It’s not your fault, but you still need to deal with it.
Daddy Issues
“I used to think my preaching was mostly about you…I’ve discovered my preaching is mostly about me.”
That’s megachurch megadouche Judah Smith on an interlude track on American girlie Lana Del Rey’s latest record, Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd.
The “you” Smith refers to could be his flock of believers, or it could be “You,” the Holy Father, or just as conceivably, “you,” his more down-to-earth daddy. Either way, it’s refreshing to hear that even, uh, celebrity pastor influencers have those moments of foggy realization that maybe you’re just acting out your own shit on other people.
The stereotype used to be that the right was perpetually performing its daddy issues. I’m sure many conservatives really are weak-willed babies simpering for authority through organized religion and military supremacy (“Dear President Vladimir Putin, I’m so sorry I was not your mother”). But while we’re painting with broad strokes, it’s not hard to wonder where the left’s suspicion of hierarchy and general factiousness comes from.
Look, like the rest of my college educated cohort aging away in Brooklyn, I’ve been reading Freud (maybe you could tell from my previous post on AI and the unconscious). After the death of God, it’s only natural we look a little closer to home for someone to blame for our neuroses and to deliver us from our needs.
There’s a Freudian valence to a recent essay by James Greig in Dazed, a piece that slapped me across the face this week. Call it the “I’m baby” problem: “Thinking of yourself as a smol bean baby is a way of tapping out and expecting other people to fight on your behalf. It also makes you a more pliant consumer.”
Greig takes note of therapy-speak that provides cover for an extended adolescence, a culture obsessed with Manichean tales of superheroes rescuing the world from evil, and the immaturity of a generation in arrested development after we’ve careened from crisis to crisis. (Rise up, gifted kid hive.)
There’s a response to this stereotype of millennial warbling that is usually coded as right-wing — life sucks, you’re not special, grow up, get your life on track. Add a snowflake or two, and that’s basically Ben Shapiro’s whole thing. Then there’s a response that seeks to affirm the hurt at the root of child-like behavior: “your feelings are valid.”
Greig’s essay complicates the assumption that this latter approach can be credibly read as progressive when it has been so thoroughly commodified into a wellness and entertainment industry that keeps us forever valid in our childhood trauma. We will not self-care ourselves to liberation.
What I would add to Greig’s thesis is that the left needs to recapture the spirit of personal agency and responsibility from the right. I used to roll my eyes at the idea of “consciousness raising,” but sometimes that’s just what organizing is — life sucks but you can make the world a better place if you take responsibility for helping us get there.
The father figure telling the wounded boy “it’s not your fault” makes for great Hollywood drama, but that realization alone doesn’t put you on a path towards liberation. It needs to be followed by the discovery that, sometimes, your preaching is mostly about you. It’s not your fault, but you still need to deal with it.
Burn After Reading
I have two pieces up in the last couple of weeks.
First, in The New Republic, calling for a more combative approach from the White House in making the clean energy economy a union economy:
Tesla’s animosity toward unionization efforts—the company maintains the workers were fired as part of a routine performance review—challenges Biden’s commitment to America’s workers. It’s a fight Scranton Joe should relish. The president needs an excuse to burnish his labor record, given his decision last autumn to force rail workers into a contract without paid sick leave. Now, with the imminent nomination of Julie Su to lead the Department of Labor and with the Protecting the Right to Organize, or PRO, Act’s reintroduction to Congress, the Biden administration should up the ante. The president needs to make clear: He will not tolerate corporate retaliation against workers exercising their legal right to collective bargaining.
Most recently, I’m in The Nation, taking apart the best argument to build the Willow oil project:
I agree that this is an issue of national security. Willow’s defenders, however, have it backward. It is precisely because fossil fuel corporations like ConocoPhillips drill for oil at the expense of a livable climate that the White House should have rejected the project. Our nation needs a stable climate to be secure. That means transitioning off fossil fuels entirely—and making pariahs of their biggest boosters.