As we watch the Trump phenomenon unfold, a number of interesting aspects are beginning to coalesce around the entire circus. Among these are questions about the 'real' heart of the Republican Party; is Trump's racism just a more blatant form of what is actually everywhere in American politics, and who is really responsible for the emerging violence anyway?
Whether Trump represents the real culmination of the recent trajectory of the Republican Party or some new manifestation of it is a question whose answer really depends upon you point of view. I think a strong case can be made for both arguments. There is little doubt that the mean-spirited, angry, nasty, evangelical, excessively (if illusory) nationalistic elements of the GOP coalesced in recent years in the so-called "tea party" movement (much like the same attitudes coalesced in the Harper Party here in Canada). And this aspect of the GOP has always been there in various forms. For a long time the more classist and racist aspects at the heart of the GOP were hidden behind neo-liberal economic policies which aimed at using supposedly neutral, purely economic approaches that claimed to have prosperity as their goal but actually targeted the poorer, more vulnerable, and racialized citizens. As many people have pointed out, this began in Nixon's so-called Southern strategy and as the limits of neo-liberalism became more clear in recent years this strategy gradually came out of the shadow and became more blatant in its "tea party" guise. It should be pretty clear that even if there have been people in the GOP who didn't really understand that the goal of neo-liberalism was to make the poor poorer (and the impoverishment of 'racial minorities' is a natural extension of those policies), that this is where the GOP was heading all along. Having said that, no political party is a monolith, least of all American political parties which have very little in the way of party law. Thus, I have no doubt that there have been many Republicans who don't like where their party has gone. Furthermore, there is some confusion about what Trump really represents, other than his angry racist firebranding. He has talked about ending certain aspects of free trade etc. So in this sense, we can't really know what kind of Republican Party Trump would represent unless he (gasp) became president.
But there is a deeper, perhaps more pressing, question below the epiphenomenon of the racism and violence of Trump and his supporters. Anyone who takes a serious view of American society understands that violence and racism (both at home and abroad) have been central to American development and economic power. As Zoé Samudzi pointed out recently in her article for Harlot.media, Hillary's Liberal Cowardice Enables Trump's White Supremacy. Samudzi is right in pointing out that there is no American without a "legacy of brutal state violence, a fact that Democrats conveniently forget as they attempt to make [a] more diverse and positive counterpart to Trump's "make America great again" slogan." What Samudzi and some others have been trying to point out is the message that few Americans want to hear, and that is below the blatant racism and violence of Trump and his supporters there are deep structural elements of racism and violence in American society that not only have been long supported by both parties but they continue to support them in various ways. Racism and violence are endemic in US society and politics and the political establishment of the Democrats and the Republicans are doing almost nothing to address these issue. More than that, they continue to trade on racism and violence for the wealth that an unfair system gives to the one percent. Anyone who thinks that Hillary Clinton doesn't have years of blood on her hands for her continual support of international violence and racism committed by the American military machine should reevaluate their knowledge of US foreign policy and Clinton's role in it. In other words, to concentrate too much on the violence and racism of Trump and his supporters diverts attention from the violence and racism that IS American society as constructed and supported by the establishment in both political parties. It is not unlike pointing to child-molesting priests in the Catholic Church as simply a way of taking attention away from the centuries of violence, sexism, misogyny, and racism, that the entire Church has always, and continues to, represent.
And this brings us to the strangest question of all, the question of culpability in the escalating violence around the Trump campaign. One particularly distasteful aspect of Trump supporters is the way they have begun to point fingers at everyone but themselves for the violence that is no plaguing the Trump campaign. By pointing fingers at groups like Black Lives Matter and Sanders' supporters, the Trump supporters are undertaking a classic smoke and mirrors strategy of violent authoritarians everywhere. This strategy is most historically obvious in colonial history. As colonized people became more aware of their oppression and began to fight back against the colonizers, the colonizers used these fights as a way of post facto justifying their colonization by suggesting that the colonized peoples were demonstrating their inherently "savage" makeup. (This strategy has been used regularly by the oppressive Israeli state) It is a simple strategy, ignore the violence upon which colonization and land theft is based, and portray yourself as the victim of a savage group who have actually been the victim all along. Thus in the US, the history of slavery and oppression don't matter, the routine death of African Americans at the hands of white police don't matter, so African Americans can be portrayed as a bunch of unreasonable, rioting fanatics.
The US is unquestionably going through a disturbing process. But it would be a serious, irrational mistake to suggest that Trump is unique. Violence and racism have been and continue to be fundamental aspects of American life, politics, and foreign policy. And until Americans begin to admit that to themselves, politics will continue to be a circus that is used to justify profound injustice.
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
The Divisive Crack in US Society. . .
I grew up in the US in the midst of the Vietnam War. It was undoubtably a turbulent time. As I got a bit older and the US started to go significantly downhill during he 1980s, loosing it economic edge and gradually rejuvenating its neo-colonial military efforts in the third world, I like many of my generation lost faith and hope. As a fairly extreme leftist, I never had much faith in the US. But also like many progressives, I thought that the liberal social movements of the 60s and 70s as well as the anti-militarism that grew out of the anti-Vietnam war effort were leading to a significantly more progressive future for the US. The Reagan presidency basically put an end to those hopes. I finally left the US shortly after George Bush (the elder) was elected. I knew for certain then that the US had set itself on the path to destruction. Though two "Democrats" have won the presidency since then, they de facto adopted the same neo-liberal economic agenda that Reagan had helped to usher in (and in many ways magnified it significantly).
I have thought for a long time now that the United States in on a path to a federal breakup. There are surely few countries that are more ideologically divided as the US. The ideological differences that mark the nation have nowhere been more pronounced than in the emergence of the so-called "Tea Party" republicans. This bizarre, shockingly ignorant, group have fashioned a strange combination of pre-constitutionalist evangelicalism, knownothinism, and an incredibly selective view of both the Constitution and early Federalist and Republican (no relation to modern republican) policies/approaches. It is a movement that is as strange as it is despicable.
The Tea Party movement may be hypocritical and often incomprehensible, but it is appealing to a large section of the bigoted, religious, white population of the US which now sees itself outnumbered in a country where it once had nearly unquestioned hegemony. There are still old-style Republicans out there but the party they once knew has gradually been taken by an even more bigoted and fundamentally religious group. It is difficult not to imagine that this de facto split will not lead in the near future to a split in the party itself. But the moderate Republicans and the Democrats have not really done much for the country anyway. The US continues to decline in many ways. Inequality (economic, social, political, and racial) is getting worse by the year. The US continues to lose its economic power, its military supremacy, its moral authority, and its democratic tradition. And a guy like Trump, despite rhetoric to the contrary, will do nothing for any of these declining cultural elements. Economically, Trump stands for more of the same - the decline of US manufacturing, the gradual disappearance of its education system, and the low-wage, anti-union economy that has led to the middle-class stagnation. Militarily Trump may talk big, but the gradual bankruptcy of the nation along with its often marginalized political stances will make it impossible for the US to continue to enforce its interests with military solutions. (Not that I really care about that, but many Americans do). The US never really had any moral authority, but many Americans struggled for it to have it. But when the Republican Nominee routinely advocates war crimes in his speeches, you can be sure that the any idea of American moral authority is permanently gone. And the very notion of democracy in the US (amidst PAC money and media concentration) is now in doubt.
There are many good and progressive people in the US, and I am sure they are horrified by the idea of a Trump presidency. But even if Trump does not become president, Americans need to think seriously about what their country has become where a blatant racist man pushing the country toward outright fascism can win the support of a significant portion of the population. It is difficult to imagine a happy ending here.
I have thought for a long time now that the United States in on a path to a federal breakup. There are surely few countries that are more ideologically divided as the US. The ideological differences that mark the nation have nowhere been more pronounced than in the emergence of the so-called "Tea Party" republicans. This bizarre, shockingly ignorant, group have fashioned a strange combination of pre-constitutionalist evangelicalism, knownothinism, and an incredibly selective view of both the Constitution and early Federalist and Republican (no relation to modern republican) policies/approaches. It is a movement that is as strange as it is despicable.
The Tea Party movement may be hypocritical and often incomprehensible, but it is appealing to a large section of the bigoted, religious, white population of the US which now sees itself outnumbered in a country where it once had nearly unquestioned hegemony. There are still old-style Republicans out there but the party they once knew has gradually been taken by an even more bigoted and fundamentally religious group. It is difficult not to imagine that this de facto split will not lead in the near future to a split in the party itself. But the moderate Republicans and the Democrats have not really done much for the country anyway. The US continues to decline in many ways. Inequality (economic, social, political, and racial) is getting worse by the year. The US continues to lose its economic power, its military supremacy, its moral authority, and its democratic tradition. And a guy like Trump, despite rhetoric to the contrary, will do nothing for any of these declining cultural elements. Economically, Trump stands for more of the same - the decline of US manufacturing, the gradual disappearance of its education system, and the low-wage, anti-union economy that has led to the middle-class stagnation. Militarily Trump may talk big, but the gradual bankruptcy of the nation along with its often marginalized political stances will make it impossible for the US to continue to enforce its interests with military solutions. (Not that I really care about that, but many Americans do). The US never really had any moral authority, but many Americans struggled for it to have it. But when the Republican Nominee routinely advocates war crimes in his speeches, you can be sure that the any idea of American moral authority is permanently gone. And the very notion of democracy in the US (amidst PAC money and media concentration) is now in doubt.
There are many good and progressive people in the US, and I am sure they are horrified by the idea of a Trump presidency. But even if Trump does not become president, Americans need to think seriously about what their country has become where a blatant racist man pushing the country toward outright fascism can win the support of a significant portion of the population. It is difficult to imagine a happy ending here.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Racism and Knownothinism as Capitalist Weapons. . .
One of Karl Marx's most famous dictums was that socioeconomic systems create the conditions of their own demise. This process could be said to happen in two ways. On the one hand, a system of production creates the conditions for a 'better' and 'more advanced' one to take its place. This rather teleological idea can be easily conceived like this - capitalism evolves such a complex system of production and distribution that mechanisms of cooperation and planning become more and more necessary. Forms of socialism become, in other words, necessary for the system to continue. One take on this process was famously outlined by Eduard Bernstein when he created (much to the chagrin of revolutionaries everywhere) the idea of evolutionary socialism. There is no doubt that capitalism has, indeed, created elements of socialism at its very heart (universal education, healthcare, an extensive public service, welfare, etc.). But capitalism has also evolved greater and greater mechanisms of exploitation, and society, by many accounts, is less equal today than it was fifty years ago.
This fact brings us to the second way in which a socioeconomic system creates the conditions for its own demise - the greed and stupidity of the ruling class. There is a growing consensus that in order to operate effectively capitalism needs to tend toward a surprisingly high degree of economic equality. Inequality leads to all sorts of socioeconomic crisis. The framers of the modern welfare state understood this clearly; they knew that without some degree of universalism, capitalism would lead inevitably to revolution. The reasons that this seems less clear today are globalization and the decline of traditional methods of industrial production in 'advanced' countries. If capitalists can effectively atomize society and production, the impulses for socioeconomic evolution are made considerably less acute. This process is both good and bad for the rich and powerful. In the short term it buys them space and time to amass unprecedented wealth while bypassing traditional revolutionary impulses. But in the long term it creates conditions for new, never before seen kinds of opposition and crisis (including potential environmental disaster).
History is littered with states and societies in which the ruling class failed to see the looming crisis, the crisis that would lead either to complete social breakdown or to the overthrow of their system of power. One of the ways in which societies attempt to draw out their period of demise is to get the 'common people' on side in their own exploitation. To do this, the ruling class has to convince the people that it is not the rich and powerful that are leading the society to inequality and disaster but that it is some external threat or that it is being poisoned from the inside by groups that are corrupting 'traditional' values. This internal target can be anything from a particular religion and/or ethnicity to intellectuals or homosexuals. These are all easy and soft targets which can be blamed for 'destroying the values' that once made the nation 'great.'
This kind of rhetoric has been much in evidence lately. Recall Stephen Harper's famous quip that we shouldn't "commit sociology," for example. The last thing leaders like Harper want is for people to attempt to analyze the origins of social threats or crises. Analysis leads to discovery of the actual socioeconomic relations behind such crises. The attack on intellectualism has always been a central weapon in the rightwing armoury. Just the other day Donald Trump said in his Nevada victory speech "I love the poorly educated." This offhand remark will surely go down in the annals of rightwing knownothinism. Jews were once the central internal target of diversion for the fascist cause. Today Muslims have taken their place. And Muslims are a much more effective target because they can be portrayed as both internal corruptors of our system as well as an external threat. When the racists ministers (and Harper minions) Chris Alexander and Kellie Leitch stood up in front of the nation to announce a "barbaric cultural practices" snitch line, they knew exactly what they were doing; they were attempting to use race and ethnicity to whip up fear of an internal corruptor of "our" values. This classic smoke and mirrors technique goes to the very heart of capitalism's crisis, a self-made crisis of inequality that the rightwing wants you to believe is rooted in the threat of the 'other.'
I am not one of those radicals that says that capitalism leads "inevitably" to its own demise per se. I believe that as a socialist that position is dangerously hypocritical. If I believe that we can make society we choose, it would be problematic for me to claim that we can't make some form of more sustainable capitalism. But I do agree with Marx's basic premiss that a system creates the conditions for its own replacement with something different. I think some 'market' mechanisms will go on for a very long time even if we do choose to move toward a more socialist society. On the other hand, I think that within a modern context fascism is an inherently unstable system that will lead to disaster. At the moment the real political question for our generation is 'can we avoid the pitfall of the fascist impulse in the face of a capitalist crisis?' Can we see through the smoke and mirrors of scapegoating internal and external threats and come to grips with the fact that capitalism's present crisis is of its own making and the people we need to reject are the very ones pointing to the "other" while it is really they who are leading us to disaster?
This fact brings us to the second way in which a socioeconomic system creates the conditions for its own demise - the greed and stupidity of the ruling class. There is a growing consensus that in order to operate effectively capitalism needs to tend toward a surprisingly high degree of economic equality. Inequality leads to all sorts of socioeconomic crisis. The framers of the modern welfare state understood this clearly; they knew that without some degree of universalism, capitalism would lead inevitably to revolution. The reasons that this seems less clear today are globalization and the decline of traditional methods of industrial production in 'advanced' countries. If capitalists can effectively atomize society and production, the impulses for socioeconomic evolution are made considerably less acute. This process is both good and bad for the rich and powerful. In the short term it buys them space and time to amass unprecedented wealth while bypassing traditional revolutionary impulses. But in the long term it creates conditions for new, never before seen kinds of opposition and crisis (including potential environmental disaster).
History is littered with states and societies in which the ruling class failed to see the looming crisis, the crisis that would lead either to complete social breakdown or to the overthrow of their system of power. One of the ways in which societies attempt to draw out their period of demise is to get the 'common people' on side in their own exploitation. To do this, the ruling class has to convince the people that it is not the rich and powerful that are leading the society to inequality and disaster but that it is some external threat or that it is being poisoned from the inside by groups that are corrupting 'traditional' values. This internal target can be anything from a particular religion and/or ethnicity to intellectuals or homosexuals. These are all easy and soft targets which can be blamed for 'destroying the values' that once made the nation 'great.'
This kind of rhetoric has been much in evidence lately. Recall Stephen Harper's famous quip that we shouldn't "commit sociology," for example. The last thing leaders like Harper want is for people to attempt to analyze the origins of social threats or crises. Analysis leads to discovery of the actual socioeconomic relations behind such crises. The attack on intellectualism has always been a central weapon in the rightwing armoury. Just the other day Donald Trump said in his Nevada victory speech "I love the poorly educated." This offhand remark will surely go down in the annals of rightwing knownothinism. Jews were once the central internal target of diversion for the fascist cause. Today Muslims have taken their place. And Muslims are a much more effective target because they can be portrayed as both internal corruptors of our system as well as an external threat. When the racists ministers (and Harper minions) Chris Alexander and Kellie Leitch stood up in front of the nation to announce a "barbaric cultural practices" snitch line, they knew exactly what they were doing; they were attempting to use race and ethnicity to whip up fear of an internal corruptor of "our" values. This classic smoke and mirrors technique goes to the very heart of capitalism's crisis, a self-made crisis of inequality that the rightwing wants you to believe is rooted in the threat of the 'other.'
I am not one of those radicals that says that capitalism leads "inevitably" to its own demise per se. I believe that as a socialist that position is dangerously hypocritical. If I believe that we can make society we choose, it would be problematic for me to claim that we can't make some form of more sustainable capitalism. But I do agree with Marx's basic premiss that a system creates the conditions for its own replacement with something different. I think some 'market' mechanisms will go on for a very long time even if we do choose to move toward a more socialist society. On the other hand, I think that within a modern context fascism is an inherently unstable system that will lead to disaster. At the moment the real political question for our generation is 'can we avoid the pitfall of the fascist impulse in the face of a capitalist crisis?' Can we see through the smoke and mirrors of scapegoating internal and external threats and come to grips with the fact that capitalism's present crisis is of its own making and the people we need to reject are the very ones pointing to the "other" while it is really they who are leading us to disaster?
Friday, February 26, 2016
What Rules do Harper and Trump follow??
Watching the gradual deterioration of rightwing politics into racism, extremism, and economic and environmental disaster, it is surely shocking how easily, here in the 21st century, the bugs crawl out from their hiding places. As cynical as I am it even surprised me how quickly Harper's regression into overtly racist politics led to the sudden emergence of increased bigotry in Canada. As soon as leaders legitimize such ideology, as Harper and his minions did and as Trump is doing now, the real ugly underbelly of the rightwing emerges. And it is both depressing and shameful.
It seems to me that the deterioration of traditional conservative parties in both Canada, the US, and elsewhere, is largely a result of the gradual failure of neo-liberal ideology which has now fairly conclusively demonstrated that it leads nowhere. Traditional conservatives who so gladly backed neo-liberalism, are now left bereft of a meaningful way forward and as they flounder and tread water the vacuum of their failure is filled by the wackos who seem to know nothing about anything and so they largely simply rely on the politics of hate, anger, and scapegoating to fill their ever increasing void.
Here in Canada in the wake of a decade of such hate and anger, we now are faced with the embarrassing presence of an opposition leader whose ignorance about just about everything is matched only by her spiteful mean-spiritedness. I mean, who would have predicted 20 years ago that we would have an opposition leader who glorifies Ayn Rand??!! (The shear stupidity of Rand's thought is matched only by the ridiculous performative contradiction of claiming to be a Randian while simultaneously being a public servant. I mean you really couldn't make this stuff up)
The other day I heard a Trump supporter complain about immigrants by saying that "These people come here and don't want to obey the rules." There are many levels of ignorance on display here, but I will talk about the one that I find most telling.
When a rightwing wingnut talks about immigrants not "obeying the rules" what they are really saying, of course, is that they are not "obeying my rules." What this ignorant Trump supporter was conflating was the difference between rules and laws. Laws are things you have to obey, while rules are something with which you choose to abide. Laws apply (or at least should be applied) to everyone equally. Rules, on the other hand are largely things we voluntarily engage with depending on time and place. If we want to engage in certain professions, for example, we can chose to abide by the rules of the professional association that grants accreditation. If we want to join a gym we choose to adhere to certain rules about, say, clothing or wiping down the machines after use. At a wider scale, rules are really just norms and standards of behaviour. But these are flexible and we can choose to flout norms even if we pay a social price for that.
The reason I am making this distinction is that the conflation of laws and norms, so poignantly expressed by that Trump supporter, is very revealing about the decline of the rightwing into a movement of anger, hate, and division. Western Liberal democracy, imperfect as it has been, was founded on an assumption that while laws should apply to everyone, norms and standards of behaviour should be as flexible as possible to allow for the greatest degree of diversity and personal belief and action. But as Western Liberal democracy has begun to falter and fail (both as a result of direct attacks by the rightwing and a growing social/political/economic inequality) the rightwing leaders (largely in an effort to divert attention from their own ideological failures) have increasingly attempted to focus people's attention on the actions of the perceived "other." They don't want us to think about the fact that there has been a significant decline in people disobeying laws, and they want us to think about how people aren't abiding by our (read traditional white) norms of behaviour.
When rightwing ideology (which even at its best is largely a defence of selfishness) fails over a long period to "deliver the goods," it is left with an empty shell of hate and anger. Where it fails to legislate this negativity (largely because courts have prevented it) it refocuses attention on the more abstract and more easily manipulatable notions of norms of behaviour. Ironically, the phenomena of Harper and Trump is actually a sign of the failure of rightwing ideology to deliver the promised prosperity, just as a bully who is losing an argument reverts to physical violence. The rightwing want us to believe that norms of behaviour are the most important thing in society not because they believe in peace and social harmony but because they have failed legally and legislatively and so they want us to believe that the apparent failures of our society (for which they are most responsible in the first place) are a result of people who have come into "our" society and don't want to play by "our" rules.
It seems to me that the deterioration of traditional conservative parties in both Canada, the US, and elsewhere, is largely a result of the gradual failure of neo-liberal ideology which has now fairly conclusively demonstrated that it leads nowhere. Traditional conservatives who so gladly backed neo-liberalism, are now left bereft of a meaningful way forward and as they flounder and tread water the vacuum of their failure is filled by the wackos who seem to know nothing about anything and so they largely simply rely on the politics of hate, anger, and scapegoating to fill their ever increasing void.
Here in Canada in the wake of a decade of such hate and anger, we now are faced with the embarrassing presence of an opposition leader whose ignorance about just about everything is matched only by her spiteful mean-spiritedness. I mean, who would have predicted 20 years ago that we would have an opposition leader who glorifies Ayn Rand??!! (The shear stupidity of Rand's thought is matched only by the ridiculous performative contradiction of claiming to be a Randian while simultaneously being a public servant. I mean you really couldn't make this stuff up)
The other day I heard a Trump supporter complain about immigrants by saying that "These people come here and don't want to obey the rules." There are many levels of ignorance on display here, but I will talk about the one that I find most telling.
When a rightwing wingnut talks about immigrants not "obeying the rules" what they are really saying, of course, is that they are not "obeying my rules." What this ignorant Trump supporter was conflating was the difference between rules and laws. Laws are things you have to obey, while rules are something with which you choose to abide. Laws apply (or at least should be applied) to everyone equally. Rules, on the other hand are largely things we voluntarily engage with depending on time and place. If we want to engage in certain professions, for example, we can chose to abide by the rules of the professional association that grants accreditation. If we want to join a gym we choose to adhere to certain rules about, say, clothing or wiping down the machines after use. At a wider scale, rules are really just norms and standards of behaviour. But these are flexible and we can choose to flout norms even if we pay a social price for that.
The reason I am making this distinction is that the conflation of laws and norms, so poignantly expressed by that Trump supporter, is very revealing about the decline of the rightwing into a movement of anger, hate, and division. Western Liberal democracy, imperfect as it has been, was founded on an assumption that while laws should apply to everyone, norms and standards of behaviour should be as flexible as possible to allow for the greatest degree of diversity and personal belief and action. But as Western Liberal democracy has begun to falter and fail (both as a result of direct attacks by the rightwing and a growing social/political/economic inequality) the rightwing leaders (largely in an effort to divert attention from their own ideological failures) have increasingly attempted to focus people's attention on the actions of the perceived "other." They don't want us to think about the fact that there has been a significant decline in people disobeying laws, and they want us to think about how people aren't abiding by our (read traditional white) norms of behaviour.
When rightwing ideology (which even at its best is largely a defence of selfishness) fails over a long period to "deliver the goods," it is left with an empty shell of hate and anger. Where it fails to legislate this negativity (largely because courts have prevented it) it refocuses attention on the more abstract and more easily manipulatable notions of norms of behaviour. Ironically, the phenomena of Harper and Trump is actually a sign of the failure of rightwing ideology to deliver the promised prosperity, just as a bully who is losing an argument reverts to physical violence. The rightwing want us to believe that norms of behaviour are the most important thing in society not because they believe in peace and social harmony but because they have failed legally and legislatively and so they want us to believe that the apparent failures of our society (for which they are most responsible in the first place) are a result of people who have come into "our" society and don't want to play by "our" rules.
Monday, February 15, 2016
Democracy and the Internet. . .
Lorne over at Politics and its Discontents posted an excellent essay today on the decline of democracy that is occurring in part because of the death of newspapers and professional journalism in general. I have been thinking a lot lately about the other side of this issue - the rise of the internet in every facet of our lives - particularly because my daughter is doing a Masters in Communication with an focus of the use of digital media by unions. She and I regularly discuss the issues surrounding democracy, digital culture, and leftist ideology.
Lorne is right about the need for newspapers and professional journalism in bringing important issue to light in civil society. This is particularly important given that collusion between government and big capital is not always easy to see or understand. Lorne rejects the notion that the internet truly democratizes information. I generally agree because when you really research the issue you find that the internet continues to be dominated to a surprising degree by powerful corporations. However, I would say that we really don't know yet the ways and degrees to which digital media will impact society and human beings in general.
My daughter and I were discussing this issue the other day because her T.A. duties required her to talk to the students about Marshall Mcluhan. She was shocked when she found out that not a single one of the students had even heard of Marshall Mcluhan. Granted, these were first year students, but they were all communications majors and Mcluhan is, after all, a very famous Canadian. We discussed this issue and broadened it as I wondered out loud why it is that despite so much access to information so many young people are ignorant of so many things. I thought back to when I was helping my son with an essay on Kerouac's On the Road. As I was discussing the book with him I started mentioning various cultural figures who Kerouac talks about throughout the text of On the Road, I realized that though he had read the book he was unfamiliar with almost all of these cultural icons. This lack of knowledge was not, in and of itself, surprising. However, given that he was reading On the Road specifically for a university class with the intention of writing an essay, I was shocked that he hadn't looked them all up as he was reading. After all, a nearly infinite wealth of information is at our fingertips at all times. These facts led me and my daughter to wonder if the internet is actually having the opposite effect on new generations than what one would assume. Perhaps instead of leading many young people to seek out a lot of new information, the internet is actually causing people to not bother trying to find many things out. The reason for this could be that the ubiquity of information could lead to an assumption that everything that we need to know will automatically come to us. Before the internet our relationship to information was clear in as much as we understood that knowing things required effort. We knew that there was a lot that we didn't know and if we wanted to know such things we had to go (for the most part) to books in order to find out. However, when information is so accessible and presumably ubiquitous, I think many young people (that is to say people who have no memory of a pre-internet experience) assume that what they need to know about culture they either already know or it will be shortly bestowed on them by this ubiquity itself. It is not a very complicated hypothesis. If you are continually barraged by information of all kinds, the idea that you might have to go out and make an effort to research and find things out seems strangely absurd.
I wonder if this phenomenon is sort of like the flip side of the death of newspapers and journalism. Our relationships to newspapers, for example, was very physical, particularly broadsheets. We had to get the newspapers and sift through them in a way that is quite distinct from how we get information on the internet. Furthermore, the physical limits of the newspaper itself was sensually understood. Newspapers were slices of information and further information required the reader to seek out another medium. The message of the internet, on the other hand, is ubiquity. If, getting back to Mcluhan, the medium is the message, then the message of the internet is potentially that in the act of opening the internet, we are information and information is us.
I have no doubt that democracy can only be meaningful to the degree that people are informed. There is no doubt that the death of the newspaper and professional journalism will close down much of society's information exchange. This is not a difficult relationship to understand, though finding a way to fill the void that it leaves is more complicated. The assumption that the internet bestows on people might be considerably more dangerous to democracy because when people assume that they are informed but aren't, they become the fodder of rich and powerful.
Lorne is right about the need for newspapers and professional journalism in bringing important issue to light in civil society. This is particularly important given that collusion between government and big capital is not always easy to see or understand. Lorne rejects the notion that the internet truly democratizes information. I generally agree because when you really research the issue you find that the internet continues to be dominated to a surprising degree by powerful corporations. However, I would say that we really don't know yet the ways and degrees to which digital media will impact society and human beings in general.
My daughter and I were discussing this issue the other day because her T.A. duties required her to talk to the students about Marshall Mcluhan. She was shocked when she found out that not a single one of the students had even heard of Marshall Mcluhan. Granted, these were first year students, but they were all communications majors and Mcluhan is, after all, a very famous Canadian. We discussed this issue and broadened it as I wondered out loud why it is that despite so much access to information so many young people are ignorant of so many things. I thought back to when I was helping my son with an essay on Kerouac's On the Road. As I was discussing the book with him I started mentioning various cultural figures who Kerouac talks about throughout the text of On the Road, I realized that though he had read the book he was unfamiliar with almost all of these cultural icons. This lack of knowledge was not, in and of itself, surprising. However, given that he was reading On the Road specifically for a university class with the intention of writing an essay, I was shocked that he hadn't looked them all up as he was reading. After all, a nearly infinite wealth of information is at our fingertips at all times. These facts led me and my daughter to wonder if the internet is actually having the opposite effect on new generations than what one would assume. Perhaps instead of leading many young people to seek out a lot of new information, the internet is actually causing people to not bother trying to find many things out. The reason for this could be that the ubiquity of information could lead to an assumption that everything that we need to know will automatically come to us. Before the internet our relationship to information was clear in as much as we understood that knowing things required effort. We knew that there was a lot that we didn't know and if we wanted to know such things we had to go (for the most part) to books in order to find out. However, when information is so accessible and presumably ubiquitous, I think many young people (that is to say people who have no memory of a pre-internet experience) assume that what they need to know about culture they either already know or it will be shortly bestowed on them by this ubiquity itself. It is not a very complicated hypothesis. If you are continually barraged by information of all kinds, the idea that you might have to go out and make an effort to research and find things out seems strangely absurd.
I wonder if this phenomenon is sort of like the flip side of the death of newspapers and journalism. Our relationships to newspapers, for example, was very physical, particularly broadsheets. We had to get the newspapers and sift through them in a way that is quite distinct from how we get information on the internet. Furthermore, the physical limits of the newspaper itself was sensually understood. Newspapers were slices of information and further information required the reader to seek out another medium. The message of the internet, on the other hand, is ubiquity. If, getting back to Mcluhan, the medium is the message, then the message of the internet is potentially that in the act of opening the internet, we are information and information is us.
I have no doubt that democracy can only be meaningful to the degree that people are informed. There is no doubt that the death of the newspaper and professional journalism will close down much of society's information exchange. This is not a difficult relationship to understand, though finding a way to fill the void that it leaves is more complicated. The assumption that the internet bestows on people might be considerably more dangerous to democracy because when people assume that they are informed but aren't, they become the fodder of rich and powerful.
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Capitalism's Crisis . . . .
Economic and political instability are often impulses to change. Long waves of capitalism (originally outlined by Nikolai Kondratiev and then taken up by thinkers like Joseph Schumpeter and Ernest Mandel) have low and hi points. When you are headed to the bottom of one of these waves, capitalism is headed for a structural adjustment. This occurred in the wake of the first "Great Depression" (or what is now sometimes referred to as "The Long Depression") in the late 19th century. One of the reactions to this depression was the Progressive Movement, and one of the legislative responses was the anti-trust (or what should be called the anti-monopoly) laws. Another structural change came in the 1930 when smart capitalists realized that capitalism was a threat to itself and if it wasn't adjusted we were headed toward chaos. The smart centre-left politicians like FDR knew that a safety net was needed to make capitalism more functional. Meanwhile even smart Conservative politicians like Churchill understood that the one of the threats of a declining capitalism was the rise of Fascism.
When the long post-war boom ended, capitalists took the opportunity to shift the socioeconomic system away from the gains of the 1930s, and they used the process of globalization to make it difficult for nation-states to respond to the growing inequality and middle-class stagnation. But with the depression ushered in by the 2008 crash we see a new process of adjustment. Once again capitalism has become a threat to itself. In the wake of bank corruption, wealth decline, and staggering inequality, the Neo-Liberal narrative is clearly breaking down. The retreat of governance away from attempts at generalized wealth creation, at fair taxation, at infrastructural investment (as well as health and education) has meant that our governments have actively conspired to impoverish the people (something governments have always been good at). But the timing of this conspiratorial relationship is optically poor because it has placed government squarely in the role of being a point man for the rich at precisely the moment when capitalism is failing the vast majority of the world's population.
The threats that we now face are multi-fold. It is not clear that capitalism's growth at all cost impetus can be reformed at all, let alone reformed in time to save us from total environmental disaster. In the short term, perhaps the more pressing question is whether we can avoid the mistakes of the 1930s and the fall into fascism. If you take a rational view of fascism, it is not at all clear that we are avoiding this fall. The current crop of GOP candidates in the US demonstrates that the Americans are slipping fast and I am certain that Sinclair Lewis is spinning in his grave. Russia has been lost to fascism for some years already and China is a fascist dictatorship par excellence. Canada has already had a ten year dalliance with this ideology and with Kevin O'Leary on the horizon (a man who has threatened to outlaw unions and jail their supporters, something he couldn't do without martial law), we are teetering on the edge of a precipice.
In capitalism, as with any system, sometimes cooler head prevail sometimes they don't. The appeal of rightwing populism (the foundation of fascism) is obvious when you are dealing with a monstrously ignorant population under which seethes hidden feelings of racism. Though Canadians managed to reject this attitude in the last election, we see how easily and quickly racists and fascists come out of the woodwork once a political leader offers them the space by legitimizing hate speech. In the US, the rapid decline toward fascism is even more obvious and circus-like. We will know in a few months from now just how bad things are. Considering that even the more moderate GOP candidates are frighteningly fascist in tone and strategy, it doesn't look good.
Capitalism is in the trough of a wave. But this time the trough could end the world. It will take a great deal of courage from Socialists and Social Democrats to avert disaster, and there is no way capitalism in its present form can survive much longer.
When the long post-war boom ended, capitalists took the opportunity to shift the socioeconomic system away from the gains of the 1930s, and they used the process of globalization to make it difficult for nation-states to respond to the growing inequality and middle-class stagnation. But with the depression ushered in by the 2008 crash we see a new process of adjustment. Once again capitalism has become a threat to itself. In the wake of bank corruption, wealth decline, and staggering inequality, the Neo-Liberal narrative is clearly breaking down. The retreat of governance away from attempts at generalized wealth creation, at fair taxation, at infrastructural investment (as well as health and education) has meant that our governments have actively conspired to impoverish the people (something governments have always been good at). But the timing of this conspiratorial relationship is optically poor because it has placed government squarely in the role of being a point man for the rich at precisely the moment when capitalism is failing the vast majority of the world's population.
The threats that we now face are multi-fold. It is not clear that capitalism's growth at all cost impetus can be reformed at all, let alone reformed in time to save us from total environmental disaster. In the short term, perhaps the more pressing question is whether we can avoid the mistakes of the 1930s and the fall into fascism. If you take a rational view of fascism, it is not at all clear that we are avoiding this fall. The current crop of GOP candidates in the US demonstrates that the Americans are slipping fast and I am certain that Sinclair Lewis is spinning in his grave. Russia has been lost to fascism for some years already and China is a fascist dictatorship par excellence. Canada has already had a ten year dalliance with this ideology and with Kevin O'Leary on the horizon (a man who has threatened to outlaw unions and jail their supporters, something he couldn't do without martial law), we are teetering on the edge of a precipice.
In capitalism, as with any system, sometimes cooler head prevail sometimes they don't. The appeal of rightwing populism (the foundation of fascism) is obvious when you are dealing with a monstrously ignorant population under which seethes hidden feelings of racism. Though Canadians managed to reject this attitude in the last election, we see how easily and quickly racists and fascists come out of the woodwork once a political leader offers them the space by legitimizing hate speech. In the US, the rapid decline toward fascism is even more obvious and circus-like. We will know in a few months from now just how bad things are. Considering that even the more moderate GOP candidates are frighteningly fascist in tone and strategy, it doesn't look good.
Capitalism is in the trough of a wave. But this time the trough could end the world. It will take a great deal of courage from Socialists and Social Democrats to avert disaster, and there is no way capitalism in its present form can survive much longer.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Whither Democracy ?
I think that there is little doubt that Western democracy has 'lost it's way' a little bit, or is a state of increasing crisis. The roots of this crisis are, ironically, not in the politics of democracy per se, but in the economic path of Western Capitalism over the past few decades. The rise of globalization and Neo-Liberal economics led inevitably toward a problematical and predictable result - dramatic and ever increasing inequality of money and power in society. This state of inequality leads to a society of crisis. This crisis appears in the form of an ever shrinking economic security for the majority of people in society. The so-called shrinking of the 'middle-class' is really just the label we put on a society in which people's economic power and longterm security becomes ever less tenable. Millions of people are without a pension for their old age, with precarious jobs that will never afford them an opportunity to provide for their future economic security. Meanwhile, huge student debt is being amassed by a generation who have little hope of stable, secure, and prosperous employment. Decades of wage stagnation led to something much worse, a precarious economy in which people are becoming little more than wage-slaves to big corporations.
All of this regressive economic movement, leads to a kind of illusion of democracy. Neo-Liberals hijacked the political discourse and political institutions, orchestrated the death of a more equal and humane form of capitalism, and then they whip up populist fervor telling people that our political institutions are broken and can't deliver renewed prosperity BECAUSE OF THE VERY SITUATION THAT THEY PROMOTED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Thus the great irony of our generation is found in the fact that the very people who have promoted this inequality (people like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and our own Harper and his minions) are the people who now use populist language to try to convince people that they are the solution to their own bad policies. Neo-Liberal politicians are, of course, in no sense interested in reversing what they have wrought. They want a precarious work-force, they want a weak and desperate working-class, they want a very small middle-class for the very simple reason that poverty for the many de facto means more wealth and power for the few.
But the saddest part of this is that or democratic institutions, the institutions that brought you government pensions, universal education, the right to a safe workplace, minimum wages (albeit too small), etc., are the victims of this economic bait and switch. The Neo-Liberal strategy has been fairly simple: create a very unequal society by taking hold of the political institutions and legislating radically in favour of the rich and corporations, stand in the way of any positive reforms that will help people be more financially and socially secure, and then blame those very institutions for what the Neo-Liberals were pursuing with such fervor in the first place. To keep this agenda on track they not only demonize the various parts of government that they have intentionally used to pursue their ends, but they divert people's attention with fear-mongering, hate speech, scapegoating of minorities, and a general championing of know-nothingism.
There is no question that our political institutions can always benefit from improvements. But it is not really the political institutions, per se, that are the problem here. The problem is that the Neo-Liberals have created a society that is dangerously imbalanced and then convinced people that this imbalance is somehow the result of legislative recalcitrance and/or leftist pipe-dreams. And the Corporate media has so twisted people's perception of the situation that many average people in the US, for example, can listen to Donald Trump, a guy who has spent his life pursuing a society of inequality, and believe that he wants to bring about a restoration of the middle-class. For a decade, here in Canada, Stephen Harper ruthlessly pursued an agenda, the primary goal of which was to create greater economic inequality, and he continually ignored or blamed others for that growing problem. Meanwhile, he failed to diversify the economy (a Economics 101 lesson) and the inevitable decline in oil prices has been like a double whammy for average people. And the real wealthy people go merrily on with ever increasing economic leverage over the rest of the precarious population.
Western democracy has, indeed, lost its way. But the reason is because we bought an agenda that seeks to destroy it and any economic equality that it brought with it. The crisis in democracy is not really an institutional crisis, it is a crisis of inequality and Neo-Liberalism that turns people into slaves of a corporate hegemony. And the people are so busy just trying to survive and lead a decent life that they have no idea what is going on around them, and the weakest ones are willing to blame minorities and the most vulnerable for a problem that was actually intentionally created by rich white men.
All of this regressive economic movement, leads to a kind of illusion of democracy. Neo-Liberals hijacked the political discourse and political institutions, orchestrated the death of a more equal and humane form of capitalism, and then they whip up populist fervor telling people that our political institutions are broken and can't deliver renewed prosperity BECAUSE OF THE VERY SITUATION THAT THEY PROMOTED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Thus the great irony of our generation is found in the fact that the very people who have promoted this inequality (people like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and our own Harper and his minions) are the people who now use populist language to try to convince people that they are the solution to their own bad policies. Neo-Liberal politicians are, of course, in no sense interested in reversing what they have wrought. They want a precarious work-force, they want a weak and desperate working-class, they want a very small middle-class for the very simple reason that poverty for the many de facto means more wealth and power for the few.
But the saddest part of this is that or democratic institutions, the institutions that brought you government pensions, universal education, the right to a safe workplace, minimum wages (albeit too small), etc., are the victims of this economic bait and switch. The Neo-Liberal strategy has been fairly simple: create a very unequal society by taking hold of the political institutions and legislating radically in favour of the rich and corporations, stand in the way of any positive reforms that will help people be more financially and socially secure, and then blame those very institutions for what the Neo-Liberals were pursuing with such fervor in the first place. To keep this agenda on track they not only demonize the various parts of government that they have intentionally used to pursue their ends, but they divert people's attention with fear-mongering, hate speech, scapegoating of minorities, and a general championing of know-nothingism.
There is no question that our political institutions can always benefit from improvements. But it is not really the political institutions, per se, that are the problem here. The problem is that the Neo-Liberals have created a society that is dangerously imbalanced and then convinced people that this imbalance is somehow the result of legislative recalcitrance and/or leftist pipe-dreams. And the Corporate media has so twisted people's perception of the situation that many average people in the US, for example, can listen to Donald Trump, a guy who has spent his life pursuing a society of inequality, and believe that he wants to bring about a restoration of the middle-class. For a decade, here in Canada, Stephen Harper ruthlessly pursued an agenda, the primary goal of which was to create greater economic inequality, and he continually ignored or blamed others for that growing problem. Meanwhile, he failed to diversify the economy (a Economics 101 lesson) and the inevitable decline in oil prices has been like a double whammy for average people. And the real wealthy people go merrily on with ever increasing economic leverage over the rest of the precarious population.
Western democracy has, indeed, lost its way. But the reason is because we bought an agenda that seeks to destroy it and any economic equality that it brought with it. The crisis in democracy is not really an institutional crisis, it is a crisis of inequality and Neo-Liberalism that turns people into slaves of a corporate hegemony. And the people are so busy just trying to survive and lead a decent life that they have no idea what is going on around them, and the weakest ones are willing to blame minorities and the most vulnerable for a problem that was actually intentionally created by rich white men.
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