Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  It’s easy to see how the left’s anti-capitalism could continuously reaffirm itself. Marxism and its variants teach that capitalism is inherently exploitative and speeds up the pace of life as it grinds everyone into dust. As capitalism advances into late capitalism, the absurdities of the free market system become more pronounced while competition forces everybody to battle each other into an early grave. Eventually, everyone simply collapses into a pit of student loan debt, depression, and joblessness.

  “If I were a millennial I would be rioting in the streets,” Brianna Wu, a Gen Xer running for Congress from Massachusetts, told me in an interview. “You guys are more screwed over than any generation in modern American history.” Wu, a videogame developer who became the target of GamerGate harassment because of her outspoken feminism, was running as a Democrat, but she thinks the party has failed miserably to promote the economic interests of millennials: “The Democratic Party is completely blowing it.… We have got to be a party that stands up for civil rights, a party that stands up for income equality, a party that stands up to the abuses of Wall Street.”

  It remains to be seen whether democratic socialists and other radical political candidates can succeed in pulling the Democratic Party to the left and then actually win elections. More mainstream Democrats must contend with a difficult contradiction: the energy and enthusiasm are on the side of the stridently far-left Zillennials, but activists representing this contingent despise moderates, centrists, and neoliberal “shills.” It’s possible that any attempt to court this group will fail, since their revolutionary vanguard—weird Twitter, Chapo Trap House, select members of the DSA—might rather lose to Trump than campaign for a member of the Clinton family.

  Even well-to-the-left Democratic candidate Cynthia Nixon—formerly of Sex and the City fame, more recently a candidate for governor of New York—experienced some difficulty securing socialist support, despite the fact that she was running against the despised moderate Democrat Andrew Cuomo. New York DSA members took a straw poll in July 2018: a third of the gathered group wanted to endorse Nixon, another third was unsure, and the final third thought she was unacceptable. According to one member, “We don’t just grant endorsements to progressives who beg us for one. We endorse people who can advance the anti-capitalist struggle.”37

  — SEVEN —

  THE OTHERS

  GREENS, GUNS, AND MORE

  The coalition of progressive intersectionality is vast, and it includes many more groups than this book has room to discuss in great depth. In this chapter, I will provide quick snapshots of a few aspects of Zillennial activism that have not been covered yet, beginning with the greens.

  Eco-Mysticism

  It was a hot spring day in Washington, D.C., and I found myself on the National Mall, conversing with four people who were each operating a giant puppet from the inside. The puppets had masks and robes fitting a distinct color and theme. There was a red fire puppet, a blue water puppet, a white wind puppet, and a green nature puppet.

  “We’re the Element Puppets,” the woman underneath the wind puppet’s robes told me. “From Louisville, Kentucky.”

  The puppeteers, and hundreds of other people, had come to D.C. on June 23, 2018, for a mass rally hosted by the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, which was founded in December of the previous year. The Poor People’s Campaign had attracted numerous sponsors, including various interfaith groups, unions, and even Ben and Jerry’s. The actor Danny Glover made an appearance, as did the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

  As always, it was an intersectional event. Speakers began their remarks by listing the oppressions relevant to their own lives: one noted that she was trans, struggling with mental health issues, and economically disadvantaged, for instance. Later, another speaker claimed to “exist at the intersection” of womanhood, blackness, and queerness. In the crowd, a representative protester carried a sign that demanded, “Stand against anti-Muslim bigotry + healthcare for all,” as if these were related things.

  The event began with a religious ceremonial performance by representatives of the San Carlos Apache Nation, who sang and played the drums. “Please join us in this religious ceremony,” said their leader, a Native American man. “Explode that evil away so the people can live.”

  The rally’s master of ceremonies was the Reverend William Barber II, a middle-aged Protestant minister with a booming voice and a grand presence. He was a high priest of intersectionality, frequently urging the protesters to see how various kinds of oppression were related—and to raise their fists in the air for solidarity.

  “I care about racism,” said the minister, who is black, “but you can’t end racism without ending the military economy … we’re going to shut it down for love and for justice.”

  Eventually, a teenage girl took to the podium to read her spoken-word piece, titled “I’m Tired of Poems About Oppression.” I missed the girl’s name; Barber had instructed everyone in the crowd to hold hands with the person standing next to them, and before I could seclude myself, a brown-haired hippie named Dmitri had taken my hand. He soon realized I was trying to take notes, and kindly let go—instead opting to place his hand on my back as I wrote. I had missed the first part of the poem, and tuned in just as the poet was saying, “I’m tired of white feminism, and white women who voted for Trump.… I’m tired of feminism that isn’t intersectional.”

  The rally stressed four core issues, the wages of an exploitative, capitalistic country: racism, poverty, the military economy, and ecological devastation. It had a workmanlike quality to it; once one set of speakers finished, the emcees summoned the next set to the stage. “Next it’s our ecological devastation speakers,” said one of Barber’s cohosts. “Ecological devastation speakers, please come up.” The ecological devastation speakers were introduced by a Jewish religious leader, further emphasizing the quasi-religious nature of the environmental activists.

  “The whole earth belongs to God,” insisted the rabbi. “Not to corporations.”

  Unlike many of the other strains of progressive activism profiled for this book, the environmental movement hasn’t changed all that much. Activists have experienced undeniable successes: the main environmentalist cause—addressing climate change—is now a mainstream one, embraced by nearly everyone in the Democratic coalition, and even some on the Republican side. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a significant setback, of course; he promptly withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a pact with other nations to voluntarily reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, carbon tax proposals continue to generate increasing interest from folks on both sides of the aisle.1

  The modern environmental movement can trace its origin to Silent Spring, the 1962 book by conservationist Rachel Carson that argued pesticides were destroying the environment. Thanks in no small part to Carson, public pressure mounted against manufacturers of the insecticide DDT, and the U.S. government eventually banned its use. (Critics contend that DDT was a highly effective tool for preventing malaria—it killed mosquitoes—and that abandoning it increased deaths in the developing world.) In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed a bill authorizing the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, in part due to the demands of environmental activists.

  In the decades since, environmentalists have achieved significant victories. Air pollution has decreased in most corners of the world, the rainforests are growing back, and U.S. reliance on coal is decreasing.2 According to my colleague Ronald Bailey, “Global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016.”3

  Activists, though, have often come across as pessimistic—at times apocalyptic. In the 1970s, they were persuaded by the biologist Paul Ehrlich that humankind would soon exhaust the planet’s resources, and millions would starve. Nothing of the sort happened, of course: technological innovation saw to that. Thanks to people like Norman Borlaug, the criminally underappreciated father of the Green
Revolution, better crop yields made it possible to feed the world’s growing population while consuming less farmland and other resources.

  Today, the environmentalist left is often sidetracked by intersectional considerations. “A particularly pernicious form of denialism is the conceit within the political left that we must cure longstanding social ills such as inequality, corporate greed, racism, and political corruption along the way to dealing with climate change,” wrote professors Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker in the Boston Globe.4

  Indeed, the progressive left’s anti-capitalism intersects with its environmentalism. Monsanto, a massive agricultural company, has often been scapegoated on both fronts. Activists have claimed that Monsanto’s genetically engineered crops are unsafe, and they demand regulation to warn people of the danger. Scientific consensus, however, holds that genetically modified crops are perfectly safe for consumption.

  On campus, environmentalism is often taught from an explicitly anti-capitalist perspective. Since anti-capitalism is the underlying leftist cause, it overlaps significantly with a number of movements that don’t presently have distinct, obvious, flashy subcultures. For instance, there are pro-environment leftists who want institutions to divest from companies that produce fossil fuels. And environmental studies classes are sometimes taught from a Marxist perspective: a 2016 workshop at Michigan State University educated students about the possibility of a green and red (in the communist sense) future.

  “Given the worsening poverty and environmental crises characteristic of contemporary global capitalism, questions about sustainable human development are surely becoming absolutely central for all 21st century socialist thinkers,” the event’s website stated. “Marxist philosophy offers a substantial theory of the social-economic form that determines our capitalist world and opens up the possibility of envisioning a post-capitalist future.”5

  Modern environmentalists are often anti-globalist as well, since they believe corporations exploit resources in the third world, where regulation is less stringent. On this front, they are strange bedfellows with the Trumpian right, which is also anti-globalist, albeit for completely different reasons.

  The most notable recent environmental justice flare-up was the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016 and 2017, which pitted the federal government against Native American activists who were concerned the new pipeline would harm the environment. Both Sanders and Obama met with activists at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to hear their demands, and solidarity marches were held all over the country. Shortly after taking office, Trump moved ahead with the pipeline project, and the National Guard evicted all protesters who still remained on-site.

  Aside from Standing Rock, explicitly environmental activism seems to have taken something of a backseat these days. Even the Poor People’s Campaign had to ground its environmentalism in anti-capitalist rhetoric and kooky spirituality to attract a crowd. If I had to guess, I’d say that the environmentalist cause doesn’t mesh particularly well with identity-based intersectionality. That’s because the victims of environmental calamity are, well, everyone. Aside from very narrow issues where specific groups are harmed—like the indigenous people of Standing Rock—environmentalism is largely about saving the entire world. It’s too “all lives matter” for 2019.

  In the first few weeks of 2019, environmental issues made a brief return to the forefront of American politics with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s introduction of the Green New Deal, a resolution to combat climate change. As is typical of intersectionality-influenced activism, the GND significantly overreached, including demands wholly unrelated to the environment, such as affordable housing and education for all, paid family leave time for workers, and “economic security for all those who are unable or unwilling to work.” This provision appeared on a fact sheet accompanying the GND, drawing so much criticism that Ocasio-Cortez’s staffers eventually claimed it was erroneous and released by mistake. The left might consider that many people would like the government to do more to help the poor, the working class, and the environment, but draw the line at bailing out all those who obstinately refuse to take care of themselves.

  Deafening Silence

  Though leftists are stridently anti-war, there is currently no tangible anti-war movement to speak of in the United States. Leftist activists routinely march in opposition to Trump, sexual harassment, income inequality, and even climate change. But the continued U.S. military involvement in the Middle East no longer merits much more than a shrug, organizationally speaking.

  Anti-war advocacy was one of the main causes of late-1960s activism, of course. But even as recently as the 2000s, opposition to war was of central importance to young activists—and not just for leftists but for liberals and libertarians as well. During my years as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan (2006–10), campus anti-war demonstrations were common. The two most widely admired politicians—the ones who generated the most excitement and the largest crowds—were the most stridently anti-war major candidates on both the left and the right: Barack Obama and Republican congressman Ron Paul. It might surprise readers that Paul, a conservative libertarian with right-of-center social views, could draw a crowd of two thousand cheering left-leaning college students at the University of Michigan, but in 2007, he did just that.6 (I was there in the audience.) Paul wanted U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and students loved him for it, despite his other policy views, which were libertarian or conservative. I remember talking with a colleague at the Michigan Daily, an extremely left-of-center female student of color. She told me Barack Obama was her first choice to be the next president. Her second choice was Ron Paul.

  But after Obama was elected president, the noise faded. Less than a year into his first term, President Obama was awarded a staggeringly premature Nobel Peace Prize; Nobel Committee members hoped that he would interpret the award as a mandate to pursue global peace initiatives. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on anyway, and the U.S. government involved itself in additional military conflicts in the Middle East during Obama’s two terms: in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere.

  The wars didn’t end, but attendance at anti-war rallies plummeted in the years after Obama’s election. While many of the most hard-core activists remained interested in anti-war activity, partisan Democrats fled the movement, falsely content that their mission was accomplished.

  “The antiwar movement demobilized as Democrats, who had been motivated to participate by anti-Republican sentiments, withdrew from antiwar protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success, if not policy success in ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” argued a team of University of Michigan researchers in a paper that analyzed rally attendance data.7

  Bill Ayers, a consistent opponent of war, told me that burnout can be a real problem. “I think that we had a moment in 2003 when the anti-war movement threatened to reorganize itself and become a real force,” he said. “How we failed to do that, I’m not wise enough to unpack that. But we had a moment in 2003 where the country was against this intervention. The world was against it. And the intervention happened anyway.”

  It’s possible that an increased reliance on drone strikes has made war seem distant and alien, like it’s happening on some other planet. It’s also possible that we have come to think of U.S. military entanglements in the Middle East as normal and unavoidable. Young people born after 9/11 will soon be old enough to enlist in the armed forces and be sent to Afghanistan to fight in a war that has lasted for their entire lives.

  “If we can’t find a way to make war a central issue, we are in a world of trouble,” said Ayers.

  At least for now, this seems like an impossible task. Opposing war was easier when the warmonger was President George Bush, a conventionally hawkish Republican. But after eight years with a defiantly hawkish Democrat in power, the issue is scrambled and confused. For those of us who continue to think U.S. leadership—whether it’s Bush, Obama, or Trump—is too eager to de
ploy military methods in service of regime change in the Middle East, the anti-war movement’s absence is keenly felt.

  Post-Parkland

  “We are tired of gun violence—our school could be next,” a trio of girls—ages thirteen, thirteen, and eleven—informed me. “What if it is?”

  It was March 2018, and I was at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., where an estimated two hundred thousand people—many of them teenagers—had turned out to oppose gun violence in schools. Survivors of the horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, had organized the event, and the many young people I interviewed were terrified that they would be next.

  “I don’t feel safe in school,” a Maryland high schooler told me.

  “Every fire drill, every alarm that goes off, I’m worried,” said one of the thirteen-year-olds.

  For many of the attendees, the obvious solution was to ban guns. Some wanted to ban all guns; others just wanted to get rid of so-called assault weapons.

  “We should stop having guns anywhere at all,” a teenage boy told me. “I feel like guns should be outlawed.”

  But it wasn’t just guns: many young people wanted more security guards, police officers, metal detectors, and other school security measures to be put in place. Kids are vulnerable, and school is a dangerous place, their thinking goes. And whenever a mass shooting happens, their worst fears are confirmed.