Taking The Exit Ramp

LAUDATE DEUM

[Updates below]

Last week, I listened to excerpts of Naomi Klein’s September 3 talk at the Socialist Conference.

Klein presented an interesting analysis of the right wing paranoid conspiracy theory upside down world – a place she calls the “Mirror World”.

Klein argued that much of that Orwellian world is the result of failures of progressives and the left, who have abandoned traditional left critiques of capitalism and corporate power. This abdication created a political vacuum that has been exploited by the right. Using several examples, she noted that right wing conspiracy theories get the facts badly wrong, but get the feelings right in appealing to legitimate and traditionally left politics, popular sentiments, and issues.

Based on that talk and her prior books, I picked up a copy of her recent book, Doppelgänger.

The book was a huge disappointment. The kernels of cogent analysis and criticism were not worth wading through all the personal pathos she delivers.

[Update: 10/8/23 – Once again, Chris Hedges does not disappoint. He makes all the criticisms Klein evades or obfuscates explicit and powerful. Here’s a taste, from his essay Fascism Comes To America :

The parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state. The liberal class, a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic insecurity and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists, who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement. […]

The root cause of our political distress lies with a liberal class that places corporate and personal profit above the common good. Liberals have conspired, since the presidency of Bill Clinton, to strip the country of manufacturing, and with it, jobs that sustained the working class. They have been partners in the transformation of democratic institutions into tools to consolidate the power and wealth of corporations and the ruling oligarchs. They forgot the fundamental lesson of fascism. Fascism is always the bastard child of bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in Italy. It was true in the former Yugoslavia with its warring ethnic factions. And it is true in the United States.  ~~~ end update]

But Klein made one extremely telling admission in that personal material.

Klein has an autistic son. In discussing her son’s autism and mocking the extremely competitive and pathologically ambitious parents she comes across in her upscale circles brag about the over-achievements of their “perfect” kids, she thanked her son for giving them an “exit ramp” from all that.

That’s exactly how I feel: I’ve taken the exit ramp

(“… I took the exit ramp, and that has made all the difference“).

I’m done with all that.

Life after the exit ramp feels grounded – grounded if in nothing else than what remains of the commons: the public lands and the extraordinary landscapes, natural beauty, and tranquility they still provide.

[Update: After I posted this, in an incredible case of serendipity, I came upon Pope Francis’ latest on climate: LAUDATE DEUM

33. In conscience, and with an eye to the children who will pay for the harm done by their actions, the question of meaning inevitably arises: “What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of my time on this earth? And what is the ultimate meaning of all my work and effort?”