Ken MacLeod's reaction the the US elections, like many others, starts with perplexity, then shows the flag and expresses solidarity with the losers, and ends by trying to say some sensible things.

Perplexity:

The Conservative and the Communist sometimes find they have more in common than either might have expected; at least that they understand each other, and agree on what is important; likewise the Freethinker and the Fundamentalist. In politics as in religion, both poles are perplexed by the Liberal; from opposite sides of the case they scratch their heads, like Victorian biologists looking at a platypus and wondering if they aren't being made a monkey of.

That's how I feel sometimes. I love you guys, but I don't understand you. Add to this that I have a tin ear for US politics, and my qualifications for commenting on last week's election, and giving my liberal friends tips on how to warm their eggs and suckle their young are complete.

It's true, he doesn't have a clue. In his novels the US is a painted backdrop seen from a great distance, too large and too powerful to be dealt with as a reality and so is mythologized, like China only more so. His European provincialism is unblemished by knowledge or insight about other cultures.

Solidarity:

Before the election, one could at least blame Bush, or some small group around him. In 2000, leaving aside the shenanigans around the count, people had voted for 'a uniter, not a divider', for a 'humbler' foreign policy, for a 'compassionate conservatism'. The atrocity of 9/11 had knocked America sideways. The fury was not only understandable, but so widely shared that the flag of Red China flew at half mast. It was only as the War on Terror mutated into the Iraq War that the mood changed. But this and other features of the first Bush term could still be seen as an aberration.

Well, now the American people have legitimised the bastard. Of course many, perhaps most, of those who voted for the President didn't consciously and deliberately vote for all he stands for. This is because not all, but a substantial portion, were too fucking stupid to find out. These knuckle-dragging cousin-fuckers who are LIVING PROOF that Darwin was right and who were piped to the polls by shills for crony capitalists who are LIVING PROOF that Marx was right still think America was attacked by Iraq, and payback is a bitch. I have news for them. It is. My only problem with that, frankly, is that I love too many folks who don't deserve to be collateral damage.

Having so little knowledge or insight about the US it isn't surprising that he voices the cartoon version of the most antagonistic view. For European provincials the US is an inkblot test, an opportunity for the meanest and messiest parts of their minds to emerge and make their stinks venting impotent fear and rage. As I heard it put recently, "they ran out of bullets and threw the gun". It gets laughs.

Attempted Sensibility - Con:

So what can the reality-based community do? Blunt the other side's wedge issues and start hammering in some wedges of your own...

God - Kill him

Guns - Buy one

Gays - Never mind

The problem here is that these aren't centrally important issues to Republicans. MacLeod demonstrates his cluelessness about the US by buying into the tabloid punditry that identifies these issues as wedge issues. They aren't, they don't have much influence on most national elections and definitely had little to do with this one. They just enrage Democrats and lead them to squander their energies in meaningless battles.

Attempted Sensibility - Pro:

Wedges the other way:

Class - Pay attention to poor

Conservatism - Red-bait every ex-Trot neocon

Environment - Forget Kyoto

Science - Never mind

Patriotism - Fake it. Read Gramsci, but talk like Debs.

Terrorism - Get serious about it

There are some useful notions here but they are blunted by the key defect of leftists in general and Democrats in particular; it's all fake, deceitful attempts to manipulate society and sell them on programs that they wouldn't support if presented honestly. By viewing the world in an adversarial manner - them and us - and seeking victory by any means they lose not only every hope of victory but also moral legitimacy, a failing that drives the best and brightest from the left.

As stated in many previous posts I fully support policies that lead to a more egalitarian society, that is more inclusive and grants full suffrage to an ever increasing proportion of the population. This isn't usefully understood as a class issue in the US, that's the paleo-European view, but it flirts with more useful ideas that consider the diverse subcultures and value systems of such a large nation composed of immigrants from all over the planet, that speaks every language on earth and worships every god in one place or another, and is old enough to have evolved purely local cultures as well. Institutions that have accreted over time that echo those antiquated European class structures, such as the elitist monasteries discussed in False Assumptions, need modernization and reform. A useful first step might be a crash course in Fallibilist Philosophy as antidote to froggy extremism.

You can't red-bait an ex-Trot neocon because they are ex, the poster children for enlightened liberalism, the ones that wised up after getting mugged, or so the story goes. The US has always had a strain of populist socialism, a more sophisticated and pragmatic version rooted in Fallibilist Philosophy. They don't try to make a god of Reason, they just use it like any other tool, which immunizes them to the objectionable aspects of red disease. They expect to screw up some and so have a sense of humor about themselves.

The idea to forget Kyoto is a good one that perhaps unintentionally goes to the heart of liberal failure. That environmentalism is a movement, is an ism, is its greatest failing. It suffers from the key defect of leftism mentioned above - it's all fake, deceitful attempts to manipulate society and sell them on programs that they wouldn't support if presented honestly - a movement that was founded solely to advance the political interests of Democrats and is intentionally anathema to Republicans not because of a core concern for healthy environments, but because it champions command and control methods to achieve environmental preservation and remediation. It is a way to attack Republicans, especially red-state Republicans who already feel like third world colonies of a remote power since so much of their territory is owned by absentee state landlords.

This ties into the failed attempt to brand Republicans as anti-science or convict them of having politicized science. The Democrats did that long ago with phoney environmental "science" up to and including the vast majority of climate change hysteria. It's foolish of them to press this issue since they are on such shaky ground. If it ever became important enough to merit focused counter attack they would be wiped out. They are engaging in a bit of childish bear baiting. If they truly annoy the bear they will regret it.

Though cynical and devoid of scholarship about American intellectual history, the advice to argue for a more egalitarian society by appealing to classic American values as expressed by earlier American thinkers - rather than continuing the present course of importing the fevered mutterings of Europeans formed in the cauldron of war and oppression that has ravaged Europe for the past 200 years (longer, but that's not entirely relevant here) - is spot on. Americanism is steeped in the British and American enlightenment and America is peopled by refugees from the old world who flocked here to participate in the freedom of an open egalitarian society, a process which continues to this day. Those who wish to leave, as we hear so much about in the MSM lately, will be promptly replaced by others who have better sense. The Tories that left the US after the war of independence were not missed and these latter day Tories will not be missed either.

The advice to get serious about terrorism is correct but MacLeod has no clue what this means, no understanding of netwar or long range strategies in an age of netwar. He's still mired in steam age thinking, still fighting the old socialist battles of a previous century with horse drawn artillery and steam locomotives. You have to think multi-dimensionally - it's go not chess - and be able to hold your mud, do the appropriate thing in each moment rather than blundering ahead with a cherished illusion of confrontation on a fantasy battlefield. It's as much about luring opponents into ill conceived attacks as it is about attacking or defending. When done properly the opponent willingly places his head on the block and welcomes the sword stroke, expecting to win even as his head falls in the basket. This is accomplished as much by gaming the media and pundits as it is by gaming the principals. The Knowledge Problem is real. How Do You Know?

Getting serious about terrorism for leftists means modernizing their thinking, recognizing a little more of the events that are occurring all around them that they have been blind to, and realizing that there is much more that they cannot by definition know. It might help to reflect on how often leftists have been wrong in their predictions about the course of events, not realizing that the end of a phase was near and not learning when their errors are revealed. The results of the US election are just the most recent example of that syndrome, fully expecting victory even as their heads dropped into the basket, defeated at every level. Neither rage nor remorse are useful reactions when you have been so completely wrong. It is time to truly become "reality based", to notice what is going on in the world, to exit the echo chambers and cocoons and become more fully human.