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The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 2: Why We Must Choose Hope Over Progress

Many people forget that the original ideology of progressivism and the original Progressive Party were created by US President Teddy Roosevelt as an explicitly white supremacist ideology. The idea was that human civilization was a number line, a one-dimensional graph along which every individual human and every group of humans progressed. As they moved forward through time, the fundamental principles of physical and social Darwinism called upon them to change and, as they met new challenges, they changed or died.

As individuals and societies moved along the line, they became more restrained, more polite, more literate, more intelligent and lighter-skinned. Every society that was not England, Germany or America was simply a point behind them on the number line of progress, when people were swarthier, dumber and less restrained.

Much as there has been a Herculean effort to remove progressivism from its white supremacist ancestry, it had remained wedded to it for an unexpected reason: it was a theory of easy and inexorable wins. The world was moving towards a predetermined goal; all one needed was to be on the right side and the engine of history would do the heavy lifting and arrive at the future society with which one had sensibly decided to align oneself. In this way, taking up the “white man’s burden” as Teddy Roosevelt believed Rudyard Kipling had asked him to do on behalf of the British Empire was not that hard a job. It was mostly about waiting to be proven right.

The idea that violent, exhausting, life-threatening struggle was the engine of history, be it the struggle conceived by Karl Marx or the divinely-ordained racial struggle conceived by John Brown and Nat Turner has always been anathema to those who believe in the Progress Myth. In other words, there is a strange and intimate dance between Progress and Whiteness.

In the mid-1980s, the colour line moved over me and, although I had been raised in a black family and remained surrounded by black relatives and mentors, I became white, not necessarily a permanent identity but one with which I have been saddled these past thirty-plus years.

As a consequence, I have an odd experience to talking to other white people about certain things. One that comes up with increasing frequency in debates about climate politics is this one: if you tell a white person that all signs point to our failing to arrest runaway feedback mechanisms in climate change, they will demand to know why you are telling them to give up. So often, when I tell white comrades that chances are that we have already passed the point of being able to arrest the omnicide, they will demand to know why I am telling them not to fight, why I am okay with them and their kids dying. The white co-optation of the Martin Luther King Jr’s paraphrasing of nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker that “the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice,” has somehow been used to justify this theory that victory is easy and inevitable or not worth fighting for.

That is not to say that the people who would later become white have always had such a view. Both the Bronze Age Greeks and Norse believed that honour demanded one must fight with the expectation of victory, even though defeat was inevitable.

For good or ill, JRR Tolkien hated progress and progressives. And the theories of time and morality he puts forward in Lord of the Rings argue that the great Manichean struggles between good and evil are won by the opposite of progress, when it comes to fighting for a just future: hope.

In the family in which I grew up, the idea that one was fighting against white supremacy was completely disconnected from the certainty, probability or even possibility of victory. One was born into a Manichean struggle between good and evil that began before you were conceived and would continue long after your death. You fought against white supremacy because it was right, whether it was during a time you were winning, like the 1960s or when you were losing like the 1870s or today.

There was never any connection between one’s participation in the struggle one’s chance of success, especially in the immediate term. One was born into the struggle and stayed in the hassle one’s whole life. Some people, like me, or my great aunt Connie could “pass,” but abandoning the struggle was one of the most dishonourable things one could do.

Kamagra tablets have emerged as a challenging ED drug of levitra online no prescription generic origin. One approach can be changing the nutrition plan of the patient, which includes a gluten shop at store discount levitra free diet and elimination diet. 4. Using toilet stool is the only solution that can help in improving cialis on line the energy level to a great extent. This procedure is used to treat excessive wounds, burns and infections such as vitiligo. cialis usa online heritageihc.com That is why I was moved to tears when Barack Obama’s 2008 New Hampshire concession speech contained the words “we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” It seemed that Obama was culturally translating between the African American idea of hope and the white idea of hope, the former being the internal strength to struggle against evil and the latter being a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of triumphing over evil.

It brought me back to the other great cultural translation project of my childhood, Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien reached back to Eddas and transmitted the Norse ideal that even though every rational oracular prediction said that the gods would lose the final battle and evil would triumph over good, the Aesir and Vanir fought on because somewhere in the distant future, beyond the final battle was a peaceful and just future called Gimli, that although they could not see how to get there and would never get there themselves, they fought for.

The central, the fundamental battle of the soul around which Lord of the Rings revolves is the contest between progress and hope. The two secondary villains of the novels are Saruman the Wizard and Denethor, the Steward of Gondor (Tolkien’s Byzantine Empire analogue). These men were the two most powerful in the known world. One was the greatest of the seven hypostatic istari, the god-men sent by the gods to aid the people in the confrontation against the greater evil, the minor god Sauron; the other was the ruler of the most powerful, prosperous kingdom.

Both men possess palantirs, oracular stones that permit them to see throughout space-time, and it is these stones that bewitch them and lead to their downfall and betrayal of the forces of good. Because Peter Jackson, maker of the LOTR films a generation ago appears not to have understood the central thematic element of the story he was telling, he depicts our secondary antagonists as being mind-controlled or bewitched by Sauron himself and falling under his sway. That is explicitly not what Tolkien sought to show or told his readers. Rather, by being directed to see the overwhelming odds stacked against them, the greatness of Sauron’s power, the vastness of his hosts, they lost hope.

Denethor’s response to the loss of hope is to fight halfheartedly and hopelessly, carrying out his duties as ruling steward but rejecting all strategems based on courage or hope. He does this until the apparent death of both of his sons, at which point, we orders a giant funeral pyre to be built and commits suicide, trying to take as much of his family and city with him. Until his suicide, Denethor is an incrementalist. He “knows” he faces defeat so he retreats as slowly as possible.

Saruman’s response to the loss of hope is to switch sides and attempt to carve out his own personal share of Sauron’s dominion by conquering first. He explains to his former allies that their “only hope” is to join with the forces of evil so that they might make their corner of it less evil. Saruman, too, is an incrementalist. Every mile of territory he conquers before Sauron does, is territory that will fall under his less-harsh yoke when the war is over. In this way, Saruman offers a better Middle Earth, “one practical step at a time.”

Gandalf, our istari hero, on the other hand, forms a small multi-racial fellowship of ordinary people who bet on a profoundly improbable strategy that has almost no chance of success; one member of the fellowship even betrays it when he is overwhelmed with hopelessness. But the fellowship does not draw hope by evaluating the probability of victory. Their hope is based on these aphorisms Gandalf quotes, “many are the strange chances of the world and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter… for even the wise cannot see all ends.”

In this way, hope comes not from the chances of a particular plan succeeding. It comes from the fact that human intelligence is fallible, that the universe is big and unpredictable and strange, that only God can see all ends. Hope comes from an acknowledgement of our smallness and fallibility not from our power and our knowledge. Denethor and Saruman believed they had seen and thought all possibilities; Gandalf had the humility to know that no one could. That does not mean averting one’s eyes from the facts before you, of the permafrost melt and the methane and sea ice feedback mechanisms, nor from the rising spectre of racist authoritarian movements everywhere. It still means using all that information to make judgements but to reject the hubris of Saruman and Denethor and recognize that, as one is not God, one cannot be all-knowing.

But for the fellowship to succeed, Saruman and Denethor first had to be defeated. And this is the reality the left faces today. There is a final battle we must soon join against the family annihilator patriarchs leading this global death cult but interposing themselves between us and them are the Sarumans and Denethors of the world, the Justin Trudeaus and John Horgans, the Pete Buttigiegs and Kamala Harrises of the world, those who hide an agenda of betrayal, capitulation and self-immolation behind a discourse of “progress,” “good first steps,” “pilot programs,” and “realism.” This is the politics of “incremental gains” which now means not even that but rather “flooring the gas over the cliff and then letting up.”

And the only way we can do that is by being fundamentally hopeful. That means finding and transmitting joy, camaraderie and certainty of the rightness of our struggle and not of our chances of victory.

Geekery Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

There Are No Climate Deniers, Only Climate Fundamentalists – Part One

For eight years, I have been writing about three things (1) the epistemological shift that is ending the Age of Reason and bringing us into the Age of Authenticity, (2) the question of the base unit, how it is that the Age of Reason, unlike other epistemes, saw the base unit of society as the individual person and not the patriarchal family unit, and how anti-Enlightenment forces are challenging that and (3) how the climate crisis is linked to fundamentalist religion, the authentic episteme and the base unit. Finally, I have also mused about how it is that (4) Anglo America has been the crucible of these things.

I am now prepared to tie these things together in… however many words this takes.

Essentially, this piece is about how no individual disbelieves the climate crisis but the discourse communities into which they stack themselves do. This is a means of embracing contradiction without experiencing cognitive dissonance by storing contradictory pieces of information in separate, non-overlapping locations. The means of doing this was pioneered not by climate arsonists but by fundamentalist religious movements, movements that, in the 1920s became tools of the petroleum industry.

It has long been understood that religious fundamentalism is the Janus face of the Enlightenment. The Age of Reason, like any other episteme, was so intellectually and socially hegemonic that it structured the beliefs both of supporters of the Enlightenment and those opposing it politically, culturally and intellectually. In essence, the belief that supernatural actions could not happen inside profane space-time was made universal. It provoked one of three reactions: (1) atheism – the belief that there had never been a god, angels, etc. and that the physical laws of the universe could explain all past, present and future events, (2) deism – the belief that God had once acted inside our universe but that this time had long ago passed and that now, we lived in a naturalistic system, (3) fundamentalism – the belief that even though it was clear that supernatural events did not take place that, to be an ethical person, one must “have faith” i.e. declare one’s belief in them.

While most Christian churches initially embraced deism, this position was an emotionally unsatisfying one. While deism was near-hegemonic in the nineteenth-century Christian world, the twentieth century is a story of its abandonment and the collapse of deistic churches, their members either becoming atheists or fundamentalists.

One must understand that fundamentalist belief is totally unlike the religious cognition of pre-Enlightenment people and peoples. One religious studies scholar explained it as fundamentalists holding tightly to their beliefs, whereas pre-Enlightenment Christians and Muslims were held by their beliefs. For pre-Enlightenment people, God, demons and angels were self-evident, observable phenomena. For fundamentalists, there is an equal certainty that these things cannot be observed and do not exist. But because they believe that such a belief would make them bad people, they solve this problem in two ways: textualization and socialization.

Textualization entails preferring a plain reading of canonical texts to one’s own cognition. When I say “canonical texts,” I refer to something far older than the Enlightenment; I mean the texts that a movement says its thinking is based on because that text is closer than other texts to the mind of God. But, until the rise of fundamentalism, nobody believed that the Vedas, Christian Bible, Jewish Bible, Koran, Analects or Tao Te Ching were written by God himself; the most extreme claim was that the Koran had been dictated by God, still allowing for human corruption, human error and the fact that God communicated at a bandwidth that exceeds human comprehension.

It is this last nigh-universal belief that structured how pre-modern people engaged with canonical texts or “scripture.” They believed that they had to be decoded, that their meanings were neither reliably obvious nor reliably literal. They invented disciplines for decoding scripture like typology, developed by the Stoic movement for the Iliad and Odyssey, practiced by Christians and Muslims for centuries thereafter on the Koran and Bible, or Cabalism, developed by Jews and practiced by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.
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In this way, pre-Enlightenment peoples understood interpretation by the human mind as necessary to unlock the meaning of scripture. Fundamentalism reversed this proposition. It argued that because one’s consciousness could not believe in the supernatural, its judgement must be suspended and substituted with the most literal-possible reading of sacred texts i.e. the one involving the least interpretation and cognition. Instead of the mind interpreting the book, the book corrected the errant mind. It is in this context that we must understand “scriptural inerrancy” to be a central proposition of fundamentalism. It is not merely the declaration that scripture is now the unmediated word of God, even when it itself declares otherwise; it is the declaration that the book is a better thinking machine than the mind, that while the mind can err, the canonical text cannot and therefore must be deferred-to.

This idea was pioneered first in the Muslim world, with the Wahabi movement, one which, like Christian fundamentalism, began in cities because that was where the Enlightenment episteme first gained hegemony.

Socialization is a process that I have only come to understand by observing people who claim to deny climate change in action. It is only by seeing how climate arsonists use scientific denial in the public square that I have come to see how fundamentalism produced a second refuge for supernatural belief.

In service of other points I have been making on this blog, I have been stressing the difference between subjective space and intersubjective space. Subjective space is what we think inside ourselves, the thoughts, feelings and ideas that exist silently in our heads, that we then express from time to time. Intersubjective space is culture; it is society; at the micro-level, it is conversation. It is where our identities live; it is where the value of a commodity lives in a capitalist society. Inter-subjective space is the intellectual and cultural air we breather, the water in our fish-tank.

When I argue with individual climate denialists on social media or in person and say “You are only pretending to believe that climate science is not real. You are feigning ignorance and stupidity. But you are not dumb. You know the truth,” the reaction is silence, retreat or concession. No individual climate denier appears able to withstand this unless supported by a larger audience. It is only when deniers know they are being observed by others of their community that they will drag out fake studies, bullshit links and mangled postmodernism. That is because while no individual climate denier believes in their pseudoscience, the intersubjective space in their communities does.

In this day and age, unlike a generation ago, there is never a moment when any climate science denier thinks that climate science is false. The only place where that belief exists is when two or more deniers have a conversation about its falsity. They experience a sense of social accord and support by expressing social agreement. This is what I mean by socialization: in a room of twenty climate science deniers, not one single individual disbelieves climate science. But the room, and every conversation in it does. This is why fundamentalists must pray together and out loud; only then, can the supernatural become real, not in their heads but in the social space between them.

This cognitive sleight of hand was not developed for climate denial. It was developed, naturally and unintentionally, by the fundamentalist movement in reaction to the Enlightenment. So that rooms full of non-believers could collectively believe in God, by substituting the judgement of the room, for their own, in the same way they substituted the judgement of the book for their own. It is just that some lucky and canny oil men bought a controlling interest in fundamentalism in the first half of the twentieth century, that turned it into their death cult’s most potent weapon.

Religion and Eschatology in 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.

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The Green Party Abortion Scandal and the Debasement of Discourse Itself

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

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

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

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

3. Political Nonsense is the Gateway to Authoritarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Green Party Abortion Scandal in Global Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Canada’s National Pro-Choice Consensus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More in the next part.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

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.

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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 |

The Mistaking of Climate Denial: How Progressive Politics Has Failed the Test of Imaginative Empathy

Today, as we debate whether to actively accelerate and magnify the extinction event in which we find ourselves, whether merely to watch the feedback effects of our activity as forests burn and permafrost melts or whether to make the Herculean effort to slow or even stop it at some point in the future, our entire debate is framed in terms of knowledge.

The bad guys in the climate debate are “deniers,” people who fail to believe that the climate is destabilizing and entering into a crisis. They push “debunked” “junk science” that tells people falsehoods about whether our planet is warming and what the causes of this might be. The good guys “raise awareness” about climate change. We “debunk” bad science and tell people what the correct science is. The “deniers” love this because they get to play dumb, to pretend they have not noticed the climate changing, that they believe the threadbare, unbelievable lies put forward by industry-funded think tanks or claim they buy into Donald Trump’s or Alex Jones’ absurd conspiracy theories about all the scientists being in some sort of Chinese conspiracy to ruin America.

What sits at the core of this belief is the idea, one much beloved by those who identify as “progressives” that we human beings are rational choice-makers whose behaviour changes based on new, more accurate, up-to-date information. Liberals and progressives narrate their own lives this way, claiming that they learned a new piece of information and that this changed their outlook or behaviour in some important way. This is often tied to their sense of self-worth. Progressives often think of themselves as smarter and better-informed than average; they understand themselves to be smarter than those around them and, consequently, more able to avail themselves of the best and most correct information and to digest that information faster and more comprehensively.

That is why progressives will often conceptualize their efforts to achieve political change as “raising awareness.” “People do not presently agree with me,” they reason, “This must be because they have less information than I do. When they have the same information I have, they will agree with me. Therefore I must work to give them the information that I have so that they will think the thoughts I think and then do what I know needs to be done.”

When a progressive looks at the global climate debate, they see a mass of misinformation being pushed by mainstream and conservative media and they see this being repeated by people who disagree with them. So, they conclude that they have to do a better job of discrediting misinformation and replacing it with correct information. And, because this is such a colossal tactical blunder, that has produced abject failure for two generations, their adversaries encourage them to keep making that tactical choice.

The reality is that progressives are being trolled. They are being made fools of. Their adversaries are playing dumb. Nobody actually believes the nonsense peddled by climate deniers; it’s an excuse, a fig leaf. The modern conservative playbook is increasingly indistinguishable from the shitty husband playbook. Protracted fighting in long-term marriages is largely composed of feigned ignorance: “I didn’t know that bothered you. I didn’t know I was doing that. I didn’t know the oven was still on. I didn’t know you couldn’t put bleach on that. I didn’t see the ‘dry clean only’ label.” And modern conservatives, the gleeful family annihilators that now run the movement love how the joke is on the progressives, how they, by playing dumb, have revealed that the progressives, with their stupid awareness-raising, are the actual idiots.

The reason that this is so is that whatever imaginative empathy progressives may once have had, they have now lost. Progressives cannot imagine that people are not like them, that someone could have the same information they do but want to do something else about it, because they have a different set of values, a different morality, a different theory of the good. Because progressives have completely imbibed the liberal theory of the self, they imagine that everyone is a utilitarian, a person who wishes to both maximize pleasure and minimize pain individually and to see that, at a population level, the greatest number experience the most good.

When they see poor evangelical Christians voting for policies that further impoverish them, they smugly think “those people are not acting rationally in their own interest. I guess they need to be made more aware.” The idea that people might conceive of their good in non-material terms is not considered, nor is the idea of sacrifice, collective or individual, that people may be choosing suffering in order to achieve something important, some change in the moral order or some deserved punishment being visited on others.

However, onset of action and durability of each form of this ED levitra 40 mg treatment. The Canadian government stipulates a price ceiling which the medicine manufacturers are bound cialis wholesale prices to adhere while handing the drugs over to the Bluetooth device and take that important call. These easily obtainable medicines today took our ancestors’ ages to discover levitra cialis and formulate. Before the invention of the lowest prices on viagra opacc.cv, some of the company does not want any medical prescription and sometimes you have to take care of that you are looking to purchase honest to goodness levitra on the web, you should ask yourself: Is it conceivable to find the site supplier? Is the solution being composed by an enlisted medicinal expert? Does the solution begin from an authorized legitimate source? Despite. One of the reasons I identify as a socialist and not a progressive is that socialists understand and make sacrifices. A socialist narrative is one populated by heroes and villains. A liberal or progressive narrative is populated by individual choice-makers with inefficiently distributed information.

This progressive failure of imagination is being intensified by certain kinds of liberal identity politics. While cultural appropriation, i.e. the appropriation of non-monetized material and immaterial cultural production by the forces of capital, is wrong, the original idea of cultural appropriation has been vulgarized into something worse than useless. It has become the idea that to represent a person or group from a culture into which one was not born in literature, drama or anywhere, really, in one’s own creative work, is an injury, a theft, that engaging in acts of imaginative empathy, that placing oneself in the shoes of another is an act of imperialism rather than solidarity.

A phenomenon we call “standpoint epistemology” has further intensified this problem, arguing that the identity group into which one is born determines what is true about the shared, discoverable physical world, that if one is indigenous, the earth can be a different age than if one is English or Yoruba. Similarly, standpoint epistemology is often mobilized to bar people from outside an identity group from teaching, studying or publishing about that group’s experiences. I recall being angrily lectured in a bar just last year that it was an act of imperialism and violence against indigenous people that I once taught a First Nations history course.

Because it has become increasingly transgressive to engage in acts of imaginative empathy, not only do we see the larger leftist community increasingly fragmented; we also see it becoming increasingly strategically stupid. That is because the most important use of imaginative empathy is not to build solidarity and understanding with one’s allies. It is to guess what our enemies will do next. Because we cannot place ourselves in their (or anyone else’s) shoes, we cannot anticipate or counter their moves against us or guess what motivates them.

The climate denialists are not people who are benefit-seeking utilitarians and proud individual choice-makers and optimizers. They are members of a global death cult, one that they entered not by gaining new information but either by being born into it or, through something far more powerful than awareness: conversion.

In the progressive theory of personal and political transformation, change is caused when a person gains a bunch of new information that makes them realize that the best way to obtain what they want for themselves and others is different than they previously thought. In this way, their objective stays the same but their strategy for achieving that objective shifts. This is the “awareness” model of social change.

In a realistic theory of personal transformation, be it socialist, communist or conservative, change is caused when a person has a dramatic, realigning experience and they realize that what they wanted was the wrong thing to want and that they now want something else. They now understand themselves to be a different, better person who now wants something different and better. It is their objective, not their strategy that has shifted. This is the “conversion” model of social change.

And this is what those of us wishing to save the life on this planet must adopt. More on that soon.

Miscellaneous Articles | 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 |