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The Identity Series – Part 2: The Junk Science of Liberalism

The term “junk science” has gained unprecedented currency in recent years as flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate denialists and young earth creationists march triumphantly into mainstream discourse. The so-called science that states autism is a parasite and can be driven out by force-feeding bleach to your kids or that which states fossils can be formed on the surface of the ground in less than a decade is distinct from merely false claims or false conclusions. It is a body of pseudo-knowledge with its own journals, experiments, training, museums and twisted logics. In this way, it bears some resemblance to abandoned and rejected scientific theories of the past, like Galenic humoral medicine with its prescribed bleedings.

One of the reasons that liberals and progressives who wish to accelerate climate change typically embrace climate nihilism over denialism is their discomfort with junk science. Despite its battered state, liberalism’s allegiance to actual science has actually increased in recent years as liberals and progressives have backed away from the more vulgar representations of the postmodern critique, now that it is being used by characters like Rick Santorum to deny climate change.

For this reason, it is generally but mistakenly thought that progressives do not embrace junk science but this is an error. Progressives, and liberals generally, do embrace junk science, just not in the hard sciences. The liberal commitment to anthropological and sociological junk science is every bit as deep as that of those outside the collapsing liberal consensus. There are many reasons for this but the first and by far the most important is that liberalism is necessarily premised on junk science.

The foundation of liberalism is social contract theory, a theory explicitly based on the best cutting-edge anthropology of pre-literate human civilizations seventeenth century Europe could produce. Social contract theory was developed by Thomas Hobbes as part of a multi-part internally consistent argument advanced in Leviathan. The foundation of this argument, as declared by Hobbes himself, was a theory about what early humans were like and how the first human societies emerged. Because there was not yet a theory of evolution, a discipline of primatology or such thing as anthropological fieldwork, no one can fault Hobbes for his methods or the theory he generated using them. Here is what Hobbes thought primitive humans were like.

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes believed that human beings’ original and natural state was a pre-social “state of nature” upon which blank slate society had to be constructed.

John Locke, who further elaborated liberalism offered his own theory of human beings’ natural state, on which his social contract theory was also premised, offers a sunnier vision of human beings’ natural state:

O understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the third father of social contract theory offers yet a more optimistic and sunny vision of the natural human state:

The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention.

This common liberty results from the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he is the sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, and consequently becomes his own master. The family then may be called the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while, in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love which the chief cannot have for the peoples under him.

In this way, we see that liberalism is premised on a set of non-identical but equally scientifically false descriptions of the origins of society, descriptions that are unanimous in these crucial errors:

that human beings begin in a pre-social state, that social bonds among humans began only after we became human beings and only after such faculties as speech and tool-making developed;
that there exists no natural centripetal attraction among human beings, that we have no natural desire to be in accord or compliance with the other human beings around us and will only seek to group-up when it is rational and profitable to do so; and

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that private property existed prior to any social order recognizing it.

Today, the human sciences tell us that this is all hogwash, that Aristotle, 2400 years ago, had a better sense of pre-literate societies than the founders of liberalism did. And since the last of these texts was published in 1762, no major discovery in the human sciences has produced the slightest revision in liberal ideology, even though the past 256 years have yielded enormous advances in understandings of how human beings form societies in both the past and present.

Like biblical literalists who happily accept the material gains produced by the Darwin-Mendel synthesis even though it requires a recognition of evolutionary genetics, liberals are perfectly happy to recognize discoveries in anthropology, primatology, sociology, psychology, neurology and psychiatry, just as long as those discoveries are understood to exist in a separate domain of human truth that does not impinge on the theories of truth.

A similar situation existed in the Middle Ages when it came to astronomy. It was “known” that the sun, moon, each planet and the “plane of fixed stars” were each contained in a crystalline sphere made of an indestructible, transparent substance known as the Quintessence and that each body could only move in circular motions. But it was obvious, long before Copernicus offered a heliocentric universe, that this did not account for the movements people saw in the heavens. So, universities split astronomy into two disciplines: Physical Astronomy, which contained the crystalline spheres and Mathematical Astronomy, which made accurate calculations of astronomical events. While Mathematical Astronomy was used day-to-day, it was not considered “true.” That was the sole domain of Physical Astronomy.

In the same way, when it comes to making academic inquiries into how human beings make choices, behave in groups, agree to do things, construct their priorities or try to hold onto inanimate objects, liberals are happy to concede the predictive power of the human sciences. Unless these things impinge on law, politics or economics; these domains must be understood only using debunked seventeenth and eighteenth-century junk science.

Worse yet, like the discipline of Physical Astronomy, liberal social junk science has continued to function as a parallel line of intellectual inquiry walled-off from the mainstream of the human sciences. In this vein, we see a particularly hamfisted and uncritical reading of the largely discredited work of psychologist Abraham Maslow taught in nearly every business school, decades after its marginalization within the field of psychology.

Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” presumes that people will/should meet their material needs before meeting any social needs. First, individuals must sort out their food, housing, clothes and a steady stream of income before they can/should get involved in making art, socializing, having fun, etc. This, of course, presumes that human beings were born into industrial consumer societies with low unemployment rates and high demand for non-coerced labour. The reality, whether one is living in a primitive hominid group or in a modern city based on the “gig economy,” one’s best guarantee of safety is a social network that can work together to stay employed, housed, fed and clothed. While this has been recognized in peer reviewed anthropology for a half a century, in the fields of knowledge that determine the actions of the state, this information cannot depose the junk science of liberalism.

How is this junk science held in place, then? It is held in place through an intellectual sleight of hand older than liberalism, itself, one we find just as evident in Aristotelian theories of law, politics and economy. Note that in the paragraph above my use of “will/should” and “can/should”—this is the main way junk social science functions. It offers models that are supposed to be concurrently a description of how the world operates and how it should operate; consequently, whenever these models fail to predict or explain events, it is not because of a flaw in the model but instead because of a flaw in reality.

You know this routine: every time there is an election in which voters do not vote based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which they “vote against their economic interests,” by which commentators mean that they do not choose the party/platform that gives them the most materially the most affordably, it is the fault of the voters, not the model of personal advantage maximization that has once against failed to predict events. In this way, junk science that fails to predict or explain events, again and again, is excused by what social scientists call “blaming the world.”

In fact what has happened is typically wholly explicable through normal social science. But this explanation cannot function as the primary explanation in our discourse because if it did, we might question not just the premising of electoral politics on falsehoods but the premising of our economic and legal relations on it too, perhaps questioning the justice and reasonableness of such things as contracts, consent and consumer choice.

More disquieting yet, it might bring into question the bedrock on which all of these things rest: the Hobbesian falsehood of the autonomous, aware, pre-social self.

Politics of Identity | fusangite | June 5, 2018

The Identity Series – Part 1: Introduction: Why I Am Not a Progressive or Whose Cock Do I Have to Suck to Run for the NDP?

Last fall, I met former BC NDP MLA Harry Lali for the first time. My friend and campaign manager Tom Ewasiuk introduced us. I didn’t think I would get along with Harry but, whatever our differences, we were men who had been around BC politics too long and both felt like ambassadors from another time.

Our interactions soon became shaped by one of the weirder anecdotes of the NDP’s successful 2017 election campaign. The riding of Columbia River-Revelstoke was one of the handful of seats the NDP had retained in the BC interior, due to high levels of precipitation (until 2013, NDP voting in the rural mainland of BC, outside of Harry’s riding, strongly correlated to annual precipitation levels and overcast days) but it was in play because of the party’s poor fortunes in the rural mainland generally and because the popular incumbent was stepping down. Because a white man was resigning his seat, new party rules made it an “equity mandate” riding, one in which only a person who was either not male, not straight, not able-bodied and/or not white could seek the party’s nomination.

Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that while the BC NDP recognizes gender, race and sexuality as sites of discrimination it does not recognize class. Or rather it does, but in the opposite way. It prohibits poor people from seeking party nominations by slapping on a punitive $5000 vetting fee because, as the party president explained to me, people who can’t easily get hold of $5000 are not serious people.

In any case, the only candidate eligible and willing to seek the nomination was a disabled woman who was unpopular with party members so, at the last minute, a person who appeared to be a straight white man was suddenly vetted as an equity mandate candidate. But the party would not disclose to the media what minority identity he represented. Harry’s and my mind went to the same place: the guy had been induced to claim he slept with other men. Where Harry and I differed was on whether the candidate, whom I rather liked, would have felt duty-bound to engage in some same-sex activity so as to engage “honestly” with the process. My feeling was that if this guy was willing to make the sacrifices he had already lined up for to help the party, what was a little fellatio? Harry disagreed.

The voters were unimpressed and the NDP lost Columbia River-Revelstoke, in part, no doubt because voters were split, as Harry and I were, on the ethical way to approach identity politics in our age.

There is a lot to unpack in this story and I will return to it a few times but now, I’m stepping way back and enlarging the optic because this is the first part of a series I really hope to do a better job of completing than my other article series because I feel that I have no collected my thoughts well enough to make a significant intellectual intervention on the subject of identity.

Liberalism and Progressivism

Liberalism, the philosophical description of the system of relationships that undergird capitalism, has, until recently, enjoyed long-term intellectual hegemony in the most powerful empires that have shaped global history. With few exceptions, most philosophical and political debates in a society like Canada’s have been among different schools of liberal thought. Since the mid nineteenth century, our major debates have been about what kind of liberal society to be, what kind of liberal economy to have, what theory of liberalism will win the day.

Today, neo-Keynesians debate monetarists; progressives debate libertarians; it is only at the edges of these debates that we see other horizons of possibility, and those are not pretty. It now appears that the American religious right, while retaining certain elements of the liberal worldview is now sufficiently divergent in some key areas like epistemology that we can see the emergence of alternatives outside the liberal consensus that has shaped our thought for the past two centuries.

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to slow the dismantling of the Cold War welfare state and to ensure that new forms of state intervention to ameliorate social problems are piecemeal, non-universal and reliant on partnerships with private corporations and the non-profit sector for delivery. The Affordable Care Act and the post-2015 BC, Ontario and Alberta provincial childcare programs exemplify progressive programs.
to accelerate and intensify a politics of minority non-economic rights and high-level representation, enforced through piecemeal high-level affirmative action like cabinet, corporate board membership and candidate nomination de facto quotas so that various disadvantaged identity groups can experience “representation” and through changes to social etiquette. Most etiquette changes, like labeling gender-neutral restrooms, prohibiting offensive Hallowe’en costumes, etc. are enforced simply through social pressure and offense politics but a growing number are mandated either by statute or through the pursuit of civil and criminal prosecutions for hate speech and exclusionary behaviour.

The progressive project, then, typically entails increasingly “representative” elites presiding over a system that typically further economically impoverishes and politically marginalizes patronized groups, while, at the same time, building and reinforcing systems of patronage that allow people to benefit from non-material ideas of representation. Black Americans strongly identified with the successes of Barack Obama as US president even though a consequence of this was an increase in white resentment and anti-black racism and the further impoverishment of black relative to white America due to Obama’s lack of political capital needed to defend black gains that slipped away under his watch.

This political formula transcends the liberal order and was probably practiced best not by the US Democratic Party but the Ottoman Empire which created a complex system of self-government known as the milet system that saw every major religious identity group in the empire represented at the elite level and offered some degree of self-government, even if that was inextricable from the legal and economic inferiority non-Muslims on which it depended.

Because of the monstrosity of the forces that have emerged to challenge the progressive project, many on the left, I among them, have often been frightened back into the progressive alliance and find ourselves defending various aspects of liberalism because of our fear of the rising tide of the extreme right or our desire to preserve some cherished aspect of the twentieth-century welfare state.

I am making my second effort at a significant intellectual intervention (since I wrote Age of Authenticity in 2012) because I believe that the time for this politics is behind us. The progressive movement will collapse—and soon. Furthermore, progressive movements’ tolerance for climate nihilism means that continuing to support the broad progressive project will simply serve to alter which political movements preside over frying the planet.

In my last major intervention, I feel as though I wrote something that, while not especially enjoyable to read, had significant descriptive and predictive power in observing the rise of Trump and an understanding of the social forces that created and maintain his movement. This intervention will not be an epistemological one but instead one about identity, and, in particular, the fraught and much abused term “identity politics.” More broadly, it will examine the link between identity that the theory of the self, just as Age of Authenticity examined the relationship between epistemology and the theory of the self.

Early in the Marxist corpus, there was significant interest in the nature of the self and an understanding that, central to the capitalist project, was the creation of a certain kind of self, and atomized, isolated self, defined by its desires and aspirations. If we are to survive, we must create new-non-capitalist selves and that will mean addressing head-on the politics and phenomenology of identity. This means asking simple but very serious questions like “Am I what I do or am I what I like?” “Do I decide if I am white or do other people?” “What, if any, aspects of identity are biologically determined?” “Is there a difference between an identity one aspires to have and the identity one does have?”

Stay tuned for part two.

BC Politics Politics of Identity | fusangite | May 15, 2018

Resignation from the BC NDP

Saturday, March 24^th, 2018

BC New Democratic Party

#301 – 4180 Lougheed Highway

Burnaby, BC

V5C 6A7

Dear Sirs and Mesdames:

Please receive this as my official resignation as a member of the New Democratic Party, its provincial council and its Surrey-Green Timbers riding executive after seventeen consecutive years and a total of twenty years as a party member. I have served on constituency executives in Surrey, Burnaby, Vancouver and Toronto. I provided your party with a crucial endorsement that altered the campaign narrative during the 2001 election; I served as a paid consultant in 2002-03; I have recruited dozens of party members over the years; I have been attending conventions as a delegate from Forum 2000 with Ed Broadbent in 1985 to the 2017 Victoria convention; and, most recently, provided substantial assistance to the Surrey-Guildford GoTV operation that saw Garry Begg defeat Peter Fassbender.

I did all of these things based on the belief that the BC NDP had learned something from its near-annihilation in the 2001 election, that it would not return to office and repeat the mistakes of the 1990s. Clearly, such a belief was utterly unfounded. Rather, it seems that the brain trust that led the party to within a hair’s breadth of total destruction is back in the driver’s seat with a goal of re-enacting a style of governing even less appropriate for today’s BC than it was a generation ago.

Men also can use King Cobra oil viagra canadian to strengthen the immune system, and has also been found suitable for keeping blood sugar levels stable. order cheap levitra continue reading over here The occurrence of the impotence most adversely affects the sex life badly. To get rid of these problems, or if a man wants to have strong erection and viagra samples sustain it for a longer period, to perform satisfactory intercourse. For its 72 hours lasting action, http://frankkrauseautomotive.com/testimonial/great-dealer/ prescription du viagra is known as the weekend pill. It is not the 1990s anymore. The world has lost its appetite for centrist triangulation, Blairism and the Third Way. Nobody is looking for a BC NDP government to strike a course on minimum wage that places it to the right of Andrew Cuomo’s New York Democratic Party. Nobody is looking for a BC NDP to show it is serious by maintaining outlandish private school subsidies, subsidizing the oil industry through the LNG scam or completing WAC Bennett’s Two Rivers policy vision. One can no longer even make the case for the Third Way based on pragmatism.

I am forced, therefore, to reach one inescapable conclusion following Thursday’s $6 billion LNG subsidy announcement: the BC NDP believes that subsidizing transnational oil companies to increase fossil fuel exports is the right thing to do, that, in the eyes of today’s NDP, the global investor class who own and run companies like Petronas are more deserving of a break on PST than homeless people trying to replace their shoes. The NDP believes in these things because it is just another capitalist party indifferent to the global extinction event the capitalist system is producing. That must be why, for instance, the terms of reference of the government’s fracking study include the approval of continued fracking.

All the signs were there that this is where we were heading but I held on after the party enacted a fee to prevent poor people from seeking its nomination; I held on after the party approved Site C; I held on after the promise to keep BC’s minimum wage below New York’s, Seattle’s, Ontario’s and Alberta’s for the next four years; I held on after it became increasingly clear that the government is rigging the proportional representation referendum not just to fail but to discredit PR nationally for a generation.

But this nihilistic, headlong embrace of global climate villainy is too much. Go to hell, New Democrats. I am ashamed I gave you a second chance.

Yours truly,

Stuart Parker,

Surrey-Green Timbers Provincial Council Delegate

CC Rachna Singh, MLA, Surrey-Green Timbers

BC Politics | fusangite | March 24, 2018

The Secret History of the Failed NDP-Green Alliance of the 90s (part 1)

In September 1997, my most trusted advisor took me aside confidentially to show me something he had been working on for a few months. I had just been acclaimed to my second term as leader of the BC Green Party following sixteen-month period of instability in which my star candidate and his allies had been drumming up a series of non-scandals in an effort to prevent me from seeking a second consecutive term.

I was twenty-five years old and had served as leader of the BC Green Party for more than four years. I enjoyed the ongoing support of the party’s founders, Paul George and Adriane Carr, who ran BC’s then-largest environmental group, Western Canada Wilderness Committee. I had the support of Greenpeace co-founders and lifelong rivals Jim Bohlen and Paul Watson. Following Andy Shadrack’s two attempts to tar me with allegations of financial impropriety backfiring, it seemed like plain sailing for the BC Green Party.

We had run in seventy-one of seventy-five ridings and placed ahead of the Social Credit Party in the previous election. And thanks to Julian’s persuasive and tactical skills, Angus Reid had changed their polling methodology and we had jumped to 5% in provincial opinion polls. Julian and I had also teamed-up with Troy Lanigan of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation and Sonja Sanguinetti, president of the BC Liberal Party to create the Electoral Change Coalition, a collection of groups across the political spectrum representing more than 100,000 British Columbians in their membership rolls, calling for proportional representation.

But in that meeting, Julian suggested that we gamble all that and take the biggest political risk of our lives. He suggested that if we wanted to achieve real power in BC, we would have to reach some kind of accord with the NDP and follow the lead of European Green parties in forming a Red-Green governing alliance.

This would involve nothing short of a 180-degree turn in all my public statements about the New Democratic Party and unknown consequences for the base on which we relied to remain in charge of the Green Party’s governing council.

Let me be clear: we failed. Two and a half years later, we and everyone we had tried to make a deal with was out of a job, politically, except Art Vanden Berg, Canada’s first Green city councillor who would, by the end of his term, be sitting in the NDP municipal caucus in Victoria

I never achieved the high office John Horgan and Andrew Weaver have, nor am I an instantly-trustworthy stalwart for either group of partisans. Still, I think the Nobel Prize winner and premier-elect might benefit from knowledge of our small story from the 1990s and how such promising accords can come crashing down no matter how much they seem to be delivering. Maybe this cautionary tale can avert a similar fate for North America’s first Red-Green governing coalition.

Let’s begin with the poem I recited prior to every meeting after I adopted this plan:

There are those who would build the Temple,

And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.

In the days of Nehemiah the Prophet

There was no exception to the general rule.

In Shushan the palace, in the month of Nisan,

He served the wine to king Artaxerxes,

And he grieved for the broken city, Jerusalem;

And the King gave him leave to depart

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That he might rebuild the city.

So he went, with a few, to Jerusalem,

And there, by the dragon’s well, by the dung gate,

By the fountain gate, by the king’s pool,

Jerusalem lay waste, consumed with fire;

No place for a beast to pass.

There were enemies without to destroy him,

And spies and self-seekers within,

When he and his men laid their hands to bebuilding the wall,

So they built as men must build

With the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.

In 1997, Julian reasoned that the first step towards a provincial coalition needed to be made where left-Green vote-splitting had produced the worst consequences. And so we began our project in Vancouver at the municipal level. The Coalition of Progressive Electors, which had formally absorbed the Civic NDP in 1993, had lost every seat on Vancouver city council, parks board and school board in 1996 and the mainstream media had placed the blame for the loss pretty squarely on us, the Green Party, after a spirited campaign in which our candidates got as much as 23% of the vote.

The fact that the NDP name was not attached to COPE also made them an easy starting point, along with the long history of crossing party lines with mixed slates of Communists and New Democrats. It was not hard to obtain an audience with COPE, still reeling from their first total electoral shutout since their founding in 1968. The late Frances Wasserlein took the lead on the COPE side in championing an alliance but, despite our shared interests and literal mutual destruction in the previous campaign, it was hard to cut a deal.

In particular, the electoral system proved a nearly insurmountable barrier in negotiations and led to the agreement’s ultimate unravelling during the 1999 campaign. COPE had been fighting for a single-member plurality first-past-the-post municipal voting system since its founding; “the ward system” as they euphemistically called it, was as close to a COPE article of faith as any policy could be. With the NDP generally winning a majority of provincial seats under first-past-the-post in Vancouver, implementing the same system municipally appeared to be a recipe for a permanent COPE majority.

But for Greens, this would mean, at best, chronic underrepresentation and, at worst, no representation at all, with our party’s vote evenly distributed across the city’s geography. In the end, Julian had to produce a series of maps for COPE showing that we could still implement municipal wards in the city even with the proportional representation that formed the foundation of our negotiating position. We also had to sacrifice all of our “limits to growth” and development freeze language from our policy in order for COPE to agree to a proportional system of municipal wards. But that took over a year of negotiating, to push that through, ultimately requiring the skill of our most personable negotiator, Paul Alexander, the first Green candidate to place third in a provincial election back in 1996.

By that time, I had moved to Victoria to join Art Vanden Berg who had only narrowly lost his 1996 municipal election bid to attempt to replicate the agreement with an official NDP affiliate and begin the work of fashioning some kind of provincial bargain. But there were other reasons to move by then. Shadrack and his allies, emboldened by my recent bout with clinical depression, had begun an aggressive campaign to remove me and my allies from the leadership of the party. As we hit 11% in the polls in the fall of 1998, there was a growing sense of urgency to move forward with the alliances because our time might be running out.

We might be inking deals with municipal NDP affiliates and the labour councils that backed them but, to do so, we were burning through our own political capital at an alarming rate. More on that in part 2.

BC Politics | fusangite | May 29, 2017

The Return of David Anderson’s Liberal Party: Class in the BC Election – Part I

The wildcard in BC politics, from the mid-1950s until 1996 was the old Liberal Party of British Columbia. In the 1953 election, the Liberals were reduced from governing party to rump party, eking out a small space in nearly every BC legislature until their unexpected transformation into, to paraphrase Roy Romanow, the Social Credit witness protection program and, consequently, the new right-wing government in waiting.

The Liberals’ forty-nine years out of government, from their defeat in 1952 to their triumphant return to power in 2001 are often narrated as a time of failure and irrelevance, which is fine as far as it goes. But what such a story misses is what the Liberal Party was during those long years in the political wilderness. Why did the party keep going? Whom did it represent? What was it for? And how is it that we needed that thing so badly that we made this weird little party all over again, out of the unlikeliest raw materials?

In many ways, it was just like its third-party namesake in the United Kingdom, a perennial electoral bridesmaid, whose MPs hail from, as one commentator eloquently put it, “university towns and the Celtic fringe.” Such a description is a useful starting point for describing the old BC Liberals led by David Anderson, Arthur Laing, Pat McGeer and Gordon Gibson. The Liberals’ ridings were always the whitest in the province with a particularly Celtic aesthetic, containing either a university or one’s bedroom community.

The party’s leaders typically had advanced degrees; they were lawyers, medical doctors, university professors, as were most of the party’s small caucuses, which, until 1991, never represented more than four ridings at once. The core BC Liberal vote, which usually fell between 5% and 20%, was only sufficiently concentrated in a few places to produce sustained victories that lasted more than a term.

The party’s longest-held area was, of course, Oak Bay, followed by Vancouver-Point Grey, Victoria and then Vancouver’s North Shore. That is because Liberal voters could best be described as too rich to vote NDP, and too educated to vote Social Credit. Being a Liberal in BC during the Cold War, when the two main parties battled for the heart and soul of BC’s mining and logging towns and its volatile, populist proletariat, was not really about policy or political ideology. It was about class, a very particular performance of class.

Liberals could be spotted on sight, festooned in their Celtic tweeds and corduroys, with their fine white features and soft hands. Electing a Liberal MLA constituted the ultimate political assertion of secure, old money, the same way a Vancouver Lawn Tennis or University Women’s Club membership might. To be a Liberal was to be above the fray, so secure in one’s privilege as to tut dispassionately at the indecorous rubes who dominated the legislature.

Of course, in dire emergencies, it was sometimes necessary to make common cause with the coarse boozers and used car salesmen who kept the province in order for the companies whose shares the Liberals owned. In one rare emergency a couple of caucus members had to join the Social Credit Party’s cabinet. But that was the exception, not the rule. As long as the coal and timber flowed out through the port, privilege was about effacing one’s relationship to the populism and rentierism that structured BC’s economy and politics, showing one’s security by remaining above the fray, one’s job unconnected to boom-bust rentierism but instead of family trusts, the VSE, the local hospital or the UBC and UVic tenure streams.
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When the BC Liberal Party was suddenly and unexpectedly called upon to shoulder the burden of running BC’s government for the province’s robber barons, the party chose a leader whose personal style and record could keep this constituency on board. Gordon Campbell, anointed by the Grande Dame of BC Liberalism, herself, May Brown, was the logical choice. While not a son of privilege, himself, Campbell was steeped in the values, culture and, of course, civic associations, of the BC Liberal tradition. In the hands of another, Campbell’s orgy of sweetheart deal privatizations and fire sales of the province’s assets might have been seen as simple corruption but he had that curious Liberal dignity that allowed him to invest this exercise with technocratic legitimacy, to redescribe simple looting as an esoteric experiment in the technocratic management of public assets.

Ironically, despite her much deeper roots in the BC Liberal tradition, Christy Clark lacks that gift and so, consequently, something of a seismic shift has been taking place in BC politics.

The old BC Liberals are back, led by a roiling mass of tweed, corduroy and messianic intellectual grandiosity, a man who, if they could have, would have been engineered by the old BC Liberals. Andrew Weaver, the incumbent MLA for the safest true Liberal seat in BC has everything: the tweeds, the corduroys, the elbow pads, a real, live proper British accent, a PhD, a professorship and a propensity to lecture his perceived inferiors on how to do their jobs. Not only that; he appears to decide how to vote on the government budget by tossing a coin, his reasons always unfathomable and obscure, conveying that he deems himself and his party above the fray when it comes to such small things the amount of money allocated to public schools.

Foolishly, my party has decided to field a prominent environmentalist against Dr. Weaver, as though the people of Oak Bay elected him based on his environmental credentials, as opposed to his perfect haute bourgeois aesthetic. What we needed was a candidate in an ascot, preferably owning both a yacht and a horse, and one with a higher-class accent than their opponent, managing their family trust’s nature conservancy. Then, we might have had a fighting chance!

But, as British Columbians adjust to the new meaning of “Green Party,” this will place limits on the brand’s appeal, as much as it might open opportunities, even in the party’s heartland. On the Island, north of Shawnigan Lake and Cobble Hill, people’s British accents don’t keep getting thicker every year as they do further south. In Nelson, even working class English accents are too snooty for an MLA candidate.

More fundamentally, performances of haute bourgeois indifference to the minutia of political economy are in shorter supply these days because of people’s very real, material insecurity, both environmentally and economically. The old BC Liberals are back, in the form of Weaver’s Greens, but does not so much signify their graduation to the status of contender as much as it does their entrapment in the most gratuitous, irrelevant part of electoral class politics in BC.

BC Politics | fusangite | April 21, 2017

The Ailing Left and the Geopolitics of Cruelty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite | February 23, 2017

Did the Survivor Vote Swing the Election for Trump?

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

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

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

One of the best ways to treat erectile dysfunction in case of men this drug pattern has been viagra price australia launched with the various delicious flavors such as banana, strawberry, pineapple, mango, orange, chocolate and vanilla. This medicine contains the compound of sildenafil citrate and it cheapest viagra price takes a shot at the playoffs. The sildenafil cheapest liquid version can provide effectiveness in as little as 15 minutes. Be that as it may Kundalini Yoga postures do much more. buy viagra pill As we learn—but never accept—in countless failed rape prosecutions, people who have been sexually violated, especially people who have been sexually violated by adults as children do not reliably say “no.” They do not reliably ostracize their abuser or reject his future overtures. They do not reliably resist further infringements on their bodies, dignity and sense of self. That is because one of the most powerful lessons a survivor of sexual abuse learns is this: their abuser is all-powerful and nobody will help them. Even if unlikely help eventually arrives in the person of the state or a concerned relative, it is often too late to unlearn that fundamental lesson about what it means to survive: one’s only hope for safety is to curry favour with one’s abuser. In this way, Trump is the epitome of the abuser: no matter what happens, he is too rich, too powerful, too dangerous, a man totally above the law and impervious to shame or social disapproval.

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

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

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

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite | November 11, 2016

An Open Letter to Thomas Monson, Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Dear Sir:

Remember back in 2008 and 2009 how America’s liberals, progressives and socialists were mightily peeved at your sponsorship and conduct of California’s notorious Proposition Eight, the initiative that sought to kill same-sex marriage in the state? Remember how mad we all were at the way you seemed to tear down the First Amendment and dance upon it as you not only sponsored the campaign but explicitly ordered your congregants to set aside their own judgement and conscience and instead follow your directives to ban same-sex marriage?

When the Church defended itself against these highly legitimate grievances, the Brethren suggested that the campaign might well have been the result of a revelation from the Lord, revealed to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, as part of the charge to promote the Proclamation on the Family as just short of latter-day scripture. Nevertheless, you guys seemed to have learned your lesson and decided never to meddle so directly in US politics again. A year ago, I would have said, thank you for finding the maturity and decency to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s.

Today, I say, forget all that! Unlearn your lessons! Never mind about Proposition Eight and all the people you hurt; the courts sorted that out in the end! Meddle in your nation’s presidential politics! Meddle like it’s 1844!

Remember that plan Joseph Smith was assassinated trying to pull off, how he was going to deadlock the Electoral College by winning one state in a three-way race and use that to get stuff done? This can’t be a totally bad plan. It was your founding prophet’s after all, likely one bestowed by divine revelation. My guess is that if you inquire sincerely of the Lord, after some prayer and fasting, he may let you know that plan is, once again, a “go.”

And I am confident that, if on Sunday morning, an emergency Church Educational System bulletin were to invite Mormons throughout the state of Utah to concur with the Brethren in granting the state’s six electoral college delegates to Evan McMullin, that would probably get done Donald Trump is, after all, as the Deseret News editorial board, stated “evil” and completely unfit for any position of public trust. He is a clear and present danger to America and to the world at large.
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I’m pretty sure there is a non-canonical prophecy about faithful LDS members emerging from the mountains to save the Constitution at America’s hour of greatest need. You know the one I mean. Maybe there is something to that after all. If there is, there is much that the American people will have to thank you for next week.

Yours truly,

Stuart Parker,

Former Joseph Smith Seminar Fellow of the Mormon Scholars Foundation

US Politics | fusangite | November 3, 2016

Winning Like Samuel Tilden: Trump, Violence and Voter Suppression

Stop saying this current US election cannot be rigged. It’s a trap. Donald Trump is projecting. He is rigging the election.

There is an unacceptable amount of gloating going on among opponents of Trump right now, all centred on the idea that Trump and his cronies have been outfoxed, outwitted and are now flailing around desperately without the vaguest plan for winning the election. The New York Times, the 538, the Guardian and other media keep stating that Trump has “no path to victory” and that his incessant claims that the election has been rigged are evidence that he knows this.

But let us consider for a moment that these claims of election rigging are the centrepiece of a path to victory that has nearly worked in the US on occasions in the past and has been highly effective in electing the kind of leader Trump wishes to be, a kind of Third World strongman, as opposed to a US president bound by conventional checks and balances.

Let us consider the two acknowledged effects of Trump’s constant refrain of election-rigging:

It is causing both Republicans and Democrats to close ranks and state, in advance, that they will immediately and unequivocally accept the results of the election.
It is assisting Trump in recruiting a growing paramilitary force of “poll watchers” and “election observers,” who will be deployed, with guns, to areas where there is a substantial concentration of non-white voters.

Trump, furthermore, has focused his accusations of voter fraud in ways that specifically target black and Latino voters. His rhetoric has talked about “different communities,” “you know who I mean,” and claimed that the main forms of voter fraud will be black Americans in “inner cities” voting multiple times and casting votes on behalf of the dead and illegal immigrants who are being waved through the US-Mexico border and being immediately permitted to vote in close states.

Even without a specific order to commit violent acts, Trump’s army of second-amendment activist poll watchers will, almost certainly, produce some violent conflicts. If they begin to harass non-white voters even non-violently, their presence might well engender violent reactions and ad hoc responses by armed young men from the communities they are attempting to intimidate. With as many as 15,000 Trump poll-watchers already signed up and with numbers increasing daily as their candidate exhorts them to come out and stop the alleged theft of the election, America can look forward with certainty to, at least, some polling places erupting into violence.

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For those who watch elections run by de facto dictator strongmen like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, we know what happens next: in order to restore public order, voting at that polling place is terminated and the voters are dispersed, in order to maintain public order. In a Zimbabwean election, ZANU-PF thugs go from one polling place to another and precipitate rioting and armed conflict, requiring that polling abruptly end in opposition strongholds before even half the votes there are cast. With no alternative place for opposition supporters to vote, massive vote suppression is achieved in the name of public order.

And what choice would local officials have, except to shut down polling places if people there were being shot, if there were rioting, if shop windows were breaking and businesses burning? The duty of law enforcement would be clear. And it is useful, at this point, to remember that in most places where Trump is mobilizing poll watchers, state law enforcement is being run by Republican governors and legislatures. Sudden and massive suppression of the non-white vote would coincide with the interests of local Republican candidates and, in the case of North Carolina, a Republican governor facing probable defeat without some kind of game-changing last-minute shift.

It is in this light that we should re-evaluate what appear, at present, to be Republican condemnations of Trump’s election-rigging rhetoric. “It is impossible to rig this election,” GOP officials in Ohio and elsewhere are telling us. There appears to be a sudden national consensus that no fraud or rigging can take place and that election night results should be immediately accepted, even if, for instance, law enforcement officers had been forced to shut down voting in Philadelphia, Miami or Columbus, even if tens or hundreds of thousands of black and Latino votes were prevented from being cast, votes that might sway the outcome in states that currently seem just outside Trump’s reach.

What if, after spending a month gloating about how we have manipulated Trump into walking into our trap, we are, in fact, walking into his by promising immediate concession in the event of election night defeat and declaring large-scale rigging impossible? While it may well be that even with substantial election day violence, America’s unwieldy popular front anti-fascist coalition of neoliberals, socialists and everything in between will still triumph, let us not confuse our opposition’s impulsivity with stupidity as we did when the fascists arose at the end of the last Gilded Age. Hitler’s and Mussolini’s thugs were figures of fun and their leaders impulsive fools incapable of achieving the great evil to which they aspired, right up until the moment they won.

Nor is this sort of thing unheard-of in America. The “Solid South” was born in the 1876 election, before the discriminatory, racist poll taxes, grandfather clauses and the like were placed in the election laws of the former Confederacy. In 1876, the irregulars who were never fully demobilized from the Confederate army in 1865, re-emerged as a paramilitary force known as the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that has endorsed Trump and is actively campaigning for him this election.

When the Klan emerged onto the national stage, it did so as a force that used the very tactics to which I refer: voter intimidation, violent assaults on black voters, inducement of rioting and social disorder at poling places. They did so in support of the Democratic candidate for president, Samuel Tilden of New York. Through widespread violence against black voters, they flipped the states of North Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas from Republican to Democrat, inaugurating the Solid South and ending Reconstruction, an era initially created not through Jim Crow segregationist laws but through extra-legal paramilitary violence.

It may be that Hillary Clinton’s margin is too wide, that too many votes will have been cast before election day, that states not targeted by Trump’s election observer brown shirts will be sufficient to provide Clinton with the 270 electoral votes she requires. But it is foolish to suggest that Trump has no plan for rescuing his campaign. And ultimately, as an admirer of fascists, thugs and political strongmen the world over, a Tildenesque victory is one that is more aesthetically appealing to him in any case. So let us be vigilant. Donald Trump is a madman, not a fool.

US Politics | fusangite | October 21, 2016

Being Godlike in America: Incest, Impunity and the Presentation of Trump’s Autocratic Credentials

At the height of the gulag, purges, death squads and Ukrainian famine, Joseph Stalin’s underlings approached him about a deeply worrying concern that might imperil the regime. Reports were coming in from everywhere that most Russians believed that the vast majority of people who were being executed or sent to Siberia were innocent of any crimes against the USSR.

But Stalin reassured them. It was not merely inevitable that most Russians would realize that those being murdered, imprisoned, tortured and shamed were innocent. It was necessary. For totalitarianism to succeed, it was necessary for citizens to fundamentally alter their understanding of the state and its leader. Whereas every Russian emperor from 1454 to 1917 had been heir to the title of Constantine, Rome’s first Christian emperor, “equal to the Apostles and God’s vice-gerent on earth,” Stalin had to do better, to exceed this status in his project of remaking Russian society in his image. It was not enough to be God’s agent; he had to be a god himself.

God, Stalin reasoned, based on a clear understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy theology and scripture, could be clearly recognized as distinct from mortals because his mortal servants were sent to punish the guilty and the unjust. God, as revealed in the Book of Job and countless other scriptural narratives, was the sole moral agent who possessed the right to punish the innocent and just. And only being god-like could Stalin, with a tiny fraction of the resources, population and allies of the capitalist empires he stared down, possibly prevail.

Whereas liberal capitalism was advancing a political theory in which any adult person might be entitled to govern a state and mete out its laws in a fair and moral fashion, Stalin offered an opposing theory, one rooted in the origins of the Russian state and its antecedents, the Byzantine Empire and the Khanate of the Golden Horde. Whereas the rulers of the capitalist, liberal West were to be understood as “first among equals,” men entitled to no more and no less than their fellow citizens, Stalin would present himself and his deceased predecessor, Lenin, as ontologically distinct from mere human beings.

And so Stalin set about doing god-like things: persecuting his children, terrorizing his allies, engaging in unspeakable atrocities, carelessly and pointlessly murdering millions as though they were straw dogs. It is in this light that we must understand actions that appear to have hobbled the Russian economy, political system and even Russia’s physical environment. No mere man could conduct himself in such a terrifying, incomprehensible, unspeakable fashion. Stalin, people concluded, must be something more.

It is in this light that we must approach the Donald Trump campaign.

Donald Trump is a man uninterested in serving as America’s president, engaged in a constant, endless process of technocratic compromise, negotiation and brokerage, the very thing craved by his opponent. Trump is not running for that job and has no interest in it. Trump is running for Stalin’s job, Mao’s job, Hitler’s job: absolute and supreme leader of a vast, world-spanning imperium. There is nothing irrational about his election strategy. He wishes to be elected with a clear mandate to serve as America’s god-king; anything less is of no interest to him.
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And it is in this light that we must understand the programmatic, intentional and strategic marketing of parent-child incest by Donald Trump. Trump chose to give the convention address, reserved for generations for the spouse of a presidential candidate, to his daughter Ivanka. This choice was intentional and premeditated, as was his unambiguously libidinous kissing and ass-grabbing of his daughter on national TV before the address, the daughter about whom he has been making sexualized comments in the media since before her tenth birthday. Trump is direct, clear and unflinching in notifying America that he owns that girl’s ass and has since she was conceived.

And that is because he has been contemplating a run, not for the American presidency but for the role of American Emperor since before she was conceived. From her conception, she has been a prop, a means by which Trump can demonstrate his god-like status. A mere man, you see, couldn’t fuck his daughter and brag about it on national television; only a superhuman being could do that and walk away unscathed. Like taxes and contracts, the bedrock of the liberal social contract, prohibitions against the most monstrous form of sexual abuse do not apply to Trump because he is a god-being who can demonstrate this status by showing himself to transcend not merely our laws but our most fundamental social mores and taboos.

In writing this piece I was as reminded of the father of a friend of mine who killed himself this year (the son, not the father, sadly), a monster who began raping him when he was eighteen months old. That man was a charter member of the New Age movement, whose lifelong hustle has been photographing people’s auras for money. He begins each day with this affirmation: “I am a god-being, limitless beyond human comprehension,” like Ivan the Terrible, Russia’s most god-like emperor who is remembered best for beating his own son and heir to death – for no reason.

Like most survivors of programmatic and flagrant sexual abuse, my dear old friend was as powerless to retaliate against his abuser as is Ivanka Trump, a woman who has received the message loud and clear from over three hundred million Americans that they will not lift a finger to protect her. Her only hope of relative safety, like most survivors of sexual violence, is convincing her abuser that she is a willing, nay enthusiastic, participant in her own abuse. Victims of lifelong sexual abuse are at once ventriloquist and dummy, normalizing their abuser’s discourse while performing their accord with it as voluntary and enthusiastic, offering hagiographic descriptions of their abuser.

What we must understand is that, for Trump’s followers, their leader’s ongoing sexual violation of his daughter is what Slavoj Zizek terms an “unknown known,” in his tribute to the epistemology of Donald Rumsfeld, something we all know but refuse to permit our consciousness to see, a belief we concurrently deny and use as a premise undergirding our reasoning. Open secrets, unknown knowns, are the most powerful form of knowledge in a society because they represent the inchoate substructure of a social order. State-sanctioned torture, race- and gender-based violence, massive inequalities of wealth and opportunity structure our every interaction and so they must exist at the periphery of our consciousness.

By signaling that he is the incarnation of those very forces, Trump offers his followers what marginalized, desperate people in America desire, a literal deus ex machina. The invisible forces that are so terrifying that we cannot speak of them by name are incarnate in a man. Perhaps, they reason, this god-man might be more easily propitiated than the implacable invisible-handed deity that has laid waste their families, towns and workplaces.

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite | October 6, 2016

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