How to Get Something from a Hot Take

It’s 2019, and so many things are called “provocative”. But what does that mean?

If you’re in college, or spiritually you never left college, you might say that the etymology of “provocative” refers to calling something or someone forth.

But what are we called forth to do? Usually, online, something “provocative” is just something that offends us, but in a way we weren’t expected to be offended. If you master that kind of provocation and dress that up intellectually, you’ve got a hot take.

And can Angela Nagle do a hot take.

This winter, Nagle’s hot take was an essay called “The Left Case Against Open Borders.” Nagle is the kind of leftist who I imagine loves to say “triggered much, libs?”.

*I don’t think they say that in Ireland, but at any rate, Nagle didn’t get what quite what she wanted.

First, she had the terrible misfortune of writing her hot-take just before Hillary Clinton declared that Europe needed to get tough against migrants in order to stop the right.

Is there a worse fate for a leftist than accidentally agreeing with Hillary Clinton? I don’t know, but it’s a tiny bit satisfying that Nagle has suffered it.

Second, her attempts at provocation have brought forth not the shrill offense she was hoping for, but sober, measured critique from the left. The Jacobin podcast episode on the article is, I think, representative.

However, as awful and misconceived as her above hot take is, I want to argue that Nagle’s piece might be productively provocative in that it does show a potential conflict between traditionally universalist leftist social thought and the ideas of autonomy and self-determination informed by postcolonial thinking.

First: some points from Nagle’s argument.

Nagle leads with a Bernie Sanders quote that “open borders is Koch brothers idea”. By this, she means that the free flow of labor is a capitalist’s dream. She’s right there.

She then widens the focus to say that this free flow of people has facilitated the mass exodus of more educated people from poorer countries toward richer countries. The era of mass migration is the era of extreme stratification, particularly between the wealthy countries and the rest. When we hear liberals in New York and London sing the praises of the cosmopolis, we ought to consider how their smug tolerant pose neatly aligns with their material interests. I can’t dispute that either.

Nagle proposes that the US left should support a crackdown on illegal immigration that punishes employers. This will discourage people from coming here, and when they stay home, they can support home-grown labor politics, which we, respecting differences and borders, can support in turn.

Now, the solution is where she loses me. First, there is no way to penalize employers that does not hurt workers, and Nagle knows that.

More importantly, deportation is cruel. The socioeconomic divide between the global north and south has become extreme, and the result is that people from poorer places are leaving circumstances so dire that they risk life, health, and freedom in order to get to places in where they can face hostility and repression.

Effectively, Nagle is proposing to hurt the most vulnerable people now in the hopes that, several steps of an uncertain process later, a more just world can be organized for.

It’s no wonder Nagle published her essay in the journal of the Trumpian right, because it’s got nothing but cruelty for the people who migrate.

For all her leftist positioning, Nagle does not conceive of immigrants as workers with interests in the here and now. She thinks of them as an object—a weapon—deployed against the native working class of the first world.

However, whether Nagle means it or not, her piece does imply the possibility that some groups of workers might have not just divergent interests, but different experiences and different claims to rights from others.

I think think the question of the other is, if not a perfectly leftist one, a question that is central to discourses of self-determination. Discussions of self-determination draw from a tradition of postcolonial theory on the opposition to imperialism.

A politics of self-determination opposes political and conceptual universalism. It opposes the idea that the modern Eurocentric imperial (or capitalist) ideas of progress and civilization will bring about the best for all possible worlds.

A postcolonial politics of self-determination claims the right of colonized and displaced people to make different worlds for themselves— worlds that people in the metropoles, having not experienced colonization from the perspective of the colonized, could not imagine.

What does this have to do with Nagle?

In her essay, Nagle refers to Marx’s position on the Irish question (though Marx’s anti-colonialism is a broader issue). In it, she quotes Marx as saying that the English working class should support Irish home-rule because if Ireland achieved self-determination, Irish workers would go home and would not longer undercut English workers.

Whether or not Nagle is using Marx correctly, a postcolonialist might take it as a meditation on solidarity respecting difference, on building a freer world for all while recognizing difference within the all.

We can conceive of an American leftist politics that is includes all of us and opposes the alienation that capitalism imposes on all of us, native and immigrant workers alike. We can also conceive that this politics can supports immigrants’ rights to a place in and recognition from American society because of their distinctive experiences of legal precarity and economic dispossession. For moral and for practical reasons, progressive politics in the US has to do both.

I am glad that the extreme nativism of promoted by the Western far-right has provoked a socialist-universalist response that is rooted in a vision of humanity’s common needs, dignity, and destiny.

I hope vision can also be accompanied by a postcolonial and feminist counter-hegemonic politics of recognition and respect for the other.

If we take the time to think about these contrasting desiderata that might be harmonized, we won’t have wasted our time reading yet another hot take.