More This Changes Nothing

COP 25 is behind us and the only positive outcome was Greta got lots of sailing experience. Which may come in handy. The Student Strikes, the Extinction Rebellions, the rallies and protests all run aground on nationalist self-interest. No nation-state is willing to threaten its economic stability, and hence elite supremacy, by slowing GDP growth. All the negotiations and vague commitments are theatre, a show that didn’t compete with The Impeachment, much less the NFL, in terms of ratings.
Remember how the big hope was an amorphous resistance known as “Blockadia”? This movement “from below” was to be led by indigenous and other “front line” peoples, but since the movement limped away from Standing Rock, a vague miasma has replaced militancy. Perhaps young students can save us while we stay busy at work. Extinction Rebellion inspired some disobedience but floundered on the shoals of Brexit. A court case? A green new deal? Bernie?
The DSA left puts its hope in “the working classes” but this nebulous bloc can’t wrap its collective head around the rupture which would be required to save us. It is a hyper-object, too far outside our everyday experience to even imagine. Even Jeremy Corbyn’s talk of a mild disruption was too much mix up. Told they can have free education, the proles protest, demanding to pay something. They hate the rich but they all want to be rich. Instead of taking advantage of crisis, workers want to play it safe, stall for time. They understand intuitively as they drive the freeways and see the tent camps and the shopping cart people that bad as it is, it can get way worse. Just as a surplus of unemployed teaches workers to accept the shit wage and lack of benefits, a surplus army of humans huddled beneath the underpass teaches them to stay quiet, do some oxy, wear a MAGA hat. To appreciate their “little pink house”.
The dominant message is that we must come together as a Nation, set aside our internal differences and unite against the Other. Protect our National Interests. Energy independence. Circle the wagons on our island, enjoy the Super Bowl and let them fight it out for the scraps. But the morning after, we wake to find the Rupture is still there, the spectre, the ticking clock. You want to believe Bill McKibben when he says 2020 is the year things change, you try to believe the candidates, let their optimism wash over you. But you have been paying too much attention.
Dan La Botz writes that we must:
“recognize that the working class is not yet prepared to act on its own. We will continue organizing and fighting for our politics in the labor and social movements, while waiting for the event that will trigger the eruption of the mass movement without which our politics have no vehicle.”
He gets the concept of rupture but places to much emphasis on a class which has no sense of belonging, is not a class “for itself”. These everyday folks intuit that there will be no “just transition” without bloodshed and they aren’t quite ready to give up the few small comforts they have finally earned just to grab a pitchfork and get their head’s bashed. Not yet, anyway.

Revenge of the Deplorables

Dark times for social justice. The Tories just answered the social democratic proposition with a landslide No Thanks, and so Britain will soon be Great again, joining a host of countries moving to the Nationalist far Right. Start with our own USA, Hindu nationalist India, Brazil, the Philippines, Israel, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, recently Ecuador...I'm sure others could grow this list. And while they are each specific and particular, there are universal trends as well; the first is a fierce anti-intellectualism which feeds on resentment and embraces xenophobic reaction.

I watched some of a recent Trump rally where he told the crowd: "You are the real elites." That is a lot to unpack but basically you have a mix of what Leftists still want to call "the working classes", Trump's hardcore base, who get their energy from having been called "deplorables" by Hillary Clinton. In the symbolic register, Hillary stands for every superior, smarty pants, over-educated snob who ever looked down their nose at these knuckleheads. The slight could have been real or perceived but the resentment is real. Where I live people paste "Proud Deplorable" on their sixty thousand dollar F350 pickups and it is that pride and resentment that Trump is a master at manipulating.These are people who keep their gun next to their Bible and porn, who think Sharia Law is about to be imposed on the US, who still don't believe Obama was born in the US. They couldn't find Pakistan on a map nor would that bother them in the least.

Now Hillary caught hell from all the enlightened progressives for using the term but the fact is, lots of these folks have deplorable politics. There is lots about the culture they identify with which is deplorable. Lots of their attitudes are deplorable and yet Trump has allowed them to not necessarily stop feeling ignorant, but to embrace and flaunt and celebrate ignorance as a virtue. Their chauvinism and xenophobia and prejudice are transfigured into nationalist zeal. This, I would argue, is the unifying ideology of the growing global move to the post-modern Right. A billionaire NY real estate con man clown telling rubes they are the elite. They laugh and clap at the stand-up because they can tell how much Trump enjoys it and they want to please the amazing phallus Father. Terry Eagleton writes: "The aim of advanced capitalism is to preserve inequality while abolishing hierarchy."

Our own Bernie faces the same dark, irrational forces. Offering a program of emancipation and liberation The People grow increasingly nervous. Wouldn't it be scary to be free? Wouldn't that mean we would have to pay attention? Wouldn't that mean we would be responsible for determining our own destiny? Where's daddy?