A couple of weeks ago I read David Foster Wallace’s essay on television and American fiction, “E Unibus Pluram,”* and I have been turning it over in my mind ever since.

One of the commonplaces of “communication professionals” in the age of social media is that the advent of the internet, and especially social media, represents a qualitative, epoch-defining shift in how humans communicate with each other. The old era of one-to-many mass communication, stretching from Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press to cable television, has now given way to a new era of many-to-many communication, in which anyone with a smartphone and a YouTube account can “go viral.”

I am old enough to remember the pre-internet era, and when Foster Wallace refers to television as “having its pretty hand around my generation’s throat,” I relate, even though I never watched much television. My parents (East Coasters who relocated to the Midwest for an academic job, much like Foster Wallace’s parents) strictly supervised my TV-watching habits as a kid: limited screen time, mostly PBS. They refused to get cable until well after I left for college. They blamed the rightward drift of the country under Reagan in part on television.

The fact that I had not been allowed to watch Saturday morning cartoons as a kid, that I had no access to MTV, and that (not unrelatedly) I spent most of my free time reading books and dreamed of becoming a writer, not a TV star, all marked me as a bit of a social outcast in high school. I could opt out of watching TV, but I couldn’t opt out of being defined by TV.

My first semester in college I saw the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (Michael Franti’s pre-Spearhead band) opening for Billy Bragg and immediately fell in love with the song “Television, Drug of the Nation.” Television as both a vehicle for the cultural tyranny of the Reagan/Bush years, and a constituent part of it.

Needless to say, I loved the internet. It was in the beginning a written medium, and despite YouTube and Instagram, despite all the graphic design and javascript animation and the so-called “beautification of the Internet,” I would argue that it still is. This was perfect for a bookworm. I started a blog in 2004, joined Twitter in 2008. Of the communities that I feel most a part of and connected to, a number of them are Facebook groups, with members scattered across the country and the world. I just helped start a podcast.

The modern internet also undermined the tyranny of one-to-many mass communications, which had reached its high point in television. It made virtual printing presses — and eventually virtual radio and TV studios — far more widely available. The sometimes overstated but real role of social media and the web in the uprisings of the Arab Spring, in the spread of Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter, and in the success of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, makes it seem fundamentally different from the conformity-enforcing television of my childhood.

Reading “E Unibus Pluram” made me rethink all that.

It was written in 1990, before the web or widespread use of email, when the average American watched six hours of television daily. Foster Wallace notes that “such high doses” of time spent watching changes human beings, and is potentially addictive:

Because the practice of “watching” is expansive. Exponential. We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start to “feel” ourselves feeling, yearn to experience “experiences.” (p. 34)

Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. In this respect, television resembles certain other things one might call Special Treats (e.g. candy, liquor), i.e. treats that are basically fine and fun in small amounts but bad for us in large amounts and really bad for us if consumed in the massive regular amounts reserved for nutritive staples. (p. 37)

This all felt eerily familiar. Not, of course, from watching television. But from watching the internet, and especially social media, and especially watching myself on social media.

The internet has on the surface resolved the contradiction that Foster Wallace identifies as the heart of the television watcher’s dilemma, that the television watcher watches TV to vicariously experience “a world where life is lively, where nobody spends six hours a day unwinding before a piece of furniture” (p. 39) — i.e., not watching TV. We are no longer sitting and watching a piece of furniture. We are “joining the conversation” by commenting and tweeting and blogging and posting photos and making videos and podcasts. Passive consumption of images of a more lively life has been replaced by using images to reframe our own lives as more lively than they in fact are, for consumption by others, as we also consume others’ lives.

But of course, this isn’t actually a resolution of the contradiction, because the humblebrags on Facebook, the instagram photos of our travels, the tweets of our snarky thoughts, don’t actually make our accomplishments more worthy, our travels more broadening or thrilling, or our conversation more witty.

Foster’s concern is primarily with the effect of television on U.S. fiction, and particularly the way that TV and the rise of meta-fiction had made irony and ridicule the dominant mode of fiction-writing by the late 80s:

I’m going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and statis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fiction writers they pose especially terrible problems. (p.49)

Anyone who has spent more than about three seconds on Twitter, especially since the 2016 election, will immediately recognize that the internet has only made this problem worse. Irony and ridicule has become the dominant rhetorical mode of not only fiction-writing but also political discourse. This is especially disastrous for the Left in an age of widespread cynicism and anger, when we desperately need to be putting forward a positive vision that can attract millions. As Foster Wallace notes:

Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing … [b]ut irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. (p. 67)

All this ironic participatory vicariousness is the ideal telescreen for the neoliberal regime whose pretty hand is still around all of our throats, even as it has lost most of its popular legitimacy. It is, I suspect, a huge component of what Freddie deBoer refers to as the “infectious sense of inadequacy with what you’re doing now, compared to the cool shit other people are doing” in his recent post “you can’t fake it.” It contributes to the kind of insecurities and performative politics that leads us to self-police activist and Left spaces.

Ultimately, all this watching of ourselves and each other is a barrier to the personal risk-taking that allows us to be vulnerable with each other and build trust, especially across social differences. And that trust is absolutely a prerequisite for the kind of organization-building and serious intellectual engagement that the Left so desperately needs.

It’s not that online spaces can’t be spaces for vulnerability, trust-building, organizing and serious intellectual engagement. It’s just that the way that most of us default to interacting with each other online is superficial. We consume other’s content in glances, respond in hot takes.

Some of this is inherent in the medium (e.g., Twitter’s limit of 140 characters) and some of it is because we have been conditioned. But none of it is unavoidable. Even on Twitter, if we are conscious and critical about our practice, we can listen with compassion and respond with respect and understanding.

We (the Left) are up against incredibly powerful systems and institutions. We have some powerful new communications tools at our disposal, but let’s use them wisely. Watch less, listen more.

*Page references are to the version in the 1998 Back Bay Books paperback edition of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. While it didn’t make sense to work it into this post, one of the most fascinating passages in the Foster Wallace essay is his discussion of conservative theorist George Gilder, who in the 80s more or less predicted the rise of a YouTube-like interactive televisual medium (pp. 70–76)

I was a true child of the 80s. I have very few memories that go back before 1980. In fact, one of my earlier memories can be definitively dated to the summer of 1980, as it is of vacationing with some family friends — true East-coast liberal elites — and overhearing them talking with my parents about how they couldn’t believe that Americans would possibly elect a know-nothing actor with retrograde right-wing views, but were kind of worried because the Democratic candidate was weak.

The popular music of the 80s was made exclusively by people who used too much product on their hair and too much electronic processing on their instruments. One the one hand, Top 40 hits were all made with synthesizers and drum machines, and on the other hand you had heavy metal guys whose guitars looked like lightning bolts and went through a battery of effects pedals: distortion, delay, compression, EQ.

The first concert I went to was when I was twelve, and I convinced my father to take me to Kemper Arena in Kansas City to see Nightranger, on a double-bill with Starship. I was pretty indifferent to Starship, but one of my father’s co-workers, who was a few years younger than him, heard that he was going to see Starship and insisted on lending him a bunch of old Jefferson Airplane records.

This blew my 12-year-old mind.

These were the classic Jefferson Airplane records, Surrealistic Pillow, After Bathing at Baxter’s, Volunteers. The guitars were raw, distorted from overloading vacuum tubes, not digital processing. Lots of the songs didn’t have identifiable verses and choruses. There were soft, haunting folk songs with just acoustic guitars and recorders, and weird aggressive sound collages. The drums were uneven and the voices were wails and shrieks as much as they were singing.

And the lyrics — “Up against the wall, motherfucker!”

It was weird, it was defiant, and it made me want to grow my hair long and take up the electric guitar (both of which I did, years later).

I wanted to know more but this was, of course, before the Internet, so I couldn’t look up the band on wikipedia. And because this was before the Internet, I didn’t have the protective coat of irony and snark that would have reminded me that these were just a bunch of dirty, smelly hippies.

There was no wikipedia, but there were liner notes. The fourth record my dad’s friend loaned us was a double-LP compilation called “Flight Log,” and it included, as its liner notes, a detailed history of the band, written by Rolling Stone writer Patrick Snyder. And of course any history of the Jefferson Airplane is also a history of the counterculture in San Francisco, and therefore really a history of the 60s. And this, to a kid growing up in the conformist 80s, was what really gave the music its power — that it was not just wild, it was utopian, it was revolutionary.

The rock critic Greil Marcus, in his book Lipstick Traces, writes about a “secret history” of utopian impulses, one that he traces from the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe through the Ranters of the English revolution, the dadaists and the situationists and punk rock and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

For me, although I now have a more nuanced view of their artistic achievements, the Jefferson Airplane will always be my first, and most intense, connection to a secret history of America, to a voice that says yes, you can demand everything, you can demand liberation, we can be together, we can tear down the walls.

Like most of the U.S. Left, I was extremely heartened by the British elections last Thursday. I have been, well, not terribly optimistic about anything political for years, and this was a decisive and meaningful win for our side. There are numerous reasons (some of which I discuss below) to be cautious about assuming that “Corbynism” can be applied wholesale to the American context, or that it means that “Bernie Would Have Won.” However, I do think it indicates a promising way forward for the U.S. Left, and it has changed some of my own thinking, especially about electoral politics.

Most importantly, it provides good evidence that a Left political program can win broad support in a country of the imperial center, a country in which significant parts of the working class, having won a decent life in the 20th century from the scraps of the overflowing imperialist table, are prone to identifying as “middle class” and are susceptible to racist and xenophobic appeals. We don’t need to wait for a “new majority” to emerge from demographic changes, which has become a kind of disturbing trend in progressive circles in America — one which I suspect contributed to the complacency and demobilization during the Obama administration.

It also demonstrates that electoral work, even when not successful in winning state power (remember, Labour isn’t actually forming a government this week), can create, as the British writer Richard Seymour wrote this past weekend, “a once in a lifetime moment, wherein mobilisation and activism could fundamentally change the whole direction of the country, giving a socialist inflection and shape to popular discontents and aspirations.” In light of this:

1. people on the Left who are, like me, skeptical of electoral work should let go of some of our skepticism, and
2. people on the Left who are engaged in electoral work should be bolder about pushing a Left program, even if they are told it will lead to electoral defeat (i.e., don’t be Randi Weingarten).

That said, there are some important differences about the U.S. context, each of which points to a key task for the U.S. Left in the coming period:

1. We need to contest with a stronger neoliberal centrism

Corbyn has faced bitter attacks on his leadership from the right wing of his own party, but it doesn’t seem to me that the Blairite “New Labour” forces have anything like the institutional support and ideological coherence of the Clinton/Obama/Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) wing of the Democratic Party.

As Matt Stoller laid out in detail a few years ago, the DLC is not just the right wing of a social-democratic party, making concessions to the center-right in the name of pragmatism. It is actually an idealism of the center — with origins in the experiences of young white activists in the Civil Rights Movement — that incorporates many of the liberatory ideals of the “new social movements” of the 60s and 70s into an individualist, free-market, neoliberal politics.

In 2012, after the shellacking that Mitt Romney received at Obama’s hands, historian Van Gosse suggested that the Democratic Party was on its way to becoming a “mass party of the center.” The right wing modernizing wing of the (now irrelevant) Parti Socialiste (PS) in France has long cherished the hope of forming “an alliance between rightwing social democrats and the most educated, dynamic fractions of the center-right, bringing together the intellectual professions and private-sector managers around a pro-European program of social tolerance and economic neoliberalism,” and they got their wish this year (at least for now) with the election of Emmanuel Macron.

The Clinton campaign’s strategy of focusing on Trump’s vulgarity and incompetence to win votes from educated, middle-class suburbanites seems, in retrospect, foolish — at least from the perspective of the short-term electoral victory which eluded her. But seen from the perspective of a long-term strategy of wielding together a bloc of “the new majority emerging in the United States” under neoliberal leadership, it makes a lot more sense.

In this respect, Trump is the ideal foil for building a centrist neoliberal bloc (which is presumably why the Clinton camp wanted to run against him instead of a more moderate Republican). Clinton and the DLC have almost nothing substantive to offer to the non-elite parts of the bloc they are trying to fashion — i.e., working-class people of color and young people — except for protection from Trump and his hordes.

Corey Robin pointed out in recent months (in some FB post that I can’t find the link to) that the DLC won hegemony within the party through repeated, ruthless and brutal criticism of the failures of Mondale and Dukakis (who weren’t even particularly left-wing), and that the only way the Left has any hope of gaining any kind of traction within the Democratic Party (or the emerging “resistance”) is to do the same with Clinton.

I’m not sure that I fully agree that making a single candidate stand in for the failures of a political agenda is useful (especially because in this case it lets Obama off the hook). I do think that parts of the Left sometimes see the Clintons and Obama as pragmatists whose election “creates space” (or would create space) for more Left organizing. I’m not convinced that this is the case. We need to be clear that the Clinton/Obama/DLC agenda is antithetical to a Left agenda, that is is harmful to the working class, and that it is no longer politically viable in most of the country.

2. We need to contest against a shadow party within the Democratic Party

Another crucial difference from the British context is the vastly different U.S. party system. Indeed, it is only in the U.S. that the “bourgeois bloc” has been able to so thoroughly capture the main left-of-center party (Macron won in France as an independent, sidelining the PS entirely).

Much of my political life has been shaped by debates on the Left about the Democratic Party, between We Must Break With The Democrats! and We Have No Choice But To Work Within The Democratic Party! I participated in the founding of the Labor Party in 1996, and was active in the Vermont Progressive Party for a while after moving to Vermont in 1998.

The Labor Party tried to dodge the question of being a spoiler third party by taking the position that we wouldn’t run candidates until we had sufficient organizational strength (members and union affiliations) to stand a credible chance of winning. Ultimately, the Labor Party strategy was based on a bid to win over a majority of the institutional labor movement to the side of We Must Break With The Democrats! — and that never materialized.

The VPP grew out of the “Progressive Coalition” formed to support Bernie Sanders when he was elected mayor of Burlington as an independent and faced hostility from the Democratic-controlled city council. It is the most successful electoral third party in the country, but has only won elections in very small districts (house seats in Vermont generally represent only about 2,000 voters) or by running its candidates in the Democratic primaries — currently the Lieutenant Governor and President Pro Tem of the state senate are Democrat/Progressives. The VPP started off as a clear alternative to the Democrats, but over time — and after a contentious inner-party vote in the mid-2000s — has accepted that to play politics on any kind of scale (even within tiny Vermont), We Have No Choice But To Work Within The Democratic Party!

More recently, I have tangentially participated in the trend of “movement” nonprofits starting 501(c)(4) organizations in order to do “independent” electoral engagement work — primarily centered around the Center for Popular Democracy and People’s Action. These organizations are certainly doing useful work, but ultimately they are trapped by the logic of winning elections. The CPD/People’s Action affiliate in my own state endorsed the most centrist candidate in the governor’s race last year (as did most of the labor movement) on the basis of “electability” — and he proved unable to even win the Democratic primary (and we now have a Republican governor in one of the most Democratic states in the country).

Kim Moody recently argued that the Democratic Party “has become a well-funded, professionalized, multitiered hierarchy capable of intervening in elections at just about every level.” It seems to me that what he describes, however, is not so much a hierarchical organization (that could conceivably be “taken over” through internal struggle, the way Corbyn and the Left did with Labour in the UK ) but more of an informal “shadow party” of wealthy donors and centrist ideologues that filter in and out of the permeable structure of the “party.”

I don’t think that there is a way to winning even some measure of state power that doesn’t, at least partially and in the near term, go through the Democratic Party. But, just as we need to recognize that there is a coherent neoliberal-centrist political agenda that is currently hegemonic within the party, we also need to recognize that there is a coherent “shadow party” that we will have to contest with, and we will need some kind of formal organization (perhaps along the lines of Momentum in the U.K.) to do that.

3. We need a new Left “common sense”

One of my best friends in high school was a recent immigrant from England, from a Labour family. It was, in fact, his somewhat vague but passionate attachment to a socialist identity that first prompted me to identify myself as a socialist. For him and his working-class family, being a socialist was just common sense for working people.

I suspect that this is still the case for a lot of working-class Labour voters in Great Britain, in a way that has no real parallel in the U.S. Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party — and vastly increased Labour’s share of the vote in the general election — not just by attracting younger and radical voters, but by energizing “former Labour supporters who had given up in despair.”

While this currently has no equivalent in the U.S., I am hopeful that the U.S. Left can create a new “common sense.” It won’t be easy, but we have rich materials to work with: the newfound enthusiasm for socialism among young people inspired by Bernie Sanders, the Black Liberation Movement, the class solidarity of industrial unionism which is still powerful in parts of the country (especially the heartland), the varied revolutionary traditions brought by recent immigrants, and the more than five centuries of resistance to colonialism of indigenous people.

Right now, we’re pretty fractured, and it’s easy to be despondent. But I think last week shows that with Left ideas, Left organization, and Left culture (and only with all three of those), we can change the direction of our country. As Seymour concludes, “The Left has nothing better, or more important, to do than make this happen.” That’s true here, too. Let’s get to work.