The Fake Radicals Stealing Lemons
The late political scientist James C. Scott endorsed what he called “anarchist calisthenics”—the regular practice of small acts of lawbreaking and disobedience. Jaywalk at an empty intersection. Have a beer in the park. Smuggle a pudding cup past the TSA agents. The point, Scott said, was to keep the civic muscles strong. Without constant reinforcement, these muscles will atrophy, and when real tyranny arrives, the flabby citizen will be powerless to resist. Scott particularly enjoyed telling Germans to get their reps in, because their grandparents had not.
Tuesday a New York Times podcast hosted the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino for a discussion of lawbreaking, which they both endorsed not as a habit of mind but as resistance to actual tyranny, today. They agreed that shoplifting from grocery stores such as Whole Foods is laudable, because (as Tolentino says, without evidence) “every major grocery chain” steals from workers and customers. Streaming services—they specifically name Spotify, which carries the Times podcast—are bad for creators and, they say, worthy of being ripped off. Piker said he would steal cars, “if I could get away with it.” Channeling Abbie Hoffman, Tolentino encourages people to steal from her own employer, The New Yorker, but does not explain which high crimes David Remnick has committed to earn this comeuppance.
They are more circumspect about violence against people. Both Piker and Tolentino giggle their way to a “no” when their host, Nadja Spiegelman, asks if they endorse murdering executives of a health-insurance company or burning down companies they dislike. (Piker says his answer is prompted by legal advice, and Spiegelman joins Tolentino in tittering at his saucy qualification.) But Piker and Tolentino both accuse health-insurance companies of “social murder,” and use that concept to (rather sympathetically) explain why Americans might react with actual murder. The host and her guests have an awfully good time agreeing about everything.
[Yair Rosenberg: The problem with Hasan Piker’s Einstein story]
Six years ago, the New York Times opinion editor lost his job for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton because he advised invoking the Insurrection Act to quell riots. The op-ed, the Times explained, fell short of the paper’s standards. This same publication today recommends listening to this podcast about the sunny side of chaos, rather than just reading the transcript, “for the full effect.” I would go further and recommend watching the video, whose Scandinavian-minimalist set, along with the participants’ chic outfits (Piker is wearing Ralph Lauren), greatly enhances the comedic effect. A previous generation of Marxists would dress down, the better to relate to the workers they tried to organize at the factory gates. These podcasters are, I suppose, the hard-left equivalent of those prosperity-gospel preachers, who dress rich so that they can give others a vision of something to aspire to.
They could not look or sound more unoppressed if they tried. Spiegelman invokes Jean Valjean, the Misérable who stole a loaf of bread to feed his family, but when offering a modern example of virtuous theft, she asks why she should have to pay for “organic avocados.” Piker says that “we’ve got to get back to cool crimes,” including Louvre heists, “bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” Crime, to these people, appears to be a series of Thomas Crown affairs, punctuated for some reason by free guacamole. Tolentino is at least self-critical. She lists the immoral acts that unsettle her conscience: “getting iced coffee in a plastic cup,” going on vacation in “so many planes,” and failing to organize workers.
The belief that workers frequently get a raw deal is an old one, and roughly 200 years of leftist R & D has gone into figuring out how to configure governments to make it easier for labor to negotiate with management on fair terms. Also old is the idea that health is a collective responsibility, and that giving a dignified life to the poor is part of the government’s job. (The belief that you are oppressed by Whole Foods, however, is a modern psychosis.) Among the remarkable aspects of this conversation is the ignorance of this long, eventful history—as if the upshot of the past century of leftism is that you can simply take things, and maybe the justice of it all will start to even out, as society gives way to what Piker approvingly calls “full chaos.”
It is difficult to take any of this seriously, especially from someone like Piker, who has compared America unfavorably to China and Cuba, two countries where you will be thrown into a dark hole if you do so much as an anarchist jumping jack. Cuba is miserable, and to travel there without noticing the misery is grotesque all by itself. China is a more interesting case, and much more ironic as a comparison. Piker’s romantic view of crime is, shall we say, not shared by the Chinese Communist Party. Nor, for that matter, is his view of communism. For decades now, China has functioned on the premise that wealth and social stability emerge only from a market economy in which big, unseen forces—not to be questioned or defied by individuals—control everything important. The value of the individual is nil, as is the value of workers, should they differ with those forces about their pay and treatment. One can agree or disagree that this model is the right one, but one cannot love the Chinese system and love rampant criminality, even “cool crimes.”
What is really going on here? Spiegelman, the interviewer, is correct to notice that something is happening “with our moral code,” and that Piker is a driver of that moral change, or an example of it. “There are so many moral compromises I make every day,” she says. I am sure she is right: So do I. Fretting over moral trivia such as using a plastic cup, then treating weighty matters such as murder with the same gravity may be a source of the moral vertigo.
Piker and Tolentino deserve some credit for sensing that their theory of social change is incomplete. They might even sense how pathetic they sound, when pretending to be outlaws, even though all that is at stake is a few lemons or a Netflix password. “We have lost the muscle that is built up to be able to engage in” collective action, Tolentino says. “We lack the willpower,” Piker agrees, “because we don’t even know what that would look like.”
Piker says, in my favorite part of the interview, that he hates stealing stuff because when Piker was a boy, his father caught him stealing from a friend and punished him. (Good dad.) Piker also says, rather gallantly, that he could not countenance dining and dashing, and that he would even cover the bill if he saw someone else steal services this way.
[Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe: Left-wing terrorism is on the rise]
To them, it seems, theft is fine as long as you don’t have to look anyone in the eye when you do it, and as long as you get away with it. (Conveniently, corporations have no faces. It is no coincidence that Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was shot in the back.) This is the opposite of gallant—and I think the lack of willpower and “muscle” is related to the cowardice inherent in almost all the acts they endorse or excuse. Spiegelman calls shoplifting “micro-looting,” a euphemism whose purpose is to avoid the inglorious term shoplifting, because shoplifting is what children and petty criminals do.
Civil disobedience, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, should be done “openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty,” because to be penalized for a righteous act only multiplies the act’s merit. You have to break the law proudly—not break it, then run away to another state and get caught with a fake ID in a McDonald’s. Getting clubbed because you refused to use the bathroom designated for your race—that is something your grandchildren will brag that you did. I wonder what is wrong with people who feel like they are on an odyssey against a comparable injustice but who evade responsibility for shoplifting produce. Leftists need calisthenics too. These people are all flab.