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Truth and Reconciliation – Part I: The Origins of Truth and Reconciliation Discourse

A couple of years ago, I wrote some essays about the transformation of the land acknowledgement from a ritual act that engaged in small-scale compensation of victims of colonialism into Canada’s answer to American Thanksgiving, a process by which settlers welcome themselves to the land they are stealing and then thank their victim for allowing their land to be stolen, like it was their idea.

Silly me. Land acknowledgements were merely the incubator of a new horror dreamed up by the brain trust of smug, woke colonialism, Truth and Reconciliation Day. The new kind of colonial rhetoric the managerial class has been practicing at corporate retreats, faculty meetings and gatherings of labour aristocrats and non-profit executive directors is now being taken nation-wide as an annual festival of white guilt and narcissistic mock self-flagellation.

To understand why this is happening, why the face of colonialism is now always crying, we need to trace the idea of “truth and reconciliation” as a political project from its inception, to understand what it was and what it now is.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it became clear that the Soviet imperial project had entered its terminal phase. The Soviet economy was being hammered not just by pent-up dissent from within and the rapid loss of its vassal states but by shifting global commodity prices that hammered its balance sheet and economy that, in turn, devalued and destabilized the ruble. The state increasingly lost the capacity to deliver the things its populace wanted and this, in turn, increased emigration and political dissent.

Ironically, a similar thing that had happened to the USSR was happening to the Republic of South Africa, the terrifying, retrograde white supremacist regional power of sub-Saharan Africa. Like the USSR under Mikhael Gorbachev, South Africa, under PW Botha, had attempted to engage in incremental liberalization by expanding opportunities for democratic participation. Botha had partially enfranchised previously disenfranchised South Asians and “coloureds” of mixed race; he had also rapidly expanded the “Bantustan” system, ceding large but economically unproductive swaths of South Africa to black-led governments.

As in Eastern Europe, these concessions had the effect of altering the horizon of expectation of South Africans in exactly the wrong way. Now that the government was beginning to yield and its multi-state solution was failing, the way forward was clear: a one-state solution of all South Africans, irrespective of race. Following a massive increase in resistance, which was met with escalating state violence and torture, Botha was forced to step down and his successor, FW de Klerk was given a clear mandate by the party: fix this.

As in the USSR, increasing international sanctions, increasing isolation, declining commodity prices had produced a crisis of confidence in the middle class who began both emigrating and dissenting at rapidly increasing rates. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the legendary cold warriors and the biggest boosters of South Africa were gone and their successors saw no need to prop up an embarrassing and corrupt regime now that the Cold War had been won.

De Klerk’s job was clear: stabilize the rand; increase its purchasing power; fill the stores with imported goods again. In other words, maintain the wealth of the propertied class and the economic privileges and heritage of white caste by any means necessary.

This meant striking an agreement with the African National Congress. The ANC had a number of leaders, a ceremonial imprisoned leader, Nelson Mandela, an international celebrity whose personality cult had been carefully constructed by Oliver Tambo, the acting president, who ran the organization from Zambia, the nearest state to South Africa that would dare to host its government-in-exile. Its most senior and powerful leader inside the country was Joe Slovo, the head of the South African Communist Party.

Tambo and Mandela were, like Slovo, Soviet-aligned communists. That meant that at the very moment they should have had the strongest hand in the negotiations De Klerk commenced, the reality was that their primary patron had just disintegrated into a post-Soviety free-for-all of plunder, corruption and political incoherence.

We must then understand that the negotiations over the peaceful transfer of power in South Africa were skewed first, in the sense that one side held all state power and the other held none, second, in the sense that one side’s international allies had just won the Cold War and the other’s had vanished and, third, in the sense that the context of the negotiation was a hegemonic global neoliberal consensus to which all major parties in all major states were abjectly capitulating.

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Consequently, what the ANC got, in its negotiations, was actually not much. There would be no land reform, no asset seizures, no nationalizations. In addition, there was the problem of the judiciary. The judiciary was corrupt and had been appointed by a white supremacist regime for a century. Even if the apartheid government could have somehow been made to agree that its officials could be brought to justice for all their murder and torture, how could one address the crimes that were committed by a regime that also did everything in its power to prevent black people becoming lawyers, never mind judges?

With little hand to play, the ANC negotiators got the best they could: new courts with limited subpoena powers and no ability to attach jeopardy to the hearings they conducted. They could make the war criminals testify but only without jeopardy attached. Almost the entire white population was blanket-immunized against prosecution for the atrocities they had committed.

The practical purpose of these courts was twofold: rapid on-the-job education of newly-minted black lawyers in courtroom procedure and an opportunity for the victims of the regime to experience some limited sense of “closure” by hearing their tormentors at least confess to their despicable acts.

The political purpose of the court was vast: to create a mandate for the new South African state to use its police forces and judiciary to protect white South Africans’ ill-gotten gains, their wealth, their consumer spending power, their ability to continue employing black servants in their homes and black miners in their gold and diamond mines. And so it needed a really catchy name. They called it the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Nearly thirty years since the transfer of power, history’s verdict is mixed. An evil that the TRC had been created to prevent did not happen; South Africa never descended into civil war. But the massive asymmetry between the voting power of black South Africans and that of whites versus the countervailing imbalance of economic power, and a state hamstrung by neoliberal property rights protections, has produced a violent, unequal society rife with corruption, which has become the only way Africans have been able to convert their political power into economic power.

In some regions of the country, especially the Southwest, Truth and Reconciliation seems to have been a step in the direction of a more equal, more inclusive, more integrated society. But as one travels northeast, closer to the gold and diamond mines, the core of the state’s economic power, the country seems as divided, as segregated as ever but with an array of private security forces and an incompetent and corrupt national constabulary replacing the old Ministry of Law and Order uber-cops.

Furthermore, as the national government devolves into a spoils system, pre-existing national divisions are increasing among black South Africans. Xhosa-Zulu relations are on the decline, to the point where the ancient corrupt vendu Bantustan leader of Kwazulu, Mangosutu Buthelezi is again a national political force. And all signs point to a continuing decline towards Kenya-style politics of great nations trapped in an endless petty fistfight over the table-leavings of neo-colonialism.

South Africa’s TRC was both a high price to pay to gain majority rule and, concurrently, a tiny amount of settler accountability bought at an astronomical price.

So why would Canada want to copy this?

It didn’t we just stole the name and put it on something emptier and worse.

More about that next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what is the Porno Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Diversity of Christianity in the Roman World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And many, many did.

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

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

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

The Council of Nicea, Worst Corporate Retreat Ever

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

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

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

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

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

The Donatist Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Third Way as Diocletian’s Persecution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are the Donatists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Paradox of Disability and Self-Help: An Homage to Dungeons and Dragons

Six years ago, I was asked to bring my insights as both a social scientist and avid player of tabletop role playing games to a University of Calgary project that was researching the use of computer games as mental health and life skills interventions for children and youth living with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, autism and other neurological disabilities. At the time, they were considering expanding their study to examine in-person, tabletop games. After I did some initial work on the project interpersonal and academic politics caused the team and me to part ways. Now that I am out of the formal academy, it is one of the projects I am dusting off. This essay is the first step in doing that.

We live in a society that denies that etiquette is important, that we do not have hard and fast rules for communication and social organization. But this denial is just one reason our society’s system of etiquette is one of the most challenging ever to exist. Not only are our rules of interaction not codified or explicit; we deny they exist and instead ask people to act based on their innate talent and social intuition.

We are not exactly being dishonest when we emphasize the role of unconscious intuition in our systems of etiquette. Intuition and innate social talent are important because our etiquette is so faddish and requires a great deal of guesswork because no person can successfully amass all the necessary information to execute it correctly.

And with each passing year, etiquette grows more occult, more faddish, changes more rapidly. And we are not always conscious of the strategies we use to cope with the burden each of us bears in keeping up with all the new rules that we must learn to avoid offense, ostracism, professional demotion or even loss of work.

I think this helps to explain the continuing importance of the situation comedy in our cultural life. Beginning with Seinfeld and Friends, a long parade of both mainstream and off-beat sitcoms have functioned only secondarily as exercises in humour and primarily as etiquette pedagogy, constructing narratives around breaches of novel etiquette practices and their resolution. Curb Your Enthusiasm exists at the margins of this discourse because it routinely questions whether these etiquette fads are positive social developments, rather than treating them as inherently good, or amoral, like the weather.

This increasingly volatile and opaque direction our etiquette has taken since the end of the Second World War has had profoundly adverse effects on those with average or below average social intuition.

And they can be measured in what can only be described as the mass pathologization of fairly ordinary folks. Autism is now a spectrum inclusive of millions of people who are really just a bit obtuse and quirky, Asperger’s Syndrome now a disease; Tourette’s syndrome is increasingly expanding into a spectrum inclusive of all people who struggle with social restraint and conversational impulse control. We have also seen an expansion of mood disorder diagnoses as our faddish systems of etiquette make social situations both increasingly difficult to navigate and increasingly consequential. “Social anxiety” was once descriptive of an inappropriate fear of the consequences of mismanaging a social encounter; now it also describes accurate and reasonable fears.

To make matters worse, more and more jobs have come to include a sales or human interaction component. Corporations route hostile customer communication through telephones precisely because telephonic communication is more fraught, more arduous, more exhausting, more dependent on follow etiquette rules and keeping one’s cool in the face of provocation. That results in fewer product returns, fewer maintenance calls, fewer refunds and exchanges. And all sorts of jobs have had a sales component appended to them.

There have traditionally existed certain kinds of jobs set aside for people with significant social disabilities but these are increasingly under threat as “sales” becomes a duty incorporated into more and more jobs. Shelving jobs in retail space, for example, now almost always include a customer service component and usually a sales component too.

What this means is that an ever-increasing portion of the population is now understood to suffer from neurological disabilities affecting social interaction; and, at the same time, the need to mitigate or overcome these disabilities has never been greater.

For those of us who are just a little quirky and unintuitive but who are now understood to occupy the top of the Tourette spectrum or the autism spectrum, there are some proven strategies that have worked for us: we can often learn social competence and even develop a significant degree of intuition through practice in less hostile environments.

For me, that environment was Dungeons and Dragons. For those who have never played the game, each player (except one) plays a “character,” a fictional person both like and unlike them whom they operate in the game, whose intentions and speech they narrate. D&D is a cooperative game, which means that even if one’s character dies, one has not lost the game but instead must imagine a new character into being. Characters are described on “character sheets,” which list and quantify the character’s innate talents, learned skills and other proficiencies.

While physical combat in the game is resolved solely by rolling dice, the social interactions, both among player-characters (PCs) and with non-player characters (NPCs) (other people one encounters not represented by one of the players) are resolved by acting-out the social interactions and then rolling dice, based on the character’s in-game social apititudes, to determine how well-received these words have been.

D&D is also soothing because it is full of measures of status. Characters gain “levels,” commensurate with their powers in the game and as they experience more success, there are steady incremental rewards. Furthermore, characters specialize into classes, with warriors wielding swords, clerics healing wounds, warlocks incinerating foes with eldritch blasts. Having clearly quantified hierarchical ranks with transparent criteria for attaining them and areas of specialization allowing everyone to be the master of something is not just soothing.

D&D creates a social microuniverse that is fairer, more transparent, better quantified, more clearly ordered than the chaos of modern social interaction. Furthermore, the game makes that micro-universe just consequential enough. Screwing up at D&D is still a screw-up. Your character may even die but none of those consequences leave the table.

My childhood D&D table, like so many others, consisted of a bunch mildly autistic kids practicing social interaction governed by a stable set of rulebooks, hour after hour after hour, week in, week out. It worked. And it continues to work.

It should not surprise us, then, that when Canada and the US unexpectedly invaded Afghanistan in 2001, many of us were hit up with a subcultural “support the troops” request: with the new edition of D&D (third) coming out, could we spare our first and second edition rulebooks and scenario packs for the troops? Because of course D&D players are well-represented in the military; because, in a way, the military is a gigantic tabletop RPG that never ends. As you gain levels, you get access to cooler and cooler, more expensive weapons, just like in D&D and there are even names for the different class levels like “admiral,” just like those tables in Gary Gygax’s original Player’s Handbook.

More than any D&D group or military battalion, the organization that truly epitomizes this kind of intervention is MENSA. A superficial observation of any MENSA chapter board tells us that MENSA is not an elite organization for the super-intelligent; it is a self-help group for people with Asperger syndrome. In fact, I learned recently from a former MENSA director, that their conventions include a set of coloured badges to indicate each delegate’s level of tactile defensiveness (coded as receptivity to hugs), one of the most common Asperger’s comorbidities.

But what would happen to MENSA, to your average D&D group, if they understood themselves to be self-help groups for the disabled? What would happen if MENSA activists began to explain their struggles to get into romantic relationships as arising from their status as disabled people and not because they are “too smart”?

I would argue that a great paradox of autism and Tourette’s self-help projects is that they use the lack of social intuition of participants to conceal the true function and purpose of the group. Essentially, we are coping with our disabilities better and working more industriously on them because we have hidden from ourselves the fact that we are disabled.

It has saddened me, the past decade, to watch similar movements, like Deaf Culture and Mad Pride, wither when the positive effects of transforming one’s disability into something other are so clearly evident in my corner of the world.

Because it is my view that ordinary, decent people would rather be a screw-up than a cripple any day of the week. I have a couple of friends whose lives are severely circumscribed by neurological disability whom I watch make that choice week-in, week-out, even though it brings shame and a sense of failure because that all those screw-ups are a lighter burden than a permanent, crippling brain defect.

Ordinary, decent people want to be heroes; they want to focus on helping others, not asking for help for themselves; they want to feel like their unique ideas and perspectives come from a rare intellectual talent, not brain damage.

The white failures of Trumpism, who blame affirmative action, reverse racism and the International Zionist conspiracy for their lack of a mate or a job are of a piece with the progressive failures furiously pathologizing their personalities and appropriating minority sexual and racial identities to explain their failure. What both groups need is more D&D. It is not natural or healthy to build one’s identity around victimhood or disability, even—nay—especially  when one is genuinely disabled or genuinely a victim.

In other blog posts on this issue, I have emphasized neurodiversity themes and talked about how many disabilities, like restless leg syndrome, produce personal ill health and population-level good health. But that is a well-ploughed furrow these days.

So in this piece I am making a case that is supplementary: if we want to actually benefit from the neurological diversity of our population and unlock the potential within the human race, we need to begin de-pathologizing our quirks and others’ quirks. And, in my view, a key early step in that must be to resist more strongly efforts to change and complicate our systems of etiquette, investing that energy not in making new social rules but in more transparently explaining and documenting those we already have.

Because not everyone is lucky to have grown up at a D&D table.

This blog post is dedicated to Jens Haeusser, Kenneth Lieblich, Michael Airton, Oscar Bot, Steve Lyons, Tara Fraser, Philip Bot and Terrence Willey, the best damn D&D group a guy could have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ll know when it comes up. You won’t have to ask.” – The Institutional Foundations of the Horgan-Weaver Sellout

By 1995, the Harcourt government’s Commission on Resources and Environment had played out. The multi-year public process that began in early 1992 had created “stakeholder” “tables” of government-selected “representatives” of environmental, industrial and recreational interest groups to create regional land use plans in the Kootenays, Eastern Vancouver Island and the Cariboo-Chilcotin. This process was supposed to end BC’s “War in the Woods,” and had enjoyed substantial buy-in from the various groups represented at the tables. CORE had created new protected areas and, to placate industry, had also created unprecedented new “dedicated use” areas of public land for specific industries, most notably the Elk Valley coal mining sector.

The origins of CORE went back to a press conference Harcourt had held in 1990, announcing an end to the “War in the Woods,” the media’s name for the many land use conflicts around the province that escalated to the point of large-scale civil disobedience and, in especially contested valleys like the Stein (Stagyn), tree-spiking and more radical forms of direct action. At the press conference, while Harcourt was still leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, internationally renowned environmentalist Colleen McCrory, president of the Valhalla Wilderness Society, the woman who had named BC “Brazil of the North,” joined hands with Jack Munro, the socially conservative, environmentalist-hating president of the BC’s branch of the International Woodworkers of America, who had sabotaged BC’s 1982 general strike, to announce that BC’s woods would soon achieve peace in our time.

Few environmentalists had publicly dissented. Paul George and Adriane Carr, founders of Western Canada Wilderness Committee, were among the very few prominent and well-funded environmental leaders not to join the consensus around Harcourt’s plan. But Carr and George were atypical opponents. George, who ran for the Greens in 1991 against the sitting premier Rita Johnston, had publicly stated that trying to address climate change was as futile as trying to stop a volcano and that one had to focus on the basics of putting fences around new groups of trees.

Opponents of CORE like me and my mentor, David Lewis, opposed CORE not just because it was only permitted to protect a maximum of 12% of the province’s land base from logging, but because it and its most prominent supporters were opposed to making climate change part of the conversation.

McCrory and her allies like Ric Careless of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) worried that their park creation agenda would be hurt if people like Lewis shaped the discourse. Beginning in 1989, Lewis had been showcasing mathematical models of atmospheric change showing that a rapidly changing climate would destroy BC’s old growth trees “whether they are cut down or not.” In the mathematical models he had crafted with respected climate scientists, forests would have to move towards the poles at somewhere between three and eight times the maximum rate ecosystems in the fossil record had moved during prior episodes of rapid warming.

There were reasons major international environmental groups tended to be part of that consensus. Groups like WWF and Greenpeace had branch offices or affiliates in BC that received money from around the world because these organizations temperate rainforest “campaigns” were headquartered out of their Vancouver offices. Funding for these offices and access to international funds and profile were contingent on old growth forest preservation continuing to shape BC’s environmental discourse. Also, many organizations raised much of their money through door-to-door canvassing and direct mail fundraising at the time and there is no question that, especially in outdoorsy neighbourhoods like Kitsilano and Fernwood, people were much more willing to open the cheque book to support a new park than a climate action campaign that might tax or ban the SUV they planned to drive to it.

While most of BC’s environmental activists threw themselves into CORE, a minority of us demanded that science not brokerage govern land use planning and that climate needed to be placed at the centre of the conversation.

In 1991, McCrory and Lewis, who lived not far apart in the rural Slocan Valley, came into public conflict as McCrory had attempted to push the local Green Party candidate out of the impending election, arguing that if the NDP did not win the riding of Nelson-Creston, it would “ruin everything I have ever worked for in my entire life.”

To her credit, unlike most of BC’s environmental elite, McCrory turned on the government at the end of CORE and denounced its protected area plans as woefully insufficient. McCrory, unlike the rest of BC’s environmental elite, joined Carr and George in supporting the Green Party in the next election. But the rift remained. At a hastily-organized press conference, McCrory endorsed the party but still refused to speak to me, look directly at me or say my name, even though I, as party leader, had rushed to Nelson from hundreds of kilometres away to accept her support. A Jean Chretien-Paul Martin press conference writ small.

Following the 1996 election, the NDP’s next premier, Glen Clark, focused on a number of industrial development plans designed to reinvigorate the party’s waning support from blue collar workers. The most-remembered was his attempt to kickstart an aluminum-hulled shipbuilding industry in BC by instructing the crown’s BC Ferry Corporation to build and purchase the first of these ships. BC’s rentier elite saw their power threatened by Clark’s import substitution industrialization plans and orchestrated a major capital strike.

But lost in that story is the most substantive and long-lasting part of Clark’s industrial strategy: a massive expansion of petroleum, especially fracked natural gas, in the province’s northeast. The government presided over an increased subsidy regime and a massive increase in BC’s participation in the petro sector. This even culminated in BC and Saskatchewan’s NDP governments going to the Supreme Court to demand that Canada’s adoption of the Kyoto Treaty on climate change be struck down.

During the Glen Clark years and the premiership of Dan Miller, his immediate successor, BC’s environmental movement overwhelmingly focused on attempting to create new parks in regions where there had been no CORE process, most importantly, the Central Coast and Inside Passage archipelagos between Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii.

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While organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club were more engaged on climate change at the international level, this was not reflected in their BC activities. And, most dramatically, WWF disaffiliated its BC chapter after Careless was found to have suppressed the work of the organization’s own scientists in order to shore-up the government’s environmental credentials.

This was not wholly surprising in that every major BC environmental group except Wilderness Committee had been part of British Columbians for a Better Environment, a strategic voting advocacy group in the 1996 election that sought to suppress the Green Party vote with the slogan “Don’t Make Your Vote a Toxic Political Waste.” As exposed in an investigation by the Georgia Straight’s Charlie Smith, most of the money BCBE spent advertising in support of a strategic NDP vote was actually public money the groups had received in government grants immediately prior to the election.

I had been warned in advance about BCBE by George and Carr because it was an outgrowth of a project in which Wilderness Committee was working with the other blue chip environmental organizations, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, WWF, Valhalla, Sierra Legal Defense, etc. And so it was in March of 1996 that I learned a piece of information whose significance and meaning I failed to fully put together for decades.

All of the major blue chip environmental organizations in BC had been approached in 1995 by an entity called the Pew Charitable Trust. It appeared, at the time, that the War in the Woods was winding down and that BC’s environmental leaders might pivot to another policy issue. But Pew showed up with a promise of $1 million per year, to be shared among the groups, to support a continuation and renewal of their forestry campaigns. The groups that signed on created a new, jointly administered, corporate entity called BC Wild. The agreement to create BC Wild was straightforward: BC Wild was an organization whose purpose was to focus on forestry issues; it had no other mandate and the agreement promised nothing else. Its one curious requirement was that all the groups had to be in; there had to be a consensus among the main environmental groups who shaped BC’s public discourse on the environment.

Two decades later, I was watching the brilliant Kelsey Grammer show Boss, depicting the seedy underbelly of Chicago politics. In the first episode, Grammer’s character, Chicago Mayor Tom Kaine, approaches a young upstart politician and asks him to run for governor of Illinois. He explains that he will be putting the full weight of his party machine behind the young man. “What do you want from me?” the candidate asks. “You’ll know when it comes up,” Kaine replies, “you won’t have to ask.”

It was at that moment that I suddenly rethought the BC Wild agreement and the need for it to represent a broad consensus. At the time, I had thought that the Pew Charitable Trust, in its hamfisted way, was trying to address BC’s environmental movements predilection for institutional instability and factionalism. But, in fact, it was really an agreement like the one I had just witnessed on TV.

That is because the Pew Charitable Trust is the charity branch of Suncor.

By the end of the 1990s, the fever had broken. New environmental groups were in town. And other blue chip charities not tied to Big Oil had shown up. The consensus not to address climate change had evaporated by 1999, and so had the BC Wild money.

But the resentments remained.

Valhalla, Wilderness Committee and Sierra Legal effectively declared war on the BC Green Party, demanding that it be offered up to their leaders, now that they had embraced the gospel of climate justice. That story is unpleasant to tell and was decidedly more unpleasant to live through. But by the end of 2000, the BC Greens were a new party, its former leader no longer a member and none of its elected municipal representatives still sitting as Greens.

I want to suggest that it was during these crucial formative years that the foundations of the first Horgan government were laid. BC’s New Democrats and Greens tripled fossil fuel subsidies in a series of budget votes and increased fracking every year; they increased oil industry subsidies by more in three years than the pro-oil BC Liberals had in the previous sixteen. The “Clean BC” climate plan touted by both parties includes increases in fracking and petroleum and coal exports and promises to double the number of logging and mining vehicles on the road by 2050.

And that is because the winners in shaping the environmental policies of both parties descend from an institutional, personal and intellectual lineage that traces back to BC Wild, that, in fact, those who rose to positions of power and influence in the movement in the 90s, while so many community organizations withered, were propelled to the top by oil money. And it is their legacy we see in the anti-climate cross-partisan consensus that has governed BC ever since.

Big HR, the New Commissars and the New Scabs

Our Absurd Moment and the Postmodern Critique
When one looks at the QAnon Shaman at the Bumpkin Putsch or Harry Potter book burnings on TikTok, it is only natural to ask “how did we get here?” How did the Age of Reason come crashing down upon us like this? Surprisingly, a common explanation is “the postmodern critique” or, as Jordan Peterson absurdly mislabels it, “cultural Marxism.” (Peterson believes that Karl Marx was the person who invented the idea that some things are good and other things are bad and then mysteriously blames him for ideologies that claim nothing is good or bad.)

The idea is that the really wacky aspects of the culture wars come from a kind of vulgar cultural relativism that resulted from university students in the Midwest misreading French philosophers at university in the 1990s and calling their misreading “postmodernism.”

All sorts of sinister silliness in our present is thrown at the feet of Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Jean Beaudrillard and their ilk. We are quick to blame pronoun politics, trigger warnings, standpoint epistemology, the moronic redefinition of “cultural appropriation” and the like on the excesses of the Golden Age of Theory.

Far be it from me to suggest that the Golden Age of Theory was lacking in excesses, silliness or nonsensical clumps of words masquerading as ideas but, most of the ideas it is blamed for had nothing to do with it.

Austerity: Crucible of the New Commissar Class
So many of the cultural practices that undermine our ability to think, to debate, to organize and to stand in solidarity with our comrades arose during the 1980s and 90s but not in the sociology, literature and women’s studies departments we so often blame. They arose in much better-maintained, newer and more expensive buildings on university campuses. Because contemporaneous with the vulgar postmodernist wave was a far more sinister and influential development: the explosion of management theory and the rise of what Thomas Piketty calls “the super-manager.”

Contrary to the public rhetoric of neoliberal reformers like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, austerity programs do not attack bureaucracy and bureaucrats. They typically increase the number of people in management roles in both the private and public sectors. Someone has to develop the strategies for designing and implementing cuts to the industrial and government workforces; someone has to create the new private corporations that are spun off from the state as public resources are sold off; someone has to develop new labour discipline routines to force more productivity out of the remaining workers to make up for all the discarded labour.

And so, the Janus face of fewer frontline workers being paid less is more supervisory and managerial workers being paid more. Furthermore, it is dangerous to promote frontline workers into these new roles. While they might be intimately familiar with the operations of their workplace, they might be from the wrong class and, worse still, act in the interest of that class by stymying austerity effort. Much better to hire folks whose knowledge and skills are unrelated to the operations of the workplace but instead are organized around management itself.

And so, while the social sciences and humanities wandered down one rabbit hole or another in the 1990s, a new kind of professional, the cross-sectoral manager came to populate this burgeoning new class and with that new kind of authority came the expansion of a pre-existing credential, the MBA, the Master of Business Administration.

Administration ceased to be a professional attainment within vocation that one achieved by rising through corporate ranks and became a vocation all its own, with hefty tuition fees to keep the riffraff out.

The was contemporaneous with all kinds of new corporations. Blairite/Third Way austerity programs often involved downloading government services to non-profit or charitable enterprises. All these government contracts with entities outside the government required management; and charities that wanted to keep contracts flowing have discovered that they need to stop promoting from within and instead to begin poaching MBAs from the private sector, often folks with family money or a wealthy spouse who could slum it with their prestigious degree.

More importantly, conventional Thatcherite austerity involved taking parts of the state that made money, selling them off cheap. This created all kinds of openings for high level managers and CEOs who needed private sector experience, to stay competitive. Former government departments needed to be reformed to be “lean” and “agile.” This involved the usual: busting unions, cutting wages and new systems of surveillance and punishment to squeeze more work out of the remaining workforce.

Most exciting for this emerging was the rise of a new kind of business that just managed other things. Hedge funds arose from new laws that made financial speculation easier. Health management organizations (HMOs) and their ilk were necessary to ensure that privatized parts of the state were not too taxed by having to actually provide services to anyone and so whole corporations came into being whose sole purpose was to act as gatekeepers to deny people basic services.

As this new management culture took off in the private sector and in the ruins of where the state had once been, it developed a vast abundance of its own nonsensical theories, like the worst excesses of postmodernism, but with fewer syllables behind it and, even less disciplined thinking. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and similar works of non-scholarship formed the zeitgeist of the emerging super-manager class.

Ironically, all this was taking place as the Soviet Union and its satellite states, the only places where the manager class had seized power from the owner class, were collapsing. And so despite having an emerging class consciousness strikingly similar to the commissars of Eastern Europe, the world’s new manager class presented itself not as competitors of the capitalist/owner class but as its handmaidens.

During this period, sectors of the economy like healthcare and postsecondary education experienced huge growth in their administrative sectors, with the number of managers per frontline worker increasing three- or fivefold. To advance in such a system, the post-USSR commissar class, remade in the Harvard School of Business, was charged with the continuous revolutionizing of production. The owner class delegated this work to CEOs and the massive bureaucracies they built outside the state, at the state’s margins and inside the state as governments sought to ape the supposedly more efficient private sector.

The meat of this work entailed increasing productivity while reducing wages. And that involved not only the formal and legal destruction of unions but a frontal assault on the cultural fabric of working folks that made them stick together, whether formally unionized or not.

The 1990s was the decade of, among other things, the listserv, proto-social media, an e-mail list that distributed your response to a post to the inbox of everyone on the list. This led to the first of a series of internet-leavened eruptions of social conflict as people normally inhibited by the physical presence, tone and body language of one’s interlocutors were able to express their opinions of coworkers and their ideas in a medium (e-mail lists) lacking in those inhibiting features. Combined with the radical social dislocation produced in workplaces by neoliberal reforms and the adjustments associated with the switch from alcohol and tobacco to coffee and anti-depressants as the main workplace drugs, this led to an explosion of the expression of workplace interpersonal grievances.

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Consequently, a key area of knowledge and action by this new, increasingly self-conscious and connected managerial class became the workplace psychology of employees. Whereas the first wave of study in employee psychology in the postwar era had been focused on increasing Fordist industrial production and the maintenance of morale and had been centred in psychology departments, this new wave was characterized by non-academic thought and thought nevertheless canonized by Business and Commerce departments at universities.

The New Age and the New HR
Rather than the empirically-driven efficiency models we associate with Robert McNamara’s presidency of the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s, this thinking was surprisingly woo-based, as it reflected the Yippie-Yuppie transition embodied in the Jerry Rubin-Abbie Hoffman debates of the 1980s. The transformation of the New Age EST movement for self-actualization into the Landmark Forum for personal and financial success typified the alchemy 1970s New Age thinking underwent to become Management Theory.

The structure of gurus, retreats and encounter groups underwent a similarly superficial transformation. The retreats became “corporate retreats,” which did not always involve even leaving the office. Instead, they imbibed of the spirit of the elementary and middle school assembly. Regular duties would be canceled for a day and the bosses and managers would introduce an individual or small team to educate the company’s workers in some way that would somehow make them better co-workers. These exercises often repurposed “trust building exercises” from 1970s New Age culture with employees being forced into conscriptive group activities that entailed behaving in undignified ways: confessional testimonials, bad collaborative drawing, incoherent improvisational skits, sack races, etc.

Many of these activities entailed classic cult recruitment strategies designed to break down one’s dignity, one’s ego in front of the group and then have the group conscripted into reforming/repairing that ego as one based on the values of the facilitators of the activity, centred around the group. The idea of the outsider guru did not just form new high level charlatan jobs like “management consultant;” “retreat facilitators,” “anti-bullying consultants,” etc. multiplied in the ever-expanding world of Big HR. For every new manager based in a single firm and workplace, there was also a new contractor, ready to charge big bucks to put on day-long events designed to induce a new camaraderie, a new loyalty as old loyalties and solidarities were chipped away by ever-tightening regimes of austerity and surveillance.

All this unfolded as the wage disparity within corporations grew; more ranks, more material differences came to separate conventional employees from management as the super-manager class emerged, to vie with the owner class for control of capitalism and its institutions.

Anti-Bullying and the New Morals Clause
A curious development arose from all this: when corporations came to the bargaining table with unions, it was often they, not the union that asked new contracts to include anti-discrimination and anti-bullying measures with large, elastic, capacious definitions of discrimination, harassment and bullying. And when there was no union with whom to negotiate, workers found similar measures creeping into their non-union contracts.

Central to these new measures was what we might call victim subjectivity. These policies were typically framed based not on intersubjective or objective standards but by subjective standards. By this, I mean that whether a person was facing discrimination, harassment or bullying was based on the following test: did the person feel as though they had been targeted based on their sexual orientation, gender expression, race, etc.? These grounds for discrimination typically excluded the two main factors in workplace harassment: class and workplace rank/status.

Such policies tended to eschew easily available evidence in favour of an individual’s feelings: had one’s coworkers witnesses some portion of the harassment? That was unimportant evidence. Could one find a pattern of financial discrimination in the awarding of overtime, holiday dates or unsuccessful promotion attempts? Again, not nearly so important as feelings.

In this way, real, material structures of power and real, material standards of evidence were effaced, enabling those most able to narrate their emotions to serve their strategic objectives to dominate this field. And as an increasing number of complaints were encouraged by these policies, complaints also came to be directed downward or horizontally in the workplace. After all, with such a deliberately flimsy evidentiary structure, it was as easy for complaints to fail with evidence as to succeed without it. Consequently, complaints tended to be directed at individuals who could not materially punish the complainant. And they tended to operate in an evidence-free frame, causing them to measure not how wronged a person was but how much power and popularity, how much social capital they could mobilize.

Furthermore, with increasing frequency, these complaints could encompass actions and opinions expressed outside the workplace provided they produced feelings located in the workplace. Unwittingly, union negotiators often tended to embrace these management-driven policies because they appeared congruent with the values associated with political projects and parties with which unions were associated outside the workplace, like anti-racism initiatives.

Such complaint structures also served another purpose for the new managerial class in the age of austerity: more and more of unions’ energies were taken up with complaints by workers about other workers, not about managers and owners. Union grievance structures, originally designed to force management accountability, have become increasingly colonized by complaints by workers about one another, further undermining solidarity and distracting union officials from fights for real economic justice inside and outside the workplace.

The HR-ification of Activism
And we all know where things have gone from here. Social justice activism is taking the cue from Big HR and the super-manager class. One does not need to be a co-worker for an individual who feels wronged or offended by something one has done or said. The moral logic of HR is now the moral logic of the world. An increasing portion of self-styled social justice activists focus all or a portion of their time on finding a person whose speech they find hurtful and seek redress through the person’s workplace.

And given the capacious, incoherent and subjective nature of harassment policies, non-co-worker complainants appear to have real power and real standing whether conferred de facto or de jure. At our present moment, it is as though everyone has had a morals clause inserted into their contract, i.e. everyone’s job is now contingent on non-controversial public speech.

Now, political victory is not a change in public policy or cultural practice nearly as often, these days, as it is the infliction of unemployment, precarity and, ideally, homelessness on any individual who thinks aloud in ways that emotionally trouble people who possess significant social capital, as though being emotionally untroubled is some kind of right we have earned, as though being emotionally troubled or challenged is not the most common path towards personal growth.

What I find most shocking arising from all this is that the huge popularity idea that those who express wrong (i.e. emotionally troubling) thoughts should not have jobs, homes or even friends and loved ones. And that the left’s idea of victory is not the conversion of those it deems opponents to values of tolerance, pluralism, economic equality and ecological sustainability but instead their firing, eviction, shunning and premature deaths.

In my own recent experiences with two abusive employers, I have witnessed this firsthand. Those most interested in striking a pose as radicals, revolutionaries, as social justice warriors, have thrown in with my bosses, amplifying their slanders of me on social media, intensifying their harassment at times I am in high-stakes negotiations. They are labouring for free because being implicated in my humiliation, immiseration and poverty will redound to their glory, making them heroes of today’s Bizarro Left.

Once upon a time, we had a name for such folks. They were called “snitches” and “scabs,” and were subject to the scorn of their fellow workers. Now scabbing and snitching are the very essence of the travesty that passes for too much of contemporary social justice activism: volunteer work for the bosses.

There Is No Alternative: Ontological Dualism and the Fiction of Political Choice in Canada

The Uselessness of Policy Resolutions

In a recent post, I suggested that no policy resolution passed by Canadian political party convention between 1994 and 2020 had effect on party election platforms or policies enacted while in government. While there may have been instances of party conventions adopting policies also adopted by their part in government, these adoptions were either post-facto or coincidental.

Time and again, every Canadian political party from the Greens to the Conservatives has defied the policies passed at party conventions and written election platforms into which, not just members but ordinary MPs and MLAs, have negligible input. With all power concentrated in the office of party leader, to select candidates and caucus members at will, since 2003, it is not surprising that Canadian political parties run like the imperial Russian state. Power flows into the office of the autocrat by vote of the members in convention. Thereafter, all power remains concentrated in that single person until removed by a party convention or stepping down.

In such a system, there are other powerful people with decision-making power, finance ministers, attorneys and solicitors-general, chiefs of staff and candidate vetting committees but their power is not derived from party members or even voters at election time. It comes from and is solely dependent upon selection by the party leader.

I have rehearsed these arguments in other essays in recent years, more than once. But what I have not chosen to examine further is the thinking and behaviour of party activists who spend hour upon hour drafting policy resolutions, getting them prioritized on convention agendas and building a supportive coalition of convention delegates to vote them through.

A half-remembered tradition of convention resolutions affecting party platforms and government policies from Canada’s first century seems an insufficient explanation. We are approaching fifty years since consequential votes at national policy conventions were part of our political culture. And given the general state of collective amnesia that envelopes our politics today, it seems quite improbable.

So, what does motivate these folks to pass resolutions at the conventions of parties that they know will ignore them?

I want to make a radical suggestion in the form of some fancy religious studies/theology terminology: ontological dualism.

Ontological Dualism

As Los Altos Institute approaches its tenth birthday, we are settling into an organizational identity, history and culture in which we can observe patterns. One is that, unlike many ecologically conscious, socialist communities, our culture is not especially atheistic, even though atheists are likely a majority.

Rather, it is a culture friendly to and representative of atheists and other “ontological monists,” like Jews, Mormons and Sikhs. These faith communities, like atheists, tend to either reject or minimize the idea of the supernatural. All of creation, whether originating in God or not, is governed by the same set of rules in ontological monism. If people have spirits, they are material, either epiphenomena generated by brain activity or physically detectable parts of the body our instrumentation cannot yet pick up. If angels exist, they have physical being of some kind and operate within the same systems of physical causation as human beings.

More importantly, ontological monists focus their religious practice on creating a just order on earth. The work you do for God here on earth is an end in itself, not a means of purchasing a ticket to heaven. If God has a kingdom, the centre of religious practice is building the part of it that exists on earth. In other words, our institutions members may be atheists but if they are theists, they are likely “religious but not spiritual.”

Ontological dualism, on the other hand, is something we associate with most religious folks. Their discourse and practices are heaven- rather than earth-centred. What we do on earth is understood to be “just a test,” as memorably characterized by David Shore’s Gregory House. Our actions on earth are highly consequential only insofar as they are the basis on which God judges how we will live our next life, whereas, for ontological monists, they are consequential for the opposite reason, that this earth, this society, are the ones that are most real and merit our sole or primary attention.

For ontological dualists, then, religious debates are often about guessing, deducing and describing the divine order and divine judgement that are understood to follow this life on earth. The phrase “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” seeks to mock this kind of speculation that has characterized most theological and cosmological writing across religious faiths.

Ontological dualism is a way of thinking that grew up gradually between the Classical Period (500-322 BCE) and the Englightenment (1750-1849), with Plato often credited as its progenitor. The idea that material reality was an inferior creation made by a fallen divinity called the demiurge, and that it was but a shadow of the true reality, the world of forms, which could only be perceived in one’s mind’s eye, was easily hybridized with a wide variety of religious traditions. And as hard science increasingly diverged from the descriptions of the cosmos in religious doctrine, we built a category of ever increasing size to enable science to continue advancing unimpeded by religion.

In the Middle Ages, this even became formalized in educational institutions. There were two separate academic fields that studied the heavens, Mathematical Astronomy, an empirical discipline used to calculate the length of years, the timing of eclipses and the like and Physical Astronomy, the discipline that described how the universe really is. In this way, the crystalline spheres made from the quintessence (fifth element) that encircled the sun, moon and each of the planets orbiting the earth could be safely protected from the insights of mathematical astronomers about how the planets moved.

In this way, religious authorities were happy to admit that the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo constituted major advances in the field of Mathematical Astronomy. They were just not pertinent to Physical Astronomy.

This was something Galileo could not abide. The existence of Physical Astronomy as a discipline was anathema to him. “It is for the church to decide how to go to heaven, not to decide how the heavens go,” the quotation attributed to him goes. Rather than being content with their being two universes, a natural one governed by empirically discoverable physical laws, and a supernatural one governed by laws communicated through the church, Galileo saw only one universe, making him a heretic and an ontological monist.

Although the Scientific Revolution from Copernicus to Newton saw the movement of the boundary between the natural and supernatural, it nevertheless required the continuation of this bifurcated view of the universe to prevent religion and science from going to war. As long as science did not pronounce heaven, angels and the immortal soul either subject to discoverable physical laws or non-existent, an uneasy peace could be maintained, until the next time the nature-supernature boundary had to be moved.

Secularized Dualism

I have spent some time writing about how conservative religious folks today are focused on pushing the dividing line between the natural and the supernatural backwards. Faith communities that once broadly accepted that our climate, geology and evolution of species were in the “natural” category of phenomena now campaigning to place these in the “supernatural” category, things that only God can describe through his chosen ministers. But what I have not done is adequately examine the ways that these categories have been maintained in the mental architecture of the secular and the unchurched.

Among scholars of religion who have sought to explain the sharp differences between American and Canadian religiosity, the most important theory is that the Social Gospel movement came to be absorbed and institutionalized through the Canadian state and its party system. Canada’s first truly national socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the first to form government was an explicitly theocratic party led by a succession of churchmen. The party’s first leader was Methodist minister and former Canadian Labour Party MP, J S Woodsworth; its first premier was T C Douglas, a Baptist minister.

And not only was the Social Gospel the animating ideology of the CCF; it also functioned as a hegemonic discourse within progressive, liberal Canada. Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had written his own book on the Social Gospel and declared it to be the principal ideology of the longest premiership in Canadian history, comprising just shy of a quarter of the twentieth century.

Canadian secularization proceeded more rapidly and more completely than US secularization, it is argued, because liberal Protestantism essentially fused with the state and its party system, while religious conservatives were much more averse to leaving traditional denominations that were based on religious affiliations that could be traced back to the Old World.

But evidently, this secularism is more superficial than we realized. As so often happens with an idea you drum out of language and discourse, it actually grows more powerful in the dark, in the uninterrogated unconscious of groups and individuals.

The Modern Policy Convention

How better to explain political party conventions than as secularized ontological dualism, our Protestant heritage returning to bite us?

Think of a political party convention as an Anglican or Lutheran synod. Geographic delegations arrive from all over to do three kinds of business:

  • hard-nosed, bare-fisted organizational politics, deciding who holds powerful positions, how resources are divided-up and which team of adherents gets to dominate the positions that control the organization’s purse strings and real estate portfolio;
  • enjoying all the social connections that are based around the organization, great conversations with people of like mind that one rarely sees, leavened by free food and drink often dispensed in acts of competitive hospitality by different factions of the organization; and
  • forging agreements, reaching compromises, conducting votes and holding debates about a divinely-ordered world you have never seen, settling questions like whether gay couples stay together in heaven and are recognized by God as spouses, deciding whether the soul enters the body at conception or quickening, deciding whether evolution is a hoax or whether it is actually the hand of God himself, in other words, making supernatural decisions about what God, his angels and heaven are like
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Folks sure have got excited about whether God blesses same sex unions, whether gender exists is heaven, whether slave-owners are served by their slaves in heaven and conducted contentious votes on these subjects, despite the fact that they know their votes do not control God, nor do they control the created, physical world. And yet they vote and fight and organize and undergo schisms, all because they disagree about things they cannot affect.

This is the modern political convention. No one is debating policy resolutions about what their party’s next government will actually do. They are debating what hypothetical governments that will never exist should do. Party policies are hypotheses about the organization of heaven, not plans for organizing on earth.

The Policy Consensus

There are reasons, of course, that this shift followed the end of the Cold War. Even after Canada moved from the British imperial sphere to the US from the 1930s to 50s, it was viewed as advisable for Canada to have a stable, thriving manufacturing sector, supplied with food and raw materials by the country’s Atlantic and Western peripheries. Local elites in Atlantic and Western Canada functioned concurrently as clients to what is termed the “Laurentian elite” of Quebec and Ontario and clients of American elites who were extracting an increasing proportion of the materials from the Canadian periphery.

The central dynamic arose after the Second World War in Canadian political economy were efforts by Western Canada’s peripheral elite to become a US periphery, unmediated by the needs of Central Canada. Deregulation, ending supply management, free trade and investor rights were the calls of Saskatchewan potash, Manitoba hydroelectric, British Columbia timber and Alberta oil interests. These interests were vigorously opposed by and typically lost to the Laurentian elite that presided over the Windsor-Quebec City industrial strip.

But since the end of the Cold War, all of Canada is now the periphery. The Laurentian elite are presiding over the deindustrialization of Quebec and Ontario and are seeking to reach an accommodation, even to merge with the rentier elites of Western Canada. But the now-ascendant resource elite of the West are split over whether to accept this fusion with the Laurentians or to seek dominance in their own right and the creation a new Central Canadian resource elite.

That is all Canadian federal elections are about now. The Conservative Party of Stephen Harper represented the latter, and, to the horror of the Laurentian elite, was able to govern Canada with little assistance from Central Canada’s old elite. Attempts by the Laurentian elite to retake power on their own ended in disaster in 2008 and 2011 with Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.

We must understand that Justin Trudeau was able to take power because of his efforts to accommodate the resource elites of the West in new and unprecedented ways, not just as junior partners but senior partners in his political coalition. The price for dealing the Laurentian elite back in was policy continuity with the Harper government; in fact, the Laurentian elite are being tested, even now, to see how far they will go for the oil industry, whether they will be successful in amplifying the policies of Stephen Harper when it comes to fossil fuel subsidies, pipeline-building, etc.

And as we have seen from the Horgan government in British Columbia and the Notley government in Alberta, every political party in this country has got them memo: we are the periphery of the American and Chinese empires. Our local elites serve at their pleasure and here to tax local populations so subsidize the extraction of their resources.

And as much as they might pretend not to, the folks at the NDP, Tory, Green and Liberal conventions all believe this in their heart. They have truly internalized the belief that there is no alternative. The only break they have from the preordained policy consensus their labour carries is the chance to organize and win the debate how many angels can dance on the head of pin.

Otherwise, we would have to admit that our current political levers are no longer connected to anything in the real world and then, we would be responsible for fashioning new ones to bring the our omnicidal petrostate to heel.

American Caliphate II: The Caliphization of the American Presidency

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

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

  1. The Caliph in Sunni Islam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. America and Religious Freedom

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

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

3. The Structure of American Religion 1850-1975

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. America: From Secular Republic to Caliphate

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

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

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

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

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

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

But a strange thing happened.

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

But the opposite happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American Caliphate I: Who Are the Young Turks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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