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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the thing is that he is succeeding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

The NDP Is Class Conscious, Just Not How You Think

In my last post I suggested that the New Democratic Party of Canada and its ilk are not unprincipled as many on the left suggest but instead have ideologically changed over the past generation and a half. For some, the knowledge that former social democratic parties, Third Way parties like the NDP are no longer socialist in character is sufficient. But I think that we need to go further to understand our present predicament. As we can now understand that these parties are here to actively stymie efforts to redistribute wealth or arrest the extinction event, it is important to comprehend and anticipate their actions, not so that we can work in concert with them but so as to prepare ourselves for their next move against us.

In my previous entry, I noted that we could adduce some of their priorities from their policy decisions. For instance, unlike twentieth-century social democrats who liked to socialize areas of the economy vulnerable to monopolization, modern Third Wayers believe that regulated monopolies and oligopolies are good ways to deliver things like railways and mass transit.

Another principle we can adduce from observation is a strong belief in meritocracy; we see this both within organizations supportive of these parties, in these parties themselves and encouraged within the state whenever these parties form government. This is because Third Way parties and their allies are not just vehicles for ideology or personal ambition; they are a larger project of class formation and class representation. And the specific meritocratic ideology they express and meritocratic practices they enact are of a piece with this.

A significant labour trend in small-p politics over the past generation and a half has been the increasing professionalization of the top tier of the non-profit activist sector. Today, most activism is directed not through democratic, volunteer-run locally-based cells of large organizations or through local independent activist organizations but instead through large, professionalized organizations managed and run by an emerging managerial class. The complex and strategic tasks of activism are not carried out in the non-monetized time of volunteers but in the monetized time of this emerging class. Similar to the original theory behind the post-Independence US military in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, part of this professional class’s skill set is the effective management of non- and partly-monetized labour so as to integrate or at least distract individuals wishing to engage as volunteers or members.

A similar trend has been taking place at universities as classroom teaching has shifted from a task primarily carried out by tenured and tenure-track faculty to one carried out primarily by temporary workers operating on four-month “hire at will” contracts without seniority rights or benefits. Because of the lack of continuity or stability in this growing part of the precariat, the work of producing a coherent curriculum or learning experience still falls to tenured faculty except that they are now expected to carry this task out not as instructors but as managers of instructors. The tenured professoriate has transformed from high-wage frontline workers into a new managerial class.

These two emerging groups are increasingly seamless with older professional formations, namely, what Vladimir Lenin termed “the labour aristocracy,” a permanent professional class of white collar managers running trade union pension funds, real estate portfolios, professionalized negotiating teams and a host of other duties. These individuals typically monopolize elected offices in unions, using the resources of incumbency in tandem with biased voting systems; or they occupy permanent unelected positions alongside elected ones, in which their position is understood to have been derived not from the democratic will of the members but from one’s professional qualifications to manage pensions, run real estate portfolios, etc.

The fourth group that intersects with these is the largest and most venerable, career civil servants, especially those working in the policy field. It is important to remember that in states like Canada, public policy is developed in two entirely separate streams: (a) inside political parties that choose leaders, field candidates, run on platforms and appoint cabinet ministers if they win and (b) inside the “policy” branches of the civil service in which a nominally non-partisan group of civil servants design policies based on a loose liberal utilitarian ideology. Many on the front lines in the civil service are engaged in micro-policy construction and many imagine their career as an ascent towards increasingly policy-oriented jobs walled-off from the direct delivery of government services.

These professional groups have increasingly converged to the point where one may move among them fairly effortlessly. In academic administration, professors increasingly work alongside individuals with MBAs and graduate “leadership” degrees or some go on to obtain similar credentials through Executive MBA programs. Once one has entered this class formation, one might find oneself the executive director of a Third Way party one year, an academic administrator the next, managing a trade union’s membership consultation process the next and then taking on a chief of staff, director of communications or deputy minister position for a Third Way government in the event of an election win. Perhaps, after the government’s defeat, one might take on a position at a management consulting, communications or government relations firm and then be hired as a contractor by one’s former colleagues at the university or union.

As Irene Silverblatt and Michel Foucault explain, one of the important features of modernity is the rise of a bureaucratic class, a portion of the bourgeoisie who understand that their right to make and enforce the rules of our society comes not from popular acclaim or heredity but instead of specialized knowledge. In this way, Silverblatt argues that the Spanish Inquisition was the first modern bureaucratic institution because the inquisitors understood their power and legitimacy as arising from their possession of knowledge, not from episcopacy or the throne. Inquisitors were policy-makers, analysts and investigators; torture was to be used sparingly, rationally and privately to produce the information necessary to legitimate punishment.

