The moment in which we find ourselves is marked by promise and peril. Throughout the Middle East, popular uprisings are dramatically accelerating history and undermining a half-century’s worth of geopolitical certainties. Meanwhile, in Canada, the US, and Europe, right-wing politicians and movements have been making significant inroads. In the US, the Tea Party has decisively undermined the Obama administration and opened up spaces for far right and fascist organizers to popularize their positions. In Canada, the Conservative Party has been steadily consolidating its grip on power and has been remaking the state in its image. In cosmopolitan Toronto, rightwing populist Rob Ford soundly defeated his liberal and social democratic opposition in the Mayoral election of October 2010.
It’s a little bit overwhelming. Enamored by naïve visions of a socially progressive Canada (arising primarily from misguided comparative analyses), popular commentators in the US have for the last half decade looked on with incredulity as Conservatives at the helm of the Federal Government launched concerted attacks on women, queer people, and sex workers. Syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage could not conceal his bemused incomprehension that a nation set to let gays walk down the aisle smoking pot could repeatedly put someone like Harper in power.
But despite the alarming rate at which they’ve been proceeding over the last decade, these rightwing incursions have not gone unopposed. Massive demonstrations against austerity in Wisconsin and elsewhere make clear that there are forces committed to checking attacks on collective bargaining and social spending; however, up until now, these forces have remained marginal and defensive in their orientation. In order for their efforts to coincide with the demands of the situation in which we find ourselves, it’s necessary that they be dramatically expanded. As always, this means base building. The question, then, is this: how do we build a base when our enemies on the right seem to have stolen our constituencies?
In order to answer this question, we must first ask and then answer another: how did the right – whose policies are at odds with the material interests of working class and racialized people – manage to build a popular base amongst those it holds in contempt? And why do right-wing ideas resonate with people who are objectively imperiled by their implications?
***
Resources are part of it. The Conservative Party of Canada has cultivated strong alliances with Christian groups boasting active memberships that have been more than willing to put time and money into the war of position. At the same time, nearly half a century of attacks on trade unions and social organizations like the National Action Committee on the Status of Women have left oppressed and exploited groups with few channels through which to articulate their own interests. Faced with a choice between a moribund social democratic party, an ineffectual trade union movement, and a marginal and – at times – incomprehensible radical scene, it’s understandable that many have looked elsewhere to find fulfillment.
But even if the radical left had the resources available to the right, it’s not clear that we’d know how to use them. It’s indisputable that the right has more access to money, media, and seats of power than does the radical left. And it’s true that these resources allow it to promote its agenda and objectives more effectively than do street posters, zines, and potlucks. However, as every good propagandist knows, millions of flyers are meaningless unless the message written on them resonates.
Even if people don’t benefit from their allegiance to the right (and even if this allegiance causes harm to them and to others), their identification with the right cannot be dismissed as “false consciousness.” The desires for self-realization and community to which the populist right appeals are real. And while the right’s mobilization of these cynical desires ensures that they remain unresolved and unresolvable, people’s identification with rightwing positions nevertheless allows them to highlight and critique liberal democracy’s own unresolved conceptions of freedom and equality.
In other words, the right has learned to successfully appeal to forms of disaffection that ought to be the preserve of the radical left. Listening to Glenn Beck, one is immediately struck by the manner in which his followers are encouraged to imagine themselves as being both in the mainstream and on the margins. Their aspirations, they learn, are at once quotidian and revolutionary. It’s a position that neatly accords with the emancipatory premise of The Internationale where the exploited remind themselves that, though they have been naught, they shall – through struggle – be all. It’s hard to deny the seduction; like the communards, Glenn Beck makes you feel like there are millions more just like you, wholly normal in their radical disaffection. And if you – all of you – got your act together, you could tear this rotten system down.
Recently, Colorlines writer Sally Kohn highlighted several things that the left could learn from Beck. Along with “making popular education popular,” “taking affirmative steps to acknowledge race,” “personalizing politics,” and “building movements through mass media,” Kohn pointed out that understanding Beck’s allure required that we acknowledge his ability to present “feelings first and facts second.”
None other than Adolf Hitler said, “Great liars are also great magicians.” Glenn Beck’s manipulation of emotion is nothing short of vicious, inhumane treason but there’s no question his capacity to understand and work through the medium of emotion is also magical.
It’s a pretty seductive argument. But since radical politics can’t be resolved through myth or magic (our solutions must instead tend toward the concrete resolution of contradiction), we must ask: if magic can reveal to us our true hearts’ desire, what must we do to see this desire realized – not in myth but in reality?
Full Article
Source: Upping The Anti
It’s a little bit overwhelming. Enamored by naïve visions of a socially progressive Canada (arising primarily from misguided comparative analyses), popular commentators in the US have for the last half decade looked on with incredulity as Conservatives at the helm of the Federal Government launched concerted attacks on women, queer people, and sex workers. Syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage could not conceal his bemused incomprehension that a nation set to let gays walk down the aisle smoking pot could repeatedly put someone like Harper in power.
But despite the alarming rate at which they’ve been proceeding over the last decade, these rightwing incursions have not gone unopposed. Massive demonstrations against austerity in Wisconsin and elsewhere make clear that there are forces committed to checking attacks on collective bargaining and social spending; however, up until now, these forces have remained marginal and defensive in their orientation. In order for their efforts to coincide with the demands of the situation in which we find ourselves, it’s necessary that they be dramatically expanded. As always, this means base building. The question, then, is this: how do we build a base when our enemies on the right seem to have stolen our constituencies?
In order to answer this question, we must first ask and then answer another: how did the right – whose policies are at odds with the material interests of working class and racialized people – manage to build a popular base amongst those it holds in contempt? And why do right-wing ideas resonate with people who are objectively imperiled by their implications?
***
Resources are part of it. The Conservative Party of Canada has cultivated strong alliances with Christian groups boasting active memberships that have been more than willing to put time and money into the war of position. At the same time, nearly half a century of attacks on trade unions and social organizations like the National Action Committee on the Status of Women have left oppressed and exploited groups with few channels through which to articulate their own interests. Faced with a choice between a moribund social democratic party, an ineffectual trade union movement, and a marginal and – at times – incomprehensible radical scene, it’s understandable that many have looked elsewhere to find fulfillment.
But even if the radical left had the resources available to the right, it’s not clear that we’d know how to use them. It’s indisputable that the right has more access to money, media, and seats of power than does the radical left. And it’s true that these resources allow it to promote its agenda and objectives more effectively than do street posters, zines, and potlucks. However, as every good propagandist knows, millions of flyers are meaningless unless the message written on them resonates.
Even if people don’t benefit from their allegiance to the right (and even if this allegiance causes harm to them and to others), their identification with the right cannot be dismissed as “false consciousness.” The desires for self-realization and community to which the populist right appeals are real. And while the right’s mobilization of these cynical desires ensures that they remain unresolved and unresolvable, people’s identification with rightwing positions nevertheless allows them to highlight and critique liberal democracy’s own unresolved conceptions of freedom and equality.
In other words, the right has learned to successfully appeal to forms of disaffection that ought to be the preserve of the radical left. Listening to Glenn Beck, one is immediately struck by the manner in which his followers are encouraged to imagine themselves as being both in the mainstream and on the margins. Their aspirations, they learn, are at once quotidian and revolutionary. It’s a position that neatly accords with the emancipatory premise of The Internationale where the exploited remind themselves that, though they have been naught, they shall – through struggle – be all. It’s hard to deny the seduction; like the communards, Glenn Beck makes you feel like there are millions more just like you, wholly normal in their radical disaffection. And if you – all of you – got your act together, you could tear this rotten system down.
Recently, Colorlines writer Sally Kohn highlighted several things that the left could learn from Beck. Along with “making popular education popular,” “taking affirmative steps to acknowledge race,” “personalizing politics,” and “building movements through mass media,” Kohn pointed out that understanding Beck’s allure required that we acknowledge his ability to present “feelings first and facts second.”
None other than Adolf Hitler said, “Great liars are also great magicians.” Glenn Beck’s manipulation of emotion is nothing short of vicious, inhumane treason but there’s no question his capacity to understand and work through the medium of emotion is also magical.
It’s a pretty seductive argument. But since radical politics can’t be resolved through myth or magic (our solutions must instead tend toward the concrete resolution of contradiction), we must ask: if magic can reveal to us our true hearts’ desire, what must we do to see this desire realized – not in myth but in reality?
Full Article
Source: Upping The Anti
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