Convergence

Zach Horton

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Theorizing Scale

May 7, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A few months ago, after over 8 years of research and writing, I published my first academic book, The Cosmic Zoom. Writing this incredibly meaningful book changed my life, and it is my ardent hope that it will assist others as well. This post is an introduction and guide to the book. But first, my immense gratitude to my amazing editors at the University of Chicago Press.

This is a book about scale. About how one thing transforms into another, about how different subjects and objects encounter one another across scales, and about how we—as disciplined or creative thinkers—come to know (and unknow) the parts of the world that inhabit different scales than we can access with our senses. Such knowledge is the product of mediation, of conjoined processes of communication, sensory stimulation, and transformation. All media is trans-scalar, and everything we access that is trans-scalar is mediated.

The Cosmic Zoom develops a medial theory of scale that accounts for its disciplinary history, the scalar politics of today, and what I call the “scalar paradox of knowledge production”: the fact that scale seems to be arbitrary, a human convention, and yet investigation of both the material and social world reveals that scalar difference is a fundamental dynamic of the universe, and one that confounds disciplined knowledge production more than it bolsters it. How do we account for this paradox? Is the cosmos scaled, or do we impose scale upon it? Rather than collapse the paradox, this book argues that both are true, and the cyclical process, or circuit, of human stabilization of particular scales and the irruption of scalar difference beyond the human constitute the medial dynamic of scale.

The Cosmic Zoom considers the current moment in history as one of profoundly important scalar politics, which formulate or contest the constellation and characterization of particular scales, producing zooms that distribute and mediate affect, engendering particular scalar identities. Scalar politics determines human relationships to anthropogenic processes at planetary scales like climate change and big data, as well as human relationships with non-humans at all scales. To take the measure of our current, troubled epoch, I argue that we must come to a far better understanding of scalar mediation.

It is my hope that this work will provide a foundation for and help to catalyze the new interdisciplinary field of Scale Studies.

I thought it might be helpful to provide something of a guide to this sprawling book, so here goes…

First Chapter and Index

Here’s the first chapter of the book, plus the index.

Full Table of Contents

Here’s an unpublished, complete table of contents that includes all section titles in the book (the published version includes only the chapter titles). Along with the published index, this may help you hone in on the conceptual needle in the cosmic haystack!

Key Concepts

The book develops a number of key concepts, a few of which are listed here:

Scalar Difference: A fundamental difference of intensity between all assemblages that impels change. Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 5.

Scalar Spectrum: The range of possible scalar difference, without implied continuity between its ranges. Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3.

Scalar Collapse: The negation of difference between different ranges of the scalar spectrum through their superimposition in speculative media. Ch 1, Ch 4.

Resolving Cut: The relative stabilization of a scalar milieu produced by an observing entity. Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 4, Ch 5.

Resolution: The degree to which ecological detail can be differentiated within a scalar milieu, as outcome of the conceptual and technical stabilization of particular scales. Ch 2.

Pan-Scalar Humanism: An ideology that positions the human at the center of the constellation of scales. Ch 1, Ch 3 (“Toying With Ideas: The Scalar Analog”), Ch 4.

Analog Scale: Scalar difference represented visually as continuous space, optically and conceptually equidistant to the human subject. As distinct from analog media, which must occlude its own seams in order to produce analog scale. See also “Zoetrope Model of Scale” and “equidistant optics.” Ch 3, Ch 4.

Digital Scale: A representation of scale as a spectrum of discrete and discontinuous milieus. As distinct from digital media, which often produces analog scale, especially when non-recursive. Ch 4, Ch 6.

Trans-Scalar Ecology: Tracing the scalar relations, co-constitutive dynamics, and interdependencies of entities across scalar difference (scalar relationality as metadiscipline). Ch 5.

Drama of Resolution: A form of narrative that continually resolves new scales, re-articulating unresolved detail with newly resolved detail. See also “scalar memory.” Ch 2.

Trans-Scalar Encounter: The perspectival encounter between assemblages across discontinuous regions of the scalar spectrum, as resolving event. Ch 1, Ch 6.

Intensive Scale: Scale as primary differentiation, prior to particular knowledge formations (ontological). Ch 5.

Extensive Scale: Scale as secondary negotiation between stabilized surfaces (medial). Ch 5.

Recursive Database Subjectivity: The encounter of the self from different scalar perspectives afforded by database-driven media. Ch 6.

Disciplinary Resolution: The stabilization of particular scales for knowledge production through resolving cuts and the establishment of epistemic protocols. Ch 4, Ch 5 (“Disciplinary Scale”).

Trans-Scalar Constellation: The articulation of multiple stabilized scalar milieus into a world. See also “Zoom” and “Scalar Politics.” Ch 4.

Here’s a PDF version of this guide.

Disciplinary Guide

For those coming to the book from diverse vectors…


Media Studies: Entire book.

Visual Studies / Design (especially Ray and Charles Eames): Ch 3, Ch 4.

Literary Studies: Ch 1, Ch 2.

Science and Technology Studies: Ch 1, Ch 4, Ch 5.

Digital Humanities and Digital Cultural Studies: Ch 6.

Software Studies: Ch 5 (“Lost in Trans-Scalar Ecology: Powers of Ten Interactive”), Ch 6.

Environmental Studies / Ecology: Ch 1, Ch 5.

Philosophy / Critical Theory: Ch 1, Ch 5, Ch 6.

Cosmic Zoom History

Beyond its theoretical content, The Cosmic Zoom is also a history of the cosmic zoom form. I wrote a blog post for Chicago University Press with some cosmic zoom film recommendations here.

This book lays the theoretical groundwork for my future academic and creative work, and mode of living. I earnestly hope it assists you in your future endeavors, whatever form and scale they may take.

Domes 2022 Update: Infrastructure

March 5, 2022 / / 0 Comments

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated this site (which I blame on the coronavirus blues), but it’s time to kick off a series of updates! I started this site years ago and named it Convergence because I intended it to be an unholy attempt to mix together different strands of my work and life that I wanted to bring together, experimentally, in the hopes that new connections, directions, insights, and dreams might emerge at the intersections. In 2022 I feel particularly invigorated to further explore this project. Plus, I know that many of you are interested in updates! So here goes…

The Domes project has been most consistently presented on this site because it represents, for me, a deep convergence of a number of my loves, including ecology, scale, family, form, dwelling, energy, systems thinking, and creativity. Let’s start out, then, with a short video of drone footage taken in January by Jon Watts. This is a candid snapshot of progress on the site that I’ll describe below:

In the past couple of years the Domes project has entered an exciting final phase. We completed the interior in 2020 and I began to focus on getting all of its interconnected systems up and running, as well as applying all I’ve learned in the previous five years to re-design some of its infrastructure. This lead to the design of a third structure, an above-ground utility hub and garage. We decided to locate this behind the domes proper, where we could dig up and re-configure our primary electrical and hydronic runs to better integrate the various components of the project’s infrastructure. I wanted to eliminate lingering underground water pressure issues that caused water to find its way into the domes (which are, after all, under ground) during heavy rains. These were issues that no one predicted before the build, and it is in fact counter-intuitive that sealed conduits would become flowing water pipes during heavy rains. But that’s exactly what happened (and in fact always happens in all conduits). Above-ground buildings are rarely affected by this because there isn’t enough water pressure in the underground conduits to push water high enough to empty into the structures. Plus, urban infrastructure has shorter runs and thus less of an opportunity to build up hydrostatic pressure. In the domes, however, long underground conduits and high hydrostatic pressure after rains easily push water up through conduits.

The opportunity to build a utility hub as a separate building allowed me to de-couple the domes from these long utility runs, eliminating the problem and creating an access point for new utility tie-ins, such as firefighting equipment, rainwater cachement, and off-grid battery banks. When digging new utility trenches, I also installed a deep “sump well” in the hillside that allows us to actually see far underground (visually or via sensors) to gather data about conditions underground. Here our friend Neal is helping me install the well:

The new building has a radiant floor that will be connected to a “heat dump” loop of our primary solar thermal heating system. This will transform its foundation into a massive heat sink to automatically handle excess thermal energy generated by the system. It can also be used, however, to provide on-demand thermal energy to the new building if/when desired. The electronic and hydronic interconnections between the domes, this new hub, and our outdoor utilities kiosk are extensive, and go far beyond the usual connections between detached buildings. This is because I’ve designed the entire site to be a single cybernetic system embedded in its natural surroundings rather than the autonomous islands that standard buildings are designed to be. Rather than the standard model of delivering utilities to autonomous buildings, here information, water, heat, and power are all shared in a multi-directional network.

I designed the foundation of the new utility hub with the necessary infrastructure, including underground plumbing and a large hexagonal pad, for a 5,000 gallon water tank. The roof is designed to collect rainwater and store it in the tank, then draw on that water for firefighting and emergency water needs. This new addition to our hydronic system is also designed to accept the input of other sources of water, such as a potential second well, in the future.

Beyond its main functionality as a utility hub, the new building will also serve as a garage so that we’ll be able to permanently house a vehicle on-site. And finally we’ll have a place to store our ladders! When the center of your ceiling is 15 feet high, changing lightbulbs can be quite a challenge! The building will also serve as a mini workshop to help keep the domes themselves less cluttered.

We considered a number of different building materials, and ultimately decided on steel as the most viable choice. We immediately ruled out wood as entirely inappropriate for the land’s fire ecology. Cinderblock or other masonry was both expensive and too monolithic, aesthetically, for our purposes. Metal is fireproof and economical; we hope we will be happy with the choice!

The pandemic has caused massive global shortages of steel, and the fabrication of our building has been delayed. However, we decided to move ahead with our foundation and are incredibly happy with how it turned out! And now all of our underground water problems have been fixed!

After we switched on our initial solar thermal system in late 2020 we were amazed: whenever there was sun it generated nearly unlimited thermal energy and used only only 60 watts (the amount of an old incandescent light bulb) of electricity to power a small pump. Compare this to the enormous amount of electricity it takes to heat up water (which is our backup system for long period of no sun). Even though we harness a great deal of electricity from the sun via the solar PV array I built in 2017, our solar thermal array feels far more magical. We decided pretty quickly to upgrade it with a second array of thermal collectors. My sister, Jess, and mom, Ann, and our friend Yves dug the forms for the new array on top of the second dome last year, and we poured them with the foundation. I then assembled the array with our friend Michael. Unfortunately, a sensor failure prevented me from bringing the full solar thermal system back online. When I next visit the site and have time, I’ll get it all running again, and our solar thermal capacity should be double. That’s a big deal, as this thermal system supplies heat to the domes (via radiant flooring), generates all of our hot water, and will, as I mentioned, be able to pipe excess heat to the new building.

We’ve also worked quite a bit on the interior of the domes, doing finish electrical, furnishing, and begun staying there. Those details will be covered in a future post!

We’ve also begun to turn our attention to landscaping. Two years ago we began to put temporary cages around new oak tree sprouts to protect them from grazing deer. Many have survived, but growing into a large tree is a long process! Meanwhile, Jess has been collecting stones from the land and has been experimenting with some masonry to help transition the front of the domes smoothly into the natural grasses of the land (which we hope to mow/cut far less in the future). She has also worked laboriously to create a paving stone pathway from the front patio to the kiosk and new garage in the back:

Next steps include further landscaping, connecting the many sensors and actuators in the domes together into the master “brain” that will allow the buildings to sense and respond to their environment, and of course, building the utility garage. As always, we welcome anyone who wants to join us on the land, especially this coming summer!

Elements and Flow

August 6, 2020 / / 0 Comments

After the twin 2017 fires that ravaged the Domes and the countryside that surrounds them, I gave a lot of thought to what it means—practically, historically, and philosophically—to live in a fire ecology. The long silence on this blog is partly due to the mourning period prompted by those fires, as well as the difficulty of formulating an adequate response to them from the point of view of dwelling, as I’ve explored here in the past.

California has always been a fire ecology, which means that its ecosystems evolved with cyclical wildfire incorporated as a key process. Wildfire serves many ecological functions, including culling insect populations that can be injurious to trees, checking the growth of non-native grasses and other plants, and returning nutrients trapped in above-ground structures (such as dead trees) to the soil. Historically, northern CA burned, on average, once every 15 years. Indigenous peoples in the region welcomed and co-existed with this fire ecology. After European colonization, however, fire suppression became the a new tool of capitalist land management. Not just fire departments for towns and cities, but state fire agencies, were formed to protect private and public property from burning, which would reduce its value. This new emphasis on fire suppression was effective at disrupting CA’s fire ecology. Now instead of frequent low-intensity, fast-burning wildfires, CA faces massive, intense ones that are far more damaging. This is what we faced in 2017. Fuels (both natural and human-made) had built up in the environment for over a hundred years, and conditions were ripe for destruction.

After the half-finished Domes lit up like a funeral pyre, and yet survived, I felt that our experiment in radical architecture faced a critical crossroads. Had the design been validated, and all that remained was to complete them as planned? Or did the significant damage they received suggest that if anything, we had been too complacent in our planning, and not given fire its full due?

The response of most landowners in the area to the fires (which burned almost all homes on the mountain to the ground) was to either abandon the area entirely and move to wetter ecosystems, or to rebuild their houses in deliberately altered ecosystems that contained as little fuel as possible. This latter strategy took the form of relocating building sites to open fields, far from trees, while killing and removing trees that felt dangerously close. Such a scorched-earth policy, far more damaging than the fires had been, revealed something deep and sinister in the human project of dwelling, a colonial and all-too-human fixation on the remaking of ecology to suit aesthetics and psychology. While this has been the program for Western civilization for thousands of years at the largest of scales, humans like to believe that these are unwanted and accidental effects of large scale industrialization. This is the logic of anthropogenic climate change: we didn’t know about these long term and global scale effects! And we certainly don’t want things to be this way! But this same logic plays out at very intimate scales, in backyards, when a wildfire and the actual or potential loss of property makes a 200 year old tree next to the house seem threatening.

Personally, I don’t believe that a short-lived human has the right to take the life of a 200 year old organism, especially for reasons of aesthetics or fear. But could the Domes project provide an alternative model or logic? It was designed to shift human perspective to larger and longer scales, to re-conceive of dwelling and building as open ended and future oriented ecological processes. The Domes were for a time 250 years in the future. And yet, here was fire, at the doorstep, today.

There is no easy answer to how to live with fire, to be part of fire ecology and not stand against it. To build anything is to resist entropy, and if it is to house and protect and preserve something for the future, such infrastructure must resist the atomizing forces of the elements: earth, air, water, and fire. How to resist without disrupting, how to dwell with fire without being consumed (figuratively or literally) by it?

The next three years of Dome building, proceeding only in brief periods of the summers and winters, saw a number of adjustments with these questions in mind. In 2018 we repaired as much of the fire damage as we could and instituted a new policy of leaving no wood or plastic-derived material exposed to the larger environment. Vents and drains that had partially melted or burned in the fires were dug down, under ground, and transitioned to metal for their short above-ground stints. Our long-planned copper wall cap and daylight tube cap were completed in copper.

The Domes are underground, even if the “ground” in question is elevated. This means that water, perhaps more prosaically than fire, poses the biggest problem. Water flows downward, and downward in this case is inside. The effect of rain and time on the earth, only recently dug up and moved, also caused significant settling. Earth, when wet, flows like slow motion fluid, which actually leads to cracks forming at the highest points on the domes, and around immovable elements like vents. Like a cosmetic surgeon, Jess ferreted out every crack and marked it with paint.

Our excavators, Jerry and Wyatt, transported more earth to the top of the domes, then dug a number of trenches for our next steps. They then left us for a week to work with the positive and negative space they had created.

One of the most surreal things about the Domes is that the roof is just a hill, with regular grass, plants, and animals living on it. This means that we ended up digging trenches and burying things on our roof, truly scrambling the notions of inside and outside, above and below. In this case, we needed to lay in electrical conduit and the supply and return plumbing for our future solar thermal array. This would cycle water through the interior and roof of the domes, heating it with direct solar energy (no photovoltaics needed) to supply and store heat energy inside. This meant that the pipes needed to be ultra-insulated. We accomplished this by encasing them in thick pipe insulation, then building rigid, waterproof foam boxes around that. At the same time, we built foundation forms for the thermal array.

In order to more effectively transport rainwater off the roof (thus allowing less of it to seep down onto the domes below, and especially the front “pit,” an area in between the two domes, the tunnel passageway that connects them, and the front retaining wall, an area where water tended to collect and seep into the foundation), we had our coppersmith Tony create a large collection pan above the pit. It directed water into a vertical drain that empties down the hill in front of the domes. On the back side, however, we added a French drain in a gravel bed that empties out the back side of the domes. This re-engineering of the roof would move the majority of water away from the pit.

All of this amounted to quite a bit of underground roof infrastructure! We ended up working late into our final night before Jerry and Wyatt were to show up again. We just finished in time, and the next morning the excavators expertly buried everything!

At the end of 2018, then, we had a (mostly) finished roof that both fire and water could easily access, but which could resist their most deleterious effects. The Domes were fully open to and part of their environment (in the most literal and direct way possible), but could modulate the elemental flows that enveloped them.

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This theme of modulated openness and elemental coexistence continued in 2019, which saw an ambitious landscaping and infrastructure plan implemented. We dug a series of shallow trenches around the Domes and laid in a thin network of sprinkler pipes and fire sensors. In the future these will be connected to a water reservoir and microcontroller that will enable the Domes to automatically detect the presence and encroaching direction of wildfire and respond with targeted water to any part of them that may be in danger. I’ll write more about this in the future as the system is implemented.

 

 

Our small “kiosk” that houses our utilities and makes them accessible outside of the Domes, which miraculously survived the fires, was expanded and clad in Hardyboard, a cement and fiber board that resists fire and water.

We added a larger foundation pad to the kiosk, a similar pad for the solar PV array (to protect its lowest points, where fire had severely damaged solar panels and microinverters), round footings on the roof for our long-planned solar thermal array, a sidewalk in front of Dome 2, and a patio in front of Dome 1. The patio in particular, the result of weeks of the careful forming of curved boards, mirrors the curve of of the retaining wall above it, as well as the curve of the interior structure.

These elements embody the paradox of concrete: though it requires a fair amount of energy to produce and has the aesthetic reputation of of sterile, urban, anti-ecology, it is the most flexible, moldable, and fluid of all building materials. It is essentially (temporarily) liquid stone, and a little, properly formed, can do the job of much more invasive, brute-force materials. Much of its poor reputation is the result of its dramatic misuse in urban ecology. Ancient Roman architects knew how to use concrete organically; this art seems to have been largely forgotten.

Here, our patio acts as a bulwark against future fire and water, while also harmonizing the interior of the Domes with the larger ecosystem. Instead of modifying the surrounding land, we built an interface that transitions, with minimal incursion, between the space of shelter and the larger energetic system of which it is a part. This interface enables us to take the land and its historic ecology as it comes. This harmonizes with the larger architectural project of the Domes: to enable but softly mediate open exchange between the human and non-human, between interior and exterior, between technology and nature, between built and organic.

In the same way that the patio provides a minimal space of exchange that keeps fire and water out but plants and animals dwelling-with, the Domes are constructed to enable energy to pass in and out in various forms.

Our large south-facing windows are capable of letting enormous amounts of solar energy into the Domes. This is modulated via overhangs on the outside and automatic window shades on the inside. We designed the overhangs using a software tool that helped us calculate, at our exact latitude, how much light they would let it on any given time of any day of the year. All such questions involve weighing a number of factors, but we designed the overhangs (separately for the Dome 1 windows, door, and Dome 2 windows) so that they would maximize the amount of direct sunlight during the winter (when the sun is much lower in the sky) and minimize the amount of direct sunlight during the summer (when the sun is high). The shades inside (which will be the subject of a future post) then modulate what happens to that sunlight, either converting it to heat, allowing it through as visible light, or reflecting it back outside, depending on the season. In this way, the Domes are selectively permeable with the environment with respect to energy cycles, allowing them to be heated or cooled as an ecological process rather than as the marshaling of exogenous energy against the local ecology—standard HVAC systems.

Further energy is transported through the Domes in the medium of water, many hundreds of times more efficient than air. A simple, small pump circulates water from the interior of the domes through the roof and solar thermal array, where tubes concentrate light into heat, transferred to water that returns into the Domes, where it supplies all of the domestic hot water, as well as additional energy for heat in cold weather.

I finished the long-planned solar thermal array in December of 2019. Future posts will cover the creative wiring and plumbing required to enable and sustain these flows.

The Domes, in their relationship with their larger situated ecology, mediate energy, as well as concepts, opening themselves to larger flows but also transforming them in sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic forms. This is, I hope, the right way to modulate the potentials of a particular ecosystem, intensifying some energies and diminishing others, while keeping those effects as local and minimal as possible. This is how a dwelling becomes both an integral part of an ecosystem, an extension beyond it, and a self-sustaining pocket within it. Rather than resistance to ecology, a participant and a modulating force. It can then open up new potentials of preservation, of protection, and thereby integration with an environment, through a mediation of energy, matter, and ideas.

Summer 2017 Dome Building Plan

May 7, 2017 / / 0 Comments

It’s that time of year again: time to get outside and build something!  And that something is, for my sister Jess and I, The Domes.  Yes, the same as last year.  This June, new friends and old are invited to join us in our little utopian project to construct a dwelling and community that preserves our core values for and in an increasingly dark future.  Energy self-sufficiency, space for creative thought and practice, communal work and gathering, re-integration with larger ecosystems, thinking and building for larger timescales… the project continues!  Join us during the month of June to help waterproof the domes and cover them with earth.  We’ll also be working on the electrical system, installing an array of solar panels, and stuccoing the front wall.  It will be exciting to finish the exterior!

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For more information about the Domes, see our updated project page.

Why Trump’s Electoral Victory is an Opportunity for the Left

November 12, 2016 / / 3 Comments

In my social and professional circles, the election of Donald Trump, perhaps the most hateful candidate ever to grace a major party ticket in the U.S. for the office of President, has occasioned mostly shock, despair, and depression. I would like to briefly share some reasons to view Donald Trump’s victory as a significant opportunity for radical politics.

There is no question that Trump’s presidency itself is a horrible step backwards, an already-extant disaster for people of color, women, Muslims, and the environment, and a potential disaster for world peace, prosperity, and safety. I am not arguing that Trump’s presidency is a good thing, but I am arguing that Trump’s electoral victory has and will produce many new opportunities for an invigorated politics of the left. Not the same opportunities that always exist in the form of opposition to right wing rule, but something entirely new, something to which we must become freshly and uniquely attuned lest it slip away. This opportunity takes the form of invaluable lessons that will help us re-assess America’s political situation with eyes wide open, the removal of powerfully conservative forces that have hitherto prevented any radical change from percolating through mainstream politics, and a political and social landscape that will be ripe for the creative application of unconventional political leadership.

In the liberal and left-leaning group that generally make up my social networks, the most oft-expressed opinion on social media feeds the day of the election was some variant of “thank god the election is here, so we can finally make Trump go away.” The sentiment here was that an electoral defeat would finally give Trump his comeuppance for his raciest, xenophobic, misogynistic campaign rhetoric and hateful fear mongering. The conventional wisdom, shared by liberals, leftists, and media commentators, was that no one as deeply bigoted as Donald Trump could ever be elected President. I shared this view, and it ensured that I was completely blindsided and unprepared for Tuesday night’s result.

However, the naïve view that Trump’s hate-filled discourse could be defeated with the victory of Hillary Clinton was the first sign, for me, that something was terribly wrong. This was smug, wishful thinking that not only ignored the strength, breadth, and tenacity of Trump’s populist movement, but also framed the magical solution as a return to establishment politics. How had the left painted itself into this corner?

All we could really see of Trump was his bigotry, and that made a democratic victory literally unthinkable and ultimately inevitable (whether in this election or the next). Our complacent reliance on the Democratic Party was already doomed. Here are some of the things that, in my view, we got so wrong, and why it’s better that they came to light sooner rather than later:

1. Our analytic categories were too narrow.

Racism, sexism, misogyny, and Islamophobia are categories that progressives, and especially academics, are well-trained to spot, analyze, and combat at the discursive level. Trump and his most egregious followers (the “basket of deplorables”) lit up this radar with such overwhelming regularity and intensity that the analytic machinery behind it was saturated and failed to function properly. Not much else got through.  Here we were our own victims of an essentialist and inflexible analytic framework. We have become perhaps too good (and too reflexive) at recognizing certain patterns at a certain scale, and could no recognize larger ones and larger scales, let alone entirely new shapes emerging in our cultural-social-medial assemblages. When it turned out that Trump’s support on election day stretched far beyond the basket of deplorables, that just didn’t compute for most of us. But the issues (speech and representation) that are most salient to us are not necessarily the most salient or important to the voting public at large. This should have been obvious, but we were blinded by our own proficiency, by habit and by…

2. Smugness.

Liberals have been winning in U.S. politics for awhile, and tend to view themselves as far more enlightened on social issues than their political adversaries. This contributed to the narrowing of our analytic categories and policy concerns (see below) and convinced us that Hillary Clinton couldn’t really lose, because the Trump camp was so in the wrong. But it is clear now that however despicable Trump is, many of his followers had good reasons to vote for him other than expressing their hatred of women, people of color, etc. More white women voted for Trump than Clinton, and Trump garnered almost 30% of the Latino/a vote, which seems inconceivable if race was the primary issue for voters. Most significantly, the voters that handed Trump the election were rust belt working class whites that had voted for Obama in the past, and had now switched to Trump (without the Democratic party even noticing). This is what turned the map red and handed Trump the election.

To sum up: bigotry seemed to liberals, radicals, and mainstream pundits to be the most salient issue of the election, and it turned out not to matter to at least half of the voting public. This is in and of itself deeply troubling from a social justice perspective, but the important point here is that the biggest drivers of voter behavior in this election trumped bigoted speech acts (no pun intended). A lot of this is just about priority. As Connor Kilpatrick argues persuasively in this article, racism is fungible: some voting communities in the U.S. have historically flopped multiple times from racist to progressive and back. This suggests that it is a subsidiary issue for many independent voters: when racial anxiety can be made to align with their biggest concerns, racism flares up; when liberalism can be made to align with their biggest concerns, they become progressive. On the left, we have tended to essentialize racism, which makes it far more difficult for us to understand this phenomenon and identify the most important issues to these voters. (Note: race is the most important issue for some voters, and they unquestioningly constitute Trump’s most rabid base, but those aren’t the voters who handed him this election.) This is not to downplay the significance of racism or suggest that it wasn’t an important aspect of Trump’s campaign, but only to note that the issue has been approached by liberals and radicals in a manner that is simplistic, essentialist, and  self serving (when discourse places you in the position of the morally righteous and makes you feel superior to your opponent, this should send up a huge red flag).  Liberal moralizing on this issue not only failed to sway half of the electorate, but actually made the problem far worse: it signaled a deep misunderstanding and disconnect between liberals and the concerns of the working class, and heaped insult upon injury by morally condemning voters for voting in their own economic interests. What could have been a stronger message to the effect that liberalism had abandoned the working class? That message was heard loud and clear, as was Trump’s message of radical change.

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3. Neoliberalism

The left has had neoliberalism in its crosshairs ever since it appeared on the scene, but liberals—who have been in the driver’s seat of mainstream politics for the past quarter century—have embraced it so thoroughly that it has become orthodoxy in the Democratic Party. Neoliberalism, implemented as a set of policy objectives by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, was a right-wing platform until Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council mainstreamed it in the 1990s. The core philosophy of neoliberal economics is that all dynamics are best rationalized and optimized if they can be driven by and as markets. Those markets should therefore be “free” in the sense of self-governing; any external force that constrains markets prevents them from fully optimizing the underlying dynamics into which they have been unleashed. This means that public property (such as water, land, infrastructure, utilities, universities, etc.) should be privatized, government regulation should be scaled back or eliminated, and every possible market should be opened up for exploitation.

In other words, capitalism should be spread to every aspect of life on this planet and any impediment to free markets should be eliminated. In policy, this is done through free trade agreements, international lending (through the IMF and World Bank) to countries in trouble in exchange for drastic changes to their laws and the privatization of their resources. Trade agreements preempt other laws such as those ensuring social and environmental protection, weakening signatory governments vis-a-vis global corporations, which can actually sue a government for doing anything (such as protecting some part of the population or element of the natural environment) that would hamper business. Neoliberalism is essentially a grand tuning of the world to transform it into a capital (monetary surplus) producing machine. The benefactors are the corporations, companies, investors, and their political allies who reap the profits. The losers are just about everyone else. However, in particularly wealthy countries, the biggest (human) losers are the working class, because neoliberal policy ensures that labor will be outsourced to the regions of the world where it is cheapest, and labor is always cheapest in regions in which laborers can be most exploited. So while the upper classes in all countries benefit from this arrangement, the working classes get the short end of the stick. The resulting disparity of wealth and lack of employment in formerly productive regions of the U.S. (e.g. the rust belt) has disenfranchised a lot of people. Trump spoke to those people. Partly he blamed Latinos for stealing what jobs remain, but mostly he blamed free trade agreements that moved those jobs out of the U.S. in the first place. That message resonated with those disenfranchised by neoliberal policy. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party didn’t even put up a fight.

4. A Compromised Democratic Party

To prevail electorally against Reaganism, the Democratic Party sold its soul. The Clintons lead that pivot, and three decades of rabid neoliberalism created, as Naomi Klein argues here, the very conditions that swept Trump into power. The Democratic Party became so rich and complacent through this platform, so corrupt, and so complacent, that it not only couldn’t see this coming, not only abandoned the very class that had at one time made up its core constituency (the working class), but actively quashed all attempts within the party to re-connect with its roots. Its leadership conspired to thwart democracy and ensure that Hillary Clinton received the nomination, despite her many flaws and vulnerabilities as a candidate. As perhaps the most neoliberal candidate available in the Democratic party, she was the worst possible one to field against Trump. Even though this was obvious, the overwhelming neoliberal power bloc within the party, along with corruption from the top, conspired to quash a candidate who could actually pull the rug out from under Trump: Bernie Sanders. This is particularly tragic because as I noted above, the left has long attacked neoliberalism; it simply hasn’t been able to breach the firewall within the Democratic party to mainstream the issue. Bernie Sanders attempted to do just that, and he was crushed by the Democratic Party machine. If he, or another non-neoliberal candidate (possibly Elizabeth Warren) had been fielded by the Democratic Party, the left could have claimed the very ground that Trump took to the ballot box.

Moving Forward

For those who feel, as I did, shocked, dismayed, and depressed (or worse, for many: targeted and scared) by the results of this election, I think the first step is to learn these four lessons. The left has failed America, and we need to understand why and how. On the day after the election one of my students noted, “we did everything we could, and it didn’t make any difference.” Yes, we worked hard to combat the racism, xenophobia, sexism, and ignorance that Trump exuded, but I think we can take heart, perhaps paradoxically, in the fact that we could have done better. We are not helpless. In fact, we can and must not only continue to do all we have in the past… we need to step up our game. We need to widen our understanding and analytic categories for grappling with this election. If you’ve found yourself coping with the election results by concluding that half of the electorate is composed of hopelessly racist, xenophobic, misogynistic people hell bent on recovering a position of white supremacy, then you’re still living inside what Michael Moore called, even before the election, “the bubble.” This conclusion is not only wrong in important ways (see my colleague Iza Ding’s post here on the limitation of generalization and the importance of nuance when identifying voting blocs in electoral politics), but also hopelessly self serving.  Instead of choosing the narrative that makes us feel superior to the white working class, lumping all of their concerns into a single category, we need to consider the strategic as well as ideological role of racism, acknowledge its contingency, and effectively analyze its relationships with other ideologies and practices.  To do so is not to back down on the fight against bigotry, but to deepen and nuance it.

It is time to take some responsibility. Hope starts with knowledge and wisdom, and this election has provided that for those who are wiling to accept that they were shortsighted and smug. I’m guilty as charged, but I soon realized that my own attitude and analytic categories were contributing to my blindness and depressed affect. Regaining political agency means grappling with these hard truths, but the affective payoff is great: instead of despair at an imagined onslaught of bigots that we cannot defeat politically, realizing that we face (among other things) a populist movement against neoliberalism opens up a path forward. This is a battle we can win, if we take off the blinders. This certainly does not mean backing down from social justice struggles—on the contrary, we must continue to fight against hatred and prejudice in every possible way. What this does mean, however, is an accurate characterization of our enemy, and in this case, it turns out that one of our biggest enemies was in our own midst in the form of neoliberal policy and philosophy. The Trump voters who turned the election in his favor, the portion of the working class that supported Obama but got little from the Democratic Party in return, aren’t really our enemies at all, and can be turned into our allies.

Creative Politics

Having Donald Trump as our president is unquestionably a disaster in the short term. But the forces that he unleashed were already there, had to explode at some point, and weren’t going to go away even if Clinton won the election. Now, instead of deluding ourselves, or patting ourselves on the back for being so morally superior, we can have a conversation about neoliberalism. Trump’s opposition to free trade started a movement that should have been lead by the left. The good news here is that Trump’s anti-NAFTA stance is hopelessly compromised by his own interests (his wealth was the result of neoliberalism) and other pro-neoliberal policies (deregulation, tax cuts to the wealthy, exploitation of U. S. coal and oil reserves, etc.) That means that the fight against neoliberalism can still be taken back by the left, and will in fact become far more potent when coupled with a broad-based platform of social and environmental justice. The forces that prevented this from happening in the past—the bipartisan consensus of the political class that neoliberalism was axiomatic and the influence of the Clinton dynasty within the Democratic Party in particular—have now been dealt a fatal blow by Trump. The coalition that I’m imagining here, should it materialize (and we can certainly make it materialize) now has more space to breathe than any other time in the past thirty years.

On a more general level, Trump has shaken up the establishment, making a return to business/politics as usual in either of the two parties a lot less likely (even if his administration morphs into a traditional Republican one). The political possibilities are, for the first time in my lifetime, completely open ended. This is not, then, a time for depression or helpless anger, but rather a time for creative imaginings. The worst thing we can now do is to double down on our old assumptions and habits. Our affect should be positive, not negative; active, not reactive. We should be building—not rebuilding, but building… something new, something better. A lot of women and girls (and men) saw their dream of a female president heartbreakingly deferred this past Tuesday. But this dream will have its time soon enough, and that time will be so much more. Facing a Trump presidency, we should not be downsizing our goals, losing the gleam in our eyes, but dreaming bigger, working together toward something that, like Trump’s presidency, was unthinkable so very recently.  We lost an election, but gained something far larger, less defined, more dangerous, and more challenging.  I’m willing to wager, however, that in our current cultural context, any opportunity to write the rules of a new game is far more valuable than an advantageous move in the old one.

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