The new authoritarianism and the blind spot of the liberal left

American society today has unobtrusively become one of authoritarianism. What this means most directly and simply is that if someone in authority tells you to do something, any response other than immediate and unquestioned obedience will most likely be instantly met with violence. The obedience that is required excludes any kind of explicit recognition that would render it less automatic.

This has less to do with race, gender, sexuality, or any other mode of social difference in terms of official identity (the group to which one belongs) than is commonly believed. That is simply because the more or less official ideology of American society is that of one that is fair to all persons whatever their demographic identity, whether this fairness is achieved by ignoring the person’s group membership attributes or by somehow appealing to them, as left-liberals are wont to do.

Indeed, it can easily be seen that people in certain minority groups may be even more than others apt to respond with violence to the person who does not respond as expected when they give an order.

Resistance is met either with psychologizing or violence. Today it is most commonly met with both. One is subjected to violence, and labelled “mentally ill”. The psychology of power comes down to a demand to take it for granted, and show that one is happy, not annoyed, when faced with it. Thus, for example, if a cop or security guard smiles and says “How are you?” you had better reply by showing how thoroughly contented you are when you say “I’m fine, thank you.” They need to know that there is no problem, because if there is a problem, it’s you.

Discontent is disposition to crime or, which is ultimately the same thing, mental illness. Disaffection is permitted to artists in their art, but to no one in society. If there is any substantial freedom, it must lie principally in recognizing that.

Those who point out that this official violence has more particularly affected certain minorities are certainly correct, as they also are if they observe that this is a feature of the capitalist state today that has little or nothing to do necessarily with attitudes justifying the privileges of the less oppressed groups.

Those who oppose this capitalist state violence are the natural allies and comrades of those who oppose it only or mostly in the cases when it affects members of their own minority group. The persistence of the belief that the repressive state apparatus is only or essentially one of racial or other group subordination is a principal contributing cause of the continuing use of this state violence and the general authoritarianism that supports it. It is normal and to be expected that someone in authority exercising it in this brutal way will appeal, if any question is raised, to notions of prejudice making what they do appear justified because those this violence is used against can be attributed an improper and unjust attitude.

This means that today, if a police officer, security guard, or other person tells you to do something, you will most likely be subject to violence by them if you ask a question, claim a civil right or liberty, state that you must read first before signing, comment on the situation, or even hesitate. You have no legal rights in these situations as far as these people are concerned, and if you assert a legal right supposing qualifying or limiting the scope of your obedience, you will be informed that that right does indeed exist — on paper — but it does not apply in this situation. The situation is a permanent state of emergency in an undeclared war of the government on its own citizens and the residents in its territory. In the case of the United States, this undeclared war may even be against the people of the world. It is at any rate against all those among them who do or might resist.

The disposition to resist, a natural feature of living bodies, is interpreted as violence on the part of the person resisting or believed to be resisting. It is interpreted as crime. It is called violence in order to legitimate both that attribution and the response on the part of the state, which response is normally violent, and to justify this violence it is attributed to the persons it is used against.

American capitalism has been abandoning all commitment to the liberties of citizens, and the left-liberals have gone along with this because they don't care about it, but only about their own corporatist political claims. Corporatism is not the philosophy proper to our corporations: it comes from a word meaning (social) body and played a significant role in the last century in fascist politics (particularly in Italy). Corporatism is the political theory that holds that people act on the basis of social group identities that are particular to them, while the state apparatus manages people in terms of these identities.

The liberal-left can only counter claims such as this by engaging in what amounts to an ad hominem or personal attack on those making them: They say that this concern with liberty is right-wing. That is falsely said, unless you are the kind of leftist who does not desire any social and political liberty but only the satisfaction of needs. (Or the kind of rightist who thinks social and political liberties can only exist as grounded in economic power.). The liberal-left is blind to the character of power in today's capitalism. It is ultimately not a form of 'left' politics at all.

Any left wing worthy of the name criticizes the capitalist police state in the name not only of unmet needs (as in the old welfare-statism) but also in the name of freedom. We say that capitalism has made most of us not more but less free. And we say that that is a problem.

Understanding this is key to grasping how 'socialism' as the modern world has known it failed. ‘Socialism’ was a form of capitalism, not a true alternative to it. And socialists will lose if they appear to not care about liberty. We cannot re-fight the Cold War from either position. The Cold War was based on a logical antinomy, and for both sides on the assumed claim that you can want social welfare (to meet the needs of those who cannot rely for them on the market) or liberty (which depends on private property and spaces outside government and social power dynamics, rather than within some new, more democratic form of them) but not both. The left’s claim about liberty is that it is capitalist social relations and institutions that today most make people unfree, and the police state and its constant wars is a feature of capitalism. Work does not make free, and in our time only the gates of hell could make such a declaration — as a cynically asserted falsehood. It must be that the liberal left largely either does not have a problem with capitalism, or has a very inadequate understanding of what it is and what any alternative to it would have to include. In fact, both of these things are true of it — fatally.