“Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void.” –Robespierre
It would not be controversial to say that, over the past few years, the socialist left in the United States has greatly enlarged its cultural footprint. Indeed, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez going viral for bobbing blissfully to the steps of Breakfast Club’s detention dance to Bernie Sanders being dubbed patriarch of the downtrodden (“Daddy Bernie”) by none other than rap goddess Cardi B, as of 2020 the semaphore of democratic socialism has thoroughly penetrated the pores of American mass, and especially youth, culture.
This visibility has coincided with increased electoral success. Sanders was a bona fide contender for the Democratic nomination in 2016. And in 2020 his makeup bid was narrowly undone by that party’s establishment, who let a thousand anodyne HR-approved centrists bloom to bulk up their base before condensing their support behind Joe Biden to decisive effect at the last minute.
Sanders and his manifold supporters, then, have undeniably made inroads in raising the political profile of the previously nanoscopic ‘far-left’ American socialist fold. But to date they have not been able to translate this into a nucleus of votes sufficient to achieve their stated goal of ‘revolutionizing’ American society—either at the presidential level or in U.S. Congress, where legislators backed by Sanders’ activist base (the DSA, or Democratic Socialist of America) remain few enough that they could hold a collective meeting and still not run afoul of COVID regulations. Given that over the past fifteen years America has experienced both declining income equality as well as more than one economic crisis—conditions that you’d think would lend themselves to a more full-blooded left-wing insurgency—all of this raises the question: just why has ‘democratic socialism’ not proven more potent at the ballot box? And why is it that an alarmingly emboldened political right has been, in America as elsewhere, far more successful in channeling popular discontent to this end?
This is the question that Ben Burgis’ new book, the lengthily titled Canceling Comedians While the World Burns, attempts to answer. Burgis himself is something of an oddity. A professor of logic in his early forties who evinces mental focus and physical dishevelment in equal measure, he became a member of the burgeoning roster of DSA-aligned, YouTube algorithm-friendly intellectuals after the publication of last year’s Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left. In that book, Burgis adeptly makes the case that, while often charged by conservative orators from Ben Shapiro to Jordan Peterson with being congenitally illogical, this does not mean the left should abandon the domain of logic. For should one in fact rigorously apply logical axioms in assessing the arguments of these individuals—Shapiro opining about the perils of net neutrality while failing to understand what it is, for instance—they often prove as prone to spontaneous collapse as the proverbial walls of Jericho.
To observe that there is something duplicitous about right-wing luminaries like Shapiro or Steven Crowder—individuals whose mantra-like repetition of the importance of facts and logic often seem to function as an aesthetic intended to veil a fusillade of bad takes—is hardly revelatory. Okay, Shapiro’s arguments often don’t stack up. He breathes. But Give Them an Argument proved itself an intriguing (if slight, being almost a pamphlet) work for two reasons. First, because where prevailing wisdom on the American left has held that personae such as these were ‘beneath argument,’ in the sense of being too stupid and/or bigoted to bother with, Burgis lays bare the risks of such an approach: namely, that a lack of sustained logical engagement by left thinkers with conservative Twitter jockeys has allowed them to flourish unchecked. This has in turn permitted them to engross a following who are likely to take the left’s radio silence not as a sign of moral superiority but as an admission of defeat. And secondly, because where the left-of-liberal consensus in the West has long tilted away from the embrace of logic due to the concern that it disguises complexities and ambiguities which progressives must address, Burgis challenges this notion. The use of logic to resolve higher-order questions, he argues, is never simple—and one should be circumspect about its implementation. But whether one thinks logic is a cure-all to age-old philosophic conundrums or no, they’re still going to need at least a smidgen of it to diffuse the rationalizations of a veritable generation of online hucksters.
As a sequel to an underground classic of sorts, Canceling Comedians does what one would expect it to do: it takes the defense of logic found in Burgis’ debut and broadens it and pushes it outward. The book begins with an extended rumination on its author’s professed love of “problematic comedy.” In the past few years, considerable moral opprobrium has been directed at stand-ups like Dave Chapelle and Louis C.K. by the left: Chapelle for the content of his jokes, which have recently taken on an acerbic, anti-woke edge, and C.K. for his having masturbated repeatedly in front of—or while on the phone with—unsuspecting female comedians (in response to the claim made by several women that C.K. had derailed their careers, Chapelle questioned whether Martin Luther King would’ve capitulated in the civil rights struggle had he been privy to someone masturbating over the phone). While charitable in his assessment of Chapelle, Burgis never goes so far as to suggest the extra-comedic behaviour of C.K. is acceptable. The women C.K. exposed himself to, Burgis reasons, weren’t his “co-workers or subordinates” exactly, and under different circumstances—say, if he’d been in a relationship beforehand—his behaviour likely wouldn’t have chafed against norms of consent. At the same time, though, Burgis’ own “gut instinct” is to think that what C.K. did is “fairly ‘problematic.’”
Burgis doesn’t take issue with the fact that C.K. received some blowback for his behavior, then. But what he does take issue with is the disproportionate attention assigned within the left to incidents such as these. Citing refusal of a donation from C.K. to the Biden campaign as particularly galling in this respect—Biden voted in favour of the Iraq War, in which millions of people died—what Burgis argues is that the focus of the left shouldn’t be on the policing of private behavior in the cultural sphere. Comedy can make us laugh. At its best, it can even make us think. But what it can’t do is change the world: if it could, America’s populist drift would’ve been cancelled out by the rise of the late night doublet of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose skewering of the right by way of satiric news segments helped galvanize a generation of woke comics. By obsessing with the antics of popular entertainers, by calling for their ‘cancellation,’ the left therefore won’t succeed in transforming the political landscape. What it will do, however, is deprive popular artists such as comedians of the political oxygen they require to transgress norms—and thus to be, well, funny. In this equation, nothing is gained: the left remains impotent. But something is lost: whereas before it was impotent, now it’s seen as simultaneously impotent and as a haven for moral scolds, with little better to do than to endlessly cycle through old tweets by celebrities so as to find an offending article.
Burgis’ observations on comedy are worth dwelling on as they furnish the book with its title. But they’re really just a set-up for the thesis of the text, which is unveiled in its third chapter: that the socialist left needs to be more strategic in pursuing its goals. Case in point is the outcry over Bernie Sanders’ appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan—a libertarian ex-MMA fighter with a penchant for psychedelic drugs and conspiracy theories—is, for better or for worse, the most popular podcaster in America. Thus appearing on his show should’ve been a coup for Sanders, who used the platform to appeal to the sort of Internet-savvy young male demographic who might otherwise be sucked into the alt-right cultural vortex of which Rogan is to some extent a part (indeed, Rogan even went on to endorse Sanders, citing his political consistency as “powerful structure to operate from” even where their views differ). Yet the left, and even some Sanders supporters, managed to blemish what otherwise would’ve been an unambiguous win by calling into question whether Sanders should be engaging with individuals like Rogan. Hasn’t Rogan, after all, been complicit in propagating the sort of conspiratorial vertigo of thought Trump has been deftly able to exploit? And hasn’t he said that things in the course of thousands of hours on air that don’t comply with the loftiest standard of political correctness? Elided by these kinds of moralistic arguments, Burgis points out, is that the goal of politics is to convert others to your side—something which will scarcely be aided by deigning them too impure to be conversed with in the first place.
To try to help the left get beyond what he sees as its moralistic fixation, Burgis repeats the gesture of his first book—albeit with a difference. In Give Them an Argument, he calls for the left to embrace deductive logic: the ability to form sound arguments, identify false premises, and so on. In Canceling Comedians, however, the stress is on probabilistic logic: the ability to to rationally assess which decisions are most eligible to bring about a desired goal and act accordingly. In making his case for the importance of thinking probabilistically, or applying “decision theory,” Burgis flexes his academic muscle by putting forth a few logical tables that would be all but incomprehensible to layman. He also adds the caveat that he doesn’t necessarily agree with the use of probabilistic logic in mainstream economics, where the behaviors of individuals are assumed to be correspondent their desires (a view which presupposes that each consumer is a rational automaton). The details of his “normative” application of decision theory are presented accessibly, however. If the socialist left wants to seem hospitable to the average voter, it’s likely not a good idea to—in a moment that was roundly mocked by the right-wing commentators like Tucker Carlson—harshly reproach attendees at its annual conference for not clapping in sign language so as to avoid upsetting those with disabilities (though Burgis clarifies that he’s not opposed to strengthening accommodation for the disabled). Likewise, if the goal is to procure victory for Sanders in the Democratic primary, it’s hard to see how having him hang out with Rogan while he prattles on about interdimensional aliens or whatever could be a bad one.
As Burgis notes, to apply probabilistic logic in in order to help make decisions supposes that one has already formulated a clear goal. It also requires that they be endowed with the ability to weigh which decisions are most likely to achieve said goal. Of course, in some cases decision theory won’t be very useful in uniting those on the same broad side of the political spectrum because there won’t be agreement on these points: either they’ll harbor different goals, they’ll have different ideas about how to realize them, or both. Because a democratic political campaign has a clear goal (getting a candidate elected) that it must realize within a prefabricated structure in a limited period of time, the first half of Burgis’ book—in which he focuses on the electoral theatre, inviting rank-and-file Sanders supporters into the cunning world of strategists—is largely inscrutable. Yet even here, it’s interesting to note that Burgis sometimes puts forth opinions that are hard to square with any strategic agenda visible from the standpoint of the present.
A frequent thinker referenced in Canceling Comedians is Adoph Reed. Reed, a black American professor of political science and self-avowed Marxist, has recently aroused controversy in the left for his claim that the focus on racial particularity within the American left, and in particular the “Black Lives Matter” movement, has had the effect of disguising the degree to which police violence is statistically a phenomenon inflicted upon the lower-class regardless of race (of which, in Reed’s view, blacks constitute a disproportionate part of for historical reasons). Reed’s arguments are credible, and there is certainly something to his sentiment—echoed by Burgis—that “identity politics” (politics defined by its concern with race, gender, etc.) has deprived the left of the ability to cut across social lines in its appeal to the working-class. It’s sometimes hard to see, however, how provocative theses such as these are eligible to help the left negotiate the tide of political upheavals which have recently torn through the country. The socialist left in the United States has been so weak for so long—to find its pre-Sanders heyday, one has to look to the Great Depression—that it invariably must content itself with responding to political concerns in a political climate that it has not shaped. From this perspective, the stances taken on this issue by Reed or Burgis can, regardless of their acuity, be dismissed as nuisances that distract from effective electioneering. This same argument can made of Burgis’ sure to be controversial agreement with Reed on the subject of “transracialism”: the idea, which emerged in response to the fierce criticism attracted by individuals such as Rachel Dolezal who passed themselves off as persons of colour, that we shouldn’t police the boundaries of race (as it is, at bottom, a social construct). Drawing an analogy with the left’s advocacy of transgender rights usually favoured by the right, Burgis applies the structures of formal logic to demonstrate that it’s inconsistent to support transgendered persons while vociferously attacking transracial ones. Yet is this really a winning strategic proposition? To apply probabilistic logic in advancing one’s goals is not the same thing as being (deductively) logically consistent—in fact, in many cases, it may positively preclude it. And amiss here is a discussion of why transracial persons are more widely resented than ‘transracial’ ones (possibly, because white women in America have made far greater strides in the past few decades than blacks—something which may have played a role in easing considerably the sensitivities surrounding questions of identity).
None of this is tantamount to the claim that the DSA body politic would be correct to (as they have, to date) distance themselves from the relatively adventurous positions staked out by Reed and seconded by Burgis. But it does show how amorphous and inexorably subjective probabilistic logic can be as a framework. It’s for this reason—the way that the conclusions derived from decision theory depend so heavily upon the presuppositions one adopts—that Burgis sometimes stumbles in the second half of Canceling Comedians. In this part of the book, he attempts to use decision theory as a basic to navigate conundrums far more complicated than how Sanders supporters ought to act in a primary cycle, or the short-term communications strategy the DSA should employ. Of particular interest to Burgis is the question of what the American socialist left should be: the kinds of objectives it should adopt, and the strategies it should use to go about fulfilling them. Yet perhaps as an inevitable consequence of the book’s brevity, some of the chapters towards the tail end of Canceling Comedians raise more questions than they answer. In the fifth chapter, for instance—the subtly titled “Tankies are wreckers”—Burgis takes aim at those in the left who identify themselves with the legacy of “actually existing” socialist states such as the USSR and Cuba (the term “tankie” dates to the occupation of Hungary by the Red Army in 1956, when it was used pejoratively to describe English-speaking socialists who backed the Soviets). Moving with all the grace of a bull in a china shop, Burgis quickly levels a surfeit of charges at these saboteurs of the Sandersian project. It’s true, he admits, that the communist regimes that surged to power across wide swaths of the third world often succeeded in enhancing the social programming in the nations in which they took power. This doesn’t change the fact, however, that they spurned deliberative democracy, and that many of them committed atrocities of enormous scale. And besides, if you want to curry favour with the average American, debating online about the actual number of peasants who perished in the Great Leap Forward probably isn’t the best way to do it.
Few would dispute Burgis’ claim that appropriating the imagery or agitprop of despotic communist states isn’t the most expedient pathway to political power in America circa 2020 (though given the affectionate view of “Uncle Joe” held by much of the U.S. public in the immediate aftermath of World War II, as well as the success the country’s had in marshaling broad support behind myriad authoritarian states, the relationship between this hostility and the actual human rights abuses of the communist bloc remains far from clear). Burgis’ historical case against the Soviet Union and the states that groked its model rests on two premises however, both of them eminently debatable. The first is that the revolutions that gripped places like the USSR and Vietnam didn’t have to end undemocratically—that the leaders of these movements simply let their autocratic impulses get ahold of them and lost the plot (or alternatively, as with the USSR’s copycats, just thought that was what socialism was). And the second is that these states weren’t really socialist: that the USSR enshrined an archetypal form of socialist organization in which “a class of party bosses and state officials […] essentially filled the role vacated by the old private capitalists.” The second point is contestable: if the goal of Communist Party brass in the USSR was to simply supplant the capitalists of yesteryear, engineering a state that had nearly the lowest wealth inequality in the world would be an odd way to do it. But it’s the first point where Burgis really gives the game away. Virtually no one reading Canceling Comedians is likely to think that a lack of democracy is good in of itself. So with the premise established that dictatorship was never really necessary to safeguard third-world socialisms, Burgis is easily able to assert the universal preferability of the democratic socialist model expounded by Bhaskar Sunkara and others. The United States, as Burgis claims, has overthrown plenty of dictatorial regimes—it’s not as if being a dictatorship immunizes you from imperialist adventurism. This sort of argument understates the bottomless aggression directed by the West towards socialist states during the Cold War (one is reminded here of Che Guevera, who when challenged to explain Cuba’s failure to demilitarize at the United Nations in 1964 pointed to a nonstop barrage of territorial violations that made it impossible). It also ignores the fact that the threats faced by socialist states in the twentieth century were as much internal as external. Nations like China and the USSR had never achieved the level of centralism characteristic of Western capitalist states prior to their socialist experiments. These governments were thus forced to constitute in quick succession, and under enormous pressure, the conditions requisite to economic functioning and republican governance. Such a process, as historical exemplars from Robespierre to Ataturk underscore, is rarely benignly democratic—or bloodless.
That some of the premises adopted by Burgis in the latter half of Canceling Comedians should prove precarious under inspection raises questions about the usefulness of probabilistic logic. Throughout the book Burgis draws heavily from the oeuvre of the late cultural critic Mark Fisher (the founder of the outfit which published Canceling Comedians, Zero Books). Of particular importance to him Fisher’s seminal 2013 polemic, “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” In that text, Fisher launches a scorched earth assault against anarchists and politically correct liberals alike, both of whom he charges with substituting a criterion of moral perfection for genuine political participation, and with cleaving to a position of “marginal impotency” (like, um, a vampire?). It’s in this light that Burgis casts the diverse ideological factions which he sees as promoting deviation from the proper course of building democratic socialism: woke radlibs, “tankies,” anarchists, and so on. There does, to be sure, appear to be a relationship between impotency and moralism. As Jon Stewart has observed, the candidates least likely to win in a political primary are usually the ones who speak with the greatest moral clarity. If probability is completely stacked against your political project, after all, why bother making concessions to it? Yet one should not move too quickly from this to the claim that such a posture is necessarily useless. Excessive political correctness—the overzealous policing of phrases, or the demand that everything from putting chopsticks in your hair to using a “blaccent” be subsumed under the heading of “cultural appropriation”—may be symptomatic of impotency. But #MeToo, which grew out this ideological terrain and was triggered by the incapacity of democratic politics to deliver the desired-for gains, is likely not. Similarly, the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communist Party were both charged with many of the things Burgis reproaches “tankies” with here: of having no idea of how to negotiate political realities, of being bloodlusts, and so on. But because of the consistency of their principles, and their steely resolve to do seemingly anything to realize them, they were the ones who emerged as victors once factions committed to strategic compromise failed to sate the public’s desire for change. In these cases, we should say that the function of political moralism is essentially incubatory: to prepare the ground for a pervasive and punitive transformation of society should the deliberative gambits of the strategists break down.
Moralism, of course, isn’t solely the purview of “tankies” or woke liberals. Long before he had a movement, Bernie Sanders was seen as an intransigent crank by his colleagues, whose insistence on purity obstructed the passage of important legislation. One suspects, then, that Burgis’ real point is this: that moralism is acceptable as long as you support the right thing. Burgis is intelligent and persuasive, and in his books and innumerable videos has given us plenty of good reasons to think that the “democratic socialist” agenda is the right one for redeeming America. But what if it isn’t? The “Sanders Revolution” has hitherto rested on a central assumption: that lodged in each American there exists a socialist that can be activated by the democratic process. Doesn’t everybody love libraries, after all? And hate having to fill out complex insurance claims? This assumption, which has had the consequence of foregrounding the importance of elections as a means of changing society, has been productive—the America socialist left is far bigger today than in 2016. But what if, given the stubborn entrenchment of corporate actors in America’s political system, there’s simply no way to generate an electoral majority who would support socialism? In Canceling Comedians, Burgis points out that popular support and moral authority are not the same thing. If most women are opposed to the legalization of abortion, for instance, this doesn’t mean that abortion is ipso facto bad. The Sanders Revolution has—both in its implosion in the Democratic primary, and in its incapacity to communicate with the radical energies summoned forth by the current pandemic due to its commitment to deliberation—already shown some of its limitations. If its methods prove to be—in the words of famed Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek—“not radical enough,” its supporters will have to make a choice. Either they’ll back down and commit themselves to piecemeal reform. Or they’ll embrace the redemptive power of violence.
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“Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left”
By Ben Burgis
Zero Books, 136pp., £10.99, April 2021, 978 1 78904 547 5