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A Marxist Reading of Bezmonov

Yes. I know. I was in the middle of writing about land reform but I have to get this off my chest before I can continue. And, like everything else on here, it is related.

The Strange Case of Michael Moriarty

In 1994, Dick Wolf dismissed Michael Moriarty from his lead role as Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone, just four seasons into the original Law & Order TV series. This was not a consequence of the personnel reset NBC had forced on Wolf the previous season but the result of Moriarty’s increasing drunkenness, paranoia, domestic violence and other erratic behaviour. Moriarty had also begun to confuse certain aspects of his personality with that of his alter ego, Stone. And on the basis of this had developed an elaborate conspiracy theory of a vendetta between himself and Bill Clinton’s Attorney-General, Janet Reno. And in 1996, he settled in suburban Vancouver and became a hassle for bar owners, local cops and TV producers here.

Moriarty arrived in Vancouver in the middle of the unite-the-right movement in which the Reform Party (the beta test version of the Tea Party) and the Progressive Conservative Party were trying to merge back into the same party. For right-wingers, this task grew more urgent in 1997, when the combined vote of Reform and the Tories actually exceeded that of the Liberal Party, which won almost double the seats of its two conservative rivals combined.

Following the 1997 humiliation, Canadian conservatives made a series of bold moves to knit their coalition back together into a single party. New conferences like Civitas, new institutions, new think tanks, all sorts of things rolled out.

One of these things was the National Post. Today’s Post is a little different than the original, which was created in the image of its founder, Conrad Black, the eccentric conservative publishing magnate, polymath and white-collar criminal. Black’s original post featured individuals who had drifted too far right to be printed in Canada’s Conservative paper of record since 1844, the Globe and Mail. Contributors included Ezra Levant (now of Rebel Media), Terrence Corcoran (a Globe columnist who had become convinced of a conspiracy theory that the Sierra Club was trying to exterminate all human life) and Michael Moriarty. Curiously, by 2000, the Post had cut ties with Moriarty, scrubbed his writing from their web site and successfully convinced Salon to run a piece falsely implying that he had never written for them.

The now-pitted Op/Ed Moriarty wrote was, nominally, an endorsement of Alberta Treasurer Stockwell Day for leader of the Canadian Alliance, a post Day did ultimately win. And Moriarty’s was one of the first public endorsements he received. But most of the piece was way more interesting and seemed as unhinged as the press was claiming Moriarty was. Now, I am not saying that Moriarty was sane or that what he wrote was sane but I will say what McMurphy says to Chief Bromden in their first conversation in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“I’ve been talkin’ crazy, ain’t I?”

“Yeah, Chief, you been talkin’ crazy.”

“I couldn’t say it all. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I didn’t say it didn’t make sense, Chief. I just said you been talkin’ crazy.”

The Afterlife of the USSR

Moriarty was deeply disturbed by the Third Way movement, which he saw, in contradistinction to everyone else except those of us on the far left, as much more dangerous and subversive than traditional social democratic parties had been. Following a summit of Jean Chretien, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton which the three explicitly identified as “Third Way,” Moriarty argued that the USSR had only pretended to fall in 1991, that it had actually become the Third Way movement, under whose aegis a global dictatorship would be inaugurated in the early twenty-first century.
Given that we had all witnessed the USSR fall and were, daily, being treated to images of its endless looting and humiliation at the hands of the hand of capital, its last leader now the Pizza Hut mascot, Moriarty’s claims seemed just like everything else about him in the late 90s: batshit insane.

Now I am going to try to explain how Moriarty was not wrong—about the Third Way, that is—not about Stockwell Day; the world proved Moriarty wrong about Day’s suitability for national leadership.

Next stop as we go ‘round the houses: Yuri Bezmonov.

In the lead-up to the 1984 US presidential election, many believed that the corrupt and bellicose Reagan Administration would be defeated by a populace that had tired of nuclear sabre-rattling and foreign policy adventurism, not to mention the early phases of neoliberalism. But, when Reagan’s numbers bottomed-out at 37% following the 1982 midterm elections, his supporters began rebuilding his brand, not by moderating his positions but, instead, by deploying charismatic surrogates to reinvigorate the national conservative movement he had inherited from Barry Goldwater in 1968.

One of the most dynamic and striking of these characters was ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmonov. Bezmonov toured the US doing local talk shows broadcast in second-tier media markets like Scranton; he did events in church basements, fraternal organization halls and libraries. The video footage that remains of his speaking tours is now on youtube and is worth your time.

Here is the essence of the message Bezmonov delivered to all those who cared to listen, including members of the American left, whom he would often directly address and warn during his speeches:

Only 15% of the budget of the KGB, the USSR’s secret service, direct heirs to the Cheka before them, and the Oprichniki before them, was being spent on espionage. 85% of the budget had been allocated to something called “subversion,” an effort to subtly propagandize liberals and leftists in the West to adopt the values of Marxism-Leninism.

Bezmonov, when he addressed people of the left and liberal persuasions, claimed KGB subversion efforts were primarily targeting, he noted that, as a totalitarian-collectivist ideology, upon seizing power would soon turn on women, homosexuals and others the left understood itself to be representing or protecting. Once they had subverted the Anglo-American and Western European university systems, the subverted would incrementally seize control of society and grow increasingly punitive towards dissenting views and opposing social movements, chipping away freedom of speech and other values they once supported.

Bezmonov argued that, at a certain point, the educated and professional classes of Anglo American and Western European would reach a tipping point and begin carrying out this agenda on their own, without the coordination or assistance of the KGB.

Had I seen a Bezmonov video at the time, I would have seen it as even crazier than a Moriarty Op/Ed of the late 90s, because I was living through the rise of neoliberalism. There was nothing remotely Soviet, as far as I was concerned, about the impending blizzard of austerity, privatization, contracting-out and investor rights and market access trade deals.

Or was there?

Revisionism and the Problems of the Marxist Canon

I would argue that the only way to make sense of this strange tale is by engaging in something doctrinaire Marxists call “revisionism.” Unconsciously based, as it is, on Rabbinic disputation and exegesis of the Talmud and Torah, Marxism has always come packaged with a theory of canon. What kind of Marxist you are is largely determined by which authors and texts you think are part of the inalterable core canon of Marxism and which authors and texts are mere interpretation of the core texts that one can take or leave.

The USSR, and the political parties (i.e. foreign dictator fan clubs) they sponsored, saw the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin as the core canon. The writings of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Ché Guevara and other communist leaders might or might be correct. And the writings of Lev Trotsky were clearly heresy. The Marxist term for “heresy” is “revisionism,” the attempt to present a revision of the core canon as the correct interpretation of said canon.

Trotskyites, on the other hand, canonize Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky and see Stalin as heretical but consider the writings of leaders like Tito as worthy interpreters who could still be mistaken. The third main faction of the orthodox Marxist movement canonizes Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Enver Hoxha, the dictator of Albania 1944-85.

While many of these differences arise from different packages of complimentary overseas beach vacations Marxists offered high-level apparatchiks in the West, at which Trotskyites found themselves at a considerable disadvantage until the rise of Hugo Chavez, they nevertheless, also represent a robust tradition of categorizing and interpreting texts.

There is no more revisionist act, in the Marxist hierarchy of sins, than revising the document that formed the foundation of the entire movement, the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Its central thesis is that history is driven by class struggle that works as follows: a ruling class controls a labouring class by controlling the means of production and the state. After a time, a new class emerges as a synthesis of the two existing classes and revolutionizes production on behalf of the ruling class, thereby gaining control of the means of production and then violently displaces the previous ruling class that needed it to revolutionize the means of production.

In this way, the patrician ruling class and the plebian labour class of the Ancient Mediterranean produced a synthesis in the form of the feudal aristocracy who then overthrew the patricians and oppressed the peasant class; a synthesis of these classes, the bourgeoisie, revolutionized production on behalf of the feudal aristocracy and then violently overthrew them and now oppresses the proletariat.

But here is where things get weird. Marx asserts, in his epilogue, that because the means of production are now wholly controlled by the bourgeoisie, enabling the infinite immiseration of the proletariat, that this final class struggle will be the last one and will be between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, breaking the very intellectual model he has used to explain reality.

But what if we were more Marxist than Marx, himself?

Let’s Do Some Revisionism

What if what has unfolded since the bourgeois liberal revolutions of the nineteenth century, his “engine of history,” had continued functioning based on the properties he so persuasively assigned to it?

Would it not follow that the class that the bourgeoisie assigned to revolutionize the means of production would seize them and turn them against the bourgeoisie? In other words, what if we understood the Russian Revolution not as a workers’ revolution but as a revolution against the owner class (i.e. the bourgeoisie) by the professional managerial class, who as predicted seized means of production from the workers that the workers had not, in fact lost? Friedrich Engels got close to seeing this possibility when he suggested that capitalism, when it had consumed the physical world, would extend into the immaterial and commodify the contents of our minds?

Is this not highly descriptive how ubiquitous forms of totalitarian mind control tended to follow the managerial class wherever it took power and found its fullest twentieth-century elaboration in the East Germany of Erich Honecker, a state where the most powerful body was not the Communist Party but the Stasi, the secret police most advanced in surveillance and mind control?

I cannot take credit for this act of audacious revisionism. I owe this idea entirely to reuniting with my comrade D’Arcy Pocklington three years ago, who has been perfecting it since the late 1990s.

My humble addition is this: if we take our Marxist seriously, it follows that the KGB, serving, as it did, as the apex of the professional managerial class, would not intellectually subvert the West to embrace a Marxist consciousness, or a worker’s consciousness but would, inevitably and axiomatically only be able to diffuse one thing into the minds of the West’s educated, liberal left: their own consciousness. They subverted the West not to, as Besmonov believed, Marxism-Leninism but instead to the class consciousness of the professional managerial class.

In other words, the mistake Moriarty and Besmonov made was in failing to see that the USSR was, unconsciously, telling a bigger lie even than it realized. Its leadership class had long since confused its own class consciousness with Marxism. And they were so convinced that even apostates like Besmonov believed they had been inculcating, in our universities, a belief in Marxism-Leninism and not, as an actual believer in Marxism must observe, the class consciousness of the managerial class.

The totalitarianism we associate with “communism” or “Marxism” has nothing to do with Marxism, with communism, with socialism. It arises from the class consciousness of the elite of the managerial class because they have been tasked with extending the reach of capitalism and their control of the means of production into consciousness itself.

Now that I think you can see where this argument is going, I’ll leave off and write a second part tomorrow.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite | October 25, 2022

Four Things Justin Trudeau Won’t Do But Should to Support American Women’s Reproductive Rights

Looking at Canadian Twitter today, the day the US Supreme Court formally struck down Roe v. Wade, and, consequently, limitations on the power of state and federal governments to fine, incarcerate or kill women for ending their pregnancies, I see that we are awash in the subject on which I wrote my last post, post-politics.

Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister, and Jean Charest, the former Québec premier and no-hoper candidate for Leader of the Opposition were quick to their keyboards this morning with condemnatory words for the US Supreme Court and its latest egregious decision. Normally, when Trudeau and other Canadian progressives try to piggyback US news stories, like mass shootings, by staking-out popular positions with watchers of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, I just sigh and put it down to the post-political era in which we live.

It’s not like there is anything Canadians can do about American mass shootings or Floridian children being prohibited from sitting on library drag queens’ laps during school hours, or whatever the issue of the moment is. Canadian politicians sound off and Canadians who have given up on politics but still like striking a certain pose on American issues cheer them on.

But this is not the case when it comes to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s not a choice between Canadian opinion leaders either taking to Twitter to offer harsh words and witty banter to score meaningless points in progressive image curation or declining to do so. American women’s loss of their reproductive rights is actually something to which Canadian public policy not only can respond but to which we should respond.

When I first started listening to the news on a daily basis, I was about eleven years old and I listened to the big CBC Radio news programs that were produced at the zenith of state-sponsored Cold War liberal journalism. As It Happens, The World at Six and the extended 10:00pm news before Book Time were staples of my day. The struggle against Apartheid looms large in those memories of the mid-1980s, as does the terminal phase of the Cold War; rivaling that were the Liverpool Ferry stories.

Back in the mid-80s, Ireland was still a conservative theocratic state and the centrepiece of its claim to being a Catholic nation was its absolute zero tolerance for abortion. No matter how young a girl was, no matter who had inseminated her, no legal abortions were available in Ireland. While there were decent underground abortion doctors in Ireland, they faced stiff legal penalties if caught and were, consequently, hard to find, especially for young women who were not plugged into the underground feminist networks and trust-based referral chains that could connect them with reproductive healthcare.

Consequently, the most rational solution to the problem of an unwanted pregnancy was for young women to board the Dublin to Liverpool ferry and have English doctors terminate their pregnancies. Liverpool has long stood as a champion of human rights, all the way back to the eighteenth century when its courts began conferring legal personhood on escaped slaves from Virginia and Georgia. And, even during Thatcherite austerity, Liverpool doctors and hospitals stepped up to help these marginalized young women.

As a result, Ireland began prohibiting pregnant women from leaving the country until they had carried their foetus to term. Police began surveilling the Dublin ferry terminal, sometimes setting up checkpoints and they began greeting formerly pregnant young women returning from Liverpool by clapping them in irons.

Ever since I became transfixed by these stories of girls, some as young as I was back in the day, I have understood that abortion is, like so many other issues connected to women’s bodily autonomy, an international issue about which bordering countries absolutely do have a role to play.

Canadians have a choice today. We can either grandstand and virtue signal or our MPs can head into parliament and start passing laws that make the kind of material difference to American women that the judges and hospital workers of Liverpool made for Irish women in the 1980s.

First of all, we need to amend our refugee legislation. American women who are currently pregnant and wish to end their pregnancies and women who have terminated their pregnancies in defiance of state abortion bans should be accepted as refugees from sex-based discrimination and persecution. Will there be diplomatic consequences to reconfiguring our policies in a way that recognizes the existence of refugees from the USA? You bet. But apparently, we feel strongly about women’s rights; so maybe we should be willing to pay a price for trying to protect them.

Second, we can be the new Liverpool for women in border states like Idaho, where abortion is currently illegal and where the governor and GOP legislative majority are planning to append abortion to the murder statute, literally meaning that women who don’t have a good enough excuse for their miscarriage will end up on death row. Canada should be inviting American organizations that want to provide reproductive health services to set up in Canadian border cities. We should roll out the welcome mat.

Third, whether they are applying for refugee status or just staying for the day to get some outpatient medical treatment, we should be waving women of reproductive age across the border into Canada, including making ID requirement exceptions for women who have not been able to secure expedited passports.

Fourth, we should refuse to share information with federal and state American government agencies that attempt to prevent or track the migration of pregnant women with a view to stopping them getting reproductive healthcare outside their state of residence. Privacy rights are central to the abortion debate; after all, Roe v. Wade was not a court judgement about a medical procedure but about women’s right to privacy.

Canada could take some risks, show some courage and make a material difference in the lives of American women of childbearing age. And any MP from any party could introduce legislation to do what I have outlined tomorrow as a private members’ bill. We could be as courageous in our defense of reproductive choice as Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the mid-1980s. But I’m not going to be holding my breath.

Canadian Politics Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite | June 24, 2022

Rex Murphy Sings “Country Roads”: The West’s Brezhnev Era and Fossil Fuel Masculinity, Part VII of My Thoughts on the Trucker Convoy

From 1964 to 1982, Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union from the zenith of its power and dynamism into its terminal phase, a tailspin so complete that none of his successors could extricate it. The Institute from Gremlins II studies, brilliantly characterizes public discourse in the USSR during those decades, “There are many eerie similarities between that time and our own – the government was largely run by a cadre of septuagenarians, wages had stagnated, yet all official narratives insisted that there was no alternative. The horizon of possible futures was closed.”

During this time period, the USSR became increasingly dependent on petroleum exports for its economic viability. Although outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the USSR, like Canada (another non-member oil exporter of the 60s and 70s) benefited from the upward pressure on global oil prices that OPEC was causing through production cut agreements and other joint efforts to affect the pricing mechanism.

Over the course of Brezhnev’s time in office, the USSR became increasingly affected by the “resource curse” or “Dutch disease,” whereby the foreign currency garnered through oil sales functioned to de-industrialize the country. Wages remained stagnant while the country de-industrialized, meaning that there were fewer and fewer things to buy in Soviet stores as local secondary and tertiary manufacturing declined and global inflation and the Nixon shock currency reforms placed possible imports out of reach.

In other words, during the first half of the 1970s, the G6’s modifications to the world currency and trading systems did not merely lead to the ultimate demise of OPEC as an effective challenge to its hegemony; it sent the Soviet economy into a tailspin not unlike that suffered by OPEC member states. This was, politically, a wild and crazy time, when the state and its commissars still had money to burn but the populace lacked both the spending power and the access to non-essential finished products.

It was clear to the gerontocracy running the Soviet Communist Party that declining living standards, coupled with Brezhnev’s increasing infiltration and repression of Soviet civil society was making the regime unpopular. Action had to be taken. And this action was to make more steel. The USSR had already been producing more steel than any country on earth under Nikita Kruschev, Brezhnev’s predecessor. But under Brezhnev, the USSR went from producing roughly the same amount of steel per year as the US to more than 50% more annually. Soviet steel production went from 100 million metric tons annually to 150 million, even as the secondary and tertiary industries using steel shrank.

With local manufacturing in decline, much of that steel was never used. In some extreme cases, in the Soviet Far East, no real plan was made for it to be used following its manufacture, given the overproduction of steel in and west of the Ural Mountains, where Soviet secondary industry was based.

The effect was that, as Russia laid off industrial workers making finished consumer and industrial goods, it hired more steel workers. And this is precisely what the Brezhnev regime wanted. They believed that more effective than creating a personality cult around the Great Leader, the most effective way to save the Soviet Union was to manufacture the most important industrial good of all: Communists.

The Soviet Union had long held that not all industrial employment was equal and, despite the USSR having a far better record on the wage gap and reducing date rape and domestic violence than its competitors in the West, the best industrial work was the most manly. Since the days of Lenin, industrial, collectivized farming had been considered the least manly and least valuable form of industrial work, whereas nothing could be more manly that making steel, with all those big cauldrons, all that fire, and the roaring noise of the mill.

While the proletariat might be manufactured by any sort of coal-fired industry, from biscuits on up, the steel mill was where the workers most likely to be eligible for party membership (the 1% elite of Soviet society) were, quite literally, forged.

The thinking was that, while times might be hard, Russia, and the other nations under the banner of the USSR, would ultimately triumph as long as society contained enough loyal communists. And the single most efficient way to make them, more efficient and trustworthy than any propaganda campaign or personality cult, was as a by-product of steel manufacture. Except that even this interpretation ultimately came to be reversed: steel ingots became a by-product of manufacturing communists.

Following the Tiananmen Square and other coordinated mass mobilizations of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party adopted and, under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, intensified their commitment to this doctrine following the death of Deng Xiaoping. Despite being an importer of metallurgical coal, in the twenty-first century, China began to follow the Soviet approach to the steel industry. Hu and Xi shielded steelworkers from the stripping of industrial worker protections and wage guarantees that took place in other sectors, for as long as they could, and walked back some of these measures following major steelworker protests in the late 2010s.

The lack of repression, violence or even significant defamation of the steelworkers is just further evidence that China has bought its own propaganda, that the Central Committee, despite all its corruption and implication in the most retrograde forms of casino capitalism, has come to believe that the mills do manufacture communists and that, unlike other workers, these ones should be listened-to.

This kind of thinking arrived in Canada and the United States seemingly out of nowhere in the mid-2010s but it arrived with great force and for a different political purpose, as a tool of the fossil fuel industry.

What else can we make of Rex Murphy’s columns for the National Post about the extraordinary civic virtue of the people of Fort MacMurray and Lloydminster? The oil towns of Western Canada are not merely, for Murphy, rural communities meriting preservation; they are the Canadian Idyll. Only in Fort Mac, Murphy claims, can one see the kind of idyllic family life we associate with the Eisenhower Era, with its engaged parents enthusiastically driving their kids to hockey and playing catch with them on the weekend.

John Diefenbaker’s family-centred, civic-minded, law-abiding, respectful Canada does still exist, Murphy tells us, but only in towns shaped by the fossil fuel industry. Murphy and his ilk, because there is a whole faux journalistic genre dedicated to this kind of writing, are essentially making the same class of argument as Leonid Brezhnev and Xi Jinping: diluted bitumen and “natural gas” are mere by-products of manufacturing patriotic, virtuous Canadians.

It is the same rhetoric that Donald Trump used so effectively in West Virginia: coal is a by-product created in the manufacture of real, true, patriotic Americans.

And for a city like Fort MacMurray, the task of depicting it as the epitome of civic virtue and the last bastion of the single-income male-headed nuclear family is enabled by the city being one of an increasing number of communities I term “Jeckyllvilles” i.e. places where the patriarchal family unit is sustained by a man who lives far away from where he works, a violent, hypermasculine, encampment with a “stays in Vegas” ethos of stimulant use, violence and problematic behaviour absorbed by a typically Indigenous, isolated population. Many men in Fort MacMurray and towns of its ilk, the world over, find it easier to embody the mid-century self-controlled softball coach masculine ideal two weeks per month precisely because they live in bizarre remote atavistic compounds that vent their violence onto local on-reserve Indigenous populations the other half of the time.

I do not believe this nationalist rhetoric would have been so successful had it not been situated within a pre-existing struggle of competing nationalisms, if it did not locate and speak directly to captured nations within the US and Canada. The genius of the fossil fuel industry was in locating and patronizing the heirs to that “migrant worker culture” of the 1920s, the Métis and Métis-influenced peoples of Anglo America and dealing itself into and concurrently energizing a pre-existing socio-cultural framework.

The independent spirit of the Hillbillies of Appalachia, of the white trash of the Mississippi Delta, of the Northwest Rebellions—they are still there. But they are being distorted, changed by the energy source that is fueling their re-creation. By latching onto regional identities and grievances, the fossil fuel industry is attempting to construct a bulwark of loyal communities and workers. And it is then able to empower those communities to articulate an alternative nationalism that appeals not just in their core territory but across the country.

Having largely lost the hearts and minds of urbanites and progressives, the fossil fuel industry, especially its smaller firms, are investing in creating regional demographic bulwarks that will make it hard to assail their power, especially under the first-past-the-post electoral system of the US and Canada. And they have been highly strategic in find those that articulate an alternative national vision, not just a parochial, independence-focused one.

The adverse effects of this partnership are already evident. The practice of “rolling coal” is just one of a set of practices we associate with “petro-masculinity,” an effort to replace the ethos of frugality and conservation historically associated with these cultures with a politics of waste, of showing status through one’s personal abundance in resource that animates the region. With the combination of fracking and deferred cleanup, these shows of abundance are all the more necessary as soil contamination, deforestation and the corruption of water systems are destroying the sense of abundance that used to be associated with the hunting and harvest seasons of autumn.

Similarly, to the South the primaries in West Virginia have become a contest between the dream that no one’s kids would ever have to go down a mine because the mines would be closed, represented by Bernie Sanders and Paula Jean Swearingen, and Donald Trump’s promise to put more people down the mine than ever before. For the first time in more than a century, most West Virginian fathers see their son following them down the mine as a social good and not an evil to be averted.

The fossil fuel industry is not stupid. It has made an alliance with an interconnected set of cultures and peoples around Anglo America and is embedding itself in those cultures more thoroughly by the year. And urbanites and progressives and everyone else who mobilizes the “deplorables” discourse in writing off and stigmatizing the peoples it has chosen to patronize are doing its work for free. It wants them to know that they have only one powerful friend: the fossil fuel industry and that their alternative vision of mixed-race peoples co-governing the great nations of Anglo America rises or falls by oil and coal.

Louis Riel, in his final years, described himself as David to the Métis’ Judea. And today, the fossil fuel industry has decided to be Cyrus: the foreign tyrant who delivers a captive nation from suffering and persecution.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite | May 30, 2022

What the Left Should Learn from the overturning of Roe v. Wade

It finally happened. Roe vs. Wade, one of the greatest pieces of liberal judicial activism of the twentieth century was struck down. For me, my comrades and millions of American women of childbearing age this is a tragic moment, another huge piece of the Cold War social democratic welfare state’s social contract sheared-off.

But this defeat was especially searing because, unlike P3s, a US-led global order, free trade, austerity and privatization, this was not a wind-assisted victory of an elite consensus. Because that is how people of the political left see those other losses: the establishment endorsed these things; they heavily bankrolled or Astro-turfed smaller or non-existent social movement groups to echo that consensus; they got pretty much all mainstream political parties, major corporations and the liberal media to present these things as not just beneficial but inevitable. “There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher said.

This win is different because the establishment was on our side and was, for the most part, against the movement that just won. While anti-abortion activists enjoy the support of some major corporations in America, they are not the majority; and while they enjoy the support of one of America’s major political parties, that support is not unanimous across jurisdictions. America’s extreme Northeast and Northwest still have pro-choice Republican parties. And it was not until the early 1990s that there was even one major mainstream anti-abortion media outfit, FoxNews. And it was not until the early 2000s that TV and movie dramas touching abortion, even on Fox, ultimately came down on the side of choice.

Finally, we must remember that, even in the religious sphere, most churches were not anti-abortion when Roe v. Wade was handed-down. The Roman Catholic Church officially and vehemently opposed abortion and so, partly to distinguish themselves from the largest single denomination (Catholics), most Protestants, including most Evangelicals used abortion as a means of distinguishing themselves from Catholics. Indeed, nothing short of a complete remaking of the American religious marketplace over the next four decades was necessary to create the near-consensus among regular churchgoers in the US that the state must regulate abortion. “Mainline” Protestant churches went from being the second-largest group of American churchgoers to a tiny portion comprising no more than a tenth; evangelicals pulled away from mainline denominations and joined with the rapidly-growing fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements; historically black churches soured on abortion; and churchgoing became a rural, rather than universal American pastime.

A grassroots movement, and one that does not enjoy the support of a majority of Americans, even today, conducted a half-century struggle and beat us.

Any person of any level of political seriousness must study this victory if they have any interest in beating the establishment at anything. Whether one agrees with the anti-abortion movement or vehemently opposes it, any person truly interested in a grassroots struggle against money and power should be studying this victory with a fine-toothed comb for years to come.

So, I thought I would offer a little bit of what I have learned, as an outsider, from my experiences of organizing with anti-abortion activists and the insights I gleaned, that other social movements would do well to follow.

In 1996, mathematician and political organizer Julian West and I decided to create a coalition of political parties and civil society organizations that would champion a provincial referendum on proportional representation. Early adopters who pulled in their organizations, and built our group, the Electoral Change Coalition (ECCO), so-named by Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation’s Troy Lanigan from the ground up. They included Troy, the BC Reform Party’s David Secord, the BC Marxist-Leninist Party’s Charles Boylan and the BC Family Coalition Party’s Kathleen Toth, among many others. As the organization evolved and took its various twists and turns, I worked with a number of anti-abortion folks on voting reform work, like Kathleen’s husband Mark, FCP candidate John O’Flynn, Christian Heritage Party leader Heather Stillwell, along with BC Reform Party pro-life insurgents Bev Welsh, backer of Wilf Hanni’s successful takeover of the party by the Christian Right, Wilf, himself and, finally, Chris Delany, the Bill Vander Zalm surrogate who merged Reform into the BC Unity Party.

In fact, my last speech as leader of the BC Green Party was as part of a panel on electoral reform the month after my defeat as party leader. It ended with a hug of appreciation for my work on the file from the Zalm himself.

ECCO’s sister, and later, successor organization was Fair Voting BC, founded by Nick Loenen, the Zalm’s seat-mate representing Richmond in the legislature 1986-91. Nick’s book on PR, the original bible of BC’s voting reform movement, A Case for Proportional Representation, was explicit in arguing that PR could be a vital tool whereby the anti-abortion advocates could wield real political power in the BC legislature and was crucial in piquing so much interest in PR on the Christian Right in the 1990s.

Most participants in our coalition were eager to try being in such a broad, disparate and diverse group but lacked cultural experience of this kind of work. And so it fell to those most experienced with this sort of thing to take the lead, and so our organization in many ways was imprinted with the style of coalition politics practiced by the anti-abortion movement.

Learning how to formulate complex communications, strategies and tactics with allies who disagree with most of one’s political views and find a significant portion of said views not just wrong but offensive is quite tricky. But this was a movement of Catholics who had persuaded members of evangelical churches that believed the Pope was the literal Antichrist to lock themselves to abortion clinic doors together.

A fundamental tenet of our meetings was that we needed to agree on as few things as possible; the more things we added to our list of points of agreement, the more likely the coalition was to fray, to collapse into arguments. Nearly every annual general meeting featured Canadians for Direct Democracy, a junior member of our coalition, attempting to get us to expand our mandate to include support for easier-to-use initiative legislation, binding referenda and other democratic reforms. Every time, CDD was voted down.

Because we learned from our Christian comrades that the strength of a coalition comes from its size and breadth and that every additional demand a coalition makes is one that makes is narrower, smaller and weaker, no matter how apparently small or intuitive.

We also learned how to have political conversations in which we could share stories about highly charged, highly polarizing political experiences by changing the kind of story they were. Stories of logging road and abortion clinic blockades ceased being stories about old growth forests and the human soul; they became stories about being the kind of person who does this sort of thing, the run-ins one has had with the courts and police. Kathleen and I shared stories about what it was like to be a beleaguered party leader in a small organization full of eccentrics and fanatics.

In this way, what we agreed on stayed small but what we could talk about was as much as any group of people thrown together possibly could. I especially savour the memory of one night when we went for drinks after staging our annual general meeting. Every year, we would re-elect Troy president and, as he was a member of the Taxpayer movement, we always counter-balanced this by having Charles, the Marxist-Leninist, give his nominating speech. That year we had got into quite a personal tussle with CDD, whose representatives had shouted “the president is a dictator! The president is a dictator!”

Troy was commiserating with us afterwards and said, “It’s like they think I’m some kind of Stalinist,” to which Charles replied, “I’m a big fan of yours Troy. I’ve got your back. But I consider Joseph Stalin to be just about the greatest human being who ever lived and I’ll be damned if you’re going to say another word against him.” We all laughed very hard after that, led by the CHP’s Heather Stillwell, if memory serves.

Another big thing I learned from the anti-abortion movement is that you can turn a media blackout into a kind of internal publicity and morale boost. A generation before one could share crowd photos and selfies on social media and be seen by thousands of eyes, North America’s anti-abortion movement trudged through a worse media blackout than any I have ever faced—and I sure have faced a couple.

In Canada, the mainstream media would cover nomination contests in the Liberals and Tories where anti-abortion candidates for office would fight it out at nomination meetings or, as the 90s wore on, suddenly find their nomination bids vetoed by the party leader. But this did not extend to other demonstrations of the sheer size of the mobilized anti-abortion movement. When abortion clinics were blockaded, mainstream media would assiduously ignore the confrontation, no matter the turnout, even when those blockades led to multiple arrests.

But the most extreme moment of the blackout would occur annually on “Life Chain” day in which anti-abortion protesters would link hands and form into incredible multi-block chains of as many as five thousand human beings at a single location. I even asked Kevin Evans, then-anchor of CBC British Columbia’s six o’clock news about this and he confirmed that not covering the Life Chain was a matter of shared policy among all major broadcasters.

Imagine Extinction Rebellion going years or even decades without a single word of their bridge and road blockages hitting the mainstream media!

But what I found was that the week after the Life Chain was the week anti-abortion activists were most serene. Rather than feeling cheated by the lack of coverage, there was a sense of purity, of power that came from being so intentionally and obviously ignored. The Life Chain imbued a sense of confidence, the sense that their adversaries had run out of ideas for stopping them but the chain was lengthening anyway, that the power they wielded was growing and nobody co-owned it; it was all theirs.

And the very absence of coverage, the media’s implicit denial of the movement’s momentum served as proof of the real momentum it genuinely possessed.

A third important feature that merits rehearsal is perhaps the most surprising to outsiders: standing behind female leaders and listening to women. Kathleen had risen to prominence as the last president of the Social Credit Ladies’ Auxiliary, succeeding its long-time head, Hope Wotherspoon, who had ascended to the presidency of the whole party. Social Credit was the last of BC’s political parties to hold separate (sometimes concurrent) women’s conventions. And as any man who has tried to interrupt an assertive Mormon woman knows, the best place to build strong leadership skills for women is in single-sex spaces.

Not only did the churches from which anti-abortionists hailed contain and defend single-sex spaces and single-sex leadership positions, the province’s natural governing party had refused to abandon the separate spheres model until the late 1980s. This meant that there were female leaders trained, tested and promoted in female-only spaces who could meet any room she entered authoritatively and command that space. Phyllis Schaffly was not an outlier; she was a type within the Christian Right, a woman who had learned to control a room, unmediated by male power.

Given that the first and most powerful interfaith organizations in Anglo America, all the way back to the WCTU, were female-led, there was an additional expectation that conditioned this organizing. It was expected that single-faith gatherings were clergy-led and therefore male led; but by the same token, it was expected that interfaith groups and other coalitions would be more appropriately led by women. And women seemed logically qualified because if there is one gender cliché of which progressives and conservatives equally partake it is the idea of the woman as social bridge-builder, peacemaker and fence-mender.

The last observation I will make is that anti-abortion activists shared something that used to be more universal among climate activists like me: a never-ending sense of urgency, the sense that lives were being lost, people were dying every day they did not win.

That kind of profound urgency actually keeps activists from working themselves to the point of burnout, because of the knowledge that one needs to be able to keep struggling every day, that one cannot give up until victory has been achieved.

But that sense of desperation also breeds a cold political calculation, one that is willing, on the large scale, to ride on the backs of the corrupt and godless Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, if that’s the only way to get to the Supreme Court. That desperation was enacted on the small scale every day, at the grassroots level.

Kathleen Toth and I didn’t just find a way to be joyful comrades because we were friendly people who love the other humans; we did so because we were desperate, so desperate as to not let some ethos of personal purity get in the way of making the deals we had to, to save the lives we understood ourselves to be trying to save.

If we really care about the issues that animate us, it behooves us to ask: (1) is our coalition broad enough, permissive enough? (2) can we build our power and momentum without needing others to recognize it? (3) do we have a pipeline that is producing powerful female leaders? and (4) if we are as desperate as we say, are we really doing all we can?

BC Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite | May 9, 2022

The Fall and Rise of America’s Original “White Trash,” Part IV of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

With the fall of Jim Crow and the rise of neoliberal “free trade,” labour mobility, investor rights and austerity programs, there was a shift in the language that Anglo Americans used to talk about race and class. And it was one with which I had a pretty direct, visceral experience. At the beginning of the 1980s, based on the “one drop rule,” I was a black kid “passing” for white. By the end of the 1990s, I was a white man.

Not all acts of passing were understood to deceptive or intentional. Lots of people who, according to the law and the census, were black effortlessly passed in Anglo American society. Back then new friends, employers and political associates were necessarily more curious about one’s family, home town, etc.; those ubiquitous wallet photos of the late Cold War were not just commemorative; they were defensive. They were props that did not just burnish one’s reputation as a family man or devoted wife but as a full member of white America.

As I has said elsewhere, the reason race remains with us is that it is dynamic and adaptive, always changing in ways that maintain its relevance and apparent descriptive power in our interactions.

The 1980s and 1990s were a time of fundamental economic and social transformation the world over, with the rise of neoliberalism and the ideological hegemony it exerted over all political formations, from Margaret Thatcher’s Tories to Tony Blair’s “New” Labour to Boris Yeltsin and other former East Bloc commissars turned neoliberal “reformers.”

An important aspect of this a phenomenon known as the “Rust Belt.” The fact is that industrial employment in both the manufacturing semi-periphery comprising places like Michigan and Ohio, and in the extractive periphery comprising places like Chile and British Columbia, high wage manufacturing employment had been in decline even in the 1960s and 1970s. But the brunt of these job losses had been experienced by non-white workers, Indigenous bush workers in BC, mestizo miners in Chile’s Atacama Desert and black industrial workers in the American heartland.

The massive increases in poverty and unemployment among Indigenous and black workers had been blamed on supposedly too-generous welfare programs of the Great Society, the government housing projects, lack of “role models” for racialized male youth, the counterculture and, of course, drugs. But really it was just a mass of job losses due to off-shoring, deindustrialization and mechanization being experienced first by the least white workers. White workers disproportionately kept some of the last remaining high-wage, unionized, industrial jobs while non-whites were over-represented in early layoffs.

However, as Anglo American society moved through the second half of the 80s and into the 90s, there was simply no way to confine the masses of industrial layoffs to, amplified by the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1988 and NAFTA in 1993, to non-whites, who had been pushed out of most recent industrial work already.

Worse yet, while the layoffs of the 1970s and early 80s had taken place in the context of an expanding welfare state, as the 1980s layoffs wore on, they took place in the context of a contracting one. There was no massive increase government housing; instead, governments were selling off the housing they had built for the poor. There was no increase in welfare; instead, governments began rolling-out new income austerity programs that prohibited people from receiving government benefits after a fixed period, even if they had no alternative income source.

It is in this context that the term “white trash” took on a more expansive meaning, seeming to wholly blot out its previous one. While it is true that many of the poorest white industrial workers in the American Midwest and Southern Ontario had, just like their former black co-workers, migrated from the former Confederate States of America in the early twentieth century, the new primary usage of the term “white trash” made no distinction among the white working class people for whom the layoff notices finally came.

Beginning in the 1990s, “white trash” took on the definition it has largely retained up to the present day. It referred to working class white people clearly bearing the stigmata of poverty, worn clothes, residence in a manufactured home, unemployment, dependence on government assistance and the afflictions that we often problematically associate with these things, depression, poor nutrition, addiction and family breakdown.

Charismatic religious movements that are especially appealing to those in poverty also became part of the stereotype. Andrew Chestnut’s work on this subject is very important, showing that subscription to movements that believe strongly in faith healing and other unscientific medical interventions is concentrated among those who lack access to medical services due to poverty or remoteness. Following Chestnut’s line of reasoning, we can also see an interest in school vouchers and charter schools is likely to be concentrated among those who lack the financial resources of those who enroll their children in private schooling but wish to deliver things private not public schools are designed to deliver.

As we presided over massive increases in working class unemployment, rapid declines in wages, as men were forced out of industrial work, and the concurrent evisceration of state programs designed to provide support under those circumstances, we began to build our contemporary “they had it coming” narrative.

The white working class had it coming, the story goes, because they voted for the wrong people, an absurd assertion given that austerity and off-shoring were enacted by every political party, irrespective of its position on the political spectrum. We added to that a lack of commitment to education and self-improvement, even as postsecondary tuition fees and other costs massively increased.

Furthermore, as class analysis came to be rejected by formerly socialist and social democratic parties and came to be replaced by “intersectionality” and other theories of oppression that deny the importance of class, a new theories of the virtuous and unvirtuous poor began to develop, whose full elaboration we see today in a pile of retconned nonsense called “critical race theory.”

If one ignores class but emphasizes the role of race and gender identity as the sole loci of discrimination and oppression, one can create a film negative of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” cliché. People with boutique sexual and gender identities and people of colour have an excuse, a justification, for poverty. But straight working class white people have no excuse. They are all, after all, awash in “white privilege.”

Journalists, commentators, analysts and comedians associated with the political left increasingly replaced the powerful and wealthy with rural, working class white people as the butt of their jokes. And the term “white,” whether modifying “trash,” or, more politely and increasingly frequently, “working class,” exculpated these individuals from accusations of “punching down.” The white working class were not the largest chunk of an oppressed working class but were, instead, comfortable people who had squandered their “white privilege.”

This reached a crescendo with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Not only had Trump the temerity to focus his message on America’s white trash, he praised key aspects of their culture, with its do-it-yourself-ism, its autodidacticism, its religiosity, etc., despite the supposedly self-evident backwardness of these things.

More tellingly, when 58% of America’s white working class voted against Trump they were singled-out and blamed for his victory, whereas, middle- and high-income white women, a majority of whom had voted for him, were not. This condemnation and blame-shifting was perfected by Ta Nehisi Coates and the Afro-pessimist intellectual school which argued that, despite the fact that a majority had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, America’s white trash were so sexist, so racist that they never had and never would vote for a black person, a woman or anyone else their bigotry told them to hate.

While Coates produced an emotionally satisfying narrative of political impotence and futility that met the psychological needs of 2017, it applied too broad a brush to too large a portion of the population to have any practical utility. For reformers, it offered no solutions; for political careerists, it offered no opportunities.

And that is why, since 2017, we have been seeing a slow return to the prior definition of white trash. Sure, America’s white working class is all over the place; but there are especially benighted, especially stupid, especially backward, especially bad people who form the core of the Trump movement.

Actual scholars of the Trump movement, who use ethnographic data and analysis are pretty clear on who the core of the movement are: local notables: the guy who runs the monthly prime rib dinner for the Elks Lodge, the woman who runs the local scholarship fund for the Parent Advisory Council, the president of the local chamber of commerce or board of trade, the treasurer of the local hospital association. These individuals are the backbone of the Trump movement because their ability to function as mediators of financial aid in their communities is threatened by an expanded social safety net and by expanded bureaucracies mediating access to essential but privatized services like healthcare. But that is not who is depicted as the core of the movement.

The core of the Trump movement, the most backward, the most irredeemable came to be understood as the original white trash. From 2017-2020, progressive journalists and academics took innumerable trips to Appalachia and the Lower Mississippi to interview the poorest Trump voters they could find, to unlock the absurd liberal non-puzzle of people “voting against their interests.” (As though anyone anywhere votes based on a personal financial calculus derived from political parties’ election platforms!)

The key to the Trump movement, journalists and scholars decided, was not to be found in the Scranton Board of Trade or the Kenosha Rotary Club but in the most rural, most remote, most impoverished communities in its poorest states.

And it is at this point in this essay series that we begin to circle back. These communities have the distinction of retaining a greater portion of what I referred to in part two as “migrant worker culture,” a set of related subcultures that have been strongly influenced by Indigenous and Métis traditions, in addition to significantly over-representing Indigenous descent relative to the rest of America.

I am not arguing that all or even most people in rural Appalachia and the Lower Mississippi are of Indigenous descent but I am arguing that they are the most culturally and genetically influenced by Indigenous culture and history. And that this influence is an un-verbalized assumption the vast majority of Americans still carry with them. Suspicion as to the incomplete whiteness of these folks has never really gone away.

And what is worse is that this assumption interacts with a novel obsession of progressives, that of racial transparency. It is as though, when modifying “trash” or “working class,” in the progressive lexicon, the word “white” is actually an expression of suspicion, of incomplete belief in these people’s whiteness. Why that should suddenly matter to progressives, who, until recently, were the least racist Americans, and what the opposing set of ideas about whiteness to which this belief reacts are will be covered in Part Five, as we begin our journey back to the 2022 Trucker Convoy.

Race US Politics | fusangite | April 18, 2022

Origins and Legacy of Anglo America’s Racial System, Part III of Questions Raised by the Trucker Convoy

In 1985, Stephen Rogers, British Columbia’s Minister of Forests committed a major gaffe that made headlines in BC’s paper of record, the Vancouver Sun. Rogers, the new minister, had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Mississippi. The Mississippi forest industry was presenting a greater and greater competitive challenge to BC forest products as BC;’s industry increasingly focused on chewing-up the boreal forest into particleboard or making similarly low-grade shakes and shingles, as the more impressive old growth began to run out and industrial reprocessing became more important.

But what landed Rogers in hot water was not anything he said about wood quality, technology or labour. What got him in trouble was his characterization of the workers in the Mississippi industry, whom he dismissed as “poor white trash.” It may surprise readers to note that those who called for his resignation or demotion attacked him for racism.

While the term “white trash” came, for a time, to define a much larger class-based group during the 1990s, back in the 1980s it still retained its original meaning from the 1600s. And, to understand where Rogers was coming from and the racism he invoked, it is necessary to say a bit about the ethnogenesis of America’s “white trash.”

From its inception, Britain’s colonial project in the Americas was sharply divided along North-South lines. Its northern colonies were populated by two main groups of colonists: religiously-motivated settlers who saw New England as a region where they could build a Calvinist society and free young men in high-risk occupations like logging, whaling and fur-trading. It was a society based around yeoman farming of subsistence crops by free people on small parcels of land. Boston was a vibrant emerging city populated by free people.

The southern colonies were a very different place. Their elite planter class controlled vast swaths of rich valley bottom land, which they turned into vast monocrop plantations to ship out indigo, rice, tobacco, sugar and the other highly prized commodities of the Age of Sail. The labour force on these plantations was, like the loggers and whalers of New England, largely comprised of poor, young men of the working class. But whereas most of the labour in the North was free, the labour in the South was compelled, unfree. The majority of the young men were indentured servants who had been sentenced to seven-year terms of slavery, sold to the planters and shipped across the Atlantic against their will.

When these seven-year terms of indenture ended, the young men were dismissed from work, penniless, sometimes offered the chance to continue their work at poverty wages but just as often simply discharged with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

With the valley-bottom land now monopolized by enormous, well-armed plantations, the young men who stayed often looked to the upland regions, regions to which local Indigenous people had also retrenched. These Indigenous communities were often the targets of vigilantism by the now-free but largely penniless young men who had worked in the plantations. These young men did not simply seek to seize the well-cultivated and fenced Indigenous farms; they sought out Indigenous women who faced a blizzard of abduction and sexual violence from these invaders.

Sometimes Indigenous people responded with organized punitive expeditions that counter-raided, burned crops and threatened to destabilize the uneasy treaty peace the planters had bought with Indigenous nations. The local legislature, the Virginia House of Burgesses, which had steep property requirements, shared the view of the governor and imperial government back in London: the problem was the young men; they had been debtors, vagrants and thieves back in England and their criminality was irrepressible. And so, at least on paper, government sided against the young violent men and with Indigenous people.

The problem was that, at the level of enforcement, there was little interest in enacting the imperial grand design. Most of the men engaged in law enforcement in the colonies had more in common with the young, violent men—in fact, they were often young men of the same class, press-ganged into military service or otherwise forced.

A potential solution to the problem of these unruly young men was presented by the Dutch in 1620: African slaves, captured according to the doctrine of “just war” in the Congo Basin and West Africa. But this actually served to intensify the problem of the young men for the first half-century of slave-purchasing. That is because it was not clear whether it was appropriate to keep black slaves for more than seven years, whether they had a different status or different legal rights than the indentured servants. Consequently, the number of both enslaved and free Africans in the South grew steadily through the seventeenth century. And a degree of class solidarity began to develop between African and European workers, especially on the plantations that used a mixture of European and African, free and unfree labour.

In the upland regions, African and European men served together in the irregular and unofficial militias that prosecuted a slow-motion war against the region’s Indigenous inhabitants, gradually driving out the land’s original inhabitants… mostly. The fact was that, unlike the Puritan Fathers of New England, the planter elite of the South was neither particularly interested in or capable of luring young women across the Atlantic. This meant that, whether by rape, abduction or, sometimes, mutual consent, it was largely Indigenous women who bore the children of the first generation of uplanders.

So it was that, within a generation, the idea that the blood of the uplanders was impure, tainted with the blood of Indigenous people, something that only intensified as small amounts of African blood began entering this mix in the second and third generations of this system.

Then in 1676, the original system broke. Nathaniel Bacon, a planter aligned with the uplanders proposed to the Virginia House of Burgesses a large, state-supported punitive expedition against the Indigenous people to clear more land for European and African occupation. The proposal was defeated and Bacon rallied his own army from the irregular militias, which grew as European servants and African slaves left the valley-bottom plantations to join this popular army.

And the army’s ambitions grew as it became more diverse, more radical. Its members seized the prime land the planters were monopolizing and marched on the capital of Jamestown, driving out the governor and holding the legislators at gunpoint.

Over the next four years, the British Empire regrouped, easily retook Virginia from Bacon’s rebels and rolled out the new racial system that would come to define the American South and British Caribbean for centuries to come. White servitude in the mainland colonies was abolished and the full rights of Englishmen were bestowed on the uplanders. African slavery was, on the other hand, made not just lifelong but indefinitely heritable.

It is this system that used terms like “hillbilly” and “white trash” to refer to the descendants of the indentured servants. These terms were not simply geographic and class signifiers. They implied that these people’s work as tenant farmers, farmhands, overseers of slaves or owners of low-value, high-elevation, low-productivity land arose, at least in part, from their blood being tainted with that of non-white, especially Indigenous people.

Essentially, Rogers had used the American equivalent of the Canadian term “half-breed,” the pejorative not used for all mixed-race Canadians at that time but specifically for the Métis. Earlier that year, in fact, an engaged liberal at our family dinner table had proclaimed, “I’ve just seen the most wonderful documentary on Louis Riel. I will never utter the word ‘half-breed’ again; it’s such a bohunk word.” (“Bohunk” was the rough Canadian equivalent of Polack, our nation’s generic anti-Slavic pejorative.) Canadians were growing more sensitive to anti-Métis racism in the mid-80s and so Rogers’ remarks were especially ill-timed and ill-received.

But, as I have written elsewhere, the persistence of race arises from the dynamism and flexibility of racial systems; the colour line is powerful precisely because it is in constant motion. The changes to our racial systems in the following ten years were substantial and affected me personally.

In 1985, blackness in Anglo America was still governed by the “one drop rule”—individuals of African descent with skin and hair as light as mine were understood to be black people who were either intentionally or unintentionally “passing” for white. In 1985, the bullies at school understood me to be a black person who could and did “pass.” For most of the twentieth century, most Anglo Americans understood that white-looking people were not necessarily white and efforts were made to discern the “true” race of people who looked like me.

At that point in history, “white trash” referred to people who were not really white but were granted a limited degree of whiteness as long as they functioned as supporters and enforcers of white supremacy for the planter class and Southern elite, a role into which they had been pushed in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion and in which many continued up until the late twentieth century as foot soldiers of the Klan and White Citizens’ Leagues. Naturally, those who did not participate in these enactments of white supremacy were often hit with insults like “not white enough to be white trash” but nevertheless retained membership in the group.

For reasons that will be explored in the next part of this series, the racial categories into which these people and people like me were placed dramatically shifted in the decade following. But, more importantly for my purpose here, I believe that we have been returning to the original definition over the past decade and a half. “White trash” and its polite euphemism, “the white working class” have been inexorably tacking back to meaning not the American white proletariat as a whole but specifically the passing Métis of Anglo America’s internal periphery.

BC Politics Race US Politics | fusangite | March 31, 2022

“Does Todd Palin Exist?” and Other Questions Raised by the Ottawa Trucker Convoy – Part II

To understand the curious case of Todd Palin, it is necessary to understand that whereas all Indigenous people in North America have experienced and continue to experience a genocide, these experiences are variegated, diverse and regional in character. So, a few words on the historical experience of Alaskan Eskimos (yes, that is the term they use to describe themselves, as distinct from the Canadian Inuit and Inuvialuit who have rejected that term).

More than any other Indigenous group in the United States, the experience of Alaskan Natives was conditioned by a doctrine known as “termination,” the primary legal doctrine of the US and Mexican governments with respect to Indigenous peoples for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although proposed for Canada by Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau and Stephen Harper, the policy has never been enacted here. It entails the abolition of Indigenous governments and reserves and the privatization of reserve land.

In 1906, Alaska became the last jurisdiction in the US to enact termination. But unlike Mexico (1922) and the rest of the US (1934), termination was not repealed during the Interwar period. It would not be repealed until 1971. This means that for the majority of the twentieth century, Indigenous Alaskans were legally indistinguishable from the colonist neighbours.

Furthermore, its repeal was less comprehensive. Instead of restoring Indigenous polities as an order of government as the Roosevelt Administration had done in the contiguous US in 1934-36, it followed the Mexican path and converted Indigenous governments into corporations without significant law-making powers.

There are some important reasons for these substantial differences. First, unlike most US states, public land in Alaska is primarily owned by the state government and not by the federal government, meaning that, following statehood, the federal government lacked a significant base of public land from which to unilaterally compensate Indigenous groups that had lost their land. Second, and much more relevant, there has been a much greater degree of demographic parity between Indigenous people and settlers through much of Alaska’s history than there has been anywhere between the Arctic and the Yucatan. Not only were settlers less likely to move to Alaska than other regions of the US due to its climate and unsuitability for farming and other pre-industrial settler occupations but colonization of much of the area of Alaska took place after the development of vaccines, substantially reducing the impact of the virgin soil epidemics on Indigenous populations.

This meant that, given the pre-existing mixed Russian-Indigenous population and the phenotypic differences between Alaskan Natives and those further south and east, significant numbers of Indigenous people were able to engage in intermarriage and racial passing that were off the table or significantly more challenging in other parts of North America. In other words, termination produced successful political, social and economic outcomes for a far larger portion of the Indigenous population.

Also, we also must recognize that the Roosevelt government’s repentance of termination and re-creation of the Reservation system was not simply an altruistic move. A significant challenge to both capitalist labour discipline and American settler culture emerged from what scholars term “migrant worker culture” because the effects of termination converged with other social forces to produce what became the effective container of significant parts of Indigenous culture.

Indigenous people were an important part of migrant worker culture for a variety of reasons. First, for many Indigenous people, especially in Oklahoma (formerly Indian Territory), termination had produced dispossession and landlessness; those who had been involved in subsistence agriculture and other forms of settled rural life now found themselves not just without homes but without communities. Second, many Indigenous people had been settled in regions unsuitable for sustainable habitation and food production as part of the unfair treaties that created the original reservations. Third, many Indigenous people came from non- and semi-sedentary cultures that saw seasonal migration for work not as a new capitalist imposition but as consistent with an Indigenous past. Fourth, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Indigenous people especially on the Pacific Coast and the Great Basin had successfully and in large numbers incorporated themselves into American capitalism through migratory work in seasonal industries, such as fishing and cannery industries that had displaced fur trading as the basis of the Alaskan economy.

But these Indigenous people were joined in migrant work by increasing numbers of settlers with their own reasons for moving into more seasonal, short-term work. First of all, the putative boom of the 1920s was sustained in large measure by two things: economic stimulus financed by high-interest consumer borrowing that increased aggregate demand and economic deregulation and abandonment of anti-trust and other prosecutions of corporate collusion and malfeasance. This meant that wages did not keep up with growth; working conditions degraded; employment security declined. As a result, an increasing number of Americans took to the road, fleeing debt and unemployment.

The devastation these policies would have caused anyway was exacerbated by the disastrous demobilization policies following the First World War that threw former soldiers into unemployment and often homelessness, while denying them sufficient health care for their grievous mental and physical injuries. Many former soldiers passed became part of the migrant worker community.

At the same time, strong social movements that had not only organized radical and marginalized most likely to be forced to move to stay in work lost strength as a result of Red Scare policies amplified by the government’s war powers to shut down dissent and socialist organizing, policies that were continued post-war to prevent America from facing the kind of revolutionary threat that had toppled the Russian government and come close to doing so in Germany.

The International Workers of the World (the Wobblies) and US Socialist Party lost members, votes and power. This did not just mean a loss of political influence and muscle on the picket line. It also meant a loss of cultural and social programs and mutual aid networks.

Finally, in 1926, the year the Socialist Party entered terminal decline due to the death of Eugene Debs, its long-time presidential candidate, many of the predominantly mestizo (mixed Indigenous and white) and Indigenous Mexican migrant workers who had been migrating between Mexico and the American Southwest found themselves trapped on the US side of the border year-round as immigration policy changed.

Taken together, this meant that there was a substantial growth in the number of migrant workers, that those workers looked to this new community not only as a source of sustenance and reciprocity but as a source of culture. And that this culture was strongly, and scholars argue, disproportionately influenced by the culture of Americans and Mexicans of Indigenous heritage.

The onset of the Great Depression only increased the number of migrant workers and this group presented a challenge to the American government in two important ways. First, the nigh-universal Western triumphalist, Social Darwinist idea of sedentary life being the bedrock of civilization and republican citizenship, that had been used to justify so much of the genocide, war and dispossession visited on Indigenous people was suggesting that American was literally de-civilizing. This fear was amplified by the fact that migrant worker culture was so heavily inflected by Indigenous culture. It was as though white people were literally being transformed into Indians as America looked on. Second, migrant worker culture constituted a threat to the American capitalist social contract because it was a form identity and community that class-based and cut across the racial divides that had been intentionally set up to prevent workers from uniting. What the organizing practices and high ideals of the Wobblies and Socialists had not been able to maintain in the lead-up to the war, cross-racial class solidarity, was now being created by the material conditions of the age.

Pulling Indigenous people out of the centre of the migrant worker culture and community was just one part of Roosevelt’s comprehensive New Deal to prevent the rise of revolutionary movements in the US.

Except in Alaska.

Not only was Alaska a backwater; its occupational mix was overwhelmingly migratory. And it was left alone, largely because the influence of migrant worker culture was not seen as either as threatening or as solvable as the culture of the Lower Forty-eight. And, consequently, the normative culture of Alaska has been much more influenced by migrant worker culture, strongly conditioned by Indigenous culture, since the beginnings of the cannery system following its purchase from Russia in the nineteenth century.

The many factors I have detailed above help to explain why only one in three Alaskans of Indigenous heritage chose to join the tribal corporations created in 1971; many accepted cash payouts for personal termination instead; others simply did not engage with the process at all.

In large measure, that is because Indigenous Alaskans generally, even those who joined in 1971, identify far more with Alaska and as Alaskans than Indigenous people of the contiguous US.

This might help to explain why the only 2008 Palin family election scandal associated with Todd Palin was his long-time membership in the Alaska Independence Party, the state’s separatist party. And he was certainly not the only Indigenous person in the state to believe that Alaskan sectional nationalism and not membership in an Indigenous polity was the best expression of his cultural and political aspirations. Because Alaskan Natives have more ownership of Alaskanness, more see being Alaskan as the way to express their distinctively less-sedentary, more wilderness-centred culture.

As we have seen in great Latin American leaders from Benito Juárez to Evo Morales, establishing a powerful stake in regional and national cultures and movements is a solid tactic for Indigenous people to achieve real cultural and material gains. And we might do well to think about how this kind of tactic has been in intermittent play within Canada since Confederation.

Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite | March 10, 2022

The Rise of the Canadian Porno Right: Making Sense of the Erin O’Toole “Poppers” Announcement

To some, Erin O’Toole’s “poppers” policy announcement this morning is just this side of a major political gaffe. Commentators are shaking their heads about how absurd and unserious the 2021 Canadian election’s campaign narrative has already become as the leader of her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition made a special appearance and announcement today about the need to legalize a grey market party drug popular among gay men.

The highest per-capital carbon emitter on earth is holding an election in the wake of an IPCC report essentially describing the probable end of human civilization and the extinction of most animal species in my lifetime and the campaign narrative on day three is dominated by a discussion of the sex drug amyl nitrate and its ilk.

But I want to argue that as absurd as the announcement and associates discourse are, the Tories’ poppers promise tells us something important about the dramatic shifts our politics are undergoing due to new debates about gender and sexuality.

So often, in contemporary politics, we tend to see novel political phenomena as a left-wing problem or a right-wing problem, especially here in Anglo America, land of the endless culture war. But the reality is that almost all phenomena we see at the social movement level are actually mirrored pretty closely on each side of the political spectrum.

Many people on the left see the split between trans rights activists and gender critical feminists as a scourge uniquely visited on their side of the political spectrum, paralyzing and splitting every organization the conflict touches. But in fact, the gender identity debate is, in many ways, shaping politics on the right as much or more. Take, for instance, this federal election.

In 2019, Canada had two right-wing populist parties, the mainstream Conservative Party of Canada and the upstart People’s Party of Canada. But despite the Conservatives losing the election, and the People’s Party scoring only 1% of the popular vote, less than two years later, there are two upstart parties, the People’s Party and the Maverick Party, each led by a former Conservative cabinet minister, Maxime Bernier and Jay Hill, respectively.

The People’s Party, which holds that biological sex cannot be changed women should be permitted to have single-sex spaces and single-sex organizations, has not merely held rallies opposing the current Gender Orthodoxy, it has reached out beyond traditional Christian Right allies and is actively courting gender critical feminists, even fielding feminist activist Karin Litzke in Vancouver East and actively reaching out to feminist leaders like Amy Hamm. Meanwhile, the Maverick Party proudly proclaims its support for the Orthodoxy in Article One of its constitution, which it highlights on its web site, recognizing “gender identity” as an unacceptable basis for discrimination, effectively foreclosing sex-based protections for women’s spaces.

We see this split in American conservatism too. Donald Trump’s first two Supreme Court appointees voted against each other in the first gender identity case to reach the court, with Neil Gorsuch on the gender identity side of the debate and Brett Kavanagh on the biological sex side.

Perceptive commentators in the United States have, for some time, been referring to this as an emerging split between what they have termed the Christian Right and the “Porno Right.” Indeed, Donald Trump’s selection of Mike Pence as Vice President can be seen as a direct strategic response to this emerging split.

While, until recently, the Christian Right utterly dominated the fiscal conservative, libertarian, isolationist and protectionist wings of the Republican Party, the victory of Trump and his allies in primaries over the past four years shows that it is this new alt-right approach to the politics of gender and sexuality that has presented the first true challenge to Christian Right ideological hegemony.

So, what is the Porno Right?

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While degenerate and pornographic patriarchs who treat their dinner guests to their private fantasies of sexual violence against their daughters, men like Donald Trump, are certainly the figureheads of the movement, they are not the primary constituency. The foot soldiers of the Porno Right are typically single or otherwise sexually unfulfilled natal males whose online world focuses on Reddit (the platform that banned de-transitioners and gender critical feminists for “hate” but continues to feature misogynistic porn in abundance, including an anal rape subreddit), 4Chan, 8Chan, Pornhub and its affiliates like XHamster.

In other words, the core of the Porno Right are Incels.

Incels are heterosexual natal males who believe that every heterosexual natal male deserves to have a sexually compliant female body awarded to them upon reaching sexual maturity and that some force is screwing up the rationing protocol, thereby causing an uneven distribution of those bodies and their hoarding by the undeserving. Some Incels focus their anger about this on wealthy, sexually successful males with more than one female sexual partner and inveigh against these men’s hoarding behaviour. Others focus their anger on the women from whom they want sex and who are withholding it from them for unfair reasons, maybe due to feminist propaganda, maybe due to being superficial about men’s appearances or caring too much about men’s wealth. Usually there is plenty of anger to go around.

Because Incels consume a great deal of pornography and often have very poor self-images, particular of their own bodies and finances (the things they think determine men’s attractiveness to straight women), many are autogynephiles i.e. men whose autoerotic activity is based on imagining themselves as women engaged in same-sex interaction. While autogynephile men have, for the past decade, been a key target of trans activists and the pharmaceutical industry in marketing gender transition as the solution to their woes, it must be understood that, even today, the vast, vast majority of autogynephile Incels have not undergone and do not intend to undergo any gender confirmation procedures. But this majority nevertheless identifies with the politics of gender espoused by its vanguard minority with respect to the unimportance and/or nonexistence of biological sex as a category.

Now, back to the election. Today, Erin O’Toole surprised and confused many by introducing the legalization of amyl nitrate and other “poppers” in the Canadian election. Poppers became known as a gay party drug in the 1980s and, until the past decade, was primarily associated with the gay club scene and online casual sex through applications like Grindr.

But in the past decade, the use of poppers has increasingly become associated with autogynephile Incels, used as an aid in autoerotic activity. Pull up Pornhub and any of their affiliates and search for “poppers” (if you dare) and you will find that autogynephile poppers content vastly outstrips gay content on most of these sites.

So, why would O’Toole get his health critic Michelle Rempel to raise the legalization of poppers in correspondence with the Minister of Health last week and follow up with a headline-grabbing poppers legalization announcement today?

Let me assure you: he is not going after the small overwhelmingly urban, overwhelmingly culturally liberal constituency of gay men who like to party. That’s just his cover. O’Toole is making his first intentional, programmatic, planned play for the Porno Right, the notoriously hard-to-poll, low-turnout constituency that turned out massively for Donald Trump and pushed him over the top in 2016.

Poppers safety is also a bigger issue for Incels than members of the gay party scene because, in the rare event that they cause cardiac events, solitary users are much more likely to suffer serious harm or death than social users. And you can bet that O’Toole is turning heads in online communities of frequent porn consumers as this announcement spreads to the darkest corner of the web.

Now I am all for legalizing poppers. They are not the drug for me but they shouldn’t be a grey market item like they are now.

But let us recognize that O’Toole’s announcement has very little to do with the health of gay men or even that of career masturbators. But it has everything to do with the Porno Right coming of age as a political constituency that, like its adversaries in the Christian Right, must mostly be courted through coded communication and dog-whistles, dog-whistles that arrived in Canadian politics this morning in Ottawa.

Canadian Politics Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite | August 19, 2021

The Modern Donatist Crisis: What the Fourth Century Roman Empire Can Tell Us About Today’s Left

A lot of what I write on this blog these days falls into the “comparative empire” school of writing. I make extended arguments by comparing some aspect of one or more pre-modern empires to a modern empire. I am going to do the same here but my argument is going to be less state-centred; the Roman state following the Crisis of the Third Century certainly comes into the story but it does not sit at the centre. Instead, a movement or set thereof within the empire is the centre of the comparison; and that movement is Christianity.

The Christianity that existed by the end of Constantine the Great’s imperial reign in 337 was radically different than the Christianity that existed a generation previously when Diocletian’s Great Persecution began in 302. The massive changes that produced the martial, state-sponsored heresy-policing Orthodox Catholic Church that Christianity had become by 337 were not just accepted. They were contested and vigorously resisted.

This resistance came to be known as the Donatist Controversy. And I want to argue that the heterogeneous set of social movements and ideologies known as “the Left” is very much like the similarly heterogeneous, diverse Christian movement of the late third century. And that we have been plunged, since the 1990s, into our own Donatist Controversy.

The Diversity of Christianity in the Roman World

Christianity, from its inception, was riven with factionalism, as confirmed by the earliest scriptures in the New Testament. The Pauline epistles, dated to about 51 CE, are a record of disputes within the intentional communities founded by Paul as well as a larger dispute between Paul and Peter over questions of jurisdiction, revenue and compliance with Levitical ordinances. While we can see that, by the last decades of the first century, a proto-Catholic movement seeking to unify the factions had already appeared and attempted to smooth-over differences with its publication of Luke-Acts, the movement’s existence already attested to the belief on the part of many Christians that their movement was too factionalized and divided.

While it is difficult to assess the relative sizes of the different movements within Christianity, we can see that by the third century, early church historians like Irenaeus were already making long lists of all the different sects and factions that claimed the mantle of Christianity.

At the same time, members of these disparate factions had a lot in common and necessarily cooperated to advance or defend their shared interests.

Some, more moderate Christians, were little different than other residents of the Roman Empire. They served in the military; they owned slaves; they believed in Greek theories of physics; they paid taxes; they didn’t stand out at the baths because they were uncircumcised; they awaited resurrection at some distant future date when Jesus would return and take them up into the heavens.

Other Christians avoided all military service and other government jobs; they didn’t use slave labour; they adopted obscure Judean and Samaritan theories of physics; they dodged taxes; they avoided public baths or were received with scorn there because they were circumcised; they lived in hope that, any day now, Jesus would return and upend the socioeconomic order and declare the permanent Jubilee.

And there existed a wide range of Christian movements and sects between these two poles.

For more mainstream Christians, Christianity was about staying aloof from the ritual and political life of the empire so as to better sock money away for things like their kids’ education or invest in Christian burial societies that were much like modern life insurance companies, designed to take care of funerary and burial arrangements. There was a weekly Lord’s supper and they kept a low profile around the festivities for other gods because theirs was a jealous one.

And the Roman state wasn’t so concerned about them anyway. Since the reign of Trajan, the Empire had conducted few persecutions and generally adhered to a kind of “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy that Pliny the Younger, as a regional governor, had hammered-out in his correspondence with Trajan early in the second century.

For less mainstream Christians, life was that of a drop-out, living in an intentional community composed of other radical Christians, at the margins of legality, outside of the social mainstream. Christianity was the centre of life, political, social, intellectual, etc. And the Empire was not irrelevant because it was tainted with devotion to pagan gods; it was a force for evil that Jesus would smash upon his return in glory.

When Diocletian’s great persecution began, regional governors and junior emperors were told that all Christians, even the most moderate, would be subject to state oversight and punishment. Suspected Christians were rounded-up and ordered, at sword point, to make sacrifices to Roman gods like Saturn and Jupiter.

And many, many did.

Those who did not were sometimes imprisoned, sometimes tortured and occasionally executed. The thinking is that out of approximately four million Christians, comprising 10% of the Roman population, only 0.1% were actually killed in the persecutions. But the number of Christians the persecutions touched was enormous.

Obviously, these persecutions helped to rally moderate Christians, especially those in the regular army, and Germanic barbarian Christians who populated the irregular units of foederati, on which the Empire had come to depend, to back the heterodox Constantine, who came from a Christian family, in his bid to succeed Diocletian.

But nearly a decade elapsed between the start of the persecution and the legalization of Christianity following Constantine’s seizure of power. And during that decade not only did many ordinary Christians recant their religion and sacrifice to pagan gods, so did many of the highest-ranking ecclesiastical officials, all the way up to bishops.

The Council of Nicea, Worst Corporate Retreat Ever

Following the persecution, two closely linked processes began to unfold that would result in the radical remaking of the Christian oecumene within the Roman Empire.

First, there was the state-led process initiated by Constantine, that sought to establish a doctrinal consensus and create a single normative, universal Christianity throughout the empire. As the process dragged on, the state became increasingly involved and increasingly coercive in its efforts to create a uniform, universal Christianity that would put the disputes that divided Christians behind them.

This process ultimately culminated in the Council of Nicea in 325, arguably the worst corporate retreat of all time, in which approximately three hundred bishops met for six straight months to hammer-out a single statement that was supposed to settle the major disputes in something akin to a modern “vision statement.” The meeting was so terrible that Saint Nicholas enters the historical record here as the guy who punched Arius, the Cyrenian presbyter and leader of the Arian movement, in the face.

Constantine chaired the meeting and would vacillate among different bishops’ positions, at one point requiring bishop Athanasius to flee into hiding in the Egyptian desert to avoid an imperial order to arrest him for heresy. In this way, participants in the council were acutely aware of the violent, coercive force of the state as a factor in their decision making.

In the narrative of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, the meeting was about resolving a dispute between the soon-to-be Orthodox faction, led by Athanasius of Alexandria and the Arian faction led by Arius of Cyrene. And the story mainstream Christians tell themselves is that it was a dispute about the relationship among, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Was there a moment that God existed and Jesus did not? Was Jesus God or God’s son? These sorts of questions.

The Donatist Crisis

In what is often considered a parallel process rather than a closely linked one, a conflict began within Christianity that, like the debate between Athanasius and Arius, was centred on North Africa. In this case, it was between those who had held firm during the persecution and those who recanted. Were those who recanted able to administer the eucharist still? Perform baptisms? What about those who had been baptized by those who later recanted? Would those baptisms still count?

Donatus, the bishop leading those who did not break under threats or torture, argued that those who had not kept faith were not and may never have been true priests able to administer the sacraments.

We typically date the Donatist Controversy to 312-21 and Nicea to 325 but, if we stop looking at these as doctrinal disputes and see them as disputes about political power, their linkages become obvious and inextricable.

From the beginning, those who had submitted to the power of the Roman state saw the legalization and imperial patronage of Christianity as an opportunity to fuse with the state and come to co-own the very system Christianity originally opposed. But not only were they opportunistic, they resented those who had held firm to their convictions and paid a material price for doing so. While they were enthusiastic about dead martyrs and organized festivals to commemorate their sacrifice, it was easy to side with the dead because the dead cannot speak for themselves. They cannot contest the power or narrative of those commemorating them.

The living martyrs were the problem. Even those who were not Donatists were, nevertheless, an implied criticism. Their very existence, especially those bearing the marks of torture, offered a criticism of those who had apostasized, just by being alive and walking around.

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For this reason, it became increasingly important that the collaborators with aspirations to state power have their own alternative set of criteria for true faith, true Christianity. The theory they settled upon was that the power of salvation and efficacy of religious rituals did not inhere in the personal holiness of the person administering them. Rather, it inhered in the specific word sequences and formulas used in religious rituals.

The idea was that the power lived in specific sequences of words canonized as orthodox. There was already the Lord’s Prayer. But the problem was that the Lord’s Prayer made sense. It could be mistaken for non-ritual communication, as a plea for physical sustenance and forgiveness from a benevolent god.

A set of words, if it means something clear and everyone in the community generally agrees with the meaning, is a pretty lousy boundary maintenance tool or internal loyalty test. If you want to push people out who are so committed to forthrightness, directness, truth-telling that they get themselves arrested, incarcerated and tortured, because they refuse to say something false or disloyal, then you need to craft language intrinsically offensive to that sort of person.

Of course, language was not the first place the emerging alliance between the state and Christian “moderates” went. First, there was material patronage. The churches of the soon-to-be Orthodox were repaired with government money; jobs, monopolies, contracts became plentiful for these more flexible Christians. Meanwhile the Donatists continued to meet in damaged and ruined churches and struggle financially as pagans and moderate Christians formed a united from in denying Donatists financial opportunities and privileges.

But language was ultimately where it went. While the intent of past actors is never available to us and we can only guess at how much the results of the Council of Nicea were a genuine effort to build consensus with a formerly fractious social movement, only those steeped in Christian ritual and doctrine can see the Nicene Creed as anything other that word salad. By “word salad,” I mean a set of words that, on a superficial first glance, appear to mean something specific and precise but are actually nonsensical and corrosive of any adjacent meaning:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.

“Father” and “begotten” in close proximity seem like they are part of some sort of idea about the relationship between a father and his offspring. But what happens to the meaning of “begotten” if “eternally” modifies it? There is “one god,” the father and “one lord,” Jesus Christ. But he is also “God from true God.” So, are there two gods or one? Of course, there are no real answers to these questions because, for word salad to be successful word salad, it must sound like it means something but contain not just an absence of meaning but a negative meaning, a force of intellectual disruption that beats meaning out of adjacent words.

The Nicene Creed was just the highest-profile piece of word salad that the Church, in collaboration with the state, introduced in the fourth century because these formulas were more effective, I would argue, than patronage, threats or force. After all, the Donatists had already survived those things.

Word salad, on the other hand, is a well-known tactic in domestic abuse because, unlike any other class of language, agreement with it is necessarily coerced. Because word salad does not and cannot mean anything, no person will express agreement with it of their own volition; some form of external fear, pressure or threat is what compels verbal accord with and repetition of word salad. Therefore, the repetition of, or expression of agreement with, the nonsense cannot be anything but an expression of submission. One cannot voluntarily agree with it because there is nothing to agree with.

And so, the Nicene Creed became one of a set of tools of the newly fused Orthodox Christian Church and Roman state. These tools did not just help to push Donatists but the kind of person who would become a Donatist, a person resistant to authority, a person who so abhorred dishonesty that they would pay a price to tell the truth as they saw it. Furthermore, by making the saving power of the Church inherent in nonsensical sequences of words, one could effectively select a future leadership class by drawing from those who, as abused, abuser or both, were already familiar with these thought-terminating discourses of veiled intimidation.

The Third Way as Diocletian’s Persecution

I want to suggest that, while no means identical, there are many important parallels between this period in Roman history from 302-337 and our present moment.

In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, every left, socialist and social democratic party enacted policies of austerity, privatization, investor rights, trade liberalization, labour mobility, etc. Having spoken to some folks who were part of these governments, there is no doubt that they truly believed that there was no alternative. And Standard and Poors and the other bond-rating agencies of the world teamed-up with the World Bank and its International Monetary Fund to punish any government that did not comply with punitive credit downgrades and coercive “structural adjustment” programs.

But there were those who could not abide these things and burned their party cards, resigned their party memberships or parliamentary seats, took to the streets with the anti-globalization movement or even took up arms against neoliberalism like the Zapatistas.

For a while it seemed that socialist, social democratic and other left parties of the world were heading for extinction. But then something strange happened. As I have written elsewhere, the Third Way movement of liberal, socialist and social democratic that incorporated free trade, contracting out, austerity, privatization, investor rights and seamless labour mobility did not die out.

The first reason for their survival was that there were some greasy, shitty jobs that parties of the right struggled to get done when opposed by mobilized citizens. Strikes, rallies, blockades and other forms of direct action could slow or demoralize a conservative government. Furthermore, elections make governments fearful of angering a majority of the population. Capital soon found that Third Way governments could grease the wheels for radical reforms governments run by their friends could not.

This was, of course, epitomized in the coalition between the NDP-Green government of John Horgan and Andrew Weaver, which was able to triple fossil fuel subsidies in just three years, something the previous right-wing governments had been unable to do in sixteen consecutive years in office. That’s because Third Way governments can demobilize lefties and environmentalists by claiming to be their comrades and buying off those needing to be bought off.

The second reason, more important in this comparison, is the way Third Way contracting-out practices function. Contracting-out is a practice whereby a government reduces the costs of providing a service by laying off the government employees who are providing it and hiring a private company to do the job instead. The private company is able to do this and make a profit by reducing wages for the work, which is easy, as the workers providing it are no longer direct employees of the government.

Third Way governments are more creative and cost-effective in much of their contracting-out because they contract charities and other non-profits to take on government work. Frontline workers in the non-profit and charitable sectors are especially reluctant to seek higher wages because they are often altruistically motivated to do the work they do and because they can see that money spent on their wages is being taken from some other area of charitable endeavour. Guilt is a powerful force in keeping wages down in the charitable sector. Furthermore, many non-profit workers labour shoulder-to-shoulder with volunteers who are being paid nothing for doing the same or similar work.

While wages are driven down in such arrangements, they tend to rise dramatically for those in charitable and non-profit management. Their organizations grow; their budgets grow; and so do their salaries and status. Over the past generation, the high-level manager class has expanded to include thousands of non-profit executive directors and management consultants and become seamless with senior civil servants, MBAs in the corporate sector, lobbyists and, as Lenin termed them, “the labour aristocracy.”

We often use the term “Astroturf” to talk about non-profit organizations that appear to be grassroots but have actually been created by a wealthy individual or consortium thereof. But I want to suggest that there is a kind of Astroturfing of pre-existing organizations that the arrival of more government money caused. The leadership of non-profit organizations came to be increasingly selected from above, based on who can redirect state patronage towards the groups rather than democratically from below.

The putative leaders of our social movements are increasingly those either patronized by the state or by wealthy individuals. And they are filling our organizations with people who resemble themselves, ambitious ladder-climbers eager to burnish their resumes with time in the non-profit sector, mainstream people who see social movement groups the way their grandparents would have seen fraternal organizations like the Rotarians or mainline churches like the Presbyterians.

We Are the Donatists

The problem is us. We stupidly think that local environmental, feminist, anti-poverty, anti-racism, etc. groups are our groups. We think that those of us who lost jobs, influence, power during 1990s austerity but held firm to our principles are the true foundation, the backbone of social movements and left-wing political parties. We stupidly think that the kids joining the local environmental group are there to get a criminal record for being arrested on a logging road when, in fact, they are there in the expectation that they will do some community service in exchange for a flattering line on their CV.

We are the Donatists, my friends. Our standing has declined as governments have lavished patronage on our rivals in civil society; theirs has risen.

We are today’s Donatists because those who vote austerity and climate arson through our legislatures, and those who campaign for them, are not satisfied with the wealth and prestige their capitulation has brought them. They are today’s version of Constantine’s moderate bishops. And they hate us. Because, like the Donatists, we are an implied criticism of them just by getting out of bed in the morning.

We are today’s Donatists because dead martyrs like Ginger Goodwin are memorialized, and praised to the skies, while surviving martyrs like Svend Robinson are being airbrushed out of our past, targets of a concerted campaign of at best, Forgetting and, at worst, Damnatio Memoriae.

Like Christianity 1800 years ago, “the Left,” has become, in a little more than a generation, a captured political formation hellbent on weeding out the vibrant discourse, diversity of opinion and strength of character on which it once relied to survive. It has turned against these virtues and is now, consequently, the enemy.

And so, it should not surprise us that we are being tested, with increasing frequency, by word salad being placed before us as one loyalty oath after another. “Sex work is work,” is just one of the thought-terminating clichés vying for the status of becoming our modern Nicene Creed.

Painful as it must have been for true Christians in the fourth century, we have to acknowledge that the institutions in which we grew up fighting for peace, socialism, feminism and planetary survival have, seemingly overnight, been captured by the very forces we oppose and are now being turned on us.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite | August 9, 2021

American Caliphate II: The Caliphization of the American Presidency

Following my last piece, American Caliphate I, I am once again returning to the ways that government, religion, culture and class interacted in the various Muslim caliphates that existed from the seventh through twentieth centuries and how these interactions are similar to recent American history. In this second exploration, I am going to be emphasizing the ways in which the post-Reagan Republican Party has functioned like the government of a caliphate and not like an Enlightenment-era secular political party.

These pieces are being prepared as companion reading for my up coming course, The Holy American Empire, offered by Los Altos Institute starting in May of 2021

The Caliph in Sunni Islam

Following the original Ummayad and Rashidun Caliphates, the predominant Muslim caliphates, the Abassid and Ottoman, treated Sunni rather than Shi’a Islam as the normative religion of their state, even if not the sole or even always the official religion. While there exist many what Christians might call denominations of Islam, Druze, Alawite, Sufi, Ismaili, etc. most of the world’s Muslims fall into two groups, Sunni and Shi’ite.

While there are many important doctrinal and historical differences between these two branches, differences relevant to our discussion here are their institutional differences, i.e. the organizational structures of these faith communities.

Shi’ite Islam is characterized by a pyramidal organization with ranks like Allamah and Ayatollah for clergy hierarchically above other Imams. We might compare it to Christian episcopal structures we associate with Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism and Orthodox Christianities where above a priest is a bishop and, above a bishop, a pope.

Sunni Islam is characterized by a flat organization of equal Imams with no ecclesiastical ranks above other ranks. We might compare it to Pentecostalism and the non-denominational movement in the United States and Latin America, a free religious marketplace where churches compete against one another for congregants. When Sunni Islam is functioning unrestricted by the state, the “call to prayer” is literally a competition to call folks within earshot to prayer by offering an attractive advertisement for the mosque in question.

Because of this lack of hierarchical authority, the role of the Caliph has traditionally been more important in Sunni societies. Although a Caliph attains his job by winning an essentially secular crown through some combination of dynastic inheritance and military support, the Caliphal model installs the head of the empire and its army as head of the various imams in his territory. While he might not be trained in doctrine, he nevertheless is head of the Sunni oecumene upon attaining the office of Caliph, in the way that pre-1453 Byzantine emperors and pre-1917 Russian Tsars were the chief churchmen of their respective empires.

Given the plurality of doctrine and competition for congregants, one might argue that one of the reasons we see Sunnis over-represented in the great caliphates of history is that Sunni Islam needs a caliph in order to make necessary doctrinal, liturgical and other changes in order to adapt and move with changing times, as all great world religions must. Without a caliph, the Sunni system will eventually break, either due to an inability to adapt and make new doctrines about new things, or due to the unrestrained centrifugal force of different Imams making different local doctrines sending the religion off in new and different directions, depending on local congregants. In this way, it should be understood that the institution of the caliph was not just important for Sunnis under the political authority of the current caliph but for those outside the state he controlled who nevertheless looked to him for leadership, a role formalized in law in 1001.

So, what does all this have to do with America, a nation purportedly founded on the separation of church and state?

2. America and Religious Freedom

First, let us begin by looking at what “separation of church and state” has traditionally meant. When the United States came into being as the first state in the world based on liberalism, the eighteenth century social movement we associate with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, it became a vital tool, an experimental ground, that liberal thinkers used to see how ideas of individualism, equality and limited government played out.

One of the things that was unclear to the founders of the US was the difference between a right accorded to a sub-collective, e.g. a state, a territory, a county, a town, a private club and one accorded to an individual. This was bound-up in the question of what rights could be operationalized at the level of the individual and what rights could only have meaningful force in the hands of a sub-collective. As Sarah Barringer Gordon has persuasively argued, it was not until the first election of the Republican Party to national government in 1860 that these tensions began to be resolved in a relatively clear and consistent way, due to America’s conflict not just with the Confederate States of America over slavery but with the Kingdom of Deseret (i.e. the Mormon Church) over polygamy.

3. The Structure of American Religion 1850-1975

Until the 1860s, the separation of church and state and guarantees of freedom of religion were understood to protect the rights of states, territories, counties and towns to select their religious affiliation. In nationalizing and elaborating on the social contract developed in Puritan Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the US guaranteed the right of the state of Maryland to be Catholic, of Massachusetts to be Congregationalist, etc.

But in the 1850s and 60s, its meaning inverted. It became the obligation of the US federal government to prevent states, territories, towns, etc. from imposing a single religion on their residents. Freedom of religion ceased to be seen as a right that could only be made operational through a collective to one that any individual could exercise in defiance of their neighbours’ belief. A law created to protect sub-collectives from federal government interference became a law that was used to protect individuals from the imposition of their neighbours’ religion on them through local government.

While the US had always been a free religious marketplace, this severing of religious institutions from governments forced otherwise minimally hierarchical religions to develop and maintain large representative bodies uniting people across the country by denomination. The forging of these stronger federations of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, etc. was contemporaneous with the intensification of sectionalism associated with the Civil War. It is in this period that we see the creation of powerful, regionally affiliated but technically national denominational organizations like the Missouri Synod Lutherans and the Southern Baptist Convention.

As readers can see, embedded in their very names are theories of centralized, deliberative decision-making. Conventions and synods are meetings, meetings where decisions about doctrine are made. While churches could technically opt out of these bodies, this was often disadvantageous, not just because of the loss of economies of scale in publishing, something central to the success of any nineteenth-century religious mass movement, but because, in an increasingly mobile, kinetic America, leavened by massive railroad subsidies, folks who moved for work liked to stay in the same denomination, not try out some new local flavour. This was especially important as many Christian denominations did not recognize the baptisms performed by other churches.

In this way, most American Christians were part of major national religious denominations for the next century and a bit. Annual and biannual synods and conventions would entail hundreds, often thousands, of ministers from a particular denominational grouping coming together to fashion doctrinal responses and changes to move with a changing society and changing needs of congregants.

These denominations were politically powerful and could and did swing elections by delivering congregants to the polls with a religiously-based voting agenda. After all, the constitution prohibited the institutional fusion of church and state, not the ideological fusion of religion and politics.

4. America: From Secular Republic to Caliphate

But during the 1960s, that began to change. Religious denominations we might call “liberal,” Quakers, Congregationalists, Methodists began suffering crippling declines in their congregations. Many people became “spiritual but not religious,” non-religious folks who had previously gone to church out of a sense of civic-mindedness stopped and even those continued to see themselves as members significantly reduced their church attendance, aside from special holidays and festivals. The expansion of both government and non-profit charity work gave a lot of new options to folks whose main payoff of attending church was helping out or bossing around people in need.

But conservative denominations also began suffering not long after the demographic tailspin of liberal Christianity began. Old school hellfire Baptist preachers had begun losing congregants, especially those in remote communities, to Sunday radio broadcasts by preachers skilled in using broadcast media, as far back as the 1930s. This was followed by the rise of the televangelists of the 1970s, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and their ilk.

The corrosive force represented by the holy men of radio and TV was not just one that permitted congregants to make their religious observances from home; it also steered people towards two relatively new and rapidly growing movements, Pentecostalism and non-denominationalism. These were religious movements lacking denominational structures and, in the case of the non-denominationalists, actively hostile to those structures. While these churches were independent from one another, organizationally, they had the following common characteristics: fundamentalism, avowed scriptural literalism, political conservatism, anti-communism and beliefs in Biblical pseudoscience. This pseudoscience took the main forms of (a) effacing modern knowledge about women’s reproductive systems in favour of supporting the distinctive Roman Catholic doctrine that any miscarriage of a zygote, embryo or foetus that can be blamed on a person is murder; and (b) young earth creationism, the idea that the earth is literally 6000 years old, that fossils can be created in less than ten years, that humans and dinosaurs cohabited and that evolution is a hoax.

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By the mid-1970s, there were efforts by the most powerful and popular televangelists to create denomination-like entities that could give these new conservative religious movements, that were growing at the expense of mainline conservative groupings like the Baptists. Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart offered an attempt at a Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God. Jerry Fallwell took a different path in creating non-denominational organizations of Pentecostals, non-denominationalists and others to carry out specific tasks, Liberty University for religiously-based postsecondary education and the Moral Majority for the purpose of engaging with electoral politics.

Thanks to the US primary system, organized political entryism can dramatically reshape national politics, which is what we witnessed, first with large numbers of these new conservatives registering to participate in the 1976 Democratic Party presidential primary to support the first Born Again Christian, Governor Jimmy Carter, to run for the presidency. They quickly soured on Carter as he came to be seen as soft on communism, supportive of an expanded federal government and guided by mainstream science on energy policy.

A far more appealing candidate was populist California governor Ronald Reagan, who had lost the Republican nomination in 1976 but was now heavily courting the Moral Majority and their allies. Republicans’ dog-whistle messaging had already been used to bring Southern white supremacists into the party’s expanding coalition. As chronicled by Fred Knelman in Reagan, God and the Bomb, this project now extended into the conflation of a first-strike nuclear war and US support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon with the fiery eschaton described in the Book of Revelation and the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party with the Antichrist. Opposition to abortion ceased to be a Catholic issue and was taken up by Reagan’s new conservative coalition too.

But a strange thing happened.

One might think that the Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson, Assemblies of God and Moral Majority would shoulder past the Southern Baptist Convention and Billy Graham, and others who had claimed to be leading God-fearing conservative voters, and become America’s answer to the Ayatollahs who had seized power in Iran the previous year.

But the opposite happened.

The new, increasingly theocratic America was not structured like a Shi’ite kingdom or republic. It began transforming into a caliphate. The authority of figures like Robertson, Fallwell and Swaggart receded, and in their place was Ronald Reagan, arguably America’s first caliph. Republican national conventions became not just a place to make public policy and nominate a candidate for the presidency. This quadrennial event has become the place where America’s religious conservatives, not just Pentecostals but conservative Baptists, Lutherans and others go to make doctrine. And this group has come to be known as “conservative evalgelicals.”

The Republican party’s policies and public pronouncements have become, for forty percent of Americans, the equivalent of hadiths, formal additions to Islamic doctrine, made by committees of Imams appointed by a Sunni caliph. In other words, just as Republican candidates are necessarily parasitic of these technically independent, autonomous congregations for votes in primary and general elections, the congregations are reciprocally dependent on the Republican Party and its leader to organize, systematize and pronounce on doctrine.

While God Bless America, was originally a piece of popular music composed by a secular Jew in 1918 in support of isolationism, the song, and, more importantly, the phrase, was adopted by conservative imperialists in the 1960s who saw America as an especially divinely-favoured and divinely-mandated imperial hegemon needed to confront the atheistic, Antichrist-led Soviet Union.

Presidents, beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had already been using the clause “God bless America,” in political rhetoric but whereas Richard Nixon mentioned God in just one in six speeches (16%) in his 1972 presidential campaign, eight years leader, Reagan mentioned God in nineteen in twenty (95%) of his stump speeches in 1980. And during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies, this clause increasingly took on the character of a caliphal benediction.

The president transformed from a first-among-equals supplicant, personally asking God to bless his country into a more clerical role. The president was acting as an intercessor between God and His chosen people, utilizing his privileged access to God to make a plea on behalf of the American people. In this way, the president transformed, for conservative evangelicals, into the head of American Christianity, a role similar to that of Constantine the Great and his successors, vicegerent of God on Earth.

5. The Elaboration of the Caliphate in the Twenty-first Century

Following the turn of the century, 9/11 and the beginning of the second Bush presidency, two additional shifts took place, one at the level of discourse, the other at the level of institution.

First, a new benediction came into being following the September 11^th terrorist attacks, “may God continue to bless America.” This amplification of the benediction now made it clear that God’s blessing was a contingent blessing, implying that a lack of blessing of the Democratic Party presidencies of the 1990s, and the social liberalism with which they were associated, could help to account for God’s unwillingness to protect the US from Osama Bin Laden. Now, the president was asking, pleading, negotiating with God for America to continue receiving His blessing, provided they behaved according to the moral order of the Bush Administration. In this way, the president’s role was that of a divinely, favoured intercessor, proximate, as medievals would say, to God’s right hand.

In this way, America’s caliphs have become keepers of America’s covenant with God, granted unique intercessory powers to plead on the nation’s behalf when it falters.

The other innovation of the Bush presidency was the expansion of school vouchers and other systems permitting the state funding of conservative evangelical religious schools, both of the fee-paying and non-fee-paying variety. The Bush era also these schools increasingly exempt from curricular demands that might get in the way of teaching young earth creationism and other kinds of conservative evangelical pseudoscience.

To this were added the “faith-based initiatives.” The Bush Administration argued that, contrary to earlier legal interpretations, the separation of church and state need not apply to the federal government partnering with and funding churches, provided the partnerships carried out secular activities. While the Blairite austerity of the Clinton-Gore years had entailed increasing partnerships with the secular non-profit sector to deliver things like school lunches and care for the disabled, Bush-era austerity, unique among the austerity programs of the Global North, included the delivery of an increasing number of services through parts of churches supposedly walled-off from their proselytizing arms.

In this way, the post-2001 US has come to resemble a caliphate, more and more, with the highest spiritual, religious, political and military office in the land fused in a single person when the Republican Party is in power. This caliph engages in increasing patronage of the nominally independent churches affiliated with the GOP. A mutual dependence now exists between conservative evangelical churches and the presidential candidate of the Republican Party; without the caliph, new doctrine cannot be made or imposed on diverse churches because no alternative mechanism to do this exists. The Southern Baptist Convention and Missouri Synod Lutherans are dying on the vine, their higher officials largely irrelevant in the platform/doctrine-making process, their individual ministers more likely to wield doctrinal power by becoming a delegate to a Republican national convention than any synod.

The extent of this transformation was impossible to gauge until the rise of Donald Trump and his decisive primary victory in 2016. Trump had not previously been a religiously observant man. He was a serial philanderer, divorcer and patron of prostitutes. He was ignorant of the Bible and of basic Christian theology. And he did not present himself as having undergone a conversion experience; he continued to use lewd and vulgar language and chose to feel-up his daughter on national television while accepting his party’s nomination.

Despite an inauspicious start and apparent constitutional incompatibility with the role of holy intercessor, the Trump presidency turned out to be the greatest doctrinal innovator in the history of conservative evangelicalism. First of all, to account for Trump’s behaviour being at variance with that of conservative evangelicals, key churchmen like Franklin Graham came forward to explain that Trump could not be judged by the standards of other mortals, that God had granted him a series of divine “mulligans,” exempting him from the rules applied to ordinary mortals. These exemptions are very much along the lines of those granted medieval caliphs to consume alcohol, miss holy observances and keep harems.

Second, policies and actions by the American state framed as necessary evils by previous caliphs, became positive goods. Separating toddlers from their parents and imprisoning them, state-mandated rendition and torture and war itself changed from being imperial practices to be swept under the rug and formulaically denied or condemned, to practices that were good and merited celebration in America’s expanding Theatre of Cruelty. God now demanded torture, murder, and torment of tiny state-created orphans. The caliph said so and the chorus of agreement from Pentecostals, non-denominations and other conservative evangelicals was deafening.

The live dismemberment of political opponents by bone saw, like an end to elections and term limits, was something to which Trump openly aspired for the future of his caliphate, a new wave of divinely-mandated torture and extra-judicial killings.

Like caliph Abu Bakr, founder of the original dynasty of caliphs, Trump has been accepted unproblematically as the leader of a religious community with whom he had little prior affiliation or specialist knowledge because of a theology that conflates the head of state, head of the army and head of the church. And they eagerly await the return of a legitimate ruler following the “stolen” election of 2020, a candidate anointed not by votes but by God himself.

If one wants to understand the broad Republican acceptance of massive voter suppression and growing demands to throw out any ballot that does not result in the continuation of caliphal rule as illegitimate, it is because, central to America’s transformation into a caliphate, is the understanding that what makes a president legitimate is not votes or elections, it is recognition of his intercessory status by the churches of the land, as God’s vicegerent on earth.

Authoritarianism Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite | April 22, 2021

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