I’ve recently been listening to the Serial podcast series, beginning with the latest season on the so-called Trojan Horse Affair, and then going back to the earlier ones.
The third, fourth and first seasons are the best ones, in that order, and I recommend listening to them to get a good sense of some incredibly fucked up things happening in the US judicial and schooling system (which extrapolates to other capitalist societies), while realizing just how feckless and ineffectual liberalism is in being able to address them effectively, if at all.
There are two specific limitations that I want to hone in on. First there is the utter inability to even consider any kind of transformative, systemic solution to what are clearly diagnosed as systemic problems. Take for example the third season on the criminal justice system. If you listen to it all the way through, it becomes evident that the entire system, from police to prosecutors to public defenders to judges, is structurally corrupt, racist, purely interested in advancing one’s own interests at the expense of things liberals claim to care about most: justice and fairness.
There are some incredibly disturbing cases cited, like a black man being pulled over and basically kidnapped by a cop, thrown into an area of a police station that no one even knows the existence of, dark, damp, no bathroom, left there for days on end without any charge. He then miraculously gets out because his relatives start looking for him, and then he wants to sue the state for having kidnapped and basically tortured him. But he isn’t able to because the local government in the area he was kidnapped in has no money. So even if you win a ten million dollar settlement, it’s irrelevant, as the state will just say they can’t pay it. The podcast host just shrugs at this, and moves on.
What the fuck?! There are so many moments like this. In season four, “Nice White Parents”, the focus is on gentrification and racism in the schooling system. They go over in meticulous detail, covering the entire history of the public schooling system in one area of New York, how corrupt and racist the entire thing was and remains to this day. But by the end there again the shrugging. “Well, what can we do? Maybe it’ll just get better if we vote for more Democrats.”
It’s this acknowledgement of the pathologies of capitalism, that ripple throughout every facet of society and affects every person from the underclass in horrific ways daily, but always from a distance. The people who host and write these shows are affluent upper middle class liberals. They’re going into these communities as tourists, as curious onlookers, who point out how terrible this and that is, but who are constitutionally incapable of addressing the underlying, root cause of it all. Because that would mean having to talk about radical, transformative, systemic change, which puts their own social and economic existence under threat. It introduces an instability in the very system that allowed them to have this role of outside observant, who can dip their toes into this daily horror, but then withdraw and return back into the security of their affluent predominately white suburb or gentrified neighborhood.
But I don’t want to commit the same error and blame these people as individuals. It’s a reflection of their class status, of their material conditions, and the ideology that naturally emanates from it.
There is a second limitation of liberalism that comes out of this podcast series that’s noteworthy. It’s from the second season, which is by far the most boring and worst, in large part because of this limitation. The subject is some American soldier, Bo Bergdahl, who allegedly went AWOL in Afghanistan. It’s not interesting at all, except for what it reveals about how liberals view anything that happens outside the borders of the US and the West more generally. Their role as outside observers is even more explicitly visible here, but now not as tourists or curious onlookers, but as representatives of the American empire, of the colonial master who looks upon their ‘backward’ subjects with contempt and total disinterest.
Whereas in the other seasons you get a detailed analysis of what exactly the problems are, though never going to the level of its underlying causes, here there’s not even a slightly critical attitude toward the invasion of Afghanistan, the war on terror, the mass killing of Afghans by US troops, the torture, the humiliation, just nothing at all.
There’s an episode where they focus on the immediate aftermath of that soldier’s disappearance, when the army command gives the order to scour the entire country to find him. Soldiers invade villages, terrorize civilians; one former soldier talks about how they forced women to unveil in front of them after they broke into their homes.
The host of the podcast just mentions this passively. In the US context you at least had long discussions of how being black and persecuted by the cops and treated unfairly has all sorts of deep psychological impacts on you, and it stays with you for years if not forever—here it’s like they’re not even human. They’re just props to tell the story of some annoying fucking asshole American who left his base.
If you want to get a look inside the mind of a liberal “progressive” who thinks they stand at the peak of morality and civilization and reason, while clearly exhibiting just how narrow and limited their ideology really is, it’s worth checking out Serial.
I’ve been very critical, but the seasons I mentioned are very well produced, written and researched, and it’s entertaining, so you’ll get more out of it than just an awareness of the limitations of liberalism.
He was released recently, right?