If you’re a disabled member of the professional middle class—or even the working poor—it can hard to get the support you need if you don’t have relatives or a spouse to do it for you. Although many disabled professionals make too much to qualify for benefits, they make too little to pay for services like housekeeping without going into crushing amounts of debt. That’s my story in a nutshell: I’ve had to go into an absurd amount of debt to get the education I needed to be able to work, accommodate myself, and offset my lack of family wealth.

My flavour of autism makes it harder for me to do a lot of repetitive, physical, “low-skilled” jobs. I put “low-skilled” in quotation marks because cleaning, cooking, building, and other manual tasks do require skill, but they don’t get you paid very much. I’m much better at abstract and symbolic work: writing, analysis, design, conceptualisation, and research. The kinds of jobs I can do usually require at least a bachelor’s degree, so it was impossible for me to get a full-time job before I graduated from college. I paid my bills with government grants, scholarships, student loans, and whatever money I could get from paid internships and freelance work. I don’t regret going to college and grad school, but I wish that I weren’t forced to go into so much debt. Most of my tuition was covered through scholarships—I took out loans to pay for rent, food, transportation, and other expenses. I haven’t been able to build up savings because of all the loans and credit cards. I live paycheque to paycheque.

But if I hadn’t gone to college, I wouldn’t be able to find a job at all despite being able to work. I can’t do retail. I can’t do food service. And with my back problems, construction, manufacturing, and maintenance are right out. I would have had to go on disability to cover my expenses and receive support. I don’t want to go on disability, since I’m able to work. It’s a difficult slog to get disability payments, too; most people are denied on the first round. And if I were to get on disability, my housing choices would be limited. Social Security doesn’t pay enough to cover the rent costs in most cities, and it takes years—sometimes a decade or more—to qualify for Section 8 housing vouchers. In a nursing home, I’d lose my rights, autonomy, and dignity, so that’s not an option, either. I’ve been estranged from my family for fifteen years, so going back home to my parents wouldn’t work. (Living with my parents was a lot like being in an institution anyway.)

There doesn’t seem to be room in public policy for disabled people who can work and need support at the same time, unless those disabled people are also poor. I do not want to be in poverty. I’ve been struggling financially over the past few months, and I’ve hated every minute. I was poor for most of my twenties, and it was miserable. I want to be professionally successful and get the support I need with things like housekeeping without breaking the bank. Is that too much to ask for? Apparently so, since every home-care benefit I can think of is means-tested. I meet the criteria right now, but what if I get a job that pays me well? (And by “well,” I mean, “I’m able to pay my rent and bills and have a reasonable amount of disposable income.” I don’t expect to become rich, at least not in this lifetime.) Then I’m left high and dry.

(ca. 2019)

The ideas of Karl Marx and his ideological descendants are not and should not be the sole foundation for left-wing political thought. They’re certainly not the sole foundation of mine. I am not a Marxist. I have never been a Marxist. This is not the same as saying that Marx was wholly wrong; I think his ideas about worker alienation, for example, are useful in describing people’s relationship to their labour. I do not, however, care very much for his predilection for teleological explanations. Is it necessarily true that workers will eventually rebel against their capitalist overlords and establish a workers’ paradise, or is it merely your ardent desire that they do so? Is and ought are two different phenomena. The problem with prognostications like Marx’s inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat is that there’s no proof that the proposed events will in fact happen. I do consider myself left-wing, though, since I am largely egalitarian.

The following ideas, presented in bullet-point format, are an attempt to articulate my particular flavour of leftism.

• People do not have identical abilities, backgrounds or proclivities; however, these differences do not require anti-egalitarian policies to maintain social equilibrium. Anti-egalitarianism based on group characteristics requires adopting a number of a priori assumptions that can be disproved easily with one or two social interactions. If you do deal with people categorically in a way that under- or overestimates them, then you may incur negative consequences from that erroneous assumption. It’s therefore optimal to adopt a politically egalitarian strategy to avoid fucking this up. There are some good explanations from game theory that show egalitarian or cooperative strategies to be better evolutionary strategies than adhering to a version of “nature, red in tooth and claw.”
• I am a staunch individualist. That doesn’t mean I’m a libertarian or a fan of laissez-faire capitalism. I believe that each person has their own needs and characteristics that are distinct from those around them. An individual’s traits should not be subsumed by group characteristics if the characteristics associated with the group are inapt to describe that individual.
• I value cooperation and humane social policy.
• I am not immune to bias. You are not immune to bias. There is no such thing as total neutrality. We as a species have irrational tendencies deeply embedded in our lizard-brains. Bias is unavoidable, but you can question it. And by all means, you should.
• Rights are, or should be, granted or rescinded based on the potential to materially harm another person’s existence. Allowing a same-gender couple to marry does not materially affect heterosexual couples’ existence; the latter can still marry and enjoy the same benefits they did before same-gender couples’ relationships were granted legal parity. Murder, rape and child abuse, however, are forms of material harm. Note that I include direct psychological harm as a form of material harm; I don’t find Cartesian dualism useful here. Emotional abusers inflict real, long-lasting effects on their victims.
• I don’t think “natural rights” exist in an absolute sense. Humans created them. That’s not to say that human rights aren’t important, but that societies had a role in determining what those rights should be. We do not need to use Platonic forms to define what we believe is right.
• I am vehemently anti-authoritarian. And no, expanding the rights of one designated group to match those of a group that has always had rights is not a form of authoritarianism.
• I am pro-women, anti-racist, pro-LGBTQ, anti-disablist and anti-xenophobic because of my individualism, not in spite of it. “Mexicans are rapists” is a ridiculous generalisation. “Black people aren’t very intelligent” is an invidious and poorly substantiated claim.
• I’ve become convinced that ontological debates about people’s identities are useless parlour games in the broader scheme of things. Debating the validity of someone’s gender identity, for example, is not particularly productive when more powerful people threaten people’s material existence. Let’s spend less time on how trans people will hypothetically destroy womanhood and more time on how authoritarian conservative politicians are hell-bent on abrogating women’s rights to control their own bodies. Even if we use a favourite reductio ad absurdum argument, like “I identify as an attack helicopter,” who cares? Does Attack Helicopter pose a direct threat to you by virtue of their identity?
• I see the utility of group-based strategies to stop people from lumping people together and judging them categorically without knowing their individual circumstances. Strategies like affirmative action/positive discrimination, diversity recruiting and sensitivity trainings should be aimed at ultimately creating a society in which people are treated as unique individuals, not members of a stereotyped conglomerate. To stop unwarranted stereotyping, you have to recognise that said stereotyping actually exists. Ignoring it won’t lead to real change. That said, however, I am uncomfortable with the tendency towards elevating group identities over individual ones. This applies both to the left and to the right, though I obviously find the right-wing variety far worse. Certain conservatives, reactionaries and libertarians may protest that they care more about individuals than groups, but these very same people will complain that they’re not allowed to make claims about women’s unsuitability to work outside the home, black people’s low intelligence or the International Jewish Conspiracy. People like Richard Spencer and other blatant white supremacists may be the nauseating of the lot, but at least they’re intellectually honest about their use of crude categories to unfairly stereotype people. I also believe that negative categorical stereotypes can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies that create positive feedback loops that continue inexorably until people have enough sense to disaggregate the people unfairly lumped together.
• I do not think that privilege or oppression are static categories. I don’t believe in the eternal battle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, white people versus “people of colour,” or God and Satan. Rather, I see these relationships as fluid, spatially and temporally bound phenomena. (Yes, I put “people of colour” in dick quotes this time. I use it out of convenience, but it is not my favourite term. Since language intended for others should be understandable, I’m often stuck using words I’d rather not use instead of inventing my own.)
• When people talk about “opposing capitalism,” they should be clear about what they actually mean. What we understand as capitalism contains a number of different concatenated ideas. Creating for-profit businesses does not require enslavement or worker exploitation; the idea that maximising profit before other concerns can very well lead to those human-rights abuses. If, however, economic policy is connected with the idea that people are entitled to full and fair participation within a given society, then it stands to reason that slavery and labour-rights abuses are inherently unacceptable. Neoliberalism is an even vaguer term; for some people, it appears to have developed the meaning of “thing I don’t like.” I’m hardly a supporter of laissez-faire capitalism, but I’m not a communist, either. I’m not against profit-making or the exchange of money for goods, but I am opposed to the idea that rampant social inequality should be acceptable. “That’s just the way it is” is a terrible defence. Yeah, that may be the way it is, but is that how it should be? Sometimes you really want the ought in an is/ought problem.
• We exist within overlapping, often mutually reinforcing contexts; there is no one objectivity, but the confluence of several observed and experienced objectivities and subjectivities. We don’t know if an entity exists outside the known universe that defines reality, rather like the distinction between positive and negative space in art. (In this case, the known universe would be the positive space, while the reality-definer would be the negative space.) There’s no proof that one exists. I’ll agree that there is a consensus reality, since there are observations that have been corroborated over and over again across time. This is why I believe in the existence of natural phenomena like gravity, evolution and global warming. If I talk about objective reality, I’m technically referring to the consensus reality whose characteristics have been uncovered through empirical findings.

Are these definitive statements? Hardly; I’m hesitant to make declarations that may or may not hold true in the face of new, controverting evidence. Anti-authoritarianism, egalitarianism and individualism are the closest things I have to core beliefs, but otherwise, they’re subject to change and refinement over time. I find that I can’t keep myself trapped in a thought-loop without wanting to break out of it.

(originally posted in 2018)

This post is part of a series of posts in which I’ll attempt to translate philosophical ideas into understandable language to reach a wider audience. I firmly believe that big ideas are, or should be, open to everyone.

Everyone can learn things about themselves. They also have the right to learn more things in a way that works for them. Unfortunately, some people think that because of who some people are, they either can’t know themselves well or don’t have the right to learn new things about themselves or the world around them. In 2007, Miranda Fricker wrote a book, Epistemic Injustice, about how people ignore others’ knowledge and prevent them from getting more knowledge easily. Epistemic is a fancy word referring to how we know things, how we learn, and how we see others’ knowledge. Epistemic injustice means that people don’t respect your knowledge because of who you are. It also means that because of who you are, people don’t give you the tools for you to gather knowledge for yourself. This happens to people who experience discrimination or have less power in society, like women, people of colour, people with disabilities, immigrants and LGBTQ people.

Here are some examples of how people encounter epistemic injustice:

• Students with disabilities can deal with epistemic injustice because they are not given a good education that helps them learn more about the world in ways they can understand. At school, people learn important strategies for communicating with other people, gathering learning, and communicating that knowledge. When people don’t learn those skills, it is harder to talk about what you are going through and what you need. Some people think wrongly that people with disabilities can’t use these tools effectively.
• Some people may not take women’s complaints about sexual abuse or harassment seriously. This means that the people who abused or harassed them won’t get caught and will keep hurting the women who complained. Some people think that women don’t know when they’re being mistreated and that they’re overreacting when they are. This is unfair because women can tell when they are being treated badly and have the right to have their boundaries respected.
• Poor people often go to schools that don’t get much money. Because there isn’t enough money to pay teachers or get good textbooks, students may not learn as much. They won’t have the tools to explain their experiences as well as people with better educations.
• Doctors may not take people of colour seriously when they tell doctors about their problems, like pain or illness. This can be very dangerous because not treating people’s pain or illnesses can kill them or put them in danger. These doctors think that people of colour cannot know how they are feeling, but white people can. This is racist. People of colour can know themselves just as well as white people can.

The problem with epistemic injustice is that it makes it more difficult for people to communicate and advocate for their rights. When you’re not being listened to or don’t have ways to talk about what you need, it’s hard to have those needs met. This means that you may not have the healthcare, education, housing, relationships, laws and policies, or services you deserve. As activists, we should work to make sure that people are listened to so we can get what we need. Everyone deserves to be included in the community, and part of that means listening to them and giving them the tools to talk about what they need to be included.

References

Fricker, M (2007). Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(reposted from 2018)

This is a follow-up post to ‘Why Conservatives Look Hypocritical’, though I actually started thinking about the issues with closed systems of thought before writing the previous article.

Authoritarian ideologies tend to be closed systems; that is, the totality of the universe can be explained within a self-contained framework. There is also a preference for fixed ontological viewpoints; if a phenomenon does not match the predefined category, then it either does not exist or is an aberration to be reclassified or shunned. The cosmological views of authoritarians exemplifies a tendency towards preferring closed systems as explanatory frameworks for the creation and behaviour of the known universe, even in situations in which mainstream science has reflected the existence of open systems. Most gallingly, people who adhere to these ideologies claim that they, and only they, have access to objective truth.

There is no single objectivity. Rather, truth exists at the centre of several overlapping objectivities and the subjectivities through which those objectivities are observed. I think there is, or can be, broad consensus in many areas, but this is not universal. Philosophically, I lie somewhere between deconstructionist postmodernism and modernist reductionism. This is not a rejection of the concept of objective reality or the scientific method; rather, it is a rejection of ultimately subjective views that merely pose as objective. I am loath to oppose the concept of objective truth entirely; to do so is dangerous in this era of fake news and alternative facts. I am hesitant to call myself a hard relativist, since I do think there are some universal moral principles that can be shared across space, time and history. I do not think, however, that those moral principles should require the denial or suppression of people’s self-determined identities or consensual relationships. Prohibiting murder makes sense, since depriving someone of their life causes them obvious material harm. Being in a same-gender relationship, however, causes no material harm on its own if the participants have voluntarily entered said relationship.

In traditionalist Christianity, there is a transcendental platonic ideal of reality that God has instantiated, and the disconnection between that ideal and the current state of the world is reflected through the theological concept of sin.

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).

Humanity’s unwillingness to comply with God’s commands vitiated this perfect order, leading to entropy. The ideal state of God’s perfect creation is also used to define objective truth. It is Plato’s transcendental world of forms transmuted into Christian orthodoxy. (I discussed this concept in more detail in ‘Why Conservatives Look Hypocritical’.) For example, same-gender couples deviate from ‘God’s plan’, and the only reason why such relationships exist is that humans are still suffering from the consequences of Adam and Eve’s original sin, and either choose to be LGBTQ or are deceived into queer personal or relational self-concepts by Satan. There is no room for the legitimacy of queer relationships or identities. Views that are discordant with the precepts of conservative or evangelical Christianity are treated as false because the Bible says they are. The Bible is routinely used to prove itself. This is circular reasoning. This circularity makes it difficult or impossible to accept scientific discoveries that more accurately explain the world. The conservative evangelical worldview is a closed system. Adopting a viewpoint that is sealed off from contradiction actually indicates that the viewpoint in question is less objective than it is claimed to be. It is also questionable whether the view of any conscious, intelligent being on its own can be truly objective. You can’t determine whether something is objective or not if you can’t even falsify it.

Religious belief is not necessary to hold these kinds of views, though it can certainly help. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism presents itself as an ostensibly libertarian ideology, but like other conservative and authoritarian philosophies, it draws from absolutist definitions of human experience to form its most deeply held tenets. For Objectivists, truth is defined outside human experience and cannot be legitimately contradicted by people’s own observations. Objectivism seems as though it is compatible with a scientific, logical worldview with its insistence on understanding the truth and avoiding subjective bias; however, the idea that objective truth can exist outside human experience is in and of itself a biased viewpoint that brings in a number of a priori assumptions. Like fundamentalist Christianity and other dogmatic religions and philosophies, Objectivism considers only philosophies permissible within its framework to be true; everything else can be discarded. Under strict Objectivist interpretations, for example, transgender identity cannot be valid under their strict definitions of what biological sex and gender are. The late Thomas Szasz, a libertarian psychiatrist, believed that transgender identities were blatantly delusional rejections of biological reality¹. In the notoriously transphobic missive The Transsexual Empire, Janice Raymond quotes Szasz to help bolster her position:

Thomas Szasz has asked whether an old person who desires to be young suffers from the “disease” of being a “transchronological” or does the poor person who wants to be rich suffer from the “disease” of being a “transeconomical?” (Szasz 1979). (Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire, in Cristan Williams, ‘Tumblr TERFs Fire Back’)

Though Objectivists claim to stand for free and open societies, adopting ideologies that disallow people’s self-determination is an intrinsically illiberal act that bears a greater resemblance to authoritarian extremists than it does other philosophies rooted in classic liberalism or progressivism. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a right-libertarian philosopher, holds similar attitudes towards the nature of knowledge and objectivity. His epistemological beliefs are a secular analogue to the closed system of conservative Christianity; he believes that knowledge occurs within a defined space, that a priori conjectures can explain phenomena just as well as, or better than, empirical methods, and that falsifiability is not a valid way to disprove a given phenomenon. Again, ideology is used to seal people from competing viewpoints. It’s rank hypocrisy for people from this political school of thought to claim that liberals are the ones advocating for censorship. Authoritarian extremists, whether right or left, are the ones who cordon themselves off from opposing viewpoints. Conservatives’ and authoritarians’ claims that liberals and leftists are the ones solely responsible for ignoring inconvenient facts are a form of projection. Creationism, ‘intelligent design’, global warming denial, Lysenkoism and other erroneous ideas stem from the a priori assumptions of those who think that authority trumps reality.

Furthermore, authoritarians tend towards conflating current political realities with ideal states. This leads to the framing of such retrograde views as patriarchy, ‘scientific racism’ and homophobia as iconoclastic positions that are being suppressed by the anti-free-speech Marxist elite. Since institutional sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination have been a reality for centuries, then they must be part of the natural order and should be upheld. Neoreactionaries, one of the intellectual precursors of the alt-right, are an extreme example of this phenomenon. Many of them, like the aforementioned Hans-Hermann Hoppe, have espoused anti-democratic views that are predicated on a given social order, like modern forms of monarchism and feudalism, with corporate CEOs serving in place of hereditary monarchs. In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe offers his ideal method of abolishing democracy in the United States:

Thus, rather than by means of a top-down reform, under the current conditions one’s strategy must be one of a bottom-up revolution. At first, the realization of this insight would seem to make the task of a liberal-libertarian social revolution impossible. For does this not imply that one would have to persuade a majority of the public to vote for the abolition of democracy and an end to all taxes and legislation? And is this not sheer fantasy, given that the masses are always dull and indolent, and even more so given that democracy, as explained above, promotes moral and intellectual degeneration? How in the world can anyone expect that a majority of an increasingly degenerate people accustomed to the “right” to vote should ever voluntarily renounce the opportunity of looting other people’s property? Put this way, one must admit that the prospect of a social revolution must indeed be regarded as virtually nil. Rather, it is only on second thought, upon regarding secession as an integral part of any bottom-up strategy, that the task of a liberal-libertarian revolution appears less than impossible, even if it still remains a daunting one (Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, p. 288).

Peter Thiel, the Trump-supporting co-founder of PayPal, is also well-known for his dislike of democracy, preferring a modernised version of feudalism or oligarchy. (In fact, Thiel presented at a conference run by Hoppe back in 2016. Past presenters at this conference include Richard Spencer, the notorious Brooks Brothers-clad neo-Nazi who was punched on camera, and Jared Taylor, a white nationalist ‘academic’.)

Accepting the the world’s messiness is a difficult task. As pattern-seekers, humans crave order. We want explanations for how the world works, and the closed epistemological and cosmological systems that authoritarians propose are extraordinarily tempting. Unfortunately, the answers that authoritarians provide aren’t real answers. ‘Because I said so’ is the answer of an incompetent parent who thinks that might is synonymous with right; it should not be the guiding principle of a cosmological, epistemological or moral viewpoint. There are other methods we can use for understanding the world around us that combine the data from our senses, intuition and reason.

1. This is actually untrue; numerous brain studies have shown potential differences in the organisation of trans people’s brains versus those of cis people, including this 2016 study. I will note that some of the language used to refer to the trans subjects in this study is outdated. Moreover, even if there were no physically identifiable differences between trans people’s and cis people’s brains, it does not necessarily follow that trans people’s self-perceptions are invalid. ↩

(reposted from 2018)

Introduction

On the face of it, the United States Supreme Court rulings defending Masterpiece Cakeshop’s right to refuse service to a gay couple and the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban seem to be based on contradictory interpretations of free religious expression. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that conservative Christians had the right to free exercise and expression of their religion; in Trump v Hawai‘i, the Court ruled that Trump was entitled to exclude people from majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States because of a different religious tradition. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out the seeming contradiction between the Court’s defence of Masterpiece Cakeshop and Trump’s Muslim ban. While I agree with her that it makes no sense to favour one form of religious expression over another, I also believe that the argument she put forward will have little to no effect on the Trump devotees and Christian fundamentalists for whom these rulings are manna from heaven. Conservatives do these seemingly contradictory rulings as consistent, but this consistency is not based on freedom of expression in and of itself. Rather, it is an ideological consistency: these rulings uphold the primacy of a certain brand of authoritarian American conservatism that is steeped in white, Christian, heteronormative supremacy. It is an illiberal ideology that establishes a clear hierarchy of values within American society. Within this school of thought, the material consequences of the rulings don’t matter; rather, it is the position these people hold within their ideological framework that matters. Like Sotomayor, I agree that the consequences should matter, but this is not how people like Neil Gorsuch or Clarence Thomas think. Understanding this kind of thinking and how it informs conservative jurisprudence is particularly important given that Trump will have another chance to appoint a Supreme Court justice following Anthony Kennedy’s recently announced retirement.

When the free market of ideas is anything but

Let’s talk a little more about what it means for a society to be illiberal. Illiberal societies restrict, or try to restrict, the beliefs, thoughts and behaviour of their subjects. In short, illiberal societies are authoritarian. This is independent of left- and right-wing social and economic ideologies; traditionalist conservative societies and leftist people’s republics can all exhibit authoritarian tendencies. They can be superficially egalitarian or intensely anti-egalitarian. They can have planned economies or loosely regulated capitalist ones. American conservatism—first associated with the Democrats before the ideological shifts of the 20th century that turned the Republicans into the party of naked white supremacy—has a strong illiberal strain that dates back to the era of Jim Crow segregation and ‘separate but equal’. The same applies to Russia and the other former Soviet states, China, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Turkey under Erdogan and Orbán’s Hungary, though the levels of severity vary by country and by time period. That said, however, I will focus primarily on the American Republican Party for expediency’s sake.

Despite these superficial differences, authoritarian societies and the ideologies that drive them share some common features. In authoritarian schools of thought, concepts of morality and right action are fixed entities exist outside the confines of space and time, and are unaffected by the vagaries of shifting social roles or political realities. People, too, belong to fixed classes: bourgeois or proletarians, men or women, the elect and the damned. This fixity can go by many names depending on the specific ideology to which an authoritarian adheres—Platonic ideals, God’s plan, the divine right of kings, Allah’s will, proletarian identity, revolutionary spirit—but the principle can apply to all of them. Many of these ideologies draw directly from Plato’s ideas about reality. Plato hypothesised that everything that existed was based on immutable, perfect forms that existed independently from the reality that we perceive with our senses.

We must conceive three kinds of things: first, those which undergo generation; secondly, those in which generation takes place, and thirdly, the model in whose likeness the generated things are born. And we may compare the receiving principle to a mother, and the model to a father, and their product to a child. […] There is first the unchanging Form, uncreated and indestructible, […] invisible and imperceptible by any sense, and which can be contemplated only by pure thought. (Plato, in Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 21.)

Though these forms are independent of what we can perceive empirically, they also define our reality. Furthermore, Plato thought that anything that deviated from this ideal was a corrupted version of these transcendent, perfect forms. When strict Platonism or ideas based on it are used to create a political philosophy, the consequences are unfree, closed societies that ostracise and punish those who hold dissenting views. In Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper eviscerates Platonism and its intellectual contributions to illiberal ideologies. Popper says the following about Plato and his views on the ideal state and its relationship to the eternal world of forms, which went on to influence Christian doctrine and other Western philosophies that tend towards authoritarianism or absolutism:

Plato believed in the possibility of arresting all political change. […] He tries to realize it by establishing a state that is free from the evils of all other states, because it does not change. It is the best, the arrested state (p. 16).

The things in flux, the degenerate and decaying things, are (like the state) the offspring, the children, as it were, of perfect things. And like children, they are copies of their original progenitors. The father or original of a thing in flux is what Plato calls its ‘Form’ or its ‘Pattern’ or its ‘Idea’. As before, we must insist that the Form or Idea, in spite of its name, is no ‘idea in our mind’; it is not a phantasm, nor a dream, but a real thing. It is, indeed, more real than all the ordinary things which are in flux, and which, in spite of their apparent solidity, are doomed to decay; for the Form or Idea is a thing that is perfect, and does not perish (p. 20).

Modern-day authoritarians, especially right-wing authoritarians, believe that society should either remain the way it was during an idealised period in time, or should return to the status quo ante if society has changed significantly since that period. People whose thoughts or actions stray from those Platonic ideals are excluded from these societies through social exclusion or government fiat. There is no such thing as legitimate dissent. Dissenters are not merely wrong; they are agents of Satan and the united forces of Hell, bourgeois counterrevolutionaries, the Jews, or immoral degenerates who wish to vitiate the Aryan purity of a given western fascist state. Under authoritarian ideologies, people are granted unequal levels of agency and social participation; people who can reasonably adhere to a given unfree society’s dictates or can go through the motions are accorded more status than those who cannot or will not. For example, in Christian fundamentalism, there is no such thing as a legitimate LGBTQ person. Everyone is really straight or gender-normative; they’ve simply chosen to be different, or have been deceived by Satan to believe that they are different. Either way, they are violating God’s ideal template for heteronormative relationships or gender-conforming self-concepts. A conservative philosophy professor and writer, Kelley Ross, refers directly to Platonism as a rationale for his political beliefs. Other authoritarians and conservatives may not refer directly to Plato, but they still share in his intellectual heritage every time they refer to ‘God’s divine plan’ or anything similar. Authoritarian ideologies are therefore closed systems that do not admit alternative points of view. If there is already a fixed view of what moral or ethical behaviour constitutes, then anything that strays outside that view is intrinsically immoral or unethical, regardless of its actual effects on other people. I am not a hard consequentialist and consider intent important when weighing others’ actions, but that is different from the idea that concepts of moral behaviour are hermetically sealed and should not be subject to dissent or argument.

Ignore what the ‘intellectual dark web’ and its loosely organised members say about the marketplace of ideas. They’re being disingenuous. The conservative ideologies they promote or appease seal themselves off from debate, because the very premise of these schools of thought is that co-existence with others is fundamentally impossible unless they change their behaviour and beliefs to match those of the dominant group or groups, because any deviation from the standard is a corruption of their preferred Platonic ideal of what society should look like. Co-existence with the ruling class in an authoritarian state requires that those people unfortunate enough to be considered subalterns within that society genuflect to those rulers. For example, in a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, everyone would have the ‘right’ to express devotion to Jesus or risk being imprisoned, socially ostracised, beheaded or burnt as a witch. There is no such thing as equal co-existence under authoritarian rule. When I speak in favour of marriage equality, trans inclusion or other policies that authoritarian conservatives deplore, this does not mean that I am also arguing for their own establishments to adhere to my own ideology. I am not asking for conservative churches to marry queer couples, change their teachings on LGBTQ people, or ordain transgender clergy. I am not telling them to change their beliefs. Christian theocrats, in contrast, believe that there should be no civil recognition of any relationship that does not adhere strictly to their interpretation of what true Christianity looks like. They do want me to change my beliefs. My participation in civil society as myself is anathema to them; for me to be acceptable, I have to change the way I behave and think. For them, God’s divine authority supersedes civil rights or pluralism. This is the difference between liberalism and authoritarianism. I am not being authoritarian for advocating for my full inclusion in society.

The Republican Party has declared its fealty to Donald Trump, no matter what he says or does. This is in part because Trump is a means to an end. Trump may not actually share any of the actual values that conservative ideologues espouse, but he is a tool to allow them to re-fashion society in their own image. As long as he is useful, they will continue to appease him. As Trump himself has said, ‘I could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’ The Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, is focused on one thing: power. He doesn’t care about the consequences his actions have on individual people; his goal is to ensure that the Republican party maintains total control over all three branches of the United States federal government. The tendency towards Platonism within the Republican party is enough of a motivator to ensure that they will try to keep power at all costs. After all, allowing the Democrats to have any influence will corrupt American society and cause it to drift further from what they have determined it should be. McConnell, along with Trump and the various personages of the Religious Right, exemplify the stranglehold authoritarian ideology has on his party.

To fight extremist Republicans like Trump, Pence, Sessions and McConnell, it is vital for policy analysts and researchers to understand precisely why they seem so intransigent, even when the actual policies that Republican politicians promote are often out of step with the preferences of American voters, regardless of registered political party. Authoritarian Platonists will not be moved by appeals to rationality, progress, decency or logic. They should be voted out of office. Removing them from power is the only way to stop them.

References

• Popper, K. The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato.