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Athena Aktipis, A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times: “Irreverent” probably comes up a lot in reviews of this book, which features a bunch of cursing and flippancy (not gallows humor, which seems to me to be a distinct thing). Nice because it does have a lot of very specific advice, including for how to make connections with other people. It was part of what spurred me to sign up for volunteer emergency community response (although it’s not clear how much of the training will be accurate now that the Trump regime is giving up on helping people, including by gutting FEMA). But it’s good to hear about the general human response of helping in crisis; her research indicates that people help each other in disasters and don’t expect payback when the need occurs because of uncontrollable and unexpected forces. Elite fears (and the slow-moving disasters that allow us to erect walls so we don’t see the suffering) lead us to think it’s all going to be bunkers and shotguns, when really what we need are friends and musical instruments.
Sarah Hook, Moral Rights, Creativity, and Copyright Law: The Death of the Transformative Author: Argues that the moral right of integrity is fundamentally incompatible with fair use and the copyright system as a whole (by comparison with authors’ rights regimes). “The ideology behind the fair dealing exceptions supports the notion that society endorses parodic and satiric uses of prior works and does not require them to obtain copyright permission. Parody and satire are uses that an author would be most likely to want suppressed. Yet, these two opposing ideologies sit within the same framework.” The concept of moral rights based on the author’s genius was also broken from the beginning: the authors who established the Romantic genius tradition in the West didn’t adhere to it. They copied ideas rather than working as solitary geniuses, revised consciously rather than accepting their creative output as organic growth, and some—like Coleridge—even plagiarized rather clearly. “Coleridge is charged by a number of scholars as having rearranged passages from Schiller to make it seem that Schiller supported his theory. Rearranging a work to elicit a meaning not intended by the author is a prima facie moral rights action.” At the same time: “His writings have stood the test of time not from riding on the backs of those before him but because every transformative author adds value to a work—‘he brought ideas to life in a unique way … one can say that Coleridge plagiarised, but that no one plagiarised like Coleridge.’”
Authors’ rights regimes, in this telling, do vary: “Germany considers the works of its authors as part of the national heritage, to be protected as heavily as its nation’s borders. France sees its authors as fragile geniuses, to be protected against the unnecessary stress that derogatory treatment of their work would bring.” But stapling moral rights onto a common-law system like Australia’s, Canada’s or the US’s creates problems: “judges must interpret provisions when they are at a loss as to why those provisions exist in the first place.” Hook argues that the moral cases decided under those regimes are very limited, and mostly just award money consistent with a license fee, which is inconsistent with the basic concept of inalienable moral rights.
Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays: Super interesting writing about literary (etc.) criticism as an endeavor always in crisis. “There is no higher truth of criticism than what W. H. Auden once said of his own book reviews: ‘I wrote them because I needed the money.’” Her aim is not to improve society but to destroy this particular society (borrowed from John Berger). I was intrigued by Chu’s argument about why The Last of Us translated so easily from game to show; she argues that “interactivity” is not at all the same thing as “control,” given how the game was designed—given how most games are designed—yet people often assume that “interactive” media offer players more autonomy, “as if the simple fact of player choice were any surer guarantee of efficacy than the existence of choice in real life.”
Sharp phrases abound: being exhibited in museums or conventionally published “is a privilege, by which I mean it largely reflects its bearers’ material resources, connections, and luck, and only to a much lesser extent their talent. It can be argued, and has, that this privilege should be redistributed to members of historically marginalized groups; good, but this would only be back pay, not freedom.”
Chu also writes about trans identity and desire’s ungovernability; she suggests that trans women “were the original political lesbians: women who had walked away from both the men in their lives and the men whose lives they’d been living.” But also she recognizes this as “overreading” the political meaning: “nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle.” Among other things, “you can’t get aroused as an act of solidarity.” And cis women objecting to the pussy hat as trans-exclusive were claiming the vagina for themselves, “as if our basic psychic integrity did not regularly rely, like everyone else’s, on identification with things we do not, in the hollowest sense of reality, possess.”
There are also reviews of specific works, most of which were unknown to me, so the pleasure came from the takedowns, such as “They mix metaphors like a bartender in a recording studio.” (Chu specifically says that she’s aiming for cruelty—calmly unleashing her viciousness.)
Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East: The strength and weakness of this book is that it is mostly solipsistic: That is, it focuses almost entirely on what Israelis did and said, both in convincing themselves that it was time to start a war and in its aftermath. This lack of outside perspective was frustrating to me for a while because it doesn’t address one crucial question: Was it true that the Arabs would start a war soon regardless, or (as some Israelis at the time maintained) would Israel’s months-away acquisition of a nuclear capability have served as a deterrent making war unnecessary? But the story Segev is telling is about how Israelis first started the war and then how they interpreted it, because that determined how they acted (as conquerors) and locked in the terrible consequences still playing out. What’s most horrifying is that many, even members of the government at the time, knew what they were doing to the Palestinians, anticipated the long-term effects of annexing territory on Israeli democracy and Palestinian suffering, and couldn’t stop it or even participated in it.
Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918: Follows specific British activists and politicians, including feminists who split into war-loving and war-hating factions, through the stunningly idiotic choices that lost a generation of young British men.
Jordan S. Carroll, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right: Super-interesting analysis of what rightwingers pick up from, and what they ignore, in sf to prove to themselves that “a fascist world is possible.” In a classic example of “you can’t control how readers read a text,” Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972), “imagines the novel Adolf Hitler would have published if he had become a science fiction novelist after emigrating to the United States in 1919” and ends with a “Master Race” of “clones “blasting off into space to colonize other planets after all Earth’s genetically inferior populations have been exterminated.” Although he intended the novel as an attack on sf’s racism and militarism, the American Nazi Party recommended the book.
Basically, the alt-right wants fixity, not the fluidity of multiple futures. “While most science fiction critics interpret the genre as experimenting freely with manifold new possibilities, the alt-right believes that science fiction compels white people to realize the inner potential already endowed to them by biological and cultural evolution.” They thus easily read narratives intended to criticize fascism, e.g. works by Frank Herbert, Alan Moore, and Paul Verhoeven, in ways that allow them to simply enjoy reactionary power fantasies. “They see the dystopia as a political program.”
More fundamentally, speculation in sf helps them announce “not only which worlds are conceivable but also who has the power to imagine other worlds in the first place.” In fact, that’s why sf attracts them—they want to change white supremacy from contested to an inevitable future. Racists believe that “white people maintain a monopoly on modal imagination,” so that only they can evolve or “envisage anything other than what already exists.” “It is not simply that the alt-right hates diversity in cinema: they’re offended by the idea that nonwhite people might exist in other possible worlds.” Notably, also, alt-right sf rarely has aliens in it, because aliens provide opportunities to think through differences—even metaphors for the other are too threatening to the white nationalist future.
But this is inherently contradictory, of course: how can “revolutionary historical changes … emerge from a white racial essence that remains forever ahistorical and invariant”? In the alt-right’s perverse imagination, they are “future-oriented workers and entrepreneurs … threatened with bondage and cannibalism by a racialized class of present-oriented parasites.” This is in sharp contrast to actual white nationalists, who mostly lead dead-end lives. [This also helps explain the attraction of AI to white nationalists—it allows them to claim the appearance of innovation without any actual innovation or talent.]
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form: Only if you really like “theory”! Ngai considers gimmicks to be a key indicator of late capitalism: “overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor-saving tricks) but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).” But under capitalism, gimmicks and mis-valued things are constantly on offer. “The gimmick is thus capitalism’s most successful aesthetic category but also its biggest embarrassment and structural problem.”
One notable observation Ngai makes is that, in current culture, people’s affective or evaluative response to art or culture is now itself understandable as “art,” whether that’s Hans Haacke’s questionnaire-based MoMA Poll (1970), “a piece for the museum comprised of surveyed responses of visitors to the museum” or Bravo TV’s The People’s Couch (2013–2016), a television show based entirely on people affectively responding to television shows, including shows explicitly turning on aesthetic evaluation such as Project Runway, American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance?, Top Chef, and of course, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” That is, art has swallowed criticism, historically seen as the boundary around art.
Relatedly, art and gimmickry are related in capitalism because art’s value grows as the supply of information and judgment grows. That means there’s always a possibility of inflation or manipulation, which made me think of NFTs. I wasn’t convinced of the capitalism point, though: there’s plenty of fraud and humbug in things like saints’ relics in the Middle Ages, or folk medicine.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism: I’m glad the reporting on Meta’s attempt to suppress the book got me to read it! Wynn-Williams starts out recounting the shark attack that nearly killed her when she was a child, and her fight to get medical treatment when her parents didn’t think it was a problem (!). This is background for her early career in diplomacy and then her move to Meta as an evangelist for Meta having a foreign policy. Basically, these people are all sociopaths and don’t care about the problems they cause, and the rest of the book is an inside account of that, though there’s not too much new there other than really amazing anecdotes about Zuckerberg and Sandberg being terrible, terrible people.
William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela: Hard to read on its own terms because it’s about the waste of vast potential wealth and the destruction of hope as well as the environment. Also very, very concerning as a potential scenario for the US; authoritarians can keep in power not just by suppressing votes but also by convincing voters that their troubles are caused by someone else. Conditions deteriorate, but even if the frog boiling in slowly heating water is a myth, humans are susceptible to just accepting the deterioration as if nothing could be done. Powerful reporting showing how bad government can destroy a country, and missteps by the opposition can enable that.
Omar el Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: I’ll confess, I really have trouble with people who boycotted voting in 2024 because the Democrats are bad on Israel. This book helped me understand, and I’m glad I read it. It’s full of sharp, agonized observations about what being Muslim in the West means. Of Egypt, and implicitly of the US, he writes that it’s “a hallmark of failing societies, … this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.”
Basically, he argues, the promises of Western liberalism are false: “the entire edifice of equality under law and process, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don’t. A hard ceiling for some, no floor for others.” [Fundamentally, I think that we have to believe in the ideals in order to generate political power to implement these ideals more faithfully; although I understand the argument that the master’s tools will never tear down the master’s house, I’ve never seen a house destroyed without tools and I don’t know what the alternatives are for getting equality and fairness.]
But he’s excellent about the political appeal of evil when Democrats are so feckless: “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.” Since you’re going to get harmed either way, voting for the liberal seems like adding insult to injury. After decades of protests without action, “is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you? … How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning?”
Ultimately, he suggests, Americans are afraid of foreign Muslims’ well-justified rage, because we imagine what we have done as something that might be inflicted on us: “When it’s a herder on the other side of the planet burning an American flag after a drone operator in an Idaho strip mall mistook his children for terrorists, revenge becomes grotesque, the irredeemable realm of savages.” We worry: what if that herder came to lead a nation? What if he began “a decades-long campaign of retaliative obliteration against multiple countries. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine anything else?”
El Akkad suggests that negation, refusal, turning away may be the most acceptable option. After all, most Americans, especially the ones in power, have long turned away from suffering elsewhere. “When the world’s wealthiest nations decide, on the flimsiest pretext, to cut funding to the one agency that stands between thousands of civilians and slow, hideous death by starvation, it is a prudent anti-terrorism measure. But when voters decide they cannot in good conscience participate in the reelection of anyone who allows this starvation to happen, they are branded rubes at best, if not potential enablers of a fascist takeover.” Simply walking away, he argues, is “terrifying to political and economic power,” because “having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more.” Again, I’m not convinced—political and economic power seems to be tootling along fine, happy that most people don’t try to interfere with its workings. When exactly does the withdrawal and “sacrifice” become a “demand”? I fully believe that withdrawal can feel individually beneficial, but El Akkad’s version of hope seems more like “And then a miracle happens” than an explanation of how exactly we build new, better structures.
El Akkad writes that he lives here not because he loves this or any country but because he’s afraid of how easily he could be killed or his life destroyed elsewhere. But this motive—to stay out of harm’s way—is also a reason to vote for Democrats. Saying, as he does, that, given the inaction of liberals who claim to be against genocide, the open hostility of the right is at least honest is completely understandable. But it assumes he won’t get rounded up and denaturalized. Like it or not, that’s where we are: voting as harm reduction. And I don't see how we get to a different, better place without more voting, given the likelihood of, and if materialized likely outcome of, a non-voting-based social reorganization.
Sarah Hook, Moral Rights, Creativity, and Copyright Law: The Death of the Transformative Author: Argues that the moral right of integrity is fundamentally incompatible with fair use and the copyright system as a whole (by comparison with authors’ rights regimes). “The ideology behind the fair dealing exceptions supports the notion that society endorses parodic and satiric uses of prior works and does not require them to obtain copyright permission. Parody and satire are uses that an author would be most likely to want suppressed. Yet, these two opposing ideologies sit within the same framework.” The concept of moral rights based on the author’s genius was also broken from the beginning: the authors who established the Romantic genius tradition in the West didn’t adhere to it. They copied ideas rather than working as solitary geniuses, revised consciously rather than accepting their creative output as organic growth, and some—like Coleridge—even plagiarized rather clearly. “Coleridge is charged by a number of scholars as having rearranged passages from Schiller to make it seem that Schiller supported his theory. Rearranging a work to elicit a meaning not intended by the author is a prima facie moral rights action.” At the same time: “His writings have stood the test of time not from riding on the backs of those before him but because every transformative author adds value to a work—‘he brought ideas to life in a unique way … one can say that Coleridge plagiarised, but that no one plagiarised like Coleridge.’”
Authors’ rights regimes, in this telling, do vary: “Germany considers the works of its authors as part of the national heritage, to be protected as heavily as its nation’s borders. France sees its authors as fragile geniuses, to be protected against the unnecessary stress that derogatory treatment of their work would bring.” But stapling moral rights onto a common-law system like Australia’s, Canada’s or the US’s creates problems: “judges must interpret provisions when they are at a loss as to why those provisions exist in the first place.” Hook argues that the moral cases decided under those regimes are very limited, and mostly just award money consistent with a license fee, which is inconsistent with the basic concept of inalienable moral rights.
Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays: Super interesting writing about literary (etc.) criticism as an endeavor always in crisis. “There is no higher truth of criticism than what W. H. Auden once said of his own book reviews: ‘I wrote them because I needed the money.’” Her aim is not to improve society but to destroy this particular society (borrowed from John Berger). I was intrigued by Chu’s argument about why The Last of Us translated so easily from game to show; she argues that “interactivity” is not at all the same thing as “control,” given how the game was designed—given how most games are designed—yet people often assume that “interactive” media offer players more autonomy, “as if the simple fact of player choice were any surer guarantee of efficacy than the existence of choice in real life.”
Sharp phrases abound: being exhibited in museums or conventionally published “is a privilege, by which I mean it largely reflects its bearers’ material resources, connections, and luck, and only to a much lesser extent their talent. It can be argued, and has, that this privilege should be redistributed to members of historically marginalized groups; good, but this would only be back pay, not freedom.”
Chu also writes about trans identity and desire’s ungovernability; she suggests that trans women “were the original political lesbians: women who had walked away from both the men in their lives and the men whose lives they’d been living.” But also she recognizes this as “overreading” the political meaning: “nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle.” Among other things, “you can’t get aroused as an act of solidarity.” And cis women objecting to the pussy hat as trans-exclusive were claiming the vagina for themselves, “as if our basic psychic integrity did not regularly rely, like everyone else’s, on identification with things we do not, in the hollowest sense of reality, possess.”
There are also reviews of specific works, most of which were unknown to me, so the pleasure came from the takedowns, such as “They mix metaphors like a bartender in a recording studio.” (Chu specifically says that she’s aiming for cruelty—calmly unleashing her viciousness.)
Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East: The strength and weakness of this book is that it is mostly solipsistic: That is, it focuses almost entirely on what Israelis did and said, both in convincing themselves that it was time to start a war and in its aftermath. This lack of outside perspective was frustrating to me for a while because it doesn’t address one crucial question: Was it true that the Arabs would start a war soon regardless, or (as some Israelis at the time maintained) would Israel’s months-away acquisition of a nuclear capability have served as a deterrent making war unnecessary? But the story Segev is telling is about how Israelis first started the war and then how they interpreted it, because that determined how they acted (as conquerors) and locked in the terrible consequences still playing out. What’s most horrifying is that many, even members of the government at the time, knew what they were doing to the Palestinians, anticipated the long-term effects of annexing territory on Israeli democracy and Palestinian suffering, and couldn’t stop it or even participated in it.
Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918: Follows specific British activists and politicians, including feminists who split into war-loving and war-hating factions, through the stunningly idiotic choices that lost a generation of young British men.
Jordan S. Carroll, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right: Super-interesting analysis of what rightwingers pick up from, and what they ignore, in sf to prove to themselves that “a fascist world is possible.” In a classic example of “you can’t control how readers read a text,” Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972), “imagines the novel Adolf Hitler would have published if he had become a science fiction novelist after emigrating to the United States in 1919” and ends with a “Master Race” of “clones “blasting off into space to colonize other planets after all Earth’s genetically inferior populations have been exterminated.” Although he intended the novel as an attack on sf’s racism and militarism, the American Nazi Party recommended the book.
Basically, the alt-right wants fixity, not the fluidity of multiple futures. “While most science fiction critics interpret the genre as experimenting freely with manifold new possibilities, the alt-right believes that science fiction compels white people to realize the inner potential already endowed to them by biological and cultural evolution.” They thus easily read narratives intended to criticize fascism, e.g. works by Frank Herbert, Alan Moore, and Paul Verhoeven, in ways that allow them to simply enjoy reactionary power fantasies. “They see the dystopia as a political program.”
More fundamentally, speculation in sf helps them announce “not only which worlds are conceivable but also who has the power to imagine other worlds in the first place.” In fact, that’s why sf attracts them—they want to change white supremacy from contested to an inevitable future. Racists believe that “white people maintain a monopoly on modal imagination,” so that only they can evolve or “envisage anything other than what already exists.” “It is not simply that the alt-right hates diversity in cinema: they’re offended by the idea that nonwhite people might exist in other possible worlds.” Notably, also, alt-right sf rarely has aliens in it, because aliens provide opportunities to think through differences—even metaphors for the other are too threatening to the white nationalist future.
But this is inherently contradictory, of course: how can “revolutionary historical changes … emerge from a white racial essence that remains forever ahistorical and invariant”? In the alt-right’s perverse imagination, they are “future-oriented workers and entrepreneurs … threatened with bondage and cannibalism by a racialized class of present-oriented parasites.” This is in sharp contrast to actual white nationalists, who mostly lead dead-end lives. [This also helps explain the attraction of AI to white nationalists—it allows them to claim the appearance of innovation without any actual innovation or talent.]
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form: Only if you really like “theory”! Ngai considers gimmicks to be a key indicator of late capitalism: “overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor-saving tricks) but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).” But under capitalism, gimmicks and mis-valued things are constantly on offer. “The gimmick is thus capitalism’s most successful aesthetic category but also its biggest embarrassment and structural problem.”
One notable observation Ngai makes is that, in current culture, people’s affective or evaluative response to art or culture is now itself understandable as “art,” whether that’s Hans Haacke’s questionnaire-based MoMA Poll (1970), “a piece for the museum comprised of surveyed responses of visitors to the museum” or Bravo TV’s The People’s Couch (2013–2016), a television show based entirely on people affectively responding to television shows, including shows explicitly turning on aesthetic evaluation such as Project Runway, American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance?, Top Chef, and of course, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” That is, art has swallowed criticism, historically seen as the boundary around art.
Relatedly, art and gimmickry are related in capitalism because art’s value grows as the supply of information and judgment grows. That means there’s always a possibility of inflation or manipulation, which made me think of NFTs. I wasn’t convinced of the capitalism point, though: there’s plenty of fraud and humbug in things like saints’ relics in the Middle Ages, or folk medicine.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism: I’m glad the reporting on Meta’s attempt to suppress the book got me to read it! Wynn-Williams starts out recounting the shark attack that nearly killed her when she was a child, and her fight to get medical treatment when her parents didn’t think it was a problem (!). This is background for her early career in diplomacy and then her move to Meta as an evangelist for Meta having a foreign policy. Basically, these people are all sociopaths and don’t care about the problems they cause, and the rest of the book is an inside account of that, though there’s not too much new there other than really amazing anecdotes about Zuckerberg and Sandberg being terrible, terrible people.
William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela: Hard to read on its own terms because it’s about the waste of vast potential wealth and the destruction of hope as well as the environment. Also very, very concerning as a potential scenario for the US; authoritarians can keep in power not just by suppressing votes but also by convincing voters that their troubles are caused by someone else. Conditions deteriorate, but even if the frog boiling in slowly heating water is a myth, humans are susceptible to just accepting the deterioration as if nothing could be done. Powerful reporting showing how bad government can destroy a country, and missteps by the opposition can enable that.
Omar el Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: I’ll confess, I really have trouble with people who boycotted voting in 2024 because the Democrats are bad on Israel. This book helped me understand, and I’m glad I read it. It’s full of sharp, agonized observations about what being Muslim in the West means. Of Egypt, and implicitly of the US, he writes that it’s “a hallmark of failing societies, … this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.”
Basically, he argues, the promises of Western liberalism are false: “the entire edifice of equality under law and process, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don’t. A hard ceiling for some, no floor for others.” [Fundamentally, I think that we have to believe in the ideals in order to generate political power to implement these ideals more faithfully; although I understand the argument that the master’s tools will never tear down the master’s house, I’ve never seen a house destroyed without tools and I don’t know what the alternatives are for getting equality and fairness.]
But he’s excellent about the political appeal of evil when Democrats are so feckless: “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.” Since you’re going to get harmed either way, voting for the liberal seems like adding insult to injury. After decades of protests without action, “is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you? … How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning?”
Ultimately, he suggests, Americans are afraid of foreign Muslims’ well-justified rage, because we imagine what we have done as something that might be inflicted on us: “When it’s a herder on the other side of the planet burning an American flag after a drone operator in an Idaho strip mall mistook his children for terrorists, revenge becomes grotesque, the irredeemable realm of savages.” We worry: what if that herder came to lead a nation? What if he began “a decades-long campaign of retaliative obliteration against multiple countries. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine anything else?”
El Akkad suggests that negation, refusal, turning away may be the most acceptable option. After all, most Americans, especially the ones in power, have long turned away from suffering elsewhere. “When the world’s wealthiest nations decide, on the flimsiest pretext, to cut funding to the one agency that stands between thousands of civilians and slow, hideous death by starvation, it is a prudent anti-terrorism measure. But when voters decide they cannot in good conscience participate in the reelection of anyone who allows this starvation to happen, they are branded rubes at best, if not potential enablers of a fascist takeover.” Simply walking away, he argues, is “terrifying to political and economic power,” because “having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more.” Again, I’m not convinced—political and economic power seems to be tootling along fine, happy that most people don’t try to interfere with its workings. When exactly does the withdrawal and “sacrifice” become a “demand”? I fully believe that withdrawal can feel individually beneficial, but El Akkad’s version of hope seems more like “And then a miracle happens” than an explanation of how exactly we build new, better structures.
El Akkad writes that he lives here not because he loves this or any country but because he’s afraid of how easily he could be killed or his life destroyed elsewhere. But this motive—to stay out of harm’s way—is also a reason to vote for Democrats. Saying, as he does, that, given the inaction of liberals who claim to be against genocide, the open hostility of the right is at least honest is completely understandable. But it assumes he won’t get rounded up and denaturalized. Like it or not, that’s where we are: voting as harm reduction. And I don't see how we get to a different, better place without more voting, given the likelihood of, and if materialized likely outcome of, a non-voting-based social reorganization.