'The Decline' (1999) by NOFX

Going on and on about Decline is a pastime for conservatives. But then 'The Decline' - a lurid eighteen minute portrait of Imperial America by punk's once-reigning left-statists - is remarkably similar to the Tory-prog dystopias of, say, Rush; the gross length, scifi gloom, and self-aggrandising individuality.

Where 'The Decline' is a cartoon version of Chomskyan politics, Rush were cartoons of the novels of Ayn Rand (herself a cartoon Nietzsche). Rush are (or were) the pop embodiment of giving in to romantic individualism. Now, we know this as the basis of right-wing life - but even the most Left leftist has to have some: at minimum,they glory in their ability to see through the neoliberal individualist script of our times. Since NOFX care about said oppressive script, we arrive at a contradiction which is also the principal contradiction in punk: how can the desire for social justice coexist with the love of doin' what the fuck you want? Do you want Chomsky or do you want Kant? 1

Decline is notable for other reasons - it is long-punk and it is concept-punk and is still, somehow, good - but as usual I fixate on the ideological.

Unquiet disquiet

What exactly is has declined? America? Democracy? Morals? The economy? Punk? The song is, of course, vague. This is the furthest point downstream of the Frankfurt School’s books, and all that survived the crossing are certain idées fixes, particularly a sense that capitalism has irresistible mind control powers, needed to explain people’s lack of upset about being exploited and misled. (“Hegemony”.)

• Reading #1: "Civil society has declined. Capitalism infected everyone with malign individualism, and now we are numb, solipsistic and stupid. It's over; we lost." An adolescent political economy, sure - but that's all you need to get started. Through this clumsy song, I learned the phrase "laissez faire" (LAY-ZY FAIR) aged 12 and correctly associated it with vast institutionalised suffering. That's not nothing.

So: demand both ‘radical freedom’ and ‘social justice’. Thing is, social justice often requires sacrifice on someone’s part (even if that sacrifice is only undoing an existing inequity, as with progressive taxation, or minding your tongue): you can’t have it and ‘radical’ negative liberty. I don’t think there can be any such thing as Left-libertarianism. This isn’t a particular failing of punk; the philosopher Richard Rorty calls the tension between public and private virtues the most intractable question in all ethics and politics.

Is there really a contradiction? In some cases you can get both - e.g. encouraging women to opt out of traditional submissive social crap invariably boosts both individual women and their society - or as regards decriminalising drugs - which is warranted by the awful consequences of prohibition alone (cf. creation of an under-underclass out of the reach of public services; toxic adulteration; vast police expansion; the destructive prison cycle). But not always, or often.

More generally, we just want individualism which doesn’t drag down the collective. This is not as easy as you might think. Maybe you can salvage freedom-talk by saying “we want freedom for everyone, not just rich white men - which is what ‘freedom’ has tended to mean in practice”. But that requires heavy intervention, and some people understandably insist on seeing (government) intervention as the opposite of freedom. (I don’t see how this can stand up to basic knowledge of what societies do to certain unlucky groups.) The contradiction is real - and philosophy’s perennial failure to cope with it means we have to navigate between its horns by ear. This actually works ok, provided you are at least minimally compassionate, and don’t mind losing ideological purity.

A bypass: in the political climate of much of the world, to argue for this kind of justice - via positive discrimination, progressive taxation, strong welfare, active diversity education - is already to be nonconformist - and so to begin to be individual. But even though I recognise the large-scale suffering, and agree with the project goals, I’m not militarising. This is because I think they (the New Left) are wrong about the decline of civil society, compassion, and free thought. Also because we’re too clumsy en masse for revolution to have much hope of serving up anything but cool speeches, disappointment, and blood. I’m with Rorty, bizarre wet pragmatist though he is. The core claim of Chomskyans is that “the United States [et al] are run by a corrupt elite which aims at enriching itself by immiserating the Third World.</span>” The sometime global bully, sometime quasi-fascist.

For some reason, this clear-sighted attention to the crimes of empire is usually tied to rejection of the Enlightenment (impartiality, individualism, technology, all that good stuff). Suspicion is always warranted, things have been bad indeed; but they would have been worse without Enlightenment ideas. We are "willing to grant that [the West] could slide into fascism at any time, but proud of its past and guardedly hopeful about its future."

Shall we get on to the actual song?

The ‘song’

First off: The Decline is really an EP of many 30 second songs stitched together. Its narrative is choppy: “BOO! Issues! Greed’s bad, nationalism’s bad, guns are bad, stupidity is bad, cultural hegemony is bad, drug laws are bad, powerful Christian right are bad, egoism’s bad, apathy’s bad. facelessly unfair economics, governmental murder.”

1. Boo! Guns, irrationality, religion! (0:00 to 3:46)
   
2. Boo! war on drugs! prison! (3:46 to 6:15)
   
3. Boo! (Musical exposition) (6:15 to 7:17)
   
4. Boo sadness! (Call it anomie to be charitable) (7:17 to 9:42)
   
5. Boo! (Recap) (9:42 to 11:03)
   
6. Boo sadness! (11:03 to 13:57)
   
7. Boo everything! (The end of the world sounds like epic quietLOUD skate punk) (13:57 to end).
   
   I find it helpful to write out the themes. The main epic one at 6:15, 10:34, call it “[The Decline]”:
   
   

Chomsky trombone.

Kantian dumbasses

A second reading of The Decline’s decline involves wheeling in another bulky philosophical engine:

NOFX, super-rich band of Chomskyans, extremely permissive boys of the rationalist strain in punk are also, obviously, a dumbass band. Immature trolls full of puns, scat and innuendo.

Even so, their Decline is about rejecting immaturity, in the special moral sense that Kant used the word. (This immaturity is just refusing to think for yourself, whether out of fear or learned incapacity.) The song starts asking “Where are all the stupid people from?” (Nationalism is supposedly to blame. Also commerce: “The man who used to speak performs a cute routine.”)

This is what's thought to justify strong individualism: maybe it's only by standing alone you can attain certain heights - of originality, impartiality, hardness, spirituality. The problem for left libertarians is that thinking for yourself only sometimes leads to rejecting capitalism. So:

• Reading #2: "Kantian maturity has declined fatally, in America, in the C20th." In the absence of NOFX giving extended historical arguments about the relative consciousness of Americans: meh. It was always low, and there are more tools to increase it now than ever before. (NOFX are immature in the common sense, but at least a little mature in this elevated sense.)