Hi hello yes and welcome to your regular dispatch from the void. I wrote this essay before the inauguration and now that the actual inauguration itself has passed without any incidents (that we know of, with a noted exception of some antifa protests of ICE facilities on the west coast), most of us will find ourselves breathing easy. Our shitty democracy, with all of its problems, lives to see the sun rise. Time to move on to complaining about the fact that Biden isn’t doing enough of some things or is doing too much with other things.
I have spent the last week agonizing over my own political history. Friends, ya girl was a libertarian there for a few years. It feels just as shitty saying it now as it was typing it out in the self-flagellating essay I originally wrote for this week. I want to explain my political evolution, in an effort to show that people really can change when you are able to foster dialogue with them. Not everyone pops out of the womb educated on the system-wide issues that plague the rights of so many people. I do still think liberty is for everyone and we must work to ensure that this is established and protected. But my preferred mechanisms for change have been altered. I also fully understand that actual, legitimate change is in many ways a pipe dream because our two party system is inadequate and perpetuates false dichotomies of thought. The number of changes in government alone require a something of a revolution; this is to say nothing about what must culturally change in order for real freedoms to manifest. I strive for honesty and clarity both in my writing and in my life. It felt unfair, or maybe untruthful, to leave this part of myself unaccounted for to you, my readers. That’s why I’m here today.
When I describe to people where I went to college, I usually start with “I left high school being a Neo-Con,” which really means that I was something like Alan Alda’s character in West Wing: close-ish to libertarianism but with an allowance for some regulation. Nothing malicious, just a little unlikeable to outsiders. I grew up in Iowa in a mostly politically conservative household, where I was encouraged to understand what I believed and what others believed. I went to a small, conservative college in rural Michigan with an almost completely white, Christian student body. I went there for the politics and the academic rigor, thinking I’d end up in the economics department, espousing the good of the Austrian school. Instead, I got an English degree, met Austin and several very dear friends, and had my first brushes with what would eventually become my spiritual home. I wouldn’t trade my education for anything; I got what I went for. But the social circles left much to be desired. I (shamefully) stood by, silent as classmates perpetuated political and cultural falsehoods and said unspeakably awful things about other human beings. These issues carry over to the college administration as well, and it’s become disappointing (or outrageous) to witness what the college will do for its political agenda. The human brain on political/cultural fear is a fucked up thing to witness in action. Young people frequently don’t understand that ideas have consequences. I was no different.
When I graduated in 2015, I got a job teaching fourth grade at a charter school in inner city Dallas. This experience was the beginning of the end; it was evident from my time teaching that literally every program that the government had was failing at some level, from public schools to the green card system to the war on drugs. This to say nothing about the insanity that is the U.S. military budget, sapping money from everywhere else that needs it (which is to say, almost every other place and program that receives a portion of the federal budget). Tax money was being squandered before our very eyes and no one seemed to give a shit. Throw more money at it, it’ll be fine.
I barely lasted the school year. I have a lot of trauma from this period; there are enormous stretches of time I just can’t remember. I was grossly unprepared for the job. I think the only reason I made it was because I had coworkers and my boss dragging me behind them and my own ridiculous, stubborn force of will. Someone had to show up for these kids, but those young students needed so much more than I could give them. I see now that such an endeavor was incredibly misguided, because a white girl trying to teach a bunch of young students of color cursive can only do so much. It was straight up white saviorism. I learned more from them about my own privilege than I ever managed to teach them from the curriculum. This system openly fails our young students of color and stands by like nothing is wrong, regardless of the kind of school they’re in. I felt like and still feel like I failed every single one of those kids. I live with that shit every fucking day.
Austin and I got married, and I moved back to Iowa. I started working at a Starbucks because the idea of stepping foot inside a classroom made me physically ill. In retrospect, I think people were probably too nice to me for being outspoken about my political beliefs. The vast majority of my coworkers were exceedingly gracious and kind. We had a lot of really amazing conversations, and some that were tense, and some that became learning moments. I learned a lot from my coworkers (and could’ve learned significantly more, were I not so stubborn). I was there for the initial racial sensitivity training, prescribed after two young Black men were arrested for being Black in a Philly Starbucks. This bit of training, among others that came later, made me realize that I needed to examine all of my privileges and biases more. Between this and the time between my year teaching taking the edge off the shock, I’d finally gained a small space in my brain to begin really interrogating what I thought. This meant I came to start reject both the politics I’d grown up with and large parts of politics I’d begun to adhere to. It wasn’t just a broken school system anymore, it was the whole thing stacked against entire groups of people.
