I Guess We Weren’t Fearmongering About Roe v. Wade After All, Assholes
A Big Fat I Told You So To Contrarians In Denial About the Abortion Movement
Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash
Dear Naysayers,
By now, you’ve learned the news that Roe v Wade — the landmark decision that protects (or should I say, protected) a pregnant person's right to choose to have an abortion — will probably be overturned, courtesy of a leaked draft from Politico. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Alito is believed to have written in the leaked draft of a majority opinion. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Most Americans don’t want this. Polling consistently shows that most people are not in favor of the decision to overturn Roe. Yet what we want doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot when it comes to American Democracy. Powerful constituencies want Roe to go, so that seems to be that.
The news hasn’t quite hit me yet. I am numb to the situation as I write this at 12:25 in the morning. I want to scream, but I don’t have the energy for it right now. I have truthfully known this would be happening for some time. Conservatives in power have telegraphed their desire to overturn this ruling for literal decades, and besides the frequent fundraising email, the Democratic Party hasn’t been able to do too much about it.
Activists, journalists, and concerned citizens have been worried about this day for decades. But we are not here to talk about these brave people sounding the alarm. I want to discuss instead how you thought this legitimate fear, broadcasted by professionals, again for DECADES, was an overreaction.
Maybe you were insistent that the ruling would never get overturned because it was too popular. “No, The Supreme Court Is Not About To Overrule Roe v. Wade,” Evan Gerstmann assuaged us in Forbes last year. “By the numbers, why Roe v. Wade will probably stand,” Eric Zorn assured us in the Chicago Tribune, convinced that it would be political suicide for conservatives. Because if there’s one thing conservatives are good at doing, it's playing by the rules of political decorum.
Maybe you reasoned that if overturned, it wouldn’t be that harmful. After all, it's not like the US healthcare system is dysfunctional or anything. “Abortions After Roe v. Wade: It Won't Be Like the Bad Old Days” downplayed one Bloomberg article in 2018, reasoning that pills could take the place of current procedures — as if conservatives would stop there.
Maybe, like writer Megan McArdle in her piece Let Roe go, you just didn’t think it's that strong of a ruling, and so welcomed the conservative gutting of the law. “…throw the matter back to the states so that people can argue about it,” she reasoned. It’s not like Republicans have an advantage in state legislatures or anything.
Well, guess what, assholes, you were wrong. You’ve been wrong about many things: the women dressing up in Handmaid outfits, the queer people staging die-ins, the working-class folks calling out labor abuses. They were terrified for a reason.
The next time you tell someone concerned about the future that they need to chill out, maybe remember this moment when your arrogance was made nakedly transparent, and then shut your damn mouth. I mean it. We don’t need people to tell us to sit still as the world burns around us.
Because the buck doesn’t stop here — the conservative constituency that has successfully lobbied the courts to reach this moment doesn’t want to end with criminalizing abortions. They have big, scary plans to merge the most repressive parts of theocracy with the worst elements of corporatocracy, and if we continue to be complacent, they will succeed — they are already more than halfway there.
So shut up and listen. I have linked some helpful resources below for you to read and donate to. Maybe absorb them next time before you think about talking over our well-reasoned concerns.
It’s My One Year HRT Anniversary & I’m Scared
This trans person is terrified of the future
Photo by Katie Rainbow 🏳️🌈 on Unsplash
I have been on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for a year, and it has made me so incredibly happy. I look at the curves of my new body in the mirror every morning, and it fills me with joy. I am the person I have wanted to be for a long time now. I think of the sad, depressed person I was before this journey, and I don’t want to go back.
It seems, though, that many unhinged people have other plans. All over the country, regressive, anti-queer laws have been passed. You’ve probably heard about them: the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida, the anti-trans athlete and puberty blocker bans, and, of course, the disturbing grooming rhetoric likening queer people to actual pedophiles.
This discourse has me incredibly nervous about the state of queer rights in America. I want to explain why I am terrified and what I think you can do about it, so please read to the end to get some fantastic action-oriented resources.
But first, the reason why I am scared.
There have been a lot of bigoted laws passed recently. According to an NBC analysis of ACLU data, there have been 670 anti-LGBTQ bills filed since 2018, most of them targeted toward transgender people. 2022 has been the worst year in recent history, with 238 filed in it alone. These laws range from bans on gender-affirming healthcare to constraining school curriculums from teaching LGBTQ+ issues to passing religious exemptions that allow organizations and businesses to discriminate against queer people.
The damage from these laws is incalculable. In 2021, a survey from the Trevor Project found that over half of trans and nonbinary youths had “seriously considered suicide in the past year.” This problem has not gone away with trans advocates continuing to sound the alarm. “Trans youth, in particular, are being hounded in public and driven to deaths of despair at an alarming rate,” Admiral Rachel Levine recently told NPR.
However, these laws aren’t only significant for what they mean individually for trans youths but for what they represent overall: a reactionary push against the radical idea that queer people are human beings. In the states, 2021 was considered one of the deadliest years for trans people, and 2022 isn't looking any better.
This type of demonization, if left unchecked, can only lead in one direction. When an entire political faction of society starts using rhetoric that likens a class of people to monsters, the solutions can get terrifying very quickly. You do not give healthcare and proper housing to those you consider subhuman. At best, you relegate them to a neglected underclass, and at worst, well, I won’t be around in that situation.
I am afraid, and it would be one thing if these laws were a mere anachronism — the dying breath of a wicked generation trying to give us the middle finger before they kick the bucket — but we are seeing this regression everywhere. Abortion looks like it's being rolled back. Voting rights are cratering. Wealth inequality has only become even more pronounced, with some arguing that it's worse today than right before the French Revolution. It’s hard to believe that queer people only face a momentary setback when everything seems to be in free fall.
How are we supposed to look at this information and feel anything but terrified?
When I bring up this anxiety, the standard retort is that this is only a momentary hiccup, with the pendulum inevitably swinging towards progress. Leaders like President Obama often say things like this, in the process, misinterpreting the famous MLK Jr line: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” to justify this perspective.
After all, younger generations are queerer and more accepting of alternative economic systems than Gen X or Boomers combined. For some, it's easy to think that we are on the cusp of something greater. Perhaps this is only the darkness before the storm. Maybe we will look back in thirty years, and we will have appropriately responded to this moment with the sacrifice and compassion it deserves (God, I f@cking hope so).
This future is possible, and I don’t want to make it seem like all hope is lost (it's not), but this optimism becomes a problem when used as a shield to ignore all the scary stuff we are talking about. We are not going to osmosis our way to a better tomorrow. There is no moral arc to the universe: nothing to assure that progress will inevitably arise from this pain.
In all my studies of history, I have seen no cohesive narrative that ties it all together. Progressive empires have fractured and given way to brutally oppressive ones, and nothing about it has made any sense. Where was the moral arc of the universe when the Indian Tribes of the Americas were decimated by genocide, or Black Africans were denied their humanity and brought over here in chains? There was no linear progression, just randomness, and destruction.
Now is not the time for blind hope — to cling to the false narrative that things will get better “just because.” Climate change is going to continue to strain our inequitable supply chain. Crops will fail, distrust of outsiders will likely increase, and people will look for someone to blame. Research has consistently shown a link between climate change and xenophobia (as well as other forms of bigotry). In the words of Elizabeth Yeampierre, co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance in how these issues are linked:
“The communities that are most impacted by Covid, or by pollution, it’s not surprising that they’re the ones that are going to be most impacted by extreme weather events. And it’s not surprising that they’re the ones that are targeted for racial violence. It’s all the same communities, all over the United States. And you can’t treat one part of the problem without the other, because it’s so systemic.”
Marginalized groups not only experience this injustice within their communities by being the ones physically closer to sources of pollution (e.g., being more likely to have industry and agriculture in their zip code) but by also being the ones more likely to have to relocate when their homes become unlivable. These climate refugees and internally displaced persons are then often treated with cruel indifference when they do move. Whether we are talking about Haitian people being expelled from the Bahamas or refugees of the California wildfires being criminalized via anti-homelessness statutes, the world's governments are not responding to our climate refugee crisis with open arms.
And why would they be? These are the same communities these governments have always hated.
Trans people are not isolated from this equation. Many of my trans siblings are already in this precarious position. Trans women earn 60% of the average US worker, and it's not much better for trans men and non-binary people. Many of us have to pay out of pocket for gender-affirming healthcare, which leads to us racking up a lot of medical debt. A risk factor that makes trans people’s lives more precarious overall and more susceptible to the environmental injustices we have already mentioned.
With more and more of us moving to escape the worst effects of climate change, I worry about how we will be treated. Trans people already face a lot of discrimination regarding obtaining employment and housing, with LGBTQIA+ youth very susceptible to homelessness.
Are we supposed to believe that trans people will be treated better when they have to relocate after losing everything they own?
As climate change becomes even more pronounced, people are not going to automatically decide to be friendlier to the marginalized communities of the world. Unless something changes, they will fall back on the same scapegoats they always have done throughout history because that's the easy thing to do. And as we are seeing, the trans community has become one of these favorite targets.
As I look ahead at the 2020s, I see a decade of unease for the trans community. I’m filled with dread over what will happen in the immediate future if we do not reverse this trend. I have just become the person I want to be, and now others want to take that sense of self away. I cannot escape the gnawing feeling that this happiness will cost me soon if reactionaries get their way. That I will suffer because I dared to be satisfied.
What do you do in the face of that future? What do any of us do?
I, for one, will keep fighting. I will continue donating, advocating, and battling for my fellow trans people because wailing in outrage porn is not enough. I may be scared, but I will not give up because even if the worst comes to pass, at least I can say I did all I could.
If you, like me, are angry and sad about all this existential dread, I beg you to do more than just read a 9-minute article that makes you angry and scared.
Fight side-by-side with me!
I have listed some resources down below to get started. If you care about this fight, you will get in those trenches and start doing something about it.
Some Helpful Resources
Trans Fundraisers
Did you know that many trans people have to self-finance their transitions? Part of this problem is the dystopian nature of US healthcare, which means many of us have to pay thousands of dollars (often out of pocket) to get life-saving healthcare.
Here are some links to help pay for that care. It might not be the best solution, but sometimes you just need to meet desperate people where they are.
Be Yourself: Gender Confirmation Surgery Fundraising
Trans Mutual Aid Funds
As we have already said, trans people need money, and not just for hormones and surgeries. The ongoing discrimination this community faces means we often encounter difficulties with housing and employment.
Mutual Aid and Emergency Funds
Trans Housing Coalition (THC)
Mutual Aid Fund
Trans Needle Exchange
Trans Women of Color Collective
Trans Journalists
We cannot trust the mainstream media to tell our side of the story truthfully. The recent BBC scandal where the news organization refused to retract a transphobic piece speaks to the prevalence of this mindset within many traditional media outlets.
Thankfully there are a lot of good trans reporters out there.
Imara Jones
Orion Rummler
Kate Sosin
Kam Burns
Jules Gill-Peterson
Trans Journalists Association
Trans Activists
Trans acceptance requires supporting people on the front lines. Please consider supporting these queer radicals fighting for a more accepting tomorrow.
They/Them Collective
Diamond Stylz
Miss Major
LaSaia Wade
Kylar W. Broadus, Esq.
Trans Artists
We need trans people to imagine, not just to fight. Please consider supporting these extraordinary people.
Mattie Lubchansky
Radam Ridwan
Alok
Peppermint
Laverne Cox
I’m A Trans Artist, Too. Just Saying
Alex Mell-Taylor
Did I miss something? Post a link in the comments and write your own list
The Strangely Conservative Politics of ‘The Batman’
Matt Reeve’s gritty reboot set out to change the game & sadly crashed headfirst into the pavement
Warner Bros
Director Matt Reeves’s gritty The Batman involves a newish Bruce Wayne AKA Batman (played by Robert Pattinson) battling against the criminal elements of Gotham City while simultaneously trying to stop a serial killer named the Riddler (Paul Dano). This Batman is a darker, arguably mentally unwell person, saying lines like “I am vengeance” to random street thugs and criminals. The trauma of his parent's death is still fresh in his mind, and he has not had the years of training to smooth over the rage bubbling below his black, military-grade spandex.
The character of the Riddler places the viewer into an interesting dilemma because this villain initially wants to stop the corruption and hypocrisy of the “system.” His victims are unscrupulous public figures like the Police Commissioner and the DA, who allegedly let crime fester in the city. “The truth” is the Riddler and his supporters' rallying call. While Batman is defending these systems, the Riddler is tackling them head-on.
It seems (again, initially) that this film wanted to critique past iterations of Batman to say something substantive about politics and criminal justice. We then get a third act that not only undercuts all the goodwill the film had been building towards, but pushes the viewer to support the very institutions that it initially criticizes.
From Frank Miller to Matt Reeves
Batman has had many iterations, but a very influential one comes from the comics of Frank Miller, notably his series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In it, a retired Batman jumps back into the fray to clean up the streets of Gotham. This comic has served as inspiration for every iteration of the Bat on the Silver Screen, from Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman to Zack Snyder’s Batman vs. Superman.
If Miller’s version could be defined in a single word, that word would be vengeance. Criminals are not only depicted as irredeemable — often taking advantage of more liberal services to evade accountability (see Two-Face) — but are dealt with brutally by the 55-year-old vigilante. Batman treats these criminals as undeserving of redemption, even at one point threatening to let one bleed out to death if they don't tell him the information he needs.
Miller was profoundly impacted by the crime wave in New York City in the 70s and 80s. He was allegedly mugged several times and even found himself with a gun in his face after unknowingly working for a coke dealer (see the story here). As he told CBR on the partial inspiration of the series: “I got mugged. I’d always wanted to visit Batman and see what I could bring to him. But living in Manhattan and getting mugged once or twice gave me a much better view of the character. It made me, at least for a little while, as angry as he was.”
Miller’s Batman is not only angry at these criminals but acutely focused on them as the source of the problem. “You don’t get it, boy,” Batman says in the series’ arguably most famous line. “This isn’t a mudhole. It’s an operating table, and I'm the surgeon.” Batman sees criminals as people that must be cut out of society to instill order and lawfulness in Gotham. It’s overwhelmingly a fascist philosophy that is not just prevalent on the pages of comics but with policing in general.
America is heavily focused on the concept of law and order, often prosecuting minor offenses instead of bothering to address the underlying causes of crime (e.g., hunger, systemic racism, wealth inequality, etc.). This is sometimes referred to as the “Broken Window Theory,” popularized by a 1982 essay written by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling arguing a link between incivility and crime. Wilson and Kelling use the metaphor of a broken window to symbolize community unrest. Miller’s Batman may be fictional, but many men and women in positions of authority continue to think like this, preferring to hand out tanks to police officers than to give would-be criminals the resources needed to eat.
Matt Reeves’s The Batman initially critiques this outlook. This Batman isn’t some unshakable figure who enacts justice with cool lines like “I'm the surgeon,” but instead is a man out-of-his-depth. He glides out of buildings only to crash his head into the pavement below. Batman prioritizes beating up random twenty-somethings rather than focusing on the city's more serious problems. He is reclusive, unwell, and ultimately out-of-touch.
When for example, Batman describes a person who was killed by the mob as “making her own choices,” the character Selena Kyle AKA Catwoman (played by Zoë Kravitz), rightfully calls him out on his bullshit. “You know, whoever the hell you are, you obviously grew up rich,” she chastises, and she's right. We are repeatedly told that Batman’s conception of justice or “vengeance” is naive and wrong. Although Director Reeves would never admit it directly, this is a direct repudiation of Miller's conception of the Dark Knight (and is honestly refreshing). As Matt Reeves says of the films in a recent interview:
“[I wanted you to] feel the suspense in a way where you’re on the edge of your seat because you get emotionally connected to the jeopardy of what’s happening and you question even the morality of what’s happening. This idea of the movement of our character in this story from vengeance to realizing that maybe that message that he’s projecting into the world might not be what he’s hoping it’s achieving, and that that would shake him to his core.”
Adding even more complexity, the Riddler is partially correct: the system of Gotham is incredibly corrupt on a systemic level. The alleged Renewal Fund established by Bruce Wayne’s late father, Thomas Wayne, to “help people” has become nothing more than a way for officials to funnel funds for their off-book endeavors. The leadership of the police is mainly in the pocket of Carmine Falcone — a criminal mastermind who is using the Renewal Fund to buy people off. Even Bruce Wayne’s billionaire philanthropist father, a man who is considered a tragic martyr figure following his death, is revealed to have secretly ordered a hit on somebody (more on this later).
The film's first two acts do a great job setting up the moral ambiguity Reeves wants us as the viewer to reflect on. It’s subverting a lot of well-worn expectations in a positive way, and then Act 3 hits, and all that work comes crashing down.
Batman, the Police Officer
The problem with The Batman is that the film doesn't want to truly commit to this systemic critique of Gotham's institutions. For example, Wayne’s father is not scrutinized for being an exploitative capitalist but ultimately for having a moment of weakness. As Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis) confides to Bruce Wayne after the latter learns his father had ordered someone's death:
“[Thomas] was a good man…He made a mistake…It wasn’t to protect the family image and he didn't have anyone killed. He was protecting your mother. He didn't care about his image or the campaign, any of that. He cared about her, and you, and in a moment of weakness, he turned to Falcone. But he never thought Falcone would kill that man. Your father should have known that Falcone would do anything to finally have something on him that he could use. That’s who Falcone is. And that was your father’s mistake. But when Falcone told him what he had done, your father was distraught. He told Falcone he was going to the police. That he would confess everything. And that night, your father and your mother were killed.”
See, it was those cowardly criminals after all.
A more brave movie would have left the audience with the tension that Bruce Wayne’s wealth is built on the exploitation of others, but we can’t have that ambiguity, can we, Reeves? In the end, Bruce’s father may have done something bad, but in one of those movie ways where he’s not as bad as you first thought.
Even the corrupt institutions destroying the city have a champion — a Black mayoral candidate named Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson) who, harkening to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, runs under the vague promise of “hope.” She’s a very likable character who refuses to evacuate as her city is attacked. We don’t know what reforms she wants to push for or how she will achieve that change, but the movie wants us to believe that a real transformation is possible through her. This is a nice thought, but it rings very hollow without criticizing specific systems like our police state or predatory capitalism.
How are you going to do that, Reál? By being likable?
It’s not like you hear Reál asking to break up the corrupt police department. She’s standing with them at the end of the film as she monologues about restoring faith in our institutions. We are supposed to believe this department is better now that the newly minuted Commissioner James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), someone Batman explicitly calls a “good cop,” is in the lead. We are meant to believe this even though no policy changes to the department have happened other than swapping out a corrupt white commissioner for a nice-seeming person of color — a good cop seems to be the solution here. The movie does seem to be playing with the aesthetic of progress without indicating what that means.
This promise of change is further complicated by a shift the antagonist has in Act 3. We learn that the Riddler doesn’t want just to remove problematic people from power, which has had a positive impact on the city of Gotham (including the election of Bella Reál after he killed her chief competitor), but to wipe it all away. He plants bombs across the city to blow up the damn protecting Gotham from the ocean so that it starts to flood. The Riddler then works with a group of radicals to gun down the survivors waiting out the flood in an indoor arena. In the film, this event happened right before November 6th, making it a transparent reference to the January 6th riots when conservative extremists occupied the US Capital Building.
Do we see the problem here?
Where earlier in the film we had a populist figure working against deeply corrupt and ingrained leaders for the public's benefit, now he’s being linked to radical conservatives (people who historically have no interest in stopping corrupt DA officials who hurt people of color). The movie then shifts the symbol of Gotham’s leadership from conservative white guys to progressive-seeming Black people while doing little else. We have marginalized community members now representing a discriminatory government without changing all the corrupt systems ruining Gotham.
This bait-and-switch happens while simultaneously demonizing the one force advocating for systemic change in the film. After all, without the Riddler taking out the corrupt officials throughout the movie, neither Mayor Reál nor Commissioner Gordon would have advanced to their current roles. It’s not like Batman was going to do it. He was too busy beating up twenty-somethings in masks. We are asked to believe in Reál when in the end, she’s still standing proudly in front of a historically corrupt police force, many officers undoubtedly still on the payroll of Falcone’s successor Penguin (Colin Farrell).
Not even the “Broken Window Theory” style of policing that Batman represents has changed. While he does distribute aid and monologue about the need to be a symbol of hope, he ends the movie ruminating about how he will have to stop the criminals and “looters” that will emerge from the chaos of the flood. He says: “…martial law is in effect, but the criminal element never sleeps. Looting and lawlessness will be rampant in the parts of the city no one can get to.”
To be clear, when supply chains break down, property rights shouldn’t matter as much as getting people the resources they need to survive. Looting is not a thing when society has broken down and everything is underwater, but that’s what the movie chooses to end on. Batman may want to be a “symbol of hope,” but his worldview is still heavily constrained by the Broken Window Theory of policing.
This focus on individual crime, rather than on the welfare of people, is a mindset that has been detrimental to disaster relief in the real world. The fear of looters infamously led to the militarization of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which prevented survivors from getting the necessary supplies they needed to survive. As a consequence, people died (see my piece I’m So Sick of Stories Blaming Humanity for The End of the World). Batman fretting about property rights when they don’t matter during disasters speaks to a level of conservatism that is frankly disturbing.
