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The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 1: Age of the Counterfeit

Before finally returning to my promised article on conversion, I feel I need to say more about how the corpus of writing on which I grew up, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth books, have provided me with unique moral and intellectual tools to approach the omnicide we now all face. It is not just that Lord of the Rings is about a world careening into an omnicide, the covering of the created world in an eternal darkness of tyranny and wastelands, fueled by war and wanton, gratuitous ecological destruction.

Before pressing on, as I have in my previous pieces about him, let us acknowledge that, even for his time, Tolkien was a racist, politically and socially conservative man. In many ways, his work demonstrates his greatness as a writer because its message and ideology are greater and more profound than the sum of his own views.

In my recent piece on the right-wing identity politics of intellect, I made some observations about the practice of trolling and the idea of “trolls.” In troll discourse, a person argues for a repugnant and/or stupid view and then one of two things happens: (a) the person browbeats their interlocutor, wasting hours of the person’s time and cannot be argued-down, at which point they declare victory or (b) the person concedes the argument and announces that they never believed the stupid views they espoused, that their interlocutor is the fool for having believed their views sincere.

The figure of the troll is, increasingly, the shape that individual members of the global omnicidal authoritarian death cult that currently runs the US, Hungary, Russia, Brazil and the Philippines, to name a few states, choose to take on when presenting themselves online.

Trolling, a decade ago, was not socially mainstream and tended to be practiced more by libertarian misanthropes than omnicidal death cultists. And the term arose from the geek culture-steeped world of 4Chan and the galaxy of locales on the internet frequented by manga-loving incels. Having been a part of geek culture since the age of nine, when my child psychiatrist prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set to me, I know it to be a rich and complex place with good and bad sides exerting both positive and negative influences on those of us within it. Few generalizations about geek culture apply to the whole space and, like all cultures and subcultures globally, it is turning darker as the sun sets on the Age of Reason.

Like most robust and vibrant subcultures, it has a large corpus of literature associated with it (including much but not all of the speculative fiction genre) and a set of canonical texts that help to structure how other texts are interpreted. JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings remains part of the canon, but something has changed about how it functions to structure the culture: over time, it has become Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the text and not the text itself. More on that later.

We have to consider, then, that the meaning of the term “troll” in geek culture was substantially influenced by Tolkien’s description and understanding of his version of the monster of European folklore. In fact, we should pay special attention to the unique features that Tolkien (and only Tolkien, not even Tolkien via Jackson) attributed  to trolls.

Like the main non-human villains in Middle Earth, orcs, trolls were created by Morgoth, the Lucifer figure, the original Enemy, during “the Great Darkness.” They were created as “counterfeits,” of ents, the “shepherds of the trees,” gigantic, benign intelligent humanoids made of wood. The trolls, on the other hand, while gigantic, were malign, unintelligent humanoids made of stone.

If you too are one best price levitra of those “more the merrier” situations. Lose weight Obesity is one of the primary reasons associated click here for more levitra sale with premature ejaculation. Energy is buoyed up and you have a better chance of surviving. More Info female viagra 100mg Only those men can get most out of this pattern and “re-set” the bar? Try these steps: Decide what you really want in life; what changes in your life will you need to implement other viagra generic online anti-spam features. Right away, we see one of the most distinctive aspects of Tolkien’s writing when confronted with this usage. As a medievalist and professor of Old English, Tolkien understood that, as language changes, sometimes meanings are lost, that as the definition of a word changes, the meanings attached to its previous definition may cease to be attached to any word and leave our conceptual vocabulary. This is what was happening (now has happened) to the original meaning of “counterfeit.”

Today, when we talk about counterfeit money or securities, we mean a copy of these things so exact, so precise, that it is indistinguishable from that thing. There is an original and the counterfeit is the most precise copy possible, designed to fool all but the most discerning. Such an idea did not exist in the Middle Ages because perfect copies were understood to be the thing; there was no distinction between copy and original if the copy were perfect. (Walter Benjamin’s work explaining this was rendered beautifully accessible in the 1979 classic Doctor Who serial City of Death by Douglas Adams.)

A counterfeit, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, was something else altogether: it was an obvious distortion mocking the original; in a Christian cosmology, a counterfeit was Lucifer’s mockery of God’s creation. The closest concept to it that we have today are the inhabitants of DC Comics’ “bizarro” universe. Not only was a counterfeit a mockery; it was understood to be an uncanny, grotesque mockery. Some conquistadors who arrived in the New World believed that they had found a counterfeit hemisphere, where the largest city’s centre was not a basilica but a step pyramid where priests performed a human sacrifice every forty minutes. The armadillo was a strong piece of evidence for this theory: it was obviously a counterfeit turtle.

Because they are uncanny, grotesque and jarring, there is much power in the counterfeit. The orcs, Tolkien’s counterfeit elves, trolls, Tolkien’s counterfeit ents—they strike fear into their opponents’ hearts simply by being, by mocking and denigrating creation itself. They constitute an ontological attack on the cosmic order simply by having existed. That they might triumph over real elves and real ents is not just a bad tactical situation; it is a sign that the cosmic order, itself, is in retreat.

The global death cult we are fighting understands that. And, consequently, it is not just trolling us at the level of conversation but at the level of existence.

How better to describe Donald Trump than as a counterfeit president, Bizarro Eisenhower, a grotesque, senescent, foul-mouthed grifter and con man. But counterfeits are not just at the top; they are everywhere. We are attacked with counterfeit science taught by counterfeit professors. The power of a Jordan Peterson comes not from his resemblance to a professor but from his uncanny failure to resemble one. There is no effort by the right to fool us any longer. As a brilliant observer of the Kavanaugh hearings observed, “telling obvious lies is a sign of power.”

This is why men performing the machismo of the death cult, like Doug Ford or Maxime Bernier, focus their attacks on children, the disabled and women: they are not trying to intimidate us by being tough guys. They are trying to unsettle us by being counterfeit tough guys.

Without understanding the original meaning and power of the counterfeit, something Tolkien understood to be so great a threat that it could upend the cosmic order, we are at sea wondering why people seem to be buying into dishonour and dishonesty, shaming themselves with gullibility. But that is not what is happening for them; they have tapped into the unholy power of the counterfeit.

Canadian Politics Geekery Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

The Green Party Abortion Scandal and the Debasement of Discourse Itself

I said in my first post about the Green Party abortion scandal that I would offer three reasons the scandal is important and matters.

In my first piece, I focused on how Canada’s parliamentary abortion consensus was forged between 1987 and 1993 and how Elizabeth May and the Green Party are the first party to depart from it.

In my second piece, I reminded readers that there is a global context in which these statements have appeared and that Canadians cannot be complacent about the security of women’s reproductive rights in our society.

In this piece, I want to talk about how the rise of global authoritarian movements is connected not just to a set of policies but to the debasement of political discourse in which the Greens are participating.

3. Political Nonsense is the Gateway to Authoritarianism

Today, we can see not just Trumpian policies but Trumpian political discourse seeping into Canadian politics through parties of the Right. Both Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier, like their provincial counterparts, increasingly state outright falsehoods, such as Scheer’s baseless claim that the Canadian government was welcoming a convicted British pedophile and serial killer to our country, contrary not just to the claims of Canada’s own justice department but to all statements by the UK government that it had no intention of repatriating the individual. This is paired with a penchant for absurd and exaggerated statements like the claim his son’s life was saved by chocolate milk.

A key tool of right-wing populists is to so debase the national conversation that it seems that everyone is lying and talking nonsense and then treating this as the norm in a liberal or social democratic state, something the can only be solved by giving unfettered power to the people who debased the discourse in the first place. Lies and nonsense, then, are crucial parts of the discourse that has produced Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

But they are not the only ingredients necessary to render a national discourse so incoherent that it ceases to be a tool voters can use to make collective decisions about how to govern ourselves. The third ingredient is an attack on coherence by destabilizing meaning and truth through constant self-contradiction. George Orwell, both in Politics and the English Language and 1984 stressed the importance of this attack on stable and reliable meaning as crucial for the victory of totalitarianism.

“War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” These are the master words of Orwell’s faceless totalitarian state

Now, let us examine the Green Party’s first line of defense for their leader saying Green MPs could debate and introduce legislation about abortion: this is not a big deal because the Greens are a party that will not punish or kick out MPs under any conditions whatsoever. In this way, voters were supposed to feel reassured that the abortion thing wasn’t a big deal because May was also okay with her caucus members voting to re-intern the Japanese or re-open residential schools.

But the Greens then proceeded with a second line of rebuttal: they were the most feminist and pro-choice party in Canada and that it was a defamatory outrage that they were being described as anything but. Not just paid and formally selected Green spokespeople like my local candidate but also rank and file members took to social media suggesting that it was as clear as day that May was the greatest advocate women’s bodily autonomy had ever had.
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Strikingly, this line of defense continued, even as current Green candidates were revealed as having publicly identified with the forced birth movement in the previous campaign and had issued anti-abortion statements as candidates in the past. Then another 2015 candidate came forward and talked about May personally seeking funds from forced birth activists and asking her to equivocate on her own pro-choice position in pursuit of money and votes.

And still the party continued to simply re-state that it was 100% pro-choice, that it was the most trustworthy party in Canadian history on women’s reproductive health and resolutely refused to explain or otherwise engage the new revelations.

Every time Donald Trump does or says something unambiguously racist, this is how he proceeds: he states that he is the least racist person in the history of the world, that racialized people are doing better with him in power than at any time in American history and that it is a ploy by his enemies to make him seem racist because they are the true racists.

His surrogates then defend him by making mutually contradictory statements without explanation. We see this re-enacted here too as Green surrogates and supporters assert (a) that their party is the most respectful and trustworthy custodians of women’s reproductive rights (b) that it would be wrong for the Green Party to penalize an MP in any way for attacking women’s reproductive right and (c) that women’s reproductive rights are not important and are, in fact, a distraction from the real issues before voters.

And the great thing is that because the Greens approach every single policy in their book the same way, as non-binding on anyone, this will not just happen with abortion; it could happen in any area of national policy at any point in the campaign.

Another way that discourse is debased by authoritarians is to argue that a thing that is already happening and being witnessed is, by definition, impossible. The third part of the Greens’ line of defense was that each candidate undergoes rigorous vetting during which they are quizzed about their position on women’s reproductive rights and disqualified if they do not support them. Therefore it was impossible for any future Green MP to be anti-choice. Leaving aside the obvious facts that (a) sometimes people lie and (b) sometimes people change their minds, this line of defense continued being mounted after CBC had located two candidates who had run in 2015 and 2019 and were publicly on the record as anti-choice.

Essentially, the Greens were stating “do not believe what you see or hear. The thing you appear to be seeing and hearing is, by definition, impossible and therefore cannot be going on right now.” This kind of reality-destabilizing argumentation is a key to Trumpian discourse down South; and it is being introduced to Canadian politics not by Bernier but by May.

The cherry on top of this, of course, is that really what May is doing is reassuring us that, despite appearances, her candidates are all very fine people, that the real injustice are the unfair attacks on the reputations of these forced birthers… by the media, because the media are reporting the candidates’ own statements. Because both major stories about the Greens and abortion have been broken by the CBC, we also see an importation of the authoritarian trope of public broadcasters as the worst of the Lugenpresse.

What the Greens are effectively doing here is importing into Canada, the elements of authoritarian discourse that are too heavy for our two yellow vest parties to carry right now, with all their baggage of climate villainy and the like.

Populist authoritarianism does not just need an angry populace to succeed. It needs a confused one, one that is presented not a set of policies but a set of irresolvable koans dressed as policy. And that is what we are getting from the Greens.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Green Party Abortion Scandal in Global Context

In my last post, I explained how it it that the Green Party of Canada is doing something unprecedented. Until last weekend, the main “wedge issue” the Liberal Party of Canada was planning to use a certain issue to retain its control over a majority of parliamentary seats: the possibility that Andrew Scheer might depart from the overwhelming political consensus of every major political party (the Tories, Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois) that women’s access to abortion was to be fought-out at the individual level and not through the state, that pro-birth groups should focus their attention on convincing women of reproductive age not to use abortion services rather than focusing on changing laws to eliminate those services.

While the Conservatives are doing everything in their power to indicate that their current anti-abortion leader will do the same as their last one did: make abortion a personal lifestyle choice rather than a legislative one, just as our national consensus has done with climate justice and disposable plastics, the Greens are the true pro-birth radicals.

While Harper and Scheer have said “no matter how much we oppose abortion, we will not let parliament debate it,” the Greens are saying “no matter how much a leader supports access to abortion, we are going to make its prohibition a matter parliament can and should debate.”

In this way, the Green Party of Canada has already restructured the entire national discourse about women’s bodily autonomy. The fact that the party identifies as pro-choice only further magnifies the power of its declaration that parliament, and not my girlfriend, should be the primary decision-maker about her uterus and its contents.

It is at this point, that we should bring in the Green Party’s fourth line of defense for their unprecedented policy: their declaration that the abortion in question is so securely settled, that women’s reproductive health is so safe in this country that their actions couldn’t possibly lead to the actual loss of bodily autonomy by real women.

  1. The Global Overton Window on Women’s Health and Rights

I lived in the United States 2009-2012. That is important. I lived in a blue state. A little over a decade ago, Americans said the same kinds of things that complacent, oblivious Canadians are saying today “they can’t ban abortion. The Supreme Court settled that question.” “Nobody could get elected president running on a pro-life ticket,” etc. Today, America is the Kingdom of Gilead, in which pro-choice justices are now a minority on the Supreme Court and women are being executed for having miscarriages.

The active ingredients in Homeopathic sex medicines are adapted in such a way as to influence the viagra sans prescription concomitant factors like mental exhaustion, poor assimilation leading to nutritional defciency etc WHY HOMEOPATHY FOR BETTER SEX? 7 GOOD REASONS #1. The inhibitors restrict this activity buying online viagra allowing the blood vessels to the penis to increase blood flow. One tablet of kamagra is enough for 24 hours duration. buy levitra vardenafil A man faces erectile dysfunction only when he is sexually cialis generic australia stimulated. It is not the only country that has seen shocking rollbacks in women’s bodily autonomy. In Turkey, India, the Philippines, Russia, Poland, Brazil and state after state with a rising quasi-elected authoritarian movement we see horrific laws being proclaimed such as Russia’s legalization of wife-beating, and, more directly on point, Poland’s efforts to re-criminalize abortion. While Islamist theocratic movements are part of this, to understand this as an especially Muslim movement misses the point that the forces of misogyny and authoritarianism are rising in societies of every religious persuasion through the political system.

In liberal Canada, the only industrialized country so colonial and backwards that it still clings to the 1990s political cul-de-sac of Tony Blair’s Third Way, of social liberal austerity administered by technocrats, as its national ideology, Maxime Bernier, and his People’s Party of Canada were never going to be the vehicle for reopening women’s bodily autonomy as a live political issue here. Something more innovative was required.

Enter Elizabeth May and the Green Party of Canada, a movement comprised not, as many think, of hardcore environmentalists but, instead, of the lowest-information voters in the country.

As I have stated before, the Greens are the only scientifically correct millennial doomsday cult in history. What I mean is that the kind of people who would have joined the Millerites in the nineteenth century, or the Albigensians in the twelfth, have joined the Greens but, by sheer coincidence, the Greens are right that the world is about to end in a series of cataclysms. For this reason, Green voters, and especially Green members, people who believe in an impending realigning eschaton.

Such individuals are often uninformed about how the society in which they live functions arising both from a sense that it is ephemeral and a lack of interest in an obviously unfair dying order. Greens, often, have cartoonish, ignorant and bizarre ideas about the social order in which they live. That is not to say that a more detailed, accurate and comprehensive understanding would not also lead to the conclusion that this order must be burned to the ground as soon as possible, but rather to emphasize how much less information your average Green Party supporter has about Canadian politics than the average Blocquiste, Tory, New Democrat or Liberal.

If there were any party in this election whose members were unlikely to be aware of the thirty-year tenuous national consensus about women’s full personhood, it would be the Greens. Would not they, and not the Tories, be the perfect instrument of a global pro-birth movement to reintroduce women’s bodily autonomy as a debatable idea in Canada’s House of Commons? Just a few “pro-life” Green MPs would be needed and, instead of facing a wall of liberal, left and socialist opposition, the first advocates for jailing women for miscarriages would be self-identified “progressives” in stockinged feet and birkenstocks, and leading that charge, the self-styled feminist woman leading the Green Party of Canada.

Then we will see how soon Canada’s national discourse on women’s personhood flows into the larger Anglo-American discourse of that understands the uterus as the one body part that is the property of the state.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Why the Green Party of Canada Abortion Scandal Is Real and Matters

Here is what we know: on September 7th, 2019, Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada stated that she would permit members of the Green Party caucus to raise the issue of abortion in parliament and propose laws to regulate women’s bodily autonomy without risking membership in the party caucus or any other punishment.

This stood in sharp contradistinction to the position taken by Andrew Scheer since assuming the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. While Scheer had sought and received the vote of many in Canada’s forced birth movement by promising that he would allow Tory caucus members to do this while running for leader, he reversed this position upon gaining the leadership and joined the broad, post-1989 Canadian political consensus that no MP would be permitted to re-open the abortion debate in the House of Commons. While the Liberal Party continues to stoke (perhaps legitimate) fears that Scheer has not really changed his position, it should be noted that every leader of every mainstream Canadian political party in the twenty-first century has joined that consensus. Until now. More on that down the page.

In response to the gaffe, Green Party candidates and spokespeople took one of two tacks. Some focused on stating that the party’s policy clearly and unambiguously supported a woman’s right to choose and that it was a misrepresentation of the policy to state that the Greens were equivocating on that question. Another, larger group focused on reminding voters that there are no Green Party policies whatsoever that bind caucus members because Green MPs, unlike all other MPs, since the glorious days of Preston Manning’s un-whipped Reform Party, would be un-whipped i.e. not subject to discipline for voting against party policy, the party leader or the majority of their fellow caucus members.

Many incumbent and retiring NDP MPs took to Twitter to point out the Greens’ soft line on abortion, which led to a third messaging tack taken by both groups: this was not a real gaffe or a real scandal. It was a fabrication of desperate NDP MPs, fearful of losing their seats over constituents abandoning them for the Greens. Given that this fear (and the consequently poor messaging) was absolutely real, this functioned as the unifying aspect of the Greens’ two essentially contradictory messages: (1) you can rely on us 100% to defend women’s reproductive choice and (2) any Green MP can vote for or against anything they feel like.

After a weekend of back-and-forth, the Greens realized that their strategy for pushing back was insufficient and so, they added a third element: while the Green Party might give its MPs greater freedom than any other party, its candidate vetting processes were as strict or stricter than those of any other major party. They claimed, on Monday, that every candidate for the party had been asked during the vetting process to declare themselves to be unambiguously pro-choice and those that did not were ruled ineligible for candidacy.

But then, a 2015 candidate for the party revealed that May had actively courted forced birth movement activists as major donors in the previous election and that she had been urged, by May, to let the donors know that electing Greens was the best way to get abortion back onto the floor of the Canadian parliament. And then, on Tuesday, the CBC ran a follow-up story about two Green Party candidates, running for the second time in 2019, who had actively courted anti-abortion activists and touted their forced birth views in the 2015 campaign. At the same time, I was privately contacted by past candidates for the party to tell me that the vetting process does not include abortion questions. Taken together, this information fit with the statements early in May’s tenure as leader when she, herself, courted the votes of the Christian Right based on her personal disapproval and condemnation of abortion.

I think this story is a very big deal in Canadian politics. But I have realize that I need to explain the three reasons that it is:

  1. Canada’s National Pro-Choice Consensus

When I was a kid, women’s bodily autonomy was still a live political issue in Canada. Women needed a note from a psychiatrist or other doctor to state that their abortion was medically necessary in order to obtain one. Henry Morgentaler was routinely being arrested and doing time for performing abortions at his clinic and not demanding these notes. In 1987, this ended up in the Supreme Court of Canada and, fourteen years after Roe v. Wade in the US, Canada had its equivalent court judgement, leavened by Pierre Trudeau’s new Charter in the shiny new Canadian constitution, barring the state from messing with women getting doctors to help them end unwanted pregnancies.

Following the court ruling, the forced birth movement regrouped. The outcome of the 1988 election was an open question. The Liberal leader was a weak and incompetent drunk, the Steve Fonyo to Pierre Trudeau’s Terry Fox but, on the other hand, he was confronting a Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who was touting a massively unpopular free trade deal with the US, who was universally understood to be extraordinarily greasy and obsessed with his own place in Canadian history; and his government was the most scandal-plagued of the twentieth century. So, looking for a lever to pull, the movement tried to expand its parliamentary delegation by pooling the votes it already had in the Progressive Conservative Party’s Family Caucus, led by Fraser Valley MP Bob Wenman, with a new set of votes: Liberals for Life.
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The Liberal Party had long been a voice for Canada’s Roman Catholic population but had been dominated by anti-Vatican socially liberal Jansenists. But, in riding after riding, the Catholic majority in Toronto flexed its muscle through ultramontane populists like Tom Wappel and John Nunziata who provided crucial volunteers, money and candidates for the party is Canada’s biggest vote pool, Greater Toronto. In riding after riding, Loyalist-white elite Liberal candidates fell to the nearly-white Portuguese, Italian and Latino crowds organized by forced birth leaders in- and outside the Church.

Many Liberals for Life entered parliament in and joined the Tory Family Caucus with a shared agenda of a strict abortion law to replace the gaping hole the Supreme Court had left following their 1987 judgement and the 1987 “free vote” that had failed to pass to place women’s reproductive systems back in the hands of parliament shortly thereafter. But they constituted a minority of parliamentarians.

Irrespective of their views of abortion as a practice, there was a broad small-l liberal consensus in the NDP, PC and Liberal benches that state power was not a tool that should be used to control women’s reproductive health. In 1989, pro-choice Liberal leader John Turner let the Liberals for Life vote their conscience, as did Brian Mulroney, the pro-choice PC Prime Minister who set the vote up, but only after twisting enough arms to make sure it would fail.

But by 1993, Mulroney and Turner were gone. Turner’s successor, Jean Chretien won a majority government. No Canadian, to this day, knows what his personal beliefs are about his church’s categorization of abortion as a mortal sin worse than murder. But, following the collapse of the Tories, and their replacement as English Canada’s second party by the Reform Party, the “free votes on everything and fly economy class” who had heavily courted the Christian Right, following their “betrayal” by the Mulroney PCs, Chretien forged what has been a key part of Canada’s national consensus since the end of the Cold War.

Initially in contradistinction to Reform and, later, in accord with its successor parties, the Canadian Alliance and Conservative Party of Canada, Chretien declared that abortion, if one chose to combat it, was not something one could or should combat with state power. Like plastic pollution and climate change, abortion was, henceforth, to be a question of individual personal virtue and not national policy. sin or no sin, pro-birth or not, Chretien argued, abortion was a matter of individual choice and not parliament. Since 1993, it has been the position of every Canadian PM, be it the pro-autonomy Paul Martin or the pro-birth Stephen Harper, that abortion is not the business of parliament.

The decision to place the abortion debate outside the Canadian public square and outside parliament has been the most consistent and important post-Cold War addition to Canada’s cross-partisan political consensus, like the continuation of Medicare as a national cost-shared program. And, until May’s alleged gaffe the weekend after Labour Day, it showed every sign of staying in place, even in the context of a resurgent global misogynist right. There is no evidence that Scheer was any more likely to fulfill Liberal predictions of re-criminalizing abortion than Harper was in 2006, 2008 and 2011.

But May has changed all that. Now, hundreds, thousands of alleged “progressives,” and a national party that won the last federal byelection and is polling ahead of the NDP, People’s Party and Bloc Quebecois, the other third parties in parliament, are arguing not just that this fragile national elite consensus does not exist but that it should not exist. The Overton window is contorting faster than ever.

While the Greens will tell you that their (completely non-binding) policies are more pro-choice even than the NDP’s, this claim is a distraction from the real damage that they are doing: they are voiding a national consensus comprising every Bloc, NDP, Liberal and Tory leader who has served since 1989 and going further than Pentecostal lay minister Stockwell Day, legendary global neocon Stephen Harper, devout Catholics Justin Trudeau, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin and Thatcherite churchgoer Tom Mulcair in declaring that the Mulroney-Chretien consensus is at an end: abortion is a live issue on the floor of the House of Commons again.

More in the next part.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

And It’s Called “The Aristocrats”: How Rachel Notley Just Murdered Horatio Alger

As Hunter S. Thompson began to observe the failure of the 1960s and the rise of modern neoliberal capitalist retrenchment, he increasingly referenced Horatio Alger stories of the First Gilded Age to describe his own precarious position in a resurgent decadent American capitalist plutocracy. Las Vegas in the 1970s was “the American dream in action” because the randomness and decadence of pre-1929 American capitalism had returned, that magical two-generation period of unfettered cultural and material capitalism from 1876-1929, named “the Gilded Age” by Mark Twain.

Las Vegas was the perfect representation of the world that ended with the stock market crash of 1929, in which stock speculation, installment plans, commodity rushes and the ideologically-motivated Ponzi schemes of the KKK and Marcus Garvey’s UNIA had turned all of America into the interior of a mobbed-up casino.

Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital and the Trump Organization made money for its own sake a legitimate ideology again in Ronald Reagan’s America, there was a celebration of the randomness and chance of turning America back into an enormous, brightly-lit casino. The two tropes of an Algeresque story were brought back: (1) the big break for the little guy and (2) the courageous investor who takes a risk on said little guy and his idea.

In the brutal world of Gilded Age capitalism, it was a self-evident truth that most hard-working people would die, forgotten, in poverty. Hard work was not a passport to wealth but instead, the human condition of the working class. To strike it rich, to make it big, to ascend from the working class to join the great robber barons required two ingredients: exceptional courage and exceptional luck. An exceptionally courageous worker would try to get near his bosses, show how exceptional he was, take risks by switching jobs, patenting a new product, defying his manager, etc. (Yes, these guys were all men.)

But, by themselves, courage and hard work were necessary but not sufficient conditions to ascend to the ranks of the Morgans and the Hearsts. Luck had to intervene. It was placing one’s future in the hands of fate that was the act of courage, to bet that some piece of good and improbable fortune would intervene to make one’s aspirations flesh, a chance encounter with the boss, rescuing an apparent orphan who turned out to be a kidnapped child of the super rich, being polite to a young woman who turned out to be the boss’s daughter, etc. Whether one celebrated capitalism like Alger or deplored it like Charles Dickens, the Gilded Age novel pivoted on the Big Break, the invisible hand of fate resting randomly on the novel’s protagonist.

Secondary to this, in fiction, was the fact that a great man, a capitalist who was already rich and powerful, would risk some portion of his great fortune by trusting this young and unaccomplished man. Instead of resting on his laurels, he would speculate bigger, further, more ambitiously, proving his worthiness as one of the oligarchs of Gilded Age capitalism.

Millionaires who ceased speculating, ceased taking risks, ceased engaging with chance, i.e. those who tried to leave the great American casino with their winnings, were not legitimate members of the oligarchy and would ultimately be displaced by less risk-averse, hungrier men.

In this way, Gilded Age capitalism was affixed to a theory of masculinity, a theory that allowed old, fat, comfortable men to continue to show their vigorous masculinity through risk taking by placing big, dangerous bets in the casino of life.

This was the idea that Reagan-era men like Donald Trump and Mitt Romney used to legitimate their continued right to the family fortune. By taking newer, bigger risks with the family money, they could show that their legitimacy was not based on a theory of hereditary aristocracy but instead a practice of masculine risk-taking.
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During the Great Recession of 2007-09, that discourse was abandoned by the American political imaginary: speculation, risk taking and the possibility of loss were abandoned as legitimating discourses by the super rich. Only suckers took risks, black people with underwater mortgages in Cleveland were chumps who took actual risks with their meager resources. Rich, powerful people, the story went, were entitled to a sure thing.

TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and its equivalents around the industrial West were based on the opposing theory of the legitimacy of capital: “too big to fail.” While people with small amounts of money had to face real consequences for speculating, the oligarchs were guaranteed economic certainty. In this way, while capitalism has always been governed by inherited wealth, it went from effacing this truth to celebrating it. Instead of arguing that the super-rich deserved their money because they took risks, it was argued that because the super-rich deserved their money, they had to be immune from risk.

This week, in my province, two things have happened that are perfectly illustrative of this new reality. The office of my member of the legislature, David Eby, was again besieged by protesters furious that $89 billion have been drained out of Vancouver’s real estate market since the government began taxing people who have a second, vacant home in places where there is a housing crisis and began to investigate and prosecute the use of the real estate market for money laundering by international organized crime and drug syndicates.

The reason they are protesting is that they believe that capitalism guarantees them the certainty that things they buy will appreciate and the state’s job is to make sure that happens. In their view, the introduction of risk is an affront to their idea of a fair marketplace. In a fair economy, anyone with sufficient wealth has the right to see their investments appreciate and those with an insufficient amount experience risk. Some people say that these individuals are fighting for their right to make money by speculating but the reverse is true. What offends these people is that they are being required to speculate, to take chances, in order to get richer. Unlike the first Gilded Age, such a requirement is not the justification for capitalism but instead an affront to the late capitalist moral order.

Today, Rachel Notley, the leader of the opposition in the province of Alberta commended the BC Court of Appeal for “creating investor certainty” for oil companies by prohibiting any environmental regulation of a gigantic bitumen pipeline being forced through BC to the Pacific Coast. The Alberta NDP, a Third Way party, sees itself as servants of the investor class and understands the job of both the legislative and judicial branches of the state as having the primary role of insulating Exxon, Suncor, Royal Dutch Shell and their ilk from market forces, insuring that whatever money they invest is not speculation but is, instead, a sure thing.

While ordinary decent people cry out against this kind of monstrous thinking, the entire political class of North America has embraced what is essentially, an aristocratic reimagining of capitalism as its own opposite. Back in the Gilded Age, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin admired capitalism’s churn, its incorporation of risk as a means to revolutionize itself. We have now reached a very different stage of capitalism: a system in which an insulated, plutocratic elite stumbles around drinking its own bathwater.

George W Bush, Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau all inherited their jobs because capitalism is losing its primary dynamic character. Because the whole system is rigged, we are producing leaders like Commodus and Charles VII. Alger’s hero is dead, slain by bloodless technocrats like Notley, who believe that it is their job to “creat[e] investor certainty,” to be the Cardinal Richelieu to our modern Louis XIII’s, to insulate our modern aristocrats from risk or consequence.

Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

The NDP Is Class Conscious, Just Not How You Think

In my last post I suggested that the New Democratic Party of Canada and its ilk are not unprincipled as many on the left suggest but instead have ideologically changed over the past generation and a half. For some, the knowledge that former social democratic parties, Third Way parties like the NDP are no longer socialist in character is sufficient. But I think that we need to go further to understand our present predicament. As we can now understand that these parties are here to actively stymie efforts to redistribute wealth or arrest the extinction event, it is important to comprehend and anticipate their actions, not so that we can work in concert with them but so as to prepare ourselves for their next move against us.

In my previous entry, I noted that we could adduce some of their priorities from their policy decisions. For instance, unlike twentieth-century social democrats who liked to socialize areas of the economy vulnerable to monopolization, modern Third Wayers believe that regulated monopolies and oligopolies are good ways to deliver things like railways and mass transit.

Another principle we can adduce from observation is a strong belief in meritocracy; we see this both within organizations supportive of these parties, in these parties themselves and encouraged within the state whenever these parties form government. This is because Third Way parties and their allies are not just vehicles for ideology or personal ambition; they are a larger project of class formation and class representation. And the specific meritocratic ideology they express and meritocratic practices they enact are of a piece with this.

A significant labour trend in small-p politics over the past generation and a half has been the increasing professionalization of the top tier of the non-profit activist sector. Today, most activism is directed not through democratic, volunteer-run locally-based cells of large organizations or through local independent activist organizations but instead through large, professionalized organizations managed and run by an emerging managerial class. The complex and strategic tasks of activism are not carried out in the non-monetized time of volunteers but in the monetized time of this emerging class. Similar to the original theory behind the post-Independence US military in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, part of this professional class’s skill set is the effective management of non- and partly-monetized labour so as to integrate or at least distract individuals wishing to engage as volunteers or members.

A similar trend has been taking place at universities as classroom teaching has shifted from a task primarily carried out by tenured and tenure-track faculty to one carried out primarily by temporary workers operating on four-month “hire at will” contracts without seniority rights or benefits. Because of the lack of continuity or stability in this growing part of the precariat, the work of producing a coherent curriculum or learning experience still falls to tenured faculty except that they are now expected to carry this task out not as instructors but as managers of instructors. The tenured professoriate has transformed from high-wage frontline workers into a new managerial class.

These two emerging groups are increasingly seamless with older professional formations, namely, what Vladimir Lenin termed “the labour aristocracy,” a permanent professional class of white collar managers running trade union pension funds, real estate portfolios, professionalized negotiating teams and a host of other duties. These individuals typically monopolize elected offices in unions, using the resources of incumbency in tandem with biased voting systems; or they occupy permanent unelected positions alongside elected ones, in which their position is understood to have been derived not from the democratic will of the members but from one’s professional qualifications to manage pensions, run real estate portfolios, etc.

The fourth group that intersects with these is the largest and most venerable, career civil servants, especially those working in the policy field. It is important to remember that in states like Canada, public policy is developed in two entirely separate streams: (a) inside political parties that choose leaders, field candidates, run on platforms and appoint cabinet ministers if they win and (b) inside the “policy” branches of the civil service in which a nominally non-partisan group of civil servants design policies based on a loose liberal utilitarian ideology. Many on the front lines in the civil service are engaged in micro-policy construction and many imagine their career as an ascent towards increasingly policy-oriented jobs walled-off from the direct delivery of government services.

These professional groups have increasingly converged to the point where one may move among them fairly effortlessly. In academic administration, professors increasingly work alongside individuals with MBAs and graduate “leadership” degrees or some go on to obtain similar credentials through Executive MBA programs. Once one has entered this class formation, one might find oneself the executive director of a Third Way party one year, an academic administrator the next, managing a trade union’s membership consultation process the next and then taking on a chief of staff, director of communications or deputy minister position for a Third Way government in the event of an election win. Perhaps, after the government’s defeat, one might take on a position at a management consulting, communications or government relations firm and then be hired as a contractor by one’s former colleagues at the university or union.

As Irene Silverblatt and Michel Foucault explain, one of the important features of modernity is the rise of a bureaucratic class, a portion of the bourgeoisie who understand that their right to make and enforce the rules of our society comes not from popular acclaim or heredity but instead of specialized knowledge. In this way, Silverblatt argues that the Spanish Inquisition was the first modern bureaucratic institution because the inquisitors understood their power and legitimacy as arising from their possession of knowledge, not from episcopacy or the throne. Inquisitors were policy-makers, analysts and investigators; torture was to be used sparingly, rationally and privately to produce the information necessary to legitimate punishment.

I want to suggest that those who think the NDP is not class-based or class-conscious party are dead wrong. It is simply that the NDP, like other Third Way parties, has changed which class it primarily represents. Today, the party is the class consciousness, i.e. the culture, ethics and interests of the bureaucratic class. This class rotates effortlessly among the private, non-profit and public sectors, technocrats who justify their power by constantly claiming to be producing new knowledge.
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With this understanding, all kinds of peculiar things about the BC NDP suddenly become explicable. Despite nomination meetings and leadership races being the main source of a party’s new members, the NDP has found them increasingly threatening and sought to shut them down by charging exorbitant fees to seek a nomination and then disqualifying large portions of candidates during a completely opaque process called “vetting” where head office staff determine whether a candidate would be a liability during a general election. Essentially, seeking an NDP candidate nomination is increasingly indistinguishable from a job interview for a technocratic position. This does not arise from some kind of internal corruption.

The reverse is true. The old NDP, the party that saw itself as representing the working class believed that the more working people who showed up to support a candidate, the more legitimate said candidate would be. But in progressive, technocratic thought, choosing someone who is more popular over someone who is more qualified is corruption, an affront to one’s values that esteem professional achievement and mastery of bureaucratic processes over simple popularity. It is out of a desire for purity, not expediency that becoming an NDP candidate has become about exhibiting success in a bureaucratic system and then demonstrating those skills by navigating the party’s own bureaucracy.

And, of course it goes without saying that any person of the appropriate class, provided they exhibit that class’s values of restraint and sobriety in their personal life, should have the requisite four- or five-figure vetting fee handily available at their financial institution.

Many were baffled that, when the party took power, it conducted no purge of the senior civil service to remove supporters of the BC Liberal Party and replace them with New Democrats. But from the perspective of those controlling the party, the ranks of the senior civil service more closely resembled them than did the members of their own party because despite the NDP’s best efforts, party membership rolls remain full of working people, grassroots activists, the un- and under-employed. In other words, the BC Liberal Party’s civil service seemed far more comprehensible and trustworthy than the party’s rank-and-file members.

And one must imagine the reverse was also true, that the senior civil service recognized and welcomed a new set of bosses who acted and felt more like equals than superiors, who embodied the cultural values of their class more precisely. No more being subordinated by indecorous rubes cum mob bosses like Rich Coleman or greasy hucksters like Mark Marissen, this new crew of putative bosses could be collaborators, allies and peers. Now, they would be treated with equality, with respect.

That is why the safest thing to do with a government decision is to create an “authority,” an unelected body of technocrats who make policy and govern at longer and longer arm’s length from the state. The health authorities and transportation authorities of BC were not created by Gordon Campbell’s BC Liberals; they were created by Mike Harcourt’s NDP. And why bring our ferries and our railroads back under public ownership? As regulated monopolies, they too can operate at a safe remove from democratic authority, guided by the same bureaucratic class.

This is why one must be so very careful in mitigating the savagery of the housing crisis without harming one’s artisanal landlording or intergenerational wealth transfer. That is why the province’s climate change plan is simply the declaration that, in the future, everyone will be made to have the kind of car members of this class already possess or aspire to own, either that or relinquish their class position by ceasing to drive.

The dream, then, of this class, expressed through its party, is the total convergence of the two branches of policy-making I set out above. Policy is not to be made by the rabble at conventions. And it is not in the party platform, which is simply a tool to obtain votes. Policy is the zeitgeist of the bureaucratic class, expressed in meetings of Harvard School of Business Executive MBAs at meetings of the board of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, commissioned in reports by KPMG, emanating from elite off-the-books “brainstorming sessions” at the Progress Summit, arising from playful speculation, soaking in the Hollyhock Institute hot tub or expressed in a UBC political science PhD thesis on “innovation in government.” It is immanent, throughout the system.

The former Marxists of the NDP envisage not “the withering of the state,” but the withering of the party. There is no confrontation between our government and the bureaucratic capitalist state. There is only a much-anticipated and tearful reunion.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Want to Know What the NDP Believes In? Believe New Democrats

There is a common story among my sort of folk, socialists and environmentalists who have been helping the NDP for all or most of the past generation, even after the disappointments and betrayals of the 90s and Canada’s proto-Blairite governments of Harcourt, Clark, Romanow and Calvert.

And the story is this, “The NDP has abandoned its principles. It has sold out. Its leadership are craven approval-seekers who won’t stand up for their principles.” I have to admit that I have been guilty of reinforcing that narrative. But I have come to believe that not only is that story false; it is detrimental because it causes people to make irrational and inefficient political decisions that cost lives.

When we assail BC’s NDP government for handing out $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other villainous, genocidal transnational corporations while telling us that we cannot afford their promised $10/day childcare for at least another decade, we talk about how the NDP has “abandoned its principles.” When Rachel Notley demanded that the federal government ignore and openly defy Supreme Court decisions protecting the rights of First Nations, we used the same language, talking about how the NDP had lost its way.

But let us consider for a moment that John Horgan, Notley and their cabinets, caucuses and political staffs are acting in accordance with their principles, that they are doing exactly what they believe in. As I stated when I quit the NDP, the simplest explanation for the decisions New Democrats make when they are in government is that they are doing what they believe in. Given the fact that NDP politicians tend to be far less personally corrupt than Liberals or Tories, we should take this seriously. When Liberals or Conservatives hand big cheques to the corporate sector, when they refuse to provide services in an essential area of the economy and turn it over to market forces, we can usually expect to see someone associated with that decision getting rich soon, usually through a lucrative corporate board appointment after leaving office, rather than old school kickbacks.

But when the NDP announces that it will not provide interurban government bus service south of Prince George when Greyhound pulls out and will let a patchwork of deregulated private fares and grey market ride sharing take its place, nobody thinks Claire Trevena is getting a board appointment or a bag of cash. When Horgan vetoes a public inquiry into money laundering, nobody expects him to join Liberal senator Larry Campbell on the board of the province’s largest casino after he retires. When Notley rigs the Alberta oil royalty review and gets the federal government to spend $4.5 billion on a leaky oil pipeline, nobody expects her to take a seat on the Suncor board when she tires of leading Alberta’s opposition. And when Michelle Mungall creates a fracking review panel that is required to recommend continued fracking, nobody thinks she will be getting one of those seats either.

Should this not suggest to us that the NDP believes more not less strongly in oligopolies and corporate welfare than Liberals and Conservatives do?

The reasons we recoil from this thinking are multiple:

First, we easily succumb to “essence in origins” ideas about politics, especially as we get older. Our theory of who or what a political movement is is linked not to that movement’s actions in the present but instead to its own origin myth, typically located in an idealized past outside of profane space-time. The NDP’s myth is like this. It is the story of how Tommy Douglas, the CCF premier of Saskatchewan created Canada’s biggest, most successful buyers’ club, Medicare, the linchpin of Canada’s liberal social contract. The NDP brought socialism to Canada, if one buys the idea that eleven networked government health insurance schemes purchasing services from small private companies is “socialism.” Medicare is certainly a good thing but, right away, one can see that it may be a tad over-described.

But essence in origins arguments are silly when discussing permeable organizations of any longevity. One need only look south to the United States. The US Democratic Party was created by America’s one caudillo president, and Donald Trump’s favourite, Andrew Jackson, who abolished the secret ballot, deregulated the medical profession, destroyed the national bank, had his own private army, owned more slaves than any other president, defied the Supreme Court and committed a series of successful and attempted genocides against indigenous people in violation of signed treaties from Florida to Louisiana to Georgia to Tennessee. Beginning in 1848, when US politics began to reorient around the slavery issue, the Democrats became the party of slavery, which they remained until the end of the Civil War, after which time they became the party of the Ku Klux Klan, a mantle they did not finish casting off until the 1980s.

Yet today, the front-runner in their presidential race is an anti-racist, democratic socialist backed by a coalition of trade unions and anti-racist groups. That is because subscription-based big tent political organizations change with their environment; they are a place invaded and abandoned by a succession of social movements based on the needs of the moment.

Why should Canada’s New Democratic Party be any different? It is not like any other political movement’s essence is preserved in amber. A century ago, the Canadian Prairies were a red Liberal wall from Lake of the Woods to the Rockies, with huge liberal legislative majorities and a deep bench of Liberal MPs who outnumbered Tories four to one. That’s because the Liberals were against the very Central Canadian manufacturing interests who form the backbone of the party today. The Tories, meanwhile, were hated on the Prairies because of their vociferous opposition to free trade with the US.

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Some people who suggest the party has fundamentally changed believe that these changes have been grounded in a secretive, elite-level hijacking of the party that has taken place behind closed doors, a conspiracy of staffers, cabinet ministers and powerful causus members stealing the party’s agenda from under the noses of a naïve socialist membership. I do not think this is helpful for two reasons.

First, I think it is simply inaccurate. I see no deceptions or conspiracies when I interact with the party at high levels. Second, it absolves people like me of responsibility for our willful blindness, rose-coloured glasses and lazy, naïve political praxis.

What if we took the radical step of deducing the NDP’s principles not by way of nostalgic or conspiratorial thinking but instead by listening to the party’s spokespeople and believing them?

The reality is that, in the post-Cold War era, the NDP’s public rhetoric and their actions in government have not been divergent at all. Prior to his election as BC premier, Mike Harcourt told the Vancouver Board of Trade that “the NDP no longer believes in the redistribution of wealth.” Later when his government made its major austerity course correction and brought in a set of punitive and draconian welfare reforms, Harcourt explained that their purpose was to crack down on “welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints.” What if the reason the NDP attacked BC’s underclass and used government policy to increase the number of homeless from 11,000 to 27,000 was because they really did think that the very poor were subhuman animals and that redistributing wealth was wrong? Why did the party’s left-wing supporters need to concoct a narrative in which the NDP was having to strategically abandon its principles so it could live to fight another day? Why not just believe the party when it told us its principles had changed?

In fact, let me go further: what if the NDP actually makes major sacrifices to avoid telling baldfaced lies to its supporters? The NDP might have got more votes if John Horgan had promised to cancel the Site C dam rather than putting forward a confusing policy whereby he equivocated and suggested a government regulatory commission would make the decision—voters like simple, direct promises, not process-oriented double-talk, even when they disagree. But Horgan chose to make a promise that would permit him to more honestly proceed with the megaproject. Let us consider proportional representation in the same light; rather than promise PR, the NDP promised a process that they could then rig to defeat the system, so as to avoid breaking a promise.

When asked what her biggest regret in government was, Notley stated it was her opposition to the Enbridge Pipeline through Northern BC. What if we take seriously Notley’s claimed conversion to the need to build as many pipelines as possible to as many places as possible? Does this not make it easier to explain her government’s lawsuits, boycotts and ad campaigns attacking the BC government, activists and First Nations?

What if, when Claire Trevana tells residents of the Cariboo Plateau and Highland Valley that the do not deserve bus service unless the free market can support it, she actually means it, that the NDP genuinely believes in the justice meted out by the invisible-handed god? What if, when Michelle Mungall, states that fracking must continue at all costs because no party that wants to win elections would allow it to stop, we consider the possibility that she believes that a party that does not support fracking does not deserve to win? When Carole James says we “cannot afford” $10/day childcare for the next decade but we can afford $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other profitable petro giants, we have to consider the possibility that she believes that working parents deserve government help less than these transnational corporations do. When Notley says Canada cannot afford Pharmacare without more pipelines and that she opposes building a national Pharmacare program until they are built, consider the possibility that this is not just information about her being in the tank for the oil industry but about how the party feels about national social programs, austerity and poor people’s access to medication.

We go to great lengths to perform a folk exegesis on the pronouncements of NDP officials so that we can understand them to be statements of practicality, unrelated to values and principles. We do that work. Nobody asks us to. We just do it for ourselves. The idea that the NDP wants to do something different than its actions in government and election platforms say has no evidentiary basis. This belief is derived not from evidence but from wishful thinking by social movement activists who do not want to face the work of creating new electoral political strategies and organizations.

And one need not simply look to NDP officials. Look at the people who have joined the party since the early 1990s. Go to a riding association meeting in a swing seat and listen to individual members. They will tell you they like what the party stands for and what it does. They will justify the $2000 entry fee people have to pay to seek the party’s nomination in their riding. They might even quote party president Craig Keating and suggest that people who do not have $2000 handy in their bank account are not “serious people,” that cash on hand is a far better indication of candidate suitability than the ability to recruit new members and turn them out to a meeting.

If you want to understand what Canada’s New Democratic Party stands for, I urge you to Believe New Democrats. They are trying to tell us what they believe in and we are refusing to listen.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Albertans, Please Burn Your Ballots: Revisiting Strategic Voting and the Symbolic Order

In Alberta, there is a Manichean struggle between two parties promising massive increases in the extraction of bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, using the power of the state to force new pipelines to carry this increased quantity of planet-killing petroleum through the unceded lands of indigenous people against their will and promising to sue any government that attempts to stop the pipelines, increase safety standards for the pipelines or sue oil companies for any damage they cause.

Both parties promise to maintain the lowest taxes on millionaires and billionaires of any Canadian jurisdiction and condemn former Tory premier Ed Stelmach’s review of oil industry royalties as a rigged stitch-up to mess with petroleum producers. They both favour maintaining the royalty regime of Ralph Klein for oil extraction and brag that they favour lower taxes on the rich than Klein ever supported.

But the two parties do differ on a few important points: an $11 minimum wage versus a $15 minimum wage, the rights of gay and transgender Albertans, whether to also use the power of the state to subsidize coal as well as oil and whether to play footsie with crackpots and racists.

For some people, these differences are enough to keep them trapped in the progressive politics trap of voting for the lesser evil. But, for many of us, the idea of abetting the intentional increase in carbon emissions has become a bridge too far. Yet there is no electable alternative for Albertans who hold this view.

So what is to be done?

In the past, I have written at some length on this blog in opposition to people opposing strategic voting and have encouraged people to vote for candidates from lesser evil parties in elections. I stand behind the reasoning for this.

The belief that individual votes “send a message” is fundamentally incorrect on two bases. First off, a voter’s idea of what their vote means is likely different from how the person or organization they want it to mean something to will interpret it. For instance, many people who vote Green think it will cause Liberals or New Democrats to think “my look at all that environmental concern; what must we do to win these people back?” More, often, however, the interpretation is “look at those jerks voting against us after all we’ve done for them. Let’s make sure to make bigger clearcuts in caribou habitat to show them.”

The exegesis of minority party votes is not something individual voters can control. The meaning made of their votes is out of their control, except in the private meaning-making session they engage in while marking their “X.”

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An “X” next to the name of a stranger associated with a flaky political doomsday cult has no clear or specific meaning that can act on anyone.

Does this mean that I advocate voting for a lesser evil party or giving up on the idea of voting at all? Perhaps. But I have not reached that point yet. Instead, I think we have to develop new voting strategies based on the truth that meaning-making in a social enterprise. That just as with everything else, we have been conned by the neoliberal order into thinking that collective actions are no different than a collection of individual actions.

If we want to take control of making votes that fail to elect people mean something, the way we must do that is intervene collectively, not just at the level of voting but at the level of political interpretation and meaning-making. And we need to engage in meaning-making acts not primarily for the purpose of communicating with people who are not us and not like us but for the purpose of building community, solidarity and connection among those who find the current pragmatic choices of accelerating the extinction event but with slightly different minimum wage legislation untenable.

If we are to move away from casting votes that produce tangible differences in who is elected, we need to move towards casting votes that produce some other kind of tangible difference, in public discourse, in movement-building or in building an electable alternative.

For this reason, I urge people to publicize their vote in an act that also publicizes how they want it interpreted. Maybe this involves entering the ballot booth and igniting the ballot with a cigarette lighter, so as to protest climate change by spending a night in jail. If one cannot afford to be arrested, consider posting a photo of one’s ballot receipt along with a clear and shared explanation of its meaning, be it a spoiled ballot or a Green one. Or if one wants to spend a few extra nights in jail, consider bringing a small scourge with you voting and turning over tables like Jesus in the Temple.

But the only way these things can become effective strategies is if they are a strategy a group takes on, be it an ad hoc affinity group of friends or a formal group that meets regularly with membership fees and a governance structure. More important than the act of voting is the act of contacting friends, comrades and allies and agreeing on a shared strategy to help shape the interpretation of a collective act, figuring out who is fetching bail and lawyers and who is going to jail, figuring out what Twitter hashtag to use for images of spoiled ballots or burning “I voted” ballot receipts.

All voting is hard and dodgy. There is no way of voting or vote one can cast that should feel good or be easy. If it is time, as it clearly is in Alberta, to cast symbolic votes, one must take responsibility for the whole meaning-making act if one is forced to vote symbolically.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Territorial Acknowledgement: Finally Canada Figures Out Thanksgiving

Doug Stanhope observed in his Netflix comedy special Beerhall Putsch that American Thanksgiving NFL games are the crescendo of the politics of the white settler “rage boner.” He observes that the festival of day drinking and proxy violence is inextricable from the uncovering of pre-Enlightenment male sexuality, in which being up for penetrating more things and people just makes one more of a man. He ties America’s system of racial oppression to “straight” white men sexualizing the lycra-clad bodies of black men on a football field, “as though they are in a glass case in a whorehouse in Phuket.”

Canadians are routinely confused by this routine because it suggests that something is going on during American Thanksgiving that our October Thanksgiving has nothing to do with. Uncomfortable as it is, Stanhope’s routine directs our attention to the importance of American Thanksgiving as the most important moment in the American patriotic calendar. More so than Christmas, Easter or any import from the Old Country, Thanksgiving defines the American nation and its moral order.

Growing up in Canada, our civic nationalism informs us that our Thanksgiving is a month earlier than America’s because winter comes a month sooner here and that it is essentially the same festival, some nonsense celebrating a successful harvest. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let us begin with the official difference. Edward VII had a bit of a health scare in the late nineteenth century. Our British imperial Thanksgiving celebrates his survival from scarlet fever or something. I have not spent thirty seconds bothering to look up the details because that is kind of the point. So, let us be clear that Canadian Thanksgiving celebrates a forgotten child of Queen Victoria surviving an illness nobody knows or cares about, at least officially. Back in elementary school, they told me it was a “harvest festival” that was globally universal. Consequently, Canadian Thanksgiving is an anemic and confused event, the last free Monday for Upper Canada’s bourgeoisie to visit their oversized cottage in Muskoka.

I think I realized the true power of American Thanksgiving when it was revealed to me that the most decadent and confused TV event of Carter-era America, the Star Wars Holiday Special (a show narrated mainly in Wookie with no subtitles, featuring musical numbers by Bea Arthur and Jefferson Starship) was not, in fact, a Christmas TV special. It was a Thanksgiving special. American Thanksgiving, one must understand, is a four-day weekend every year. Some years, Christmas is a three-day weekend, some years, four. But Thanksgiving is four days every year. And, unlike Christmas, it is unfettered by Protestant continence and discipline politics; it is a truly Bacchanalian festival based around day drinking, overeating and, as Stanhope reminds us, temporary suspension of both liberal and evangelical theories of male sexuality. It is a classic Bakhtinian carnival.

The story that sits at the heart of this carnival is the story of the Pilgrim Fathers being helped out by indigenous people when they ran out of food in the winter and Indians supplying them with squash, beans and corn to survive the first New England winter. Later, the Pilgrim Fathers would express their thanks for this by murdering the indigenous people, abducting and raping indigenous women, destroying their farmhouses and fences and stealing their land.

Thanksgiving celebrates the classic rapist interpretation of being invited up for a cup of coffee. “Of course they agreed to all the rape, murder and theft when they gave us that spaghetti squash,” the thinking goes. By thanking indigenous people for their consensual generosity at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Americans excuse themselves for every subsequent act of rape, murder, theft and genocide. And on Thanksgiving, they gather to celebrate the racial hierarchy of their state not by saying “she shouldn’t have been dressed that way” but, instead, “thanks for dressing that way and letting us know you were up for this gangfucking.”

Until the twenty-first century, Canada has lacked a ritual or celebratory enactment of American Thanksgiving. In this way, we have been inferior, guilt-ridden and confused colonists.
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Enter the territorial acknowledgement.

1992 and the Five Hundred Years of Resistance (“It would take nation of millions to keep us down”) campaign coincided, I argue elsewhere, with the emergence of Third Way politics in Western Canada in the governments of Roy Romanow and Mike Harcourt. It was in these governments of austerity, QuaNGOs and other monstrosities that “progressives” began to seriously innovate and build what would become the identity politics of the twenty-first century. It is in this decade that the first “territorial acknowledgement” performances began in BC and spread east.

Because mainland British Columbia, west of the Rockies, was seized based on the Australian terra nulius doctrine, we do not violate treaties here because we never signed them in the first place. The absence of treaties meant that we operate on the “unceded territory” of various First Nations. And in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics as we put our province on display, some enterprising members of the urban indigenous underclass realized that they could market a service to progressives: welcoming them to their unceded territory.

So, in twenty-first century BC, a new kind of political performance emerged: a progressive organization would pay an indigenous person a few bucks to “welcome” their meeting to the unceded territory of… one or more First Nations. The names hardly mattered, nor did whether the member of the urban indigenous underclass was a member of any of those groups. The point was that progressives could feel that they had a kind of legitimacy others did not, that they were somehow addressing the problem of colonial oppression through a ritual speech act and the movement of very small amounts of money.

I might still be on side with territorial acknowledgement if it had stayed that way instead of converging with American Thanksgiving. Today, not just at progressive gatherings but increasingly at gatherings of all political stripes, especially state-sponsored ones, not just in BC but throughout Canada the “this is the traditional territory of [fill in the blank]” speech act is universalizing.

The thing is that we are such frugal colonizers that we have begun cutting indigenous people out of the act. Today, at most gatherings, we welcome ourselves to the territory we have stolen. We acknowledge that it is someone else’s and then pat ourselves on the back for having noticed. The idea of shelling out $150 to a member of the urban racialized proletariat to be part of our act of triumphant yet appropriately guilt-ridden liberal conquest is too much of an inconvenience. So we commend, thank and welcome ourselves, leaving more money for the very small finger sandwiches and bulk Yellow Tail shiraz in the catering budget.

In this way, Canada has finally discovered the true meaning of Thanksgiving. We have realized that it is not about the survival of our imperial overlord’s child. It is about saying “thanks for giving us the thing we stole from you after raping you and beating you up.” In this way, the territorial acknowledgement has transformed from an act of minor entrepreneurship by marginalized people into the linchpin of modern, Canadian colonial discourse, the ultimate celebration of the conquest.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

The Prince, the Pea and the Mercury: Justin Trudeau’s Politics of Poisoning and Politeness

In 1956, Japanese doctors first noticed Minamata Disease, the affliction that is destroying the people of Grassy Narrows. Despite the repressive, state-colluding culture of Japanese industry, by 1968, the Chisso Corporation had been forced, by public pressure and citizen activism, to stop dumping mercury into the drinking water of the people of Minamata City. In other words, more than half a century has gone by since the story of corporate mercury-poisoning of a population played out on the global stage. Before I was ten years old, the story of Minamata had become a touring stage play, which I watched in the early 1980s at the Vancouver Children’s Festival.

It goes without saying that, as with the fracked gas, bitumen, sulphur and chemical waste we dump into indigenous people’s drinking water throughout the petro-belt from Chetwynd to Llodyminster, we did not become aware of the adverse consequences of poisoning First Nations’ water through industrial activity after starting our mining projects; we knew of the consequences before we even began planning the projects, before any shovel hit soil. This, of course, fits into the larger program of poisoning indigenous Canadians through inferior reserve water systems that pipe non-potable, dangerous poison into residents’ homes from coast to coast. When placed in context with the water systems of black-majority communities in Michigan, Flint, Dearborne and Detroit, it seems almost as though when a group of racialized people in North America cease to be a necessary part of a regional labour force, we simply pipe poisoned water into their homes to kill them.

But that is not the scandal that has horrified Canadians. The systematic poisoning and murder of a racialized rural underclass is not news. It is the business of Canada, not just within our borders but in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, etc.

This, in other words, is not our Minamata scandal. Nobody is saying, “How could we let this company do this to Canadians?” We do not even construct that question because Canada’s white settler state nationalism does not include the people of Grassy Narrows the way Cold War Japanese nationalism included the people of Minamata.

So what has scandalized Canadians about this week’s confrontation between our Prime Minister and the woman who witnessed against his government’s callous indifference to the poisoning of her people?

Etiquette. The failure of etiquette.

The problem, for Canadians, is the way Justin Trudeau deported himself when confronted. Opposition politicians and media opinion leaders have decried Trudeau’s “sarcasm,” “callousness,” and “dismissal” of the protester’s concerns. They have spent no time decrying the disability and premature deaths of dozens of indigenous people, the thing to which the protester sought to direct the nation’s attention.

The framing of our national debate goes to the heart of the Canadian colonial project and of our theory of civic nationalism. More than almost any other state on earth, Canada is a liberal state, one in which the authority to govern is linked to the embodiment of the culture of the haute bourgeoisie, the upper middle class.
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The fairy tale that best expresses this is the Princess and the Pea. A young woman, switched at birth, is unaware that she is heir to a European throne. People question her legitimacy, the justice of her inheriting the throne. So, she is tested by placing a single dried pea under her mattress. The consequence is that she cannot sleep and tosses and turns all night. But does not complain. The bed is padded more and more by those seeking to show she is not a princess. But she continues to feel the pea and she continues to stoically endure this fate until she is universally recognized as heir to the throne.

This story embodies the essence of the liberal project and the culture of the class leading it. The princess embodies self-control, the most important bourgeois value. This self-control functions as a form of merit, of deservedness. The fact that she has inherited it and it is in her blood is in no way contradictory of it also functioning as a meritocratic qualification. In this way, hereditary privilege and merit are fused into a single thing. But the princess also embodies the other bourgeois value: sensitivity. There is no more haute bourgeois act than the well-timed stifling of tears, the fusion of two other contradictory values: sensitivity and self-control.

In a liberal Canada, one must understand that the tearful public apology and the territorial acknowledgement are not countervailing forces mobilized against colonialism; they are the justifying discourse of colonialism itself. “Are you apologizing [to former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould], Mr. Trudeau?” the Prime Minister was asked after sacking our nation’s first indigenous justice minister for failing to give special treatment to his friends. “I will be making an Inuit apology [in Iqaluit] later today,” he responded. That is because we have tied our sense of entitlement to keep stealing indigenous land, abducting indigenous kids and just flat out murdering indigenous people by poison, by cop and by poverty to our embodiment of restraint and sensitivity.

In other words, etiquette, the body of knowledge that distinguishes the haute bourgeoisie from the other classes.

That is how we give unemployed indigenous parents $175/month to look after their kids and then, when the kids appear to be suffering from the effects of colonialism and poverty, we abduct them and pay foster parents $750/month to do the same job. We explain that, unlike our racist ancestors, we don’t want to hurt indigenous kids. We care about them. We care about them so much that we are prepared to rescue them from the cycle of poverty, colonialism and intergenerational trauma.

Liberal Canada is freaking out right now because Trudeau’s mask has been torn; our mask has been torn. When we see Trudeau smirking as he “thanks” the protester for her donation as she is violently ejected from the room by uniformed thugs, it is as though we have caught our own reflection in the mirror at a particularly unflattering angle. Trudeau has revealed himself as fundamentally no different than the conservative bullies like Doug Ford who challenge Canada’s liberal state project by proudly embodying the cruel swagger, arbitrary violence and misanthropy the liberal project seeks to conceal.

What offends us are not children convulsing in hospital beds in Thunder Bay; it is the glimpse in the face of our Prime Minister of who we really are.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |