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There Is Nothing Socialist About David Eby’s $8 Billion Deficit

The Strange Case of Grant Devine
In the spring of 2001, former Conservative Saskatchewan premier Grant Devine addressed a private luncheon of Fraser Institute supporters at a swanky downtown Vancouver hotel. There were good reasons for the event to be private. Devine was, even among the most ardent members of the political right, a controversial figure. His government had gone down to one of the most crushing defeats at the polls in the province’s history in 1991, with the party falling from 45% of the vote to 25% and losing 28 of its 38 seats in the legislature, with every single urban MLA going down to defeat. And that was only the beginning.

Senior staffers, backbenchers and even cabinet ministers were prosecuted by the RCMP for an organized expense fraud scheme that had been common knowledge in the Devine government’s final term in office. Former cabinet ministers did jail time for stealing public funds. One committed suicide to avoid an imminent arrest. In the 1995 election, the party was reduced to five seats. And its caucus crossed the floor to form a new party called the Saskatchewan Party, to which the NDP referred in the 1999 and 2003 elections as the “Conservative Party witness protection program.” It has not held a seat since.

But the total destruction of the Saskatchewan affiliate of their party was not even the thing about Devine of which grassroots Canadian conservatives most strongly disapproved. In the late 80s and early 90s he had plunged Saskatchewan deeply into debt by building infrastructure in rural communities far beyond what local demand could support and undertook a pricey administrative reorganization of government to fill the many office buildings he constructed in small communities around the province. He also instituted direct subsidies to farmers and ceased charging resource royalties to oil companies and he sold off most revenue-generating part of the government.

Devine’s government remains widely viewed as the most fiscally irresponsible government anywhere in Canada in the 1980s. Not only did they leave office awash in debt; they had created a massive structural deficit that would take a decade of austerity to eliminate.

The Real Dangers of Public Debt
So, at the private luncheon, where no media were allowed, he was asked about this very thing. His response, and I must paraphrase here, was that he knew, a year into his final mandate, that he was facing certain defeat in 1991. And therefore he chose to destroy the province’s finances so that, when the NDP returned to power, they would be unable to bring in any new government programs, that they would be forced into enacting austerity and not expanding the welfare of the province that gave birth to Canadian Medicare.

I have no idea if this was a mere excuse concocted with the benefit of hindsight or whether it was the plan all along. But it was clearly true: plunge a jurisdiction far enough into debt and its ability to make political choices democratically is profoundly undermined. And one has a pretty good idea of who will be making the political choices in an indebted jurisdiction: the global financial elite, the banks, the bond-raters and the investor class.

Historically, the Saskatchewan NDP, the first democratic socialist party ever to take power in North America, has always been debt-phobic. The party held power for seventeen years before introducing Medicare because it felt that for the policy to have a chance, the province would need to be debt-free.

Because it is private companies, especially Standard and Poors, owned and run by the global financial elite, who hand out credit ratings, a heavily indebted and heavily borrowing jurisdiction can only continue enacting its policies if they meet with the approval of the elite of the financial sector. And once upon a time, it seems like just the other day, New Democrats did not understand the corporate elite to be their best buddies.

As a provincial finance minister I once knew reported of her meeting with Standard and Poors, the fiscal responsibility of your jurisdiction and its future financial plans are but small factors in the determination of your jurisdiction’s credit rating. Bond raters and bankers are, like everyone else, ideological. And they want to see governments and people who share their ideology do well and those who do not, not quite so well.

The reality is that a credit rating downgrade by the bond-raters, changes in the lending terms of banks and other governments are political in character. And, the more indebted you are, the more additional borrowing you need to conduct for the coming fiscal year, the greater the ability of the global financial elite to throw your jurisdiction into a debt spiral through a series of interest rate hikes.

Back in the 90s, we saw that play out at the international level as governments like Zimbabwe’s and Argentina’s went into these tailspins, ultimately resulting in World Bank bailouts contingent on World Bank officials being given control of the countries’ finance ministries decisions over program funding leaving their capitals and moving to New York and Geneva.

I have never understood organizations like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ argument that borrowing money is somehow socialist or left-wing. Certainly, there was a time when a lot of borrowing was done by social democratic and liberal governments to more rapidly expand their economies and build the welfare state more quickly during the first phase of the Cold War (1948-80). But this was a period when the global financial elite were part of broad society-wide consensus that producing prosperity and a social safety net for working and middle class people was essential to winning the Cold War for the capitalist side.

As that consensus evaporated in the late 1970s and early 80s, borrowing policies that had worked in the 1950s and 60s stopped working. That was partly due to the restructuring the global financial system in 1974 but more importantly, because, unlike in the age of John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith, the financial sector no longer saw itself as a partner in the construction of the welfare state.

The NDP’s Dramatic Fiscal Policy Reversal
When John Horgan and Carole James, his finance minister, came to lead the first BC NDP government in sixteen years, they were proud of the small budget surpluses they posted during their half-decade in power. And this was just one aspect of their commitment to policy continuity with the government they had replaced. This was, in large measure, because their government’s senior decision-makers were veterans of the party’s nine turbulent years in power during the 1990s, especially after its re-election in 1996 when it faced a capital strike by the mining industry and other major sectors of the economy.

The late 2010s and early 20s NDP was not just afraid of the banks. They were afraid of pretty much every major international industrial cartel. Not spooking or upsetting the mining and petroleum sectors was almost the categorical imperative of the Horgan regime. That is because, like a credit rating downgrade, a capital strike can hobble an economy and destroy the ability of a government to pursue its agenda as the economic contraction causes its revenues to fall and its costs to grow.

So, what are we to make of the new fiscal approach of premier David Eby, the tyrant who succeeded Horgan because the official returning officer, who just happened to be a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, running the succession process, disqualified Eby’s competitor and acclaimed him with nary a vote being cast by the party or its caucus?

The official $7.9 billion budget deficit he and his finance minister announced for 2024-25 is only part of the story. The actual increase in BC’s debt will be just shy of $20 billion thanks to borrowing hidden away in shell games around capital spending and crown agencies and corporations. The province’s debt to gross domestic product ration will climb from 17.6% to 21% in a single year leaving us $123 billion in the hole. And it is not like this will be a one-time thing, the forecast for the 2024-26 deficit, if Eby wins re-election this fall is $6.3 billion, a number sure to grow as the date of next year’s budget approaches, even if we pretend the inevitable orgy of pre-election spending announcements this fall is not going to happen.

Since becoming premier and, as I remarked above, even in the process of becoming premier, Eby has made it clear that he is a janitor for the global financial elite, someone whom they can trust to continue the massive subsidies to the Royal Dutch Shell and the other partners in LNG Canada, someone they can trust to continue throwing a million dollars a day at the Site C dam, whose energy will power the increased fracking operations necessary to fill the pipeline to Kitimat.

Similarly, the pharmaceutical industry can trust him to pursue to most aggressive policies to increase the supply of legal opioids, going so far as to issue fentanyl to high school students without their parents’ consent or knowledge. And readers of this blog know what I think about his government’s other aggressive policies to destroy kids’ endocrine systems and get them hooked on pharmaceuticals they will need for the rest of their lives.

And that is why in my view, Eby is pursuing fiscal policies that undermine the ability of any successor government, his own or another party’s, to deviate from the policy course British Columbia was on before the NDP even formed government.

Because if this plunge into debt continues, the effects of a credit rating downgrade or a capital strike on BC will soon be so catastrophic that another premier would have to spend years paying down the debt before they dared apply the same carbon tax to Big Oil that they do to individual consumers, before they enacted appurtenance legislation to revive our sawmills, before they stopped experimenting on children with dangerous, dependence-inducing drugs.

If a government wants to change course on any major issue of concern to the global financial elite, it will have to be preceded by years of austerity and policy continuity.

This idea that racking up debt is somehow socialist is absurd because what this kind of government debt really does is drain power out of our legislature and into the boardrooms of the banks and bond raters in New York while their stooge, Premier Eby does a soft shoe routine to distract us and his sycophants praise his supposedly courageous borrowing program.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Ugly Symbiosis Between New Democrats and Church Burners

Three Years of Church Burnings
For more than two and a half years, since June 2021, a particular group of Canada has been targeted with a series of terrorist hate crimes: non-white churchgoing Christians. Beginning with the churches of indigenous people, starting in 2021 but soon branching out to include Filipinos, Copts and other racial groups, this group of Canadians has seen ninety-seven of its churches targeted by arsonists.

And yet only one has been brought to justice. Recently, another was captured on video, a young white man in a white hood who attacked a Catholic church in Regina, whose entire public-facing board of directors are non-white community leaders.

When the church-burnings began, supposedly staged as revenge for mass graves allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar near former residential schools, indigenous leaders formed a united front in condemning the burnings. From the most woke-sympathetic neo-traditionalist conservationists to the most pro-development Christians, the leadership of indigenous Canada spoke with a single voice and called for an end to the targeted arsons of on-reserve churches.

They pointed out that indigenous people are one of the most Christian groups in Canada and that their churches are often the oldest and most sacred buildings in rural First Nations communities. Buildings that have served as every kind of community space, for political meetings, education, major gatherings and, of course, generations of weddings and funerals.

But Woke Canadians, especially white Wokes, continued to applaud the burnings until there was such palpable disgust among mainstream Canadians that a few of the most enthusiastic pro-arson civil society leaders, like Harsha Walia, were sacked. Funny how, when push came to shove, the sacrificial victim selected by progressive Canadian civil society leaders was one of the few non-whites publicly endorsing the burnings.

Although the full-throated enthusiasm for this targeted campaign of terror in the progressiverse has died down, it has not been replaced by any actual opposition to the burnings. As in 1960s Alabama and Mississippi, the respectable civil society leadership of the establishment may have stopped publicly cheering for their burnings but they are not saying a bad word about the continued campaign of arson by their irregular militia and instead work to suppress mainstream media coverage of ongoing efforts to keep non-white people of faith terrorized and intimidated.

And how have Canada’s so-called Anti-Hate groups responded to the targeting of a particular religious subset of racial minority groups in nearly one hundred separate acts of domestic terror? They refuse to talk about it and change subject if pushed. Like the rest of the progressive establishment, they work to ensure that while racialized people of faith know about this campaign, the volume is turned down in the public square and instead whitter-on about how it is people of faith who are violent hate-mongers planning to visit a reign of violence on trans-identified youth, funded by the Trump movement and leavened by ‘Russian disinformation’ any day now.

Why is this?

I want to make clear that I am not making the case that there is any kind of conspiracy directing these events, no grand puppet-master or thought-out plan. I am not even suggesting that there is any real coordination. (Although I cannot imagine that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network facilitating the networking of chapters of Antifa, the violent street militia, and maintaining lists of targets that they will not let the media see, is helping matters.) Nor am I suggesting that police and prosecutorial inattention is part of any sort of policy, just the natural outcome of Woke culture capturing police forces.

Instead I want to suggest that there is a set of incentives, a logic that encourages the present state of affairs. Today, when you look at those mobilizing against the sexualisation of children, the destruction of women’s spaces, the rights of parents, etc. You see Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus strongly represented, punching above their demographic weight. And you see white working class anti-authoritarian activists also throwing in strongly.

There is constituency who tell each other, their faith leaders and pollsters that they share the concerns of those mobilizing but you are largely demobilized in this fight: non-white Christians.

Because in the 2020s, everything is about everything else, and people are amazed that someone like me can see the Greenhouse Effect as an existential threat and yet not believe women have penises, this happy coincidence serves the Canadian establishment. The large-scale mobilization of non-white Christians in Canada’s culture wars would radically tip the balance. But this group receives messages every month that it is already outside the protection of the law and, if it looks uppity, the campaign extralegal violence is likely to intensify.

The New Democratic Response
It is in this context that we need to examine two extraordinary events that took place last week following the church-burning. The first took place in parliament when a Conservative MP rose and sought the leave of the house to make a unanimous motion condemning the ongoing burnings. No division was required because he was immediately shouted-down with “nay” from Liberal and NDP MPs.

My former party, the NDP, originally founded and led by churchmen, Tommy Douglas and J S Woodsworth, who believed that their policies were the expression of what was then called “the Social Gospel,” refused to condemn the burning of the churches. The party whose representatives once included civil rights activists from the Mississippi, like Sadie Kuehn, who hosted the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, now deems it wrong to condemn arson targeted at racialized people. The only party whose MPs spoke against Japanese internment in the 1940s wants non-white Christians to know they do not enjoy the equal protection of the law.

In the days that followed, many people of faith in British Columbia reached out formally and informally to the David Eby government asking the BC NDP to do better, given how disproportionately many arsons have taken place in BC. What followed was a slap in the face. Eby’s attorney-general, Niki Sharma, announced a new set of instructions to crown prosecution services to more aggressively target, not arsonists, not those bigoted against religious people but against people opposing the government’s doctrines on gender and child safeguarding.

