The Fake Left is up to its totalitarian tricks again, via NYT:
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, will no longer appear as a headliner at this year’s New Yorker Festival, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, announced in an email to the magazine’s staff on Monday evening.
The announcement followed several scathing rebukes and high-profile dropouts after the festival’s lineup, with Mr. Bannon featured, was announced. Within 30 minutes of one another, John Mulaney, Judd Apatow, Jack Antonoff and Jim Carrey said on social media that they would be pulling out of scheduled events at the festival. Right around the time when Mr. Remnick announced the cancellation of Mr. Bannon’s participation, Patton Oswalt did the same.
I will reiterate again that I am not in league with the US alt-right or any similar movement. But it is a great shame that the fake lefties at the New Yorker didn’t sit and listen to Mr Bannon. He said some great stuff to Four Corners this week that it needs to hear. Notably two points:
- that the US working classes are angry and unrepresented, and
- that the Democrats are yet to have their reformation so the alt-right had stolen its base.
And here we come to it. Mr Bannon is spectacularly correct. The Left needs an immediate root and branch reformation to address its catastrophic divorce from those it is supposed represent.
More to the point it is a counter-reformation that is required. We’ve already had the revolution in the rise of cultural Marxism. The post-structural revolution that led directly to the rise of the identity politics that today dominates Left-wing policy-making in Western nations and, concomitantly, the decline of class-based politics.
How exactly this happened is impossible to trace with any precision – though the book “No Logo” does a pretty good job of it – but we can observe the rough manner of transformation.
The post-structural revolution transpired before and during the end of the Cold War just as the collapse of the Old Soviet Union denuded the global Left of its raison detre. But its social justice impulse didn’t die, it turned inwards from a notion of the historic inevitability of the decline of capitalism and the rise of oppressed classes, towards the liberation of oppressed minorities within capitalism, empowered by control over the language that defined who they were.
Simultaneously, capitalism did what it does best. It packaged and repackaged, branded and rebranded every emerging identity, cloaked in its own sub-cultural nomenclature, selling itself back to new emerging identities. Soon class was completely forgotten as the global Left dedicated itself instead to policing the commons as a kind of safe zone for a multitude of difference that capitalism turned into a cultural supermarket.
As the Left turned inwards, capitalism turned outwards and went truly, madly global, lifting previously isolated nations into a single planet-wide market, pretty much all of it revolving around Americana replete with its identity-branded products.
But, of course, this came at a cost. When you globalise capital, you globalise labour. That meant jobs shifting from expensive markets to cheap. Before long the incomes of those swimming in the stream of global capital began to seriously outstrip the incomes of those trapped in old and withering Western labour markets. As a result, inflation in those markets also began to fall and so did interest rates. Thus asset prices took off as Western nation labour markets got hollowed out, and standard of living inequality widened much more quickly as a new landed aristocracy developed.
Meanwhile the global Left looked on from its Ivory Tower of identity politics and was pleased. Capitalism was spreading the wealth to oppressed brothers and sisters, and if there were some losers in the West then that was only natural as others rose in prominence. Indeed, it went further. So satisfied was it with human progress, and so satisfied with its own role in producing it, that it turned the power of language that it held most dear back upon those that opposed the new order. Those losers in Western labour markets that dared complain or fight back against the free movement of capital and labour were labelled and marginalised as “racist”, “xenophobic” and “sexist”.
This great confluence of forces reached its apogee in the Global Financial Crisis when a ribaldly treasonous Wall St destroyed the American financial system just as America’s first ever African American President, Barack Obama, was elected . One might have expected this convergence to result in a revival of some class politics. Obama ran on a platform of “hope and change” very much cultured in the vein of seventies art and inherited a global capitalism that had just openly ravaged its most celebrated host nation.
But alas, it was just a bit of “retro”. With a Republican Party on its knees, Obama was positioned to restore the kind of New Deal rules that global capitalism enjoyed under Franklin D. Roosevelt. A gobalisation like the one promised in the brochures, that benefited the majority via competition and productivity gains, driven by trade and meritocracy, with counter-balanced private risk and public equity.
But instead he opted to patch up financialised capitalism. The banks were bailed out and the bonus culture returned. Yes, there were some new rules but they were weak. There was no seizing of the agenda. No imprisonments of the guilty. The US Department of Justice is still issuing $14bn fines to banks involved yet still today there is no justice. Think about that a minute. How can a crime be worthy of a $14bn fine but no prison time?!?
Alas, for all of his efforts to restore Wall Street, Obama provided no reset for Main Street economics to restore the fortunes of the US lower classes. Sure Obama fought a hostile Capitol but, let’s face it, he had other priorities. And so the US working and middle classes, as well as those worldwide, were sold another pup. Now more than ever, if they said say so they were quickly shut down as “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “sexist”.
Thus it came to pass that the global Left somehow did a complete back-flip and positioned itself directly behind the same unreconstructed global capitalism that was still sucking the life from the lower classes that it always had. Only now it was doing so with explicit public backing and with an abandon it had not enjoyed since the roaring twenties.
Which brings us back to today and Steve Bannon and the need for a left counter-reformation. An alt-Left if you will, that returns to its roots of fighting the bloodsucker of global capital that is draining working class people and youth worldwide. In Australia it will need to tackle the immigration-led economy and plague of rent-seekers (including bizarrely, unions) to end the class war. But where is it going to come from?
Traditional Marxist thought would have revolution springing from the proletariat. Brexit and Donald Trump have illustrated just that. They are a large angry force that if given an outlet, even a tangential one, will express it. But Trump, at least, has hoodwinked them, with his most successful policy to date a massive tax cut for the rich. Not much of a revolution there.
Later Marxists theorised student populations could be the spark of change. But that’s a joke today. Students are systematically brainwashed with post-structuralism. I know, I used to do it. And the resulting social trend is towards ever more permissive behaviour (which I mostly agree with) at the price of ignoring economic position. They are all superstructure and no base.
The bourgeios is in on it with the oligarchs in Australia so both are the outright enemy of the revolution. The media, including the ABC, is also corrupted so that doesn’t leave much room for a popular movement.
If there is a germ of change that might form an alt-Left that re-engages in class struggles from the relative centre it’s probably going to come from a Whiggish right. A kind of noblesse oblige movement that is environmental, anti-population growth, pro-sensible regulation, national interest but still liberal. Movements like Sustainable Australia, perhaps a Mark Latham smoothed One Nation, or similar might do it.
In the mean time, the righteous anger will grow and find its own way very likely via the alt-right.