Libertarianism didn’t start out bad, I think. The core of the movement was that the state sucked and was only capable of injustice. To an extent I still think that’s true. The pages I followed on Facebook were largely anti-Trump, anti-war, anti-cop, anti-immigration-regulation, and anti-drug-regulation. Name a regulation and they were probably against it, for better or for worse. “Taxation is theft” was the common refrain. These aren’t necessarily bad ideas when put into different intellectual contexts. Socialists, for example, are also anti-Trump, anti-war, anti-cop, anti-immigration-regulation, and anti-drug-regulation. But they have different solutions to the issues. Libertarians think a freed market will provide the solutions to, say, global warming, whereas a socialist believes government action, i.e. regulation, must solve the problem. Generally, libertarians believe that our crony capitalist market is the result of regulation and corporate interest; a freed market will better cater to the actual needs of a populace. Corporations will build better roads and solve global warming, rather build than billion dollar war planes that only kind of work. They’re treated as persons only insofar as you need to be able to sue the shit out of them, should that road they built infringe upon your own rights in some way.
But libertarianism has always had what I call a marketing problem. I’d look up and notice that the movement was largely populated by people (mostly younger white men) who were and remain almost wholly incapable of showing compassion. They didn’t care about outreach and mostly didn’t care about having healthy, spirited dialogue. They don’t give a shit about the rights of others, only that their own go on protected. More importantly, no one viewed the accumulation of large amounts wealth or property as potential forces of corruption, nor would they even entertain the notion. Not my property, not my problem, go cry to someone else, taxation is theft.
I remember people being aghast at mutualism efforts. A Facebook meme page mod’s young cousin (18 years old maybe) was several months pregnant, and she’d literally just left an abusive relationship. She needed a bit of money to make it to her next paycheck, and the mod was asking for grocery money on her behalf. Many of the few women (and even some single dads) who followed the meme page chipped in. We raised 300 bucks or so in an hour, and after another hour the mod posted a picture of himself and his cousin at the grocery store, and then a picture of the receipt, listing things like food and even diapers. The leftovers were going toward her next rent payment. But some assholes were like “not my problem” and “use protection next time” or “lol this is a scam.” Fucking clowns. I wondered in earnest if these were the sort of people I wanted to share beliefs with. The people in a movement dictate what the movement believes, and this seemed to be getting fucked up as time went on.
I also quickly realized that libertarianism often leads to shitty power dynamics. An unregulated industry wreaks havoc on our systems: environmental, agricultural, social, etc. Nothing is spared. That young, single mother-to-be would have to depend on mutualism efforts in a perfect libertarian society because there’s not a government big enough to tax for social programs. And then there’s the danger that those mutualism efforts are also de-incentivized to the point of non-existence. If enough consumers aren’t demanding something, it’s not going to happen. To put this into a personal context, I had started questioning the ways Starbucks produced coffee. It’s easy. The commodity coffee market often sells product for mere dollars per pound, but Ye Olde Greene Mermayde sells pound sized bags for at least sixteen bucks. And this was to say nothing of being a wage worker for a large international corporation. Everyone except the executives and the shareholders gets the shaft. The few profit off the labor of the many. The many not only included my coworkers and I, but the myriad unnamed and unseen coffee producers living it what is now frequently called the global south. This dehumanizing, exploitative relationship is present in pretty much every industry you can think of, whether you like it or not. And no matter what politicians promise, it’s unlikely to change anytime soon. I started talking with coworkers about this; this was not new information, but I’d kept myself blind to it up to that point. I stopped looking past it. Someone joked that I was finally beginning to be radicalized (hi Zak). He was right.
In 2019, I left Starbs and started working at an independent shop. I thought this would assuage my concerns about the labor issues in coffee. It didn’t. That’s another essay. Working in service is still working in service in this colonialist, capitalist nightmare state. 2020 happened. We all know how that went.
I realized several months ago that I had a wildly incomplete picture of the power dynamics associated with race and labor. I can’t even point to when it happened, really, just that it did. It took me far too long to get to it; I was unwilling to see it before. I’m so fucking sorry. I have started to have the hard conversations with Austin and members of my family. There were a lot of long periods of silence where we thought about what we said, and what it means. I still have more hard conversations to have, ones that have the potential make or break certain relationships. In some ways, this evolution of thought has been significantly freeing; I’ve allowed myself to dialogue with myself where I didn’t before. In other ways, I’m still fighting knee jerk reactions to my own privilege and inherent biases. Our complicity in a state that directly favors the white and rich must be examined, and we all must work for both systemic change and cultural change. Both must happen to have real, lasting effects. Systemic change, however, does not come easily or quickly. And still, with these words, I feel like I’ve over-simplified the matter. The problems with these imperialist systems are vast and have roots that are hundreds to thousands of years old. They are worth being dismantled.
I love, respect, and appreciate y’all. Thank you for reading this. This was not an easy essay to write. This journey won’t be over any time soon, and to an extent, it shouldn’t end at all. We need to allow our understanding of these situations and systems to change. Stagnancy is arguably a form of complacency. We should expect more from ourselves.
One thing before we move on. Part of the reason I wanted to bring this all up is to say that I basically witnessed the infancy of the movement that stormed the capital on January 6th and continues to effect widespread unrest. There’s a lot of journalists covering these matters, so watching the term “boogaloo” become mainstream has been surreal. Back in like 2017 that was something people made fun of, nothing more than the wet dreams of armchair commando edgelords. It was (generally) viewed as incompatible with the sort of mainstream libertarianism popular at the time. A lot of these folks were banned from commenting on various pages because they got big mad at anti-American memes. Looks like that shit changed quickly. From what I hear (from friends who stayed to watch what happened, notably, a social psychologist studying honor culture), a lot of groups and pages got flipped somewhere in 2018 and 2019. If you’d told me three years ago that the Boog would become credible threat to national security, I would have actually laughed in your face. How the turned have tables.
Lastly, it bears mentioning that I stopped getting on Facebook regularly in 2018, stopped altogether shortly after, and then just deleted it a several months ago. Good fucking riddance. Social media is and remains a tremendous echo chamber from which there is no escape. That said, I have twitter and insta (linked below). The former is mostly out of necessity, but I do like having somewhere to post lukewarm takes and post the occasional poorly written sentence while drunk. Instagram is mostly food and coffee, sometimes clouds. Consider following if you want more of this, for whatever reason.
One big influence on how I think about the systems we live with is Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. You should subscribe. She’s fucking phenomenal. Particular favorites include On Ingredients, On Luxury, and On America. Her emphasis on valuing workers should not be a foreign concept to us and yet it is; valuing people should not be political but um, somehow it is. I know I’m a broken record with recommending her newsletter, but the things she talks about are important. I can think of no one else who has influenced me more in the past year.
On a different note, I read Wikipedia for fun from time to time, because I’m a freak, and I stumbled upon the page for the Timeline of the Far Future. Probably not the best thing to read during a bout of insomnia at like two in the morning, but I suppose there are worse things? Something about watching the time values grow into exponents really fucked me up and now I’m worried about what happens to our planet if it doesn’t get taken out by the sun’s red giant phase or blitzed by an interstellar object at some point. It’ll take us about 100 quintillion years for earth finally fall into the tiny black star that is the sun due to gravitation radiation, but that’s only if something else doesn’t get it first. Seriously, is no one else worried about this?!
I’m getting really tired of people being all “the best croissants come from Paris if you haven’t had one you’re not living.” And it’s like, lady, this is a Starbucks, just fucking order something so I can go clean a sink. I’m a millennial, I can’t afford a house payment, let alone the plane tickets or the anxiety that flying gives me, I bet you’d judge me for that too. But you smile because you’re dead inside and go ah no, but it’s “on the list,” whatever that means. Ah yes, those were the days. Pieces like this, make me feel smug. Sure, an industrial croissant is an indicator of where we’re at as a society, but also they taste pretty good. Elitism is the real enemy here.
And lastly, this essay pretty much encapsulates how I feel about today’s essay. After one shit draft and then four major revisions to this one, I’m ready to move on. I’ll (hopefully) see you next week! I’m trying weekly posts out, mostly because I wrote this right after sending out the last one. One of my goals has always been to go weekly, but I’m not sure if my thought processes or attention span have the momentum in them or not. I appreciate your patience with me during this trying time.
Thanks for being here! I appreciate your support. If you have any questions, comments, or screams of pain into the void, feel free to leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach out to me on twitter (movervoltage) or instagram (m.overvoltage). If you like what you’ve read, consider sharing it with a friend. Thank you so much, stay safe <3
Well said, Madeleine! Wow, it's crazy how much we have in common. I too grew up in a conservative town, attended a majority-white, conservative college, and I've slowly been making the shift from more libertarian to more left-of-center views. Still can't call myself a liberal or a leftist (too much of a Catholic for that). But it is nice to see I'm not alone in my concern for others in the world!