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Politics of Identity - 2. page

Originally an article series, this category covers Stuart’s writing about identity and self-making in contemporary capitalism.

Wokeness, Intersectionality, History’s “Wrong Side” and the False Progressive Consciousness of Time

From the moment the word came into being, the term “progressivism” brought with it a false consciousness of time. The great global meta-ideology that arose in the 1890s packed with it a set of false, mystical beliefs about the nature of time and how it interacted with human societies.

When I say “meta-ideology,” what I mean is that progressivism has never been an ideology; rather, it describes a set of beliefs that underpin multiple ideologies from Marxism to Comtian Positivism to Modernization Theory to Postmillennial Protestantism. These various belief systems came to be collectively categorized as “progressive” following the publication of Francis Galton’s Eugenics and Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, both of which sought to transform the recently published works of Charles Darwin from a scientific theory of biological evolution into a social science based on the junk science of race.

Reasoning by analogy, Galton and Spencer decided that human civilizations would, like terrestrial lifeforms, gradually evolve into increasingly complex, refined, intelligent societies, and that every “race” was, just like Darwin’s species, slowly, inexorably evolving towards perfection. The intellectual hegemony of progressivism was evident in the encyclopedias and atlases of a century ago, in which a diagram akin to a number line appeared on the opening pages showing the different races whose civilizations comprised the world in order from darkest to lightest.

On the far left, there would be a diagram of a black-skinned man with a protruding jaw and a large, sloping forehead and below him, “Caveman” and “100,000 BC.” On the far right would be a light-skinned man in a morning suit and top hat with the caption “Englishman/German” and “the present.” Between these two were other faces depicting the great Progressive Chain of Being, going something like, “Negro… Indian… Red Indian… Chinaman,” and below each face would be dates “4000 BC… 2000 BC… 0 AD… 500 AD.” In this way, progressives reimagined all racial, cultural, political, artistic, scientific, technological, military, really any form of difference as a differences in the progress of a race. There were no other peoples in the world for white Europeans, just themselves at different moments in the past.

While not all progressives conflated their worldview with the junk science of race, there nevertheless existed a meta-consensus across almost every major ideology that the more “advanced” a society was, the more complex, the more technological, the less violent, the more secular, the more just, the more educated, the less superstitious, the more egalitarian. In this way, political disagreement could be recast as a difference of opinion about how to achieve progress, not about what progress looked like or whether it was good.

There is something beguiling about an ideology that tells you that your future victory is both inevitable and fully knowable, that the ultimate triumph of good over evil is baked into the structure of the universe itself.

This idea was not just a consequence of Darwinism but of the whole cultural zeitgeist that permitted Darwin’s work to be so rapidly accepted. After all, progressivism’s most popular aphorism was composed Unitarian Universalist minister Theodore Parker, who died the year Origin of Species was published. Parker’s church, the one in which I was raised, was so progressive that its ministers took to blessing the openings of new factories and railroads. And the saying, often falsely attributed to Martin Luther King Jr, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” The shortened version quoted today tells us much about how this idea underwent a kind of karma to “instant karma” transition.

How, then, did one comprehend the victories of one’s political opponents if one were a progressive? Obviously, one’s opponents had done something unfair or unnatural that had temporarily reversed the flow of time itself. If Marxists did well in an election, liberal progressives would bemoan or slide back into despotism. If liberal progressives did well, Marxists would understand this to heighten the contradictions in capitalism and produce a kind of slingshot effect whereby the magnitude of today’s defeat was commensurate in size to that of tomorrow’s inevitable victory. One’s adversaries’ victories were ephemeral, one’s own, inevitable and permanent.

Over time, the march of actual, real history with all its messiness, ambiguity and surprise began to challenge the progressive theory of time. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 shook the world as one of the most educated, secular countries of the Middle East suddenly became a theocracy. But more influential on people’s thinking in the long term was the mid-1970s reverse in the gap between rich and poor, which began widening again. In the 1990s, it was joined by the gap between male and female wages and, around the same time, black and white. More and more concrete indicators of “progress” began to disappear.

As societies took stock after crossing Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the twenty-first century,” the forces of progress and progressivism were in disarray. Marxist governments and parties were a spent force. Parties of the right the world over began to purge progressives, driving right-wing progressives like David Frum, Kim Campbell, Arlen Specter and Hugh Segal into parties that still espoused progressive beliefs.

Although I have spilled much ink about the economic and political effects of the Third Way movement in social democratic and liberal parties in the 1990s, I have said little about their impact on discourse. In both parties of the right and parties of the left, the universal neoliberal policy consensus effectively foreclosed any genuine political debates or contests of investor rights, privatization, austerity and the other aspects of the emerging neoliberal order.

This meant that for parties of both the right and the left, politics had to be expressed in largely immaterial, cultural terms. Parties of the right created moral panics around abortion, the rights of linguistic minorities and announced that they would be defending Christmas against the putative war against it by progressives.

The War on Christmas is, in key respects, the core of the efforts by progressives to regroup in the twenty-first century. It is not exactly that the beleaguered forces of progressivism holed-up in their Third Way parties opposed Christmas or conducted any kind of intentional war on public Christmas celebrations. But it is true that a state or large corporation appearing to favour Christian religious observances over those of minority faiths began to be understood not as a minor inconvenience or a harmless breach in church-state separation. No, it was an offense, an affront, almost a form of violence against religious minorities that were not Christian.

Oddly, though, it was not representatives of Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism who spoke out against public Christmas celebrations, nor was it members of small autocthonous movements in the Anglosphere like the Handsome Lake Church or Nation of Islam. No. Those who rose to the bait and combatted conservatives in their efforts to “put the Christ back in Christmas” were progressive white secularists, either atheists or practicing their “spirituality” outside of organized religion.

While it might seem silly to engage on an issue on which conservatives enjoyed not just majority support but broad indifference to the issue among non-supporters, this behaviour seems more rational if one considers the discursive straitjacket in which progressives now found themselves. The idea that every political triumph is actually a wind-assisted victory is a great one when you’re on a winning streak. But it becomes worse than useless when one is taking an absolute pasting. Perhaps, if one keeps losing, this might indicate one is on “the wrong side of history.”

For this reason, left progressives (and now suddenly all the progressives were in parties of the left) necessarily had to transform their political program into one that did not just contain victory in the future but victory in the present and recent past. In essence, progressivism necessarily sanctifies the past and present orders as manifestations of a divine will, a secular faith more effective than any religion at collapsing what God intends and what God permits into a single thing.

Necessarily, then, left progressives joined right progressives in seeing the expansion of free trade agreements, economic migration, investor rights as positive forces; globalization was progressive; nationalism, regressive. Similarly, right progressives soon joined left progressives in celebrating gay marriage, the rise of “gender medicine,” increased parliamentary representation of women and minorities and the secularization of public space; civil liberties were progressive; tradition, regressive.

For something to be progressive, it was necessary that it have a nigh-uninterrupted record of incremental victories, one building on another. But as our societies have become more divided and volatile, these things are growing fewer and further between. As with the Third Way politics it produced, progressive culture switched from deciding what is desirable and figuring out how to make it possible to figuring out what is politically possible and arguing for its desirability.

We can see this in the politics that preoccupy progressives and the cultural left today: condemnation of and sanctions against Israel, reduced regulation of sex work, reduced drug prohibition, more gender medicine for kids and adults. Why would these be the things that capture the progressive imagination in ways that climate justice, wealth inequality, etc. do not? Why do people wrap themselves and festoon their identities with signs of their politics on these issues? Because these are the things towards which evidence shows incremental, inexorable progress. If they become our primary proxies for human goodness and development, the false time consciousness of progressivism can be maintained.

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But this was a strain, an effort. Progressivism could not carry on in this state. Something else had to shift to save progressive time consciousness. Enter: Wokeness.

It is weird that “Woke” has taken less than a quarter of a decade to change from a compliment to a pejorative. That stated, both those who cling to the title and those who use it as an insult share a belief in the immense power of the term. And I concur.

“Wokeness” fundamentally changes progressive time consciousness and functions as a countervailing force against the ever-narrowing optic of possible futures that progressive time consciousness has been producing.

What the term “Woke” implies is this: the reason that major problems in our society have not been adequately addressed is that nobody noticed these problems or tried to solve them until very very recently. This is revealed in the less powerful, less seductive term that preceded “Woke” in the progressive imaginary, “Intersectional.”

Although its creator Kimberlé Crenshaw has never made such a claim, those who purport to be adherents to intersectionality believe that until Crenshaw published her two articles on the term, one in 1989 and one in 1994, no one had ever theorized or even thought about how class, race and gender oppression function synergistically. Intersectionalists argue that all feminism before 1994 was “white feminism” until an obscure legal scholar published an article on the ways in which gender and racial oppression interact.

In the mid-2010s, whenever I argued with people who demanded that I support intersectionality, I would argue that Friedrich Engels, bell hooks, Richard Wright and others had much more sophisticated, descriptive models of how race, class and gender oppression interact than Crenshaw did. The rebuttal was always the same: before intersectionality, nobody had considered these synergies of oppression, never mind carefully and painstakingly theorizing them. The fact that Engels wrote a book in the nineteenth century arguing that class oppression originated in patriarchy was so far outside the discourse that Intersectionalists could not integrate this datum into their progressive worldview; it was beyond the pale, outside the discourse.

Instead, they chose to believe that prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, all feminism was white supremacist; socialists and communists never considered race or included racialized people; all racial equality movements were nationalist; etc.

Wokeness is simply the generalization of the false Intersectionalist premise to all politics. In this way, failure, regression, the lack of progress on human equality can be redescribed as arising from the fact that, until a generation ago, no political philosophers or political movements had theorized, desired or worked for true human equality.

In Woke time consciousness, everything is happening for the first time! Everything is unprecedented! While progressive time consciousness had been slowly, relentlessly, circumscribing possible fields of political action and possible loci of victory, Wokeness can reverse this declension with one single grand fallacy: the belief that no one has ever really wanted to or tried to pursue social justice until just a minute ago.

And the best thing about Wokeness is that it can be individualized, personalized, consistent with the neoliberal subject, which comprehends all political failures as failures of individual virtue.

Because of this, the ability of Wokeness to short-circuit progressive time consciousness radically opens the horizon of future possibility in the progressive imagination. But, at the same time, it circumscribes and distorts that field because it casts future justice in terms of personal individualistic fulfillment or punishment.

Consequently, new “rights” and “freedoms” are attached to it that make no social sense and are indicative of a pathologically narcissistic or solipsistic consciousness, like the right to control who others perceive one to be, the right to be sexually attractive to whoever one is attracted to, the right to be talked about as one imagines oneself, when one is not even there, the right to move in and out of a protected class of person, based on mood. Even the fallacious conservative idea of first responders being replaced by ephemeral associations of one-person militias is an increasingly Woke proposition.

Furthermore, political outcomes are, themselves, radically individualized. Woke political “victories” are about removing a TV ad or billboard from one’s field of vision, silencing words one does not wish to hear, firing individual malefactors, blacklisting others, throwing folks out of restaurants and storefront businesses for wrongthink and beating them in the streets if they won’t shut up. While Wokeness turns the past into a slate grey canvas devoid of detail and the future into a colourful panorama of wild shapes and exotic, unique beings, it has no theory of how to translate a series of putative victories into a possible future. And it shows no interest in developing one. Political action in the present is disconnected from the project of creating a just future.

And because it is still part of a nominally progressive time consciousness, one need not ask whether these outcomes pass tests of human decency or rational strategy. Wokesters do not even understand themselves to be perpetrators of these acts; “history” is doing this violence with the back of its hand, running roughshod over those on its “wrong side.”

This kind of time consciousness is the death knell of revolution. It replaces progressivism’s inability to fully embrace a true sense of hope in the first place with a false, cartoonish, childish, counterfeit hope. A mockery of hope itself.

At the very time we most need to be reading the literature of the Cold War, writers from the authoritarian states of Eastern Europe and Latin America, we are instead enthusiastically throwing in with the very project they denounced: the political project of Forgetting.

Because we must be able to remember a different past in order to imagine a different future, Forgetting is core to every authoritarian project. That is Milan Kundera’s argument in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of the deepest, most audacious literary explorations of the totalitarian project inspired by the Cold War dictatorships. That kind of thinking is desperately needed today; we need to go back and read our Kundera, our Isabel Allende.

Because if we allow the past to become nothing more than a fading, half-remembered dream of the Woke, darkness will fall.

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity | fusangite |

American Caliphate I: Who Are the Young Turks?

American Caliphate: Who Are the Young Turks?
There are some ideas I have been developing since I began writing on US empire and imperialism here back in 2011, a whole decade ago. Because I am now teaching an online course on the subject, I thought I should write a couple of pieces tying my reasoning together and elaborating it more fully. If you want to skip ahead to the meat of this piece, just scroll down to the second section. And if you’re already conversant with my analysis of the similarities between the US and Ottoman Empires, head to section three. This article is the first of two in a short series.

1. Why Comparative Empire?
One of the most important tools we have for understanding empires and the operation of imperialism in the present is disciplined historical comparison. I say “disciplined” because one of the features of discourse in modern imperial systems is lazy and undisciplined comparison.

There is always going to be someone in any European or Euro-American empire going on about how the present is like the “last days of Rome,” which usually yields, if explored, a total absence of clarity or accuracy about how the Roman Empire came to an end, according to any historiographic tradition. We all know that usually male, conservative, ancient mariner type who grabs the wrist of a young person at a Christmas party or wedding and begins reciting the myth of the sexual permissiveness of the Late Roman Republic and how that’s all happening again thanks to gay marriage or heavy petting or whatever the moral panic of the moment is.

But the existence of this social phenomenon should not put us off comparing empires. If anything, the ubiquity of bad thinking about comparative empire is actually a good thing; at least one’s starting position is something people are thinking badly about, rather than something people are not thinking about at all.

Thanks to first Marxists, Dependency theorists, World Systems theorists and, most recently, what we might call the “energy systems theorists” to use a broad enough brush to include Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy and Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire, we can usefully compare imperial structures based on a variety of metrics across time and space. That is because they have noted universal structural properties we find across empires, both self-conscious and unconscious, such as the existence of a core and a periphery, and the redirection of energy from periphery to core.

As a historian, this is my main toolbox for thinking about not just the United States but the regional empires seeking to challenge its status as the global hegemon in the late twentieth century or as the pre-eminent global power in this century. As a non-quantitative historian, I necessarily rest my analogical reasoning atop the hard inductive work of economic and environmental historians of these empires, without whom this work would not be possible.

2. How the Ottoman Caliphate Worked
In my endorsement of the Bernie Sanders campaign for the 2020 US presidential nomination, I argued that a striking feature of the imperial vision of the mainstream of the Democratic Party and that of the shrinking neoliberal faction of the Republicans, as espoused by characters like Pete Buttigieg and Lisa Murkoswski, is a theory of political representation similar to that of the Ottoman Empire and, to a lesser extent, previous Muslim empires claiming to be the Caliphate.

The status of Caliphate and the title of Caliph have been claimed by Muslim states that wished to be recognized as the pre-eminent Muslim power globally since the religion’s founding. The head of state of a Caliphate, the Caliph, had a role similar to the Byzantine and Russian emperors who took on the mantle of “vicegerent of God on earth.” The idea was that God had effectively chosen the Tsar/Caliph by placing his chosen representative in the position of leading the state that controlled the most territory, fighting men and population within a larger religious community.

In this way, although a Tsar, Emperor or Caliph might rise to his office through the ranks of the army or through inheritance, or, most commonly, a combination of the two, he became, upon his accession, the greatest churchman in the land, the successor to Muhammad the Prophet in Muslim tradition and successor to Constantine the Great, “equal to the apostles” in Orthodox Christian tradition. Caliphs and emperors were expected not just to lead the armies of Christ or Allah, as the case might be, but to intervene in settling doctrinal and liturgical disputes, policing the boundaries of orthodoxy, not just militarily but ideologically.

With less stringent controls on doctrine and sectarianism and an impressive record of conversion across vast geographic areas, the Muslim world over which a Caliph presided was far more diverse than that over which any Byzantine or Russian emperor ever did. And this remained true up until the official disbandment of the Ottoman Caliphate by the Turkish parliament in 1922.

Within the Ottoman Empire, there were al-kitab, the people of the book, Christians and Jews, whom the Quran and hadiths specifically designated as enjoying freedom of religion. But did that apply to Yazidis? Zoroastrians? Then there was the problem of Islamic sects and movements not recognized as Muslim by most Sunnis. Sure, Shi’ites were Muslims. But Druzes? Alawites? Should they be managed like the Yazidi or like the Ismailis? This was then overlaid on a complex mass of ethnicities, Albanians, Kurds, Nubians, Greeks, Serbs, Copts and Arabs. And this, in turn, was overlaid on the geography of Europe, the Near East and North Africa.

In other words, central to the job of an Ottoman Caliph was the maintenance and management of diversity. Like the other venerable empires of its age, the Russian, Mughal, Hapsburg and Holy Roman Empires, this diversity was understood to redound to the glory of the emperor, who might style himself Caliph of his whole realm but also Emperor of the Greeks, King of the Serbs, Protector of the Jews, etc. The number of kinds of person over which one’s empire ruled, the richer it was considered to be.

This diversity had to be reflected not only in titles but in the pageantry of government. A successful Caliph’s court featured viziers (ministers handling portfolios, regions or peoples) representing all the diversity of the empire: an Orthodox Greek from Palestine, an Arab Shi’ite from Basra, an Egyptian Orthodox Copt from Asyut, an Arab Alawite from Alakia. While the Caliph was always a Turk, and the empire, one that moved wealth from non-Turkish periphery to the Turkish core, the symbolism of the empire typically sought to downplay Turkish domination through the pageantry of diversity.

Of course, because the average early modern peasant was more politically sophisticated than progressive Twitter is today, the non-Turkish subjects of the empire were not fooled. They had had no part in choosing their “representative” and correctly understood that being picked by the Caliph was not a triumph of representation and that no ceilings of any sort had been broken in the process.

While some local folks close to the vizier would no doubt benefit from government jobs and the rewriting of laws in their favour, having one’s local ethno-religious community “represented” in the court of the Caliph was hardly good news for the community as a whole.

Having been selected by the Caliph and elevated from above, the interests of the vizier were clear: their ability to “represent” their community was contingent on its good behaviour and continued labour to move resources to the Turkish core of the empire. If “his” people rose up in a costly or protracted way, the vizier had failed and could not expect to keep his job. Therefore, through a combination of pageantry, patronage, surveillance and force, the vizier did all he could to keep his people in line, as loyal subjects of the Caliph.

Ottoman diversity politics proved highly effective until the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. But while an incipient Pan-Arab Nationalism and the rise of Palestine-focused Zionism raised some concern about imperial cohesion, it was the unexpected force of Turkish nationalism that brought the empire down.

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Just like the rest of Eastern Europe and the Near East, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the forces of industrialization, dispossession and urbanization create new and unprecedented emigration to the New World and unprecedented poverty, dislocation and alienation at home for the Caliphate, especially in its core territory where it was building railroads, consolidating agricultural lands and constructing factories.

By the early twentieth century, Turks could see that capitalist industrialization was ravaging the imperial core more than its periphery. And, as they began to buy into the identity political of nationalism, it seemed clear who the culprits were and what was to be done? What was the point of even having an empire if Turkish people were passed over for senior government jobs that were given to Arabs or, worse yet, to Copts, Armenians or other Christians? Why were Jews dealt-in when modern nation-states like Russia were getting rid of theirs?

And it wasn’t just the ministerial jobs. It was government patronage. An Arab vizier might work to maintain Arab trading monopolies in Damascus or Beirut. A Copt might make a sweet trade deal for Egyptian wheat and pass over Turkish-owned, Turkish-tilled wheat fields in Anatolia.

This spirit was felt most strongly in the military and led to what we knew as the “Young Turk” coup. It should be understood that this was not the only force that propelled the mini-revolution forward. Members of many ethnic and religious minorities joined the movement backing the coup saw its central demand of representative, parliamentary democracy as serving them too. At last, their representatives would be chosen by them from below and not selected by the Caliph, from above. This presumably would mean that their representatives would pursue their community’s interests. Because in any politics, representatives can only represent the interests that have conferred their power on them.

However, one can see that Turkish soldiers and working and middle class Turks were the prime motive force, militarily and economically, behind the coup, as power was increasingly consolidated in the Turkish junta that would lead the empire into the First World War.

3. The American Caliphate
The Young Turks are alive and well in America, and not on Cenk Uyghur’s show.

Substitute “Turkish” with “white,” and one can see the same central grievance reflected in the Trump movement as in the Young Turks. Working and middle class folks in a white settler empire mistakenly focusing their grievances about capitalism on the minority tokens used to control racialized populations, rather than on capitalism itself.

And, like the Young Turk movement, they are joined by members of the tokenized minority populations who do not benefit from the small amounts of patronage and largesse the modern viziers like James Clyburn dole out to their personal networks. And this choice is, to an extent, rational because it is these tokens, these modern viziers who are the most immediate and visible faces of capitalism, corruption, cronyism and empire in their communities.

In his recent book The New Authoritarians, David Renton argues that the modern left must work harder to expose the racism of movements like the Trump movement. This is completely wrongheaded. The Black, Indigenous and Latinx supporters of the movement are perfectly aware that they are working with racists—because they have correctly ascertained that they have no choice but to work with racists because the other side are also racists hellbent on maintaining and reinforcing racial hierarchies. They flocked to the Trump movement in larger numbers in the four years following his election because they saw how little it mattered whether the racists in power were overt or covert in acknowledging their own racism and that of the socioeconomic order of the American Empire. And the same is true of white working class folks.

Everybody already knows that contemporary conservative populist parties are racist. The problem is that most but not all people know that mainstream progressive parties are not merely racist; they, like conservatives, are growing more racist. They are just manifesting this increasing racial essentialism and disrespect for the agency and opinions of racialized people through the diversity politics of a Caliph rather than the populist blaming politics of Young Turks.

Misogyny, similarly, is something people are increasingly seeing as a wash. If women wish to protect their reproductive rights as their first priority, they need to vote for progressives. But the cost of doing so grows higher with every passing year as progressive parties increasingly court social movements that advocate violence against women in the name of diversity. Incarcerated women, lesbians, victims of domestic violence, racialized feminists in authoritarian patriarchal religious communities, women concerned about girls and women’s sport, women concerned about girls’ body images, are increasingly deciding that the conservative misogynists are a safer bet on their specific issue than the progressive misogynists.

The same is true on the environmental front. The choice is between a lying family annihilator patriarch like John Horgan or Justin Trudeau versus an honest one like Donald Trump, who made it his goal to achieve the hothouse climate scenario. Both kinds can be relied on to increase fossil fuel subsidies, fracking, logging, coal mining and every other omnicidal activity on the table, to floor the gas over the cliff.

As often happens in an empire in decline, consciousness of that decline enables a growing portion of the population to see the insincerity, emptiness and simple failure of the empire’s messages about itself. “A place for everyone and every in their place,” might have been coined with respect to the British Empire but it is true of all empires large enough to encompass a significant portion of the world. And when these empires begin to contract and there are fewer places, not more, for its diverse population, one sees the rise of Young Turks.

We have to do better than that. We simply must. These Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Labour, Leave/Remain, Liberal/NDP, UCP/NDP binaries must be broken. And this is especially challenging because, just as they share commitments to increased carbon emissions, a widening wage gap and a white supremacist order, they also share a commitment to reducing regular folks’ access to the political system. Again, the differences are mostly superficial. While today’s Young Turks focus their efforts on monetizing politics and reducing voters’ access to the polls, the Caliph’s men focus on locking down candidate selection processes through vetting committees and rigged primaries.

And that means challenging myths. Just as Donald Trump appealed to a golden age that never existed through his recycling of Ronald Reagan’s slogan, “Make America great again!” America’s Democrats also pine for some lost golden age when their empire exercised power multilaterally, didn’t keep immigrant toddlers in cages and didn’t illegally detain and torture thousands of people for thinking the wrong thoughts. There is no idyllic past for the empire and the vassal states tied to it, like Canada, to return to. There is no pristine moment, for instance, in my province when the Okanagan fruit harvest was made without busing in racialized, pauperized labour force denied the full protection of the law.

After years of reluctantly backing progressives against conservatives and urging others to stay in that coalition, I have to acknowledge that they have worn me down. I no longer have a dog in that fight. Being involved in the factional politics of a necrotic imperial order makes me and anyone else in it not just a worse person but a more confused one. Before I assess what an alternative, socialist, feminist, eco-centric course might be, I still need time to shake off the confusion.

This article will be used in a number of Los Altos Institute programs this year, including our Authoritarianism reading group and our up coming online course, The Holy American Empire.

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

New Authoritarians #1: Cosmopolitan Societies, Populism and the Present Moment: What’s New About the New Authoritarians?

In the 1920s and 30s, we saw so many of the things we see today: financialization and deindustrialization in core economies, a fragile world peace fraying among rival empires, massive wealth disparity and concentration, economic growth sustained by rising consumer debt and increasingly irresponsible stock market speculation, people problematizing their gender and getting tattoos and the rise of populist authoritarians.

When very similar political, material and economic conditions obtained, we saw the same kinds of political and social phenomena that we do today. Populist authoritarians, anti-democratic strongmen nevertheless returned to office through elections were one of the key phenomena associated with that period. Ioannis Metaxas, António de Oliveira Salazar, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Plutarco Calles were not unlike Donald Trump, Recep Erdogan, Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte in their time. And much has been written about the lessons we can learn from the successes and failures of the 1920s and 30s and how we might apply them to fighting populist authoritarianism in the present.

But we must also ask what makes today’s authoritarians new, and examine how they are different from their forbears a century ago. I want to suggest that one of the most notable differences has to do with questions of diversity and cosmopolitanism.

1920s Europe was a continent of new countries and old countries with new borders, following the treaties ending the First World War and the ethno-national partition processes established in their wake. The border of Italy had gelled just two years before Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, following an eighty-year process of partition, expulsion and amalgamation that pulled Italian-speakers into the boot-shaped polygon etched on the map and pushed Slovenes, Croats, Germans and others out. This Italy possessed an ethnolinguistic homogeneity all previous incarnations had lacked.

The Greece in which Ioannis Metaxas took power was just twelve years old, following a century-long process of partition and expulsion, with Greeks pouring in from Asia minor and Turks, Slavs and Albanians being pushed out east and north. The Weimar Republic that Hitler overthrew was similarly only fourteen years in age, with thousands upon thousands of Czechs, Poles, Germans and others being forced to relocate in a byzantine partition process that lasted years.

For fascists, the ethno-linguistic purity of their nations was insufficient. Roma, Jews, Catalans, Basques and others were early and easy targets for political movements whose paranoid style required the existence of internal enemies. And the fact that these groups were so thoroughly assimilated only helped to feed narratives of internal subversion and conspiracy.

For all the superficial similarity of their rhetoric, with the exception of Hungary’s Victor Orban, today’s authoritarian success stories are coming from states that are best-known not for ethnolinguistic homogeneity but diversity and cosmopolitanism. Not only are Brazil, the Philippines and the United States some of the most diverse countries in the world, they are only growing more so with time. The US is increasingly a bilingual country; Filipino Muslims and Fukien Chinese are more geographically distributed than every before; even as Brazil continues to boast German, Japanese and other non-Portuguese news media from settlers a century ago, English- and Spanish-speakers constitute larger chunks of the population.

Donald Trump did not just continue but amplified his rhetoric when it came to praising white supremacists, denigrating Muslims and abusing Latinx peoples. Narendra Modi’s rhetoric of Hindu supremacy and exclusivity has, similarly, not been tempered by high office. And Jair Bolsonaro’s race-baiting of Afro-Brazilians combined with continued calls for Indigenous genocide have similarly continued or been amplified in office.

Yet, when it came time to examine who the five million new Trump voters were this November, it turned out that this group of voters were disproportionately non-white, with Asian Americans and Latinx voters becoming more likely to positively reappraise Trump than white voters. Similarly, Modi’s successes at home in bringing Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs into his coalition, to make the BJP a more religiously diverse party are even being experienced in the Indian diaspora. Even former Khalistan activists and their children, who fled India in fear of their lives, with the dream of a Sikh homeland in Punjab are increasingly joining pro-Modi diasporic coalitions with Hindus.

When one delivers this news to Woke folk/progressives, there is the usual response: this should not be what is happening; the people who are doing it are stupid and because it is dumb and should not be happening, we should behave as though it is not.

But what if this behaviour is rational and based on people’s lived experiences? How can we explain what is taking place? Because if we cannot explain what is happening or why it is, we have no hope of stemming the tide.

First, we must ask this: what is supporting a new authoritarian movement an alternative to? For racialized people, ethnic and religious minorities, it is, among other things, an alternative to the way liberal societies and neoliberal economies manage questions of diversity, pluralism and cosmopolitanism.

Most visibly, our societies manage this through tokenism, a kind of neo-Ottoman social organization where people with minority identities are prominently featured in high-level government and corporate positions. Like a Greek Orthodox vizier in the Ottoman court or an Armenian Christian vizier serving an Abasside Caliph, the material interests of the vizier are a continuation of the dominant order. When medieval fellahin in the Nile Delta saw a Copt as the Caliph’s first minister, there was no celebration of impending Christian-Muslim equality, no talk of breaking glass ceilings. They understood clearly that, to keep his job, the vizier would work tirelessly for the supremacy of the Muslim Caliph who appointed him. Sadly, contemporary progressives lack the political sophistication of the average medieval peasant and are still wowed by the pageantry of false equality.

When Mexicans or Arabs move their support to Donald Trump, they are looking past the symbolism of exhibiting children in cages and American bombs landing on Yemeni cities and recognizing that the Trump regime is only a little more racist and Islamophobic in its policies than the Obama regime that preceded it. That, when one strips away the theatre of cruelty, the same Christian and white supremacist structures are continuous, maintained by Republicans and Democrats alike.

This might explain why the Trump regime might be seen as no worse, but why might it be seen as better? First of all, transparency and honesty; while Trump is honest and unapologetic about the way that the hierarchy of American cosmopolitanism is ordered, liberals and progressives constantly lie about an imagined equality, an imagined amity. Trumpism, on the other hand, recalls the rough and tumble pluralism of the First Gilded Age, of the Roman Republic, where competition among ethnicities was acknowledged, where neighbours traded racist jokes across back fences and rioted against one another.

Of course, some especially foolish folk might say that our goal is for a pluralism that is non-hierarchical, that is culturally neutral. Even leaving aside Karl Popper’s arguments about how pluralism must be governed by a value system that values and supports pluralism, it is also obvious that different dominant cultures organize pluralism different ways.

“Personality of law,” for instance, is a historically common pluralism that has been rejected by modern liberal Christian “secular” societies. In this model of pluralism, every person has the right to be governed based on the laws and traditions of their religion or ethnicity. Sharia law applies to Muslim citizens and canon law to Christian citizens. Only in the EU is personality of law incorporated into the Christian pluralist order—and it only applies to wage legislation i.e. most workers carry their country’s minimum wage with them. In modern Ethiopia, as in the United States before the 1860s, freedom of religion is exercised by towns, not individuals.

Modern liberal pluralism is not the only, or even most logical theory for organizing a religiously and ethnically diverse cosmopolitan society. And, I would argue that one of the most powerful forces animating modern populist authoritarian movements is not a desire to eliminate pluralism but to offer new models of pluralism that are more satisfying for their followers.

The Trump movement, like its Democratic Party opponents, recognizes the United States as a complex hierarchy of races and religions that enjoy varying degrees of wealth, safety and opportunity; these are not just groups of individuals but a complex system of institutions, secular and religious, that deserve varying degrees of state patronage and recognition, depending on the race and religion in question.

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But whereas the traditional party system cloaks this in a discourse of secularism and cultural relativism, the Trump movement is transparent in how it hierarchizes these groups and the institutions that purport to represent them. This transparency has proved attractive to white Christians, who receive the most state recognition and patronage but has proven increasingly popular with groups that are below the top of the hierarchy but still seek and obtain recognition and patronage.

For instance, it has not just been Christian charter schools that have benefited from the policies of Education Secretary Betsy de Vos. Madrassahs have benefited too, albeit to a lesser extent, as have Jewish and Hindu religious schools. And the movement’s popularity has grown in these communities as their leaders have come to hear Trump’s anti-Semitic and Islamophobic proclamations as indicative not of a Nazi-style genocidal policy but rather the rhetoric one associates with the rough and tumble hierarchical pluralism of pre-WWII America, the Ottoman and Roman Empires.

In India, we see a similar set of developments. Whereas Muslims are subject to increasing brutal violence and genocidal actions by Narendra Modi’s BJP and affiliated militias, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains have enjoyed increasing state protection and patronage. For the Modi movement, there exists a binary: non-indigenous religions i.e. evangelical Christianity and Islam are facing increasing persecution and attempts at eradication. But those religions considered to be part of a larger Hindu-based family of religions descended from the one true faith are now inside the Hindu tent and organized into a hierarchy. In this way, there are substantial material and political payoffs that autocthnonous enjoy when their members join Modi’s coalition in greater numbers.

A similar phenomenon obtains when it comes to lower caste Indians. While most Dalits (ie. Untouchables) and “backward” castes have faced increasing violence from the Hindu fundamentalism being hawked by the Modiites, there is a paradox. Modi himself brags of being of “the most backward caste” and proudly shows the evidence of this coursing through his blood and written upon his skin. His personal rhetoric is not merely exemplary; it is instructive: by adopting the dress, politics and affiliations of his movement, other darker, lower caste Indians can whiten themselves.

Prior to Modi, there were processes of passing and whitening known as “Sanskritizing” that the old secular Congress Party worked actively against. Their goal was to the eradication of caste, not unlike the dreams of Latin and Anglo American liberals at the foundation of their countries. Individuals and jatis (large lineage groups) have always had a way of moving up the caste hierarchy. Under Hindu, Mughal and British rule, this process was negotiated by the brahmins, the priest class, permitting mobility for individuals and groups at the cost of reinforcing the overall caste structure. (Similar to the limpieza de sangre system I explain here.)

Under the rule of the Congress Party, following independence, Sanskritizing i.e. leaving one’s village, moving to a large city and falsifying one’s genealogy was the preferred process, not unlike “passing” in the United States during the same period.

But the Modi movement offers an alternative preferable to more and more low-caste individuals: joining the movement and using a rank in the party or one of its militias as a whitening influence on one’s lived caste position. Just as Rudyard Kipling’s fictive British Raj promoted private Gunga Din to the rank of corporal posthumously, despite him coming from a low caste ineligible for officer ranks in the army (unlike the martial lineages like Sikhs), because he better embodied the traits desired in a British officer than a man of the correct race and lineage, BJP and its militias are mass producing Gunga Dins.

In America, the Trump movement offers two models of personal whitening, both arguably imported from the more venerable and better theorized and strategized Modi movement.

If there was one event more uncanny in the 2016 US election than any other, it was the Donald Trump campaign’s Hindu diaspora campaign event. Building on the ways in which the colour line in the core of Dixie had already come to work, the campaign was explicit in its invitation to high-caste Hindus who, like Nikki Haley, are already situated above the black-white colour line in states like Louisiana and South Carolina. High caste i.e. white Hindus were explicitly recognized as part of a global Aryan nationalist white supremacist project in ways that had not been since the 1930s. While Trump, himself, was personally clueless, helpfully stating “I support Hindu,” during the bewildering event in which he was festooned in gold and received endorsements from temple priests, his advisors were clear-eyed.

And high-caste Hindus were just one part of a larger project. Many Latin American states have a long white supremacist history but none more than the two great “white settler states” of the Southern Cone, Brazil and Argentina. White Brazilians and Argentines from metropolises like Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo come from a civic discourse that is more explicitly white supremacist than that of Anglo America. And many have suffered indignity and confusion coming to Canada and the US, having led lives of benefiting from and praising white supremacy, only to find themselves situated below the colour line. These groups the Trump campaign targeted successfully.

And this is a paradoxical feature one finds particularly in the Bolsonaro, Modi and Trump movements: if one is located within the movement, the colour line becomes more flexible and moves lower to accommodate more folks.

In this way, the Trump movement’s use of regalia is especially powerful. Donning a red MAGA hat makes any person wearing it if not white than significantly whiter in the eyes of other MAGA hat-wearers. And this is not a wholly new phenomenon, especially in the US. Poles, Czechs, Irish, Turks, Greeks, Italians, etc. all became whiter by joining not the anti-racist Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln but the white supremacist Democrats of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the newly white and the nearly white joining a populist racist movement might make the country as a whole more racist, the lived experience of individuals is the opposite. A MAGA hat is more powerful than Kevlar when it comes to stopping police bullets.

What begins to come into focus with these comparisons is that unlike the fascists of the 1920s and 30s, or retro fascists like Victor Orban and the fourth and fifth parties of Western Europe’s parliaments and legislatures, the new authoritarians are not simple opponents of cosmopolitanism. Rather, they seek to refashion their countries’ pluralisms into systems that are more visible, more hierarchical, more dynamic and at peace with many long-term civic inequalities.

We see this too in Recep Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman term. Erdogan’s movement is pronouncing on a century of secular liberalism at gunpoint in Turkey and offering, in its place, a return to a pluralistic, theocratic, ordered hierarchical Ottoman past, offering permanent inferiority to religious and ethnic minorities as an alternative to assimilation at gunpoint that the Kemalist state offered in the twentieth century.

But most importantly, for traditionalists within any culture, there is a universal appeal in the figure of the authoritarian patriarch.

Bill Maher pointed out in 2012 that, as people grow increasingly cynical about the ability of their votes to arrest or even mitigate the destruction of neoliberalism, they begin thinking about political campaigns like a wealth seminar: Mitt Romney and Donald Trump are not going to govern to benefit individuals of their class. Rather, by joining their movement and following their advice, you might become like them—they will tell you “the secret” to becoming rich, powerful patriarchs like themselves.

In this way, there is an implicit, unstated promise, especially from a man dominating a large, attractive and accomplished family like the Trumps. Every conservative patriarch sees the election of a man like Trump as authorization to intensify his domination of his women, his children. Men that head families staging gender reveal parties, sending their kids to religious schools, engaging in surgery tourism to perform gendercide or FGM see a natural ally, even if he might say a few mean things about their church, their temple, their language.

As John Sayles wrote in the film Lone Star, “it’s comforting when you see one prejudice triumphing over another deep prejudice.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |

What is Identitarianism? – Part IV

To recap, then, here are some key features of modern Identitarianism:

  1. It is a system of etiquette that shares with other etiquette systems the properties of being occult, complex and faddish
  2. It is a system of etiquette that shares with others a politics and practice of honour and offense in which misidentification of a person is the chief offense
  3. It is premised on identity and ontology being functionally identical, that one’s very existence is premised on identity and that misidentification is a kind of attempted or threatened murder
  4. Like other systems of honour and offense, it is mainly enacted when another person of equal or lesser rank to one’s own is dishonoured and satisfaction must be given
  5. It values traditional, conservative forms of identity linked to labour exploitation, i.e. race and gender and sees these identities as emancipatory rather than oppressive
  6. It sees traditional, conservative forms of identity not merely as helpful ways of constructing a self but as having exclusive possession of knowledge unavailable to those outside those identities
  7. It sees identity as how one imagines oneself in one’s mind’s eye, unmediated by society or the physical world
  8. It is democratic and seeks to make its social practices and experiences of honour and offense universally available rather than confined to a class

What this means is that if someone acts as though another person is not who they claim they are, that person has breached Identitarian etiquette and can then be subject to social sanction. This is part of phenomena I have previously identified as “privatized reputation” and “large, porous selves.” In this way, Identitarian offense politics can and do extend further than previous regimes of honour and etiquette. In other words, to say “you are not who you claim to be” or, equally offensively, “he is not who he claims to be” is a kind of death threat and merits an immediate expression of offense.

Three of these are exemplified in our society’s reimagination of transgender people in Identitarian terms. Pretty much every human society has had transgender members because schemes of gender are naturally incomplete, non-descriptive and, most importantly, oppressive. But in none of those societies has there been the kind of pronoun politics we have now.

In other regimes of etiquette, offense is caused by using the incorrect second person pronoun when addressing people i.e. “tu” is used in place of “usted” in Spanish or “vous” in French to debase the rank of one’s interlocutor intentionally or unintentionally. Today, offense-causing with pronouns comes from using the incorrect third person pronoun when talking about people. What this means is that a person’s honour can be attacked when they are not even present. Any person who knows the individual’s gender (i.e. the gender they see themselves having in their mind’s eye) can intervene and upbraid the offender for dishonouring the aggrieved party.

In this way, a gap between the correct form of address and the appearance of the person being addressed can be policed by any person and can fluctuate without the appearance of the person changing. While one’s gender expression takes work to change, through pharmaceuticals, clothing purchases, surgery, behavioural training, etc., one’s gender identity can change instantaneously and repeatedly with none of the lag experienced in changing one’s gender expression.

By severing “expression” and “identity,” the work of the Born Again movement is complete. It is explicit that who a person appears to others to be and who they actually are two independent variables that may fluctuate without reference to the other. In this way, an individual who has carefully observed another person’s gender expression and spoken about them on that basis when talking about that expression might be upbraided by anyone possessing the occult knowledge of the person’s true gender.

One can look from India to Japan to Montana to New Mexico to Mauretania from 1000 BCE to the late twentieth century and find no other society in which trans culture contained this theory of offense. And that is because it has nothing to do with being a gender-non-conforming person; it is tethered to recent elaboration of late-stage capitalism, Identitarianism.

Another place where we see Identitarianism hiding behind some piece of allegedly trans culture that has just appeared out of nowhere in less than a generation is the idea that people who do not reciprocate the sexual desire of transgender people are bigots who must work to change this view. This view tends to be expressed with the greatest vehemence about lesbians who only wish to sleep with other cis women and not with trans women. Organized groups of these lesbians have faced campaigns by Identitarians, putatively on behalf of trans women, to remove them from pride celebrations, dyke marches and other organized queer solidarity and feminist events.

But much more concerning is the idea propounded, with almost none of the push-back one would hope for, that cis lesbian women with no attraction to trans women should have sex with them anyway.

No one should want to sleep with people who are not attracted to you. A healthy person who lusts after another person wants them to experience the same attraction they are experiencing. But Identitarianism occludes that because it conceptualizes the feelings and thoughts others have about you, even when you are not there, as part of a package of rights you believe you have. It is your right to be seen as you see yourself in your mind’s eye and you are dishonoured whenever someone does not do that.

A third is a hyper-conservative element best described in the slogan “trans women are women.” Even in cultures that do not assign a third, fourth or nth gender to gender-nonconforming people, they nevertheless decide that a trans person is a kind of a woman or a kind of a man. The idea that trans people should have identical rights and experiences to cis people is rendered absurd quickly when gender identity is built in intersubjective or objective space. But when it is built in subjective space, one ends up with absurd situations like Jessica Yaniv demanding that her penis be seen-to by a gynecologist.

Trans people and cis people have different medical needs, have different social impacts on environments, different life narrative structures; recognizing these forms of difference is vital in creating a diverse, inclusive society that accepts trans people.

But, because Identitarianism is a set of etiquette practices is not a coherent, self-consistent theory or even something mainly made out of Wrong propaganda “Nonfat, no cholesterol” has brought Americans to high carbohydrate diet full levitra online sales of the sugars. This makes shopping simple and even trouble free pamelaannschoolofdance.com buy viagra for customers. There are two reasons behind this : firstly, viagra for sale mastercard is a prescription drug which can only be obtained with a prescription from your doctor. When it comes to ED problem, it has no linked with age and it can happen to men in their 40’s and 50’s, while Tadalafil is marketed with less than 5% of the marketing budget afforded to check out that pamelaannschoolofdance.com cialis generika. ideas, the very differences that must be accommodated can be effaced or denied at any time when an etiquette breach takes place.

Whereas traditional models of pluralism and accommodation of gender non-conformity have included acceptance of body-shapes, vocal registers and patterns of gesticulation that are not cliched or cartoonish representations of the two normative genders, this too, has been turned on its head. Because there is only one kind of woman and one kind of man, it is now considered a medical necessity for trans people to be taught the most conservative, conventional ways of dressing, speaking, walking, acting. Training in being “ladylike” or “manly” is now understood to be part of a liberatory agenda.

Furthermore, as state school systems adopt gender affirmation policies, it is increasingly the obligation of the state and its agents to police conformity to gender norms and to inquire of boys that do not have fistfights and girls who dislike dolls whether they are “really” boys or girls in their mind’s eye. If not, the state is obliged to assist them through surgery and pharmaceuticals into matching their mental image of themselves to physical reality.

This, to me, is a thought experiment that reveals much about the true underpinnings of Identitarianism. It is analogous to the common antebellum South thought experiment of asking a the child of a planter how his slaves would serve him when he went to heaven. The true function of the thought experiment is to make an oppressive class order seem so totalizing, so structuring that emancipation from it becomes inconveivable because it transcends time, death and the physical world itself. The point is to render inconceivable a revolution that throws off the shackles of race and gender by imagining those things as so universal that they are coterminous with existence itself.

But while so much of the debate about Identitarianism has swirled around trans communities and has cast disproportionate and unfair shade on them, I believe this is, itself, a misogynistic ruse.

At the end of the day, Identitarianism is a set of social practices that reinforce two of the darkest, most pernicious forces on earth.

First, it seeks to increase involvement in, support of and commitment to race and gender as not merely real but positive forces and it mobilizes literally millions of people into policing race and gender boundaries every day. Because Identitarianism is non-ideological and offense-based, these conflicts tend to be inconclusive and illogical, making them more protracted and divisive and increasing people’s investment in them. Because controlling what others understand one’s race and gender to be is literally a matter of life and death, there is a bottomless pit of offense and conflict into which one may descend. After all, knowledge, itself, is a property of identity so there can be no meeting of the minds even on the subject of valid evidence. Consequently, we see Identitarianism destroying solidarity and creating division, constantly generating new flare-ups of offense.

But let us look beyond the movement politics of liberals, progressives and leftists and look at the true ambit of Identitarianism. The systems of incentives that keep this new etiquette system in place do not live in contested restroom space or the Take Back the Night march.

They live in white suburban homes where patriarchs use violence to make their daughters wear dresses and their sons, trousers, lest their costume impugn the manliness of their father. They live in conservative evangelical schools where there is a new sense of urgency in making sure all the little boys fight and all the little girls have dolls. They live in the Trump movement where thousands of black and Latino voters wave racist signs because they are white in their mind’s eyes.

Similarly, the politics of Identitarian rape, in which other people’s attraction to you is a right you possess and not a feeling they have, the true beneficiaries are not the trans women who broke into Rape Relief Women’s Shelter and defaced its library with penis drawings, or even the male prisoners in the British prison system who change their gender identity (but not expression) to female to engage in sexual predation.

The true beneficiaries are the Incel movement. The overwhelming majority of Incels do not have prosthetic breasts and do not plan ever to obtain them. There is nothing feminine or gender-non-conforming about their gender expression or their gender identity. In the vast majority of Incels’ minds’ eyes, they are a virile, commanding muscular man being serviced not by a solitary lesbian but by seventy-two virgins or some evangelical Christian equivalent.

While our attention has been directed by our own desire to police boundaries, by services like Tumblr and by the news media to the way Identitarianism impacts small communities of feminists, queer and gender non-conforming people, this is a sideshow to distract from the primary beneficiaries: rapists and racists.

Identitarianism is the ultimate ideology of male rape because it places these two crucial liberatory statements off-limits “you are not who you say you are” and “he is not who he says he is.” Race is good. Gender is good. They liberate you. But the one thing you cannot do is question the claims a person makes about who they really are.

In this way, it is most descriptive not of liberal progressivism but of Trumpism. Donald Trump is stupid. Donald Trump rapes women. The Trumpites, as proper Identitarians, are deeply offended on his behalf when someone calls him stupid because they know that in his mind’s eye, he is a “very stable genius.” The veracity of the claim does not enter into it because the claim is offensive irrespective of its veracity and demands satisfaction.

Similarly, Donald Trump can call the neo-Nazi Charlottesville marchers “very good people” because, in those men’s mind’s eyes, like all generations of torch-wielding Klansmen back to 1865, they are “very good people.” And those who would say otherwise have dishonoured them because who they are is theirs. Finally, Donald Trump’s ability to rape and to keep raping—and that of most other prolific rapists—inheres in it being impermissible to say “you are not who you say you are” or, more importantly, “he is a rapist,” because in Identitarianism, Trump is not a rapist (a) because he doesn’t look like one in his mind’s eye and (b) because raping you was his right, not your experience.

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Politics of Identity | fusangite |

What Is Identitarianism? – Part III

Identitarianism is not merely innovative in the ways it seeks to democratize performances of honour and offense. In many ways, this democratic tendency is the least innovative thing about it. To engage with its more innovative elements, it is necessary to move past the early Cold War (1945-74) and look at theories of self-fashioning that arose during its second half (1974-91). If not the foremost then certainly the first and most radical innovator in self-fashioning in this period was the Born Again Christian movement.

Just as in my work on post-Enlightenment epistemology, I believe that the Born Again movement constitutes a disruptive moment in our past that leads directly to some of the strangest and most disturbing elements of our present.

The Born Again movement, centred in the US, functioned, as I have said elsewhere, as a form of national reconciliation. It look elements of conservative evangelicalism, the ascendant religious movement within American conservatism and epitomized in the Southern Baptists and Non-Denominationalists and produced a true synthesis with the thinking of the smaller Jesus Freak movement that had emerged in the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s.

If there is a scene in cinema that is emblematic of this new kind of Christianity, it appears in the Robert Duvall film The Apostle in which the central character walks into a river and re-baptizes himself into the Christian sect of which he is the only member and sole minister. The Born Again movement fundamentally changed the nature of identity in the modern era by introducing an entangled practice of self-authorization both in adopting an identity and in that identity’s recognition.

As with pretty much all religious conversion before the 1970s, whether you were a member of NOI was something NOI determined. One needed to be accepted as a convert by a community; simply espousing the truth of NOI scripture or changing one’s surname to an Arabic one did not, in and of itself, function to make one an NOI member. Those changes were a means to an end: gaining the approval and acceptance of existing movement members to be recognized as one. In this way, the name-change and public attestations were simply rhetorical tools to achieve the goal of gaining the acceptance of the group. It was NOI that determined if one were a member of the “nation,” and the sumptuary and other laws were necessary but not sufficient conditions.

This, of course, followed a long tradition comprising Christian baptism, confirmation ceremonies, circumcision, veiling, etc. that permitted one to adopt and maintain an identity as a member of a religious group.

The Born Again movement radically changed that. It systematically rejected as untrustworthy all criteria for membership that lived in an inter-subjective, shared, social world. Church attendance, holy day observance, Healthcare providers suggest that discussing the problem with someone on line viagra may make you feel good. Medicines effectively treat this condition, buy levitra online check stock but do not get this wrong, veterinary chiropractic is not here to replace veterinary medicine. order tadalafil Improvement that a lifetime after environment your self a few goals. A research says that almost every second man faces erectile dysfunction which also means that the blood is not delivered viagra sans prescription canada to the desired parts of the body because of which you are not able to intimate with your mate. abstaining from sex outside marriage, catechism, confirmation, participating in the eucharist, mechanisms used by America’s various Christian denominations might just as easily be signs of apostasy as of faith. But more importantly, the double-confirmation of one’s Christianity was also rejected. To be a Christian, one had to be baptized. And once, baptized, one had to be recognized as Christian by other Christians, typically in the form of joining a congregation.

The Born Again movement changed the location of these things. Baptism ceased to be an objective physical event that took place in a shared, observable world and became something that happened internally inside the self. When one was “born again,” this was sometimes followed by a public baptism by other Born Again members but this was not baptism; in those cases as in the cases where there was no public baptism, one’s baptism was understood to have already taken place internally to one’s soul.

The ceremony changed from a necessary condition to become Christian and became an unnecessary post-facto formality. What mattered was that one’s soul had been changed through the establishment of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. True conversion entailed an unobservable phenomenon taking place entirely outside of the physical world.

Furthermore, because so many of the older and more mainstream denominations were opposed by the Born Again movement and vice versa, acceptance by a congregation was also severed from the adoption of a Christian identity. In this way, baptism moved from an objective and observable criterion to a dead letter; in this way, congregational membership i.e. recognition by other Christians as one of them, moved from a social and observable criterion into the same irrelevance.

Like NOI members, we can view Born Again Christians as proto-Identitarians.

Another important feature both groups possessed and that we see in Identitarians today is the belief identity confers monopolistic power to make knowledge about one’s group. White Devils could never learn black history because the ability to know the true history of the Moorish race inhered in the blood.

Similarly, Born Again Christians mobilized audacious anti-science rhetoric, turning mainline Christianity on its head in arguing that reason was not a tool for reaching God but an impediment, that historical “truths” like Young Earth Creationism could never be deduced through reason and evidence. Instead, God had to act upon one’s soul for one to achieve true knowledge. So effective, was this turn in overthrowing the epistemology of mainline Christianity that many cannot remember that Protestant Americans ever believed otherwise.

Politics of Identity | fusangite |

What Is Identitarianism – Part II

In places governed by an honour politics, it is somewhat gauche to be mainly in the business of defending one’s own honour when it is under attack. Normally, it is the job of the person of the highest rank in a dynamic to defend the honour of those of lower rank. In this way, if a lady of rank and standing, a doña, let us say, is dishonoured, it is the responsibility of the nearest don to do something about it, to reprimand, assault or otherwise punish the offender for an etiquette breach like sounding too familiar (maybe using the tu pronoun instead of usted), or failing to bow as deeply as a difference in rank might merit, or inappropriately chewing, touching or spitting in her presence.

When one stands up for the honour of one less honourable, this does not merely defend their honour, successfully standing up causes honour to redound to you. In this way, a butler might defend the honour of the scullion he supervises; the lady of the house might defend her gardener; etc. Putting one’s own time and body on the line to defend the honour of others, even others not present, merely insulted in an indiscreet dinner conversation does not merely make you more honourable. Honour systems are social economies and so, the total amount of honour in the system also increases, the more exchange and competition there is over it, just like in the money economy.

For this reason, fights over honour are not a problem; they are a solution. It is in everyone’s interest for as many people as possible to be fighting about as much as possible. Consequently, the taking of offense on one’s own behalf or that of others has strong and constant incentives.

One can see this both within Identitarian communities and in Identitarian interactions with those outside their communities: offense-taking is a cultural practice that is cheered on, that produces minor day-to-day heroes and is fostered in new and exciting ways by modern social media platforms.

But for all the novelty we associate with the taking and communication of offense, Identitarianism is a deeply conservative set of movements. By this I mean that Identitarian movements are deeply invested in the reinvigoration of traditional forms of identity, often in reaction to liberation movements seeking to dismantle them.

We see this in what is arguably the first Identitarian social movement, Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam (today led by Louis Farrakhan). In post-war America, there was a major invigoration of black liberation movements for a variety of reasons, from a sense of entitlement, camaraderie and confidence among black soldiers on the Second World War, the need to compete internationally with an anti-racist foreign power, the USSR, the continued Great Migration making black votes more plentiful and useful.

People like Paul Robeson, Richard Wright and others responded to this by redoubling their activism for socialism, arguing, correctly, that blackness was a thing co-created with capitalism, that race was an elaboration, a leavening agent of capitalist labour systems, something arising from class whose oppression functioned synergistically with it to keep workers divided and rightless. Robeson’s strategy was to build solidarity with working class and racialized people globally, to support miners’ strikes in Wales and South Africa and to deliver the message that there was a single culprit, capitalism, for the misery of workers. When the scales fell from people’s eyes and they saw that race was just a tool to divide the working class, working people would find the solidarity they needed to overthrow capitalism.

But Robeson, Wright and their comrades faced a new national security state apparatus that saw socialism (especially socialist internationalism) as treason and visited both anti-communist propaganda and persecution on America on a vast scale, labeling the movement as godless and anti-Christian, among other things.

It makes sense, then, that the more successful strategic response emerged in the form of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the SCLC) that presented a more palatable anti-racist universalism. The movement that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence also engaged in a rhetoric that sought to dissolve, to abolish race as a category: that of being colourless before God.

King and his allies preached a doctrine that in God’s eyes, race did not exist that God himself was, as one sympathetic author put it, “the colour of water.” King’s rhetoric was also effective in casting all people possessing race, not just black people, as suffering oppression and injustice at the hands of racism. Everyone was impoverished socially, culturally and personally by the barriers between essentially similar human beings by a trick of the mind that caused them to falsely see difference where there was none.

It is against these two movements that what we might think of as the first proto-Identitarian social movement emerged: NOI.

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Where King and Robeson taught that race was a socially constructed tool that could be abolished, NOI sided with the Klan in teaching that race was physical, real, inherited through the blood and inscribed on the outside of the body. Furthermore, they also agreed that God himself had decreed this and that race was an inextricable piece of a heavenly, divine order.

The problem, they explained, was that things had been screwed up by an evil Jew. According to what is called “the Myth of Yakub,” a Libyan Jew of the fourth century BCE had genetically engineered a scourge on the other races by creating “White Devils.” White Devils, or modern white people, were then an aberration of the divine order, and maliciously designed to inflict evil and suffering on the world.

The true master race, the Moors (Black and Arabic people), had been subject to a brutal campaign of oppression by the Jews and the White Devils for millennia in order to prevent them from taking their rightful place at the head of the human race.

Rather than challenge the idea of race or even the justice of a racial hierarchy, the complaint of NOI remains, to this day, that the correct and just racial hierarchy of God has been inverted into the incorrect and unjust racial hierarchy of the White Devils and their Jewish masters. In this way, not only does NOI seek to reinforce the idea of race and the pseudoscience of scientific racism, it also has been able to nurture classic 1930s-style anti-Semitism.

But NOI did not merely limit itself to defending race and racism. A major part of its agenda was an attack on the failings of black gender politics, teaching a particularly austere form of black respectability politics. Women could not serve in the kinds of public leadership positions they could in the Black Church; women’s dress was more carefully policed and their sartorial choices narrowed to garments that were both strongly expressive of sexual dimorphism and modest and austere in their colours and shapes. While the Jews and White Devils were trying to force women outside through the home by depressing black wages, NOI members were to redouble their efforts to become single-income families.

NOI men were routinely compared favourably to other black men. NOI men were faithful in marriage; NOI men protected ‘their’ women; NOI men supported their families; NOI men did not beg, did not ask for help, did not complain to white people about their sorrows; they were independent, industrious and self-sufficient. And NOI mocked the SCLC for their effeminate adoption of non-violence, rather than holding the paramilitary drills NOI held for the inevitable “race war.”

In addition to defending race and gender as universal pillars of a divine order, NOI also generated new forms of offense-giving and offense-taking, directed primarily not at whites but at non-NOI Blacks. Like actual Muslims, NOI members swore off pork, the primary meat of 1950s black America. Family gatherings with NOI converts became sites of conflict over sumptuary laws; traditional family foods and recipes could be rejected or fought-over; or additional expense could be incurred by a host to avoid such conflict and generate its own complexities.

More fraught still, was the matter of the name. A crucial part of conversion was the rejection of one’s “slave name” and the adoption of a “Muslim” name. In all cases, this entailed the rejection of the family name one had inherited through one’s father because it could likely be traced back to one’s ancestor’s owner’s name. But it also often entailed the adoption of a new given name. This might instill a sense of rejection, not just in a proud and conservative father whose name might no longer live on through the generations but in the mother and father who chose the person’s name at birth.

Conflicts over name did not just arise through intentional provocation and grievance-raising; they primarily arose through habit. Family members, especially older ones, not to mention family friends might refer to a convert by their given name out of habit or out of a failure to apprehend that the new name was a replacement, rather than an addition to a given name, something African Americans were used to, having a complex and rich set of cultural practices around nicknames and diminutives.
In this way, some of the poorest and least powerful Americans built a cultural movement that made conservative anti-feminist retrenchment, conservative anti-racist retrenchment and a new system of etiquette and offense available to people previously unable to participate in a traditionally elite form of social behaviour.

And it is important to recognize that while Identitarianism is conservative in the sense of seeking to reinforce threatened and crumbling ideas of gender and race; it is democratic in the sense of seeking, however inefficiently or fruitlessly, to make honour politics universally available to all people.

Politics of Identity | fusangite |

What Is Identitarianism? – Part I

I have decided to teach a course on a phenomenon I call Identitarianism, a loose set of converging social movements that share properties I identify as Identitarian. I used to use the term “identity politics,” following the lead of Bernie Sanders, to refer to this phenomenon and related social movement activity. But that was a mistake. I am increasingly convinced that Identitarianism constitutes a rupture with past politics of identity as described by theorists like Stuart Hall. It is, at best, a novel and powerful kind of identity politics the like of which has not been seen before.

First, let me begin by saying what it is not. Identitarianism is not an ideology or system of beliefs. As I said in my previous post, novel social movements forming during the collapse of the Enlightenment episteme are unshackled from past cultural demands that they understand themselves as projects of systematically describing the world.

In one of my earliest posts to this blog, I observed that these shackles need not even apply to the major “-isms” of the Englightenment. The suffix “-ism,” you see, comes from the Greek suffix “-ισμοσ,” which does not mean “the idea of” but rather “turning into.” In this way, capitalism is not so much a set of ideas about resources, money, labour, etc. as it is our shared experience of being converted into capital. Similarly, I used the term Identitarian-ism not to indicate a set of ideas but a process of making a kind of person.

So, what are some things Identitarianism is?

First and foremost, it is a system of etiquette. Systems of etiquette are schemes of regulating human behaviour through honour, shame and offense, and these practices are linked a schemes of occult knowledge about correct behaviour.

When my old friend Jack Harman asked Queen Elizabeth II about how people should behave around her, she explained that her job was to act as though however people chose to address and honour her was correct, to pretend that her system of etiquette was identical to theirs, to never take offense at social behaviour but instead seem unoffended in order to normalize the action and put people at ease. This, she explained, was why her courtiers instructed people meeting her on how to act and what to say, so as to provide them with knowledge that could reassure them, in the moment, that they were behaving correctly.

This is the prerogative of the richest woman on earth and the monarch of a half-millennium-old empire, to treat etiquette as irrelevant because she can afford to, because differences of culture, lineage, wealth and power are so huge that there is no way an interlocutor could lower her to the point of being their equal.

Etiquette is not and has never been a great interest of the most powerful. But it is a significant pursuit of those who are insecure in their power and aspire to more. The gentry, the bourgeoisie, these are the sorts of people for whom etiquette is a matter of life or death. For this reason, systems of etiquette are both occult (they require large amounts of knowledge that is rationed and not widely available) and faddish (this knowledge must constantly change and be reacquired through channels to which one has not lost access).

Etiquette is about learning and enforcing ever-changing rules that both establish a boundary between a class and those below them and about organizing hierarchy and resolving conflict within that class. The more etiquette-conscious and etiquette-focused a group, the more the group is engaged in competitions around honour. Dueling classes in dueling cultures are the people organized around etiquette: the European gentry and bourgeoisie before the Napoleonic Wars, the Brazilian and American planters before the abolition of slavery: these were classes with complex, faddish, endlessly-changing and highly consequential rules for social interaction. Members of society competed with one another over honour i.e. the esteem in which they were held by others for following with precision not just the letter but the spirit of the rules of etiquette currently in vogue.

When a person failed to interact with one in a manner befitting one’s social standing, one experienced dishonour, a kind of social humiliation deeper than simple shame: an experience of shame so injurious, so profound that it might cause a person to keep bleeding social status indefinitely, to become so dishonoured as to become an outcast, outside of society itself. Consequently, defending one’s honour was an incredibly fraught experience, one filled with violence and terror, fear of failure and rage at the offender.

This is because, in honour-based, etiquette-focused social systems, honour is a matter of social ontology i.e. whether one exists as a person is contingent upon experiencing honour through etiquette confirming one’s personhood. In this way, honour-based societies conflate identity with ontology: to be recognized as an honourable person is indistinguishable from personhood itself, from existence itself. To lose one’s honour is to experience social death.

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And it should surprise no one that honour-driven societies appear near the top of the most vertical, unequal, extreme social hierarchies, Charleston 1860, Paris 1780, Bahia 1880, New Orleans 1800.

We tend to associate these places with decadence, with people failing to meet the most minimal standards of decent behaviour, places in continuous violation of the principles upon which they are purported to be based. In this way, the New Orleans Octaroon Ball survived following the Louisiana Purchase because it perfectly encapsulated an honour-based order.

This is because, in an honour-based patriarchy, the discourse is that honour comes from victory in battle, marital fidelity, piety, etc. But honour is really governed by two unrelated things: (a) the ability to stay on top of the rules of etiquette and perform them with fidelity and (b) the ability to use one’s social power to make false things true about oneself. In other words, the gap between the behaviour of an honourable person and honourable behaviour is necessary and constitutive of an honour politics.

This might help to explain the core project of Identitarianism: forcing people to describe you, not as others experience you socially but as you are in your mind’s eye, whether that’s how you imagine yourself when you are masturbating, or how you imagine yourself when you are praying, or both. Honour politics is about forcing your inferiors and competitors to describe you not as they experience you, but as you imagine yourself.

Because honour is really a measure of power, the ability to force one’s competitors and inferiors to act as though false things are true, the true power of an honourable man in an honour-based system is demonstrated by conceiving mixed-race slave-children through rape and preaching the doctrine of racial purity, by fucking prostitutes and mistresses and preaching marital fidelity, by murdering slaves arbitrarily and preaching mercy and forbearance in dealing with inferiors. And having those falsehoods about oneself honoured in public through awards, parades and homilies.

In this way, those winning the game of honour in an etiquette-based society reside in a fool’s paradise, an environment in which challenging one’s narrative about who one really is is so dangerous, so fraught, so risky that almost no one does. So your inferiors and competitors guess what you want them to say about you, and say it without your personal instruction, referring instead to the plethora of rules and descriptive terms laid out in the system of etiquette.

Identitarianism is an effort to democratize this politics and make it accessible to anyone with the leisure time necessary to learn the rules of etiquette and to express offense and outrage whenever one’s honour is impugned. Part of its appeal is that it offers people nowhere near the elite an opportunity to engage in a set of elite social practices that anyone with enough time to study the rules of etiquette and police possible moments of dishonour is permitted to participate. Certainly, the rules are designed to be most easily learned by people who have attended elite liberal arts colleges in the United States and the leisure time commitments of offense-taking and offense-expressing are heavy and tough to keep up with a full-time job. But that does not mean that only the bourgeoisie can participate in Identitarianism; it just means that, as in basically all class-delimited systems, they constitute the overwhelming majority of participants.

Just like Jane Austen’s characters existed at the periphery of the English gentry and were technically in the game because of their slavish devotion to the ideology of honour and their willingness to metabolize an insanity of rules, low-income folks, non-men, non-whites, etc. can participate in the Identitarian system. And like those who came before them, that perfectly honourable footman who taught himself Shakespeare at night in his tiny room, they are exhibited as the finest, purest representatives of the system in which they struggle to participate.

But this is not an innovation. This is a constitutive property of the capitalist order, that long ago produced Untouchable Billionaires in India.

So, if Identitarians are based around a politics of offense, honour and etiquette, what offends them?

The answer is simple: discrepancies between how they see themselves in their mind’s eye and how they are referred-to in public. In this way, the wider the gap between one’s imaginary self and one’s public self, the greater the opportunity to be insulted and offended. As in any other patriarchal honour-system, power comes from the ability to muster outrage and offense at the gap between one’s disparate selves, the resident of the fool’s paradise and the tyrant in the real world.

Just as such discrepancies entitled the gentlemen of Dixie and Bourbon France to shoot one another with muskets, such discrepancies in the modern frame also authorize brutal and punitive actions. More on that in the next part.

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Politics of Identity | fusangite |

Castrovalva: Reappraising Anti-oppressive Thought in 1980s Doctor Who

In the past, I have suggested that there is a sharp break between the politics of monstrosity in original Doctor Who (1963-89) and new Doctor Who (2004-present). The most famous, effective and frightening monsters in the original series stemmed from memory of the fascist threat in the Second World War and, secondarily, from fear of the Soviet Union. The Daleks, the Cybermen, Sontarans and the Autons, as well as minor villains like the Movellans all played to the fear of a militaristic totalitarianism that annihilates individual free will.

The second Doctor Who found its legs when it came to creating truly terrifying monsters when it began to play on a more universal yet less individually ubiquitous centre of fear: childhood trauma. The Weeping Angels and the Silence perfectly encapsulate the experiences of repression that we associate with serious childhood abuse and trauma.

That stated, I want to offer a qualification to that general schema in suggesting that the last nine years of the original series, which, ironically, was produced by a pedophile, presages this childhood turn in a few important ways. A hallmark of the original series’ final decade was the return of the Master, a timelord of commensurate power to the Doctor but evil. The original Master, played by Roger Delgado, had been featured in 1970s plots in which he formed alliances with hostile alien forces or sought to trick non-hostiles into hostility. The 1980s Master, played by Anthony Ainley, was a different sort of villain who replaced the first Master’s primary strategy of alliance with that of illusion, especially disguise.

In every storyline featuring the Master in his first four years, he is either disguised as someone else (Castrovalva, Timeflight, the King’s Demons) or someone else is disguised as him (Planet of Fire). Fundamental to his villainy, when he returns, is his misrepresentation of himself and his use of this illusion to wrong-foot the Doctor. Yet it often seems that the misrepresentation is not merely a means to an evil end but an evil end in itself.

This allows late original Doctor Who to tell some important and prescient stories about questions of identity and subjectivity, ultimately, in my view, putting forward a very specific kind of anti-oppressive narrative that challenges the kind of hegemonic identity politics that were only in a nascent state during the 1980s.

Nowhere is this anti-oppressive politics better illustrated than in the first Peter Davison serial, Castrovalva, named for the MC Escher painting of the same name. The original painting, early in Escher’s career, did not have the features for which he would later be known: there was no recursion or optical illusion within the piece. Instead, it depicted an actual place, a remote village in the mountains of Central Italy.

But within the Dr. Who Castrovalva, there was also a tribute to later Escher, a central courtyard structured by recursive geography; every staircase away from the town square was also a staircase to the square. Furthermore, the Master, who had created and populated the city with simulacra of human beings, could manipulate individual paths within the city, looping them back to different locations based on his needs. His ability to manipulate included not just the geography of his pocket dimension city but also how its inhabitants physically perceived him.

The Master, himself, was disguised as the village elder known as “The Portreeve.” For much of his time in the Master’s fake city and domain of control. Ultimately, the Master’s plan is thwarted because the Doctor teams up with the local librarian and convinces the inhabitants that there is something wrong and evil about the order of their city and that its history, politics and even physical topography are an illusion and a trap.

There are several details and aspects of this plot that reveal it to be more than it first appears. The first of these struck me during my brief visit to Colorado City in 2011. Colorado City is the core territory of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the violent, polygamous Mormons who split from the main body of their church in the 1940s. They are secretive and in frequent conflict with the law and centre their activities on a town on a disputed section of the Utah-Arizona border. Upon entering the town and beginning to drive past high-fenced compounds, down empty streets, our car was approached by a local teenager trying to hitch a ride out of town. Thereafter, our vehicle came under suspicion and a large truck dragged a concrete median across the road by which we had entered, trapping us in the “city.”

For the next fifteen minutes, my companion and I drove up and down the streets of the city while we were observed from behind fences and through tinted truck windows, concrete medians being dragged from one intersection to another to create and endlessly changing labyrinth. Colorado City was a closed place ruled by a hereditary theocracy that determined who could enter and leave. The place, being the least genetically diverse town in the US, was a gigantic extended abusive family and so it followed logically that part of its entrapment of its residents was a recursive geography that folded back in on itself. After the elders let us escape back onto the highway, it began to occur to me how large and important the message of Castrovalva might be.

No doubt, the children growing up in Colorado City begin their lives unfamiliar with the idea that a street grid might be stable, predictable and attached to a fixed geography rather than the shifting mind of a city’s autocrat. This was certainly true of the residents of Castrovalva. The town’s residents are creations of the Master, himself, and have known no other world. The one exception is the librarian, Shardovan. Shardovan, The drug starts working after 30 minutes of medicine intake but rest depends upon the variety of medicine as some are effective india cheap cialis in male enhancement. Use buy viagra online the Medication according to the Recommended Dosage only. Among many wonderful drugs on the market used for their anti ED qualities are viagra sample free s and Sildenafil Tablets. However, if you do it right, you’ll be able to stop this problem vardenafil online permanently. although he cannot see the topographic inconsistencies and recursion with his eyes can nevertheless “see it in [his] philosophy.”

What makes Shardovan different is that he spends so much of his time reading. Although the books are all fraudulent creations of the Master, documenting a fabricated history of Castrovalva, the ongoing interaction with a stable symbol system and dialectical reasoning causes him to begin noticing the inconsistencies of his world, to nurture the belief that he is participating in some kind of elaborate, oppressive fraud.

Here, again, Castrovalva tells us something important about oppression and anti-oppressive practice: even a creation of an oppressive system can see through their oppression by finding a touchstone of self-consistency, in this case, the written word. It does not even matter that the book was a creation of the system of oppression or that its reader, too, is a wholly endogenous part of the system: the sequencing of a story, the stable correspondence of letters to sounds or ideas, the act of comparing past to present: these things have an intrinsic liberating power. It also says something important about the nature of oppression, that it is the natural ally of double standards, special pleading and other forms of inconsistency.

But of course, it is much easier to resist when one’s own sense of inconsistency is supported by the words, actions or even just presence of someone from outside, not habituated to the false logics that underpin oppression. The Doctor is sickened and disoriented by the space-time inconsistencies of the pocket dimension, making him, at once, the weakest and most powerful person there. So often, this is what we see when a new person joins an abusive family unit or an oppressive regime expands into a new territory: those not habituated to the system of oppression and disorientation are both the most wounded by and resistant to the new order.

This is expressed best when Ruther and Mergrave, the two town elders, revisit Shardovan’s skepticism in the Doctor’s presence. They are strengthened, nourished, by a voice from outside Castrovalva echoing the doubts they have long nourished. And this precipitates the climactic confrontation of the story.

Following the confrontation, Mergrave, the town doctor, confronts the Master and says, “you are not the Portreeve.” To which the Master responds, “something’s been messing with your perception threshold.” “No. You are not the Portreeve. I believe the Visitor.”

What is remarkable about this confrontation is that the category “Portreeve” has almost no equivalent outside Castrovalva. It is a medieval English word for the bailiff of a market town containing a seaport. It is a category that has been created by the Master to describe only one person in the universe, himself. And the only people who know the word or its putative meaning are the simulacra he has created to populate his pocket dimension world. It appears to mean the most wise and knowledgeable elder of Castrovalva, as the person has no law enforcement power and there is no seaport.

It is not that the Doctor has talked through how a Portreeve should act or what one is. All that has happened is that the simulacra have recognized that who the Portreeve says he is does not match who he appears to be. As any child raised in an abusive home knows, the first step in escaping that abuse is to recognize that their caregiver’s self-description does not match their actions, even though the abuser has defined all the terms by which they are judged. An fundamental feature of abuse and oppression, in other words, is what we have come to call “gaslighting,” the way that there is an axiomatic disparity between an oppressor’s self-description and their behaviour. This serves both to wrong-foot and paralyze the victims of that abuse that traps them, and, paradoxically, to offer a way out of an otherwise totalizing, self-contained system.

After the Master turns on his accusers, Shardovan destroys the machine that manipulates the topography of Castrovalva to keep its inhabitants imprisoned and disoriented, sacrificing his life in the process. His last words are “you made us, man of evil; but we are free now.”

Whether we examine oppression at a global scale, a familial scale or anywhere in between, what Castrovalva offers us is a story of resistance to oppression as endogenous in a totalizing system. The simulacra turn on their creator, even though it may mean the end of their lives and even their universe. They do so because asserting one’s autonomous will is more deeply constitutive of true personhood than life itself.

Today, we live in a world under the sway of family annihilator patriarchs practicing a counterfeit masculinity, leveling rape threats at teenage environmental activists, grabbing their daughter’s asses on live TV to the applause of the crowd, decriminalizing spousal violence in response to grassroots campaigns, riding their coarse boasting about sexually assaulting women to electoral victory.

And I believe that Castrovalva offers us not just hope but a narration of the first steps in mobilizing an endogenous resistance from within our states, within our families. It begins with the realization that the power of the oppressor comes from their presumed right to dictate who they are to us, to define, in defiance of our own observations, the bounds of the possible and of, not just their power, but their identity in our eyes. And it tells us clearly that the first step in resistance is the moment we say to our oppressor,

“You are not who you say you are.”

Geekery Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity | fusangite |

“Rapists don’t tend to curse on stage:” Bill Cosby, Respectability Politics and the Inversion of Affirmative Action

Hannibal Buress, the black comedian who successfully placed Bill Cosby’s record of sexual violence before America, after several failed attempts by others, did so partly in retaliation for a set of senescent remarks by Cosby about comedians like himself, younger, blacker comics, for whom profanity was central to their performance.

“Pull your pants up, black people!” he paraphrased Cosby’s rant, “I had a sitcom in the 80s!”

“Yeah,” he said in his own voice, “but you’re a rapist… and I can’t help but having noticed that rapists don’t tend to curse on stage.”

There is a lot to unpack in those remarks, all germane to the slinter, the trick by which people who believed in affirmative action have been conned into believing in its opposite, without realizing that their views have been turned around.

The first part is this: there have long existed two theories of why black people continue to be the most oppressed caste in America’s racial system. These theories are often held, to varying degrees, within the same person. They are, to paraphrase an apocryphal Native American saying, the two wolves within every black person.

One wolf says, “the reason our people are kept down is structural. We were brought here as slaves and our oppression doesn’t just keep us down. It holds up our country’s whole caste system of racial inequality to grease the wheels of capitalism.” The other wolf, the self-hating wolf, says, “sure, we were brought here as slaves and damaged by slavery. But the real damage slavery caused was ruining our culture. If other black people were not so dishonest and lazy, and we all acted like respectable, disciplined people, we could achieve equality.”

Booker T Washington, the first de facto national spokesperson for Black America, more than a century ago, epitomized that divided self. He advised black people to be respectful, deferential to white people, to focus on learning the trades, not drinking too much and keeping their clothes and homes cleaned and pressed. That way, he publicly claimed, they would achieve equality within a few generations and laws and wealth distribution would change in response to this performance of self-discipline and respectability.

It later turned out that Washington also funded many people, legal challenges and organizations he publicly condemned as too radical and contrary to the project of what scholars call “black respectability.”

My grandfather, Harry Jerome Sr., was very much a man of the first wolf, a trade unionist, a socialist, a member of the CCF, a man who sat in at lunch counters and organized buses to hear Paul Robeson sing. But that did not stop him making sure his and his family’s shirts were bleached whiter, starched harder, pressed flatter than any white family’s, that his shoes were shined; he had taught himself to read while a shoeshine boy in New England and liked to slip Shakespeare quotations into his speech when dining with richer, whiter people.

Still, when push came to shove, he knew that it was an economic structure, a caste system, leavened by capitalism, that kept him down, that that was the vastly more important factor. Bill Cosby once thought that too, before all the millions of dollars, unprosecuted sex crimes and dementia destroyed his once-fine, albeit predatory, mind.

In the 1960s and 70s, the United States’ federal government and many of the country’s white citizens repented of their caste system and sought to use the power of the state to bridle its worst excesses of violence and discrimination. This encompassed two main policy initiatives: desegregation and affirmative action. Both were based on a structural understanding of racial oppression.

Hospitals, schools, parks, washrooms, offices and other government facilities had been segregated in much of the country. So were many private businesses, with either the standard  “no blacks, dogs, Jews” sign or with inferior facilities available to non-whites, as in government facilities. The motivation behind integration was not, as people today contend, to produce classrooms, parks and restaurants that were “diverse” the point was not having an aesthetically correct rainbow of colours in elementary school class pictures, or even to give black and white kids a chance to get to know each other. The logic for this was born of the core principle of the twentieth-century Cold War welfare state: universality.

During the Cold War, social democrats and democratic socialists understood that privileged people, wealthy people will only vote to adequately fund government programs if they themselves have to use them. American schools were integrated not to achieve diversity but to achieve and maintain parity in per-student funding between black and white students. That way a school board controlled by white racists could not, as they had for the previous eighty years, underfund black students while funding their own kids adequately.

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Affirmative action, similarly, came from the same impulse. As I have stated previously, the point was not to produce a “diverse” workforce for the sake of diversity itself but to equalize incomes and promotion opportunities between whites and non-whites and between male-headed and female-headed households. It was financial security, disposable income and getting in on intergenerational wealth accumulation that affirmative action programs sought to foster.

When the Reagan revolution began in the US and Thatcherism was embraced throughout the English-speaking world in the 1980s, affirmative action and integration were far more popular among their beneficiaries than the parties and politicians that instituted these programs. They were popular for the simple reason that they worked. Beginning in the 1960s, through the 1980s, these measures lifted people out of poverty and set whites and non-whites, men and women on a more equal footing, often within a couple of years of being instituted.

If one were to dismantle affirmative action and integration, these parts of the fabric of American life could not be attacked head-on any more than one might attack nigh-universal television or automobile ownership. So, the first step in undermining affirmative action and integration so as to reduce their reach and effectiveness was to re-narrate what the purposes and effects of the programs were.

This is where the self-hating wolf comes in.

Integration certainly got black kids into more contact with white kids and raised the test scores, university admission rates and general literacy and numeracy of black kids. But what if we argued that this was caused not by equalizing per-student funding but by black kids being exposed to more disciplined, continent, well-mannered white kids. What if integration was succeeding because black kids could see what a proper student looked like, in the form of their white classmate and were choosing to emulate that superior model? This, rather than structural financial equality, came to be the New Right’s explanation of the apparent success of integration.

Even more perniciously, a similar argument was made about affirmative action: the reason black communities were rising from poverty, the reason women’s wages were rising relative to men’s was not that pay and promotions were made more equal to those enjoyed by white men. No. Successful women and successful people of colour were lifting their communities out of poverty by providing “role models.”

Apparently, women were being underpaid and people of colour underpaid, not because of systemic and unfair discrimination but because of local and justified discrimination because they just did not know how to deport themselves as successful people worthy of promotion.

Even though women and people of colour were less likely to rush to Reagan’s coalition or Thatcherite parties, they, and the crumbling liberal and social democratic parties they supported, began to imbibe this falsehood too. In my own city, I watched black community organizations that had been focused on boycotts, lobbying and political organizing for affirmative action turn into more conservative organizations designed to instill good work habits. Public events no longer featured political speakers but successful “role models.” Speeches were not about how to achieve collective success through reform of government and major corporations but about how to achieve individual success by emulating the featured role model.

It was not just Bill Cosby’s most iconic role, Heathcliff Huxtable, the hyper-respectable sweater-wearing suburban medical doctor and lovable dad that created the Thursday night NBC ratings juggernaut; the non-respectable, profanity-laced routine of Chris Rock’s first HBO cable special in the 90s featured the iconic, “black people vs. niggers” routine articulated the identical thesis: black people’s biggest problem is other non-respectable, lazy black people; the solution is for people to read more, wash more and go back to school.

While the corrosive Identitarianism of contemporary liberal and progressive movements has many sources and points of origin, none is more important than the conservative reconfiguration of the meaning, purpose and mode of operation of affirmative action and integration.

Integration was redefined in the 1980s and 90s. What began as a strategy for equalizing educational resources across race by producing diverse school populations became an end in itself. In contemporary bathroom or shelter bed debates, the diversity of people in a public facility has been adopted as a categorical imperative and reimagined as a human right. One does not need to ask what the benefits of a diverse group in a public facility are because diversity is an end in itself.

Affirmative action, as I have written elsewhere, only need apply to leadership groups and famous people. We do not need measures to equalize wages and promotion opportunities because, we have decided, the pauperization of female-headed and non-white families was never caused by that. Those families will get richer and more successful just by “seeing themselves represented” on corporate boards and Third Way party caucuses and cabinets. Barack Obama will make black people richer relative to whites because of his superb qualities as a continent, benevolent, intelligent, respectable role model.

Except that we know that doesn’t work. That was never the problem. The Obama presidency made black people poorer relative to whites but we continued to support him because the insidious nature of the “role models” argument is that it exists inchoate in every one of us, inculcated into our thinking as part of the structure of racism in our society.

And worse yet, as we see with Bill Cosby, the danger of believing in the theory of the role model is not just that it leads to poverty; it leads to us building up and worshipping the monsters among us because, in our imaginary Reaganomics theory of cause and effect, exposing and tearing down a role model predator might result in us sinking deeper into poverty and marginality.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |

The Identitarian Activist Labour System: Aesthetics, Identity and Conscription

When I was a child, my parents and I lived in a house in Kerrisdale, a former streetcar suburb in Vancouver centred around a set of three-storey walk-up apartment buildings inhabited by the current and former servants of those living in the adjacent neighbourhood, Shaughnessy. Over time, Kerrisdale became a high-income neighbourhood in its own right and my parents were part of that transition. My mom was black and my dad was white; my grandma bought them their house with the money from her late husband who had been a prominent stockbroker.

My kindergarten class over-represented high-caste Indians, Jews, Catholics and other members of the new Kerrisdale bourgeoisie, the newly white and the nearly white. Some marshland was cleared for the Arbutus Club, a fee-paying club to serve this secondary elite, who could not gain admittance to the Vancouver Club, Terminal City Club, Vancouver Lawn Tennis Club, University Women’s Club or Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

Nevertheless, when my mom would wheel me up to the high street, Forty-first Avenue, in my stroller, the elderly white women who had retired from domestic service always assumed that I must be the child of a very rich person, from the Shaughnessy side of the train tracks because I appeared to have a black nanny.

In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, black domestic servants were the most sought-after in Canada. As the Laurentian elite continued to converge with the Yankee elite of the US, an increasingly popular way of displaying one’s wealth in Canada was to have a domestic who resembled an American domestic. Having a dark-coloured servant with distinctively African features was better than an ounce of saffron in the cupboard. Black bodies, especially in Western Canada, were very rare, comprising less than 1% of the population, and they looked all the more exotic, as a result. At the same time, as showing one’s wealth through one’s exotic possessions, having black bodies in one’s house in Canada also showed one to be conforming to the mores of the most powerful elite in America, the Yankees, the nabobs and patricians of the Northeast. One could concurrently show one’s status through both conformity and exoticism, both expressed through the same body.

Most black people who were brought to the Americas were brought here as plantation labour, deployed in lowland, humid regions that had been depopulated of Indigenous people. They were put to work in sectors where they were expected to live long, hard lives. (Because most of the costs of a slave were paid up-front at the time of purchase, slaves were not, mainly, sent into high-mortality tasks like mining for fear of investment loss.)

But a minority of slaves were sent somewhere else: to serve as butlers, guards, nannies, etc. in places where the manual labour of colonialism didn’t come from slaves but from Indigenous people or from low-status white creoles. In Mexico City, Lima, Boston and New York, the greatness of a house was determined not just by its size but by the blackness of its guards, porters and butlers. That is because blackness was an integrated part of an aesthetic display by the wealthy: where black bodies were rare, and consequently expensive and difficult to obtain, they were deployed as part of an elaborate show of power. In the late twentieth century, Japanese night clubs used the same strategy—the most elite ones had African bouncers: just one of the rare and precious things one could enjoy there, of a piece with the endangered abalone brought all the way from the waters off California.

In addition to being about scarcity and preciousness, showing the bodies that pseudoscience said were the most unruly, base and uncontrollable forced to stand at attention, to bow, to curtsey, while wearing impractical, fancy, constraining clothes has always fitted into the politics of the Western Hemisphere’s elite. The Spanish, British and American Empires have always been animated by that neo-Ottoman spirit: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. By putting the most abject, alien and unruly bodies adjacent to those of the most powerful elites, serving them with precision and fealty, the play of American empire and racial hegemony is enacted every day.

In 1988, I was an enthusiastic new member of the Green Party. I was also sixteen years old. And in September of that year, the party held an omnibus nomination meeting at its Vancouver office on Commercial Drive. I was studying for a physics test and could not attend but I begged my mom to go to the meeting in my stead.

When she entered the room, she found herself to be the only non-white person there. It was quickly decided that the party would not field any municipal candidates unless the slate was joined by a woman or a person of colour. As my mother was the only member of either group with any experience in politics (she had run for Parks Board in 1978) and one of only four women in the room, she suddenly found herself in a hostage situation. The Green Party was going to deny every supporter in the city the chance to vote for them unless my mother agreed, then and there, to run.

A short aside to my readers: my mother and I are estranged. That is neither a good or a bad thing. It just is. I ask that you respect our privacy as I have hers these past seven years: I never tell a story about my mom that she herself has not told to a public audience. If you want a narrative of blame for our estrangement, blame the intergenerational legacy of trauma descended from slavery.

Some people might say that this was a great step forward in the broadening of the Green Party’s appeal to new constituencies of voters. I am not saying it was not. But here is what it also was: extortion and conscription.

A group of white people with more leisure time than my mother decided to withhold their labour from the project of saving the planet unless they could make the first black person over whom they could exercise power do an equal or greater amount of work. They did this by, among other things, using the threat of dashing her son’s hopes to do that. That’s extortion.

A black person was coerced to do work for an organization run by white people with no compensation, monetary or otherwise. That’s conscription. And—a little bit—slavery.

Some people might argue, as they have falsely done in other areas of American life, that this is affirmative action. Let us be crystal clear:

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There is no such thing as affirmative action when people are not being paid. The purpose of affirmative action is not to have a workforce that looks diverse, by showing off bodies that have different genders and races inscribed on them. The purpose of affirmative action is to redistribute wealth—to give non-white and female-headed families the ability to save money, to inherit money, to send their kids to college, to participate in activities money had cut them out of.

It is not affirmative action when people are placed in roles that deplete their leisure time, that deplete their funds, that deplete the resources available to their families. That’s counterfeit affirmative action.

Our understanding of this is occluded by the way the civil society and its labour systems were reordered by Third Way austerity in the 1990s. Today, most charitable and activist enterprises function like businesses. Volunteers are unpaid interns. Boards of directors are essentially self-appointing. The funds come from donors who gain no membership rights with their donation or from family trusts or the state.

Because we see active volunteer membership not as part of a democratic culture of a self-governing organization with regular, democratic internal elections, it is easier to falsely apply ideas of affirmative action to what we euphemistically call “the non-profit sector.” Because the people doing the daily work of these organization are conceptualized as a mix of paid organizers and their unpaid interns.

Today, in BC, there is an effort being led by Indigenous people, in particular, the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en people. The traditionalist faction of the Wet’suwet’en people are making big sacrifices of their labour, their money, their freedom to stop a gigantic carbon bomb being built in Kitimat by cutting off the route the government has chosen for its pipeline.

The Wet’suwet’en traditionalists are doing everyone in the world a gigantic favour by protecting us from the machinations of the BC government, Canadian government, Royal Dutch Shell and Mitsubishi.

And what is our response? Mostly, it has been good. But I have also noticed something else.

In communities all over BC, white settlers like me are saying “well, I’ll come to a rally but it needs to be led by Indigenous youth.” Note how they don’t care what First Nation the youth come from. It’s just that people younger and less white than them, with fewer resources, at greater risk of police brutality are being asked to stand in the vanguard. If they do not, these white settlers might just withhold their labour from the single most important climate battle being waged in our time and place.

Like so much of colonialism and racism, I believe that these efforts and conscription and extortion are unconscious. That’s what makes our settler colonial order so powerful here: it lives inside the unconscious of everyone.

Those parts of the activist world that have not been colonized into the “non-profit sector” that delivers contracted-out government services, lets kids do office work so they can check a box and be allowed to graduate high school, with its set of executive director commissars, are an especially dangerous place. The people standing on logging roads, standing in front of bulldozers, camping on rail lines, these are not people managed carefully by incorporated NGOs with offices and executive directors pulling in six figures; they are mainly young, racialized and poor. Taking on a leadership role in organizations like that doesn’t burnish your resume; it makes you unable to pass a criminal record check, difficult to hire, difficult to house.

How dare we tell the most marginalized people in our society that we will withhold our labour from the struggle unless they bear a disproportionate amount of the risk of violence, unemployment, homelessness, etc.?

All that stated, I believe strongly that when marginalized people seek leadership roles, we must yield those roles to them. And we should support them in those roles by providing them with money, with childcare, with job references and referrals and, most importantly, with our labour. But this should happen only when we have made sure their labour has not been extracted under duress, that they are not our conscripts but, instead, that we are at their service for once.

I cannot help but notice that when white settlers are critical of a group for not “being representative,” they only mount that criticism after looking at a photo of a crowd or a photo array of individual portraits. No one asks if any of those depicted has an invisible disability, a mental illness, an addiction, an autoimmune disease. No one asks if any of those is housed, if they are a member of the underclass, the proletariat, if they are undocumented or do not have literacy skills. And certainly nobody asks if they are descended from people whose skin is not as white as theirs; those of us with Indigenous and African blood and epigenomes ravaged by colonialism are of no use in such a project because our bodies fail to meet the aesthetic demands of the colonizer. (White-looking Indigenous bodies can still be useful if costumed correctly in an exotic way that points towards an imagined past of noble savages with long braids.)

That is because, for far too many people on what we might call “the left,” the politics of representation is not a justice-based project at all. It is an aesthetic project. A key aspect of the display of elite white power is the ability to fashion a mosaic, made out of the most exotic human bodies you can find, that signals to other white people in the same way black domestics servants once did. Such a project is not about transcending colonial racism; it is a re-enactment of that racism.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |