The first hostile comment arrived right on schedule. It appeared under In Relative Opacity, the first post this publication ran, and it engaged nothing the piece actually said. Nothing about the hearing room, nothing about the vote, nothing about the thinness of who shows up to govern Los Angeles. It went straight past all of that to the word behind the masthead, and it knew exactly what it wanted to say:
“Socialism is a myth built on lies... it creates an equal amount of poor people who have no motivation to do better... The wealthy and the doers create the jobs and the taxes from all of that run the system... You will never see socialism in Beverly Hills or in any community where people want to truly better themselves... Capitalism may not work for everyone, but socialism works for no one. Give me the American dream.”
The hostility is unremarkable; hostility is the weather out here. The fluency is the interesting part. Read the comment again and notice that nothing in it is responsive. It has the cadence of a thing said many times before, under many different posts, needing nothing from any of them. Each sentence arrives pre-assembled: the makers and the takers, the moochers and the doers, the dream that works for anyone willing to work it. The comment is not an argument. It is a recitation.
Gramsci had a name for the reservoir this kind of speech draws from. He called it senso comune, common sense: the sediment that history deposits in all of us, fragments of religion and folklore, dead science and living prejudice, absorbed rather than reasoned into, contradictory and yet experienced as obvious.1 Common sense is what thinking sounds like after hegemony has done the thinking for us. None of which means the commenter is stupid. It means he is fluent, and fluency has a supply chain. Somebody manufactured each of those sentences, and they keep circulating because they do work. Ask what the work is and the comment becomes genuinely interesting. Who benefits when “the doers create the jobs” feels obvious? What becomes invisible when poverty is explained by motivation? What does the Beverly Hills line protect from examination?
So: a series. I am calling it Common Sense, and it will run here in Marginalia, one objection at a time. Each entry takes its title from the objection itself, in quotation marks, in the words it actually arrived in. Each entry asks two questions of its specimen: whether it is true, and what work it does regardless. And each entry routes through Los Angeles wherever the city offers material, which is more often than you would think, because the vernacular catechism of anti-socialism runs aground on this city in instructive ways. Who will pay for it? The voters of the City of Los Angeles answered that at the ballot box in 2022, and Planned Walls looked at what the money is buying and what stands in its way. It has never worked anywhere? The largest municipally owned utility in the country delivered the water in the objector’s glass this morning. You will never see socialism in Beverly Hills? Beverly Hills, a separate city that likes to be mistaken for a neighborhood, may be the most collectively provisioned real estate in America: racially covenanted into existence, subsidized by the federal mortgage interest deduction, shielded by a California constitutional amendment passed in 1978. The wealth there is collective provision, captured. Readers of the Rothstein note already know half of that story; the entry will tell the rest.
Two commitments, so the series does not become a shooting gallery. First, every objection gets its strongest available form. When the entry concerns economic calculation, the interlocutor will be Hayek, not a comment section; if an answer cannot survive the serious version of the objection, it has not earned the easy one. Second, the objections stay in their own words. The series is a study of how these beliefs circulate, and the circulation happens in kitchens and comment sections, in the vernacular, in the exact phrases that come out at Thanksgiving. The phrasing is data.
Which is where you come in. Send me the objections as you have actually heard them: from the cousin, the coworker, the guy at the gym, the official in a hearing, the comment under the post. Skip the polished think-tank versions; send the sentences as they arrived, verbatim as memory allows. Reply to this email or leave them in the comments. Sources stay anonymous, wording stays intact, and the best specimens become entries.
Readers of The Colonized Horizon will recognize this as the same question worked from the other end. That essay asked why we dream in the language of capital. This series inventories the phrases the language is made of.
Gramsci one more time, because he saw all of this from a prison cell. History, he wrote, deposits in each of us an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory, and the first task of critical thought is to compile one.2 The commenter closed by telling me I needed to wake up. On that much we agree. This is what waking up looks like: the inventory, compiled in public, one obvious sentence at a time.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 323–343.
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 324.