The B-Side Fetish
There is a type of person (you know this person) who only loves things (e.g., musicians, bands, musical styles, authors, ideas, causes, movements, etc.) until they become popular. If you ask this person what their favorite Bowie song is, they’ll invariably choose some random, obscure song found on the B-Side of one of his lesser known albums. Gavin McInnes, cofounder of Vice magazine, is one of these people. His bizarre political trajectory makes sense as soon as you realize it. Like many hipsters of his age, Gavin equates being radical, not with any vision of social justice, but with being provocative, pissing off the bourgeoisie, and making fun of people who care about stuff (any stuff). I know people like Gavin who enthusiastically supported Trump, and probably even voted for him, not because they liked any of his proposed policies, but because they just wanted to watch the world burn. As a guy I know put it, with gritted teeth, “I just want Trump to win so I can see the look on Jon Stewart’s smug little face.”
People like Gavin McInnes are exceptional. Most of those possessed by the b-side fetish think of themselves as small “d” democrats, egalitarians, men and women of the left, and lovers of humanity. And that’s what makes their denigration of all things “popular” so deeply problematic. After all, what does it mean to say that something is popular if not to say that the thing in question has been touched by the people? Are the people untouchables that defile everything that they touch? Are these hipster Brahmans rendered ritualistically impure by contact with popular things? I wonder.
Reflective lefties have found ways, often ingenious ways, to reconcile a theoretical love of the people with an actual contempt for the people. None has proven more adaptable than Marx’s notion of false consciousness, though Freud’s idea of denial will do in a pinch, same is true of Gramsci’s equally circular concept of hegemony. Regardless, positions of this stamp invariably lead to some species of Leninism. The people are, according to this view, deluded idiots; and, as a consequence, all social progress depends upon some sort of a vanguard party, a small minority of enlightened experts—who see things clearly, unlike the rest of us. We should, if we know what’s good for us, defer to their superior wisdom. If we fail to do so, well, then, either we’re doomed or they’ll just have to seize power and (to borrow Rousseau’s phrase) force us to be free. And they wonder why the working class no longer votes for them.
It’s always deeply problematic when progressives reduce everything to power à la Thrasymachus — “justice is simply what is good for the stronger” (Plato, The Republic, 338c) — as it undermines the idealism that is the sine qua non of their commitment to social justice. Even so, pragmatically speaking, it might make sense to reduce everything to power when you’re trying to wake a sleeping elephant, when the people you wish to mobilize are the silent majority, when the oppressed you wish to mobilize vastly outnumber the oppressors. But when the oppressed group you wish to mobilize is a minority group, reducing everything to power is just plain stupid. “Cynicism of the Thrasymachean sort,” as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum rightly observes in Cultivating Humanity (1997), “is the best recipe for continued oppression of the powerless.”