I want to suggest that those who think the NDP is not class-based or class-conscious party are dead wrong. It is simply that the NDP, like other Third Way parties, has changed which class it primarily represents. Today, the party is the class consciousness, i.e. the culture, ethics and interests of the bureaucratic class. This class rotates effortlessly among the private, non-profit and public sectors, technocrats who justify their power by constantly claiming to be producing new knowledge.
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With this understanding, all kinds of peculiar things about the BC NDP suddenly become explicable. Despite nomination meetings and leadership races being the main source of a party’s new members, the NDP has found them increasingly threatening and sought to shut them down by charging exorbitant fees to seek a nomination and then disqualifying large portions of candidates during a completely opaque process called “vetting” where head office staff determine whether a candidate would be a liability during a general election. Essentially, seeking an NDP candidate nomination is increasingly indistinguishable from a job interview for a technocratic position. This does not arise from some kind of internal corruption.

The reverse is true. The old NDP, the party that saw itself as representing the working class believed that the more working people who showed up to support a candidate, the more legitimate said candidate would be. But in progressive, technocratic thought, choosing someone who is more popular over someone who is more qualified is corruption, an affront to one’s values that esteem professional achievement and mastery of bureaucratic processes over simple popularity. It is out of a desire for purity, not expediency that becoming an NDP candidate has become about exhibiting success in a bureaucratic system and then demonstrating those skills by navigating the party’s own bureaucracy.

And, of course it goes without saying that any person of the appropriate class, provided they exhibit that class’s values of restraint and sobriety in their personal life, should have the requisite four- or five-figure vetting fee handily available at their financial institution.

Many were baffled that, when the party took power, it conducted no purge of the senior civil service to remove supporters of the BC Liberal Party and replace them with New Democrats. But from the perspective of those controlling the party, the ranks of the senior civil service more closely resembled them than did the members of their own party because despite the NDP’s best efforts, party membership rolls remain full of working people, grassroots activists, the un- and under-employed. In other words, the BC Liberal Party’s civil service seemed far more comprehensible and trustworthy than the party’s rank-and-file members.

And one must imagine the reverse was also true, that the senior civil service recognized and welcomed a new set of bosses who acted and felt more like equals than superiors, who embodied the cultural values of their class more precisely. No more being subordinated by indecorous rubes cum mob bosses like Rich Coleman or greasy hucksters like Mark Marissen, this new crew of putative bosses could be collaborators, allies and peers. Now, they would be treated with equality, with respect.

That is why the safest thing to do with a government decision is to create an “authority,” an unelected body of technocrats who make policy and govern at longer and longer arm’s length from the state. The health authorities and transportation authorities of BC were not created by Gordon Campbell’s BC Liberals; they were created by Mike Harcourt’s NDP. And why bring our ferries and our railroads back under public ownership? As regulated monopolies, they too can operate at a safe remove from democratic authority, guided by the same bureaucratic class.

This is why one must be so very careful in mitigating the savagery of the housing crisis without harming one’s artisanal landlording or intergenerational wealth transfer. That is why the province’s climate change plan is simply the declaration that, in the future, everyone will be made to have the kind of car members of this class already possess or aspire to own, either that or relinquish their class position by ceasing to drive.

The dream, then, of this class, expressed through its party, is the total convergence of the two branches of policy-making I set out above. Policy is not to be made by the rabble at conventions. And it is not in the party platform, which is simply a tool to obtain votes. Policy is the zeitgeist of the bureaucratic class, expressed in meetings of Harvard School of Business Executive MBAs at meetings of the board of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, commissioned in reports by KPMG, emanating from elite off-the-books “brainstorming sessions” at the Progress Summit, arising from playful speculation, soaking in the Hollyhock Institute hot tub or expressed in a UBC political science PhD thesis on “innovation in government.” It is immanent, throughout the system.

The former Marxists of the NDP envisage not “the withering of the state,” but the withering of the party. There is no confrontation between our government and the bureaucratic capitalist state. There is only a much-anticipated and tearful reunion.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Carry on like this, Dr. Weaver, and we will have deserved extinction

A little over two years ago, on May 10th, 2017, Dr. Andrew G. Weaver, the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia, issued a threat: he might use his three-person caucus to keep the criminal enterprise known as the BC Liberal Party in office if the BC New Democratic Party did not give him what he wanted. The BC Liberals had held power in the province for sixteen years. During that time, they had conducted a fire sale of public assets, selling, for instance, a railroad valued at $1.1 billion for $99 million. That sale was so egregious, some of the party’s underlings had to do some time for it in exchange for their families being looked-after.

The one decent thing the BC Liberals had done was to introduce a carbon tax in 2008, a tax that was capped by the party’s second leader, Christy Clark, in 2011. Clark’s government had been focused on vastly expanding fracking and petroleum extraction in the province and selling the “natural gas” to unspecified buyers in East Asia. The BC Liberals had also sold off public forest land, allowed mining companies to break the law with impunity and vastly expanded casino gambling in the province, which had become a haven for those wishing to use an inflated real estate market and an insufficiently supervised set of casinos to launder billions of dollars.

