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“Adulting” at Christmas: the Decline of the Child-Centred Festivals of the New Deal Order

“What is a woman?” has become an effective refrain for opponents of Genderwang to bust out in public hearings, townhalls, etc. to wrong-foot progressives. Progressives are reluctant to reiterate what the laws they proclaim say on the subject which is “any person who says ‘I am a woman’ at any time, at any place and for any reason.”

Certainly, women have born the brunt of a lot of terrible progressive legislation concerning freedom of assembly, movement, association and speech. They have been locked in prison cells with serial rapists, made to compete against men in the boxing ring, had the violent abusers they were fleeing admitted to their women’s refuge, forced to receive strip searches and personal nursing from men cosplaying as women. The list goes on. It is well-rehearsed.

Ultimately, the progressive idea seems to be that the ways our bodies and minds have been shaped to meet our species’ reproductive needs is unfair and, therefore, somehow untrue or is something that we can and should cause to be untrue. I would argue that such an enterprise only becomes reasonable in a society in which reproduction, itself, is, as the queer theorists would say, “de-normalized” and “de-centred.”

And at no time is this more evident to me than during my two favourite childhood holidays, Christmas and Hallowe’en. The shift of annual gift-giving from New Years to Christmas and the rise of Hallmark and the greeting card industry in the 1840s, radiating out from the US, followed by the collaborative Anglo-American invention of the modern Santa Claus at the end of the nineteenth century created a whole new diety and ritual practice for a novel secular liberal Christmas.

Hallowe’en, which arose from new forms of consumption and settlement, enabled by the decline of sugar prices with the rise of the sugar beet industry in the American Southwest and the rise of row house streetcar suburbs was, similarly, a new festival and one which, like the new Christmas moved the centre of celebration and observance from otherworldly miracles to the miracle of childhood.

There were a few reasons for this shift, not least a rapidly expanding industry producing packaged sweets, fueled by massive increases in sugar supply and declines in price as American maize and beets produced a sectoral import substitution boom, a new industry in greeting cards and the rise of urban department stores, supplanting the catalogue distributorship model.

But there were also social needs to be met. The growth of the suburbs, the immigration boom, increasingly fueled by Eastern and Southern Europeans, meant that a whole new ethos of neighbourliness had to be built. Hallowe’en was an ideal mechanism for conscripting previously unconnected people into a neighbourly activity through dynamics of pressure and shame, as well as children’s enthusiasm, in that it also allowed them to be vetted based on their treatment of neighbour children. And by inserting a strain of benign paganism, Hallowe’en could also be used to vet for civic-minded religious tolerance.

In a way, child-centred Hallowe’en was to the neighbourly culture in which I grew up, in which my mom borrowed and lent butter, flour and sugar with the other women on our block, what the hajj was to medieval Islam. Mall Santa, I would contend, functioned in a similar way: no one would look too askance on a family that missed going to church on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth, to the extent that it was even appropriate to inquire about such things across denomination. But Mall Santa, the closest thing we have to the eponymous priest class of Pharaonic Egypt: that was the pilgrimage that every family had to make. A child could miss Jesus’ intercessory and redemptive sacrifice but not the materialist confession they made on the lap of a portly man who resembled more a medieval imagining of a man possessed by Mammon than the Saint Nicholas who punched Arius in the face at the Council of Nicea and whose bones Recep Erdogan has offered to sell us.

But worry was also a big part of what generated these rituals, twin demographic anxieties nearly identical to our own. Strange how when wealth rapidly polarizes and demand is fueled and maintained by massive increases in consumer debt leavened by increasingly conscriptive monthly instalment plans, people seem to decide that the solution is more cross-dressing and immigration. But of course, rapid, unsustainable rates of immigration were, just as they are today, part of the Global North’s strategy for maintaining increasingly precarious economic growth by creating shortages of jobs and housing, pushing down wages and pushing up rents.

The immigration increases were justified much as they are today, white Protestant birth rates were declining and, to maintain the constant growth capitalism demands, more migrants were necessary. Teddy Roosevelt propounded a natalist policy in response, seeking to ban contraception and create new incentives for families to have kids. We often mistake the “baby bonus,” like the public school system as a proto-welfare state policy that a party like Germany’s Social Democrats might introduce. But these policies are the sort we see coming out of the natalist governments of Viktor Orban and Jean-Francois Legault today. You see: public schools and baby bonuses were originally understood in natalist terms i.e. they were created because the state believed people should have more kids and sought to make that easier; they did not arise from a belief in universals material entitlements of minors to education or to clothing and shelter.

Ultimately, child-centred festivals addressed these anxieties, to an extent, in a number of ways. They had an assimilating effect on communities by conscripting them into universal activities through their children, dampening worries about immigration; both local Anglo creoles and newcomers were creating new shared civic rituals together; they helped to build trust and vetting processes for neighbours’ suitability to look out for free range kids, enabling the world of Our Gang and the Little Rascals to come into being.

The New Deal Order was only around for little more than half a century. It was largely sustained by the rise of the Soviet Union and East Bloc. Without them, there is simply no reason it was rational to keep that social contract around. It had served its purpose and won the Cold War. And universal material guarantees could be safely scaled-back.

And so, not just the material supports but the cultural and infrastructural supports for parents were stripped away. Instead of focusing gifting primarily on children and secondarily on other relatives at Christmas time, the idea of a nebulously-defined self-selected “family” of friends was relentlessly popularized in media, entertainment and popular psychology, making who was to receive a gift less clear and more fraught with anxiety likely to produce over-purchasing. Besides, with their knowledge and expectations, adults tend to prefer more expensive gifts. It made good money, good sense to replace a child and family-structured Christmas with voluntarist liberal associational Christmas.

The changes in Hallowe’en I found personally upsetting. I watched the festival from one centred on children to one centred on twentysomethings and then on adults in early middle age. It took me decades to outrun the damn thing. Every time I thought Hallowe’en parties would become age-inappropriate in my circle and stop being major events, they suddenly became age-appropriate for even older people, again a move relentlessly pushed by popular media.

Furthermore, as laws and the culture of the caring professions shifted in a more individualistic, neoliberal direction, on the one hand, and, on the other became gripped by an irrational safetyism that sought to shut down the very idea of free range kids, the Hallowe’en’s hajj-like properties declined. Instead of being a block-based processional festival, individual children were driven, by their parents, to the homes of trusted, pre-vetted people. Childless newcomers to neighbourhoods ceased putting out decorated pumpkins and buckets of candy. And so the integrative and vetting functions, crucial to the maintenance of neigbhourliness, disappeared. In its place were parties focusing on novel and fantastical forms of display by young women as wire-fu, manga and superheroines came to define new fads in my generation’s male sexual imaginary.

But today, on our streets, it is not young women with blue hair and shiny clothes that are exotic. Free range children sent to the Safeway to buy extra tomatoes, unsupervised kids on buses, kids on bikes: these are the surprising and transgressive sight of this society. Free range kids are not just a scary verging on impossible idea for us because we no longer vet our neighbours and there are no more “block parent” signs in houses’ windows.

They challenge us because we no longer believe that an adult behaving as an adult is an essential part of the social contract. When you live in a society where people have no experience of children, who have had their natural instincts to care and look out for kids beaten out of them, who believe not that a child is a protected class of person but that being a child is a right. Only a society that thinks about childhood as a privilege or right to which they can subscribe, that a person can pick up or put down, would verb the word “adult” and congratulate themselves on social media for “adulting” that day. Of course, this is a society that is engaged in trying to tell us that the “adult baby” fetish is benign.

Similarly to womanhood, childhood is being transformed from a particular embodied location in the human reproductive and developmental process into a feeling, a state of mind. How else can we explain our government’s insistence that children as young as twelve can and should obtain lethally dangerous drugs like Lupron and Fentanyl, behind their parents’ backs and at state expense? How else do we explain fifty-two-year-old York University professor Nicholas Cepeda being permitted to participate in middle school girls’ swim meets and wave his dick at the twelve-year-old girls in the locker room? His right to be a child trumps their right to experience the protections normally granted to children, just as his right to be a woman does.

While Cepeda is an outlier—although not as much of one as you might hope if you read the news on Reduxx—his entitlement speaks to where our horizon of possibilities has gone as our contact with children and, relatedly, our experience of age-appropriate behaviour has steadily declined over the course of my adult life.

It is not that progressive Canadian society has some sinister idea of what a child is, exactly. It is that it has absolutely no idea what a child is. And if you don’t know what a woman is, you can’t protect women. And if you don’t know what a child is, you can’t protect children.

In the crescendo of Tom Waits’1980s surrealist auctioneer song, Step Right Up, Waits chants “It turns a sandwich into a banquet / Tired of being the life of the party? / Change your shorts! Change your shorts! Change your life! / Change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy and get rid of your wife!”

Now that’s an option, a present you can buy yourself for Christmas after a hard year adulting.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

2024: The Year Canadians Said “Merry Christmas”

When I was a child, “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” were common greetings in the world around me, in informal spoken language during the second half of December. They were not heard quite as frequently as “Merry Christmas,” but they were things people organically said. And they said these words with enthusiasm quite often. Their meaning was clearly not the same as “Merry Christmas” but the phrases were not understood by Canadians outside of conservative Christianity to be adversarial to “Merry Christmas” either.

In large measure, that was because they were about something positive. They did not, and have never, merely signified the mere avoidance of the term “Christmas.” Rather, they signified belief in something: the Cold War secularist civic nationalism we associate with the Great Society and the welfare state. Especially in Canada, where our welfare state arose the secularization of the Social Gospel movement and its leaders like Tommy Douglas, “Season’s Greetings,” was not simply a neutral expression. It signified belief in a project, the project of creating a liberal, universalist secular social contract that wove a thread through the churched and unchurched and through Christians and people of other religious faiths.

It was like our flag, our national anthem, our official multiculturalism, our welfare state. Sure, these things lacked deep cultural roots and were elite-driven projects handed down from on high but they appeared grounded in the ethos of reasonableness on which the great secular Anglo democracies of the twentieth century were culturally centred. One could comfortably say “Merry Christmas” and “Season’s Greetings” because they were complementary and compatible benedictions.

Of course, like so many aspects of white settler state liberalism, it actually concealed its own prejudices and cultural imperialism; fortunately, like many such prejudices of the age, they were relatively benign. Part of what held up “Season’s Greetings” and its friend “Happy Holidays,” was a major falsehood, a myth relentlessly propounded by the teaching profession, politicians and liberal religious leaders: that every major religious faith is like Christianity and that every religious tradition has two major annual festivals, one in the month following the vernal equinox and one in the two weeks surrounding the winter solstice.

Liberal secularists and neopagans like this myth for opposing reasons: liberal secularists like the idea that we are really just celebrating the climate, the seasons, the weather, that religion is simply an inefficient or nostalgic way of celebrating scientific laws and natural phenomena. Neopagans, one of the movements involved in the pernicious redefinition of “cultural appropriation” from the commodification and monopolization of cultural knowledge (as depicted in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou? and dramatized by Monsanto’s patenting of basmati rice) to normal processes of cultural change and transmission, like this idea because it creates the false idea that Christians somehow stole the pagan festival Yule from Germanic pagans. Neopagans, being a white consciousness movement, if ever there were one, also share with atheists the dubious distinction of being the only people I have ever seen offended by “Merry Christmas.”

But the reality is, of course, that there is nothing universal about the there being two main religious festivals linked to the winter solstice and vernal equinox. Even North American liberal Judaism, the sole religion used to make this bold assertion, underwent significant modification to fit into this framework, elevating local observance the fairly obscure festival of Channukah above the far more significant festival of Yom Kippur.

Ironically, as we replaced our immigration with one that selected entrants based on class rather than colour, the obvious falsity of the universalist myth that every religion is excited about the vernal equinox became increasingly evident to us. And much of our enthusiasm for saying our secularist benedictions declined with it. We realized that we were not saying anything to our Muslim, Hindu or Sikh neighbours about their faith or seasonal experiences; we were just talking about the strange trip we were on.

Reactions to this came in a variety of forms: first, a growing negativity, a spirit of nullification, which had begun in the US, spread rapidly north. Lacking an ACLU  and First Amendment of our own, we nevertheless imbibed a new kind of bitter American secularism, complaining about the violation of our non-existent separation of church and state (the first article of our liberal constitution is “the Supremacy of God” and our king is the head of a major Christian church). And so we began complaining about Christmas displays, songs and greetings receiving too much state sponsorship, being too permissible in public workplaces and other public settings.

And so we also borrowed the moronic idea that Christians saying “Merry Christmas” to non-Christians was some sort of injustice, injury or offense. Needless to say, people from venerable world religions were not offended, and often took the lead in saying it to us. No. The only people who seemed to be offended were neopagans and white atheists i.e. apostates from Christianity who constructed their religious identity in opposition to Christianity.  

Another reaction was to attempt to astroturf new religio-cultural traditions that affirmed rather than contradicting the false premise of “Happy Holidays” universalism. Liberal churches, progressive school boards and other institutions dominated by liberal intellectuals invested heavily in the constructed festival of Kwanzaa, the black liberal secularist answer to Channukah.

The most pernicious reaction was proxy-offense culture, where identitarian whites take offense at people saying “Merry Christmas” to people of non-Christian faiths on their behalf. As I explained in my original series of essays on identity politics four years ago, proxy offense-taking is an important part of hierarchical honour cultures. Taking offense on behalf of a perceived sleight of one’s inferiors is central to maintaining and burnishing one’s identity as a powerful person in an honour culture like late eighteenth century Mexico, mid-nineteenth century Dixie or contemporary Coastal British Columbia.

The idea is that oppressed people lack both the knowledge and sophistication to be offended and the social capital to enact offense, even if they are. And so a crucial part of liberal white consciousness is taking offense on behalf of one’s inferiors, just as a lord might take offense on behalf of one of his servants if they were insulted on a public street in eighteenth century England.

In recent years, as the Pearsonian nationalist project was first betrayed, then hollowed-out, then inverted, all that remains is the offense-taking. And so, “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays,” have come to be perceived as combative slogans, as the precursor to a metaphorical duel in which today’s gentry, the commissar class, throw down a gauntlet, challenging their interlocutors to repeat back a meaningless and empty slogan or face the consequences.

Because I have been pushed out of Woke culture, I no longer even experience this. For the past two years, nobody has said “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings” to me at this time of year. Instead, “Merry Christmas” has made a remarkable resurgence as a greeting, one relished by both Christians and non-Christians alike. Because it turns out that moments of understanding and appreciating difference, of mutual recognition, of vicarious joy in others’ joy, of mutual agency are what bind a society together.

So I choose to remember 2024 as the year Canadians outside the Progressiverse, united in one small way: saying “Merry Christmas.” Arabs in keffiyehs said it; Zionists in yamakas said it; feminists supporting sex-based rights said it; Christians said it. And I say it: Merry Christmas.

Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Wrestling With the Term “Climate Communism” and the Kernel of Truth Therein: A History of the Karl Marx-Thomas Malthus Debate 

Respectful Discourse and Getting to the Heart of Matters 
Watching how disrespectfully my views are treated by the Woke world since my cancelation has made me think more carefully about how I can be more respectful, myself, when I come up against arguments that it is my first instinct to ridicule or dismiss.  

So I caught myself the other day when I read a bunch of Twitter posts about how what the World Economic Forum, Justin Trudeau and Kamala Harris believe in something called “climate communism.” 

Now, if I were simply interested in contradiction and dismissal and not engaging, this essay would be about how it strikes me as weird that rule by the super-rich and massive state subsidies to fossil fuel companies to build pipelines, fund oil exploration and subsidize natural gas liquification constitutes “climate communism.”  

Isn’t communism about the government shutting down corporations and socializing assets, not buying presents for big companies the way the Canadian government did with the TMX pipeline or handing out six billion dollars in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell, Petronas and other big oil companies as the BC government has done? Also, isn’t communism about government officials running our lives not Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Bill Gates and other unelected billionaire CEOs running them from outside the government while the state looks on passively? 

But the reality is that most of the people who are worried about communism on the internet these days believe that it means what “fascism” used to mean: a cabal of state and private corporate actors, led by the super-rich, shutting down democracy and immiserating and impoverishing the populace. 

And these days, our terms are so mangled that, for people like BC premier David Eby, increasing natural gas and petroleum emissions, extraction and exploration is climate action. For many, “climate action” has come to mean flying private jets everywhere and building gigantic coal-fired server farms while punitively taxing people who drive to work because their bus route has been shut down by the government and they are driving a used car and not an EV they couldn’t afford.  

There are lots of problems with our mangled language, a feature of the Newspeak of the Gaslightenment. But what if we instead focused on the truth words might be unexpectedly freighting too?  

When I began writing this essay, it was largely to explain, just more constructively, why the term “climate communism” made no sense. So, I began writing my typical style of essay, based on my training in the method and theory of the history of ideas. And, as I chronicled the various debates in ecopolitics since the 1970s, I came to realize that the term does point us towards knowledge and intellectual clarity, that while not literally true, it is nonetheless informative.  

But to understand how, it is necessary to head back to the closing years of the eighteenth century. 

The First Economic Materialists 
I am going to start this story in 1798 with the publication of An Essay on the Principle of Population by economist Thomas Malthus. Contrary to the claims of orthodox Marxists, Malthus’s book was the first work of structuralist, materialist history in the West. 

Malthus’s argument was that human societies had a natural boom-bust cycle structured primarily not by immaterial ideologies or beliefs, not by institutional systems for organizing political or labour power but instead by human reproduction and the physical environment in which societies are located.  

Malthus argued that human societies in a state of material surplus, with respect to food and energy, tend to grow until the population does not merely hit a limit where it consumes all the calories it is producing and there ceases to be surplus; it will overshoot that surplus, resulting in famine and other associated morbidities that will act to push population levels back down to a level at which surplus can again be generated. And this cycle will repeat indefinitely. 

In other words, history has a shape, a pattern, based on the physical limitations of the material world. If one were to graph human action in time based on Malthus, history would look something like this: 

It was Malthus, then, not Karl Marx who first put forward a theory of history patterned and structured based on material reality. Malthus, not Marx, was the first “historical materialist” who looked past the military and political history of “great men” and saw a more profound and durable pattern arising from material realities of food production and the beginnings of a concept of an ecological footprint. It is Malthus who gave us the intellectual equipment for the idea of an “earth overshoot day,” now an important piece of ecological thought.  

Writing before the fossil fuel revolution fundamentally altered the energy calculus of human civilization, Malthus’s understanding of human history was of a basically cyclical history orbiting around a steady ecological state.  

Fifty years, later, when penning the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx argued for a different theory of history, one that, while deeply concerned with the materiality of human labour and associated technologies, the corpus he and Friedrich Engels generated in the ensuing decades was strangely devoid of any serious analysis of the ecological impact of the labour and technological regimes it discussed.  

Even as organizations like the Sierra Club began to coalesce, even as major health and ecological damage became evident from the impacts of expansion of coal-fired industry, Marx and Engels largely handwaved this. Once the workers controlled the factories, naturally, they would manage them in a way that did not degrade human health or the environment. 

Indeed, if we were to graph Marx’s theory of history, as I did a decade and a half ago, we can even the inflationary, expanding character of human societies and economies as history approaches its crescendo. Marxism may be materialist in the sense of labour systems but not in the more conventional sense of the term. Despite the first “limits to growth” theory preceding Marxism by half a century, no serious environmental insights inform an otherwise brilliant analytical corpus. 

The Marx-Malthus Debate Arrives More Than A Century Late 
While Marx and Malthus clearly put forward adversarial theories of history, no Marx-Malthus debate appeared in the nineteenth century or most of the twentieth. For one thing, while the Marxist corpus and its vast array of fanfic were selling like hotcakes, Malthus gathered dust on the shelves. It seemed that fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers and new industrial agricultural and fishing technologies had rendered Malthus obsolete, at best, and, at worst, dead wrong. 

But, beginning in the 1970s and rising to a crescendo at the end of the 1980s, positive reappraisals of Malthus began as the Green Revolution in chemical agriculture began delivering adverse health effects and long-term environmental degradation, as the consequences of fossil fuel extraction and emissions began clearly showing their long-term costs, as wild fisheries began to collapse. 

And beginning with the publication of Small Is Beautiful by E F Schumacher in 1973, a new corpus of writing emerged within which there would finally be a serious intellectual confrontation between Marxian and Malthusian thought. Ecopolitical philosophy was, for a generation, a vibrant and dynamic field of serious intellectual debate, something hard to remember, given the rapid and shocking de-intellectualization of the environmental movement and of Green parties over the course of the 1990s.  

Broadly, ecopolitical philosophy organized itself into four camps: Bioregionalism, Ecofeminism, Social Ecology and Deep Ecology. With the exception of Ecofeminism, each of these ideological tendencies was either fully Marxian or Malthusian in its environmental approach. Bioregionalists and Deep Ecologists believed that Malthus was essentially correct, that ultimately, there were hard physical limits on human population and human activity and that while these limits might be deferred by technology or economic systems, this would simply delay and, consequently, intensify the environmental day of reckoning.  

The expansion of industrial society and the increases in human population it made possible essentially entailed more radically exploiting natural resources and ecosystems, meaning that when civilization was finally stretched to far past its normal Malthusian limit, the scale of the inevitable collapse would simply be that much more cataclysmic. Deep Ecologists and Bioregionalists backed strategies to reduce population and economic scale, favouring local, self-sufficient economies, de-industrialization, elimination of the logistics industry, etc.  

Deep Ecologists got into some hot water in 1984 when some movement leaders suggested that the Ethiopian Famine was a Malthusian population correction and seemed to show an indifference to famine aid. Especially damaged by this was the leader of Earth First!, Dave Foreman. But all Deep Ecologists were forced to confront a certain dark misanthropy that inevitably seeps into movements that attempt to de-centre human universality in their philosophical system. (That is not to say that such philosophies are illegitimate but simply that they come, like any school of thought, with a particular set of unavoidable problems that they must confront.) 

Surprisingly, one person who came to the rescue of the Deep Ecologists was Murray Bookchin, the anarcho-socialist philosopher who led the Social Ecology movement. Unlike the Deep Ecologists and Bioregionalists, Bookchin joined the Marxists in effacing the very possibility of serious environmental problems existing in labour systems he deemed fair. Nevertheless, Bookchin agreed to engage in an epistolary debate with Foreman to seek common ground between their respective philosophical tendencies.  

Of course, there was something in it for Bookchin. For some time, he had been using the term “Malthusian” as an epithet with which to attack Deep Ecologists. In his dependent position, Foreman was forced to disavow Malthus at Bookchin’s invitation in Defending the Earth, the book in which they published the exchange.  

Presaging the contemporary left’s Newspeak linguistic orthodoxy, something enthusiastically practiced by Bookchin’s institute since his demise, Bookchin’s argument against Malthus was not an argument in the conventional Enlightenment sense. Rather, he put forward the view that Malthus’s original theory did not merely describe what he deemed possible but what he deemed desirable. According to Bookchin, Malthus as not a man warning us to avoid overdevelopment lest it cause widespread famine and disease but a man who celebrated famine and disease as a righteous punishment for the poor having too many babies. 

Even prior to his debate with Foreman, Bookchin had sought to turn “Malthusian” into a blasphemous epithet connoting support for eugenics, population culs, etc. The moment anyone raised the possibility of limits to human population or the problems of stretching finite resources across a large number of people, Bookchin and his followers would declare their interlocutor a “Malthusian” and refuse to debate them on the grounds that they were basically the same as Hitler. “Malthusianism,” to Bookchin, was not a bad idea but a blasphemous one, one he would condemn rather than debating whenever it appeared to rear its head. 

Belief in limits to growth and understanding scale to be, itself, the main ecological problem, generally won the day in ecopolitical debates from 1970-88. This was years before the Woke moment and, consequently, the Social Ecologists generally came off as haughty, censorious and bad-faith debaters. Until the late 80s, they were the intellectual and political outliers, often bringing a destructive sectarianism to Green political projects, further undermining their credibility within the larger movement. 

But this changed with the United Nations’ publication of Our Common Future, by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Prime Minister of Norway and chair of the UN Commission on Environment and Development, whose findings the text reported. While the commission did some excellent work in documenting and describing the “interlocking crises” (a useful term it coined), its overall effect was, in the view of many environmentalists, of whom I was one, anything but salutary. 

In the view of Brundtland and her fellow commissioners, the primary cause of environmental degradation was not over-production or excessive wealth but the opposite. Overgeneralizing from the case of illegal forest clearance and desertification in the Sahel region of Africa, the commission advanced the view that poor people destroy the environment by doing desperate and unsustainable things and that the best way to stop this was to make the world much richer. Bizarrely, a report on the adverse effects of the rapid and dramatic expansion of industrial civilization, reported that the only way to turn the tide was to expand industrialization even more rapidly. 

In fact, Brundtland’s recommendation that we dramatically accelerate the industrialization of the Global South so as to achieve a five- to tenfold increase in the size of the global economy was promptly echoed in Bookchin’s next book Remaking Society. This new belief in rapid industrial development as the solution to the world’s environmental ills caught on fast because it also had a sexy name. Brundtland called it “Sustainable Development.” 

While some visionaries in ecopolitics like my mentor, David Lewis and Greenpeace founder and Stinger Missile designer Jim Bohlen joined me in denouncing the very idea of Sustainable Development, most of the environmental movement, including those interested in ecopolitical philosophy decided that the way forward was to treat Sustainable Development as a floating signifier and endorse it as a means of contesting its meaning in the public square. 

Sustainable Development did not just prove a disastrous idea that sold the industrialization of the Global South as some kind of environmental remediation project; it also sounded the death knell of ecopolitical philosophy as a site of vibrant debate and critical thought. By the start of the twenty-first century, between the professionalization of the movement, through Blairite austerity and the decision to adopt a floating signifier as the centre of our master discourse, the environmental movement had self-lobotomized. 

The movement’s leaders did not talk about the political thought of Marilyn French, Dave Foreman, E F Schumacher or even Murray Bookchin, for that matter. Green parties and the movements from which they had emerged had been absorbed into the, itself, rapidly debasing political discourse of the larger progressive left. And their reading material became that of the larger Progressiverse. When I asked a 2010s Green Party candidate what their favourite works of ecophilosophy were, they did not know any of those names but they did recommend the works of neo-Keynesian journalist Naomi Klein. 

This is not to suggest the total destruction of ecopolitical thought. Derrick Jensen and his fellow thinkers in Deep Green Resistance, along with a few other courageous voices, continued the work of debating, speaking, thinking aloud about the big underlying issues behind the omnicide and the philosophical implications of addressing them. But, as much as I have compared him to Saint Jerome in effectively canonizing and rationalizing the creative cacophony that preceded him, an equally apt comparison is to the Teacher of Wisdom at Qumran. Because I fear the future of this work may be closer to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls than the Vulgate. 

Climate Versus the Communists 
At the beginning of the 1990s, as I have written elsewhere, the mainstream of the suddenly professionalizing environmental movement was not merely indifferent to climate as an issue; they were actively hostile. There were multiple reasons for this, some parochial, some universal. Certainly, direct bribes from the fossil fuel industry had something to do with it all. 

But one important reason was that those of us in the movement who opposed Sustainable Development featured climate centrally in our arguments. Anyone with basic mathematical competence could look at a graph of the size of the global economy, tracking recessions, depression and booms and overlay a graph of carbon emissions and see that, for the past century or more, they have been basically the same graph. 

The world economy ran on oil and coal and increasing its size meant accelerating the Greenhouse Effect.  

The debate over sustainable development was the last gasp of the Marx versus Malthus debate and, sadly, the Marxists won. The environment was going to be protected by the fact that a planet on which everyone enjoyed, as Bookchin called it “bourgeois abundance” in Remaking Society would naturally become populated by educated, intelligent, conservationists. And such good, virtuous people would never hurt the environment. 

Of course, the climate nihilism of 1990s environmental leaders could not stand indefinitely, especially following the Kyoto climate conference of 1997 when governments from low-lying nations of the Global South stepped forward as major voices for a growing global concern. But this did not result in some sort of continuity between the 1990s climate movement and that of the twenty-first century. 

Those who had sounded the alarm on climate in the 1980s and 1990s found ourselves further marginalized as the Sustainable Development shills from blue chip environmental groups and government suddenly transformed into the leadership class of a new kind of climate movement, largely discontinuous with that which had preceded it, Greenpeace being a notable exception. 

The New Climate Politics  
Today’s climate politics bears scant resemblance to the activism in which I participated in the 80s and 90s. Back then, we used the term “Greenhouse Effect” because it had a pedagogical function because we felt that an educated public using their common sense was the way for us to make politics change. We made appeals to reason. Today’s movement makes appeals to authority, “trust the science,” “99% of scientists say,” “the science is settled,” have replaced “you know how a greenhouse works? Well…” 

Instead of foregrounding how little we can predict how a destabilized climate will behave in future and how it is impossible to make long-range predictions about an enormous, complex, chaotic system like a planet’s climate, false discourses of control, combined with dubious mathematical modeling have given the world’s elite the sense that we can choose how fast and how much to warm the planet.  

The debate between warming the planet 1.5 degrees and 3 degrees Celsius expresses a delusional fantasy of control, almost as detached from reality as climate denial itself. The synergistic cascading feedback effects of the atmospheric warming, oceanic hypoxia and ocean acidification that we have already unleashed are unknowable, never mind the effects of the inevitable substantial future carbon emissions. 

Instead of spreading as much knowledge as possible and emphasizing how little we know about the future operation of weather systems and the carbon cycle, we have anointed a new priestly class. Experts on the articles of faith of progressives, epidemiology, climate and gender are persons of great knowledge so deep, so complex, that they could never explain it to you and won’t even try and, in fact, it may be impertinent to question too closely. They speak not for climate science but for “the Science.” 

The reality is that most of these “experts” are not climate scientists, any more than the gender experts are geneticists or the public health officials are epidemiologists. Proper climate scientists these days are telegraphing panic and uncertainty, not narratives of social control, technological fixes and, mysteriously, insect-eating. 

While climate might serve as a key justifying discourse for increasingly mechanized efforts at authoritarian social control, their private jets, coal-fired server farms, their obsession with concrete towers and subway tunnels show no particular interest in actually reducing carbon emissions. Indeed, it seems that whatever emission reductions the carbon austerity measures they impose on local populations achieve are quickly nullified by some new energy-intensive technology like AI, the building of another coal-fired electric vehicle factory or another war. 

That’s because, like Marx and Bookchin, they are thinking like the governments of the USSR and People’s Republic of China. Chinese and Soviet steel mills produced steel as a biproduct in their effort to manufacture more communists. Similarly, our society’s  commissars are trying to manufacture a new kind of person through new practices of social control, new technologies and a more totalizing labour system.   

The measures they advance, from bossy electric vehicles to straws that come apart in your mouth, are focused only indirectly on the atmosphere. They are about making a new society, populated by a novel kind of human being, one whose citizens will then fix the climate. Their politics are based on a belief much like that of Marx or Bookchin that if you impose the correct material and labour conditions on people, they will become the sort of person human beings need to become.  

And once that happens, the environment thing… it’ll take care of itself. 

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

2024: BC’s Star Wars Holiday Special Election: My Jeremiad in Support of John Rustad

A couple of years ago, I promised I would write the occasional massively out-of-date movie review for this blog if it served a larger pedagogical purpose. Well, that time has come around again and I am now pleased to be reviewing the Star Wars Holiday Special a mere forty-six years late. 

Better, more humorous essays take a full inventory of the failure of one of the most bizarre examples of the 1970s variety show genre, featuring musical numbers by guest performers such as Jefferson Starship and Bea Arthur, who had mysteriously purchased the bar at Mos Eisley Spaceport. The show is a collage of barely-connected set pieces, some of which even sort of work, like the cartoon that introduces Boba Fett. But here are the most salient facts about the show for those who have somehow remained uninformed:

  • the show’s primary characters are Chewbacca’s family back on his home world and their closest family friend, Art Carney;
  • most of the dialogue is in Wookie and presented without subtitles;
  • most of the show involves Chewbacca’s family waiting for him and Han Solo to get home for Life Day, the Wookie equivalent of of Thanksgiving; 
  • Carrie Fisher is clearly so high that she has no idea who or where she is and Mark Hamill is slathered with thick makeup to conceal his injuries from a recent auto accident

So, with those salient points in mind, imagine this:

It is American Thanksgiving Weekend, 1978 and your kids are in the rec room, watching the second-ever Star Wars production and you walk in to see the gentle child-oriented science fiction retelling of the classic hero narrative but instead…

You watch a bunch of people dressed up as ape-like creatures in fur suits speaking in unintelligible shrieks and bellows. Then the scene cuts to Chewbacca’s dad wearing a virtual reality helmet Art Carney bought him for Life Day. And he’s watching a scantily-clad Diahann Carroll doing what appears to be a phone sex ad, while drooling and masturbating and mumbling in Wookie.

What ordinary, decent parent witnessing that scene would not decide to vote for Ronald Reagan at the earliest opportunity? Fundamentally, I think people fail to understand how the realigning presidential election of 1980 was non-crazy liberal Americans responding to their state of affairs with, “alright. That’s just enough. I’m calling dad.”

Here, in British Columbia, parents have been treated to a lot of Star Wars Holiday Special moments since their last chance to cast a vote in 2020, including:

  • CBC-BC’s broadcast of a ten-minute documentary celebrating a trans-identified nine-year-old boy who does exotic dancing for adult men at a strip club in Montreal and sells sex toys at a sex shop on Saturdays;
  • Steamworks, Vancouver’s original brew pub, hosting exotic dancing by a trans-identified female “drag-king,” on government-prescribed testosterone, who writes highly popular social media posts about how removing the duct-tape she puts over her developing breasts for her act tear off her skin and cause her to bleed;
  • the thirteen-year-old girl who died of a drug overdose in the Abbotsford homeless camp because the BC government prevented her parents from putting her in rehab and instead supplied her “safe supply” fentanyl and other opiates, starting at the age of twelve because that’s the je jure age of majority in BC when it comes to meth, opiates and puberty blockers;
  • the gala fundraising dinner promoted by Global TV-BC to support the hiring of extra security for the BC government-funded Carousel Youth Theatre’s summer “drag camp” for 7-11-year old boys to learn to do exotic dancing for adult men based on false claims by its organizers that transphobic bigots planned to assault the children enrolled;
  • the free cocaine-snorting and crack-smoking kits and instructions available through vending machines at local hospitals to people of all ages and mental competencies
  • the three-year public showtrial to delicense BC nurse Amy Hamm for her refusal to say that women have penises;
  • the eighth-grade BC teacher who taught her students a lesson on how to perform oral sex on each other and then provided each child with fruit-flavoured condoms;
  • the public beatings of BC children’s safeguarding activists such as Chris Elston and Meghan Murphy by antifa while local police looked on, laughing and pointing at the assaults;
  • the Canadian Bar Association’s successful effort to build on their triumph in putting serial rapists in women’s prisons and have serial violent pederasts housed in prison mother-baby units here in BC; 
  • the BC government’s systematic and secret provision of the chemical castration and lobotomization drug Lupron and of “safe supply” fentanyl to children as young as twelve, without the knowledge or consent of parents;
  • and those are just the first ten things that crossed my mind, presented in no particular order, never mind all the innocent, troubled children BC Children’s Hospital has lobotomized, mutiliated and sterilized in the name of Genderwang.

Basically, we live in a province in which the Establishment believes that anything that horrifies ordinary, decent people must be a good idea, that anything that activates the gag reflex of a normal adult is the categorical imperative of public good.

The reason people like me are overlooking the novelty, gaffes and disorganization of John Rustad’s BC Conservative Party and throwing all in is because ordinary decent people cannot and should not tolerate another moment of living under this bizarre sadistic pornocracy.

The co-founder of Los Altos Institute, Don Todd, a Marxist philosopher who was on the original Red Scare HUAC blacklist, wrote at length about how in a any true socialist society, common sense, as advocated by American revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine, sits at the foundation of any true free and democratic society. While, like all other terms, it has been battered and abused, Rustad is absolutely right to centre his election rhetoric around this principle. The reason we are not just failing as humans but as great apes (orangutans and bonobos wouldn’t “complicate” or “problematize” antifa’s young masked men beating up women in the street; their innate primate common sense would cover that) is that we have become alienated from our basic sense of disgust and revulsion, a fundamental aspect of the common sense that makes democracy possible. 

And it is common sense stripping away the credibility of premier David Eby every day. 

For those unaware of our premier’s long track record of contempt for ordinary, decent people and our gag reflex, let me take a moment to acquaint you with its highlights:

  • working with now-disbarred lawyer John Richardson in 2002-04, Eby formed the PIVOT legal society to “advocate” for Downtown Eastside drug addicts to bribe addicts with cigarettes and hard drugs to swear out false affidavits alleging illicit assaults by police that never took place;
  • other than defending Richardson against charges of resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, the only time Eby ever set foot in court as a lawyer was to make a constitutional challenge against the Criminal Code of Canada’s definition of aggravated sexual assault; Eby’s HIV-positive client had had sex without notifying his partners of his medical status and Eby argued that people with HIV and AIDS shouldn’t have to tell their sexual partners;
  • supporting, as head of the BC Civil Liberties Association, the Mormon fundamentalist compound in Bountiful, BC’s right to engage in the cross-border sex trafficking of underage girls based on their freedom to practice their “religion”;
  • naturally, then it should surprise no one that as BCCLA president, Eby argued that every fetish, including pedophilia, should enjoy the same legal protection as same-sex attraction.

Let’s be clear: the choice in this election is not a conventional one. The fact that I happen to personally like and know a bunch of BC Tory activists, some of whom are former NDP elected officials is actually neither here nor there. This election is about whether we continue to accept being ruled by monsters, freaks, perverts and ghouls. As a child, I never understood how or why the adults voted for Reagan. But now, I’m voting for John Rustad because this can’t go on any longer. 

I’m calling dad.

BC Politics | fusangite |

The Sun Sets on the World of Prescott Bush and the Right-Progressives: Placing the Collapse of Kevin Falcon’s BC United in Global Context

Full disclosure: This article is by a partisan. I have returned to British Columbia from Tanzania at my own expense this fall to volunteer full-time for John Rustad’s BC Conservative Party. I have been a party member since John first crossed the floor to the Tories and count among the party’s candidates and organizers many friends and comrades. 

Any successful big tent party includes many people and constituencies who do not agree with the party on everything. That is, in fact, the hallmark of a broad coalition. So while I am passionate in support of the party and of John, I do not consider myself to be a conservative ideologically, nor do my many genuinely conservative friends and comrades consider me to be so. 

Disclosures out of the way, I am not writing this piece as a BC Tory partisan but in my normal role as an analyst of major trends in the politics of the Global North. If you are a British Columbian, or, for some strange reason, educated in our parochial history, feel free to skip the next section.

BC Political History to 2020 
For those not following the parochial politics of British Columbia, let me begin by filling you in on the specifics of our local politics. The first official political party to enter the BC legislature was, technically, the Socialist Party, which began winning the electoral district of Newcastle, then a string of company coal mining towns owned by the Dunsmuir family, on Vancouver Island in the 1890s. 

Upon the election of Socialists, BC’s previously non-partisan legislature decided to adopt the Canadian national party system and its members joined either the Liberal or Conservative caucus. In 1903, the Tories were elected with a slim majority but fell into minority government the following year. To save their government, they made an agreement with the BC Socialist Party to enact the forty-hour work week and other reforms in exchange for propping up the government. These policies proved so popular that the Tories won a series of landslide victories in the following elections and governed the province until 1916. 

From the 1890s through the 1920s, a handful of Socialist and Labour party members of the legislature were elected in mining towns at the province’s periphery. The parties were leaderless and centred on local labour councils. Although, in some elections, their combined vote share approached 20% of the provincewide vote, it seemed that their participation in government was something that could only take place at the pleasure of one of the two main parties. 

But in the 1930s all that changed. A new party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a proto-social democratic producerist party, with bold plans to socialize medicine, natural resources, electricity and a host of other major parts of the economy ran a full slate of candidates led by labour leader Robert Connell and won 32% of the popular vote on their first try in 1933. Although the party’s vote share fell slightly in 1937, a resurgent Conservative Party meant that they still gained on the governing Liberals and, had they not been leaderless and disorganized, might have won a three-way race against the two mainline parties.

The 1937 election was followed by a palace coup within the BC Liberal Party and the merging of its caucus with that of the Conservatives in 1938 and the leadership of coup leader John Hart. And ever since 1938, no matter how much the CCF or its successor party, the New Democrats, have moderated their views and policies, the overarching logic of BC politics on right has been this: “socialists” must be kept out of office at all costs.

This resulted in the creation of three big tent political parties that have dominated BC politics until very recently: the Liberal-Conservative Coalition (1938-52), the Social Credit Party (1952-93) and the BC Liberal Party (1993-2020). While these parties have proclaimed the same basis of unity since the emergence of what we might call the Second BC Party System, the leading ideology of each of these coalitions and their protagonists has shifted on a number of occasions.

The Liberal-Conservative Coalition is best characterized as a “welfare capitalist” regime that enacted kind of neofeudalism, partnering with major logging, energy and mining companies to build sawmills, pulp mills, dams, roads, mines, smelters and communications and energy infrastructure. The government and its supporters in industry, being primarily governed by a fear of socialism, sought to create a harmonious social contract that would settle the young men working in the bush, at the mills and down the mines by replacing work camps with towns and villages. 

The thinking was that because–this seems unimaginable today–young single men who worked with their hands formed the backbone of socialist politics, the sensible thing would be to slowly, incrementally improve their wages, working conditions and benefits and house them in places congenial to family life, where they might settle down with a young woman and raise kids. Once immersed in respectable liberal capitalist society, the thinking was that they would lose their taste for socialist radicalism.

But the Coalition did not slay the socialist dragon and, following a succession crisis in the early 1950s, one of its members, WAC Bennett, of the legislature crossed the floor and became leader of the Social Credit Party and promptly, if only by a hair’s breadth, won the 1952 election. BC’s distinctive brand of Social Credit never incorporated the crypto-currency schemes of the original social credit movement of Clifford Douglas. Instead, it was a producerist party that largely maintained the neufeudal Tree Farm License system devised under Hart, a system that, like original feudalism, tied tenure over alienated crown land to obligations to the local populace, primarily in the form of the creation and maintenance of local sawmills. 

The Socreds, from 1952 to 1979, were ideologically promiscuous, socially conservative producerists who saw small businesses as their primary allies and profited from the local business communities that had coalesced in BC’s mill, smelter and mining towns. The party’s leadership was composed primarily of local businesspeople and did not see either their own bureaucracy or big business as entirely natural or trustworthy allies. It engaged in periodic culls of the provincial workforce and uncompensated expropriation, most notably of the private electric power producers and the creation of BC Hydro.

During their final eleven years in power, the Socreds transformed into a Thatcherite party that privatized pubic assets and enacted austerity programs. It was during this period that the relationship between big business and the senior members of the permanent bureaucracy began to improve, with public assets returning to the private sector and senior managers being granted new powers to enact austerity programs in their government departments. 

In 1993, the BC Liberals became the big tent under the leadership of Gordon Campbell, a former mayor of Vancouver who had eight years to craft a new coalition before taking power in 2001. This coalition is best characterized as being “right-progressive,” favouring the kind of alliance with big business as a partner in shaping the province, like the Coalition of 1938-52. But this was paired with management-directed austerity and reorganization and the creation and multiplication of government “authorities,” a management-heavy regional reorganization of government services directed by expert senior bureaucrats and executed through partnerships with private companies and non-profit organizations. 

Because it had been preceded by a Blairite NDP government in the 1990s, it had a civil service that was already, to a significant extent, already conversant with and supportive Third Way austerity practices and largely endorsed them, especially as many of the partners in these new service delivery schemes were non-profit organizations, the majority of whose employees and decision-makers were socially liberal, university-educated progressives. 

This new configuration of BC’s big tent “free enterprise” coalition as a partnership between business and the progressive courtier class did not just increase the legitimacy of austerity, contracting-out and other aspects of neoliberalism in BC’s managerial class and caring professions; it also produced the first and only progressive free enterprise coalition in BC history, a government not just known for privatization and austerity but for the most comprehensive Genderwang school curriculum of any Canadian province and a carbon tax designed to fight climate change. 

The Rise and Fall of Right-Progressivism
It would be unfair to call the governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark anachronistic, exactly. But the shape of political coalitions in the Global North began changing in the 1990s and that process has largely completed. In the twentieth century, politics largely ran along a left-right axis: parties of the left favoured largely regulatory and distributive projects conducted by the state and parties of the right favoured small government and less redistribution.

Both kinds of parties had a mix of two forces known as populism and progressivism. Like populism, progressivism traditionally existed on both the left and right of the political spectrum. The governments of Clark and Campbell were typical of right-wing progressivism as follows:

  • the close involvement of and deference to experts not just in enacting but in shaping government policy and the substitution of elected officials with appointed experts in existing policy-making processes, 
  • the adoption and promotion of novel and fashionable views about race, identity, family structure, human sexuality, etiquette, etc.,
  • the “voluntarily compliance” principle whereby the regulatory burden for environmental and other public safety and health rules is shifted from government officials to in-house experts and compliance officers within the private sector, 
  • the preference for non-binding, structured forms of public consultation facilitated by technocrats over binding, democratic political processes, and
  • the promotion of incentive-based eugenics to encourage sterilization, abortion and other restrictions on reproduction of low-status and undesirable persons,

to name just a few. Such policies were promoted by right-wing progressives for much of the twentieth century and are associated with figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Prescott Bush, scion of the Bush political dynasty and treasurer of Planned Parenthood, which has returned to its roots in promoting incentive-based eugenics campaigns. 

But, first in North America in the 1990s, and then spreading through the Global North in the 2010s and 20s, the right-left dynamic changed. As parties of the left adopted their own set neoliberal austerity, contracting out and privatization policies, policies I characterize as Blairite austerity politics ceased to substantially pertain to questions of distribution and ownership and became more focused on social issues and questions of expertise, social control and what is pejoratively characterized as “the culture war.”. This happened first in Canadian national politics in the 1993 federal election, in which the Progressive Conservative Party, a classic right-progressive party was annihilated in English Canada by the Reform Party, a populist party that had little time for experts and technocratic governance.

The next year, Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America swept the Republican Party back into a congressional majority but, more importantly, radically disempowered the right-progressives in the party’s senate and house caucuses, placing a new politics of populist belligerence at the centre of US politics. 

By the twenty-first century, the right-progressives began abandoning their former parties and found themselves welcomed into parties of the left, often into leadership positions, now exerting more influence over policy than they did in their former parties of the right, as exemplified in the careers of Canadian MP Garth Turner and US Senator Arlen Specter. By 2015, the last three Canadian Progressive Conservative prime ministers, Joe Clark, Kim Campbell and Brian Mulroney were endorsing Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party over Stephen Harper’s Tories.

And as the 2010s rolled on and the progressive and conservative worldviews began to diverge both more widely and more rapidly, this realignment also began spreading first to the rest of the Anglosphere and then elsewhere in the Global North. Policies on climate, gender identity and Covid were important sites of this rapid and growing divergence precisely because they were tied so intimately to high-stakes confrontations between popular classes and experts.

From London to Victoria
The last section might just as easily be fitted not into an article about the collapse of the BC United Party but about the massive migration of votes from the UK Conservative Party to Reform UK earlier this summer, as the British Tories, another progressive conservative party that backs climate science and vaccine mandates and that took too long to turn against the Genderwang policies it itself introduced in 2010s. Or even the steady bleed of votes from the right-progressive German Christian Democrats to the populist Alliance for Germany. 

But what makes the party that governed BC from 2001-16 such a fascinating case study is the compression, the rapidity of the realignment that took place. Despite its poor showing in the 2020 election, British Columbia’s BC Liberal Party (as it was known then), Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Victoria was, like the British Tories, the striking exception to a large scale realignment of politics in the Global North. Like the Boris Johnson’s Tories, it had successfully defended its right flank and no candidate to its political right was elected, just as in the five previous elections held in the twenty-first century.

But the signs were there to see. While there was no credible party of the new populist right contesting the election, small parties, fielding no more than a dozen candidates, that had perennially scored in the low single-digits, at best, when it came to percentage vote share, got surprising results around the province. For the first time, a Libertarian Party candidate received more than 10% of the vote, ditto the Christian Heritage Party’s slate, as did the brand new Rural BC Party. Meanwhile the tiny Conservative slate won over 30% of the vote in their stronghold in the Peace River country. 

But rather than recognizing, as Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader has, that his party must embrace and include a resurgent constituency of anti-authoritarian, populist climate skeptics, Kevin Falcon responded to this new kind of conservatism by attempting to purge it from his party. By symbolically expelling his former cabinet colleague John Rustad on his birthday for retweeting a climate skeptic tweet, Falcon signalled that his party was an old school right-progressive party like Rishi Sunak’s Tories or Armin Laschet’s Christian Democrats. He underlined that point when whipping his caucus to cast a symbolic vote condemning the Freedom Convoy. And unlike Sunak’s Tories, Falcon’s party did not make any meaningful concessions to anti-authoritarian populists, unlike the 180 degree turn on Genderwang led by Kemi Badenoch. 

But such high-risk, boneheaded moves might have been survivable had he not chosen to pair them with a move that dramatically undercut his strategy: he renamed his BC Liberal Party “BC United,” recalling the previous big-tent right-wing coalitions that had governed the province. If Falcon were really trying to make the party a bigger, more inclusive tent that recalled the Coalition and the Socreds at their height, how could he exclude social conservatives, populists and other key constituencies that have formed a crucial part of the base of successful right-wing parties in BC? 

The BC Liberal Party was a dead party walking when Falcon took it over, a kind of party that is now obsolete, based on a coalition of groups and ideologies that no longer see themselves as natural allies or even politically compatible. You can’t both administer a carbon tax and retain the support of the industrial working class; you can’t both enact Genderwang and retain the support of most people active in faith communities; and nobody wants to hear about how you’ll better administer a society based on its liberal social consensus because there is no longer any such consensus. 

But Falcon’s shambles of a rebanding process compressed this death march, which could have occupied much of the 2020s and more than one electoral cycle, into just two years. Of course, that is only half the story. The other half of the story, that of how Rustad and his Young Turks pulled off one of the most rapid political ascents Canada has ever seen, is one in which I am a minor character and which you’ll have to wait a while to read about.

BC Politics | fusangite |

The Age of Bizarro Churchill, the Outsourcing of Wife Beating and the Creation of the Super-Id

Beginning in the 1890s during the Boer Wars, Winston Churchill had a consistent response to whatever ailed the British people: “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!” That plan did not work out so well at Gallipoli and caused him to lose standing among the Coalition Liberals and British people but nevertheless, when the future kingdom of what would become Saudi Arabia began his insurgency against the British puppet ruling the British mandate of Hejaz, Churchill was back on form. It was time to conscript the young men and send them into the desert to prevent the rise of the Saudis.

But the world changed around Churchill. And because the world changed, and kept changing for the worse, one day in the 1930s it came to pass that Churchill was finally right. The correct answer to what the British were facing had become, “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!”

So they made him Prime Minister and, the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, we live in the age of Bizarro Churchill. The old man who is finally right is the person we are most certain is wrong.

It has been more than fifty years since Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, more than thirty since Preston Manning tried to sell Canadians on dramatic cuts to our immigration rates and nominated racist MP candidates like Herb Grubel, Randy White, Bob Ringma and Philip Mayfield. Back in those days we were right to see panic over immigration as mainly driven by racial animus and bad “slippery slope” reasoning. We called Powell and Manning racists; we held rallies against Powell’s racism and Manning’s promiscuous flirtations with racists; and we were not wrong.

Back in the twentieth century, we were still relatively prosperous; we had strong institutions; most people could still afford their rent; and we had a robust civic nationalism structuring our multicultural pluralism, with flags and outfits and festivals that included all of us. Back then, activists opposing increased immigration were overwhelmingly old and white and the movements were rife with discredited race science and belief in eugenics.

Today, a clear majority of both white and non-white Canadians want immigration levels to be reduced to where they were when Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party was in office, approximately 20% of current levels. Those most supportive of current immigration levels tend to be white seniors, those who remember the odious politics of people like Powell, Manning and Ringma most vividly. Those least supportive are young people can have been pushed out of entry level jobs by temporary foreign workers and kids from the Global South on student visas and young families unable to find housing they can afford.

But the response from the courtiers and commissars who run our societies is not the way the British people responded to Churchill in the 1930s and 40s. Instead, they argue that supporting any kind of reduction to any kind of immigration is axiomatically wrong, that no matter what the migration situation is in a country, it is, by definition morally and politically wrong to restrict it in any way for any reason.

Instead of engaging logically with people recommending temporary or permanent reductions in migrant flow, they simply label anyone with an objection a hateful bigot and their ideas “hate speech,” what they call “stochastic terrorism,” the idea that if you say or even repeat a statement deemed “hateful,” you are in effect murdering members of a minority groups to whom the statement might refer.

Similarly, many conservatives acquitted themselves atrociously during the gay liberation movement and AIDS crisis. Lifesaving medication was denied to innocent people; their same sex partners were spitefully barred from visiting them in hospital; their partners’ pension spousal benefits were confiscated; and marriage was placed out of reach. In the 1980s, Andrew Dice Clay’s and Eddie Murphy’s stand-up performances ended far too frequently with the men who had laughed at the homophobic jokes performed going out and beating up innocent gay men.

Just as I attended anti-Reform Party rallies, I fought for gay rights and organized with Svend Robinson, Canada’s first openly gay MP.

But, as I warned at the time, we were taking shortcuts for which we would pay later. Instead of arguing that people have a right to marry whomever they want, we should have argued that, extending marriage rights to gay couples was a pro-social move of intrinsic that would make our societies better, not the creation of a new kind of right. Similarly, when we argued that we should never judge people for the weird sex they like, I thought: “this is heading for trouble.”

But, the Bizarro Churchill effect is, of course, present on questions of human sexuality now. If men need to wear diapers and shit themselves in the street in front of us, dance provocatively in sexualized getups in front of grade schoolers and wave their junk teenage girls in locker rooms, who are we to judge them? After all, if objecting to one form of male sexuality showing up in public was wrong in the 80s, objecting to any form of male sexuality asserting itself in any context is inherently wrong at all times and places.

And so those of us who object to Genderwang and are trying to protect gay kids from being sterilized and mutilated are bigots, hatemongers and, most ironically, “homophobes.” Last fall, when the Million March for Kids took place, once credible journalists ran stories stating that those of us in the march were planning to hunt down homosexuals and beat them up, just like those Clay and Murphy fans in the 80s. The BC government even sent warning to daycare centres that we were coming to assault the gender-confused children there.

In the 1990s and 00s, we fought against Ronald Reagan’s Drug War, worked for safe injection sites, decriminalization of hard drugs, supportive housing for addicts and freeing those convicted of drug offenses from prison. Like my work on welcoming immigrants and civil equality for gays and lesbians, I remain proud of this work and glad I did it.

But now we face a situation where, as reported by Adam Zivo in the National Post, we have a government program in BC that allows teenagers to receive hard recreational drugs from the province and have the state act to keep that secret from parents, literally slipping children fentanyl and telling them not to tell mom, thanks to the terrible precedent set by administering Lupron to teenagers secretly.

But again, object to there being too many drugs out there, as the government increases the drug supply, as no credible academic study has ever recommended, or object to how young the people are that we’re giving addictive drugs to or even simply suggest that being a full-time unhoused drug addict is a less worthwhile life than having a job and a family and once again, one is accused of hate speech, bigotry and stochastic terrorism. The next overdose will be blamed on us—as though you can’t OD on “safe supply” fentanyl.

Again, because conservatives were wrong about something in the past, they cannot possibly be right about it now. And anyone who agrees with them now has become a “far right” “hatemonger.”

Violence Against Women and the Rise of the Super-Id
I used to think this was just some sort of cognitive error that was producing these three highly similar social phenomena where all problems caused by out-of-control immigration can only be solved by fewer immigration controls, all problems caused by drug use can only be solved by more drugs and all problems caused by Genderwang can only be solved by de-stigmatizing “minor attracted persons” and conferring on people the right to have their bodies made into surreal Japanese hentai monsters at government expense.

But a recent chat with a very important gender critical thinker convinced me that this is something darker:

The other thing that changed in our society in the 1980s was our fairly successful crackdown on domestic violence and marital rape. Wife-beating, of course, continued. But it had to be closeted in new ways. Even celebrities who publicly advocated it were smacked down hard or the media edited their backwards views out of their interviews. Male violence against women was attacked both by law enforcement with a new zeal and, at the same time, Hollywood and the news media came together to stigmatize this vile behaviour.

But we didn’t fix the men or address the underlying causes and so violent misogyny has been building up as behind a dam since the 1980s. And the inhibitions and prohibitions around white men and respectable men hitting and sexually assaulting women have never been greater, especially in progressive communities.

And so this violent misogyny has found a vent. Pakistani grooming gangs in England do have permission to rape, beat and traffic women; so do men in dresses; so do homeless men on meth. And that is why our governments are now admitting young, male rootless immigrants at a higher rate than other immigrants, proposing, as BC’s chief medical health officer recently did a chain of meth stores like our stores that market cannabis products in a friendly atmosphere, but for crystal meth.

White progressive men have outsourced their misogynistic violence to three groups of men. It is an exchange: these men enact the misogynistic violence and rage of the commissar class towards women and, in exchange, the commissar class describes them as victims and grants them total immunity from the consequences of their actions, not just legally but socially.

The Woke ideologies that enable this are a kind of Super-Id our society has built itself. A psychological force that uses ideology to push our collective behaviour beyond even where your average unrestrained male id would go.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Canada’s Emerging Two-Tier Society

Until it was gradually overtaken by “the Tories will ban abortion” beginning in the 2000 Canadian federal election, the favourite, and not wholly inaccurate or illegitimate scare tactic used by Canada’s Liberals and New Democrats was to claim that conservatives, if elected, would institute “two-tier health care.”

For decades, this claim was repeated. It was understood to mean that provincial conservative governments would violate the Canada Health Act or that the federal Tories would amend the Act and permit private medical businesses to opt-out of the state’s single-payer health insurance system, thereby creating a second tier of health care that permitted other forms of payment such as cash or private insurance.

Before I go any further, I should take a moment to explain how Canadian public healthcare came about and how it is structured because there are many romantic myths about it, often less popular in Canada than in countries, especially the US, where our system is inappropriately and excessively romanticized.

The History of Canadian Public Healthcare
In 1948, Clement Atlee’s Labour Party government in the United Kingdom nationalized private hospitals and medical practices, severing prior employer-employee relationships, expropriating hospitals and other medical facilities from charities, churches and private corporations and turning Britain’s health care system into a unified, publicly owned system in which doctors were now government employees. They also intervened in medical licensing so as to prevent doctors using their syndical power to ration their labour or otherwise subvert the government’s agenda of expanding the scope, reach and accessibility of the system.

But what they did not do was attempt to enforce a monopoly, nor did they coercively expropriate for the most part. Instead, they lured doctors away and institutions away from the private system by making the public system a more lucrative and stable place to work. Similarly, their interventions in medical licensing entailed purchasing a majority on the board of the medical association through what was tantamount to bribery. The health minister in charge of the nationalization, was quoted as saying, of the doctors, “ultimately I had to stuff their mouths with gold.”

Such an arrangement was untenable as consumer use of the NHS grew rapidly. Soon, doctors began leaving the public system but the UK was able to use the decolonization of its collapsing empire to flood the labour market with doctors and nurses who were Wind Rush migrants.

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation government of Saskatchewan, the only social democratic government in early Cold War Anglo America, studied all this carefully and figured that, to create a truly public, truly universal system, they were going to have a fight on their hands. So they spent sixteen years paying off the province’s debt making it the most prosperous jurisdiction in the country before attempting to socialize health care.

The province’s doctors balked at becoming government employees and having their hospitals and general practices made state property under any circumstances or level of compensation. And a strike ensued, resulting in the government’s defeat and the deaths of some innocent people.

Perhaps having anticipated this turn of events, Tommy Douglas, the premier who had conceived of this had resigned the premiership, leaving his successor, Woodrow Lloyd to wear the defeat while he became leader of the federal NDP and entering the House of Commons where, following the 1963 election, he held the balance of power.

Lester Pearson, the Liberal Prime Minister was what one might call a Great Society Cold War hawk. Like John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson whose election interference and public contempt for his Tory predecessor, John Diefenbaker, had helped win him the Prime Minister’s office, Pearson believed that the West could only win the Cold War if it matched or exceeded the state’s material guarantees of health care, housing and employment that the USSR promised. But the point of expanding the New Deal order and creating the Great Society was understood as a means of saving capitalism not dismantling it.

So, in collaboration with Douglas, Pearson worked to create a made-in-Canada solution to the problem of universal healthcare. Canadian Medicare did not seek to expropriate medical facilities nor to turn doctors into government employees and it left their syndical associations, the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Medical Association unmolested. Instead, Medicare created one territorial and ten provincial health insurance companies and prohibited the private sector from selling health insurance.

While provincial governments created new hospitals, the old hospitals remained, for decades, in the hands of churches and private interests. Clinics and individual practices remained private businesses, as they do to the present day. Doctors continued being compensated on a fee-for-service basis by the new state insurance companies just as they had been by the old private ones.

While NHS-like aspects have gradually crept into the system with a small minority of salaried doctors and nurse-practitioners at government-created clinic-like health centres and with an increasing portion of large health facilities becoming state-owned, the fundamental structure of Canadian Medicare has remained intact: a private health care system paid through a state-owned health insurance monopoly. What makes Canadian healthcare universal and public is its insurance companies not its health facilities or their employees.

The Collapse of Canadian Public Healthcare
Since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, with its widening gap between rich and poor, increased labour mobility and increased costs of graduate degrees, public healthcare systems throughout the Global North have struggled to meet rising demand, expanding mandates, increased labour costs and increasing struggles with high-wage labour retention. In most places, this has resulted in more of the wealthy using privately insured or fee-for-service medical services to, as Canadians would think of it, “jump the queue” and obtain higher quality and faster service through their greater wealth.

Because Canada borders the United States and most of our population lives near the border or can cross it via air or land with relative ease, as our system degraded, Canadians became world leaders in medical tourism, nipping across the border for whole procedures or just for tests whose results would move them up the queue in Canada for expensive and urgent treatment, for instance, of cancer.

And as more Canadians of middle and high income made a habit of holidaying in Mexico and as ties between Canada and India deepened, India and Mexico began to compete with the United States in attracting Canadian medical tourists, offering cheaper procedures and, in Mexico’s case, medical and dental treatment mixed with resort living.

But for those of us for whom this was out of reach, things have grown steadily more dire as has the situation for all Canadians requiring emergency or urgent care near them quickly. Fewer and fewer Canadians have family doctors. “Walk-in clinics,” once the pressure release valve on the system now rarely accept walk-ins and require appointments to “walk in” weeks or months in advance. Furthermore, many of those clinics now refuse to grant in-person appointments at all and book fifteen-minute telephone consultations that are still usually weeks in the future and which allow the patient to discuss only one individual health problem often making it impossible for doctors to evaluate their condition, having neither physical contact nor a full description of the patient’s symptoms. And if, unable to tolerate this gatekeeping, Canadians present themselves to a local hospital emergency ward, they can face a wait of up to twelve hours before they can be seen by anyone and might still be turned away for having an insufficiently urgent condition.

Having personally spent three and a half years on a waiting list to see a specialist I ultimately never did get to see, I cannot over-emphasize the degree to which things often become more dire if your condition requires a referral in Canada. Months and even years are spent on the waiting list to see medical specialists, even oncologists and other specialists treating conditions that have an inherent urgency to them.

Except that this is not your experience of the Canadian medical system if you come from the correct social class.

The Rise of Class-Based Health Care
From 2013-15, I was in a live-in relationship with a highly educated woman with a PhD. Although not a MD, per se, she held a senior position as the manager of a government-run healthcare facility, presented at medical conferences and had even been published in The Lancet. The first New Year’s party we attended together was in the palatial home of a friend of her who also held a senior position in the healthcare system. There were doctors aplenty at the event, specialists, general practitioners, bureaucrats and officials in syndical organizations like the BC Medical Association, College of Physicians and Surgeons, running things like the International Medical Graduate program (which allows doctors to control which immigrants are permitted to join their profession immediately and which have to jump through hoops).

Within two weeks of moving in with her, I had a family doctor for the first time in years. And when she or I received referrals from our GP and we did not promptly see a specialist, a few calls could be made and that specialist appointment was soon available.

You see, whereas the two-tier medical systems of the other Global North countries make access to prompt and quality care increasingly contingent upon wealth, Canada’s system makes these things contingent upon class. Whom one knows, with whom one socializes and who is inside one’s larger social world determines access to health care in Canada.

Like old school class systems, the Canadian system looks down on those who might be termed nouveau riche and shunts them into poor person healthcare or out of the country. Healthcare access in Canada is about class and culture in the traditional sense, measuring one’s social refinement, family history, educational background, literally what parties you attend and how much sophistication and decorum one can show there. One’s socio-cultural proximity to the commissars and bourgeoisie, of which wealth is merely one very important facet, determines your access to Canadian healthcare.

For the members of Canada’s commissar class and liberal bourgeoisie, there is no healthcare shortage, no access problem. The system functions for them as it once did for all of us.

Two-Tier Rental Housing
While best dramatized through the story of healthcare, the increasing importance of class, as opposed to mere wealth, in accessing the basics for a healthy and successful life in Canada, applies across the board.

When I returned to Vancouver in 2022, following my fatwa, I had some extraordinarily good fortune. A friend was part of an upwardly mobile family that had acquired a small real estate empire of two or three properties and was renting out subdivided houses and a laneway home. While my friend was, like me, a college professor, his father was an autodidact whose prodigious hard work and canny business sense had helped to create small complex of rental housing over which the family presided. While riding high financially, after some bad experiences with tenants, he asked his son to find a higher class sort of tenant for their recently vacated laneway house.

The presence of a more educated, more respectable, more credentialed tenant was something of value to him. And so, with his son carefully concealing my recent expulsion from progressive society and emphasizing my teaching and publishing record, I received a lease at a discount of somewhere between 30% and 50% relative to market rates.

As what some clever person called “artisanal landlording” becomes more popular for Canada’s commissars and bourgeoisie, with constantly rising rents and property values, the only true “sure thing” in the Canadian investment scene, such arrangements are growing more common.

As with medical care, one’s access to affordable housing is conditioned not merely by wealth but by class. If you know a landlord, just as in health care, costs fall, waiting lists vanish and insecurity, fear and precarity recede.

The Rising Stakes of Cancelation
Naturally, when faced with such egregious unfairness, things like healthcare user fees appear egalitarian and leveling by comparison. Private healthcare becomes saleable to the working poor in new ways because it grants levels of access currently beyond their means. Instead of the wealthiest among us beating the drum for the eviscerating of the Canada Health Act, it is increasingly the proletariat and lower middle class.

To be clear, much as I am downwardly mobile and a higher and higher velocity, I don’t want user fees. But they are popping up anyway despite half-hearted and haphazard efforts by government to suppress them. The largest chains of clinics in BC, those run by Telus (a company whose other operations receive massive government subsidies) and Loblaws, do now charge user fees for seeing doctors in person. Only telephone consultations are free now. Smaller clinics and chains are introducing subscription fees and charges to stay on the patient list and have permanent files and repeat visits to the same doctor.

And those paying those fees are now being pushed into defending them, knowing that if the fees vanish, so do the “services” for which they pay.

This is not, furthermore, merely about access to the basics of life, including housing and healthcare. It also fits into the larger matrix of rising authoritarianism. Not only might you be fired for saying something unorthodox and facing cancelation; your expulsion from polite society could cost you your housing (a small landlord just needs to say a family member needs your suite to legally evict you) and your access to medical care.

By linking housing and healthcare to class, rather than mere wealth, Canada has made cancelation scarier yet as the range of acceptable political opinions in polite society continues to contract.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Breast Gropes, Rabbit Punches and the Politics of Fear at Versailles: How Machiavelli’s the Prince Helps Us Understand the Paris Olympics

Every single time I write a gender critical blog post, a feel a very familiar feeling: fear deep in the pit of my stomach, rising through my abdomen and reaching up to choke my throat. Despite having begun my gender critical writing almost five years ago, not only am I still scared every time I publish an essay like this, I am no less scared than I was the previous time. That is because there is always something to lose, always the possibility of new “consequences” as Wokes call them for expressing my opinion that men cannot become women; women cannot become men; it is wrong to sterilize and chemically lobotomize children; etc.

In today’s essay I want to explore that fear more thoroughly because I grow more convinced every day that almost everyone’s experience of the strange new social movement with which the West is wrestling is being primarily conditioned by fear; and the antics we saw at the Paris Olympics are just the latest demonstration of that.

And because I remain committed to continuing to try and awaken in my former comrades the courage necessary to challenge not just Genderwang but the larger authoritarian project as whose vanguard it functions, even though every time I pen an article like this I inevitably lose another few comrades and friends, despite my views on this subject being unchanged over the past five years. Just this week since the last essay, I lost a couple more. That’s because even though my views have not changed, the danger of being publicly associated with heretical views only increases every year in the Progressiverse as its inhabitants habituate themselves to the existence of an ever more demanding grassroots Holy Inquisition.

Re-reading Machiavelli in the 2020s
So, really, what this piece is about is what we might call “the politics of fear,” a profoundly misunderstood term today. The idea of a fear-centred politics was first strongly theorized in Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince in 1513. It is my view that, from the outset, the meanings and lessons of the text were based on a fundamental misreading of the historically contingent character of its arguments because later interpreters were unacquainted with Renaissance humanist readings of Roman history.

Throughout the text, Machiavelli invokes important Roman historical actors in a series of lessons about how to do politics successfully. Most readers understand The Prince as illustrating which the author believed to be hard, permanent proto-social scientific truths. But to one with at least a passing familiarity with Roman history and with the Renaissance humanist movement’s worldview, this does not seem quite right.

Typically, when Machiavelli refers to a past actor like the Roman general Scipio, who was both successful in their politics and laudable in their principles, he uses them as an example of what not to do if one wants to succeed in sixteenth-century Italian politics. Similarly, when he wants to use an historical example of politics that would work, he typically serves up the example of a villain, tyrant or, at least, a fatally flawed historical actor.

I take this highly strategic and self-conscious use of historical references to indicate not that he is talking about what makes a prince wise and successful irrespective of when and where he rules but to relay the following subtext: “Italy has entered into some kind of hell dimension in my time; if the best and most virtuous rulers and warriors of the past existed in sixteenth-century Italy, they would fail whereas the most venal and villainous of past actors would succeed.” In this way, I read The Prince both as a piece of absolutely sincere practical advice to the warlords and oligarchs of Italy in 1513 and as an absolute indictment of the time and place in which he lived.

Maybe this is just projection but I feel the same way about contemporary politics in the Global North. And that is because how to succeed at the politics of fear has changed to Machiavelli’s from its opposite in the space of a decade.

When I was growing up in last years of Cold War welfare state society, people believed that they were witnessing the rise of a new “politics of fear.” What this meant was that, until the mid-2010s, political candidates and parties focused increasing effort on making potential supporters fear their opponent. The term “hidden agenda” was used with increasing frequency, especially against conservative parties and candidates but was used across the board. The idea was that if you could make a group of voters fear what your opponent might do to them, they would vote for you defensively.

Single women in their child-bearing years were often the targets of the most successful fear politics. We are coming up on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Liberal Party of Canada making the “hidden agenda” of their conservative opponents to re-criminalize abortion a centrepiece of their political communication every election. Conservative parties also did an impressive job, warning of the impacts of unrestricted immigration and “soft on crime” approaches to criminal justice.

Machiavelli would not have called this “the politics of fear,” nor would he have given such a politics much of a chance of success in sixteenth-century Italy. In fact, he would predict that in Renaissance Florence, such an approach would actually help one’s political adversary. In his chapter on fear as a political force, his argument was that a wise prince rejects the love of his people in favour of their fear, that the more the popular classes fear you, the more they will support you, and that while the people’s love can be sustained for only a time, their fear can be sustained indefinitely.

As the 2010s wore on and people’s sense of financial, environmental and social security continued to wane, the politics of Florence under the Medici family was reborn. And its midwife was Donald Trump. Of course, before Trump could become politically successful, the kind of fear and hopelessness that pervaded Machiavelli’s world had to creep up. And there were signs that a growing portion of the Global North would be ready for this kind of politics to return. People had to become more psychologically and materially insecure and frightened before Trumpism could work on them.

A true Machiavellian politics of fear works on a set of interlocking psychological bases in such an environment:

The Ivan the Terrible Effect
Ivan the Terrible was a popular Tsar and remained popular long after his death because he ruled in a time when Russians were extremely insecure as the Mongol Khanates that had ruled the Pontic steppe continued their violent destabilizing breakup, following Muscovy’s successful war of independence to separate itself from the Golden Horde.

Just like the Comanche or any expansionist equestrian pastoralist society, the imperial Mongol civilization was successful because they struck fear into the heart of local agrarian and agro-pastoralist populations, often by engaging in gratuitous acts of murder, property destruction and sexual violence.

Ivan the Terrible was successful in rallying former subjects of the Horde and incorporating them into the expanding Russian state not by sharpening the contrast between how things worked in his Christian kingdom and how they worked in the Horde but by reducing it by demonstrating novel forms of gratuitous cruelty and violence.

Ivan formed the original ancestor of today’s SVR. Before the KGB, before NKVD, before Cheka, there were the Oprichniki, an army of black-clad riders with rotting dogs’ and wolves’ heads tied to their saddles, completely above and outside the law, who conducted massacres of unspeakable and pointless cruelty and debauchery. Ivan often led this host, with an iron wolf’s head mounted on his horse. Ivan was not just “terrible” in this context; he was also known for having beaten his own son to death for no apparent reason.

Yet he enjoyed considerable popular support because his subjects felt that they were, on balance, safer being led by a monster because he possessed the capacity to strike fear into the otherwise fearless Mongols.

When you are staring down the barrel of something scary that you perceive to be a terrifying external or alien force, there is a terrible logic to supporting a leader who has proven his worth by perpetrating atrocities indiscriminately against his own people.

And this appeal is a gendered one, not one unique to women but one more concentrated in women because they are more likely to have been sexually interfered with as children or physically terrorized in a romantic relationship. People who have had these experiences, male or female, often seek out romantic partners not on the basis that they will be gentle and different but that they will be so “formidable” (a more accurate translation of Ivan’s actual title) that they will frighten off the other violent abusers.

Reaction Formation
People who voted for Trump because he would stand up to China, stare down Mexican migration or kick the drug dealers out of town, were conscious in their embrace of the politics of fear: Trump was a scary, seemingly invulnerable bastard whose aggression was largely directed away from them and towards the things they discerned to be threats. But those credentials did not just come from his affect. They came from how he had treated business partners, employees, investors and even his own family members, proudly calling his daughter “a hot piece of ass” on the Howard Stern show, for instance. The people who consciously imbibed this politics of fear were largely middle and working class white men to whom Trump was not that scary in the first place.

But for women like a former girlfriend of mine who grew up with a father, and major Republican donor I might add, who made his violent sexual fantasies about her a regular part of family dinner conversation, this kind of response is less conscious and rational, more instinctive, inchoate and hard-wired.

Survivors of child and domestic abuse and violence have an instinct to placate an emotionally dysregulated, powerful, potentially violent man, irrespective of whether that behaviour makes them safer. Reaction formation is a form of double consciousness that enables and conceals this.

Because those experiencing it feel profoundly unsafe but deem themselves unable to escape or reduce their unsafety, like an abused spouse or child, they become vehement, passionate and insistent that the thing that is terrifying them is VERY SAFE, 100% SAFE. If they cannot control their safety, they can at least control their feelings about it. I first made this argument when observing that the Canadians most insistent that anthropogenic climate change is not happening are those whose lives and communities are most endangered by it. The climate has to not be changing; that’s the only way to feel safe.

As I stated at the time, I believe that the two big poll surges Trump experienced among married white women, the day he accepted the GOP nomination and Election Day, were powered by his campaign’s brilliant mastery of the intuitive logic of reaction formation.

Trump chose to give his daughter an open-mouthed kiss and grab her ass on live TV at the moment he knew the most people would be watching. He understood, whether intuitively or consciously, that he could most effectively demonstrate his power by violating the incest taboo as publicly as possible and then watch as no one at the GOP convention attempted to stop or condemn him. As I wrote at the time,

And it is in this light that we must understand the programmatic, intentional and strategic marketing of parent-child incest by Donald Trump. Trump chose to give the convention address, reserved for generations for the spouse of a presidential candidate, to his daughter Ivanka. This choice was intentional and premeditated, as was his unambiguously libidinous kissing and ass-grabbing of his daughter on national TV before the address, the daughter about whom he has been making sexualized comments in the media since before her tenth birthday. Trump is direct, clear and unflinching in notifying America that he owns that girl’s ass and has since she was conceived.

Trump successfully activated reaction formation in survivors (not all survivors but many) across the country; they denied what they saw as abused spouses often do when they see their own children abused; they became more desirous of pleasing and complying with his will; and, most importantly, they became vehement in their denials that he was dangerous and predatory.

The sad fact is that survivors who have not adequately addressed their own experience of abuse, especially those still engaged in placating their abuser on a regular basis, are more likely to speak up in favour of the abuser, as a deep-seated subconscious self-protective strategy, and, to further protect themselves, conceal from their own consciousness what they are doing and why.

The next surge, one long-debated by pollsters and other psephologists, was the iconic photograph of Trump looking over his wife’s shoulder and watching her fill out her ballot on election day, 2016.

As I wrote at the time,

As we learn—but never accept—in countless failed rape prosecutions, people who have been sexually violated, especially people who have been sexually violated by adults as children do not reliably say “no.” They do not reliably ostracize their abuser or reject his future overtures. They do not reliably resist further infringements on their bodies, dignity and sense of self. That is because one of the most powerful lessons a survivor of sexual abuse learns is this: their abuser is all-powerful and nobody will help them…

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

The Politics of Fear Come to the Olympics
In my efforts to explain the Democratic Party’s unexpectedly good showing in the 2022 midterm elections, I suggested that it could be accounted-for by the Democrats adopting the fundamental logic of Trumpian campaigning, of seeking to make the voters more frightened of them, of presenting as their representative, the most emotionally dysregulated, abusive person in the room. Trump, in a way, has become obsolete. He is now replaceable because the logic of his political strategy has been embraced by all.

At the start of the Paris Olympics, many of us gender critical folks were anticipating a good week because two men were going to be boxing women on TV. These men, furthermore, checked none of the boxes that characters like Dylan Mulvaney use to distance themselves aesthetically or rhetorically from their masculinity.

Imane Khelif did not merely look just like a man, complete with Adam’s Apple and a hulking manly build; he “lived as a man” in Algeria and gave interviews about manliness and masculinity directed to an audience of other men; he did not wear a hijab, as Muslim Algerian women do; he had a deep voice; he walked like a man; he even adjusted the position of his scrotum in front of us on live TV; and he had been disqualified from international women’s boxing the previous year because he had been found to have XY chromosomes.

This was going to be a slam dunk, we thought: people will see a man punching a woman in the face. And that is what we saw. What followed, we did not expect: all kinds of people previously sympathetic to gender critical positions, including materialist radical feminists, became supporters of Genderwang and vigorously defended his status as a woman on social media. Even the Italian woman he savaged recanted her opposition to being beaten by a man and apologized for saying what happened was unfair. And that support grew throughout the week as a second male boxer also began beating women in the ring.

I want to suggest that this is best explained by two iconic images from the boxing ring:

In the first, Imane Khelif gropes the right breast of Angela Carini immediately after humiliating her in the ring. In the second, Lin Yu-Ting illegally rabbit-punches his female opponent on the back of the neck, using a dangerous attack that could have left even a male opponent permanently disabled. And the referee did nothing.

Now, whether these acts were carefully planned or merely serendipitous and intuitive is utterly irrelevant. This essay has no interest in the consciousness of Khelif or Lin. My interest is in the consciousness of the audience.

This was visual rhetoric on a par with the those two images of the 2016 Trump campaign. They said, unambiguously: men can abuse women under the justifying discourse of Genderwang in front of the entire world, surrounded by supposed professional arbiters of fairness and nothing will happen. Not only can they engage in this abuse with impunity; the will do so to thunderous applause, and even make their victim apologize to them for saying they were victimized.

Now I am not writing this to complain or lament the state of humanity today or even to grieve the latest batch of friends I have lost but as a wake-up call to critics of the authoritarians: we have to stop pretending that this is a battle of wits, of analysis, of information. Those things mean nothing at this phase of the debate. The worst argument and the best argument we can make will elicit identical reactions because if we actually put on our thinking caps and stop distracting ourselves by pretending that sounding smart and informed is going to move the needle, we have to recognize that this is a contest about human consciousness of power and safety. That’s it.

Our rhetoric must cease to address the fight we wish we were in, between the bad and good analysis, between bad and good information, and start addressing what is actually animating it: performances of power and terror, the Machiavellian politics of fear.

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

True Names of the Paris Olympiad: Humpty Dumpty and the Adam-God Heresy at the Versailles Olympics

I don’t think anyone doubted that the Paris Olympics or, as I prefer to think of them, the Versailles Olympics, were going to showcase the current state of the madness or morbidities of the world. But in better times, those debates circled around more intelligible things, like whether to boycott an Olympiad hosted by a despot or whether to bar from competition representatives of a pariah regime. Foreign delegations would try to strike a balance when interacting with local members of their country’s diaspora, how much to flirt with a local minority population with which they sympathized. One thinks not just of 1936 Berlin but the two boycotted Olympics (1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles) at the end of the Cold War, the slaughter and repression preceding Mexico City 1968, Chechen and gay solidarity activism at Sochi 2014 and the massacre of Israeli Olympians by the PLO in Munich 1972.

But, despite the Gaza punitive expedition now having escalated in a region-wide war from Sanaa to Tehran to Damascus and the ongoing slaughter in Sudan and Ukraine, Paris has focused the world’s eyes of the bed-shitting morbidities of the cultural crisis of the post-liberal societies of the Global North.

There is no shortage of commentators with wise words to say about the perversions of the West showcased at the event, so effectively demonstrated in the Last Supper drag act and the decision to put men in the boxing ring with women, leaving me with nothing especially unique to say on the subject of the actual events. Instead, I want to focus on radical and dramatic differences between how progressives and non-progressives in the Global North have debated these bizarre events and defended their respective positions.

Olympic-level Lying
I had not planned to pay much attention to the Olympics. I don’t find watching either the sports or the public art around the sports very interesting. But my interest was piqued as I watched the debate about a number in the opening ceremonies, a peculiar little dance number called “Last Supper on the Seine.”

The number, according to the cast, the official event program and the IOC, itself, was a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting. And it predictably offended evangelical Christians, as was its clear intent, which is fine. There is nothing wrong with doing a dance number that offends some people in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Nothing at all.

Where things got weird was when a silly observation by an art historian went viral. The art historian claimed that the piece was not a parody of the Last Supper but of a seventeenth century Dutch painting, Festin des Dieux, a painting likely, itself based on Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Literally piling insult upon insult, viral memes circulated by progressives argued that evangelical Christians were wrong to be offended because, in their ignorance and stupidity, they had mistaken a depiction of Festin for the Last Supper.

Except that any person who looked at both paintings would of course see that the dance number far more closely resembled the Last Supper than it did Festin. What fascinated me was that almost no progressive smugly circulating posts inveighing against evangelicals’ putative ignorance of art history had heard of the painting before they circulated the meme or looked at it before schooling us plebs on what we had really seen. Why would they need to? A person with a PhD in art history had told them what they were actually looking at. Why would they then need to use their own eyes?

Then there is an adjacent dust-up. One of the drag performers parodying an apostle and standing next to a child, was exposing his scrotum through a hole in his fishnet stockings. Again, it is not like the Genderwang movement has not, on numerous prior occasions defended drag performers flashing their junk at kids. They could have done so again on this occasion but instead, they began arguing that the scrotum we could all see was not a scrotum but “a spot of skin on his upper leg.” What does that even mean? Still, this phrase also started making the rounds among progressives. We were foolish and ignorant for mistaking “a spot of skin on the upper leg” for an obviously and intentionally displayed scrotum.

Again, rather than contesting the propriety of the display, the choice was to look at the same photo we were looking at and basically say “you are only imagining that is a scrotum, you ignoramus.”

Then, of course the crescendo came during the week when an Algerian man won a series of women’s boxing matches. The fact that he was a man was perfectly obvious to anyone who looked at his body or watched his fights. He had a man’s face, a man’s build, a man’s arms, a man’s neck, complete with Adam’s apple; he moved like a man; he punched like a man; he did not wear a hijab, as Algerian women generally do; candid photos of him living happily as a man back home surfaced on the internet; he even adjusted the position of his scrotum in front of all of us on live TV.

But what clinched it was that the International Boxing Association had disqualified him from women’s boxing in 2023 because a genetic test had revealed he had XY chromosomes.

But the IOC, quickly followed by a legion of breathless progressives decried any acknowledgement as “hate speech,” “bigotry” and, as they cycled through the usual list of stonewalling epithets, moving on later in the week to “disinformation” and “Russian interference.” I anticipate them blaming Donald Trump the “the far right” tomorrow.

The arguments progressives began to cobble together did not deny that this was his chromosomal makeup but rather that two other factors trumped any genetic test’s possible conclusions: his sex was listed as “female” on both his birth certificate and passport. A doctor had put the wrong sex on the form because he had failed to notice the minor genetic defect that concealed the baby’s penis and scrotum, which did not descend until he was in his early teens as he went through bog standard male puberty that built the body he inhabits today. And because Algerian passports are based on citizens’ birth certificates, this error was replicated on his travel documents.

Progressives then argued that he was a “biological woman” and “assigned female at birth,” based on what his government-issued ID said. Memes abound about how “far right disinformation” is causing people to believe Imane Khelif is a man when “she” is clearly a woman. These memes almost always included Khelif clearly looking and posing like the man he is.

And even when the XY chromosomes are acknowledged, Woke folk have gone on to argue that “some women have Y chromosomes” and “she has female Y chromosomes.”

Wokes Believe in the Adam-God Heresy
It is tempting to think that progressives are engaged in a broad-based grassroots effort at gaslighting the rest of us i.e. destabilizing our sense of what is real through a programmatic campaign of disorientation and deception.

But that would be a silly conspiracy theory because it would involve millions of people engaging in coordinated acts of bad faith. When I debate progressives on these subjects, I do not get a sense of bad faith. I get a disturbing sense of passionate sincerity, the sort I pick up from Young Earth Creationists, like the person arguing with me has something more than belief; they have faith; that this is true because it needs to be true for the universe to be as I need it to be.

So, how can we understand these three interventions as sincere representations of the Woke worldview? I think we have to go back to the understanding that just as the Second Great Awakening gave birth to the first American space religion, Mormonism, the Third Great Awakening has spawned Wokeness, the most popular of all American space religions, outstripping the original Sandinismo, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, and even Scientology.

American space religions have a number of common features other religions generally do not have. And I have written at some length about their common doctrine that we all have pre-existent spirits that possess a race and a gender before they are born into the material world. But that is not their most important doctrinal feature nor the one relevant to what we have witnessed this week.

Shortly before his martyrdom in 1844, Joseph Smith revealed his last and greatest cosmological revelation in the King Follett Discourse, our God, he explained, was not always God. He was once a man who lived on the planet Kolob and made himself God by learning the secrets of the universe, the powers of the priesthood, powers that inhere in his mastery of true name magic.

That’s the most distinctive thing about American space religions: they are essentially godless. They do not believe in God as ontologically distinct from humans; they believe that men can learn powerful magic and make themselves gods. That’s the goal in the LDS, NOI and Scientology: auto-apotheosis.

Mormonism did not emerge, fully formed, like Athena, from the forehead of Zeus. Historian John Brooke shows us that it was an agglomeration of folks beliefs of a group of English religious refugees known as the Cunning Men, the working class manifestation of the great Hermetic magi of the Renaissance, like Elizabeth I’s court astrologer John Dee. While they believed themselves to be practitioners of various magical arts they peddled to the popular classes, like astrology, love magic and divining, their greatest power came from their mastery of Hermetic true name magic.

True name magic refers to kind of magical practice premised on the idea that if you know the “true name” of a person or thing, you have a special magical power over it. The main Mormon activity, “temple work” i.e. the baptism of the dead, requires that LDS members compile the names of their dead relatives so that they can baptize them retroactively through a set of secret temple rituals. Without knowledge of the precise names of the deceased, the rituals do not work. All that genealogical work is about learning people’s names so that their spirits in the afterlife can be acted-upon.

It is in this context that we should also understand NOI’s practice of converts taking a new name, upon conversion, to reflect the fundamental change in the nature of their spirit. Having come up with the idea of “dead naming,” long before the trans movement was a glint in Pfizer’s eye, NOI adherents understand the use of their prior name as causing them not just public shame but a kind of spiritual damage.

American space religions share a common intellectual ancestry with the Kabalarian church, another movement practicing Hermetic true name magic: the myth popular among many medieval Jewish and Christian cabalists that Adam was actually God, that he had created the world by naming the objects in the Garden into existence.

This understanding the relationship between language and the world is what we are contending with now. In place of the Adam-God myth as the justifying discourse buttressing this view, we have vulgar postmodernism alloyed with the Humpty Dumpty Fallacy.  

Through the Looking Glass with Humpty Dumpty

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’”

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass chills us with its prescience here. Humpty Dumpty’s promiscuous, arbitrary and dictatorial control of language is power, nothing more, nothing less.

Woke apologists like Judith Butler vulgarize and redefine the linguistic constructionism of Jacques Derrida and the postmodernists and basically argue that reality, our shared world is made out of words and that if we change the words, we change the world. They also vulgarize and debase Michel Foucault and the poststructuralists’ idea of the “episteme,” arguing not that how knowledge is “made” and power is distributed are intimately related in a complex dance but instead simply that knowledge and power are either the same thing or completely interchangeable things.

In other words, Wokes live in a world in which the words on a birth certificate or passport absolutely do supersede anything their lying eyes might witness. The state and a certified medical doctor put “female” on that birth certificate. The Algerian state then confirmed it by putting it on a passport. What could be me more authoritative than expertise fused with state power? How could one’s senses or one’s common sense possibly compete in making authoritative claims?

If an art historian says “Last Supper on the Seine” is not about the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci but about an obscure Dutch painting called Festin Des Dieux, why would one need to bother looking at the painting? An expert opinion naturally trumps what one’s lying eyes might observe if one tried looking at both paintings and comparing them to the dance number.

But the case of the scrotum is the most disturbing because it demonstrates that this sort of thing has become such a habit of mind for progressives that their first move is to deny what their adversaries say they see, no matter how visually obvious. After all, just today, an MSNBC host posted to Twitter that that nobody tried to shoot Donald Trump the other week.

While progressives prefer it when experts or the state, more fully endowed with Hermetic magical powers, do their work for them and change reality by renaming what we see as something we do not see, grassroots devotees are growing more confident in their mastery of true name magic, their development as fully functioning magi, themselves. Through an act of naming, they can make a scrotum vanish, not visually, of course, but in the ultimate reality, the reality of true names.

Or, as Orwell put it, “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

True Dreams of Robben Island: Dreams, Conspiracy Theories and the Public Memory of Nelson Mandela

Truth, Reconciliation and the Creation of Saint Nelson
Following the last South African election, in which the African National Congress finally completed its multi-decade project of squandering its parliamentary majority, I have been commenting and watching the country more closely and not just because it is a more popular subject of dinner conversation in Dar Es Salaam than it likely is back in Vancouver.

Even before the election, I had been writing about the fundamental unsustainability of the deal hammered-out between the African National Congress and the South African National Party because of my views on what scholars euphemistically call “transitional justice” in Canada and my belief that our “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC) was not the unalloyed good it was imagined to be. I argue, you may recall, that the reason we mistakenly view our commission as an unalloyed good is that we have the same mistaken view of the original South African TRC.

When I was a child in the early 80s, we used to go trick-or-treating on Hallowe’en carrying little boxes for UNICEF in which we collected pennies, or larger denomination coins if we found ourselves at one of those overly liberal houses that was giving out boxes of raisins instead of real candy. But as the global anti-Apartheid movement became a bigger deal in my home town, folks at my local Unitarian-Universalist Church made us little cardboard boxes, the same shape and size as the UNICEF boxes but for the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU).

Late in PW Botha’s presidency, under increasing pressure from the wave of democratization sweeping through Eastern Europe and mounting boycott and sanction campaigns, the South African regime’s stance towards the African National Congress began to soften and the international anti-Apartheid movement sought new, positive ways to highlight their support for the country’s main opposition movement. While the ANC’s offices were in Zambia and its president had been Oliver Tambo since 1967, the movement, at Tambo’s instigation developed a new international public relations strategy.

In this strategy, Tambo’s leadership was effaced in the public square and the true leader of the ANC and the global anti-Apartheid movement was presented as Nelson Mandela, the former president of the ANC who had been imprisoned and whom no one had seen in decades. And so, in July 1988, the movement staged seventieth birthday celebrations for Mandela all over the world, in community halls and stadiums and everything in between. They were a great success. Performers and activists genuflected to grainy black and white photos and footage of Mandela prior to his incarceration, the imposing, gun-toting burly communist guerilla leader and former boxer of the early 1960s.

This campaign to create a new public image for the ANC and its supporters around the world, one focused on Mandela, the elderly political prisoner, was a great success and led to Mandela making public appearances in 1989 and being released from prison the following year.

Another Important Dream
In the late 80s, my high school friends and I had a number of dreams that strongly influenced our politics, life choices and the increasingly distinctive lexicon of our small community. Oscar’s dream about the zombie invasion at Church’s Fried Chicken had been important. So was my sugar refinery zombie invasion dream. But then there were the Dreams of Steve, an extraordinary set of dreams and visions our friend kept a dream journal by his bed to record. And it is on the basis of this journal that I present: the Nelson Mandela dream.

Steve was fifteen years old and still in high school when the new, shorter, white-haired, peaceful-seeming, almost beatific Mandela began making appearances on the world stage in 1989. And in his dream, he learned that Mandela would be getting out of prison to celebrate his seventy-first birthday and that Steve had been chosen to host the affair in the small apartment in a three-storey walk-up, on Vine Street in Southwest Vancouver, that he shared with his mother.

Steve is one of the world’s great raconteurs and has a talent for offering up only the details most necessary to understand the shape of a story, like those economical paintings in which the artist renders an image using the fewest brush strokes possible. So, the narrative of the dream is awfully short:

“Once people showed up, everything was going just fine, until Nelson started doing his card tricks. And then, for an encore, he started passing little red plastic combs through his head. Then the police showed up and tear-gassed the sofa.”

But what Steve found most disconcerting in his evaluation of the dream was this: the Nelson Mandela who did the card tricks was the 1960s Mandela not the 1980s Mandela. He was a huge, broad-shouldered, tough man in a suit with a gun, the communist bomber and implacable foe of the National Party.

I have reflected on that dream many times in the decades since. Because somehow it captured something I could not fully express, until my pal David returned from his most recent trip to South Africa.

The 2024 South African Election and Its Aftermath
Earlier this year, South Africa held an election in which the ANC lost its majority, not just thanks to the corrupt and shambolic leadership of Cyril Ramaphosa but because the flaws inherent in the deal between the ANC and the National Party, between Mandela and, Botha’s successor, FW De Klerk, made South Africa’s current political crisis inevitable by kicking the resolution of major structural problems down the road rather than resolving them at the time.

Because the agreement was structured by the contemporaneous global embrace of neoliberalism that was taking place in the 1990s, not only did it immunize the vast majority of those who had terrorized, tortured and murdered black dissidents; it placed off limits any transfers of wealth or lands from the white population either to the black population or to the state. Not only did the deal radically constrain the state’s powers of expropriation and redistribution; it actually took land away from the black population. By decommissioning the Bantustans, the fake, internationally unrecognized countries like Ciskei, Transkei and Kwazulu, ruled by local strongman stooges for the South African government, there actually came to be less land in the country controlled by the black majority.

Further constrained by capital flight and emigration by high income professionals, black-ruled South Africa had limited ability to use social programs or compensated expropriation to meaningfully transfer wealth to the black majority, whose land and labour had been stolen and exploited for decades. Effectively, the most politically viable strategy for converting black political power into black economic power naturally became government corruption, favouritism and self-dealing. By leaving almost 100% of the economic power with whites and almost 100% of the political power with blacks, the “compromise” reached by Mandela and de Klerk set South Africa on an inevitable course towards corruption, and via, corruption, to the return of tribalism.

The ANC lost its majority due to two main factors: first, the resurgence of actual socialists within the ANC demanding land reform and, the ultimate exit of that faction under the leadership of Julius Malema into a party called the Economic Freedom Fighters, which began winning seats in the 2014 election. Second, the tribalization of the ANC spoils system and growing intraparty conflicts between the Xhosa majority and the Zulus, ultimately leading to former president Jacob Zuma’s exit and creation of another pro-land reform spinoff party appealing also to more economically moderate Zulus who felt that the ANC had become a Xhosa party and peeled 15% of the vote off the ANC.

Without a parliamentary majority, the ANC faced an impossible choice. A partnership with Malema and/or Zuma would almost certainly have entailed Ramaphosa’s resignation and replacement with a leader more acceptable to the pro-land reform parties and, more importantly, would almost certainly cause an immediate wave of capital flight, emigration and unrest in response to land redistribution, not to mention possible punishment by the World Trade Organization, World Bank and independent bond-rating agencies.

So, the ANC went into coalition with the Democratic Alliance, the main party of the white South African minority, a party committed to neoliberal economics and opposed to land reform. Now, not only do white South Africans continue to hold disproportionate economic power, for the first time since 1999, they also hold disproportionate political power, with white South Africans opposed to redistributive policies controlling the ministries in charge of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, immigration, infrastructure, public works and environment.

While this deal may have saved the ANC in the short term, it will almost certainly lead to the continued decline of the ANC’s popularity and a growing sympathy for Malema’s explicitly racialist, black nationalist take on what ails South Africa.

The Nelson Mandela Conspiracy Theory
It is in this specific political context, of the formation of South Africa’s first black   -white coalition government in thirty years, that a new conspiracy theory is spreading like wildfire, first among South Africans but now among African nationalists everywhere: the real Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s and the man who made peace with FW de Klerk was an imposter.

After his latest business trip to South Africa, my friend David reported the widespread popularity of this theory, backed by claims that the government has prohibited Mandela’s genetic information being compared against those of his descendants, that Winnie Mandela’s fall from power was due to her efforts to expose the imposter and that her atrocities were made-up, that access to Mandela by his old comrades was radically restricted during his presidency and a host of others.

Obviously, I think those claims, as literal claims, are hogwash.

But I have to say that the moment I heard the conspiracy theory, I felt like it was true on a deeper, more profound level than the literal or the historical. And I began to weep. The Marxist who believed that his people would never truly be free without redistributing the land, without nationalizing the mines, without taking control of the factories, did die in that prison.

And that, I think, is why Steve’s dream has stuck with me all these years because what made it uncanny was the irreconcilability of the two Mandelas, the way it referenced without articulating all the dreams the anti-Apartheid movement nurtured that were discarded in the peace deal with de Klerk, losses we never allowed ourselves to acknowledge and therefore were unable to grieve.

From the 1920s to the 1990s, the former German colony of Namibia had lived under South African rule, its small German colonial population placed in charge of a vast and diverse black population. In the 1980s, when Sam Nujoma, the leader of SWAPO (the Southwest African People’s Organization), Namibia’s equivalent of the ANC, was asked when his people would achieve freedom and independence from South Africa, he answered “when President Mandela gives them to us.”

Nujoma’s statement speaks to a global phenomenon of shifting our agency and aspirations from our home countries into the South African freedom struggle. As the Cold War wound down, socialists faced disappointment after disappointment, defeat after defeat, on the world stage. As our own domestic horizon of possibilities grew ever narrower and supposedly anti-capitalist regimes around the world were increasingly not just defeated but utterly discredited, we vested more and more of our hopes and more and more of our idealism in the anti-Apartheid movement, the ANC and the person of Nelson Mandela.

And so it was that his total capitulation to neoliberalism and his abandonment of the ANC’s socialist ambitions between 1990 and 1994 narrowed the horizon of possibility of socialists the world over. The total victory of Blairism within the social democratic parties of the Global North over the course of that decade would have been more of a fight had Mandela, our mythical hero, not made these capitulations acceptable through our overinvestment in the international personality cult Tambo had created.

It may not be true. But the world in which we live today, the one in which the left failed and has been replaced by a monstrosity shambling around in its flayed skin, functions as though the real Nelson Mandela died in a cell on Robben Island in 1987 and a doppleganger took his place.

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