We are All Future Distractions

Won't someone please think about the salience?

We live in an age of distraction. Perhaps in more than one way: sure, we’re distracted, but we’re also obsessed with the idea that we’re distracted.

The idea that we are not paying attention to the right thing, that in fact we’ve lost the ability to pay attention we once had, is, as Jonathan Crary pointed out, a persistent feature of modernity. Of course, we also have consistent moral panics about especially young people paying excessive attention, paying the wrong kind of attention, or paying attention to the wrong thing. So maybe it’s better to say, there’s a longstanding discourse about how we’re not paying the right kind of attention to the right objects, and the wrong kind of attention to undeserving objects.

Crary suggests that this is indeed at least in part an effect of an experience of surfeit, or what Walther Benjamin in his Baudelaire-essay calls “shock”. To be modern is to be overwhelmed by information, impressions, facts, opinion: just leaving your house or picking up a newspaper is a disconcerting, destabilizing experience. To be modern is also to recall — faintly, vaguely, possibly only through grandparents or through literature — a time when it was different. A time when our attention and the world we were paying it to existed in some kind of harmony. When world and attention stood in some more appropriate, intuitive (“natural”?) relationship. Today, we’re always paying attention to the wrong things; and we’re forever telling each other, telling ourselves, we’re paying attention to the wrong things.

This isn’t always a bad thing, of course: Activists and scientists, public health professionals and politicians alike draw our attention to things we aren’t paying the attention they deserve. Sara Ahmed has written very movingly about the kind of inattention that can sustain inequality. Our organizations say that "We haven't been able to give as much attention as we would have liked to this”, when in truth that withholding of attention is how they communicate worth, hierarchy, priority. But the idea that our attention is in the wrong place, and the guilt it occasions, is part of our politics far beyond that, and not usually for good.

Distraction is something of a universal condition of the social media age. Our attention is a valuable commodity, we feel that valuable commodity dissipating, and we feel guilty about that. This has given rise to one of the strangest rhetorical strategies of the social media age: the idea that disciplining the attention of others is itself a form of political intervention. I should be clear, I think that this form of discipline is different from saying “hey, I think you guys are paying too much attention to this, and not enough to that”. That is (a) an implicitly ethical claim (this thing deserves your attention), and is (b) usually dependent on an explanation of reasons. You shouldn’t pay attention to this thing for reasons x, y, and z; you should instead pay attention to this (hopefully related thing) for reasons a, b, and c.

Arguments of this kind can be deeply annoying of course — which argument can’t? — but they’re still a core aspect of public deliberation. If I may go full Hegel for a moment, arriving at a momentary consensus about what the world is like and what in it we as a society ought to be paying attention to, is pretty central to being in a society in the first place. This is what we do: We direct each other’s attention one way or the other. The other thing of course is that arguments of this type simply mark out the content and the bounds of a pluralistic society. You may care about x, I may not give a shit about it; but my recognition of your reasons for your caring about x in some way is my recognition of you as a person different from me. Note that this can still be very much imply an ethical position: I can recognize your reasons for caring about x rather than y, and think they stink and you’re a POS for having those reasons.

Sorry for the lengthy preamble, because in the end this post is about stuff that happened this week. The version of this argument I’m interested in is the “don’t get distracted”-kind. In it, the reason you’re paying attention to x, but paying attention to y, isn’t because you’re different from me, it’s because you’re a dupe.

We all remember this kind of rhetoric from the first Trump administration; we remember it from the interregnum. Don’t shout about the thing you’re shouting about, you’re playing into their hands. Don’t rise to their bait.

There is an important, but unspoken corollary to this kind of rhetoric: “we” shouldn’t have the kind of “debate they want”. The idea that your own side might have good arguments even in the “debate they want” doesn’t seem to enter into the equation. You can only lose this kind of debate, this framing suggests, though it is never made clear why. There appears to be — and I’ll get back to that — almost a sense (possibly not entirely conscious) that the other side is in the end right or at least deeply plausible, and a lengthy debate would reveal this fact. But more importantly, Gavin Newsom is actually conflating two things here: is the problem that Democrats aren’t going to win this debate? Or is it that the debate is a “distraction”? He says both and in fact acts as though those two things mean the same thing. But of course they don’t. Does the other side’s attention to an issue mean that for your side the same issue becomes automatically a distraction?

To me what this strange, unsubstantiated associations outlines is the long shadow cast by Bill Clinton. It’s surely no accident that Clinton’s Crypt Keeper James Carville himself appears to be all over this particular round of chide-the-left. It’s not that Clintonism adopted Republican talking points necessarily; Clinton adapted to, in fact made himself dependent on their attention. He goverened on what they were paying attention to. Clintonism at times consisted of adoption of Republican policy preferences; but more often than not — think about Clinton’s weird and awkward adoption of anti-“PC” rhetoric — it simply accommodated itself to the things “voters” cared about, which in each case turned out to be the thing the other party cared about. A certain kind of self-described liberal pundit is still happiest when articulating their supposedly liberal alternative on a playing field laid out by conservatives. Speaking of which…

It’s a perfect tweet, 10/10. First off, is it true that “everyone should think about which topics they want to raise the salience of and why”? Who is “everyone”? It would seem like a good rule for a pundit to explain why they care about certain issues and not others. It also seems like a good rule of thumb for a politician who has only limited time on camera. But “everyone” seems to seriously overstate the case, and, as so often with Yglesias, he seems to be chiding “liberals” or “the left” by really attacking people on Twitter. And — I don’t know what to tell you, Matt — posting on the internet is free. Which, yeah, does tend to relieve us of the onerous task of assessing each “topic” we raise before we have the temerity to post our opinion on it with our 42 followers.

Second, in its visual the tweet makes the (“popularist”, I suppose) point that the topics one should raise should be the ones where people agree the most with you. Is that true? Isn’t politics also persuasion? Wasn’t the man who convinced Americans that an economy that had recovered pretty impressively from the pandemic was actually dogshit just elected President? The lines in Yglesias’s graph go up and down with time — I’m no expert, but doesn’t that indicate that people’s relative favorability scores on “the economy”, “immigration” etc. are capable of change? It feels like it might be the job of a politician or a political journalist to change people’s views on these matters, if people’s views on these matters are indeed mistaken.

Thirdly, it seems bizarre to untether these issues from morality — some issues are salient, whether the people are on your side or not! Again, this feels like what both politicians and journalists are supposed to do: make issues salient, overcome inattention! Imagine what the Civil Rights Movement would have looked like, if MLK had looked at opinion polling and said, nevermind, let’s pack it up, people love anticommunism, let’s pivot to that. Finally, even if we left morality aside for a moment: surely people won’t forget “inflation/cost of living”-issues, just because Democrats start talking about people getting abducted by masked men in unmarked vans! I tend to notice my cost of living because, well, I’m paying it! It’s hard for it to slip my mind. A single immigrant, by contrast, easily might slip people’s minds. Which is why paying attention to them seems not just morally good, but also in fact prudent. Unless, of course, like Matt Yglesias, you don’t think immigrants “deserve” everyone’s attention.

And I think this is what’s happening here. There’s a division of labor here between one party that brutalizes immigrants, trans people, activists, and students; and (parts of) the other party that dismisses these people as “distractions”. I really stumbled over the following quote from a “House Democrat”, “a centrist” who “spoke anonymously”, on account of he has less courage than anyone you’ve ever met. This talking point about the “hairdresser” is so interesting to me because it’s cropped up in a few places — centrist dems seem somewhat enamored with the talking point — and because it’s also so self-negating.

Because of course the anonymous Democrat who spoke to Axios (it’s Axios, so I’ll allow the possibility that this person doesn’t exist) is probably referring to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which has indeed attracted broad-based support among Democratic politicians and in the media. But Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not in fact a hairdresser; that would be a different man, Andry José Hernández Romero. So the idea that the Democrats were “taking the bait for one hairdresser” is so eager to be dismissive that it refers accidentally to two men who share the same fate (as well as skin color).

That seems to me key here: the dismissal of these men as a distraction and the fact that this man whose fate this Democratic congressman thinks of as a distraction is in reality two people who the congressman can’t bother to tell apart, are part of the same problem. Not only are Democrats wrong to pay attention to men like Garcia and Romero, yes, attention paid to them is in fact “a trap”. But the congressman can’t be bothered to pay enough attention to settle on which one of these two he’s actually meaning to declare a non-entity. This may even be intentional: “I can’t tell y’all apart” is rarely offered as a statement of fact; it is a power move, it says “I don’t have to tell you apart; individuality is for me and my friends, and you don’t rank.”

I think many of us can recognize this double dismissal: our concerns don’t matter because we don’t matter. Attention to our concerns would imply attention to our individual persons and, well, we don’t deserve that. That would be too much to ask. And this is where the congressman’s dismissal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who until recently worked on construction sites, as a “hairdresser” becomes important. “Hairdresser”, I’d contend, in this quote is democrat for “f*ggot”. Why are we making a fuss about this f*ggot, this congressman really wants to know. The government wants to do with these people what it wants, and we would be fools to step into the “trap” of caring about them, or even bothering learning their names or learning that they’re different people. Why, if we end up stepping in and helping this fairy, the bullies might say we’re queer ourselves.

I am laying this out as drastically as I am here, because I lived through years of “centrist” democrats telling the party not to indulge in “divisive” “culture war” issues such as whether people like me deserved rights, or deserved not to get murdered. “Don’t take their bait”, they’d say, the bait being, presumably, the people not having to be scared for their lives. “Being a problem is a strange experience”, W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote in The Souls of Black Folk. So, it turns out, is the experience of being bait. But that’s what we were — our political expression, our personal expression, hell, our personal conduct. Everything we did, we were told, reflected (always poorly) on something, set something back — a cause that those chiding us claimed to believe in just as fervently as we did. It may be hard to imagine all this now — or at least it would be, except that the same people moved on to doing the exact same thing to trans people the moment they (temporarily) no longer could do it to gay men and lesbians.

All this in spite of the fact that if there’s one thing the beginning of the second Trump administration has made clear, it’s that economic issues can no longer be meaningfully distinguished from culture war issues. The United States is about to destroy its education sector, which is an incredibly productive part of its economy for culture war reasons. A school like, say, UPenn may appear to some as an élite and remote place filled with privileged people; it may appear to your Fox News-watching uncle as mostly the place where that trans woman swam that one time. But to Philadelphians it is, of course, also the city’s largest employer. In fact, in terms of top employers in all of Pennsylvania, UPenn ranks just behind the Federal Government, the State Government and Walmart. In what way is gutting such an employer a “culture war” and not an economic issue? As I pointed out on In Bed with the Right’s episode on trade, the new administration seems hell-bent on destroying its vibrant renewable energy and EV sector, because it thinks getting power from the sun is for wimps and real men make energy by penetrating the earth.

At the same time, the tariffs are all about manhood, all about swole jobs as opposed to “bullshit jobs” or “keyboard jobs” or whatever. It was about “depressed and addicted and broken” men returning to “making things”, as far right gadfly Milo Yianopoulos put it on “X”, “in the image and likeness of God the Maker”.

In their overall logic, the tariffs are not about restoring an economic status quo ante — that’s gone. They’re all about recreating the cultural memory of manufacturing jobs, of a certain performance of masculinity coinciding with making good money — which, as Jess Calarco has pointed out, “mistake[s] correlation for causation.” Those who want to bring back a glorious age of good, high-paying, respectable manufacturing jobs “think their parents and grandparents had the ‘good life’ because of jobs in manufacturing. In reality, their parents and grandparents had that life because of unions, pensions, high marginal tax rates, and strong social policies — with a little post-War exceptionalism and a lot of racism and sexism thrown in.”

And of course disrupting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who pay taxes, go to work, buy stuff and keep the economy running because you don’t like the way they look has an economic dimension. Britain found that out after Brexit. Western Europe’s aging countries that alternate between demonizing anyone who doesn’t look and think exactly like them, and wondering why they’re unable to lure more Indian doctors or Taiwanese programmers into the country, are finding that out as well. I doubt Gavin Newsom, Matthew Yglesias and Unnamed Democrat #2 don’t realize that. But they are so used to a reflexive marshaling of “the economy” and “economic issues” any time someone says “hey, this seems kind of unjust”, especially if it seems unjust towards someone other than white people. “The economy” isn’t a separate thing for them anymore. It’s just a way of saying “get real”; it’s a way of saying: pay no attention to the thing you’re paying attention to.

So there’s this interesting split in these kinds of analyses: I doubt that these politicians and writers share the beliefs of Trump and his people; but in a weird way they share the beliefs behind those beliefs. The ideas that there is an “economy” more real than culture, and that Republicans and Real Americans™️ have privileged access to it, etc. I have to think of a remark Slavoj Žižek has in one of his prefaces, which speaks of the “fetishistic split” in ideology: the person who buys into an ideology, Žižek argues, outsources their belief, which actually frees the individual from having to hold obviously untrue beliefs themselves. Here’s what Žižek writes:

“This paradox indicates the fetishistic split at the very heart of an effectively functioning ideology: individuals transpose their belief on to the big Other (embodied in the collective), which therefore believes in their place- individuals thus remain sane qua individuals, maintaining the distance towards the ‘big Other’ of the official discourse.”

I think this makes a lot of sense, and interestingly — though I don’t recall Žižek saying as much — there are two ways of getting to this point of identification/disidentification what he calls “the ‘big Other’ of the official discourse”. You could identify with it on the whole, but then add more shadings and nuances — think of the fact that, as my podcast co-host Moira Donegan likes to point out, seemingly every Trump-supporter will start their defense of Trump with a list of all the things they don’t like about Trump. Their identification with the project proceeds by way of first disidentifying with the man, his tweeting, his boorishness, his stupidity, etc. But there is of course the option of going the other direction — believing the big picture, the official discourses, while pushing towards a point of disidentification from it. And I think that tune goes a little like this: you can’t stand Trump, you think the Dems need to fight like hell, etc. etc.; and then you list all the things Trump understands that Dems do not. The point is: you’ve actually swallowed much of the ideology, you just happen to not … believe it personally?

The fact that our heroic unnamed congressman went to the “hairdresser” even though he was talking (probably) about a construction worker, is thus a telling slip. From David Eng to Jasbir Puar, a lot of queer theorists have pointed out that in the immigration system we see the internal contradictions of what Puar calls “homonationalism” play out. On the one hand, Western countries hold themselves out as havens for queer people from less “enlightened” nations. On the other the demeaning and homophobic way in which they then seek to sniff out “immigration fraud” by queer people betray that their acceptance is often purely formal.

Queer immigrants are like light switches — you can turn them on and off as you need them. Are you using them to argue your own moral superiority, perhaps to justify attacking another country? Well, then they are precious cargo eminently worthy of even the most extreme forms of protection. Their very existence, their thriving is a sign that — the few bombs you’re dropping notwithstanding — you are on the right side of history. But if they go out and go all … queer on you, then you need to crack down on them. And when you point that out to them, you are told that there you go again, paying attention to the thing you ought not to pay attention to.

The irony of course is that the same people are perfectly willing to be distracted by shiny objects, when those shiny objects accord with their priors. Let a majority of the American public, let Senator Van Hollen, let the media obsess over the abstract rights that are accorded to people even when they’re imperfect (yes, including criminals, since those rights are how we determine whether they’re criminals in the first place)! These rocket scientists will be focusing their attention to where it really belongs: with a cherrypicked (and contested) buzzwords (“might have been involved in human trafficking”???) that they gleaned from flopsweat-drenched Fox News reporting desperately trying to backfill a justification for something that is unjustifiable.

This is how we all function in the logic of a centrism both trying to beat back and deeply enthralled to the rise of the far right: we are all future distractions. Our outrage, our arguments, our protestations are heard, of course, but they are heard as irritations, annoyances, as lapses in strategic thinking. How could you be so stupid as to raise this point, or, worse? You are playing into their hands!

Are there ten thousand of us taking to the streets? Well, look at those ten thousand distractions. Are there millions of us taking to the streets? Millions of distractions. Nothing will ever make these people real to Republicans because they are not in the end, to them, real Americans. But nothing will ever make these people real to (some) Democrats and (some) centrists, because they are, in the end, dangerous distractions. Sirens that fill your ears with songs of morality and “never again”, but, which you, in wise foresight, have blocked out in advance. Of course, in the end, it’ll leave just them, tied to the mast. When they came for the trans people, they declared the plight of trans people a distraction. You get the idea. When they come for them, there will be no one left to call them a distraction"