People like Eby and Jagmeet Singh understand perfectly well the—for them—serendipitous effect of these burnings in suppressing the growing wave of opposition to their key social policies and will use them even if that use is absolute affront to everything generations of New Democrats have believed.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Segregationists Who Burn Churches Are Who They Have Always Been

Unpopular authoritarian regimes often intimidate their subjects into faking popular enthusiasm and support through extortion, coercion and intimidation. But when such regimes are weak, the best they can do is to intimidate their subjects into silence, at least. This is the reality of modern Canada, a weak government, led by weak, authoritarian men, who lack the power to terrorize the populace into a fearful ovation and must settle for browbeating the majority into silence.

I grew up in a black family in Western Canada in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember the stories from my mother, aunts and uncles, as well as veterans of the US Civil Rights movement like folk singer Leon Bibb, friend of the great Paul Robeson, at the dining room table. One of Leon’s most evocative stories was of the first time he witnessed a lynching on a countryside drive with his father on the rural outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1930s. He talked about how after witnessing the swinging corpse of a young black man, a silence descended over their car and followed him and his father into their house when they returned home.

Unable to compel ordinary, decent Canadian people into the kind of terrorized ovation a great authoritarian like Joseph Stalin might elicit in support of his government’s most depraved policies, Woke Canada must settle for the grudging silence of its non-white Christian population as its governments proceed with a set of bizarre and perverse policies opposed, by the vast majority of the Canadian public, a majority that has been cowed by relentless smears, threats and intimidation.

Yet, as the Kaufman report, just released by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, states, when anonymized by pollsters, Canadians of all races, religions and cultures share a profound skepticism of the articles of faith of Woke Canada. While I do not share the report’s analysis about structural racism (indeed, this article is premised on the opposite belief), the data about Canadian public opinion, on which it is based, is indisputable. And it is no coincidence that the strategy we see being used to shut down opposition to the establishment is based on the one Woke lie that has been successfully sold to Canadians, according to the report: that there are mass graves of hitherto-unidentified bodies of First Nations children near abandoned residential schools.

Last week, a surveillance in camera in Saskatchewan captured a striking image. A Roman Catholic Church whose congregants are primarily of African, Middle Eastern and Filipino origin, in Regina, was the site of Canada’s ninety-seventh church arson since the start of 2020. But it is not the flames emanating from the gasoline poured into the church that was most striking. The camera captured an image of a young, white man, wearing a white hood performing the arson.

Having grown up as I did, such an image is an especially chilling one for me. We descendants of slaves know of the long tradition of white men in white hoods burning the churches of racialized people.

The Klan Is Not An Organization But A Property of American History
What historians call the First Ku Klux Klan, which flourished from 1865-89, burned the churches of their former slaves throughout the South during the violent process euphemistically called “Redemption,” whereby black voters were intimidated and murdered to allow white majority governments to seize power and disenfranchise black citizens. The Klan favoured the churches because they were typically the sole or primary place black people could congregate. Lacking community infrastructure and real estate, black churches played a special role as political meeting hall, community centre and place of worship.

So the irregular Confederate militias torched these buildings and often the people inside to intimidate black people, to let them know that the simple act of assembling on their own terms would not be tolerated.

That original Klan died out after it had outlived its purpose and restored Confederate rule to the South. But following the release and smash success of America’s first Hollywood blockbuster, Birth of a Nation in 1915, in which the original KKK were portrayed as the heroes, those responsible for America’s reunification and true ethnogenesis with the inauguration of the Jim Crow system. A new Klan formed, this time with broader interests, as a mass national organization that opposed Slavic, Jewish and Catholic immigration, as well as supporting ongoing racial segregation and its expansion to the national level.

In reality, the Second Ku Klux Klan was created as an insurance and mail fraud scheme and fizzled after a series of criminal prosecutions but, in its day, it nationalized tactics previously confined to the South. Black farmers in Upstate New York were lynched and mosques, synagogues, and orthodox churches became targets of arson by young, white-hooded white men.

My mother, aunts and uncles all remember the church bombings and burnings of the Civil Rights Era, after the Klan had reassembled, this time as the paramilitary of the White Citizens’ Council movement. The Third Ku Klux Klan was not so much an independent organization but the paramilitary wing of White Citizens’ Councils, its violence functioning as a kind of initiation process to vet ambitious young white men the Councils installed in leadership positions in state-level Democratic Parties to resist the national party’s efforts to integrate the party and end segregation and disenfranchisement.

This time, the churches were targeted not just because they had remained the primary civil spaces of black people in the South but because the Civil Rights Movement had decided its public-facing leadership should be churchmen like Martin Luther King Jr. and church activists like Rosa Parks.

That Klan fizzled-out when the last miscegenation laws were repealed and avowed segregationists like George Wallace recanted their white supremacy in the early 1980s. While individuals like David Duke continued to grab the odd headline by claiming to lead an organization that barely existed, the reality is that like its two previous incarnations, the Klan fizzled-out as an organization.

The thesis of this essay is that the Klan is that it is not so much an organization as a set of reactions inherent to the Anglo American racial system. Until the premises and structures underpinning this system change in profound and fundamental, ways, we will be overshadowed by the Once and Future Klan.

Four Years of Church-Burnings in Canada
In 2020, young white people began donning white hoods and setting fire to racialized people’s churches all over Canada in response to a controversy over whether there were undiscovered mass graves of indigenous children near former residential schools. Shockingly, despite nearly one hundreds arsons having been committed since this controversy erupted, only one arsonist has been arrested or charged.

Kathleen Panek, a young white woman who wore a conventional black hood, rather than a KKK-style face-covering white hood was identified through camera footage, charged, prosecuted and convicted. While her lawyer claimed that she was under the influence of drugs and upset with her boyfriends, Panek has remained closed-lipped about her motives for destroying a Surrey church whose congregants are Egyptian immigrants. 

So the only clues we have had about the other arsonists came from their social media supporters, who are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly Woke. The constituency least supportive of the burnings, which originally targeted indigenous Christian churches exclusively, before branching out to include Filipino, Coptic and other non-white urban congregations, were indigenous people. All factions of indigenous civil society, from the most neo-traditional and eco-conscious to the biggest pro-business, pro-development folks roundly condemned the burnings and begged the arsonists to stop.

This has had no effect. Woke, white Canadians continue to applaud or remain silent as the most sacred buildings of constituencies with whom they purport to sympathize are destroyed. Just four days ago, a Conservative MP seeking a unanimous motion of condemnation of the church burnings was shouted down by NDP and Liberal MPs refusing to grant consent.

Churches of indigenous people, churches of immigrants, churches of racialized people—their burnings have either been celebrated or Wokes have averted their gaze. No condemnations have emanated from supposedly “anti-hate” organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. They are busy sharing lists with Antifa so that when these non-white people of faith object to government policy, they can be more efficiently doxed and threatened.

I have found it telling that Woke activists were eager to label the participants in the Freedom Convoy as Klansmen and suggest, without the slightest evidence that they are led by the KKK. That is because fundamental to Wokeness is its use of projection as a rhetorical tactic to sow confusion in its adversaries.

There is one group of white supremacist, white-hooded, church-burning segregationists in Canada and we know who they and their friends are. Only one social movement is fighting to racially segregate university campuses and classes, the Wokes. Only one social movement is asserting that whites are intellectually superior to non-whites (the euphemism they use is “logocentric”); the reason non-whites just can’t do math as well and can’t even show up on time is that whites are uniquely logocentric, according to the ideology propounded by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry. Only one movement in Canada is claiming that history is made exclusively by whites and that non-whites are just bystanders and victims.

As we have seen in the fiasco at Harvard, Wokes are not interested in appointing competent, intelligent minority tokens to represent them in their elite-level diversity projects. They want to see the least competent, the least qualified, the most dependent, the most precarious non-whites in token positions. Because that is all they expect of non-whites: inferiority.

Think of all of the brilliant black female academics who have out-published and out-taught Claudine Gay a hundredfold, the formidable black and Asian women of American politics who could out-organize and out-debate Kamala Harris in their sleep. That’s because, if a minority token goes off-script, their fall needs to be immediate and precipitous; so one seeks out tokens with the fewest accomplishments and the most skeletons.

Going off-script is, after all, highly consequential, when Wokes wield so much of their power through acts of extorted ventriloquism. As Cherokee author Thomas King observed, nothing upsets white liberals more than one not being “the Indian [they] had in mind.”

When Canadian Labour Congress officials assert that lesbians, women’s rights and child protection activists are white supremacists controlled by evil, shadowy American money, leavened by “Russian disinformation,” they need reality to resemble, at least superficially, their outrageous claims. And that means keeping down, keeping silent non-white Christians who are deeply concerned about the capture of our schools by genderwang and deeply racist teachings, asserting their children’s inherent racial inferiority as a host of disciplines and skills.

Indigenous Christians, immigrant Christians, non-white Christians need to be intimidated, to be kept silent, lest they contradict the white supremacist “narrative” of the Wokes, that they love all this tokenization, DEI racism and genderwang. And one of the ways you do that is a four-year campaign of burning their churches.

Does this mean someone is orchestrating the burnings? No. But I do think that we can now assume that the enthusiasm the Canadian establishment has for punishing the perpetrators is about the same as that of Dixie’s establishment during the last round, half a century ago. Those wielding the hammer, the commissar class are not trying too hard to stop this because they’re not sure that it’s wrong.

Am I asserting that there is a conspiracy here? No. Am I even asserting that Wokes are aware that they are white supremacists, that their whole tearful colonizer act is a giant racist humblebrag? No. What I am saying is that: I don’t care who the Wokes think they are; I don’t care how they self-identify, who they believe they are or what they think they’re doing any more than I care about the inner life of the supporters of the first three Klans.

What matters is this: if white people are putting on white hoods and burning the churches of non-whites who need to be kept in line to be kept out of politics and civil society, it doesn’t matter how they identify. If people fighting to segregate schools and propound doctrines of non-white inferiority, we already know who they are.

They are the Ku Klux Klan.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

“Begging the Question,” the Kingdom of War, Newspeak and the Myth of “Cultural Marxism”  

Mao’s Linguistic Reform and the Perverse Effects of Deleting Words
In the 1950s, Mao Zedong embarked on a number of projects to remake Chinese society, some with disastrous consequences, such as the Great Leap Forward. But not all of these projects are remembered as atrocities or even failures. One of the best-reviewed of Mao’s initiatives was a major linguistic reform, which standardized Chinese characters, enabling them to be type-written, radically increasing the efficiency of publishing and circulating documents and making literacy more accessible. This was paired with the standardization of the pinyin system for transliterating Chinese into Latin characters, making Chinese easier to teach and learn as a second language.

Still, Mao could not resist also making this project serve his authoritarian ends of reshaping the human mind and soul to a proper communist one, albeit with Chinese characteristics. So, as many characters in the alphabet were being deleted, modified or simplified anyway, it was pretty easy to delete from the language most of the characters that referred to Confucian ideas. If, Mao reasoned, he could destroy people’s ability to write about pre-revolutionary political concepts, to even refer to them, this would result in his revolution attaining total ideological hegemony.

But this is not exactly what happened.

Because Confucianism had become so deeply ingrained in Chinese cultural life over two thousand years, depriving people of the ability to talk about it shut down people’s ability to describe how it continued to condition people’s values; the ways it conditioned their social behaviour, their parenting practices, their theories of justice and merit became harder to describe, to criticize, to even notice because the words for what was happening had been lost. The reform affected society almost randomly; in some places, Confucianism lost its power to structure people’s lives but in others, its power actually intensified.

The Murder of “Begging the Question”
It is dangerous, then, to deprive ourselves of the language needed to name, to describe, to criticize social practices, especially if those practices are widespread and possibly harmful. And one did not need to witness Maoist China to see this as a consequence of authoritarian linguistic reform. It had already been predicted by George Orwell in his descriptions of the pernicious functions of Newspeak in 1984.

That is why I became increasingly concerned a little less than a decade ago by what seemed to be a programmatic campaign of linguistic engineering by news anchors and reporters on Anglo American TV, a practice that was surprisingly culture-wide, FoxNews and MSNBC being equally likely to engage in it.

When delivering a monologue about the implications of a story, the reporter or anchor would say, “…and this begs the question:” and then ask an obvious question about the consequences of the news just reported. They could say “prompts the question,” “raises the question,” “makes us wonder,” etc. but suddenly “begs the question” became the sole term, as it has remained up to the present.

The reason this should concern us is that by redefining “beg the question” to mean “raise the question,” the thing to which “begging the question” used to refer is no longer linguistically accessible to us. There is no alternative term for the logical fallacy to which this term had referred for centuries prior to this act of linguistic sleight of hand.

And I do not think it is a coincidence that “begging the question” has become an increasingly common form of illogic in our public square since we have lost the ability to name it.

1421: Still a Really Bad Book
So, what did “begging the question” use to mean?

Let me offer an example that will meet an additional need I use this blog to meet sometimes: giving bad reviews to books and movies I have had a beef with for decades but never got around to denouncing before, in this case, the 2002 publication 1421: The Year China Discovered the World.

The author, Gavin Menzies, exemplifies a phenomenon common enough that members of my profession have recognized that it will always be with us: a highly successful, intelligent man retires from a long career for which he has received recognition and accolades and, upon retirement, decides that he is a fully qualified historian who does not need to learn anything about the historian’s craft, or the set of skills that were drilled into me during the ten years I spent receiving my three history degrees, culminating in a PhD.

I generally have no problem with amateur historians and am actually glad to be part of a profession where everyone does feel qualified to do my job, irrespective of their credentials. It’s a better class of problem than its alternative. Nevertheless, Menzies exemplifies one of the more odious characteristics of many amateur historians, especially highly confident male retirees who join up: he has all kinds of criticisms of the assumptions, practices and methodology of my profession, despite having absolutely no idea of what any of them are, nor having taken even a minute to investigate what they might actually be, in an evidence-driven way.

Having no idea about how professionals do historical research or analysis, except that they do it wrong, Menzies proceeded to base the analytical framework on a logical fallacy known, until ten years ago, as “begging the question.”

When someone begs the question, what they do is use their argument’s conclusion as its premise. Menzies traveled around the world to locations he had visited as a British naval officer and asked the question, “if we assume that the Chinese came here in a large treasure ship in 1421, can we find evidence supporting this hypothesis, provided we do not consider other possible explanations?” Menzies read extensively in the fields of history, archaeology and paleontology looking for evidence confirming his hypothesis and, lo and behold, found a bunch.

Because Menzies’ methodology was so brazen and irresponsible and inconsistent with other evidence, few academics even bothered to review his work but a handful did, not to specifically dispute his individual claims but to point out that his work was actually part of a literary subgenre they named “cult archeology,” a set of practices of evidentiary cherry-picking used by non-academic historians to hypothesize pre-1492 transoceanic voyaging by Eurasians, a genre that reached its crescendo in the Victorian era and early twentieth century, when there were a lot more books on Mu, Atlantis and Lemuria in mainstream bookstores.

Allow me to offer two examples of Menzies begging the question in 1421:

By making the 1421 global transoceanic voyage by Admiral Zheng He both the premise and conclusion of his book, Menzies “discovers” that the prehistoric mylodon did not die out 11,000 years ago during the Pleistocene extinctions but survived up to the sixteenth century. Why? Because Chinese sources reported that their mariners had encountered dog-headed men during the fifteenth century. Given that the mylodon’s original habitat was in a region of South America he believed Zheng visited, Menzies concluded that the mariners had mistaken this large, bipedal ground sloth for a dog-headed man.

Of course, if Menzies had not had this ready-made explanation and had he actually bothered familiarizing himself with pre-modern ethnographic and geographic literature, he could have easily found a less audacious explanation i.e. that encounters with dog-headed men had been a common trope in such literature since before Herodotus wrote about their presence in Central Asia. Indeed, dog-headed men were such an important intellectual fixture in Eurasian literature and thought from China to Great Britain that one of the most popular Catholic saints, Christopher, was understood to have been a dog-headed man, who lived for over two-hundred years before being executed for losing a debate to the Emperor Decius because he could only bark. The self-evident truth of the dog-headed men’s existence was used to address important philosophical questions about whether humans were subject to a single creation followed by a diffusion or whether the different peoples of the world were autocthonous.

Another example of Menzies begging the question was his handling of conquistador Bernal Diaz’ firsthand account of the conquest of Mexico in which he participated as one of Hernan Cortes’ men. Menzies makes much of Diaz’ description of an elite market in Tenochtitlan where he reports there are chickens for sale. How could chickens have got to the New World, Menzies asks, unless transported there by Zheng in 1421!? After all, there were no pre-Columbian chickens.

An author with an iota less of a commitment to cherry-picking could easily have generated an alternative explanation simply by reading and thinking about the rest of Diaz’ description of the market without a premise requiring confirmation. The description lists all kinds of other plants and animals unique to the Eastern Hemisphere whose meat, skins and feathers were available at the market… because Europeans had not learned the local names for these creatures nor made up new names, themselves. Consequently, jaguar pelts were identified as the pelts of African and Asian great cats; turkeys were called chickens; etc.

“Cultural Marxism:” A Pernicious Cherry-picking Project
Because we no longer have a term that refers to begging the question, now that “beg the question” means “ask the question,” people are getting away with a lot more question-begging in the public square because we can no longer precisely name their act of logical sleight of hand. One such movement is one to which I have found myself uncomfortably proximate in recent years: the critics of Wokeness who blame a force they call “cultural Marxism.”

James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, among the most prominent propounders of this theory are, like Menzies, accomplished professionals and thinkers who have been successful researchers and analysts in disciplines I couldn’t just take up now that I’ve retired from the historical profession. I couldn’t assemble a clinical psychology trial like Peterson, nor could I even read, never mind evaluate the system of symbols Lindsay used in his work as a mathematician.

By the same token, I am not calling these men charlatans, exactly. But as a person whose PhD and peer-reviewed publications are all about how one tracks the history of ideas and figures out where they have come from forensically, their lack of interest in the actual methodology of intellectual history strikes me as, if not dishonest, at least irresponsible.

Since the formation of the Tubingen Institute for the historical study of the Bible in the 1840s, scholars have worked for generations to develop a set of principles for figuring out what prior texts were most influential on a later text and how that influence was exerted, and how to determine the facticity of historical events texts claim to chronicle. The “principle of inconvenience,” e.g. why we think the Jesus movement split off from the John the Baptist movement, the principle of “multiple independent attestation,” etc. have formed a robust set of practices for doing the kind of work Lindsay and Peterson purport to be doing when they pronounce authoritatively on the origins of Woke doctrines.

But really, they are begging the question.

They have already decided that the works of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci and a particular faction of Marxist interpreters known as the Frankfurt School are the authors of every distinctive, pernicious Woke doctrine. And, by cherry-picking from these texts, and massaging the meaning of excerpts they are absolutely able to find every single problematic Woke doctrine within this corpus. So, they declare, “there is the culprit!” without, of course, looking for other possible origins and influences and without ascertaining how influential, widely read or agreed-with the texts they cite actually were. Nor is any real investigation made of the methods of transmission, diffusion and popularization of these ideas. One does not have to worry about such things when your conclusion is also your premise.

Alternative Explanations of Woke Manicheism, Starting with Mani
Obviously, having now hurled the grenade, it is incumbent upon me to offer at least one example. Lindsay and company argue that the Woke idea that the world is divided between two groups engaged in a Manichean struggle between light and dark, good and evil, one in which it is foreknown that “the oppressed,” i.e. the good guys who are currently losing, will ultimately and axiomatically triumph over the oppressors comes from the Marxist idea of class struggle.

Our first clue as to the outrageousness of this claim should come from the word “Manichean.” This worldview was popularized from North Africa to Central Asia to Western Europe by a guy called Mani in the third century CE. His religion, named after him, was called Manicheism. Like contemporary Wokeness, it included basically three kinds of people: the Sons of Light, the Sons of Darkness and a subset of the Sons of Light, interpreters of the cosmology and those fully aware of the structure of the universe, known as “the Hearers,” in a system nearly identical to the Woke worldview that divides the world into the oppressed and the oppressors. The term “Woke” was coined by Wokes to describe themselves as the modern equivalent of Mani’s Hearers.

Manicheism has all but died out but many worldviews resemble it. Indeed, Christianity, especially Calvinist branches of Christianity have a very similar formulation and also see the world as being divided into the same structure and the same teleological history in which the world is currently in the hands of the iniquitous who will be overthrown by the good when Jesus comes back.

Even before Manicheism, worldviews like this were known. Persian Magianism gave rise to Zoroastrianism, which is considered to have been the main influence on Mani in fashioning his own religious system. And this kind of thinking strongly conditioned new religious movements and heresies, up to the present day, from Cathars to Westboro Baptists. And of course we find not just a Manichean worldview but a “hearer”-type tradition within Sufism, the elite Muslim mystical tradition that sat atop the Ottoman Empire from 1299-1922.

In fact it seems not merely audacious but breathtakingly selective to attribute the binarism of Wokeness to an ideology that has only existed since 1848, given that these ideas have structured several major world religions for millennia.

French Algeria and the Kingdom of War
So, let me offer an alternative explanation not just for the generalities of Woke binaries but for its specificities and peculiarities, many of which do not actually fit with Marxian ideas of binary social conflicts.

A major influence on Wokeness, Lindsay acknowledges, was French continental philosophy from the 1950s through 80s in the areas of postcolonial theory, poststructuralism and queer theory. A major early influence in this set of intertwined intellectual movements were veterans of the Algerian War of Independence, in which communists and liberals opposed to the Algerian colonial project made common cause and forged new political alliances with conservative Muslims who also desired an end to the colonial project. France had ruled Algeria since seizing it from the Ottoman Empire in 1840 and sent hundreds of thousands of French settlers to colonize it.

Jacques Derrida, the father of postmodernism and the practice of deconstruction was likely one such Franco-Algerian who supported the uprising, as was Albert Camus, the great existentialist writer. Frantz Fanon, father of postcolonial theory, moved from the French colony of Martinique to aid the rebels in Algeria as part of a larger project of decolonizing the French Empire.

Perhaps, then, before looking to the Frankfurt School, we might ask what the war that dominated the French public square, news media and politics from 1954-62 as the major poststructuralists came of age, might have contributed to their thinking.

I would like to suggest that far more than Marxian class struggle, the Zoroastrian struggle against darkness or Christian eschatology, the thing the Woke binary most closely resembles is the core of militant Islamic political theory: the idea of the Kingdom of Peace versus the Kingdom of War.

The idea on which the medieval caliphates were based was that since Mohammed, the world has been divided into two communities: the Kingdom of Peace, the places where Muslims control the government and the Kingdom of War, the places where Muslims do not control the government. The cause of all war, in this formulation, is the continued existence of the Kingdom of War, the places that insist on not being governed by Muslims. All the violence people experience when they reside in the Kingdom of War is not caused by acts of military or criminal aggression whether it emanates from individuals or collectives, from other states in the Kingdom of War or from the Kingdom of Peace is axiomatic to the Kingdom itself. People experience war and violence in the Kingdom of War not because of specific aggressive and violent decisions or acts but because being a victim of violence is inherent to and axiomatic from residing therein.

Does this not sound a lot more like the Woke theory of violence, of oppression, of democracy, of submission than anything Fred or Karl cranked out in the nineteenth century? And unlike the Frankfurt School of Marxism, such an explanation comes with a ready-made story of diffusion and popularization.

As some of you know, this essay is just the first part of a major research project by Los Altos Institute to dismantle the theory of cultural Marxism and show it for what it is: begging the question.

Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Return to Oz: The Rise of the New Producerists

The Second Gilded Age
It is almost impossible to over-state the similarities between the First Gilded Age (the 1880s through 1920s) and the current one, so-named by US historian Thomas Sugrue (1991-present). By the 1920s, the wealth gap between rich and poor was the largest in human history. More women were in work outside the home than ever before. The continued growth of the economy was predicated ballooning consumer debt and stock market speculation.

Cross-dressing was really trendy and progressives were very excited about voluntary, incentive-based eugenics, whereby governments and civil society organizations encouraged homosexuals, the mentally ill and indigenous people to get themselves sterilized. And there was a massive public controversy over whether women should have their own sex-segregated competitive sports.

Authoritarian movements of both the left and right were on the rise while the sheen seemed to have come off good old fashioned democracy. And working people were paying for nearly everything on instalment plans that never seemed to end. But they appeared unable to bridge racial, sectional and rural-urban divisions to form a viable political coalition to reverse their immiseration.

Of course, that was the terminal phase of the First Gilded Age. And, of course, history does not repeat. It only rhymes. But you must admit, this seems a pretty catchy rhyme, as history rhymes go.

Free Soilers, the First Producerists and the Wizard of Oz
And yet, there is one area of comparison, one set of obvious parallels that commentators comparing First Gilded Age to the second seem to avoid: the Producerist movements. It is strange how the producerists have been excised from our social memory and political history, despite them having had a huge political impact which left many traces, chief among which is the Wizard of Oz, originally written not as a children’s pulp novel (this genre was just in the process of being born) but as a political satire of the 1896 US presidential election.

Dorothy, the novel’s main character, begins her story in Kansas, the crucible of American producerism. Kansas, a state founded on a prior movement with similar grievances and a similar constituency, the Free Soil movement, was a natural seedbed. Free Soilers were yeoman farmers of staple goods, especially maize. Despite working hard on their family farms every year and churning out a lot of food for the rest of America, it seemed that they could never get ahead. The costs of getting their food to market, via sternwheelers, canals and railways often left little money in their pockets.

Meanwhile, Down South, it seemed that the rich slave-holding land-owners, despite being soft-palmed and idle, were making money hand over fist. So, Free Soilers, like Abraham Lincoln, argued that the economy was being skewed by railway companies, milling concerns and other corporations, in cahoots with Washington’s political elites. This force they called “slave power” and they primary interest in bringing down slavery was not humanitarian concern for the slaves but the desire to alleviate the poverty in their own communities.

And yet, following the abolition of slavery, matters only seemed to get worse. None of the money Ulysses Grant’s administration handed the railway companies ever seemed to trickle down to the farmers and reduce the costs of shipping their products to market. Indeed, the railway boom drove canal and river boat companies out of business in many cases and consolidated railways into an increasingly small group of ever-larger corporations.

So, some of the farmers who remained unhappy with their lot began to embark on new political analyses and new political projects. They broadened their optic and began to see that it had not been the planter class but rather the whole national business elite: rail, finance, shipping, manufacturing that were against them. As in the Second Gilded Age, the First Gilded Age was characterized by rapid horizontal (i.e. firms doing the same kind of business merging) and vertical (i.e. firms that fed into each other’s supply chains e.g. iron, coal and auto manufacturing) integration. Business in the US was rapidly consolidating, merging into things called “rings,” “trusts” and “combinations.”

The little guy was being squeezed out, a feeling that intensified as new agricultural industries, like the sugar beet sector, began snapping up the land of economically marginal independent farmers and consolidating land into plantation-like operations, worked, in the southwest, by Hispanic debt peons and in the southeast by black sharecroppers. The banks clearly colluded in this process and then rail companies built special spur lines to these new latifundia.

The first political response was the Greenback Party, which ran candidates in the three presidential elections of the 1880s on a platform of breaking the power of the banks through something we today call “cryptocurrency.” The thinking was that the power of the vast conglomerates and the growing financial sector could be broken through the issuance of a new currency that was not pegged to gold.

The Greenbackers soon began electing members to the US House of Representatives and local town councilors, not just in farming communities but in the new single-industry mining towns that were popping up all over the West. The incipient industrial union movement in organizations like the Knights of Labour began drawing close to this coalition in the mill and mining towns of the West opened by massive rail development, and fueled by commodity rushes and booms like the Dakota gold rushes.

Like the farmers, the miners, loggers and mill workers of the West saw themselves as the true creators of America’s wealth, those whose hands transformed the country’s natural capital into the things that materially sustained its people. And they too lived at the whim of instalment plans, catalogue store monopolies, banks and railways, eking out a meagre existence while the wealth generated by their toil somehow vanished.

The Greenbackers and their successor party, the Populists, were not anti-capitalist. Rather, they believed that capitalism was being sabotaged by powerful business and government elites that colluded to rig the system against hard-working producers. In the 1892 presidential election, the Populists won Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota and Colorado but their biggest haul of electoral votes came from Kansas, pulling in 9% of the popular vote. The party also elected eleven members to the House of Representatives.

Major civic organizations backed the party, the Grange, a federation of farmers’ cooperatives and the Knights of Labour, a Christian proto-trade union that, like the Grange, was more interested in restoring the spirit of Adam Smith’s capitalism than upending it.

Yet for all the deregulation of the financial sector and trust busting producerists called for, the movement, from its inception, also pushed for socialization of the railways, the electrical grid and the education system, not out of an incipient or nascent socialism but because populists saw these things as necessary foundations for a level playing field in the marketplace.

The Road to the Emerald City
What the Populists could not do, it seemed, was break out of their core geographic region. After four elections, their party had been unable to make a dent in the political duopoly that dominated the East Coast and Midwest. Despite the Populists having moderated their policy from pure crypto currency to a position called “bimetallism,” which proposed to peg the dollar to both gold and silver, and despite there being widespread support in all regions of the country and within both major parties for bimetallism, the leaders of both major parties resolutely backed the gold standard, a position that had become synonymous with the elite policy consensus of the duopoly on a host of issues.

Naturally, then, as Dorothy arrives in Oz, concurrently afflicted by the wicked witches variously representing natural disasters and economic downturns, she realizes that her only hope is to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, Baum’s allegory of the gold-paved path to Washington.

En route, Dorothy gains the support of the Scarecrow, the personification of the Populist Party’s base, the maize farmers of the Great Plains, big-hearted but lacking in political savvy. While she personally wins over the Tin Man, who represents the industrial working class of the Northeast, he is never convinced of the project of the Scarecrow, or the Cowardly Lion, the representation of William Jennings Bryan’s insurgent entryist politics, about whose ultimate failure the Wizard of Oz was written.

Entryism Then and Now
Disappointed by inability of the Populist Party to crack 10% or break out of its core region, some producerists had begun to favour political entryism as a strategy after the disappointment of 1892.

Entryism is a political strategy we tend to associate with twentieth- and twenty-first century Marxists. The idea is that a radical group slowly, stealthily joins a more mainstream organization and gradually accumulates influence therein before fully uncloaking as a group conducting a take-over for the purpose of radically realigning the organization. Most recently, Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in the British Labour Party were accused of being a coalition of far-left anti-Semitic extremists organized by the group Momentum, who had stealthily joined the party to radically change its trajectory. Similar accusations were leveled at the Dogwood Initiative and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in their effort to realign the BC New Democratic Party’s fossil fuel policies through the insurgent leadership campaign of Anjali Appadurai.

Irrespective of the veracity of the specific accusations in the present, entryism is something we today associate with educated, urban environmentalists and socialists but, arguably, the most successful act of political entryism in the Anglosphere was Bryan’s seizure of the Democratic Party.

Bryan and the populists traveled to Chicago without his candidacy having been declared, riding a wave of general dissatisfaction with the pro-establishment, conservative policies of their incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, a strong supporter of the gold standard. With Cleveland’s potential successors trying to sort out just how much of their party’s legacy to wear and how much to repudiate, the entryists staged a floor vote on bimetallism which they won handily and which gave Bryan the opportunity to deliver one of the most famous pieces of American political oratory, the “Cross of Gold” speech, which he compared America’s farmers and labourers to Christ himself, arguing that they were being crucified by the banks and big business on a “Cross of Gold.”

And he won the presidential nomination on its strength, only having declared his candidacy moments before.

Bryan began the transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of the working man and the small holder with his presidential runs in 1896 and 1900 but his campaigns received a fraction of the financial support Cleveland’s did, as the banks and major industries had no use for a candidate that repeatedly denounced them, often by name. At one point, Bryan even named JP Morgan in a Democratic Party convention resolution, proposing the expulsion of any Democratic who took money from him or any of the nation’s other influential plutocrats.

Bryan did not just campaign to break the power of the banks and major industries; he also opposed American imperialism, Baum’s decision to represent him as the Cowardly Lion coming from the media attacks he sustained for joining Mark Twain and other early peace movement figures in opposing America’s invasion of the Philippines.

Bryan’s movement, which continued to hold significant sway in the Democratic Party, ultimately helped to shape the New Deal of the 1930s, was not informed by Marxism or any other explicitly socialist ideology. Rather it comprised rural labourers and farmers who believed the only way to get a square deal under capitalism was to bridle the power of big business.

Producerism in Canada
While Canada’s more conservative political culture enabled producerists to enjoy a comfortable home in the Liberal Party, the perpetual opposition in nineteenth-century Canada, this began to change with the election of the Wilfrid Laurier government, which began the party’s century-long project of alienating its original rural Western base. Following Laurier’s fall and the upheavals caused by the First World War and botched demobilization programs, there was a rapid radicalization of the Canadian producerists, which yielded dramatic post-war political changes.

Out of nowhere, it seemed, the United Farmers of Alberta swept the province’s farming communities and formed a majority government in 1921. Meanwhile, the province’s slow-growing Labour Party had split into pro- and anti-Marxist factions. The anti-Marxist faction won seats in Edmonton and entered the legislature as allies of the United Farmers, based on a shared producerist ethos, one that sought to bridle the greed of the banks, the railways and the subsidized manufacturing interests of Central Canada. The Farmer-Labour alliance remained in power for the next fourteen years.

The same year, at the national level, a producerist party, calling itself the Progressives, swept the West, from Vancouver Island to James Bay in the 1921 federal election, consigning the Conservative Party to third place and holding the Liberal Party to a minority. Allied with this mix of labourers and farmers was a more radical group, the Independent Labour Party, led by a key figure in the Winnipeg General Strike, JS Woodsworth.

Without strong leadership or a coherent program, Canada’s producerist parties gradually declined, primarily because they had thought little about reasonable policy prescriptions that could actually restructure the economy along the lines of the supporters’ class interests. And so, after forming a single provincial government in Ontario, the party was slowly reabsorbed into the Liberals and Conservatives.

Western Producerism and the Rise of the CCF
In the West, however, the decline of the producerists was more complex. The more urban, secular and socialistic labour factions of the parties and the more religious, rural and free market factions increasingly drifted apart, giving birth, in the 1930s, to the two regional political parties that dominated Canada’s three Western provinces: the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and Social Credit.

It must be understood, then, that while socialists like JS Woodsworth, Tommy Douglas and Major Coldwell were highly effective in recruiting not just labourers but farmers to the CCF, the party’s rank and file members and most of its elected representatives were not bespectacled readers of Marx and Engels but farmers and workers animated by the producerist ethos, the idea that industries like banking, electricity and rail should be socialized so that individual workers and farmer could get a fair shake financing their family businesses, keeping the lights on and getting the products of their hard labour to market.

That is why, when Canada elected its first CCF government in Saskatchewan, this was only possible because Saskatchewan was the least urban province in Canada, allowing Douglas and his producerist coalition to be swept into office, despite losing the province’s two main cities.

It is also useful to remember that during his seventeen years as premier, Douglas never introduced Medicare. The universal social programs his government delivered were a universally accessible electrical grid and highway system. It would be his successor, Woodrow Lloyd, who would fall on his sword over Medicare in 1961.

Today’s Producerists
Well, folks, it’s 2024 and the producerists are back. Farmers, truckers and rural industrial workers, the core of the original producerist coalitions of the US and Canada have returned, not just in Canada but throughout Europe. Big rigs and tractors are blocking highways from Berlin to Nanaimo, raising a host of grievances shared by the classes that raise our food, drill our oil, mine our coal, deliver our goods, etc. I do not agree with all of the demands of today’s producerists, nor is their coalition any more coherent or cohesive than the first producerist coalitions were.

But it is they, not the laptop class of soft-palmed urbanites looking down on them who are organizing the big anti-government rallies and anti-war demonstrations. They are the ones denouncing the big banks, the legacy media, the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industry.

Just like the producerists who won the 1944 Saskatchewan election, the 1919 Ontario election and the 1921 Alberta election, they are being demonized, smeared and belittled as hicks and hayseeds, sources of ignorance, pestilence and disorder, in many cases by the successors to the very party they founded in Calgary in 1931, the CCF. They’re even being smeared with an accusation that was already tired in 1944, that they are dupes and stooges of a foreign strongman in Moscow and not just ordinary, decent people who want a fair shake out of this economy, however unrealistic that dream might be.

But maybe that message is starting to get through now that we see their demonization grow ever more extravagant, as terrorists, Klansmen and Nazis. Anything, I guess, to distract us from the man behind the curtain.

Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Jackie Robinson, Barry Goldwater and the Geomagnetic Reversal

Since the Earth first formed, its magnetic field has re-polarized several times. The North Pole has become the South Pole and vice versa. Sometimes these transitions have taken as long as ten thousand years; some have taken place in less than a hundred. All of these transitions, by the standard of geologic time, have taken place in the blink of God’s eye. Suddenly, south is north and all the molecules start realigning based on the new magnetic field structuring the matter and energy of the earth’s systems.

I want to suggest that, since the emergence of what is called the Second Party System, this is essentially how American politics functions, that it does, in human time, what the earth does in geological time: re-polarizes. US politics and its coalitions are highly dynamic, as dynamic as any in the world. But, especially since the introduction of the Primary System in the 1920s, this political dynamism has been coupled with a bipolar system. And even before the 1920s, for the previous century and a half, the emergence of a new party always led to the collapse of an old one.

This combination of a locked-in two-party dynamic with a highly dynamic politics constantly making and unmaking big, unwieldy coalitions means that, unless legally restructured from the bottom up, the United States is fated to undergo a series of magnetic reversals. And it is my view that we are at the crescendo of such a reversal today.

Furthermore, the way that news media have changed throughout the Anglosphere white settler states, the repercussions of this realignment, globally, are even greater than during the Cold War.

For those less acquainted with US history than I, let me take a moment to describe some other re-polarizations. Beginning in 1932 and culminating in 1960, the Democratic Party went from being the party of white supremacy, backed by the Solid South, running on a national platform of segregation and the maintenance of Jim Crow disenfranchisement laws to becoming the party of black America, steadily losing white majority segregationist states from 1944 until 1980 when not a single state in Dixie backed them.

Intimately related to this process, the Republican Party began actively courting southern segregationists in 1960, running against the Civil Rights Act in the 1964 election under Barry Goldwater, with the assistance of floor-crossing segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, and adopting Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968, to actively solicit the votes of white supremacists.

In the 1970s, under the leadership of Gerald Ford, the Republican Party became, explicitly the party of neoliberalism, moving its progressive wing, which had long favoured greater state regulation of business, since the Teddy Roosevelt presidency, to the periphery. Free marketers eclipsed old school right-progressives and politicians changed their stripes accordingly, with long-time progressives like George H W Bush becoming evangelists of neoliberalism.

From 1932 until 1992, the Democrats had been the party of the New Deal, the Welfare State, having previously been the party of deregulation in the nineteenth century. But in 1992, they shouldered past the Republicans on their right and from 1994-2000 enacted an aggressive program of deregulation, free trade and social program cuts. Having previously been the party of Catholics, Blacks, Latinos and the white working class, the four most socially conservative groups in the country, the post-Clinton Democrats coupled their newfound love of free markets with a muscular social liberalism, focusing on aggressive secularization and hot button social issues like gay marriage.

Consequently, Republicans became aggressive in playing to Catholics and the white working class (even in the early twenty-first century, they feared actively recruiting racialized constituencies while trying to keep the last of the segregationist southerners on board.) First, they focused exclusively on social issues, abortion, gay marriage, the coerced secularization of private business, etc.

But with the ascent of Donald Trump, advised by Steve Bannon, this appeal to working class Americans of all stripes broadened. And, for the first time since the Clinton Administration ratified it, Americans were given the chance to vote against NAFTA in 2016, a hated agreement that had ravaged so many industrial towns, tearing the fabric out of communities and leaving industrial town after industrial town looking like a Bruce Springsteen song.

This brought more dividends than even imagined, for the GOP, in the form of working class voters of all racial backgrounds. Despite the largely cosmetic changes to NAFTA, working class voters continue to pour into the Republican Party.

Of course, everyone who has a progressive between 1992 and the present knows the Democrats’ counter-move: to vigorously, assiduously recruit upper-income, educated white suburbanites who have traditionally voted Republican but are disgusted not so much by the party’s policies but by its adoption of the most boorish, proletarian cultural affectations. Correcting the spelling of working class people and sneering at their belief that they could do research or form political opinions on their own became a staple of the party that had once propounded its core doctrine as the common sense and decency of the working class.

This is starting to generate its own set of problems for the GOP: in primarily white regions of the country, they are now at a disadvantage in special elections and other low-turnout contests, because the voter suppression laws could not name a colour and could only suppress people’s votes based on class. So, because Democrats are now richer and better-educated than Republicans in growing swaths of the country, the very laws Republicans enacted in the twentieth century to suppress Democratic voting is now suppressing their own vote, as they grow increasingly dependent on the white working class.

And, how long before, mere lip service to respecting working class people turns into policies that could materially benefit them at the expense of the Mitch McConnells of the world?

Curiously, possibly because of its incredibly incompetent and maladroit style from top to bottom, the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign actually told us poignant and ironic story about this, a powerful piece of American history when they aggressively popularized video footage of Jackie Robinson and his cadre showing up at the 1964 Republican convention to denounce the nomination of Goldwater and the recruitment of Thurmond.

Robinson, one of the most important media surrogates for liberal, respectable black Americans, was an American icon, the much-beloved baseball player, the first black person to play on a major league team. Throughout the 1950s, he had been an active member of the GOP, “the party of Lincoln,” when American blacks were leaning Democratic but split between the main parties. He exerted an important influence on the Eisenhower regime in its reaction to Brown v. Board of Education and in the passage of the first national Civil Rights Act in 1957.

Robinson passionately expressed his absolute incredulity that the party that had freed the slaves would back an avowed segregationist for senate and an opponent of the Civil Rights Act for the presidency.

The Clinton campaign showed us this video as part of their sheepdog operation of snapping up that last handful of GOP-voting white, upper middle class, educated suburban liberals in the outskirts of Detroit, Philadelphia and Raleigh, an operation that was, even then, producing diminishing returns.

Looking back, in hindsight, as a reluctant Clinton supporter at the time, I now see how the video actually illustrates the opposite of what she hoped it would. Rather than focusing on equivalencies they wished us to draw between Goldwater and Trump, I am focusing on Robinson, a man living in the past, a man unable to accept the realignment he had been living through since 1932. To him, the Republican Party was not a dynamic, ever-changing force but something of a fixed essence that transcended the ravages of time.

The problem was not that the Republicans had changed but that Robinson had not. He was at the wrong convention. He should have been down the road at the Democratic convention, shepherding the floor vote on the Voting Rights Act and defusing the conflict between the two Mississippi convention delegations.

Unfortunately, since the Jon Stewart-ization of progressive news in the Anglosphere, this distinctively American polarity is now culturally if not politically enveloping society in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The political obsessions of Canadian progressives are those Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Trevor Noah tell them to have. They are worried about militarized police forces, abortion laws, gun control and host of other issues, where the US and Canada are in very different situations with respect to our problems, our laws and the possible solutions. Unconcerned about the Trudeau government’s massive expansion of guest worker programs, they whitter on about needing to support illegal immigrants to the US. Unconcerned about the fake college shakedown we are running on the children of the global middle class, indebting families for generations, they are focused on American student loan forgiveness.

For this reason, the American realignment has come to Canada, not because of structural features of Canada but because of the cultural politics of the post-political Anglosphere.

You see, Canadian progressives, you are actually Jackie Robinson, people living in a nostalgic past to justify membership in parties that have long since abandoned the working class.

Canadian Politics Race US Politics | fusangite |

Colonized By Wankers: the Unique Vulnerability of the Anglosphere to Progressive Authoritarianism

In my last essay, I had some words to say about why Canada was uniquely susceptible to becoming one of the world’s pre-eminent Wokeistans. Because it was near the end of a 3500-word behemoth of an essay, rather than making you find it in the original text, I shall just begin by reposting it here:

In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.

Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.

Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.

This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.

Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionistic self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.

Many found this section to be the most engaging part of the essay because it helped to account for what Canadians are experiencing as a unique vulnerability to the most bizarre forms of Woke social and political behaviour and the lack of any apparent cultural or institutional capacity to resist them. But I cannot let this story of Canada’s incomplete or superficial secularization stand as a sufficient, or even primary, explanation of the state of my country.

For one thing it does not account for the fact that Canada is not one nation sticking out within the Global North put part of a particular set of places that exhibit near-identical vulnerabilities to and comorbidities with the key themes and obsessions of Wokeness such as a celebration of censorship, placing certain groups of perceived villains (e.g. “TERFS, Zionist Jews, etc.) outside the social contract and state violence monopoly, essentialization and fetishization of race, combined with a theory of sex and sexuality primarily premised on some combination of the Emperor’s New Clothes and the Mister Potato-Head Fallacy.

If one thinks of Wokeness like Dante’s circles of Hell, Canada is not the only member of the outer circle. Out here with us are Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; the next most dramatically Woke places are Wales and Scotland and it is only then that places outside the Anglosphere enter the running, with Norway, Germany, Mexico and Brazil. Yet, although first target and most heavily invested-in in the progressive authoritarian project, the United States and England have, after many early capitulations are looked-to, the world over, as places where social movements, from feminists to Muslims to conservative Christians, are offering some of the strongest, most courageous grassroots pushbacks against Wokeness.

Clearly, there is some relationship between Wokeness and the Anglosphere but one that is complex and must be thoroughly understood because, understanding the variegated susceptibility of English-speakers to Wokeness, can reveal important things to us about progressive authoritarian identitarianism.

Now, to past! In Richard Bushman’s most underappreciated book, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, the grand old man of American history reminds us that hijacking revolutions is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. Indeed, it is in the nature of revolutions to inevitably be hijacked. That is because a revolution must assemble a substantial majority of the population to succeed; the vast majority of a population has to believe that rolling the dice on a revolution is more likely to improve their lot than not for one to happen.

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution originally included socialists, students, feminists, liberals and all kinds of people it would eventually turn on. Similarly, Lenin’s, Mao’s, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s, Robespierre’s, Castro’s and most other successful revolutions entailed the assembly of a vast and variegated groups of constituencies with conflicting interests but who found the destruction of the regime to be a shared interest.

It should not surprise us, then, that the first modern revolution, Washington’s Revolution was just this sort of thing. Bushman exposes, in his study of war propaganda from the 1770s and 80s that people favouring the creation of an independent liberal republic in America were a small portion of revolutionaries who fought in the American Revolution but were over-represented in the military and political leadership largely thanks to George Washington’s personal sympathies with liberalism.

When the British Empire conducted a ruthless internal inquiry as to how they lost the Thirteen Colonies, not a thing every empire can do, and a significant cultural reason that British Empires have been global hegemons for the past 260 years, a quarter of a millennium, they engaged in a truth-seeking process more interested in imperial success than protecting decision-makers. Their conclusion: the reason they had lost America was that they had made the mistake of settling it with Englishmen.

The British Caribbean, full of Irish indentured servants and Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Québec, populated primarily with French Catholic colonists, had not joined the revolution because its master discourse was not a doctrine of republican liberal independence but the assertion of the Common Law right, granted all Englishmen, to rise up against and slay the king’s evil courtiers who have falsely counseled him into misgovernment.

In other words, most American revolutionaries were as bewildered as Iranians in 1980 and Russians in 1918. They had risen up, as loyal subjects of King George, to slay his evil counselors based on their rights as free Englishmen, propounded in every constitutional document from the Salic Law to Magna Carta.

So, the British Empire made an important decision: henceforth, no colony would be run by Englishmen; it would be run by a group the British had already colonized, a group already disentitled, and members of that group already comfortable in the role of stooge. That’s why Canadian British imperial pageantry is full of kilts, bagpipes and tartans… or at least it was until Justin Trudeau’s raceplay fetish got control of it and filled it with Vanishing Indians and settlers doing Aboface, with their drums and feathers.

So, the British Empire re-thought Ireland. The people to colonize Ireland were not the English but the Irish Scots, Scots who, for one reason or another, factual or not, believed that they were the true, pure Irish. Not a surprise in an era governed by the discourse of fictive etymology to re-describe the Irish colonial project not as Englishmen civilizing the Irish but as the Ulster Protestant Scotsmen returning to their homeland and reclaiming it.

Have you ever wondered why Indian accents sound so similar, whether the native speaker speaks an Indo-European/Aryan language from the North or a Dravidian/Tamil language from the South, like Malayalam? There is a reason for that: the thing that unites Indian accents from Kerala to Punjab is the “Welsh lilt.” Because the Welsh, like the Scots, people conquered by the English, were disproportionately sent to India.

In this way, every post-1787 white settler state in the Anglosphere (New Zealand, Canada, Australia) was colonized by an already-colonized people, as was Ireland, the original template for the project. The US, Scotland and Wales were merely, as so brilliantly expressed in Trainspotting, merely colonized by the English, who are wankers. But what happens when those colonized by wankers colonize others?

I would suggest that our deep colonial consciousness causes a constitutionally supine nature to enter a populace that has never even met its oppressor but instead only encounters, as authority figures, members of peoples also conquered by its oppressor. This also helps to explain the cases of Mexico and Brazil. Brazil, it must be remembered: produced the greatest black slave-hunters in the world, escaped and manumitted African slaves in Brazil who still had enough cultural knowledge to sail back to Africa and enslave African war captives in the Sertão around Luanda (the first place to legally define whiteness as—the possession of shoes).

This supine nature suffuses the cultures of the outer Anglosphere. It is no coincidence that the strong leaders of Canada’s twentieth century were overwhelmingly from outside Anglo culture, Laurier, St. Laurent, Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien all grew in French-majority communities that threw off the culture of stoogery during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, to declare that Quebecois were “masters in our own house.”

Anglo Canada, Australia and New Zealand, furthermore, are all places designed to toady to whoever the hegemon is. The position of stooge transcends one specific empire. Once the British Empire entered terminal decline, all three rapidly realigned their politics to serve the interests of the United States over the interests of Britain. And it is no coincidence that, since the Chinese Empire has regained its belligerent swagger under Xi Jinping, each of these countries has had a major Chinese political interference scandal, in which their national governments were beginning to hedge their bets, and, not knowing whether to kowtow to Washington or Beijing, began doing both.

Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand are proceeding in lock step to return to their colonial past, transferring power from democratic institutions to technocrats within government or within the regulated oligopolies with which their governments are fusing. All three are increasingly in love with censorship, gun control and the transfer of parental rights to the state. Unlike Westminster, parliamentarians have discarded all pretense of representing their constituents to the government and now brazenly represent the government to their constituents, always voting with the party whip and belittling local voters who demand better as victims of “Russian disinformation” or bigots.

And it is not so much that these countries are becoming newly authoritarian. It is that their essential nature, carefully baked-in by the nineteenth-century British Empire is coming to fore. This is how they are designed to respond to stress, uncertainty and threat; they are returning to their roots, rediscovering their inner toady and petty enforcer. What was mistaken as cultural conservatism in these countries a hundred ago is being mistaken as a kind of illiberal cultural liberalism today. But the reality is that these things are both simply expressions of fundamental weakness, a desire to conform, a desperation for approval from whoever appears to hold the hammer, a nature intentionally built into these societies from their founding.

Progressive Canadians and New Zealanders, especially, are playing up their white guilt colonizer myths to histrionic proportions. There are many reasons for this, which I have been exploring on this blog for more than five years. But let us not discount what this myth is being used to obscure: that Canadians and New Zealanders were never the big, tough, warlike colonizers we have made our ancestors out to be. Part of the core of the myth of intentional genocide is a myth of our colonial ancestors possessing a strength and a ruthlessness they never did. We love to compare ourselves to Israel these days because part of us wishes our nation had been forged by truly great men, by powerful, ruthless, proud figures like David Ben Gurion and not a bunch of colonial administrators and mediocre lawyers at a genteel booze-up in Charlottetown.           

To turn things around the people of the Outer Anglosphere must finally find their courage. At its core the crisis we face is not an information problem; it is not an ideological problem; it is not a public opinion problem; it goes much deeper. It is a problem of courage.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Identity | fusangite |

The Self-Harming Elect and the West’s Long-term Problem with the Athletes of God

This essay is a “big think” essay that makes a multi-part argument. If you have a background in metaphysics or religious history, you can probably skip more than half of it and just read later sections but it is present in its long form so that readers without any such background can trace my arguments about why social movements celebrating self-harm and led by self-harming people constitute the threat that they do in our present moment.

If you don’t want to read a bunch of philosophical and religious background, either because you already know it or because you just don’t care that much, I urge you to move ahead to the section entitled “Canadian content.”

The Mind-Body Dichotomy in the West

One of the most significant problems the Church faced in Late Antiquity prior to and during its incorporation into the Roman imperial state was that of the Athletes of God. Philosophical and religious movements whose intellectual genealogy includes Plato and Platonist readings of other philosophers has a very real problem based on something that does not actually exist: the body-mind dichotomy.

Possibly due to some sort of mild autism, one of Plato’s most influential philosophical contributions was the idea that our material reality was an inferior and corrupted reality, a distorted shadow of what he called the “World of Forms.” God, the true creator, had created and inhabited a perfect, immaterial world composed of pure and perfect ideas. But unfortunately, creation had got all screwed-up by a being called the Demiurge, which had created the material world, as a mistake. The World of Forms, the immaterial world, was actually more real than the physical world.

Unfairness, stupidity and suffering were caused by this state of affairs, in which human beings were uniquely positioned because our bodies resided in the inferior, material reality but our intellects, our thoughts, existed in the world of forms. This generated a form of Greek junk science so popular that we see it influencing even the earliest Christian texts, the Pauline Epistles, the idea of immaterial “spirits.”

The Pharisees’ (of whom Paul had been a follower) knowledge of this popular Greek belief likely came from the Samaritans, who had used the idea of “hypostasis,” the fusion of a spirit and a body into a single being to explain their own messianic tradition of the God-man, a title claimed by Samaritan holy men like Simon Magus and Dositheus. But whereas this idea was likely originally used to cast Jesus in terms comprehensible to the Greeks to whom Paul was selling Christianity on commission, early in his ministry, he adapted the Platonic idea that being a union of spirit and flesh was actually the universal human experience.

But this did not mean that all people were equally spiritually gifted in the ad hoc cosmology Paul sold his converts in the third quarter of the first century. “Spiritual gifts” were unevenly distributed in the human population, with those most able to distinguish and separate mind and body being the most gifted. These gifts were also variegated depending on the nature of one’s spirit, making some healers and others, speakers in tongues. This framework was propounded in his first epistle to his Corinthian followers in direct response to political exigencies.

The letter, after all, was a response to inquiries from his flock about how to handle dissident members within and the Petrine faction of the Jesus movement, without. In an effort to maintain control of his flock, he explained that he could detach his spirit from his body and instantaneously send it to Corinth to surveil his followers and make sure that they remained loyal and followed his instructions. That is the origin of the expression Christianity has long sought to deliteralize when one asks the meaning of “I will be there in spirit.” At the foundation of Christian tradition, in what is likely the earliest book of the New Testament we have (circa 51 CE), is the idea that the most spiritually gifted among us are actually able to sever their spirits from their bodies at will.

This naturally intersected with pre-existing traditions of asceticism prevalent throughout the civilized world. Christianity by no means invented fasting and other ways of physically punishing the body to achieve some kind of greater union with the divine. Holy men might walk across hot embers, swear off food or water or draw their own blood both to seek and hold the attention of crowds and to achieve union with the divine. And it is in Buddhism, before Christ’s birth, that we see the first critiques of this behaviour and the rejection of asceticism in favour of “the middle way,” of limiting asceticism to prevent self-harm.

From Gnosticism to the Athletes of God

There is little question that Christianity’s unique fusion of the Platonic theory of the body-spirit dichotomy with universal and pre-existing traditions of asceticism amplified the dangers internal self-harm movements posed. The Gnostic movement within Christianity suffered persecution by the other sects for a variety of reasons, ranging from its magpie-like heterodoxy, to a predilection for creating pseudonymous scripture, to its rejection of institutional authority in favour of charismatic claims of special revealed knowledge. But we should not understate the importance of the fact that it most thoroughly rejected the material world in favour of the spiritual and the greater tendency on the part of its adherents to engage in acts of self-mutilation, starvation and other forms of self-harm.

As Christianity drew closer to the state in the third century, prior to Diocletian’s persecution which responded to this development with violence, Church Fathers were looking beyond the Gnostic heresy, one whose appeal was largely limited to the most urban, literate and intellectual adherents to a related phenomenon that had a true popular following and which implicitly contested the authority of the bishop-centred hierarchical institution they were building. That problem was the Athletes of God.

The Athletes of God were individuals considered to be more blessed with spiritual gifts than others and who displayed these gifts through public acts of spectacular self-deprivation or harm. An example sufficiently moderate to retain his recognition as a holy man, by the Church, was the hugely popular Saint Simeon Stylites of Aleppo, who lived atop a small platform atop a pillar for thirty-seven years. Simeon was a hugely popular figure who drew thousands of pilgrims as a popular saint, while still alive. In his day, many considered him a Church Father and co-founder of the Church, itself and small fortunes were made by Aleppo merchants selling his effluvia and counterfeits thereof to pilgrims.

Monasticism and the Leashing of the Athletes of God

But the exhibitionism, self-harm and disruption of institutional authority all led the Church to recognize a social movement that would either replace or contain the Saint Simeons of the future: the followers of Benedict of Nursia, a contemporary of Simeon. As I briefly mentioned in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, some Christian ascetics like Saint Anthony the Great had already begun separating themselves from society and becoming hermits or forming small collectives in ecologically marginal places with little permanent human habitation. Following in the larger Judean-Samaritan tradition that included groups like the Essenes, these communities were not unlike the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. They tended to feature a sole, almost always male, leader who propounded a set of specific teachings and established some form of hierarchical communitarian mini-society. These mini-societies tended to collapse with the death of the leader, such as the community led by Saint Anthony the Great who spent his life wrestling the Devil in the Egyptian desert.

Benedict, with the endorsement and assistance of the Church, transformed these phenomena in several key ways through his compilation and publication of the Benedictine Rule, a codified, standardized set of written instructions for how such communities should run without the necessity of a charismatic leader and with a built-in succession process for leadership. The Church’s adoption of the Benedictine Rule, which spawned the Benedictine Order, the first order of monks in Christianity, did a number of important things designed to make the likes of Saint Simeon the exception in Christian asceticism, primarily a relic of the past. Ascetics were increasingly evicted from the public square and sent to become part of monastic (first Benedictine and then other orders with approved rules, like the Dominicans) communities.

Like the Buddhist traditions before them, “reasonableness and moderation” were at the core of these communities’ practices. In addition to prohibiting extreme acts of self-harm and instead forcing regular meals, rests, etc. on the monks, Benedictine monasticism moderated the Athlete of God tradition in other important ways.

First, their status within the church and the status of individuals in the monasteries were not determined by something as volatile as personal charisma, flair, endurance or daring but instead by bureaucratic promotion processes that placed abbots within the ecclesiastical hierarchy but not at its top.

Second, acts of asceticism were out of public view. Whatever social currency or charisma might be gained from astounding stunts of self-harm was limited to an audience of other monks engaged in the same program. What happened at the monastery stayed at the monastery and this was not simply limited to sodomy but to any other weird antics the men there might be getting up to. Placed out of public view, many of the exhibitionistic payoffs associated with the Athlete of God tradition fell away.

Third, monasteries were supposed to be self-sufficient. This entailed breaking land and engaging in a lot of practical physical labour. Shoveling shit and digging ditches do not leave a lot of energy for protracted acts of exhibitionistic asceticism. If you starve yourself, you don’t have the energy to carry out the menial duties spelled-out for you in the Benedictine Rule. If you injure yourself, again, this may impinge on the basic duties that are required of your by your community. This meant that engaging in acts of self-harm too extreme actually compromised one’s status as a Christian ascetic.

What this effectively meant was that during the centuries of Catholic hegemony in the West, those prone to acts of exhibitionistic self-harm were institutionalized and required to sleep regularly, take regular meals and engage in forms of work designed to make their asceticism as ordinary and uncharismatic as possible.

The Albigensian Crusade and the Social Contagion of Self-Harm

Of course, this tradition stared-down many challenges. One of the most significant was the Cathar movement, a neo-Gnostic movement that went further even than Plato himself in declaring that God created our spirits, angels and the heavens but that the Demiurge was, in fact, Satan himself, and that the material world was intrinsically evil, a creation of the Enemy. Anorexia and other epidemics or self-harm and body hatred followed Cathar teachings as they spread through present-day France and Spain. Human sex and sexuality were also understood to be part of Lucifer’s curse, something of which we would be cured if administered the appropriate magical rituals at the time of death. The body was a prison, as was the earth itself.

By 1209, the movement had become sufficiently threatening that the Kingdom of France redirected many of their crusaders from the Middle East to the Cathar-controlled areas, hastening the demise of the last Crusader States, already suffering from the Fourth Crusade’s betrayal of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

There were many ironies to the Albigensian Crusade, the name commonly given to the Pope’s decision to declare those armies a formal crusade of equal weight to the various invasions of the Levant that had been undertaken under the same name and to formally affiliate the Holy Inquisition with it. Whatever brutality the Crusaders meted out in the Middle East paled in comparison to the savagery of the first “crusade” inside Catholic territory; far too popular among the Church’s strategies for preventing people dying by their own hand through starvation or flashier forms of suicide was to pre-emptively execute them.

But the urgency of the Crusade and the desperation of the Church in prosecuting it indicates that the prospect of facing whole armies of Athletes of God was something Rome thought could bring Christianity itself down, that self-harm contagions, leavened by Plato-influenced ideas of body-mind dualism, was an existential threat. Further evidence of this belief is evinced in the decision by the Spanish Kingdom of Aragon to pull many of its troops out of its protracted war with the Spanish Muslims, the Moops (couldn’t resist), and send them North to assist in the Crusade after France experienced some military setbacks.

But the lack of troops also proved a problem, making the Crusade dependent on local mobs more interested in settling scores and seizing the property of their neighbours than in enforcing any particular religious orthodoxy. But, again, the level of panic on the part of common people may also indicate not just a simple intolerance but a response to a harmful social contagion that might cause a friend or relative to suddenly begin engaging in acts of radical self-harm leading to premature death.

And people really were starving and mutilating themselves en masse, swept up in a religious enthusiasm that was shattering families, disrupting communities and shutting down economies.

And Now Some Canadian Content

Following the costly and brutally savage victory over the Cathars, the church became programmatically vigilant about self-harm movements, about the resurgence of the Athletes of God, not just because the “spiritually gifted” charismatic leaders of these movements were a competing locus of religious authority but because they appear to have had genuine humanitarian and theological concerns.

There is no reason to doubt that Catholic intellectuals, who comprised the overwhelming majority of thinking people in Europe for much of its history, did genuinely care about people’s physical and mental health. They constructed large, elaborate, hospital systems, ran medical schools and crafted “penitentials” which served as almanacs of suggested treatments for recurrent psychiatric problems in parishioners. Similarly, theologians appeared motivated by the genuine desire to see the natural world as a key piece of evidence of God’s existence, his grace and his love for his creation. The beauty and abundance of the natural world were clear, unambiguous evidence both of his power and his love.  

That is why the church was especially vigilant, as it expanded across the oceans, beginning in the fifteenth century, that it not permit anti-life, anti-creation or anti-body ideas enter it through the conversion process. As early as the fifth century, the Church had seen mission and conversion as a complex social process in which converts could only adopt new ideas and practices if they were allowed to bring some of their pre-existing beliefs and practices into the church with them. Indeed, the foundational document for missionaries was composed in the sixth century by Gregory the Great, who exhorted his missionaries not to build new churches but, instead, to gradually redecorate pagan temples so that converts’ habits of worship be disrupted as little as possible.

For this reason, after experiencing huge initial successes, the Jesuit mission to Japan was scaled-back and little opposition was offered to the Tokugawa Shogunate’s expulsion of missionaries and confinement of Christianity to Nagasaki. This was a direct result of reports from missionaries that Catholic traditions of martyrdom and imitatio Christi (embodying Christ) were being too easily and frequently conflated with pre-existing traditions of ritual suicide. While being indifferent to suffering and death was noble and Christian, self-inflicted harm for religious purposes, especially exhibitionist self-harm, set off alarm bells. Missionaries began meting out punishments and withdrawing the Eucharist from enthusiastic Japanese self-harmers.

In colonial Canada, missionaries faced a similar challenge with Iroquois traditions of conversion-by-torture, a tradition that was amplified by the “mourning wars,” whereby the Iroquois Confederacy and other Iroquoian military powers, such as the Huron Confederacy, were increasingly motivated to absorb members of adjacent ethnic groups to replace population lost through the Virgin Soil epidemics of European disease. War captives were tortured until, according to Iroquoian cosmology, their spirit left their body and the spirit of a dead comrade entered and replaced it. Thereafter, the war captive took on the name, job and, often, family position of the deceased person whose spirit had entered their body.

Consequently, endurance of torture and the stigmata left behind had a double meaning in Iroquoian society: the marks of torture on the body of a stranger might indicate that a miraculous event had taken place and that body was now actually the body of a beloved comrade, relative or friend; or, the marks of torture on the body of an escaped or ransomed war captive might indicate that will was so strong that their spirit refused to leave their body despite excruciating pain and that they had remained true to their people under the worst duress.

The first indigenous Canadian, Kateri Tekakwitha, to become a Catholic Saint attained this status because she became involved in something that should seem eerily familiar to contemporary readers:

Like many young women in Iroquoian society, exhausted by continuous martial law, and political crisis, and enticed by Catholic promises of a quiet, peaceful life Kateri chose to leave her community and become part of a church-organized settlement where young, indigenous women could try out the ascetic life and see if they wanted to become nuns.

Kateri and the other girls soon became subject to what we today term a “social contagion,” whereby they entered into a concurrently solidaristic and competitive pact of egging each other on to engage in increasingly extreme acts of self-harm. Although she was initially an instigator of these practices among the girls, Kateri grew increasingly uncomfortable as they facilitated and participated in each other’s acts of physical mortification, doing increasingly severe injuries to themselves and others, in a syncretic crescendo of extreme acts that concurrently fulfilled both Iroquois traditions of public torture and Catholic ideas of imitation Christi.

Eventually, Kateri took it upon herself to exhort the other girls to stop and, when they persisted, she appealed to the clergy running the compound to shut down what had become a danger to both the bodies and souls of the girls. Despite her best efforts, Kateri was unable to convince most of the other girls to stay within the community, abandon their vicious cycle of self-harm and comply with the moderate asceticism inspired by the Benedict and the monastic tradition.

Today’s Athletes of God

In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.

Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.

Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.

This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.

Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionist self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.

Religion Without God

To understand why the grip of self-harm movements is so especially tight in English Canada, it is important to recall a salient feature of the Cathar worldview: that God was not god of the material world, that Satan was its god. Material creation was not just as mistake, as in original Gnosticism, but an evil, a wrong that merited correction.

It is only by depriving our worldview of the idea that the material order is good or divine but still using Christian cosmology and habits of thought to structure it, can we reach the conclusion that those who are most spiritually gifted are, naturally, those who are “born in the wrong body.” Of course it would be the spirits most at odds with their material being that would be greatest spirits in the world, to whom we should defer, morally and politically.

Those seeking escape from the material world through drugs, those seeking escape through surgery, those seeking escape by fusing with the machines through which they communicate are the most spiritually gifted. One can see this by the stigmata tattooed on their bodies in the form of scars, amputations and prostheses. The more at odds a body is with physical creation, the more that body commands authority in the bizarre religious revitalization movement that has seized control of my country.

Wokeness Is An American Space Religion

Today’s Athletes of God have not come out of nowhere. The incomplete and superficial secularization of Canada only explains our unique vulnerability to this sinister neo-Cathar movement. A series of religious movements have been refining the key ideas we see gripping progressive society today, a group of organizations and belief systems existing at the periphery of Christianity.

Mormonism, as propounded by Joseph Smith from 1830-44, first put forward the idea of a universe in which God was not the creator but simply an intelligent being who learned the rules of a godless pre-existing universe, enabling him to create planets and people them with ensouled beings. Smith gave us the idea that before our conception or birth, we were pre-existent immaterial spirit beings who possessed an inalterable gender before they attached to a body. The idea of us as spirit beings, imprisoned in an inferior reality, on a prison planet was then developed in Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam and elaborated in L Ron Hubbard’s scientology.

These beliefs have been powerfully synthesized into a religious revitalization movement of fanatics and enthusiasts whose subconscious motivation is to undo the flawed creation that is Lucifer’s material world.

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

No More “Climate Justice!” It’s Time to Share the Losses

Back in 1988, very few people in the activist world were working on the climate crisis or, as we called it back then, the Greenhouse Effect. But I had the good fortune to encounter a group of political visionaries who were working hard, not just to touch the conscience of government but to do something that was even harder back then: convince mainstream environmental groups and their leaders that climate would be the defining environmental issue of our age.

Chief among these individuals was David Lewis, my political mentor, the firewood collector, giant and car repairman, not the retired NDP leader. With the publication of Our Common Future by the United Nations, the results of a two-year commission conducted by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the profile of global environmental issues, ozone depletion, migration, chemical drift and climate, temporarily eclipsed the parochial issues and locality-specific concerns.

The scientific community was quick to make that switch in emphasis because its members could see that ocean acidification, ocean hypoxia, global heating and ozone depletion could wipe out ecosystems and species without there being any direct encounter with human beings. Or, as David put it, “if we fail to arrest the destabilization of planetary life support systems, these trees will die, whether they are cut down or not.”

But David and his group, the FOOLS (Friends of the Ozone Layer), were outliers in the environmental movement, especially in British Columbia. There were, of course, exceptions, such as the future English King Charles, Greenpeace International and its founder, Jim Bohlen, along with a handful of others but, especially in British Columbia, where he and I organized, the hostility with which our message was greeted by the mainline environmental groups nearly matched that of the fossil fuel, disposable aerosol and foam packaging industries. And ultimately, Jim, David’s and my insistence on prioritizing global environmental issues over parochial issues in our analysis, during the periods we exerted substantive control over the BC Green Party (1989-91, 1993-2000) helped to provoke the take-over and purge conducted by the eco-courtiers in 2000.

While I have already written another essay on the institutional hostility we faced from the emerging eco-courtier class, and their corruption and collusion with the fossil fuel industry, I want to re-examine the politics of BC Wild (the name of the Sunoco-funded coalition of environmental groups tasked with suppressing the climate debate in BC) through the lens not of petty corruption, but of class and culture.

The Other David Lewis

David Lewis was not a rich man. A university dropout, he lived in a small, modest home in Krestova, a remote rural community that was once the centre of the Doukhobor Sons of Freedom movement. He took odd jobs fixing cars and chopping wood and, when there was a big construction contract in the region, he could get temporary construction work. The first time the consort of the patrician Swedish Green Party leader, Per Gahrton, Ulla Lemberg, met Lewis during an official visit, she was transfixed by the hardness of his palms, their deep callouses and the dirt and congealed engine oil under his fingernails that he hadn’t managed to scrub away for the press conference. She could not stop talking about David’s hands for the rest of their official visit, noting that there was no one so genuinely working class in her party, even in the Far North.

Within a year, with only me and Jim to defend him, David was pushed out of his spokesperson position in the BC Greens, with Jim forlornly remarking, “I think David Lewis is the only person who has ever truly spoken for this party.” David’s charismatic style had made him a darling of Vancouver live radio and decision to attend Globe 90, the UN conference in Vancouver, selling bottles of “sustainable development” as a nineteenth-century vaudevillian huckster, complete with an antique portable sales counter with telescoping legs, had landed him on the national news as a spokesperson for the party. But his willingness to incorporate Marxian ideas of class struggle into his media statements and emotional style of sharing his fear that humanity would not rise to the occasion were frightening to many in the party and even more in the larger environmental movement.

Pressure began to mount from environmentalists outside the party to give David the proverbial hook. This pressure came largely from environmentalists already in the tank for Mike Harcourt’s New Democratic Party, the obvious government-in-waiting as the forty-year Social Credit political dynasty entered its terminal phase.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, BC’s environmental movement was dominated by wilderness “preservation” groups, comprising local volunteer-run, subscription-based civil society organizations like Friends of Clayoquot Sound and the West Arm Watershed Alliance, as well as organizations that, while technically working on a single area, had gained an international funding base and professionalized leadership, such as Friends of the Stein Valley and the Valhalla Wilderness Society.

These latter groups, along with the branch offices of international environmental groups like the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund, dominated the stage and were, largely, staffed by members of the incipient commissar class who were also functioning, at this point, as eco-courtiers within the (since 1987) Third Way government in waiting, the New Democrats.

These groups channeled money from all over the world into fighting to preserve the last of BC’s old growth forest from logging. While groups like WWF and Greenpeace had many irons in the fire, their global temperate rainforest preservation campaigns were invariably headquartered in Vancouver or Victoria and the delivery of “results” in BC affected the finances of the entire organizations and all their campaigns around the world.

Return of the Seekers

While David did not oppose the efforts to fence-off ecosystems from mining, logging and other industrial development—after all, these ecosystems functioned to protect biodiversity and absorb atmospheric carbon, mitigating and slowing the collapse of planetary life support systems—he did object the discourse the Big Green groups were popularizing on multiple fronts.

First, these groups did not merely use terms like “save” and “preserve” when they talked about the stretches of forest and alpine they were seeking to have declared parks; they often amplified these claims by suggesting ecosystems would be held in their present state “forever” by an act of the state. David felt that this was both dishonest, given that his models showed that forests ecosystems would need to move nine times faster than the fastest forests had previously moved in the past to adapt to rapid climate change, and because this discourse of permanence directly undermined our movement’s warnings of impending catastrophe.

Second, the sales pitch for these new parks contained much that ran counter to the idea that areas were being preserved due to an ecological imperative. Organizations like Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WC2) went beyond marketing calendars, posters and other forms of low-end merchandise depicting the threatened ecosystems as aesthetically pleasing. They produced lavish coffee table books, featuring the art of photorealist wildlife artists like Robert Bateman and my father, Ron Parker.

Movement leaders, like Joe Foy, would juxtapose the idea that a place like the Walbran Valley merited preservation because it was “untouched” while at the same time exhorting supporters to “get out there” and camp and hike in the regions. Indeed, Foy’s WC2 went beyond encouraging eco-tourism. They use the illicit building of eco-tourist infrastructure as a means of strengthening their hand in government negotiations. The building campsites, trails, bridges and moorages became key activities of big environmental groups, especially those based on Vancouver Island.

In this way, David argued, environmentalists were speaking out of both sides of their mouths: touting the pristine, unchanged and allegedly unchangeable character of these areas that situated them outside the economy, while concurrently seeking to build an industry built around the recreational gratification of a particular class.

In later years, during David’s extended break from political activity (1991-97) I supplemented this criticism with the additional observations that rather than focusing on working class jobs being threatened by the logging industry ecosystem damage, such as the commercial fishery and canneries, and working class recreation, such as hunting and trapping, the economic activity that was touted by Big Green groups was eco-tourism, a passtime mainly of wealthy, educated urbanites that tended to provide low wage, non-union hospitality industry employment in rural areas.

In other words, the environmental movement’s focus on wilderness “preservation” had two pernicious aspects that interacted synergistically. First, it minimized the sense of urgency and impact concerning the Greenhouse Effect.

Second, it caused a reversion in the class politics of the movement to a pre-Cold War state. Prior to the Cold War, the environmental movement, as epitomized in the Sierra Club, was a quasi-religious bourgeois movement focused on the spiritual and aesthetic experiences wealthy urban elites could have in landscapes cleared of their human populations. Its international board of directors included leading lights of the Yankee patrician Republican Party elite of the time, like Teddy Roosevelt and Prescott Bush (scion of the Bush dynasty).

During the Cold War, following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the movement had taken a working class turn, focusing on the health of workers and of low-income communities. It championed farm workers with its calls for pesticide bans and working class neighbourhoods disproportionately affected by industrial disasters and waste. It gained major working class allies in farmworker union leaders like Cesar Chavez and Charan Gill.

But now it called not just for industrial workers to accept less work and lower-paying work but also more socially servile and submissive work as is axiomatic in the hospitality industry.

And when environmentalists faced accusations and criticisms from the industrial working class of the North American periphery, their response was typically not one of acknowledgement or compensation but of denial and obfuscation. Environmentalists denied that there would be any economic cost to what they proposed and instead baselessly asserted that in a green economy, everyone would become more prosperous, a delusion that finally reached its crescendo in the LEAP Manifesto of 2015.

The Rationality and Decency of the Proletariat

David, being a member of the peripheral industrial working class, himself, understood exactly how such assertions would play. Industrial workers would reasonably assume that when the costs of something were being downplayed or denied, it meant that they and not the urban bourgeoisie and commissar classes would be the ones to shoulder those costs on their own.

And so he proposed a radical departure in discourse, one that I am ashamed to say I did not have the courage to follow him on. His master term in the interviews he gave in 1989-91 was “share the losses.” Both climate change and the economic transition necessary to limit it would undoubtedly produce losses. And he felt that the only way to gain the support of the industrial working class was to stop trying to bamboozle them and present them with the cold, hard facts of the high cost of transition and a plan for sharing that cost fairly.

That’s because David believed in a politics that I did not yet understand, the politics that Bernie Sanders brought to the coal towns of West Virginia and for which coal miners voted in large numbers. You see: what liberals call “people voting against their own interests” is nothing of the kind. Working class voters are more altruistic than the bourgeoisie and the commissars. Even though they have less, they are more willing to make material sacrifices to bring about a moral order in which they believe. White working class voters demeaned and denigrated as stupid and ignorant are no more stupid than low-income Woke urban progressives working as baristas. The difference is that their culture contains a greater respect for, and ethos of, personal and collective sacrifice.

The Twenty-first Century Degradation of Climate Discourse

But, as it stands, the environmental movement did not listen to David Lewis and things have only worsened. When environmental organizations decided to become “climate champions,” in the late 1990s, they retired “the Greenhouse Effect” and replaced it with “climate change.” Whereas the former term was one that, by its very structure, educated people about the mechanism by which the climate was destabilizing, the one that replaced it severed the term from any theory of causation, making it easier for climate denialist ideas to creep in.

Whereas disputing the Greenhouse Effect entailed explaining why heavier molecules were not trapping heat in the atmosphere, disputing “climate change” simply entailed offering some half-baked theory offering some other cause of the change, or baldfaced denial that change was taking place.

And because the environmental movement’s leadership now deemed regular folks too stupid to understand how their atmosphere was changing, an appeal to reason was replaced with an appeal to authority, “trust The Science!” And indeed those touting this new approach began to suggest that it was problematic for regular people to educate themselves, examine evidence, etc. and that uppity proles who did that were risible figures, fools seduced by low production value youtube videos into a fantasy world. Best to advise the proles to not even try to understand!

And, as the first decade of the twenty-first century closed, environmentalists hit upon an even more disastrous term in which to encapsulate their discourse: “climate justice.” “Climate justice” packaged belief that carbon emissions were causing the climate to worsen with a set of unpopular, punitive government policies that targeted the working class of the Global North’s extractive periphery for special punishment through increased transportation costs, destruction of the used vehicle market, increased costs for basic heating and refrigeration and the singling-out of agriculture for special financial penalties.

It is no wonder, in our present moment that, even as extreme weather events also disproportionately ravage the property and livelihoods of the rural working class, “climate denial” increases, not just because of reaction formation but because “climate science” has been conflated with a set of punitive taxation measures targeting that class.

We Must Share the Losses

But it does not have to be this way. There is still time. As David would say if he were here, “we cannot lose faith that humanity will rise to the occasion.” And that is why I exhort us all to find a just and equitable plan to share the losses and save the planet.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Consciousness of Decline, the Afterlife of Oswald Spengler and My Exit From Anglo America

“There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

These words by Italian novelist Italo Calvino capture one of the most important superstructural elements in geopolitics, a phenomenon whose study was pioneered by Simon Fraser University’s Paul Dutton in his study of Charlemagne’s Empire, the first Holy Roman Empire: consciousness of decline.

Like all the truly great academics with whom I have studied (a small but not insignificant subset of the great intellectuals I have known), Dutton came to a profound knowledge of the whole world by studying one thing therein comprehensively. Dutton argued that while the Carolingian Empire, which lasted for only five generations, between 768 and 889 CE, was always a dodgy prospect from an economic and logistical perspective, a key factor in its decline was essentially immaterial (my fellow Marxists would likely distinguish it as superstructural but let’s not split that hair here).

Dutton’s argument was that Carolingian courtiers and aristocrats, especially after Charlemagne’s coronation as the first Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 CE, were intellectually shaped by an emergent historiography that sought to explain the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire between 395 and 554 CE. This caused an excessive vigilance in looking for signs of an incipient decline and fall in their present. What might be viewed as a setback or interregnum within a Chinese imperial historiography, which chronicles multiple periods of fragmentation followed by consolidation, was viewed, in the Carolingian world, as a harbinger of the end.

Dutton began his career with a doctoral dissertation on the role of dreams in the Carolingian court. One such dream of ultimate decline was the subject of an early essay of mine on the nature of hope. The apocryphal dream of Charlemagne was a descriptive composition written at the end of the empire and then backdated and retrojected to the year 813. The dream lives on today in literary form, forming the basis of JRR Tolkien’s “four ages” schema which structured Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion.

But this apocryphal dream was one of many dreams, both apocryphal and real, that visited Carolingian courtiers and seemed to forebode the empire’s inevitable decline and fall. The Vision of Charlemagne (the name of the document in question), narrated imperial fragmentation as unidirectional and cherry-picked political events to do so. It depicted only centrifugal forces, when the Carolingian realms were divided, never centripetal ones, when kingdoms were consolidated and division undone.

Consciousness of decline, by conditioning political decisions with a sense of hopelessness and desperation, is not merely able to accelerate and intensify a material decline; it can, in my view, by itself, cause decline in the face of mere setbacks and the anxiety those setbacks produce. And the desperation caused by consciousness of decline is as or more likely to result in a state overplaying its hand, to prevent a temporary loss as it is to produce resignation and apathy. Usually, societies experiencing consciousness of decline will alternate between the two, following acts of grandiose risk-taking with periods of apathy and despair.

One society, so gripped, was the early twentieth century German Empire, a society overlapping and aspiring to the same territorial boundaries as the Carolingian Empire a thousand years before. That society had an eloquent spokesman for this consciousness, the highly influential authoritarian vitalist intellectual, Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West (1918). Spengler’s argument was that the Western civilization had reached the stage that the Roman civilization had reached at the beginning of the civil war between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar that brought about the fall of the Roman Republic and the creation of the Roman Empire.

Spengler argued, in the binaristic, catastrophist thinking emblematic of consciousness of decline, that because the West was on the same trajectory of Rome and proceeding down the same path, there was only one thing that could delay or perhaps even arrest its fall: the end of democracy and the rise of a charismatic Caesar-like authoritarian militarist leader who would institute “Caesarism.” Needless to say, Spengler’s beliefs conditioned the Nazi movement, not just indirectly through Mein Kampf, which it helped to inspire; it was a popular book among the intellectuals of German authoritarianism, inside and outside the Nazi Party.

Ultimately, the pessimistic desperation we associate with consciousness of decline, we can see in German society thereafter as both the Communists and Nazis saw the libertinism of the Weimar Republic as the equivalent of the putative “decadence” of the late Roman Republic. That desperation, the need to immediately stop the decline, cauterize the supposed wound did not just affect German election outcomes and street battles; it conditioned Hitler’s military strategy, especially in the later years of the war when periods of desperate brinksmanship were followed by abject despair and resignation, culminating in the wanton destruction of infrastructure and murder of civilian populations and then, finally, the murder-suicides of the Nazi leadership.

Ultimately, two material victors of the Second World War were states that, for all their flaws, lacked this consciousness of decline in the generation following the war. The USSR and USA did not begin to experience consciousness of decline until the 1970s and, whatever its profound flaws, the Reagan presidency was successful in dispelling this consciousness at least for a while.

It was not until the American victory over their Soviet rivals that consciousness of decline began creeping into America’s imperial court on a long-term basis. At the same time as the Third Way began downwardly adjusting the material and social expectations of America’s middle and working classes, a debate erupted between Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington on the pages of the prestigious American conservative imperialist journal, Foreign Policy, published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Following the fall of the USSR and Warsaw Pact in 1991, Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that Pax Americana was now global and permanent, that free market capitalism and Jeffersonian democracy had won the day and constituted the final phase in human evolution. But just as Spengler was no doubt reacting against Georg Hegel, who had made the same argument about the German state, and on whose thinking Fukuyama had based his book, Fukuyama’s claims elicited a neo-Spenglerian response.

Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations argued that, contrary to Fukuyama’s theory, the world was about to become more divided and enter a period of multi-polar conflict among fundamentally different and irreconcilable “civilizations” and that America had but a short period of time before it became heir to the long undoing of the enemy sovereigns who had submitted to them.

Soon, Huntington predicted, America would be beset on all sides by civilizations with fundamentally different values, that would grow stronger, demographically and economically and soon outpace America and its vassals. The Chinese, Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, Japanese, Indian: these civilizations could soon become existential threats to America. To survive, Huntington argued, America would need to retrench; it would need to consolidate its military resources in its core territory and vassal states, reinvigorate American industrial and energy production, fight strategic wars at its margins to slow the loss of territory, especially its loss to Muslim civilization. It would also need to retrench socially by reducing liberal pluralism, a key source of its weakness, and rediscover its identity as a Christian civilization.

Huntington included some case studies in his work. Whatever one may think of the man’s values, the predictive power of his model is evident as the histories of Turkey and Ukraine continue to unfold as he predicted three decades ago. But it is not events in Black Sea states that ultimately made Huntington’s thinking hegemonic among American foreign policy thinkers. It was, of course, the events of September 11th, 2001.

Whether it is the Trump movement’s focus on internal reindustrialization and energy extraction or the Democratic Party’s and Bush Administration’s proxy wars and military coups in the imperial periphery, America’s elite decision-makers are all gripped with consciousness of decline, of the neo-Spenglerian vision of Samuel Huntington, alternating between episodes of brinksmanship and shows of power and wallowing in self-indulgent despair and decadence.

Consciousness of decline is something that afflicts an empire, a civilization and its imperial culture. So naturally, this consciousness does not recognize the Great Lakes or forty-ninth parallel as any kind of barrier when it comes to America’s crankiest toady, Canada. The Canada-US border has been no barrier to the spread of this consciousness of decline, but that does not mean Canadian decline consciousness lacks a specifically Canadian inflection.

The long-term alliance between elites in the Liberal Party of Canada and in the Communist Party of China, dating back to Pierre Trudeau’s pilgrimages to the tomb of Norman Bethune means that Canadian decline consciousness is as likely to show up as supplication to Chinese power as it is to bellicosity in Ukraine.

Canada’s elites vacillate between desperately toadying to the rising power of China and the declining power of the US. Our country, which has never existed as anything other than a vassal state to one empire or another, now behaves towards the world’s great powers, be they India, China or the US, like a strapster, one of those small yappy dogs that runs up to you and decides, seemingly at random, to either bite, lick or urinate on you.

Certain that they cannot actually improve the lot of Canadians and that our country is in decline, Canadian political debate has been reduced to a blame game. We are a post-political state whose leaders, rather than trying to solve problems, either insist that the problems do not exist and that the people pointing them out are ungrateful liars or explain that the problem were caused by the other team who must now be punished for screwing things up.

So, although Canada is wealthier, more powerful and has the resources to turn things around, I am exiting North American society because it has become consumed by a consciousness of decline, because societies that believe they are in decline are scary, depressing and unpredictable places to live.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |