Mass political consciousness changes over time. This doesn’t seem like an outrageous claim, until you read its very many, very outraged negations. In The New York Times this week, centrist naif Nicholas Kristof starts by saying there may be one great hack that will end the Trump presidency — spoiler, there’s not — and ends by saying that there is no way that the mass political consciousness let Trump happen. What’s his evidence that people didn’t consciously vote for Trump? Well, at least he doesn’t say this week that “the Russians stole the election!” Instead, he offers this as a closer, “And what does it say about a presidency, that just one month into it, we’re already discussing whether it can be ended early?”
The better questions to ask here would be first, “Who is Kristof’s editor, and why are they letting him pose a lazy solipsistic question as a final par?” Then, “What does it say about mainstream centrist media that they keep denying this election ever happened, and suppose that their own endless questioning of it is evidence enough of a monumental deceit?”
Yes, it is terrible that Trump became President. He is Not My President, etc. But, he is someone’s President. To deny that the mass political consciousness has changed to allow that terrible thing to occur is to ask only, as Kristof repeatedly does, “Why don’t you understand that everyone thinks as I do?”
Look. I want everyone to think as I do, too. This is sort of the human condition, and it is one particularly pronounced in us, the hubristic media class. I am, however, aware that not everyone does think as I do. If they did, they would have seized the means of production, changed the mode of production and we’d all be working a max of three hours a week in collectives making socialist champagne to toast the death of capitalism. Or similar.
I know that people do not think as I do. I know why people do not think as I do — or, at least, I have an elaborate way to explain this tragic state of affairs to myself. We won’t go into that, as it is boring. In short, like a lot of people, I can see that there are reasons people disagree with me, even if I continue to privately believe that no disagreement with Marvellous Me is logically possible. Kristof — here used as an example of a Western centrist press with its fingers in its ears — just couldn’t possibly see how disagreement could be the case.
Instead, they say that there is no broad disagreement. Mass political consciousness has not truly changed. It couldn’t, because I am correct and am a great guide to what everyday people who live in flyover states on under $30,000 p.a. are thinking. Here in Manhattan, where I work with many people from industries as diverse as advertising and social media management, I know the real people. The real people tell me they did not vote for this, ergo it didn’t happen.
And so we continue with many months of WikiLeaks, Comey, fake news, misogyny, racism etc. Sure, these factors played a role, and if there ever does turn out to be meaningful evidence that Putin “hacked the election”, I’ll be fascinated to learn by what means for my own covert purposes. I would like to “hack” Bernardi off the ballot. As I am, however, neither nation-state nor coder, I choose instead to look at the change in mass political consciousness, which Kristof says never happened, and nut out why it happened. So that we might stop it happening in a more meaningful way than pretending that it didn’t, a la Not My President.
[You won’t bring down Donald Trump with angry signs and funny memes]
Look, Kristof. You have bought in very publicly for a very long time to this whole liberal democracy thing and in these terms that you devotedly uphold, unfortunately he is your President. This sort of leader is becoming everybody’s leader and unless you concede this to be the case and the result in a change of a mass political consciousness, you are just going to keep making solipsistic arguments.
Does it really need to be said that Western voters are turning their backs on the centre? Hungary, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy have all seen the rise of the cultural right. Spain, Greece and Scotland have seen one of the material left. Those dudes in Poland seem to be having a bet each way, perhaps agreeing to be communists on Tuesdays and virulent racist scum on Wednesdays. Whatever you think should happen to mass political consciousness is not necessarily going to be the same, Nicholas, as what really does.
“The people have spoken” does not need to be read as a mandate or a statement of truth. When Le Pen takes power, we must try to interpret that utterance rather than simply calling it a lie. The consciousness that led to her popularity is clearly false. It remains a fact. The people have spoken and if we don’t like what they are saying — and I don’t one bit — we engage them in a new conversation. Without our fingers in our ears.
We heard a lot in the recent US election and during Brexit about the “lesser of two evils”. Sure, people would say, both the European troika and Clinton’s version of the Democratic Party are both in the business of wealth creation for the few. But this is the “lesser of two evils”. And faced with a world full of racism, I actually agree. I would rather have non-racist institutions who favour the investor class rather than the racist sort who will do exactly the same.
But it’s not what I want, is it? I am not the people. The people see, in growing numbers, “the lesser of two evils” being the person or party who promises to share the wealth. This is just the case, Nick, as your representative friends, who, being so representative, have a very low income, will tell you. I will vote for the person who promises to restore my purchasing power.
So what, then, is the “lesser of two evils” in this case? It’s the one that all the Kristofs of the world refuse to consider. It’s Corbyn’s Labour, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece and Sturgeon’s SNP in Scotland. If the faith in the centre is diminished, then, in practical terms, the “lesser of two evils” becomes socialist.
[Our kids face a jobless future, and pollies (even Bernie) have been utterly useless]
Of course, this opportunity for the mass political consciousness happens to coincide with my own beliefs, so it’s a bit more visible to me than it is to Nick. But, surely, in a West where we are voting for “outsider” alternatives, the lesser of two evils is no longer the function of the centre.
I am, as you may have noted, a really predictable material leftist in my thinking. As I have said, I understand that others do not share my view. But I detect a moment in which many could, and in some nations do. I invite all the Kristofs to see that at this moment in history, the “lesser of two evils” is, at the level of reality, socialism. The centre is now perceived by the mass political consciousness for what you like to say it is: no true evil at all. Choose the lesser of the two true evils. Or just end your arguments with a question?
Socialist champagne. Not really looking forward to that one.
We’ve both drunk worse.
‘The people’ (whoever they are) didn’t vote for Trump. Some people did. And ‘socialism’ wasn’t an actually existing alternative. Thoughts?
More than sixty million people did vote for Trump.
I make the case that where socialist candidates exist in the present, they gain meaningful support. Bernie wasn’t unpopular. Syriza is in government.
Ok, let’s break this down. Of a total eligible voting population of 250 million, about 137 million actually voted. Of these, a 3-million majority (about 66 million) voted for Hillary, and about 63 million voted for Trump. In the swing electoral college districts that mattered, the vast majority of these voters were white, as well as being rural and/or (but not necessarily) working-class. That doesn’t mean the needs of these voters aren’t worth listening to and addressing, but it doesn’t mean they constitute ‘the people’. As for socialist candidates in the US and abroad: Bernie did successfully drag Hillary to the left; but I doubt if he would have swung the election in those electorates (where I think you underestimate the appeal of Trump’s racism, nationalism and xenophobia, and the relentless demonisation of Hillary, some of which was class-based, but much of which was based on lies). As for Syriza: yes, they are in government, but have correspondingly abandoned much of their socialism and populism and accepted the economics of austerity (for better or worse). Yes, economic neo-liberalism has failed the majority (and minorities), but political liberalism is not dead, but on the contrary needed now more than ever, in a united front between the centre and the left against fascism. The argument against Trump’s ‘legitimacy’ in the liberal press is important, because his campaign and administration are based on lies, and because he continues to make fundamental assaults on democracy and human rights.
That saved me writing that, but far less elegantly – well put!
It’s also worth considering that a huge amount of people, either legally, illegally or administratively, are prevented from voting (for instance people who’ve been to gaol for a certain time), not to mention the huge amount of long-term residents who can’t become citizens. These people are far more likely to be poor and from oppressed groups, so on balance much less likely to vote Republican.
I’d suggest even saying a quarter of potential voters voted for Trump would be optimistic. And not all of them voted for the same reasons. So, it’s entirely valid to protest Trump and discuss the fact that he’s not representative of the country as a whole.
Other than that, I totally agree with the article – the dead hand of amoral, smug, thoughtless (as in not having any original ones) Centrism must be lifted from the ailing body politic!
Sure. All good points. The prison population alone changes the vote. Still. More than 60 million thought DONALD TRUMP as president material.
Again, if he were the only one, we’d probably have to look into some sort of “reality TV has eaten our insides” analysis.
Look at a map of Europe. Look at the polls for One Nation. You cannot keep explaining the rise of the hard right, racist without exception in the present, with “nuance”.
Something is happening. It has happened before. If we think we can hack our way out of this one, we’re wrong. Fascists rise in times of economic downturn.
@HRH Rzr 2100
As said I largely agree with your article. I totally agree about the march of history stuff – anyone but the 90% of people who are force-fed the brain-spam on offer in the Commons would only agree that economic hardship breeds radicalism / clarity. Nevertheless, Trump’s actual vote (for very plausibly a large range of motivations), was less than a quarter of the population, so it’s not ‘elitist’ for people, however constrained by their own ideology, to be venting outrage. Remember, he said, before the vote, that he wouldn’t promise to respect it – the current reaction, for better or worse, from the anti-Trump majority, is far less that the Trumpite reaction would have been. If you think they get angry about light on patently false assertions about crowd size, can you imagine what would happen if reality had collided in the form of a lost election!?!?
Given, somewhat unrelated, but let them froth at the mouth at Trump, the more people move from anger, to words, to action, the better. Slapping down the words, however correct, and however much I feel like I belong in the smug ‘I-already-knew-it’ crowd, is counter-productive – let the anger out, talk about it and work out what you can DO about it. (admittedly hard with the ID-pol crowd, beyond a GetUp petition)
Although I am no expert in French politics, I have a feeling you are right about a likely La Pen victory. The next most viable contender, Macron, seems to do nothing but spout vacuous platitudes in order to avoid discussing his policy agenda – that of a banker. Just as Clinton thought that her feminist posturing would compensate for her deep corruption and moral bankrupcy, Macron offers the same globally unpopular neoliberal agenda as the withered old men but with a handsome young face. Even if this works in the coming election, a Macron victory would only delay the inevitable collapse of his centrist brand.
The profound disillusionment associated with Obama’s faux-progressive presidency has resonated around the world. I wonder how long it will take for the penny to drop for the liberal political class that identity-based rebranding will not save them. The sooner the better.
Helen, your making the same mistake Kristof did. You don’t ike what happened, so you pretend someting else entirely had happened – something that means that actually, everyone agrees with you.
I understand you’d LOVE for people to think vote for “the person who promised to restore their purchasing power” or “the person or party who promises to share the wealth”.
But they didn’t, did they?
They voted for the guy who promised to repeal what little public health care there was, cut corporate taxes by more than half, and Build A Wall.
They din’t vote for Trump because they are your comrades. They’d tie you and any other commie to the next tree, if they were allowed to. They voted for Trump because they are authoritarains at heart who are very comfortable with inequality and hierarchies and exploitaton of the poor by the superrich, so longs as their are at least one or two groups beneath them.
sorry for the typos. I swap a your for a you’re, and a their for a there *sigh*
I agree that the Trump victory was, in significant part, the expression of a sympathy for authoritarian leadership. But the ‘authoritarians at heart’ and the white nationalist contingent has always been a significant presence in the U.S. The question is what explained the swing? You can’t explain a variable with a constant.
It is a pretty solid lesson of history that the rise of authoritarianism and scapegoating of minorities coincides with the desperation and powerlesness engendered by socioeconomic inequality.
Your interpretation also dismisses the evidence that many, while disagreeing with his racist authoritarian rhetoric, voted Trump because he actually acknowledged their rapidly deteriorating labour prospects.
What evidence am I dismissing?
I said that people vote, especially in times of economic downturn, for the politicians that promises to fill their hip pocket. This is not a bold claim, and it is one that I make.
I have said explicitly elsewhere in Crikey that many of the white people who voted for Trump in those key counties were found to vote for Obama in the previous two elections, and so the charge of racism is here hard to apply. I have also said, again not here, that the second biggest swing from the Dems to a GOP nominee came from Hispanic voters. (The biggest was from all people earning under 30k, now more than fifty per cent of the US population.)
So while I don’t explicitly mention this in a piece on a Western phenomenon (there simply wasn’t space) I don’t dismiss it.
I do not believe we should blame the white working poor for the uses of racism by Trump and the instrumentation of racism. I am opposed to this charge. Again, there’s not always space to make the same thing explicit if you want to provide something of a length that is actually readable during a working day.
I think we are agreed, yes? But, I really don’t dismiss this evidence, and I think this guy is best on the analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm2Vfj42FY
Helen,
I think there has been a miscommunication here. My comment was in response BaBr.
apols!
Oh, authoritariansim and white nationalists have always been there so can’t explain anything – but desperation and powerlessness engendered by socioeconomic inequality is new on the scene? Are you kidding me? Rest assured that none of these issues was any less of a problem in 2012. “You can’t explain a variable with a constant.”
If anything, 2012 to 2016 was one of the brief periods in recent history when things actually DID get better for a lot of people economically – largely because they were so extraordinary shitty after 2010 and recovered a bit.
The new promise was NOT to “fill anyone’s hip pockets”. We know that because no such promise was ever made. The new promise was that people would finally be allowed to mock an humiliate the one or two groups beneath them to their hearts’ content.
And that evidence for voter’s motivation is something I do wish you’d share. So far I haven’t had a chance to ignore it.
It is crazy to pretend that Trump’s poularity in the rustbelt states was purely because of bigotry and nothing to do with his campaigning on labour and political corruption. These people voted for Obama twice.
“Rest assured that none of these issues was any less of a problem in 2012”
That’s right. And Romney didn’t even pretend to care about them.
So your evidence on voters’ motivation is to tell me that I’m crazy if I don’t believe in a particular motivation? “These people” didn’t vote for Obama twice. At least we (that includes you) have no frigging idea, how many of them, if any, did.
Let’s take Pennsylvania, the most shocking swing nobody believed was possible. How did the eligible population vote?
In 2012, 3.0 million Obama, 2.7 million Romney, 0.1 million other candidates, 2.7 million no vote
In 2016, 2.9 million Clinton, 3.0 million Trump, 0.2 million other candidates, 2.6 million no vote.
Not a single person would be required to vote Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 to create that “swing”. I’m sure there were a few. In fact, at least 60k most likely did. After all, 60k voters switched their registration from Democrat to Republican.
It’s just that that doesn’t mean “those people voted for Obama” as you like to say it. It means a TINY fraction of those people voted for Obama once.
It then doesn’t follow that it wasn’t about bigotry, it then follows that for a TINY fraction of Trump voters it probably wasn’t. Don’t elevate them to a supposedly representative voter.
By the way, Trump never pretended to care about “desperation and powerlessness engendered by socioeconomic inequality” either. When did he say ANYTHING that suggested he cared about the desperate and powerless? He went out of his way to show that he doesn’t give a fuck about anyone he thinks of as weak, which is exactly what he would call the desperate and powerless. I imagine the tweet “Dude whines he’s poor, wants us to pay his health care. Weak!”
So, you don’t think that the number of years a particular person faces economic decline is a factor?
The decline started in the early 1980s, late 1970s. When the Keynesian full employment regime was abandoned in favour of a market friendly form, our access to services, real wage rises, pleasant towns began ebbing away. At some point, things were going to break. Whether that is four years or eight years after a catastrophic financial incident (1929 to 1933; 2008 to 2016) is contingent on a number of factors.
Whatever you say, there has never been so many openly racist, hard right parties elected to power in the West. I am not making this stuff up. You can be all post-modern and pretend that we live in a cloud of ideas instead of material reality if you wish. I believe ideas are very important. The facts of political economies are, too. If you choose to ignore the rise of fascism by attributing it all to people being bad people, dunno where that will get you. However, good luck.
I have no idea where you’re getting from that I don’t believe in materialism, and we all live in a cloud of ideas.
I also didn’t say that the number of years a person faces economic decline don’t matter , I said that it’s intellectually dishonest to say factor A doesn’t matter because it’s been around for a long time, then offer an alternative factor B as an explanation – that just happens to have been around for a long time too.
Anyways, I’ll tell you what I do believe instead of what I didn’t say:
The candidate who won is the one who
– promised to slash public health
– promised to cut corporate taxes from 35% to 15%
– claimed over and over again that wages in America are too high
– was completely silent on unions and the continued corrosion of collective bargaining rights
– was completely silent on any labour protection laws
– said taxes in America are much too high, then suggested to decrease the highest and INCREASE the lowest rate of income tax
– was outperformed by his opponent by a 12% margin among voters with less than 30k, by 9% among voters with 30-50k (-> people with a below- average income, which is 52k in the US, voted for his opponent)
– outperformed his opponent in every income class over 50k, including the >250k (->people with an above- average income voted for him)
And you’re convinced it’s the working class rising, and telling me that *I* am ignoring the material reality?
Helen, I don’t think socialism or communism is a dirty word. I believe we do have structural economic problems, leading to inequality, injustice and exploitation that do need solving and that could be solved if we stopped asking “how high” whenever some mining magnate or corporate leader tells us to jump. I happen to not believe that collective ownership of productive capital is a good idea, but I do believe in public education and public health, and in strong unions. I do believe that a fair tax system is key to solving our problems, which in my world includes inheritance taxes, land taxes and wealth taxes, lower taxes on labour, and the abolishment of stupid tax concessions on socially completely useless “investments” such as buying and selling houses someone else built 40 years ago.
I just can’t ignore the facts listed above enough, to believe that I’ll find much support for any of that among Trump voters, who were in their overwhelming majority not the working poor at the bottom of the pile. They were the white middle-class suburban types, and they were more concerned with making sure someone other than them stays at the bottom of the pile, than with turning the pile. These people are not going to bring about the revolution.
Oh, and another thing. I have heard a very select few people telling me that all this could have been avoided had we concerned ourselves more with structural economic problems.
I have had a ton of people telling me that all this could have been avoided, if only we had left people alone with same-sex marriage, racism and all this feminism-crap.
Just to be clear: if Girl Day and White Ribbon ignore structural economic problems, so does opposition against them. If unisex toilets for trans people and Safe Schools programs are about airy-fairy ideas instead of materialism, and a stupid thing to put on the top of one’s list of priorities – so is the fight against unisex toilets for transgender people and the school chaplains program.
Most people of the “Excessive PC makes people vote Trump”-crowd seemed fairly sympathetic to Trump. It’s almost as if the Trump-fans themselves keep telling us that they aren’t too concerned with structural economic problems, and royally pissed off about some airy-fairy clouds of ideas.
I appreciate the apology, one I routinely make in many of my own comment dispatches.
I am not making the same mistake. The alternative does exist, and where it does, it is popular. I say this. Podemos. Syriza. SNP. Corbyn has made Labour the largest and youngest political party in Europe. I did not mention Sanders, whose avowed “socialism” accrued him the biggest recorded crowds for a candidate in US presidential history and the most individual donations.
I am not saying (although I believe it) that socialism is right. I am saying that it is, currently, the lesser of two evils. Where there are declared socialists, people vote for them. I am hardly the first to suppose that there were those Bernie supporters who went on to vote for Trump.
I really do make the case that it is a real-world alternative. It is. Many people of far better repute have made this case, including Varoufakis, once himself of Syriza. He saw Syriza as the only meaningful argument to Golden Dawn. He has outright said that without a policy of wealth equality, the racists win.
This is not an unusual claim. It was made, over and again, by those in the Frankfurt School about the rise of Nazism. “Socialism or barbarism” is a very old and very real thing to say about times of economic downturn. No one poor wants to vote for those advocating austerity, or its new synonym “free trade”. When there are more poor people, as is the case in the present, there will be more votes for anti-austerity parties, whatever their flavour. I think the socialist one is the “lesser of two evils”.
I have used examples. I have used several. The socialist alternative exists outside of my head.
Finally, Trump made it very plain that he promised to restore jobs and wealth. This was his key election promise. Jobs. Jobs provided by the building of the wall, a sort of fascist New Deal. My acquaintance Steve Keen writes about this in the SMH this week,That he was never GOING TO change the conditions of workers is beside the point. That he said he would is the point. He used the term “working class” and repeatedly talked about raising wages, and he said he would do this by raising tariffs. We know that this is impossible for a net importer. Most people don’t spend time like you and I reading about macro-economic trends. Most people just vote and pick up what they can after long work hours. They hear “I have a job creation plan”. Even if it is nonsense, that is what they hear. People without high school, let alone tertiary, qualifications hear this after thirty years of wage decline. Who do you think they are going to vote for?
If you did not hear Donald Trump say that he would improve living standards, you were not listening to his speeches. He said it repeatedly. That he will NOT, again, is beside the point. (Again, how do most people know the integrity of an economic plan? Not all of us read books or have the time to.) Hillary never said this, or if she did, it was lost beneath a torrent of “America is already great”. She is post-material. Trump located himself in the material, which is also the territory of the socialist. Except, socialists aren’t racists. It is the lesser of two evils.
I think we’re talking about different things. Maybe I misunderstand the point of your article. You say “I’m not saying socialism is right” and I’m tempted to respond “Well, I’m not saying it’s wrong!” Yes, the socialist alternative exists outside of your head, and it is an attractive one in many respects. (Albeit less so in some others). I promise, you don’t need to convince me of the benefits of wealth redistribution, nor of it being possible. I just think that you’ll have even more trouble convincing Trump voters of its benefits, than you will have convincing centrist progressives. I don’t think you want to see the wrong thing happen, I think your mistaking fierce opponents for covert supporters.
I guess we mostly differ in this point: I do NOT believe that there was a significant number of “Sanders or Trump”-people. Of course there were *some*, but you can find examples of just about anything in this world. I believe there were lots of people who wanted Sanders, but stayed home and didn’t vote when they only got Hillary as an option. And I believe there were lots of *other* people who never wanted a democratic type and stayed home for previous elections, but did bother voting when they suddenly had the option Trump. I believe that because when I listened to what Trump said, I heard “With me, you’ll have power and dominance again and get rid of the sissies” not “With me you’ll have money again and get rid of the bosses”. Seriously, he actually did say, repeatedly, that wages in America are *too high*. And every politician under the sun has promised people more money anyway. Every politician in history said “I have a job creation plan”. It never mattered, because nobody ever believes it.
And I don’t think that’s why we see the rise of the right in Europe either. I believe reckless politicians. by courting the fascists, have brought some ugly ideas to the surface that have been boiling there for a long time. I don’t believe these ideas or their supporters are anything new. They just hide until they see their tide rising.
Let me just pick one example: you mention Germany having seen the rise of the cultural right. I’m German, and have thus been following the events there very closely, and I see anything but the rise of the right because their is no socialist alternative. Germany *does* have a real socialist alternative, and has had it for decades: Die Linke (The Left); they are entirely unafraid to speak of the communist tradition they come from, and their main topics are minimum wages, taxes, poverty, and how to regain democratic control of economic policy. I’m pretty sure you’d quite like the vast majority of their program. They consistently get just under 10% in general elections, around 20% in the East. There is your socialist alternative, but it did NOT prevent the founding of a new far-right party. Which, incidentally, wasn’t a “rise” of far-right populism either. The far-right AfD also gets about 10% support. They aren’t new though – not new people and not new ideas. They just always used to be absorbed into the right-wing of Merkel’s CDU, where regular conservatives hid them within their ranks and made them shut up. When a new party was formed that promised them to be able to be seen in broad day-light again, they jumped on the opportunity. You see the rise of the right in the absence of a credible left. I see the presence of a credible left, and a resurfacing of the right that has always been there but is now less afraid to speak up in the light of new political trends.
By all means, PLEASE let us re-distribute wealth. The current situation is untenable, economically and socially. I just don’t believe for a second that it will placate those on the far-right, let alone convince them to get back on the ground of human decency, because I don’t think it’s what makes *them* tick anymore than the centrist progressives.
On the other hand, if we want to see similar policies in effect anyways, maybe it’s pointless to debate why the other one has the wrong reasons for wanting the right thing.
What I mean by “the right policies” (I rpobably should have spelled that out) I don’t think socialism or communism is a dirty word. I believe we do have structural economic problems, leading to inequality, injustice and exploitation that do need solving and that could be solved if we stopped asking “how high” whenever some mining magnate or corporate leader tells us to jump. I happen to not believe that collective ownership of productive capital is a good idea, but I do believe in public education and public health, and in strong unions. I do believe that a fair tax system is key to solving our problems, which in my world includes inheritance taxes, land taxes and wealth taxes, lower taxes on labour, and the abolishment of stupid tax concessions on socially completely useless “investments”.
Helen, good thought provoking piece as always.
I think that you are being to literal with the whole “he’s not my president” thing. Of course Trump is in power and will, no doubt, do a great deal of damage while he is in charge. The man is about five feet away from the “nuclear football” so there will always be a bit of wishful thinking where this lunatic is concerned. I see the question that you quite legitimately raise differently.
What all the centralist blather is at the moment is an expression of outrage, but not an empty one. Populist sentiments may have got us into this pickle, but it is not the only cause. Us progressives have done little to stop it. Every brutal outrage to the body politic that has occurred thus far was allowed a hospital pass by people like, well… like me. I stopped being a unionist because it didn’t seem necessary anymore. I didn’t protest the corporatism of our society. I never got personally involved in politics because it was all too much work and a bit of a hassle. I accepted the soft corruption of political donations. I didn’t get out of my own comfortable centralist way. I believed that people would have a sense of community. I, and millions like me, was sound asleep in our little complacent bubble. Well, perhaps no longer? It is not only the populists who can get angry, us in the center are starting to get furious too. What you see as empty whining is actually the beginning of a fightback. This all starts with an outpouring of outrage and it only gets bigger with momentum. Give it time, Trump has only been in power for a few weeks. Let the political resistance have a bit of time and allow the anger to develop. It sounds like you have cast the die already.
Mate, why not revisit this question in, say, six months? I’d hate to suggest that the populists are going to be in charge for evermore. I don’t think so.
I really like your optimism, Nudie, and I adore your story.
But there’s this thing happening that is so wilfully ignorant of history. Apparently, Trump is the very first president to have deported, applied austerity, dominated the world with brutality etc. So long as liberals hold on to the idea that things were better in the Obama Times, they maintain the fixation on the power of speech. So precious and so central to liberals.
Where were the protests for the people deported by Obama, the Muslim nation bans? He deported more people than all of the twentieth presidents combined. But, you know, he sweetly called them “undocumented”.
If we see Trump as an aberration and not as an extension of policies formed over decades, we miss the point. Again. As farce.
There will be some politicised at the actions. This is great. But, so many of them engage in a false nostalgia for a better time. Just like the right.
*sigh* Yes, this brutalization began some time ago. I listened to an essay last night on the ABC where where this bloke suggested that the 20th century was a slow arc towards a better society (despite the bloody great bumps along the way). That the year 2000 was in all respects vastly improved upon over the year 1900. However, he did not have the same hopes for the year 2100. For one thing, people will not be as necessary in the future as they were in the past. Scary thought if you follow things towards certain conclusions.
If they ain’t needed they wont be feeded. And they sure as hell are NOT needed.
What Helen and her fellow fantasist socialist-libertarians seem unable to grasp is that centrist liberalism in the West is what provides them with a platform to critique the governance of the West, the foreign policy of the West and the economic model of the West.
Make no mistake, the death of centrist liberalism which you so flippantly “welcome” will be the death of your ability to publicly critique any of the above without having your door kicked in by the secret police.
On top of this, the polarisation of the left into an extreme socialist vs centrist position is actually ruining the best chance to bring genuine economic reform to liberalism.
There goes the possibility of restoring the “New Deal” regulations so catastrophically discarded. There goes the possibility of retaining/reforming progressive taxation. Not to mention that we’ll now be losing hard-fought social reforms as the cherry on top.
But I’m sure that when desperate young women are forced to resort to backyard abortions, Muslims are rounded up and sent to internment camps and social media is policed for unpatriotic statements you’ll still be relieved you’re not living under the tyranny of a centrist like Obama…
Centrists are, at best, fairweather friends of freedom of speech, privacy, and public interest whistleblowing. At several critical junctures centrists have gutted people’s rights in those areas. You sound like Colonel Jessup arrogantly scolding people who question the manner in which he provides “freedom”. What freedoms we still enjoy endure despite, not because of, centrists.
As in “it was necessary to destroy society in order to save it”, to paraphrase.
Obama deported more persons than all of his predecessors in the twentieth century combined. His administration set a record for refusal of FOIA requests. I think he seems like a very nice fellow. His policies and actions, which truly impacted press freedom, form part of a descent, whose low point may not even be Trump. Have a look in Europe where there are characters markedly worse.
I am simply saying that people vote either socialist or hard right increasingly in the western present. Not a fantasy. A fact.
And I am not sure how you see me “welcoming” the end of neoliberalism. I clearly say that the neonational flavour of those two evils is, in my view, the greater.
It is not a fantasy to point out fact. The fascists are here. What are you going to do? Talk the voters around and make them see centrist sense?
Or, to use a little Brecht, “elect a new people”?
This seems to be the liberal fantasist solution. You folks. Saying that I live in a fantasy world when all we can really both sense is true horror.
@Damien, are you so naive, or so historically ‘thin’, that you don’t know all those “New Deal” things were only made possible by a very powerful, very radical left-wing movement pressuring the Centre to move towards arrangements that were more equal. As the subsequent history of the US shows, they didn’t go nearly far enough, especially in the US. If the left had been more successful in the US after the ’30s both the US and the wider world would have been a far better place. The centrists were pretty content to stall things once the pressure from the left eased up.
Yes, Bob.
Without the agitation by communists in the US, this compromise would never have been possible. It wasn’t all Keynes. (Whose theories, as predicted, would only steer the economy toward the benefit of the middle for a while.) It was hard negotiation with hard left unions and activists.
(I actually can’t imagine how FDR slept. Industrialists on one side. Revolutionaries on the other.)
These folks don’t realise that they need communists to preserve their capitalism, at times.
I think the key phrase here is “pressuring the centre”. You know, the centre that actually won the power that enabled it to deliver outcomes.
My point is that leftists continually attacking “centrism” and “liberalism” (note: different from “neo-liberalism”) actually HELPS the fascist cause by further undermining liberal institutions which remain the only available platforms to address these issues.
Because, like it or not, socialism is electoral suicide in the West (speaking of not learning from history).
Damien. There are several examples in the present West where open socialism has won elections. I have mentioned them.