Arguing... with People
On the Internet, it can be difficult to remember that arguments aren’t just blocks of text that you can scroll up and down in two-dimensional space. However abstract, ambiguous, or second-order they might get, arguments are put forward by particular people in particular places and times. They’re motivated by particular concerns about the world in which those particular people live.
But when we entertain and evaluate arguments, how and why should we consider the particulars of the people making them?
I want to take up those questions in light of recent leftist critiques of liberal rhetoric itself and the anthropological character of liberal rhetoric. I want to credit what I think is valid in those critiques, however I also want to point out where and how bad and invalid arguments appear on the left because of the anthropological concerns of the people making them.
To do so, I want to revisit a post I wrote, a post where I’m realizing I made a mistake. The mistake was that I made some assumptions about the person who was making that argument and why they were making it.
The argument I misgauged was the “left case against immigration”, this time put forward by Angela Nagle.
I still think Nagle is mistaken, but I didn’t express my disagreements quite right because I dismissed the case as a just a gimmick for the sake of “being provocative”. I didn’t consider that Nagle herself was making an argument about the kind of people who employ self-serving liberal rhetoric and not so much putting forth a concrete program herself.
So, I here I want to respond to Nagle’s critique of this liberal rhetoric and to describe the work that her critique does for a particular cohort on the left of which Nagle is part. Specifically, I think that it’s all well and good to look at the will to power behind liberal rhetoric, and all rhetoric, this kind of hermeneutical scrutiny can only take us so far.
But first, a brief statement of something obvious many of us need reminding of:
We’re told not to make ad hominem arguments. An ad hominem argument is when we argue against people and not against their arguments. It is when we reduce the claims our opponents make to the particulars of people making those claims. Of course, let’s not do ad hominems. I’ll try not to make any, and I won’t accuse others of doing ad hominems hastily.
However nevertheless, we can easily lose ourselves in second-order abstractions if we forget that arguments are made by people with noble and petty interests.
I misjudged Nagle’s argument because I misjudged Nagle’s intentions behind it, but Nagle is reminding us that arguments are always made by interested people.
Here is some of her case. She says that when you hear high-minded, inclusive bromides about America as a nation of striving, hopeful newcomers, think about the material interests of the urban elites who are making these cases. Those elites are in fact using the idea of an inclusive country as a humane front for their real agenda of crushing unions, tearing up the social safety net, and creating a borderless world of where capital flows to the top, and workers race to the bottom.
That is to say, Nagle herself is connecting a particular kind of argument to a particular kind of person making the argument. She’s not quite doing ad hominem but she is arguing about how and why her opponents make the cases they make.
I’ll revisit my disagreements with Nagle’s practical politics later, but it should be enough for the moment for me to say that Nagle’s broad picture is correct.
It is hard for us to remember, being so mired in our moment when right-wing ultranationalism seems everywhere ascendant, but in recent decades in the West, the liberal-elite consensus really did put up a multicultural facade for its policies of class warfare.
Nagle’s analysis isn’t alone. Since I wrote her off, I have started noticing there is a large group of leftists critiquing the rhetorical form and sometimes the substance (like Nagle does) of the connection between capitalism and progressive social thought, or more precisely, between the material processes that shape our world, and the nice-seeming liberals who offer the rhetoric in support of those processes. They connect the arguments to the people making the arguments.
The political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. has been one of the best-known polemicists against what he calls “the political economy of anti-racism”. In a 2002 essay, Reed argues that anti-racism has been the rhetorical front behind which American elites have been able to advance their neoliberal agenda of privatization and pro-corporate policies. When American elites claim to promote diversity of all kinds, what they are doing is given a humane veneer to their destructive agenda. Is it a coincidence that American universities, who train the next generations’ managers, politicians, and media workers, are the font of intersectionality and diversity culture? Reed says, of course not.
On its merits, of course, Reed’s case is correct. Corporate-power projection these days in undeniably woke. Just look at what has become of Pride.
However, Reed is not, in the case against anti-racism, describing what the economy or society themselves are actually like. We do not read about whether and how racism or other prejudices really are at work in US society, and if they are not, are there grounds with feminism and anti-racism that the left should theoretically or practically share, and which ones?
These are long debates on that part of the American left of which Reed is the most prominent representative, but his most public and most polemical cases since 2016 have been descriptions of how anti-racism functions as political rhetoric that masks interests.
Reed is rather saying that there is a certain kind of person, one part of the elite that now clothes its extractive agenda in rainbows and quotes from Dr. King. In essence, his case is anthropological and not sociological. He says that there is a certain kind of person, a bourgeois liberal, who projects power and status a certain way.
I do not mean here to dismiss Reed or any of that cohort by saying they’re just doing ad hominem arguments. Not only is his case anthropology correct, but it is actually good critical method to consider arguments not only as abstractions, but as put forward by particular people in particular circumstances.
You don’t have to be a Marxist to notice the class politics that underwrites Western feminism, multiculturalism, and contemporary LGBT discourses.
That is just the thing, all of the causes we consider progressive have been informed and shaped by those we could consider elites. Here, the purity-minded “far” left, or class-substantive left is no exception. Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s famous essays on the "Professional Middle Class” (PMC) state quite definitively that most all left-directed political movements in history of any consequence have been led by, if not defined by, people with significant cultural and social capital. From Lenin to Michael Harrington, they’re middle-class in genealogy if not social outlook.
I mention Ehrenreich’s essay because at this moment, leading intellectuals on the left, and specifically Bernie Sanders’ campaign and the Democratic Socialists of America, are concerned about the renewed gentrification of their movement. There is a fear that whenever we hear class-focused rhetoric (which is used by the left all over the world) intermixed with discourses about racism, misogyny, or homophobia (which tend to be concerns of American progressives and spark little interest on the left in, say, Europe), there we have infiltration by the PMC. If the PMC destroyed the Democrats, surely these people can destroy the DSA.
