Believe me, I understand. I know that the Democratic elites actually represents moneyed interests, and right now those are bleeding America and the world dry. And I know that when that happens people tend to go to extremes, either communists looking to pull down the strong, or fascists looking to make sure they are not the bottom by stomping on those weaker. And I know the solution has to be to stop the bleeding in the first place, to offer everyone something better.
It does not give me any love for those who react by trying to beat up the vulnerable. Asking us to please be more accepting of Trump supporters is asking us to stop standing up for black people, Hispanic people, LGBTQ people, honestly poor and even working people in general. It is not a sacrifice we should make, and it is not a sacrifice it is smart to make. We need progressive policies. We do not need to be more accommodating to fascists. It’s that simple.
Do read the article in full, if you can make time - it will repay the investment. It is not merely about elites representing moneyed interests being why people tend to go to extremes.
And for avoidance of doubt I am as vehemently anti-fascist (in fact anti-anything-right of-centre) as the next person. Not all people who misguidedly voted for Trump are fascists themselves even if they are de facto enablers. Michael Sandel’s analysis of how we got here and what these people are in many cases reacting against goes to the heart of many of our current political problems globally.
I think these key paragraphs - below - do go beyond merely pointing a finger at moneyed interest. It is a long quote, but is as much for other readers who may not want to wade through the whole article - so while you and I may not need to debate this further, I hope others may get the gist of Sandel’s argument.
But the main point of The Tyranny of Merit is a different one: Sandel is determined to aim a broadside squarely at a left-liberal consensus that has reigned for 30 years. Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing. “The book tries to show that there is a dark side, a demoralising side to that,” he says. “The implication is that those who do not rise will have no one to blame but themselves.” Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own. “On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.” Not only was this state of affairs seen as irreversible, it was also presented as laudable. “To object in any way to that was to be closed-minded, prejudiced and hostile to cosmopolitan identities.”
A relentless success ethic permeated the culture: “Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively. They hadn’t got a university degree and so on.” As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified. “They became reliant on the professional classes as their constituency, and in the US as a source of campaign finance. In 2008 Barack Obama became the first Democratic candidate for president to raise more than his Republican opponent. That was a turning point but it wasn’t noticed or highlighted at the time.”
Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure. Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”
And for anyone not familiar with Michael Sandel:
Sandel has become one of the most famous public intellectuals and debaters in the English-speaking world, taking a berth at Harvard after receiving a doctorate as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford. He has been described as “a philosopher with the global profile of a rock star”, reaching audiences of millions online from his Harvard base. Listeners to his BBC Radio 4 series, The Public Philosopher , will have become familiar with the Socratic style of questioning, as Sandel artfully tests the assumptions in the arguments of his audience. Millions of YouTube viewers, where his lectures on justice can be freely accessed, will be familiar with the high, serious forehead and gentle, softly spoken delivery.
Well, the article was framed in a UK context. Miliband’s Labour was a lot to the left of allegedly non-right US figures like Clinton or Obama.
In 2012, he added intellectual lustre to Ed Miliband’s renewal project for Labour, speaking to that year’s party conference on the moral limits of markets. The speech, and his book of the same year, What Money Can’t Buy , helped inspire Miliband’s critique of “predatory capitalism”, which was the Labour leader’s distinctive contribution to post-crash political debate in Britain.
What Money Can’t Buy sealed Sandel’s status as perhaps the most formidable critic of free-market orthodoxy in the English-speaking world.
I merely offered this article (in response to another poster trying to articulate something similar but not so concisely or articulately) as a thoughtful and thought-provoking perspective on why many populist politicians are being successful of late and apparently with the support of many whose interests they actively work against, and maybe - in part - to help understand why those voters vote they way they do.
I’m not offering the article or the issues it discusses as any excuse for Trump or his supporters, or as a full explanation of Trump’s apparent popularity. But we do need to understand what motivates those voters who feel so abandoned by ‘mainstream’ politicians that they end up as enablers - inadvertent ot advertent - for the sort of proto-fascism we see in Trump, Erdogan, Balsinaro, Orban, et al.
ETA and this one was also (see below) a reply to Mindysan, and the post I was replying to has also mysteriously disappeared.
FFS, did I not also say they were enablers, earlier above?
And yes, they can fuck right off, but they won’t actually fuck off and if we do want them to fuck off and stop enabling the fascist bastards we do need to figure out why they are doing it - or at least enough of them who would never previously have countenanced such behaviour while ‘normal’ (yeah right) politics was at least able to keep them barely satisfied with their lots.
And no, I’m not advocating going back to barely satisfying enough voters to keep them from enabling fascists. But - and here’s the thing - many of them genuinely do not realise that this is what they are doing.
I’m out of here now. Goodnight.
@orenwolf this probably belongs in the other thread now. I was trying to reply to Mindysan and maybe that post could have been moved across too. All my posts since the Sandel article have stemmed from it, and replies to it, and it (my Sandel article post) was moved across
ETA this was a reply to @Mindysan whose post seems to have disappeared from the original thread this was split from, and/or from this thread. @orenwolf was that deliberate or an accident? (Or user idiocy on my part?)
From a German perspective this feels oh so wrong. And I don’t even have to go back to the Weimar Republic for that (appeasing the Nazis worked…well… let’s say…not that well).
When the AfD and Pegida were rising in the polls in the wake of the refugee “crisis” you heard exactly the same voices. We have to listen to the frustrated. They are only “concerned citizens”, etc. etc. The media and even some politicians stumbled over themselves in heading east and interviewing all of the angry people. It didn’t work.
You know what did work in putting a stop to their rise? Uncompromising shunning from everyone, but especially in parliaments and in what one would call “polite society”. Regional parliaments changing their rules so they didn’t have to have an AfD member as their honorary parliamentary president (which used to go to the oldest parliamentarian), people refusing to work in committees with them, it being a social death sentence to make even one step towards them. People refusing to co-sponsor laws with them even if they were uncontroversial or beneficial ones. That’s what finally stopped them in their tracks.
Look at Austria to see what happens if a society with similar starting conditions instead thinks it’s OK to make these people socially acceptable.
I mean, that’s what the guy who coined the term thought.
While I can extend sympathy to those crushed under the wheels of or left behind by neoliberal globalism (especially as it transitions in late-stage capitalism from meritocracy to hereditary aristocracy), I don’t have much of it to give to those who’ve reacted by becoming suckers for a right-wing populist con man who plays to bigotry and anti-intellectualism. We have to call them, and their leaders, what they are.
We do have to call their leaders what they are. We do have to call those leaders’ knowing supporters what they are. But many voted that way out of desperation at being paid any proper attention by the parties they traditionally looked to. Those are the people who can be won back over time by demonstrable action once the fascists are deposed. Of course, that does not solve the challenge of how to depose the fascists while those deluded desperate are still taken in. Catch-22. Education, education, education and getting the vote out.
(And, yes, of course, like many such works, selective message extracting has subverted it over the years.)
But the source of their frustration is largely nothing to do with the things the new right are banging on about. Their concerns were elsewhere and were simply hijacked by the new right.
If a less ‘devil take the hindmost’ meritocratic laissez-faire capitalism had not become the left’s reaction to the Thatchers of this world, if the left (or even the centre) had left more safety nets in place and engineered more routes out of the meritocracy trap, these ‘concerns’ would have been trivial and incapable of hijacking so effectively.
(Of course, I cannot speak for Austria, and Germany seems to have better safety nets and ladders out - e.g. vocational training - than places like the UK and USA, where my points may be more applicable.)
A desperate sucker is still a sucker. Besides that, there’s also an element of self-defeating spite. The Know-Nothing 27%* are too stupid, ignorant, gullible and/or self-deluded to try to win over.
[* not all of them losers in the global economy, I’d add – lots of suburban and exurban white people in that group]
Oh, it’s plenty applicable to Germany as well. I think you’re absolutely right. And the strange thing is that underneath their veneer of “patriotism” those far right parties are advocating extreme versions of exactly the policies that caused these declines.
Granted. I don’t think we’re really arguing contradictory points here. It’s a question of voter segmentation. And I’d gladly physically segment quite a large number of them, individually, one at a time.
If he can’t find specific people to blame for his woes, Donald Trump often targets the ‘Deep State’.
Yet, from my understanding, the Deep State’s original meaning has to do with the fossil fuel industry’s insidiously effective lobbyist manipulation of government. It would be a large part of the national Capitol’s ‘swamp’ that Trump and his fans claim has corrupted DC and ergo is after his presidency.
So, considering the Trump administration’s kowtowing to big fossil fuel (mostly via the loosening of environmental protections), he seems content with wallowing in it—far from genuinely wishing to “drain the swamp”, as he and his unconditional supporters claim.
Sure, I’ll get right on that as soon as they stop murdering all the black and trans people. While centrist white men debate the nuances of how to be nicer to fucking Nazis, we’re dying out here.
There’s plenty of discussion and debate to be had about things like fiscal and social policy. It wasn’t so long ago (we’re talking living memory here) that there were more differences between specific camps within Republican and Democratic parties than the parties themselves – you had liberal progressive Republicans and conservative segregationist Democrats.
The problem is that these days those who proclaim themselves as conservatives have belief systems that have nothing to do with conservatism at all – they come from the hyper-divisive Goldwater mold of conservatism as a form of cruelty meant to benefit well-off, straight, white, and Christian men at the expense of anybody who’s not those things. (The only exception being those who are allowed to provisionally be in the club as long as they are useful toward furthering the goals of those in power. Having fame and money helps.)
Their platform revolves around hate, fear, and selfishness. Hate and fear of “the other” and selfishness that someone else having equality is in turn weakening themselves.
There’s no empathy or discussion to be had with someone who hates someone because of their skin color, who they choose (or not choose) to smash genitals with, or how they choose (or not choose) to worship.
There’s no empathy or discussion to be had with someone who feels they are superior because they happen to be born in America and others should get in line or GTFO.
There are people out there that are brave (and perhaps foolish) enough to have a line of communication to these people, but I’m not one of them. I don’t need that shit in my life. I guess that makes me part of the problem?
Because the majority of people who have been screwed over the worst by both parties—people of color, LGBT people, other oppressed minorities—did NOT vote for the white supremacist douchebag just because they felt the parties they traditionally looked to weren’t paying attention to them.
This is what is driving me crazy. People talking like nothing is really happening. America is giving women forced hysterectomies at concentration camps. Maybe it’s time to stop talking about whether “liberals” ought to have more empathy for the people supporting that.
There’s a larger ecosystem that allows Trump to exist, that makes America ripe for fascist takeover. And it’s partly a result of a technocratic class that doesn’t like democracy unless the “dumb” people vote for the “right” candidate. But it’s far more fueled by the Republican party intentionally cultivating it to as an election strategy.
Oh, bullshit. Right and wrong exist. Fight the wrong. Fight it tooth and nail. Protect the vulnerable and be a thorn to the greedy and powerful. Dong ma?
We do not need to sympathize with the Nazis. Full stop.
