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“And that is why I have decided to call this album ‘Frank Sings Tunes that the Young People Will Enjoy'”: the Children of the Gentry Won’t Save Us

On May 22nd, 1982, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch in which Joe Piscopo played Frank Sinatra who, late in his career, had decided to make his music more relevant to young people. “And that is why I have decided to call this album,” Piscopo’s Sinatra shouted, “FRANK SINGS TUNES THAT THE YOUNG PEOPLE WILL ENJOY.”

I quote this sketch all the time because its thematic material is just as relevant to the business of left-wing activism as it is to music, perhaps more so. Doing non-monetized activism for socialist and environmentalist causes is hard, demoralizing work that is often characterized by simultaneous conflict with one’s adversaries and one’s putative allies. Often, in the chaos of an ever-changing matrix of movement groups, leadership classes and ideological fads, it is difficult to maintain one’s bearings and, relatedly, one’s relevance in the larger activist community.

A common solution to this problem is to associate oneself with “the young people,” a nebulous category that allows one to cherry-pick a set of allies from a wide diversity of youth movements that are engaging in the activist world at any given time. If one is associated with young people and their activism, it does redound to the relevance and popularity of one’s own. This, in turn, has led to a strange fetishization of associations with youthful people, language and culture on the left that often functions—in and of itself—as a source of legitimacy.

Lest people get me wrong here, let me make clear that I began not just as a young activist but as a youth activist; my longest-running activist campaign in the 1980s was fighting for abolition of the voting age, beginning in 1985. I desperately wanted to work, as an equal, with older activists than myself. It was at this time that I first noticed this fetishization, what youth were for in the larger left activist context: we were cultural and aesthetic props in the life narratives of older folks. As a profoundly uncool kid, devoid of musical taste, fashion sense or association with any youth cultural activity cooler than Dungeons and Dragons, I was quite useless for these purposes.

While I was able to build a movement of hundreds of young, fee-paying members, my total lack of youth cultural capital made this movement pariahs among older activists who were eager to patronize young scenesters who could confer the kind of cultural capital they sought.

Another thing that kept my movement and me safely away from more powerful, senior allies was our lack of association with the university system. I dropped out of university in 1990 to be an activist full-time and this had been preceded by a prodigious career of skipping school. Few of my associates, even the cool ones, went to university. So it was that even though my closest organizing associate, Paul, was a good-looking musician and smooth talker, he also found himself far from any patronage, being a full-time worker with no postsecondary credentials.

This is because the youth culture that is most likely to be fetishized on the left is the youth culture that is best publicized, richest in cash, whitest and highest-status, in other words, the culture of the children of the bourgeoisie. This culture is the most resourced to put on public events, the target of most youth-focused advertising and the For more information, please visit 99eyao website: Or see related articles like White Discharge after Urination or Stool Not Always Prostatitis: Prostatitis is a cialis canada cheap common andrology disease, and usually occurs in young adults, middle-aged men, the prevalence rate was nearly 20%. How can one buy kamagra? Every form is obtainable through sildenafil buy a registered drugstore;one can also buy Kamagra tablets or other product for good sexual health. The safe and all natural women viagra canada pharmacies sex capsule in India: Fezinilcapsule is the valuable and amazing sex capsule for female. Psychosexual therapy is one among the widely prescribed treatments for impotence in old cialis without prescription uk age. easiest to find: they are on the campus of your local North American liberal arts college, Centre, Brown, Bishop’s or Quest.

They have plenty of time during the day to stage small rallies and be interviewed by the media. They have institutional support to assist them in producing publications and holding events. They are often the ones with the gumption to shoulder-past other organizers to stand at the front of a march, literally and figuratively. They are not the kids organizing other Uber drivers to unionize, other cashiers to strike for higher pay, other illegal immigrants to obtain sanctuary; they are not even easy to find at your local polytechnic institution.

Back in the 1960s, the culture of this group did spread from the small elite colleges to the major public universities, giving rise to the counterculture and getting a lot of bodies to marches and protests. Children of the working class and petit bourgeoisie became, for a short time, a portion of that culture, but only at the zenith of the welfare state when student grants were plentiful and tuition fees negligible.

Nevertheless, people look back with fond nostalgia for what the Great Society and the Pearsonian Welfare State created in the US and Canada, this dazzling period of protest. And yet, in hindsight, when we look at the real political gains that were made, we credit the movements that were mostly not absorbed into the counterculture. The Southern Christian Leadership Convention stands out; the Black Panthers stand out; quiet revolutionaries like Therese Casgrain and Pierre Bourgault stand out; the Yippies do not.

Some scholars today feel that the spread of the Counterculture, i.e. the youth culture of the bourgeoisie, actually inhibited and foreclosed the growing revolutionary possibilities that the material and legal realignments of the Great Society made possible. This reappraisal has been part of a larger intellectual phenomenon to reassess the Baby Boomers as a generation and emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between today’s Fox News viewers and occupiers of university administration buildings demanding that they be able to grade themselves.

It is in this light that we might want to worry about making the same mistake again. Today, there are so many youth-driven movements on things that matter to older activists like me: the climate strikes, the unionization drives, Black Lives Matter and a host of others. But in our efforts to “sing tunes that the young people will enjoy,” we make two major errors that compound with one another.

First, we assume that the culture of the young people actually getting things done is the same as the youth culture of Centre College, Brown or Dartmouth. Second, we assume that because this culture views cultural conformity and the ability to enforce new cultural norms as highly important, that more relevant young activists do too. I fear that we are wrong on both counts and that, even as #OkBoomer has become a witty intervention against the sanctimonious bullshit of history’s most entitled generation, we are repeating the very error of Boomer era and confusing the culture of the children of the elite with revolutionary practice.

There are a lot of kids out there to admire. Let’s take some time to choose the right ones.

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Do Conservatives Have Opinions About Climate?

For someone who declares an end to the Age of Reason, as both an epistemological and a political project, with some frequency, it surprises me how often I underestimate the effects of this collapse on my immediate surroundings and the political reality in which I attempt to take action. So, once again, I am writing a mea culpa for failing to notice and describe, with clarity, some of the obvious consequences of the widespread abandonment of Enlightenment thinking. I have failed to notice that political movements that identify as conservative do not have ideas, thoughts or opinions about the climate crisis. They only superficially appear to.

What movements like the Trump Movement have are a set of social practices they use to respond to people who do have thoughts, ideas and opinions about climate. I used to think that the reason the forces of climate denial and the forces of climate justice could not have an actual debate was because the two movements practiced different epistemologies, that their ways of determining what is true were incompatible. So, they would not accept each other’s argumentation or each other’s evidence.

But, ironically, I think that this description actually awards the two groups too much common ground, not too little. That is because I did not think through the fact that the burden Enlightenment epistemology places on people is to assume that the purpose of saying things is to convey meaning and that meaning is made out of ideas about the world. But what if the episteme of Authenticity (or whatever is out-competing the old epistemology of the past) does not place these burdens on people? What if, culturally, it does not demand that the things that are said convey meaning and/or that meaning arises out of a description of how the world works?

The reality is that long before we great apes and other smart creatures decided to use conversation as a meaning-making, data-transfer activity, many spent thousands or millions of years taking turns making sounds, competitively, cooperatively, spontaneously or based on long-rehearsed material. Conversation is a rhythmic game used for many things and it is only in recent centuries that we have over-focused on its data transfer possibilities and logic co-processing capacities at the expense of more venerable functions. Perhaps those most eager to exit the Enlightenment are among the most eager to return to conversational basics.

So, let us consider that climate deniers and their ilk do not feel the need to have opinions or ideas about the climate, never mind expressing them in a conversational or epistolary context.

Because Authenticity, or whatever this new knowledge-power system turns out to be, sees things in intersubjective and social terms, rather than objective terms, opinions about scientifically-knowable processes are not so much wrong as uninteresting, outside the frame, unless they can somehow be recast in social terms.

So, that is what conservatives do when they are confronted by people expressing ideas about a shared, physical, inescapable reality that undergirds society without being able to be reshaped solely by social perceptions. Their goal is to draw the experience into a space that is of interest to them: the social. So, their goal is to say things calculated to produce anger, sadness, disappointment or disengagement but this does not mean that they think the things they are saying are, in any sense, descriptive of the world. They are not playing a meaning-making game; they are trying to force their interlocutor to stop playing it.

So, they might say, “the climate is not changing,” and, when confronted with evidence then say, “the climate is always changing and always has been.” They might say “carbon does not warm the planet” and then, moments later, “we need this carbon to warm the planet to stop the de-carbonization of the atmosphere over the past 500 million years.” They might say, “fossil fuels do not contribute significantly to carbon emissions,” followed by “if we don’t release all this carbon, the economy will collapse and everyone will starve,” followed by “carbon from fossil fuels doesn’t warm the atmosphere, only carbon from animals and plants does.” And on it goes.

What conservatives are doing is engaging in a social practice in which they often participate when we are not even there. They say In other viagra cheap prices terms, kamagra is viable penile enhancement pill, which provides males improved energy level and stamina to make bedtime moments perfect. Intake of Ginseng along with levitra 20 mg a diet plan and regular aerobic exercises. A recent study in the United Kingdom has documented, ‘In 2000, most of divorce cases were filed from women not satisfied with their husbands’ bedtime performance.’At that time, males did not have any effective medicine to treat viagra stores http://appalachianmagazine.com/2017/01/18/president-george-h-w-bush-placed-in-intensive-care-wife-barbara-also-hospitalized/ their erectile brokenness issue. Much should be possible to counteract or overcome a tadalafil from india hefty portion of the conditions that aggravate the psyche. these things to each other routinely, to identify as part of the same movement and practice the rhythmic game of conversation where people take turns making similar sounds.

So, what are these words that superficially appear to be ideas but, in reality, are not?

They are talking points.

“Talking points” is an idea that is not nearly as old as our collective amnesia says it is. It is a term arising from the neoliberal era and became important during the waves of industrial deregulation, de-unionization, wage rollbacks and expansion of manufacturing into peripheral agricultural regions like Mexico and India. The 1980s were also an age of product-tampering, a related phenomenon, as the decline in regulation made this form of industrial sabotage vastly easier.

This caused the burgeoning public relations business to specialize in a key area, “crisis communications,” special PR professionals within firms and, later, whole specialized firms like Navigator and RunSwitch, whose sole job was to deal with things like product recalls. The gold standard for crisis communication was Burson-Marsteller’s handling of Union Carbide’s massive industrial disaster in Bhopal in 1984 which killed 16,000 people and injured an additional 550,000.

Crisis communications developed a fundamentally different way of talking using something we call a “key message” and “talking points,” not to communicate but for the purpose of preventing or sabotaging communication. If a CEO or PR flak was being interviewed by the press, the idea was to refuse to answer any questions honestly or completely but instead to give a highly repetitive “key message,” whose purpose was partly to reassure listener but primarily to make them disengage, by beating all actual meaning out of the conversation by making answers unrelated to questions and making answers as repetitive and predictable as possible.

And these efforts were effective. They prevented corporations’ shares from declining too much in value by suppressing both information and attention. They were so effective that incumbent governments began using them as part of their messaging and experienced the same kind of improvements in public opinion.

Much of the stupidity of the recent political history of North America—and especially Canada—has come from people confusing talking points and key messages with successful persuasion. This evidentiarily-unsupported orthodoxy that one attains office by being repetitive, off-topic and hostile to conversation became so powerful that political parties and movements of all kinds adopted it. And its adoption was so widespread, so fast, that there was little opportunity to compare the use of talking points to other more conversational, informative strategies.

Worse yet, many on the liberal left now confuse talking points with ideas, when they are, in fact, the very opposite. And this has led to widespread, self-inflicted idiocy as people have tried to squeeze actual ideas into vessels expressly designed to be unable to hold them.

One of the reasons modern conservatism is ascendant is that it understands what talking points are: they are a conversational tactic, akin to the strategy of “cutting off the ring” in boxing. Consequently, liberals and progressives trying to use talking points are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs because they mistake what talking points are and insist on attempting to tether them to sense.

Modern conservatism does not call upon its followers to believe things about asocial phenomena like climate. And it does not call upon its followers to say things that are self-consistent or representative of ideas. Members of the Trump movement or the Bolsonaro movement or the Duterte movement might say lots of things about climate but this does not mean that they represent things they think about climate. Because what they think about climate is nothing at all.

Politics of Epistemology US Politics | fusangite |

How I Helped Destroy Canadian Democracy: Part II: Citizens’ Assemblies Are an Elitist Cancer

Citizens’ assemblies are an idea that was introduced into Canadian politics as a direct consequence of decisions of which I was part and a movement I helped to build; their pernicious effects on Canadian democracy have only increased in the generation since these fateful decisions. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Social Credit coalition, two groups that had been most involved in maintaining BC’s big tent centre-right party felt that their decades in the coalition had delivered little or nothing for them: the Christian Right and the “taxpayer” movement, organized under the aegis of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, a group with few formal members but many supporters, pushing what one might call a “neo-Jeffersonian” ideology.

Both of these groups, now exiled from the provincial government for the first time in sixteen years, went about organizing and members became involved in various projects: organizing more actively at the municipal level, working to build the modern electoral reform movement, working to build smaller boutique right-wing parties, working to re-create Social Credit under a new brand name, building the Reform Party of Canada in BC and participating in processes of intellectual and organizational renewal in right-wing civil society organizations.

Following the first-ever re-election of an NDP government in BC, this work intensified. A consequence of this was the creation of two voting reform organizations: Fair Voting BC, headed by former MLA and anti-abortion activist Nick Loenen, and the Electoral Change Coalition of BC, headed initially by Sonja Sanguinetti, president of the BC Liberal Party. However, Sanguinetti soon stepped down from this role and was replaced by Troy Lanigan, the BC spokesperson for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

This happened because while Lanigan’s (and, it happens, my) organization favoured a two-stage referendum process as was used in New Zealand, Loenen’s backed a citizens’ assembly, something that had never previously been used in Canada. Loenen’s argument was that politicians elected under first-past-the-post were in a conflict of interest in choosing a new voting system, as their material interests aligned with the current one. Therefore, the process of choosing a new system had to be de-politicized. During his MA studies at UBC and continued political activity in Richmond following his defeat, he, like the CTF crew, had become aware of a new approach to political decision-making that had been pioneered by the Republican Party in Orange County.

The Orange County GOP had, since the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964, been the intellectual vanguard of American conservatism producing what is called “Sunbelt populism” and the “Reagan Revolution,” developing language to popularize such ideas as “supply side economics.”

The Orange County GOP had found, as Christian, white and conservative demographic and electoral hegemony had been collapsing with major influxes of Jewish, liberal and LatinX voters, both elections and public consultation processes had been producing non and anti-conservative mobilization and representation. The old solution to maintain elite white power, the idea of “commission government” was not an option because the technocratic, professional class, from which city managers were drawn was also increasingly liberal and non-Christian, even if nearly just as white.

Whereas the process of mobilizing LatinX, low-income or non-white voters tended to move the opinions of those voters to the left, because of the inherent nature of movement-building and mass mobilization, what if voters could be “represented” or “consulted,” through a process that was inherently conservative, individualistic and elite-focused? And so, the citizens’ assembly was born. The technical name was “deliberative polling” but the aptly-named Jefferson Centre trademarked the term Citizens’ Assembly in 1971.

This system of replacing democratically representative bodies with demographically representative bodies was soon tested in other conservative bastions like Richmond, BC. Finally, the neighbourhood busybodies could be cut out of the equation, and the people directly “represented.” This idea had a certain appeal for those on the left too, who resented the over-representation of property-owning, conservative “NIMBYs” in both local government and consultation processes.

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In this way, the permanent government employees who “support” the assembly are the most influential upon it. In fact, the criteria for being part of deliberative polling is often a requirement to be disconnected from the social movements working on the issue before the group. In this way, those involved in deliberative polling serve no one and represent no one, in the democratic sense.

Yet, beginning in 1997, the voting reform movement chose to back-burner the idea of a two-stage referendum process and instead support the BC Liberal idea of a one-stage process, of an assembly followed by an up or down vote on its conclusions. While, in the case of the BC assembly, this was not a disaster for the voting reform movement—the assembly, for reasons that are still debated, gave us a highly saleable system. The problem was the discourse and theory of politics that it popularized, especially following the progressive take-over of the voting reform movement 2005-07.

Progressives began arguing that being politically mobilized about and committed to an issue was a conflict of interest and tainted the democratic process. Furthermore, because the permanent bureaucratic class, rather than elected representatives did the facilitation, research, etc. and essentially set the table for assemblies, including de facto writing the multiple choice question they were answering, progressives loved the idea of these focus groups because the professional class they typically comprised were running them. A focus group of random people disconnected from social movements, assisted by selfless bureaucrats simply seeking to use their education to create an ordered society was exactly the body that should be making political decisions. In fact, they began to argue that citizens’ assemblies were more politically legitimate than legislatures, that being demographically representative rather than being democratically representative was what gave a body the right to govern.

And it did not matter that, following the lucky strike in BC in 2004, citizens’ assemblies began recommending garbage, unsaleable voting systems in Prince Edward Island and Ontario. An important characteristic of these systems was their use of “closed lists.” In most systems of proportional representation, voters choose which individuals will benefit from their support for a political party. Whether open list, single transferable vote, single non-transferable vote, cumulative vote or whatever, in most PR systems, parties end up with the same share of the vote as their share of the seats, and their caucuses are composed of the party members who are most popular with the electorate and, consequently, bag the most individual votes.

In the majority of Canada’s citizens’ assemblies, guided by technocrats, populated by disconnected people, the consensus was to choose closed-list systems, the only proportional systems that share first-past-the-post’s defect that if a voter wishes to vote for a party, the party and not the voter chooses which of their candidates benefits from that vote. To be fair, this was not just a response to top-down leadership and disconnection from social movements. It was also the result of many progressive Canadians telling assemblies that, given a choice, Canadian voters would not choose female or non-white candidates to be beneficiaries of their votes, and therefore needed elites to direct their votes to the women and minorities whom voters were not wise enough to choose.

Because focus groups being guided by selfless technocrats to come up with more efficient means of imposing political order and social control is essentially the utopia imagined by the progressive managerial class, the orderly assembly and not the chaotic and diverse legislature has become the fetish object of the electoral reform movement. In this election, Fair Vote Canada is not endorsing, as it has in the past, legislation to immediately enact proportional representation. Instead, it is calling for a National Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform; it is not even demanding that its terms of reference restrict it to examining kinds of proportional representation. The goal of FVC, today, is no longer the enactment of PR, on which it was founded in 2001. The goal is to achieve whatever kind of voting system technocrats can facilitate a focus group consensus on, irrespective of whether it is even proportional.

This fetishization of neo-Jeffersonian, anti-democratic decision-making is not limited to voting reform anymore. Now, progressives are proposing it to solve all kinds of political deadlocks and disappointments that should be solved through citizen mobilization.

BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Identity Series – Part 6: Trump and the Democratization of Intelligence

The Anglo American right are mirror-punchers, first and foremost, gay men seeking to imprison people for what they masturbate to, crybabies who hate “snowflakes,” stupid people who hate the mentally challenged, draft avoider chickenhawks, an endless queue of people demanding a participation ribbon for denouncing the Special Olympics etc.

But let us stop, for a moment, on the special hatred of the Special Olympics. Why is it that America’s conservative elite so despise participation ribbons? TARP: the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The 2007-08 financial crisis was a turning point in the discourse of the American right. As I have stated previously, this is the moment when Americans inverted their ideas about the relationship between wealth and risk. Whereas previously, wealth concentration was justified because the wealthy person had taken a risk to become so, this inverted to the idea that only poor people should be subject to risk and that wealth entitled one to riskless accumulation.

In this way, the truth that Wall Street was the Special Olympics for the rich, in which everyone got a ribbon, no matter how stupid their actions, changed from a reality that everyone denied to a putative good that was now universally recognized. But because of the mirror-punching character of the right, the Special Olympics then became a symbol of all the was wrong in the world, precisely because America’s elite saw in them a funhouse reflection of themselves and the order they represented.

Within Anglo America, this phenomenon has been felt with a special intensity in Canada. Doug Ford, the Trump clone who became premier of Canada’s Rust Belt province of Ontario through an extended and mediocre impression of Trump, first rose to national prominence as a city councillor by identifying autistic children as his personal enemies and launching a multi-year vendetta against them. This personal and specific vendetta against disabled kids has now been adopted by the People’s Party of Canada, the rising neofascist party of former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier, who has placed Greta Thunberg’s autism diagnosis at the centre of his climate change denial argument.

In this way, deserving recipients of affirmative action efforts have been foregrounded as the enemy by a plutocratic elite of economic Special Olympians who can hear the hollowness of their own self-justifying propaganda.

It is in this context that we need to think about Donald Trump’s identity politics of intelligence. For Trump, the most important way in which he uses the bully pulpit of the presidency is to declare his intelligence and mental fitness, in contradiction to what evidence would seem to suggest. And, as I suggested in my last piece, he is surprisingly successful. In fact, if we accept that what we are is purely an intersubjective judgement, he actually is the smartest man on earth because he has mobilized a whole social movement of over a hundred million people who shout this claim from the rooftops.

And we need to examine why he is successful at this. Fundamentally, it is because his project of declaring himself to be a genius is a democratic one. It includes and aggrandizes those who participate in the project of Trump’s greatness. As he declared at a pivotal moment in his primary bid, “I love the poorly educated.”

Many mistook this as Trump insulting his own base but, in fact, it was the opposite. He argued, as many have before him, that education pollutes and confuses our native intelligence, that the unschooled are the Kaspar Haeussers of politics, that their lack of information and education by a corrupt system enables them to think with greater clarity than others.

And in addition to making a claim of intelligence, not just on behalf of himself but on behalf of his movement, Trump’s normalization of troll discourse provides his base with the tools to demonstrate their intelligence.
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Trolling is the ultimate “heads I win, tails you lose” conversational game. A troll makes a dubious claim and then defends it. In the course of defending it, the troll either, through a combination of falsehood and emotional abuse, gets those disagreeing to quit the field, at which point he can declare victory both for himself and for the outrageous claim he has made. But if his interlocutors remain continent and disciplined and box him into a corner through evidence and argument, he can then declare that he never understood his claim to be true and that his true objective was to waste the time and emotional resources of those with whom he disagrees.

Trolls, then, play a rigged game that, no matter the outcome, allows them to declare themselves to be the smarter person and winner of the argument. Either they won the argument OR they “fooled” their interlocutor into believing they were dumb enough to believe the claim they had made. Either way, they showed themselves to be the smartest guy in the room.

In this way, whenever a member of the Trump movement arrives at a family gathering or appears in social media parroting a demented claim by the president, they have already won. Either they have fooled people into the belief that they are not smart when, in fact they are, or they have won the argument outright, albeit by brute force, again showing them to be the smartest. In this way, the smarter you appear to be, the smarter you are and the stupider you appear to be, the smarter you are.

In this way, the Trump movement is an identitarian one, but one built around the identity of “smart person” or “very stable genius.” In this way, the Trump movement is a true movement because it entails not just an allegiance but a praxis that shapes both action and thought, like the Ghost Dancers or the Iron Shirt Qi Gong masters of the Boxer Rebellion. The Enlightenment episteme was not governed by intelligence more than any other but it was one governed by claims of intelligence. During the Age of Reason, true or false, claims to have the right to govern one’s fellow citizens and, to an increasing extent, claims about one’s own personhood inhered in intelligence. We were an intelligence-worshipping society, if not an intelligent one, discourses about animal rights, abortion, racial equality were governed by claims of intelligence.

And, when we found ourselves still admiring things like charm, strength or toughness, we redescribed these attributes as “the seven intelligences.” One was not longer agile or strong; one was “kinesthetically intelligent.” But we still understood that this framing was, itself, a claim for the supremacy of that special quality that lets one do crosswords or sudokus at a certain speed. In this way, intelligence became a hegemonic power that oppressed those who had consistently been evaluated as not intelligent.

When Trump rails against “elites,” he does not mean other rich men like himself. He means professors, writers, artists and, most importantly, technocrats, people who use their identity as “intelligent” to exercise social power over others. Anti-intellectual movements have been a common phenomenon in the United States but Trump’s possesses an audacity, ambition and reward that no other has accomplished. Rather than fighting through the dungeon to the gigantic treasure chest full of intelligence that others have been guarding, one gets to the final battle, defeat the dragon and then opens the treasure chest and, instead of destroying it, distributing it to everyone who has been denied their fair share.

In this way, the Trump movement, like the Germanic peoples who beset fourth- and fifth-century Rome, they have unintentionally upended an order that they merely came to plunder.

It is at this moment that we must confront the most unpleasant and problematic element of identity. While one’s identity is primarily intersubjective i.e. governed by the opinion of the crowd, some part of it remains objective, inherent in a judgement by the physical world, rather than the self or the crowd. Otherwise Donald Trump is the smartest man on earth.

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 5: Donald Trump Identifies as Intelligent

Thank you to all my supporters for tolerating this lengthy hiatus in the writing of my blog. It has been an emotionally challenging little while as I have left my college and university employment, moved to a small city at the fifty-fourth parallel and started a new radio program there. I have also had some serious writers’ block, not to mention some genuine fear that I would phrase this piece too imprecisely and cause needless hurt.

Let us, for a moment, imagine Donald Trump as a tragic figure. How might we tell his story?

Trump is the culmination of a multi-generation project by a lineage of bourgeois Rhineland Germans to enter the American elite. Frederick Trump came to America in 1885 during the First Gilded Age to make his fortune. He soon found that the East Coast had its own establishment, descended from English and Dutch immigrants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who already enjoyed their own high society scene complete with local customs and manners. Recognizing that he could not easily break into this elite with the modest fortune he had, he decided instead to head West to the periphery of the American Empire during the Closing of the Frontier.

There, he established not-entirely-respectable businesses, running hospitality, drug and sex work businesses that functioned parasitically on the various booms and rushes of the North American Northwest through the early twentieth century. But by 1905, he was ready. Full of Klondike Gold Rush and sex-trafficking loot, he returned triumphantly to New York City to finally incorporate the Trump family into the most prestigious regional elite in the US, the New York elite, who had finally eclipsed the old pseudo-aristocratic planters of the Virginia and the Carolinas and the Puritan-descended Congregationalist nabobs of New England.

Even so, let us be clear that Frederick Trump did not die a millionaire, even. He had taken tremendous risks to create a small real estate empire that he could bequeath to his son to carry out the multigenerational project of entering the New York elite. At this point, it might be helpful to recall to concept of the “base unit” as explained in previous blog posts. For the Trumps, the base unit is not the individual, the person. The base unit is the lineage, as Donald Trump, himself, has stated on many occasions. The patriarch of the lineage is simply the part of the collective body that speaks for it, that represents it and its multigenerational objectives to the world.

Frederick Trump Jr. built a true real estate empire in New York from his father’s half-dozen properties. But this work was work that was begun with his hands. It was not primarily speculation that made the original increases to the Trump fortune but work in the building trades. Frederick Jr. was a carpenter, plumber, mason and electrician. Unlike a true member of the ruling class, he used his body, its energy, its strength, its dexterity, to build the Trump real estate empire.

Let us imagine that as coarse and rough as the hands of Frederick Sr. had been, the hands of Frederick Jr., were tougher, more leathery, more calloused, more scarred. The thing about class, before the 1990s was that it was like karma. There was no “instant class” in America any more than “instant karma” was the animating principle of the Vedic worldview. The wealth one attained in life did not determine one’s own class but one’s children’s.

By all accounts, Frederick Jr. was a truly bright man, a fast learner, someone who could have obtained a merit-based degree and would have, had it changed his own personal class. But the point was to truly change class, to change the class of the lineage not merely its current head.

The person who was to be a true, soft-handed, degree-educated, refined member of the haute bourgeoisie, the first Trump of the ruling class was a boy named Donald, who was born in 1943, the anointed future head of the Trump empire.

The problem is that there was something wrong with the boy, something obvious from the beginning, the restlessness, the lack of restraint, the self-pity, the narcissism, the oversensitivity, the negligible attention span. As great believers in eugenics, the Trumps found their lineage plans stymied by the fact that the boy could not sit still, was oversensitive and, by all accounts, was not too sharp – by half!

While he might look the part, with a tall body and the blonde hair and blue eyes, the brain was a disappointment. It was not to say that the boy was entirely stupid—his strange affect made it hard to tell if he was lying or telling the truth; he lacked any sense of morality and a conventional sense of shame; and these things combined to make it hard for him to discern truth from falsity. But he was not the ubermensch who had been expected. Frederick Jr. did his best to season the boy. Private school was not enough so it was off to military school. There was the brutal verbal scolding and domination, the violence and threats thereof. A terrified Donald could follow orders; but it was not the sort of creature who knew when it was its turn to speak, which fork to use or how many lines or shots was too many.

Donald was likely rescued from military service in Vietnam because of his father’s fear of how he might demonstrate cowardice or indiscipline rather than any real fear for the young man’s safety.

Nevertheless, it was too late to put off the anointing of the Trump lineage’s kwisatz haderach. Donald was to be the first Trump to enter the New York elite. The problem was that, upon his graduation from the least prestigious of the Ivy League institutions, the University of Pennsylvania, complete with a sealed transcript of dubious grades, he failed to do so. It is not that Donald did not work as a CEO of a major real estate businessman, so anointed by his terrifying mobbed-up dad with the calloused hands. It is not that he was not fabulously rich. It was not that he was not famous.

Or rather, maybe it was because he was famous. Donald attempted to join the New York elite beginning in 1968, at the age of twenty-five. Back then, this meant a performance of etiquette with precision, dignity and a certain subtlety. During the Cold War, Anglo masculinity, especially in the New York and international scenes was still governed by a single master attribute: restraint. The ability to not speak, to not gesture, to feign disinterest, to feign not noticing, to master others by exhibiting the most self-control, this was the masculinity in which the Nelson Rockefellers of the world traded; this was the age of the Kennedys, when one showed measured politeness on a cocktail of intravenous meth and quaaludes and a quart of single malt. Donald was a loudmouth, a boor, a man not invited to parties when men far less wealthy and less white, but more restrained were. Or worse yet, he was invited to parties as a conversation piece, a curiosity, the person about whom everyone was laughing behind his back.

Less production of lipid layer viagra australia online also causes such problems. So, viagra samples canada take a proper diet for achieving goal. Revisit the module whenever you want, refurbish the learnt and keep on cialis tab re-doing it till the time you understand it completely. You can regularly consume Kamdeepak capsules twice for two to three months to boost male sex the cost of viagra drive, vitality and vigor. Instead of being a respected member of the bourgeoisie, he was a mascot, a prop, a figure of fun, a man who would, he knew they said behind his back, “never really be one of us.” Still, there were many compensations. Trump was rich enough and famous enough to have sex with his daughter, put on cocaine-fueled orgies with girls provided by Jeffrey Epstein, be a regular guest on Howard Stern, a reality show host and professional wrestler. In these activities, Donald found solace. He could act with judicial impunity like a true member of the New York elite, dodge debt and bankruptcy like the Gordon Geckos and Mitt Romneys of the world and get on TV and radio whenever he wanted. He was rich, powerful and, he realized, believed to be a member of the elite by the middle American rubes he swindled through Trump University, Trump Steaks and the Trump Taj Mahal.

But then the cultural moment shifted and Donald’s luck began to turn. Yale graduate George W Bush Jr. affected a fake Texan accent to win a gubernatorial election and suddenly the world of the American elite began to change. No longer were restraint, self-control, subtlety and superficial respect for women conservative values; they were now liberal values. Restraint, politeness, subtlety were not the way a member of the elite won a Republican nomination; they were how people entered the liberal elite that was seizing control of the Democratic Party.

Al and Tipper Gore, the jumped-up Tennessee cracker vice-president were abstemious, respectable people. Hillary Clinton, the scorned wife with the frozen blonde hair was the embodiment of restraint, refinement and education. Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s culture had turned to the archetype of the cowboy, the ultimate twenty-first century gender play drag act, in which refined, bourgeois, fragile men costume themselves as coarse working men whose hands are not soft.

But the problem with the project of a lineage is that it is not directed by the current patriarch. It is directed by the old man buried in the basement. Frederick Sr. and Frederick Jr. are dead; they cannot imagine the America of the present, in which the elite has become so plutocratic and ossified that it just bails itself out and gives itself awards for bad judgement as it drinks its own bathwater. They still yearn for an elite that demanded a mastery of etiquette, a control of the body, perfect diction and spelling, not “hamberders” and “covfefe.”

And so poor Donald is conflicted. He figured that by becoming the most powerful man on earth, who can destroy all creation with the simple touch of a button, that he could push his way into the New York elite. Somehow, Barack Obama, the negro who could hold his coke in a way Trump never could, was able to engage with this elite. Somehow Hillary Clinton, the scorned wife from Scranton could get behind the velvet rope and he could not, even after beating them and their party in a US presidential election. People whose parentage, gender and race should have placed them far below Trump in the great American chain of being were included and he was not.

When Donald looks at Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the other late additions to the New York elite he despises and envies, he sees intelligence, education and self-control, the very things that would allow him to fulfill his lineage’s mission. And in their place, he has only power and popularity. So, he uses the presidency’s power to assert this: “I am a very stable genius.”

He can do this on Twitter because, contrary to a lot of nonsense floating around, it is conservatives who are the true masters of identity politics. For Donald, it is enough to assert it himself. It is unclear whether he even understands that other people are, in fact people. He may live in a solipsistic micro-universe. For him, it is enough to proclaim that he is a “very stable genius” to make it so, in the cultural moment in which we currently exist.

And the thing is that he is succeeding.

This is true, first of all, because late capitalist ideas of identity are subjective, not intersubjective. By this I mean that the self one imagines being in a masturbatory or other fetishistic fantasy is the self that one truly is. This is not just played-out on liberal Tumblr among whatever they call the kids younger than Millennials. This is the self of the visioning board, the self one who converts to The Secret believe in. The true self, in the late capitalist formulation, is the photo one posts on the aspirational visioning board. (Visioning boards are a craft item the author of The Secret encourages people to fashion, depicting images of the things to which one aspires, which will be brought into being through a meditative practice.)

So, in Trump’s mind, he is sophisticated, brilliant, self-controlled, thin, larger-handed, etc. And that, in and of itself, is sufficient. If he identifies as intelligent, who are we to tell him he is not? Unlike transracial white black Tumblr bloggers, Trump has no use for prefixes. He is not a trans-genius. He is a genius. Full stop.

But let us suppose that we think about identity not in the way late capitalism tells us it operates but the way human beings continue to operate it. One’s identity remains, despite the best efforts of the neoliberal order, intersubjective: one’s identity is an agreement between the self and the crowd about who one is. And the crowd has all kinds of demands. No one understands the scale of these demands better than transgender people. The crowd demands lots of surgery to change the shape of bodies, a pharmaceutical regime to increase or reduce the coarseness of one’s hair, the adoption of often-exaggerated mannerisms associated with stereotypical gender norms and, of course, a complete overhaul of one’s wardrobe. Even then, such agreements are tough to negotiate and many people with trans identities, despite their most diligent efforts, cannot achieve crowd buy-in, irrespective of their internal feelings or massive investments in social persuasion.

But when we imagine the reshaping of identity to be a shared late capitalist project containing both liberalizing forces and supposed forces of reaction, we see something extraordinary with Trump’s trans-genius identity: he appears to pass the intersubjectivity test. The fact is that more people believe he is a genius than believe almost anyone else is. His base, a solid one third of the American people, over a hundred million souls believe that he is a genius, likely the smartest person ever to hold the office of US president.

Except that he does not. Trump can go a lot of places where he really is a very stable genius, just not the ones he wants. He still cannot be a very stable genius at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He cannot be one on Martha’s Vineyard or in the Hamptons. While an epistemologically-divided America can permit Trump to be a genius; the very nature of its division makes it impossible for him to be one in the only places that matter to the Trump lineage.

Yet within that tragedy is a story of generosity and emancipation. Trump may not have achieved geniushood. But he has made it possible for millions of others to do that very thing. More on that in my next post.

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Neo-Ottoman America and the Need for Bernie Sanders

[Today, I am opening a Patreon page to support this blog because you will be getting five articles per month henceforth. Please consider supporting my work and the distinctive historical analysis I bring to my writing here – S.P]

In the Mike Leigh movie High Hopes (1988), Rupert, a character representing nostalgic, as opposed to Thatcherite, Toryism explains the greatness of the British Empire that he hopes to see restored: there was “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.” This is an effective characterization of the Second British Empire that emerged following the recognition of the American republic in 1784 and entered into terminal decline following the outbreak of the First World War, two hundred and thirty years later.

Unlike the First British Empire (1536-1783), in which great expense and brutality were undertaken to convert Irishmen into Protestant Englishmen, in which legal differences between the English and Scots were systematically worn down, in which a million colonists on the Atlantic Seaboard originally rose up over their inequality with the Englishmen of the Eastern Hemisphere, the Second British Empire rejected assimilation as a doctrine. The reason America had risen up was because its residents had come to understand themselves to be entitled to the same rights as those of Great Britain.

So, the Second British Empire became all about difference. Welsh, Scots and Indians were to be understood as colonized peoples and, at the same time, colonizers on behalf of the British: distinct, inferior, yet powerful colonized peoples. The Welsh were massively over-represented in the colonial administration of India, the Scots in British North America and the Indians in the administration of Africa. One colonized people managed another at the level of the imperial state.

But below them were hierarchies of the colonized, recognized and supported by the imperial state. In this way, the British abandoned the project of Protestantizing Québec and instead empowered local bishops to sit at the top of a theocracy that ran Lower Canada until 1960. In India, dozens of principalities and emirates dominated or snuffed-out by the Mughal Empire regained a nominal independence under the British East India Company and, later, the British Raj, each with its own prince, courtiers and set of laws. The “trucial states” of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai and less-remembered names were monarchies selected by the British to rule their populations independently but backed by the power of the Royal Navy.

The Second British Empire was based on the understanding that hegemonic power arises from recognizing as many kinds of people and as many kinds of peoples as possible and, wherever possible, making their elites not competitors but collaborators in a vast and elaborate system, one offering “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.”

These ideas did not come to the British Empire out of nowhere. They came from the systems of government developed by the Ottoman Empire, the first modern state more committed to systematizing than erasing the traditions and hierarchies of the past. The Ottoman Empire had succeeded in claiming the title both of Caliphate and Roman Empire during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries by modernizing and systematizing the things that had made medieval Islamic civilization the juggernaut that it had been: religious diversity, cosmopolitanism and hierarchy.

The Ottomans were the one modern state that sought to reinvigorate a legal principle of the Ancient World: personality of law. From Spain to France to England to Japan, the other ascendant states of the early modern world were interested in processes of assimilation, homogenization and the tying of law and culture to geography. These states assailed minority languages and religious difference in an effort to forge the first true national identities.

But the Ottomans took the opposite approach, instead reinvigorating institutions and practices that had atrophied in the Middle Ages. Self-government rights for linguistic minorities were restored. The milet system, whereby religious minorities governed themselves, was established throughout the Empire, granting Nestorians, Chalcedonians, Orthodox and Catholic Christians different governments. The court of the Caliph drew Egyptian Copts and Albanian Muslims, with powerful government positions carefully doled-out to those who sat atop various hierarchies representing ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. There were different streams for civil service and mercantile jobs based on region, language and religion. In the Levant, Orthodox Greeks were preferred for civil service posts, Sunni Arabs for mercantile monopolies and oligopolies, but the same did not hold true in Egypt or Albania. The Ottomans, more than any empire before or since, nailed the “politics of representation.”

Underpinning this was the principle of “personality of law,” the idea that the laws that applied to a person were not the derived from the polygon in which one was standing, etched onto the surface of the planet (the way the law works today) but rather from what sort of person one was, a Christian or a Muslim, a Turk or an Greek, a speaker of Arabic or Serbo-Croatian. This proved a highly effective means of social control. Because every group in the empire was “represented,” there was an elite to which every Ottoman could aspire, and there was an elite willing to defend the Ottoman state in order to safeguard its privileges, its representation.

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Before resuming the history lesson, let me be clear about what the politics of representation is not; it is not affirmative action. Affirmative action programs are necessarily part of larger state-led efforts to make sure that all participants in the workforce are treated fairly and that all parts of the workforce are representative of the population as a whole. The politics of representation does the opposite. By creating token elites from every group, it seeks to quiet the voices of non-elites by co-opting them into identifying with “their” elites in their putative competition for influence with “other” elites. Will the next vizier be a Copt or a Greek? And when the former succeeds, this politics sells this as a victory for the million Coptic fellahin toiling in cotton fields throughout the Nile Delta. That is why affirmative action works against any job being viewed as the province or specialty of one particular religion, gender or ethnicity but instead tries to create the most representative, mixed group possible in all jobs at all levels.

What once was the politics of affirmative action in the 1970s has, just like the rest of America’s welfare state in the ensuing forty years, been slowly turned into its opposite, cosmetically similar and yet for opposing purposes, with opposite functions. The Third Wayers who remade the Democratic Party and its trade, welfare and criminal justice policies under the Clinton Administration were also key agents in the transformation of affirmative action from a legal practice focused on working people to a symbolic discourse focused on elites.

The vision of diversity espoused by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is the modern politics of representation: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. In this politics, America’s first black president could preside over a net annual transfer of wealth from black America to white America, with black Americans poorer relative to whites and more segregated relative to whites than at any point in the preceding forty years. That is why America is hitting a forty-five year nadir in reproductive freedom following the first major party candidacy for the presidency by a woman and her victory in the popular vote. It is because when you conflate justice for groups with symbolic and elite representation of their elites, those groups don’t just fail to benefit. They lose.

The idea that the composition and conduct of a royal court determines what happens in the world below is a myth with long legs: Oberon and Titania’s court in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arthur and Guinevere’s in the grail stories, the Jade Emperor’s in Chinese myth, etc. We love those old myths and have been seeking to shoe-horn them into reality since Procopius blamed Justinian and Theodora for the Darkening of the Sun. But it’s just sympathetic magic: a theory of cause and effect that seems aesthetically intuitive but is actually bullshit.

Many things can cause an elite to be demographically representative of the population it purports to represent; one is a successful program of affirmative action and economic equality. Whatever legitimate criticisms we make of Fidel Castro’s Cuba when it comes to democratic rights and freedom of speech, by 1991, Cuba’s Communist Party had come to reflect the population below it in terms of racial representation because this diversity arrived from below. Black Cubans achieved parity as hotel managers before they achieved it in the Party. But although this representation has been maintained at the party level, that representation was no safeguard of equity below. Two generations of Cuban leaders have had to sacrifice economic equality for success in the tourism economy and have exiled black Cubans to the back of shop after shop. In this way we can see that diversifying those in authority has no causal relationship to diversity or fairness below. But diversifying below almost always is expressed in diversity above.

Of course, the transparency, the hollowness, the cynicism of the Ottoman politics of representation wears people down and angers those who see that it does nothing materially for the lives of ordinary people. In the nineteenth century, a Turkish nationalist movement emerged in the Ottoman state, demanding that, as creators of the Empire, Turks- all Turks- should enjoy superior political and economic authority. The Turkish nationalists focused their sense of injustice on the minority groups that they believed enjoyed greater power and opportunity than ethnic Turks. Because every group in the Empire was headed by corrupt elites, examples of Arabs, Greeks, Copts and Albanians screwing good, honest Turkish people out of their birthright abounded. Of course, this new Turkish nationalism led to Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and others seeking better deals outside the Empire, which in turn provoked the pogroms of the 1910s and 20s for which the term “genocide” was invented.

Today, America stands somewhere similar. Donald Trump’s agenda is that of the Turkish nationalists of the nineteenth century: to cleanse the elite of minorities and restore them to their proper place either at the bottom of society or outside of it altogether, behind walls or prison bars. The Democratic Party’s decision to respond with the politics of representation sealed its fate and caused it to lose in 2016. Whatever movement triumphs over Trumpism, it will not be the defenders of a corrupt and broken status quo, but one that offers a more compelling and inclusive idea of universality: one pulling a thread through Americans, as workers, as citizens.

Within the US Democratic Party, there is only one candidate who stands for that. And my American friends, you should back him. He is here to smash capitalism, not fix it. And that is what all Americans need. What keeps Hispanic communities from being raided and terrorized is not a Hispanic Secretary of Labour—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people safe from police violence and wrongful imprisonment is not a black Attorney-General—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people from being segregated into inferior housing is not a black Secretary of Housing—America has one right now under Donald Trump. What keeps women’s reproductive rights safe is not a female Secretary of Health—American had one under Obama. The only force capable of fighting racism, authoritarianism and misogyny is socialism—and not the elite espousal of socialism, but its socialist enactment, the mobilization of millions of people across differences of sexuality, race, religion and gender.

What matters and must matter is that Donald Trump is opposed by a politics of equity and equality, not the broken and corrupt neo-Ottomanism of a place for everyone and everyone in their place.

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Ailing Left and the Geopolitics of Cruelty

In the six years since I started this blog, I have tried to render upsetting social and political events in abstract terms and subject them to some level of analysis. Last year, for instance, I wrote a bit arguing that by showing that he was sexually violent and abusive to his daughter Donald Trump’s was successful in portraying himself as an omnipotent strongman figure to his base. I want to continue with that theme and unite it with some of my observations about the institutional failure of Canadian left politics at present.

But in doing so, I want to simplify things. My ability to wrap syllables and analysis around hard realities is sometimes useful. But sometimes it distances us too much from the horror we face and the simplicity of the problem before us. Great work has been done to re-legitimate the word “lie” after decades of obfuscating terms like “mis-statement,” “alternative facts” and “journalistic balance.” I would like us to do more with another necessary word: cruelty.

Simply put, our problem is that every day, more and more people in our societies embrace cruelty and other people’s suffering as a necessary moral good. And that, readers, is, in my estimation, evil.

 

The reason Americans have chosen a confessed rapist and proud child molester to lead the greatest empire the world has ever known is because the ascendant social and political movements, in state after state, around the world, are those that celebrate cruelty and the infliction of suffering on others.

There have been many devastating consequences of pragmatic socialists aligning with liberal utilitarians over the past half-century, from the Third Way (neoliberalism with a human face) to the conflation of socialist thought with a nebulous, incoherent progressivism, to the replacement of socialist internationalism with foreign policy Taoism. But perhaps the most devastating is this: people who have believed themselves to live in an unjust society, who feel the palpable injustice of neoliberalism with its bloodless technocracy, heritable privilege and collision course with the carbon cycle have been offered nothing by the left. No large-scale leftist political movement has stated with clarity “this social order is fundamentally unjust and must be replaced with a just one.”

Instead we, on the left have offered short-term tactical alliances, strategic retreats and technocratic fixes. We have been so focused on trying to save the vestiges of the twentieth-century Keynesian welfare state that we have become the defenders of the status quo, promising desperate people that, with us as junior partners, things will get worse slower.

As a result, we have stood back and given free rein to the worst forces in our societies to offer the only theory of fairness on offer. By submerging socialism in liberal utilitarian discourse, colloquially known as “progressivism,” we have quit the field. We have chosen not to offer any competition to those saying “everything is fucked. The world is just as unfair as you feel it is. We must take drastic action to change everything.” At the very moment when climate science tells us unambiguously that this is actually the only position an intellectually responsible person can take, we continue to offer incremental change that no one is looking for.
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So, who is saying that? Those speaking with the most clarity on this issue are American conservative evangelicals and Salafists. They have a simple message: God is trying to punish people. He is trying to scourge humanity and the institutions that comprise twentieth-century states are standing in the way. There are too many earthquake survivors, too many cancer survivors, too many people living through famines and droughts, too few homeless people freezing to death, too few asylum-seekers drowning on the high seas. The consequences of climate change have been effortlessly repurposed by these movements. Droughts, famines, floods and fires are God’s traditional tools for scourging the unjust and the just alike. And once again, government stands in the way, thwarting God’s judgement at every turn.

Day after day, I read well-intentioned but confused liberals and socialists on social media bewildered that Trump’s supporters are so foolish as to think that Obamacare’s repeal will make things better. Such a position arises from a failure of imagination about what “better” can mean, the inability to understand that the way its repeal will make things better will be by causing more people to die, people who should already be dead, were it not for the hubris of Barack Obama to try and interpose the state between God and his judgement.

Such a worldview is cruel. The theory of fairness that is on offer is that God is trying to punish us and we, arrogantly, are trying to dodge that punishment. But, at the same moment, it is altruistic. Many of the people fighting to repeal current US healthcare law or keep their town in the hands of ISIL or the Lord’s Resistance Army or Boko Haram are willing to sacrifice their own lives in the name of this monstrous theory of justice. People are willing to lay down their own lives to make sure that there is more suffering and death in the world, in accordance with God’s plan.

Not only does the contemporary mainstream left fail to validate the feelings of those who believe the world is fundamentally unfair and must be reordered to restore justice, it also rejects the efforts of people who wish to be heroes—valiant people who have that intuitive consciousness of the injustice of the present order. The world is, and always has been, full of people who are willing to put everything on the line to fight evil. There are incipient heroes in every family, in every neighbourhood, town and village. Many people have been surprised by the thousands who put their bodies on the line at Standing Rock last year, the thousands who faced off against the state in the streets in the early days of the Trump regime. Many people were stunned by the Syria-wide protests against a monstrous, homicidal regime following the bombing of Aleppo. I was not.

The problem is that the mainstream electoral left has a place for you if you can represent yourself as a victim, an aspiring technocrat or a classically liberal rational actor and benefit-maximizer, and, ideally all three, if you care to look at the BC NDP’s candidate selection procedures. But what about people who want to denounce injustice, call out evil for what it is, and march out into the streets to challenge it? The fascist movements around us are winning because they have a place for those people and we do not. The leftist mobilization we have seen in recent months has taken place in spite of the prevailing thinking of the left, not because of it.

Our present political moment arises from the fact that there is only one compelling narrative for vanquishing injustice that people are being offered. And it is the one that celebrates cruelty, that eggs on climate change, that revels in torture, that cheers “LET HIM DIE!!! LET HIM DIE!!!!” like that 2012 Republican primary debate audience when candidates were asked about the uninsured. In opposition to this, we offer an imagined past of tolerant twentieth-century welfare states, accommodation with global capital and the investor class, investor rights regimes like the EU and NAFTA, and small-scale technocratic change, provided the investor class gets its cut.

It is a testament to the fundamental decency of the human race that, in democracies around the world, a slim majority continues to reject the politics of cruelty and conservative religio-political eschatology. In the absence of a visionary left, that decency is all that is holding human civilization in place.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Did the Survivor Vote Swing the Election for Trump?

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump vote at PS 59 in New York, New York, U.S. November 8, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY - RTX2SKKG

There has been a lot of talk about how Donald Trump won over so many white women in his campaign. The general narrative is, and I am not saying it is untrue, that, for American women, white supremacy trumped female solidarity. I am sure that is the case. But it is useful to think about the other things that might also be true, truths that function synergistically with this one.

A terrifyingly large proportion of people in America have had sex to which they did not consent by the time they turn eighteen. It is just shy of a majority of women and as many as one in six men. And the Trump campaign telegraphed their candidate’s propensity—perhaps even preference for—non-consensual sex, especially given that his main rebuttal of the “grab them by the pussy” tape was to suggest his accusers were too ugly to have been the women he actually assaulted. Similarly, the campaign did the opposite of disabusing the public of the notion that at least one of his daughters grew up having sex with him, something to which he has alluded in multiple interviews over the decades.

What is, as I suggested in my piece on Trump’s preference for incestuous relations, this was an intelligent and rational piece of campaigning.

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What survivors have also learned from the failed rape prosecutions in our media is that a survivor needs to fashion a public image of themselves that either denies their past experience or portrays them as a Lifetime Network TV movie hero-victim, for whom sexual violence and abuse has been a crucible, forging them into an implacable warrior against their abuser and the system supporting him. The majority of survivors who have become more vulnerable, more involuntarily compliant, more calculating, dissembling and fearful are viewed as reprehensible beings to be derided or attacked for currying favour with past abusers or consenting to further abuse.

What if the Trump campaign activated this? What if this is what undergirds his decisive victory among white women is this? What if the more his violent, predatory monstrosity was displayed, the more it began being refracted through the emboldened misogyny of men in their own space, America’s survivors intensified their performance of divided selfhood. Trump, in a way, became the biggest, most inescapable sexual assailant imaginable. In all the ways that a child sees a sexually predatory adult as omnipresent and omnipotent, Trump actually was, his face on every TV screen, his words coming out of the mouths of so many proximate men, like the eponymous priests of ancient Egypt, embodying America’s fascist, rapist god-man.

For most survivors, the way forward would be clear: dissemble and comply. Somehow your abuser will know if you tried to thwart him. In all likelihood, your abuser wants you to generate a narrative that you have consented, that he has done nothing wrong. Ultimately, the greatest performances of domination are the ones that inspire feigned consent. What if the moment, America’s survivors placed their hands on that lever, they felt their omnipresent, omnipotent abuser leaning over the flimsy cardboard privacy partition, their eyes full of malice, and knew what they must do to survive another day?

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite |