The roller coaster is just starting – or at least that is what I keep telling myself. Western countries’ politics grow more and more frayed: tribalism is becoming the norm. Friendships, families, public institutions, and universal truths no longer provide moral guidance or meaning. The digital economy and social media instead offer us means to self-isolate in illusions of our choice protected with their own facts, news commentary, heroes and villains – totally distinct and re-enforcing narrative realities. The lofty founding principles of the internet are dying on the floor.[i]
Everything is reduced to 280 characters. Substance,
nuance, insight, fallibility and humour become casualties to knee jerk
reactions. Identity is the name of the new game. Historical grievances,
collective guilt, hierarchies of oppression[ii] and millenarian beliefs
in a ‘mythical’ restoration become the primary currency for dealing with real
despair. Revenge and settling scores are offered as specious solutions to
complex problems. The revolution will eat its children.
The goals of the extreme right and left to restore
America to a ‘magical’ greatness[iii] or erase the ‘inherent’
evils of the past mirror each other in their detachment from reality. Both
portraits for the future place group membership as the primary driving force in
society. This assault on individual autonomy is an existential threat to
liberal democracy.
Meanwhile, a conman has taken the helm – fire, fury
and chaos are the only means for him to maintain power. His political opponents
fan violent resistance in a cynical means to control the narrative. Resistance
burns into wildfire as individuals surrender themselves to movements not for
building communities but instead to destroy imagined enemies.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”[iv]
Writing in 1919, Yeats’ milieu appears remarkably
similar to our own a century later. Post-World War Europe devastated by the
scars of war, political infighting and the Spanish flu pandemic would rush on
straight into un-paralleled economic collapse - fueling political extremism and
violence over the next 25 years. The international community then embodied by
the League of Nations was paralyzed by an equally isolationist and war weary
America.
Today, we find ourselves in a similar gyre – this time
everything is accelerated a hundred-fold via global markets, social media, and
shortening attention spans. The COVID-19 meteor has smashed the global economy
and with it peoples’ livelihoods, families and futures. Varying responses
across the planet demonstrate which leaders do and do not have clothes. America
like the emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale is nude in front of the
world and it isn’t pretty.[v]
The crater left not a just hole but an opportunity for
the wealthiest to accelerate an automated economy wherein large subsections of
the population will face a jobless recovery darker than their already
precarious gig-based existence.
The world’s richest man doubled his fortune[vi] and central banks printed
trillions of dollars[vii]
to prop up the rich while ordinary people got the shaft. Socialism for the 0.01
percent while 50 million would go hungry in the richest country in human
history.[viii]
Into the West’s decayed sick patient politics spread
all kinds of hallucinations ranging from the absurd QAnon and anti-maskers to
millenarian religious groups and self proclaimed Woke Marxist trained Black
Lives Matter organizers. Armed groups in the streets battle political opponents
convinced that they are defending the nation or fighting entrenched tyranny.
The illusion overpowers reality as the poor fight the poor over ideas they will
never profit from.
“Things
are going to explode. Take care of your family and yourself first. The time for
critical thought is dead.”[ix]
The internet has destroyed expertise - every opinion
is now equal regardless of fact or flaw. The media consists of not careful
analysis but rather screaming heads who long ago abandoned vetting sources. We
are all equal in front of the bonfire.
Make believe revolutionaries de-capitate offending
statues from distant times. Judging the past by today’s values offers a cruel
image of the blind judging the mute.[x] We’ve lost our stake in
the present and prefer to fight long dead tyrants as their supposed sins are
self-evident.
Enlightenment values are castigated as a tool of white
supremacy,[xi]
scientists are fired and verifiable scientific truths are discarded on
ideological grounds.[xii] 2+2 no longer equals 4 –
math is a social construct.[xiii] Educational
institutions ban heterodox literature for the sanctity of safe spaces. The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is no longer a book exposing the evils of racism
but instead perpetuates racism.[xiv] There are no heroes.
