This interview between the NYT and the author of ‘how to blow up a pipeline’ includes discussion of the social acceptability of political violence. Unsurprisingly, the NYT person flips out at the idea of property destruction and seems to bounce between ‘political violence is never acceptable’ and calling David Malm a hypocrite for not blowing up a pipeline during the interview. Evidently this is the kind of political violence the NYT doesn’t support, in contrast to the kind of political violence they love (i.e. political violence used by the american state against property and humanity both foreign and domestic).
This is my favourite part of the interview in the spoilers.
spoiler
NYT: We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.
Malm: Of course we can. Why not?
NYT: That is moral hypocrisy.
Malm: I disagree.
NYT: Why?
Malm: The idea that if you object to your enemy’s use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions. The far right is very good at running electoral campaigns. Should we thereby conclude that we shouldn’t run electoral campaigns? This goes for political violence too, unless you’re a pacifist and you reject every form of political violence — that’s a reasonably coherent philosophical position. Slavery was a system of violence. The Haitian revolution was the violent overthrow of that system. It is never the case that you defeat an enemy by renouncing every kind of method that enemy is using.
NYT: But I’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy, however debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?
Malm: Imagine you have a Trump victory in the next election — doesn’t seem unimaginable — and you get a climate denialist back in charge of the White House and he rolls back whatever good things President Biden has done. What should the climate movement do then? Should it accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something like property destruction? I admit that this is a difficult question, but I imagine that a measured response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a country like the United States and whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected.
NYT: Could you give me a reason to live?
Malm: What do you mean?
NYT: Your work is crushing. But I have optimism about the human project.
Malm: I’m not an optimist about the human project.
It’s an example of not fighting every point at once. Staying on track makes it harder for others to muddle the conversation.
The topic at hand is when political violence is acceptable, not what Biden has done on climate change. So you stick to the topic instead of opening up new points of disagreement.
God this is so difficult for me to do. It takes real talent
It also takes a lot of contempt for your opponent which is always fun
I think of it in terms of useful lies for children. In teaching there are a lot of useful lies for children that help them understand the basics of a subject while, strictly speaking, being completely wrong and kind of useless - think how atoms start as a ball, then become a series of circles, then become a series of figures of 8 and donuts as you progress through high school to university - and it’s the same thing here. Biden isn’t really helping, but that requires an advanced understanding they don’t have yet, so you lie that he is until they build up the requisite knowledge base.
Damn, this is a great comparison.
When you see leftists trying to bring liberals along, it sometimes feels like right as your liberal is wrapping their head around the atom, the leftist starts getting frustrated at them not immediately seeing the implications this has for p and s orbitals, and then asks them to read Newton.
If you get good at it you don’t even compromise on the secondary issues you talk about, you just don’t state them in a way that demands a response. Notice how Malm didn’t say “Biden has done good things but…”, he said:
Which is likely meant to be read as:
It’s setting the issue aside without giving ground on it. “Maybe you think he’s done some good, but whatever it is it doesn’t matter for this conversation.”
For real
I prefer to just open up front after front when I’ve got the rhetorical tanks for it. If your arguments are smooth and practiced enough to avoid bogging down, you can really box a mofo in
I wonder how effective this is. If they’re really open minded about all these topics I could see this working well, but if it’s a bunch of stuff they’re dug in on I’m not so sure.