Signs of economic recovery are tempered by austerity budgets and job cuts. The financial crisis has become a sovereign debt crisis that officials in Europe deal with seemingly by moving the moment of reckoning into the future and … hoping. Young people everywhere are contemplating lives that don’t live up to what their parents enjoyed, increasing the likelihood of intergenerational conflict. Anti-austerity violence in numerous European countries, and England’s worst riots in decades, remind us that the unrest is not as unthinkable as we often presume. When people are satisfied with life, they don’t riot. Nor do many imagine just how attractive radical political options can become when times change.
As one sign that times have, in fact, changed, the Occupy movement has filled screens, papers, and parks around the world. Its demands don’t necessarily fit together, but its message still resonates: Things are not alright. “Democracy” is dominated by the wealthy, gridlocked in the U.S., and diminished in Canada as the primacy of Parliament is repeatedly violated. The state can’t guarantee our protection from terrorism, or from capital, but it still manages to send our soldiers to fight unwinnable wars. It hardly bears mentioning that these issues often obscure that other problem called global warming, which won’t go away on its own.
In case you’re tempted to think that we’re always down on ourselves, look back to the late 1990s. There was a sense, then, that life was correctly ordered and, crucially, getting better. That’s not just a 1990s – or even a 20th-century – conceit. It is the grand promise of modernity: that science and technology, the modern state, economic production, and an open public sphere will make everyone’s life better in a cumulative, ongoing way.
So, perhaps we simply need to ride out this uncertainty. But times are tough, and many people understandably want to take action. For those people, then, what politics are best suited to exploiting uncertain times? Two initial options present themselves, with each one displaying an unusual hybrid of political commitments.
Conservative reform.
This is what British Prime Minister David Cameron calls the “Big Society.” Working on the premise of permanent austerity, it combines a small state that provides core services like security and a system of justice with conditions that promote economic activity. Ideally, everything else – in whole or in part – is turned over to the private sector (as we have seen happening with health care, schools, universities, and even the police), the public sphere (as charities and volunteer groups tackle unemployment and homelessness, for example), or both (as with arts and culture funding). Over-reliance on the state is replaced by a society in which every group plays its part.
Social-democratic traditionalism.
This contradictory-sounding option takes us back to the post-Second World War Keynesian consensus with its full-blown commitment to the welfare state. Its potentially powerful argument (if more prominent figures were to adopt it) is that we could all enjoy lives like those of the baby boomers if we cared to make the necessary adjustments. A universal system of health care, a strong social safety net, and a fully funded pension scheme are all for the taking – that is, if we pursue more efficient services while accepting higher taxes and increased premiums.
In uncertain times, the politics and rhetoric of solidarity find stronger attachments among an uneasy populous. Make no mistake: The Big Society depends on community solidarity as much as collective obligation defines the rally for the welfare state. In both cases, the message is that “we’re all in this together.” But uncertain times also produce heightened feelings about exclusion, which play into, and are prompted by, more radical positions that increasingly supplant mainstream options.
The Tea Party on the right and Occupy on the left are two of the most well-known radical options. Each one wants to alert us to the divisions that sit beneath apparent togetherness. The Tea Party contends that the welfare state is a support scheme for the undeserving who prevent better days: the lazy, the underhanded, the foreign. Occupy argues that Big Society ideas impose a “sink or swim” reality upon local communities, while the wealthy and the politically powerful are free to live their gilded lives. A similar rehearsal of these arguments just occurred in France’s presidential election, with the radical National Front and Left Front parties winning 29 per cent of first-round votes.
This is where detached analysis should end. Occupy and the Tea Party remind us that while politics always invokes community and unity, the unavoidable underside is division and exclusion. From what I’ve seen and read, Occupy has been regularly disparaged as an incoherent, yet extremist, option, in no small part because the U.S. hasn’t been confronted by such overt class-based politics from the left in more than four decades. I happen to think the Tea Party’s views are corrosive – yet, so far, its political influence has been much greater.
Without wishing to exaggerate the similarities, there is a useful comparison to be made between this situation and the political climate in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. Communists then were vilified like Occupy protestors are today, as agitators who belonged outside the mainstream political system. By contrast, National Socialism, like the Tea Party today, was thought to be manageable, gaining acceptance into the very system it sought to destroy. The unsettling insight already made by 20th-century European intellectuals, from the Frankfurt School to Michel Foucault, is one that we fail to appreciate today: Our constant lookout for fascism against democracy obscures those elements of fascism within democracy.
Over the next decade, we may reach a precipice where we consider seriously whether the solutions offered by conservative-reformers and social-democratic traditionalists are surpassed by the more radical futures imagined by the Tea Party and Occupy. Our receptiveness to such previously marginalized positions is already on the rise precisely because more people feel they’re being confronted by outright ordeals rather than everyday problems. If this trend continues, we can bet on a dramatic heightening of rhetoric around solidarity and exclusion. The results could be regressive or progressive. The process will be dramatic.
Original Article
Source: the mark news
Author: John Grant
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