1.
Thanks to my family, I understand how people on the center right, libertarian right, and populist right think about current versions of left liberalism and socialism. I thought about describing the main misconceptions my family has about socialism. But the gap between the two wasn’t blasted out by a lack of education so much as by propaganda and exploitation feeding on their otherwise practical interests and, I think, well-meaning intentions. Yet I’m even uncomfortable with this. It’s the framework of a Christian missionary, a thread between Christianity and Bolshevism that Yuri Slezkine attempts to untangle in his book The House of Government (which I am currently reading) as a common exercise of a millenarian cult.
How can socialism escape an evangelical mode?
Perhaps understanding why it continues to emerge in our society is a better starting point than moral authority. As the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello argued in The New Spirit of Capitalism, socialism is the shadow of capitalism, its inevitable dialectical antithesis—even if it serves a necessary function that helps capitalism, as a system, adjust and refine itself to social realities. They point out that capitalism does not offer the fundamental concepts, beliefs, or ethical codes we expect from older modes of social organization. Anti-capitalist activism, distinct from the socialist tradition, has provided capitalism with what it lacks, pointing out how it ought to evolve and innovate in order to work better.
There remain social and cultural forms that continue to collapse under the force of market logic. We might imagine those to be traditional religion, the nuclear family, and traditional mass politics, to name a few. But what are disappearing now are the far more subtle assumptions underpinning social integrity—friendship, public trust, face-to-face communication, the value of crowds—that we may not even have very clear or conscious vocabulary for precisely because we assumed these two be inalienable, essential. But so many other truisms once felt this way that we now consider outmoded, extinct. (Note: I am editing this post on April 1 from the perspective of the COVID-19 crisis, though it was written on Groundhog Day.)
2.
I recently went to a Bernie rally in Springfield, Mass., where I grew up, though I wasn’t able to actually get into the event. Within a half-mile radius of the rally, three different buildings drew three different crowds together.
The Bernie crowd that wrapped in a line around the entirety of the block occupied by the Mass Mutual Center, once the Springfield Civic Center, a Brutalist-style convention center from 1970s. It was “updated” within the last ten years with the usual metal-and-glass combination to give a “cleaner,” brighter look. What had originally been a blocky, sculpted square with benches and potted trees at the front of the building became an enclosed space for events like conferences. The space was filled with smooth glass, bright-white LED lights, and shiny materials. The Apple Store-like brightness contrasts remarkably against the grey, pock-marked concrete framing it.
Another crowd was there that night, too: hockey fans. The local AHL team had a game that night. On three occasions I witnessed people going to the game mistaking the long line for their own. Which is to say, I saw people realign where they thought they belonged with where they were.
Across the street is the MGM Springfield Casino. A hodge-podge of postmodern architecture that intends to recreate the city’s early-twentieth century look and feel. It’s no coincidence that the period the design is so nostalgic for—gangsters, zoot suits, high balls—reflects a time when organized crime, legal and illegal gambling, and unregulated industrial capitalism flourished. I stepped into the place to use the toilet. The people I saw there were not crowded at all. I saw few groups, mostly singles or a couple. Whereas I could guess the politics of the people lined up (on State Street, no less), a similar exercise in the casino would be projection. And that’s the point, I guess. But the investment put into the casino resort, $960 million, is an article of faith for its owners as much as city officials, who hope to receive $17.6 million annually as part of a 121A tax agreement that structures payments in lieu of property taxes. It is a policy used in Boston to fund low-income housing developments. For fiscal year 2020, Springfield received only $13.9 million from the casino.
My brief derive ended at my favorite restaurant in Springfield: Red Rose Pizzeria. The pizza is good, yes, but the standard peppers and pepperoni that it comes with (you have to request not to have these, if you don’t want them) will give you heartburn. The bustling of white-and-black-clad servers, the marble round tables, and the mirrored-and-brassed walls evoke a turn-of-the-century Hapsburg café. It’s difficult to walk anywhere in it—you bump into people, get in the way, have nowhere to stand. Meanwhile, the kitchen is exposed by windows and you’re forced to watch twenty or more workers and muse on the spectacle of labor going into your square-cut slice.