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Canadian Politics

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.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

My Baby Pictures: My First Political Essay, June 1992 on Consensus and Green Politics

I just found this piece while checking through my archive to make sure the 1992 chapters of my memoirs were accurate. I hope this piece disabuses those of you who think my PhD has anything to do with my writing practices or anything else about me of such a notion. This is an essay by a twenty-year-old who dropped out of first-year university.

IS CONSENSUS POSSIBLE IN THE GREEN PARTY?
By Stuart Parker

Several people have put it to me that the consensus process has been harmful to the development of Green Parties because it is a cumbersome and ineffective means of making decisions. I disagree with this strongly. I have seen consensus work effectively in a number of situations and believe consensus to be a valuable process for making decisions in groups. It is my belief, however, that the Green Party of B.C. is doing a great disservice both to itself and to the cause of advocating consensus by perpetuating the myth that the decision making process it is currently using on the provincial level is consensus, or even a distant relative of the process.

Having been an advocate of consensus decision making, and having applied it to groups I have organized outside of the Green Party, I had been puzzled by the lack of success in using the process experienced by the Greens and had always put the problem down to the behavior of a number of individuals. It was not until the B.C. Greens Annual General Meeting of 1992 that it occurred to me that a key and essential element of consensus was missing from Green Party decision making. I was reading and copying down the notes left by a workshop on values important to the functioning of consensus. The notes said, “trusting and respecting everyone.” It occurred to me that the element of trust had clearly been missing since I became involved with the B.C. Greens in 1989.

According to those practicing consensus, it is clear that trust is absolutely essential to the process. Unlike unanimity decision making, wherein concessions on unrelated issues are exchanged for consent on a particular issue, consensus presumes that every person operating within the process is working for the benefit of the group. It also presumes that every participant needs to have a high level of trust in the intelligence and motives of all his or her fellow participants. Under the original definition of the consensus process (as opposed to the one now used by the B.C. Greens), the facilitator is charged with phrasing and proposing all decisions adopted by the group, based on his or her sense of the group’s feelings on this issue.

The party’s faith in the intelligence and selflessness of its facilitators was obviously so seriously jeopardized by 1989 that the facilitator had been demoted to the role of chair in meetings, simply to keep a speakers’ list and receive motions from the floor. The term “enrichment” had been demoted to “friendly amendment” and a voting fallback had been introduced to the process so that blocks could be overridden.

The 1992 Annual General Meeting saw a movement by the party closer to the original definition of consensus, with a one day workshop devoted to consensus decision making, the reintroduction of trust building exercises and increased socializing between the participants. While a sense of trust in the process was not fully restored, the party moved closer to a group capable of using consensus. The 1992 meeting was also by far the most culturally homogeneous, being comprised, almost entirely of participants not only politically but socially part of the alternative movement, virtually all of whom felt fully comfortable and appreciative of the fact that the meeting took place at someone’s home. With a narrow cultural base, the meeting was more comfortable with a consensus process.

1991-92 also saw a sharp (50%) membership decline in the party and an even sharper decrease in funds. While during the growth years of 1988-91, consensus had changed into a unanimity oriented version of Robert’s Rules, after the party’s extremely disappointing showing in the 1991 provincial election, full unanimity, trust oriented consensus came back into vogue. This interestingly parallels the original adoption of consensus in 1985, which had followed the boom years of 1983-84. Membership had dropped from 1200 in 1983 to 700 in 1984 to roughly 350 in 1985. This had followed extremely disappointing electoral showings as well.

When political parties suffer emotionally crushing defeats, as with the Alberta Social Credit Party in the early 1970s and the B.C. Social Credit Party in 1991, where a party’s showings have fallen short of their expectations by orders of magnitude, there are what is known as “back to the roots” movements. In the case of right wing parties with a populist base, this means more barbecues, more meetings in rural areas, policies further to the right, active promotion of “Christian principles,” a movement away from active support of transnational business to small business, etc. In essence, such a movement attempts to create a culturally homogeneous party of white, rural, Christian people, driving away even faster the few mainstream supporters the organization the party has been able to hang on to. After all, it is much easier to handle a crushing defeat, when all the remaining supporters can feel better socially about one another because they not only have similar politics, but similar friends, are of a similar age and class and of the same religion.

Most political movements with populist roots tend to want to go back to those roots to cope with major defeats. Perhaps if the New Democrats had ended up with seven seats in 1991, instead of the Socreds, we might be seeing militant, old line socialist trade unionists taking over the party, pushing feminists and environmentalists to the fringe.

So, here we are with the Green Party and its own “back to the roots” movement. The 1992 Annual General Meeting Agenda invited people to enjoy “drumming and cappuccino” and “invoking the goddess from within.” The Canada Day weekend was forsaken in favour of the summer solstice, which is not a long weekend, in the extreme southwest corner of B.C., on a farm. The reaffirmation of consensus was only the crowning touch, and no wonder that it worked better, when the cultural base to which the meeting and party appealed were narrowed so effectively. We were able to send signals to career oriented people, members of organized religions and generally anyone not a member of the Gulf Islands, Kitsilano, New Age culture that they would not fit in culturally to our AGM.

As was explained to me by the writer of the agenda (whose views on Green policy I respect tremendously and whose work on hosting the meeting I do appreciate) “Well, that’s ‘island life.’” Well, the fact is that most of the people in BC, we are trying to reach, including many environmentalists, don’t live on our island. We are not here to promote a culture, we are here to promote a political program. Counter culture and electoral politics are not easily compatible. While both are necessary to achieve social change, the active fusion of the two strategies will render both impotent.

It is not the Green Party that will save the world, and there is no single strategy that will. The Green Party should be making itself the most effective tool to engage in electoral politics, while it leaves other groups working to save the planet to make themselves the most effective lobbying tools, or monkeywrenching tools, or alternative cultures. For the same reason that environmental groups do not limit themselves by supporting a single political party, and thereby narrowing their base of supporters, so the Green Party should not be narrowing its base culturally.

So how does this reflect on consensus? It is clear that consensus is an effective process in an affinity group of culturally similar people, and I believe, capable of enhancing such a group. But when it is applied to a larger group, without a basis of trust, with membership criteria based solely on paying a fee, either the process breaks down or the group consciously or unconsciously undertakes a policy to discourage the membership of people with whom they cannot easily establish a basis of trust. From 1988 to 1991, we have watched the first process happen and now we are switching to the second. It seems that we have a choice: either to make a farce of the process or create additional membership criteria. Because right now, the membership form mentions neither trust nor culture.

If the Greens are to move ahead, it is my belief that we must create a party inclusive of all people who share our concern for the imminent breakdown of planetary life support systems. We must therefore adopt a process which does not have trust as a prerequisite.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

There Is Nothing Socialist About David Eby’s $8 Billion Deficit

The Strange Case of Grant Devine
In the spring of 2001, former Conservative Saskatchewan premier Grant Devine addressed a private luncheon of Fraser Institute supporters at a swanky downtown Vancouver hotel. There were good reasons for the event to be private. Devine was, even among the most ardent members of the political right, a controversial figure. His government had gone down to one of the most crushing defeats at the polls in the province’s history in 1991, with the party falling from 45% of the vote to 25% and losing 28 of its 38 seats in the legislature, with every single urban MLA going down to defeat. And that was only the beginning.

Senior staffers, backbenchers and even cabinet ministers were prosecuted by the RCMP for an organized expense fraud scheme that had been common knowledge in the Devine government’s final term in office. Former cabinet ministers did jail time for stealing public funds. One committed suicide to avoid an imminent arrest. In the 1995 election, the party was reduced to five seats. And its caucus crossed the floor to form a new party called the Saskatchewan Party, to which the NDP referred in the 1999 and 2003 elections as the “Conservative Party witness protection program.” It has not held a seat since.

But the total destruction of the Saskatchewan affiliate of their party was not even the thing about Devine of which grassroots Canadian conservatives most strongly disapproved. In the late 80s and early 90s he had plunged Saskatchewan deeply into debt by building infrastructure in rural communities far beyond what local demand could support and undertook a pricey administrative reorganization of government to fill the many office buildings he constructed in small communities around the province. He also instituted direct subsidies to farmers and ceased charging resource royalties to oil companies and he sold off most revenue-generating part of the government.

Devine’s government remains widely viewed as the most fiscally irresponsible government anywhere in Canada in the 1980s. Not only did they leave office awash in debt; they had created a massive structural deficit that would take a decade of austerity to eliminate.

The Real Dangers of Public Debt
So, at the private luncheon, where no media were allowed, he was asked about this very thing. His response, and I must paraphrase here, was that he knew, a year into his final mandate, that he was facing certain defeat in 1991. And therefore he chose to destroy the province’s finances so that, when the NDP returned to power, they would be unable to bring in any new government programs, that they would be forced into enacting austerity and not expanding the welfare of the province that gave birth to Canadian Medicare.

I have no idea if this was a mere excuse concocted with the benefit of hindsight or whether it was the plan all along. But it was clearly true: plunge a jurisdiction far enough into debt and its ability to make political choices democratically is profoundly undermined. And one has a pretty good idea of who will be making the political choices in an indebted jurisdiction: the global financial elite, the banks, the bond-raters and the investor class.

Historically, the Saskatchewan NDP, the first democratic socialist party ever to take power in North America, has always been debt-phobic. The party held power for seventeen years before introducing Medicare because it felt that for the policy to have a chance, the province would need to be debt-free.

Because it is private companies, especially Standard and Poors, owned and run by the global financial elite, who hand out credit ratings, a heavily indebted and heavily borrowing jurisdiction can only continue enacting its policies if they meet with the approval of the elite of the financial sector. And once upon a time, it seems like just the other day, New Democrats did not understand the corporate elite to be their best buddies.

As a provincial finance minister I once knew reported of her meeting with Standard and Poors, the fiscal responsibility of your jurisdiction and its future financial plans are but small factors in the determination of your jurisdiction’s credit rating. Bond raters and bankers are, like everyone else, ideological. And they want to see governments and people who share their ideology do well and those who do not, not quite so well.

The reality is that a credit rating downgrade by the bond-raters, changes in the lending terms of banks and other governments are political in character. And, the more indebted you are, the more additional borrowing you need to conduct for the coming fiscal year, the greater the ability of the global financial elite to throw your jurisdiction into a debt spiral through a series of interest rate hikes.

Back in the 90s, we saw that play out at the international level as governments like Zimbabwe’s and Argentina’s went into these tailspins, ultimately resulting in World Bank bailouts contingent on World Bank officials being given control of the countries’ finance ministries decisions over program funding leaving their capitals and moving to New York and Geneva.

I have never understood organizations like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ argument that borrowing money is somehow socialist or left-wing. Certainly, there was a time when a lot of borrowing was done by social democratic and liberal governments to more rapidly expand their economies and build the welfare state more quickly during the first phase of the Cold War (1948-80). But this was a period when the global financial elite were part of broad society-wide consensus that producing prosperity and a social safety net for working and middle class people was essential to winning the Cold War for the capitalist side.

As that consensus evaporated in the late 1970s and early 80s, borrowing policies that had worked in the 1950s and 60s stopped working. That was partly due to the restructuring the global financial system in 1974 but more importantly, because, unlike in the age of John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith, the financial sector no longer saw itself as a partner in the construction of the welfare state.

The NDP’s Dramatic Fiscal Policy Reversal
When John Horgan and Carole James, his finance minister, came to lead the first BC NDP government in sixteen years, they were proud of the small budget surpluses they posted during their half-decade in power. And this was just one aspect of their commitment to policy continuity with the government they had replaced. This was, in large measure, because their government’s senior decision-makers were veterans of the party’s nine turbulent years in power during the 1990s, especially after its re-election in 1996 when it faced a capital strike by the mining industry and other major sectors of the economy.

The late 2010s and early 20s NDP was not just afraid of the banks. They were afraid of pretty much every major international industrial cartel. Not spooking or upsetting the mining and petroleum sectors was almost the categorical imperative of the Horgan regime. That is because, like a credit rating downgrade, a capital strike can hobble an economy and destroy the ability of a government to pursue its agenda as the economic contraction causes its revenues to fall and its costs to grow.

So, what are we to make of the new fiscal approach of premier David Eby, the tyrant who succeeded Horgan because the official returning officer, who just happened to be a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, running the succession process, disqualified Eby’s competitor and acclaimed him with nary a vote being cast by the party or its caucus?

The official $7.9 billion budget deficit he and his finance minister announced for 2024-25 is only part of the story. The actual increase in BC’s debt will be just shy of $20 billion thanks to borrowing hidden away in shell games around capital spending and crown agencies and corporations. The province’s debt to gross domestic product ration will climb from 17.6% to 21% in a single year leaving us $123 billion in the hole. And it is not like this will be a one-time thing, the forecast for the 2024-26 deficit, if Eby wins re-election this fall is $6.3 billion, a number sure to grow as the date of next year’s budget approaches, even if we pretend the inevitable orgy of pre-election spending announcements this fall is not going to happen.

Since becoming premier and, as I remarked above, even in the process of becoming premier, Eby has made it clear that he is a janitor for the global financial elite, someone whom they can trust to continue the massive subsidies to the Royal Dutch Shell and the other partners in LNG Canada, someone they can trust to continue throwing a million dollars a day at the Site C dam, whose energy will power the increased fracking operations necessary to fill the pipeline to Kitimat.

Similarly, the pharmaceutical industry can trust him to pursue to most aggressive policies to increase the supply of legal opioids, going so far as to issue fentanyl to high school students without their parents’ consent or knowledge. And readers of this blog know what I think about his government’s other aggressive policies to destroy kids’ endocrine systems and get them hooked on pharmaceuticals they will need for the rest of their lives.

And that is why in my view, Eby is pursuing fiscal policies that undermine the ability of any successor government, his own or another party’s, to deviate from the policy course British Columbia was on before the NDP even formed government.

Because if this plunge into debt continues, the effects of a credit rating downgrade or a capital strike on BC will soon be so catastrophic that another premier would have to spend years paying down the debt before they dared apply the same carbon tax to Big Oil that they do to individual consumers, before they enacted appurtenance legislation to revive our sawmills, before they stopped experimenting on children with dangerous, dependence-inducing drugs.

If a government wants to change course on any major issue of concern to the global financial elite, it will have to be preceded by years of austerity and policy continuity.

This idea that racking up debt is somehow socialist is absurd because what this kind of government debt really does is drain power out of our legislature and into the boardrooms of the banks and bond raters in New York while their stooge, Premier Eby does a soft shoe routine to distract us and his sycophants praise his supposedly courageous borrowing program.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Ugly Symbiosis Between New Democrats and Church Burners

Three Years of Church Burnings
For more than two and a half years, since June 2021, a particular group of Canada has been targeted with a series of terrorist hate crimes: non-white churchgoing Christians. Beginning with the churches of indigenous people, starting in 2021 but soon branching out to include Filipinos, Copts and other racial groups, this group of Canadians has seen ninety-seven of its churches targeted by arsonists.

And yet only one has been brought to justice. Recently, another was captured on video, a young white man in a white hood who attacked a Catholic church in Regina, whose entire public-facing board of directors are non-white community leaders.

When the church-burnings began, supposedly staged as revenge for mass graves allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar near former residential schools, indigenous leaders formed a united front in condemning the burnings. From the most woke-sympathetic neo-traditionalist conservationists to the most pro-development Christians, the leadership of indigenous Canada spoke with a single voice and called for an end to the targeted arsons of on-reserve churches.

They pointed out that indigenous people are one of the most Christian groups in Canada and that their churches are often the oldest and most sacred buildings in rural First Nations communities. Buildings that have served as every kind of community space, for political meetings, education, major gatherings and, of course, generations of weddings and funerals.

But Woke Canadians, especially white Wokes, continued to applaud the burnings until there was such palpable disgust among mainstream Canadians that a few of the most enthusiastic pro-arson civil society leaders, like Harsha Walia, were sacked. Funny how, when push came to shove, the sacrificial victim selected by progressive Canadian civil society leaders was one of the few non-whites publicly endorsing the burnings.

Although the full-throated enthusiasm for this targeted campaign of terror in the progressiverse has died down, it has not been replaced by any actual opposition to the burnings. As in 1960s Alabama and Mississippi, the respectable civil society leadership of the establishment may have stopped publicly cheering for their burnings but they are not saying a bad word about the continued campaign of arson by their irregular militia and instead work to suppress mainstream media coverage of ongoing efforts to keep non-white people of faith terrorized and intimidated.

And how have Canada’s so-called Anti-Hate groups responded to the targeting of a particular religious subset of racial minority groups in nearly one hundred separate acts of domestic terror? They refuse to talk about it and change subject if pushed. Like the rest of the progressive establishment, they work to ensure that while racialized people of faith know about this campaign, the volume is turned down in the public square and instead whitter-on about how it is people of faith who are violent hate-mongers planning to visit a reign of violence on trans-identified youth, funded by the Trump movement and leavened by ‘Russian disinformation’ any day now.

Why is this?

I want to make clear that I am not making the case that there is any kind of conspiracy directing these events, no grand puppet-master or thought-out plan. I am not even suggesting that there is any real coordination. (Although I cannot imagine that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network facilitating the networking of chapters of Antifa, the violent street militia, and maintaining lists of targets that they will not let the media see, is helping matters.) Nor am I suggesting that police and prosecutorial inattention is part of any sort of policy, just the natural outcome of Woke culture capturing police forces.

Instead I want to suggest that there is a set of incentives, a logic that encourages the present state of affairs. Today, when you look at those mobilizing against the sexualisation of children, the destruction of women’s spaces, the rights of parents, etc. You see Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus strongly represented, punching above their demographic weight. And you see white working class anti-authoritarian activists also throwing in strongly.

There is constituency who tell each other, their faith leaders and pollsters that they share the concerns of those mobilizing but you are largely demobilized in this fight: non-white Christians.

Because in the 2020s, everything is about everything else, and people are amazed that someone like me can see the Greenhouse Effect as an existential threat and yet not believe women have penises, this happy coincidence serves the Canadian establishment. The large-scale mobilization of non-white Christians in Canada’s culture wars would radically tip the balance. But this group receives messages every month that it is already outside the protection of the law and, if it looks uppity, the campaign extralegal violence is likely to intensify.

The New Democratic Response
It is in this context that we need to examine two extraordinary events that took place last week following the church-burning. The first took place in parliament when a Conservative MP rose and sought the leave of the house to make a unanimous motion condemning the ongoing burnings. No division was required because he was immediately shouted-down with “nay” from Liberal and NDP MPs.

My former party, the NDP, originally founded and led by churchmen, Tommy Douglas and J S Woodsworth, who believed that their policies were the expression of what was then called “the Social Gospel,” refused to condemn the burning of the churches. The party whose representatives once included civil rights activists from the Mississippi, like Sadie Kuehn, who hosted the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, now deems it wrong to condemn arson targeted at racialized people. The only party whose MPs spoke against Japanese internment in the 1940s wants non-white Christians to know they do not enjoy the equal protection of the law.

In the days that followed, many people of faith in British Columbia reached out formally and informally to the David Eby government asking the BC NDP to do better, given how disproportionately many arsons have taken place in BC. What followed was a slap in the face. Eby’s attorney-general, Niki Sharma, announced a new set of instructions to crown prosecution services to more aggressively target, not arsonists, not those bigoted against religious people but against people opposing the government’s doctrines on gender and child safeguarding.

People like Eby and Jagmeet Singh understand perfectly well the—for them—serendipitous effect of these burnings in suppressing the growing wave of opposition to their key social policies and will use them even if that use is absolute affront to everything generations of New Democrats have believed.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Segregationists Who Burn Churches Are Who They Have Always Been

Unpopular authoritarian regimes often intimidate their subjects into faking popular enthusiasm and support through extortion, coercion and intimidation. But when such regimes are weak, the best they can do is to intimidate their subjects into silence, at least. This is the reality of modern Canada, a weak government, led by weak, authoritarian men, who lack the power to terrorize the populace into a fearful ovation and must settle for browbeating the majority into silence.

I grew up in a black family in Western Canada in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember the stories from my mother, aunts and uncles, as well as veterans of the US Civil Rights movement like folk singer Leon Bibb, friend of the great Paul Robeson, at the dining room table. One of Leon’s most evocative stories was of the first time he witnessed a lynching on a countryside drive with his father on the rural outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1930s. He talked about how after witnessing the swinging corpse of a young black man, a silence descended over their car and followed him and his father into their house when they returned home.

Unable to compel ordinary, decent Canadian people into the kind of terrorized ovation a great authoritarian like Joseph Stalin might elicit in support of his government’s most depraved policies, Woke Canada must settle for the grudging silence of its non-white Christian population as its governments proceed with a set of bizarre and perverse policies opposed, by the vast majority of the Canadian public, a majority that has been cowed by relentless smears, threats and intimidation.

Yet, as the Kaufman report, just released by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, states, when anonymized by pollsters, Canadians of all races, religions and cultures share a profound skepticism of the articles of faith of Woke Canada. While I do not share the report’s analysis about structural racism (indeed, this article is premised on the opposite belief), the data about Canadian public opinion, on which it is based, is indisputable. And it is no coincidence that the strategy we see being used to shut down opposition to the establishment is based on the one Woke lie that has been successfully sold to Canadians, according to the report: that there are mass graves of hitherto-unidentified bodies of First Nations children near abandoned residential schools.

Last week, a surveillance in camera in Saskatchewan captured a striking image. A Roman Catholic Church whose congregants are primarily of African, Middle Eastern and Filipino origin, in Regina, was the site of Canada’s ninety-seventh church arson since the start of 2020. But it is not the flames emanating from the gasoline poured into the church that was most striking. The camera captured an image of a young, white man, wearing a white hood performing the arson.

Having grown up as I did, such an image is an especially chilling one for me. We descendants of slaves know of the long tradition of white men in white hoods burning the churches of racialized people.

The Klan Is Not An Organization But A Property of American History
What historians call the First Ku Klux Klan, which flourished from 1865-89, burned the churches of their former slaves throughout the South during the violent process euphemistically called “Redemption,” whereby black voters were intimidated and murdered to allow white majority governments to seize power and disenfranchise black citizens. The Klan favoured the churches because they were typically the sole or primary place black people could congregate. Lacking community infrastructure and real estate, black churches played a special role as political meeting hall, community centre and place of worship.

So the irregular Confederate militias torched these buildings and often the people inside to intimidate black people, to let them know that the simple act of assembling on their own terms would not be tolerated.

That original Klan died out after it had outlived its purpose and restored Confederate rule to the South. But following the release and smash success of America’s first Hollywood blockbuster, Birth of a Nation in 1915, in which the original KKK were portrayed as the heroes, those responsible for America’s reunification and true ethnogenesis with the inauguration of the Jim Crow system. A new Klan formed, this time with broader interests, as a mass national organization that opposed Slavic, Jewish and Catholic immigration, as well as supporting ongoing racial segregation and its expansion to the national level.

In reality, the Second Ku Klux Klan was created as an insurance and mail fraud scheme and fizzled after a series of criminal prosecutions but, in its day, it nationalized tactics previously confined to the South. Black farmers in Upstate New York were lynched and mosques, synagogues, and orthodox churches became targets of arson by young, white-hooded white men.

My mother, aunts and uncles all remember the church bombings and burnings of the Civil Rights Era, after the Klan had reassembled, this time as the paramilitary of the White Citizens’ Council movement. The Third Ku Klux Klan was not so much an independent organization but the paramilitary wing of White Citizens’ Councils, its violence functioning as a kind of initiation process to vet ambitious young white men the Councils installed in leadership positions in state-level Democratic Parties to resist the national party’s efforts to integrate the party and end segregation and disenfranchisement.

This time, the churches were targeted not just because they had remained the primary civil spaces of black people in the South but because the Civil Rights Movement had decided its public-facing leadership should be churchmen like Martin Luther King Jr. and church activists like Rosa Parks.

That Klan fizzled-out when the last miscegenation laws were repealed and avowed segregationists like George Wallace recanted their white supremacy in the early 1980s. While individuals like David Duke continued to grab the odd headline by claiming to lead an organization that barely existed, the reality is that like its two previous incarnations, the Klan fizzled-out as an organization.

The thesis of this essay is that the Klan is that it is not so much an organization as a set of reactions inherent to the Anglo American racial system. Until the premises and structures underpinning this system change in profound and fundamental, ways, we will be overshadowed by the Once and Future Klan.

Four Years of Church-Burnings in Canada
In 2020, young white people began donning white hoods and setting fire to racialized people’s churches all over Canada in response to a controversy over whether there were undiscovered mass graves of indigenous children near former residential schools. Shockingly, despite nearly one hundreds arsons having been committed since this controversy erupted, only one arsonist has been arrested or charged.

Kathleen Panek, a young white woman who wore a conventional black hood, rather than a KKK-style face-covering white hood was identified through camera footage, charged, prosecuted and convicted. While her lawyer claimed that she was under the influence of drugs and upset with her boyfriends, Panek has remained closed-lipped about her motives for destroying a Surrey church whose congregants are Egyptian immigrants. 

So the only clues we have had about the other arsonists came from their social media supporters, who are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly Woke. The constituency least supportive of the burnings, which originally targeted indigenous Christian churches exclusively, before branching out to include Filipino, Coptic and other non-white urban congregations, were indigenous people. All factions of indigenous civil society, from the most neo-traditional and eco-conscious to the biggest pro-business, pro-development folks roundly condemned the burnings and begged the arsonists to stop.

This has had no effect. Woke, white Canadians continue to applaud or remain silent as the most sacred buildings of constituencies with whom they purport to sympathize are destroyed. Just four days ago, a Conservative MP seeking a unanimous motion of condemnation of the church burnings was shouted down by NDP and Liberal MPs refusing to grant consent.

Churches of indigenous people, churches of immigrants, churches of racialized people—their burnings have either been celebrated or Wokes have averted their gaze. No condemnations have emanated from supposedly “anti-hate” organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. They are busy sharing lists with Antifa so that when these non-white people of faith object to government policy, they can be more efficiently doxed and threatened.

I have found it telling that Woke activists were eager to label the participants in the Freedom Convoy as Klansmen and suggest, without the slightest evidence that they are led by the KKK. That is because fundamental to Wokeness is its use of projection as a rhetorical tactic to sow confusion in its adversaries.

There is one group of white supremacist, white-hooded, church-burning segregationists in Canada and we know who they and their friends are. Only one social movement is fighting to racially segregate university campuses and classes, the Wokes. Only one social movement is asserting that whites are intellectually superior to non-whites (the euphemism they use is “logocentric”); the reason non-whites just can’t do math as well and can’t even show up on time is that whites are uniquely logocentric, according to the ideology propounded by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry. Only one movement in Canada is claiming that history is made exclusively by whites and that non-whites are just bystanders and victims.

As we have seen in the fiasco at Harvard, Wokes are not interested in appointing competent, intelligent minority tokens to represent them in their elite-level diversity projects. They want to see the least competent, the least qualified, the most dependent, the most precarious non-whites in token positions. Because that is all they expect of non-whites: inferiority.

Think of all of the brilliant black female academics who have out-published and out-taught Claudine Gay a hundredfold, the formidable black and Asian women of American politics who could out-organize and out-debate Kamala Harris in their sleep. That’s because, if a minority token goes off-script, their fall needs to be immediate and precipitous; so one seeks out tokens with the fewest accomplishments and the most skeletons.

Going off-script is, after all, highly consequential, when Wokes wield so much of their power through acts of extorted ventriloquism. As Cherokee author Thomas King observed, nothing upsets white liberals more than one not being “the Indian [they] had in mind.”

When Canadian Labour Congress officials assert that lesbians, women’s rights and child protection activists are white supremacists controlled by evil, shadowy American money, leavened by “Russian disinformation,” they need reality to resemble, at least superficially, their outrageous claims. And that means keeping down, keeping silent non-white Christians who are deeply concerned about the capture of our schools by genderwang and deeply racist teachings, asserting their children’s inherent racial inferiority as a host of disciplines and skills.

Indigenous Christians, immigrant Christians, non-white Christians need to be intimidated, to be kept silent, lest they contradict the white supremacist “narrative” of the Wokes, that they love all this tokenization, DEI racism and genderwang. And one of the ways you do that is a four-year campaign of burning their churches.

Does this mean someone is orchestrating the burnings? No. But I do think that we can now assume that the enthusiasm the Canadian establishment has for punishing the perpetrators is about the same as that of Dixie’s establishment during the last round, half a century ago. Those wielding the hammer, the commissar class are not trying too hard to stop this because they’re not sure that it’s wrong.

Am I asserting that there is a conspiracy here? No. Am I even asserting that Wokes are aware that they are white supremacists, that their whole tearful colonizer act is a giant racist humblebrag? No. What I am saying is that: I don’t care who the Wokes think they are; I don’t care how they self-identify, who they believe they are or what they think they’re doing any more than I care about the inner life of the supporters of the first three Klans.

What matters is this: if white people are putting on white hoods and burning the churches of non-whites who need to be kept in line to be kept out of politics and civil society, it doesn’t matter how they identify. If people fighting to segregate schools and propound doctrines of non-white inferiority, we already know who they are.

They are the Ku Klux Klan.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Return to Oz: The Rise of the New Producerists

The Second Gilded Age
It is almost impossible to over-state the similarities between the First Gilded Age (the 1880s through 1920s) and the current one, so-named by US historian Thomas Sugrue (1991-present). By the 1920s, the wealth gap between rich and poor was the largest in human history. More women were in work outside the home than ever before. The continued growth of the economy was predicated ballooning consumer debt and stock market speculation.

Cross-dressing was really trendy and progressives were very excited about voluntary, incentive-based eugenics, whereby governments and civil society organizations encouraged homosexuals, the mentally ill and indigenous people to get themselves sterilized. And there was a massive public controversy over whether women should have their own sex-segregated competitive sports.

Authoritarian movements of both the left and right were on the rise while the sheen seemed to have come off good old fashioned democracy. And working people were paying for nearly everything on instalment plans that never seemed to end. But they appeared unable to bridge racial, sectional and rural-urban divisions to form a viable political coalition to reverse their immiseration.

Of course, that was the terminal phase of the First Gilded Age. And, of course, history does not repeat. It only rhymes. But you must admit, this seems a pretty catchy rhyme, as history rhymes go.

Free Soilers, the First Producerists and the Wizard of Oz
And yet, there is one area of comparison, one set of obvious parallels that commentators comparing First Gilded Age to the second seem to avoid: the Producerist movements. It is strange how the producerists have been excised from our social memory and political history, despite them having had a huge political impact which left many traces, chief among which is the Wizard of Oz, originally written not as a children’s pulp novel (this genre was just in the process of being born) but as a political satire of the 1896 US presidential election.

Dorothy, the novel’s main character, begins her story in Kansas, the crucible of American producerism. Kansas, a state founded on a prior movement with similar grievances and a similar constituency, the Free Soil movement, was a natural seedbed. Free Soilers were yeoman farmers of staple goods, especially maize. Despite working hard on their family farms every year and churning out a lot of food for the rest of America, it seemed that they could never get ahead. The costs of getting their food to market, via sternwheelers, canals and railways often left little money in their pockets.

Meanwhile, Down South, it seemed that the rich slave-holding land-owners, despite being soft-palmed and idle, were making money hand over fist. So, Free Soilers, like Abraham Lincoln, argued that the economy was being skewed by railway companies, milling concerns and other corporations, in cahoots with Washington’s political elites. This force they called “slave power” and they primary interest in bringing down slavery was not humanitarian concern for the slaves but the desire to alleviate the poverty in their own communities.

And yet, following the abolition of slavery, matters only seemed to get worse. None of the money Ulysses Grant’s administration handed the railway companies ever seemed to trickle down to the farmers and reduce the costs of shipping their products to market. Indeed, the railway boom drove canal and river boat companies out of business in many cases and consolidated railways into an increasingly small group of ever-larger corporations.

So, some of the farmers who remained unhappy with their lot began to embark on new political analyses and new political projects. They broadened their optic and began to see that it had not been the planter class but rather the whole national business elite: rail, finance, shipping, manufacturing that were against them. As in the Second Gilded Age, the First Gilded Age was characterized by rapid horizontal (i.e. firms doing the same kind of business merging) and vertical (i.e. firms that fed into each other’s supply chains e.g. iron, coal and auto manufacturing) integration. Business in the US was rapidly consolidating, merging into things called “rings,” “trusts” and “combinations.”

The little guy was being squeezed out, a feeling that intensified as new agricultural industries, like the sugar beet sector, began snapping up the land of economically marginal independent farmers and consolidating land into plantation-like operations, worked, in the southwest, by Hispanic debt peons and in the southeast by black sharecroppers. The banks clearly colluded in this process and then rail companies built special spur lines to these new latifundia.

The first political response was the Greenback Party, which ran candidates in the three presidential elections of the 1880s on a platform of breaking the power of the banks through something we today call “cryptocurrency.” The thinking was that the power of the vast conglomerates and the growing financial sector could be broken through the issuance of a new currency that was not pegged to gold.

The Greenbackers soon began electing members to the US House of Representatives and local town councilors, not just in farming communities but in the new single-industry mining towns that were popping up all over the West. The incipient industrial union movement in organizations like the Knights of Labour began drawing close to this coalition in the mill and mining towns of the West opened by massive rail development, and fueled by commodity rushes and booms like the Dakota gold rushes.

Like the farmers, the miners, loggers and mill workers of the West saw themselves as the true creators of America’s wealth, those whose hands transformed the country’s natural capital into the things that materially sustained its people. And they too lived at the whim of instalment plans, catalogue store monopolies, banks and railways, eking out a meagre existence while the wealth generated by their toil somehow vanished.

The Greenbackers and their successor party, the Populists, were not anti-capitalist. Rather, they believed that capitalism was being sabotaged by powerful business and government elites that colluded to rig the system against hard-working producers. In the 1892 presidential election, the Populists won Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota and Colorado but their biggest haul of electoral votes came from Kansas, pulling in 9% of the popular vote. The party also elected eleven members to the House of Representatives.

Major civic organizations backed the party, the Grange, a federation of farmers’ cooperatives and the Knights of Labour, a Christian proto-trade union that, like the Grange, was more interested in restoring the spirit of Adam Smith’s capitalism than upending it.

Yet for all the deregulation of the financial sector and trust busting producerists called for, the movement, from its inception, also pushed for socialization of the railways, the electrical grid and the education system, not out of an incipient or nascent socialism but because populists saw these things as necessary foundations for a level playing field in the marketplace.

The Road to the Emerald City
What the Populists could not do, it seemed, was break out of their core geographic region. After four elections, their party had been unable to make a dent in the political duopoly that dominated the East Coast and Midwest. Despite the Populists having moderated their policy from pure crypto currency to a position called “bimetallism,” which proposed to peg the dollar to both gold and silver, and despite there being widespread support in all regions of the country and within both major parties for bimetallism, the leaders of both major parties resolutely backed the gold standard, a position that had become synonymous with the elite policy consensus of the duopoly on a host of issues.

Naturally, then, as Dorothy arrives in Oz, concurrently afflicted by the wicked witches variously representing natural disasters and economic downturns, she realizes that her only hope is to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, Baum’s allegory of the gold-paved path to Washington.

En route, Dorothy gains the support of the Scarecrow, the personification of the Populist Party’s base, the maize farmers of the Great Plains, big-hearted but lacking in political savvy. While she personally wins over the Tin Man, who represents the industrial working class of the Northeast, he is never convinced of the project of the Scarecrow, or the Cowardly Lion, the representation of William Jennings Bryan’s insurgent entryist politics, about whose ultimate failure the Wizard of Oz was written.

Entryism Then and Now
Disappointed by inability of the Populist Party to crack 10% or break out of its core region, some producerists had begun to favour political entryism as a strategy after the disappointment of 1892.

Entryism is a political strategy we tend to associate with twentieth- and twenty-first century Marxists. The idea is that a radical group slowly, stealthily joins a more mainstream organization and gradually accumulates influence therein before fully uncloaking as a group conducting a take-over for the purpose of radically realigning the organization. Most recently, Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in the British Labour Party were accused of being a coalition of far-left anti-Semitic extremists organized by the group Momentum, who had stealthily joined the party to radically change its trajectory. Similar accusations were leveled at the Dogwood Initiative and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in their effort to realign the BC New Democratic Party’s fossil fuel policies through the insurgent leadership campaign of Anjali Appadurai.

Irrespective of the veracity of the specific accusations in the present, entryism is something we today associate with educated, urban environmentalists and socialists but, arguably, the most successful act of political entryism in the Anglosphere was Bryan’s seizure of the Democratic Party.

Bryan and the populists traveled to Chicago without his candidacy having been declared, riding a wave of general dissatisfaction with the pro-establishment, conservative policies of their incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, a strong supporter of the gold standard. With Cleveland’s potential successors trying to sort out just how much of their party’s legacy to wear and how much to repudiate, the entryists staged a floor vote on bimetallism which they won handily and which gave Bryan the opportunity to deliver one of the most famous pieces of American political oratory, the “Cross of Gold” speech, which he compared America’s farmers and labourers to Christ himself, arguing that they were being crucified by the banks and big business on a “Cross of Gold.”

And he won the presidential nomination on its strength, only having declared his candidacy moments before.

Bryan began the transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of the working man and the small holder with his presidential runs in 1896 and 1900 but his campaigns received a fraction of the financial support Cleveland’s did, as the banks and major industries had no use for a candidate that repeatedly denounced them, often by name. At one point, Bryan even named JP Morgan in a Democratic Party convention resolution, proposing the expulsion of any Democratic who took money from him or any of the nation’s other influential plutocrats.

Bryan did not just campaign to break the power of the banks and major industries; he also opposed American imperialism, Baum’s decision to represent him as the Cowardly Lion coming from the media attacks he sustained for joining Mark Twain and other early peace movement figures in opposing America’s invasion of the Philippines.

Bryan’s movement, which continued to hold significant sway in the Democratic Party, ultimately helped to shape the New Deal of the 1930s, was not informed by Marxism or any other explicitly socialist ideology. Rather it comprised rural labourers and farmers who believed the only way to get a square deal under capitalism was to bridle the power of big business.

Producerism in Canada
While Canada’s more conservative political culture enabled producerists to enjoy a comfortable home in the Liberal Party, the perpetual opposition in nineteenth-century Canada, this began to change with the election of the Wilfrid Laurier government, which began the party’s century-long project of alienating its original rural Western base. Following Laurier’s fall and the upheavals caused by the First World War and botched demobilization programs, there was a rapid radicalization of the Canadian producerists, which yielded dramatic post-war political changes.

Out of nowhere, it seemed, the United Farmers of Alberta swept the province’s farming communities and formed a majority government in 1921. Meanwhile, the province’s slow-growing Labour Party had split into pro- and anti-Marxist factions. The anti-Marxist faction won seats in Edmonton and entered the legislature as allies of the United Farmers, based on a shared producerist ethos, one that sought to bridle the greed of the banks, the railways and the subsidized manufacturing interests of Central Canada. The Farmer-Labour alliance remained in power for the next fourteen years.

The same year, at the national level, a producerist party, calling itself the Progressives, swept the West, from Vancouver Island to James Bay in the 1921 federal election, consigning the Conservative Party to third place and holding the Liberal Party to a minority. Allied with this mix of labourers and farmers was a more radical group, the Independent Labour Party, led by a key figure in the Winnipeg General Strike, JS Woodsworth.

Without strong leadership or a coherent program, Canada’s producerist parties gradually declined, primarily because they had thought little about reasonable policy prescriptions that could actually restructure the economy along the lines of the supporters’ class interests. And so, after forming a single provincial government in Ontario, the party was slowly reabsorbed into the Liberals and Conservatives.

Western Producerism and the Rise of the CCF
In the West, however, the decline of the producerists was more complex. The more urban, secular and socialistic labour factions of the parties and the more religious, rural and free market factions increasingly drifted apart, giving birth, in the 1930s, to the two regional political parties that dominated Canada’s three Western provinces: the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and Social Credit.

It must be understood, then, that while socialists like JS Woodsworth, Tommy Douglas and Major Coldwell were highly effective in recruiting not just labourers but farmers to the CCF, the party’s rank and file members and most of its elected representatives were not bespectacled readers of Marx and Engels but farmers and workers animated by the producerist ethos, the idea that industries like banking, electricity and rail should be socialized so that individual workers and farmer could get a fair shake financing their family businesses, keeping the lights on and getting the products of their hard labour to market.

That is why, when Canada elected its first CCF government in Saskatchewan, this was only possible because Saskatchewan was the least urban province in Canada, allowing Douglas and his producerist coalition to be swept into office, despite losing the province’s two main cities.

It is also useful to remember that during his seventeen years as premier, Douglas never introduced Medicare. The universal social programs his government delivered were a universally accessible electrical grid and highway system. It would be his successor, Woodrow Lloyd, who would fall on his sword over Medicare in 1961.

Today’s Producerists
Well, folks, it’s 2024 and the producerists are back. Farmers, truckers and rural industrial workers, the core of the original producerist coalitions of the US and Canada have returned, not just in Canada but throughout Europe. Big rigs and tractors are blocking highways from Berlin to Nanaimo, raising a host of grievances shared by the classes that raise our food, drill our oil, mine our coal, deliver our goods, etc. I do not agree with all of the demands of today’s producerists, nor is their coalition any more coherent or cohesive than the first producerist coalitions were.

But it is they, not the laptop class of soft-palmed urbanites looking down on them who are organizing the big anti-government rallies and anti-war demonstrations. They are the ones denouncing the big banks, the legacy media, the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industry.

Just like the producerists who won the 1944 Saskatchewan election, the 1919 Ontario election and the 1921 Alberta election, they are being demonized, smeared and belittled as hicks and hayseeds, sources of ignorance, pestilence and disorder, in many cases by the successors to the very party they founded in Calgary in 1931, the CCF. They’re even being smeared with an accusation that was already tired in 1944, that they are dupes and stooges of a foreign strongman in Moscow and not just ordinary, decent people who want a fair shake out of this economy, however unrealistic that dream might be.

But maybe that message is starting to get through now that we see their demonization grow ever more extravagant, as terrorists, Klansmen and Nazis. Anything, I guess, to distract us from the man behind the curtain.

Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Jackie Robinson, Barry Goldwater and the Geomagnetic Reversal

Since the Earth first formed, its magnetic field has re-polarized several times. The North Pole has become the South Pole and vice versa. Sometimes these transitions have taken as long as ten thousand years; some have taken place in less than a hundred. All of these transitions, by the standard of geologic time, have taken place in the blink of God’s eye. Suddenly, south is north and all the molecules start realigning based on the new magnetic field structuring the matter and energy of the earth’s systems.

I want to suggest that, since the emergence of what is called the Second Party System, this is essentially how American politics functions, that it does, in human time, what the earth does in geological time: re-polarizes. US politics and its coalitions are highly dynamic, as dynamic as any in the world. But, especially since the introduction of the Primary System in the 1920s, this political dynamism has been coupled with a bipolar system. And even before the 1920s, for the previous century and a half, the emergence of a new party always led to the collapse of an old one.

This combination of a locked-in two-party dynamic with a highly dynamic politics constantly making and unmaking big, unwieldy coalitions means that, unless legally restructured from the bottom up, the United States is fated to undergo a series of magnetic reversals. And it is my view that we are at the crescendo of such a reversal today.

Furthermore, the way that news media have changed throughout the Anglosphere white settler states, the repercussions of this realignment, globally, are even greater than during the Cold War.

For those less acquainted with US history than I, let me take a moment to describe some other re-polarizations. Beginning in 1932 and culminating in 1960, the Democratic Party went from being the party of white supremacy, backed by the Solid South, running on a national platform of segregation and the maintenance of Jim Crow disenfranchisement laws to becoming the party of black America, steadily losing white majority segregationist states from 1944 until 1980 when not a single state in Dixie backed them.

Intimately related to this process, the Republican Party began actively courting southern segregationists in 1960, running against the Civil Rights Act in the 1964 election under Barry Goldwater, with the assistance of floor-crossing segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, and adopting Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968, to actively solicit the votes of white supremacists.

In the 1970s, under the leadership of Gerald Ford, the Republican Party became, explicitly the party of neoliberalism, moving its progressive wing, which had long favoured greater state regulation of business, since the Teddy Roosevelt presidency, to the periphery. Free marketers eclipsed old school right-progressives and politicians changed their stripes accordingly, with long-time progressives like George H W Bush becoming evangelists of neoliberalism.

From 1932 until 1992, the Democrats had been the party of the New Deal, the Welfare State, having previously been the party of deregulation in the nineteenth century. But in 1992, they shouldered past the Republicans on their right and from 1994-2000 enacted an aggressive program of deregulation, free trade and social program cuts. Having previously been the party of Catholics, Blacks, Latinos and the white working class, the four most socially conservative groups in the country, the post-Clinton Democrats coupled their newfound love of free markets with a muscular social liberalism, focusing on aggressive secularization and hot button social issues like gay marriage.

Consequently, Republicans became aggressive in playing to Catholics and the white working class (even in the early twenty-first century, they feared actively recruiting racialized constituencies while trying to keep the last of the segregationist southerners on board.) First, they focused exclusively on social issues, abortion, gay marriage, the coerced secularization of private business, etc.

But with the ascent of Donald Trump, advised by Steve Bannon, this appeal to working class Americans of all stripes broadened. And, for the first time since the Clinton Administration ratified it, Americans were given the chance to vote against NAFTA in 2016, a hated agreement that had ravaged so many industrial towns, tearing the fabric out of communities and leaving industrial town after industrial town looking like a Bruce Springsteen song.

This brought more dividends than even imagined, for the GOP, in the form of working class voters of all racial backgrounds. Despite the largely cosmetic changes to NAFTA, working class voters continue to pour into the Republican Party.

Of course, everyone who has a progressive between 1992 and the present knows the Democrats’ counter-move: to vigorously, assiduously recruit upper-income, educated white suburbanites who have traditionally voted Republican but are disgusted not so much by the party’s policies but by its adoption of the most boorish, proletarian cultural affectations. Correcting the spelling of working class people and sneering at their belief that they could do research or form political opinions on their own became a staple of the party that had once propounded its core doctrine as the common sense and decency of the working class.

This is starting to generate its own set of problems for the GOP: in primarily white regions of the country, they are now at a disadvantage in special elections and other low-turnout contests, because the voter suppression laws could not name a colour and could only suppress people’s votes based on class. So, because Democrats are now richer and better-educated than Republicans in growing swaths of the country, the very laws Republicans enacted in the twentieth century to suppress Democratic voting is now suppressing their own vote, as they grow increasingly dependent on the white working class.

And, how long before, mere lip service to respecting working class people turns into policies that could materially benefit them at the expense of the Mitch McConnells of the world?

Curiously, possibly because of its incredibly incompetent and maladroit style from top to bottom, the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign actually told us poignant and ironic story about this, a powerful piece of American history when they aggressively popularized video footage of Jackie Robinson and his cadre showing up at the 1964 Republican convention to denounce the nomination of Goldwater and the recruitment of Thurmond.

Robinson, one of the most important media surrogates for liberal, respectable black Americans, was an American icon, the much-beloved baseball player, the first black person to play on a major league team. Throughout the 1950s, he had been an active member of the GOP, “the party of Lincoln,” when American blacks were leaning Democratic but split between the main parties. He exerted an important influence on the Eisenhower regime in its reaction to Brown v. Board of Education and in the passage of the first national Civil Rights Act in 1957.

Robinson passionately expressed his absolute incredulity that the party that had freed the slaves would back an avowed segregationist for senate and an opponent of the Civil Rights Act for the presidency.

The Clinton campaign showed us this video as part of their sheepdog operation of snapping up that last handful of GOP-voting white, upper middle class, educated suburban liberals in the outskirts of Detroit, Philadelphia and Raleigh, an operation that was, even then, producing diminishing returns.

Looking back, in hindsight, as a reluctant Clinton supporter at the time, I now see how the video actually illustrates the opposite of what she hoped it would. Rather than focusing on equivalencies they wished us to draw between Goldwater and Trump, I am focusing on Robinson, a man living in the past, a man unable to accept the realignment he had been living through since 1932. To him, the Republican Party was not a dynamic, ever-changing force but something of a fixed essence that transcended the ravages of time.

The problem was not that the Republicans had changed but that Robinson had not. He was at the wrong convention. He should have been down the road at the Democratic convention, shepherding the floor vote on the Voting Rights Act and defusing the conflict between the two Mississippi convention delegations.

Unfortunately, since the Jon Stewart-ization of progressive news in the Anglosphere, this distinctively American polarity is now culturally if not politically enveloping society in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The political obsessions of Canadian progressives are those Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Trevor Noah tell them to have. They are worried about militarized police forces, abortion laws, gun control and host of other issues, where the US and Canada are in very different situations with respect to our problems, our laws and the possible solutions. Unconcerned about the Trudeau government’s massive expansion of guest worker programs, they whitter on about needing to support illegal immigrants to the US. Unconcerned about the fake college shakedown we are running on the children of the global middle class, indebting families for generations, they are focused on American student loan forgiveness.

For this reason, the American realignment has come to Canada, not because of structural features of Canada but because of the cultural politics of the post-political Anglosphere.

You see, Canadian progressives, you are actually Jackie Robinson, people living in a nostalgic past to justify membership in parties that have long since abandoned the working class.

Canadian Politics Race US Politics | fusangite |

Colonized By Wankers: the Unique Vulnerability of the Anglosphere to Progressive Authoritarianism

In my last essay, I had some words to say about why Canada was uniquely susceptible to becoming one of the world’s pre-eminent Wokeistans. Because it was near the end of a 3500-word behemoth of an essay, rather than making you find it in the original text, I shall just begin by reposting it here:

In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.

Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.

Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.

This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.

Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionistic self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.

Many found this section to be the most engaging part of the essay because it helped to account for what Canadians are experiencing as a unique vulnerability to the most bizarre forms of Woke social and political behaviour and the lack of any apparent cultural or institutional capacity to resist them. But I cannot let this story of Canada’s incomplete or superficial secularization stand as a sufficient, or even primary, explanation of the state of my country.

For one thing it does not account for the fact that Canada is not one nation sticking out within the Global North put part of a particular set of places that exhibit near-identical vulnerabilities to and comorbidities with the key themes and obsessions of Wokeness such as a celebration of censorship, placing certain groups of perceived villains (e.g. “TERFS, Zionist Jews, etc.) outside the social contract and state violence monopoly, essentialization and fetishization of race, combined with a theory of sex and sexuality primarily premised on some combination of the Emperor’s New Clothes and the Mister Potato-Head Fallacy.

If one thinks of Wokeness like Dante’s circles of Hell, Canada is not the only member of the outer circle. Out here with us are Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; the next most dramatically Woke places are Wales and Scotland and it is only then that places outside the Anglosphere enter the running, with Norway, Germany, Mexico and Brazil. Yet, although first target and most heavily invested-in in the progressive authoritarian project, the United States and England have, after many early capitulations are looked-to, the world over, as places where social movements, from feminists to Muslims to conservative Christians, are offering some of the strongest, most courageous grassroots pushbacks against Wokeness.

Clearly, there is some relationship between Wokeness and the Anglosphere but one that is complex and must be thoroughly understood because, understanding the variegated susceptibility of English-speakers to Wokeness, can reveal important things to us about progressive authoritarian identitarianism.

Now, to past! In Richard Bushman’s most underappreciated book, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, the grand old man of American history reminds us that hijacking revolutions is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. Indeed, it is in the nature of revolutions to inevitably be hijacked. That is because a revolution must assemble a substantial majority of the population to succeed; the vast majority of a population has to believe that rolling the dice on a revolution is more likely to improve their lot than not for one to happen.

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution originally included socialists, students, feminists, liberals and all kinds of people it would eventually turn on. Similarly, Lenin’s, Mao’s, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s, Robespierre’s, Castro’s and most other successful revolutions entailed the assembly of a vast and variegated groups of constituencies with conflicting interests but who found the destruction of the regime to be a shared interest.

It should not surprise us, then, that the first modern revolution, Washington’s Revolution was just this sort of thing. Bushman exposes, in his study of war propaganda from the 1770s and 80s that people favouring the creation of an independent liberal republic in America were a small portion of revolutionaries who fought in the American Revolution but were over-represented in the military and political leadership largely thanks to George Washington’s personal sympathies with liberalism.

When the British Empire conducted a ruthless internal inquiry as to how they lost the Thirteen Colonies, not a thing every empire can do, and a significant cultural reason that British Empires have been global hegemons for the past 260 years, a quarter of a millennium, they engaged in a truth-seeking process more interested in imperial success than protecting decision-makers. Their conclusion: the reason they had lost America was that they had made the mistake of settling it with Englishmen.

The British Caribbean, full of Irish indentured servants and Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Québec, populated primarily with French Catholic colonists, had not joined the revolution because its master discourse was not a doctrine of republican liberal independence but the assertion of the Common Law right, granted all Englishmen, to rise up against and slay the king’s evil courtiers who have falsely counseled him into misgovernment.

In other words, most American revolutionaries were as bewildered as Iranians in 1980 and Russians in 1918. They had risen up, as loyal subjects of King George, to slay his evil counselors based on their rights as free Englishmen, propounded in every constitutional document from the Salic Law to Magna Carta.

So, the British Empire made an important decision: henceforth, no colony would be run by Englishmen; it would be run by a group the British had already colonized, a group already disentitled, and members of that group already comfortable in the role of stooge. That’s why Canadian British imperial pageantry is full of kilts, bagpipes and tartans… or at least it was until Justin Trudeau’s raceplay fetish got control of it and filled it with Vanishing Indians and settlers doing Aboface, with their drums and feathers.

So, the British Empire re-thought Ireland. The people to colonize Ireland were not the English but the Irish Scots, Scots who, for one reason or another, factual or not, believed that they were the true, pure Irish. Not a surprise in an era governed by the discourse of fictive etymology to re-describe the Irish colonial project not as Englishmen civilizing the Irish but as the Ulster Protestant Scotsmen returning to their homeland and reclaiming it.

Have you ever wondered why Indian accents sound so similar, whether the native speaker speaks an Indo-European/Aryan language from the North or a Dravidian/Tamil language from the South, like Malayalam? There is a reason for that: the thing that unites Indian accents from Kerala to Punjab is the “Welsh lilt.” Because the Welsh, like the Scots, people conquered by the English, were disproportionately sent to India.

In this way, every post-1787 white settler state in the Anglosphere (New Zealand, Canada, Australia) was colonized by an already-colonized people, as was Ireland, the original template for the project. The US, Scotland and Wales were merely, as so brilliantly expressed in Trainspotting, merely colonized by the English, who are wankers. But what happens when those colonized by wankers colonize others?

I would suggest that our deep colonial consciousness causes a constitutionally supine nature to enter a populace that has never even met its oppressor but instead only encounters, as authority figures, members of peoples also conquered by its oppressor. This also helps to explain the cases of Mexico and Brazil. Brazil, it must be remembered: produced the greatest black slave-hunters in the world, escaped and manumitted African slaves in Brazil who still had enough cultural knowledge to sail back to Africa and enslave African war captives in the Sertão around Luanda (the first place to legally define whiteness as—the possession of shoes).

This supine nature suffuses the cultures of the outer Anglosphere. It is no coincidence that the strong leaders of Canada’s twentieth century were overwhelmingly from outside Anglo culture, Laurier, St. Laurent, Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien all grew in French-majority communities that threw off the culture of stoogery during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, to declare that Quebecois were “masters in our own house.”

Anglo Canada, Australia and New Zealand, furthermore, are all places designed to toady to whoever the hegemon is. The position of stooge transcends one specific empire. Once the British Empire entered terminal decline, all three rapidly realigned their politics to serve the interests of the United States over the interests of Britain. And it is no coincidence that, since the Chinese Empire has regained its belligerent swagger under Xi Jinping, each of these countries has had a major Chinese political interference scandal, in which their national governments were beginning to hedge their bets, and, not knowing whether to kowtow to Washington or Beijing, began doing both.

Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand are proceeding in lock step to return to their colonial past, transferring power from democratic institutions to technocrats within government or within the regulated oligopolies with which their governments are fusing. All three are increasingly in love with censorship, gun control and the transfer of parental rights to the state. Unlike Westminster, parliamentarians have discarded all pretense of representing their constituents to the government and now brazenly represent the government to their constituents, always voting with the party whip and belittling local voters who demand better as victims of “Russian disinformation” or bigots.

And it is not so much that these countries are becoming newly authoritarian. It is that their essential nature, carefully baked-in by the nineteenth-century British Empire is coming to fore. This is how they are designed to respond to stress, uncertainty and threat; they are returning to their roots, rediscovering their inner toady and petty enforcer. What was mistaken as cultural conservatism in these countries a hundred ago is being mistaken as a kind of illiberal cultural liberalism today. But the reality is that these things are both simply expressions of fundamental weakness, a desire to conform, a desperation for approval from whoever appears to hold the hammer, a nature intentionally built into these societies from their founding.

Progressive Canadians and New Zealanders, especially, are playing up their white guilt colonizer myths to histrionic proportions. There are many reasons for this, which I have been exploring on this blog for more than five years. But let us not discount what this myth is being used to obscure: that Canadians and New Zealanders were never the big, tough, warlike colonizers we have made our ancestors out to be. Part of the core of the myth of intentional genocide is a myth of our colonial ancestors possessing a strength and a ruthlessness they never did. We love to compare ourselves to Israel these days because part of us wishes our nation had been forged by truly great men, by powerful, ruthless, proud figures like David Ben Gurion and not a bunch of colonial administrators and mediocre lawyers at a genteel booze-up in Charlottetown.           

To turn things around the people of the Outer Anglosphere must finally find their courage. At its core the crisis we face is not an information problem; it is not an ideological problem; it is not a public opinion problem; it goes much deeper. It is a problem of courage.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Identity | fusangite |

The Self-Harming Elect and the West’s Long-term Problem with the Athletes of God

This essay is a “big think” essay that makes a multi-part argument. If you have a background in metaphysics or religious history, you can probably skip more than half of it and just read later sections but it is present in its long form so that readers without any such background can trace my arguments about why social movements celebrating self-harm and led by self-harming people constitute the threat that they do in our present moment.

If you don’t want to read a bunch of philosophical and religious background, either because you already know it or because you just don’t care that much, I urge you to move ahead to the section entitled “Canadian content.”

The Mind-Body Dichotomy in the West

One of the most significant problems the Church faced in Late Antiquity prior to and during its incorporation into the Roman imperial state was that of the Athletes of God. Philosophical and religious movements whose intellectual genealogy includes Plato and Platonist readings of other philosophers has a very real problem based on something that does not actually exist: the body-mind dichotomy.

Possibly due to some sort of mild autism, one of Plato’s most influential philosophical contributions was the idea that our material reality was an inferior and corrupted reality, a distorted shadow of what he called the “World of Forms.” God, the true creator, had created and inhabited a perfect, immaterial world composed of pure and perfect ideas. But unfortunately, creation had got all screwed-up by a being called the Demiurge, which had created the material world, as a mistake. The World of Forms, the immaterial world, was actually more real than the physical world.

Unfairness, stupidity and suffering were caused by this state of affairs, in which human beings were uniquely positioned because our bodies resided in the inferior, material reality but our intellects, our thoughts, existed in the world of forms. This generated a form of Greek junk science so popular that we see it influencing even the earliest Christian texts, the Pauline Epistles, the idea of immaterial “spirits.”

The Pharisees’ (of whom Paul had been a follower) knowledge of this popular Greek belief likely came from the Samaritans, who had used the idea of “hypostasis,” the fusion of a spirit and a body into a single being to explain their own messianic tradition of the God-man, a title claimed by Samaritan holy men like Simon Magus and Dositheus. But whereas this idea was likely originally used to cast Jesus in terms comprehensible to the Greeks to whom Paul was selling Christianity on commission, early in his ministry, he adapted the Platonic idea that being a union of spirit and flesh was actually the universal human experience.

But this did not mean that all people were equally spiritually gifted in the ad hoc cosmology Paul sold his converts in the third quarter of the first century. “Spiritual gifts” were unevenly distributed in the human population, with those most able to distinguish and separate mind and body being the most gifted. These gifts were also variegated depending on the nature of one’s spirit, making some healers and others, speakers in tongues. This framework was propounded in his first epistle to his Corinthian followers in direct response to political exigencies.

The letter, after all, was a response to inquiries from his flock about how to handle dissident members within and the Petrine faction of the Jesus movement, without. In an effort to maintain control of his flock, he explained that he could detach his spirit from his body and instantaneously send it to Corinth to surveil his followers and make sure that they remained loyal and followed his instructions. That is the origin of the expression Christianity has long sought to deliteralize when one asks the meaning of “I will be there in spirit.” At the foundation of Christian tradition, in what is likely the earliest book of the New Testament we have (circa 51 CE), is the idea that the most spiritually gifted among us are actually able to sever their spirits from their bodies at will.

This naturally intersected with pre-existing traditions of asceticism prevalent throughout the civilized world. Christianity by no means invented fasting and other ways of physically punishing the body to achieve some kind of greater union with the divine. Holy men might walk across hot embers, swear off food or water or draw their own blood both to seek and hold the attention of crowds and to achieve union with the divine. And it is in Buddhism, before Christ’s birth, that we see the first critiques of this behaviour and the rejection of asceticism in favour of “the middle way,” of limiting asceticism to prevent self-harm.

From Gnosticism to the Athletes of God

There is little question that Christianity’s unique fusion of the Platonic theory of the body-spirit dichotomy with universal and pre-existing traditions of asceticism amplified the dangers internal self-harm movements posed. The Gnostic movement within Christianity suffered persecution by the other sects for a variety of reasons, ranging from its magpie-like heterodoxy, to a predilection for creating pseudonymous scripture, to its rejection of institutional authority in favour of charismatic claims of special revealed knowledge. But we should not understate the importance of the fact that it most thoroughly rejected the material world in favour of the spiritual and the greater tendency on the part of its adherents to engage in acts of self-mutilation, starvation and other forms of self-harm.

As Christianity drew closer to the state in the third century, prior to Diocletian’s persecution which responded to this development with violence, Church Fathers were looking beyond the Gnostic heresy, one whose appeal was largely limited to the most urban, literate and intellectual adherents to a related phenomenon that had a true popular following and which implicitly contested the authority of the bishop-centred hierarchical institution they were building. That problem was the Athletes of God.

The Athletes of God were individuals considered to be more blessed with spiritual gifts than others and who displayed these gifts through public acts of spectacular self-deprivation or harm. An example sufficiently moderate to retain his recognition as a holy man, by the Church, was the hugely popular Saint Simeon Stylites of Aleppo, who lived atop a small platform atop a pillar for thirty-seven years. Simeon was a hugely popular figure who drew thousands of pilgrims as a popular saint, while still alive. In his day, many considered him a Church Father and co-founder of the Church, itself and small fortunes were made by Aleppo merchants selling his effluvia and counterfeits thereof to pilgrims.

Monasticism and the Leashing of the Athletes of God

But the exhibitionism, self-harm and disruption of institutional authority all led the Church to recognize a social movement that would either replace or contain the Saint Simeons of the future: the followers of Benedict of Nursia, a contemporary of Simeon. As I briefly mentioned in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, some Christian ascetics like Saint Anthony the Great had already begun separating themselves from society and becoming hermits or forming small collectives in ecologically marginal places with little permanent human habitation. Following in the larger Judean-Samaritan tradition that included groups like the Essenes, these communities were not unlike the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. They tended to feature a sole, almost always male, leader who propounded a set of specific teachings and established some form of hierarchical communitarian mini-society. These mini-societies tended to collapse with the death of the leader, such as the community led by Saint Anthony the Great who spent his life wrestling the Devil in the Egyptian desert.

Benedict, with the endorsement and assistance of the Church, transformed these phenomena in several key ways through his compilation and publication of the Benedictine Rule, a codified, standardized set of written instructions for how such communities should run without the necessity of a charismatic leader and with a built-in succession process for leadership. The Church’s adoption of the Benedictine Rule, which spawned the Benedictine Order, the first order of monks in Christianity, did a number of important things designed to make the likes of Saint Simeon the exception in Christian asceticism, primarily a relic of the past. Ascetics were increasingly evicted from the public square and sent to become part of monastic (first Benedictine and then other orders with approved rules, like the Dominicans) communities.

Like the Buddhist traditions before them, “reasonableness and moderation” were at the core of these communities’ practices. In addition to prohibiting extreme acts of self-harm and instead forcing regular meals, rests, etc. on the monks, Benedictine monasticism moderated the Athlete of God tradition in other important ways.

First, their status within the church and the status of individuals in the monasteries were not determined by something as volatile as personal charisma, flair, endurance or daring but instead by bureaucratic promotion processes that placed abbots within the ecclesiastical hierarchy but not at its top.

Second, acts of asceticism were out of public view. Whatever social currency or charisma might be gained from astounding stunts of self-harm was limited to an audience of other monks engaged in the same program. What happened at the monastery stayed at the monastery and this was not simply limited to sodomy but to any other weird antics the men there might be getting up to. Placed out of public view, many of the exhibitionistic payoffs associated with the Athlete of God tradition fell away.

Third, monasteries were supposed to be self-sufficient. This entailed breaking land and engaging in a lot of practical physical labour. Shoveling shit and digging ditches do not leave a lot of energy for protracted acts of exhibitionistic asceticism. If you starve yourself, you don’t have the energy to carry out the menial duties spelled-out for you in the Benedictine Rule. If you injure yourself, again, this may impinge on the basic duties that are required of your by your community. This meant that engaging in acts of self-harm too extreme actually compromised one’s status as a Christian ascetic.

What this effectively meant was that during the centuries of Catholic hegemony in the West, those prone to acts of exhibitionistic self-harm were institutionalized and required to sleep regularly, take regular meals and engage in forms of work designed to make their asceticism as ordinary and uncharismatic as possible.

The Albigensian Crusade and the Social Contagion of Self-Harm

Of course, this tradition stared-down many challenges. One of the most significant was the Cathar movement, a neo-Gnostic movement that went further even than Plato himself in declaring that God created our spirits, angels and the heavens but that the Demiurge was, in fact, Satan himself, and that the material world was intrinsically evil, a creation of the Enemy. Anorexia and other epidemics or self-harm and body hatred followed Cathar teachings as they spread through present-day France and Spain. Human sex and sexuality were also understood to be part of Lucifer’s curse, something of which we would be cured if administered the appropriate magical rituals at the time of death. The body was a prison, as was the earth itself.

By 1209, the movement had become sufficiently threatening that the Kingdom of France redirected many of their crusaders from the Middle East to the Cathar-controlled areas, hastening the demise of the last Crusader States, already suffering from the Fourth Crusade’s betrayal of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

There were many ironies to the Albigensian Crusade, the name commonly given to the Pope’s decision to declare those armies a formal crusade of equal weight to the various invasions of the Levant that had been undertaken under the same name and to formally affiliate the Holy Inquisition with it. Whatever brutality the Crusaders meted out in the Middle East paled in comparison to the savagery of the first “crusade” inside Catholic territory; far too popular among the Church’s strategies for preventing people dying by their own hand through starvation or flashier forms of suicide was to pre-emptively execute them.

But the urgency of the Crusade and the desperation of the Church in prosecuting it indicates that the prospect of facing whole armies of Athletes of God was something Rome thought could bring Christianity itself down, that self-harm contagions, leavened by Plato-influenced ideas of body-mind dualism, was an existential threat. Further evidence of this belief is evinced in the decision by the Spanish Kingdom of Aragon to pull many of its troops out of its protracted war with the Spanish Muslims, the Moops (couldn’t resist), and send them North to assist in the Crusade after France experienced some military setbacks.

But the lack of troops also proved a problem, making the Crusade dependent on local mobs more interested in settling scores and seizing the property of their neighbours than in enforcing any particular religious orthodoxy. But, again, the level of panic on the part of common people may also indicate not just a simple intolerance but a response to a harmful social contagion that might cause a friend or relative to suddenly begin engaging in acts of radical self-harm leading to premature death.

And people really were starving and mutilating themselves en masse, swept up in a religious enthusiasm that was shattering families, disrupting communities and shutting down economies.

And Now Some Canadian Content

Following the costly and brutally savage victory over the Cathars, the church became programmatically vigilant about self-harm movements, about the resurgence of the Athletes of God, not just because the “spiritually gifted” charismatic leaders of these movements were a competing locus of religious authority but because they appear to have had genuine humanitarian and theological concerns.

There is no reason to doubt that Catholic intellectuals, who comprised the overwhelming majority of thinking people in Europe for much of its history, did genuinely care about people’s physical and mental health. They constructed large, elaborate, hospital systems, ran medical schools and crafted “penitentials” which served as almanacs of suggested treatments for recurrent psychiatric problems in parishioners. Similarly, theologians appeared motivated by the genuine desire to see the natural world as a key piece of evidence of God’s existence, his grace and his love for his creation. The beauty and abundance of the natural world were clear, unambiguous evidence both of his power and his love.  

That is why the church was especially vigilant, as it expanded across the oceans, beginning in the fifteenth century, that it not permit anti-life, anti-creation or anti-body ideas enter it through the conversion process. As early as the fifth century, the Church had seen mission and conversion as a complex social process in which converts could only adopt new ideas and practices if they were allowed to bring some of their pre-existing beliefs and practices into the church with them. Indeed, the foundational document for missionaries was composed in the sixth century by Gregory the Great, who exhorted his missionaries not to build new churches but, instead, to gradually redecorate pagan temples so that converts’ habits of worship be disrupted as little as possible.

For this reason, after experiencing huge initial successes, the Jesuit mission to Japan was scaled-back and little opposition was offered to the Tokugawa Shogunate’s expulsion of missionaries and confinement of Christianity to Nagasaki. This was a direct result of reports from missionaries that Catholic traditions of martyrdom and imitatio Christi (embodying Christ) were being too easily and frequently conflated with pre-existing traditions of ritual suicide. While being indifferent to suffering and death was noble and Christian, self-inflicted harm for religious purposes, especially exhibitionist self-harm, set off alarm bells. Missionaries began meting out punishments and withdrawing the Eucharist from enthusiastic Japanese self-harmers.

In colonial Canada, missionaries faced a similar challenge with Iroquois traditions of conversion-by-torture, a tradition that was amplified by the “mourning wars,” whereby the Iroquois Confederacy and other Iroquoian military powers, such as the Huron Confederacy, were increasingly motivated to absorb members of adjacent ethnic groups to replace population lost through the Virgin Soil epidemics of European disease. War captives were tortured until, according to Iroquoian cosmology, their spirit left their body and the spirit of a dead comrade entered and replaced it. Thereafter, the war captive took on the name, job and, often, family position of the deceased person whose spirit had entered their body.

Consequently, endurance of torture and the stigmata left behind had a double meaning in Iroquoian society: the marks of torture on the body of a stranger might indicate that a miraculous event had taken place and that body was now actually the body of a beloved comrade, relative or friend; or, the marks of torture on the body of an escaped or ransomed war captive might indicate that will was so strong that their spirit refused to leave their body despite excruciating pain and that they had remained true to their people under the worst duress.

The first indigenous Canadian, Kateri Tekakwitha, to become a Catholic Saint attained this status because she became involved in something that should seem eerily familiar to contemporary readers:

Like many young women in Iroquoian society, exhausted by continuous martial law, and political crisis, and enticed by Catholic promises of a quiet, peaceful life Kateri chose to leave her community and become part of a church-organized settlement where young, indigenous women could try out the ascetic life and see if they wanted to become nuns.

Kateri and the other girls soon became subject to what we today term a “social contagion,” whereby they entered into a concurrently solidaristic and competitive pact of egging each other on to engage in increasingly extreme acts of self-harm. Although she was initially an instigator of these practices among the girls, Kateri grew increasingly uncomfortable as they facilitated and participated in each other’s acts of physical mortification, doing increasingly severe injuries to themselves and others, in a syncretic crescendo of extreme acts that concurrently fulfilled both Iroquois traditions of public torture and Catholic ideas of imitation Christi.

Eventually, Kateri took it upon herself to exhort the other girls to stop and, when they persisted, she appealed to the clergy running the compound to shut down what had become a danger to both the bodies and souls of the girls. Despite her best efforts, Kateri was unable to convince most of the other girls to stay within the community, abandon their vicious cycle of self-harm and comply with the moderate asceticism inspired by the Benedict and the monastic tradition.

Today’s Athletes of God

In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.

Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.

Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.

This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.

Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionist self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.

Religion Without God

To understand why the grip of self-harm movements is so especially tight in English Canada, it is important to recall a salient feature of the Cathar worldview: that God was not god of the material world, that Satan was its god. Material creation was not just as mistake, as in original Gnosticism, but an evil, a wrong that merited correction.

It is only by depriving our worldview of the idea that the material order is good or divine but still using Christian cosmology and habits of thought to structure it, can we reach the conclusion that those who are most spiritually gifted are, naturally, those who are “born in the wrong body.” Of course it would be the spirits most at odds with their material being that would be greatest spirits in the world, to whom we should defer, morally and politically.

Those seeking escape from the material world through drugs, those seeking escape through surgery, those seeking escape by fusing with the machines through which they communicate are the most spiritually gifted. One can see this by the stigmata tattooed on their bodies in the form of scars, amputations and prostheses. The more at odds a body is with physical creation, the more that body commands authority in the bizarre religious revitalization movement that has seized control of my country.

Wokeness Is An American Space Religion

Today’s Athletes of God have not come out of nowhere. The incomplete and superficial secularization of Canada only explains our unique vulnerability to this sinister neo-Cathar movement. A series of religious movements have been refining the key ideas we see gripping progressive society today, a group of organizations and belief systems existing at the periphery of Christianity.

Mormonism, as propounded by Joseph Smith from 1830-44, first put forward the idea of a universe in which God was not the creator but simply an intelligent being who learned the rules of a godless pre-existing universe, enabling him to create planets and people them with ensouled beings. Smith gave us the idea that before our conception or birth, we were pre-existent immaterial spirit beings who possessed an inalterable gender before they attached to a body. The idea of us as spirit beings, imprisoned in an inferior reality, on a prison planet was then developed in Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam and elaborated in L Ron Hubbard’s scientology.

These beliefs have been powerfully synthesized into a religious revitalization movement of fanatics and enthusiasts whose subconscious motivation is to undo the flawed creation that is Lucifer’s material world.

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