http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/07/kcet-org-feature-on-boyle-heights.html
Regular readers will know that this year we've had a blog post or two about artists vs the social welfare of non-artists. Ever since Hayao Miyazaki completed The Wind Rises and film critics rushed to say it was a film about artists I've been stuck on this idea that if that's really what the film is about Miyazaki's most piercing observation has gone largely unremarked upon, that the vocational artist is invariably both the builder and servant of some kind of empire. There are some artists and writers and musicians who would say that all art is political. Then, in that sense, all art is propaganda made by the artists as servants of ideology on behalf of that ideology's empire. If the reactionary right forever bewails the eternally receding golden age the left seems to have another problem, failing to recognize its own imperialist ambitions within any given cultural context and the existence of its own empires.
To put the matter another way, making a safe space for artists of a particular set of groups can be seen as a threat that could displace poor people in a neighborhood and disrupt what used to be what they had of a job base.
...
That was the introduction for a blog post on an arts venue that opened up in Boyle Heights. And here we are in 2017.
https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/boyle-heights-gentrification-art-galleries-pssst
Art and Complicity: How the Fight Against Gentrification in Boyle Heights Questions the Role of Artists
Carribean Fragoza
July 20, 2016
...
Boyle Heights has witnessed eastbound waves of gentrification that have transformed Echo Park and Highland Park into more affluent and white neighborhoods. The proliferation of artist studios and galleries has come to signal the arrival of additional enterprises that raise property values and cost of rent for businesses and housing tenants, eventually resulting in their displacement.
Newcomers, including artists, have been drawn to Boyle Heights by its rich cultural character -- forged from generations of Mexican, Japanese, Russian and Jewish immigrants relegated to the city’s eastern periphery -- as well as its cheaper rent and property in an increasingly unaffordable city.
...
Today, one of the most standout reminders of this community’s hardships is Boyle Heights’ calcified industrial zone. The community now sits among the remnants of former warehouses and factories, like the skeleton of a creature that curled up and died many lifetimes ago. Longtime residents of Boyle Heights in some ways, consider themselves the keepers and guardians of these bones, for many still remember when they were animated and provided their families with humble but dignified sustenance.
Gonzalez and Ana Hernandez, another member of Union de Vecinos, recall the factories, warehouses and cold storage plants where families once worked. They remember that the building that PSSST now occupies on Third Street, was once a Halloween costume factory.
It was along these industrial zones that Father Greg Boyle and the mothers of Pico-Aliso organized walks that grew into marches for jobs for their children and husbands. Hence, these were the origins of Homeboy Industries and their famed mantra “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job.” More broadly, jobs would help this community reclaim its streets.
So when galleries started moving into these warehouses in the mid-2000s, residents did not see it as a sign of new life breathed into their community, but rather many were cautionary of what that meant for their own future in this place. In their journey of recovering from decades of gang violence and drugs, they kept their eyes set on a new horizon.
“Our vision for Boyle Heights has been more jobs and better education,” Hernandez says.
However, that future now faces different challenges with the arrival of investors, speculators and more affluent residents. Among them, the arrival of artists. [emphasis added]
“It’s ironic and sad. People have lost their jobs. They were pushed out of their neighborhood. And today arrives a new force that is transforming the zone of the factories to create a completely different culture. So not only are they actually stealing their work, but also their labor of love for creating a space for the young people. What the community created is now being occupied by others,” says Union de Vecinos member Leonardo Vilchis.
“We have struggled to make our community a better place. Now that we’ve cleaned up our community, it’s not fair for the galleries to just come here, like PSSST that gets to lease that space for free for 20 years. Its not fair,” Hernandez says. [emphasis added]
...
“The architecture is supposed to be accessible. It’s supposed to be inviting to the community,” says PSSST board member Adrian Rivas, who has strong grounding in the Chicano/Latino art community in L.A. He remains hopeful that PSSST can offer Boyle Heights residents and local artists access to a cutting-edge arts and gallery space.
“I’ve always heard, ‘Why can’t we have these spaces? Why can’t we show our work in spaces like that?’ We love our rasquache spaces too, but why shouldn’t we have a space like this?” he adds.
Most importantly, Rivas believes that PSSST could provide local artists with a space to experiment with new forms and practices. He notes that recently, PSSST’s first artist-in-residence, Guadalupe Rosales, invited L.A. Chicano artists and DJs to collaborate in a series of performances at the gallery where they were able to share the work they are known for, as well as to experiment.
According to PSSST founder, Jules Gimbrone, the importance of experimental art spaces for marginalized communities, particularly for queer artists and folk, is underscored by the June shooting at Pulse, a queer dance club in Orlando that left 49 young men and women dead. “These spaces for freedom of experimentation are rare for trans, youth and people of color. There’s no room for mistake as they are always performing with a lot of risk. We need to cultivate safe spaces.” [emphasis added]
Citing the shooting at Pulse over in Orlando, Florida as a reason for the need for a safe space for experimental art in the Los Angeles area seemed ... pretty difficult to buy. "safe space" for whom, evidently, never stopped being the salient question. So ... here we are in 2017.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-boyle-heights-20170222-story.html
February 22, 2017, 10:50 AM
Citing harassment and online trolling, the co-founders of an art space in Boyle Heights announced Tuesday that they will close the nonprofit, calling it a casualty of a raging fight over gentrification. [emphasis added] PSSST, which opened on East 3rd Street last year, came under fire from some residents and activists concerned about a new wave of galleries moving into the largely Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights.
“We are unable to ethically and financially proceed with our mission,” co-founders Barnett Cohen and Jules Gimbrone and community outreach coordinator Pilar Gallego said in a statement on their website. “Our young nonprofit struggled to survive through constant attacks.” [emphasis added] ...
http://hyperallergic.com/360174/boyle-heights-art-space-closes-blaming-anti-gentrification-activists/
LOS ANGELES — Citing “the ongoing controversy surrounding art and gentrification in Boyle Heights,” nonprofit art space PSSST has decided to close, according to a statement posted on their website. Their 5,000-square-foot building located in the predominantly Latinx neighborhood opened just last June amid accusations from community activists that the influx of galleries was contributing to gentrification and the displacement of long-term residents. Despite PSSST’s non-commercial focus, it was simply their presence that posed a threat, as Leonardo Vilchis of Union de Vecinos told Hyperallergic at the time: “The question of whether the gallery is for profit or nonprofit does not make a difference to us. Serious damage has been done in the community by nonprofit institutions, foundations, public agencies, and private/public investment […] The issue for us is less a question of who is doing the damage, but what damage is being done.”
Community activist groups like Defend Boyle Heights and BHAAD (Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement) have repeatedly called for all galleries to leave Boyle Heights, to be replaced with social services, child care, grocery stores, or laundromats. Many of the galleries do not own their buildings, however, so it is not clear how realistic this request is. [emphasis added] “As PSSST does not own 1329 East 3rd Street — and our lease was directly dependent on us maintaining our 501(c)(3) status and mission — the owner will now assume control of the building,” their statement reads. “We have no say in how they choose to proceed or what they will do with the property.”
Anti-gentrification protests targeting the galleries have been a constant presence over the past nine months, as protestors posted mock eviction notices on gallery doors, chanting “Fuera!”[“Out!”] as they marched past posh opening parties. Tensions continued to escalate when “Fuck White Art” was spray-painted on the roll-up gate of Nicodim Gallery, prompting a ill-considered decision on the part of the LAPD to pursue the vandalism as hate crime. [emphasis added]
As John Halle noted in quoting Bordieu not so long ago, there's no such thing as racism, but there are a lot of racisms. Last year it seemed that the trans/queer element for the art venue was not going to be considered sufficiently justifiable to anti-gentrification groups to give the arts venue a pass. Conservatives on the whole seem both incapable and unwilling to consider the possibility that there is a wildly fractured left; or to put it another way, the idea that the gay community isn't monolithic doesn't fit into culture war propaganda for either the left or the right coalitions. So the prospect that a gay/trans/queer friendly arts venue would get denounced by working class people of color might be read too glibly as an observation of the ideological incoherence or hypocrisy of the left.
How about ... we consider things like tax codes that in some contexts explicitly favor artists over, say, families?
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/05/atlantic-artist-loft-affordable-housing.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/affordable-housing-for-white-people/483444/
...
The report calls these buildings POSH developments, Politically Opportune Subsidized Housing. They’re priced in such a way that families with children or those who are extremely poor could not afford them. To be considered affordable for those whose income is 60 percent of the area median income, rents can be 30 percent of the set income level. But often, the rents for these buildings are at the very upper end of the spectrum. For a one-person household in Minneapolis, the maximum allowable rent is $910. A-Mill studios rent for $898. Most tax-credit developers don’t set the rents that high because their projects are in lower-income neighborhoods and because they are targeting lower-income tenants. But developers of POSH properties do. The buildings also require application fees and reservation fees (to keep a unit off the market while the application is processed), additional costs that would make units out of reach for low-income families, the authors say.
In 2007, the IRS tried to crack down on subsidized housing that gave preference to artists. They said that doling out credits for such properties potentially violated the tax code because such housing was not “for use by the general public.” Soon after, lobbyists succeeded in inserting an item into 2008’s Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA) that exempted artists’ housing from the tax rules requiring projects using tax credits be used by the general public. Since then, according to Orfield and Stancil, subsidized artists’ housing has grown rapidly in Minneapolis and other areas. [emphasis added]
The artist properties share a few characteristics. They’re usually conversions of historic buildings (which can more easily win developers tax credits). They have restrictions on the professions of the tenants (usually artists). They’re located in hip neighborhoods where the market rent is among the highest in the city. And they are often built with loans from the city to promote the public good, by making a place for artists to live.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with promoting the public good and building more affordable apartments in trendy and expensive neighborhoods. POSH properties can help high-income neighborhoods become more economically diverse. And the not-in-my-backyard objections that often come with affordable housing are less likely to be present for POSH properties, because neighbors rarely object to artists’ buildings that look like luxury condos and hold mostly white tenants. POSH properties help lower-income white people and artists who want to live in cities but otherwise would be pushed further out into suburbs.
Kinda reminds me of the South Park episode from season 19 "The City Part of Town". Gentrification seems awesome to the people who can afford the bespoke hipster culture that emerges from it but working class people find things are lamer than ever.
So while artists and entertainers can say they feel vilified in the age of Trump the reality seems to have been, to go by journalistic coverage of things that went on well before Trump announced his candidacy, resentment of artists receiving undue favoritism compared to working class families was incubating over the last decade. If you can't parse the admittedly occasionally arcane distinctions between "liberal" in its academic usage or its colloquial intra-tribal usage on the one hand, and neoliberalism on the other you can get an inaccurate sense of the left and center-left in the last ten to twenty years.
While it's fairly normal for conservatives to scoff at the idea of white privilege being a thing, and while on the internet there are progressives who wield the term "privilege" presumptuously as a way to presume the guilt of people they disagree with ... the thing about privilege is that we've just seen a case where the mere fact that an arts community has gay or queer leadership won't insulate them from being the targets of protests along both racial and class divides.
Conservatives seem temperamentally unlikely to appreciate that the left and liberal are not on the same page and that even within the left people aren't all on the same page. We live in an era in which an arts venue couldn't bolster its street cred with homage to LGBQT causes because when it came to the issue of gentrification the arts scene was regarded as emblematic of what might be called a class enemy in more old school Marxist terms.
So when I wrote that sprawling blog post last year considering what artists were saying about being artists in the age of Trump ....
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2016/11/links-for-weekends-american-artists-and.html
I was thinking of a lot of things but one of the things I was thinking about was the coverage of the Boyle Heights arts venue and how the solidarity that the liberal/left scene seemed to take for granted against Trump's candidacy was a self-generated illusion. For the people who benefited from a globalist scene it was inconceivable that anyone would want something else. The possibility that partisans to the left and the right of what might be called the presumed Clintonian center might choose someone else, whether Sanders or Trump, was impossible to imagine, apparently.
Of course thanks to the Electoral College vote Trump became President.
It would be a shame if in the years to come artists continue to look at themselves as having some kind of persecution complex because playing the role of the persecuted and misunderstood visionary is something that can be taken up by just about anyone. Mark Driscoll tried that here in Puget Sound for a few years. Reportedly some guy named Milo may have a similar play but it's not limited to peple considered unacceptably to the right. The trouble is that people who are ostensibly liberal or left get this way, too.
We're not that far into the Trump administration and it still seems that people in the culture industry have failed to grasp that they may have been regarded by people outside those indsutries as something old Marxist terminology might dub class enemies.
I try to read on both the left and the right and at the edges as well as the center. Well, whatever the center is ... . The traditional coalitions that were assumed to get things done on the left and right have fractured and in that sense it wasn't a surprise a populist agitator got a following.
The closure of PSSST may be a warning for intra-liberal/left artists that there is not, in fact, a presumed unity or cohesion in the liberal/left scene any more than there's necessarily a cohesion between mainstream conservatives and what's increasingly known as the alt-right.
Artists and entertainers may tell themselves their sympathies are with the working class but that may only be in relative terms if the alternative is the high finance caste. It might turn out that artists and entertainers don't have anything in common with working class types if it came down to a question of what they want to do and what they consider the ultimate end of living. On that score the entertainment castes may ultimately have everything in common with the haves rather than the have-nots.
So there's that. Incubating another little project or two as well. But for now highly elaborated linky posts ... .
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query boyle heights. Sort by date Show all posts
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Thursday, February 23, 2017
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
KCET org feature on Boyle Heights gentrification and land development "Art and Complicity: How the Fight Against Gentrification in Boyl Heights Questions the Role of Artists"
Regular readers will know that this year we've had a blog post or two about artists vs the social welfare of non-artists. Ever since Hayao Miyazaki completed The Wind Rises and film critics rushed to say it was a film about artists I've been stuck on this idea that if that's really what the film is about Miyazaki's most piercing observation has gone largely unremarked upon, that the vocational artist is invariably both the builder and servant of some kind of empire. There are some artists and writers and musicians who would say that all art is political. Then, in that sense, all art is propaganda made by the artists as servants of ideology on behalf of that ideology's empire. If the reactionary right forever bewails the eternally receding golden age the left seems to have another problem, failing to recognize its own imperialist ambitions within any given cultural context and the existence of its own empires.
To put the matter another way, making a safe space for artists of a particular set of groups can be seen as a threat that could displace poor people in a neighborhood and disrupt what used to be what they had of a job base.
https://www.kcet.org/shows/
Art and Complicity: How the Fight Against Gentrification in Boyle Heights Questions the Role of Artists
Carribean Fragoza|
July 20, 2016
...
Boyle Heights has witnessed eastbound waves of gentrification that have transformed Echo Park and Highland Park into more affluent and white neighborhoods. The proliferation of artist studios and galleries has come to signal the arrival of additional enterprises that raise property values and cost of rent for businesses and housing tenants, eventually resulting in their displacement.
Newcomers, including artists, have been drawn to Boyle Heights by its rich cultural character -- forged from generations of Mexican, Japanese, Russian and Jewish immigrants relegated to the city’s eastern periphery -- as well as its cheaper rent and property in an increasingly unaffordable city.
...
Today, one of the most standout reminders of this community’s hardships is Boyle Heights’ calcified industrial zone. The community now sits among the remnants of former warehouses and factories, like the skeleton of a creature that curled up and died many lifetimes ago. Longtime residents of Boyle Heights in some ways, consider themselves the keepers and guardians of these bones, for many still remember when they were animated and provided their families with humble but dignified sustenance.
Gonzalez and Ana Hernandez, another member of Union de Vecinos, recall the factories, warehouses and cold storage plants where families once worked. They remember that the building that PSSST now occupies on Third Street, was once a Halloween costume factory.
It was along these industrial zones that Father Greg Boyle and the mothers of Pico-Aliso organized walks that grew into marches for jobs for their children and husbands. Hence, these were the origins of Homeboy Industries and their famed mantra “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job.” More broadly, jobs would help this community reclaim its streets.
So when galleries started moving into these warehouses in the mid-2000s, residents did not see it as a sign of new life breathed into their community, but rather many were cautionary of what that meant for their own future in this place. In their journey of recovering from decades of gang violence and drugs, they kept their eyes set on a new horizon.
“Our vision for Boyle Heights has been more jobs and better education,” Hernandez says.
However, that future now faces different challenges with the arrival of investors, speculators and more affluent residents. Among them, the arrival of artists. [emphasis added]
“It’s ironic and sad. People have lost their jobs. They were pushed out of their neighborhood. And today arrives a new force that is transforming the zone of the factories to create a completely different culture. So not only are they actually stealing their work, but also their labor of love for creating a space for the young people. What the community created is now being occupied by others,” says Union de Vecinos member Leonardo Vilchis.
“We have struggled to make our community a better place. Now that we’ve cleaned up our community, it’s not fair for the galleries to just come here, like PSSST that gets to lease that space for free for 20 years. Its not fair,” Hernandez says. [emphasis added]
It's common enough to find artists and writers who talk about how great it would be for artists to have a place in a community. But uncritical acceptance of the idea that what makes for affordable housing and access to creative space for an artist would be good for a community is a foolish idea. We've blogged a little about an article at the Atlantic that discussed artist-specific housing subsidies in the past. Particularly for those artists whose allegiances are left, the prospect that the vocational artist and his/her interests may qualify the artist as, to use a blunt term, a class enemy of the actual working class, does not readily spring to mind.
Artists want space and so a question arises, "Why can't we have this space?" as the article goes on to discuss:
...Guarded only by a delicate gridded wire gate, PSSST is painted in pristine matte white. A set of clean concrete steps leads to what was once a loading dock and is now a small patio crowned with a tall white pedestal bearing a glass water dispenser of drinking water. Condensation embraces the cold surface. On a scorching summer day, it’s a vision of oasis, a promise and prize of arrival.
“The architecture is supposed to be accessible. It’s supposed to be inviting to the community,” says PSSST board member Adrian Rivas, who has strong grounding in the Chicano/Latino art community in L.A. He remains hopeful that PSSST can offer Boyle Heights residents and local artists access to a cutting-edge arts and gallery space.
“I’ve always heard, ‘Why can’t we have these spaces? Why can’t we show our work in spaces like that?’ We love our rasquache spaces too, but why shouldn’t we have a space like this?” he adds.
Most importantly, Rivas believes that PSSST could provide local artists with a space to experiment with new forms and practices. He notes that recently, PSSST’s first artist-in-residence, Guadalupe Rosales, invited L.A. Chicano artists and DJs to collaborate in a series of performances at the gallery where they were able to share the work they are known for, as well as to experiment.
According to PSSST founder, Jules Gimbrone, the importance of experimental art spaces for marginalized communities, particularly for queer artists and folk, is underscored by the June shooting at Pulse, a queer dance club in Orlando that left 49 young men and women dead. “These spaces for freedom of experimentation are rare for trans, youth and people of color. There’s no room for mistake as they are always performing with a lot of risk. We need to cultivate safe spaces.”
...
So a shooting on the other side of the country becomes a reason for an arts facility in Los Angeles ... .
The trouble with identity politics is that everyone can invoke an identity. As the article goes on to report, not even all the artists in the area buy the idea that a "safe space" should be obtained in a conventional arts gallery way that displaces people.
Yet as community talks continue over weeks and months, as positions are clarified and guidelines drafted, the threat of displacement is not diminished, as development projects move forward and the arts district receives attention and accolades from the New York Times and art world insiders. “We are still waiting to see an example of where an arts district didn’t displace a community. The designation of an arts district is a tool of development. We don’t have time for artists to figure out how they feel,” says Rhine. [emphasis added]
Despite the community dialogues, Delmira Gonzalez sees little potential for co-existence between art galleries and the longstanding community. “We have 7,000 people here that need housing. And on top of everything, our bridge gets knocked down and we have a homelessness problem. Why do we need to accept them? Why do we need to have compassion for them? The answer is ‘no.’ The answer is 'get out.’”
...
Ultra-Red describes this action as “The art of resistance,” a practice that, like traditional and institutional art, has its own set of aesthetic and operational frameworks. One unique characteristic of this anti-gentrification movement in Boyle Heights, as well as in other parts of the city, is the strong involvement of institutionally-trained artists, graduates of prominent art schools who are equipped to use the language of arts but are pushing towards radical practice that breaks down institutional arts, especially as they are tied to a capitalist market.
According to Rhine, the pressure that artists are experiencing from community groups and other artists that support anti-gentrification movements clarifies their role in gentrification. “In trying to establish a fine arts space within the professional sector, it’s next to impossible to start or maintain that space without direct complicity in speculative development. It’s impossible to escape complicity,” Rhine says. [emphasis added]
Furthermore, this mounting pressure points to what Rhine and other activist artists believe will be the necessary future of art. “So if an artist is challenged by the communities facing displacement to act in solidarity, then the artist has increasingly no choice but to be complicit fully or to invent a different kind of art. It means changing what art is and it’s not going to be what we learned in school or see in galleries or what is celebrated in art history. It is going to be a new art that is not necessarily going to be recognized as art.” ...
So at least some artists in the area call BS on the idea that the "safe space" is worth the displacement of poor people who have been in the neighborhood for years before the gallery was begun.
The proposal that artists need to think of ways of being artists that isn't dependent on late capitalist infrastructures could be met with another proposal, that the very idea of being a vocational artist should be up for question. Sousa's warning about the emergence of the recorded music industry was that it would exacerbate and mutate musical cultures into an intransigent caste system in which there were vocational producers and buying consumers, attained at the cost of the amateur culture that really made a musical culture what it is from region to region. In such a context the people most likely to formulate a potential change in the local arts scene wouldn't be the school-trained vocational artists but the amateurs. If vocational artists can't appreciate the possibility, let alone the reality, that what's in their material best interests might not actually beneficial for working class, low-income people in their community, then the paradox of such an artist, if a leftist (as opposed to a Randroid) would be inadvertently being a part of the ruling class while embracing a self-deluding ideological stance that lets the artist speak of himself or herself as if it were otherwise. Because, let's face it, if you could afford to go to school in the arts, odds are moderately decent you're part of the ruling class by socioeconomic origin whether you want to admit this or not.
To put the matter another way, making a safe space for artists of a particular set of groups can be seen as a threat that could displace poor people in a neighborhood and disrupt what used to be what they had of a job base.
https://www.kcet.org/shows/
Art and Complicity: How the Fight Against Gentrification in Boyle Heights Questions the Role of Artists
Carribean Fragoza|
July 20, 2016
...
Boyle Heights has witnessed eastbound waves of gentrification that have transformed Echo Park and Highland Park into more affluent and white neighborhoods. The proliferation of artist studios and galleries has come to signal the arrival of additional enterprises that raise property values and cost of rent for businesses and housing tenants, eventually resulting in their displacement.
Newcomers, including artists, have been drawn to Boyle Heights by its rich cultural character -- forged from generations of Mexican, Japanese, Russian and Jewish immigrants relegated to the city’s eastern periphery -- as well as its cheaper rent and property in an increasingly unaffordable city.
...
Today, one of the most standout reminders of this community’s hardships is Boyle Heights’ calcified industrial zone. The community now sits among the remnants of former warehouses and factories, like the skeleton of a creature that curled up and died many lifetimes ago. Longtime residents of Boyle Heights in some ways, consider themselves the keepers and guardians of these bones, for many still remember when they were animated and provided their families with humble but dignified sustenance.
Gonzalez and Ana Hernandez, another member of Union de Vecinos, recall the factories, warehouses and cold storage plants where families once worked. They remember that the building that PSSST now occupies on Third Street, was once a Halloween costume factory.
It was along these industrial zones that Father Greg Boyle and the mothers of Pico-Aliso organized walks that grew into marches for jobs for their children and husbands. Hence, these were the origins of Homeboy Industries and their famed mantra “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job.” More broadly, jobs would help this community reclaim its streets.
So when galleries started moving into these warehouses in the mid-2000s, residents did not see it as a sign of new life breathed into their community, but rather many were cautionary of what that meant for their own future in this place. In their journey of recovering from decades of gang violence and drugs, they kept their eyes set on a new horizon.
“Our vision for Boyle Heights has been more jobs and better education,” Hernandez says.
However, that future now faces different challenges with the arrival of investors, speculators and more affluent residents. Among them, the arrival of artists. [emphasis added]
“It’s ironic and sad. People have lost their jobs. They were pushed out of their neighborhood. And today arrives a new force that is transforming the zone of the factories to create a completely different culture. So not only are they actually stealing their work, but also their labor of love for creating a space for the young people. What the community created is now being occupied by others,” says Union de Vecinos member Leonardo Vilchis.
“We have struggled to make our community a better place. Now that we’ve cleaned up our community, it’s not fair for the galleries to just come here, like PSSST that gets to lease that space for free for 20 years. Its not fair,” Hernandez says. [emphasis added]
It's common enough to find artists and writers who talk about how great it would be for artists to have a place in a community. But uncritical acceptance of the idea that what makes for affordable housing and access to creative space for an artist would be good for a community is a foolish idea. We've blogged a little about an article at the Atlantic that discussed artist-specific housing subsidies in the past. Particularly for those artists whose allegiances are left, the prospect that the vocational artist and his/her interests may qualify the artist as, to use a blunt term, a class enemy of the actual working class, does not readily spring to mind.
Artists want space and so a question arises, "Why can't we have this space?" as the article goes on to discuss:
...Guarded only by a delicate gridded wire gate, PSSST is painted in pristine matte white. A set of clean concrete steps leads to what was once a loading dock and is now a small patio crowned with a tall white pedestal bearing a glass water dispenser of drinking water. Condensation embraces the cold surface. On a scorching summer day, it’s a vision of oasis, a promise and prize of arrival.
“The architecture is supposed to be accessible. It’s supposed to be inviting to the community,” says PSSST board member Adrian Rivas, who has strong grounding in the Chicano/Latino art community in L.A. He remains hopeful that PSSST can offer Boyle Heights residents and local artists access to a cutting-edge arts and gallery space.
“I’ve always heard, ‘Why can’t we have these spaces? Why can’t we show our work in spaces like that?’ We love our rasquache spaces too, but why shouldn’t we have a space like this?” he adds.
Most importantly, Rivas believes that PSSST could provide local artists with a space to experiment with new forms and practices. He notes that recently, PSSST’s first artist-in-residence, Guadalupe Rosales, invited L.A. Chicano artists and DJs to collaborate in a series of performances at the gallery where they were able to share the work they are known for, as well as to experiment.
According to PSSST founder, Jules Gimbrone, the importance of experimental art spaces for marginalized communities, particularly for queer artists and folk, is underscored by the June shooting at Pulse, a queer dance club in Orlando that left 49 young men and women dead. “These spaces for freedom of experimentation are rare for trans, youth and people of color. There’s no room for mistake as they are always performing with a lot of risk. We need to cultivate safe spaces.”
...
So a shooting on the other side of the country becomes a reason for an arts facility in Los Angeles ... .
The trouble with identity politics is that everyone can invoke an identity. As the article goes on to report, not even all the artists in the area buy the idea that a "safe space" should be obtained in a conventional arts gallery way that displaces people.
Yet as community talks continue over weeks and months, as positions are clarified and guidelines drafted, the threat of displacement is not diminished, as development projects move forward and the arts district receives attention and accolades from the New York Times and art world insiders. “We are still waiting to see an example of where an arts district didn’t displace a community. The designation of an arts district is a tool of development. We don’t have time for artists to figure out how they feel,” says Rhine. [emphasis added]
Despite the community dialogues, Delmira Gonzalez sees little potential for co-existence between art galleries and the longstanding community. “We have 7,000 people here that need housing. And on top of everything, our bridge gets knocked down and we have a homelessness problem. Why do we need to accept them? Why do we need to have compassion for them? The answer is ‘no.’ The answer is 'get out.’”
...
Ultra-Red describes this action as “The art of resistance,” a practice that, like traditional and institutional art, has its own set of aesthetic and operational frameworks. One unique characteristic of this anti-gentrification movement in Boyle Heights, as well as in other parts of the city, is the strong involvement of institutionally-trained artists, graduates of prominent art schools who are equipped to use the language of arts but are pushing towards radical practice that breaks down institutional arts, especially as they are tied to a capitalist market.
According to Rhine, the pressure that artists are experiencing from community groups and other artists that support anti-gentrification movements clarifies their role in gentrification. “In trying to establish a fine arts space within the professional sector, it’s next to impossible to start or maintain that space without direct complicity in speculative development. It’s impossible to escape complicity,” Rhine says. [emphasis added]
Furthermore, this mounting pressure points to what Rhine and other activist artists believe will be the necessary future of art. “So if an artist is challenged by the communities facing displacement to act in solidarity, then the artist has increasingly no choice but to be complicit fully or to invent a different kind of art. It means changing what art is and it’s not going to be what we learned in school or see in galleries or what is celebrated in art history. It is going to be a new art that is not necessarily going to be recognized as art.” ...
So at least some artists in the area call BS on the idea that the "safe space" is worth the displacement of poor people who have been in the neighborhood for years before the gallery was begun.
The proposal that artists need to think of ways of being artists that isn't dependent on late capitalist infrastructures could be met with another proposal, that the very idea of being a vocational artist should be up for question. Sousa's warning about the emergence of the recorded music industry was that it would exacerbate and mutate musical cultures into an intransigent caste system in which there were vocational producers and buying consumers, attained at the cost of the amateur culture that really made a musical culture what it is from region to region. In such a context the people most likely to formulate a potential change in the local arts scene wouldn't be the school-trained vocational artists but the amateurs. If vocational artists can't appreciate the possibility, let alone the reality, that what's in their material best interests might not actually beneficial for working class, low-income people in their community, then the paradox of such an artist, if a leftist (as opposed to a Randroid) would be inadvertently being a part of the ruling class while embracing a self-deluding ideological stance that lets the artist speak of himself or herself as if it were otherwise. Because, let's face it, if you could afford to go to school in the arts, odds are moderately decent you're part of the ruling class by socioeconomic origin whether you want to admit this or not.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
links for the weekend on art galleries protested, museums as emblems of imperialism, churches with bad and very bad men in the news,
art galleries are moving out of Boyle Heights. This has been an intermittently burbling news story over the last few years as anti-gentrification groups have targeted art galleries and art collectives in their campaign against what they regard as a harmful influx of real estate development and gentrification in a neighborhood.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-gentrification-protests-future-of-boyle-heights-20180808-story.html
If you've followed this story over the last few years one of the subplots, so to speak, is that art galleries and artist groups that have had LGBTQ interests have tried to set up venues but the anti-gentrification side is, for want of a better way to put this, not buying it. Gentrification that wraps itself in the rainbow banner is still gentrification.
Not everyone is convinced the museum paradigm itself is viable or fair these days.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/17/museums-copies-stephenson-rocket-lewis-chessmen-art-tate-v-and-a
'I.e. nothing expresses the colonialist mentality of the Western powers like a museum in which the artifacts of the empires they plundered and conquered get shipped to a place where they can be severed from their social or cultic contexts and regarded as, whether visitors realize it or not, trophies of imperial success.
But then I'm reminded of something the Native American author Sherman Alexie once wrote and said about Native American as distinct from American Indian, that the term reflected a kind of self-pitying self-exonerating white guilt that makes little difference to Indians. If you can identify them by tribe, do so, and if not, call them Indians but "Native American" seems more about whites feeling better about themselves in the now than about being of much help to actual American Indians.
Of course Sherman Alexie's future as a publicly recognized writer is a bit in flux this year. Men who have positioned themselves as better than the men they were around sometimes turn out to be worse than self-advertised to be. That ... might as well be a transition into the news about Willow Creek.
A whole lot of people at Willow Creek Church stepped down/are stepping down.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-willow-creek-elders-step-down-20180807-story.html
in other church related stuff, formerly Catholic-now-Orthodox Rod Dreher has been blogging a lot about the graft and deception and abuse that he has said spurred him to abandon Catholicism.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/banality-of-catholic-bishop-evil/
he links to a 1,356 page grand jury which ... you may or may not wish to read.
Being a Protestant I admit to not having an immediate stake in how things play out but it does trouble me that a bureaucracy looks to have dedicated itself to its own preservation over against the welfare of people used and abused from within the powers available in the bureaucracy.
Now it's not that any team, religious or secular, Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox, liberal or conservative necessarily has any advantage merely by dint of ideological stance but that's not really what the take-away seems to be. The take-away is that the machinery becomes self-perpetuating and to get all Fritz Lang's Metropolis about it, Molech's gears consume humans and it just keeps going and people keep the machine going.
As the Russiagate story continues there's occasionally an author who asks point blank if today's Russiagate might correspond to the dawn-of-the-century WMD search.
But let's say it all gets proven. What is the US supposed to do? We're not at war with Russia but are people pursuing the case that Russia colluded with Trump against the Clinton campaign think that we should be? To use the word "treason" in the way people have used it about Trump is "just" similar enough to the way Republican and conservative pundits brandished the word against anyone who was not on board with the War on Terror or Gulf War 2 that it seems ... like a bad idea.
As Friedersdorf put it recently, the media gatekeepers that made Trump a star may have regrets about him now but they were the ones who gave him the celebrity he was able to wield to get elected:
While there may be meat to Russiagate the turnabout aspect of regarding Trump himself as beholden to foreign usurpers may seem a bit too ... consistent with a pattern I've felt like I've been seeing over the last twenty-five years--the government isn't legitimate unless the elected president was wanted in the job by the people who are saying "not my president", whether blue or red. Native Americans have discovered that it doesn't matter how much you say "not my president" or "not my Congress" or "not my Supreme Court", they have the power to decide a bunch of things that you can petition or appeal but that may not change for, oh, roughly a century. The American Indian Probate Reform Act of 2004 comes to mind ... . Not that people shouldn't complain when they feel it's necessary. I have never bought the idea that if you didn't vote you don't have the right to complain. Your right to complain about the political process doesn't come from whether or not you have the franchise already and also make use of it.. Your right to complain has something to do with the First Amendment.
Friedersdorf larger point is that the gatekeepers failed. As quoted above gatekeepers in media decided (or, if we insist on a passive formation, allowed) someone like Trump to become a celebrity promulgating tendentious claims about a few things.
In terms of theories of the press this is the libertarian theory of the press writ large. Even before I'd read anything by Daniel Kahneman on cognitive biases I was skeptical about the libertarian theory of the press in practice, back twenty odd years ago before the internet became what it has become. The probability of McCarthy-style Red Scares has probably increased astronomically rather than declined. We're grappling with what seem to be the capacity of media to catalyze paranoia across the spectrum but what we don't seem able to come to terms with is how this can look within any given realm of the spectrum. The right can have its conspiracy theorists and progressives can be concerned about the Family or the Kochs. There may be something to those worries even if those fears may be in some way out of proportion to the world itself.
Trump wouldn't be the first president who's thought of as the lap dog for foreign usurpers. That was said plentifully about Obama.
I have written in the past about how Trump seems to embody the vices of the Hollywood that let him become a star. It's not that I like Trump at all, it's that it has seemed as though when Hollywood has lamented that a TV fixture has become president that the figure was a Trump and not a Jon Stewart or a Trevor Noah or maybe a Rachel Maddow.
In order for someone's star on the Hollywood walk of fame to get defaced it has to be there to begin with. Since you have to pay 40k to get the star you want there ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/trump-walk-of-fame-star-vandalized/566087/
It can seem as though with the post-Weinstein reports of how Hollywood has worked in the last thirty years (or always) the trouble with the outrage expressed about Trump isn't that he has said and done bad things, it's that he was not the kind of celebrity who was "supposed" to win high office.
That we're facing a renascent multi-polar world in geopolitical power seems like a necessary and obvious realization to make. The United States "may" have faced a threat in the form of Russian hacking attempts but given the way fundraising and "dark money" have worked in purely intra-national politics (if that's even possible now) how sure are we that the Russia in the Russiagate is necessarily the biggest or final concern?
Even if we're rid of Trump we're not getting a Clinton presidency now or in the future. The tunnel vision I sense from those that just want us to be rid of Trump is that we may not be thinking through the implications of proving a case that Russia hacked a United States election. The very idea of why they might want to do so from a perspective other than a ... well ... Russiaphobic one doesn't seem to be on the table. I thought that when the Berlin Wall came down decades ago we could finally live lives in which it was taken for granted the Cold War was actually over. The Russiagate headlines and opinions make it seem as though that thought was either optimistic or that perhaps there is a sense in which the Russian story is the WMD of our time, a story that is firmly believed the evidence for which doesn't seem to be quite as conclusive as people who are not already bought in might find entirely convincing. I remember Powell's about face on the probability of WMDs years ago and while I'm not sure all of the present stuff means we'll end up in a war with Russia it's hard to think of what else people can expect Congress to do if the collusion stuff were to be proven to have occurred.
Which I guess is my way of saying that the people who want Russiagate to blow the id off of Trump's presidency don't come off as though they're thinking about this in the wake of us/U.S. not finding a ton of WMDs, in the wake of the War on Terror, in the wake of all sorts of things that have seemed like bad policy moves.
It makes sense that people would regard it as terrible if someone at Trump's level suggests that Chinese students could be or probably are spies.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/08/09/politico-reports-trump-called-most-chinese-students-us-spies
It's not that higher education couldn't be a ripe recruiting ground for spies within the U.S. just from an intra-national standpoint, it would make sense that other nations would have an interest in students as spies. But it feels strange that worrying about Russians can coexist with a sense of outrage that Chinese people could be regarded as national security threats. It's personally unnerving since I've had friends of Chinese and eastern European lineage for decades and I wouldn't stop to think any of them are spies. But the Russian hacking headlines can sometimes leave me with a feeling that it's "okay" for some people to dread Russia or joke that we should start learning Russian on the one hand, while lamenting Trump's tweets and speech about people of color. Is there just some special handbook of what types of paranoia are legitimate and what kinds aren't?
The idea that the United States could actually do well in a full on conventional war seems ... dubious. We've had an all volunteer force for so long and relied so heavily on sheer technological advantages that people could ignore that that kind of hubris was part of how things went badly in Vietnam. To give just a for instance, some absurdly optimistic engineers and forecasters got this idea that missiles would render guns an obsolete technology and so why bother installing guns on fighters? Then in actual combat it transpired that missiles are long range assets and short range liabilities, as in the short range where an enemy plane can open fire on your plane and you've got nothing comparable to return fire.
How sure are we as a nation we haven't reached a comparable moment of folly in terms of technology? Just because we've spent the last few decades doing point to point incursions doesn't mean we're prepared for an actual traditional war kind of war.
Nor should we operate under the assumption that Republicans are the only hawks. If we look at the last century the Democrats have a remarkable track record of executives getting us into the hottest possible shooting wars or escalating our military interventions abroad for more or less ideological reasons. Surely people remember that Christopher Hitchens, was it, loathed JFK as a hawk? One of my siblings joked that Republicans are the ones who take up not-declaration-of-war military adventures but that if you want a real bona fide declared war Democrats are the winners every time in the last century.
In perhaps the same way that Republicans pretend to be about small government the Democrats pretend they are the peaceable party.
Theoretically nobody wants a hot war, not when nuclear weapons are still in play, not when biological weapons are still an option. But there's only so many things you can say before a face-losing gambit has to be taken up or face is lost. We may well have already lost enough face with Trump being in the executive branch that there's no turning back the clock on that issue.
Turning back to the academy (not that one) I'm remembering a friend who shared that she was looking into grad school in music and visited NYU. She rejected that program for a few reasons, if memory serves, but the most memorable one was that she heard some of the faculty say what she regarded as inexcusably racist remarks about Asian and Asian American musicians. Now this was a friend I made at Mars Hill, so it might be pertinent to mention that in light of the way people tend to think of Mars Hill as having been chiefly a white church as though that also meant white nationalist. There were not a ton of people of color there but the PNW is pretty white and has a lot of white supremacism in its legacy regardless of the ostensibly blue electorate. The older I get the more I find it exasperating that white progressives and conservatives keep trying to scapegoat each other for a shared legacy of racism but I'll get back to the NYU point, the friend wasn't exactly a liberal sort but she regarded the offhand comments she heard from people at NYU as inexcusably racist. I forgot about those concerns but it seems NYU got in the news within the education scene.
So, on the matter of NYU.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/New-Disclosures-About-an-NYU/244278
https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-a-Letter-Defending-Avital/243650
https://www.chronicle.com/article/NYU-Scholar-Accused-of/244308
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/why-do-academics-defend-colleagues-accused-of-harassment/567553/
Whether it's Hollywood or higher education it's possible to maybe grade them on a curve compared to what the Catholic Church has hidden but it's seeming like the institutions are smelling really bad across the board, like there's some kind of rot everywhere but it only stinks to those who lean over to smell what seems stinkier in someone else's backyard. Not that we have to grade on a curve, exactly.
It would be hard to ignore altogether how the university systems we have in the West are indebted institutionally and intellectually to ... medieval Catholicism. It might be tough for academics in the West to regard themselves as part of an alternative to whatever they regard as abusive in Catholic hierarchical governance if a comparable root and branch issue in connection to power can exist within a liberal arts college.
Having not so long ago read a piece by Lisa Ruddick about what she regarded as a troubling tendency within academia to lionize or celebrate modes of sexuality that stick to capitalism even though they could be construed as impersonal and exploitive ...
https://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool
...
To elaborate, our profession often speaks affirmatively of sex when it either “shatters” a person or violates social norms.[6] Any one lover could presumably be traded for another, so long as the requisite effects occurred. What is discounted is the idea of valuing a lover for the one being he or she is, with the inner richness and consistency that could make for an “integral” relationship. And while I have focused on the academic devaluation of love, I could as easily have considered the ways in which current criticism discourages readers from experiencing poems as integral objects, the ways in which it occludes the author’s mind as a potential integral object, and the ways in which it discounts the invaluable human capacity to experience life itself as an integral object.[7]
The greedy institution has a stake, altogether, in impoverishing its members’ object worlds. It promotes a hollowness, which can then be compensated with the satisfactions of status and affiliation within the group. Perhaps this is a tendency of all professional life. But when, as has happened in English, the soul-sapping quality of professional collectives finds an alibi in the anti-individualist ideology of left postmodernism, we have the conditions for quite a bit of mystification and malaise.
Finally, a small subset of work in ELH glamorizes cruelty in the name of radical politics, though this motif abates after 2006, perhaps because of a change in editorial leadership. The piece I find most troubling is an article on a short story by Henry James. This article proposes that if one faces a choice between having sex with children and protecting them, “perhaps one should let oneself desire the child, and—relinquishing the gratifications of protection—let the child die.” Sexually precocious children should “perhaps” be allowed a death of “innocence” that will supplant the pleasures of childhood with “other pleasures” delivered by adult lovers. James’s short story supposedly conveys this moral. But the lesson is said to apply in real life as well, wherever adults might be tempted to issue “calls for the protection of children.” The story is said to reveal “the dire results of protecting children from desire”—anywhere. For today’s anti-pedophile perpetrates the “potential violence” of “speaking on [children’s] behalf.”
There is a place in academe for scholarship that responsibly weighs the benefits and costs to children of sex with adults. But the present piece offers no empirical findings. Instead, it manipulates postmodern commonplaces to argue that people who try to shield children from “the depredations of influence and seduction” are imputing to children boundaries that they do not have. Children cannot be “corrupted” sexually because no child has a core of selfhood that has not already been thoroughly penetrated or “influenced” by society and language. We are asked to acknowledge “selves’ constitutive corruption.” For the mere phenomenon of influence is apparently so destabilizing that it “throws into question the attribution—particularly to oneself—of substantive depths, of ‘inner’ selves or meaning behind appearances.” A haze of familiar antihumanist abstractions thus eases in the practical conclusion as to the pointlessness of trying to protect children’s “‘inner’ selves” from violation.
...
At least some academics have expressed worry that there's a subset of academia that celebrates sexuality that can be construed as anti-capitalist that ordinary people on the street might regard as exploitive and evil. It doesn't seem out of place to remember someone once wrote "there is none that is righteous, not even one." But that force of that observation isn't in what's said in the quote, it's the observation that nobody seems to even want to become better. The prophetic condemnation wasn't some "nobody's perfect" bromide but a condemnation of the listlessness and self-satisfaction of exploitive and decadent people who were assured that, well, why would disaster befall them?
John Halle had a bit of blogging commentary on something to keep in mind, now would not be the time for people in the liberal arts to imagine that sexual harassment is less common in the liberal arts than it is in STEM. There's at least some studies that indicate that in spite of a liberal arts wing that believes the hard sciences are the domain of patriarchal harassment, it's the liberal arts and humanities where there seems to be the most reported sexual harassment and misconduct.
https://johnhalle.com/outragesandinterludes/who-are-the-abusers/
the liberal arts may have inherited a kind of unexamined clericalism it can't recognize in itself even though it could easily recognize the same vice in a more formally and traditionally clerical culture.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-gentrification-protests-future-of-boyle-heights-20180808-story.html
If you've followed this story over the last few years one of the subplots, so to speak, is that art galleries and artist groups that have had LGBTQ interests have tried to set up venues but the anti-gentrification side is, for want of a better way to put this, not buying it. Gentrification that wraps itself in the rainbow banner is still gentrification.
Not everyone is convinced the museum paradigm itself is viable or fair these days.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/17/museums-copies-stephenson-rocket-lewis-chessmen-art-tate-v-and-a
'I.e. nothing expresses the colonialist mentality of the Western powers like a museum in which the artifacts of the empires they plundered and conquered get shipped to a place where they can be severed from their social or cultic contexts and regarded as, whether visitors realize it or not, trophies of imperial success.
But then I'm reminded of something the Native American author Sherman Alexie once wrote and said about Native American as distinct from American Indian, that the term reflected a kind of self-pitying self-exonerating white guilt that makes little difference to Indians. If you can identify them by tribe, do so, and if not, call them Indians but "Native American" seems more about whites feeling better about themselves in the now than about being of much help to actual American Indians.
Of course Sherman Alexie's future as a publicly recognized writer is a bit in flux this year. Men who have positioned themselves as better than the men they were around sometimes turn out to be worse than self-advertised to be. That ... might as well be a transition into the news about Willow Creek.
A whole lot of people at Willow Creek Church stepped down/are stepping down.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-willow-creek-elders-step-down-20180807-story.html
in other church related stuff, formerly Catholic-now-Orthodox Rod Dreher has been blogging a lot about the graft and deception and abuse that he has said spurred him to abandon Catholicism.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/banality-of-catholic-bishop-evil/
he links to a 1,356 page grand jury which ... you may or may not wish to read.
Being a Protestant I admit to not having an immediate stake in how things play out but it does trouble me that a bureaucracy looks to have dedicated itself to its own preservation over against the welfare of people used and abused from within the powers available in the bureaucracy.
Now it's not that any team, religious or secular, Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox, liberal or conservative necessarily has any advantage merely by dint of ideological stance but that's not really what the take-away seems to be. The take-away is that the machinery becomes self-perpetuating and to get all Fritz Lang's Metropolis about it, Molech's gears consume humans and it just keeps going and people keep the machine going.
As the Russiagate story continues there's occasionally an author who asks point blank if today's Russiagate might correspond to the dawn-of-the-century WMD search.
What I find disconcerting about the Russiagate situation is that assuming a collusion or a hack can be established and all the dots can be connected what, exactly, is the United States supposed to do? We're not technically in a declared war with Russia so it's hard to see how "treason" fits. That leaders are in the pocket of corporate international and multinational interests doesn't even seem controversial if you just write the sentence out without attaching personal names. It may be troubling that we could turn out to have a POTUS whose receipts of purchase could turn out to be more publicly established than usual but I guess I've gotten middle-aged enough to have a jaded and grim sense that power seems to be bought and if the scandal is that we actually find out a few names of who bought who the scandal might just be that it became a matter for record.
The question that nags me is whether there's anyone who "isn't" bought off in such a way.
The likelihood of impeachment seems remote. It's not that it's impossible. I can imagine it, it's that if the worry is that Russia has jeapordized the integrity of the electoral system then regarding Trump as a traitor or a bought-off president doesn't seem all that new. I've had conservative relatives and friends claim something like the idea of a president bought off by foreign interests about Obama. It's not that the charge isn't serious, it's that it's so readily made for partisan reasons it's a bit hard to feel ike this isn't a replay of what Republicans did with Clinton twenty years ago, in the sense of the political theater of it.
As Friedersdorf put it recently, the media gatekeepers that made Trump a star may have regrets about him now but they were the ones who gave him the celebrity he was able to wield to get elected:
...
Starting in 2004, the NBC television network and the producer Mark Burnett worked to make Trump a primetime reality-TV star, casting him as an accomplished real-estate mogul making decisions behind a boardroom table, using all the artifice of their industry to make him look good. The image they cultivated for Trump on that show was arguably the most powerful factor in shaping the perceptions of his supporters.
As early as President Obama’s first term, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News was boosting the racist conspiracy theory that Obama was a foreign-born usurper—and the notion that Trump, the nation’s leading Birther, was a credible candidate for president. “During one of Trump's frequent appearances on Fox & Friends, the network started teasing the idea of Trump in the Oval Office,” Media Matters noted. “While asking him for his opinions on Libya policy, on-screen text asked, ‘What Would President Trump Do?’”...
Gatekeepers created President Trump. It is not clear whether he would’ve won the presidency or not in a marketplace of ideas less heavily influenced by the choices of elites at NBC, CNN, and Fox News, not to mention Breitbart and political talk-radio hosts who abuse gatekeeping on their shows to keep their audiences in information bubbles.
...
While there may be meat to Russiagate the turnabout aspect of regarding Trump himself as beholden to foreign usurpers may seem a bit too ... consistent with a pattern I've felt like I've been seeing over the last twenty-five years--the government isn't legitimate unless the elected president was wanted in the job by the people who are saying "not my president", whether blue or red. Native Americans have discovered that it doesn't matter how much you say "not my president" or "not my Congress" or "not my Supreme Court", they have the power to decide a bunch of things that you can petition or appeal but that may not change for, oh, roughly a century. The American Indian Probate Reform Act of 2004 comes to mind ... . Not that people shouldn't complain when they feel it's necessary. I have never bought the idea that if you didn't vote you don't have the right to complain. Your right to complain about the political process doesn't come from whether or not you have the franchise already and also make use of it.. Your right to complain has something to do with the First Amendment.
Friedersdorf larger point is that the gatekeepers failed. As quoted above gatekeepers in media decided (or, if we insist on a passive formation, allowed) someone like Trump to become a celebrity promulgating tendentious claims about a few things.
The consistently thought-provoking Damon Linker posits in his latest column that Western culture’s dominant view of technology rests on a lie: “the notion that the world would be a better place without gatekeepers.”
Conventional wisdom holds that “if only the most powerful information-dissemination technologies ever devised were left open to all—unregulated, uncontrolled, ungoverned by authorities who make decisions about what's acceptable and what isn't—the world would be a much more free and thriving place, the thinking goes,” he writes. “But for this to be true, human beings (individually but perhaps especially collectively) would need to be far more capable of exercising wise judgment.”
In fact, he argues, we need gatekeepers:
That can be difficult for individualistic, egalitarian citizens of liberal democracies to accept. We have long been taught to revere the marketplace of ideas. Let a million ideas bloom, and through competition with each other, the best will thrive and spread while the worst die out under scrutiny. But this is not what happens in our shared digital lives.
In terms of theories of the press this is the libertarian theory of the press writ large. Even before I'd read anything by Daniel Kahneman on cognitive biases I was skeptical about the libertarian theory of the press in practice, back twenty odd years ago before the internet became what it has become. The probability of McCarthy-style Red Scares has probably increased astronomically rather than declined. We're grappling with what seem to be the capacity of media to catalyze paranoia across the spectrum but what we don't seem able to come to terms with is how this can look within any given realm of the spectrum. The right can have its conspiracy theorists and progressives can be concerned about the Family or the Kochs. There may be something to those worries even if those fears may be in some way out of proportion to the world itself.
Trump wouldn't be the first president who's thought of as the lap dog for foreign usurpers. That was said plentifully about Obama.
I have written in the past about how Trump seems to embody the vices of the Hollywood that let him become a star. It's not that I like Trump at all, it's that it has seemed as though when Hollywood has lamented that a TV fixture has become president that the figure was a Trump and not a Jon Stewart or a Trevor Noah or maybe a Rachel Maddow.
In order for someone's star on the Hollywood walk of fame to get defaced it has to be there to begin with. Since you have to pay 40k to get the star you want there ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/trump-walk-of-fame-star-vandalized/566087/
It can seem as though with the post-Weinstein reports of how Hollywood has worked in the last thirty years (or always) the trouble with the outrage expressed about Trump isn't that he has said and done bad things, it's that he was not the kind of celebrity who was "supposed" to win high office.
That we're facing a renascent multi-polar world in geopolitical power seems like a necessary and obvious realization to make. The United States "may" have faced a threat in the form of Russian hacking attempts but given the way fundraising and "dark money" have worked in purely intra-national politics (if that's even possible now) how sure are we that the Russia in the Russiagate is necessarily the biggest or final concern?
Even if we're rid of Trump we're not getting a Clinton presidency now or in the future. The tunnel vision I sense from those that just want us to be rid of Trump is that we may not be thinking through the implications of proving a case that Russia hacked a United States election. The very idea of why they might want to do so from a perspective other than a ... well ... Russiaphobic one doesn't seem to be on the table. I thought that when the Berlin Wall came down decades ago we could finally live lives in which it was taken for granted the Cold War was actually over. The Russiagate headlines and opinions make it seem as though that thought was either optimistic or that perhaps there is a sense in which the Russian story is the WMD of our time, a story that is firmly believed the evidence for which doesn't seem to be quite as conclusive as people who are not already bought in might find entirely convincing. I remember Powell's about face on the probability of WMDs years ago and while I'm not sure all of the present stuff means we'll end up in a war with Russia it's hard to think of what else people can expect Congress to do if the collusion stuff were to be proven to have occurred.
Which I guess is my way of saying that the people who want Russiagate to blow the id off of Trump's presidency don't come off as though they're thinking about this in the wake of us/U.S. not finding a ton of WMDs, in the wake of the War on Terror, in the wake of all sorts of things that have seemed like bad policy moves.
It makes sense that people would regard it as terrible if someone at Trump's level suggests that Chinese students could be or probably are spies.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/08/09/politico-reports-trump-called-most-chinese-students-us-spies
It's not that higher education couldn't be a ripe recruiting ground for spies within the U.S. just from an intra-national standpoint, it would make sense that other nations would have an interest in students as spies. But it feels strange that worrying about Russians can coexist with a sense of outrage that Chinese people could be regarded as national security threats. It's personally unnerving since I've had friends of Chinese and eastern European lineage for decades and I wouldn't stop to think any of them are spies. But the Russian hacking headlines can sometimes leave me with a feeling that it's "okay" for some people to dread Russia or joke that we should start learning Russian on the one hand, while lamenting Trump's tweets and speech about people of color. Is there just some special handbook of what types of paranoia are legitimate and what kinds aren't?
The idea that the United States could actually do well in a full on conventional war seems ... dubious. We've had an all volunteer force for so long and relied so heavily on sheer technological advantages that people could ignore that that kind of hubris was part of how things went badly in Vietnam. To give just a for instance, some absurdly optimistic engineers and forecasters got this idea that missiles would render guns an obsolete technology and so why bother installing guns on fighters? Then in actual combat it transpired that missiles are long range assets and short range liabilities, as in the short range where an enemy plane can open fire on your plane and you've got nothing comparable to return fire.
How sure are we as a nation we haven't reached a comparable moment of folly in terms of technology? Just because we've spent the last few decades doing point to point incursions doesn't mean we're prepared for an actual traditional war kind of war.
Nor should we operate under the assumption that Republicans are the only hawks. If we look at the last century the Democrats have a remarkable track record of executives getting us into the hottest possible shooting wars or escalating our military interventions abroad for more or less ideological reasons. Surely people remember that Christopher Hitchens, was it, loathed JFK as a hawk? One of my siblings joked that Republicans are the ones who take up not-declaration-of-war military adventures but that if you want a real bona fide declared war Democrats are the winners every time in the last century.
In perhaps the same way that Republicans pretend to be about small government the Democrats pretend they are the peaceable party.
Theoretically nobody wants a hot war, not when nuclear weapons are still in play, not when biological weapons are still an option. But there's only so many things you can say before a face-losing gambit has to be taken up or face is lost. We may well have already lost enough face with Trump being in the executive branch that there's no turning back the clock on that issue.
Turning back to the academy (not that one) I'm remembering a friend who shared that she was looking into grad school in music and visited NYU. She rejected that program for a few reasons, if memory serves, but the most memorable one was that she heard some of the faculty say what she regarded as inexcusably racist remarks about Asian and Asian American musicians. Now this was a friend I made at Mars Hill, so it might be pertinent to mention that in light of the way people tend to think of Mars Hill as having been chiefly a white church as though that also meant white nationalist. There were not a ton of people of color there but the PNW is pretty white and has a lot of white supremacism in its legacy regardless of the ostensibly blue electorate. The older I get the more I find it exasperating that white progressives and conservatives keep trying to scapegoat each other for a shared legacy of racism but I'll get back to the NYU point, the friend wasn't exactly a liberal sort but she regarded the offhand comments she heard from people at NYU as inexcusably racist. I forgot about those concerns but it seems NYU got in the news within the education scene.
So, on the matter of NYU.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/New-Disclosures-About-an-NYU/244278
https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-a-Letter-Defending-Avital/243650
https://www.chronicle.com/article/NYU-Scholar-Accused-of/244308
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/why-do-academics-defend-colleagues-accused-of-harassment/567553/
Whether it's Hollywood or higher education it's possible to maybe grade them on a curve compared to what the Catholic Church has hidden but it's seeming like the institutions are smelling really bad across the board, like there's some kind of rot everywhere but it only stinks to those who lean over to smell what seems stinkier in someone else's backyard. Not that we have to grade on a curve, exactly.
It would be hard to ignore altogether how the university systems we have in the West are indebted institutionally and intellectually to ... medieval Catholicism. It might be tough for academics in the West to regard themselves as part of an alternative to whatever they regard as abusive in Catholic hierarchical governance if a comparable root and branch issue in connection to power can exist within a liberal arts college.
Having not so long ago read a piece by Lisa Ruddick about what she regarded as a troubling tendency within academia to lionize or celebrate modes of sexuality that stick to capitalism even though they could be construed as impersonal and exploitive ...
https://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool
...
To elaborate, our profession often speaks affirmatively of sex when it either “shatters” a person or violates social norms.[6] Any one lover could presumably be traded for another, so long as the requisite effects occurred. What is discounted is the idea of valuing a lover for the one being he or she is, with the inner richness and consistency that could make for an “integral” relationship. And while I have focused on the academic devaluation of love, I could as easily have considered the ways in which current criticism discourages readers from experiencing poems as integral objects, the ways in which it occludes the author’s mind as a potential integral object, and the ways in which it discounts the invaluable human capacity to experience life itself as an integral object.[7]
The greedy institution has a stake, altogether, in impoverishing its members’ object worlds. It promotes a hollowness, which can then be compensated with the satisfactions of status and affiliation within the group. Perhaps this is a tendency of all professional life. But when, as has happened in English, the soul-sapping quality of professional collectives finds an alibi in the anti-individualist ideology of left postmodernism, we have the conditions for quite a bit of mystification and malaise.
There is a place in academe for scholarship that responsibly weighs the benefits and costs to children of sex with adults. But the present piece offers no empirical findings. Instead, it manipulates postmodern commonplaces to argue that people who try to shield children from “the depredations of influence and seduction” are imputing to children boundaries that they do not have. Children cannot be “corrupted” sexually because no child has a core of selfhood that has not already been thoroughly penetrated or “influenced” by society and language. We are asked to acknowledge “selves’ constitutive corruption.” For the mere phenomenon of influence is apparently so destabilizing that it “throws into question the attribution—particularly to oneself—of substantive depths, of ‘inner’ selves or meaning behind appearances.” A haze of familiar antihumanist abstractions thus eases in the practical conclusion as to the pointlessness of trying to protect children’s “‘inner’ selves” from violation.
...
At least some academics have expressed worry that there's a subset of academia that celebrates sexuality that can be construed as anti-capitalist that ordinary people on the street might regard as exploitive and evil. It doesn't seem out of place to remember someone once wrote "there is none that is righteous, not even one." But that force of that observation isn't in what's said in the quote, it's the observation that nobody seems to even want to become better. The prophetic condemnation wasn't some "nobody's perfect" bromide but a condemnation of the listlessness and self-satisfaction of exploitive and decadent people who were assured that, well, why would disaster befall them?
John Halle had a bit of blogging commentary on something to keep in mind, now would not be the time for people in the liberal arts to imagine that sexual harassment is less common in the liberal arts than it is in STEM. There's at least some studies that indicate that in spite of a liberal arts wing that believes the hard sciences are the domain of patriarchal harassment, it's the liberal arts and humanities where there seems to be the most reported sexual harassment and misconduct.
https://johnhalle.com/outragesandinterludes/who-are-the-abusers/
the liberal arts may have inherited a kind of unexamined clericalism it can't recognize in itself even though it could easily recognize the same vice in a more formally and traditionally clerical culture.
Saturday, February 04, 2023
HT The Music Salon: Don Baton on overselling Florence Price--a set of arguments paradoxically and predictably weakened by lack of engagement with non-classical cultures
Bryan Townsend noted that Don Baton claimed over at City Journal taste in American classical music is a signaling cascade and that Alex Ross is upstream of everyone else, but that New York can be like Toronto, a city that is prized as the heart of cultural influence in the country. Whether or not it's actually the case, however, is debatable. After all, the death of New York has been a theme here and there. To pick just one example ...
New York's slow death as an arts scene due to gentrification is a journalistic trope, and yet at the same time art-washing is also a journalistic trope and also not without cause. Since Hyperallergic was so vigilant about defining and deploying the concept of artwashing in coverage of Boyle Heights I'll include a few links for your perusal.
Now why would I lead with all that before getting to Don Baton's case that we all need to move on from Alex Ross? Well, because if we're going to try to talk about Alex Ross and the influence of arts writers at The New Yorker it doesn't hurt to introduce caveats to the whole project by asking how firm the foundation is for the rest of the world (and even the rest of the United States) caring about what taste-makers in New York are saying. I hated Nirvana when they first became popular and I still hate the band. Most of the Seattle grunge era sound aggravates me. I grant an exemption to Soundgarden but that's about it. Even a Seattleite can note like the Seattle sounds, and by extension, just because Alex Ross says X doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit. That is, of course, what Don Baton has argued ...
Saturday, December 09, 2017
Richard Florida at CityLab on America's leading art hub cities, New York has fallen and Los Angeles is on top
https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/12/americas-leading-art-hubs/547769/
Richard Florida claims that in terms of sheer number of jobs the leader in arts jobs in the United States is Los Angeles, followed by San Francisco, followed by Portland/Vancouver in Oregon, THEN New York.
If the metric were changed to self-employed artists the leader turns out to be Nashville. Hardly a surprise there, but then I'm a musician so I'll admit to not being the least bit surprised to read that the highest level of self-employed artists would be in Nashville.
...
While New York galleries will be well represented at Art Basel Miami Beach, the metro is no longer the nation’s leading center for art and artists.
That honor goes to Los Angeles, which tops the list on our combined measure of employed and self-employed artists. Los Angeles not only has a larger concentration of artists than New York City based on its LQ, it has a larger number of absolute artists, even though New York City has a much larger general population. Indeed, it’s been shown that a significant number of artists are moving from the New York City to the Los Angeles metro.
A number of leading tech and knowledge hubs number among the top 10 as well. San Francisco is the second on the list, and Portland third, with New York trailing in fourth place. Bridgeport-Stamford is fifth and Seattle, Nashville, Austin, San Jose, and San Diego round out the top 10.
This seems like a newsflash because while there's a lot of interesting arts stuff in the Seattle area I've hardly had the budget to feel like I could afford to go to most of the events. :(
In fact I've been wondering for years whether or not contemporary American arts talk hasn't been missing out on the possibility that arts scenes have an unwitting role in making life more expensive for non-artists, indirect though the effects often are.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/affordable-housing-for-white-people/483444/
The bohemian artist who does the art thing isn't "just" a white Romantic era trope, since the rapper can certainly fit the mold of the Byronic artist poet seer hero, too. But then there's tax loopholes and stuff.
Earlier this year the debate about gentrification and arts and local community was a steady issue in connection to Boyle Heights.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/02/remember-that-art-space-on-boyle.html
To put it rather starkly, for working class sorts the worst thing that can happen to the neighborhood is a bunch of arty arts artist projects. Twenty odd years ago when I was already sick of hearing grunge bands the grunge bands didn't break out on to the radio because Seattle was necessarily thought of as "the" arts mecca, or was it?
...
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/artists-cant-stop-gentrification-because-theyre-part-problem/312566/
Richard Florida claims that in terms of sheer number of jobs the leader in arts jobs in the United States is Los Angeles, followed by San Francisco, followed by Portland/Vancouver in Oregon, THEN New York.
If the metric were changed to self-employed artists the leader turns out to be Nashville. Hardly a surprise there, but then I'm a musician so I'll admit to not being the least bit surprised to read that the highest level of self-employed artists would be in Nashville.
...
While New York galleries will be well represented at Art Basel Miami Beach, the metro is no longer the nation’s leading center for art and artists.
That honor goes to Los Angeles, which tops the list on our combined measure of employed and self-employed artists. Los Angeles not only has a larger concentration of artists than New York City based on its LQ, it has a larger number of absolute artists, even though New York City has a much larger general population. Indeed, it’s been shown that a significant number of artists are moving from the New York City to the Los Angeles metro.
This seems like a newsflash because while there's a lot of interesting arts stuff in the Seattle area I've hardly had the budget to feel like I could afford to go to most of the events. :(
In fact I've been wondering for years whether or not contemporary American arts talk hasn't been missing out on the possibility that arts scenes have an unwitting role in making life more expensive for non-artists, indirect though the effects often are.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/affordable-housing-for-white-people/483444/
Affordable housing sometimes has a bad reputation: The name often conjures crumbling public towers or far-away pre-fab units built by private developers.
But there’s another kind of affordable housing, built with tax credits and city loans, typified in a place like the A-Mill lofts. Set on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, the A-Mill lofts include a penthouse resident lounge, a fitness center, a yoga studio, free wi-fi, dishwashers, and studios for painting, pottery, dance, and music.
The A-Mill lofts sound like the type of opportunity that most poor families would dream of. But a new report suggests that the lofts are not accessible to most poor families. Though they were built with affordable-housing tax credits and city loans, they’re too expensive for most voucher holders to afford, the report finds. Instead, they go to mostly to white artists, who have incomes below the median for the area but above the average affordable-housing tenant.
This type of majority-white subsidized housing is not unique. According to the report, from the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota, about 6 percent of housing built using low-income tax credits in Minneapolis and St. Paul is built for artists. And those buildings don’t look at all like traditional affordable units. The artist housing is 82.4 percent white, and the average income of tenants is $29,890. Only about 3.3 percent of tenants receive rental assistance. All other housing built with low-income-housing tax credits in those two cities, by contrast, is 19.8 percent white, with an average income of $17,140, and 67 percent of tenants receive rental assistance.
“There’s a dual system of subsidized housing in Minneapolis and perhaps other cities,” Myron Orfield, one of the study’s authors, told me. “There's the traditional form of subsidized housing, heavily concentrated in minority neighborhoods and heavily occupied by poor, non-white voucher holders. And then you have another system of affordable housing— artist housing in white neighborhoods that's predominantly occupied by non-poor, white artists.”
Earlier this year the debate about gentrification and arts and local community was a steady issue in connection to Boyle Heights.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2017/02/remember-that-art-space-on-boyle.html
To put it rather starkly, for working class sorts the worst thing that can happen to the neighborhood is a bunch of arty arts artist projects. Twenty odd years ago when I was already sick of hearing grunge bands the grunge bands didn't break out on to the radio because Seattle was necessarily thought of as "the" arts mecca, or was it?
...
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/artists-cant-stop-gentrification-because-theyre-part-problem/312566/
Today, Vera Haller of The Wall Street Journal brought the nation's attention to the real victims of gentrification: college educated artists being priced out of the rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. Because, as we all know know, the problem with low income, predominantly minority neighborhoods being developed is that, as Haller puts it, "gentrification usually displaces the artists who breathe life into gritty neighborhoods."
Ever since the infamous blackout of 1977, Bushwick has been a largely destitute neighborhood, just waiting for weekend raves and multimedia exhibitions to bring it back to life. Now the raves and exhibits are there, and developers are coming to ruin everything hipsters hold dear, just as was the case in Williamsburg ten years ago.
Haller's piece profiles a group of artists trying to curb the tide of condominiums and rent hikes by pooling their resources and buying their own studio space. She writes:
...
There's nothing wrong with artists looking for cheap places to live. And in some ways, gentrification is good for a neighborhood. There are long-time residents who think it's great. As urbanist Benjamin Grant wrote in a piece for PBS, "Who wouldn't want to see reduced crime, new investment in buildings and infrastructure, and increased economic activity in their neighborhoods?"
Fair enough. The problem is, it is mostly the new arrivals, and people who bought into the community early, who reap the benefits of the change. Buying now is a smart move for artists looking for affordable studio space, but to act as if artists — specifically college-educated young adults — are victims, instead of part of the problem, is dishonest and ignores the people truly harmed as Bushwick becomes ever more synonymous with cool. [emphasis added]
These art hub cities are not exactly cheap places to live and there is no real promise that if you move to one of these art hub cities you'll "make it". Some of the musical associates I know have left the Seattle area to find musical life elsewhere or aren't doing so much in the arts scene lately. That might be because as friends and associates got married and had kids they found it was less and less possible to keep active in the arts scene.
I've written about this before but one of the things I wish had been more a part of my education in college was a discussion of what artists and musicians and writers actually did for a living. Since I'm already ripping on Western art religion this weekend anyway, it would have helped to know that someone like Trollope was a postal worker who wrote on his off hours. It would have been handy to know that Sor, the most significant guitarist composer in the history of the instrument, had military posts that had low-level paper work responsibilities because a royal patron let him have that job so he could compose. Matiegka (who I'm sure you've never heard of unless your the kind of guitarist music fan who knows exactly who Matiegka is) worked as a clerk in a law office. Haydn was, to try to describe his job in modern parlance, a master of ceremonies and music producer for an aristocratic dynasty. These people all had day jobs and/or patrons. Charles Ives was in insurance sales after dropping out of being a church musician. The pattern here is that in the art religion of liberal arts education we don't really get told what these people did to buy food and stay in a house, we're told what they did that revolutionized art or literature or whatever the art is.
What we got sold in liberal arts study is that we, too, can make a living doing this stuff. Paul Hindemith singled that out as the biggest and most toxic delusion perpetuated by American liberal arts education, but worst of all in music.
So the theme for this post is, yep, artists who complain about gentrification need to consider the ways in which their existence as economic agents plays a role in that process.
Saturday, June 23, 2018
a piece at Harpers intones the death of New York City
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/
New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great.
As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring.
This is not some new phenomenon but a cancer that’s been metastasizing on the city for decades now. And what’s happening to New York now—what’s already happened to most of Manhattan, its core—is happening in every affluent American city. San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its remarkable diversity; they swarm in and out of the metropolis in specially chartered buses to work in Silicon Valley, using the city itself as a gigantic bed-and-breakfast. Boston, which used to be a city of a thousand nooks and crannies, back-alley restaurants and shops, dive bars and ice cream parlors hidden under its elevated, is now one long, monotonous wall of modern skyscraper. In Washington, an army of cranes has transformed the city in recent years, smoothing out all that was real and organic into a town of mausoleums for the Trump crowd to revel in.
By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.
...
To playfully put a twist on a phrase penned by the lately departed Tom Wolfe, when the affluent of New York considered the question of how "you don't think the future knows how to cross a bridge?" people with the power to do so zoned the possibility of crossing that bridge out of existence for people without the means to afford to stay, after crossing the bridge.
...
The immediate cause of the increase in poverty doesn’t require much investigation. The landlords are killing the town. Long ago, the idea that “rent is too damn high” in New York was so thoroughly inculcated into the city’s consciousness that it became a one-man political party and a Saturday Night Live sketch. But the rent is too damn high, and getting higher all the time. Whereas the old rule of thumb was that your rent should be one paycheck a month, or about 25 percent of your income, the typical New York household now spends at least one third of its income on rent, and three in ten renter households pay 50 percent or more, according to the latest New York Housing and Vacancy Survey.
And the situation is getting rapidly worse. According to the same survey, the price New York landlords wanted for vacant apartments from 2014 to 2017 increased by 30 percent, while the median household income for all renting families from 2013 to 2016 went up by 10 percent. The burden has fallen hardest on those who can least afford it, according to the real estate database StreetEasy, with rents rising fastest on the lowest wage earners in the city.
...
The rent being too high in cities like New York or Seattle seems like something we should have anticipated over the decades. If anything it would seem like those who openly advocated for the "Urban Archipelago" over against all the red-state voting morons in fly-over country should have seen this coming. No matter how big a city is still a city, cities have limits, and it's nearly axiomatic that the more progressive the city is in its political sympathies the more confining its zoning customs are. Nor can it be said that arts interests correspond well with the interests of regular working people as anyone who has read coverage of the zoning battle in Boyle Heights could recall.
If an American arts scene has a place for a Jeff Koons why should it be a surprise that a city like New York can end up overpriced, gentrified to the point at which it's too expensive for regular people to live in, and in some way a hollow shell of the art scene it may have once been?
But having grown up all my life on the West coast I have not been won over to the art religion of New York as the center of the world. I met an aspiring jazz musician decades ago who matter-of-factly declared that if you could make it in New York you could make it anywhere. I asked, "Why don't you just make it anywhere first and then go to New York if you feel like it?"
All the alleged awareness of "the one percent" at this point seems moot if the upper twenty-percent considers themselves to have not and have never contributed to the situation.
And the rest of us may have, without thinking through the implications, Amazon-delivered our regional culture away.
Now while I've got my objections to the legacy of German idealism and 19th century European art religion I am not so sure that a newer era of intersectionally-informed poptimist culture is necessarily going to be better. I like animation and I enjoy a range of popular music from the 20th century. I'm a classical guitarist but I can appreciate that hip hop has become "the" dominant popular music in terms of raw sales across the nation and change happens. Given the lag between formalized theory and musical practice (with the former dragging behind the latter for maybe a half a generation or so in musical historical terms if we don't count all the 20th century avant garde bids at prescriptive theory from Schoenberg through the total serialists and so on) we may not have a clear or concise range of theories of what takes for a solid hip hop number that can make its way into a music education textbook for another generation. The racial ideological narratives are still too front and center in the realm of educators who want to discuss the music. I'm not saying that part doesn't need to be discussed, it's just that when I consider the messages I heard and read from Civil Rights leaders it seemed like sustaining a purity politics wasn't necessarily foremost in the minds of King and others.
But then the assumption that hip hop can only traffic in misogyny and anarchy and anti-establishment thought seems far too glib, too.
But the purported demise of New York City seems like part of a larger trajectory I've been thinking about in the last few years. The Atlantic-based circle of economic and political power-brokering has a shelf-life and while the rise of Trump is glibly taken as a sign that America is going to be fascist (and it could be, because democracies don't seem to really last that long if we consider the thousands and thousands of years of human history), it could betoken something else. A declining New York could be just another potential indicator that the Atlanticist power dynamic that has governed the world for half a millennium is inching ever closer to some unofficial end of its shelf life. There's no reason to think that people at Silicon Valley are less terrible in terms of the world-shaping influence they have compared to a place like New York, but I'm thinking, too, in terms of cultural-artistic paradigms. If New Yorkers could think of themselves as the artistic-cultural center of the American universe that era can end, especially if fewer and fewer normal people can afford to live there. If a high-end retailing arts district and financial district chain is what New York becomes then the insularly middle-to-highbrow can only go so long without becoming ... what's the phrase? Decadent? Maybe.
Of course I've lived on the West coast my whole life. I saw the Seattle music scene emerge. Meh. I witnessed what I regarded as a renaissance of animation as an art form and that has been fantastic to observe as a lifelong admirer of the art form. Whether we're talking about the first eight years of The Simpsons, South Park over 18 years, Batman: the animated series, the emergence of a mainstream market for Miyazaki's works by way of Disney distribution, the development of Flash-based animation shows ranging in style and content from My Little Pony to Archer, animation has exploded with life.
And ... a lot of the in-between and cel work gets done by studios in South Korea.
I've been thinking in the last few years how we may have already been shifting from an Atlancist to a Pacific nexus of power. If by some chance the Trump administration or whatever "deep state" power brokers sense that that is the change in the tide, then I don't feel a great need to bewail the demise ofa New York city I've never had any incentive to visit.
We seem to have a mythology popular among the liberal arts and journalists that if you just promote the liberal arts human liberty flourishes but there's no real reason to believe that has ever been the case. If anything in geo-political and military terms it seems that the stronger and more stable empire is the context within which liberalization trends can emerge, but the culture-industry types or "culture-makers" keep thinking that the cart really must somehow come before the horse.
When I was still in school I remember hearing and reading that the future of the American economy was in information markets and in service-based economies and that the days of industrial production were gone. Well, here we are and it seems it sucks. When Trump was running I didn't like him but if the rebuttal to "make America great again" is "America already is great" and "I'm with her", that latter slogan was the most insufferably smug slogan I've heard in thirty years. If that was the best the DNC could do their failure is not altogether mysterious. As Truman reportedly put it, if you give the public the opportunity to choose between a fake Republican and a real one they vote for the real one.
But then with the current guy, I just don't see how fifteen to twenty years of the likes of Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or Samantha Bee or even Rachel Maddow couldn't give us the emergence of someone from within the castes of television of someone like Trump. If Reagan was our movie star president then Trump is our reality TV star president and yet the entertainment industry does not seem to have stepped back enough to recognize how it played a part in making it conceivable for such a man to throw his hat into the ring. What if a leader like Trump can show America, and more particularly New York, what it has really been as distinct from what its people and its literati in particular have convinced themselves its supposed to have been?
In that sense, native Pacific Northwesterner that I am, I'm just not sure that the decline (perhaps more imagined than real) of New York City is automatically tragic because someone at Harpers has written about it. It is sad, and Seattle is set to be too expensive for many of its lifelong residents to feel able to stay around. We have a comparable shift going on over there, too. But that is, I think, the inevitable outcome of attempting to cultivate power and influence across that urban archipelago. What blue state types don't seem to realize is that what this long-term policy nexus would encourage could look suspiciously like the emergence of powerful city states that are expected to (absent the existence of a functional Electoral College system) completely dominate the course of the United States.
New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great.
As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring.
This is not some new phenomenon but a cancer that’s been metastasizing on the city for decades now. And what’s happening to New York now—what’s already happened to most of Manhattan, its core—is happening in every affluent American city. San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its remarkable diversity; they swarm in and out of the metropolis in specially chartered buses to work in Silicon Valley, using the city itself as a gigantic bed-and-breakfast. Boston, which used to be a city of a thousand nooks and crannies, back-alley restaurants and shops, dive bars and ice cream parlors hidden under its elevated, is now one long, monotonous wall of modern skyscraper. In Washington, an army of cranes has transformed the city in recent years, smoothing out all that was real and organic into a town of mausoleums for the Trump crowd to revel in.
By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.
...
To playfully put a twist on a phrase penned by the lately departed Tom Wolfe, when the affluent of New York considered the question of how "you don't think the future knows how to cross a bridge?" people with the power to do so zoned the possibility of crossing that bridge out of existence for people without the means to afford to stay, after crossing the bridge.
...
The immediate cause of the increase in poverty doesn’t require much investigation. The landlords are killing the town. Long ago, the idea that “rent is too damn high” in New York was so thoroughly inculcated into the city’s consciousness that it became a one-man political party and a Saturday Night Live sketch. But the rent is too damn high, and getting higher all the time. Whereas the old rule of thumb was that your rent should be one paycheck a month, or about 25 percent of your income, the typical New York household now spends at least one third of its income on rent, and three in ten renter households pay 50 percent or more, according to the latest New York Housing and Vacancy Survey.
And the situation is getting rapidly worse. According to the same survey, the price New York landlords wanted for vacant apartments from 2014 to 2017 increased by 30 percent, while the median household income for all renting families from 2013 to 2016 went up by 10 percent. The burden has fallen hardest on those who can least afford it, according to the real estate database StreetEasy, with rents rising fastest on the lowest wage earners in the city.
...
The rent being too high in cities like New York or Seattle seems like something we should have anticipated over the decades. If anything it would seem like those who openly advocated for the "Urban Archipelago" over against all the red-state voting morons in fly-over country should have seen this coming. No matter how big a city is still a city, cities have limits, and it's nearly axiomatic that the more progressive the city is in its political sympathies the more confining its zoning customs are. Nor can it be said that arts interests correspond well with the interests of regular working people as anyone who has read coverage of the zoning battle in Boyle Heights could recall.
If an American arts scene has a place for a Jeff Koons why should it be a surprise that a city like New York can end up overpriced, gentrified to the point at which it's too expensive for regular people to live in, and in some way a hollow shell of the art scene it may have once been?
But having grown up all my life on the West coast I have not been won over to the art religion of New York as the center of the world. I met an aspiring jazz musician decades ago who matter-of-factly declared that if you could make it in New York you could make it anywhere. I asked, "Why don't you just make it anywhere first and then go to New York if you feel like it?"
All the alleged awareness of "the one percent" at this point seems moot if the upper twenty-percent considers themselves to have not and have never contributed to the situation.
And the rest of us may have, without thinking through the implications, Amazon-delivered our regional culture away.
Now while I've got my objections to the legacy of German idealism and 19th century European art religion I am not so sure that a newer era of intersectionally-informed poptimist culture is necessarily going to be better. I like animation and I enjoy a range of popular music from the 20th century. I'm a classical guitarist but I can appreciate that hip hop has become "the" dominant popular music in terms of raw sales across the nation and change happens. Given the lag between formalized theory and musical practice (with the former dragging behind the latter for maybe a half a generation or so in musical historical terms if we don't count all the 20th century avant garde bids at prescriptive theory from Schoenberg through the total serialists and so on) we may not have a clear or concise range of theories of what takes for a solid hip hop number that can make its way into a music education textbook for another generation. The racial ideological narratives are still too front and center in the realm of educators who want to discuss the music. I'm not saying that part doesn't need to be discussed, it's just that when I consider the messages I heard and read from Civil Rights leaders it seemed like sustaining a purity politics wasn't necessarily foremost in the minds of King and others.
But then the assumption that hip hop can only traffic in misogyny and anarchy and anti-establishment thought seems far too glib, too.
But the purported demise of New York City seems like part of a larger trajectory I've been thinking about in the last few years. The Atlantic-based circle of economic and political power-brokering has a shelf-life and while the rise of Trump is glibly taken as a sign that America is going to be fascist (and it could be, because democracies don't seem to really last that long if we consider the thousands and thousands of years of human history), it could betoken something else. A declining New York could be just another potential indicator that the Atlanticist power dynamic that has governed the world for half a millennium is inching ever closer to some unofficial end of its shelf life. There's no reason to think that people at Silicon Valley are less terrible in terms of the world-shaping influence they have compared to a place like New York, but I'm thinking, too, in terms of cultural-artistic paradigms. If New Yorkers could think of themselves as the artistic-cultural center of the American universe that era can end, especially if fewer and fewer normal people can afford to live there. If a high-end retailing arts district and financial district chain is what New York becomes then the insularly middle-to-highbrow can only go so long without becoming ... what's the phrase? Decadent? Maybe.
Of course I've lived on the West coast my whole life. I saw the Seattle music scene emerge. Meh. I witnessed what I regarded as a renaissance of animation as an art form and that has been fantastic to observe as a lifelong admirer of the art form. Whether we're talking about the first eight years of The Simpsons, South Park over 18 years, Batman: the animated series, the emergence of a mainstream market for Miyazaki's works by way of Disney distribution, the development of Flash-based animation shows ranging in style and content from My Little Pony to Archer, animation has exploded with life.
And ... a lot of the in-between and cel work gets done by studios in South Korea.
I've been thinking in the last few years how we may have already been shifting from an Atlancist to a Pacific nexus of power. If by some chance the Trump administration or whatever "deep state" power brokers sense that that is the change in the tide, then I don't feel a great need to bewail the demise ofa New York city I've never had any incentive to visit.
We seem to have a mythology popular among the liberal arts and journalists that if you just promote the liberal arts human liberty flourishes but there's no real reason to believe that has ever been the case. If anything in geo-political and military terms it seems that the stronger and more stable empire is the context within which liberalization trends can emerge, but the culture-industry types or "culture-makers" keep thinking that the cart really must somehow come before the horse.
When I was still in school I remember hearing and reading that the future of the American economy was in information markets and in service-based economies and that the days of industrial production were gone. Well, here we are and it seems it sucks. When Trump was running I didn't like him but if the rebuttal to "make America great again" is "America already is great" and "I'm with her", that latter slogan was the most insufferably smug slogan I've heard in thirty years. If that was the best the DNC could do their failure is not altogether mysterious. As Truman reportedly put it, if you give the public the opportunity to choose between a fake Republican and a real one they vote for the real one.
But then with the current guy, I just don't see how fifteen to twenty years of the likes of Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or Samantha Bee or even Rachel Maddow couldn't give us the emergence of someone from within the castes of television of someone like Trump. If Reagan was our movie star president then Trump is our reality TV star president and yet the entertainment industry does not seem to have stepped back enough to recognize how it played a part in making it conceivable for such a man to throw his hat into the ring. What if a leader like Trump can show America, and more particularly New York, what it has really been as distinct from what its people and its literati in particular have convinced themselves its supposed to have been?
In that sense, native Pacific Northwesterner that I am, I'm just not sure that the decline (perhaps more imagined than real) of New York City is automatically tragic because someone at Harpers has written about it. It is sad, and Seattle is set to be too expensive for many of its lifelong residents to feel able to stay around. We have a comparable shift going on over there, too. But that is, I think, the inevitable outcome of attempting to cultivate power and influence across that urban archipelago. What blue state types don't seem to realize is that what this long-term policy nexus would encourage could look suspiciously like the emergence of powerful city states that are expected to (absent the existence of a functional Electoral College system) completely dominate the course of the United States.
Saturday, June 09, 2018
two different reviews at LARB about Yascha Mounk's The People vs Democracy
Seeing as Mounck has a book out and is arguing that populism has become dangerously antidemocratic
On Aug. 23, 1939, the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich secretly met in Moscow to sign a treaty of non-aggression. The infamous “red-brown pact” paved the way for the Nazis’ conquest of large swathes of central Europe. It also caused a deep crisis of conscience for activists, including my grandparents, who had been attracted to communism in part because of its promises to free the world from sectarianism and racial injustice.
In the end, most communists found some way of reconciling their conscience with the unconscionable. They invoked strategy or necessity, the evil of bourgeois capitalism or the wisdom of Joseph Stalin (or denied the existence of the pact altogether). In one way or the other, they contrived to recover the certitude that they were on the side of the angels—and that this could, at times, justify an alliance with the devil.
...
and that the far left and the far right can agree on goals, it's about time to check out some discussions of Mounck's ideas. I've read a few interviews he's given discussing his ideas and I am just not entirely convinced that when he says people are turning against democracy that they are necessarily turning against liberalism or democracy. People may be getting angry about and upset over internationalism and globalism but that's not exactly the same thing. Disquiet over those trends could even explain why the far right and far left have paradoxically had some goals in common--if people believe that internationalist globalism has damaged regional economic and cultural life and that what's called neoliberal globalism seems to have been the catalyzing problem over the last forty years it would make sense that the left and right might bargain to fight those trends.
What if, spitballing here, the unifying opposition is against Atlanticist internationalism as the dynamic that governs the global economy? Having lived my whole life on what is sometimes caustically referred to as "the left coast" what if the power balance has been shifting in the last half century away from an Atlantic seat of power to a Pacific seat of power? Couldn't the recently reported news about Facebook and companies in China at least invite this as a consideration? What if the forces opposed to the status quo are not necessarily against either liberalism or democracy in Mounck's taxonomy but against attempts to maintain the viability of Atlanticist internationalism, in a phrase the idea that a consortium of American and European influences would govern the course of the global economy. What if there's a future in which a steadily declining United States finds it easier to be in league with China, India and tethers its economic interests there?
If Europe spirals down into decline, perhaps even eventually the point of becoming Second World in some future centuries from now, that doesn' tmean the world will end.
So, with that speculation in mind ... here's a few reviews of Mounck's book from LA Review of Books.
…
What distinguishes Mounk’s contribution to the genre, for good and ill, is what we might call its fundamental Voxiness — its currency in the cafe society of liberal Washington. At the level of form, Voxiness combines a seemingly insatiable desire to convey the latest social science with a correspondingly steadfast refusal of wide-ranging normative argument. This is what generates its astonishing capacity, at the level of content, to somehow both overturn conventional wisdom and affirm the preexisting beliefs of reasonable people. [emphasis added]
Scalpel at the ready, Mounk approaches our ailing body politic with a comprehensive vision in three parts: diagnosis, etiology, and therapy. The diagnosis, which forms the longest section in the book, is that liberal democracy has been pulled apart — not only in places like Venezuela or Hungary, but also in Western Europe and the United States — by the forces of populist authoritarianism on the one hand and oligarchic technocracy on the other. The etiology and the therapy are more complicated: among the sources of our woes are stagnating living standards, newfound ethnic pluralism, relentless globalization, changing technology, and growing skepticism about core liberal-democratic values, and the remedies lie in multifarious prescriptions for bolstering productivity, rehabilitating national identity, recovering national sovereignty, taming social media, renewing civic education, and so on. That is a lot to swallow, but in Mounk’s opinion a complex problem requires a complex solution
Some will object to these definitions. The Ancient Greeks, for example, saw election as an aristocratic mechanism that would inevitably benefit existing elites or produce new ones. And socialists have long claimed that genuine democracy requires the collective shaping of the whole of life, including the economy. But Mounk’s approach has the virtue of being uncontroversial relative to standard political discourse while nevertheless pointing to some of the aspirations behind liberalism (protecting or respecting individuals) and democracy (shaping the world together). [emphases added]
Keeping liberalism and democracy apart from a conceptual perspective allows Mounk to make his signature claim, which is that the two have begun to come apart empirically as well. In some areas, he says, we are seeing democracy without rights; in others, we are seeing rights without democracy. This is a neat idea, perfectly formed for an op-ed or a book jacket or an elevator speech, but it turns out to fit awkwardly with the messy phenomena that Mounk wants to uncover in connection with the rise of populism.
That could make a person wonder whether Mounck's own explication of the problem traffics in the very populism he's trying to warn us against, when it's put that way.
Once a simple solution has been formulated (“Build a wall!”) the slippery slope to illiberalism begins. For if the answer is so obvious, the question becomes why it hasn’t been implemented already, and the answer to that must lie in a conspiracy to thwart the will of the people — that is, a conspiracy by enemies of the people, whether corrupt politicians (“Lock her up!”) or foreign interests (“Obama is the founder of ISIS!”). The only remedy is to empower an honest leader (“He tells it like it is!”) to shake things up (“Drain the swamp!”) and thereby allow the authentic demos (“real America”) to take back control of the state (“America First!”). Once in power, however, the people’s spokesman (“I am your voice!”) gets frustrated by the institutional roadblocks of a liberal society, from the media to the judiciary to the civil service, and therefore begins to delegitimize those roadblocks (“fake news,” “the deep state,” et cetera) and undermine them wherever possible (“I expect loyalty”). And so it comes to pass that democracy becomes severed from liberalism.
There is certainly a thrill in coming to recognize this pattern, especially given Mounk’s enviable ability to assemble examples from Italy, Spain, Greece, France, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, South Korea, and Switzerland. Conceptually speaking, however, there is an obvious problem with the notion of “illiberal democracy”: those who undermine liberal institutions tend to also undermine democratic ones. Mounk claims that while the typical effect of populism is to threaten democracy, its fundamental nature is democratic, inasmuch as it expresses the will to restore power to the people. But as Jan-Werner Mueller has argued, the strategy of characterizing rival political parties as enemies of the people already signifies contempt for the democratic project of discovering the real will of the people.
The brittleness of Mounk’s conceptual framework is even more apparent when we turn to his examination of “undemocratic liberalism.” He provides a compelling argument that technocracy is on the rise in liberal democracies, pointing especially to growing numbers of civil servants, bureaucratic rules, trade treaties, independent central banks, and judicial review procedures, all of which involve entrusting a professional elite with decisions that might otherwise be the subject of political contestation. [1] Few will need persuading that liberal democracies are becoming increasingly oligarchic, but Mounk does an excellent job of pressing home the point. In the United States, he observes, the amount of money spent lobbying politicians doubled from $1.5 billion in 2000 to $3.2 billion in 2015; and in 2013 it was revealed that members of Congress (whose median net worth is over 10 times as high as that of an average American) are urged to spend around half their working hours seeking campaign contributions. [2] The situation is less dramatic in Europe, but even there politicians have grown more and more insulated from their constituents, with working-class backgrounds a rarity among representatives.
When the trend toward technocracy is combined with the trend toward oligarchy, the influence of ordinary voters starts to seem marginal at best: either an issue is taken out of the democratic arena altogether, to be handled by allegedly neutral experts drawn almost exclusively from the upper middle class, or it is debated by those who have a structural incentive to please the super-rich.
Mounk is surely right that the mixture of oligarchy and technocracy provides fertile ground for populism — it is precisely because the people really have lost their voice that the populist can claim to restore it to them. But what this has to do with “undemocratic liberalism” or “rights without democracy” is unclear. Neither oligarchy nor technocracy is naturally understood as resulting from any kind of emphasis on citizens’ rights; technocracy subordinates the individual’s right to self-determination to the expert’s decision regarding her best interests, while oligarchy privileges the rights of the few as against those of the many.
So there is nothing particularly liberal about “undemocratic liberalism.” [emphasis added] Nor is it necessarily undemocratic, at least in its technocratic dimension, since as Mounk himself points out, democratic decisions need to be carried out by public bodies and hence by officials who inevitably have some degree of autonomy. In the end, then, Mounk’s diagnosis seems faulty: liberal democracy may well be under strain, and perhaps even under threat, but the categories of illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism mostly serve to obscure the phenomena at hand.
This is not simply pedantry, for if we picture the threats to liberal democracy as in some way symmetrical and hence on a par, we may fail to see that populist authoritarianism is typically a reaction to oligarchy and technocracy. And if we fail to see that, we may end up treating the symptoms rather than the disease.
And at this point I'd interject that the fuzziness that may come about with a term like "undemocratic liberalism" is that we might want to ask which demographics of a population to which such a liberalism could apply. To invoke Hollywood and the arts worlds, you could be as LGBTQ as you want and still not do anything significant for the working class. A battle over land zoning and art space in Boyle Heights comes to mind. People in the neighborhood came to believe that the promotion of an LGBTQ friendly arts venue was actually in conflict with the interests of the long-time residents of the neighborhood and that part o what made the venue dubious was that it ostensibly promoted art by people of color when the gentrification process at work marginalized the economic interests of longtime residents in favor of an arts scene.
So another way to put that is that "undemocratic liberalism" looks like the liberalism typical of aristocrats and autocrats for millennia. In Baroque era operas princes and counts and kings could bask in stories about their kind generously making life better for select members of the lower castes. We may arguably be in a new feudal age where the powers are corporate juggernauts and the royalty sit in board rooms but because the monarchy isn't official ... it's not any kind of new Counter Reformation era Baroque period. ...
There is therefore a sense in which the whole book can be summed up by the following passage: “There are no easy solutions. And yet, a principled compromise is possible.” The posture is that of the adult in the room, the millennial who despairs of his own generation’s flirtation with populism (there is a section entitled “The Young Won’t Save Us”) but hopes to exhort them toward mature reasonableness. It’s easy to poke fun at this stance, especially given Mounk’s awkward prose — an electronic search yields 76 entries for the “And yet,” formula at the start of sentences — but in the era of Twitter politics there is something refreshing about Mounk’s refusal to paint himself as more radical than he actually is.
This certainly qualifies as a complex package of proposals. But if Mounk were to ask himself why the various policies that he suggests have not already been implemented, the answer would most often seem decidedly simple: our political systems have grown increasingly oligarchic over the last few decades and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. For Mounk’s proposals to pass, the balance of power in society would have to alter first. And since this cannot be achieved simply by appealing to the conscience of existing elites, it will require large-scale mobilization of the rest of the population — or, to put it another way, left-populism.
The same conclusion can be reached if we focus on Mounk’s recommendation that citizens remind one another of the merits of liberal democracy. Why would people do this if the system is as unresponsive to their interests as Mounk suggests? In an egregious passage, Mounk vocalizes the kind of thing that a citizen from a group whose life prospects have stagnated over the last few decades — that is, most of the population, since the average American household is no richer now than it was 30 years ago — might have said to themselves during the last election: “‘I’ve worked hard all my life […] and I don’t have much to show for it. My kids are probably going to have it worse. So let’s throw some shit against the wall and see what sticks.’” If we can get past the Clintonite cyborg aspect of this exercise in sympathetic imagination, the point that Mounk is making is that oligarchic regimes are unlikely to inspire true loyalty. For ordinary citizens to want to protect liberal democracy, in other words, they must be given a genuine stake in it. And that is precisely what left-populism proposes to give them.
Mounk is not some kind of crypto-neoliberal. If anything, he seems to be a European-style social democrat, which puts him way to the left of most American Democrats. The point is just that his desire to defend the complexity of the reasonable center against the simplicity of the crazy extremes blinds him to the logic of his own argument. No doubt it would be a mistake, both practically and theoretically, to assume that curtailing oligarchy will solve all our problems. But it does seem plausible that the interests of ordinary citizens are unlikely to be served by a political system in which you basically have to be rich to get elected — including at the local level — and even then you have to spend half your time sucking up to other rich people.
As a result, it also seems plausible to say that in the United States, at least, wresting back popular control of political institutions is a sine qua non of stabilizing liberal democracy. So if a politician such as Sanders were to make that the guiding thread of a campaign, that need not imply any simple-mindedness — only a sense of where the most pressing problems really lie.
…
The People vs. Democracy almost raises this question, but doesn’t quite follow it all the way through. “If we want to preserve both peace and prosperity, both popular rule and individual rights,” writes Mounk in the introduction, “we need to recognize that these are no ordinary times — and go to extraordinary lengths to defend our values.” But what are these lengths? In the conclusion, Mounk glosses the “courage to stand up for what we hold dear” as involving a readiness to attend public protests, to remind fellow citizens of “the virtues of both freedom and self-government,” and to push political parties to bolster liberal democracy in the ways already described. But this seems a remarkably irenic response to the apocalypse that is allegedly upon us, not least given that Mounk himself says that in “extraordinary times, when the basic contours of politics and society are being renegotiated” the existential stakes of politics seem to justify departures from the rules of the game. Might we not need to bend or break the rules of liberal democracy in order to defend it for the long term, as Lincoln famously did when he suspended habeas corpus during the American Civil War? This is what the authoritarian left-populist will claim.
To provide a compelling answer to this challenge, Mounk would have to show why people should care about liberal-democratic institutions in the first place — why the rule of law is valuable, why individual rights should be considered inviolable in certain respects, why norms of civility are important, why popular views should be translated into public policy, and so on — and then make the case that these reasons do not collapse with the onset of oligarchy. That would be a different book, of course, but it would be one that treated those attracted by populism as susceptible to rational argument. Without that, all we are given is reasonableness without reasons. [emphasis added]
"Reasonableness without reasons" aptly sums up the problem with what Mounck seems to be striving for. But I have also gotten a strong sense, in reading what Mounck has had to say, he's ultimately worried about the demise of what I'd have to call Atlanticism, the idea that the First World powers united by the Atlantic ocean and some kind of shared Euro-American legacy of Western civilization constitute the sum of both liberalism and democracy. Maybe we need to be cut loose from the postmillennialist style master narratives endemic to Marxist and dominionist/theocratic Social Gospel legacies for Euro-American colonial imagination. Certainly there's no inherent reason a Christian should assume that such a regime of thought is actually biblically defensible or desirable. In this sense the fundamentalist is probably better off than either the evangelical or the mainliner but here is not the place to burrow into that--the proposal is that the Atlantic age is already coming to an end and perhaps that's as should be. The question of whether or not liberalism and democracy as we've known them can survive the demise of Atlanticism seems to not be on the table. The possibility that human life will go on without either liberalism or democracy seems to be unthinkable to journalists and thinkers in the West at this point. The sun set on the English empire generations ago and if it is still twilight for the empire that's because of how closely it has been tethered to American interests.
So, on to the next review
…
Mounk attributes populism to anxieties bred by economic, technological, and cultural change. More specifically, he blames anger at stagnating wealth and fears about future economic prospects (especially for the working class), communications allowing outsiders to bypass media gatekeepers to reach large audiences (social media and the internet), and unease about changing national identity (those immigrants sure seem to be coming fast). In the context of the Brexit and Trump, this looks like a decent explanation, but Mounk claims to be writing a defining book about populism generally, and “local context” be damned.
When it comes to “most countries” where populism is surfacing, all three of Mounk’s contentions are problematic, but the most flawed is his contention that populist voters are reacting to stagnating salaries and limited work opportunities. Actually, in Hungary and Poland — places Mounk and others hold up as the vanguard of today’s insurgency and archetypal authoritarian populist regimes — wealth and living standards have exploded since the collapse of communism in 1989. Salaries continue to grow rapidly, including for industrial workers. In Hungary, per capita GDP increased 534 percent since 1989. Unemployment is 3.9 percent as compared to 12.1 percent in 1993. Wages rose 11.6 percent on average between the third quarters of 2016 and 2017. Put bluntly, these are not the same problems confronting ex-GM assembly line workers in Saginaw, Michigan.
While Mounk would surely chalk all this up to Central European “local context,” these examples are not outliers. In India, where the economy has grown 2,216 percent since 1991 and the country has moved to dismantle its rigid caste system, populist Narendra Modi is in charge. Indian real wage growth is forecast at 4.8 percent this year. In 2017, in the Philippines, now administered via the violent stylings of populist Rodrigo Duterte, salaries rose five percent, and similar growth was seen in Turkey, the domain of authoritarian populist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In these places too, it is difficult to see parallels to the plight of out-of-work pipe fitters in Youngstown, Ohio, or Newcastle, England. No doubt there are economic anxieties in Central Europe, Turkey, and elsewhere, and it is true that the gap between rich and poor is growing (it is growing in Canada, for that matter), but there is no prevailing feeling that opportunity has left, never to return. At some point, an accumulation of local contexts is just context.
There is at least one egregious omission too. Though Mounk briefly discusses campaign finance in the United States, he mostly ignores what, between 1980 and 2016, was demonstrably the single biggest driver of votes for right-wing authoritarian populists — heightened perceptions of corruption. [1] In the United States, this was embodied by Trump’s “drain the swamp” mantra and the animus for “Crooked Hillary” (that predatory plutocrat in a pantsuit) that was the single biggest branding exercise of the 2016 election. Elsewhere, perceived corruption was also the key to the rise of authoritarian populists.
In 2010, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party gained a two-thirds majority in parliament amid corruption by the rival Socialists and fallout from a scandal that saw Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány caught on tape admitting he lied to voters. With enough parliamentary support to change the constitution, Orbán dismantled checks and balances and has kept power ever since. In the 2015 Polish elections, the illiberal Law and Justice party rode discontent from the so-called “Waitergate” scandal — in which incumbent Civic Platform party politicians came off as corrupt after servers recorded discussions over meals at posh restaurants — to become the first party since 1989 to form a government without coalition partners. Law and Justice used the recordings to create the picture that “the whole political and economic elite is corrupted, sucking out the blood of the nation,” Łukasz Lipiński, with Warsaw-based think tank Polityka Insight, recently told me.
Meanwhile, Duterte in the Philippines and Modi in India both ran on anti-corruption platforms. In Turkey, Erdoğan’s AKP party first won elections in 2002 (two years before Facebook was founded), when the key issue was corruption in the previous government that lead to a stock market crash.
But even as Mounk’s effort to map the root causes of populism makes some wrong turns, all is not lost. The explication remains thought-provoking and illuminating, and the same goes for the final section of the book. Here, Mounk takes on the impossible task of proposing solutions to our many political predicaments.
...
These reviews, I must admit, have tended to confirm my already forming impression that Mounck's case is probably better understood not as a worry that liberalism and democracy are at odds as much as that the cumulative dominance of Atlanticist internationalism is slipping away rapidly. The less legitimate the United States is seen as the "leader of the free world" the more precarious the influence of Western global liberal or neoliberal influence may be seen as being. Factor in ecological concerns and one might ask whether there even "should" be a liberal or a democratic response to global climate change concerns. Wouldn't a totalitarian response be faster and more efficient? Nobody in the West would advocate for a totalitarian response, of course, not officially, but if the world is in as much peril as Hollywood films are apt to make it seem then perhaps the best thing that could happen to the world is for the entire First World Western-based system to crash. Who in the Third World already unable to access the amenities and luxuries of the First World that we take for granted would miss us?
First World imagination looking at the end of human civilization in the wake of our own hubris is a common thread. Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind ran with the idea that humanity refined technology to the point where seven days of fire reduced the world to an ecological decimated wasteland but that, paradoxically, humanity had mastered gene manipulation and biological engineering to a degree that allowed them to create a kind of ecological reboot disk in the form of the ecological world Nausicaa found herself living in. Her decision at the end of the manga to destroy the shrine that would allow the earlier humanity that engineered a solution to the seven days of fire was motivated by a belief that life itself must life, not at the behest of technocratic engineering and manipulation on the part of humanity. She is aware, though, that in doing this she may have doomed all life on the planet to eventual extinction but decides she must trust that life will go on.
So a crisis in the First World about a sense that the First World has cultivated a lifestyle that ultimately damns the entire human race to extinction is not really a new motif.
What may feel temporarily new is a belief that the stakes are easier to recognize in our era than they were half a century ago. When the system crashes how many hundreds of millions of people in urban centers will suffer and die as a result? For as dismissive as so many people can be of religious writings in general and of apocalyptic writing in particular it's fascinating how strong a pull apocalyptic and eschatological writing still has in catalyzing thoughts about just how much longer we can ride this civilizational train before it derails.
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