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?
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