conventionally radical

Let's call it 'radical common sense'

Beyond the narcissism, this is where the lies come from, and where the belief comes from that a lie is true, must be. The truth is not enough, these people think; I have to tell the story that will get results, results that will testify to their deeper truth.

But the deeper problem, I think, is that telling stories is the only way these people can conceptualize getting results. And because appealing to the public sphere to be scandalized and to demand reforms is the only kind of result they can envision – because this is how they imagine justice works – the story will inevitably become what it needs to be to appeal to that kind of conscience, whatever will appeal to that sense of the public’s fickle taste. No one in the West will care about the reality of Syrian repression, thinks Tom MacMaster; I need to invent an Angelic White Victim to speak in place of those whose stories are not, as such, sufficiently compelling to compel action can only speak and be unheard.
[. . .]
It’s hard to imagine a future without militaries or a world without capitalist production, because we don’t live in that world, or that future; everything we do know about the range of possibilities we inhabit is derived from the economic and political conditions of it, of our knowable world. And since we live in a world that produces capitalist exploitation as reliably and as organically as militaries produce conflict and police produce criminals, we will always have difficulty in imagining what a system that didn’t organically do so would look like; we will tend to be confined to the solutions which that system produces for itself, which the world we live in makes thinkable, possible. In short: we can imagine killing Kony, or fining or shunning Apple only because doing so would do nothing to disable the systemic forces that make Kony possible in the first place, would do nothing to change the system that makes it economically “necessary” to treat workers the way Foxconn does.

The limitations of the politics of telling stories to scandalize the public sphere. The limitations on imagination imposed by social structure. Yes, of course, well said.

But somehow it feels as if it's by rote, both the essay itself and my "of course" reaction. That says as much about me as about the essay, that I've passively absorbed enough intellectualized radicalism that I've developed an "of course" reaction. Yet that also means that intellectualized radicalism is enough of a codified genre that it's possible to pick up its cues passively over a few years. I suppose there's nothing wrong with being a genre, establishing its conventions as common-sense for the genre's practitioners and audience.

I feel like there's a point I've not quite gotten to yet, but maybe I'll return to this later.