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I remember listening to the original 'Not in Our Name' statement by Saul and it reinforced my strategic resolve in advocating for Palestinian human rights against the normative discourse. However, I have come to think that the existentialist, culturalist, voluntarist, elitist, and romanticist political orientations (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Spengler, Shmidt) has been a failure in general. In the rare case when its goals are realized (since as much as it talks about power, it has little understanding of its dynamics), more often than not, it produces a result that we correctly understand in retrospect as far right wing, even if we don't see it coming, because our moral sense caused us to not think it through due to our categories of understanding. This is the case for those who advocate for Israel, as a response to oppression and disenfranchisement (which was itself, the same culturalist approach to losing their ability to maintain their historical relations to land (as a peasantry), see the socialism of fools and Heidegger's dasien and discussions of rootedness / culturalized blood and soil politics) and treating categories of people as collectively responsible for their oppression and therefore, as worthy of dispossession as a form of collective justice. We should try to learn from the failure of their reasoning (not by inverting their categories, but questioning the whole orientation itself more fundamentally on its own terms, since it fails on its own terms). What is required for this liberation you think is just and due? Who will have to be disenfranchised to achieve it and do I believe in collective punishment based on nominal historical categories? What dynamics has/ will that produce and have I thought this through? I very much like and respect Saul, but I have come to have a very different understanding of historical ontologies and political divisions. Its fixity causes us to not reflect on dynamics and change and that gets us to not understand how things happen. However, we still have the opposition to genocide in common.

Part of the elitist orientation of the Nietzschian / Heideggerian approach is the trickle-down political understanding of nominal representation through a popular representation of 'dasien.' Saul calls it 'Black faces in high places.' This kind of nominalism neither impacts nor changes the situation of the group it claims to reflect overall, but only sets up narrow patronage networks which can impact a few individuals, leaving the rest worse off than before, since apparently their needs are nominally met by recognizing someone that is classified like they are. The ideas is that the impact is supposed to 'trickle-down' on the basis of community affinity and trickle down economics by identity group ( which is even more preposterous than, the traditional version of neoliberal trickle down nonesense; what a joke!). If political change is the goal, leftists need to stop deferring to this approach, as such, rather than just in particular cases. Do not invest your hopes in voices you like based on their expressive aesthetics. Be part of organizations that can effectively discipline representatives to be actually accountable to the popular will of those you claim to represent and not proportion influence to potential for economic contribution. The Democrats were a top down patronage network based party when they were the party of slavery, as well as of segregation and the KKK and they remain that after they have added new groups to their patronage network coalition. Stop expecting anything from this approach in general. It is not just which groups are included or excluded in the top-down patronage approach. It is not the problem that the Democrats didn't include a Palestinian voice or did not listen to this or that NGO which claims to speak on their behalf. The problem is this nominalist approach as such in contrast to a universalist / realist one. Solidarity is not between you and the representatives of a group (stop deferring to leadership as definitive authority) , it is between you and the mass of the group itself. They are not subjects of your pity or patronage, they are not your moral superiors or inferiors, they are your comrades and you need them for your mutual defense. A community does not share the bulk of its interests with its big or small business owners, but largely as workers in conflict with them (i.e. via unionization). The more the interests of workers are internally divided in relation to ownership, the less money and social power they have to impact anything, both as subgroups and in aggregate. If you subdivide, you can easily be played off against each-other.

Also, moral shaming based on evocative framing of production forms and processes as linked to the past, as if they are driven by a fallen cultural essence, rather than more pragmatic dynamics confuses the goal and the political approach. When you contemplate addressing this, rather than just feeling it, it leads you into some useless cul de sacs. This is more effective at inspiring quietism and withdrawal (back to the land, authenticity, Heidegger(the Nazi)) then it does effective political mobilization. What would it mean to withdraw from the implicated sins of the modern economy, seen as essential and unchangable due to historical genealogy rather than addressing conditions through our labour solidarity? Did it actually change anything when it was tried before? Back to the land; turn on, tune in and drop out. How is that going for you? Can this approach change production relations, as such? If I do handycrafts or grow a vegetable garden (which I do), how does this impact broader society? What can it change really? The approach is fundamentally unserious. Is this shaped by the choice to participate or not as a cultural protest or by power in relation to the reproduction of life? How can we understand power and forms of social organization as to why this form of protest was fundamentally ineffective and ostensibly politically meaningless? If anything, it tends towards cultural conservatism and social elitism (even as a counter-cultural form), which idealist moralism generally does anyway. Other than economic nostalgia, that will starve most people if enacted, it gives us no positive direction to go in to survive. It only tells us to submit to the will of our true betters since they know what is best due to their rootedness and authenticity. This is a long way around to reproduce forms of chauvinism that exist in many places around the world. I know Americans imagine the US as the center of the universe, but there are other things that happen that deviate from the narrative ontologies you abstract from your context. Trying to fit everything into your boxes is part of the problem.

