Domestic Left #97: On not doing things
When I was in college, I took exactly one political science class, and only under some duress. At some point I belatedly realized that in order to graduate I would have to take not only a certain number of credits outside of the social sciences, which I fulfilled with courses in math and music, but also a certain number of social-science credits which were not in my major, history.
Political scientists and historians are, in general, sworn enemies, and the specific political science professor I took this course from was a bit of a campus antagonist of my favorite history professor, who was effectively my advisor. She (my history professor) would always complain about the writing style that “his” students would use when they showed up in her classes — not enough commas, among other things — but I always suspected from the way she talked about him, and the general vibe on campus, that they just really disliked each other. (There was also, almost certainly, a gendered component to this. His fanboys among the student body were just that — fanboys — and political science is a significantly more male-dominated discipline than history.)
I ... did not particularly enjoy his class. He taught it, law-school “Socratic method” style, in a classroom set up like a small amphitheater; he would inquisit specific students about the readings and mock their answers; he was charismatic and supremely self-confident. He was, in short, kind of a prick, the kind of prick whose performance of mastery a certain type of person (almost entirely young men) often strive to emulate.
That said, one of his performances has always stuck with me. Gesturing to an imaginary ham-and-cheese sandwich on a stool in front of him, seeking to illustrate some point from Plato or Weber or one of the other political philosophers we had just read, he pointed out that he would never eat it (he was Jewish) not because of any characteristic of the ham or the cheese, much less anything related to the hog farmers or dairymen who had produced it, but because that was how his community defined itself. As people who did not, among other things, eat ham and cheese sandwiches.
At some point, during one of my efforts at self-improvement, I realized that the easiest way to modify my own behavior was (and is) to introduce “friction” — to make the thing that I want to stop doing so much just slightly more inconvenient, just slightly more trouble. If I buy a six-pack and put the whole thing in the fridge, I will be tempted to drink three or four beers; if I only put two beers in the fridge, I will drink less. When I want to cut down on my social media use, I remove apps from my phone.
Nothing is stopping me from going to the beer store to purchase more cold beer, or from re-installing the apps or logging into my social-media accounts on my laptop, but introducing that extra bit of effort prompts me to think, “wait, do I really want to do this?” instead of just mindlessly doing it.
On the flip side, the key to getting myself to do things that I have been avoiding, or just dislike doing, is to remove friction. If I want to make it more likely that I actually get up and run in the morning (especially in cold weather), I sleep in my running clothes. Sometimes I will close down all of my browser windows except the one containing the document that I have been avoiding working on, but really need to, and then go for a walk. When I return to my computer, it is not guaranteed that I do not find ways to avoid doing the thing, but it is a lot less likely.
In 1996, the folk singer Ani DiFranco made an album “with” the legendary folk singer, anarchist, and IWW propagandist Utah Phillips. Titled The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, it consists of recordings of Phillips’ between-song banter and storytelling from previous live shows, set to slightly hip-hop inflected instrumental tracks produced by DiFranco.
On “Candidacy,” Phillips announces that he is running for the presidency on the “Sloth and Indolence Party” ticket. The name of his party is inspired by his having “studied the presidency carefully” and realized that “when you have a president who does things we are all in serious trouble.”1
Phillips promises, “I guarantee that if I am elected, I will take over the White House, hang out, shoot pool, scratch my ass and not do a damn thing. Which is to say if you want something done, don’t come to me to do it for you, you’ve got to get together and figure out how to do it yourselves. Is that a deal?”
It’s hard to remember — in part because many of us literally aren’t old enough to remember, in part because of the way history’s victors get to write the history — but the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was arguably as apocalyptic as the recent re-election of Trump. Reagan’s declaration that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” (and the way that “new Democrats” like Clinton and Obama embraced that precept) set the stage for the brute-force sledgehammering of the American state we’ve seen over the past few weeks. DOGE is the Gipper’s spoiled grandchild, midwifed by the “end of welfare as we know it” and Larry Summers’s market fundamentalism, finally given the keys to the car. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Reagan didn’t fire as many federal workers as Trump has, but the ones he did — the 11,345 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization — set the stage for a generalized assault on the labor movement (as Trump’s actions will as well, if they are not resisted vigorously). Across the country and across the economy, companies demanded concessions. If workers refused, companies would force them out on strike and, in many cases, bring in replacement workers and bust the union.
A few unions resisted. Mine did — and we even won a few fights, at least temporarily, at Wabco in Pittsburgh and Morse Cutting Tools in New Bedford. But most unions gave in, most notably the United Auto Workers, which had, in many ways, pioneered the concessions trend in 1979.2
In no industry, perhaps, was the concessions trend more devastating than in meatpacking. An old labor movement comrade of mine from Iowa City, who worked for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE, the largest federal workers’ union), had grown up in Fort Dodge in the 1950s and 60s, and he remembered the meatpackers as the “kings” of the town when he was growing up. Indeed, meatpackers, thanks largely to the once-militant United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), were at the time the highest-paid industrial workers in the country, surpassing even autoworkers. But the once-proud UPWA had, like most of the U.S. labor movement, given up on militancy. They merged first into the much more conservative butchers’ craft union and then with the out-and-out corrupt Retail Clerks International Union to form the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in 1979.
But old traditions die hard. In Austin, Minnesota, a former UPWA local now known as UFCW Local P-9 struck in August 1985 after their employer, Hormel, imposed a 23 percent wage cut. The strike was not supported by the parent union, so the 1,500 members of Local P-9 were forced to rely on themselves, their community, and support from other rank-and-file workers. As Peter Rachleff, a professor of history at Macalester College in St. Paul who was actively involved in supporting P-9 told Minnesota Public Radio on the 25th anniversary of the strike, “The strike had to become a beehive of activity, in which workers and their families and their community became involved.”
The company re-opened the plant in January with scabs, and the Democratic-Farmer-Labor governor, Rudy Perpich, sent in the National Guard and state police. Rachleff recalled, “People were shocked that the National Guard and the State Police would haul people off to jail, would bust the windshields out of cars that were trying to block exit ramps off I-90, that they were very rough with people who were trying to commit what they considered in a very Martin Luther King-kind of way, to be a principled, civil disobedience.”
UFCW eventually ordered the local to return to work, then suspended the local officers when they didn’t comply. The strike was lost, and perhaps, realistically there was no way it could have been won. One local union can’t take on an entire company, let alone an entire industry, by itself. But the P-9 strike proved a touchstone for rank-and-file workers across the country seeking to resist the assaults that Reagan’s presidency unleashed, where new concession demands seemed to materialize every day.
In a recent edition of his excellent newsletter, The Counterpublic Papers, the political scientist Lester K. Spence addressed the question of “what do we do” in the current moment. It’s worth quoting him at length, because it’s the best and most nuanced take I have seen on the idea that “rest is resistance”:
No. Rest isn’t resistance. It’s rest. It’s needed in many cases, but it in and of itself is not resistance. From my standpoint as a social scientist who tries to think like an organizer there are two problems with this formulation — it expands the concept of “resistance” far too much to be of analytical or practical positive political use because it conflates action with inaction. There are obvious instances in which the equivalent of being still does constitute resistance — strikes for example — but simply resting doesn’t fit the bill here.
(I may expand on this later, but whereas capitalism requires action to function, and withholding or not engaging in that action CAN constitute resistance, authoritarianism requires inaction, because inaction can be read as consent. Rest here is inaction. Doesn’t mean it isn’t a right or that it isn’t needed. It does mean though that without concerted action, at best rest is only rest.)
Again, it’s important. But it’s important at this moment as a way to prepare people for real political activity. And real resistance.
At the college where I took that political science class, especially in the social circles I travelled in, there were many students who did not eat cheese, and many more who did not eat ham, for a different reason: they were vegetarian or vegan. In contrast to today, most of them chose that diet not for reasons of climate (barely on people’s radar in the early 90s) or health (one militant vegan I knew ate mostly tofu pups — e.g., fake hot dogs — and potato chips), but out of a desire to avoid harming animals.
In my memory, at least, animal liberation was, if not exactly dominant, the most visible activist cause on campus. I remember getting into an argument with a vegan friend over whether it was more morally acceptable to eat honey (produced by bees under, as near as I can tell, reasonably humane conditions) or sugar (often produced by humans in slave-like conditions).
I generally tried to leave the moral questions alone, but frequently got into arguments about the relative efficacy of consumer activism versus other forms of social struggle, especially given my burgeoning interest in labor history. Even among people who ate meat, I remember finding two really entrenched beliefs. First, that changing consumer behavior was not only an approach to effecting social change, but the most effective approach. Second, that all one really had to do was to avoid immoral consumer choices yourself, as an individual, and your own personal righteousness would inspire others to do so.
In his 2010 book The Communist Hypothesis the French philosopher Alain Badiou compares two different kinds of defeat: defeats “covered with glory” which lost but remained principled, such as the Paris Commune or the student and worker revolts of May 1968, and the slow “defeats without glory” in which social-democratic and liberal parties “win” but then impose the same market fundamentalism that their supporters voted against. Or send in the National Guard or state police to break strikes.
Ritual, is, among other things, a mechanism for reducing friction. The weekly church service or poker night or run club, the monthly membership meeting, the daily meditation practice, they all remove the extra work of making plans and decisions, the exercise of executive function that can be so draining, especially in a modern life that requires so much managing of things and people and technology.
As I have become more loquacious in my journaling, I no longer do it every day, but I do it most days. And I always try to think up and write down a “gratitude.” Some of my recent gratitudes:
My ability to enjoy solitude
The sun in winter
Vaccines
“Those moments when I do just get up and do the dumb things I gotta do”
Among the people urging rest in the moment, at least for well-heeled Democratic Party leaders, is the noxious grifter James Carville, who recently emerged from whatever mixture of slime and lucre he resides in to urge Democrats to “play possum.”
This, of course, has been the Democratic Party strategy for most of my life. Let the Republicans get so awful that you can scrape together a bare majority in the next election by simply being slightly less awful. Without having to do anything that might discomfit your wealthy donors. Then get back into office, do nothing of substance, and lose the next round, helping the country move ever further rightward.
As the CUNY professor of political theory Corey Robin pointed out in a recent Facebook post:3
[Twenty] percent of Americans now say that they think flying is very unsafe or somewhat unsafe, up from 12% last year. Google searches for “is it safe to fly” are way up from the norm. And Trump just fired 400 workers at the FAA. If an opposition party can’t put these simple stats together to make a political argument about society, government, and our interdependence, it’s neither in opposition nor a party.4
My second year of graduate school, I lived in a housing co-op with about twenty other people, in a massive house overlooking the Iowa River on North Dubuque Street in Iowa City. It was a “student” co-op, affiliated with the North American Students of Co-operation (NASCO), a federation of housing co-ops founded in 1968.
You didn’t have to be a student to live there, but the arrangements were more suited to students than to, for want of a better term, “normal” adults. Each of us had our own bedroom, but all the other areas — bathrooms, living room, kitchen, etc. — were common spaces. We had weekly meetings which we ran by consensus every Sunday evening and a chore wheel which worked reasonably well at distributing responsibility for keeping the common areas clean. Every evening, we cooked and ate a common supper in the huge kitchen on the lower level.
The residents were about evenly split between undergraduates and graduate students, almost all of us in our 20s, but there was one long-term resident who was a couple of decades older than the rest of us, Jeff. We perceived him as a bit of an “old hippy,” but he could well have been younger at the time than I am now — if he had been a teenager in the 60s he would have just been in his mid-to-late 40s.
He worked in the dining services at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and was a steward for AFSCME Local 12, which represented some 5,000 blue-collar workers at both the university and their affiliated hospitals and clinics. He was an old-school anarchist Wobbly, in the Utah Phillips mold. He had no use for electoral politics, but he was always up to join a picket line.
Jeff was one of the few meat-eaters at the co-op, and the only one of us who insisted on incorporating meat as an option in our common meals (such as, say, adding ham to a few of the grilled-cheese sandwiches). However, he was equally insistent that we never purchase any products made by Hormel, not really because boycotting their products would in any way affect the company, more than a decade after the lost strike, but because in that house, we honored the memory of the P-9 strikers and their defeat covered with glory.
Normally I try to avoid prescribing courses of action in this newsletter — among other reasons, because I do that kind of writing for work all the time. But, as everyone has been noting, the times aren’t exactly normal right now.
Anyway, if you’re looking for things to do right now, it seems to me that the people most in the crosshairs are immigrants, federal workers, and higher education, so get out and support them. The new Federal Unionists Network has been organizing rank-and-file federal workers (who are split among a variety of other unions in addition to AFGE) to resist the Trump attacks. Higher Ed Labor United and Labor for Higher Education have been doing the same in their sector; UE General President Carl Rosen (my boss) is going to be speaking at a Labor for Higher Education event on Tuesday, which will be live-streamed. These are both union-based efforts so I’m not sure how much they really need money, but, you know, follow them on social media, amplify their messaging, turn out for their events when they have them in your area.
There are local organizations that organize immigrant workers all across the country, and they do need both money and volunteers. Embarrassingly, I couldn’t tell you who does this work in Pittsburgh (though writing this has prompted me to ask around to find out), but I still give money regularly to Migrant Justice in Vermont.
Finally, be on the lookout for May Day activities this year. Or start planning one. In 2006, immigrant workers reclaimed this traditional workers’ holiday with the closest thing we’ve had to a nationwide general strike in the U.S., the “day without immigrants,” and my understanding is that something similar is in the works for this year, but addressing all of our struggles. An injury to one is an injury to all.
A few things I’ve been reading recently:
My friend (and former bandmate!)
has a good piece up on her new Substack which does a good job of dissecting the strengths of the Trump-Musk messaging about DOGE. You gotta know your enemy. (Also, hey, subscribe to her Substack!)
This New Yorker article from September goes into some detail about the continuities between Reagan and Trump.
As I was working on this newsletter, I reread fellow Kansas expatriate Anne Boyer’s 2017 essay “No,” from 2017. I didn’t end up citing it directly, because ultimately I think what I had to say was somewhat orthogonal to what she is saying in this essay. But you should read hers, too.
And a few other recent Substack posts had, I thought, good takes on the recent unpleasantness, all of which relate somewhat to the theme of the essay above:
Lyz Lenz’s “Make America Isolated Again” at Men Yell at Me
Mia Milne’s “You Don't Need to Feel Hopeful to Make a Difference” at her Solar Thoughts Newsletter
Jenna Park’s “Metamorphosis and the state of wintering” at Everything is Liminal
Milne is especially perceptive on one of the key reasons why, as Spence says, rest is both important and necessary (even if it doesn’t constitute resistance):
The problem is that you cannot create feelings of hope by suppressing feelings of hopelessness.
It may not be very clear from final form this essay ended up taking, but it began as a meditation on how exhausted I have been recently. My “day job” as communications director for a labor union has, you will not be surprised to learn, been pretty demanding recently, and promises the same for the immediate future.
Anyway ... I have been keeping up a pretty regular weekly schedule for this newsletter for over a year, but I may need to take a break here. The ritual of weekly creative writing has been good for me, but I would be lying if I said it hasn’t created a certain amount of pressure, or that said pressure didn’t sometimes feel oppressive (especially when I don’t get a draft done on Saturday).
I’ve got some good, longish-form pieces in the works, and lots of other, smaller ideas that I want to write about. So it’s certainly possible that I will be back next week, but at least until I have finished the major work project that I am currently enmeshed in, and/or things settle down a bit in the broader world, I am going to give myself permission to spend the weekend hours that I usually spend on this newsletter resting.5 See you on the flip side.
To be clear, I don’t personally endorse Phillips’ conclusion that the “do-nothing” presidents Millard Fillmore and Warren G. Harding were our best presidents. But I think the broader point has some merit.
Some four decades and several corruption scandals later, UAW members finally threw out the “Administration Caucus” which had ruled their union since the days of Walter Reuther, resulting in the militant and highly successful “stand-up” strike of 2023. The contract won after that strike began, finally, to reverse some of the concessions the union had agreed to over the decades.
If you are still on Facebook, you should seriously follow Corey Robin. He has some of the best and most level-headed analysis of the current moment. He also posts more occasionally on a blog at coreyrobin.com.
Robin’s original post said “Forty percent,” which he corrected within a few hours (“[Correction: 20%. Had a brain zap moment, where 2 out of 10 became 40 rather than 20%. I think the larger point still stands.]”). Showing an impressive commitment to transparency, Robin left the mistake in the original text of the post, but I edited it when reproducing here, for clarity and concision.
If I feel like it. Calvinist workaholic that I am, I may well not feel like it 😊.
I could swear there was a classic tweet from years ago that noted the Dems once again emulating their noble animal totem, the opossum
Thank you, Jonathan. I appreciate your words and perspective. Also, I too: enjoy solitude, sun in winter, vaccines, and days when I get up and do the things I gotta do