#why is no one talking about the wonkafication of men

[sophie-frm-mars]

Ben Shapiro enters his willy wonka era

Disclaimer: Ben Shapiro is a morally bankrupt shitheel who hates women and he doesn't deserve the oxygen of publicity, but this fucking thing has given me brainworms and I need to smoke them out.

Okay so 2023 is doing something AMAZING to the brains of celebrity reactionaries. First Jordan Peterson wore his "twitter suit" with a matching tie that has "little elon musk heads" on it, most aptly described by Sam Seder as JBP entering his "willy wonka era"

But this morning I wake up to see that everyone's favourite facts and logic boy Ben Shapiro has created this fucking monstrosity. This rube goldberg machine of political "science". This mousetrap-ass load of bullshit. I have to conclude that Shapiro is also entering his Wonka era.

So what the fuck is going on here?

Benny has concocted from his powerful mind a formula for determining "governmental legitimacy" which is just such a beautiful artefact of who Ben Shapiro, as opposed to his colleagues, truly is. Clearly the dream of the Intellectual Dark Web never went away, and while others realise that their role within the fetid reanimated corpse of modern conservatism is to troll and clown their way through towards their political vision, Shapiro thinks he's doing real serious business here.

So we're going to use maths to acertain a quality that is by definition subjective. Legitimacy is going to be nil if you consider a government ideologically abhorrent, and if you're a party zealot who believes with total burning passion in the project of the current administration, legitimacy is going to be absolute. That's just fantastic. I love maths. I did my maths A Level two years early. I can't wait to dive in here and learn some maths with Mr. Ben Ass P-word

So the factors in the equation: he uses social solidarity (S), the responsiveness of the government to citizens (R), the "avoidability" of the government (A) which isn't as silly as it sounds to begin with, the efficacy of the government or its ability to implement (I) what it means to do, and all of that is divided by the violation of people's rights (V), the strictness of the laws or regulations (R') and lastly the force used to maintain those laws, or as Shapiro has it the aggressiveness (A').

I'm gonna work backwards through these factors because I think we'll have more fun that way, but I wanna say first that although Shapiro's purpose in producing this abomination is in trying to make it look like you can scientifically determine the legitimacy of a government in a numerical figure, sometimes equations in science are produced not to use exact units or even perform the calculation in them but to get us to agree on the factors that are involved in constituting something like "governmental legitimacy". I wanna say secondly that only a conservative hyperfreak of Ben's calibur could think "governmental legitimacy" is really the Big Political Question of our current moment. Thirdly I'll just say that if you were going to try to make this calculation, the fact that no part of this equation measures how closely the ideology of the government matches the desires of the population (I know, how would you even) or how legally the government's mandate was obtained (again, a nightmare) is just, basically pretty funny.

Okay

Aggressiveness (A') is a reasonably quantifiable factor. We could measure the police budgets per capita that are put towards militarisation, the number of incidents of police brutality supposing we could get non-state reporting on that, the number of police, perhaps a weighted scale of different policing tactics. However, there's already a problem observable in the real world: policing is not uniform. Police brutality, more militaristic policing, more extreme tactics and even vitally where the police are deployed is highly racialised, differentiated by class strata, and as is readily apparent in the imperial core right now, even partisan as police are far more likely to consider leftist protest or disruption to be a serious threat than its right wing counterparts.

Regulations (R') seems theoretically quantifiable, and there are others who have tried to quantify how strict and authoritarian the policy environment created by a government is. We're gonna keep coming back to this same problem though: legitimacy is subjective and if an entire population were absolutely A-OK with being surveilled, jailed, brutalised, taxed, banned, prohibited, spanked and spit on by the state, and they'd voted the government in with a landslide majority to try and do it to em as nasty as possible, many would argue that would be a legitimate government.

Violation (V) of people's rights is again theoretically quantifiable, but which rights, and whose? because Ben Shapiro believes that abortion is murder, and believes that someone's rights are being violated whenever an abortion is performed. Not only that but he has also argued in several places that the pregnant person is being let down by society when they get an abortion because they deserve instead to have support to have and raise the baby, or be able to put the baby up for adoption confident in the quality of life that the child will receive. If you think abortion is murder, the "violation of rights" alone will make the denominator of this fraction absolutely enormous and, unsurprisingly, make the legitimacy of any government that allows abortion to be practiced very very low. Would you look at that, it's like legitimacy is subjective or something waow

Implementation (I) of the things that the government intends to do is actually pretty quantifiable but we need a coefficient attached to implementation here, right? One that can swing positive or negative, that tells us how well the government aligns with the will of the people, because a very effective government that does the opposite of what the people want is more illegitimate than an ineffective government that intends to do what the people want. Maybe that's in Shapiro's definition to begin with, an implementation of what the people want.

Avoidability (A) is actually a very fun and interesting metric for citizen consent. Can people leave if they don't like what the government is doing. I don't actually disagree with the idea of this factor relating to legitimacy at all, and I think it's a fairly decent point, although I'd prefer to see it factor in the possibility of living outside of government jurisdiction within the territory of the state, as well as weighing up the ability to engage partially with state jurisdiction, which would be a much more robust way of understanding "avoidability". Shapiro just defines it like "if people don't like the government they should move", and what can I say but

In all seriousness that opens up a whole second world of "avoidability" right? Like what resources do people have, how mobile are they, can they bring their belongings, resources, family with them if they decide to exercise this right to exit? We can't simply measure the number of emigrants from a country to see how many people "didn't consent" to the government there, because there are all sorts of reasons you wouldn't want to simply move country if you didn't agree with the legitimacy of the government. I'm a trans woman living in Britain and I have to constantly assess and reassess the balance between how much government policy could ruin my life and the enormous weight, cost, effort, alienation, distress and time lost if I had to move country.

Responsiveness(R) is pretty funny to me, because like... responding to what? If I write my local MP to ask for gay space communism and they throw my letter in the bin, they aren't at all responsive to my needs, but like, should they be? Or rather, should they be expected to be? Moreover if they reply and explain that Rishi Sunak isn't amenable to sucking and fucking aboard the starship enterprise, or reply and lie to me and say that it's totally gonna happen if I just vote Labour at the next election, is that responsiveness? If I'm on a waiting list for healthcare, and I write an official complaint to the government body responsible, and they write back telling me I'm not going to get treatment any sooner but they're working on it, is that responsiveness? Okay, supposing responsiveness is quantified in a scale of how quickly and effectively a government directly implements what the citizens ask it to do, we again arrive at the questions of "which" and "who". If our government has a massive majority support and most people are really happy with what they're doing, then the vast majority of complaints and expressed desires from the population will come from the political minority. If the government responds to those requests and implements the will of the political minority, they'll probably become immediately hysterically unpopular, but check this out: then the political majority who previously supported them will start to complain, and then, being a hyper-responsive government, they'll implement very effectively what they've been asked to do, and then the original complaints will return, which they'll respond to, and on and on and on. So the most responsive government imaginable is actually a government that basically everyone would consider illegitimate because they'd appear to be spineless and fickle. This is such a metric I'm actually laughing out loud writing this

Social solidarity (S) is so fascinating. So fascinating. Shapiro explains that a measure of lack of social solidarity is that people will vote for their candidate essentially just to offend their neighbour. I'm not gonna even really engage with this argument pretty much constructed to pander to "Biden stole the election" conspiracy theorists, but rather I wanna talk about how interesting it is that a far-right pundit, religious fanatic and some-time conservative pseudo-libertarian like Ben would use "solidarity" as a positive factor in constructing his model of legitimacy. Again, if we imagine extremes of this, it doesn't work in his calculation at all. A population with extreme social solidarity may well support an authoritarian regime that is constantly refining the vile machinery of necropolitics, or it may be that the population has solidarity because they have raised group consciousness in response to their oppression by the government, so two easy conceptions of social solidarity instantly give opposite outcomes in terms of governmental legitimacy.

What's really interesting to me is how this social solidarity metric fits into the way that people like Ben construct racist propaganda about China. The underpinning myth of China in American conservative propaganda is as a place where the population is in total agreement about the legitimacy and mandate of the ruling party (although in reality this is obviously far from true) and that basis of "mob rule" allows the CCP to persecute political minorities without repercussions. If the picture that American conservatives paint of China were true, the CCP would be an extremely legitimate government at least on this one metric. What Ben has accidentally stumbled upon with his social solidarity metric is a conception of authentic democracy which is, far beyond his ability to assess and analyse, the perfect opposite of his entire political project. If people get together to discuss their problems, to raise group consciousness, to debate and discuss and agree on how they would like the world they live in to function, and then form a government based on their social solidarity, or form no government based on their solidarity and live through direct democracy for that matter, then Ben is saying, that would be a very legitimate political project. Workers of the world unite, says comrade Shapiro