Yesterday I wrote about the rise of pseudo-independents — a large and rapidly growing group of Americans who behave like partisans, but who call themselves independent. Freddie deBoer has written a response, though to what I’m not entirely sure. So I’ll just make a few points:

I

Freddie thinks that I’ve written an article about grifting. If you want to see what kind of debate we’re engaged in here, a simple exercise: ctrl+f the word “grift” in both of our articles. You’ll find the word 5 times in his and 0 in mine. I can’t stop the man from pretending that there are doofus grifting accusations lurking in the subtext of my post that I did “not quite accuse anyone of” but am “skirting around”; but allow me to spend the rest of point (I) laying out the kind of response this kind of criticism deserves.

II

Some pundits, I note, are fond of suggesting that the Brave Unpopularity of their politics demonstrates something about how heterodox they are. I say this is ridiculous, citing polls as evidence. Freddie’s response? To tell me what I just told them: that tying popularity to heterodoxy is ridiculous. And to cite polls as evidence.

I have no idea what’s going on here. Evidently Freddie can make a narrow point about orthodoxy and opinion among “the country writ large” without making some profound claim about their fundamental relationship, but if I do the exact same thing I am “tying questions of orthodoxy to popularity” and this is “very odd”?

III

I wrote an article with frequent references to heterodox pundits. From this, Freddie might have concluded that it was not about him, since he doesn’t call himself heterodox; but instead, he once again read against the text, and concluded that I meant to refer to him and accidentally didn’t.

And this is too bad, because I don’t think that Freddie is a grifter. Nor do I think he is some kind of secret political or ideological partisan posing as independent. In fact, one thing I appreciate about Freddie is that he always has identified as a leftist, and does not — at least in identification — try to place himself outside of left politics. I think he owns what he believes in a way that a lot of folks do not, and I have long argued that self-identification is one of the ways we do this.

That said, I will add one thing that I think Freddie does have in common with pseudo-independents. In passing, he suggests that I am

annoyed by the rise of the “a plague on both your houses” niche in political media…

I have to say, it’s incredible to read this sentence from someone who got into political media more than a decade after I was blogging for Ralph Nader. That Freddie has defined The Niche so narrowly that he thinks that people like me are outside of it sounds to me very much like the pseudo-independent who thinks his criticism of our politics is much rarer than it actually it is.

ADDENDUM: IV

I wonder about the latter because Beijer is a socialist, and in America in 2022 socialism is about as challenging to elite opinion as a glass of milk.

The more I think about this comment, the more it surprises me and the more it warrants a response. If all Freddie means by it is that no one has any politically consequential ways to challenge elite opinion in 2022, fair enough. But otherwise I can only think of three explanations for this, ranked from least to most likely:

1. Freddie thinks socialism has won.

2. Freddie does not want socialism to win.

3. Freddie wants socialism to win, but has come up with a clever strategy for this involving not advocating for it.

I refuse to believe that Freddie actually thinks (1), though it would admittedly be pretty funny if he were a FreeRepublic.com grandpa all along. I guess there’s an outside possibility that he thinks (2): let the vague imperative of “challenging elite opinion” become the north star of your politics and you can end up travelling to some strange places. The difference between socialism and “anti-elitism” reminds me a whole lot of the difference between Catholicism and so-called “non-denominationalism”. One has its problems, but you know exactly what you’re gonna get; the other only has one problem, but it’s that no one has any idea what it is. (2), in any case, doesn’t sound to my ear like Freddie either.

Unfortunately, that just leaves (3). And that’s disappointing, because if I had to describe the role of ideology under capitalism in ten words, I’d do it in five: “rationalize not fighting for socialism.” Even for socialists it’s an incredibly seductive strategy. Here, all I’ll say is that it’s not new, it’s not innovative, it’s not unpopular, and for decades on end it’s proven to be the only socialist strategy that’s managed to fail even harder than fighting for socialism.