Also, I don't see how not dancing to a song can actually further any tangible political goal. Maybe as an individual it indicates to some who see this act as a betrayal, as a form of solidarity, so they aren't alienated from you as an isolated unique and individual member of a coalition. That is, you will be admitted as a trustworthy ally by not sharing in a cultural activity, as an isolated individual. Honestly though, if this is their cultural-political line, I have a hard time believing they really believe in systemic change at all rather than individual moral posturing like a moral conservative. Church people posturing as the social elect among the masses of sin. If they were serious, or honestly, even better religious people they wouldn't abandon potential allies for such minor slights. This type of perscriptivism certainly wouldn't stop most people from dancing or doing anything else that prescriptive morality often dictates. Should everyone who liked 2LiveCrew back in the day be banned from political engagement? What would this achieve? Would it really protect women? How do you include prisoners if you are that rigid in your inclusion criteria? What would change socially if no one danced to this sort music? What would it change? We gonna bring back 90s Tipper Gore politics and call that radical again? There, moral majorities where acting from the centers of US state power with a large dominant social consensus among those with power... and yet their punitive approach other than hurting individuals, had no social impact at all. Their punitive approach made the transgression cooler and it did nothing to change behavior. Parental discretion labels became symbols that a work was transgressive, rebellious, and fun. What might have come from an anti-sexist, anti-violence position just reinforced racism at the time, which had more of a class character than it does now or at least there is more of a internal division now. It was seen a lumpen underclass art in a racialized context, in need of correction of a strong disciplinary father figure, like Bill Cosby presented himself as (Remember his 'pull up your pants rhetoric.') Rebellion against the rigid constraints of a rigid morality is what counterculture (including HipHop) largely embraced. What ends up as central to that art may not be always socially constructive, since negation doesn't fill in what should be in its place, but policing it just made it feel like genuine freedom and rebellion from joyless jerks who wanted to control everything in your life including what you liked to listen to. Maybe we need to not validate such forms of scolding and policing as if they lead to anything useful. Entertainment consumption does not reinforce behavior. If it did, everyone who watched crime and violence on TV would be a murderer. We are not such automatons reacting to cultural inputs, we actual react to our conditions of life and that leads behavior. Crime is more often economic or personal. Desperation is a large part of it. More broadly, social roles reflect social power dynamics, not ideologies, or cultural habits. (Why are women viewed by these cultural forms as objects that display wealth and status, as objects and not as people, who are potential friends or partners, not reducible to their bodyparts? What does that reflect in society and its crisis? What does the status they are seeking tell you about what they feel they are missing and what in the world explains why they might feel that they are missing something? i.e. Rampant unemployment, deindustrialization, austerity, hopelessness for ever getting a stable job or family life, leading to hedonism since you feel you have no possible future, not as individuals but for large populations. These conditions have social consequences both in life and art.) Systemic change is not an aggregate change of enough individuals or of institutions of moral leadership, it is a change in the dynamics that reinforce the distinctions in the first place and endow them with persistent meaning. Changes in relative power and shared interests changes relational commonsense. That is what need to be aimed for. Policing consumption or cultural habits doesn't go anywhere useful, particularly if you are interested in changing power dynamics in society for more than just a patronage scheme, who can be the lead scolds on MSNBC for the Democrats supporting genocide. You need the allies you can get if you are serious about actually winning and there are way greater sins than dancing to the wrong music that would be consequential grounds for dismissal from a movement; at least a serious movement. If this is not even movement connected, it has no meaning at all, just the moral politics of individual consumption, as if individual consumption changes impacted the world at all. Its narcissistic and not real; it has no mechanism of impact. Materialism not idealism.