Conclusion
Recently the YouTuber Kay and Skittles, in their video The Batman: Critiquing Power Fantasy, described this film as a “liberal power fantasy” — one where just getting the right people to lead the system will result in change. Kay argues:
“[The Batman] invites you to not be a monster at all. To opt-out of the struggle …and just trust in the system that's currently in place to sort it all out. To dress up inaction as pragmatism and to buy into pretty words from political actors who, at best will be ineffective, and, at worst, will actively work against you.”
Despite the aesthetic of change, this narrative is conservative in that it doesn't want anything to change. Although Batman intends to abandon his gritty Punisher-style aesthetic at the end of the film, he’s still clinging to a worldview of stopping criminals and looters. One that ultimately values preserving property rights over people's lives — and that’s not changing the system. It's merely the same status quo with a nicer finish.
Matt Reeves came in wanting to tell a story that departed from the conventions of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, but he ended up making a narrative that changed the aesthetic of the Batman while keeping everything else in place. He may want Batman to be a symbol of hope, but he continues to be a guardian of the status quo.
HBO’s ‘The Gilded Age’ is Capitalist Trash
The show about 1880s aristocrats is all sparkle and no substance.
Image; NPR
The Gilded Age is about several upper-class families in Manhattan. We have the ingenue Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), who has just moved in with her aunts from Pennsylvania after losing everything in the wake of her father’s death; Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a young, ambitious Black woman trying to build her own way in the world of writing, and lastly, the up-and-coming Russell family who is New Money that has just moved to an upscale Manhattan mansion on Fifth Avenue. What follows is a dramatic story of three “outsiders” trying to succeed in a world of High Society.
I have a love-hate relationship with the rich. I love the pretty dresses they wear and the brilliant buildings they live in (something this show has in spades), but I absolutely hate the rich as a concept. I am in the camp that it's unethical for one person to have so much wealth when so many others have too little.
I was thrilled to watch HBO’s The Gilded Age because it not only has two actresses I enjoy (I am a massive Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski stan), but it provides the perfect springboard to talk about the wealth inequality in our society. We currently exist in a second, worse, more prolonged Gilded Age that has utterly warped our society. Any critique of men such as Andrew Carnegie or J.P. Morgan directly applies to the Robber Barons of today.
Unfortunately, The Gilded Age falls more in line with Downton Abbey than The Great Gatsby (something that is sadly unsurprising given Julian Fellowes’ involvement). It is a celebration of the wealthy that provides very little of the substance I was hoping for with an HBO production. A show that ends up being some of the worst capitalist propaganda out there.
The Poor Are A Bit Too Upitty
While wealth is undoubtedly a focus of the show, class is not (note by class, we are referring to describing the stratification between those who own the means of production and those who don't). We are not given many opportunities in the show to explore the more toxic elements wealth has on the working class and society-at-large. We occasionally get subplots about the staff of the Brook and Russell families, but these stories are primarily tagged-on to the larger dramas of the rich. The staff focus on romantic love, toxic exes, and revenge, not unionization, exploitation, or wage theft.
Those who do try to advance or keep their standing are often framed in a negative light. Bertha Russell’s lady’s maid Turner (Kelley Curran), who tries to move up in the world by seducing George Russell, is portrayed as an antagonist. She is not only painfully unsuccessful but ends up teaming up with Oscar van Rhijn (a queer man struggling to maintain his class standing) to leak him information about the Russell household.
Even lawyer Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel) — a love interest to Marian Brook in the first season — is portrayed partially as overly ambitious. An impression that is not necessarily wrong. Though he and Marian profess a deep love for one another, the two agree that social standing is ultimately more important and go their separate ways.
Then you have the “working-class” character Peggy Scott, laboring in the Brook household as matriarch Agnes van Rhijn’s (Christine Baranski) secretary. Peggy wants to be a writer and tries to satisfy the traditional “working your way up” narrative of holding down a job while pursuing your dreams on the side — a hustle, if you will. As Peggy excitedly says to Marian, “For a New Yorker, anything is possible.”
Yet Peggy comes from a well-to-do Black family. She may face discrimination from the racism of the 1880s, but she's not a working-class figure — that’s simply a fakeout to subvert the audience's racist expectations that Peggy would automatically be poor just because she’s Black. She received a good education, which she then utilizes as Agnes' secretary. Peggy is choosing to voluntarily be working-class because of the emotional abuse of her father, who does not support her writing career. While I love that we are seeing this rarely depicted facet of history, I think as a narrative device, it allows the show to have the aesthetic of a working-class, “bootstrapping” lead without actually having one.
In a better show, they might be trying to point out that “working your way up” is mostly a fantasy only available to those with means, but we are never given a valid counterpoint to emphasize this fact. With the exception of maybe the lawyer character Tom Raikes, many of the real working-class people in the first season are portrayed as either complacent with their position in life or coded as outright antagonists.
Rich People Don’t Care About Racism
Overall the show does a lot of sidestepping, especially with Peggy’s character. Although racism does exist on the show, it mainly comes from working-class characters like the staff or disgraced rich people such as Anne Morris. It’s mainly confining racism to people who are either “bad” or ignorant (see the TROT trope to understand why this is frustrating).
The heads of the Russell and Brook households don’t seem to have a problem with racism. George Russell is shown to be tolerant, even making reference to a Jewish Banking firm. Agnes is likewise not bigoted. “It doesn’t seem to matter to her,” Marian says of Agnes' indifference to Peggy being a Black woman in her employment. Peggy is accepted as Agnes' secretary after obtaining a mere reference check from her school, which is oddly progressive given how concerned she is about standing on the show.
Throughout the first season, Agnes makes a massive deal about hating New Money. She does not let Marian participate in functions with the Russells because it would cause a scandal, but you know what else would cause a scandal: having a Black Secretary in 1882.
It cannot be overemphasized how “not over it” the elite of New York City were with not just racism, but slavery itself. While New York’s gradual emancipation law would have freed most enslaved people on July 4, 1827 (55 years before the show takes place), enslaved people born after 1817 were not freed from bondage until they became 21. This fact means that, from a timeline perspective, the wealthy people on this show potentially grew up with legally enslaved people serving them.
Although New York was an abolitionist stronghold, that feeling was not always felt in New York City. The city’s ports, banks, and other aspects of its economy had been wedded to slavery for decades. A violent riot occurred in 1863 in protest of the draft, where according to writers Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis in The Washington Post: “…immigrant artisans…attacked draft offices, Republican newspapers, and black people, killing random African Americans in the streets and even burning down the colored orphanage.” The majority of city voters did not vote for Abraham Lincoln in either the election of 1860 or 1864 (less than twenty years before the show took place).
How do you think the conservative Old Money of our show would have felt about those elections, I wonder?
Peggy being the personal secretary of Agnes would be a significant plot point, not just something she does out of obligation. High Society would judge the Brook family for it, but the show is not interested in how the rich specifically upheld racism during this period.
We know that racism exists as we do see and hear Peggy experiencing it, but our main white leads are not placed in the position of having to perpetuate these systems in front of the viewer. Sure, Marian enacts a microaggression towards Peggy by assuming her family is poor. Peggy is also denied entry places, but those are mainly individual actions. These rich people would have actively upheld institutions that harm people of color, and the show doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality of how their wealth was built on racism. Our wealthy heroes are the trailblazers scoffing at these antiquated systems, not the elite keeping everyone else out (when, in reality, that's what they did).
Ultimately, the central tension is not about classism or racism but between New Money and Old Money. As Agnes says to Marian in the first episode: “…you need to know we only receive the old people in this house, not the new. Never the new….The old have been in charge since before the revolution. They ruled justly until the new people invaded….”
Hmmm, I wonder what policies progressive icon Agnes van Rhijn seems to be favoring here when she claims the “old guard ruled more justly?”
The show doesn’t say, but again, many of those “just” Old People were enslavers, so there’s kind of only one direction to go here realistically. But acknowledging that would mean making Agnes and most of High Society on this show the villains, and we can’t have that. It’s the discrimination of New Money that the show focuses on instead because while that provides tension, it’s not as terrible as recognizing America as it honestly was.
“The Wealthy Are The Future”
As a consequence of this bias against Old Money, the Russells are actively discriminated against from participating in High Society. They aren’t invited to special functions, and no one goes to their events (cue sad violin music). The ever-strong Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) breaks down in tears at one point because the Old People are just so mean to her.
This discrimination did (and still does) happen, but class interests tended to unite these divides. The late 1800s and early 1900s were packed with intense, often violent disputes between monied capitalists and the workers they abused, and you’d hardly see capitalists on the picket line. New York City was no stranger to this tension. Stikes had periodically popped up in the city for decades (see the Tompkins Square Riot, the Cigar makers’ strike of 1877, and later the Newsboys’ strike of 1899). The first Labor Day parade was held in NYC in 1882 (the year this show took place), and it would go on to be seen as an important milestone in the larger labor movement.
Men like Mr. Russell (loosely based on an amalgamation of Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Kissam Vanderbilt, and Jay Gould) were not on the side of these workers. Jay Gould was cruel and obtained a massive fortune partially through stock manipulation. He paid many of his workers poverty wages and brutally suppressed labor organizing.
Infamously, during the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 (four years after this show started), he hired strikebreakers and Pinkerton men to suppress organizing. He then used his influence in the media, so the public focused on the violence of the organizers and not the men Gould had hired to enact violence on said strikers. While George Russell has referenced Pinkerton on the show, we have yet to see the reality of that on screen, which, to be clear, would involve him overseeing brutal violence.
Likewise, William Kissam Vanderbilt received his fortune from a family that relied on labor exploitation. His grandfather Cornelius, the man who initially “built” the family fortune, was a ruthless businessman who drew upon monopolistic practices. William’s father, Henry Vanderbilt, would continue the tradition, infamously calling on workers to accept lower wages in the middle of a recession (see the Railroad Strike of 1877). William was more interested in philanthropy than business, but he was by no means stirring for radical change.
While William’s wife Alva Belmont (the woman Bertha Russell is based on) did have a history of supporting union labor, and was a financier of some of the most militant wings of the suffragette movement in the United States, that’s not the reality we see on the show. Bertha pushes to support the Red Cross and to break into High Society. She is not looking to expand the burgeoning US labor movement. By all means, I would love to see these influences of Alva Belmont reflected on the show with Bertha Russell. Please make that a reality in season two!
Yet these historical examples do not make it to the screen. The closest “bad thing” that George Russell’s company causes is a train crash, which he feels awful for and is not morally responsible for causing. It's a tragic “accident” that he has prepared for by donating generously to the Red Cross. “Ask [Miss Barton] to get to Millbourne, Pennsylvania, if she can,” George Russell asks his wife, hoping to use the aid organization to assist in the relief effort.
This plotline frustratingly develops so that George is “unfairly” taken to court for the accident (though he ultimately is acquitted). One of his employees used subpar supplies for the train that crashed and then pocketed the profits. While the real Vanderbilts exploited workers, the show would have us believe that George couldn’t possibly have facilitated this accident. “Remember, I’m a rich man, which means I'm a villain.” George laments to his wife, suggesting that this “persecution” is ridiculous, and based on the conclusion of this arc, his resentments seem valid. In the logic of this show, he was being falsely accused and scapegoated for his wealth.
If this show were more self-aware, I’d say that they were doing some Succession-style (2018 — present) commentary on the delusional egos of the rich, but we are never given a dissenting voice to make that case. We aren't supposed to hate these people for the awful things they would have done to the poor to maintain their fortunes — i.e. wage theft, exploitation, union-busting, etc. We are supposed to pity their exclusion from High Society and admire their tenacity. These are people who get things done.
Marian, our ingenue POV character, spends a lot of time belittling the conservatism of her aunt Agnes. She pushes the old elite, and consequently the viewer, to see this discrimination of New Money as ridiculous (how groundbreaking). In episode three of season one, there is a scene where they are discussing the funding of an Opera House, and Marian, in disbelief, asks why they are excluding New Money. “But what is the point of shutting out these men and their families when they could probably build an opera house that’s 20 times better than the one we have now?”
The message is clear: the ascendancy of people like the Russells in society is an inevitable good. We are given no dissenting voice other than unlikable rich men and women incapable of change to counter this. “We must go where history takes us,” Bertha Russell tells a fellow socialite. She is referring to herself and the other New Money as that change. A crowd of onlookers admires a newly lit New York Times building in the background. The show here seems to be making a transparent metaphor between the technological development of electricity and wealth.
The New People are the future, the shows suggest repeatedly, and they appear to be a better one. After all, they don't care about someone's race, religion, or ethnicity, merely the building of wealth. If only this backward Old Money would get out of the way, we would have some real change.
A Rich Conclusion
In the end, we are not criticizing the rich as a class as much as a particular type of rich. The stodgy old money that creates a subculture based on exclusion are out, and the meritocratic rich such as the Russells and Peggy Scott, are in.
This perspective relies on a meritocratic myth about how capitalism, for all its faults, really does let those who work hard enough get to the top. George Russell was able to earn his wealth. Bertha was able to break into High Society. Peggy found herself working for a newspaper that respected her talent. Anyone can make it to the top. “Maybe we will be [invited] one day,” a servant says of possibly getting an invite to Russell’s party in the hazy future. “After all, this is America.”
Yet this fantasy is and has never been true. Those with money often get it by taking advantage of deep inequities. Something that was true with Vanderbilt in the 1800s and is true of men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos today. The good “philanthropy” they end up doing with that money often serves to justify their own position in the hierarchy and, in some cases, can solidify or even worsen existing inequities (see Winners Take All).
We don't need tone-deaf narratives reveling in the horrors of the Gilded Age and portraying them as cute fun. We need to see works that portray the rich of this time through the lens of the horrifying, regressive things they did to the poor. Or otherwise, we are just getting capitalist fan fiction that is all aesthetic and no substance.
Conservatives Don’t Give A Damn About Victims of Sexual Assault
Conservatism is a political movement blocking legislation that protects victims
Image; Elle
I don’t even remember her that well. Her face and her name have been sapped away by time. She was a friend of mine in Catholic school, as much as someone as deeply depressed and dysphoric as I could make friends at that point. I remember her being fearless. She was sardonic, always quick to deliver a funny quip, and she would smile whenever she knew one of her jokes was appreciated.
Then one day, she was gone.
When I asked why she had left, I received a response through whispers and hushed conversations that a priest had touched her. I didn’t know what that meant. It would take me years to piece together that she had been assaulted, but I knew that the priest had done something wrong and that that was linked to her leaving my school.
Few would even speak about this openly with me, and I remember no one explaining why she was punished and not the priest, but I think I have my answer years later. He was in a position of power, and she was not. The Archdiocese of Newark was more interested in protecting its reputation than serving someone in its flock. It would take years of work from liberal and leftist activists and reporters for this truth to get out, and by then, the man in question would be gone.
There has been much talk of “groomers” from conservatives (note grooming in this context refers to pedophiles coercing children into sexual acts without being caught). Many conservatives claim that people who defend transgender and other LGBT people are nothing more than groomers. “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Ron DeSantis’s press secretary erroneously and hatefully tweeted on March 4th.
Yet, when I think of my nameless friend, it wasn't liberals or leftists who forced her to leave my community but conservative administrators and officials who didn’t want the scandal to hurt their church’s reputation. And there are many more examples of this event. When we look at modern conservatism as a political movement within the US, it often creates an environment where grooming is rampant.
Conservatism and deference
Before we jump into the more heated parts of this article, I want to make a quick aside and say that “no, trans people and their defenders are not inherent abusers.” We are not even going to entertain this accusation as valid. Trans people are far more likely to suffer abuse than dole it out. This latest tactic from conservative politicians and pundits is nothing more than an attempt to scapegoat a marginalization community by painting them as the “real” enemy—a classic example of false persecution that I have written about before.
It should also be noted that abuse can come from any side of the political spectrum. It's relatively easy to cherry-pick anecdotes of abusers and claim that they are representative of an entire people or culture. In the same way, I can post a link to an awful liberal abuser; I can also find one of an appalling conservative. People are people, and no identity is immune from abusing its power, even hardcore leftists who claim to be radical, intersectional feminists. While I could chronicle the many groomer conservative politicians and pundits we’ve seen throughout the years in a gotcha-style article, it's more helpful to show how current conservative ideology often preserves abuse on a systemic level.
Although contested by many (see Stanford Encylopedia), the primary goal of conservatism seems heavily rooted in the principle of showing deference to the status quo. There are many reasons for that impulse. Some might want to preserve stability because they argue it's the best way to organize society. Others value the preservation of the free market, which means fighting off progressive change in our current neoliberal environment. More might have a predisposition to authority and order in general. And, of course, conservatives on top might be doing so to merely protect disruptions to their interests.
Whatever the reason, as a consequence, this deference to the status quo often translates to conservatives backing traditional, mainstream institutions: the military, the nation, the police. If there is a symbol or institution that represents (and often protects) our current neoliberal economic order, then chances are the conservative movement has laid claim to it as its own.
And right away, we see where this creates an interesting dilemma that, although not unique to conservatism, is very prevalent within it. What happens when abuses of power exist within these institutions conservatives have crafted an identity around? If conservatives are so deadset on protecting the military, for example, as an institution, then what happens when a problem develops within that institution?
Will they be quick or even capable of addressing it?
Grooming in the Military
This question isn’t hypothetical. For decades the US military has had a rampant sexual abuse and harassment problem. A 2021 study from the RAND Corporation found that “….one in 16 women and one in 143 men [were] estimated to experience sexual assault within [the] DoD.”
This disturbing trend is something higher-ups have known about for literal decades. One of the first significant scandals to break the news was a conference in Las Vegas in 1991, known retrospectively as the Tailhook scandal, where seven men and 83 women officially reported incidents of sexual assault and harassment.
The culture of the military, which is an overwhelmingly conservative institution, has been one of denial and dismissal. Historically an alarming number of victims who file a report about their abuse have suffered retaliation. According to a 2016 investigation by the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General, nearly a quarter of service members who left the military after reporting a sexual assault in the 2009 to 2015 period received a less-than-fully-honorable discharge. Something that requires a lot of time and effort to appeal and can prevent victims from getting resources such as education under the G.I. bill and VA Benefits — the latter of which prevents them from accessing the mental health services they may need. As one officer laments about their sexual assault:
“I was 18 years old, was a mental mess, and was terrified to be back aboard [the ship] any longer than I had to. I wasn’t protected, I wasn’t helped, I wasn’t safe from any type of harm!! So how did I actually know what I was signing or even in fact what an OTH [Other Than Honorable] discharge was to mean? How was I to know that from all the sexual attacks that I had to suffer and the harassment, assaults, threats to my life and safety that for all these years the [discharge would be] a huge factor to how I lived and how my life ended up?”
And these are the dots we can trace within the official record. For years, this implicit threat of reprisal has created an environment where many people in the military do not feel like they can speak out and often choose to “put up” with their abuse instead.
In other words, it's been an environment encouraging grooming on a systemic level.
You would think that conservatives would care about stopping this grooming within an institution they seem to care about —that's what they claim to do with these “don’t say gay” bills and puberty blocker bans (and to be fair, there have been a few token conservatives throughout the decades who do speak out). Yet most reforms have historically not been pushed for by the conservative wings of either party. In fact, conservative factions are often the ones actively working to stop reforms in these areas.
For example, one barrier within the military is how these cases have been handled legally. Military law is not regulated like civilian law. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has allowed military commanders to decide whether to investigate and pursue legal action for incidents of sexual assault. For reference, that would be like allowing a manager at a company to determine whether an investigation could go forward with their employees. There clearly would be a perverse incentive structure for companies like Walmart or Amazon to protect their reputation over the welfare of their employees, and we see the same thing with the military. Time and time again, the interest of the victim has been ignored.
Since 2013, Senator Gillibrand has introduced a bill that, among other things, would remove the authority of the “chain of command” to prosecute sexual assaults and other major military crimes. So rather than your superior deciding these cases, the DoD would commission officers independent from the chain of command to make these decisions instead.
Yet, this reform has been blocked repeatedly by the more conservative wings of Congress. In 2014, the bill came close to passing, with just five votes shy of a Filibuster majority. Even Mitch McConnell threw his hat in the ring over what he probably thought would be good ammunition against his female challenger, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. However, the bill ultimately failed after more conservative voices argued it would be “impractical” and “naive,” with 35 Republicans and 10 Democrats voting against it.
Note that conservatism here doesn’t just include Republicans. The Democratic Party is a big tent, and there are plenty of Democrats that lean to the right on many issues (see Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, etc.). In the case of this 2014 law, this included Claire McCaskill, a moderate who fought hard to ensure those 10 Democrats did not back Gillibrand’s bill. We could say the same for Democrat Adam Smith, a conservative Dem who supported the Iraq War and voted against a mild NSA reform, who worked with three other men to help strip Gillibrand’s provision from 2021’s National Defense Authorization Act.
These aren’t leftist positions. The opposition to help victims on this issue might sometimes have a “D” next to their name, but they aren't on the left.
Grooming in the Catholic Church
We’ve so far focused on the military as an example, but this problem is replicated in any environment where power dynamics are unequal and toxic levels of deference encourage obstructionism. We could likewise talk about sexual assault in prisons, ICE detention facilities, or, as we already discussed, the sexual assault scandals among authority figures within the catholic church.
It probably doesn't need an explanation but let's do a recap anyway. For years, priests, nuns, and other religious officials abused their positions to take advantage of the children in their flocks. This isn’t a new occurrence. It’s been happening for a long time. However, starting in the 90s, these incidents began to receive significant media attention, whereas earlier, they would receive mere whispers, and calls for reform began to build.
It’s taken a lot of effort for us, as a society, to even feel comfortable talking about this scandal, and again, even moderate laws trying to improve this situation have been bogged down with obstructionism. One significant barrier for younger victims of sexual assault is that the way grooming works (i.e., coming across as innocuous to victims) often means it takes years for victims to realize that a problem has even happened. Consequently, there has been a significant movement to temporarily extend the age a former child victim can press civil and criminal charges (sometimes referred to as a “lookback window”).
The Catholic Church has spent a lot of money lobbying against these laws, often using a frustrating amount of deception to “mitigate risk” (i.e., protect abusers). When Maryland lawmakers tried to pass one of these laws, they found that Catholic lobbyists had deceived them into providing a permanent exemption for the Church. Crafter of the law, and former abuse victim, Democrat C.T. Wilson told The Washington Post: “I made a deal with the devil. I was working with them in good faith.… They were behind the scenes, crafting language that protects them forever.”
The Church is no stranger to manipulating people to stop reform, but you know where they generally have support — the sympathetic ears of more conservative lawmakers. As the communication director for assemblywoman Markey said of an attempt to pass a similar reform in New York in 2016: “The Republican-dominated Senate has always been the stumbling block for final passage. They have blocked even committee consideration of the bill over the past few years.” (Note: a version of this law was finally passed in New York three years later in 2019 after Republicans lost control of the Senate). We have seen similar bills blocked in Pennsylvania and even in the US Senate — all by Republican obstructionism.
From extending Title IX guidelines to abolishing child marriage laws, there are a lot of policies that could help protect children and adults from grooming. If the current conservative movement in the US cared about protecting people from sexual assault, you would think it would be urgently pushing to pass these laws, but again, that’s not what we are seeing.
Far from it, when it comes to actually stopping grooming, conservatives don’t seem to give a damn at all.
Conclusion
I often think about what would have happened if my school and church had taken steps to stop that vile man from abusing his flock. If they had created an environment where abusers were not insulated from accountability and justice. Would the events I described in the beginning still have happened?
At the very least, I might still know my friend’s name.
Many people probably wanted me to post examples of individual conservatives grooming people — homophobic politicians sleeping with underage children, pastors engaging in child marriages, and the like. But as awful as these examples are, this problem is worse than a few individuals abusing their power. On a systemic level, conservative leaders are not interested in creating policy to protect citizens from sexual assault and, worse, actively get in the way of this goal.
I am sure that many individual conservatives are very lovely people who have never committed any sexual assaults (please, keep doing that). This issue has less to do with individual abusers and, again, more about systems of power. While liberals and leftists are not immune to abuses of power, current US conservatism is a movement with a toxic level of deference that turns followers, if not into abusers, then at the very least into enablers.
It’s a political movement eager to defend those in power at the expense of their victims — and if anything promotes grooming, it’s that.
A Sexy Guide Explaining How Inflation Could Change Everything
Low prices were globalization’s one job; What happens when it can’t deliver?
Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
Hey there. It's been a long, long day. You are ready to wind down, but you can't because everyone is talking about inflation. "US inflation hits the highest level in 40 years in January…," goes a titillating article for The Guardian. A suggestive New York Times poll claims that almost 9 in 10 adults are concerned about inflation, something that allegedly cuts across party lines. People are worried about the rising cost of goods and services. It caused quite a stir, and now it's preventing you from getting off.
We've all been there.
That's where I come in with this sexy breakdown, where I go deep with a penetrating analysis of all the essentials you need to get that sweet release. Although some of this concern over inflation is merely a wedge issue being pushed by naughty Republicans to demonize the Biden administration (and for even naughtier corporations to raise prices on consumers), inflation is indeed a very valid concern. And not just for sweaty consumers like you but the powerful as well. If this trend continues, it could be a possible breaking point for over forty years of economic thought.
And what could be hotter than that?
Neoliberalism is killing the vibe
First things first, let's define some terms. I know definitions, your favorite thing to get off to.
Right now, we are ruled by the economic theory of "neoliberalism," a philosophy best described as the desire to let the capitalistic marketplace dictate all human interactions. The influence of neoliberalism is pretty dominant in our society, which is why so many political groups may seem so similar, even if they differ on pesky cultural issues. Democrats and Republicans may intimately disagree over abortion and trans rights, but they do agree that the government's primary function is to encourage and maintain private property, markets, and trade.
You liked that definition, didn't you? Well, don't worry, you dirty, dirty definition dumpster, more are coming.
Now, if you have been around the political watering hole for the past couple of decades, you'll have noticed a familiar story emerge from supporters of neoliberalism about "globalization" (i.e., businesses being able to operate on a global scale). It goes like this: the neoliberal policies of globalization (e.g., free trade, outsourcing, deregulation, spanking, not being allowed to pee, etc.) may hurt some workers in the short term, but it shouldn't matter in the long run if that translates to lower prices. As explained in a 2019 article in National Geographic:
“In general, globalization decreases the cost of manufacturing. This means that companies can offer goods at a lower price to consumers. The average cost of goods is a key aspect that contributes to increases in the standard of living. Consumers also have access to a wider variety of goods.”
See baby. I wasn't lying about those definitions. 😈
Proponents of globalization have usually overemphasized this alleged plus to counter irksome critics who point to all of our current economic systems' drawbacks. As long as Americans could buy cheap products, we were supposed to be contented, or at least that was the ultimate fantasy. Terminated workers could be retrained, new businesses would grow, everyone's standard of living would increase, and everyone's cup would runneth over (oh yeah).
From what we can tell, that never really happened. In the last forty years, wealth inequality has skyrocketed. We have all seen a spike in essential services such as housing and health care. In fact, over half of all bankruptcies in the US have resulted from medical issues. Unlike the last party I attended, that increased standard of living never trickled down. It was like the ultimate tease, except instead of consensual fun, we were all nonconsensually getting a raw deal.
And now, cheap goods and services (the one incentive America still had) are allegedly on the chopping block. Many Americas don't have enough to buy even the cheap crap that was supposed to make us satisfied and really hit that spot. We are an Empire built on bread and circus politics, and because of this latest round of inflation, more and more people cannot even get their bread or, more importantly, their premium, water-based lube.
You might be quick to argue that this claim is an over-exaggeration, that other countries have it worse, or that I use far too much lube, but I am not interested in whether this feeling is valid. All economic systems thus far have had inequities, where they starve huge swaths of their populations (see the Irish Potato Famine, the Great Depression, the Sex Toy Shortage of 1892, etc.). Maybe now is uniquely awful. Perhaps it's not. I don't have the expertise for that, and more to the point, I don't think it matters. What's more important is that people feel that it's different and want to try something new (oh, daddy).
Americans right now are increasingly coming to hate the current system. Faith in institutions such as Congress is low. Nearly 40% of Americans have a negative view of capitalism as an economic system, and that number is over half for Gen Z adults. Consequently, interest in alternatives, such as socialism, is high among the younger generations.
And this distrust opens the door, both front, and back, for a shift in economic policy. Something I can assert with confidence because it has happened before.
Economic systems are open
Sort of like consent in the kink community, emotional narratives are everything in economics. When I look at strains of economic thought, they do not emerge from a gaping black hole in the universe. Their dominance is almost always because they were campaigned for by thinkers and their supporters. Neoliberal scholars like Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman spent years laying the intellectual foundation for our current economic system. Their wealthy benefactors, partly hoping to reverse the regulations of the New Deal, set up think tanks and supported academic institutions to advance this worldview. They then backed political candidates such as President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that enshrined this ideology into law, which was the opposite of sexy.
Yet it takes more than just plowing money into an idea, no matter how good your technique is. The validity of your competitor has to be in question as well, and in the 70s, neoliberalism's predecessor, Keynesianism, had a significant legitimacy crisis that it did not survive.
Named after English economist and Chad, John Maynard Keynes, Keynesianism argued that an economy is driven by "aggregate demand" or the total spending of goods and services by private and public sectors. Keynes & company argued that an increase in demand leads to an increase in supply. Where neoliberalism is like the withholding sir who tries to encourage austerity and fiscal conservatism during downturns, Keynesianism is like the daddy who showers us with government programs when times are bad to increase employment and spending. A classic example of this is the New Deal, which used programs like the Public Works Administration (PWA) to hire workers for public works projects (see The Hoover Dam, the Reagan National Airport, and the Triboro Sex Swing).
So what happened to Keynesianism? Well, strap into your harness because we are headed for your second favorite thing, baby, a saucy recap.
A prudish neoliberal would argue that while this theory worked well during the post War period (1945–1968) when the United States was going through its Golden Age, it was not suited for the years that followed. The narrative goes that as the decades progressed, international competitors started to recover from the devastation of WWII and meet and, in some cases, surpass US manufacturing. This placed American exports at a disadvantage, though it's important to note that, from an employment perspective, this industry continued growing until 1979.
At the same time, more Americans transitioned to the service sector, where wages and benefits were lower on average. Coupled with an expanding social safety net and, more importantly, a costly imperialist war in Vietnam, inflation was on the rise, and the purchasing power of the average American was down. And with it, the American public's ability to buy essential goods like butt plugs.
This hot, hot powderkeg came to a head in the early and late 70s when a series of Oil Shocks (caused by an embargo from OPEC and the fallout of the Iranian revolution, respectively) drove oil prices to skyrocket. Much of US society was dependent on oil at the time, and so this rippled throughout the economy. This influx of slow economic growth, high unemployment, and high inflation became known as "stagflation" and was deemed a problem for Keynesianism.
Keynesianism posited an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment (the supposed Phillip's Curve, named after hunk and Chad A. W. Phillips). If you had one, you weren't supposed to have the other. But under stagflation, this relationship was no longer responding as it should. Inflation was going up, and so to was unemployment. This situation created an opportunity for opponents to brand the policies of Keynesianism to be incidental to the success of the Post-War Period and to blame it for the stagflation that followed.
The rest, as they say, is history. We have been arguably suffering under the kink-shaming policy of neoliberalism ever since.
Now again, the validity of whether Keynesianism was indeed unable to deal with stagflation is irrelevant (a lot of people don't agree with the neoliberal narrative at all). Remember, the reality of a situation is rarely the reason why a worldview becomes adopted. It's certainly not why my tired ass accepts a booty call at 1 am. What is true is that people in power believed, or at the very least, could argue and convince others that Keynesianism was unable to handle (and possibly even caused) stagflation, which helped lead to the mainstream adoption of neoliberalism.
We see flashpoints used frequently to push for different economic theories. Keynesianism, for example, supplanted the laissez-faire, supply-side approach to economics that was challenged by the devastation of the Great Depression. While ending for many reasons, Mercantilism terminated partly due to a series of revolutions you may be familiar with (e.g., the American Revolution, the French Revolution, etc.). And, of course, Daddy Marx’s ass was kicked to the curb by dominatrix Margaret Thatcher.
For change to come, a moment also must arrive that allows dissidents to question the system's underlying logic. Material reality is essential, but how that reality is packaged, advertised, and deeply pushed onto people is what makes or breaks economic and political systems (give it to me, daddy). So much effort had to go right to make these new systems possible. People had to toil away for years on a set of ideas, and all of that is for naught if those who control things (or their opponents) do not feel that change is necessary.
And boy, oh boy, oh "don't stop now" boy, do people feel change is necessary now.
A quick (but not too quick) Conclusion
This truth is what makes the conversation around inflation so important. It might seem like inflation isn't just another bad thing in a world of rising seas and growing authoritarianism, but it's actually thee bad thing. The one objective our current economic system was supposed to do was to increase the average consumer's purchasing power. Since that is now in doubt, we could be entering a legitimacy crisis of the last 40 years of neoliberal economic policy.
Something as hot as it is existential.
People are not happy with the current order. If neoliberalism is unable to meet the challenges of the current moment, as I suspect it is not, then that means we might see the emergence of a new type of economic thought dominating our world.
What will that be? I have no idea. Like any good dom, I have my preferences, but a new system does not necessarily mean a better one. It's possible that wealth inequality could collide with climate change, leading to ecological exterminationism, where the rich let the poor of the world die out. Maybe the rise of China will cause an increase in the popularity of State Capitalism. Perhaps we will get that infamous “fully automated luxury space communism.”
The point of this article is not to tell you the future — no one can do that — but to reframe why this conversation about inflation is so important. It's more than just a talking point Republicans are using to win the midterms or a sexy guide to help you climax (by the way, I have not yet given you permission to orgasm). It's a potential legitimacy crisis and one that has been brewing in the background for decades.
Okay, you can now release.
The Will Smith-Chris Rock Slap Debate Is Overshadowing An Insidious Labor Issue
The story of how some of your favorite celebrities crossed the picket line
Image; NPR
On March 27th, 2022, during a lived televised broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards, actor Will Smith approached comedian Chris Rock on stage and slapped him across the face. He allegedly did so because of a joke the comedian made about Actress and wife of Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head (Jada has the medical condition alopecia areata). Clips of the incident went viral and became a heated part of the pop culture "discourse" as people debated whether this action was right or wrong.
You might have opinions on this event, or like Daniel Radcliffe, you might simply be tired of people talking about it. We will sidestep the ethicality of this action and instead chat about the labor issue that no one is talking about.
After debating the wrongness of the slap, a lot of celebrities then immediately left the Dolby Theater to cross the picket line at the Chateau Marmont after-party — many of them not even knowing (or caring that they did so).
After parties are a massive thing in Hollywood, and no night personifies this sentiment more than the Oscars: the Governor's Ball; the Vanity Fair party. The night is littered with various events, balls, and galas for celebrities to drink, pose with other stars, and strut in fabulous outfits.
Beyonce and Jay-Z hosted one such after-party at the Chateau Marmont, a venue with longstanding labor issues. According to reporting from The Hollywood Reporter, Management has created a hostile work culture rife with racial discrimination and sexual misconduct for years. The climate at the hotel often valued the customer over the health and safety of their staff.
In one example from that THR article, a housekeeper described an incident where a male guest began masturbating while she cleaned the room. She reported the guest, but Management refused to bar him from the hotel, and he continued to visit. In her own words: "[Management] made me believe that they were going to deal with it, but they didn't do anything. They made me feel unsafe at work. Every time I saw him, I was reliving my experience. I felt abused again."
According to the THR piece, the hotel owner, André Balazs, was also a piece of work that was constantly intoxicated, openly violated the city liquor laws, and groped staff and guests alike. One of his staffers remarked: "It's like having an alcoholic, drug-addicted father, but it's your CEO."
Partly in response to this toxic workplace culture, hotel workers started organizing several years ago with the union Unite Here. A push began in earnest sometime before 2020, hoping to push for a vote within the next year or two.
When the COVID pandemic emerged in earnest in 2020, temporarily reducing the bookings of the hotel industry, Balazs allegedly saw this as an opportunity to stop the unionization drive in its tracks. He announced a pivot to turn the Chateau Marmont into a timeshare, firing 248 workers in the middle of a pandemic without providing them severance packages or extended health insurance. People have been leading a boycott of the Chateau Marmont ever since, and prolific voices such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay have endorsed it.
Again, this is the venue where Jay-Z and Beyonce chose to host their after-party. The THR piece came out in 2020 (about two years ago), and they either didn't care about the venue's reputation or are so far removed from labor issues that the toxic work culture of where they decide to party doesn't even enter into the equation.
On the night of the 94th Oscars, organizers from UNITE HERE Local 11 were actively picketing the venue, often fighting against the private security force the Carters had hired. Unless showing up very late to the party (most of the picketers reportedly dispersed around 1 am), guests, who ranged from Tiffany Haddish to Chris Pine, had to cross this picket line to enter. The word "Boycott" was projected onto the building outside, meaning that some celebrities had to know something was up, and they simply didn't care.
Do you know what many of these celebrities did care about, though? The Will Smith-Chris Rock slap.
"I wish I had a man who would protect me like that," attendee Tiffany Haddish joked to People.
"Here's a picture of my dress at the award show where we are apparently assaulting people on stage now," attendee Zoë Kravitz posted to Instagram.
The only celebrity guest who seemed to comment on the labor issue was Rosario Dawson, who claimed she did not know about the boycott and signed onto the pledge after the fact.
However, most attendees have not commented on this issue, and the same applies to A-list celebrities in general. Hollywood was quick to debate the case of the slap, something that, in the grand scheme of things, is relatively minor. Yet when it came to making a tangible impact on the people fighting for better working conditions (people who make their A-list life possible), they were and continue to be silent.
The whole conversation about the slap feels like a distraction. It's a spectacle concerning an ultimately minor issue compared to the vast wealth inequities plaguing modern America. Will Smith and Chris Rock are two wealthy elites who decided to air their grievances in public, and regardless of your opinion of that action, it's clear a lot of people in this industry do not care about the workers they consider beneath them.
Nothing slaps the energy out of Hollywood more than having to consider the working class.
Peacemaker Is What Superhero Content Could Be
Disney, Marvel the DCEU, and the case for setting aside sanitized fantasy for superpowered reality.
Image; Alex Moreland
Watching Peacemaker was like taking in a fresh breath of air. The dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has meant that most modern superhero movies fall within a particular mold — i.e., light movies with incredible fight scenes and superb action. This reality is so enshrined that things that deviate from this mold usually earn some criticism. 2022's The Batman movie, for example, garnered objections for not being fun enough. "self-seriousness crowds out much chance of fun," reads the subheader of one review in the New Yorker.
However, the DC universe is generally much darker than Marvel Comics, and that has created an opportunity for creatives like James Gunn to tell stories that are the antithesis of the light fantasy of the MCU. Peacemaker is a show that's not only funny but manages to deconstruct concepts like US imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism that the MCU has never wanted to touch.
Gunn's 2021 The Suicide Squad serves as an unofficial pilot for the show, as it takes place immediately following it. The movie observes a rag-tag group of "villains" that are part of the secretive Task Force X. Headed by agent Amanda Waller (played by the peerless Viola Davis), the pejoratively labeled “Suicide Squad” is used to accomplish dangerous missions on behalf of the US government.
Waller is ruthless in her pursuit of US hegemony and often is crueler than the alleged villains she leads. In the film, we learn that their mission has nothing to do with bettering humanity but is really about erasing the US's involvement in an ethical experiment before a new, anti-US regime exposes it.
This premise is already a radical departure from the MCU, which has historically gone out of its way to ensure that the US government cannot be linked to any in-universe atrocities. The world's problems are blamed on secret Nazi groups like HYDRA or terrorist cells like the Ten Rings, never the US military or government itself, which in the real world has provided resources for many MCU films.
In fact, the MCU has had a history of deferring to conservative entities and movements. It frames opposition to institutions such as the wealthy and white supremacy as supervillain territory (see The MCU is for Rich People), and has not been the most diverse in telling these narratives. It took years to have anything in the way of nonwhite leads (see Does Disney Care About Diversity?).
The Suicide Squad not only had more substance than most MCU films but much more diversity. We had multiple compelling female leads (see Daniela Melchior's Ratcatcher and Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn), as well as both a Black protagonist (Idris Elba’s Bloodsport) and a Black antagonist (again Amanda Waller). I know people love to talk about Black Panther and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings as pinnacles of diverse representation in the superhero genre, but it took the MCU a regressive ten years to get to that point, and the DCEU has quite frankly beaten the MCU on many important milestones (see Wonder Woman).
Peacemaker leaves where The Suicide Squad left off. Christopher Smith, AKA the Peacemaker (played by John Cena), becomes part of an undercover unit trying to stop alien "Butterflies" from conquering the world. These aliens are insects that burrow into people's skulls and take them over a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Like with The Suicide Squad, we get some diversity (though honestly, I thought the movie was better in this regard). Waller's daughter Leota Adebayo, played by the excellent Danielle Brooks, is one of the primary leads. Adebayo is a textual lesbian in a beautiful relationship with Elizabeth Ludlow's Keeya. Other characters of note are the head of Project Butterfly Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji); Nhut Le's Cheeto-chomping Judomaster; and detective Song (Annie Chang), who steals the show once she's taken over by the Butterfly alien's leader.
But what really gets me into this show is a fascinating conversation about fascism and white supremacy interweaved throughout the first season. You see, unlike the MCU's Captain America, which is pretty much "self-aware" propaganda for American Exceptionalism, Peacemaker's pro-America rhetoric isn't portrayed as good. We learn that his vigilantism was taught by his white supremacist father, the White Dragon (a not subtle Klan reference), who raised him explicitly to purge minorities.
That premise leads the viewer to an uncomfortable conversation about how pro-American superheroes can channel into the white supremacist fascism that has dominated much of American political discourse. Adebayo even calls Peacemaker's worldview a "proto-fascist libertarian idea of freedom." The show is directly challenging our worship of this iconography and who we consider to be the hero.
The problems with American Exceptionalism are further highlighted in the show's other villain — the body-snatching Butterflies from another planet. While the actions they have committed are reprehensible, it's not out of a will for domination (well, not only that), but to correct America's systemic failures. As body-snatched Detective Song monologues in the season one finale:
“Our kind traveled here from a planet that had become unlivable….But not long after we arrived, we realized that the people of Earth were on the exact same trajectory as our people had been, ignoring science in favor of populist leaders who tell you that the floods and the fires and the disease are unrelated to your own actions. Valuing profit over survival. Treating minor inconveniences as assaults on your freedom. And so, we made a vow to do anything we could to change your future. We made a vow to make the choices for you that you were incapable of making on your own, to save your people and your world no matter how many lives it cost us.”
Like damn, isn't that an exact diagnosis of all of our current problems (side note — I might be team bug overlords).
When Peacemaker decides to stop Song's plan by killing her people's only food source, it's not portrayed as some righteous good action, as we see in other properties, but one where we aren't even sure if the hero was correct.
"Did I just kill the world," Peacemaker asks Adebayo?
"Maybe," she responds, "or maybe you just gave us a chance to make our own choices instead of our bug overlords."
This conversation is honestly a refreshing moral dilemma that the MCU movies have primarily strayed away from. There is no Falcon and The Winter Soldier speech about how America can be better. We don't know if Peacemaker's decision was correct because the American system he is working from is so toxic that you are ultimately left wondering if aliens would do a better job.
We are left uncomfortable with the status quo, and that's what you want a piece of art to do when broaching topics like white supremacy and capitalism because they cannot be solved by watching 8 hours of television. They will require a systemic overhaul to unravel, and that work will be difficult and nerve-wracking.
With Peacemaker, we see a window into what modern superhero shows and movies could be. Although fictional, this show doesn't stray from the emotional reality of what America is and has always been. It does not pull punches when discussing systemic issues such as racism and capitalism.
It's been clear for some time that Disney's MCU is more interested in delivering a sanitized fantasy that does not challenge our larger problems, but with Peacemaker, I see a world of possibility wrapped up in an American flag and a ridiculous-looking helmet.
Ca-Caw.
Dear Ted Cruz: I Do Regret My Transition
Why couldn’t I have just existed?
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Dear Ted,
A little bit about me: I started to "medically" transition at 30 years old. It was the result of years of grappling with insecurities, cumbersome insurance paperwork, and social stigma. I am still balancing this transition as I struggle with what is my correct bra size and how much mascara to use, but I am pleased to be the person I am now. I just wish I didn't have to wait thirty years to get here.
I look at my childhood and see a lot of sadness that didn't have to be there. I could have been a beautiful nonbinary girl learning to do all these things when cisgender girls learned to do them, and it would have hurt no one.
Why couldn't I have just existed?
No, seriously. I am asking: Why do people like you make trans children suffer so long in silence just to be themselves?
So many people like you are claiming to be looking after "the children" when you campaign to take away trans children's access to healthcare. But really, your actions are denying us our ability to become whole people, and it doesn't just fill me with regret — it makes me furious.
When I look at the debate people like you are having about "allowing" children to transition, it's always centered around the fact that we may regret something that is "permanent." Years ago now, you tweeted: "For a parent to subject such a young child to life-altering hormone blockers to medically transition their sex is nothing less than child abuse," (Ted Cruz, 2019). As far as I can tell, you haven't changed your stance.
Yet this fear mongering isn't true, and it pushes the harmful myth that transitioning is dangerous for children. I think you are smart enough to know that. All the research indicates that puberty blockers (medication that pauses puberty) are relatively safe. The moment the child goes off the medication, they will, in most cases, resume the puberty of the sex they were assigned at birth. We know this because cisgender (i.e. not trans) children have been taking puberty blockers for decades, and we are pretty aware of their effects. As Jason Klein, a pediatric endocrinologist, told VICE (Hannah Smothers, 2021):
“Puberty blockers have been used for decades in cisgender kids who either are going through puberty too early, or, in some instances, kids who are going through puberty very quickly. Their use has been FDA approved, well-studied, well-documented, and well-tolerated for a long time now. And it’s the exact same medication that we use in trans or nonbinary children to basically put a pause on pubertal development. Exactly the same medications, at exactly the same doses.”
There might be some more information we will learn about this medication over time, but that's the case with all life-saving medicine. Science can tell you nothing with absolute certainty, so when a scientist states that puberty blockers are overwhelmingly safe in most cases, that's about as sure of a thing as you can get.
For those trans children who do take the extra step to socially or medically transition (i.e., not just to pause puberty, but to take on a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth), most don't regret their decisions. Detransitions are not only rare but overwhelmingly happen because of "external factors such as pressure from family, non-affirming school environments, and increased vulnerability to violence, including sexual assault," (2021).
In other words, it's not someone's transition that is the problem, but our society's reaction to it. This entire framing that people like you are putting forth is wrong. This has nothing to do with the welfare of children.
Quite the opposite, by denying trans children the resources they need, you contribute to many of their deaths. The number of trans youth (and adults) contemplating suicide is staggering (Dawn Ennis, 2021). The Trevor Project's National Survey found that 52% of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the US seriously considered killing themselves in 2020. That number went down for those who had access to spaces that affirmed their gender identities and sexual orientations.
If you cared about children, you would not be maliciously increasing the likelihood that children across the US will kill themselves. That's decidedly an anti-children stance.
All I can think when I read these numbers is that I could have been part of that figure. I was 27 before somebody even asked me what my pronouns were. I didn't know being nonbinary was even an option, but the moment I learned about it, the words they/them escaped my mouth within seconds. I had spent a lifetime not realizing that a piece of me was missing — that I could be something more than unhappy. I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom, so I could weep both tears of joy, but also of profound sadness at the time it had taken to come to this realization.
Suddenly, a lot of depression made sense as dysphoria. I had been suicidal for most of my life, and although other factors contributed to part of that, the inability to connect to my whole self didn't help. There were years spent being uncomfortable about who I was, wishing to no longer exist because I didn't think I was a whole person. I am only here today because of luck. A lot of trans people are.
But if my personhood was denied to me, it's not my fault, Ted; it's yours.
When you deny trans children the ability to learn about themselves, you aren't just deferring medication or surgery by a couple of years. You are preventing them from articulating their personhood, from being able to imagine a whole world beyond what they were taught to be possible. It's like forcing a square into a round hole and blaming the shape for fracturing into pieces. In the process, you watch the person disappear. They crawl into themselves until they cease to exist.
That is murder. It may not be as quick as shooting someone or stringing them up, but it leads to the same outcome—the death of a person.
I indeed regret my transition. I regret that you robbed me of my childhood. That you, and the bigots like you, clawed away at my very sense of self, under the pretext of protecting me, when all you were doing was protecting your own sense of comfort.
You traded my life and the lives of countless others to protect your fragile little ego, and I hate you for it. If there is a God, they will make you crawl on your knees on burning sands, listening to the wails of all the trans children you murdered, before even beginning to consider your pleas for redemption.
Burn in hell, Ted.
LinkedIn Is A Toxic, Capitalist Meme Generator 👊🏻
Work, capitalism, propaganda, & the myth of meritocracy
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
LinkedIn's stated mission is to make working professionals "more productive and successful." With over 750 million members, that narrow goal translates into a platform where people are unsurprisingly centered on either getting a job or highlighting their jobs successes. It's Facebook for job hunters and capitalists. Most go there to share their new positions, promotions, and hustles, leaving all the messy complications of life at the door.
Social media has always been inauthentic. All platforms encourage people to curate a persona along certain aesthetic and political lines, but the values promoted on LinkedIn are f@cking toxic. They are all about glorifying the grind. "8 years ago today I had four dollars in my bank account," creator Shay Rowbottom posted to viral success in 2021 "Keep going. 👊🏻."
LinkedIn is a place where, for the most part, the terrors of our system are massaged away so that viewers can instead consume advice on working harder, faster, better, and more smartly. To participate and be successful on this platform, you have to find a way to fit your problems into the marketplace or be deemed a bad worker.
Something I would like to stress before diving into the messiness of LinkedIn is that, contrary to many of the tropes we will be talking about, most people are simply working to survive. There has been a lot of conversation about how people want meaningful work and might even take a pay cut to get it, but when I look at polling data, that's not the primary reason they are at their current jobs. In poll after poll, people pretty consistently indicate that providing for their lifestyles and families is a huge reason why they are there.
It may be evident to some, but it still bears mentioning: we all need money to survive. Most of us have to take a job to get money, even if it doesn't align with work we consider meaningful. Add to this the fact that wages have stagnated and healthcare and housing costs have risen, and you might begin to understand why most Americans do not like their current jobs.
Why be happy about something you were forced to take to cover your basic needs, and barely accomplishes even that?
The typical LinkedIn post covers none of this reality. Many LinkedIn influencers aren't interested in trying to systemically understand why the state of work is so bad for most people. In fact, most want to ignore discussions of "politics" altogether. "Politics should not be discussed on LinkedIn. Keep it clean folks!!" wrote one user recently. The platform is even implementing a "no-politics" feature, which it defines as limiting content related to "political parties and candidates, election outcomes, and ballot initiatives."
This desire for no politics, however, goes against our human instincts. Under one definition, politics is how we make decisions about our community's collective resources. It's unreasonable to assume that users on this or any platform will never want to express opinions on something so fundamental to their lives, even if some consider such things "unprofessional." As one conservative LinkedIn user wrote in a viral post: "politics invades every facet of our lives."
Indeed we have seen a glaring exception to this "no-politics" rule with Russia's War against Ukraine. Users have been very opinionated on this issue. "I hate mixing politics and business. But killing innocent people can't be ignored," wrote one "apolitical" user on why his business was cutting ties with partners in Russia. LinkedIn, the company, has been surprisingly vocal about this situation too. It recently referenced the whole situation in its blog. Their Global Growth Manager even posted a pro-peace image on his feed that has generated quite the stir among users.
In other words, LinkedIn is a non-political platform, except for all the cases when it's not. The "no-politics" crowd ignores the fact that even they have a political framework. Overwhelmingly, these users proselytize about the values of working hard and pushing through. "no pain, no deals. know pain know deals" cheekily posted Scott Leese. This is essentially the belief in a "meritocracy" or a system governed by people who are selected to power based on their ability.
Contrary to what users like Leese may say, this way of thinking is very political. Meritocracy emphasizes individual responsibility at the expense of looking at structural problems — something with enormous political implications because it basically justifies people's social, economic, and political positions in life. You get somewhere based on how hard you work, regardless of all the structural barriers in your way.
LinkedIn users who follow this political belief can get very defensive when it's criticized. "Those who think they're ENTITLED need a solid throat punch," begins a post from conservative Erin Whitehead about how people need to stop complaining. She continues. "You aren't even entitled to feel good about yourself. You have to earn that shit. 👊🏼" This example may sound extreme, but it highlights a pervasive feeling throughout the site. The consistent advice seen on LinkedIn is to either suck it up or stop complaining. "Suck it up, Have a Great Week and…#KeepGettinAfterIt, y'all!!👊" advises another user (side note — what is up with the overuse of the fisted hand emoji?).
Yet it's also not true that LinkedIn influencers are always positive (there is a lot of talk of failure on here), but it's usually very individualized. For example, influencer James Carbary shared a humble brag about botching his first TedX talk. Likewise, we could talk about marketer Adam Goyette mentioning how he sent out the wrong email to 1 million people. These men are admitting to bad things that happened to them, but in a way that both highlights their current successes and takes on all the responsibility for their failures. The implicit narrative is to keep working in spite of defeat. "Here's to kicking fear in the mouth and doing things that scare us anyway," James Carbary continues, highlighting how individual perseverance is what is needed to power through.
We see this individualized philosophy color even the most radical comments on the platform. "I can promise you that your health is far more important than your finances or your job," begins author and cancer survivor Scott Leese in what sounds like a very revolutionary statement….for LinkedIn.
On its face, it's an opinion I very much agree with. We should care more about our health than our jobs. However, even this proclamation is only looked at through the lens of what you as an individual can do in the marketplace. Scott continues: "Money comes and money goes. Our lives are irreplaceable. Sell from a place of gratitude, resiliency, and determination. Lead from a place of selflessness, safety, empathy, and fulfillment."
Not only do his final few lines betray the fact he is far more concerned with selling in the marketplace than his health, but by telling people to focus on health as an individual choice, he's being very toxic. Scott ignores all the problems with our healthcare systems and frames healthcare as something an individual can choose to do independently of that system. You know, just choose to be healthy, yall.
This is your casual reminder that over half of all bankruptcies are the result of medical issues. Most Americans can't focus on their health because they don't have the option to — our system bleeds them dry first.
The majority of content on LinkedIn frames the individual as at fault, especially in the workplace, where the dynamic between capitalists and workers is underplayed. "People don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad bosses," author Brigette Hyacinth lectures on one of LinkedIn's top posts. She, in essence, is arguing that there are no power dynamics within the employee-employer relationship, just people who disagree. When unhappiness towards an employer or industry is posted on the platform, creators like Hyacinth treat it as a relationship between two people, rather than one between a lower-status individual (i.e., the employee) and a person representing an even more powerful class or entity (AKA the boss).
This blindness means that most solutions are only viewed through an individualistic lens. "Treat your workforce as valuable as you do your customers," warns LinkedIn marketer Chris Williams, delivering a solution that boils down to company leadership being nicer. This comment is tone-deaf, and LinkedIn is filled with disingenuous posts like this one asking bosses and companies to treat their workers better, while ignoring all the power imbalances that ensure these requests will never be listened to. Companies that do awful things such as union-busting and wage theft don't need a stern talking to. They need to be mobilized against.
Granted, it's not wrong to ask for better pay and more respect from your boss, but what is often divorced from these suggestions are solutions such as unionization, greater regulation, or any answer that would try to increase the power of workers as a group. Few commenters are looking at this systemically. While I might have been able to find the occasional center-left content creator on LinkedIn (Robert Reich, for example, reposts much of his work from YouTube there), most were disgruntled individuals with little influence. Users who were passing around memes and petitions that never gained traction.
It was far easier to find a conservative criticizing leftist policy than to discover anyone who self-identified as a leftist or progressive on LinkedIn. For example, it was effortless to come across dozens of conservatives lamenting AOC’s Tax the Rich dress at the 2021 Met Gala, but few sharing it in earnest or even criticizing it from a leftist perspective. "…tonight [AOC] wore a dress that says "tax the rich" to a Met Gala dinner that costs $30,000 a ticket," chastised one conservative user, among many.
I ran dozens of similar searches for terms like leftism, unionization, liberal, single-payer healthcare, socialism, and more, and while they generated some results, they were far from viral. Conservative memes on work routinely won out in the end, which reveals something fundamental about the platform — this is a conservative site.
When I look at LinkedIn at a distance, I see a conservative, capitalist meme generator. A platform that incentivizes a toxic environment, where everything is framed through the lens of the individual. Users are implicitly encouraged to describe their jobs in the best possible light, while simultaneously ignoring the systemic problems that make work in America so difficult (e.g., poor wages, low union membership, massive corruption, deregulation, etc.).
The culture on this site seems clear: if you can't get your boss to agree to improve your work conditions, then it's on you as an individual to either work through it or leave — the realities of the market be damned.
Say what you will about Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok — at least these platforms have some diversity of political thought. LinkedIn is an unending churn of capitalist propaganda. While conservatives have spent so much time lamenting that social media has a bias against them, they clearly have a home on LinkedIn.
A Leftist Reading of Disney's Encanto
Mutual aid, superpowers, and magic.
Image; captured on Disney+
The moment I saw Encanto, I couldn't get enough of it. I have been singing the songs Surface Pressure, and We Don't Talk About Bruno on loop so much that I think my partner is finally getting sick of them. I have rewatched this movie actively three times, and another four times, I have put it in the background while I'm working. I probably have memorized half the lines in this film about a family with magical gifts living in a secluded Columbian community.
I love much of what this movie tries to do thematically. The central plot about protagonist Mirabel Madrigal bucking the unrealistic expectations of her family, specifically those of her demanding Abuela Alma, resonates strongly with me. It's a breath of fresh air for a major film to come out against the perfectionism and burnout plaguing much of modern society.
However, there is more to take from Encanto than just the interpersonal dynamics of the main characters. This film has a very leftist subtext buried underneath the tiles and floorboards of the Madrigals' casita. It can be read with a leftist, dare I say, a socialist lens that most "mainstream" films cannot.
So let's have some fun and talk about how this movie is an example of an accidental leftist work.
This entire article might have you scratching your head. Encanto isn't leftist. It's a kid movie about magical powers and singing.
And yes, the creators didn't intend to make a film with socialist principles. Disney is a capitalist entity that has been quite aggressive with maintaining its dominance in the pop culture space — when you have free time, google Disney and IP law to see what I mean. The executives behind this film just wanted to make money, and they were using Encanto to tap into new markets in the Latin American space.
However, a creator's (and financer's) intentions are only half the equation. Under the "Death of the Author" theory of interpretation, art is about the meaning the viewer brings to it. Director Ridley Scott didn't set out to make a feminist work with Alien (Sigourney Weaver's character was allegedly written as a man initially), but that's what happened. Director Tommy Wiseau wasn't trying to make a beloved camp masterpiece with The Room, but his out-of-touch misogynistic outlook led to something quite funny to the public. Often a work takes on a completely separate meaning from the author's intentions, and we can see a similar thing happening with Encanto.
For one, the people in Encanto live in a non-capitalist society. Abuela's "encanto" or miracle raised mountains around the valley they live in, effectively cutting them off from the larger world. As far as we can tell, there is no money in this society, and that's probably because "class" was not an issue the creators of this film wanted to complicate their narrative. It would be tough for us to see the Madrigals as down-to-Earth, working-class folks if they were also profiting off their Godlike powers.
That decision, however, left us with a story where money and work are entirely different from our world. The Madrigals are actively encouraged to give their gifts freely to the community. "We swear to always help those around us and earn the miracle that somehow found us," Abuela belts out in the opening musical number, The Family Madrigal. Townsfolk feel comfortable requesting work from the family, which we see when Luisa, who has super strength, is asked to do routine tasks like moving churches and recovering lost donkeys (routine for her, anyway).
The mundaneness of these powers owes much to the genre of "magical realism," a style that involves the matter-of-fact introduction of fantastical elements. We are not supposed to question the strangeness of the Madrigals powers because, in this universe, they simply exist. That's how magical realism as a genre works.
However, the strangeness of the Madrigal's generosity has more to do with the values of our culture. The residents of Encanto seem to exist in a mutual aid economy where people work cooperatively to achieve their community's needs. This system of reciprocity is so far removed from our capitalist society that it feels far more alien than the ability to move mountains. For many, it's easier to imagine a community where people have superpowers than one where capitalism doesn't exist, and in Encanto, we have both.
Now there is arguably a sleight hierarchy around these powers. The Madrigals seem to have the most prominent house in the valley, and the entire community comes together in celebration whenever a family member obtains a new power, but they are not portrayed as powering-hungry or tyrannical. Where in other properties (and real-life), this might be the makings of a magical aristocracy, in Encanto, the townspeople have a lot of agency. A scene that highlights this well is how the Guzman family calls off their son's marriage proposal to Isabela after one disastrous dinner. That would not happen if the Madrigals had unquestioning control in the valley.
Yet even the control the Madrigals do have, especially that of Abuela Alma is interrogated in the film. While Alma does insist on her family unselfishly leading a life of service, she still holds a lot of unhealthy values from her old life, specifically those of perfectionism and hustling. In capitalism, for most people, your value is tied directly to the labor you can produce. If someone cannot produce enough, we often let "those people" die (see homelessness, poverty, starvation, etc.). This is why our society focuses so much on always working (e.g., hustle culture) and on the products of our labor being perfect, because failure to produce successful goods and services can lead to death.
Alma carries a lot of this anxiety. Even though the Madrigals live in an idyllic society where all their wants are provided for by literal magic, she still wants her children to be continuously producing for the community. "Work and dedication" are her driving values, and the film clarifies that this obsession is unhealthy.
In the song Surface Pressure, Luisa sings about how the continuous pressure to constantly perform is causing her to burn out. The line: "Under the surface
I'm pretty sure I'm worthless if I can't be of service," highlights how strung out she is. The film ends with allowing her to rest more, suggesting to the viewer that maybe the culture of constantly working and always hustling is unhealthy. People should be allowed to rest.
Perfectionism is tackled in not one but two separate plotlines. One revolves around Mirabel's "perfect" sister Isabela who discovers in the song What Else Can I Do? that it's okay not to be perfect. The other is from Mirabel's aunt Pepa, whose emotions control the weather. At the end of the film, she learns that she doesn't have to suppress her feelings all the time in pursuit of this perfectionism, happily dancing in the rain. These storylines, among many others, indicate to the viewer that it's okay to be different and produce things outside the norm.
And here's the thing: if you take this logic to its natural conclusion, these are some radical positions. Again, many people cannot rest or put away their perfectionism because not producing successful products and services in the marketplace can lead to your death. The ability to let people rest would involve some big, structural changes in the way resources are distributed in our society, so they don't feel like they need to work all the time to survive. Rich people would have to lose much of their control and resources and be brought down to everyone else's level through policies too complex to go into detail here.
Disney is, by no means, directly advocating for that approach with this film. They are a conservative identity that actively campaigns for policies such as wage theft, sweatshops, and more. But by creating a film that stresses community and rejects our current work norms, this conservative company made a product that is accidentally very leftist.
Something that highlights this reality comes from my favorite scene in Encanto near the movie's end. The casita has been destroyed, and the family Madrigal is now powerless. Their interpersonal dynamics may have been resolved, but they don't know where they will live. Mirabel starts singing about rebuilding the house, and it's here that the entire community enters the scene with the line: "Lay down your load…We are only down the road…We have no gifts, but we are many."
Typically films in America center on what our protagonist will do for the world (see the Hero's Journey). Luke brings peace to the galaxy. Neo stops Zion from being destroyed. It would have changed little in the narrative to have the family rebuild this house on their own, under Mirabel's direction, highlighting how her leadership has saved this family unit. But by bringing the community into the equation, they are stressing the importance of community as a value. The Madrigals provided for their community in the past, and now they are being provided for in return.
We need more films that push for these kinds of narratives because we need more stories rejecting our current capitalistic concepts of work and atomization. Although I am not holding my breath for Disney to deliver these narratives regularly, I think Encanto serves as a brilliant inspiration for future writers and creators to draw from.
We might not have gifts, but we can imagine a world beyond this one, and that's just as magical.
When Socialism Came To Reading, Pennsylvania
How past victories and defeats can guide the present
Photo by Luis Quintero on Unsplash
(This article was originally published in The Washington Socialist).
Nearly one hundred years ago, socialism was on the rise in America. Registration for the Socialist Party of America (SPA) peaked at over 100,000 members in 1912. Socialist leaders were elected to local and state offices all over the country, ranging from Santa Cruz, California, to Curranville, Kansas, to Charleston, West Virginia. Interest stayed high for the remainder of the decade, with dues-paying members in the tens of thousands.
However, this started to change in 1919 when America went through its first Red Scare. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had started several years earlier and would not be concluded until 1923. In combination with other factors like increased labor strikes and self-proclaimed “anarchists” mailing bombs to prominent Americans, the government started to crack down on “radical” organizations. Thousands were arrested and deported. This stigmatization and violence, in combination with the SPA’s “unpatriotic” anti-war stance during WWI, meant that dues-paying members were halved in the following years, and socialist politicians all over the country lost their seats.
Yet somehow, amid declining membership and greater hostility to socialism, there was a socialist stronghold carved out in the town of Reading, Pennsylvania, in the late 1920s, which had entrenched socialist leadership there for years. When we look at this chapter of American history, it reminds us not only how much more complex US history is, but how to build political power for an ideology that’s outside the mainstream.
It might be hard for some to believe this even happened. Many Americans do not have a favorable opinion of the word “socialism.” According to a recent Axios/Momentive poll, only 41% of those surveyed claimed to view socialism positively (though this number is growing and admittedly higher among younger people). This grim outlook is partly due to that Red Scare propaganda we discussed earlier. In the past (and now), socialism has been likened to an ever-creeping menace infecting the heart of American society. Many men and women who were reared on that belief are now in positions of power today, which impacts our entire conversation about socialism.
Yet despite the ideology of socialism arguably being even more widely disliked during the 1920s, it could still find a home in places like Reading, Pennsylvania (the other two cities often cited during this time are Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Bridgeport, Connecticut). In 1927, the Socialist Party of Pennsylvania (SPP) captured the city council, the mayorship, several seats on the school board, and many other seats in the municipality. In later years, they would successfully send representatives to the State Assembly and even had a woman candidate unsuccessfully vie for the governorship (Lilith Martin Wilson).
The reasons for this success were varied. Firstly, the SPP had impressive organization and leadership. Even before their parent organization, the SPA, granted them a charter in 1902, labor activists in the area were involved with groups like the Knights of Labor and the Populist Party. The SPP established its own newspaper (The Labor Advocate) and committed to recruiting people during street corner speeches, parties, and more.
After being chartered, it took another decade of committed SPP organizing before they could put forth a full slate of municipal-level candidates (something that takes ongoing commitment). Their mayoral candidate, John Henry Stump, was well-liked by his constituents, and he was able to rewin his mayorship into the 1940s, well after the SPP had started to fracture.
Another prominent SPP activist was James H. Maurer, who started in those aforementioned Knights of Labor circles. He spent decades organizing in the Reading township before achieving any electoral results. Maurer was seen as a charismatic leader and a driving force behind the SPP’s success. As scholar Raymond J. Phillips writes:
“Older Readingites recall Jim Maurer as a forceful and persuasive speaker who had no peer on the public platform….This writer offers the opinion that in the absence of Maurer, the Reading Socialists would not have been as successful as they were. While Mayor Stump was a highly personable individual, he was not a particularly effective organizer and administrator, and he depended upon the forceful leadership of men like Maurer to carry him through.”
Secondly, a considerable part of SPP’s success was that there was also a keen sense of community among Reading’s socialists. The SPP frequently hosted parties and picnics, even purchasing a park and renaming it Socialist Park. This work and the vital fundraising that often went with it were predominantly the work of the SPP’s women, particularly the Berks County Women’s Political Committee, and its many iterations. This committee, although under-appreciated, was essential for handling many of the non-electoral and political functions of the organization. It cannot be overstated how vital fundraising was to providing the SPP with a regular income.
Thirdly, and maybe most pressing, local leadership was very savvy about tying their movement to issues the town’s working-class supported (note, there was a sexist and racist undertone to this). A big issue the Socialist Party of Pennsylvania campaigned on during the election of 1925 revolved around municipal finances. Many working-class voters were facing rising housing costs, preferring to own rather than rent and, therefore, as scholar Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr. put it, “[were] very sensitive to the problems of municipal debt and taxation.” Socialists used this to their advantage, portraying the Democratic administration as wasteful. The SPP positioned itself as against issuing more municipal bonds. They put out a four-page weekly bulletin in the Labor Advocate called “The Loan Question,” describing how they would reduce these costs for the working-class voter by advocating for a pay-as-you-go model for spending.
While the SPP didn’t capture any seats in 1925, all the bond issues submitted for a vote were rejected as well. This success in messaging encouraged the party to run again in the following election cycles, where they heavily focused on the Democratic administration’s perceived wastefulness. This message was hammered home repeatedly until finally, in 1927, the SPP swept the board with both the mayorship and the city council.
Unsurprisingly, a significant concern of mayor John Henry Stump’s administration was making sure that the tax burden was not placed more heavily on working-class property owners. For example, a big selling point of Stump’s plan for a new City Hall was it being allegedly under budget. Stump renovated an old high school instead of building a new City Hall from scratch, which appears to have been cheaper. His administration also tried and failed to create a “scientific” establishment of property values. This would have led to tax savings, that although lower for everyone, were proportionally more significant for smaller property owners (e.g., working-class homeowners).
However, this desire for a small tax burden does not mean that Stump cut back services in the same way conservatives try to when campaigning on lower taxes. During his administration, many services were expanded, such as a municipal purchasing office, a street cleaning service, a machine shop, and more. His administration also fundamentally changed how payment worked for many municipal positions by moving towards salaries, which was deemed more economically efficient. The SPP made many improvements, but Stump’s administration was adamant that the costs of those new services not be passed on to their preferred constituency, which in this case was (white, male) working-class homeowners.
I want to stress that these policies were built on the racism and sexism of this period, which should not be emulated or admired. There were things done that we would consider abhorrent by today’s standards, such as how Stump’s administration cracked down harshly on sex work the moment he entered office. Though not barred from running for positions, white women were far from equitably treated compared with their male peers. The absence of Brown and Black individuals in the literature I researched on this subject also speaks to the discrimination that existed. Such policies are not only morally repugnant but are partly the reason for the party’s collapse in the region.
The SPP declined in Reading due to a combination of factors. Their control was always tenuous, as both major parties were against them from the start. The local Democratic and Republican parties teamed up together multiple times to defeat the socialist party’s municipal slate in both the elections of 1917 and 1931. These “fusion” tickets were tough to overcome when the two parties were able to pull them off and continue to be a threat for socialist candidates in the present day (see India Walton’s 2021 race).
When the Great Depression hit, Mayor Stump was the incumbent — a curveball that his administration was unprepared for. Stump’s insistence on rejecting any relief effort funded via tax increases, under the rationale that it would place a more significant burden on working-class homeowners, allowed the opposition to paint his administration as cold and heartless. Stump tried to raise funds privately, but these efforts turned out to be insufficient. Defeated, he had to direct those in need to ask the county for help, paving the way for the Democratic-Republican-fusion victory in 1931. The Socialists would regain power eventually, winning an upset victory in 1935, but it placed their party out of the majority for several cycles.
It’s difficult to say what would have happened if Stump had acted differently here. Would it have made a difference if he’d accepted a publicly financed relief effort? Given the unique stresses of the Great Depression, it’s possible that he would have been swept out of office no matter what. Still, his insistence on serving working-class homeowners over his other constituents certainly didn’t help.
Another reason the SPP suffered was that the political climate had been altered by the success of the New Deal. FDR’s establishment of massive public works projects and financial reforms like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Glass-Steagall Act, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) cut into the SPP’s base. Again, in the words of scholar Raymond J. Phillips, “Norman Thomas, the party’s presidential candidate from 1928 to 1948, has attributed the decline to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. In Reading, too, it appears that the Democratic party has had a stronger appeal for the younger generation than has the Socialist party. …”
Lastly, and probably most importantly, a big blow to not just SPP membership but SPA overall had to do with infighting. A major turf war was waged nationally and locally between the party’s “Old Guard” and the more radical “militants,” leading to the SPP fracturing a year after their triumphant victory in 1935. These militants, also referred to as “leftists,” had a general desire for the party to accept more explicitly Communist principles. This split would turn out to be irreconcilable, as many of the Old Guard would leave in 1936 to form the Social Democratic Federation, reluctantly endorsing Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt for president that year (a decision arguably fueled partially by resentment of the now “militant” SPA).
There are many reasons for this divide, both ideologically and personally. However, in terms of Reading, this tension was not helped by the sexism within the party. There was a contingent of women “militants” who did not feel appreciated by their male comrades. This feeling was, in many ways, valid. Just like they would be in most contemporary organizations, SPP women were often stigmatized, making equal participation in the organization difficult. The following information from William C. Pratt’s work, “Women and American Socialism: The Reading Experience,” shows a huge gender discrepancy in committee members. This gap is even more striking once you realize that most female committee positions came from the Women’s Committee.
Source: The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 99, №1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 84
This lack of representation made several women leftists resentful of the SPP, to the point that after the fracture, many of them turned their back on socialist politics altogether. Some female leftists found they would rather support the Democratic Party than the Old Guard. In the words of scholar William C. Pratt:
“Now known in some circles as the Mostellerites (after Clara Mosteller), they began to endorse Democratic candidates rather than their former colleagues and most of them ended up in the Democratic Party by 1940….No longer Socialists, the “Mostellerites” apparently were consumed with bitterness and rage against their old comrades and slowly faded out of the Reading Socialist picture.”
Again, this resentment was understandable in some ways. The Old Guard kept a tight hold on power. Men like Jim Maurer and John Henry Stump had been in charge of the SPP’s direction in Reading for over a quarter-century, and they had no desire to relinquish power. Longtime leftist activists such as Charles Sands and Fred Merkel began rallying opposition and eventually supported the militants. Merkel would help coauthor a controversial pamphlet titled Rule or Ruin, accusing Old Guarders of trying to maintain “oligarchic control of the local.”
In some ways, Merkel was right. After a few turbulent local meetings and an incendiary national convention, Old Guard Readingites attempted to freeze the left out of their local party’s affairs — at one point dramatically expelling leftist delegates from a state convention for “constitutional irregularities.” The Old Guard, no longer recognized by the national party due to the schism with the leftists, waged a constant battle in ’36 to maintain control of SPP assets like the Labor Advocate, the party office, and Socialist Park.
For all these reasons and more, the Socialist Party of Pennsylvania started to lose steam in Reading and quickly. A few years later, in 1938, they lost majority control of the municipality in a landslide defeat. Only Stump would enjoy reelection in the late 1940s, which was more due to his popularity than to Readingites’ belief in the socialist party.
By 1965 the number of socialist party members in Reading was about 25. The Socialist Party of America would cease to exist by 1972, changing its name to Social Democrats, USA, with two caucuses spinning out into separate organizations (i.e., Socialist Party USA and The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a precursor to the DSA).
In modern times, I could not find much activity in Reading amongst the Social Democrats, USA, and the Socialist Party USA. I reached out to both organizations, but neither responded in time to be included in this article. The DSA does appear to have a small but active chapter in Berks County, which, as recently as December 2021, hosted a bowling fundraiser a 20-minute drive from Reading’s downtown.
When we examine the history of Reading, Pennsylvania, many of the issues probably sound pretty familiar: socialism is still viewed suspiciously by the majority of Americans (though unlike during the SPP’s time, that trend is reversing); Democrats and Republicans seem united in crushing leftist opposition; infighting also exists as strongly as it has in any period. We see from this history that these issues are not confined to the past. We can learn important lessons from the successes and failures of the socialist movement in Reading.
For one, the SPP successfully fought for policies that appealed to a working-class constituency, even if that strategy sometimes proved to be too narrow at times. National issues are all well and good, but to win on the local level, it’s clear that campaigning on issues your constituency cares about matters slightly more. Without sacrificing their values, men like Stump, at least initially, tailored their rhetoric and policies to work within their community’s local political ecosystem.
Unlike Stump, however, we have to try to be flexible when another disruption inevitably hits. The SPP was ill-prepared for the coming of the Great Depression. Like today, the Republican and Democratic parties could swoop in and reclaim power (temporarily at first, before securing a more permanent victory in ‘38). Socialists cannot just grab seats when times are good. They have to prove to constituents that they are best for navigating the bad times as well.
Will Americans turn to socialists during the coming disruptions that climate change will bring, or will they drift towards an increasingly xenophobic, corporatist right?
Additionally, as socialists, we must welcome and include as many identities as possible into the fold. When we continue to exclude comrades for identities such as their gender, race, age, or sexuality, it creates resentments that are very difficult to resolve. Leadership must be willing to let new blood into the fold, or new and old members alike will defect, weakening our base and political brand.
I always have wondered what would have happened if men like Stump and Maurer had made a genuine effort to make their more resentful comrades feel included in the decision-making? Would the SPP, and even the SPA, survive past 1938 to be more than a shell of its former self?
We will never know the answer to that question, but hopefully, we do not have to ask it next time.
Politicians Aren't Your Boyfriends
Stanning over Volodymyr Zelensky, Justin Trudeau, & Barack Obama isn't hot
The moment the internet saw how Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy reacted defiantly to Russia's hostile invasion, it almost instantly turned him into a sex symbol. "So hot," someone half-joked in a TikTok video with over a hundred thousand likes. "BREAKING: every woman in your life now has at least a small crush on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it," quipped a viral tweet with an even greater reach on Twitter.
Regardless of whether these posts are ironic or genuine, many people are putting forth the narrative that Zelenskyy is a snack, and this type of reaction is exceedingly common online. We have seen the same response with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, where it's possible to find dozens of articles about how sexy he is. You could also point to former President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and even Sarah Palin.
People on the internet love to turn politicians into romantic crushes, and it creates an unhealthy culture that deifies the very people who deserve the most criticism. The last thing we need is to treat our politicians like our boyfriends.
On the one hand, I understand why this obsession happens. The internet is built on parasocial relationships (i.e., one-sided relationships, where one person spends a lot of emotional energy and the other doesn't know they exist). The entire influencer profession is predicated on the idea that one person can maintain a one-way relationship with thousands, potentially even millions of people. Social media actively encourages people to prioritize these relationships because they are immensely profitable, which is why they have become so ingrained in our lives.
Politicians may have a different job from most entertainers (although even that gap seems to be lessening as more and more entertainers like Trump and Zelenskyy become politicians). However, they are still competing for the same social capital as every other influencer out there. Politicians have social media accounts. Many of the big ones tweet, create content, and pose for selfies. It makes sense that some of us would develop a parasocial relationship with them in the same way we do other "celebrities."
More so, many of us might seek a hero during times of uncertainty. Someone to turn complex issues like geopolitics into a straightforward narrative of good and evil. Russia is the aggressor in its invasion of Ukraine, but the debate surrounding how to respond to that aggression is complicated (i.e., the ethicality of sanctions, the "right" amount of mobilization, etc.). Although not impossible to understand, these issues require some work to figure out, but if you treat your politicians like celebrities you can worship, it removes the burden of having to do this work.
Why worry about geopolitics when you can stan Daddy Zelenskyy and Justin Trudeau instead?
Yet it's unhealthy to “stan” politicians (i.e. being an overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity) because, unlike other celebrity crushes, the stakes here are very high. Politicians aren't your boyfriends. They aren't even your friends. They are people who have power over you, and when we stop criticizing their actions and instead worship them, we remove them from accountability.
Infamously, a recent "politician boyfriend" was Andrew Cuomo. During the height of the first COVID wave, people were calmed by Cuomo's daily press briefings. Some people joked that they were "Cuomosexuals." Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped that he was "Andrew-curious." Influencer Randy Rainbow even put out a song about falling in love with Andrew Cuomo, remixing Disney Hercules' song I Won't Say (I'm In Love), with cringeworthy lyrics like "I hope they make you king."
However, this celebrity worship covered up a bitter truth: Cuomo wasn't actually handling the COVID pandemic that well. A scandal emerged in 2021 about his administration obscuring the number of nursing home deaths in New York. This coincided with a sex scandal where multiple women came forward and accused him of sexual harassment. He would resign shortly after the story became too big for him to ignore (later criminal charges against him would be dropped).
Yet none of this information was new to us in 2020 when this celebrity worship began. We saw critical reporting early on that accurately depicted his administration's problems with COVID. In the words of Russell Berman in August of 2020 for The Atlantic:
Cuomo's initial response to the coronavirus outbreak was slow and mistake-filled. He initially balked at issuing stay-at-home orders while cases mounted and then ordered sick elderly patients out of hospitals and back to nursing homes, where the virus spread like wildfire.
That last point became the central focus of the nursing home scandal, and again, this article was released over five months before the scandal would break major headlines in January of 2021.
We can see the same pattern for many "boyfriendified" politicians. People may have the hots for Trudeau, but self-inflicted scandals have plagued his administration. From being the only Canadian PM found to have formerly broken ethics rules to his approval of a controversial pipeline expansion, there are plenty of reasons to kick his ass to the curb. Obama likewise may have been considered sexy, but his administration was mired in mistakes. History has not looked kindly at his interactions with the GOP or how he did not press charges against many instigators of the 2008 financial crisis. The deification of politicians whitewashes these conversations of accountability that are always bubbling just below the surface.
Furthermore, these conversations are harder to have when we must first wade through an "ironic" discourse on how hot these leaders are. Some might argue that saying these "politicians are boyfriend material" is all just a joke, but the internet is a toxic place where no one ever knows when someone else is joking. It is filled with manifestos and memes of the vilest stuff imaginable, protected under the banner of "humor." One person's totally obvious "joke" is another person's call to action, and it's clear that there were plenty of people who took the "boyfriendification" of politicians like Andrew Cuomo very seriously.
Those "Cuomosexual" jokes were a symptom of a much larger cult of worship that the governor took advantage of for nearly a year. Since Trump's handling of the pandemic was so disastrous, even Cuomo's mediocre response was depicted as this masterful stroke of leadership. "Why We Are Crushing on Andrew Cuomo Right Now," wrote Molly Jong-Fast in Vogue. "Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now," quipped Ben Smith in the NY Times.
It's incredible how a cult of worship can make even a milquetoast response to something into an act of genius. If Cuomo had politically survived his scandals, he'd still be kicking around — remembered fondly through the prism of the "Governor that got us through COVID" in much the same way Rudy Giuliani was "America's mayor following 9/11." And that would be a shame because, as we have seen, Cuomo's leadership wasn't particularly good.
In a way, all of this posturing is just an indirect form of hero-worship. The difference between fawning over how "Trudeau is your daddy who will always treat you right" and comparing more authoritarian figures such as Trump to Jesus is a matter of degrees. One of these is undoubtedly worse than the other (The Trump one is worse), but it's still leading in the unhealthy direction of worship. We are uncritically stanning our favorite politicians, and that road can get cringy quite quickly.
I will say it again: your politicians are not your boyfriends. They are not your friends. They're not your bros. They are not your heroes. They represent systems of power, and although sometimes you might be aligned with those systems, there will inevitably be times when you are not.
Sometimes you will have to fight against the very people who claim to represent you (and yes, even the ones you voted for). And when that happens, your imagined parasocial relationship with them inside your head will not help you.
Dump your imaginary boyfriends, and treat them like people instead.
Geralt of Rivia: The Little Liberal That Couldn't
It’s time to question the philosophy behind The Witcher 3
At the core of the game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the story of one man named Geralt of Rivia as he travels the war-torn lands of Velen and Novigrad to track down the whereabouts of his adopted daughter Ciri. Geralt is a Witcher, which is a mutated sword-for-hire who slays monsters. Witchers have supernatural abilities that make them both hated by the people they serve and also needed by them. This premise serves as an exciting tension as Geralt sorts out where exactly his loyalties lie: monsters or man.
I love this game. I binged it during the pandemic, and at level 65 and over 69 hours of gameplay (hehe) under my belt, I would say I have a solid grasp of the game at this point. I picked to romance Yennefer in my first playthrough, because like in the show, I love how headstrong Yen is. My favorite scene in the game involves you and Yen waiting behind a door, trying to listen to your adopted daughter Ciri talk to members of the Lodge of sorceresses. It shows warmth and tenderness to these two characters that you don't usually see in action games.
When we examine this game’s politics, though, there are a lot of internal contradictions: Geralt is an avowed centrist who hates politics but constantly meddles in the affairs of nations and kings; the misogynistic male gaze is present in nearly every scene, and character choice, but is coupled with some powerful female protagonists; the game allows you to decide the fate of entire regions and principalities, but all of them end up perpetuating a pretty awful status quo.
As I traveled on Roach across the lands of Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige, I came to understand more about this game's philosophy. The Witcher 3 is one of contracts, markets, and justice at the hands of a sword. Although it may be set in a medieval-seeming world, The Witcher's values are very contemporary — a celebration of liberalism, the philosophy that lays the foundation for our world.
So let's talk about the good, the bad, and the downright Nilfgaardian about the politics of The Witcher 3 and what that can tell us about our world too.
Now politically, Geralt as a character is a big ole' centrist. Witchers follow a code called the Path, where they are not supposed to be involved in politics. They are neutral. This gives him a narrative reason to constantly travel and not be very invested in the sides of man. Geralt serves multiple polities throughout the three main games, taking contracts for Nilfgaard, Redania, and more. His apoliticalness is a defining aspect of his character that remains unchanging. In fact, if you choose to spend your final days with Yen, the narrator, Dandelion, remarks that they "lived a calm quiet life far from all things political."
However, the main character's philosophy does not make it the same as the games. My favorite game is Disco Elysium (sorry, Geralt), and it allows the main character to adopt any philosophy you want: communism, neoliberalism, fascism. Take your pick. However, the game is coming from a leftist perspective. Even liberals in Disco Elysium call themselves "ultra-liberals," describing how they fight to preserve the powers of capital in a way that most real-life liberals would not. The game never shrugs from its perspective, especially when depicting opposing points of view.
Likewise, we know The Witcher game is not apolitical (if such a thing were even possible). From stumbling on vigilante thugs terrorizing elves to helping persecuted mages leave the city of Novigrad, Geralt is encouraged to fight against acts of injustice all the time. There are several moments where characters directly call him out on his apoliticalness. "Oh bollocks," chastises the former spymaster Sigismund Dijkstra when trying to get the player’s help in killing the xenophobic king of Redania. "That’s a convenient excuse [Witchers] try to hide behind every time the temperature rises. It’s grown hot, my friend." Dijkstra has moral standing in this scene. The music is soft and pleasant while the player patiently stands there and waits for him to finish monologuing.
It helps that Dijkstra's planning this assassination for a seemingly sound reason. He explains before this outburst that he's allegedly not doing this for self-enrichment but due to his ideals. "Any idea what made [Old Redania] strong?" he asks Geralt about why the old regime was better before Mad King Radovoid took over. "…[because it had] a strong state with healthy commerce, manufacturing, solid alliances, progressive science, and fair, independent courts that hand down just judgments."
This speech should ring some bells. You should be very familiar with how commerce and contracts control your life. These values are the ones a lot of viewers may agree with because they make up the bedrock of our current society: the enlightenment values of classical liberalism (e.g., believing that allowing someone to control private property is intimately tied to human liberty). Our world is currently ruled by an offshoot of liberalism called "neoliberalism" that heavily emphasizes using the marketplace to guide all human action. By waxing poetically about the philosophy of liberalism, the game is not only telling the player that their current political norms are awesome but signaling that Dijkstra shares them too.
In fact, if you choose to endorse Dijkstra to rule the North in the quest Reason of State, it leads to an ending where he triumphs against the Nilfgaardian invaders and economically industrializes the North. He is described by Dandelion in the closing narration as a ruthless but wise ruler, saying: "He knew that to preserve the peace he would need to prepare for war. Following Nilfgaard's example, he consolidated his rule over vast lands through a broad program of resettlement and industrialization. All for the good of his subjects — though often contrary to their will."
That's an interesting perspective because it subtly suggests to the viewer that although his rule is harsh, the tenets of liberalism (e.g., private property, courts that enforce contracts, a centralized state, etc.) do allow the country to "modernize." This framing is a moral choice the game makes to reinforce a specific worldview. It doesn't help that the other two options are letting the fascistic empire Nilfgaard conquer the entire continent, albeit potentially under the "benevolent" rule of Ciri, or allowing Radovoid to genocide all mages, nonhumans, and intellectuals from the North.
One of these three options is definitely framed better than the others.
Furthermore, Dijkstra's values of a strong economy and independent rulings are core tenets of the game. We see this through the contract-heavy focus of Geralt, whose trade requires that he take work and haggle for pay. Contracts are the highlight of the game for many players because they turn into mini-CSI episodes. You have to track down various leads using your supernatural "Witcher Sense" and try to determine what monster is terrorizing the local area. These quests are enjoyable, and occasionally they even end as de facto courtrooms, where you get to pass rulings and judgments.
Another way we see this philosophy emphasized is by the types of enemies the game chooses to focus on. There are many monsters to destroy in this game (looking at you drowners). Still, when it comes to our human enemies, we don't spend much time mowing down the warriors of Nilfgaard or Redania — that would require the game to frame certain sides as unlikable mechanically. Instead, we spend much of our time chopping down deserters, bandits, and pirates: enemies who are pillaging the local economies.
A mini-quest you can do in the game is to liberate areas occupied by monsters and these human pillagers. A satisfying animation happens when these quests are completed. Geralt sits down to meditate, and as time passes, the former occupants return to the area. With peaceful music, it’s always framed as a good thing regardless of whether this lets Redanian or Nilfgaardian forces recapture the land. I always found it strange to celebrate these moments because I despised both of these forces in my playthrough. I honestly would rather a strategic point be occupied by drowner monsters than given to either of these fascist empires. Yet, those considerations are not what’s thought of as essential mechanically. The fact that violence has ended, and that current landholders can restake their claims to this land is what’s celebrated.
And so when Dijkstra monologues about the need to create a healthy economy and independent rulings, I found myself nodding along with him because these are the values the game has subtly been reinforcing the entire time. Geralt's livelihood as a Witcher depends on fair contracts being enforced. He's also spent half the game restoring the local economy by clearing out bandits, pirates, and monsters. If there is one person who values healthy commerce and fair judgments, it's our protagonist.
Now there are a lot of criticisms of liberalism as a philosophy. Someone more on the Left might say that this system prioritizes those who hold favorable contracts to property rather than the workers who produce much of that value. In contrast, others on the Right would probably devolve into incoherent ramblings about nationalism and racism (you can probably see where I stand on this spectrum). But while we see the Right firmly represented by Radovoid, who is rightfully (pun intended) portrayed as a monster, we never really focus too much on the affairs of peasants and workers, outside of haggling for payment (and making sure they deliver on their promised coin).
Why focus on those who do not hold property or wealth in a game that's not really about them?
Liberalism is a very individualistic philosophy, but it's also one that celebrates a particular type of individual: i.e., the property owner or what a particular German philosopher might call the Bourgeoisie. So it's unsurprising that we instead end up focusing on a Great Man version of history. The game places a premium on the choices of a few individuals, especially during narrator Dandelion's closing monologue. We learn that if Radvoid lives, the North wins the war, despite him purging the land of all of his intellectual and magic users because he's a "tactical genius." If Ciri takes the throne of the fascist Nilfgaard, we are meant to believe that things will be better for the world because she was taught "simple human decency" by Geralt. It all comes down to what a couple of actors choose to do, and not so much about breaking down the systems of power that make this world turn.
We walk away with a celebration of the dominant ideology — inside the body of a snarky mutant who always asks for his money upfront.
All this being said, I still love this game and how it sometimes subverts your expectations. Throughout this series, you make many decisions about what quests to take and what people to let live or die. Yet the most crucial choice of who gets to save the world is not one you can make at all. Ciri is the one who saves all of reality from the entropic force known as the White Frost (a metaphor for what is effectively climate change), telling Geralt when he asks her not to sacrifice herself: "What can you know about saving the world, silly? You're but a witcher. This is my story, not yours. You must let me finish telling it."
That's probably one of my favorite lines in all video games. I get a particular joy imagining people's reaction to it when it was first uttered back in 2015, during the height of Gamergate. It must have been something to see a bunch of gamers being told that the world didn't revolve around them.
However, this fleeting moment of catharsis aside, for most of the game, you are in the body of a centrist navigating through a liberal world. Our Witcher continues to take contracts (predominantly for the wealthy) and tacitly fight for the powerful, albeit begrudgingly so, all while delivering some very misogynistic humor. He is kind of the perfect avatar of our world's dominant philosophy. And given where we are right now, we have to question if that's something that should go unchallenged? If not even his own daughter considers him a hero, why should we?
Because unlike in the game, our own White Frost (i.e., climate change) isn't some natural force brought on through magical entropy storms, but one caused by our society and its ideals. The values of liberalism and neoliberalism have brought upon us an impending existential crisis, and we don't have a Ciri to save us.
Instead, we have to question the avatars of the Carbon Age. And unfortunately for the aspiring Geralt's of our world, that means caring more about politics and the people that it affects.
Exploring The Alleged White Savior Trope in 'The Book of Boba Fett'
What does whiteness even mean in the Star Wars galaxy?
Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash
The first season of the Disney+ show The Book of Boba Fett has come and gone. The Space Opera-meets-Western about a bounty hunter named Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) running a crime family in the desert city of Mos Espa, Tatooine, brought with it plenty of nuggets to deconstruct. We saw impressive set pieces, incredible fights scenes, and cool CGI droids that looked like Droidekas (They're called Scorpenek Annihilator's, by the way). I personally loved the character Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), who can assassinate me any day.
However, along with these fun elements came a heated conversation about white saviorism and how Boba Fett did or did not embody it. The Book Of Boba Fett Is Not A White Saviour Story, went the title of an article in The Gamer that was released before the series had even finished airing. "Did anyone else find that the latest Boba Fett episode has white savior vibes?" complained one post on Reddit.
When examining these claims, it becomes apparent that critics might have stumbled onto something worthing deconstructing, even if the "white savior" trope might not be the best label to describe it (I am still conflicted personally). The Book of Boba Fett does replicate some harmful tropes that warrant scrutiny — something that hits a lot of raw nerves over media representation and whose voices matter in the Star Wars universe.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, we should probably define what we mean when using the term "white savior." This phrase is used to describe stories of both real-life and fictional white people, who make the suffering of an oppressed group about that white character's desire to help. As Fariha Roisin writes in Teen Vogue:
“Hollywood has a trend when it comes to these films in general. It’s most commonly seen in Oscar-bait movies; the white savior complex is a constant leitmotif. Hollywood supposedly inserts these roles for complexity, for drama. But what ends up happening is that they perpetuate an idea that is essentially a historical banner of colonialism: People of color need white people to save them.”
In media, this perspective translates into films where the white person "goes native" (an offensive term where a colonizer assimilates into a non-dominant culture), leading oppressed people to victory against their oppressors. It's a narrative that focuses on the otherness of the colonizer protagonist at the expense of the people they are "saving." A quintessential example of this is the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. This work fictionalizes the life of the real T. E. Lawrence, making the story all about how this one man led the Arab people against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.
In a more fantastic example, James Cameron's 2009 Avatar is about a former marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), going to the world of Pandora to help Earth mine the planet for natural resources. Through his interactions with the native Na'vi people, Jake eventually grows to disagree with Earth's colonial extraction of Pandora's resources. He learns and masters the ways of the Na'vi people and unites their disparate tribes against their Terran oppressors.
White savior films are problematic for several reasons. For one, they usually suck up all the oxygen in the room in focusing on their colonizer protagonist. White audiences are pretty familiar with T. E. Lawrence, but they do not know Prince Faisal nearly as much, despite him having an essential role both in the traditional "T.E. Lawrence" story as well as King of Iraq in the postwar period. There are important areas of history that, for a long time, we chose not to focus on because the white savior arc was deemed more attractive.
They also simplify history so that the colonizer can be the hero at all, when that alleged saving may have never have happened. When the war ended, much of the Arabian peninsula was divided up as imperial holdings by France and the United Kingdom. T. E. Lawrence was against this action but ultimately failed to lobby for Arabian independence. Bitter and defeated, he changed his legal name and, according to Smithsonian Magazine, told a friend he "never wanted to be in a position of responsibility again." He then reenlisted in lowly military positions over the next 14 years on bases in Britain, suffering from what would now be classified as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The reason people have made this claim of white saviorism for The Book of Boba Fett is because the main character has an arc that involves Tusken Raiders or sand people. Those "primitive" seeming aliens who attacked Luke in the first movie over four decades ago, and since then, have been mainly depicted as xenophobic monsters for defending their ancestral land. Boba Fett gets captured by the Tusken Raiders but slowly earns their trust. He is given a gaffi stick and then teaches them how to use technology like speeder bikes (something the writers would have us believe they have not figured out how to ride in their thousands of years of occupation). He then builds them up into a force that can challenge groups like the Pyke Syndicate, who are moving Spice through the sand people's territory.
Now even though this doesn't go well for the sand people in the show (sort of like how British victory didn't bode well with for Arabian people in real life), you can see from afar how this general outline maps onto the white savior trope. You have a man teaching the sand people how to assert themselves, albeit failing fantastically in the end. The narrative then focuses on that man's struggle and pain when he loses his newfound "tribe" once the Pykes wipe them out.
It can be argued that the sand people in The Book of Bobba Fett aren't so much fully formed characters as objects to be "fridged" (i.e., killed off) for Boba Fett's character development. We don't even know the names of a single sand person by the time they die in episode three. In fact, if you look up the two major sand people characters on IMDB, they are referred to as Tusken Warrior (Joanna Bennett) and Tusken Chief (Xavier Jimenez), which complicates this whole narrative. In-universe Tusken is a colonizer name for the sand people after they raided Fort Tusken in 19 BBY (i.e., Before the Battle of Yavin).
Would using the word Tusken here (which in-universe is the oppressor's framing) be a creative decision that would happen if the show's writers cared about respectfully elaborating on this fictional culture?
At the very least, you would think we would learn essential details like the name of the tribe or the names of these two characters who allegedly had such a profound impact on Boba Fett's development. Hell, even subtitling the Tusken language like they do other alien races on the show would go a long way in fleshing these characters out. Why give this alien race the same treatment the Star Wars universe does for droids?
Now proponents of the show have been quick to point out that although this might seem like a white savior trope, it's not because both the main character and the show do not qualify as white. As Stacey Henley writes in that aforementioned The Gamer article: "Boba Fett is played by Temuera Morrison, a New Zealander of Māori descent. He's a person of colour, just as the Mandalorian played by Pedro Pascal is. This already reduces the White Saviour trope…." One Navajo Star Wars fan says this more bluntly in an article for the Inverse: "It's playing with that white savior trope, but it's supposed to undermine it by having a Native man in that place. And therefore it can be changed and is useful."
Your acceptance of this argument will depend heavily on whether you think Temuera Morrison's heritage of Māori, Scottish, and Irish descent "decolonizes" this role. This argument brings us into a complicated conversation about colorism and white-passing privilege that I don't think is relevant here—deciding how white an actor has to be before a role becomes a colonizer work shields the company making that work from criticism. We should be focusing on how Disney is a colonizer company. They tried to trademark the phrase Dia de Los Muertos to sell Coco swag, and their appropriative nature has continued to the present day. This series was created and written by white showrunner Jon Favreau. Disney is not a champion of indigenous representation in this or any work.
In the same vein, in the context of the Star Wars universe, Boba Fett is a colonizer, no matter who plays him. While Star Wars may operate under white supremacy on a metatextual level (its creators and owners are primarily white colonizers, after all) on a textual level, whiteness is not the central divide. The main tensions between people in the Star Wars galaxy have nothing to do with whiteness and fall more along lines between the rich vs. the poor; the core worlds vs. the outer rim; humans vs. aliens (though it should be noted that no one gives a f@ck about droids). These are where the lines between oppressor and oppressed are in Star Wars, and Boba Fett was a slaver, bounty hunter serving a xenophobic, fascist empire when we last see him in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. He then turns around in The Book of Bobba Fett to save the groups he would have slaughtered and enslaved several years earlier.
Again, this is a narrative where the colonizer is the focus in our interactions with this indigenous group (something that rings some Lawrence of Arabia-sized alarm bells). Your acceptance of this trope's usage here will depend heavily on how respectful you think Boba Fett's interactions are with this sand people tribe. Is this rehashing an old trope or subverting it? Is he offering the sand people aid or salvation? Considering the tribe is fridged by the third episode to focus on the protagonist's pain, does it even matter? This sand people tribe could have benefited from more character development before they were genocided because that decision isn't helping Disney's case here.
It's also important to note that Bobba Fett doesn't do this "saviorism" just for the Tusken Raiders, but nearly every divide we are talking about here. He's helping the poor mod kids of the worker district by giving them a job (note — they look more like models than street urchins). Boba Fett is tolerant of alien species ranging from the Wookie Black Krrsantan (Carey Jones) to the Rancor given to him by the Hutts. He helps unify the more rural Free Town with the residents of Mos Espa. The show paints Boba Fett pretty explicitly as a champion of the downtrodden.
Yet his politics aren't liberatory but self-centered. He's not trying to free these people from the systems that oppress them but to create a crime Family of his own. As Boba Fett says in episode four: "I'm tired of working for idiots who are gonna get me killed." His analysis of past problems boils down to him not being the one on top, claiming his leadership will be fairer for the people below him. That's paternalistic as f@ck, and precisely the type of narrative I would imagine an out-of-touch screenwriter would think of when imagining a folk hero (stares at Jon Favreau).
Furthermore, his politics are also very conservative, which is a core component of white saviorism or "colonizer saviorism" if you find that term more fitting. It simplifies systemic problems into something our colonizer protagonist can overcome through force of will. When the mod "kids" complain about a lack of economic opportunities in the worker district, Boba Fett doesn't bother to understand why this is the case. He gives these individuals jobs and stops thinking about improving the economic circumstances for the people of Mos Espa — the ones he's allegedly governing. He turns the problem into something he can personally solve rather than a complex system that will require structural reform.
When he grabbles with an increase in a drug named Spice, the narrative implies that the solution boils down to removing the drug traffickers from the planet, essentially replicating the dynamics of The War on Drugs. The causes for drug usage in real life are far more complicated than simply attacking the big bad drug dealers. They involve dealing with cultural and socio-economic factors — none of which Boba Fett seems particularly interested in or even capable of dealing with. Instead, the narrative gives us a reality where Boba Fett can solve this issue, leading the charge on top of a Rancor, which, although looking incredible, is not a recommendable solution for solving your community's local drug problem.
The narrative goes out of its way to make sure all of these complex, systemic issues can be solved individually by this former slaver, who is finding himself through helping others. To me, that doesn't sound like the progressive narrative on "found family" that many fans are touting it as, but one that uses the aesthetic of progressive politics to sell a conservative story.
Now I love Star Wars. I personally found it awesome when Boba Fett rode that Rancor into battle. I geeked out when Cad Bane entered the scene in his cowboy getup, and I have loved the chance to see all sorts of classic aliens in the CGI flesh.
And I know there will be a particular type of person out there triggered by me "coming" for their beloved Star Wars. "It's just a show," they will say. "Stop being so serious." I could give the classic spiel about how criticizing media is not the same thing as attacking it, but I think that would be sidestepping the issue at hand. This criticism I'm making is sort of an attack — it's an attack against the idea that certain types of people, or really anyone, get to be the savior.
When I look at the last couple of decades of nerd culture, I think it's fair to say that white saviorism is rather prominent. From Commander Shepard (a pretty on-the-nose Jesus allegory) in the Mass Effect trilogy saving the galaxy from the Reapers, to Tony Stark snapping his fingers to right all the wrongs of the last five years, we have these narratives that deify our heroes and that's not healthy. I want protagonists to help others, definitely, and sometimes be the hero, but I do think it's unhealthy for them to be our saviors.
I want to push back against the paternalistic narrative that one person can stroll into town and solve all of its problems. It takes a lot of coordinated effort between a broad coalition of people to solve the sorts of issues that The Book of Boba Fett does, and often that work isn't sexy. This show makes overtures to that idea (see the poorly developed "city and Freetown folk coming together" plotline). Still, they fall flat, as all the large problems are dealt with by the Mandoralians guns, Boba Fett's Rancor, or Fennec Shand's impressive moves (seriously, I will die on the hill believing that Ming-Na Wen deserves her own show).
If Disney wants to make a show about these liberatory politics — something it's in no way required to do (this could have just been The Sopranos of Tatooine, and it would have been fine) — then it needs to do better in showing it. The narrative needs to be less about Boba Fett and his feelings and more about him assisting the people of Tatooine in their struggle: the Sand people reclaiming their ancestral land; the worker's district gaining economic and political autonomy; there being genuine democracy in Mos Espa.
Because at the end of the day, the season one story in The Book of Boba Fett is about one former slaver's rise to power, and I fail to see how we walk away with anything more than a friendly dictator with cool armor.
How 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' Gives Us A Masterclass In Using Repetition
This catchy show about mental health can teach you how to be a better writer
Image; Hollywood Reporter
I love the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015–2019). It combines many of my favorite elements: strong female protagonists, "problematic" women, musical numbers, and uproarious comedy. I still sing the soundtracks to this show three years after it has ended. Some of its lines have become inside jokes between my partner and me. No other show has so much staying power in my head.
The show is about a young lawyer named Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) moving across the country to pursue her obsession with a guy. We slowly learn that this fixation is not because of some inherent awfulness but due to unaddressed mental illness partially brought on by familial abuse. Rebecca has been attempting to mask these destructive behaviors her entire life, and throughout the show, her primary coping mechanism is processing her feelings as musical numbers inside her head.
I normally deconstruct harmful things in media, but today I wanted to focus on something that this show does right, specifically how Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a masterclass in using repetition to make both great jokes and themes all in one stroke. If you love the show or want to learn more about using repetition in your work, stay tuned until the end.
Repetition of Theme Songs
The first significant repetition you as the viewer will probably notice is the show's theme song, which changes from season to season, but is repeated during the start of every episode. Most shows only try to capture the tone or aesthetic in their theme songs, assuming they even have one at all. These theme songs usually solely rely on visuals to convey to the viewer who our lead characters are and what the show is about (think Law & Order, Friends, The Simpsons, etc.).
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, however, does something rare in media — it forecasts its themes and character arcs in the lyrics of the opening theme song. The first season's jingle involves Rebecca in complete denial, describing how she has moved to West Covina because she's sad and not due to her fixation with hunk Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III). She's being called crazy by a chorus and reflexively rejecting those labels as "sexist" and lacking "nuance." In the second season, she has repressed this obsessive tendency even further with the lyrics, "I'm just a girl in love (La la la lovey dove). I can't be held responsible for my actions."
The third season is where we see a shift. She has gone from denial and repression to doubt. Her idea of crazy is buckling at the seams, highlighting Rebecca's own struggle with these terms. As the chorus of the song mocks beautifully: "You do (you don't!) wanna be crazy. And you don't (you do!) wanna be "crazy." To clarify: yes, no on the crazy. We hope this helps!."
By the time we get to the fourth season, the theme song's lyrics show us that Rebecca is a fully actualized person. She's not only capable of the emotion of love, but happiness, sadness, and cruelty. We have gone through an entire emotional journey, just through the evolution of the show's opening theme song, highlighting how it uses repetitive jingles (something that is usually an afterthought to most TV shows) and makes them a core aspect of its storytelling.
Take note, writers: no element of your story should be an afterthought. Even seemingly benign aspects of a work can be vital to the story you are trying to tell.
Repetition of Lyrics and Dialogue
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, however, is more than just its theme songs. This show put out on average three musical numbers per episode, and many of these are reprised in a way that recontextualizes the song so that it takes on a new meaning.
For example, the song "I am a Villain In My Own Story" was initially sung by Rebecca to signify how her obsession with Josh had caused her to do some terrible things to those around her, but it serves as the background music for Josh's ex Valencia Perez (Gabrielle Ruiz) as a way for her to process her breakup with him (see Why Is Josh's Ex-Girlfriend Eating Carbs?). Good musicals (and just good stories in general) know how to take an emotionally-resonate theme and remix it for the appropriate moment (see also Centaurworld season one for another example).
This repetition isn't always in the background of Crazy-Ex Girlfriend but is frequently included in the dialogue as well. The lyrics of the first season's theme song are repeated line for line as a joke between characters Paula Proctor (Donna Lynne Champlin) and her husband, Scott. We also see frenemy character Audra Levine (Rachel Grate) repeat the closing line of season 2's I’m Just A Girl In Love, symbolizing to the viewer that she is in the middle of a breakdown. "You can't call me crazy," Audra rationalizes, "because when you call me crazy, you are calling me in love. Blam." It's a funny button to a joke because we know exactly what that line means by this point in the series — we've only listened to it over a dozen times.
These repetitions can highlight serious themes, too, not just jokes. We learn that the lyrics of the second season's theme song are word for word what Rebecca's mother told a judge after Rebecca burned down a former obsessions house. "Your honor," her mother tells the judge, "She's just a girl in love. She can't be held responsible for her actions." We understand that these words are a justification imparted to Rebecca by her mother on how she should perceive her unhealthy attachments with men. It goes into this theme of how Rebecca is caught in this negative cycle that has detrimentally impacted her mental health.
In another example, when Rebecca texts her father in the season two finale to see if he will come to her wedding, it's the exact same message she sent to Josh Chan when she first arrived at West Covina in season one. It symbolizes how her obsession with Josh partly stems from the unhealthy attachment she has with her father, whose abandonment led to some significant insecurities about men.
This show is adept at first introducing a concept to the viewer in a humorous way only to reveal that that quirk is part of a larger, more dysfunctional form of behavior. We think her obsessiveness is just a quirk of her "craziness," but really, it points to a far more painful and poignant history.
This is good screenwriting 101. When you introduce something in a banal or humorous way, it lowers your audience's guard. When a turn happens in the narrative, it's not something that we can claim comes out of left-field — it was there in the theme song of the first season.
Conclusion
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is not the only show to use repetition to its advantage. The idea of a motif (i.e., a repeating feature or idea) has been around in literature for hundreds of years and used in art thousands of years before it went by that name. It's not revolutionary to suggest that you repeat resonating themes and symbolism for your viewers to make your work more impactful.
While all good stories should try to do this, it's awe-inspiring how much Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does with repetition. There's not a single scrap that the show doesn't seem to tuck away to build upon later. From the repetition of its theme songs to its score to its lyrics, I have always found myself continuously delighted by how things will return to me.
If you are looking for something to hone your craft, I highly recommend giving Crazy Ex-Girlfriend a binge. It might just be what the doctor ordered.
Does Disney Care About Diversity?
Eternals, Encanto, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Frozen.
Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash
I have been a Disney fan for a long time. My favorite Disney movie growing up was Hercules, whose songs I would sing on repeat (and can still do so to this day). When the character Megara (Susan Egan) sings her song I Won't Say (I'm In Love), I swoon with delight every time, and you can often catch me humming the chorus over and over again while at work. I love Megara. I admired her bravery and independence growing up, and as a trans person, I'd be lying if I said she didn't have a seminal impact on how I view gender norms.
Disney has been putting out a lot of "diverse" movies recently (more on this term later): Encanto (2021), Coco (2017), Moana (2016). Many of these films are good, great even, and the company has done some important work in fostering stories that have piqued viewers' interest. Luisa’s song Surface Pressure from Encanto has become one of my personal favorites, which I sing now even more than I Won’t Say (I’m In Love).
However, this recent success exists against a backdrop of nearly a century of regressive storytelling. Before the mid-2010s, Disney's past films were overwhelmingly white, eurocentric, and straight. There has been a lot of press given to Disney's strides towards greater diversity, but given its history of conservative and arguably racist and sexist messaging, we have to question the benevolence of this new strategy.
Disney doesn't seem to be focused on diversity in a progressive sense as much as it is trying to capture an evolving market. While that is a good thing overall from a societal standpoint, it should give us pause about assigning accolades to an entertainment company that is ultimately very conservative.
First, let's define what we mean when we say "diversity." In our current context, we are speaking about a catchall term for any representation that falls outside white supremacist patriarchy (i.e., anyone who is not a white, cisgendered, straight, neurotypical man).
So you know, the majority of the planet.
There is a narrative that Disney hasn't been the most diverse in the past, but now they are "doing better." For example, the piece The Year Disney Started to Take Diversity Seriously in Vanity Fair talks about how starting in 2016, they seemed to be putting out more "diverse" work. The article referenced films such as Moana and Queen of Katwe, claiming they represented a radical departure from Disney's previous filmography. As Yohana Desta writes in the closing lines of that article: "Though [Queen of Katwe] was outside the norm even for Disney, the studio's devotion to making it the right way is a sign that Disney really is committed to telling stories the world should hear."
We see this sentiment also in Disney's latest marketing. I think a great recent example of catering to this definition of diversity is the 2021 film Eternals: the superhero movie about ten immortal aliens protecting humanity from evil monsters. The advertising for Eternals was focused pretty heavily on this concept of diversity from the getgo. The lead-up to the film was filled with headlines of its star-studded cast members like Salma Hayek and Gemma Chan, as well as its producers and directors, hailing this one feature.
This persistent claim could be made because Eternals did include many non-white leads. It also had a lead with a disability, and one main character that was openly queer, which is a rarity for the MCU. In particular, the appearance of gay Eternal Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) and his partner Ben (Haaz Sleiman) had not been done before in the MCU or Disney's larger canon in general. This depiction created quite the stir, even if the movie overall was not very good. "How 'Eternals' Establishes the MCU's First Gay Superhero and Same-Sex Couple in a Movie: 'It's Life-Saving'" read the headline from a Variety article shortly before the film's release.
There were many think pieces like this one. The film's advertising heavily leaned into this concept of diversity, and defenders were quick to frame negative press as bigoted. "Looks like we're upsetting the right people," Eternals star Kumail Nanjiani said in a now-deleted tweet in response to the film allegedly getting review bombed by users criticizing its queer representation.
So is this claim true? Was Disney, as a studio, terrible with making diverse stories before the mid-2010s, and are they better at making them now? Has Disney become a #woke defender against bigoted mobs?
On the one hand, the answer to this question is kind of obvious. Of course, Disney has gotten better with its content. When we look at its past titles, it's undeniable that they were overwhelmingly eurocentric and white. Many of them also had terribly racist tropes. From the painful depiction of Indigenous people in Peter Pan (1953) to the offensive black caricatures in Dumbo (1941), you can quickly point to dozens of examples. The most infamous probably being the 1946 film Songs of the South, which has a "happy" slave character best remembered for their song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah."
However, comparing the Disney of now to the Disney of the past almost seems disingenuous. It's unsurprising that Disney executives of the 30s through the 90s were putting out racist content: that was the dominant culture. What we need to do is compare the Mickey Mouse corporation to contemporary standards, and by that metric, they are extremely conservative.
Let's return to the example of Eternals. The reason the character Phasto was such a big deal only makes sense when looking at Dinsey's past conservatism. For over a decade now, Disney has put forth the narrative that they would have queer representation in their films, only for that representation not to be very good or present at all.
For example, there was a lot of buzz around Disney having a queer movie in Avengers: End Game (2019), only for that character to be a minor one with not much dialogue. Other examples include a blink-and-you-will-miss-it dance between LeFou (Josh Gad) and some side character in the 2017 Beauty and the Beast reboot; a brief kiss between two same-sex extras in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019); a screenwriter claiming on Twitter that two male characters in Zootopia (2016) were gay; and many more.
These scenes, assuming they exist on screen at all (looking at you Zootopia and Cruella), could all be edited out or redubbed for foreign releases so that they didn't impact sales abroad. For example, the grieving partner in Endgame was redubbed for Russian audiences partly to not run afoul of a homophobic censorship law in that country. We saw a similar situation unfold when Disney clipped that aforementioned brief kiss in The Rise of Skywalker to avoid getting a higher age rating for its Singapore release. This pattern of behavior is not the sort of thing a company would accept if they cared about queer representation as a concept.
Disney may have an undeniably queer character on the Silver Screen now — 21 years after Will & Grace had their big kiss on TV, and 16 years after Brokeback Mountain — but that doesn't mean they are suddenly bastions of queer progressivism. The framing they used with Eternals, of conflating all criticism as "bigotry" when the movie is indeed very bad, speaks to a level of manipulativeness that makes this whole situation feel very icky.
I have always found the narrative around introducing diversity in Disney properties to be odd because it’s marketed as this significant progressive action. Yet as we have already seen, it’s only a big deal because they choose not to be inclusive for decades. As yet another example, in the MCU (which was purchased by Disney in 2009), it took over a decade for us to get a black lead with Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa in Black Panther (2018). This happened 20 years after Wesley Snipes’s Blade and 10 years after Will Smith’s Hancock. Disney wasn’t exactly breaking new ground with Black Panther anywhere outside the MCU. In the meantime, they made billions of dollars, mainly selling white, conservative narratives for over a decade.
This logic applies to most "groundbreaking" decisions within their repertoire. The "true love" narrative that Frozen (2013) subverted was revolutionary only because Disney marketed regressive narratives about Love for decades. It's not like narratives about putting yourself first over a man didn't exist. Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman was released in 1978. It was nominated for multiple Oscars. You could make similar arguments about having a woman protagonist in the MCU (see Captain Marvel), a Chinese protagonist (see Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), or any other "diverse" identity. These stories were progressive only in relation to the Mickey Mouse company's deeply ingrained conservatism.
Let’s be real here. Disney was the bad guy who decided that it would be more profitable to tell conservative narratives and ignore entire swaths of the world’s population than break new ground. And now, in the year of our Lord Gritty 2022, they are trying to act like this half-assed representation is the equivalent of making bold strides in diversity, when in the current environment, it’s just the bare minimum. Most of us don’t want to see the White Aryan Power Hour anymore, and Disney is responding to a long-overdue trend.
And even this attempt to meet the bare minimum is usually a struggle. When I look at some of the most progressive works the company has put out in recent years, it's clear that there are still significant internal struggles between the company's more conservative elements and their more progressive creators. For example, the TV show Owl House, which has been heralded for both its queer and Hispanic representation, seems to have had a lot of internal resistance from company executives. The creator Dana Terrace has been open in the past about how executives tried to forbade her from adding queer representation, and sadly the show will now be canceled after a significantly shortened third season for "reasons." As she wrote on Reddit in late 2021:
At the end of the day, there are a few business people who oversee what fits into the Disney brand and one day one of those guys decided TOH didn’t fit that “brand”. The story is serialized (BARELY compared to any average anime lmao), our audience skews older, and that just didn’t fit this one guy’s tastes. That’s it! Ain’t that wild? Really grinds my guts, boils my brain, kicks my shins, all the things. It sucks but it is what it is.
This happened in 2021, not in Disney's far-off history. Terrace insists this cancellation wasn't because of homophobia, and we will honestly never know for sure because it's not like she can be any more direct. It's noteworthy that Disney has a history of blocking queer representation. Similar comments were made by Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls, about the company forbidding him from adding explicit queer content in his show. And these are the comments that escape into the public. There's probably a whole unspoken history of homophobic, racist, and sexist conservatism behind the scenes that we will never know about because few would risk their career by being open about it.
Given this company's history, it seems weird to be lauding Disney for projects they barely want to put out and are only socially relevant because of their deeply rooted conservatism. We are rewarding a company's recalcitrance over the creators who actually break ground in this area, and then allowing Disney to pretend like this representation means anything more to them than dollar signs.
I think a scene that highlights this tension perfectly comes from the MCU movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The main character Xu Shang-Chi or "Shaun" (Simu Liu), is at a dinner with his fascist father, Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung). Wenwu monologues about how racist American audiences were for fearing The Mandarin villain in Iron Man 3, and by extension, the viewer for not criticizing that narrative earlier:
Xu Wenwu: “A funny story. Some years ago a terrorist from America needed a boogeyman to bring your country to its knees. So he appropriated The Ten Rings. My Ten Rings. But because he didn’t know my actual name, he invented a new one. Did you know the name he choose? The Mandarin. He gave his figurehead the name of a chicken dish. And it worked. America was terrified. Of an orange.”
This scene is an indictment of America's indifference to the racism of the previous phases of the MCU, and it's funny for multiple reasons. Within this film universe, it's sort of hypocritical of Wenwu to pretend like he is somehow apart from the racism of American Empire when, as the immortal leader of a secret organization that governs the levers of the world, he has 100% upheld American imperialism. The opening monologue shows the Ten Rings organization assassinating political leaders. If anyone has had a say in how biases have shaped up on Earth, it's this man.
The same logic applies on a metatextual level as well. This commentary is disingenuous because it ignores the power dynamic between the typical MCU viewer and the studios that make films and push culture. America did not make the Iron Man movies. That was Marvel Studios. They choose to make a racist narrative because they deemed it profitable, and like Wenwu, they haven't done much to change the circumstances that led to that bigoted example. The same people who created that racist narrative are still in charge of the MCU today. Kevin Feige was the head of Marvel Studios back in 2007, and he's still in charge now.
Rather than try to push for genuine accountability, films like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings are blaming "America" as a whole for this racism. It was merely the racist American markets, the studio seems to be arguing here, so don't hold us responsible for perpetuating that racism. That's how the market works. Whether racism goes up or down, you meet viewers where they are.
Does that sound like a company that cares about diversity?
Does it sound like a company that will combat white supremacist narratives if and when our country's opinions on "diversity" change?
Listen, I am still a huge Disney fan. I would not be penning a 2,000 word-plus article if I was not invested in this brand. I love Pixar. I love the MCU. I only constantly complain because I care.
Yet if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that Disney is a traditionalistic entity primarily concerned with making money by appealing to the conservative values of the time. It might employ individual creators who care deeply about progressive or even leftist values, but it's never going to adopt those as a matter of principle.
That's simply one wish that won't come true.
The Weirdly Conservative Politics of ‘The Expanse’
Spaceships, "bad" revolutionaries, and incremental change.
Image; screen-captured via Amazon Prime
The Syfy, and later, Amazon property The Expanse (2015 — 2022) was a space opera set several hundred years in the future. It was about a group of people navigating the geopolitics of our solar system, particularly the crew of the "Roci," a ragtag team of mercenaries-turned-freedom-fighters who come from the three major polities (i.e., Earth, Mars, and The Belt, as in the Asteroid Belt). The lead of the show is arguably James Holden (Steven Strait), who tries to lead the crew to a middle ground so that they can do the "right thing."
This series had a lot going for it. It falls into what many nerds like myself would call "hard science fiction" for its willingness to portray space travel as it would actually be with our current understanding of science. Ships are designed so that they can move backward and forward in the directionless void. Characters strap in to deal with the effects of thrust and gravity. It's truly an incredible sight to behold for any lover of spaceships.
The show is also great from a representation standpoint. There are countless strong (and weak) female characters, from UN Representative Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) to Belter administrator Camina Drummer (Cara Gee) to Martian commando Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams). These characters come from a wide range of races and ethnicities, which is refreshing given how white traditional hard science fiction has been in the past (and now). These characters have a spectrum of sexualities and political ideologies that make them three-dimensional and enjoyable to watch.
It's the show's politics where we start to run into some problems. Even though gritty political realism is supposed to be a selling point, we end our final season with a political message that is ultimately very conservative: align with "nice" establishment types or stand aside.
The crew of the Roci fights against various threats throughout the series, but it's the last major one that highlights the problem here. The antagonist isn't a corporate CEO manipulating alien technology or a high-ranking Inner, but a Belter dictator that rises to power by taking advantage of "anti-Inner" sentiment from Belters. Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) establishes a free Navy that, with the help of superior technology from rogue Martian separatists, begins to chuck asteroids at the Earth, killing millions of people. To recap, the Belters, the formerly oppressed group, gain political autonomy, and one of the first things they do is an attempt to genocide their oppressors.
If you follow any conversations online about “land back” (i.e., giving land back to indigenous people) or black nationalism, this trope is probably familiar. Whenever people advocate for redistributive policies, one of the most common counterpoints is to bring up the strawman of "White Genocide." We see this, for example, in South Africa, where conservatives are erroneously claiming that land seizures, which have mostly been nonviolent, are the result of some plot to kill white farmers. These false claims are made all while ignoring why there is such a massive disparity between white and black landowners in South Africa in the first place. "The violent, ethnic cleansing of white farmers by armed, black gangs is infuriating & heartbreaking," falsely claimed columnist Katie Hopkin in 2018, "And the world doesn't care. Or at least the mainstream media doesn't care. Do you?" Conservatives have a habit of portraying any attempt at redistribution as being just as bad as the original stealing of said resources (context be damned).
We see the same logic sometimes used in the US with conversations of giving land back to tribal governments, and this example is even more ludicrous. While any group of people can do horrible things (people are people, after all), the idea that an oppressed group is materially capable of performing a genocide against a country like the United States is laughable. The US has both larger numbers and has one of the most advanced militaries on the planet. Also, Native American tribes endured a genocide under United States rule. They cannot turn around and do the same thing in kind, even if they want to. It's a pointless hypothetical because it's simply not possible under current material conditions.
In the realm of fiction, however, such strawmen narratives can be entertained, especially in science fiction, where the oppressed group can gain control of some magical technology to level the playing field. The "oppressed being no better than the oppressor" is an all-too-common trope in pop culture. We see this in the video game Bioshock Infinite (2013), where protagonist Elizabeth (Courtnee Draper) uses her powers of being able to move between alternative realities to find the one where anti-racist freedom fighter Daisy Fitzroy (Kimberly Brooks) has overwhelming odds against the technologically superior state of Columbia. Daisy uses that advantage to press for white genocide.
We see it again in Black Panther (2018), where N'Jadaka AKA Erik "Killmonger" Stevens (Michael B. Jordan) threatens to destroy the current white supremacist political order using Wakanda's magical-seeming vibranium weapons so that he can establish Wakandan imperialism. "The sun will never set on the Wakandan empire," he monologues in the thrown room as he prepares to distribute arms across the world to topple white governments. The pen allows writers to create a world where this conservative strawman can come to life.
The Expanse falls into a similar pattern. The people of the Belt have suffered under exploitative capitalism for generations. We start with Earth and Martian polities (and corporations) controlling Belter resources, and as a consequence, Belters have to pay a premium for necessities like air and water. Even with some independence following efforts by Fred Lucius Johnson (Chad L. Coleman) and Anderson Dawes (Jared Harris), they were still massive inequities between Belters and Inners that would take generations to fix. If current history is a guide, there would be even more suffering from the fallout, as corporate actors and corrupt Mars and Earth officials try to sabotage equipment and resources as they pull out of the Belt.
Colonizers are very petty when it comes to giving up power. For example, Haiti was, for years, forced by the US and France to use their national income to service debt repayments. These debts were mainly reparations to French slaveholders — something it took more than a century for the former slave colony to pay off. Yes, you heard that correctly: these governments forced formerly enslaved people to pay back their tormentors. It's straightforward to imagine resource-starved Inners demanding a similar arrangement with the Belt, where they lock them out of critical systems and infrastructure and establish blockades and embargos unless their former subjects pay an obscene amount for leniency.
Yet The Expanse creates a narrative where everything falls into place just right so that this oppressed group, which before the rise of fascist Marco Inaros barely had the resources to feed all of its people, forms a new Khanate that challenges the great powers of the solar systems. Reality is filled with stories of imperialists massacring, genociding, and assassinating emergent independence movements, but instead, we get a story where a population of tens of millions, scattered across the void of space, oppresses a civilization in the billions. It's not that the narrative isn't beautifully constructed or that it doesn't make sense within the logic of the story — it is, and it does— but that so much had to go right in this show just so that we could get another metaphorical "White Genocide" trope.
This narrative is reactionary, and this conservatism doesn't stop and end with the show's villains but with the characters, the show chooses to focus on.
The most powerful POV character we focus on in the show is UN Representative Chrisjen Avasarala, who has a high role in Earth's government throughout the series. Avasarala starts out as an awful human being. She's a military hawk who contributes to the Belt's exploitation in the first season. She is racist against Belters and freely tortures OPA operatives (one of the main factions of the Belt) to maintain Earth's imperialist hold in the region.
Yet we are also supposed to like her. She has some of the best lines in the entire series. I was mesmerized whenever she was in a scene, and her witty one-liners only get better when Martian Bobby enters her orbit, and the two have a playful back and forth (seriously, I ship them). And while I am all for lovable villains, I don't think we are meant to entirely disagree with her positions, even in her most xenophobic first season. Avasarala is portrayed as practical and reasonable. That firm head on her shoulders helps her uncover Chairman Jules-Pierre Mao's plot to weaponize the alien protomolecule in the first season. As written on Syfy's website (the network producing the show at the time):
“Avasarala is the Deputy Undersecretary of the United Nations, but the only reason she hasn’t risen to the very top of the ego-powered political hierarchy is because she like getting shit done. We’d say she’s a “walk softly and carry a big stick” type of politician, but she doesn’t walk softly, and her stick is more like a rail gun. Most importantly, she can walk manipulative circles around anyone she deems an adversary (or a friend for that matter), and she swears like sailor.”
We as the audience are meant to think that she gets things done, but until she evolves to become slightly less racist in the last two seasons, that trait was being used to perpetuate imperialism. The show seems to initially want us to admire this person who can work the system, even though the system itself is toxic. We are worshipping a political fixer, an upholder of the status quo who would most likely be the villain in real life. The person who embargos the Belt so that rich Inners can receive reparations from the loss of profits they suffer during the Belt's independence — all while convincing everyone that it's for the common good.
Yet the show truly wants us to believe that an individual like Chrisjen Avasarala can work against the system from within, even as she serves it. The show talks a lot about "good" and "bad" apples in the final season. There is a scene near the end where Avasarala is talking to a reporter named Monica Stuart (Anna Hopkins) about a botanist, Praxideke "Prax" Meng (Terry Chen), who leaked information about experimental biotech to the Inners. When learning about this selflessness from Avasarala, Stuart replies, "Well, one good apple, sometimes that's all it takes."
The show's talking about Avasarala here. She is one of those good apples who will reform the system. Yet this entire sentiment misappropriates the original saying, which is "one bad apple can spoil the barrel." The phrase is talking about how negativity is not an isolated incident but can be systemic. The concept of a practical politico who alone bends the system for the common good is fiction. You do not get that high up, on your own, without already being bent.
However, in the fiction of The Expanse, they seem to suggest that imperialists can change the system by being friendlier and having better values. Avasarala becomes less awful, and she uses the same tactics she employed to bully the oppressed to bully fellow imperialists. "The government would fall if I even proposed the debate," the Martian Prime Minister threatens over the possibility of Belters controlling a new trade union administering trade outside the solar system — a plan Avasarala eventually endorses. This dissent and hatred from the Prime Minister seem very real to me, but it never really happens because the plot dictates that we wrap things up. Avasarala quiets the PM, and nothing comes of his fear. The political and corporate actors who would oppose her in our world are somehow silent.
This magical thinking gets even worse in the closing moments. The other main protagonist Holden helps establish that aforementioned trade union to govern the pocket dimension that connects the solar system to thousands of other habitable worlds (it's this whole thing). He is appointed to head it under the condition that Drummer, a Belter, be the Vice President. He then immediately resigns to give Drummer, and by extension, the Belt, greater political autonomy, but no one does anything to subvert this action because Avasarala has decided to be nice.
Avasarala: I will undo this.
Holden: Don’t. Please don’t even try. It was the only way to secure the peace. The only way we all move forward together. And you know it.
Avasarala: Oh, James I hope you’re right.
And she doesn't resist Holden's decision. The Belt gets equality because one powerful, arguably conservative woman chooses to be agreeable. I am being facetious here. Other people fought for this future too, especially Drummer (who sacrifices so much throughout the series), but Avasarala's consent is still central to the Belt's independence.
It happens because colonizers let it happen.
The narrative of The Expanse does try to highlight some interesting dilemmas. I loved its depictions of oppression and its representations of queer life. For me, Drummer's polyamorous family was a highlight in the entire series because it's a rarity in modern television. There are many good gems here, but its foundation is still built on conservative politics, even as it makes overtures to progressive identity politics.
I think a scene in episode five of season six highlights this well. Drummer and the Roci member Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper) argue about what to do in the war against Marco Inaros. It comes down to a binary — fight against him with the Inners or do nothing. Drummer wants another option, but she cannot find one. Naomi drives home the point that there isn't one, pushing Drummer to help her in the fight against the Belt's Free Navy:
Drummer: so what is it for me? I can choose to wait for the bounty to go high enough that someone kills me, or I can put a collar on my neck and hand the Inners the leash. This universe has no place for me.
Naomi: I wish there were another way. I tried to find one, but there isn’t.
Ultimately, despite the revolutionary rhetoric, this show is very invested in the status quo. Its solutions to inequality boil down to either helping the "good apples" in the system or ejecting yourself from it entirely. Entities that attempt to go against the grain, such as Marcos Inaros or Fred Johnson, are all washed aside when this series comes to a close. The only workable solution we, as the viewer, have is working within the system through the creation of government institutions that the Inners will respect. The Belt wins power through negotiation and fealty and by letting principled Inners make space for them.
I think that's a fascinating message to close out with because, again, it is a conservative one — maybe not conservative as we think about it in a US context, but one that ultimately reinforces the status quo. Work within the system and let friendly privileged people lead the way — either on Earth or amongst the stars — or stand aside.
But hey, at least Avasarala looks fabulous doing it.
The MCU is for Rich People
The global franchise is propaganda by the wealthy and for the wealthy
Image; Animated Times
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is the most well-known franchise in the world. Even if you have never seen a single movie, you've probably have learned something about its overall scope and premise. It's about heroes coming together to stop larger-than-life threats with witty one-liners and technology that rivals an entire country's military arsenal. You would think that a property this large would be relatable to most viewers, and in some respects, it is: the action is fun, and most people find the comedy entertaining.
Yet when it comes to class, the relatability of these heroes is often lacking. As we look at the income level of many of the MCU's heroes, the wealthy are disproportionately overrepresented. We see this inflation both in terms of characters as well as the ideologies that these films represent.
This franchise is not relatable to the working class at all. It's for the rich, which should give most viewers some pause as they watch this allegedly harmless entertainment.
When I say that the rich are overrepresented in the MCU, I mean that quite literally. People with wealthy upbringings make up about a third of all protagonists (see my data here). Characters like Iron Man's Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), the new Hawkeye Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), Shang Chi (Simu Liu), or The Wasp's Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) grew up obscenely wealthy. The same can be said for Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and Black Panther's T'challa (Chadwick Boseman), who are all wealthy members of nobility or aristocracy.
An additional 18% are protagonists who may not own businesses, have inherited family fortunes or titles, but are upper-middle-class, working professionals. Doctor Stephen Vincent Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) was one of the top neurosurgeons in the country before he became the Master of the Mystic Arts. Doctor Robert Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), AKA the Hulk, had a successful, top-secret contract with the U.S. military. Even Ant-Man's Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) had a master's degree in electrical engineering that he used in a successful career as a criminal.
Some of these characters were coded in their films as being working class. Scott Lang was fired from a service job at the beginning of Ant-Man (2015 ). At the start of his movie, Shang Chi was a valet, living a simple working-class life with his friend Katy (Awkwafina). However, when we look at their backgrounds, they didn’t grow up poor. Scott Lang was a middle-class, working professional stealing money from upper-class criminals. And as the leader of the Ten Ring’s organization, Shang Chi’s father was secretly one of the richest men on the planet (probably). Bruce Banner was working in a bottling plant in The Incredible Hulk (2008) because he’s on the run — not because that’s where we think he should be. He was a successful scientist. These characters were (and are) well-off people going through rough times.
Once we exclude characters who do not qualify for class analysis because they had non-traditional upbringings (think Vision, The Watcher, Natasha Romanoff, etc.), about 32% percent of MCU leads had a genuinely working-class background. These include men and women like Peter Parker (Tom Holland), Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) of Falcon fame, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), and refugee Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). They are people who textually are shown struggling with poverty growing up and often in the present as well. Sam Wilson, for example, has an entire scene in his show where he can’t get a bank loan.
He's definitely no Iron Man.
Many of these figures, though, are already beholden to the status quo in some way by the time we meet them. Nearly 60% of these working-class heroes have a military background with a long history of serving the state. Carole Danvers was an Air Force pilot. Steve Rogers was a WWII recruit. Clint Barton worked for the intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D.. Sam Wilson was an airman. These figures seemed to have loved the branches they served and never delivered genuine dissent against the state in a tangible way. The closest we get to actual conflict is the movie Captain America: Civil War (2016), and that film is not about our heroes protesting the injustices of U.S. society, but rather them upset that the U.S. government wants to regulate their vigilantism.
Furthermore, the narrative often frames these characters so that any class commentary from the source material is defanged. For example, in the early 2000s Spiderman trilogy, Peter Parker is shown struggling with poverty. He's behind on his rent. His apartment is shitty, and he cannot get ahead in his chosen industry of photojournalism, despite secretly being the subject he is photographing.
Yet, in the MCU version, while he is described as poor (Peter allegedly had to dumpster dive to build his first suit's tech), we don't see that reality on the screen. His apartment is very nice for something in N.Y.C. He goes to a great school, and his most significant problem seems to be asking out a girl. His mentor moves from being Uncle Ben (the working class mentor who infamously said the line "With great power comes great responsibility") to the Billionaire Tony Stark — a man that seems to be framed as his father figure. "…nice work in D.C.," Stark congratulates Parker in Spiderman: Homecoming (2017), "My dad never gave me a lot of support, and I am trying to break the cycle of shame." If that's not the line of a metaphorical father figure, I don't know what is.
In the MCU, we have moved from the rich C.E.O. being the villain in the 2002 Spiderman movie (see Green Goblin) to being the hero. Peter Parker ends the second movie, Spiderman: Far From Home (2019), far removed from his alleged poor roots. His aunt effectively becomes a philanthropist, raising money for those displaced by the Blip. Her son stands behind her in a hundred million dollar suit worth more money than what was probably raised at the event.
That's not a working-class narrative.
The only two working-class protagonists I can see that genuinely are not active agents of the state or sycophants of the wealthy are Wanda Maximoff and Peter Quill — two people on the edges of Earth's society. Peter Quill is a criminal-turned-hero zipping through space in The Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, far removed from the politics of our planet. And Wanda is a former freedom fighter who, after the results of WandaVision (2021), is more of an anti-hero than a true hero (she enslaved an entire town). We are talking about two leads in a list of over twenty, and they are not the capital "H" Heroes that we think of when the word "Avengers" is brought up.
In fact, many of the people with actual class commentary in the MCU are coded as downright villains. Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman) from the show Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) wants to create equality for the people of the world and prevent our governments from returning to a pre-Snap status quo, and she is depicted as a monster. N'Jadaka (Michael B. Jordan), AKA Killmonger, wants to dismantle white supremacy, and he is portrayed as going "too far." Adrian Toomes AKA Vulture (Michael Keaton) from Spiderman: Homecoming rightfully identifies that Tony Stark, a billionaire, should not be getting paid to clean up the fallout from the battle of New York (see Avengers) because it is a mess he partly caused. Yet Toomes is the movie's primary antagonist.
No one who criticizes the status quo is a hero in the MCU, and as a consequence, our leads are often literally fighting against the people who want to change things.
I still like the MCU. I can quote monologues from Thor: Ragnorack (2017) and Black Panther (2018), but I also understand that this franchise is not for me. The MCU is a very conservative entity that ultimately perpetuates narratives that affirm the status quo. It's hyper militaristic and values the opinions of the rich over anyone else, and that stops me from getting too wrapped up in it.
If you like the MCU, that's fine. As a trans leftist, I like many properties that aren't for me. I am currently binging the Witcher 3 (2015) on Playstation (and loving it), and I am not a straight centrist who grunts at everything, and I still play it. I don't for a moment, however, think that my values are reflected in this game, and the same sentiment applies to the MCU.
It's for the rich, and if that's not you, maybe start questioning your attachment to this iteration of heroes. The rich already have enough. You don't have to give them your definition of a hero too.
Disney’s ‘Hawkeye’ Proves Accountability Is Impossible in the MCU
Arrows, revenge, & the impossibility of social progress in the MCU.
Hawkeye (2021) is a cute buddy comedy about the titular Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) passing on his title to a new generation. His protege is a rich trust fund kid named Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), who has idolized him since seeing him swing out of a building in the first Avengers movie. Cute Christmas decorations are everywhere, making it similar to the action movie Die Hard, only funnier. Running gags like the mob using “Bro Delivery Service” vehicles to transport its goons keep things moving enough for you not to think too deeply about the premise.
Yet the moment you start thinking, things fall apart almost immediately. One of the biggest problems with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has always been about accountability. The series has been more than willing to bring up important issues such as racial justice, wealth inequality, and government overreach, only to drop them to focus on the next big bad: the conversation about greater government oversight from the Civil War film was sidestepped to deal with the fallout from the Infinity War saga; the new Doctor Strange 2 trailer makes it’s pretty clear that Wanda Maximoff will not be held accountable for enslaving an entire town; and of course, every villain in the franchise is depicted as having a valid point, only for that point to be discarded for going too far (see Killmonger, Ultron, Karli Morgenthau, etc.).
We see this trend continue in the Disney+ show Hawkeye, where former spy and Avenger Clint Barton is being pursued by the New York criminal underworld for the terrible things he did following the first Infinity War movie. The narrative alludes to a deeper conversation about collateral damage only for Clint to walk away, facing zero accountability for those actions. We stop focusing on these deeds so that we can instead shift our attention to the “real” bad guys that run New York City’s criminal underground.
For those who need a refresher (something that increasingly is necessary when breaking down any MCU property), Hawkeye was one of the first Avengers (AKA those superpowered people who saved the world over ten years ago). He first appeared back in the original Thor movie in 2011. He is much older now — hence the need to reluctantly bring in new blood — and this makes for a premise you’ll recognize if you’ve watched any old school buddy cop movie.
Clint and Kate meet after she prevents goons from crashing an illegal auction. The hilariously named Tracksuit Mafia is trying to steal the suit of the mysterious vigilante, the Ronin (whose long since been MIA). Kate wears the suit to have some anonymity to stop the mafia from stealing it, and shenanigans ensue. This last-minute decision prompts the criminal underworld to believe that the Ronin is back on the scene, causing them to go after the inexperienced Kate. This forces Clint to come back into the world of vigilantism so that he can keep her safe, leading to a wacky and emotional set of fights scenes and revelations.
To add to the intrigue, we soon learn that Clint was the original Ronin. This fact is not so much a spoiler as a thing that happened over six movies and three shows ago, so you might have forgotten. He lost his entire family after the events of the snap (i.e., that thing that killed half of all sentient beings in the universe), and this sent him down a murderous rampage where he indiscriminately killed anyone he believed to be a criminal.
This history sets up an interesting premise, as we first believe that we will be earnestly exploring the fallout of those actions: the collateral damage that comes with doling out justice indiscriminately. The first primary antagonist is a mob lieutenant named Maya Lopez (played by Alaqua Cox), who claims that the Ronin killed her father. She understandably wants revenge for this extrajudicial killing, and much of the first half of the season is our leads trying to get her to stop her bloodthirsty rampage.
The second (sudden) villain is the assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), an MCU character first introduced in the movie Black Widow. She is resentful over the loss of her adopted sister Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). Yelena blames Clint for Natasha’s death and ideologically serves as the voice of dissent. As she says to Kate in episode 5:
“I have a question for you….Why do you risk your life for him, Clint Barton? How has everybody forgiven him for his past?…You are so fond of him. It tells me you don't really know who he is….He came here to protect his reputation. Do you know how many people he has killed? The trail of blood that follows him, you could wrap around the entire world. ”
I would love to exist in a world where this criticism was treated seriously, but unfortunately, that world is not the MCU. Kate quickly justifies Clint’s collateral damage as necessary to save the world. Like every MCU property before this one, the nuance brought up by this show’s antagonists is sidestepped by the narrative. These two characters turn out to not have valid criticisms of Clint after all. Maya’s father was actually killed by Wilson Fisk, AKA Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). Yelena’s hatred for Clint is ultimately a misunderstanding, as he didn’t kill Natasha at all. She chose to die in End Game so that the other Avengers could get the Soul Stone. These two people didn’t really disagree with Clint because the narrative isn’t willing to let us genuinely question his “good guy” status.
The series ends, not with Clint having to grabble with his decisions (and the ideology that led him to make those choices), but him ending pretty much where he started: with his family loving him and him being respected by the world-at-large for his perceived heroics. There is no greater oversight as he hands the equivalent of “WMDs-in-arrow-form” off to an entitled trust funder. There are no reparations to the victims he has killed in his long career as a spy and vigilante. Clint symbolically destroys the Ronin suit, as if symbolism can somehow make up for his past actions. His emotional change meant to stand in for accountability.
It turns out that all the depth the show first foreshadowed was never really there, to begin with: merely an aesthetic used to give viewers the illusion that they are watching something more meaningful.
In many ways, this show has broken my perception of the MCU completely. It has made me doubt I will ever see any form of accountability from these characters — No matter how many people they kill. No matter how they violate the sovereignty of nations and the personhood of “nonpowered” persons — it seems there will unfailingly be a big bad to justify these characters’ actions. Whether we are talking about tyrants like Thanos, or the criminal mastermind Kingpin, our heroes will always have to table conversations of accountability for another day.
Ultimately, this is a story about avengers — a word that comes from the Old French word avengier, which means “to take revenge.” The only justice these figures will ever know is retributive violence. They dole out “eye for an eye” punishments that categorize people and things into good and evil. Their methods are largely divorced from the systems of poverty and inequality that drive most people’s actions. Hawkeye was never going to be forced to question his actions following the Snap, and I was a fool for thinking that would happen for even a moment because that story would involve a solution more significant than simply punching and shooting at things.
Retribution is not accountability, and yet it is all these heroes seem to know, which makes me sad for our world. If the greatest heroes in our stories only know how to take revenge, what does that say about our models for justice?