Better Late Than Never?

Not really. The dominant post-election narrative promulgated by both U.S. "political" parties and the vast commentariat is that the Dems lost the socio-economic group known as "the working class" to the Repubs. A group, by the way, that never got much airplay prior to this bizarre election. Now it's all you hear! We abandoned the Working Class! Win back the Working Class! For the last several decades we heard a lot about the "middle-class". Until a few weeks ago, this was who all the "politicians" were supposedly fighting for. The class everyone wanted to see prosper. This class is different from workers even though they work. They are simply better educated and make more dough and are willing to help the environment as long as there is no cost to them personally. According to sociologists and people who study these things. The problem, unfortunately, is that the working class is so thoroughly atomized and individuated, they have no class consciousness nor sense of class belonging. They are alienated consumers and totaly transactional in their "politics". Sadly, appeals to solidarity or economic justice or even "democracy" fall flat. Like everyone, they simply want treats. Promise them treats, even fossil-fueled treats, especially fossil-fueled treats and you get their vote. A chicken in every pot works but a guaranteed family vacation to Disneyworld will make you Emperor For Life. Try asking them if they identify as workers and see the funny look you get. The reason I put "politics" in scare quotes is because in a liberal capitalist "democracy" ( more scare quotes), the sphere of The Political is so truncated, so denuded, as to debase the true meaning of the term. It is used (constantly, repeatedly) to make people believe they are self-governed. A lovely thought, right? "Of the People, by the People, for the People!" Legislation and policy! As Master of your own destiny you get to choose between a Party who offers you a trip to Disneyworld or one who offers sex-reassignment surgery and cities without cops. No brainer! Of course all of this post-election analysis assumes you would really want to win control over this free-falling shit show. That takes a certain breed of sociopath or deluded moron. As the COP resumes in Azerbaijan you won't hear two words about climate change in all the Post-Election Analysis. Because it was never an issue during the election. We heard a lot about the wars, a lot about inflation, a lot about immigration. So the workers voted for Hope and Change! Why wouldn't they. Cheap fossil-fueled treats for all! Deal with the floods and fires as they come. That's what insurance is for , right? What this all boils down to is a huge pile of what Mark Fisher called ideological rubble. Mixed with a large dose of repressed and subsumed psych-social trauma. We know it's a facade but act AS IF it's real. Thrown in a cynical fuck-the-future attitude and some Christian millenialism and hang on to your hats, we're in for a wild ride.

Face to Face

Richard King, author of Here Be Monsters, has a new piece in the magazine Arena titled Standing Ground in a Turning World. He argues that "identity politics" has been detrimental to Left organizing because it lacks a sympathetic understanding of how people's lives have been turned upside down by the pace of techno-scientific change. He recommends tolerance for small c conservatism and the traditional values that help anchor people people tossed about by modernity. He sees signs of this "moral maturity" in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations which have avoided the purity tests seen in other recent protest movements. I've tried to make this case for some time, insisting that technology tends to run out ahead of culture's ability to absorb and assimilate it resulting in the kind of incoherent "politics" we are seeing globally. This incoherence shows up on the Left in the form of pronoun policing and snow-flake hysteria over cultural appropriation. On the Right it manifests as looney conspiracy theories and "passionate intensity" ranging from populism to fascism. The question for me is how you find the sweet spot between a provincialism that can be reactionary, racist, xenophobic etc and a cosmopolitanism that is alienating. You want to tolerate religious belief but also challenge chauvinistic sex-gender prejudice. We can appreciate "face to face" interactions but still value the internet. It is the question of how much time these adjustments take. Capitalism moves at the speed of light and "all that is solid melts into air", regardless of the cultural dislocation Freemantle Shipping News