Militant ideology took over institutions of higher
learning and critical theory replaced critical thinking. The new political
correctness reared its ugly head at places like Evergreen College where student
mobs threatened staff with bats and academic leadership refused to curtail
those who professed violence.[xv] Critical theory, playing
political necromancer, revived Mao’s Red Guard in the shape of the Woke Cult,
promising similar chaos to that of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
In Woke world, the identity you are assigned in
society is the class position you are prescribed for life. Transcendence is
impossible. Engaging and admiring other cultural practices is cultural
misappropriation. Novels and fiction are not to be enjoyed as a means for
understanding other peoples’ lives and experiences – they are tools for
critically analyzing power structures. Pleasure, art, humour, creativity and
civility are all tools of oppression.
“The
civility discourse is a dangerous one. Civility, typically, is a power reserved
by, precisely, those in power.”[xvi]
The great non-violent struggles of generations past
never counted. Reformers failed. The game is over – radical change is imminent.
The mob on the street will determine what is just.[xvii] Looting of small
locally owned businesses and large companies is a morale act supporting the
fight against white supremacy and systems of oppression.[xviii] The Woke are coming to
the rescue.
Working class people were long ago abandoned by the
national leadership. Labour, work and dignity were outsourced to developing
economies to accommodate the wallets of the financial elite supported by
bankrupt theories of Ivy League academic institutions. Austerity was justified
by faulty excel sheets[xix] all the while attacking
what was left of social safety nets. Let them eat cake.
The red hats remember the past. The post World War Two
economic recovery heralded the largest expansion of middle class jobs in
history.[xx] Chief Executive Officer
to Worker salary ratios sat at ‘humane levels’ of 20-to-1 instead of the
current 278-to-1.[xxi]
This ‘golden era’ oversaw increased access to university education, home
ownership and increased life expectancy. People had a chance of making it.
Party leadership in both the Republican and Democratic
national committees exported middle class jobs under the Clinton consensus[xxii] while justifying to
themselves that globalization was good for everyone despite not paying any cost
themselves. For lack of any substantive disagreement on economic or tax policy
with their Republican rivals, it was easier for Democrats to pander to the
toxic wellspring of identity politics than to deal with hard questions linked
to healthcare, labour protections and social mobility.
Following the jobs, factories and livelihoods
devastated by the political class - deaths by suicide, alcoholism and opioids
accelerated in what Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case term deaths of
despair. White working-class life expectancies fell.
“Destroy work and, in the end,
working-class life cannot survive. It is the loss of meaning, of dignity, of
pride, and of self-respect that comes with the loss of marriage and of
community that brings on despair, not just or even primarily the loss of
money.”[xxiii]
And into the great void, jumped the orange haired
salesman offering an alternative to the establishment’s well rehearsed lies.
Having built a life on deception whether defrauding the tax man, dodging the
draft, lying to banks,[xxiv] refusing to pay
contractors or serial philandering – Donald Trump served as the perfect foil to
the establishment’s lying leadership.
Here was a self-made trust fund child and corporate
magician who had built his life around the illusion of success. Despite many
earlier failings and bankruptcies, he had finally succeeded at something –
promoting himself to household familiarity through The Apprentice television
series. Sitting on his gaudy golden throne in New York, he conjured a brand
that he would lease to towers, hotels and golf courses across the planet while
owning little beyond the licensing rights to his cult of personality.
With no platform beyond ‘success’ and opposition to
the status quo combined with a psychopathic inability to apologize – Trump’s
overt lies were interpreted by voters as almost honest in comparison to the
subtle lies of his opponents who had devastated working class communities. The
American myth of elite meritocracy was shattered by a man who advertised his
vices as virtues and surrounded himself with a cadre of soon to be incarcerated
felons.
Appealing to the dejected, the MAGA hat was born. A simple
slogan designed to appeal to what both political parties had sold out –
ordinary people. Enemies were created – immigrants became criminal rapists, the
professional civil service became the deep state and countries in direct
alliance with the US turned into deadbeats who had abused American goodwill.
America became alone in the world.
Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang rejected
the divisive prescription of identity politics and tried to reach out to their
party’s former working-class political base. In an effort to thwart meaningful
change, the DNC establishment cynically used identity politics to sink their
campaigns. It was easier to adopt cult like woke language than to confront
oligarchic commercial interests.[xxv]
Seeking to get back to business as usual, the DNC and
liberal media decided to double down on initially peaceful protests which were
quickly coopted by violent elements. Americans had woken up to their police
state – unfortunately the man at the helm had no desire to reform the country
but rather push it to extremes and the Woke Cult eager to see it all burn
further fanned the flames.
Over the last week, a red hat teenager gunned down
three protesters in Kenosha followed by Antifa murdering a Christian militia
member in Portland. The dangerous escalation plays into the beliefs of a range
of potentially violent groups whether the Boogalloo movement, the Proud Boys,
white nationalist groups, Antifa, the Woke cult or Marxist BLM organizers. What
they all have in common is a belief that they are fighting the personification
of evil. The other side is not human.
Given the prevalence of guns and explosion in gun
sales,[xxvi] the 40 million newly
unemployed,[xxvii]
a virus that is spreading rapidly, media tolerance for violence, and the
President’s goal of using widespread chaos as his primary means of achieving
re-election – the United States is looking very much like the twilight years of
the former Yugoslavia, the Late Roman Republic or Weimar Germany. There is the
very real chance we see armed battles in the streets between warring political
factions – think Gangs of New York minus the Hollywood.
Many of my compatriots here north of the now closed
border look down at our cousins with mixtures of horror and mystery. It is as
if your neighbour next door has just lit his house on fire and has emerged with
torch in hand to boast to you about the blaze. “America First!” he shouts. I
look on in amazement wondering, “First to what? – Ruin?”
They fished the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg out of the
canals of Berlin in 1919. She had been summarily executed after trying to
launch a violent communist putsch during the nascent years of the Weimar
Republic. The fear of radical communist takeover would be later used by the
Nazis to destroy democratic interwar Germany. That very same fear of radical
change appears to be similar to what is gnawing at my southern neighbor’s soul.
Making decisions during a state of fear is never a good idea and yet the
American people face perhaps their greatest decision yet on November 3rd,
2020.
It’s anyone’s guess as to where the American project
is headed. Hopefully, cooler minds prevail. But unlike, Marvel comic book
movies, the good guys don’t always win. There is the real risk that election
results will be disputed by both camps and that the Supreme Court and even the
US military may become involved.
“I
swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that
troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate
the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a
bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership
standing alongside.”[xxviii]
The former Secretary of Defense’s words could be
interpreted to support a military enforced transfer of elected power or soft
coup d'état. The Pentagon and Supreme Court are both the last remaining
vestiges of non-partisan led institutions in the country. Depending on how
things play out in the ballot box and in the streets, they both may end up
occupying serious roles in the months ahead.
If anything is certain from this mess, it’s that there
is the real chance that November won’t represent the beginning of the end but
rather the end of the beginning. Buckle up – the roller coaster is just
starting.
[i] Russell Brandom, We Have Abandoned Every Principle Of The Free And
Open Internet, The Verge, December 19, 2017: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16792306/fcc-net-neutrality-open-internet-history-free-speech-anonymity
[ii] Shannon Ridgway, Oppression Olympics: The Games We Shouldn’t Be
Playing, Everyday Feminism, November 4, 2012: https://everydayfeminism.com/2012/11/oppression-olympics/
[iii] Dale Beran, The Boogaloo Tipping Point, The Atlantic, July 4, 2020:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/american-boogaloo-meme-or-terrorist-movement/613843/
[iv][iv] William Butler Yeats,
The Second Coming, 1919: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)
[v] Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 1837
[vi] Jonathan Ponciano, Jeff Bezos Becomes First Person Ever Worth $200
Billion, Forbes, August 26, 2020: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/08/26/worlds-richest-billionaire-jeff-bezos-first-200-billion/#426e626f4db7
[vii] Eric Basmajian, Central Bank “Money Printing” – Is It
Inflationary?, Seeking Alpha, March 29, 2020 https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/48075864-eric-basmajian/5427013-central-bank-money-printing-is-inflationary
[viii] Catarina Saraiva, Carolina Gonzalez and Peyton Forte, Workers
Keeping Americans Fed Are Going Hungry in the Heartland, Bloomberg, September
2, 2020: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-hunger-minnesota-pandemic/
[ix] Confidential Source,
Private Message, Whatsapp, August 31, 2020
[x] Henry Olsen, The Anti-Statue Movement Has Taken A Turn Into
Absurdity, The Washington Post, June 22, 2020: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/22/anti-statue-movement-has-taken-turn-into-absurdity/
[xi] Jamelle Bouie, The Enlightenment’s Dark Side, Slate, June 05, 2018:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html
[xii] Lawrence Krauss, The Ideological Corruption of Science, The Wall
Street Journal, July 12, 2020: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ideological-corruption-of-science-11594572501
[xiii] Ben Zeisloft, Math Education Prof: 2+2 = 4 ‘trope’ ‘reeks of white
supremacy supremacy patriarchy”, August 9, 2020: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=15409
[xiv] Thomas Ullman, Cancel Culture Is Undermining Learning and
Undermining Students Like Me, Foundation for Economic Education, August 17,
2020: https://fee.org/articles/cancel-culture-is-undermining-learning-and-harming-students-like-me/
[xv] Franklin Einspruch, Left In Denial Blames Evergreen’s Bat-Wielding
Student Mobs On Professor Who Opposed Racism, The Federalist, June 18, 2018: https://thefederalist.com/2018/06/18/left-denial-blames-evergreens-bat-wielding-student-mobs-professor-opposed-racism/
[xvi] Dr. Joseph Weiss,
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Wesleyan University, Screen Shot –
Facebook Post
[xvii] Michael Shermer, The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism,
Scientific American, September 1, 2017: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unfortunate-fallout-of-campus-postmodernism/
[xviii] Natalie Escobar, One Author’s Controversial View: ‘In Defense Of
Looting’, NPR, August 27, 2020: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178/one-authors-argument-in-defense-of-looting
[xix] John Cassidy, The Reinhart and Rogoff Controversy: A Summing Up,
The New Yorker, April 26, 2013: https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-reinhart-and-rogoff-controversy-a-summing-up
[xx] Cecil Bohanon, Economic Recovery: Lessons from the Post-WW II
Period, September 10, 2012: https://www.mercatus.org/publications/economic-history/economic-recovery-lessons-post-world-war-ii-period
[xxi] Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe, CEO compensation has grown 940%
since 1978, Economic Policy Institute, August 14, 2019: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/#:~:text=Using%20the%20stock%2Doptions%2Drealized%20measure%2C%20the%20CEO%2D,1970s%2C%201980s%2C%20or%201990s.
[xxii] Tom Curry, Consensus In Spite of Conflict, NBC News, Date Accessed:
September 1, 2020 : http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071895#.X1ZZwChKjIU
[xxiii] Sir Angus Deaton and Anne Case, Deaths of Despair and the Future of
Capitalism, Deaths of Despair, March 17, 2020, Princeton University Press,
ISBN-13: 978-0691190785
[xxiv] Heather Vogell, Never Before Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major
Inconsistencies, Pro Publica, October 16, 2019: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-never-before-seen-trump-tax-documents-show-major-inconsistencies
[xxv] Michael Sainato, Bernie Sanders: Dems Must Grow Out of Identity
Politics Rhetoric, Observer, November 22, 2016: https://observer.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-says-dems-must-grow-out-of-identity-politics-rhetoric/
[xxvi] Reggie Cecchini, Gun Sales Spike As COVID-19 Outbreak, Unrest Surges
In America: Experts, Global News, August 2, 2020: https://globalnews.ca/news/7242103/coronavirus-anti-racism-u-s-gun-sales/
[xxvii] New York Times, U.S. Jobless Claims Pass 40 Million: Live Businesss
Updates, May 28, 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/business/unemployment-stock-market-coronavirus.html
[xxviii] Jeffrey Goldberg, James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes
Him As A Threat To The Constitution, The Atlantic, June 3, 2020: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-mattis-denounces-trump-protests-militarization/612640/
