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The Spread of the Culture War and the New Politics of Denial and Superstition

Election Results from the European Union
Many of my former comrades are wringing their hands about the turn European elections are taking these days. They worry that various “far right” parties are taking Europe by storm and are about to create authoritarian fascist regimes that suppress people’s basic political rights, such as their freedom of assembly, speech and movement.

But the reality is that many of these parties, while historically right-wing and anti-immigration, are fueled by anti-authoritarian voters who are already experiencing progressive, globalist governments limiting their freedom of assembly, speech and movement. Parties like Alliance for Germany, Brothers of Italy and Reform UK certainly do have their share of disturbing supporters and do fan the flames of nativism.

But to everyday folks, these parties are the only ones promising to stop jailing people for refusing to use wrong-sex pronouns, stop working with Big Tech and the American Military-Industrial Complex to censor and surveil our everyday communications, explore a policy of détente rather than escalation on Europe’s Eastern border, safeguard people’s right not to be fired for political wrongthink and keep men out of women’s sports and spaces. They are the parties that express respect for farmers, veterans and other vocations admired by the working class but belittled by the commissars.

So I think the fear that these parties represent anything other than, at absolute worst, a lateral move, when it comes to people’s political rights and basic freedoms. Furthermore, these is no evidence to suggest that continuing to ramp up migration into societies unable to handle such high levels is somehow going to produce less “hate” towards minorities than the migration restriction policies of the European right. Let us remember that, when fascism was first on the rise in the 1920s, it was pragmatic reductions in migration that helped to calm tensions, reduce anti-immigrant violence and prevent the rise of fascism in many countries, including the US and Canada.

What troubles me about these parties and their rise is not that. It is the way in which they are expanding the reach of the most pernicious elements of the Anglo American culture war. Many of these newly ascendant parties on the right, and new parties trying to represent the Old Growth Left, like George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain and Sahra Wagenknecht’s Reason and Justice Alliance of Germany, share a feature uncommon in European political parties, even highly conservatives ones, just a few years ago.

They take pseudoscientific positions on the climate crisis. I do not merely mean that they pursue policies that will increase carbon emissions. Parties across the political spectrum do that, with various justifications or, increasingly frequently, none at all. Indeed, as British Columbia and Germany have recently shown, Social Democratic-Green coalition governments can be the most effective at building pipelines, burning coal and fracking gas. Conservative parties wish they could match the kinds of alliances Greens and Social Democrats can make with Big Oil, like the $6 billion in new subsidies the NDP and Greens handed companies like Petronas and Royal Dutch Shell. As I have written before, nothing raises investment capital for a new pipeline better than a photo of Greta Thunberg posing with the leader of the jurisdiction in which it is to be built.

The battle between the British Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party (that guy has staged more political comebacks that I have ever attempted!) is a microcosm of the upsetting spread of the Anglo American culture war through the whole of the Global North, reshaping the First World’s epistemology and experience of community.

In the 1980s, political parties of all stripes accepted the Greenhouse Effect as part of a long-term scientific consensus and pledged to take decisive action to address it. The political debate was about which parties’ plans for dealing with the climate made the most sense and were most cost-feasible. But in the 1990s, that shifted. With the defeat of the regimes of Brian Mulroney and George H W Bush, a new kind of conservative climate politics came to the fore: leaders like Stockwell Day, Stephen Harper, Newt Gingrich and Ralph Klein did not deny that the Greenhouse Effect was real. They simply maintained that it wasn’t that big a deal and, besides, there was no point in doing anything because India’s and China’s economies were expanding and would increase emissions anyway, and besides, it would be way too costly to actually do anything effective anyway. I characterize this position as “climate nihilism.”

But in Europe, conservative parties remained in the state of 1980s American conservatism until recently, with leaders like Angela Merkel and Rishi Sunak still slinging the climate politics of a Mulroney. Farage eclipsing Sunak would constitute British conservatism leaping directly from climate action to full-on denialism, skipping a whole generation of nihilism.

The Rise of the Denialists
With the rise of Trump, climate nihilism was deposed as the normative position of the right. Climate denialism took its place. As I have discussed in other essays, I continue to use the term “denialism,” despite its pejorative connotations because it is descriptive of a particular way of structuring belief. Climate denialists have no shared or stable position on how the climate does work, only on how it does not.

As I have stated in other essays, climate denialists comprise four main intellectual tendencies:

  • individuals who believe that humans cannot, by definition, change the climate; some base this belief on a view that only God can change the earth’s climate; others base their belief on the idea that the earth is very very big and we are very very small;
  • individuals who believe that carbon atoms in the atmosphere do not have a highly efficient insulating effect but instead that they either (i) are incapable of producing an insulating effect at their current density, (ii) are incapable of producing an insulating effect at any density, (iii) are reflecting so much heat away from the earth that they are actually cooling it;
  • individuals who follow the new thinking of Patrick Moore that atmospheric carbon atoms do rapidly warm the planet and that we must increase global temperatures by ten degrees Celsius as quickly as possible because (i) we must do so to ward off an impending ice age (ii) the planet must be helped to reach its full life-supporting potential, which can only be realized under Eocene hothouse conditions;
  • individuals who believe that the inherent inaccuracy of long-term climate forecasting models for a chaotic, complex system like the atmosphere discredits the underlying science of the effects of atmospheric carbon and has demonstrated that there cannot be a Greenhouse Effect

I say “tendencies” rather than camps or groups because climate denialists will switch between these positions multiple times, often in a single conversation. When they do this together, they tend to feel affirmed and agreed-with, even if the person they are talking to is directly contradicting a claim they have just made. This is even more maddening when one is arguing with a denialist and they switch among these positions in the course of a single conversation.

So, the spread of climate denialism from the original Anglo white settler states, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US across the Atlantic, to the UK and onto the continent is a concern, not just when it comes to public discourse but because of the function denialism performs.

In other essays, I have written about how climate denialism does have clear pro-social functions, like the way it seems to reduce the celebration of child endangerment and abuse. But I want to suggest that its primary function is one of boundary maintenance, of community construction. Because climate denialism is not a stable set of ideas, an ideology or an alternative scientific theory, it is not persuasive, from a logical perspective. You cannot become convinced of denialism in the way you become convinced of an idea.

I have watched a number of people become climate denialists, people I respected and continue to respect. These people have a common story: they, like me, were progressives. They, like me, were canceled. They, like me, found a new and welcoming community on the anti-authoritarian populist right.

They, in other words, were people who had been traumatically rejected by long-term friends and communities in which they had felt safe, and were followed to their new community by feelings of profound unsafety. So, when they saw that contemporary Anglo-American conservatives use climate denial as a form of community boundary maintenance and identification, they were strongly motivated the make their position on the right secure.

Their motivation was, of course, conditioned not by how conservatives handle pluralism but how progressives have come to handle it. I work with conservatives all the time. Perhaps because they are constantly being inundated with refugees from the left, conservatives have developed a more pluralistic social contract. I can be their friend and comrade without being a conservative. My opinions on climate are not a firing offense, when it comes to our shared projects and relationships. But they do mark me as a non-conservative, a member of an ideological minority group temporarily sheltering in conservative society.

A key reason my friends and comrades have been so willing to adopt climate denial is their experience in progressive society. You see: over the past decade, just as conservatives have made the pseudoscience of climate denial their primary boundary maintenance condition, progressives have made their own pseudoscience, genderwang, theirs.

Like climate denialism, genderwang is a denialist community. It doesn’t deny the Greenhouse Effect. It denies something even bigger and more obvious: the existence of biological sex in the human species. And it, too, encompasses a set of mutually contradictory intellectual tendencies:

  • sex is assigned at birth by authoritarian genocidal medical personnel, not observed; there is no difference between male and female bodies other than the physically undetectable, immutable pre-existent sexed soul inside them; there are female penises and male vaginas; there is no way, from simply looking at a body, to know its sex; sex and gender are the same thing and people know their true sex, in their mind even in the womb and knowing it is their first conscious thought; people with vaginas lose races to people with penises because they are lazy, don’t try hard enough and are deliberately losing to make trans people look bad;
  • the invisible, undetectable, immutable, pre-existent soul inside people has a gender; a person’s gender can differ from their biological sex; in fact, with increasing frequency, the pre-existent gendered souls are born in the wrong-sex body; we must medically intervene to correct this birth defect by performing “gender-affirming” surgeries to make these bodies’ sex align with their gender; sex and gender are completely different things and people know their true immutable, pre-existent gender, in their mind, even in the womb, and knowing it is their first conscious thought;
  • we are all on a “gender journey” and our biological sex may change, sometimes multiple times, throughout our lives; thanks to new technologies, we can keep swapping out body parts and sex characteristics like Mister Potato Head, with absolutely no medical or psychiatric consequences; the only medical risk is not following a soul on its gender journey; sex and gender are sometimes the same thing and sometimes not, depending on what needs to happen next; and people’s knowledge of what their sex is shifts with their sex, itself, sometimes within a few hours.

As with climate denialists, sex denialists will only see these mutually contradictory ideas reinforcing each other. Like climate denialists, they might take all of these positions in the course of a single conversation or argument. But the consequences of noticing these contradictions are much more severe. They can lead to the loss of the custody of one’s children, loss of employment, loss of friendships and relationships, expulsion from churches and civil society groups and, in an increasing number of countries, incarceration.

As I suggested in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, the best community boundary maintenance is done with word salad, not sense, with pseudoscience and magical belief, not ideas or knowledge. Espousing belief in nonsense, in magic, in word salad can only measure one thing: allegiance to the community that shares this putative belief. The problem with making membership in a community contingent on a scientific belief or consistent ideology is the danger that someone espousing the belief is not a loyal member of the community because they might have simply been convinced of its veracity. Only magical belief and pseudoscience represent membership and loyalty, alone.

Straw Men and Only Straw Men
Another way one can detect that we are dealing with communities of magical belief is their tendency to never present the argument of their opponents but to always outrageously strawman it. There are lots of polarizing debates in which the adversaries clearly understand and accurately represent their opponents’ arguments.

Gun control comes readily to mind. Advocates for gun control focus their arguments on breaking down the idea that an armed populace is more effective at resisting tyranny. Gun control opponents focus their arguments on how little about the gun market law enforcement is capable of controlling, when the culture is hostile to that control. Looking back at the debate, it seems pretty respectful and responsible. People hear each other’s points and disagree.

Compare the popular gun control memes and claims of the Sex Denialist and Climate Denialist movements. They almost all entail presenting outrageous falsehoods about the beliefs of those outside the community, falsehoods easily debunked if there were any good faith direct interaction going on.

Common Climate Denialist claims include:

  • opponents believe every sovereign country has its own climate and atmosphere and any emission increases or reductions directly and immediately affect those in the country in which an emission originated’;
  • opponents claim that everywhere in the world is always hotter than it was the year before, that “average global temperature” means “local temperature everywhere”;
  • opponents all wish to end farming and switch to a diet of veganism and insects;
  • there was a scientific consensus in which opponents believed in the 70s and 80s, predicting an imminent global ice age;
  • opponents never believed in the destabilizing polar vortex or any other climate phenomenon that increases the number of unpredictable, unseasonable cold weather events, are completely taken by surprise by these events and are unable to explain them;
  • opponents believe that the climate has never changed before and have never heard of the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age or Darkening of the Sun and cannot explain these things;
  • opponents believe that their individual lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions will cause their personal lives to be less afflicted by warming and extreme weather events; and
  • opponents believe that carbon dioxide and methane are the only things in the atmosphere that affect climate.

Common Sex Denialist claims include:

  • opponents advocate that everyone’s genitals be inspected before they are permitted to enter a washroom;
  • opponents oppose people of both sexes using single-occupant washrooms;
  • opponents demand that children and adults conform to stereotypical roles based on their birth sex;
  • opponents want to hurt gender-confused children, either by driving them to suicide, brainwashing or violently assaulting them;
  • no homosexuals oppose sex denialism;
  • opponents hate homosexuals and want them to be subject to mass violence and assault;
  • opponents are completely focused on the genitals of trans-identified people because nothing other than their genitals distinguishes them from the sex class they are trying to identify into;
  • opponents are all social conservatives and motivated by religious intolerance;
  • opponents are led by a Scottish children’s book author and do not form their own opinions, instead fanatically following her diktats; and
  • no opponent genuinely cares about prison rape, women’s sports, rape shelters, child safeguarding or the health of gay and autistic youth; people adversely impacted by genderwang policies do not exist, deserve whatever happens to them if they do exist (because they are only claiming to be hurt because they are bigots), and are not and should not be genuinely cared-about by anyone else.

Not only are these claims all false; many actually describe the positions taken by sex denialists themselves, situationally, when engaged in making demands or claims that serve them.

The Crisis of the West
Shortly after I got to Tanzania, I was giving some business advice to local businessmen about getting investors for a ship-cleaning service at the Port of Dar Es Salaam. The meeting began, like a fair number of my discussions with middle class residents of Dar this year, with a conversation about the unseasonable extreme weather events the city was suffering and how the Greenhouse Effect was to blame. Later in the meeting, they asked me about how to spin their efforts to mitigate the climate impact of the disposal business to foreign investors. I asked if they knew what political parties their potential investors belonged to. The question seemed bizarre to them.

I then had to explain that, whereas, in most of the world, the Greenhouse Effect is a scientific fact for which evidence mounds up every day in the form of record temperatures and extreme weather events, it is a cultural belief in Anglo America, that if the investors were supporters of the Republican Party, for instance, any mention of climate change would drive away their investment.

And, returning to the European elections, what disturbs me is that belief in both biological sex and climate change, are being converted into cultural beliefs throughout the Global North, that, as we saw with the reception of the Cass Review in England, no amount of corroborated, factual information can cause people inside the “culture war” to change their opinion about very physically obvious things. As the contagion spreads, our societies are reflecting the United States, a country where the two main socio-political factions, the communities in which most people have to live, are structured, bounded, based on belief in pseudoscience, in magic.

The “most advanced” countries in the world are fast becoming the most superstitious. One is reminded of the late Qing Dynasty destruction of maps, that as China got smaller and less powerful, elites acted to destroy as evidence of the diminution, of the decline, by attacking the maps showing it.

The Enlightenment legacy of the West is clearly failing in its core, traditional territory. But if there is one reassuring thing that has been reinforced for me as I have met with people working on climate from Kenya, South Sudan, Egypt, Turkey, Tanzania, Ecuador, Peru and other places, it is that not every culture has abandoned these ideals. The world over, people still aspire to the ideals of scientific truth, human rights, democracy, and they are bewildered that people in the traditional territory of the West have abandoned them. But that is actually the story of the West. It has always been on the move. It is not a place or a people; it does not live in the blood but in the human soul.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Global Economic Order in One Scene

In 2007, my mother and I took a trip to four East African countries, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. It was an amazing trip about which I will say more at a later date. But there was one incident on that trip that, to me, crushes, to a diamond, the contradictions of the relationship between Africa and the West in the twenty-first century:

It was important to have a travel agent because every night, at midnight, Addis time, Ethiopian Airlines would “lose” all their reservations. If you didn’t have a travel agent on the case, your plane tickets would vanish if Ethiopian Airlines were not called that morning.

Our travel agent took a day off the day of our Nairobi-Addis flight and so when we got to the airport, our tickets were worthless. So, we went to the desk with copious paperwork and convinced the guy at the wicket that we did indeed have tickets despite the airline having no record of our reservation.

He told us that he would get us tickets. We just needed to sit down and wait. Thirty minutes later, we realized that he had vanished and was not working on our case. So I went to the wicket and went through the same process again, this time obtaining boarding passes that seated us in the gnarly crew seats at the back of the plane.

As we boarded the plane, we noticed that the man who had promised to get us tickets was now serving as the ticket-taker. And shamelessly took our tickets, no guilt that he had promised us that he would solve our problem and then abandoned us.

The stewardesses were pushed out of their seats and we were seated with a man in sandals and a very avant garde business suit. I was seated on the aisle, next to my mom. He was seated on the opposite side of her.

Once we were in the air, he opened his bag and pulled-out a rainbow-coloured blanket which he draped across his lap. He then got out the current edition of The Economist. And, once in the air, pulled down his pants under the blanket and began jacking off vigorously, masturbating until he came. To The Economist.

As the instructor of Global Economic History for the Simon Fraser University School of International Studies 2014-19, let me tell you: this is 100% of the information you need to understand the current global economic order.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

The Hour Is Later Than You Think: Canada in the Shadow of the Prorogation Crisis, Sixteen Years Later

In 2008, I made my first foray into writing for a mass audience during a dark period in Canada’s recent past, known as the “Prorogation crisis” in a guest column for Rabble.ca. I did so because the events that unfolded did not just lead to a disappointing political outcome; they revealed both a deep institutional susceptibility to authoritarianism in Canada’s constitutional order and a deep, largely unseen, cultural authoritarian substratum in Canada that was more Russian than English. A central theme of my published work ever since, and of my blog since I started it in 2011, has been trying to warn my fellow Canadians about the creeping authoritarianism of our institutions and culture.

The First Threat: The Canadian Online Harms Act
With a bill before parliament to suppress speech and jail opposition figures that would make Recep Erdogan blush we have to stop living in the past and lying to ourselves about the situation in which we find ourselves. The hour is later than you think. And pro-tip to Justin Trudeau: proper dictators never make repression like this so explicit. Only the weakest dictators pass nor do they need to pass laws that so explicitly suppress opposition speech and jail their opponents. Proper authoritarians do this through extra-legal means and trumped-up charges. Normal authoritarians do not need to lean on the apparatus of the state in this way, nor are most so shameless as to lay before the public what they are doing.

To be clear: if I return to Canada after Bill C-63 is passed, I am effectively returning home with a price on my head. That is because any person who finds an essay like this “hateful” can anonymously report me to a tribunal empaneled by the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Liberal government. This tribunal would not need to tell me who had accused me or what hateful act I was accused of, lest describing the act itself reveal the identity of my anonymous accuser. The bill sets the evidentiary standard for this tribunal lower than that of an ordinary court and explicitly states that (a) I would have no right to offer testimony or face my accuser and (b) simple accusation would be sufficient evidence for conviction.

If convicted, I would be fined $70,000 and $20,000 of that would be kicked back to my accuser. In other words, being offended by the online remarks of opposition activists and politicians could be a lucrative full-time job someone could do anonymously from the privacy of their own home. Of course, in my case, they wouldn’t get their $20,000 and I would end up in jail for non-payment of a fine.

Or maybe that would not even need to happen. Because the law also specifies that if the tribunal is convinced that a person is likely to make a “hateful” comment in the future, something like “no one is born in the wrong body. You are beautiful just the way you are,” they can be pre-emptively placed under house arrest, banned from using the Internet and subject to random drug-testing until the tribunal is satisfied that this person no longer presents a risk of uttering future hate-speech. Welcome to the Pre-Crime Division of the Canadian government.

Now, I am just a washed-up fringe left politician and failed child star nobody listens to. My life has mostly been Gary Coleman’s run against Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California.

But let’s think about Pierre Poilievre and all his candidates. Let’s think about Maxime Overdrive and all of his. How many times have the Prime Minister and his surrogates accused them of peddling hate speech, conspiracy theories and “unacceptable views”? And, worse yet, fervently believed themselves when they said it, as did many of their judicial and quasi-judicial appointees.

Has the Prime Minister not already asked “How long must we tolerate these people?”

While it is not the most likely outcome of passing C-63, which will more likely produce a slower diminution of free speech rights, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the bill will be used to incarcerate the leaders of the right-wing opposition parties and most of their candidates, enabling a default Liberal victory.

The Second Threat: Indefinite Prorogation
But this is not the only route by which we may be moving towards some kind of institutionally-anointed post-democratic authoritarian regime. And that is why we need to remember the Prorogation Crisis of 2008.

In 2006, when he received 36% of the vote and formed a minority government, Stephen Harper decided to govern as though he had a majority, using brinksmanship to stay in power. Trusting that at least one opposition party would be unwilling to face the voters at any given moment, Harper played chicken with Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe for two and a half years. And time and again, an opposition leader, usually the Liberals’ Martin, Graham or Dion, would buckle and refrain from voting against legislation they purported to oppose in order to avoid an election.

Unable to goad the Liberals into toppling the government and giving him another crack at winning a majority, Harper eventually called an election himself in September 2008. The campaign nearly produced the majority he sought but came twelve seats short.

Following the election, in which the Liberals suffered major losses, the opposition leaders decided this could not go on. Assembling a coalition of parties who had won 54% of the vote and 52% of the seats in the election, Stephane Dion hammered-out a left-green coalition agreement with Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton, a deal the business wing of the Liberal Party and the Central Canadian establishment found very troubling, with its massive funding for changing Canada’s energy system to a post-petroleum one.

Harper’s response was to demand that parliament be prorogued i.e. the Governor-General suspend the constitutional requirement that it meet shortly after the election and instead continue the pre-election government. Everyone knew what the subtext of this was. Harper wanted to give the business faction of the Liberal Party time to pull off a palace coup and replace Dion with someone who would continue giving Harper carte blanche to govern.

Initially the Canadian left thronged into the streets to support “The Coalition,” which seemed to be the collective expression of our shared dreams. I remember the rally at Nathan Philips Square in Toronto where I witnessed an example of the paradoxes of charisma whose like I had not witnessed since the 1996 Vancouver Film Festival when the stunningly beautiful, charismatic and talented Adrienne Shelley was unable to get a block of seats for herself and her three friends who watch her own movie, Sudden Manhattan at the Vancouver Film Festival. The cinematic opposite of Julia Roberts, Shelley seemed to small and unauthoritative in person that her own fans who had heard up to listen to her post-screening talk wouldn’t give her a seat at her own movie.

Watching Stephane Dion struggle through the crowd to get to the stage at Nathan Philips Square that cold day in December, while Mary Walsh vamped on stage, cracking jokes about his poor film-making abilities, I could see this thing was a house of cards.

That got clearer after the crisis did not conclude immediately. As Harper crafted his formal prorogation strategy and the Governor-General Michäelle Jean hit the law books, the stock market took a bad turn and, within a week, a found myself in an awkward conversation with my Communist Party member and trust fund heiress friend about how, while she had initially supported the Coalition, her finances were deteriorating and the country did need order, something Dion was not going to bring. She hated Harper and everything he stood for but…

This was reflected in the polls that came out in the ensuing days. A majority of supporters of every Coalition party except, profoundly ironically, the separatist Bloc Quebecois, now supported Harper continuing over their own party joining the government. It was these polls about which I wrote in Rabble, in which I suggested that this was not due so much to the kind of self-interest Canada’s Liberal elite were exhibiting but because their theory of political justice had changed.

“For Canadians, entitlement to rule comes not from the capacity to build a coalition representing the majority but instead from the capacity to discipline one’s core constituency. This is why, much as they find these attributes of Harper personally distasteful at a human level, Canadians appear politically undaunted by the image of a Prime Minister who rules his party by fear and centralizes power in his own hands. What offended Canadians about the likes of Randy White and other undisciplined, bigoted members of the Class of ’93 Reformers was not their bigotry, per se. It was the way their public statements demonstrated Manning’s inability to offer the discipline and control Chretien could.”

Resolve began to weaken, especially in the Liberal caucus, following Jean granting Harper’s request for prorogation. Harper, himself, was surprised by this turn of events. He was expecting the Liberal appointee to turn him down and to have to plead his case directly to the Queen. Jean was, after all, from the opposing, what we would now call “Globalist” faction of the elite.

But Harper was helped by a phenomenon over which my friend Kenneth lost his political life trying to warn us of back in 1999. In the fall of 1999, Jean Chretien broke with more than a century of tradition and appointed Adrienne Clarkson as Governor-General, Canada’s head of state. While the media were very excited that she was a non-white TV personality, Kenneth, speaking for the Monarchist League of Canada, publicly worried that we would, for the first time, have a Governor-General who was not a former privy councilor, had no legal training or experience and was completely unfamiliar with the operations of the complex interface between the government and the state in a Westminster constitutional monarchy. He actively worried about whether an untrained person could safely guard the most important valve in our entirely political system.

The New York Times decided to label his questions, “thinly-veiled racist thunderbolts” and suggested that he was the leader of an unseen network of Canadian white supremacists who did not believe a brown woman could be Governor-General. The story was carried on the wire services, and he spent the next two years contacting newspapers from Melbourne to Rio de Janeiro trying to get them to print the retraction his lawyer had wrung out of the Times.

Because Jean, like her predecessor, was utterly untrained and lacking both confidence and education in the core legal matters around which her job centred, she simply channeled the zeitgeist of her class when it came time to adjudicate the request that the new parliament be prevented from meeting until the establishment had re-established its control over the main opposition party.

While Mary Simon, the current occupant of Rideau Hall, at least has experience in government and the upper echelons of the civil service, she has never been a privy counselor, received a law degree or served as an MLA or MP. More importantly, cultural conditions, political polarization and class consciousness in Canada are in vastly worse shape than they were in 2008.

This is the Canada that used the Emergencies Act to stop a protest that more closely resembled an extended tailgate party than the insurgency the Prime Minister claimed it was. This is the Canada in which a drawing in sharpie based on a right-wing podcast joke on the side of a camper van Pierre Poilievre accidentally appeared near is being used as evidence of the white supremacist coup he is planning. The Convoy, the least violent, the least deadly, the most peaceful mass mobilization in Anglo America in the twenty-first century (compare to: Occupy, Free Palestine, Black Lives Matter, January 6th, Charlottesville) is routinely depicted by Trudeau and his ilk as a narrowly averted violent coup that required the suspension of Canadians’ civil rights.

I would argue that, although not the most likely outcome of his Liberals losing the election, there is a non-zero chance that, a completely sincere Trudeau might go to Mary Simon and request the indefinite prorogation of parliament and the continuation of his government until some future condition, like the replacement of Poilievre, is met, or new elections can be held uncontaminated by “hate” and “disinformation,” i.e. until additional censorship legislation can be enacted. And the residents of the progressiverse would applaud this as “saving democracy,” the way Rob Reiner keeps telling his twitter following that the US can only “save democracy” if every candidate except Joe Biden is removed from the ballot this November.

It is my most fervent wish that this article will be labeled in years to come as evidence that this was the moment that I lost it, when I was overtaken by paranoia and became consumed with fear of threats that were never present. But on the off chance that the hour is as late as I think, we need to start floating these scenarios in the public square if, for no other reason, than to get Canada’s progressive parties to convincingly assure Canadians that the things I fear they might do, they absolutely will not.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Our World Is Run By The Family Annihilator Patriarchs

A Discourse for All Communities
Due to the massive realignment our culture is undergoing and my distinctive place in it, I straddle multiple opposing discourse communities. As a person who is gender-critical, socialist and anti-authoritarian, a lot of my life entails code-switching because, to be effective, I cannot just work with the relatively small “gender critical” and “old growth left” communities where I feel most at home. And it is rare when I do not find myself engaged in an act of cultural translation, not carefully choosing different words to communicate the same idea to one audience that have used other words to communicate to another one.

Indeed, the fact that I do this was one of the justifying bases for the fifth cancelation campaign directed at me in 2023. Apparently, I was being immoral and misleading by communicating differently to my mainly anti-authoritarian populist audience on Twitter and my mainly eco-socialist audience on Facebook. Or so I learned from the clearly template-based correspondence I received from long-time friends and acquaintances last summer. Usually, this complaint appeared in paragraph two.

So, when I bust-out a term and it speaks immediately and clearly all the discourse communities in which I am present, to some degree, I take notice. I pay attention. And if there is one term I have generated in recent years that has done this, it is “Family Annihilator Patriarchy.”

One might expect my feminist, socialist, deep green comrades in Deep Green Resistance to like it but its most welcome reception has actually been among comrades on the populist right, people from whom I held the term back, thinking it would alienate them. But no, my neighbour, a producer of news round-up videos for grassroots Donald Trump supporters and beef importer-exporter and folks like him seem to be the biggest fans.

The Family Annihilator: A Peculiar Kind of Mass Murderer
Like many important ideas I have picked up over the years, I believe learned about family annihilators in a Law & Order script by Quebecois Quiet Revolutionary and Catholic Modernist René Balcer, the most prolific contributor to the franchise. Family annihilators are the most under-represented sort of mass murderer in our mass murderer-obsessed entertainment industry.

The Paul Bernardo-style serial killer sex fetishist, the David Berkowitz-style cop-taunting brilliant psychotic, the ruthless big score robber of the Die Hard franchise, the hostage-taking desperate man of Dog Day Afternoon, the man at the end of his rope pushed into a killing spree depicted in Joker and Falling Down: these are the staples of the mass murderers of the screen. Family annihilators make for more upsetting, more uncomfortably uncanny TV.

A family annihilator is a man who relishes his patriarch/provider role in his family. He is proud that his wife and children depend on him for their material and emotional needs, whether or not this reflects the material or emotional reality. Whether progressive or conservative, politically, in relational terms, he casts himself in the role of a retro, traditional patriarch.

Whether he does this as a put-upon, solicitous Woke dad who does all the cooking and cleaning as well as being the bread-winner, showing what a feminist he is or whether he does this as a pious, stern traditionalist “family head,” is not really of interest. The point is that a family annihilator sees his family’s happiness, success, even survival as contingent on him, his labour, his moral clarity.

And this is how he derives his sense of self-worth: the guy everyone depends on, who provides for everyone, who is to be admired not because of his intrinsic value but because he, alone, he personally upholds a whole family.

When such a man faces circumstances that will materially or reputationally depose him from his role as patriarch, especially if they entail public shaming, he snaps. Major financial losses, conflict with the law, unemployment, etc.: these sorts of things inspire family annihilators to murder their putative dependents.

Their logic in doing so is this: their dependents’ lives would be over without them. They could not possibly handle the shame, poverty, loss of status that is coming. So the only responsible thing to do, the only way to actually carry out one’s obligations as a patriarch is to murder them all before they can experience the shame, poverty and loss of status. They see this act of mass murder as altruistic.

Of course, it is anything but. It is narcissism crushed to a diamond. The annihilator is the one who cannot handle the shame. So he murders the witnesses to his shaming. The annihilator feels valueless. So he murders his putative dependents before they can realize how little they actually need him.

Conservative Annihilators: Trump, Bolsonaro and Duterte
I first developed the idea of the family annihilator patriarchy when I was in my final years as a left-progressive in response to the Trump Administration’s grudging compliance with an international demand for its emissions, climate and temperature targets more than a year into its mandate. When it finally did produce them, the Trump Administration inaugurated a new school of thought in the discourse community called “climate denialism,” by stating that its goal was to emit as many hydrocarbons as possible as quickly as possible to achieve its goal of raising global temperatures by 16 degrees Fahrenheit (“Eocene Hothouse”) by the end of the century, a rate of temperature change that has never failed to produce a mass extinction event.

When I read this, I thought of the first time I went bowling, at the age of six or seven. Having very poor hand-eye coordination, something with which I suffer to this day, I was completely unable to knock over any pins. Feeling increasingly frustrated as my peers were largely able to pull this off, I began bowling directly into the gutter, my only option for regaining my sense of agency over the humiliating situation in which I found myself.

No doubt inspired by this audacious discursive turn, Patrick Moore, whose entire professional career has been as a rent-a-quote man for eco-villains and has been dining out on his “co-founder of Greenpeace reputation” for nearly half a century, has developed a whole new school of climate denial, arguing that carbon emissions do indeed warm the planet and, because of an impending ice age, we have to warm it as fast as possible or we will all die.

But Moore’s refinement and pseudo-scientific justification of the Trump Administration’s position did not take place right away, even as it emboldened Trump allies to make similarly nihilistic claims. Jair Bolsonaro claimed that the Amazon Rainforest was not being destroyed fast enough and its indigenous people not dying-out fast enough. He promised to destroy the forest and its people as expeditiously as possible. And this was not limited just to environmental questions. Rodrigo Duterte, facing an epidemic of gang violence and vigilante murder in the Philippines promised to solve it with more extrajudicial killings by stirring pro-government vigilantes and police forces untethered from the rule of law into the mix.

This all struck me as family annihilator psychology:

Can’t come up with a plan to stabilize the climate? Fry everyone and everything as quickly as possible.

Can’t come up with a way to build a sustainable society and economy in the Amazon? Destroy the Amazon and eradicate its people.

Can’t bring law and order to Filipino communities and protect? Turn the communities into protracted street battles with more stray bullets flying in all directions.

These plans seemed underpinned by the idea that if you could kill the people you failed before they noticed you had failed them, this was as good as success because you could avoid shame in two ways, first, by eliminating the people who witnessed you failing them, and, second, by making their elimination seem intentional, not a failure but something you had intended all along.

Globalist and Leftist Family Annihilators
Around the same time this was happening, the new government of British Columbia was finalizing its climate policy. A coalition of social democrats and Greens, who appointed the former head of the Canadian Sierra Club its climate minister, had just been elected to govern my province.

They were and remain unmatched for high-flown climate rhetoric from Western Hemisphere governments and boldly rolled-out a plan called Clean BC to achieve “net zero.” Clean BC, in its present form, entails doubling BC’s coal exports, quintupling liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, building five LNG export terminals and pipelines to the fracking fields of the northeast, increasing fracking at a rate of more than 10% per year, permitting the conversion of BC’s remaining forests into a new export product: fuel pellets that burn as a dirtier version of coal, doubling the exports of BC forest products, admitting Uber and Lyft to the jurisdiction, thereby increasing taxi sector emissions by more than 50%, doubling fossil fuel industry subsidies, exempting Big Oil from the carbon tax, etc.

At the federal level in Canada, we see the same thing: the former head of Greenpeace Canada announcing an immediate climate apocalypse and angrily shaking finger at all the people who haven’t found a way to finance a home heat pump yet while building the oil industry a free multi-billion-dollar pipeline and jetting off to climate meetings on a private jet as our Minister of Environment.

We see similar combinations of climate emergency hysteria messaging and rapid increases in extraction and emissions of carbon around the world. In Germany, the SDP-Green coalition government is expropriating the homes of Bavarian villagers and forcing them off their land at gunpoint to create new open-pit coal mines.

But this goes far beyond climate: the globalist hatred of agriculture, the attempts to reduce regional food security and food productivity even as their own climate models presage collapsing fish stocks and declining agricultural yield and of course the absurd veneration of Genderwang, which sees the sterilization of healthy children as the ultimate ritual expression of the moral good, provoking mass rallies and huge ovations for sterilizing, lobotomizing and amputating the healthy body parts of children.

The “it ends with me,” family annihilator mindset is actually stronger among progressives today because they led with the claim that they could, would and were solving our interlocking environmental and economic crises. Unlike characters such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the progressive elites who hold their annual booze-up and super-rich singles mixer in Davos every year, people like Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and Al Gore, told us that they did have matters well in hand, that through technocratic management of a global neoliberal economic framework through multilateral international agreements, they were not just going to solve our environmental problems; they were going to make us all more prosperous, more equal and more democratic.

And so their shame, their humiliation, is even greater because they were not merely asleep at the switch; they magnified the problems even worse through their incompetence and hubris.

Their reaction, therefore, to their failure, is like my elementary school reaction: to bowl directly into the gutter, to warm the planet as fast as they can, to impoverish us as thoroughly as they can and to eliminate feedback mechanisms by which we can notify them of their failure by sabotaging the democratic process and refusing to even meet with those who disagree with them, instead characterizing their critics as conspiracy theorists and bigots.

Like true family annihilators, they are eliminating witnesses to their failure to deliver the prosperous, sustainable technocratic utopia they promised through a series of forever wars with no achievable victory conditions, by depressing fertility with endocrine disruptors and other pollutants, by reducing the birth rate by making it unaffordable to raise kids, by making lethal drugs like fentanyl more available, especially to children, by rapidly expanding euthanasia programs, like Canada’s MAID, by shutting down and smearing farmers, ranchers, fishermen and their work and by not just pushing but venerating our society’s most aggressive eugenics campaign since the 1930s.

Fortunately for us, the new censorship and myth-making industry made possible by the alliance between Big Data and the national security state, which has spread from China to the West rapidly, means that witnesses to failure can be reduced by more tightly controlling what people are able to learn, permitted to see and allowed to say they know, allowing elites to engage in witness elimination without actual murder.

Women of the Patriarchy
As in all successful patriarchies, some of the patriarchy’s work is being done by female leaders, characters like Chrystia Freeland and, I would argue, a larger amount than is typical of a patriarchal system, because, although men are always going to outdistance women when it comes to proficiency at and inclination towards murder (we’re just built to be better at it), the psychology of a family annihilator is a much more gender-neutral thing than that of a rapist serial killer who targets strangers.

The idea of being the sole provider of a family’s wellbeing is one women have readily taken on, often for perfectly good reasons. The 1970s divorce wave would likely have been more socially chaotic and cataclysmic if the female-headed family were not an idea with which humans were already comfortable to some degree, sociologically and biologically.

And so women’s protective tendencies towards their own children and others is being channeled into this increasingly normative elite psychology: family annihilation. Lupron for kids is care. Fentanyl for kids is care. (Yes, there is a BC government program that gives teenagers fentanyl to teenagers without their parents’ knowledge or consent.) Euthanasia for the depressed, disabled, the homeless is care. Shuttering farms and ranches is just good ecological stewardship.

Shame and Weakness, Not Malice and Competence
I do not want to suggest that our two teams of family annihilator global elites are aware they are family annihilators. As is typical of narcissism-related pathologies, most annihilators would struggle to even place themselves in a class or type of person because narcissists thrive on a sense of specialness and are notorious mirror-punchers, so awash in worthlessness and shame that any act of introspection is traumatic.

Rather, I want to suggest that the spread of family annihilator psychology is reflective of a growing senses of powerlessness, shame, weakness and doubt that are overtaking our elites. They are scared to admit their failures, unwilling to take responsibility, terrified to exposing how little they know and arrogant and foolish they have been. And they are scared of us and our disapproval.

The folks trying silence, starve and kill us today would prefer to be heroes who really did provide us with a clean, prosperous, fair society, who could honestly say they “saved the planet.” It is only their failure to do so that makes us targets of their displaced rage and shame at themselves.

The psychology of the family annihilator is unique among the psychology of murderers, except poisoners, in that it is about the avoidance of confrontation not fulfillment through confrontation. After all, these folks, are coming for us because they are scared even of confronting themselves, their own insecurities. Because if there is one aphorism our present age is proving out, it is this:

There is nothing more dangerous than a weak man.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Anti-Cosmopolitan City (part 2): The Intolerant Urbanizer

Real Problems and Crises in Rural and Northern Canada
Wally Oppal is probably one of the most accomplished people every to have served in elected office in BC history. He served, from 2005 to 2009, as Gordon Campbell’s Attorney-General, Minister of Justice and Minister of State for Multiculturalism. He was part of the one four-year stretch of benign technocratic liberalism the BC Liberal Party managed to deliver during the second quarter of its sixteen years in power.

He was part of the government that unexpectedly introduced English Canada’s first carbon tax, one that course corrected to the political centre, after four years of slash and burn neoliberal austerity and privatization. Having already made a name for himself as a Supreme Court and Appeal Court justice, following his electoral defeat in 2009, Oppal was deemed that ideal person to chair a government commission into one of the worst episodes of police failure and dereliction of duty, the 2010 Missing Women Commission of Inquiry into the multi-year reign of murderous predation serial killer Robert Pickton inflicted on the survival sex workers of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).

The does not stand alone. It is one of a half-dozen reports by different levels of settler and indigenous governments and international NGOs that investigated the larger phenomenon of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada, including but not limited to Northwestern BC’s infamous Highway of Tears and Southwestern BC’s infamous DTES.

But while the report does not stand alone, it does stand out as the best of such reports. Like all others it has two main demands: (1) restore the bus and (2) close the camps.

If you want female members of the rural underclass to be abducted, raped and murdered less, they should probably have an affordable way to get from the Indian Reserve (i.e. brutally underserviced rural ghetto) to town for groceries, smokes, a movie, a trip to the pub. So, allowing the bus service to be withdrawn and then restoring only a fraction of it, with there being no bus service on most days and no on-reserve stops on most reserves is probably not a great thing. If only we could get the bus service back to 1997 levels!

The other demand, to close the camps, is equally obvious. Rural and Northern Canada is being emptied of towns and villages which are being replaced with temporary worker camps, known colloquially as “man camps.” Reversing Cold War policies that sought to settle workers in the industrial periphery in towns and villages with schools, hospitals and public amenities, neoliberal and post-neoliberal policies have sought to dismantle small towns and replace them with temporary encampments, single industry towns composed almost entirely of young men, without basic amenities, government services or an environment in which children could be raised.

Gone are the mining towns of the past with their community halls, small elementary schools and newspaper offices. Gone even are the restaurants and cafes as camp workers eat in enormous mess halls when not suppressing their appetites with central nervous system stimulants whose use is widely tolerated in the camps.

Because these camps are so dominated by energy sector workers, usually existing to construct pipelines, frack natural gas or build macro-hydro projects, enterprising academics in the US have found they can construct predictive murder maps just by knowing fracking and pipeline construction locations. The isolated, young, stimulant-using young men typically work two weeks in, two weeks out, spending the rest of their time in communities like Fort Mac and Fort St. John. To briefly reference an earlier article, this is why I tend to call the communities Rex Murphy idealized “Jeckyllvilles.”

Oppal’s Underappreciated Insights Into Self-Fashioning
But Oppal went beyond the usual “close the camps,” “bring back the bus” chorus to write in detail about how women and girls’ at-risk status follows them from low income rural communities in ways that have little to do with race. Oppal observed that the non-indigenous women targeted by Pickton and other predators shared key demographic characteristics: they were low-income and had migrated to the Vancouver as young adults.

Oppal argued that, for young, low-income migrants, urbanization is a crucial part of identity formation and self-fashioning, that becoming a fully agentive person with her own distinct identity and choices is strongly conflated with moving to the city for young women who find themselves in at-risk work, at-risk housing or in conflict with the law. To return to a rural community or even request help from people still residing in it is a shameful act for young adults who centre urbanization in the creation of their adult self.

In other words, the use of urbanization narratives in self-fashioning, in and of itself, places young women from the rural and remote communities at material risk by constraining their access to material and the range of places they can live. Not only is it shameful to return to one’s supposedly benighted community of origin or obtain aid from its residents; it is shameful to admit that one has experienced, violence, intolerance of exploitation in one’s new place of residence. It creates incentives for narrating painful, dangerous and exploitive work as more voluntary and less harmful than it actually is.

And this kind of thinking is hardly limited to survival sex workers and members of the urban underclass.

When one examines those most enthusiastic about stripping urban life of ideological pluralism, religious diversity, etc. we tend to see urbanizers disproportionately represented among the most intolerant. They tend to espouse the belief that the kind of community they left was not merely situationally problematic at the time that they but that rural communities are inherently benighted and that the kind of people who voluntarily live in such places are, axiomatically, people who are some mixture of ignorant, evil and stupid.

I am not, of course, referring to all people who move from small communities to large communities. I am referring to a particular subset in which the intolerance is most concentrated, although hardly universal.

Profiling the Intolerant Urbanizer
Most people who move to larger communities do so to take up a new job or attend an educational institution. These individuals typically do not centre their urbanization the same way when fashioning an identity and a life story. Those who move for college typically place their education at the centre of the adult identity they create; similarly, those who move for work typically place their new job at the centre of their self-fashioning project. It tends to be individuals who move and then find work or take up low-status employment prior to moving so as to finance the move.

Similarly, individuals who aspire to live in a particular city about which they developed an interest as a younger person and who move to a far-away city rather than the nearest major centre, are less likely to become intolerant urbanizers because their narrative is centred on attraction to a specific urban space, not their rejection of life in a small community. Intolerant urbanizers therefore tend to have come from lower-income backgrounds with fewer educational prospects and to lead adult lives with lower-education, lower-status jobs. Paradoxically, they often tend to accord greater respect to white collar work and higher education than those with more education and higher status jobs.

Because of this, they tend to see qualities in themselves that they value such as having high status friends and associates, being well-read and politically well-informed as arising primarily from their decision to live in a city. Consequently, they also tend to strongly associate rural communities with intolerance, ignorance, dead-end jobs, etc.

And because their decision to relocate is so central to their identity, it must always be viewed as an unalloyed and permanent good. For this reason, they are often hostile to positive news about rural and remote communities. An increasingly diverse and high quality culinary scene, the opening of a local university, these things annoy them but the news from home that intolerant urbanizers are typically most upset by is the election of non-conservatives by their former community. If their former community is expressing the same political views as the one in which they live now, its status as a benighted and unimprovable place that could never have been reformed, only escaped-from is compromised.

This is why “guns and religion,” “basket of deplorables” and “unacceptable views” discourse and quips by progressive politicians are so tempting to pepper a stump speech or interview with. They play so strongly to the intolerant urbanizers in the room whose self-fashioning narrative is premised this image of people from small communities as almost ontologically distinct from urbanites.

Obviously, there is considerable irony to this reality, given that intolerant urbanizers are leading the charge to make cities into the very sort of place they indict the countryside for being: rigid, unchanging, intolerant, pious and homogeneous.

While there have been intolerant urbanizers for as long as there have been cities, the authoritarian turn our society is taking amplifies their social power and encourages the ugliest, most problematic aspects of their worldview. Insecurity over this obvious irony, unfortunately, only magnifies the authoritarian impulse. Criticism of the widening gap between the ideal of the permissive, diverse, cosmopolitan city and the day-to-day reality of our increasingly authoritarian urban culture only increases the impetus for shunning, silencing and punishment of critics, a tightening of the circle and a further chilling of speech.

It is really the height of irony that the highest priority when it comes to controlled and coerced speech is the demand for a chorus of agreement about just how free, diverse and tolerant city life really is. From preschool onwards, educators, news media and opinion leaders relentlessly “celebrate” just how wonderfully tolerant the contemporary progressive city is. But those most committed to these celebrations are those raised outside of the cities, who have made changing their residential address in their teens or twenties the most important thing about themselves in the fragile identity that sits atop this migration story.

Self-made identities and self-fashioning projects are not equally important or present in all human societies. The intolerant urbanizer is part of a larger phenomenon about which I have written in the past: our society’s reversion to a baroque culture, one deeply concerned with social rank, one that transacts an increasing portion of social power through dynamics of honour and offense. Such societies tend to encourage and foreground forms of self-presentation as central to identity dynamics and the intolerant urbanizer is just one element, just one example of how these new social trends are curdling urban life in the Global North.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

Could 2024 Be Decided By How Americans Think About Their Daughters’ Futures?

A Defense of Roe v. Wade
If we are to understand America’s culture war sympathetically and as the tragedy it is, I want to suggest that a good way in is to think about the parents of daughters in the 2024 elections. The Democratic Party had, it was thought, an excellent chance of hanging onto the presidency and Senate while regaining its House majority because the thing that has evolved into the supreme law-making authority in America, i.e. the Supreme Court, made an unpopular decision. They struck down Roe v. Wade, arguably one of the best-ever pieces of judge-made law on a social issue.

The genius of the 1970s Supreme Court was that it did not rule on whether a foetus, embryo or zygote had attained such things as personhood, viability or life. It simply rules that the coercive power of the state cannot pass into a body, that punitive laws cannot pass through the skin or through an orifice into the human body. It did not rule that abortion was good or bad, murder or not murder; it simply ruled that things inside a human body were not things over which the state should possess coercive power.

And it was a decision about which moderates in the anti-abortion movement, especially Democrat-voting Roman Catholics, initially, could live because the court had made no pronouncement on whether efforts to dissuade women from terminating their pregnancies were morally correct or incorrect. It simply constrained the movement from using certain tactics and powers to stop abortion.

And there are good reasons for this. You give up a lot when you create a society in which the state has a duty to closely surveil the bodies of women during their reproductive years, a society in which the police are obliged to investigate miscarriages and society that feels the need to radically restrict the mobility, assembly and association rights of women it fears might end a pregnancy. I remember the Fianna Fail’s authoritarian theocratic regime in 1980s Ireland, with the cops pursuing pregnant teenagers trying to board the Dublin-Liverpool ferry and returning them to Irish soil in handcuffs, facing charges. It is damn hard to organize a society in which people are free and abortion is meaningfully illegal.

The Democrats and the Burden of Government
Well, despite being supported by a clear majority of Americans, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court and, almost immediately, the Democratic Party began salivating over all those votes from affluent, educated suburban women they were finally going to bag, the Holy Grail of their political strategy every election since 1992. And initially, polls seemed to back up their theory of a great blue wave, sweeping them back into office with a renewed congressional majority.

But, perhaps inspired by the spirit of Bizarro Spiderman, “with no power comes no responsibility,” the party has behaved in ways that seem to indicate a desire to be relieved of the burden of governing the United States. They have chosen to re-nominate a presidential candidate whom over half of his own supporters believe to be mentally unfit to complete a second term in office. And, despite having a deep bench of competent campaigners and strategic thinkers still, they have deployed a rogue’s gallery of as his surrogates, with Batman villain Gavin “the Stoat” Newsom and Kamala Harris, who is clearly president in the Robocop timeline, leading the charge.

And if there has been a crescendo to this apparently suicidal course of political action, it is president Biden’s unilateral rewrite of Title IX, stripping women of the right to sex-segregated sports, prisons, shelters, restrooms, etc. If the Democrats were crafting a campaign to foreground women’s rights at home and abroad and to say “a Blue vote is a vote for women’s equality,” what could the logic behind the Title IX reforms possibly be?

I am going to shoulder past that question because that milk has already been spilled. There is no Title IX reversal in the Democrats’ future and no abortion reversal in the Republicans’. That table has been set and the question that will divide America and determine much about how its citizens’ vote will be based on how, both as individual parents and, as a society as a whole, how we think about our daughters’ futures.

The question America will answer this fall is this: what hypothetical dangers and challenges do we see in our daughters’ futures?

Democratic Voting and the Omnicide
Democrats, who are much more likely to share my belief in the escalating dangers of anthropogenic climate change and a host of interlocking environmental crises, like collapsing fisheries, plastics pollution, clearcut logging, endocrine disruptor pollution, etc. already have a bleak and pessimistic view of the children’s future. Increasingly post-political in their thinking, they are both more likely to believe that their children will have fewer economic opportunities and a worse physical environment and that there is little that can be done to change this. As I have argued elsewhere, this may have something to do with their membership in religious movements that exalt child sterilization as an expression of one’s elect status and moral virtue.

But the point is that America’s progressive, urban population is already thinking about bad things happening to their children, and wondering if it is even moral to bring more children into this world. For all we know, this might be a key hidden motivation for publicly celebrating the sterilization of children on the scale that we do.

But even leaving that aside, we see that predicting and either mitigating or weathering anticipated harm to children is the main way the left thinks about kids politically. Anti-bullying programs, whatever their efficacy, are premised on the belief that one’s child will be bullied. Environmental protection and education programs, again, are about anticipating something bad happening to kids and maybe getting out ahead of it.

Fundamentally, the left is pessimistic about the future of their children and structures its politics of childhood based on fear and disappointment. Preventing children from being harmed whether bullied, physically injured, misinformed, even merely contradicted, is seen as the governing principle in the politics of childhood.

And it is in this context that blue-voting parents of girls will be thinking:

“What will happen if my daughter has an unwanted pregnancy?”
“What if my daughter makes bad sexual and romantic choices?”
“What if my daughter is raped?”
“What if my daughter is too poor to house and feed a family?”
“What if my daughter cannot find a romantic partner with whom to form a family?”

She might need an abortion and we must protect her opportunity to do so.

Conservatism and Youth Sports
In 2008, one of the many political shifts that the Sarah Palin candidacy punctuated was the politicization of sports parents. To be a parent who was enthusiastic, supportive and exuberant about one’s child’s participation in sport has been transforming from a universal value, across the political spectrum, into a conservative one.

Law and Order: SVU, once a great Catholic modernist crime procedural, which has slowly been captured in the orbit of Wokeness has increasingly vilified parents who enthusiastically support their children’s sports. So, when it came time to enroll the main character’s son in an extracurricular activity, to help fill-out his personality, the only viable thematic option was ballet. Soon the character had to come out as bisexual, at the age of ten. How could he be sympathetic if he were tainted by team sports?

When the late Rex Murphy decided to write a series of puff pieces about the greatness of petro culture, featuring Fort McMurray, the centre of Canada’s oil sands, he waxed lyrical on the subject of petro parents’ interest in their kids’ sports. Always a feature of Northern Alberta culture, sports volunteerism transformed from the resting heart rate of the province’s capital, the perpetually NDP-voting “Red”-monton, the Austin to Calgary’s Dallas, which featured the highest rate of per capita volunteerism in a major Global North City for many years, into a parochial feature of its conservative satellites and outskirts.

Indeed, the argument that it is impossible to be a decent parent without a petroleum-fueled SUV or pickup truck because—how else could you get your kids’ sports equipment to games and practices?—became a staple of the Canadian climate debate.

By increasingly foregrounding future athletic success in conservative political understandings of the child, an optimism is cultivated. You don’t become a hockey mom or a soccer dad because you imagination is full of failures and defeats. Your inner life is full of your child winning in the future.

You don’t obsess over how to console your child when they inevitably lose. You think about how to give them and their teammates a leg up to win. And, for lower- and middle-income parents who want to see their child go on not just to athletic success but to academic and financial success, sports are not just a route to physical and psychological fitness. They lead to scholarships. They lead to prize money. They lead to public recognition and honour.

Materially, they can lead to a university education not fueled by debt.

While the damage the Title IX changes will do to incarcerated women, women fleeing domestic violence, women needing to use public locker rooms and restrooms is considerable, it will not fundamentally structure the election. But I believe the changes it makes to girls and young women’s sports will.

Optimistic parents, i.e. conservative parents, may be missing out on how many chambers we have left to discharge in our game of Russian roulette with our planet’s ecosystems but they will be asking compelling questions about their daughters:

 “What will happen if a man steals my daughter’s place on the podium?”
“What if a boy steals her prize money?”
“What if her team is disqualified for not playing against boys for during scouting season?”
“What if a boy pushes her off her field hockey team?”
“What is a boy takes her scholarship money?”
“What if a man steals her spot in university?”

Parents governed by these thoughts, even if they are pro-choice and support Roe v. Wade, are not going to be animated in the same way by the worry that their daughter might have an unplanned pregnancy, because they have optimistic thoughts about their children’s futures. Ultimately, the fears I just enumerated are premised on an underlying hope, a premise that one’s daughter will be identified by an athletic scout, a win a scholarship, win a medal, make the team she wants to join. And they also imply a theory of natural justice, in ways that the Democrats’ fears are not.

The campaign we are facing will be, like the previous two, among the most divisive, dark and pessimistic in modern American history. And I see a method in the Democrats’ madness: the darker and bleaker they make the future look, the more frightening the world they describe, the more people will vote based on fear for their children rather than hope.

As working class people of all races turn increasingly against the Democratic Party, it benefits from a lower-turnout environment. Already, in places where the working class is primarily white or Asian, GOP voter suppression laws have begun suppressing the Republicans’ own vote. That is why Democrats now enjoy a structural advantage in off-year and special elections.

But this strategy may be, as the British say, “too clever by half.” Those mysterious Obama-Trump switchers of 2016 were not, as characterized, urban socialist “Bernie bros.” The switchers, most evident in states like Iowa were regular people in medium sized towns whose imagination was captured by the way Barack Obama spoke to us, the feeling he called-up when he declared, “We have been warned against offering people false hope. But, in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”

With no candidate on the horizon capable of kindling a sense of hope in most Americans, this election will, nevertheless, test US voters, and especially the mothers and fathers of daughters. And those votes will be determined, in large measure, not by a rational calculus of the risks girls and young women face in their minds but the hopes and fears for them we hold in their hearts.

US Politics | fusangite |

The Anti-Cosmopolitan City – Part #1: the Tolerance Horseshoe

The Tea Party and Trump Waves
I was living with an American woman, the daughter of evangelical Christians and major Republican donors. They had a framed wall-length signed portrait of George W Bush in their entry foyer and had FoxNews, which Rachel termed “the Jonestown loudspeaker of conservative America” running on the television in at least one room at all times. I moved to the US with my beloved in 2010 and continued residing in the US, even after we split up, through 2012. I celebrated Thanksgiving in 2010 at the home of a Tea Party organizer in Fort Worth, Texas. I was living in Kansas City when Rick Santorum won the Missouri GOP primary in 2012. And, from 2002 to 2022, I was part of a community of tabletop role playing gamers centred in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of the locations the America’s conservative and liberal tectonic plates collide.

So I want to make clear that I experienced the dark turn of American conservatism up close and personal, from the Sarah Palin nomination through Charlottesville. And there is no doubt that less dense, less urban, more rural and smaller communities led America’s descent into the various forms of intolerance and woolly thinking that blossomed in those years. Palin’s “real America” was more easily duped by conspiracy theories, more likely to blame outsiders for problems, more inclined to political hyperbole and polarization and grew more suspicious of the rest of America, leavened by all that Koch Brothers money.

But the Tea Party and Trump waves were not especially remarkable. Political scientists and historians expect reactionary movements to come from smaller, more rural, more remote communities, to be concentrated in economic sectors that appear to be in their sunset years. Scholars expect those with less education, residing in less demographically diverse communities to be more prone to nativism, xenophobia and “us versus them” thinking.

What is far more shocking, far more in need of explaining and far more pressing an issue is the way in which it has become the most educated, the most urban, the most progressive who now lead Anglo America’s charge against political pluralism, free speech, scientific literacy, religious tolerance, press freedom and representative democracy.

While history is full of intolerant cities and welcoming, pluralistic small towns, historical moments when rural areas are more culturally and politically pluralistic than urban areas in the same society are rare. Times are rare when educated people are more ideologically inflexible and hostile to new information than those with less formal education. If people are going to be beaten in the street for their unorthodox views, if books are going to be banned, if the places of worship of minority peoples are going to be burned, we expect small towns to commit those sins prior to and more prolifically than the big cities, not the reverse.

Yet, as of about half a decade ago, this is the reality into which Anglo America and much of the rest of the Global North has entered.

The Crisis of Intolerance in Our Cities
When Meghan Murphy, the gender critical feminist journalist, was driven out of her home town of Vancouver, a key moment was the day she left her house in the morning to discover her photo plastered on lamp standards around her neighbourhood, calling her a hate criminal and suggesting that violence against her was appropriate.

During her nearly successful bid for mayor of Ottawa, Catherine McKenney (they/them), then a city councillor, organized a public beating of “Billboard” Chris Elston, the children’s rights campaigner and following his public flogging, threatened a more severe beating should he attempt to return to Ottawa with his “children can’t consent to puberty blockers” campaign.

When the hundredth church arson attacking non-white Christians took place in Regina last month, directed against a Catholic congregation primarily comprising three racial groups, Africans, Middle Easterners and Filipinos, a Conservative motion condemning the burning was shouted down in parliament by members of the overwhelmingly urban caucuses of the Liberal and New Democratic Parties. And when David Eby, NDP premier of BC was approached through back-channels by those seeking stronger law enforcement around church burnings (perpetrators have only been charged in 2% of cases), Eby reacted by announcing new measures, not to prevent hate crimes against racialized Christians, but to criminalize the beliefs of the parishioners.

When the Million March for Children took place last fall and thousands of Canadians turned out to oppose government programs to chemically lobotomize and sterilize children without parental knowledge or consent, rallies were able to take place in rural communities but in urban centres, “counter protesters” did everything in their power not merely to stage their own protests but to drown out or disperse rally participants. Murphy, during one of her brief trips to Canada was charged by counter-protesters attempting to physically assault her. They failed to hit her but still managed to prevent the rally coming off and her from speaking. My comrade Lierre Keith, head of the Women’s Liberation Front, was not so lucky. She was punched in the face at two rallies in the Pacific Northwest while attempting to speak that year.

And as we saw in rallies from Melbourne to Dublin to Vancouver to San Francisco, it is not merely that the police failed to hold back violence against the protesters. Police officers were often shown assisting violent mobs in carrying out their beatings, in some cases being caught on film pointing and laughing as vigilante mobs beat unarmed protesters with fists and weapons.

And this goes beyond organized politics. Vehicular collisions are up. Pedestrian deaths at the hands of drivers are up. Stranger assaults are up. Exhibitionism and other contactless sex crimes are up.

Ancient Alexandria and the Urban Scale Horseshoe
I have long expressed outrage at the dark turn my city and so many others have been taking but it is long past time to go beyond that outrage, that we began thinking about both the short- and long-term factors that are giving rise to this curdling of the cosmopolitan city because there is no single force, no single explanation that can adequately or fully account for what is happening. A confluence of factors has made the increasing intolerance of our cities self-magnifying, as those fearing persecution and intolerance move to smaller, more human scale communities or out of the Global North altogether.

As a historian, the first place I naturally go when seeking to answer such a question is the past: when, in the past, has it been the cities that have led their rural counterparts when it came to intolerance?

The pogroms against the Jews of Alexandria in 38 CE under governor Flaccus are a striking example and one of the few times in Antiquity that urban Jews fared worse than rural Jews at the hands of pagans or, later, Christians. On the occasions that urban communities outdistanced the hinterland in their persecution of Jews and other minorities, up to Germany in the 1930s and 40s, there may be some patterns.

The cities in which pogroms were most enthusiastic and popular (as opposed to being driven from above) tended to have a geography segregated primarily by religion rather than by class. While all cities have tended to experience natural religious ghettoization, this has been tempered by countervailing and competing forces, like occupational and class-based segregation of “unclean” work and workers. The multi-confessional character of industries like butchering, tanning, fishing and logistics produced kinds of residential congregation and segregation that could undercut religious uniformity in an area.

There is also the question of scale. Alexandria was one of the few pre-modern cities with a population that exceeded a million. This scale permitted something highly problematic that Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish intellectual, who leaves us the best written records of the 38 CE pogroms, which he survived, called out in his time.

Philo was concerned that many of his neighbours and coreligionists in Alexandria were falling away from the Jewish sumptuary laws, not keeping kosher, not honouring the Sabbath, etc. This was because, he observed, unlike a Jew in a smaller city, an Alexandrian Jew could experience his identity as a Jew just by rising in the morning and heading out the door. Everyone he would meet that day, everyone with whom he socialized, everyone with whom he worked, everyone from whom he bought something would be a Jew. In this way, living at such a massive demographic scale actually replicated the life of a Jew in tiny village off the Jordan River.

There was no need to maintain behavioural boundaries or to be behaviourally distinct; geography and economy took care of all that for you. And if that was happening to Jews, it was most certainly happening to the pagan majority which held political power in the city, backed by an imperial army and navy drawn from a military hegemon with forty million residents.

I want to suggest that one of the most pernicious elements of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, “Queer”/Pharma Pride, the rise of social media “call-out” culture and various other forms of cultural authoritarianism is the way in which they help to recreate Philo’s Alexandria. Even if people in a workplace have diverse opinions and affiliations politically, they are increasingly required to express identical views in their workplace for fear of losing employment. Progressive urbanites on Facebook routinely see threats from friends and family on their screen, telling them what virtuous political position they must now express in order to be spared public humiliation and ostracism.

In smaller, more human scale communities, complete segregation from those who disagree with you is less feasible. Ideologically recalcitrant people cannot be wholly purged from or cowed within the labour system. The break room in a company in a smaller town is more likely to contain people who express unorthodox political views.

In other words, there is a kind of horseshoe effect when it comes to community size: make a city large enough and it can segregate its way to small-town religious and ideological parochialism, provided there exists a strong enough “us-them” dynamic and an enforcement system with the muscle to back it up.

Purity and Pollution in the Modern City
Key to such an “us-them” dynamics are ideas of purity and pollution. As I have been arguing the past two years, I believe that the class differences between the rural and industrial proletariat and the rest of the population have been magnified to the point where they exhibit the qualities of caste.

I have made my cultural arguments concerning race, economic sector, public health policy and a host of others concerning the amplification of cultural difference and the need to segregate “unclean” persons from the rest of us. Pseudoscientific myths concerning Covid vaccination and transmission, the re-description of unorthodox speech as “unsafe” the repackaging of anti-Métis racism as “anti-racism” and the growing state-sponsored conspiracy industry that labels me a hate criminal and Diagolon a white supremacist terrorist paramilitary have helped to give rise to moments like the East Vancouver anti-Truckism (Terry Glavin’s term, not my own) protest of 2022.

A solidarity convoy was organized in the dying days of the Ottawa convoy to show support for the increasingly nutty remnant of the protest in Ottawa and arrived in Vancouver but the people of East Vancouver were ready with a counter-protest. I asked a friend who supported the counter-protest what they were counter-protesting, given that the convoyists had basically stopped issuing coherent demand. Which of the trucker demands, I asked, were people protesting.

The answer was horrifyingly honest: people were not turning out to protest a political position the truckers were taking. They were protesting their existence as human beings, the fact that they were people who existed and wore the wrong clothes, worked at the wrong jobs, enjoyed the wrong recreational activities and lived in the wrong places. As Glavin had cleverly pointed out with a nonsense neologism, there was no “truckism” to protest.

That is why, when the two groups of protesters finally clashed at First Avenue and Commercial Drive, the truckers, forced to a standstill by the protesters honked their horns and waved their Canadian flags and the counter-protesters chanted “trans rights are human rights!” again and again.

But another way to examine this caste-making is to look at the function of caste within a market economy. Caste had made the Indian economy the most dynamic and productive in the world and, its spread to Europe and the New World, through the creation of “black” and “Indian” (the American kind) as heritable castes, is inextricable from the sustained growth and dynamism we associate with mercantilism and capitalism in the early modern world.

One of the reasons caste makes a market economy more effective is by reserving certain kinds of work for certain castes and constraining the labour supply for that work by rendering certain castes ineligible for it. Truckists cannot simply enter the commissar class simply by obtaining the right training and professional credentials. They must also at least appear to embrace the American space religion the commissars practice, with its veneration of self-harm, special grammar and usage rules, numerous novel holidays, special flags and costume, and complex system of etiquette.

An increasing number of professional degree programs now require the taking of loyalty oaths to the ideology of the commissars as do many workplaces. More difficult to fake than a loyalty oath are official records of regular Covid mRNA vaccinations. And, given the highly urban character of most commissar class jobs, aside from frontline elementary education, there is the matter of urbanization.

It deserves a whole article.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity | fusangite |

American Campuses Show Us the Totalizing Logic of the National Security State

Speculative fiction author Ursula K Leguin wrote not that long ago that the reason her genre of writing will only grow more important in the days ahead is because possibilities of living differently than we do will grow more remote, become more repressed in our consciousness. We need a literary genre that can “remember freedom” because the primary project of an authoritarian social order is to destroy people’s memory of the past and, thereby, their ability to imagine a different future. A place that this reality has welled-up to confront us is in the various Palestine solidarity campus encampments around the United States.

I want to make clear that I am speaking specifically to the situation in the US and not to Palestine solidarity or campus protest dynamics elsewhere. That is not to say that none of my observations are applicable in those contexts but I think we are seeing something in a purer form in the US as a consequence of recent, US-specific events.

Pro-Likud elements in the Democratic and Republican parties, who insist that any criticism of the state of Israel is, axiomatically, anti-Semitic, even if made by a Zionist member of a Zionist party on the floor of the Knesset, were obviously eager to bust out all the fancy law enforcement and surveillance resources they could as soon as they got wind of these modern campus occupations.

But the thing is: the old bipartisan imperial foreign policy establishment crew are a lot smaller, older and less influential than they were. Their relevance is being temporarily shored-up in the present by the fact that a member of this group is currently the president. But he might well be the last such president. In both major parties, there is a growing number of isolationists, a growing number actively seeking détente with the other great powers and a growing number of foreign dictator fans.

But because domestic culture war issues being fought out over bodily autonomy (i.e. Team Prison Rape/Forced Jab vs. Team Forced Birth/Antivaxx) is the main structuring feature of day-to-day American politics, the détentists, isolationists and foreign dictator fans in the Republican Party simply could not resist throwing in with the old Military-industrial Complex buddies like Lindsay Graham and Joe Manchin on this one, given most protesters’ predilection for blue hair and to match their blue face masks. Almost on aesthetic grounds alone, governor Greg Abbott was drawn into calling out the troops to pointlessly assault a bunch of University of Texas students who, let’s be clear, were not going to show up for class that day anyway.

Throughout the US, university and college administrators responded to encampments with wholly unnecessary, gratuitous assaults on students and, more generally, on fundamental civil rights to free movement, assembly, association and speech.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that, aside from some as-yet-unfulfilled threats and sabre-rattling at the University of Toronto, no equivalent crackdown has taken place in Canada. I think part of the reason for that is that Canada’s populist right learned good lessons from the experience of the Convoyists and had no appetite for throwing in with the establishment authoritarians just for the chance to deliver a punch in the mouth to a social movement they find odious.

So, let’s be fair: campus protesters in the US have faced a more authoritarian response to their activities than elsewhere. Even campuses where local government and campus administration have not responded punitively or abridged the students’ rights, students reasonably feel a solidarity with their comrades on other campuses where this has happened and no doubt fear, to a greater or lesser extent, that just because they have escaped retaliation now, this may not hold indefinitely.

Nevertheless, what I find most upsetting about these protests is the way in which the occupations have instinctively and immediately acted to abridge people’s mobility, assembly, association and speech rights in the areas over which they have assumed control. Checkpoints, racial profiling, segregation, no-go zones, constant surveillance, security personnel patrols and a host of other practices are spreading through the territories controlled by the protest camps.

More disturbing still is that, unlike Black Lives Matter or Occupy camps, regulatory protocols are not coming out of some kind of quasi-democratic, participatory deliberation or out of a clearly identified leadership/organizer class. These practices are autocthonous, immanent properties of a 2020s protest camp.

Some people in the camps just feel naturally called-upon to set up check points at which they can check IDs, interrogate people and administer loyalty oaths. Some people just enjoy filming potential interlopers to their encampment as they sit outside their tents or on blankets. For people like me, who come out of a different generational protest tradition, it is as though we are watching the kids who used to report us for our protests organizing protests of their own, a bunch of hall monitors creating their own little surveillance state. These behaviours are coming naturally to them and require minimal coordination.

And I want to suggest that this is because the logic of authoritarianism is becoming so deeply embedded in the children of the commissar class, that their horizon of possibilities is becoming so curtailed, that they cannot imagine a successor or replacement society that is not also an authoritarian surveillance state. Consequently, their reaction to being subject to authoritarian overreach is to counter with authoritarian overreach of their own.

This is fundamentally different than the working class Convoyist movement of Canada, which responded to authoritarian overreach by the establishment and government with exuberance and defiance, with spontaneous breaches in noise, assembly and mobility restrictions. There are, needless to say, no bouncy castles, no hot tubs, no spontaneous song and dance numbers on these campuses.

There are certainly participatory activities, ritual chants, songs and other acts, dutiful assemblies for speeches, and performances. Even my favourite of the students’ activities, their Jewish-led Passover seders, which I note my pro-Likud friends avoid talking about, were sober, somber and highly ritualized. (I nevertheless think these events were important and pro-social in and worked to combat the anti-Semitism that is always a danger in such movements.)

You may view the protests’ intervention in the escalating region-wide war that is gradually engulfing the entire Middle East, from Yemen to Iran to Lebanon positively or negatively. That is a matter for another article. There are only so many friendship-ending divisive controversies on which even I am prepared to take a public position at once.

What I can say is that the news they are delivering us about the political horizon of possibilities of young, educated Americans is very concerning indeed.

Authoritarianism US Politics | fusangite |

Why Do We Think Doing Crack in the Hospital Is Okay?

Anxiety in the Age of Trump
Whether or not one was a Donald Trump supporter, the end of the primaries in the summer of 2016 inaugurated a new age of vigilance, anxiety and outrage for Americans. Whether by virtue of Trump’s boorish norm violations, intentionally provocative communications strategy and general emotional dysregulation, or whether due to the near-constant attacks on the Administration’s functioning and legitimacy, a new baseline level of rage and fear took hold in Anglo America and much of the Global North, a pervasive psychosocial state we have yet to shake-off eight years later.

America’s stand-up comics were, for the most part of group of liberals already skilled in mocking and belittling America’s populist conservative movements. And many did a great job of skewering the Trump administration over the president’s apparently unhinged public behaviour and revolving door of officials, each greasier and more bizarre than those they replaced.

But the comedian who best expressed the sense of anxiety that pervaded America was John Mulaney. He offered the following metaphor: “It’s like there’s a horse loose in the hospital… And nobody knows what the horse is going to do next, least of all the horse. It’s never been in a hospital before.”

I quoted that bit many times during Trump’s four years in office and have a few times since, especially as that feeling of anxiety has not gone away, what with the Bumpkin Putsch, followed by the failed impeachment, the prosecutions, the efforts to disqualify Trump based on a crime the impeachment trial had acquitted him of. The feeling that there is a horse loose in a hospital has never gone away.

But the reason this description of the situation plays so well with people like me who were steeped in progressive culture is that it plays to an unconscious belief that society, as a whole, is just one gigantic hospital.

The Rise and Fall of the Giant Agora
At the zenith of neoliberalism in the late 1990s, no matter what party one supported at election time, no matter what church one attended, no matter where one was located, socially, when neoliberalism enjoyed cultural and ideological hegemony, we saw society as a gigantic marketplace. The agora had swallowed the whole city. The schools, the hospitals, the council chambers, everything existed in the context of the marketplace. If we wanted to say that something was good, we looked around for words of praise and said things like “profit,” “efficiency,” “competition,” etc.

But as we entered a period of socio-political realignment in the early 2010s and the commissar class who dominate the Pharma and Data sectors began to eclipse the neoliberals as our cultural hegemons, our understanding of the world began to shift away from seeing everything through the prism of the market. Covid and the opioid crisis helped in this shift but the re-categorization of all pain and unpleasantness as “trauma,” and all responses to it as “triggering,” was just as important.

What had begun in the 1990s with the huge-scale prescription of third-generation SSRI anti-depressants reached its culmination as we came to redefine feeling bad as inherently problematic. Our identities began to shift, too. Those who have embraced the new progressive culture of the commissar class, have come to engage in self-fashioning behaviours of self-diagnosing oneself into a series of pathologies, with the assistance of the ubiquitous online psychiatric diagnostic quizzes, funded by a pharmaceutical industry eager to receive more orders for psychiatric drugs.

In British Columbia, the government’s policies of steadily reducing and restricting citizens’ access to free medical care have resulted in the normalization of psychiatric self-diagnosis, presented by telephone during ten-minute appointment telephone windows at clinics that charge cold hard cash to see a physician in person. More and more British Columbians are on speed as internet ADHD self-tests have come to be accepted by the province’s overloaded clinics and Adderall and other amphetamine prescriptions are dispense by phone and online. One doesn’t need to tell the government one is an addict to be prescribed meth substitutes, although that works too; one can just say that it’s tough to concentrate, what with a horse being loose in the hospital.

But it is not just during a doctor’s appointment that your average progressive British Columbian announces a set of psychiatric self-diagnoses. This is how people who have adopted the culture of the commissar class talk about themselves all the time; within a few minutes of meeting someone at a fashionable party, one begins to hear one’s new acquaintances list of mental illnesses, even before they get to their preferred pronouns.

Indeed, psychiatric self-diagnosis has become the linchpin of self-fashioning in the progressive world. As being unique and special in the sight of God is not a culturally or emotionally available option, the language one uses for both describing one’s uniqueness and begs not to be bullied in this, one of the most judgemental and predatory social orders of recent times, is to “identify into” a series of neurological disabilities and sexual fetishes.

The term “neurodiverse,” one that initially made sense only at the population level, has become conflated with “neurodivergent” and applied at the individual. If one can no longer be unique in the sight of God, one can at least be unique and special in the sight of an imaginary all-seeing doctor.

That is because what Mulaney was telling us is that we have stopped believing that society is a gargantuan, all-encompassing marketplace and has become one huge world-containing hospital.

However rational, well-intentioned and even life-saving Covid policies were, when the state began to regulate the size of the crowd you could meet for drinks, have over for dinner, even host at a backyard barbecue, a consequence was that the hospital made your home one of its rooms, your street one of its wards. The reason we have re-described ourselves as a bag of diseases and other conditions necessitating medical intervention is that we have accepted the logic of the commissars, that society is now an all-encompassing hospital.

Brad West and Doing Crack in the Hospital
It is in this context that we must approach Port Coquitlam mayor Brad West’s recent interview with the Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer. In response to the BC government announcing a review of its new policy of letting hospital patients carry weapons and buy, use and sell illicit drugs while in hospital, West suggested that the government could save its money. His review was done, “In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”

What baffled those outside the Progressiverse was how this could even be a thing, how it was that, in an environment where powerful drugs are being administered by highly trained professionals, trained in predicting and managing drug interactions, how addicts shooting up street drugs of unknown provenance or purity could possibly be remotely safe and not undermine the precise care they are receiving. How on earth did we get here? How could one reasonably administer opiate pain relievers when patients were also self-administering unknown types and quantities of opiates?

And weapons!? How could it be safe for people doing central nervous system stimulants and undergoing intensive, painful and disorienting medical treatment to be armed with hunting knives and boxcutters?

The answer is simple: if society is a hospital then the hospital is society.

And in the giant society-spanning hospital, everyone is a doctor or a patient, and as evinced in the increasingly ubiquitous signage about not upsetting and “triggering” receptionists and medical personnel at clinics, both.

If everywhere you go is the hospital, then whatever you are free to do in the world, you are, axiomatically, free to do in the hospital because if the world is the hospital then the hospital is the world.

Generally, when a society idealizes something, whoever or whatever is being idealized is actually being singled-out for special punishment. No society idealizes female virtue like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Similarly, our society grows ever more shabby in its treatment of people genuinely neurologically disabled. Autistic people have been pushed out of self-advocacy organizations and the public square by people who are merely a little quirky or socially inept. Their spaces have been invaded and their silencing has enabled, as Hillary Cass’s review most recently pointed out, a mass sterilization campaign to be waged against autistic youth in the name of genderwang.

Similarly, mental healthcare has all been all but withdrawn from people truly disabled by addiction and madness. Treatment has been replaced by “supportive housing” and tent cities. It seems that the only right of the addicted and insane we defend is their right to be miserable, to sleep rough, to defecate in the streets, to shoot up in parks and to scream at passers-by. And there is a logic to this too. The more ill health there is, the more society really does seem like a gigantic understaffed hospital.

Medicalized Societies Are Sick Societies
We are not the first society to decide to see everything through the prism of medicine and disease. In recent studies of Franciscan and Jesuit catechisms written in Iroquoian languages, we find that the societies embroiled in the “mourning wars,” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein Huron and Iroquois warriors engaged in endless capture-oriented military campaigns to replace population lost to smallpox and other Eastern Hemisphere diseases also saw the world in medical terms.

Almost every positive thing Christian missionaries promised new indigenous converts was described in the Iroquoian languages, as a form of medicine. Every good thing in the universe, grace, salvation, sustenance, community was presented as “medicine.” That is because a society only decides it is a gigantic hospital if those living therein know that sicknesses of body and mind have metastasized into a social sickness, a society-wide cancer, in the case of the Iroquois, an epidemic not just of smallpox but of something they called “false face disease,” a consequence of centuries of continuous war, disease and martial law.

The way out of such a society, such a state of being is not more medicine. It is not categorizing more things as sickness and categorizing more activities as medicine. Prescribing chemical castration and lobotomization drugs to children may be called “medicine” but there is nothing healthy about it. Offering to murder disabled, homeless and depressed people through the MAID program is called “medicine” but it is anything but. Amputating people’s healthy body parts or adding prostheses and fake orifices so they can better resemble the Japanese cartoons they believe to be their “true selves” is not medicine by any reasonable definition, nor is secretly prescribing fentanyl to teenagers as part of some sort of Opposite Day “harm reduction” plan.

You see: the thing that makes our society sicker, more dangerous than the late-stage Iroquois Confederacy is that a hospital is a hierarchical, authoritarian bureaucratic institution that conflates power, expertise and medicine into a single authoritative principle. In this society, whatever the state does, is, by definition, “medicine,” irrespective of whether it makes you more or less healthy, irrespective of whether it makes you suffer, irrespective of whether it even kills you.

If there is a solution, I would suggest we can find it in the Tao Te Ching:

“He who is sick of sickness is well.”

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

Socialism and the First and Second Left: How the Forty Hour Week Came to British Columbia

Gordon Campbell killed my grandma.

I don’t mean this in a “fuck you Gordon, die in a fire!” kind of way. I like Campbell fine and think he went out on a high note as premier, with his audacious tax policies, that sought to undo some of the damage he did with his first round of tax policies a decade before.

It is more that my grandma was pretty damn tired of being alive by the time she was in her mid-90s. Always fashionable and fit, she could not handle the shame of getting around with a walker. You can purchase a stylish cane. There are no stylish walkers. She had also outlived more than a dozen bridge foursomes and was just too demoralized to go to all the work of assembling another bridge group, only to have its members die on her in a year or two.

The daughter of George Martin, a welder and Bolshevik soap-boxer (yes, an actual Bolshevik; he assiduously followed global communist politics and had taken a position on the Bolshevik-Menshevik split when it happened), my grandmother was also deeply demoralized by the rise of Third Way neoliberalism and the destruction of the world’s democratic socialist parties in the 1990s. So pissed off was she that she contributed her bookkeeping expertise to helping me build the BC Green Party, expertise she had last used to help the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) set up its Vancouver office in the 1970s.

So, when Gordon Campbell was elected BC premier in 2001 and proudly announced the repeal of the forty-hour work week in 2002, my grandmother was pretty sure that it was time to go.

My grandmother was born in 1908, four years after the BC legislature enacted the forty-hour work week. And she felt that she should never have had to live to see the day that this victory for working people, made before she was even born, would slip away. For her, it served as the final piece of punctuation marking the end of the aspirations of the socialist movement.

The political moment into which my grandmother was born during what Mark Twain termed “the Gilded Age,” was the time in which, around the world, socialists came of political age. The period that began in the 1880s and ended with the 1929 global economic crisis did not just contain the Mexican and Russian revolutions. It contained the founding of Britain’s Independent Labour Party in 1893 and its first election to national government in 1923.

As I have argued ad nauseam on this blog, we live in a time much like those years, with its rapidly widening wealth gap, ownership concentration, ballooning consumer debt, penchant for cross-dressing, chaotic international order and debate over women’s sport. The particular aspect of that time that I want to focus on in this essay is the collapse of “the left” as a political coalition.

History of the First Left
“The left” is a term that started as a literal description of a set of allied voting blocs in the French parliament in the lead-up to the Revolution of 1789. Initially, it simply referred to the collection of Estates-General members who favoured radical and revolutionary change. Dominated by liberals, almost from the outset it included socialists, secularists, suffragists, prohibitionists, Abolitionists, advocates of colonial devolution and supporters of land and tax reform. In the ensuing decades a similar “left coalition” coalesced the other great industrial democracies, Britain, Prussia, etc.

It made sense, during the nineteenth century, for members of the left to make common cause. The rising trade union movement was key in legitimating “the left” as a strategic political coalition as liberal parties made space on their parliamentary slates for candidates backed by trade union locals in the burgeoning industrial cities of the age. Class consciousness had not reached the point where individual labour candidates were viable in winner-take-all electoral systems and so liberal parties and trade unionists mutually benefited from their alliance.

While there were of course major conflicts within the left among its constituent groups, and especially between its dominant and original political grouping, the liberals, new political movements that, by virtue of a shared belief in modernization and reform, saw themselves as equally legitimate claimants to the mantle of the Left.

Conflicts between labour and capital were intense when it came to questions like the scale of permissible industrial action and the use of police as strike-breakers. But these were, to an extent, mitigated by shared left-wing beliefs and assumptions such as the status of women and children as protected classes of person within the workplace and without and a shared belief that freer trade and fewer tariffs would benefit both industry and the poor.

But in the 1890s, that shifted throughout much of the Anglosphere. In 1893, the Independent Labour Party was formed in Britain, ultimately resulting in the Labour Representation Committee splitting from the Liberal Party. And English speakers were actually late to the party. German’s socialists and trade union movement had abandoned their partnership with liberals in 1874. In France, the parliamentary divorce took place in 1885.

Throughout the Gilded Age, socialists and liberals would find themselves on the same side of certain issues and in accord on certain causes but these movements understood themselves to be adversarial and were, naturally, embittered by their recent divorces. But socialists, in particular, sought to make it clear that they were not part of some larger political community in which both they and the liberals were in fundamental accord. At both the movement level and in electoral politics, socialists sought to show their independence from liberals, reminding working class people that both liberals and conservatives were movements controlled by and representing “the bosses.”

Socialism and the Forty-hour Week in British Columbia
My grandma grew up in Gilded Age BC because her dad was blacklisted from dock work for his Bolshevik soapboxing, first in Glasgow and then in Belfast. Vancouver, British Columbia, was the western terminus of the British North American rail system, port with such severe labour shortages that communists, criminals and malcontents from the four corners of the earth could still find a decent day’s pay.

And the province had a strong and militant labour movement thanks to the Dunsmuir coal baron dynasty that controlled middle Vancouver Island with their own private army, occasionally assisted by the RCMP. Consequently, BC was one of the first places in the British Empire to elect socialists to its legislature.

Even before the capitalist members of the legislature had separated into the Liberal and Conservative parties, the Labour Party elected its first member in 1898. The following election, in 1903, BC’s first true multi-party election returned a Conservative government with a razor-thin majority, one that eroded over the course of the year, leaving the Tories in a minority in 1904.

Rather that voting with their erstwhile fellow leftists, the Liberals, to bring down the Tory government, they negotiated with Premier Richard McBride to enact a series of socialist policies, the best-remembered of which is the forty-hour work week.

BC’s is an early example of socialists not being cowed into working with liberals and progressives in service of some kind of putative larger left but it is hardly unique to this period. Rather than swearing fealty to one set of bosses or the other, socialist and labour parties and movements played the capitalists off against each other in an effort to secure the best deal for workers. This kind of audacious and often successful brinksmanship caused voters to begin electing socialists as governments in their own right, a political outcome that grew more common as the Gilded Age wore on.

History of the Second Left
But big things changed in the early 1930s with the rise of Stalin as the USSR’s sole hegemon, the rise of the Nazi movement, Franco’s victory in Spain and the realignment of liberal political economy by John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Beginning in the 1930s, responding to the growing consensus in the West that fascism was the greatest threat capitalist societies were facing, Stalin encouraged Soviet-aligned parties to throw themselves into “popular front” politics, not just joining but actively organizing grand anti-fascist, anti-conservative coalitions with progressives and liberals.

Even in places like Canada, where popular front politics never went anywhere electorally, the effects of Stalin’s decision, one shared by many socialists who suddenly found renewed common ground with liberals around basic issues like free speech and elections, was to restore the idea of “the left” as a grand coalition, a large and diverse political community, whose main constituent groupings were liberals, progressives and socialists.

Following the Second World War, the shared project of building the welfare state, albeit motivated by different reasons, kept “the left” together as a political and cultural community. When people said “left wing,” and “right wing,” they had clearly understood meanings. People could be “centre left” or “far left”; the left were always getting into arguments but the arguments were about the correct way to authentically be left-wing, for the most part.

At the height of the Cold War left consensus, social democrats were called “liberals in a hurry,” suggesting that there was not really much disagreement about the political direction society should head among those of the left, just the velocity at which the destination should be approached.

But all that changed in the 1980s and early 90s.

First, with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and then Soviet Union, there was simply no foreign policy justification for liberals to support the welfare state. Those who had worked hardest to enact welfare state policies, leaders like Lester Pearson, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnston, and Richard Nixon were Cold War hawks who believed that matching or exceeding whatever material guarantees the USSR offered was critical to victory.

For the first thirty years of the Cold War, building the welfare state had been the logical means of both pacifying the domestic left with material concessions and roles in its construction and competing with the Soviets in the international field of public opinion, claiming that a capitalist welfare state, organized on Keynesian economics could outperform a “democratic centralist” one-party state when it came to delivering housing, healthcare, education, etc.

Suddenly, all that social spending ceased to double as defense spending.

Besides, much of the left was becoming entranced the Third Way, a kind of PG-rated neoliberalism that offered a sort of Thatcherism with a human face, especially attractive to liberals and progressives. But even many former socialists, especially those more class-adjacent to their liberal and progressive allies, suddenly discovered the virtues of austerity and free trade.

In battles over the rise of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank’s “structural adjustment” programs, investor rights treaties like NAFTA and Maastricht, with their secret courts and irreversible privatization provisions, socialists were utterly routed in the 1990s, whether in electoral contests, like the 1993 Canadian election that came close to eradicating the New Democratic Party or in the internal politics of big tent left-wing parties, where the likes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Mike Harcourt routed the parties’ socialist factions.

Socialism After the Second Left
Socialists have reacted to this in a disappointing way. None of the optimism about socialism’s future and the rising power of labour that had ended the First Left were apparent in the 1990s. Socialists had not voluntary exited the left because their prospects looked better outside than inside. They had been marginalized, reduced to little more than mascots of a bygone age within the parties and larger movement culture of the left.

But instead of grimly accepting what had happened and marching forward on our, we socialists instead covered our defeat and humiliation in a rose-tinted nostalgia. “The left” was no longer a historically contingent alliance of disparate movements and interests but a sentimentalized identity rooted in the past.

To accept our defeat within the left was too much in the context of the massive geopolitical and economic setbacks we were experiencing, the collapse of industrial employment and private sector unionism. So, the worse the left treated socialists, the more explicitly anti-socialist its social values and political ideas, the more socialists sentimentally idealized “the left” not as a political possibility in the present but as a post-political social identity rooted in a story about the past, about one’s political and moral lineage and pedigree.

Socialists’ stirring speeches about the moral virtue, noble history and their unshakeable allegiance to a floating signifier called “the Left” have, of late, been in inverse proportion to their actual power and relevance on the contemporary left. The left doesn’t need or want them. It has achieved its current political hegemony by reuniting left-progressives with right-progressives. It has achieved its current electoral power by building a coalition of the private and public sector managerial classes and those who hope to enter them. Socialists and workers are nothing short of an inconvenience on today’s left. Hence its now-constant disparagement of working people.

Like it or not, if socialists ever want to work with the left again, it won’t be by pretending we have not been evicted. It will be the way we did during the Gilded Age, through brinksmanship and careful, strategically rational agreements an alliances. Sentimentally pretending we are still part of the left is the most effective way for socialists to give away the little remaining power we have.

We have to get back to building socialism outside the left, operating independently of the left and we have to get over this idea that the owner class somehow has worse cooties than the managerial class. Because evidence does not support that view. A lot of workers have got there. Maybe if we did, we could actually get something done like, I don’t know… bringing the forty-hour work week back to BC.

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