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Big HR, the New Commissars and the New Scabs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

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

The Uselessness of Policy Resolutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ontological Dualism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secularized Dualism

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

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

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

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

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

The Modern Policy Convention

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

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

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

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

The Policy Consensus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

American Caliphate II: The Caliphization of the American Presidency

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

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

  1. The Caliph in Sunni Islam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. America and Religious Freedom

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

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

3. The Structure of American Religion 1850-1975

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. America: From Secular Republic to Caliphate

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

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

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

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

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

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

But a strange thing happened.

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

But the opposite happened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authoritarianism Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

American Caliphate I: Who Are the Young Turks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |

The Tory Party’s Climate Change Vote Is Scarier and Means More Than You Think

There is so much to unpack from this weekend’s Conservative Party convention vote on climate change that one struggles to know where to begin. So, first, what happened: the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Erin O’Toole, and his surrogates, placed a resolution before the national convention of his party to affirm the scientific truth that anthropogenic climate change is real. In an apparent effort to be cast by the media as a moderate and modernizer within the party, he used his platform as leader, not just in the convention hall, but in the media in the days leading up to the vote, to strongly promote a “yes” vote in support of the resolution. The resolution was defeated.

This is fascinating, first of all, for anyone studying the changes in epistemology wrought by the twenty-first century. If there is one thing to characterize the Trump era it is the collapse of the separate categories of “knowledge” and “power” into a single category. To quote OCAD professor Eileen Wennekers, “Covfefe points us to the master discourse of the Trump Administration. What it means is that when Donald Trump says something, it becomes a word.”

To be clear, the party that received the largest share of the popular vote in the last election (from just over one in three Canadians) just held a vote on whether a piece of science is true. This is of a piece with a larger trend across the political spectrum of completely conflating knowledge and power. Of course, a political party has the power to determine which physical laws are true. For decades now, the US Republican Party has believed that how zygotes, embryos and foetuses work is something to be determined by democratic voting rather than scientific investigation.

But this has spread to include a whole galaxy of physical laws now determined by democratic votes—the Anglo American conservative universe is full of science created by voting. Energy from solar power is impossible to store and cannot be generated on cloudy days. The Australian mega-fires were a combination of targeted arsons committed by climate change activists and false-flag operations that used special effects to simulate fires. And windmill cancer continues to kill Europeans by the thousand every year.

Progressives have taken a different direction. Science is now made by government-appointed experts. Prominent progressive activists and journalists now propound the theory that the political jurisdiction in which one lives determines how Covid-19 transmission works. If one prefers the views of better-published, more qualified scientists over those of BC’s chief medical health officer concerning the utility or masking or the susceptibility of children and adolescents to Covid variants, one is “against science.” Even when the only public figure in North America who concurs with her views on these subjects is Donald Trump.

What makes Bonnie Henry infallible is the fact that she is the most senior public health government official in her jurisdiction and has been given a title and powers reflecting this. If the medical chief of the province’s oldest hospital disagrees with her, this does not mean that there is a debate over medical science. It means that Royal Columbian Hospital’s chief doctor has turned against science itself.

In other words, while progressives prefer autocratic, state-based authority to determine scientific truth and conservatives prefer democratic, party-based authority to determine scientific truth, both of Anglo America’s main political groupings concur that power can be converted directly into knowledge.

And that is just the first remarkable thing about this vote.

Until this weekend, whenever a fellow activist talked to me about how their party convention was going to vote on an important environmental or social issue, my response would always be the same, “Look at all the provincial and national party conventions in English Canada since 1993. Tell me of one vote on a policy resolution that has materially affected a party’s platform or policies it has enacted in government.”

That’s because, until this weekend, there was none. The only convention votes that have mattered since 1993 have been the selection and deselection of party leaders. Period.

As I have written extensively elsewhere, through a combination of changes in federal and provincial law and changes in political parties’ organizational structures over the past generation, Canadian politics has diverged from other democracies in systematically draining the power out of parliamentarians and party members and concentrating it in the office of each party’s registered leader. Whereas, in the twentieth century, resolutions by party members could force changes in platform and government policy, these are routinely ignored. Whereas, in the twentieth century, party members or legislative caucuses needed to approve party platforms, this is now done by head office staff and the office of the leader. Whereas, in the twentieth century, candidates were chosen by the mutual agreement of local members and the party leader, local agreement is now an optional formality.

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Given this situation, one must ask two questions: (1) Why did Erin O’Toole place a resolution before his party’s membership and campaign for it to be passed, when he could just as easily have kept climate change off the convention floor and then written his desired policy into the party platform unilaterally, (2) What are the implications of this concession of power to party members?

First, let us be clear: nothing has changed legally. O’Toole still has the power to write the defeated resolution into his party’s platform. The only reason the convention vote has power over him is that he sought and campaigned for the approval of the members. It is his choice, not some institutional or legal change that has given meetings of his party’s membership this power over him. But this is now a real power. By arguing that he required this vote in order to campaign effectively in the next election, O’Toole has turned the democratic vote of his members into something necessary and real.

So why did he?

Likely, O’Toole has been observing how the “rally around the flag” effect under Covid has made our leaders even more infallible than they were previously. Party activists, at least in parties like the BC NDP and BC Liberals, understand themselves, when they attend a convention, less as decision-makers and more as members of a lavish theatrical production. A party activist’s job at a convention is to bust out of their role as an extra and get a brief speaking part at the microphone, praising their leader and his wise policies, irrespective of their private thoughts on the matter.

O’Toole must have expected that Tory convention delegates would behave like members of other parties and work from the script he had handed them. But they didn’t. Instead, we witnessed the building of an impressive coalition against the resolution led not by oil industry shills but by Campaign Life Coalition, the largest anti-abortion organization in Canada.

The Religious Right has long chafed under the authoritarian leadership of the new Conservative Party that they worked so hard to create in 2003, a leadership that has shown a surprising loyalty to Canada’s cross-partisan consensus to keep women’s reproductive rights out of parliament. Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole have all been effective at isolating, marginalizing and cutting off support from the anti-abortion movement when it came to voting on their key issue.

But what this establishment did not see coming was the emergence of a larger Trumpian coalition of forced birth advocates, climate change deniers and other stigmatized groups fronted by an issue other than abortion. In this way, the Tory establishment has found itself stuck in the 1990s, when these groups were separate and smaller, as compared to the present-day reality where, for many, climate change denial, assault weapon legalization and putting women with insufficiently documented miscarriages on death row are politically inextricable from one another.

This moment in Canadian politics should worry both left-wing and mainstream Canadians. A populist revolt against the autocracy of Canada’s political structures is happening. Rank-and-file party members are standing up to their leaders and building alliances to challenge the power of our country’s political class and the consensus they embody.

The problem is that this revolt is taking place on the political right; there is no sign of it on the left. The sense that people can organize together and, through democratic voting, challenge elites and their agenda is coming back to life in Canada but inside the our party of the right.

While this, combined with an imminent election defeat, likely marks the death of O’Toole’s political career, it marks the very opposite of death when it comes to the Tory party. As we have seen again and again, movements that mobilize and engage regular folks with the idea that they can confront power and make change ultimately triumph over movements that do not, whether or not they immediately seize state power.

This weekend is a sad and troubling moment when it comes to the climate crisis, to women’s reproductive rights and to the pursuit of economic equality. But it could be a good day for democracy in Canada, if rank-and-file New Democrats, Greens and Liberals tear a page from the new book Tory members are reading.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

C-6 Neither Helps Nor Harms Human Rights Because It’s Not a Real Law

In 1993, Brian Mulroney and his Tories bottomed-out at 14% in the polls. After nine years in power, the party had exhausted the patience of Canadians, not so much with its policy direction, which was largely continued by subsequent governments but because Mulroney’s kind of charisma had turned on him. His unctuous charm had gone from asset to liability, as had his loyalty to his team in the face of scandal and minor corruption. But he believed he had an ace up his sleeve.

As the guy who had declined to place a new abortion law before parliament despite the invitation of the Supreme Court, and as the guy who had received much but given little to the social conservatives who had stood behind his party for decades, the last thing anyone would expect would be for him to attempt to fight an election on a social issue. But, brilliant strategist that he was, Mulroney hit upon a motherhood social issue that would reunite his coalition and stop the insurgent socially conservative Reform Party: child pornography.

The Internet, that series of tubes nobody understood, had emerged as a new social force in Canada in the late 1980s and helped to reactivate society’s fears of anonymous predators luring impressionable youths. The tricky thing was getting the opposition parties to oppose the bill. But Mulroney, a successful lawyer in Québec before his ascent to the PMO, had a damned clever plan.

What if parliament were presented a child pornography law that was so egregious, so invasive, so overreaching, so incompetently written that decent, responsible folks could not possibly support it? Mulroney sought to craft a child porn law that was so bad that opposition members felt ethically obliged to oppose it.

The draft legislation proceeded to criminalize students who were romantically involved passing notes in class and any play, film or book in which persons under the age of majority expressed a desire to sleep together. It didn’t just make it a criminal act to write or see a John Hughes movie; it would be an offense to possess a copy of Romeo and Juliet.

But the Liberals and NDP were wise to Mulroney’s ploy. Svend Robinson, the NDP justice critic, was dispatched on an extended trip to Europe, lest his penchant for honesty get in the way of the party’s plan to roll over and vote for whatever garbage legislation was placed before the House. Seeing this, the Tories began adding more sloppy, offensive and absurd provisions to the law as it wended its way through parliament. But the opposition wouldn’t bite.

Why?

Opposition parties’ desire for power was their obvious motive for waving this egregious piece of legislation through. But how did more responsible members justify this? Beginning in 1977, even before the patriation of the 1982 Constitution and adoption of the Charter, Canadian courts had become increasingly confident in striking down bad public policy and, to an extent, writing replacement law themselves. Liberals, Bloquistes and New Democrats were confident that the courts were an effective enough guardrail for Canadian democracy that they could sit back and wait for the courts to fix the law.

And that is what has happened. The law, as it currently exists, as informed by case law and modified by a succession of court judgements, is a perfectly good law.

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This might help to explain Bill C-6, the anti-conversion therapy bill before parliament, the bill that the Trudeau government is desperately trying to convince the Conservative Party to oppose. The bill appears to make it illegal for any counselor to question or treat child and adolescent gender dysphoria using anything other that cosmetic surgery, puberty blockers and hormones. Talk therapy, which has assisted young people in feeling comfortable and at peace in their bodies in the past now carries the penalty of custodial jail time. The idea that it is normal for adolescents to feel uncomfortable or alien in their changing bodies has been effectively criminalized. Adolescence is now a disease to be treated with surgery, sterilization and a lifelong hormone regime. Witnesses who have found these treatments ineffective and have “de-transitioned” with the assistance of talk therapy were barred from testifying before the parliamentary committee on C-6 on the grounds that de-transitioners are an anti-trans “hate group.” NDP MP Randall Garrison distinguished himself in the committee by first voting to bar de-transitioner testimony and then arguing that de-transitioners did not exist, that no person has ever repented of a gender transition and that to suggest such individuals do exist is “a myth” propounded by “hate groups.”

But the legislation does not merely categorize talk therapy for gender dysphoria as a criminal offense. It conflates Christian anti-gay conversion therapy with talk therapy for gender dysphoria. The clinically illegitimate and ineffective “pray away the gay” programs also now carry with them the same prison sentences as treating gender dysphoria with talk therapy. It is an offense, now, to attempt to suggest to a young person that they might be attracted to members of the opposite sex and question their same-sex attraction.

Let’s think that through for a moment… Doesn’t this mean that telling a same-sex attracted young person that they might be trans gets you sent to prison for anti-gay conversion therapy? Doesn’t this mean telling a trans kid they might actually be gay gets you sent to prison for anti-trans conversion therapy? That would be my take. In other words, it’s illegal to counsel kids who are confused about their sexual and gender identities. Period. The law puts anyone who counsels children on notice that they have until the bill achieves Royal Assent to get out of their current line of work.

Not only does this law endanger mental health providers. It endangers gender-non-comforming kids by cutting them off from the attention and support they need. And it is not merely engaged in hornswoggling the religious conservatives and gender critical feminists it provokes; it also exploits the emotional and physical labour of trans and gay rights activists by deceiving them into thinking it protects gay and trans youth.

And it’s like it’s 1993 all over again because no opposition party is rising to the Liberals’ bait. The Liberals still need a wedge issue that will stampede progressive voters into their tent, and one that must be attached to a piece of legislation so egregious, so overreaching, so self-contradictory, so incompetent that either Jagmeet Singh or, preferably, Erin O’Toole feels duty-bound to oppose it.

It is in this light that we should anticipate the anti-hate online hate-speech legislation that the government is currently crafting. We should expect to see a law attaching jail time to any criticism of Israeli domestic policy, misgendering an individual in private conversation and a host of other provisions designed to specifically target constituencies who will lobby their MPs to oppose the law.

While little of this debate will be covered in mainstream national media, which will emphasize the nigh-unanimous support for these laws, Canadian civil society will become a hive of activity as organizations mobilize, dodge or split as the election drumbeat grows stronger. In a low-turnout election, the role of mobilized civil society organizations will be crucial in driving turnout. Churches, trade unions, public education organizations, women’s centres will communicate with their members about these laws and divisive internal battles will ensue.

I know many folks on all sides are itching to get into the ring and mobilize around these two pieces of legislation; but this is a mistake. Not only will it further divide our organizations and even our families, it is ultimately serving a government re-election strategy. These laws have not been proposed in good faith. The government has no actual intention of seeing their provisions go into effect. These documents are propaganda not law; that is the only function they will ever serve.

Instead, we need to begin joining together to call out this bad faith legislating. Evangelical Christians and trans rights activists might not have much in common when it comes to their perspectives on the two bills. But both groups should experience a shared outrage at being manipulated to serve the political ends of a corrupt regime by forcing divisive and costly conflicts upon them.

Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The New Censorship and Its Limits

Anyone with an anti-American or vaguely left-wing worldview has probably begun noticing that the content warnings, automated suspensions, topic bans and other online speech suppression publicly justified by the need to censure Donald Trump and limit the spread of hoax Covid cures are now being broadly directed against expressions of socialist, feminist and anti-imperialist positions on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other platforms.

While continuing to curate a subreddit focused on the anal rape of women, Reddit has told gender critical feminists that their discussions are no longer welcome. Articles based on reputable, credible climate science are now tagged with the same “potential hoax” flags used for the bleach cures for autism and Covid. Even good natured joke posts like “fuck America” or “Americans deserve what’s coming to them” have resulted in Facebook bans for up to forty-eight hours. Pages like The Left Chapter, Michael Laxer’s hub of socialist organizing in Canada, have been removed from their members’ Facebook feeds by a supposedly automated decision for which there are no stated reasons and no right to appeal.

Criticisms of China’s WeChat platform grow increasingly hollow as we see our speech not merely shaped by algorithms but corralled into discourses acceptable to social media firms’ owners.

How did it come to this?

First and foremost, the self-identified left has internalized and more completely believes in what, until recently, were understood to be conservative values in the 1980s. As Brexit exposed, the free trade, investor rights and dependence on rightless foreign labour are now understood to be progressive values. Nasty conservatives want to re-erect barriers to neoliberal globalization because they are cruel and racist. Therefore, we must support the very treaties that helped to create neoliberal austerity in the first place, the logic seems to go.

Because of this, progressives understand late stage monopoly capitalism the same way the original progressives, Teddy Roosevelt’s crew, understood it in their day: universal public services should not be provided by the state but by regulated monopolies and oligopolies with state-appointed oversight boards and commissions. These boards and commissions’ job would be to guarantee minimum service standards to customers and minimum profits to investors.