Again, the concern is real. How can a movement call itself a workers’ movement if its members are much more likely adjunct lecturers than plumbers?
The problem is when Nagle and others are able to frame the debates on the left (and there are many) as arguments of genuine partisans of the working class vs liberal elites. First, as we’ve seen, these debates tend to be internal to rarified intellectual circles in the first place, but more importantly, because Nagle is so concerned with rhetoric and what kind of person makes such and such a case, she does not actually address the world affected by the policies whose rhetoric she criticizes .
Nagle’s argument on immigration excludes the possibility that immigrants themselves are workers who have material interests in staying alive and not being terrorized by US security forces (a pattern of fear and misery set by Barack Obama, the consummate cosmopolitan neoliberal, whom by Nagle’s dichotomous key we should find importing the third world to destroy the native economy and culture).
Nagle is part of the rising tide of European leftists who oppose accepting and assisting people from from the countries whose economies organized around delivering profit to places like Europe. Such leftists do not in fact tend to say “fuck Bengali workers, I only care about English workers”. The argument tends to be that they’re resisting global capitalism, and the people who profit from and sing the praises of that capitalism can be stereotyped as a certain kind of cosmopolitan.
So when you hear “oh pity the poor immigrants”, or better, when you see AOC in a designer clothes weeping at the border, in a display of public emotionality many working-class people would find profoundly alienating for its subject, its form, and its substance, proof that the left despises them and their values, you should know that “here is the liberal bourgeoisie.”
And anthropologically, she’s not wrong. European (or any) elites in fact anthropologically cosmopolitan? Of course they are (superficially so), and moreover who could possibly deny the snide, overeducated, scolding character of contemporary liberalism? Not me. The problem is when we reduce our arguments about the world to arguments against specific people.
You can hate metropolitan do-gooders as much as you like, and God are they easy to hate, but don’t imagine you’re doing class warfare against them if you’re deporting their immigrant neighbors. Hate AOC all you like (she can take it), but your support for ICE hurts workers and doesn’t do a damn thing to her.
We can miss the critical points in arguments when we focus too much on the people we’re arguing against. It’s not just popular polemicists like Nagle who fall prey to this anthropological distraction.
No less than Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was also susceptible. Luxemburg’s work is at the core of democratic socialist thought, but in her time, she was well-known as a skeptic of women’s suffrage.
Let’s remember women’s suffrage was the #MeToo of its day, the cause of the unloveable, bourgeois social-justice warriors. She was so skeptical not out of anti-feminism as such, but because of whom she saw as the feminists of her day.
She says: “Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against “male prerogatives” would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class. Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat. They are parasites of the parasites of the social body.”
Luxemburg isn’t actually presenting a case against suffrage, she is saying that the women associated with that cause it aren’t really interested in it, not in the goods that universal human rights are supposed to help us acquire, those goods of the left, because of the kind of people they are. Because the cause of suffrage was associated with “parasites of the social body”, the cause itself was suspect.
I don’t mean to over-focus on the word “parasite”, which you’re likelier to find in fascist discourse nowadays than socialist— don’t get hung up on that. My point is that if you think you’re talking to a parasite, your conversation is likely not to be a fruitful one, and maybe you’ll miss a leftist case that indeed women should vote, and immigrants are possessed of human rights like natives.
The fact is that a more fruitful conversation on the left, or anywhere else online, isn’t happening because we do not assume that we are having a discussion in good faith. We do not assume that we are people interested in the same goods who are debating issues on similar bases. We do not assume that we are engaged in the same struggle or mutualistic struggles.
How might we be able to build such good faith? I don’t know. A promising answer might begin with what Barbara Ehrenreich herself recommends. These days, the leading critic of middle-class liberalism isn’t getting on a high horse and saying no one who grew up with an art book on the coffee table can ever be part of a purified “true” left movement. She only says that those middle-class or declassé liberals have got to realize that it won’t be their movement.
Ehrenreich says that such libs have got to check their privilege, be respectful, and listen to people who haven’t had what they’ve had. They’ve got to treat the struggle they’ve read about in books as a struggle among people, often people who aren’t in the least bit like them, and not a radical performance-art project they dreamt of in college.
Is there hope that they can? Perhaps there’s some from Ehrenreich, but even Adolph Reed isn’t foreclosing the possibility.
Reed has said recently that he rejects the label of “class reductionist” for himself, and furthermore, he says:“Although there are no doubt random, dogmatic class reductionists out there, the simple fact is that no serious tendency on the left contends that racial or gender injustices or those affecting LGBTQ people, immigrants, or other groups as such do not exist, are inconsequential, or otherwise should be downplayed or ignored. Nor do any reputable voices on the left seriously argue that racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia are not attitudes and ideologies that persist and cause harm.“
Now, I’m not sure agree with Reed on empirical grounds that all serious leftist tendencies fight for immigrants and so on. See: Europe. But, if we assume for the moment that Reed is correct, then there are two possible reasons to keep engaging in (constructive) debates among people on the left
Either: 1) The intellectual program of the left really is capacious, and there are solid doctrinal reasons that someone who opposes class oppression should also be concerned about kinds oppression they might not have considered from their reading or thinking.
And/or 2) The people of the left, both noteworthy and ordinary people who have worked in the various movements that have tried to affect justice more equally, they are people who are likely receptive to different, or even contrary, views and experiences than their own. These people will probably have a harder time keeping a tradition as pure, or as intellectually cohesive, as some leftist intellectuals might hope, but they are the kinds of people who are present in the lives of others.
