Catherine Liu on the Psychology of Liberalism
I’m trying this new stream of consciousness thing because the Foucault post is taking me longer than I anticipated. That requires research. This is a live reaction to Joshua Citarella’s recent (second) interview with Catherine Liu. I disagree with her on many things, agree with her on many things, and man can she spit.
Catherine Liu comes off as a materialist with her scathing critiques of ideology-driven post-post modern liberal progressives (mostly academics). She calls out a failure to call out capital, to relegate power and oppression to puppet structures like heteropatriarchy or bureaucracy (or consumerism in the case of Naomi Klein). This is why I was so surprised when in a passionate defense of the Western canon she implied that the Enlightenment in Western Europe precipitated the overthrow of feudalism in France. It’s interesting to me that such a doctrinal Marxist would make that kind of claim about ideology, but can any of us ever be truly orthodox? The Western canon is the spectre hanging over today’s humanities departments, that’s why I changed paths really. I think somewhere deep down I know my home is in the humanities, but the absolute failure of the departments to reckon with Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes leaves the classes and reading lists feeling hollow. I don’t want to like Aristotle, I just want to read him. Don’t we have a duty to understand the ideological underpinnings of the Western world if we ever want to change it?
Telling leftists to grow the fuck up. This is where she hits the nail on the head. She has such a way of breaking down how the left became not the left, how it became petty wars of language waged over the internet. The term “language rituals” is so good, how it’s about the words you say the coffee you drink and your pronouns in your bio, and that’s what America thinks politics is. A vibe, something you can buy. She brings it back to counterculture a lot, the revolutionary fervor of the 60s hitting a plateau and becoming this strange academic bubble, she talks about the hippies thinking they were bringing about the age of Aquarius and free love and all the while the machine of Capital kept marching on.
Democracy is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. Democrat and Democracy are words that denote two different things, huh, but they sound way too similar. Noam Chomsky is a figurehead for anarchism, what he calls libertarian socialism, something that for him is inextricable from Democracy. This makes perfect sense because of how old he is. I think we forget that millions of people older than Baby Boomers are still alive. Chomsky shares with us the Silent Generation’s leftism shaped by the world wars. Actual battles between the forces of Democracy and Authoritarianism. The USSR was even on our side! That’s what’s so interesting about the American creation myth, this kernel of truth. Chomsky has seen the light in Democracy, we have not. And this is what Liu says, we see Democracy spitting out idiotic, worthless political figures. Have you ever been inspired by Tim Walz or AOC? These authoritarian urges bubbling up in America today are a result of the absolute failure of Democracy under Capitalism. And so we’ve wound up back at the spectre of the Western canon, because if we’re taking this line of thought all the way to the end as Liu does, you must give some credit to the secular humanism that comes out of Enlightenment thought. I’m not saying I fully agree with her, but I think it’s an interesting thought experiment. The American revolution was still a revolution, right?
She has an incredible story related to all this stupid academia stuff. She was involved with a satellite of the Occupy Wall Street movement as a faculty member at the University of California Irvine, and the group once spent a 5-hour long meeting deciding that they should not call themselves “Occupy” because of possible colonial implications. Later as the movement grew there was internal conflict about whether or not to provide a list of demands to the administration. Liu wanted the organization to have demands, because otherwise what was the whole point? Aimless protest? In the end there was a list of demands, which included gender neutral bathrooms on campus. The story goes that when the list was handed to one of the administrators with which the protestors were negotiating, he laughed and said “we can give them gender neutral bathrooms.”