If "critical theory" is to be a useful and good thing, it needs to punch up, not down. This is a crux of social justice thinking. Most critical theorists would not dispute this.
So when "white fragility" being displayed by your average nobody on social media or "incels" - men who can't get laid come in for criticism from "progressives" while Wall Street, corporate lobbyists, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex and the State Department are ignored, one really has to wonder. Just whose side are they on?
Incels and the all lives matter types are (for the most part) marginalized and deeply insecure. If they had access to education, good jobs or connections within institutions, they'd be secure and have intimate partner relationships, wouldn't they? Or at least they'd be much more likely to.
Unlike feminists and BLM types, they have no advocates in the political sphere or the popular culture. This isn't to say life is a picnic for women and ethnic minorities as a whole either, and I don't often agree with reactionary world views, but understand that more white males than women and people of color believe reactionary things because they have no critical theory of their own and can't access media and academic resources. The SJWs can, and they're not too interested in helping out their down and out white male counterparts. They have "privilege", remember? And then they act surprised when poor white men become tea baggers and Trump supporters.
It's bad enough when conservatives tap into the resentments of otherwise ignored and marginalized segments of the dispossessed white male underclass to farm them for votes only to ignore them once in power. It's that much worse when the so called progressives exploit critical theory to essentially the same ends vis-a-vis those women and people of color who've lucked out and gotten into the middle class - use them to elect "liberal" democrats on woke social issues who otherwise march to the beat of the big donors and corporate lobbyists once in office. The progressives should know better.
When the concept of privilege is used to scapegoat a voiceless segment of the population, something has gone terribly wrong. They've made a Faustian bargain with big media and big academia: ignore the real issues plaguing minority underclasses (because with some exceptions they're the same issues that plague poor whites and poor men) and instead demonize the poor white man, and the professional "activist" class will remain comfortably ensconced. As an additional kicker, this serves to drive poor white men to embrace conservatism. The right won't help them in any significant material sense, but will at least put up a pretense of representing them in the cultural sphere. The woke power structure can then hold up white male reactionaries as evidence of how truly deplorable they are.
The wokies in media, academia, state and corporate bureaucracies got theirs, and they're pulling the ladder up behind them. They're the postmodern equivalent to the aristocracies of labor who got gold plated contracts for themselves, so screw everyone else. That's no way to a just, socialist society. Sooner or later, they get co-opted by the people with real power, and betrayed and dispensed with when they're no longer useful.
This is one of my major gripes with the social justice warrior types. They punch down. Imagine if they used their clout in academia and the media to push for meaningful reforms in police training and procedure, for universal health care, for a revitalization of the trade unions, for getting money out of politics, for major infrastructure reinvestment, for a new new deal, a sovereign wealth fund, a guaranteed income ... imagine how much better the lives of the marginalized would be?
Imagine how many black lives could be saved? Black lives matter, don't they? I say they do, and I think the SJWs need to start taking that a bit more seriously. White/male fragility, incels, microagressions and people posting all lives matter on social media aren't the instruments of oppression in America. Capital controlling the levers of government is.
But then, were the 21st century "social justice" crowd were to start saying that, they'd lose their privileged access to academia and mass media. So their actions stand to reason, don't they?
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For the freedom loving leftist
Thursday, 4 June 2020
Wednesday, 3 June 2020
To Riot or Not to Riot
According to a 2015 article in the Intelligencer: A New Study Shows Riots Make America Conservative, author Johnathan Chait suggests that, well, riots make America more conservative. Five years on, it's not exactly a new study.
But that's part of the broader problem, isn't it? This could have been written yesterday, or in 1973, and it would ring just as true. That the antics of the weathermen and the days of rage in the late 1960s contributed to Nixon's 1972 defeat of the liberal Hubert Humphrey is generally accepted and in line with common knowledge. I have a distinct feeling, and we can treat this as a prediction if we'd like, that the 2020 Democratic Party Convention will be a repeat of its 1968 counterpart, assuming it's not cancelled due to Covid 19.
Today, Trump supporters hype violent groups like Antifa or the more unruly segments of Black Lives Matter as evidence of the nihilism that they claim, rightly or wrongly, underlies spikes in left wing activism. While I hate to admit it, they're not entirely wrong. People have many good reasons for not liking rioting and looting. Among other reasons for being leary of the ongoing rampages on American streets today are the deaths of David Dorn, David McAtee, David Patrick Underwood and Chris Beaty. All of whom were black. Did their lives matter?
If the right can ride this conservative shift into power, we'll see nothing change as regards the underlying causes of unrest on the left. Conservatives do what they've always done: entrench corporate power under the auspices of protecting liberty and "American" values and traditions. Nixon did it. Reagan did it. Both Bushes did it. Trump is doing it. George W. Bush can "step into the right side of history" and condemn George Floyd's death and call for change all he wants. He had eight years as president to fix this. When he had the power to do it, he did absolutely nothing to aid the plight of poor and minority communities and in fact did much to exacerbate them.
Conservative governments cracking down, as Trump has vowed to do, bring to mind the oft quoted definition of insanity. If militarizing law enforcement was going to fix this, I think it would have by now. It's basic common sense that if militarized cops with a "warrior" mentality who view the citizenry as the enemy end up killing citizens, as the evidence suggests they'll do in greater numbers, then we can expect more riots and looting, not less.
And then, of course, more conservative governments leads to more crack downs, more erosion of civil liberties and a more adversarial relationship between the people and the state. If that's the tack we take, don't come crying to me the day self styled revolutionaries burn your neighborhood to the ground.
Conservatism is all about breaking down the relationship between the citizen and the state. Conservatives profess a deep distrust of the state, which is sustained by taxation, a form of transaction they view as innately corrupt. Government is the problem, not the solution, right? Well, witnessing police violence one can certainly sympathize, in principle. Conservatives, at least in theory, emphasize tradition and organic relationships among people, and don't believe that the relationship between the citizen and the state can be positive.
Except when it can be. With enough money, the correct donors and lobbyists can expect first class service from otherwise maligned big government. Electorates swinging right in response to leftist rioting is rooted in the belief that conservatives truly cherish social stability and rule of law. This is a belief that we should all know by now to be misguided, at least among prominent movers and shakers in US conservatism.
Stripped of all pretense, the conservative establishment in America cares about entrenching the power of wealth. Slashing taxes and deregulating finance and industry. Simple as that. At best, they'll take such steps as are necessary to protect the homes of the rich and powerful from the impact of rioting. If you're working and middle class, well, you're on your own. Conservatives have always been quite explicit about this in other contexts. Why would they change their spots now?
Once people wake up to the fact that conservatism in America is all about enriching the already most wealthy and nothing else, they turn to the liberals. The Democrats. The so called progressives, am I right?
Bill Clinton carried on the most reactionary elements of the Reagan-Bush years and in fact doubled down on them, enacting the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in a vain attempt to reach to the center and gain the approval of conservatives. Who still branded him a radical leftist and crushed him in the 1994 midterms.
One would expect that America's first black president, Barack Obama and his black female Attorney General Loretta Lynch would have taken the issue seriously? As the 2010s progressed, more and more African Americans ascended to Mayorships and Chiefdoms over major police departments across the country. Surely they would have gotten a handle on things? Right?
If I hear you laughing, know that I laugh with you.
Between 2013 and 2019 - an even split between the time of liberal democrat Barack Obama and conservative republican Donald Trump, 7,666 people in the U.S have been slain by police. Not all of them black, of course. And I'm sure some of these were non preventable and legitimate acts of self defense on behalf of law enforcement personnel. But still, that's a damn high number, and it suggests to me a very deep problem in the American body politic.
A problem we're not voting our way out of. At least not now, as things stand.
Which brings us back to the rioting. Sure, it's bad. But it's got us talking seriously about this, hasn't it? We're hearing, in drips and drabs, about concrete measures that can, and in some cases have, been taken to actually deal with this issue. It's complicated, and good results won't be immediate even if the broadest suite of proposals were implemented immediately. It goes beyond even reform of the police, into a complete reappraisal of the role of the state in America and its relationship with its citizens.
While rioters and looters are hard to sympathize with, I'd suggest that political leadership in America can deal effectively and proactively with its social problems if less rioting is what they'd like to see. Perhaps a political system that's open, transparent and genuinely democratic instead of simply a tool of the rich elites to maintain control would be a good place to start. At the very least, can we not wait until our cities are burning down before we actually start addressing serious problems?
Getting such leadership and such a system requires that we citizens will have to grasp the fact that the complacency we've become accustomed to over the last few decades won't cut it any more. Politicians won't just do their jobs the way we're all expected to and do the right things for the nation the way we're expected to do our jobs correctly. Keep thinking that you can just go to and from your job and otherwise shut off, and sooner or later the riot will be on your doorstep. The political class needs ongoing pushing and pressure.
Voting conservative and hoping that normalcy, law and order will thus prevail would now be a case of doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results.
I believe there's a word for that.
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 |
| Who Voted for This? |
Today, Trump supporters hype violent groups like Antifa or the more unruly segments of Black Lives Matter as evidence of the nihilism that they claim, rightly or wrongly, underlies spikes in left wing activism. While I hate to admit it, they're not entirely wrong. People have many good reasons for not liking rioting and looting. Among other reasons for being leary of the ongoing rampages on American streets today are the deaths of David Dorn, David McAtee, David Patrick Underwood and Chris Beaty. All of whom were black. Did their lives matter?
If the right can ride this conservative shift into power, we'll see nothing change as regards the underlying causes of unrest on the left. Conservatives do what they've always done: entrench corporate power under the auspices of protecting liberty and "American" values and traditions. Nixon did it. Reagan did it. Both Bushes did it. Trump is doing it. George W. Bush can "step into the right side of history" and condemn George Floyd's death and call for change all he wants. He had eight years as president to fix this. When he had the power to do it, he did absolutely nothing to aid the plight of poor and minority communities and in fact did much to exacerbate them.
Conservative governments cracking down, as Trump has vowed to do, bring to mind the oft quoted definition of insanity. If militarizing law enforcement was going to fix this, I think it would have by now. It's basic common sense that if militarized cops with a "warrior" mentality who view the citizenry as the enemy end up killing citizens, as the evidence suggests they'll do in greater numbers, then we can expect more riots and looting, not less.
And then, of course, more conservative governments leads to more crack downs, more erosion of civil liberties and a more adversarial relationship between the people and the state. If that's the tack we take, don't come crying to me the day self styled revolutionaries burn your neighborhood to the ground.
Conservatism is all about breaking down the relationship between the citizen and the state. Conservatives profess a deep distrust of the state, which is sustained by taxation, a form of transaction they view as innately corrupt. Government is the problem, not the solution, right? Well, witnessing police violence one can certainly sympathize, in principle. Conservatives, at least in theory, emphasize tradition and organic relationships among people, and don't believe that the relationship between the citizen and the state can be positive.
Except when it can be. With enough money, the correct donors and lobbyists can expect first class service from otherwise maligned big government. Electorates swinging right in response to leftist rioting is rooted in the belief that conservatives truly cherish social stability and rule of law. This is a belief that we should all know by now to be misguided, at least among prominent movers and shakers in US conservatism.
Stripped of all pretense, the conservative establishment in America cares about entrenching the power of wealth. Slashing taxes and deregulating finance and industry. Simple as that. At best, they'll take such steps as are necessary to protect the homes of the rich and powerful from the impact of rioting. If you're working and middle class, well, you're on your own. Conservatives have always been quite explicit about this in other contexts. Why would they change their spots now?
Once people wake up to the fact that conservatism in America is all about enriching the already most wealthy and nothing else, they turn to the liberals. The Democrats. The so called progressives, am I right?
Bill Clinton carried on the most reactionary elements of the Reagan-Bush years and in fact doubled down on them, enacting the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in a vain attempt to reach to the center and gain the approval of conservatives. Who still branded him a radical leftist and crushed him in the 1994 midterms.
One would expect that America's first black president, Barack Obama and his black female Attorney General Loretta Lynch would have taken the issue seriously? As the 2010s progressed, more and more African Americans ascended to Mayorships and Chiefdoms over major police departments across the country. Surely they would have gotten a handle on things? Right?
If I hear you laughing, know that I laugh with you.
Between 2013 and 2019 - an even split between the time of liberal democrat Barack Obama and conservative republican Donald Trump, 7,666 people in the U.S have been slain by police. Not all of them black, of course. And I'm sure some of these were non preventable and legitimate acts of self defense on behalf of law enforcement personnel. But still, that's a damn high number, and it suggests to me a very deep problem in the American body politic.
A problem we're not voting our way out of. At least not now, as things stand.
Which brings us back to the rioting. Sure, it's bad. But it's got us talking seriously about this, hasn't it? We're hearing, in drips and drabs, about concrete measures that can, and in some cases have, been taken to actually deal with this issue. It's complicated, and good results won't be immediate even if the broadest suite of proposals were implemented immediately. It goes beyond even reform of the police, into a complete reappraisal of the role of the state in America and its relationship with its citizens.
While rioters and looters are hard to sympathize with, I'd suggest that political leadership in America can deal effectively and proactively with its social problems if less rioting is what they'd like to see. Perhaps a political system that's open, transparent and genuinely democratic instead of simply a tool of the rich elites to maintain control would be a good place to start. At the very least, can we not wait until our cities are burning down before we actually start addressing serious problems?
Getting such leadership and such a system requires that we citizens will have to grasp the fact that the complacency we've become accustomed to over the last few decades won't cut it any more. Politicians won't just do their jobs the way we're all expected to and do the right things for the nation the way we're expected to do our jobs correctly. Keep thinking that you can just go to and from your job and otherwise shut off, and sooner or later the riot will be on your doorstep. The political class needs ongoing pushing and pressure.
Voting conservative and hoping that normalcy, law and order will thus prevail would now be a case of doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results.
I believe there's a word for that.
Follow Ernest Everhard on these other social media formats:
Monday, 1 June 2020
The Smash-Grab is What America is All About
The year 2020 seems to be a reckoning. But a reckoning for what? A whole lot of chickens are coming home to roost.
Looking at scenes of rioting and looting playing out across America following the murder of black man George Floyd at the hands of rogue police officer Derek Chauvin, it's easy to think that while anger and protest are justified, rioting and looting are stupid and misguided. Easy and correct, of course. Opportunistic criminals, who are by differing accounts white supremacists, anarchist agitators or even the cops themselves using the social unrest as a pretext for stoking people into rampaging mobs warrant our condemnation just as much as rogue and murdering police officers do.
Yet the sight of mobs breaking into stores, tipping over shelves of merchandise and making off with whatever they can get their hands prompts a deeper, more troubling question. That being: who are you to condemn this, America? This is what you're all about.
I distinctly recall the halcyon days of the neoliberal euphoria back in the mid 1990s. Soviet communism had fallen, Chinese communism was embracing the free market with vigor and social democracy and new deal liberalism were in distinct retreat across the western world. What was the mood of the nation then? Survival of the fittest, take what you can get and every man for himself was not playing out in the streets amidst burning buildings in those days. Rather, it was the ethos being praised in the editorial pages of virtually every major media outlet across the western world, and the policy being taken by governments and universally cheered by their electorates.
No need to ask what would become of the losers in this then newly made culture of the hustle. As John Mellencamp suggested (possibly ironically) in his Reagan era hit Pink Houses, they ain't no big deal. We didn't need no namby pamby social safety nets and regulatory protections such as the Glass-Steagall act. Get ready to compete on the free market like a real man, and if you lost that was your own fault and your defeat was to the betterment of society as a whole. The glorification of the smash-grab did not begin with blue checkmark twitter after Floyd's ugly demise, but in the board rooms of the corporations who owned the media back in that seemingly more innocent time.
We've all seen the results of this by now.
Following the market crash of 2008, the store whose windows was being smashed was the federal government - that same government who had no business in the provision of social welfare to its citizens - and the looters were those corporate outfits deemed too big to fail.
Since then, social media has revealed in real time the real effects that this social darwinism 2.0 has had in the real world. Communities torn apart and ravaged by corporate maleficence and government apathy. Manufacturers gone in search of lower wages and worse working conditions, infrastructure neglected in favor of tax cutting and expenditure on foreign warfare, low wage service jobs in big box retailers with no connection to the communities they locate in. Hopelessness, drug addiction, suicide, wholesale relationship and social breakdown and anti social behaviors abound and prison populations have swollen. Statistically significant portions of the population have zero prospects at things like a half decent job or a relationship with a significant other, things once thought the hallmark of the American dream. Social dysfunction that could once have been dismissed as being isolated to ghettos of poor and discriminated against minorities - itself a travesty - has now crept into demographics once thought the stable middle class.
And now, a major pandemic has hit the world compelling many states to go into lock down mode, restricting people's economic and social activities. This has led to depression levels of unemployment and increased pressure on social welfare and health care systems. Which in America have either been gutted or exist only for private profit.
Suffice it to say, people are mad as hell about it.
So where is the political left in all of this? Surely a radical socialist movement could easily capitalize on all of this. Surely there is enormous potential to put huge pressures on big business and big government of a kind not seen since the 1930s? Yet even here, the malignant selfishness that has swept the nation in recent decades has firmly taken hold.
Most so called progressive activism has about it the same kind of take-what-you-can-get ethos we've come to expect everywhere. Most radicals have had the good fortune to come from the social strata privileged enough to be radicalized in the nation's colleges and universities. As you might expect, what they've received is an indoctrination into a radical egocentrism. I only care about my race, my gender, my sexual orientation and I don't have to reason with or have any kind of real dialogue with anybody because of my exalted marginalized status. While they raise some legitimate issues, can we really expect social justice from these so called social justice warriors who have no real comprehensive vision of what a just and fair society might look like, and invest their activist vigor instead into a toxic call-out cancel culture?
If anything, the so called left of today - a today with more class consciousness among the majority than ever before - is the one and only thing keeping the reactionaries going. When the moral bankruptcy of the neoliberal smash-grab has been rendered obvious for all to see, the far right winger can still point to the anarchist rioters and proclaim, "here is your political left! Here are your socialists! Is this what you want?
The answer is obvious. Yet I find these anarchist rioters strangely difficult to fully condemn, despite the obvious harm they're doing. I think it was Peter Gowan, in a May 28, 2020 article in Jacobin Magazine who perhaps put it best:
Rioters and looters should not be given a free pass, of course, and too many people in the Jacobin crowd would seem to do this. They destroy the neighborhoods of the very poor minorities that the protesters are championing. But I would ask: just who is the rest of the western world and America especially to condemn them? The looters are just doing what they've been told to by the society they live in, after all. Turn a crisis into an opportunity and take what you can get. Their methods are simply the methods that people without the capital or opportunity necessary to riot and loot legally on the trading floors of Wall Street must then turn to.
Sorry to have to tell you this John Mellencamp, but the losers ARE a big deal. The people warning us to that effect were also no big deal back in the 1980s and 90s because surely we were all going to get rich and prosper in the dawning free market utopia taking shape back then. Perhaps they'll be a big deal now that our cities are burning to the ground due to deep and systemic injustices and antisocial political elements that our media and educational system created, and a pandemic ravaging our population that could have been much more easily contained by a viable national health care system.
I guess the smash-grab, I guess survival of the fittest and every man for himself weren't such good ideas after all. Who'd ever have guessed.
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Looking at scenes of rioting and looting playing out across America following the murder of black man George Floyd at the hands of rogue police officer Derek Chauvin, it's easy to think that while anger and protest are justified, rioting and looting are stupid and misguided. Easy and correct, of course. Opportunistic criminals, who are by differing accounts white supremacists, anarchist agitators or even the cops themselves using the social unrest as a pretext for stoking people into rampaging mobs warrant our condemnation just as much as rogue and murdering police officers do.
Yet the sight of mobs breaking into stores, tipping over shelves of merchandise and making off with whatever they can get their hands prompts a deeper, more troubling question. That being: who are you to condemn this, America? This is what you're all about.
I distinctly recall the halcyon days of the neoliberal euphoria back in the mid 1990s. Soviet communism had fallen, Chinese communism was embracing the free market with vigor and social democracy and new deal liberalism were in distinct retreat across the western world. What was the mood of the nation then? Survival of the fittest, take what you can get and every man for himself was not playing out in the streets amidst burning buildings in those days. Rather, it was the ethos being praised in the editorial pages of virtually every major media outlet across the western world, and the policy being taken by governments and universally cheered by their electorates.
 |
| Ain't that America - Something to See |
We've all seen the results of this by now.
Following the market crash of 2008, the store whose windows was being smashed was the federal government - that same government who had no business in the provision of social welfare to its citizens - and the looters were those corporate outfits deemed too big to fail.
Since then, social media has revealed in real time the real effects that this social darwinism 2.0 has had in the real world. Communities torn apart and ravaged by corporate maleficence and government apathy. Manufacturers gone in search of lower wages and worse working conditions, infrastructure neglected in favor of tax cutting and expenditure on foreign warfare, low wage service jobs in big box retailers with no connection to the communities they locate in. Hopelessness, drug addiction, suicide, wholesale relationship and social breakdown and anti social behaviors abound and prison populations have swollen. Statistically significant portions of the population have zero prospects at things like a half decent job or a relationship with a significant other, things once thought the hallmark of the American dream. Social dysfunction that could once have been dismissed as being isolated to ghettos of poor and discriminated against minorities - itself a travesty - has now crept into demographics once thought the stable middle class.
And now, a major pandemic has hit the world compelling many states to go into lock down mode, restricting people's economic and social activities. This has led to depression levels of unemployment and increased pressure on social welfare and health care systems. Which in America have either been gutted or exist only for private profit.
Suffice it to say, people are mad as hell about it.
So where is the political left in all of this? Surely a radical socialist movement could easily capitalize on all of this. Surely there is enormous potential to put huge pressures on big business and big government of a kind not seen since the 1930s? Yet even here, the malignant selfishness that has swept the nation in recent decades has firmly taken hold.
Most so called progressive activism has about it the same kind of take-what-you-can-get ethos we've come to expect everywhere. Most radicals have had the good fortune to come from the social strata privileged enough to be radicalized in the nation's colleges and universities. As you might expect, what they've received is an indoctrination into a radical egocentrism. I only care about my race, my gender, my sexual orientation and I don't have to reason with or have any kind of real dialogue with anybody because of my exalted marginalized status. While they raise some legitimate issues, can we really expect social justice from these so called social justice warriors who have no real comprehensive vision of what a just and fair society might look like, and invest their activist vigor instead into a toxic call-out cancel culture?
If anything, the so called left of today - a today with more class consciousness among the majority than ever before - is the one and only thing keeping the reactionaries going. When the moral bankruptcy of the neoliberal smash-grab has been rendered obvious for all to see, the far right winger can still point to the anarchist rioters and proclaim, "here is your political left! Here are your socialists! Is this what you want?
The answer is obvious. Yet I find these anarchist rioters strangely difficult to fully condemn, despite the obvious harm they're doing. I think it was Peter Gowan, in a May 28, 2020 article in Jacobin Magazine who perhaps put it best:
If you care about looting, turn your eyes to the militaries, the police, the pharmaceutical companies, the private equity ghouls, the landlords, the real estate speculators, and the billionaires. And demand that a world once looted from the vast majority be now returned to them.
 |
| Little Grey Jail Cells for You and Me |
I guess the smash-grab, I guess survival of the fittest and every man for himself weren't such good ideas after all. Who'd ever have guessed.
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If "critical theory" is to be a useful and good thing, it needs to punch up, not down. This is a crux of social justice thinking. ...