On My Politics

I view of the recent election I’ve been thinking about my politics. Here’s an edited version of note I recently sent to my friend Frank Munley, whom I’ve known since 1966 or 67. It frames my politics in events in my life.

Ever since I read Bertrand Russell in my teens I’ve been on the left. Just exactly where on the left, that’s another matter.

Bertrand Russell, as you know, there’s really no one like him today. He was born into the British aristocracy in the late 19th century and was an enormously influential logician and philosopher throughout the first half of the 20th century. He was also a pacifist, went to prison for it, and worked for nuclear disarmament during the Vietnam era. He was also a prominent essayist (got a Nobel Prize in Literature) and public intellectual. But I digress.

I was born in 1947, but of course I don’t remember Truman. I do remember Eisenhower. And I remember the 1959 steelworker’s strike, almost 4 months, over 500K workers. I grew up in a steel town, Johnstown. I seem to have identified as a Republican during the JFK era (before Russell). I think that’s because I thought my father was a Republican. I’m not too clear on this.

I remember one Halloween; I had a good haul and my bag was breaking. We went to the house of a friend, "Nick Canoni” was his name, something like that. His dad asked me what party I was and I replied “Republican.” “Well, let me give you a good Democrat bag,” he replied. And he did.

Anyhow, some-time during my mid-teens my father told me that the company “encouraged” (required?) management to contribute to the Republican Party. He was an engineer, hence white collar, and worked for Bethlehem Mines. He also told me Bethlehem employees were not supposed to buy foreign cars. The restriction was lifted, however, and he got a VW Beetle as a second car. These shenanigans by management did not sit well with me.

That’s when I began reading Bertrand Russell. I think I started with a book I found in a cardboard box in a closet in the basement, the same box where I found 1984. I must have read 10 or so books by Russell, including his big fat History of Western Philosophy. Meanwhile the war in Vietnam got nasty and very visible and I opposed it. I joined SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] during my freshman year at Johns Hopkins and met you, I believe, in my second year. When the draft was instituted in the late 1960s I drew #12 in the lottery and got called. I became a conscientious objector and performed my civilian service in the Chaplain's Office at Johns Hopkins.

I don’t think I voted in a presidential election until 1976 or perhaps 1980. I think I voted Democrat every time, except for the year when I voted for Nader. So, yes, I voted for Harris this time. Perhaps I should have voted for Stein as I live in New Jersey. But, Trump lost NJ by 16 points in 2020; hew only lost by 9 points this time out.

Basically, ever since my college years I’ve believed that our political/economic system was fucked.

This next passage is from a comment I made to a post by Michael Liss at 3 Quarks Daily. It embellishes on what my note to Frank says about my electoral politics.

Ever since I started reading Bertrand Russell in my mid-teens I've been on the Left and opposed to war. I remain opposed to war, and I'm still of the Left, for whatever the hell that means. I've never thought of myself as a communist, much less a party-member Communist. Democratic socialist? I like the sound of that, but I don't know what that means.

For my purposes, I'm not sure it matters. I need a politics to guide me in the voting booth, not just for the presidential election, but for the state and local elections too. I don't need a well-defined politics to make those decisions. So, I'm willing to leave the heavy political thinking to others. That's not the intellectual responsibility I've taken on for myself. I've got other matters I think about.

Finally, I should say a word about Art Efron and Charlie Keil. I met Art at graduate school in the English Department of SUNY Buffalo. He taught a course on radical approaches to literature; I signed up because I wanted to see what it was about. He introduced me to the anarchist thinking of Alex Comfort, which I found congenial. We’ve got to be careful about that word, “anarchism,” which tends to mean pointless rabble-rousing and trouble-making. But that’s not what anarchism is about as a political philosophy. It’s about self-organization and tends to favor smallness. Those are things I find attractive.

Charlie Keil is an anarchist as well. While he was at Buffalo when I was there. He was in American Studies but I didn’t know he was there, though our paths did cross one time just before I left. But I met up with him two decades later and we’ve been working together ever since. We’ve marched together in New York and even Vermont and over the last few years I’ve worked with him on some small book projects.

In 2015 and 2016 we worked on a small collection of materials built around a Benjamin Rush published in 1793, “A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States.” With the addition of materials by Mary Liebman, Frederick L. Schuman, Charlie, and me, we had the first volume in a series of pamphlets on the theme of local paths of peace today: We Need a Department of Peace: Everybody’s Business, Nobody’s Job. A couple of years later I put together a collection of essays by the economist Thomas Naylor, Thomas Naylor’s Paths to Peace: Small is Necessary, in which he argued that nations and corporations have grown too big for effective governance. It also had something of an anarchist feel. The most recent addition to the series is a collection of essays on music, Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature.

Those are all political books, each in its own way. But they don’t provide much practical guidance in the electoral politics of the United States. The first argues for peace. Who doesn't want peace? But actually created a department of the federal government for it...? It's been tried and failed. No reason not to keep trying, but I don't see how that's going to help get us through the second Trump administration. Naylor wants to downsize the polis. He lived in Vermont so he could participate in the secession movement that's been active there. Not gonna' happen. The the last book urges people to act locally to support live music in every way, especially among kids. That people can do. I'm all for it. Not sure it'll have much effect on electoral politics. These books advance ideas, and that’s important too.