The return to this system through the sale of highways, power utilities, auto insurance companies, communications utilities, etc., often by progressive governments, has caused many progressive folks to see nothing as intrinsically unjust about the social media monopolies sitting in private hands. In fact, given how unjustly they have been treated by regulated monopolies, like their local phone, electrical or cable company, many see the absolute autocratic dictatorship of a charismatic individual as preferable to the faceless, bureaucratic regulatory bodies that have failed to bridle the greed of regulated firms in any meaningful way.

Second, this internalization of essentially capitalist theories of justice as, in some way, socialism-adjacent has also been paralleled by a decline in the critical vocabulary of the putative left. In this case, the ability to identify a commons must precede any efforts to socialize one. Yet, when many progressives defended Twitter’s ban of Donald Trump, they often argued that the authority of Twitter to remove Trump’s account was absolute because the online space the platform had created was its own private property and not a common carrier, i.e. a part of the communications commons required to carry everyone’s messages without discrimination.

The fact that the organizing energy of folks opposed to the private, commercialized, conservative, manipulative and censored character large social media platforms have taken on has been almost entirely directed into creating alternative, cooperative digital commons is, on the one hand, heartening. Clearly, there is some residual of Antonio Gramsci in the effort to build socialist institutions outside the state. But the flip side of this, soberingly, is that negligible organizing energy has gone into amending the telecommunications legislation in countries around the world to make these commons at least more subject to public regulation and, ideally, expropriation and socialization. Instead, progressives have, again, naturalized a profoundly conservative and undemocratic state of affairs.

Third, and most importantly, there is an epistemological split in our society. Free traders and protectionists exist in parties across the political spectrum now. Advocates for big government and limited government, same deal. Increasing rates of permanent and temporary human migration, again, no longer divisive. Nor is public borrowing. What increasingly animates what Sam Kriss terms the “reverse identity parade” that electoral politics has increasingly become is how one makes knowledge.

Progressives make knowledge using scientific expertise. What I mean by that is that progressives make knowledge by assessing who the highest-ranked or most authoritative expert is according to their criteria and then unquestioningly believe what that person says, until such time as someone demonstrates themselves to be more authoritative. The personality cult around BC’s Chief Medical Health officer Bonnie Henry is a great example. Many physicians and epidemiologists have criticized Henry’s mask skepticism and claims about the safety of schools for exposure and transmission. Henry’s followers tend to defend her on the basis of her rank. Dissidents are wrong because they are lower than Henry with respect to political and titular rank. If one prefers the opinions of the Chief of Medicine at Royal Columbian Hospital to those of Henry, one is quickly branded as being “against science.” Because science has become synonymous with expertise: i.e. the credentials and state power one possesses on the basis of one’s putative knowledge.

Conservatives, on the other hand, make knowledge in an increasingly participatory way. “Do your research!” is a slogan now associated with the false belief that vaccines cause autism in children. Pioneered by Glenn Beck, conservative talkshows function as how-to demonstrations for organizing variegated data to produce a foregone conclusion. Because the right’s enemies are amoral supermen, number in the millions and effortlessly translate their intentions into real world events, an answer like “George Soros” or “Black Lives Matter” or “Antifa” can function to explain any event. In this way, modern remedial conspiracy theory is less “pin the tail on the donkey” and more the Aristocrats. The entire joke is filler and the punchline is both foreknown and unrelated.

Because of the horrifying amount of not merely false but seemingly deranged belief out there in the form of QAnon, Covfefe, anti-vaxx, bleach therapy, climate denial and young earth creationism. And because these beliefs are clearly winning the epistemological battle, new and more drastic measures must be taken to suppress them, the thinking goes. Because FoxNews is permitted to broadcast outrageous, lethal, society-crippling lies, with Newsmax and other crazier broadcasters nipping at their heels, progressives think that we must impose new and more stringent rules to ensure the veracity of what appears in TV and on social media.

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And because efforts to bridle the power to lie of Fox and others have consistently failed in the Senate and Federal Communications Commission, centrists and progressives have become the chief apologists for the direct censorship powers wielded by Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk. The problem, in progressive minds, is that these CEOs have been too timid in their efforts to control the claims and ideology permitted on their media. The idea seems to be that in the absence of the state, the billionaires must step in.

This is a grave error.

Last year, I wrote an essay about the 1980s Doctor Who story Castrovalva. In the show, the villain, the Master, creates a pocket dimension and populates it with simulacra, giving the environment and the characters detailed invented personal histories. The hero of the story is the librarian Shardovan. Although he is one of the simulacra and the books are all forged by the same hand, he becomes a skeptic simply because he detects the logical inconsistencies within the official histories, first material inconsistences, then logical consistencies. The climax of the episode occurs when he confronts his creator and accuses him of not being who he claims to be.

A number of people have so focused on how this essay fits into the theory of identity I was developing at the time that this intervention was primarily an epistemological one.

Both good stories and accurate social science derive their quality from their ability to describe how human beings think, feel and react to one another. The author of the false history of Castrovalva would have faced a choice: either write stories that are self-consistent, in which events hit together and makes sense on their face or write stories that are consistent with observed human nature. One cannot do both without capturing the desire of the human soul to be free. No matter which way the stories were written, they would have struck a false note to any person endowed with basic empathy and critical thinking capacity.

It is my argument that FoxNews, Newsmax, Breitbart, Rebel Media and their ilk should elicit the same reaction from folks with remotely functioning critical thinking skills and basic empathy. If a person with a healthy sense of empathy and basic critical thinking capacity watches FoxNews for a week, they will know that the station is telling lies, even if they have access to no other news source. In fact, a person with these two basic things should, over time, be able to figure out what is actually happening by only watching Rupert Murdoch’s equivalent to the Jonestown loudspeaker.

That is because FoxNews and its allies are horribly inconsistent. Donald Trump both organized and did not organize the riot at the capital. The riot at the capital was both patriotic and unpatriotic. No officers were killed there. The officers who were killed were no big deal. No officer death is ever acceptable. Barack Obama is a communist. And an atheist. And a Muslim. Anthropogenic climate change is good. Anthropogenic climate change is not happening. The seas are not rising. The seas are rising because we threw too many rocks in the ocean. Robert Mueller is a traitor. Robert Mueller is Donald Trump’s best friend.

No person with functioning empathy and critical thinking skills is going to be susceptible to the kind of disinformation centrists and progressives think the new censorship will protect people from. And the reason this fear seems all the more real because critical thinking skills are on the decline everywhere. The progressive embrace of expertise is a mirror image of the right’s embrace of QAnon. And they share a cause: the kind of self, the kind of soul human beings were called-upon to construct during the Enlightenment is under attack. It is being remade.

Whether moving in progressive or conservative circles, not only do we see a decline in the practice of reasoning aloud in conversation. We see the normalization of the emotional reactions of people suffering clinical narcissism. It is expected that people learning that another person has special talents or knowledge they do not will be experienced as an attack. It is expected that not being seen as one ideally imagines oneself is an injury, an attack. We determine what viewpoint is correct by assessing who has the greatest emotional stake in being right and the status needed to force that recognition. We imagine the words said about us must be the same as the words said to us. As I wrote nine years ago in Age of Authenticity, these post-Enlightenment selves are larger, more porous and overlap others. For these selves, truth is located at the centre of the self, the place most walled-off from material reality. One’s epistemological foundations are to be found on an inward journey, not an outward one.

Combined with the reduction in teaching and the lack of cultural confidence in basic critical thinking and reasoning skills, a growing portion of our population will espouse belief in incoherent nonsense. Changing or reducing the supply of pre-fabricated nonsense will make little to no difference. That is because modern conservatism has an intellectual do-it-yourself-ism that easily enables folks to substitute their own homemade batshit crazy ideas, with the same base ingredients of racial animus and confusion.

That social trend can only be arrested by dealing with the problem of the consumer, not at the level of the producer.

If Breitbart or FoxNews had existed in the 1960s, most people who believe them today would not only have disbelieved them. They would have found them laughable, funny, absurd. Even the John Birch Society and Lyndon Larouche activists would have found their explanations unusable because of the conspiracy theories would not be self-consistent with their last retelling. Too many details would be missed or wrong. And Alex Jones and his crew, the belief that every piece of errant data is a false flag or a “crisis actor,” would likely be institutionalized under the more muscular mental hygiene statutes of the time.

A population this addle-minded cannot be protected from thinking crazy things by censorship. It can only be protected by rebuilding not just our capacities for empathy and logic but for the cultural institutions that have nurtured and reinforced these things. We must re-democratize civil society institutions. We must increase the amount of zero-barrier free education available to regular folks. We must renew our democratic institutions like the FCC and CRTC to convert social media into socialized common carriers. We need to reform our education systems to prioritize critical thinking and logic and understand the inculcation empathy part of that project, not oppositional to it. We must throw off orthodoxies, new and old, that seek to shut down our capacity to think aloud together.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite |

New Authoritarians #2: Internment, Amnesia, the Maximato and Hindutva

This article is the second in a new series on authoritarianism, an online companion to Los Altos Institute’s reading groups on the new authoritarianism and on global diaspora and migration. Starting February 2021. It is part of my efforts to open up a larger field for both comparative and connective analysis of authoritarian movements past and present and in the Global North versus Global South. If you would like to support more scholarship like this, please consider responding to our Institute’s annual financial plea.

Last week, I wrote about the dangers of historical blindness when it comes to the catastrophic legacy of Canada’s residential school system. Unfortunately, Canada’s white settlers need to stage a performance of tearful ancestor-blaming in order to continue those very ancestors’ despicable policies.

Today, I want to write about another of our forebears’ sins and how our narration of it is blinding us to rapid and dangerous changes in geopolitics that are fueling the rise of the “new authoritarians,” like Recep Erdogan, Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte and Narendra Modi, the elected leaders of some of the largest, most diverse states on earth.

Specifically, I am writing to explain why it is that remedying this historical blindness helps us to understand that, next to the Stars and Stripes and the Confederate Flag, the next most prevalent flags at the Trump movement’s storming of Washington were the flags of the Republic of India and of its ruling party, BJP.

The Problems of Canadian Nationalism

Canadian civic nationalism is truly progressive in that it buys into what historians call “the progress myth,” an idea that the things that liberal folks like about their societies, pluralism, cosmopolitanism, free markets, open borders, tolerance, universal education, ecological sustainability, technological innovation etc. are baked into history itself; that human beings are merely agents of an invisible force called “progress” that will inevitably triumph in shaping our societies into societies that progressives (i.e. most Canadians) like.

Part of the evidence for progress is the idea that the generations that are currently alive are the best people there have ever been. By best, we mean most thoroughly embody such progressive policies as pluralism. Those of us who are at the peak of our social influence, in early middle age, believe ourselves to epitomize those values better than any previous generation of human beings in the place where we live.

To progressives, Donald Trump and his cohort of authoritarians are a glitch, a blip, an aberration. Perfunctory, symbolic efforts are invested in getting rid of those folks because history will do that. The real work of being a progressive  if how they use their time is anything to go by) when it comes to the civic nationalism of a place like Canada, is to prove oneself more progressive than other putative progressives. One could do this by calling them out for their insufficiently full-throated praise of a progressive value or cause or, maybe, less adversarially, making sure that the cans in the recycling blue box on one’s front porch shine brighter than those in one’s neighbour’s.

But the most important thing in Canada’s progressive civic nationalism, more than virtue-signaling or chastising one’s neighbours, is ancestor-blaming. There is only one area of ancestor-blaming that can compete with our crocodile tears for the Indigenous people whose land we continue to confiscate and poison, whom we continue to abduct and incarcerate from cradle to grave: Japanese Internment.

The Japanese Diaspora in the Pacific

Following the Japanese Empire’s bombing of the military base the United States was using to colonially occupy the Kingdom of Hawaii, the Canadian and US governments began stripping citizens and residents of Japanese extraction of their homes, their businesses and their civil rights, breaking up communities and relocating them to BC’s interior and the Prairies.

This process was not merely one of the most flagrant abrogations of human rights in Canadian history and, on top of that, nakedly racist (no such measures were taken towards Germans, Italians or Finns); it was clearly also commercially motivated. The strongest voices supporting internment were canneries and fishermen, and it was the white-owned parts of the fishing industry who benefited most from the resale of Japanese land, boats and canning infrastructure. Powerful Japanese businesspeople were suddenly penniless; powerful fishing and canning cartels were smashed.

There is no question that, as with the residential schools, our ancestors were on the wrong side of history. But, as with the residential school debate, flattening our forebears into no more than moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash facsimiles harms our ability to make sense of and ethically respond to the present.

In Canada and to a much greater extent, the US, Japanese immigrants were initially understood to be a kind of white or honourary white immigrant when they began arriving on the Pacific Coast and Hawaii in the nineteenth century. Newspapers, encyclopedias, school textbooks all sought to draw sharp distinctions between Chinese and Japanese people based on the geopolitics and racist pseudoscience of the day. The Japanese played baseball and wore top hats; their country was a formal ally of the British and French Empires; they had beaten a great power (Russia) in a head-to-head war in the twentieth century.

While Japanese settlers on the Pacific Slope faced a great deal of racism (and nowhere more so than British Columbia), their typical defense was their sharp racial difference from the Chinese, an indebted failing state that was exporting indentured servants to balance its books.

Like Jews, Turks, and Arab Christians, the Japanese existed at the margins of whiteness initially, with national laws typically recognizing them as white and local opinion typically not, in the early years of the twentieth century.

Ironically, it was following the war in which Japan was an effective ally of Canada and the US that the Japanese hold on whiteness grew more tenuous by the year. The failure of governments to demobilize First World War veterans, resulting in inflation, homelessness and major social upheaval (of which the Winnipeg General Strike was but one instance) was a global phenomenon. Eager to diffuse the emerging socialist consciousness that had toppled the Russian Empire, major corporations and media throughout the capitalist world began offering an alternative to socialism to cure the ills of demobilization and the early 1920s: racism and nationalism.

Always a strategy since the nineteenth century, major media and corporations began describing the workplace as a site of racial and national competition. Major manufacturers funded patriotic associations and conservative newspapers written in immigrants’ first languages and encouraged residential segregation of different ethnicities. In this environment, anti-Japanese sentiment hardened, especially because Japanese lineages were competing so effectively against Europeans. The more Japanese folks were pushed out of white society, the more they subscribed to cartels and buyers’ clubs, a local, practical economic nationalism.

But Internment was not simply produced by a rising tide of racism, segregation and economic antagonism. Something else had to happen to lead to this event:

The Maximato.

The Mexican Diaspora and Its Interwar Weaponization

Few people outside of the historical profession have heard of the Maximato and fewer still appreciate its global impact. In 1924, just as fascism was emerging as a distinct political force, two years after Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power and one after the Beer Hall Putsch in Germany, an admirer of Mussolini’s became president of Mexico.

In Mussolini’s first half-decade in power, prior to his 1928 reversal and creation of Vatican City, the centre of Il Duce’s agenda was anti-clericalism. Mussolini and Turkey’s Kemal Attaturk led political movements in societies that had traditionally been dominated by a single religion. Beginning in 1922, both governments began the violent repression of conservative religious leaders and enacted legislation like veiling bans to break the power of clerics over their followers. But the most ambitious of the 1920s authoritarian anti-clerics was Calles. Priests and bishops were prohibited from public assembly or wearing religious dress and the Callistas smashed the old church-led education system, just like Attaturk’s movement in Turkey. This ultimately led to the Cristero War in Mexico which spilled over the border in to the United States when US Catholic clergy and the Knights of Columbus began running illegal guns to the rebels.

Understanding that their longstanding control of education was the church’s greatest power, Calles and his fellow Mexican revolutionaries moved quickly to build a state-funded, secular, universal education system under the direction of the federal government and expelled or drove out thousands of clergy.

For Calles, the Cristero War was just one limitation of his power. Another was the Mexican constitution, which prohibited the re-election of a president who had served his full term. Recognizing the magnitude of his project of remaking Mexican society into a secular, authoritarian, one-party state (like what Attaturk would achieve in Turkey or Nasser in Egypt), Calles worked, from the beginning, on means to rule Mexicans via proxies. The term Maximato refers to this because, in this Save time and money by ordering from our convenient, discreet and in-expensive Indian online pharmacy.Our online medication store sells only brand-name prescription drugs, at the lowest prices let these sufferers to avail the viagra cialis on line treatment. It’s the devotedness and hard work done by Late best price on viagra Hakim Hashmi who dreamt of serving people by utilizing the healing power of mother nature. This novelty should uphold the following two rules (3 cialis online australia and 4). 3. In contrast, subliminal message experiments’ subjects display no effects whatsoever after the end levitra australia online http://foea.org/6-revision-v1/ of the experiments. system, like an early Roman Emperor, Calles’ true power came from his informal rather than formal position. Under his successors, Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio and Abelardo Rodriguez, he was still recognized, acknowledged and deferred-to as the Maximo Jefe.

While many appreciate the personal and temporal magnitude of the Maximato, our historical amnesia prevents us from fully seeing its spatial and popular elements. As much as the Maximato, as a project, was about governing beyond Calles’ 1928 term limit, it was also, especially in the context of the ongoing Cristero War, about governing beyond the US-Mexico border.

So, in the 1920s, Calles began the most ambitious campaign of politicizing a diasporic community the world had ever seen. Organizers for Calles’ party went beyond creating local associations across the border to vote in Mexican elections; these associations also participated in American elections, embedding themselves in the Democratic Party machine in Denver, Reno, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. Consulates multiplied and grew; soon consulates were partnering to create Spanish-language day and night schools. Organizing rallies, unionization drives and political education became part of the duties of a consul in the Mexican diplomatic corps.

This was a major innovation.

Because immigrants from a state were typically the most hostile to the rulers of their homeland, especially Sikhs and Irish Catholics who understood their homeland to be under a hostile occupation, Calles built on the fact that most Mexican emigrants had backed the revolution of which he had been a leader. But with a twist: the revolution was continuous, and taking place under his direction. Now emigrants could be equal parts in the building of a patriotic, secular, revolutionary state with not just members but with political aspirations outside Mexico’s borders.

This organizing played an important part in the rising tide of anti-Mexican racism in the US. But it also inspired other authoritarians to reimagine their movement as a global one, in which their diaspora played a central role.

The Failure of the Axis Powers at Diasporic Weaponization

For Adolf Hitler, this proved mostly a headache; diasporic Germans were cautious about proclaiming their sympathy for a hostile foreign power after the First World War and so most pro-Nazi parties outside Germany were those of non-Germans who had narrated their nationality into the Nazi myth of the “Aryan race.” Consequently, Hindu fundamentalist and high caste Hindus formed the majority of Nazi-tribute parties in the various electorates and principalities of British India. And many of these groups and individuals went on to form the Hindutva parties out of which the modern BJP was formed.

Emperor Hirohito and his Prime Ministers, looked to the example of the Maximato in their imagination of the role their diaspora might play in the coming global conflict but there is no evidence that the Japanese government put even a fraction of the thought and investment into creating something similar with their large diasporic populations in the US, Canada and Brazil.

Although they liked the idea that the Issei and Nisei might make a crucial difference in the coming war the British Empire and possibly the USA, aside from the odd proclamation, Hirohito and his prime ministers offered negligible material organization or inducement. But, beginning in California and traveling up the coast to Canada, many Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians reacted to increasingly restrictive laws and growing anti-Asian sentiment by publicly identifying with Japan and its imperial project.

And it is no coincidence that despite British Columbia being far more strident and extreme in our anti-Asian sentiment, the idea for Internment came from the South, from the US.

The thing is: there really were pro-Empire, pro-Hirohito activists and organizations within in the Japanese community on North America’s Pacific Slope, despite the negligible and ineffectual help from Japan.

Our forebears were not reacting to nothing, not acting merely out of a deep-seated racism, nor merely out their covetousness of their Japanese neighbours’ land and fishing fleet. Those things were no doubt preponderant factors in this crime without which it would not otherwise have taken place.

It is that our ancestors needed an alibi for that crime and that alibi was the false and exaggerated belief that the Empire of Japan had weaponized its diaspora as a political and paramilitary force.

So, how does the present change if we suddenly remember our excuse, our alibi and its origins in a real phenomenon that altered the politics of the American Southwest?

The Hindutva Movement in the Present

Maybe we would notice, then, the ways in which Narendra Modi is building his own modern Maximato, one that extends beyond the boundaries of India to encompass a larger Hindutva nationalist community and political project. One of the most striking moments of the 2016 Trump campaign was its celebration of Hindu nationalism in a nationally-televised event, presenting Trump and his movement as the Hindutva choice for America, something reenacted and reciprocated a hundredfold on his tour of India.

While including high-caste and Hindu fundamentalist Indians in mobilizing a transnational diaspora based on a shared Aryan mythic heritage disgusted Hitler, the Modi movement’s version of the project is not squeamish in this way. And we are beginning to see the kind of infrastructure the Maximato built appearing in societies around the world, an activist diplomatic staff of highly politicized consuls, working to build and strengthen Hindutva patriotic associations in our communities.

And we are not just seeing this phenomenon in far right parties. Like the Callistas, the Modi-ites are working in many scenes. Progressive and left parties with a predominantly white membership are especially susceptible, quickly placing Modi-ite entryists in key spokesperson and decision-making positions. Our hunger to tokenize brown bodies to demonstrate our legitimacy to other white Hindutva candidates for our supposedly socialist municipal party, Proudly Surrey. The BC Green Party, similarly, has nominated individuals aligned with far-right forces in India in the 2017 and 2020 elections. In the US, those trying to outflank Bernie Sanders on the Identitarian left welcomed the Modi movement into the Tulsi Gabbard presidential campaign.

Because today’s authoritarians have a different approach to diversity and cosmopolitanism, one that seeks to organize different peoples into a hierarchy rather than seeking to eliminate difference, Modi-ites often adopt discourses that superficially invoke unity and allyship among the autocthonous Indian religions Hindutva permits. This enables them to insinuate themselves into broadly liberal or progressive organizations, even as their primary agenda is to build a global authoritarian religious fundamentalist movement. That is because progressives, increasingly, see nothing but colour and reduce a person’s politics to what they perceive to be the interests of that person’s race, gender or sexuality.

The Modi movement and the Trump movement are increasingly organized and connected global movements that are self-conscious in their understanding that they are part of a worldwide struggle between a new and vibrant populist authoritarianism and a shopworn, exhausted and confused set of movements defending democracy. And so, MAGA hats appear at Hindutva rallies and Aryan supremacist flags fly comfortably next to those of the Confederacy.

And we are turning a blind eye, partly because our innate racism combined with progressive smugness makes us refuse to see differences of opinion among folks we do not consider white. Consequently, when activists like Surrey’s Gurpreet Singh, publisher of Radical Desi, or organizations like Indians Abroad for a Pluralist India, ask for our solidarity in standing against this Modi-backed program of institutional capture in the Indian diaspora, we fail them when we don’t show up; and, in turn, fail the global movement against the new authoritarianism.

But I also have to wonder if some of our unwillingness to make common cause with those calling this out goes back to the cartoonish image of Canadian ancestral villainy on which our civic nationalism is based. Our ancestors were wrong and evil to make so much of a handful of pro-Hirohito rallies and speeches, wrong to see these things being precisely organized and commanded by a force already present. Our ancestors were motivated by greed and racism to see an organized movement where there was none, and they then massively overreacted to this illusion. Therefore, we reason, any talk today of weaponized diasporas and global alliances among authoritarians must be both wrong and racist.

I would suggest that taking this position is grossly irresponsible. We need to stand in solidarity with our fellow citizens of all extractions against globalizing authoritarian movements. Canadians have been right to stage anti-Trump marches and protests over the past four years, against Trump’s foreign policy, against his domestic policy and against the actions of his supporters in Canada. I think our non-white fellow citizens deserve the same kind of solidarity when staring down a far more organized movement that makes no distinction in its murderous intent towards Indian Muslims, irrespective of the country whose citizenship they hold.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Historical Blindness and the Intellectual Legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools

On December 15th, Erin O’Toole, the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa very cannily remarked on a Zoom call, a call he could be confident would be leaked to the media, that the Indian Residential School system was established by decent folks for the altruistic purpose of educating Indigenous people. The uproar was as predictable as the canned and obviously pre-written apology delivered at the beginning of the next news cycle.

Jagmeet Singh, Charlie Angus and a host of other progressive politicians and opinion leaders in the NDP, Greens and Liberals were unanimous: the people who created the residential school system were all—to a man—evil people with black hearts and bad intent who wanted nothing more than to exterminate every single indigenous person in Canada. How dare Mr. O’Toole suggest that anyone with good intentions could have been involved in the project, never mind fashioning it?

This reaction is of a piece with a larger dumbing-down of the Anglo left of which I have spilled copious ink elsewhere, a dangerous slide into stupidity that makes us disoriented, flat-footed and prone to unintended acts of destruction in the present.

Canada’s Indian Residential School system did not have a single underlying motive. That is because it arose from a broad national consensus including all major political tendencies in the country. People and organizations normally at loggerheads could, at least, all agree on this. It did not just arise from an elite consensus but an elite meta-consensus, a consensus among all the major elites in mid-nineteenth-century Canadian society.

One of the biggest problems with our current historical narration is that it pays attention to one group within that consensus: members of the Conservative Party bloc within John A MacDonald’s governments. It is easy to find quotations by MacDonald and his cabinet ministers describing the schools as the means by which “termination” would be most effectively achieved. Termination was a policy doctrine developed in the United States by members of the Republican Party that wanted to see an end to politically, linguistically and culturally distinct indigenous peoples. While some people in the future might include indigenous people in their ancestry, they would think of themselves in the same way as creole (American-born European) lineages thought of themselves, as good, upstanding white Americans or Canadians (many eugenicists believed that Indigenous people’s skin would lighten even without intermarriage simply by adopting European diet, dress and lifestyle). The point was the total termination, eradication of all indigenous separateness and distinctiveness.

While those people were important in creating the residential schools, the schools would not have survived for more than a century under the administration of a succession of Conservative, Liberal, Liberal-Progressive, Progressive Conservative, Conservative-Social Credit and Liberal-NDP governments without being backed by far more organizations and ideologies. Nor would every major mainline religious denomination, United, Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican and Catholic not just have supported the schools but run and staffed the schools themselves.

These churches did not just have conservative members; they produced the leaders of Canada’s socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, too. JS Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas came out of the same leadership class that designed and staffed the residential school system.

Canada’s protestant churchmen were over-represented among a larger group we call “reformers,” middle-class professionals who had adopted the new ideology of “progressivism,” and had become activists, campaigners for social improvements. Many reformers believed that, with the destruction of traditional indigenous lands, food sources and economies, assimilation was the only means by which to “save” indigenous people not just from starvation and extinction but from the total loss of their culture and identity.

At the zenith of Charles Dickens’ popularity, the largest group of reformers agitating for residential schools for both settler and Indigenous children were anti-child labour reformers. Just as violence was not part of a typical Indigenous child’s upbringing, farming, hunting and artisanal work were. These reformers saw little daylight between the racialized children of sharecroppers helping to bring in the cotton harvest in Georgia and those bringing in a maize harvest or drying the catch from a salmon run in the Canadian West.

Furthermore, education reformers noted that not only were Indian Reserves unable to find qualified, permanent teachers for on-reserve day schools, this was a larger problem. Rural schoolhouses, even in settler communities with road and rail access, were having trouble finding any staff, never mind qualified staff with experience or Normal School training. Some looked to the southwestern US where residential schools had been established to address the failure of the region’s settler and indigenous day schools. That is among the reasons many in the senior leadership of Indigenous communities, not just elected band council chiefs but traditional leaders initially supported the residential schools.

There was another, powerful reason many Indigenous leaders supported the creation of the system, even though they would later come to repent it: in 1858, Benito Juárez became the first person of fully Indigenous ancestry to become the leader of a post-independence state in the Western Hemisphere. A Zapotec Indian, he had not only been democratically elected to lead Mexico by a primarily white and mestizo voting population; he had served as chief justice of the Supreme Court, on his way up, and then, following his election, successfully repelled the Franco-Egyptian invasion of Mexico in 1861-67.

Juárez was a committed liberal and believed that the strongest forces holding back Indigenous people like himself: (a) Remember, these factors are necessary but may not be buy viagra sufficient to achieve the breakthrough. But the patent protection is now open for all and not taking the medication viagra cialis achat click this pharmacy shop as indicated by the security safeguards can have antagonistic impact on the individual’s wellbeing as opposed to inhaling a few large meals Consume food high in dietary fiber, which improves the health and function of your digestive system. 22. That’s because identifying and correcting https://www.unica-web.com/archive/2019/general-assembly/Friends%20of%20UNICA%20report.pdf commander viagra the underlying cause can help restore erectile function in many men. When and how does the role of sexologist come into play? A happy conjugal life viagra without prescription usa is required to stay hale and hearty for a long time. residential segregation on reserves and (b) missionaries translating scripture and catechism into Indigenous languages so as to teach literacy to Indigenous people in their native language, rather than the language of the colonizer. Juárez pointed out that literacy in a language different than that in which laws were written, judicial proceedings held and elections conducted, was a literacy that ghettoized his people. He therefore favoured the privatization and auctioning-off of reserve lands to and a new kind of education that provided linguistic immersion in the language of the colonizers.

Juárez, a figure of pride and hope to Indigenous people all over the Western hemisphere, suggested that reserved-based life and Indigenous languages were shackles holding Indigenous people back from the kind of successful life he had led, by running away from his village and teaching himself first Spanish, then law.

While it would later turn out that privatization of collective Indigenous reserve lands in the US and Mexico would only deepen Indigenous poverty and marginalization, this was not something initially known, in these early days of liberalism. The same was, of course, true of residential linguistic immersion programs like the Canadian Residential school system.

The system did indeed result in a veritable holocaust for Canadian Indigenous peoples—it produced madness, trauma, death, injury, permanent disability and scars that will remain for generations to come. It also produced catastrophic losses in language, culture, custom and family systems. These catastrophes, this holocaust continue to the present day.

One of the reasons this slow motion genocide, this holocaust continues is because of the defects in how we remember the residential schools.

By forgetting all the well-intentioned folks who designed, built and ran the residential schools and deciding that our ancestors were, all of them, black-hatted villains hell-bent on perpetrating a gratuitously cruel genocide, we exculpate ourselves and our actions in the present.

White guilt and colonizer tears are, today, the oil that keeps the wheels of our continued colonial project greased. An endless stream of false apologies and ancestor-blaming permit us to do the unthinkable: abduct more Indigenous children from their parents each year than we did at the height of the residential school system.

Not only do we abduct more Indigenous kids than ever; we incarcerate more Indigenous adults than ever; our non-officer army ranks contain more Indigenous people than ever; and the RCMP is able to continue its uninterrupted legacy of brazenly executing a certain number of Indigenous people year-in, year-out.

What is our excuse? We tell ourselves that, unlike our ancestors, we have good intentions; whereas they had evil intentions. And we con ourselves into believing that is a remotely legitimate way to think by forgetting our forbears’ aphorisms like “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” No. We are good. Our ancestors were bad. No more questions need to be asked. We can just continue besieging Indigenous land with riot police, shooting Indigenous people in our driveways, tearing Indigenous babies from the arms of their parents.

Worse yet, we have actually incorporated the residential schools into the myths that justify continued colonialism. We tell ourselves, “Indigenous people are so damaged, so traumatized by the legacy of the Residential Schools and colonial violence, they cannot look after their kids, so we must abduct them; they cannot look after themselves, so we must incarcerate them.”

“Of course, they won’t be further traumatized, physically, psychologically and culturally because our good intentions will magically translate into good outcomes, just like our forbears’ bad intentions automatically translated into bad outcomes,” we half-convince ourselves.

By drawing an arbitrary bright line between our ancestors and ourselves, by labeling them bad people and ourselves, good people, we authorize ourselves to continue, uninterrupted, the holocaust, the genocide they began.

In this way, all of Canada’s leaders, Erin O’Toole, Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau are actually in accord about continuing, in broad strokes, the policies of John A MacDonald’s governments when it comes to First Nations. The only difference is the historical myth they use to justify it, O’Toole’s myth of the white-hatted colonizer with only good intentions or Singh’s and Trudeau’s myth of the black-hatted colonizer with only bad intentions.

To quote Albert Einstein, “things should be made as simple as possible. And no simpler.”

Until we abandon convenient exculpatory myths and embrace the complexity of the motives of our ancestors, we will continue needlessly killing, jailing and traumatizing Indigenous people without accountability.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

New Authoritarians #1: Cosmopolitan Societies, Populism and the Present Moment: What’s New About the New Authoritarians?

In the 1920s and 30s, we saw so many of the things we see today: financialization and deindustrialization in core economies, a fragile world peace fraying among rival empires, massive wealth disparity and concentration, economic growth sustained by rising consumer debt and increasingly irresponsible stock market speculation, people problematizing their gender and getting tattoos and the rise of populist authoritarians.

When very similar political, material and economic conditions obtained, we saw the same kinds of political and social phenomena that we do today. Populist authoritarians, anti-democratic strongmen nevertheless returned to office through elections were one of the key phenomena associated with that period. Ioannis Metaxas, António de Oliveira Salazar, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Plutarco Calles were not unlike Donald Trump, Recep Erdogan, Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte in their time. And much has been written about the lessons we can learn from the successes and failures of the 1920s and 30s and how we might apply them to fighting populist authoritarianism in the present.

But we must also ask what makes today’s authoritarians new, and examine how they are different from their forbears a century ago. I want to suggest that one of the most notable differences has to do with questions of diversity and cosmopolitanism.

1920s Europe was a continent of new countries and old countries with new borders, following the treaties ending the First World War and the ethno-national partition processes established in their wake. The border of Italy had gelled just two years before Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, following an eighty-year process of partition, expulsion and amalgamation that pulled Italian-speakers into the boot-shaped polygon etched on the map and pushed Slovenes, Croats, Germans and others out. This Italy possessed an ethnolinguistic homogeneity all previous incarnations had lacked.

The Greece in which Ioannis Metaxas took power was just twelve years old, following a century-long process of partition and expulsion, with Greeks pouring in from Asia minor and Turks, Slavs and Albanians being pushed out east and north. The Weimar Republic that Hitler overthrew was similarly only fourteen years in age, with thousands upon thousands of Czechs, Poles, Germans and others being forced to relocate in a byzantine partition process that lasted years.

For fascists, the ethno-linguistic purity of their nations was insufficient. Roma, Jews, Catalans, Basques and others were early and easy targets for political movements whose paranoid style required the existence of internal enemies. And the fact that these groups were so thoroughly assimilated only helped to feed narratives of internal subversion and conspiracy.

For all the superficial similarity of their rhetoric, with the exception of Hungary’s Victor Orban, today’s authoritarian success stories are coming from states that are best-known not for ethnolinguistic homogeneity but diversity and cosmopolitanism. Not only are Brazil, the Philippines and the United States some of the most diverse countries in the world, they are only growing more so with time. The US is increasingly a bilingual country; Filipino Muslims and Fukien Chinese are more geographically distributed than every before; even as Brazil continues to boast German, Japanese and other non-Portuguese news media from settlers a century ago, English- and Spanish-speakers constitute larger chunks of the population.

Donald Trump did not just continue but amplified his rhetoric when it came to praising white supremacists, denigrating Muslims and abusing Latinx peoples. Narendra Modi’s rhetoric of Hindu supremacy and exclusivity has, similarly, not been tempered by high office. And Jair Bolsonaro’s race-baiting of Afro-Brazilians combined with continued calls for Indigenous genocide have similarly continued or been amplified in office.

Yet, when it came time to examine who the five million new Trump voters were this November, it turned out that this group of voters were disproportionately non-white, with Asian Americans and Latinx voters becoming more likely to positively reappraise Trump than white voters. Similarly, Modi’s successes at home in bringing Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs into his coalition, to make the BJP a more religiously diverse party are even being experienced in the Indian diaspora. Even former Khalistan activists and their children, who fled India in fear of their lives, with the dream of a Sikh homeland in Punjab are increasingly joining pro-Modi diasporic coalitions with Hindus.

When one delivers this news to Woke folk/progressives, there is the usual response: this should not be what is happening; the people who are doing it are stupid and because it is dumb and should not be happening, we should behave as though it is not.

But what if this behaviour is rational and based on people’s lived experiences? How can we explain what is taking place? Because if we cannot explain what is happening or why it is, we have no hope of stemming the tide.

First, we must ask this: what is supporting a new authoritarian movement an alternative to? For racialized people, ethnic and religious minorities, it is, among other things, an alternative to the way liberal societies and neoliberal economies manage questions of diversity, pluralism and cosmopolitanism.

Most visibly, our societies manage this through tokenism, a kind of neo-Ottoman social organization where people with minority identities are prominently featured in high-level government and corporate positions. Like a Greek Orthodox vizier in the Ottoman court or an Armenian Christian vizier serving an Abasside Caliph, the material interests of the vizier are a continuation of the dominant order. When medieval fellahin in the Nile Delta saw a Copt as the Caliph’s first minister, there was no celebration of impending Christian-Muslim equality, no talk of breaking glass ceilings. They understood clearly that, to keep his job, the vizier would work tirelessly for the supremacy of the Muslim Caliph who appointed him. Sadly, contemporary progressives lack the political sophistication of the average medieval peasant and are still wowed by the pageantry of false equality.

When Mexicans or Arabs move their support to Donald Trump, they are looking past the symbolism of exhibiting children in cages and American bombs landing on Yemeni cities and recognizing that the Trump regime is only a little more racist and Islamophobic in its policies than the Obama regime that preceded it. That, when one strips away the theatre of cruelty, the same Christian and white supremacist structures are continuous, maintained by Republicans and Democrats alike.

This might explain why the Trump regime might be seen as no worse, but why might it be seen as better? First of all, transparency and honesty; while Trump is honest and unapologetic about the way that the hierarchy of American cosmopolitanism is ordered, liberals and progressives constantly lie about an imagined equality, an imagined amity. Trumpism, on the other hand, recalls the rough and tumble pluralism of the First Gilded Age, of the Roman Republic, where competition among ethnicities was acknowledged, where neighbours traded racist jokes across back fences and rioted against one another.

Of course, some especially foolish folk might say that our goal is for a pluralism that is non-hierarchical, that is culturally neutral. Even leaving aside Karl Popper’s arguments about how pluralism must be governed by a value system that values and supports pluralism, it is also obvious that different dominant cultures organize pluralism different ways.

“Personality of law,” for instance, is a historically common pluralism that has been rejected by modern liberal Christian “secular” societies. In this model of pluralism, every person has the right to be governed based on the laws and traditions of their religion or ethnicity. Sharia law applies to Muslim citizens and canon law to Christian citizens. Only in the EU is personality of law incorporated into the Christian pluralist order—and it only applies to wage legislation i.e. most workers carry their country’s minimum wage with them. In modern Ethiopia, as in the United States before the 1860s, freedom of religion is exercised by towns, not individuals.

Modern liberal pluralism is not the only, or even most logical theory for organizing a religiously and ethnically diverse cosmopolitan society. And, I would argue that one of the most powerful forces animating modern populist authoritarian movements is not a desire to eliminate pluralism but to offer new models of pluralism that are more satisfying for their followers.

The Trump movement, like its Democratic Party opponents, recognizes the United States as a complex hierarchy of races and religions that enjoy varying degrees of wealth, safety and opportunity; these are not just groups of individuals but a complex system of institutions, secular and religious, that deserve varying degrees of state patronage and recognition, depending on the race and religion in question.

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But whereas the traditional party system cloaks this in a discourse of secularism and cultural relativism, the Trump movement is transparent in how it hierarchizes these groups and the institutions that purport to represent them. This transparency has proved attractive to white Christians, who receive the most state recognition and patronage but has proven increasingly popular with groups that are below the top of the hierarchy but still seek and obtain recognition and patronage.

For instance, it has not just been Christian charter schools that have benefited from the policies of Education Secretary Betsy de Vos. Madrassahs have benefited too, albeit to a lesser extent, as have Jewish and Hindu religious schools. And the movement’s popularity has grown in these communities as their leaders have come to hear Trump’s anti-Semitic and Islamophobic proclamations as indicative not of a Nazi-style genocidal policy but rather the rhetoric one associates with the rough and tumble hierarchical pluralism of pre-WWII America, the Ottoman and Roman Empires.

In India, we see a similar set of developments. Whereas Muslims are subject to increasing brutal violence and genocidal actions by Narendra Modi’s BJP and affiliated militias, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains have enjoyed increasing state protection and patronage. For the Modi movement, there exists a binary: non-indigenous religions i.e. evangelical Christianity and Islam are facing increasing persecution and attempts at eradication. But those religions considered to be part of a larger Hindu-based family of religions descended from the one true faith are now inside the Hindu tent and organized into a hierarchy. In this way, there are substantial material and political payoffs that autocthnonous enjoy when their members join Modi’s coalition in greater numbers.

A similar phenomenon obtains when it comes to lower caste Indians. While most Dalits (ie. Untouchables) and “backward” castes have faced increasing violence from the Hindu fundamentalism being hawked by the Modiites, there is a paradox. Modi himself brags of being of “the most backward caste” and proudly shows the evidence of this coursing through his blood and written upon his skin. His personal rhetoric is not merely exemplary; it is instructive: by adopting the dress, politics and affiliations of his movement, other darker, lower caste Indians can whiten themselves.

Prior to Modi, there were processes of passing and whitening known as “Sanskritizing” that the old secular Congress Party worked actively against. Their goal was to the eradication of caste, not unlike the dreams of Latin and Anglo American liberals at the foundation of their countries. Individuals and jatis (large lineage groups) have always had a way of moving up the caste hierarchy. Under Hindu, Mughal and British rule, this process was negotiated by the brahmins, the priest class, permitting mobility for individuals and groups at the cost of reinforcing the overall caste structure. (Similar to the limpieza de sangre system I explain here.)

Under the rule of the Congress Party, following independence, Sanskritizing i.e. leaving one’s village, moving to a large city and falsifying one’s genealogy was the preferred process, not unlike “passing” in the United States during the same period.

But the Modi movement offers an alternative preferable to more and more low-caste individuals: joining the movement and using a rank in the party or one of its militias as a whitening influence on one’s lived caste position. Just as Rudyard Kipling’s fictive British Raj promoted private Gunga Din to the rank of corporal posthumously, despite him coming from a low caste ineligible for officer ranks in the army (unlike the martial lineages like Sikhs), because he better embodied the traits desired in a British officer than a man of the correct race and lineage, BJP and its militias are mass producing Gunga Dins.

In America, the Trump movement offers two models of personal whitening, both arguably imported from the more venerable and better theorized and strategized Modi movement.

If there was one event more uncanny in the 2016 US election than any other, it was the Donald Trump campaign’s Hindu diaspora campaign event. Building on the ways in which the colour line in the core of Dixie had already come to work, the campaign was explicit in its invitation to high-caste Hindus who, like Nikki Haley, are already situated above the black-white colour line in states like Louisiana and South Carolina. High caste i.e. white Hindus were explicitly recognized as part of a global Aryan nationalist white supremacist project in ways that had not been since the 1930s. While Trump, himself, was personally clueless, helpfully stating “I support Hindu,” during the bewildering event in which he was festooned in gold and received endorsements from temple priests, his advisors were clear-eyed.

And high-caste Hindus were just one part of a larger project. Many Latin American states have a long white supremacist history but none more than the two great “white settler states” of the Southern Cone, Brazil and Argentina. White Brazilians and Argentines from metropolises like Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo come from a civic discourse that is more explicitly white supremacist than that of Anglo America. And many have suffered indignity and confusion coming to Canada and the US, having led lives of benefiting from and praising white supremacy, only to find themselves situated below the colour line. These groups the Trump campaign targeted successfully.

And this is a paradoxical feature one finds particularly in the Bolsonaro, Modi and Trump movements: if one is located within the movement, the colour line becomes more flexible and moves lower to accommodate more folks.

In this way, the Trump movement’s use of regalia is especially powerful. Donning a red MAGA hat makes any person wearing it if not white than significantly whiter in the eyes of other MAGA hat-wearers. And this is not a wholly new phenomenon, especially in the US. Poles, Czechs, Irish, Turks, Greeks, Italians, etc. all became whiter by joining not the anti-racist Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln but the white supremacist Democrats of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the newly white and the nearly white joining a populist racist movement might make the country as a whole more racist, the lived experience of individuals is the opposite. A MAGA hat is more powerful than Kevlar when it comes to stopping police bullets.

What begins to come into focus with these comparisons is that unlike the fascists of the 1920s and 30s, or retro fascists like Victor Orban and the fourth and fifth parties of Western Europe’s parliaments and legislatures, the new authoritarians are not simple opponents of cosmopolitanism. Rather, they seek to refashion their countries’ pluralisms into systems that are more visible, more hierarchical, more dynamic and at peace with many long-term civic inequalities.

We see this too in Recep Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman term. Erdogan’s movement is pronouncing on a century of secular liberalism at gunpoint in Turkey and offering, in its place, a return to a pluralistic, theocratic, ordered hierarchical Ottoman past, offering permanent inferiority to religious and ethnic minorities as an alternative to assimilation at gunpoint that the Kemalist state offered in the twentieth century.

But most importantly, for traditionalists within any culture, there is a universal appeal in the figure of the authoritarian patriarch.

Bill Maher pointed out in 2012 that, as people grow increasingly cynical about the ability of their votes to arrest or even mitigate the destruction of neoliberalism, they begin thinking about political campaigns like a wealth seminar: Mitt Romney and Donald Trump are not going to govern to benefit individuals of their class. Rather, by joining their movement and following their advice, you might become like them—they will tell you “the secret” to becoming rich, powerful patriarchs like themselves.

In this way, there is an implicit, unstated promise, especially from a man dominating a large, attractive and accomplished family like the Trumps. Every conservative patriarch sees the election of a man like Trump as authorization to intensify his domination of his women, his children. Men that head families staging gender reveal parties, sending their kids to religious schools, engaging in surgery tourism to perform gendercide or FGM see a natural ally, even if he might say a few mean things about their church, their temple, their language.

As John Sayles wrote in the film Lone Star, “it’s comforting when you see one prejudice triumphing over another deep prejudice.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |