Now that Yair Lapid has pulled the veil off of his political beliefs it becomes evident that these are both superficial and unimaginative. What is most disappointing is not that he entertains these ideas, what can you expect from someone that works so hard at giving offense to so few, but rather that the ideas he espouses are so popular.

Here, like elsewhere we find little more than an ill conceived collection of neo-liberal baubels and populist trinkets. At best there is a sentimental distortion of a past that never existed which all too often resembles just plain old chauvinism.

So, what are these populist fallacies then?

The market can solve problems that the state can not.

There is a tendency to look at how messy politics is, how imperfect the way that decisions are made is, how mediocre the results often are and look with envy at how “successful” businesses are at attaining results. This is, of course, a fallacy. Politics take place in a democracy and is conducted in the public arena when compared to businesses which conduct their affairs behind closed doors and are run by hierarchical organizations. Politics and government exists to serve the wants and needs of citizens, business exists to make a profit.

If there is something wrong with the way the Trains are run, why is the logical answer to privatize it? If we need to change the way this service is managed, let’s change it. The reason for it’s existence doesn’t need to and shouldn’t change. It exists to provide a service to the public, not to make money. Add to that there is no example that I am aware of where public transportation was privatized and this led to better service, less problems and ultimately less cost.

Not so, says Lapid, trains should be privatized. Let the market take care of it.

You are all middle class.

I keep on thinking about Monty Python’s the Life of Brian when I hear Lapid talk about the middle class. “You are all individuals”, Brian shouts at the masses proclaiming him the messiah, “we’re all individuals”, they answer. You are all middle class, Lapid seems to say, except for them. Them are the Arabs, the ultra-orthodox and the Plutocrats, leeches the lot of them, living off the sweat and toil of the productive middle class.

What is this all encompassing middle class? My very unscientific definition of the middle class would be those people that can afford to buy an apartment, raise their kids and retire without feeling uncertain that they can pay for all of it. Someone who struggles to do the same is part of the working class. Someone who is unsure if he can feed and clothe his family is poor. Someone who can spend his money frivolously is rich. I am most certainly working class by this definition. Lapid is banking on our tendency to identify up and despise down.

Talking in us and them always makes me uncomfortable. Lapid is suggesting pursuing the divisive, niche politics of them and us while at the same time decrying the divisive, niche politics of others. When talking about Shas and Yahadut HaTorah he calls them both free-loaders and also holds them up as role models for how small political parties can exercise disproportionate power. Talking in us and them disenfranchises the them. Does a society belong less to its poor than it does to its working and middle classes? Is Lapid suggesting a democratic society modeled on Athens, with few citizens serviced by many residents?

This place was once decent (when we were running the show)

The most disturbing sentiment is one which is not specific to Lapid but rather seems to be part of a general malaise. There is a longing for a mythical past when things where more clear cut, people knew their place, when “we” were in power and “they” were not. This is what he alludes to when he says that he wants to change the political system so that small parties can no longer exert power over the coalition. He acts as if there is a form of democratic government where these pressures don’t exist.  The whole point of democratic government in general and parliamentary government in particular is that it forces compromise. It does not allow any single political group to impose their will on the rest. This is a good thing.

Things were not better in Israel when it was being run by a single party. Corruption existed, cronyism was everywhere and whole parts of the population had decisions made for them without being consulted. We don’t live in the past, so why are we seeking out solutions that only partially worked then to solve different problems now? The sixties, which so many of us progressives like to hark back to, was not an era of liberty and social justice but rather an era of great strife as a result of tremendous injustice. Perhaps it is better to look to the past in order to avoid making the same mistakes rather than as a model for our future.

There is this Bertrand Russell quote that I saw on someone’s facebook wall the other day:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, wiser people so full of doubts.”

A lot of people liked this and seemed to identify with the sentiment, many of whom are professed liberals, lefties and progressives. It triggered a long conversation about how easy it is to trigger that inner fascist we all have that longs for order and certainty and disdains the messiness of groping towards an uncertain truth. I surprised myself with how, when I thought about it, this seemed like such a chauvinistic sentiment. Whether he knows it or not, Lapid is flogging very similar wares and banking on people voting for sentimental reasons.

Shorter Showers

One of the many pamphlets I picked up in Zuccotti park was an anarchist essay by Derrick Jensen “Forget Shorter Showers – Why Personal Change Does Not equal Political Change”. I didn’t take to it’s argument then, that change in the personal sphere has negligible effect on the public sphere, but it took what Chris Hedges had to say on liberals talking about the needs and interests of the poor without ever being in danger of meeting the poor for me to understand why not.

Personal change is essential for political change. Political change requires passion, authenticity and an ability to empathize.  As banal as it might seem, it is exactly learning to buy less that awakens us to the unsustainable nature of our consumer society. It is learning to eat better, to make our own food, to know what we are putting in our mouths, that allows us to realize the importance of promoting equal rights to good nutrition. It is precisely through caring for others that we come to understand our short comings as a society in caring for the needy.

If all we do is concentrate on grand ideas, theories and mass political movements in order to affect change, we are not likely to get very far. We need to marry these ideas to practical change on the ground. It is only when enough people stop believing that change is impossible that it starts to take place. It is only when people feel that change will affect them on a personal level that they will invest the emotional capital needed. How can we convince others to affect change if we haven’t made it ourselves? Who will believe is when we speak of hollow theory?

Even though the Arab spring is more about civil liberties and self determination while protests elsewhere are more about the consequences of economic oppression, what sparked and allowed these protests to grow is personal change, personal example which allowed masses of people to realize that they were in the same predicament. One of the reasons why the protest movement has not yet turned into a mass movement in the States is because the majority of people who are struggling are still embarrassed to admit it, still believe that somehow, magically they’ll realize the American dream.

Like others I believe that the watershed in Tunis, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Athens, Madrid and Lisbon came when people no longer felt that they were the only ones that were struggling with the system. This loss of shame at not being able to keep up the farce that everything was ok; that although the economy is tough, you’re keeping your head above water; that although you need to bribe to get ahead, you are managing; that although your neighbor got dragged away by the secret police in the middle of the night, they won’t come for you. This is what is fueling the revolutionary change in governments, in the way so many of us are thinking about the way our world should look. It’s the understanding at a personal level that the status quo simply can no longer be maintained. It is seeing your friends and neighbors struggling, seeing them protesting, defying power, that will move you to join the attempt to reshape our world.

Practical Occupation

Last month protesters from OWS along with community organizers broke into a home in East New York that had stood empty since being foreclosed in 2008 and turned it over to a woman and her family who had been homeless for the last 10 years. In similar actions in Columbus, Atlanta, San Francisco and Southgate, foreclosed, empty houses are being occupied by Occupy and turned over to those without homes. Evictions, sometimes as soon as 2 months after failing to make a mortgage payment, are being resisted by large crowds making it impossible for police to force people out of their homes. Through this action, OWS is putting its money where its mouth is by highlighting poor communities and how they have been affected by our economic system. It is also exposing some of the central questions we should be considering if we want to rethink how we run our societies.

In order for the movement to grow the coming year it is essential that it proves its relevance in helping to solve problems. The true relevance of OWS in starting a new conversation on how we want to see the future of our societies can only be maintained by not restricting ourselves to pointing out what is wrong but by proposing alternatives and implementing them where possible. Only by testing our ideas can we ascertain if they work. We have nothing to fear from the messy process of trial and error.

The focus on repossessed homes exposes one of the central differences between capitalism and socialism, between private property and community property, between the right of the individual and the right of the community. The question is what is of greater value, the right of an individual to buy an apartment building and leave it empty, for whatever reason, or the right of 20 families to housing at the expense of the individual?

A city belongs to all its inhabitants. When you buy a plot of land in a city that has been zoned for dwellings, do you have the right to not develop that land? The permits and deeds give you the right to make a profit from developing an apartment building that will serve a number of families, it does not give you a right to not build that building.

Finding the correct balance between the rights of individuals as opposed to the rights of a collectives is tough. Within reason, there is much to be said for the concept of private property. It is not difficult to find examples where the tyranny of the masses, or those claiming to speak for the masses, has trampled the rights of individuals. That this can and does happen in collectivist societies should not be used as an excuse to prevent criticism of the opposite extreme.

We are witnessing a tyranny by individuals who have amassed enough wealth and political power to trample the rights and interest of the many in order to serve the privileged few. Besides highlighting these perversions, we need to make sure we spend enough time thinking about how we break these power structures without merely replacing them with equally unbalanced and perverse structures and then to act. The housing crisis, at the heart of the current economic meltdown, is the perfect testing ground to try and rethink the balance between these rights in very practical terms.

Maintaining Indignation

Having spent the last couple of weeks with family visiting for the holidays and entertaining my kids on their winter break, I have felt markedly less angry at the outrages of our plutocracy. This is a good thing, to be reminded how easy it is to go through life oblivious of how the very few are running us into the ground. I was reminded of what Jamie Kilstein from Citizen Radio said, about living in a progressive bubble when you are mainly tuned in to other progressives and their independent media.

I’m still amazed and often at a loss for words when I have to explain what OWS is all about. What they want. Why they are so upset. Why they don’t just get a job. When you think about it, with the reality tv, unbridled consumerism, the cheap, processed crap we keep on stuffing our faces with on top of the usual day to day struggles, it’s no surprise that relatively few that manage to maintain their indignation.

And maintain our indignation we must! They told us we were a spoiled bunch of bored rich kids in New York, while they continued to repossess people’s homes without even holding the deed to the properties. They told us we were a bunch of sushi eating liberals in Tel Aviv while privatizing public lands. They called us lazy, welfare addicts in Athens while pushing austerity on the poor and debt relief on the rich. They call us terrorists in Damascus, when they have already killed more than 5,000 of us.

This will be our challenge in the coming year, to remind everyone why it is unacceptable to cause economic collapse and not be held accountable; why it is unacceptable to make housing, education and a decent wage inaccessible to many while the few take an ever growing share of the GDP; that to continue to expect the current system to supply different results is the definition of insanity.

And if that didn't piss you off, watch some of this, it worked for me...