Nevertheless, Weaver threatened BC’s New Democratic Party with the possibility that he would keep this crew of kleptocratic money-laundering climate villains in office if the party did not do all it could to woo him to their side.

To make all of this work, the BC Green Party leader, who was still a member of the Liberal Party of Canada and not of the Canadian Greens, hired Norman Spector as his chief negotiator to deal with the competing NDP and Liberal demands to support their legislative minorities. Spector had been the deputy minister to Thatcherite BC premier Bill Bennett and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. And he had been instrumental in the Restraint Program and the efforts to shut down Operation Solidarity, which opposed it, making BC a laboratory for unfettered Thatcherism, with its austerity and privatization, in 1983.

Spector flitted back and forth between Clark and NDP leader John Horgan, trying to make a deal Weaver found favourable, for nearly a month. In the end, in exchange for agreeing to vote “no confidence” against Clark, Weaver obtained what we call the “confidence and supply agreement.”

The agreement was pretty problematic as it was based on what we might call “process promises” – promises in which someone commits to do what some future consultation or evaluative process tells them to do. The BC NDP secured an agreement from Weaver and his caucus that they would support the government until 2021 in exchange for a promised minimum wage increase being referred to a commission, the decision on whether to build the Site C hydro megaproject being referred to the BC Utilities Commission and ditching first-past-the-post and bringing in proportional representation referred to a postal referendum.

This stood in pretty dramatic contrast to similar agreements at the federal level like Jack Layton’s 2004 agreement to support Paul Martin’s government for nine months in exchange for $4 billion in new social spending, or Tommy Douglas’s 1965 agreement to support Lester Pearson’s government in exchange for creating Medicare. This was especially underlined, contemporaneously, in 2017, by the Democratic Unionist Party propping up Theresa May’s regime in London in exchange for billions of dollars in new spending and a hard border being re-created in Northern Ireland in contravention of the Good Friday Agreement. Whereas the DUP had secured not just a fortune in government spending but the dismantling of a multi-decade international peace process, Weaver secured an agreement to listen to civil servants.

But, when the BC Utilities Commission found that there was neither an energy, economic nor environmental case for Site C, the NDP went ahead with it. When the NDP appointed a fake YES committee for proportional representation, run by the historical enemies of electoral reform, who looted the government’s funds and presided over a historic defeat for PR, the Greens did not bat an eye. They were more concerned with three issues:

  1. inviting Uber, the American Ponzi scheme dressed up as a taxi company, seeking to abolish public transportation, into BC and pay drivers less than minimum wage while doing it;
  2. preventing “card certification” of unions in non-union workplaces, forcing workers to vote twice to be unionized, the second vote under the supervision of their bosses and subject to intimidation and coercion; and
  3. preventing the minimum wage from rising to $15 before 2021, keeping it under that of Jason Kenney’s Alberta until the end of the government’s mandate

During their time working with the NDP, Weaver’s Greens developed a fourth major concern: preventing British Columbians who own two homes from paying a surtax on their second home in places where homeless people were desperate for shelter.
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The Greens have not been shy in threatening to bring the government down over the latter three issues, threatening to vote with the BC Liberals in the next confidence vote if the government did not scale back its support for workers unionizing or earning a decent wage.

Before going on, I should clarify what a confidence vote is: it is a vote before the legislature that falls into one of two categories: (a) it pertains to appropriations/money or (b) it is declared to be a “confidence vote” by a majority of members of the legislature. Any time there is a “confidence vote” before the legislature, the government must win this vote. Otherwise, the Lieutenant-Governor will either choose a new premier from among the assembly’s members or a call a new elections. Sometimes a confidence vote is a budget. Sometimes it is a tax bill. Sometimes it as an innocuous bill that has had the following phrase added to it as an amendment, “and this house has no confidence in the government.” That’s how Joe Clark’s government fell in 1980.

I am writing this piece because of recent events in which Dr. Weaver has offered us a second-rate Pontius Pilate impression around some provincial legislation that served to massively increase fracking in the Peace Region, build a pipeline from the Peace to Kitimat, and construct the highest-emission, most climate-changing megaproject in BC’s 162-year history by giving a billion dollars in tax breaks to Royal Dutch Shell. Royal Dutch Shell, for those with a shorter memory, was the petroleum company of apartheid South Africa and a key actor in the genocide against the Ogoni people in Nigeria.

According to Weaver and his apologists, there is nothing the BC Green Party can do to stop the package of $6 billion in tax breaks for transnational oil companies to develop liquified “natural gas” export facilities in Squamish and Kitimat, based on fracking and pipeline-building, with the “product” destined to be burned in the USA or East Asia to fire inefficient industrial production. They argue that there is nothing they can do because the BC Liberals and BC NDP both support these LNG projects and, between them these parties control the vast majority of votes in the legislature.

This seems strange because the concessions Layton demanded in 2004 were opposed by the Liberals and Conservatives who comprised the vast majority of MPs; this was also true of the Medicare reforms the NDP demanded in the 1960s; they too were opposed by most of the MPs in the house. Similarly, a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is opposed by the vast majority of MPs in Westminster. The reason that Layton and Douglas got their way is because they did not just threaten to vote against the government on the specific issue; they threatened to vote against the government on everything unless they got what they wanted.

The Tories, being implacable enemies of the Liberals, put all kinds of confidence matters before the house, just as the BC Liberals do against the BC NDP. There is a wealth of opportunities for Weaver and his confederates to defeat the government if the Horgan regime does not do what they want. But they only threaten to do this when they want to reduce wages and undermine the rights of workers. Whenever there is an environmental matter on the table, they claim their hands are tied because they must vote with the government on all confidence matters in the interests of “stability,” a nebulous concept they refuse to define.

So, let us be clear: when it comes to sticking up for property and business owners, the BC Greens threaten to bring the government down all the time and obtain major concessions from the NDP but when it comes to the environment, their supposed raison d’être, they state that they cannot threaten to change their vote on a confidence vote unless it specifically mentions LNG. According to the Greens “if you don’t do what we want, we will vote to defeat you at the next opportunity” is a threat that is both impossible and unethical, even though Medicare, the putative bedrock of our social contract was obtained by that very threat.

In response to this reasoning, some Greens have stated, “but what if the NDP won’t back down and we do have to bring down the government?” “What if they win a majority or the Liberals do?” The argument seems to be that unless the threat of defeating the government over the biggest carbon bomb BC has ever built has a 100% chance of succeeding, it should never be issued. The reasoning appears to be that a 100% chance of two huge LNG plants, fueled by fracked gas in the Peace, carried by pipeline through Unist’ot’en territory, to Squamish and Kitimat, is somehow not as risky as whatever a majority NDP or Liberal government would do. So it is better vote for that rather than take a risk and try to stop it, even though this involves signing off on the most omnicidal legislative act in BC history.

Let’s be clear: if the world increases carbon emissions at the rate the BC NDP-Green government proposes to, we are all dead and so is most of everything else, except maybe a rat every four miles. There is a good chance we’re dead anyway, but at least we have a shot if we try to stop governments accelerating the extinction event that grips our planet.

The BC Green Party is right. There is a chance that if they actually tried to stop Kitimat and Squamish LNG they might fail. But we are out of time. If we take no risks in attempting to save the planet, it’s over. We’re done. And we will have deserved to die.

BC Politics | fusangite |

Want to Know What the NDP Believes In? Believe New Democrats

There is a common story among my sort of folk, socialists and environmentalists who have been helping the NDP for all or most of the past generation, even after the disappointments and betrayals of the 90s and Canada’s proto-Blairite governments of Harcourt, Clark, Romanow and Calvert.

And the story is this, “The NDP has abandoned its principles. It has sold out. Its leadership are craven approval-seekers who won’t stand up for their principles.” I have to admit that I have been guilty of reinforcing that narrative. But I have come to believe that not only is that story false; it is detrimental because it causes people to make irrational and inefficient political decisions that cost lives.

When we assail BC’s NDP government for handing out $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other villainous, genocidal transnational corporations while telling us that we cannot afford their promised $10/day childcare for at least another decade, we talk about how the NDP has “abandoned its principles.” When Rachel Notley demanded that the federal government ignore and openly defy Supreme Court decisions protecting the rights of First Nations, we used the same language, talking about how the NDP had lost its way.

But let us consider for a moment that John Horgan, Notley and their cabinets, caucuses and political staffs are acting in accordance with their principles, that they are doing exactly what they believe in. As I stated when I quit the NDP, the simplest explanation for the decisions New Democrats make when they are in government is that they are doing what they believe in. Given the fact that NDP politicians tend to be far less personally corrupt than Liberals or Tories, we should take this seriously. When Liberals or Conservatives hand big cheques to the corporate sector, when they refuse to provide services in an essential area of the economy and turn it over to market forces, we can usually expect to see someone associated with that decision getting rich soon, usually through a lucrative corporate board appointment after leaving office, rather than old school kickbacks.

But when the NDP announces that it will not provide interurban government bus service south of Prince George when Greyhound pulls out and will let a patchwork of deregulated private fares and grey market ride sharing take its place, nobody thinks Claire Trevena is getting a board appointment or a bag of cash. When Horgan vetoes a public inquiry into money laundering, nobody expects him to join Liberal senator Larry Campbell on the board of the province’s largest casino after he retires. When Notley rigs the Alberta oil royalty review and gets the federal government to spend $4.5 billion on a leaky oil pipeline, nobody expects her to take a seat on the Suncor board when she tires of leading Alberta’s opposition. And when Michelle Mungall creates a fracking review panel that is required to recommend continued fracking, nobody thinks she will be getting one of those seats either.

Should this not suggest to us that the NDP believes more not less strongly in oligopolies and corporate welfare than Liberals and Conservatives do?

The reasons we recoil from this thinking are multiple:

First, we easily succumb to “essence in origins” ideas about politics, especially as we get older. Our theory of who or what a political movement is is linked not to that movement’s actions in the present but instead to its own origin myth, typically located in an idealized past outside of profane space-time. The NDP’s myth is like this. It is the story of how Tommy Douglas, the CCF premier of Saskatchewan created Canada’s biggest, most successful buyers’ club, Medicare, the linchpin of Canada’s liberal social contract. The NDP brought socialism to Canada, if one buys the idea that eleven networked government health insurance schemes purchasing services from small private companies is “socialism.” Medicare is certainly a good thing but, right away, one can see that it may be a tad over-described.

But essence in origins arguments are silly when discussing permeable organizations of any longevity. One need only look south to the United States. The US Democratic Party was created by America’s one caudillo president, and Donald Trump’s favourite, Andrew Jackson, who abolished the secret ballot, deregulated the medical profession, destroyed the national bank, had his own private army, owned more slaves than any other president, defied the Supreme Court and committed a series of successful and attempted genocides against indigenous people in violation of signed treaties from Florida to Louisiana to Georgia to Tennessee. Beginning in 1848, when US politics began to reorient around the slavery issue, the Democrats became the party of slavery, which they remained until the end of the Civil War, after which time they became the party of the Ku Klux Klan, a mantle they did not finish casting off until the 1980s.

Yet today, the front-runner in their presidential race is an anti-racist, democratic socialist backed by a coalition of trade unions and anti-racist groups. That is because subscription-based big tent political organizations change with their environment; they are a place invaded and abandoned by a succession of social movements based on the needs of the moment.

Why should Canada’s New Democratic Party be any different? It is not like any other political movement’s essence is preserved in amber. A century ago, the Canadian Prairies were a red Liberal wall from Lake of the Woods to the Rockies, with huge liberal legislative majorities and a deep bench of Liberal MPs who outnumbered Tories four to one. That’s because the Liberals were against the very Central Canadian manufacturing interests who form the backbone of the party today. The Tories, meanwhile, were hated on the Prairies because of their vociferous opposition to free trade with the US.

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Some people who suggest the party has fundamentally changed believe that these changes have been grounded in a secretive, elite-level hijacking of the party that has taken place behind closed doors, a conspiracy of staffers, cabinet ministers and powerful causus members stealing the party’s agenda from under the noses of a naïve socialist membership. I do not think this is helpful for two reasons.

First, I think it is simply inaccurate. I see no deceptions or conspiracies when I interact with the party at high levels. Second, it absolves people like me of responsibility for our willful blindness, rose-coloured glasses and lazy, naïve political praxis.

What if we took the radical step of deducing the NDP’s principles not by way of nostalgic or conspiratorial thinking but instead by listening to the party’s spokespeople and believing them?

The reality is that, in the post-Cold War era, the NDP’s public rhetoric and their actions in government have not been divergent at all. Prior to his election as BC premier, Mike Harcourt told the Vancouver Board of Trade that “the NDP no longer believes in the redistribution of wealth.” Later when his government made its major austerity course correction and brought in a set of punitive and draconian welfare reforms, Harcourt explained that their purpose was to crack down on “welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints.” What if the reason the NDP attacked BC’s underclass and used government policy to increase the number of homeless from 11,000 to 27,000 was because they really did think that the very poor were subhuman animals and that redistributing wealth was wrong? Why did the party’s left-wing supporters need to concoct a narrative in which the NDP was having to strategically abandon its principles so it could live to fight another day? Why not just believe the party when it told us its principles had changed?

In fact, let me go further: what if the NDP actually makes major sacrifices to avoid telling baldfaced lies to its supporters? The NDP might have got more votes if John Horgan had promised to cancel the Site C dam rather than putting forward a confusing policy whereby he equivocated and suggested a government regulatory commission would make the decision—voters like simple, direct promises, not process-oriented double-talk, even when they disagree. But Horgan chose to make a promise that would permit him to more honestly proceed with the megaproject. Let us consider proportional representation in the same light; rather than promise PR, the NDP promised a process that they could then rig to defeat the system, so as to avoid breaking a promise.

When asked what her biggest regret in government was, Notley stated it was her opposition to the Enbridge Pipeline through Northern BC. What if we take seriously Notley’s claimed conversion to the need to build as many pipelines as possible to as many places as possible? Does this not make it easier to explain her government’s lawsuits, boycotts and ad campaigns attacking the BC government, activists and First Nations?

What if, when Claire Trevana tells residents of the Cariboo Plateau and Highland Valley that the do not deserve bus service unless the free market can support it, she actually means it, that the NDP genuinely believes in the justice meted out by the invisible-handed god? What if, when Michelle Mungall, states that fracking must continue at all costs because no party that wants to win elections would allow it to stop, we consider the possibility that she believes that a party that does not support fracking does not deserve to win? When Carole James says we “cannot afford” $10/day childcare for the next decade but we can afford $6 billion in subsidies to Royal Dutch Shell and other profitable petro giants, we have to consider the possibility that she believes that working parents deserve government help less than these transnational corporations do. When Notley says Canada cannot afford Pharmacare without more pipelines and that she opposes building a national Pharmacare program until they are built, consider the possibility that this is not just information about her being in the tank for the oil industry but about how the party feels about national social programs, austerity and poor people’s access to medication.

We go to great lengths to perform a folk exegesis on the pronouncements of NDP officials so that we can understand them to be statements of practicality, unrelated to values and principles. We do that work. Nobody asks us to. We just do it for ourselves. The idea that the NDP wants to do something different than its actions in government and election platforms say has no evidentiary basis. This belief is derived not from evidence but from wishful thinking by social movement activists who do not want to face the work of creating new electoral political strategies and organizations.

And one need not simply look to NDP officials. Look at the people who have joined the party since the early 1990s. Go to a riding association meeting in a swing seat and listen to individual members. They will tell you they like what the party stands for and what it does. They will justify the $2000 entry fee people have to pay to seek the party’s nomination in their riding. They might even quote party president Craig Keating and suggest that people who do not have $2000 handy in their bank account are not “serious people,” that cash on hand is a far better indication of candidate suitability than the ability to recruit new members and turn them out to a meeting.

If you want to understand what Canada’s New Democratic Party stands for, I urge you to Believe New Democrats. They are trying to tell us what they believe in and we are refusing to listen.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Albertans, Please Burn Your Ballots: Revisiting Strategic Voting and the Symbolic Order

In Alberta, there is a Manichean struggle between two parties promising massive increases in the extraction of bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, using the power of the state to force new pipelines to carry this increased quantity of planet-killing petroleum through the unceded lands of indigenous people against their will and promising to sue any government that attempts to stop the pipelines, increase safety standards for the pipelines or sue oil companies for any damage they cause.

Both parties promise to maintain the lowest taxes on millionaires and billionaires of any Canadian jurisdiction and condemn former Tory premier Ed Stelmach’s review of oil industry royalties as a rigged stitch-up to mess with petroleum producers. They both favour maintaining the royalty regime of Ralph Klein for oil extraction and brag that they favour lower taxes on the rich than Klein ever supported.

But the two parties do differ on a few important points: an $11 minimum wage versus a $15 minimum wage, the rights of gay and transgender Albertans, whether to also use the power of the state to subsidize coal as well as oil and whether to play footsie with crackpots and racists.

For some people, these differences are enough to keep them trapped in the progressive politics trap of voting for the lesser evil. But, for many of us, the idea of abetting the intentional increase in carbon emissions has become a bridge too far. Yet there is no electable alternative for Albertans who hold this view.

So what is to be done?

In the past, I have written at some length on this blog in opposition to people opposing strategic voting and have encouraged people to vote for candidates from lesser evil parties in elections. I stand behind the reasoning for this.

The belief that individual votes “send a message” is fundamentally incorrect on two bases. First off, a voter’s idea of what their vote means is likely different from how the person or organization they want it to mean something to will interpret it. For instance, many people who vote Green think it will cause Liberals or New Democrats to think “my look at all that environmental concern; what must we do to win these people back?” More, often, however, the interpretation is “look at those jerks voting against us after all we’ve done for them. Let’s make sure to make bigger clearcuts in caribou habitat to show them.”

The exegesis of minority party votes is not something individual voters can control. The meaning made of their votes is out of their control, except in the private meaning-making session they engage in while marking their “X.”

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An “X” next to the name of a stranger associated with a flaky political doomsday cult has no clear or specific meaning that can act on anyone.

Does this mean that I advocate voting for a lesser evil party or giving up on the idea of voting at all? Perhaps. But I have not reached that point yet. Instead, I think we have to develop new voting strategies based on the truth that meaning-making in a social enterprise. That just as with everything else, we have been conned by the neoliberal order into thinking that collective actions are no different than a collection of individual actions.

If we want to take control of making votes that fail to elect people mean something, the way we must do that is intervene collectively, not just at the level of voting but at the level of political interpretation and meaning-making. And we need to engage in meaning-making acts not primarily for the purpose of communicating with people who are not us and not like us but for the purpose of building community, solidarity and connection among those who find the current pragmatic choices of accelerating the extinction event but with slightly different minimum wage legislation untenable.

If we are to move away from casting votes that produce tangible differences in who is elected, we need to move towards casting votes that produce some other kind of tangible difference, in public discourse, in movement-building or in building an electable alternative.

For this reason, I urge people to publicize their vote in an act that also publicizes how they want it interpreted. Maybe this involves entering the ballot booth and igniting the ballot with a cigarette lighter, so as to protest climate change by spending a night in jail. If one cannot afford to be arrested, consider posting a photo of one’s ballot receipt along with a clear and shared explanation of its meaning, be it a spoiled ballot or a Green one. Or if one wants to spend a few extra nights in jail, consider bringing a small scourge with you voting and turning over tables like Jesus in the Temple.

But the only way these things can become effective strategies is if they are a strategy a group takes on, be it an ad hoc affinity group of friends or a formal group that meets regularly with membership fees and a governance structure. More important than the act of voting is the act of contacting friends, comrades and allies and agreeing on a shared strategy to help shape the interpretation of a collective act, figuring out who is fetching bail and lawyers and who is going to jail, figuring out what Twitter hashtag to use for images of spoiled ballots or burning “I voted” ballot receipts.

All voting is hard and dodgy. There is no way of voting or vote one can cast that should feel good or be easy. If it is time, as it clearly is in Alberta, to cast symbolic votes, one must take responsibility for the whole meaning-making act if one is forced to vote symbolically.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

This Month Is For Seeing Autism, Not Campaigning Against It

I am generally opposed to “awareness” as a political idea, consequently, as an activist effort. The belief, for instance, that Canadian mining companies poisoning and murdering Mayans in Guatemala can be, in any way, addressed by awareness is pernicious.

However, Autism Awareness Month is a different sort of thing. That is because autism does not have a “solution” per se and those who claim that it has a “cure” are typically either quacks, psychos or both.

What Autism Awareness Month demands of us is not donations (although some well-directed ones can help), a campaign or solutions as much as it demands an optical care. The point is to see autistic people, consider their experiences and think about the ways our society’s structure pushes not just their plight but their talents into the shadows, into the margins.

The idea, for instance, that every job now involves customer service and sales has increased not just the marginalization but the unemployment rate of autistic people. Adding cashier duty to a shelving job can push autistic people from their workplace into a solitary life of collecting disability. Demanding the practice of an haute bourgeois etiquette politics and the faddish social precision that entails from everyone in a desk job can push autistic people into silence, invisibility and eventually unemployment.

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Often, these are people whom we cannot help through our own efforts but at a remove, by supporting their caregivers, their relatives, those who aid and are present with them. It is important, in our efforts to be aware and supportive this month, to reject the neoliberal politics of disease and disability in which atomized individuals are afflicted. Autism afflicts not persons but families; families experience the emotional stress and grief of autism; families are impoverished by autism; families are stigmatized by autism. Some of those effects are from the disability itself but more often than not, they are from how our society interacts with it, the resources we provide, the resources we deny, the social spaces we create and those we fail to create. So our awareness, and our care must extend not simply to persons managing autism but to families managing autism.

And that includes giving space and support to people who have been pushed to their wits’ end and are mismanaging it. Not every anti-vaxer is a black-hatted villain; some are just people who are taking refuge in a conspiracy theory because they have been overwhelmed by guilt, stigma, powerlessness to help their child and the total exhaustion that comes from carrying more of a burden of emotional and physical care than any individual can. That includes giving space to people whose emotions seem out of control. We must remember that the body autism disables is the family.

Finally, let us remember that we are sliding into the greatest extinction event in four billion years. Every species, every population, including our own, faces the likelihood of extinction. Those that survive such events are those with the most diverse mutations, the widest spectrum of kinds of members. We must remember that just as anorexic people have pulled average people through famines, just as those with restless leg syndrome guarded our primate groups while the rest of us slept, just as schizophrenics stepped forward and helped to lead the resistance to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge when neurologically average people were paralyzed, we do not know what role our autistic brothers and sisters may have to play in our survival in the future because only God can see all ends. In this way, we must also reject the idea that autistic people are a population-level illness to be extirpated from the human population. They are not; they are a precious part of the human family to whom we should direct a little more care and attention this month.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

Territorial Acknowledgement: Finally Canada Figures Out Thanksgiving

Doug Stanhope observed in his Netflix comedy special Beerhall Putsch that American Thanksgiving NFL games are the crescendo of the politics of the white settler “rage boner.” He observes that the festival of day drinking and proxy violence is inextricable from the uncovering of pre-Enlightenment male sexuality, in which being up for penetrating more things and people just makes one more of a man. He ties America’s system of racial oppression to “straight” white men sexualizing the lycra-clad bodies of black men on a football field, “as though they are in a glass case in a whorehouse in Phuket.”

Canadians are routinely confused by this routine because it suggests that something is going on during American Thanksgiving that our October Thanksgiving has nothing to do with. Uncomfortable as it is, Stanhope’s routine directs our attention to the importance of American Thanksgiving as the most important moment in the American patriotic calendar. More so than Christmas, Easter or any import from the Old Country, Thanksgiving defines the American nation and its moral order.

Growing up in Canada, our civic nationalism informs us that our Thanksgiving is a month earlier than America’s because winter comes a month sooner here and that it is essentially the same festival, some nonsense celebrating a successful harvest. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let us begin with the official difference. Edward VII had a bit of a health scare in the late nineteenth century. Our British imperial Thanksgiving celebrates his survival from scarlet fever or something. I have not spent thirty seconds bothering to look up the details because that is kind of the point. So, let us be clear that Canadian Thanksgiving celebrates a forgotten child of Queen Victoria surviving an illness nobody knows or cares about, at least officially. Back in elementary school, they told me it was a “harvest festival” that was globally universal. Consequently, Canadian Thanksgiving is an anemic and confused event, the last free Monday for Upper Canada’s bourgeoisie to visit their oversized cottage in Muskoka.

I think I realized the true power of American Thanksgiving when it was revealed to me that the most decadent and confused TV event of Carter-era America, the Star Wars Holiday Special (a show narrated mainly in Wookie with no subtitles, featuring musical numbers by Bea Arthur and Jefferson Starship) was not, in fact, a Christmas TV special. It was a Thanksgiving special. American Thanksgiving, one must understand, is a four-day weekend every year. Some years, Christmas is a three-day weekend, some years, four. But Thanksgiving is four days every year. And, unlike Christmas, it is unfettered by Protestant continence and discipline politics; it is a truly Bacchanalian festival based around day drinking, overeating and, as Stanhope reminds us, temporary suspension of both liberal and evangelical theories of male sexuality. It is a classic Bakhtinian carnival.

The story that sits at the heart of this carnival is the story of the Pilgrim Fathers being helped out by indigenous people when they ran out of food in the winter and Indians supplying them with squash, beans and corn to survive the first New England winter. Later, the Pilgrim Fathers would express their thanks for this by murdering the indigenous people, abducting and raping indigenous women, destroying their farmhouses and fences and stealing their land.

Thanksgiving celebrates the classic rapist interpretation of being invited up for a cup of coffee. “Of course they agreed to all the rape, murder and theft when they gave us that spaghetti squash,” the thinking goes. By thanking indigenous people for their consensual generosity at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Americans excuse themselves for every subsequent act of rape, murder, theft and genocide. And on Thanksgiving, they gather to celebrate the racial hierarchy of their state not by saying “she shouldn’t have been dressed that way” but, instead, “thanks for dressing that way and letting us know you were up for this gangfucking.”

Until the twenty-first century, Canada has lacked a ritual or celebratory enactment of American Thanksgiving. In this way, we have been inferior, guilt-ridden and confused colonists.
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Enter the territorial acknowledgement.

1992 and the Five Hundred Years of Resistance (“It would take nation of millions to keep us down”) campaign coincided, I argue elsewhere, with the emergence of Third Way politics in Western Canada in the governments of Roy Romanow and Mike Harcourt. It was in these governments of austerity, QuaNGOs and other monstrosities that “progressives” began to seriously innovate and build what would become the identity politics of the twenty-first century. It is in this decade that the first “territorial acknowledgement” performances began in BC and spread east.

Because mainland British Columbia, west of the Rockies, was seized based on the Australian terra nulius doctrine, we do not violate treaties here because we never signed them in the first place. The absence of treaties meant that we operate on the “unceded territory” of various First Nations. And in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics as we put our province on display, some enterprising members of the urban indigenous underclass realized that they could market a service to progressives: welcoming them to their unceded territory.

So, in twenty-first century BC, a new kind of political performance emerged: a progressive organization would pay an indigenous person a few bucks to “welcome” their meeting to the unceded territory of… one or more First Nations. The names hardly mattered, nor did whether the member of the urban indigenous underclass was a member of any of those groups. The point was that progressives could feel that they had a kind of legitimacy others did not, that they were somehow addressing the problem of colonial oppression through a ritual speech act and the movement of very small amounts of money.

I might still be on side with territorial acknowledgement if it had stayed that way instead of converging with American Thanksgiving. Today, not just at progressive gatherings but increasingly at gatherings of all political stripes, especially state-sponsored ones, not just in BC but throughout Canada the “this is the traditional territory of [fill in the blank]” speech act is universalizing.

The thing is that we are such frugal colonizers that we have begun cutting indigenous people out of the act. Today, at most gatherings, we welcome ourselves to the territory we have stolen. We acknowledge that it is someone else’s and then pat ourselves on the back for having noticed. The idea of shelling out $150 to a member of the urban racialized proletariat to be part of our act of triumphant yet appropriately guilt-ridden liberal conquest is too much of an inconvenience. So we commend, thank and welcome ourselves, leaving more money for the very small finger sandwiches and bulk Yellow Tail shiraz in the catering budget.

In this way, Canada has finally discovered the true meaning of Thanksgiving. We have realized that it is not about the survival of our imperial overlord’s child. It is about saying “thanks for giving us the thing we stole from you after raping you and beating you up.” In this way, the territorial acknowledgement has transformed from an act of minor entrepreneurship by marginalized people into the linchpin of modern, Canadian colonial discourse, the ultimate celebration of the conquest.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |